The dreadful, astonishing Athenians

and more about the meaning of hubris

Photo by John Koliogiannis on Unsplash

Dear Readers,

I wrote this post almost a year ago today, in May, 2024. I’m offering it to you again as a lead-up to my upcoming series on the Greek gods as we know them from myth and tragedy.

May 2024! Not exactly the good old days, but far better than now, when hubris – in its original form – is the brand of our nation’s president. Read on to see what I mean.

Here it is:

I’m late with this post, because in my little world, one lovely thing and one terrible thing happened, two days apart, earlier this month.

The lovely thing: I had a scarily personal essay published in the New York Times, and the response I received from people who were touched by it made my head spin. Literally. I felt physically disoriented.

The terrible thing was far more terrible than the lovely thing was lovely: I lost one of my dearest friends to cancer. David Konstan was the mightiest of scholars, the most generous of teachers, and the wittiest and silliest and very often not-for-polite-society company imaginable. He was such a mensch, this kid who grew up in the old Lower East Side and ended his career as a full professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown. He leaves many grieving friends and students around the world. There will never be another like him.

David once observed, apropos of I don’t know what, that ancient Greek had no word for art, or culture, or science, but that with a single word you could say, “Shove a radish up your butt,” or “Would that you would fondle my testicles.” I know that the former is true – Aristophanes! – and I have to take his word for it about the latter, and why not.

David was able to elucidate the greatness of all that we associate with Athens, without getting misty-eyed over the glory that was Greece. That glory was covered in blood. Athens was right behind Sparta in its energy for state-sponsored violence and oppression of non-citizens.

No woman, child, or son of a non-citizen mother could be a citizen, even if born in Athens. An Athenian citizen was, by definition, a man born to the legal wife of a citizen father. Most women were not taught to read. Only the elite of either gender were educated. Every able-bodied citizen was trained from a young age to kill. Athens warred constantly with rival cities and city-states. When they won, their prisoners (if they took any) were either killed or enslaved – men, women and children. Read the Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War for details. (An Athenian general, he fought in that same war. After losing an important battle to the Spartans, his fellow citizens sent him into exile for 20 years. The people did not always use their power wisely. At least he had time to write.)

Slavery was an accepted and unquestioned practice. The great men of literature, the visual arts, statecraft and philosophy unashamedly owned people. So did anyone who could afford to, even if they could afford only one person; as in the American south, an agricultural society required many people to work the land.

And their gods! What a crew. If the Greeks created their gods, they created them very much in their own image. The Olympians, Zeus and Co., were capricious, selfish, violent and greedy. They never overlooked a slight or a misdeed, even an accidental one. (As one of my incarcerated students once observed, “Sounds like they were trained by the Department of Corrections.”) The city spent vast amounts of money on temples and festivals in their honor. As in human life, the less powerful try to avoid the wrath of the more powerful.

Yet the Athenian playwrights didn’t shy away from showing the cruelty of the gods as portrayed in the old stories. (Wait until I start writing about Euripides.) Athenians revered their tragedians as much as they feared their gods, it seems. The comic playwrights (Aristophanes, and others whose works have not survived) took their jobs seriously, too. They had license to mock politicians and generals and, in The Frogs, the god of theater himself, Dionysus, without punishment or censure.

Even with their sense of superiority to all others, Athenians held a sacred space for theater where citizens were willingly made to feel and think about very big questions: fate, the nature of the gods, divine and human betrayal, combat trauma, suicide, the desolation of war, the duties of citizenship, the oppression of women – just for starters.

After close to 30 years of war ended with the Spartan triumph over the Athenians, Athens soon stopped producing great playwrights, and the once mighty city-state lost its fierce identity. Some say that Athens’ hubris was the cause of its downfall. I don’t have an opinion about that.

But I do have something to say about hubris. I left some readers of my last post thinking that they had been using the word incorrectly for their whole lives, as had their parents and teachers. Not so.

Words change meaning over time, and not just ancient words originating in other languages. Following the evolution of current slang is a great way to see semantic change in action. Chill is my favorite example at the moment. It’s a verb (to relax, to calm down; to hang out, sometimes romantically, as in ‘Netflix and chill’) and an adjective (calm, easygoing, agreeable). The connection between ‘chill’ and ‘cool off’ or ‘cool down’ is pretty clear; and ‘he’s chill with that,’ means that he does not object to the situation, is not hot under the collar about it, to use really old slang.

Now, finally, for hubris. Today it has a range of meanings: excessive pride, narcissism, believing that you can do more than you can, refusing to listen to well-founded warnings, challenging the limits placed on humans by natural, religious or civil laws; in general, cruising for a bruising, as my big brother used to say whenever I objected to his benevolent tyranny.

None of these meanings are wrong. They’re just not what the word meant in Athens at the time of the tragedians.

Like ‘chill,’ hubris has undergone considerable semantic change; unlike ‘chill,’ it has had over two millenia in which to do so. Its verb form, hubrizdo, was the legal term for ‘assault,’ including rape. So there’s a sense of violence inherent in the word.

On the stage, Greek tragic heroes like Creon in Antigone (see my first ever post) and Agamemnon (my second) and Oedipus (the next few after that) are punished for their hubris. Here’s what those three characters have in common:

·      They disregard accepted customs of behavior and decency in order to have their way.

·      They commit violence against the innocent and/or intimidate by threatening violence.

·      They are sure that they can get away with anything, and say so.

·      No one dares criticize or oppose them, except those whom the gods protect (a prophet or a priest), or those who end up dead for their trouble.

·      They offend the gods in some way that they realize too late, and are punished.

The first four on this list will be frighteningly familiar to anyone following American politics at the moment. Who knows if punishment is coming, or who will be punished, or who will do the punishing. The Greek gods have withdrawn to parts unknown.