(simplified and abridged paraphrase of William Arrowsmith’s discussion of Greek drama within his “Introduction to Euripides’ Alcestis,” prepared by Matthew Evans Cockle)

In his introduction to Euripides’ Alcestis, William Arrowsmith describes ancient tragedy as modal theater. Arrowsmith defines modes as the generic states and phases of existence. Ancient tragedy can thus be understood as modal theater representing archetypes and universals which correspond to generic states and phases of human and divine existence.    

The language of mode is the language of ananke/necessity. There is no ancient Greek equivalent for the term mode. Nevertheless, there is an astonishing coherence to the ancient Greek language of necessity. This language extends from “expressions of force and strength through persistent verbal images of pressure or constraint or binding, to the well-developed vocabulary of authority, coercion, deference, and obligation…” Indeed, saturation in the idiom of necessity and force is, for Arrowsmith, the single most obvious fact of ancient Greek tragedy, epic, lyric, and history.[1]

Greek drama represents human fate in a world where any one order of being is defined by contrast with other orders of being. The characters of Greek drama are generically defined by their masks. These masks immediately signal to the audience the order of being to which a character belongs as well as the essential states and phases to which this character is subject. Each of the hierarchically arranged orders of being represented within ancient tragedy corresponds to a different set of potential modes of existence.                                                                

“Mortal” and “immortal” are examples of orders of being that correspond to different modes of existence. Combining the idea of order of being and mode of existence, we may speak of species of existence. Species of existence are distinguished by the limits imposed upon them by necessity (ananke).                        

Greek literature represents men and events within a “hierarchy of being which runs from absolute, untrammeled Olympian possibility at the top to sheer wretched subjection to total necessity at the bottom.” Within the species of existence proper to humankind (both mortal and aware of personal mortality) we can further distinguish between a variety of modal degrees. These modal degrees are determined by a variety of additional limits imposed upon individuals and groups—such as political oppression, old age, suffering, sexuality, slavery. These limits, taken together, form the molds of necessity that determine personal fate. Thus, differences in modal degree correspond to differences in suffering as well as differences in power and value. In the hierarchical orders of Greek society there are slaves, peasants, nobles, and free men—and within these orders there are further modal distinctions to be drawn between cowards, women and men of courage, and heroes.      

The ancient tragedians were the enthusiastic inheritors of a culture with exceptionally coherent values. According to Arrowsmith, the coherence and clarity of Greek thought and art results from a vital concern with generic states and phases of human existence, a passion for “observing the modes of men and gods.” In keeping with this cultural passion, Greek literature is distinguished by the concentrated effort to clarify, realize, and place the modes of existence.

Illustrating the profoundly modal nature of Greek cultural understanding, “the Delphic command to “know oneself” refers to a recognition of one’s place in the grand scheme of things. To “know oneself” is to know what it is to be a human and to possess a human’s fate. The human who knows him- or herself always knows one thing—his or her personal mortality. The human is defined as a transient and a suffering being for whom necessity shapes life’s course. The human who recognizes his or her fate “will think mortal thoughts” (ta thneta phronein). To think mortal thoughts is to think towards the full realization of the facts of one’s condition: to fully conceive one’s fatedness, limits, death, and even one’s personal Aphrodite (the extent to which one is bound and/or driven by love).

To see everything, as the gods do, “under the aspect of eternity” (“sub specie aeternitatis”) obliterates both meaning and morality. Those who do not suffer are seldom compassionate: they are seldom “fellow sufferers” (“conservi patientes”). The gods are exempt from necessity. At the same time, they impose necessity upon the mortal beings beneath them. Only great heroes, great fools, great criminals, or very young individuals will resist the necessity imposed upon them by the gods. Such resistance results from being contemptuous of the modes, ignorant of them, defiant of them, or innocent of them (as with the “prosperous fool”[2] Admetos whose innocent hybris results from his accidental exemption from necessity by fortune).

Most Greek art is sustained modal meditation. The Greek dramatist’s powerfully affective sense of composition resonates with the audience’s concern with the phases and states of human existence. Indeed, Greek drama mirrors and cultivates its audience’s concern with the phases and states of existence as these correspond to the individual and communal limits of necessity imposed upon them.

The narrative structures of ancient tragedy emphasize and intensify the modal distinctions that both define the characters themselves and distinguish them from each other. Thus, the hero is typically defined in relation to the sophron. The hero, on the one hand, is a man or woman suffering the imbalance of excess. The hero’s achievements and failures exceed all prior limits, confounding old modalities and redefining the boundaries between human and god. The hero is a possessor of magnificent yet ambivalent arete (fully flourishing human excellence) who fails to recognize his or her personal limits. The sophron, on the other hand, is a character of sound, sober, and balanced mind: a possessor of sophrosyne (healthy, balanced, self-understanding sanity) who knows who he or she is. When the character and fate of the hero are finally revealed, their contours may be powerfully emphasized through immediate contrast with those of the sophron.

The great modal example in Greek literature is Homer. At the very top of Homer’s modal hierarchy is godhead, sheer power, intense being; the quality “possessed by what is wonderful and unique,” the special radiance of the exceptional and prodigious. Homer’s gods are functional descriptions of the modes of great men; thus, the heroes are heroes not because they enjoy the favor of a god but because their arete requires a god’s presence to account for it. Their arete reveals divinity, almost summons the gods.

Achilles’ courage is like Odysseus’ mother-wit and Paris’s looks, a charisma. Every power a being possesses is pertinent to his or her place along the great hierarchically arranged gamut of being. Each order suffers the cumulative ananke of the orders above it in an ascending curve of freedom and power. At the same time, against the hybris of great men and women whose “greatness dislikes limits,” stands sophrosyne—a mastery of modes, a skill of acceptance and self-knowledge according to who one is, according to one’s powers and circumstances, according to one’s mortality, according to one’s place upon the curve of power and freedom.

In sum, necessity is the essential criterion of mode. Within ancient Greek drama, death distinguishes human from god and human beings are distinguished from each other by status, wealth, sex and age. Greek masking conventions present characters’ generic traits directly and immediately. Indeed, the individual’s character is little more than the sum of the possibilities implicit within the generic presentation of his or her mask. These generic possibilities are then stressed by contrast with foil characters and finally amplified and “thickened” by language, plot, development of theme, and theatrical “blocking.”[3]

The hero justifies and reveals the value of life by knowingly confronting death on the behalf of others. (11) In the “Alcestis,” by Euripides, Admetos learns from Alcestis’ death that each man must do his own dying, that death is the ultimate and most personal of facts. The “Alcestis,” furthermore, shows us that our lives and deaths are inseparably linked to those of others: the life Admetos wins by Alcestis’ death is, without Alcestis, a life not worth living. This thesis is relevant for all of us because, like Admetos, individuals and societies constantly ask, and sometimes constrain, others to do their dying for them. As Admetos learns, however, no man can escape his personal death. At the same time, we only learn how to live and die from those who, by dying for others, teach us life’s value—for life reveals its value only in the presence of death.

TRAGIC CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS AS IMAGINED BY THE EXISTENTIALIST AUTHOR ALBERT CAMUS[4]

Sisyphus demonstrates that we can live with “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it”. For Camus, Sisyphus reminds us that we cannot help seeking to understand the reality that transcends our intelligence, striving to grasp more than our limited and practical scientific understanding allows, and wishing to live without dying. Like Sisyphus, we are our fate, and our frustration is our very life. Camus, however, insists on the victorious nature of Sisyphus—he knows the whole extent of his wretched condition and a sense of tragedy “crowns his victory.” Thus, in Camus’s reading Sisyphus exemplifies tragic consciousness by living fully aware of the bitterness of his being and consciously facing his fate.[5]

Commentary on Camus’s Interpretation

Camus lightly modernizes and intellectualizes his ancient Greek source material. He is engaging in a philosophical imitation of the Greek poets, altering emphases and adapting his sources to accommodate his own time, place, and language. The archetypal myth of Sisyphus, as William Arrowsmith might plainly describe it, represents the individual’s recognition of self while suffering the constraining necessity of his or her personal fate.

Camus exalts an endlessly embattled, spiteful, and revolutionary Sisyphus. The traditional Greek perspective, however, appears ultimately to exalt the figure of the Sophron, who possesses a sane and balanced mind, recognizes his or her place and limits, and knows him- or herself. Indeed, the hero and the sophron are represented as contrasting pairs within the tragic drama (though it appears the hero may come to possess a share of sophrosyne following the full suffering recognition of his or her terrible personal fate). In other words, Camus casts Sisyphus as a hero worthy of emulation—an answer to the crushing meaninglessness of human existence within modern civilization—but the Greeks represented their heroes more ambivalently. Seldom do the Greek heroes avoid enormous suffering and even enormous personal crimes. In the ancient Greek tradition, the heroes inspire awe both for what they accomplish and what they suffer (at the hands of others and as a result of their own occasionally terrible ignorance) and their experience is rather to be dreaded than emulated.

The definition of tragic consciousness as “living fully aware of the bitterness of one’s being and consciously facing one’s fate” is neither Camus’s nor the Stanford Encyclopedia editors’ invention. In Euripides, after Herakles has slaughtered his wife and children there follows a recognition scene: Herakles is first confronted with what he has done (what he has done to his own family in his own palace is no different from what he has always done in the palaces of others) and what he is (what he has always been), and he is then persuaded by his friend Demophon, who possesses sophrosyne, to bear-up nobly and face his fate in the full awareness of who and what he is.

[1] Arrowsmith describes the second section of Aristotle’s Rhetoric—which introduces a set of generic phases and states of existence together with the behaviours and attitudes that typically accompany them—as a “modal phenomenology of human age and fortune” (10).

[2] The term “prosperous fool” is taken from Aristotle’s Rhetoric 2,15.

[3]  “Blocking” refers to the location and posture of characters as well as to the way in which they move in theatrical space, in relation to each other.

[4] This paragraph is an abridged paraphrase of the discussion of tragic consciousness within the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Albert Camus entitled: “The Myth of Sisyphus: Happiness in Facing One’s Fate”

[5] Camus claims the tragic consciousness of Sisyphus as the ultimate goal of his own “absurd reasoning.”