Aeschylus in Sicily

Abstract

Time has done almost its worst with the cultural and social history of Western Greece in the period from Hieron's succession in 478 to the death of Aeschylus in 456. It has left us no complete work by any Western Greek author; and for a chronicler of the period it has been able to do nothing better than a Diodorus Siculus. As a result, most of those details in the picture that are not missing are obscure. Close observation is fruitless, except only at one or two points where there still falls the brilliant but fugitive light of a Pindaric ode. Even so, if we step far enough back, a general composition emerges about which, I believe, there will not be much disagreement. This was a precocious culture, largely called into being by artificial means, and hence short-lived. But while it lived it anticipated in many ways the culture and the problems of Old Greece a generation and more later. Here already was at least one city-state swollen to outsize proportions, with a fluid population for which the moral and social patterns of the close-knit archaic community must inevitably have been losing their meaning. Here already was that violent confrontation of old and new, tradition and free inquiry, which is more familiar to us from the Athens of the late fifth century, from the time of Euripides, Socrates and Aristophanes. There is a religious background of essentially rather primitive mortuary beliefs—that whole region, of course, is the demesne of the Two Goddesses—though these beliefs themselves are taking on new and far from primitive shapes in the minds of the Pythagoreans and their associates. In abrupt contrast to them stand the utterly modern and sophisticated minds of the native Epicharmus and the immigrant Xenophanes; and half-way between there is a Sicilian who embodies in one man the contradictions of the epoch: Empedocles, poet and scientist, author (to the consternation of the learned in modern times) both of the Περὶ Φύσεως and of the Καθαρμοί. The same time, in Syracuse, sees the beginnings of a school of rhetoric—rhetoric, carrying in itself all those fearsome questions as to the relation between the word and the thing, between beauty and truth, which were to perplex Plato well into the fourth century.

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