“An Audience in Athens During ‘Agamemnon’ by Aeschylus”, as imagined by William Blake Richmond (1842-1921). Aeschylus (?525-?456) was the first of the great Athenian playwrights, remembered for some 90 plays of which only seven have survived, including the Oresteia trilogy, Prometheus Bound and Agamemnon. He lived in Athens at a time when the city was making its first experiments with democratic government; at the same time, Athens faced intense pressure from the old-fashioned absolute monarchy of Persian Empire, and Aeschylus was present at Marathon in 490 BC when the free Greek city states rebuffed Darius I of Persia. See The Battle of Marathon.
ALL the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them: inspiring, encouraging, consoling; by the lonely lamp of Erasmus;* by the restless bed of Pascal;* in the tribune* of Mirabeau;* in the cell of Galileo;* on the scaffold of Sidney.*
But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better, by those pursuits in which she has taught mankind to engage; to how many the studies that took their rise from her have been wealth in poverty, — liberty in bondage, — health in sickness, — society in solitude? Her power is indeed manifested at the bar, in the senate, in the field of battle, in the schools of philosophy. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain, wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep, — there is exhibited in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens.
* Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466-1536) was a Roman Catholic clergyman from Holland, widely regarded as on the great philosophers of the Renaissance. His was a lonely path in that during the Protestant Reformation, in indeed in his own personal religious life, he was a moderate, who disagreed with Martin Luther yet acknowledged the need for reform. He himself found solace in the personal warmth of the Greek Fathers rather than the cold rationality of Rome’s approved Schools, a taste picked up from John Colet (1467-1519) while both were teaching in Oxford.
* Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the French scientist, inventor, philosopher and theologian, suffered chronic ill health from his late teens onwards, and died when only 39 years old.
* A tribune was a Roman official chosen by the plebeians (common people) to protect their interests. The word is also used for the dais or platform from which an assembly is addressed, which seems the most likely meaning here.
* Honoré Gabriel Riqueti (1749-1791), Count of Mirabeau, was an early campaigner for the French Revolution, who argued for a constitutional monarchy based on that of Great Britain. His death (of natural causes) in 1791 was a sore blow to the moderate position and the Reign of Terror followed soon afterwards.
* Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was sentenced to imprisonment in 1633 by the authorities in Rome, a sentence almost immediately commuted to house arrest, in which he remained for the rest of his life. His crime had been to assert that the earth orbits the sun, whereas the majority of scientists in his day held that the sun orbits the earth.
* Algernon Sidney (1622-1683) was led by his studies of classical literature to republicanism, though he opposed the trial of Charles I in 1649 and would not serve in Cromwell’s Protectorate. He spent the early reign of Charles II in exile, returning in 1677 following a pardon, but was implicated in the Rye House Plot and was executed in 1683. He is remembered today for a fiery speech from the scaffold, in which he roundly denounced the statement in Patriarcha by Sir Robert Filmer (?1588-1653) that God “caused some to be born with crowns upon their heads, and all others with saddles upon their backs”.
Précis
Closing an essay with a brief reflection on the contribution of ancient Athens to civilisation, Lord Macaulay acknowledged her influence in Universities, in the courtroom and on the battlefield, but suggested that the greatest influence was felt in private, where the consolations of her tales, her philosophy and her poetry helped bring good out of times of sorrow and pain. (60 / 60 words)
