Individuality and Communal Life: Culture of the Ancient Greek Polis
There remains to be discussed the question whether the happiness of the individual is the same as that of the poleis, or different. (Aristotle 7.2)
As Claude Levi-Strauss observed, one of the key functions of myth is to help us navigate the binary tensions of the polar opposites that make up our world. One such diametric opposition in daily life comes from the tension between society and the individual. In classical myth, the city-state and highly patriarchal nature of Greek society means that this tension was understood as a tension between one’s obligation to their polis and their household. Ancient Greece understood the purpose of a polis to be to insure the happiness of the households which made it up, and they engraved the ways to understand the balance between one’s familial obligations and one’s stately obligations into the myths which they told. This theme was so important to the Ancients that it is more or less time–invariant, found in myths as varied as Homer’s 8th century BCE epic The Iliad and Sophocles’ 5th century Antigone.
Perhaps the most obvious starting place when looking for myths that emphasize the tension between poleis and their constituent households is that of Paris– the trojan prince who was nursed by a she-bear and grew up as a shepherd living on the fringes of civilization. Paris’s dichotomous nature as both the leader of a highly civilized polis and a wild lone wolf type serves to naturally highlight this tension, but the myth goes beyond just this in making the relationship clear. When Paris is born, his parents — King Priam and Queen Hecuba — had been told of a prophecy that Troy would fall if the boy were allowed to live. The King and Queen do not doubt the prophecy; they think that allowing their boy to live would lead to the loss of their kingdom and eventual death of the polis. This is one of the clearest enumerations of the tension between household and state in all of myth. Still, they could not bring themselves to kill the boy and went on to accept him back into their family when he came of age.
The obvious critique of this reading of the Paris myth is that the destruction of Troy could be a warning against the sort of filial loyalty that Priam and Hecuba display rather than a sanctioning of it. After all, many family members died as a result of the war. But, this is ignoring the existence of less extreme methods of obeying the prophecy. Killing an infant son is a foolishly reactionary decision, and one that may still be punished by the gods as inhuman behavior. A more reasonable decision would have been simply to give Helen and Paris to the Greeks when they came to Troy to retrieve them. Here the tradeoff between polis and household is steep in the exact opposite way that it was when Paris was an infant. Now rather than an innocent infant being sacrificed for a prophecy that might take decades to occur, a grown man (and criminal) must be sacrificed to save thousands of lives, the household of Priam, and the entire polis. Where the sacrifice had been large and the urgency small, the sacrifice is now small and the urgency is great. But the royal household again takes an extreme path and puts the entire polis on the line to protect their son. This is illustrative of the careful balance that a Greek must maintain between the tensions of citizenship. They can neither blindly sacrifice their household to the polis nor completely shut their ears when the polis is in need.
The story of Sophocles’ Antigone fleshes out the balance that Greeks must strike and shows that, even in extreme cases like treason, preserving the dignity of the family takes supremacy over the laws of the state. Or as Antigone puts it, “not such are the laws set among men by the Justice who dwells with the gods below” (Sophocles 14). When King Creon resists the advice of the seer Tiresias and imprisons Antigone for doing her familial duty, it brings the wrath of the Gods onto the entire polis as they refuse to accept any sacrificial rites. Though this phenomenon and Tiresias’s foretelling that Creon will lose “flesh of [his] own flesh” (Sophocles 33) scares Creon into appeasing the gods, his good deeds come too late and Creon’s wife and son end up dead in short order. The end of the play leaves its audience reflecting on the fact that the man who insisted upon mortal law has retained his crown but paid a horrible price for it, while the woman who obeyed her household duties is reunited with her brothers in the afterlife. Such a disparity of outcomes makes it clear that the Greeks honored those who defended their household even when their family was at odds with the polis.
Antigone’s willingness to defy the state at the behest of her internal moral code is a big part of what the Greeks identified as a core trait of Hellenic culture. In Politics, Aristotle observes that:
Those who live in a cold climate and in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organization … Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection (Aristotle 7.7)
Indeed, the Greeks often defined their own culture by means of othering against the “barbarians” around them. Perhaps the most famous theatrical example of this is Euripides’ Medea, about a woman from Colchis brought to the city state of Corinth. Medea’s homeland being both far north and far east of Greece means that she is portrayed as the worst of both of the barbarian types described above. Creon uses almost the same terminology as Aristotle when he notes that he’s banning her because “You are innately clever and skilled in many evils” (Euripides 8). The Corinthians fear Medea because “intelligent and inventive” but also so “full of spirit” (Aristotle 7.7) that she has no respect for the duties of the polis or her husband’s household and is ruthlessly self-serving. Acts like convincing Pelias’s daughters to murder him, her own filicide in Corinth, or her public rejection of women’s role in ancient Greece (“I would rather stand three times/ in the line of battle than once bear a child” (Euripides 7)) underscore just how clever and how irreverent towards her duties to the polis and the household she is.
It may seem at first that Medea’s exaggeratedly “bad woman” characteristics are simply ancient xenophobia adapted for the stage. But when taken in context with the rest of the play, they reveal as much about the tension between the polis and the household as the myths of Paris and Antigone. Indeed, the downfall of her household does come partly from the conniving nature of Medea. But, for the most part, it is Jason’s political aspirations which cause the end of his house. Medea rightly observes that his reason to get remarried is simply that “[Jason’s] foreign marriage was not turning out gloriously enough for [him]” and he more or less agrees, adding that he’d like to father royal sons (Euripides 14). In a tragic arc familiar from the story of King Creon in Antigone, Jason puts his want for the love of his polis above his want for the love of his family and is “left childless and devastated” (Euripides 32) as a result. This contextual grounding of the myth makes it clear that the moral of Medea is not just for Greeks to distrust barbarians, but for them to remember their obligations to their family take priority over more worldly aims.
A study of their mythology shows that the ancient Greeks always believed that the balance between one’s polis and one’s individuality was a precarious one. In their highly patriarchal society, this tension often manifested in the form of myths and plays about a man’s having to make decisions between his family and his political aspirations. The tragic stories of characters like Jason and Creon of Thebes, as well as Priam’s part in the Trojan war, are all examples of this despite the large chronological gaps between them. This tension was such an important part of the Ancients’ conception of citizenship that Aristotle addresses it many times in his work Politics, determining that the special character of the Greeks was that they could build a complex society like the empires of the Near East, but their people were individualistic like the less civilized North. He predicted that this precarious duality would mean that “if [Greece] could be formed into one state, [it] would be able to rule the world” (Aristotle 7.7), a prophecy that came near to fruition with the reign of Alexander the Great. As such, the above three stories were probably responsible in some part for the characteristic of the Western world as we know it today.
References:
Aristotle, and H. Rackham. Aristotle: Politics. London: Heinemann, 1959.
Euripides, and C. A.E. Luschnig. Medea. NYC: Unknown, 2014.
Homer. Illiad. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893.
Jebb, R. C. Sophocles: Antigone. Bristol: Bristol Classical, 2002.