A chorus declares his deeds ‘worthy of the city and its monument at Marathon’.Īristophanes’ comedy marked a flight of fancy, but it was also in some ways representative of a ‘comedy of nostalgia’ that was popular at Athenian theatre festivals – the city’s most important occasions for communal gathering and reflection – during the era of the Peloponnesian War.Ī decade or so after The Knights, another playwright, named Eupolis, staged his own nostalgia-tinged comedy called The Demes. Toward the end of the play, Demos undergoes a complete off-stage transformation and re-emerges rejuvenated, as glorious as he had been in the days of Miltiades and Aristides – two generals of the Persian Wars. The play is a satire of contemporary politics in it, the Athenian people are personified as a cranky, half-deaf old man named Demos, who is caught in the thrall of a greedy and manipulative politician.
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Sixty-six years after that battle – the same stretch of time that separates us from 1951 – the Athenian playwright Aristophanes entered The Knights in one of his city’s drama festivals. Not long after their victory, the Greeks began to think that they would never stack up to the glories of the past.
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Its most celebrated icons were the Marathonomachai, who fought and defeated the Persian troops in the 490 BCE Battle of Marathon (the playwright Aeschylus was one of them). Throughout antiquity, those warriors would be revered as Athens’ Greatest Generation. A few decades earlier, Athenian citizen-soldiers had helped to rout the Persian invaders of Greece. Even in the mid-fifth century BCE, Athenians were already looking back with longing. What happened? What made it fall?’īut was there ever such a Greek Golden Age? When, exactly, was Greece great? In fact, nostalgia for a lost greatness can be found in the so-called Golden Age itself. Disillusioned within hours of disembarking, he interrogates a prostitute named Ilya (played by Melina Mercouri) about what has gone wrong: ‘No society ever reached the heights that were attained by ancient Greece! It was the cradle of culture. A half century before that issue of FOCUS, in the hit film Never on Sunday (1960), the director Jules Dassin played the part of the American tourist Homer Thrace, a man who has journeyed to Greece in search of its ancient philosophers. That stereotype long predates the current crisis. The country that gave rise to Socrates and Plato, Myron and Phidias, Pindar and Sophocles, Pythagoras and Thucydides, today has no significant poets, composers, artists or philosophers.’ One article, titled ‘2,000 Years of Decline’, pronounced: ‘The modern Greeks prove their dissimilarity to their ancestors almost daily. In February 2010, Germany’s FOCUS magazine notoriously featured a doctored image of the Venus de Milo – one arm restored, flipping the bird – with the headline ‘Fraudsters in the Euro Family’. That nostalgia sometimes comes packaged in accusation. In the European West, after all, nostalgia for the marble-white Greece of Thucydides, Sophocles and Socrates runs deep. Politicians and media outlets alike regularly play off a version of the same old trope: the Greeks were great once, but today they’re a far cry from their ancestors. Comedy sketches call upon the Olympian gods to lampoon the Greek people for childish irresponsibility. Political cartoons abroad portray Greeks as lazy, corrupt and fiscally reckless.
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#Ways of life in ancient greece series#
Along the way, they’ve offered a series of lessons in adding insult to injury. For nearly seven and a half years, creditors have held the country in an economic stranglehold. This May, Greece’s parliament passed yet another austerity bill in the hopes of securing more European debt relief.