Greek Drama as Education

Abstract

I have never believed-despite considerable evidence to the contrary--that a paper intended for delivery before a learned convention should content itself with the reiteration of the obvious. There is little to be said about the Greek conception of the function of drama in society that has not been well and plentifully said already. In the fifth century at least, the drama, like all poetry, was considered primarily a teaching medium. The poet was the didaskalos, teacher, not merely in the sense that he taught his actors and choruses, but also with the implication that he instructed his public, through a medium that offered the widest possibilities for the dissemination of ideas and information, and which could also, in a single hearing, reach the greater part of the body politic. The plays themselves offer ample testimony of this, in great ways and small. When the chorus in The Libation Bearers announce that they will assist Orestes' work as women may, they mean that they will aid him with the power of song; and they are doing no more than voicing the conventional attitude towards the function of poetry in Greek society. When the satyr chorus in The Cyclops offer similar assistance to Odysseus, they are not merely being cowardly. It is of course true that they shrink from physical participation in the blinding of the monster. But, both they and Odysseus realize, an appropriate song at this moment of crisis is not without its value. We might recall here that the Spartans, by no means notorious aesthetes, included music in their program of military training. Euripides, in Medea, puts into the Nurse's mouth a powerful, if apparently irrelevant, diatribe against the abuse of poetry: