Greek Tragedy - Greek art

National Review, May 17, 1999 by David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer

Mr. Klinghoffer, an nr senior editor, is author of The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy.

Greeks hate Turks, so on your next trip to Athens don't say this out loud, but the truth is that modern-day Greeks basically are Turks, without the mustaches. As I'll explain, that fact gives the newly restored Greek galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art their heartbreaking allure.

The seven galleries were designed in 1912, but for decades their contents languished in dusty glass cases you passed on the way to the restroom. Three years ago the museum set out to restore them to their pristine condition circa 1917, and the restorers have done a marvelous job. A skylight was reopened above the main, barrel-vaulted hall, while three east-facing rooms are now lit by tall windows looking out on pre-war Fifth Avenue apartment buildings. Thoroughly cleaned and artfully rearranged in new cases or in the open air, everything glows with natural light: cool white marbles, dusky pinkish marbles, green- patinaed bronzes, terra-cottas of red figures on black or black figures on red.

The period under consideration is the sixth to fourth centuries b.c., when Greek art was basically about two things: death and drinking. Maybe a third of what's on display consists of funerary monuments. Prominent here is the distinctly Greek motif called a palmette, like a stylized palm branch, which can be found crowning many steles, or marble grave shafts, a design eerily suited to marking graves. An especially tall and lovely example, in a pinkish color vaguely suggesting dried blood, stands in the central gallery under the skylight.

The other kind of Greek tombstone portrays the departed himself but in a way that hints at a peculiar quality of ancient Greek culture. In sculptured relief, the dead person is shown as if in life, saying goodbye. On one stele, a little girl distractedly kisses her two pet doves. On a set of three steles, the departed sits in a chair, impassively shaking hands with friends and relatives. Nobody appears to be grieving. They don't even look each other in the eye. The mood is strangely calm.

Strange calm is a characteristic Greek mood. The Oxford classicist E. R. Dodds once wrote about visiting the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles, which had decorated the Parthenon in Athens. A young man ap- proached him and sheepishly admitted: "I know it's an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff doesn't move me one bit." Why not? "Well, it's all so terribly rational." To modern folk, said Dodds, the Greeks can seem "lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience." His defense of the Greeks against the charge of shallowness tends to be undermined by looking at their artistic and literary remains.

What's absent from Greek art is a dark side-the recognition that life is transcendently confusing and painful. As the Met's fourth-century grave sculptures suggest, Athenians at the height of their civilization appeared to have convinced themselves that they had it all figured out, everything worth knowing wrapped up in neat little bundles. That is why they portrayed themselves as indifferent when confronted with death. The reasonable man has nothing to fear.

If you don't think the Greeks were a little shallow, then read their plays. Greek tragedy is supposed to evoke pity and terror in the face of divine retribution. But the stuff is so muffled in verbiage that a good paragraph-long summary of a play by Aeschylus is often more haunting than the play itself. The playwright seems to be interested mainly in dazzling you with literary virtuosity. Smugness is the dominant impression left by Greek drama.

Greek philosophy, too. Even Socrates sounds smug in his famous declaration that he's wiser than everyone else because he knows that he knows nothing. He taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, whose work reads like the monologue of someone who's very smart but a very, very fast talker. He talks so fast that you can't possibly follow all the logical leaps-by the end of which he's proved that the happiest man is the philosopher, and therefore that he and his philosopher pals are dearest to the gods.

As for Greek religion, it is associated with the word "mystery," which meant a ritualized drama to be viewed by initiates of a "mystery" cult. The performance of the mystery was intended to reveal what happens to the initiated soul at death. But once you'd seen the "mystery" revealed, there was no more mystery. For Leo Strauss, in his essay "Jerusalem and Athens," on this unmysteriousness hinges one of the fundamental differences between Biblical and Greek religious thought. A key symbol of the Biblical deity is a dark, impenetrable cloud.

The self-confidence of the Greeks in the power of their own minds to figure it all out is likewise reflected in the other two-thirds of Greek art at the Met: the huge bell-shaped bowls, called kraters. Early on they were decorated with black figures, typically mythological, on a red background. Then in sixth- century Athens the switch was made to red figures, most often depicting mortals en- gaged in household or sporting activities, on a black background. The potters realized they had hit on a really gorgeous combination of texture (terra-cotta) and color, and they stuck with it. One of the most charming of the Met's kraters shows, in red figures, a domestic scene: two girls listening to an older woman play the lyre, one girl with her chin on the shoulder of her friend as they stand there enraptured. It's like a candid photo from a fifth-century sorority party.