The Crowd in Ancient Greek Theatre as a Tool for Psychological and Political Analysis of Fifth-Century Athenian Society
Vivian Crooks
“They tore like an invading army into the villages of Hýsiac and Érýthrae, which nestle on the lower spurs of Cíthaeron, and turned them upside down. They snatched up babies out of homes […] while the women, hurling thyrsi from their hands, oh, the women wounded men, set men to fight… that was not without some unknown power.”
This vivid description of a manic crowd of women in Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae, tearing through the countryside with inhuman strength, reflects the convention of inserting angry crowds into the narrative, a ubiquitous practice in Ancient Greek literature. Whether it be the chorus, which is present in the performance space, or a group of characters existing in space exterior to the play’s setting—like the maenads in the passage above—the presence of these groups merits psychological interest. The language the author uses to explain certain phenomena, can provide rich information about their world-conception and their social, political, and historical context. Examining ancient literature through this lens reveals not only the psychology of the fictitious groups in the works, but the inner workings of the minds of the authors and others in their era. In this essay, I will ask how groups in Greek tragedy contribute to our understanding of the psychology of the individual within wider Athenian structures and to the politics of the time as a whole.
I. Non-Choral Group
In Euripides’ Bacchae, a group of women from Thebes, dubbed bacchants, later maenads, participate in a ritual of worship of the god Dionysus. The spirit of the god and his associated wine possess the women and madden them, causing them to ravage the landscape of Mount Cithaeron. Being in an extra-scenic space, they are reported to have pillaged and destroyed everything in their sight, even killing and tearing up the body of their king, Pentheus, whom Dionysus tricks to go and observe them. Pentheus, king of Thebes, disapproves of the bacchants’ behavior and is the first to speak of any sort of maladie or madness, ordering his men to “Track this foreign effeminate down who infects our women with a new disease, befouls our beds.” An opponent of Dionysus’ godhood, Pentheus sees the bacchants as deranged rather than devout; while others ascribe their behavior to Dionysian possession, he believes ‘disease’ is the root cause. In both cases, the blame is bestowed upon the character of Dionysus in his human form, though Pentheus’s inability to accept him as a god reveals his Theory of Mind (ToM).
Theory of Mind, as Paul Dilley defines it, is “the cognitive capacity to attribute mental states to self and others.” Using Theory of Mind to analyze the word choice of the characters in the play affords a sense of their distinct worldviews. While Dilley’s definition broadly describes ToM, many culturally distinct variations of it differ based on a community’s beliefs about the divine. Part of the modern Euro-American secular view is that “entities in the world, supernatural or otherwise, do not enter the mind,” yet thoughts have the power to affect emotions and cause illness. The Euro-American supernaturalist view, on the other hand, states that entities, such as gods, can cross the mind-world boundary. Most of the characters in this play hold the latter view. The herdsman, while delivering a testimonial recounting of the maenads, says, “Then the whole mountainside became convulsed and god-possessed, even the animals: nothing but it moved with the mystic run.” His metonymic use of “the whole mountainside” implies that the god Dionysus crossed the mind-world boundary of the maenads and the animals, driving them to behave both deliriously and chaotically. However, Pentheus’s description differs:
So, like a wildfire it already hurries here,
outrageously, this mass hysteria:
disgracing us before the whole of Thebes.
…We must march against these mad bacchants.
His word choice reveals his beliefs. Using the terms “hysteria” and “mad” instead of the herdsman’s “god-possessed” demonstrates a key difference in the commonly-held ancient ToM (Euro-American Supernaturalist) and our modern one (Euro-American Secular). Not believing that Dionysus is a god, Pentheus displays the Euro-American secularist ToM. When speaking about the behavior of the maenads, he uses language more akin to a modern psychological analysis of the bacchants’ mental state. While the concept of ancient ToM is rich in revelations and omnipresent in ancient plays, it plays an especially important role in examining ancient Greeks’ conception of psychological phenomena. Where the ancient layperson might ascribe the event to interference by the gods, a more modern take would lean towards something internal, which can be explored through theories of mob mentality and crowd psychology.
Mob mentality was first discussed by social psychologist Gustave LeBon in his 1896 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. LeBon’s monograph, though dated in its perspectives on historically racial, class-based, and gender minority groups, marks an important milestone in the study of the crowd that has remained notable for and applicable to academic crowd psychology work throughout the last century. From his work, crowd theory with the central concept of a collective mind emerged; when “an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it…A collective mind is formed.” This collective mind, in what LeBon calls a “criminal crowd,” generates mob mentality. A crucial feature for the formation of the collective mind is something LeBon calls “suggestibility,” which Schwab compares to hypnotism. These features, especially hypnotism, are all recognizable in the mob of maenads. At the end of the play, when Agave holds her dead son’s head proudly, thinking it the head of a lion, this hypnotism slowly wears off. “Cadmus: Then—whose face is this you are holding in your hands? / Agave: It’s a lion’s…or, they that hunted it said so.” This scene references Agave’s previous ‘suggestibility’ wherein she and the other maenads hunt her son, Pentheus, under the false assumption that he is a lion, tearing him to pieces in a gruesome scene that takes place in distant space and is recounted via messenger speech. As the crowd dissolves and disperses, so does its collective mind, allowing the individuals to regain agency. This return to reality, or reunion of the narrating and experiencing self, as Anna Lamari explains in her discussion of the Madness Narrative in Euripides’ Bacchae, “makes narration reliable” in a delirium narrative. Agave’s narrative self, the part of her that is capable of holding conversation and giving orders to the maenads, remains lucid throughout the play. Her experiencing self, the part that perceives and feels, however, is what is “suffering.” The mob mentality hypnotises Agave's experiencing self, fooling her into mistaking her own son's head for that of a lion. She loses her ability to discern reality from delusion. As Agave slowly returns to sanity, there her narrating and experiencing selves reunite, and the latter becomes once again lucid. This scene’s recognition lends credibility to Agave’s narration of her experience within the mob and liability for her actions as she realizes what she has done.
The Euro-American supernaturalist perspective, on the other hand, would explain Agave's recognition as the withdrawal of Dionysus within her psyche. Both the split of the two selves and their subsequent reunification allows the reader to understand the different characters' perspectives on madness. As Cadmus recounts in this scene, “the whole city was possessed by Bacchus.” Cadmus, representing the supernaturalist viewpoint, ascribes the entire event to the interference of the god Dionysus; as Lamari mentions, madness in tragic contexts is typically connected to “external, mainly divine sources.” Agave's blame, according to Cadmus, lies not in her participation in the mob mentality but in being possessed by Dionysus despite not previously believing in his godhood. Cadmus’ perspective aligns with the general ancient Greek religious belief that gods might interfere with human affairs and punish those who do not serve them. The analysis of psychological dynamics in groups, written by an ancient Greek author, reflects their socio-cultural norms and viewpoints.
Along with using psychological theory to understand the maenad crowd, we must consider their performance’s dramaturgy and the space they use. The god Dionysus introduces the maenads in their extra-scenic space at the beginning of the play, saying, “I hurry to the dells of Cithaeron where the bacchants are, I go to join them in their dances there.” For the rest of the play, the crazed group remains in this extra-scenic space, defined as stage right—where Dionysus might point while delivering this line. Descriptions of the bacchants build upon the audience’s imagined view of them, with imagery from messenger speeches updating the knowledge of their activities in this extra-scenic space. As most gruesome scenes of death or attack do not occur on stage, possibly due to the difficulty of portraying them in ancient times, the maenad’s frolic of folly is, predictably, not on stage either.
The idea that the maenads’ folly is only present off-stage is vital for understanding the play’s viewing experience and the role the audience’s imagination plays in it. In his work on space in tragedy, David Wiles says, “The on-stage world and an imagined off-stage world are taken to be homogeneous.” As I discussed above, the entire storyline of the maenad’s behavior is relayed to the audience via messenger. In this way, Euripides distances the audience from the action, providing the viewer with a “panoramic standpoint,” placing them within space. Through the device of the messenger speech, Euripides can orient the audience and locate the actions of the play in spatial distance. Here, Dionysus’ opening address lays a framework for future messenger speeches by asking the audience to imagine action taking place on Mount Cithaeron as being relevant for the story taking place; he primes their minds for the idea that something of importance for the plot might happen there. This address, similar to the upcoming messenger speeches, sets up a contrast between the “peaceful rural scene and the violence which follows.” The use of distant space then situates the audience within the geography of the play and leans on their imagination and memory for part of its performance. Because Thebes and its nearby Mount Cithaeron are a common setting for ancient plays, the messenger speech becomes more psychologically relevant. For audience members who have seen these previous tragedies, recalling the mountain brings to mind actions that happen in this familiar mental geographic location. This spatial reference familiarizes the audience with the setting, causing tension between their expectations and reality. Euripides gives his audience the freedom to envision for themselves the debauchery of the women on Mount Cithaeron, allowing for a high level of personal psychological engagement with the work and its dramaturgy.
II. Choral Group
In the Eumenides, the tragic crowd is embodied in the chorus—made up of the furies. The furies, unlike the maenads, are entirely on stage in performance space, contributing a remarkable energy and presence. Aeschylus frequently describes and stages the furies surrounding Orsetes, using their physical presence to intimidate and encircle him. In The Bacchae, the mob was distant and imagined, while, in The Eumenides, the mob is very much present as a chorus with aggressive and erratic movements in their dances. They call out,
We think we are straight in our justice:
no anger from us comes against those
who hold out pure hands,
and each walks through his life without harm;
but to any who sins like this man here
and conceals bloody hands,
we appear as true witnesses in support of the dead,
exacting payment for bloodshed with authority.
Aeschylus’ crowd acts aggressively as it moves toward a common goal: justice for the death of Orestes’ mother, Clytemnestra. The gruesome and bloody imagery evoked from the wording of this choral exclamation is similar to that in the messenger speech reporting the gorey details of the violent maenads. Once again, this remains only a threat, and the audience is asked to play a part in creating the imagery to imagine what “exacting payment for bloodshed with authority” entails, rather than any vicious attack taking place on stage. Emphasizing and staging the physicality of the furies, Aeschylus stays within the traditions of ancient theater while also playing up the furies’ ferocity. In this scene, the chorus of furies surrounds Orestes, “ominously encircl[ing]” him during their binding song, and sings their ill-will towards him, describing the ancient prerogatives of justice and revenge mentioned at the beginning of their song. Viewing this aggressive use of space, with Orestes defenseless in the center, the audience must be startled by the old gods’ power and presence, as well as by their dramatic and shocking appearances. As David Wiles explains, the choral odes do not act as “poetry enhanced or illustrated by rhythmic movement, but rather as a sequence of visual images interpreted by words.” In other words, the play is not primarily a work of text, but a performance, a dramaturgy, which the furies’ dance can remind us of. Since aggression and bloodshed is not typically shown on stage, this aggressive use of space is likely the most hostility the audience will experience. This adds to the immersive aesthetic experience for the audience —what they feel while watching the performance—which is distinctly different from the imagined one of the maenads, adding a psychological tension between the hostility of the play’s setting and the disassociation of the audience.
As for the broader role of space in the play, Aeschylus partakes in proleptic spatial narration. Rush Rehm defines this as “realizing physically onstage what previously had been described verbally.” Discussing the court space within the trilogy before utilizing it as the setting in the final act of The Oresteia is dually comparable to the use of the fury chorus as the crowd. Aeschylus also employs proleptic spatial narration with the furies, bringing them in as the chorus after referencing them in the previous two plays. In a metatheatrical interpretation, where previously an aggressive crowd (like the maenads) would only behave belligerently off stage, verbally described by a messenger speech and performed exclusively in the minds of the audience, Aeschylus has now brought the mob onto stage. The change in use of space within the greater tragic Greek canon thus introduces a considerable intertextual weight to the physical performance of the furies in their choral song and dance. In a direct interpretation of proleptic spatial narration, Rehm discusses how with Athena’s arrival comes the announcement of the formation of a court for Orestes’ trial, which primes the audience for a scenic shift from the Acropolis to the Areopagus. With the choral use of space being rich both inter- and intra-textually, this aspect of the performance leans on the minds and memories of the audience, enhancing its psychological nature.
The furies exemplify many features of crowd theory; as a chorus, they have no individual identities, often speaking and acting in unison, contributing to LeBon’s proposed “collective mind.” As you might recall from the passage quoted earlier, one section of their song and dance shows this: “We think we are straight in our justice: No anger comes from us against those…” The use of first-person plural pronouns is an important aspect of their language that reveals their collective identity. Before beginning her analysis of lyrical fragments in her Group Identity and Archaic Lyric, Jessica Romney outlines social psychology concepts related to groups. In the formation of groups, she emphasizes the importance of depersonalization and in/out-group categorizing. The chorus, at its core, is a group of depersonalized individuals. This is true especially in The Eumenides, where the furies act and speak as one. Romney also discusses the “external-we.” By using an “external-we,” groups, like the furies, strengthen their collective identity by defining themselves as different from others. The chorus refers to Athena and the gods as “You younger gods.” The chorus locates self-identity through negation—they distinguish who they are by means of understanding who they are not. As Felix Budellman states, “the normal unit of thought is the collective” in unitary groups like the chorus. Because of this, “choruses rarely divide into individual voices,” but when the chorus leader speaks alone, it is “a form of synecdoche rather than division.” The furies’ use of “I” can be explained through this interpretation; the group is depersonalized, and from a singular personal pronoun one can infer its intended synecdochal use. These features of the furies’ choral performance as well as their use of space shed light on the play’s relevance to modern psychological concepts.
The furies are certainly under a LeBonian ‘hypnotism’ that possesses them to behave with such conviction as a group. However, being somewhat divine, this doesn’t seem to dissolve in the same way that it did for Agave and the other maenads. Through Athena’s involvement, the crazed furies can reintegrate into society and be ‘unhypnotized.’ In this case, a newer, more superior divinity’s involvement must calm the mob of furies and allow them to become the newly gracious ones. The furies go from using defensive self (group)-centered language (clearly opposed to Athena and the earthly way of living):
That I should suffer this, alas—
I the ancient in wisdom—[and] live on earth
[where] pollution goes, alas, without punishment!
All my force is in my breath,
and all my rancour,
to language showing acceptance and understanding after hearing Athena's rhetoric:
Chorus: Queen Athena, what abode do you say I have?
Athena: One untroubled by all distress. Accept it, I beg you!
Chorus: And suppose I have accepted—what prerogative remains for me?
Athena: That no house is to thrive without you.
…
Chorus: You will win me over, it seems; I am giving up my rancour.
Within a few lines of Athena’s words, imbued with wisdom and logic, this divine symbol of Athens dissolves the madness from the crazed furies and allows them to become ‘normal.’ This conversation provides considerable evidence for the ascription of crazed, delirious, mob behavior as being managed by divine intervention, or crossing of the mind-world boundary. Athena’s plot resolution reflects the Euro-American supernaturalist view that Aeschylus and most ancient audience members likely held, suggesting that mob mentality was connected to the divine. Through examining these phenomena in literature we can hypothesize about the societally-held theories of mind and the divine.
III. Social and Political Contexts
The Eumenides, while dealing with the crazed mob of the furies, is situated in an inherently political context that pushes the audience’s perception of morality and democracy. In the same way that we have examined Ancient Athenian ToM through textual performance, we can investigate how other social and political ideals are portrayed in ancient authors’ works through representations of groups.
When discussing the relevance of groups, we must analyze the role of the third type of group—the audience. Because this group is known mainly to be the citizens of Athens, Athens' importance as the birthplace of democracy cannot be overlooked in the analysis of tragedies. The Tragedians were certainly influenced—consciously or unconsciously—to include aspects of the political environment in their works, given their habitation in the city. Whether it was to make a political statement by detailing the downfall of a society run poorly by a tyrant in Antigone or to highlight the city’s democratic ideals in Euripides’ The Eumenides, Peter Burian describes how drama compelled audience members to think independently and consider diverse opinions. Athenian drama “provides an essential tool for assessing democratic self-understanding during that period.” In this way, the audience becomes important to consider when discussing groups in Greek Tragedy. Leaving the scenic space in considering this group, we must consider how extra-scenic factors, namely the political and social context of fifth-century Athens, would play a role in audience reflections or poets’ writing objectives. We can apply Felix Budelmann’s case study of dēmos to parts of their work depicting groups to understand ancient perception of group cognition.
Demanding audience involvement and political decision-making, tragedies function as a tool for democratic discourse. In fact, audience participation “engages and makes its own a democratic culture of open debate.” As Burian explains, tragedy, in its dialogic form, extends the Athenian foundational principle of free speech, parrhēsia, to perspectives of those not typically permitted in the political arena, attesting to the importance of the collective decision-making present in Ancient Athenian democracy. Some scholars like Edmund Stewart argue that the use of the word tyrannos and thus the presence of tyranny is a neutral element in tragedy. However, heavily biased by their political environment and the ideals of democracy, the Athenian open debate always looks negatively upon tyranny. Thus, the democratic perspective, as embodied by the dialogue of tragic drama, prevails over tyrannos as a result of the poet’s bias.
The discussion between Athena and the furies at the end of the trial scene in The Eumenides represents the success of the demos over the tyrannos. The furies (although not necessarily tyrannical), opposing Athena’s viewpoint, are given no advantage in their dialogic argument with Athena. However, immediately othered, they symbolize a crazed and blood-thirsty “pre-political order that threatens an essentially democratic political order.” Aeschylus, in his democratic guise, grants the furies parrhēsia, but he does not afford them equality. He uses the furies’ madness narrative as a device to show that Athena’s democratic position is the standard one and she must cure their madness so that they return to reason, to convention. Precisely by presenting open dialogues in ancient tragedy, the tragic playwrights’ democratic beliefs and preferences bias the outcome and message of the work. Although the audience may form their own opinions around these debates, the biases of the playwright/setting guide their perception of the two parties.
The poet’s spatial manipulation is equally politically relevant as their framework. Rehm, in his analysis of Aeschylus’s use of space, introduces the concept of reflexive space, meaning the amphitheatre in which the audience reflects on and engages with the tragedy. This is particularly relevant in the Athens-based setting and performance of The Eumenides. With the themes of justice, fairness, and democracy, the content of the play already evokes the central political beliefs of fifth-century Athens. However, the final act, with a setting change to Athens and introduction of Athena—the official divine embodiment of the city’s political foundations—pushes this even further. Instead of situating his final act in the heroic, mythical “once upon a time,” Aeschylus implicates his audience in the reality of the tragic events, eliminating the distance between the play and its viewers. This shift then sets up a place to contrast the barbaric prerogatives of the furies with the civilized decision of Athena. Additionally, the use of reflexive space, the physical location of the performance, and the play being performed in Athens add meaning to the observation and performance spaces being extremely similar to political assemblies and courts. The theater being set up as this space primes the audience for a discussion of democracy in a trial, as the introduction of distant space in The Bacchae primes them for chaos in its wilderness. This setting asks the audience to take on a political mindset and determine if Athena’s decision is fair. Although, as I have argued above, their decision is likely biased by the playwright's own choice. This setting and performance space, which requires the audience to participate in the plot, psychologically and politically skews the audience’s viewing experience. In a similar vein, the need for divine intervention reflects the audience’s perception of madness and the divine. The diegetic Athenians clearly show respect for Athena, as they associate her with wisdom and ask her to decide the fate of Orestes. She steps in to enact change and explicitly take away the madness of the furies, dissolving their possession by defining her superiority as a New God using rationality and rhetoric. Aeshcylus’ democratic bias demonstrates the political influence that living in Athens has had on him. The democratic values, including rhetoric, reason, and parrhēsia, of The Eumenides are also those of Athens.
Through examining language use for the descriptions of groups, specifically “I” and “my,” we can, similar to our previous argument, extract the impact of the poet’s thoughts—this time in regard to the perception of group thought. In the section concerning the chorus, I discussed particular language use of “I” and “we” in the group speaking parts of the chorus. The view of the chorus as one unit is not strictly a facet of Greek Tragedy. Rather, it is the common perception of collective cognition in Ancient Greece, which we can observe in political writings. As Budelmann quotes in Aristotle's description of the dēmos, “Just as the multitude becomes a single man with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one as regards character and thinking.” The language used both by Aristotle—describing the “multitude” as becoming one in “character and thinking”—and by tragic poets, with their synecdochic use of pronouns for choruses, is demonstrative of the common perception of the group as one unit. When Aristotle attempts to account for the individual’s impact on the group, “the result is a monstrosity.” Thus, the history of thought and writings surrounding groups, such as the chorus, attribute mental states and desires to the group as one. When the furies speak, they use words such as “my” and “I”: “I am dishonoured, wretch that I am; my heavy rancour releases on this land—woe to it!—a poison, a poison from my heart to requite my grief…” Their discussion of grief and dishonor reflects the classical theory of group minds. Using this language shows a common belief that the group is a single unit that thinks and feels as one. Within the social and political context of democratic Athens, one can intuit how the city’s political structure, being so reliant on the group’s decision, impacts their ways of thinking about collective cognition.
Conclusion
Discussing supernatural, secular, and group theories of mind, I have provided a modern perspective on what psychological phenomena might have impacted the production of Ancient Greek literature in an effort to reconstruct the psyches of people during this era. The experience of belonging–to a group, to an audience, to a space, to a society–profoundly shaped and was shaped by ancient tragedy. The psychological reality of choral and non-choral groups reveal that the tragic poets’ work is a device through which we can observe and abstract the thinking and biases of fifth-century Athens. Existing within the reflexive space of the amphitheatre, further, the audience relates to one another while they participate in the civic reflection prompted by the actions of the play. In further extending this to examine the social and political context of the work, I have attempted to consider what other factors might impact the authors’ use of language and political intentions. With an analysis of the work of several scholars in Classical Studies, I have provided an enriched understanding of not only Ancient Theory of Mind and Groups, but of the dramaturgy and texts of the plays themselves.
Bibliography
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