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General questions: 1- What is the importance of studying criticism? 2- Explain the origin of the word criticism and in what way is it related to poetry? 3- Why is the general reading of a poem essential for understanding it? The first recorded instances of criticism go back to...

General questions: 1- What is the importance of studying criticism? 2- Explain the origin of the word criticism and in what way is it related to poetry? 3- Why is the general reading of a poem essential for understanding it? The first recorded instances of criticism go back to dramatic festivals in ancient Athens, which were organized as contests, requiring an official judgment as to which author had produced the best drama. A particularly striking literary-critical discussion occurs in Aristophanes’ play The Frogs, first performed in 405 BC, just before the ending of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC in the utter defeat of Athens at the hands of its rival, Sparta. It may seem odd, in our age of highly technical and specialized approaches to literature, that literary criticism should be used to entertain and amuse a large audience of several thousand people. This fact alone is testimony to the highly literate nature of the Athenian citizens, who were expected to recognize many allusions to previous literary works, and to understand the terms 17 of a critical debate, as well as its broader political and social implications. In fact, the chorus in the play itself commends the erudition of the audience, claiming that the citizens are so “sharp” and “keen” that they will not miss “a single point.”4 The plot of Aristophanes’ comedy is built around the idea that there are no good poets left in the world; the current living dramatists are “jabberers... degraders of their art” (Frogs, l. 93). The only way of obtaining the services of a good poet is to bring a dead one back from Hades. In order to determine which of the dead tragedians, Euripides or Aeschylus, is the more suitable for this task, a trial is conducted before the court of Pluto, the god of the underworld. The judge of course will be Dionysus, the patron god of drama. Aristophanes portrays the comic adventures of Dionysus and his slave Xanthias, as they make their way to the court and hear the arguments offered by each of the two tragic poets. This is not merely a contest between two literary theories, representing older and younger generations; it is a contest in poetic art (Frogs, ll. 786, 796). Aeschylus represents the more traditional virtues of a bygone generation, such as martial prowess, heroism, and respect for social hierarchy – all embodied in a lofty, decorous, and sublime style of speech – while Euripides is the voice of a more recent, democratic, secular, and plain-speaking generation. In talking of the general functions of poetry, Aeschylus explains that poets such as Orpheus have taught humankind religious rites, moral codes, 18 and medicine; Hesiod gave instruction concerning farming; and Homer sang of valor, honor, and the execution of war (Frogs, ll. 1030–1036). Aeschylus places himself in this tradition, reminding the audience how his own dramas inspired manly passions for war (Frogs, ll. 1021, 1040). He cautions that “we, the poets, are teachers of men” and that the “sacred poet” should avoid depicting any kind of evil, especially the harlotry and incest that we can find in Euripides (Frogs, l. 1055). Euripides agrees that in general the poet is valued for his “ready wit” and wise counsels, and because he trains the citizens to be “better townsmen and worthier men” (Frogs, l. 1009). But he claims that, in contrast with Aeschylus, he himself employs a “democratic” manner, allowing characters from all classes to speak, showing “scenes of common life,” and teaching the public to reason (Frogs, ll. 952, 959, 971–978). He insists that the poet should speak in “human fashion,” and accuses Aeschylus of using language that is “bombastiloquent,” obscure, and repetitious (Frogs, ll. 839, 1122, 1179). Aeschylus rejoins that a high style and lofty speech is appropriate for “mighty thoughts and heroic aims” (Frogs, ll. 1058–1060); and he upbraids Euripides for teaching the youth of the city to “prate, to harangue, to debate... to challenge, discuss, and refute,” as well as bringing to the stage “debauchery” and “scandal” (Frogs, ll. 1070–1073). Ultimately, to great comic effect, a pair of scales is brought in, showing Aeschylus’ verse to be “weightier” (Frogs, ll. 1366, 19 1404–1410). Significantly, there are two factors involved in deciding the issue: Dionysus explains that not only does Athens need a true poet who will enable her to continue with her dramatic festivals and “choral games,” but this poet will be called upon to give the city some much-needed advice on a political problem, namely, what should be done about Alcibiades (a brilliant but selfish and indulgent general currently in exile and who had been a threat to the state and the democracy) (Frogs, ll. 1419–1422). Aeschylus basically repeats the advice offered at the beginning of the war by the Athenian statesman Pericles: that Athens’ true wealth lies in her fleet. Dionysus pronounces as victor Aeschylus in whom his “soul delights” (Frogs, ll. 1465–1467). Interestingly, the chorus sings the praises of Aeschylus as a “[k]een intelligent mind.” This intelligence, however, is of a peculiar kind; it embodies the wisdom required for the art of tragedy; and it is pointedly contrasted with the “[i]dle talk” and “[f]ine-drawn quibbles” of the philosopher Socrates (Frogs, ll. 1489– 1497). This quarrel between poetry and philosophy will surface again and again in the history of literary criticism. It is clear that Aristophanes’ play both embodies and enacts the civic duty of poetry and literary criticism. In fact, the play was uniquely honored by being acted a second time, since Aeschylus was deemed to have performed an important patriotic service to the city (Frogs, Introd., p. 293). Such an accolade may rest on his evident call for Athenians – about to suffer a humiliating military 20 defeat – to return to the martial and “manly” values represented by Aeschylean drama. His play The Frogs stages the drama of Athens’ political and cultural dilemma as a literary-critical dilemma. This first recorded instance of a sustained literary- critical debate reveals a number of salient features of both poetry and criticism in the ancient Greek world. Firstly, our sometimes narrow focus on the “purely” aesthetic or literary dimension of a text would have been incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks; poetry for them was an important element in the educational process; its ramifications extended over morality, religion, and the entire sphere of civic responsibility; as such, poetry itself was a forum for the discussion of larger issues; it owed a large measure of its high esteem to its public and political nature, as well as to its technical or artistic dimension. In fact, these various dimensions of poetry and literature were not mutually separated as they sometimes appear to be for us. Hence, to understand the origins and nature of literary criticism in the Greek world – especially in the work of Plato and Aristotle, which we shall look at soon – we need to know something of the political, social, and intellectual forces that shaped their understanding of the world. Political and Historical Contexts “Classical” Athens in the fifth century BC – just prior to the time of Plato – was a thriving democratic city-state with a population estimated at about 300,000. However, this democracy differed considerably from our modern democracies: not only was it a 21 direct rather than a representative democracy, it was also highly exclusive. Only the adult male citizens, numbering about 40– 45,000, were eligible to participate in the decision-making process. The rest of the community, composed of women, resident aliens, and a vast number of slaves, formed a permanently excluded majority. Even most free men, whether working on the land or in the cities, were poor and had little hope of economic betterment (LWC, 32). This circumstance, widespread in the Greek world, was responsible in part not only for class conflict but also for a perennial struggle between different forms of government. The philosophies and literary theories of both Plato and Aristotle were integrally shaped by awareness of these political struggles. By this stage of her history, Athens was not only a democracy but also an imperial power, head of the so-called Delian League of more than a hundred city-states, from whom she exacted tribute. Her rise to such predominance had been relatively recent and swift, though democracy itself had taken some centuries to evolve, displacing earlier systems such as oligarchy or tyranny and monarchy where power had resided in the hands of a small elite or one man. By 500 BC the tyrants had been overthrown in all the major Greek cities (LWC, 31). The ideals of social equality and democratic structure were furthered in Athens by leaders and lawgivers such as Solon, who made the law courts democratic; Cleisthenes, who organized the political structure into ten tribes, each represented by 50 members in 22 the Council of the Areopagus; and Pericles, who instituted pay for people to serve as state officials, so that such service might not be a privilege of the wealthy. In his funeral oration, Pericles defined democracy as a system in which power lies in the hands of “the whole people,” “everyone is equal before the law,” and public responsibility is determined not by class but by “actual ability.”5 What propelled Athens into prominence was largely her leading role in repelling two invasions of Greece by Persia. In the first of these, the Athenians, without Spartan aid, defeated the Persian forces led by King Darius at Marathon in 490 BC. The second invasion was halted by Athens’ powerful navy at Salamis in 480 BC and on land at Plataea in 479 BC. Despite the fact that the land battle was won with the help of Sparta, it was Athens who assumed the leadership of the Greek allies, organizing them into a confederation, the Delian League, with the aim of liberating the Greek cities of Asia Minor (now Turkey) from Persian rule. These postwar years were the years of Athens’ power, prosperity, and cultural centrality: Pericles dominated Athenian politics; the Parthenon and Propylaea were built; the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides were staged; the city was host to professional teachers of philosophy such as Protagoras, and to schools of rhetoric, which taught young men of the nobility the art of public speaking and debate (PV, 22–23). The city was alive with free political discussion and intellectual inquiry. Pericles called Athens the “school of Hellas” (LWC, 35). 23 In all of these historical circumstances, there were at least three developments that profoundly influenced the nature of literature and criticism, as well as of philosophy and rhetoric. The first was the evolution of the polis or city-state. The Greeks differentiated between themselves and the non-Greeks known as “barbarians” primarily by this political structure, the polis, which alone in their view could allow man to achieve his full potential as a human being. When Aristotle defined man as a “political animal,” it was this structure that he had in mind. As the scholar M. I. Finley puts it, the polis was comprised of “people acting in concert, a community,” where people could “assemble and deal with problems face to face” (LWC, 27–28). As later thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim reiterated, man’s very being is social and public in its essential orientation, and his own fulfillment lies in advancing, not sacrificing, the public interest. These assumptions are common to the otherwise differing literary theories of Plato and Aristotle, who are both obliged to consider literature as a public or state concern. Finley states that “religion and culture were as much public concerns as economics or politics... the great occasions for religious ceremonial, for music, drama, poetry and athletics, were the public festivals, local or pan-Hellenic. With the state thus the universal patron, Greek tragedy and comedy... were as much part of the process of faceto-face discussion as a debate in a legislative assembly” (LWC, 28). Even the internal structure of drama was influenced by the ideal of the polis: the chorus (whether comprised of a group of dancers and singers, or a 24 single speaking character) was the representative of the community or polis. As Gregory Nagy so eloquently puts it, the chorus was a “microcosm of social hierarchy,” and embodied “an educational collectivisation of experience” (CHLC, V.I, 50). It is clear that literature and poetry had a public, even political, function, which was largely educational. T. H. Irwin states that “Athenian dramatic festivals took the place of some of the mass media familiar to us.”6 No one was more deeply aware than Plato of the cultural impact of literature. In fact, Irwin points out that the “moral outlook of the Homeric poems permanently influenced Greek thought,” in ways that conflicted with democratic attitudes. We might add that Plato – no democrat – also took great pains to counter the influence of Homer and the poets. Poetry had a primary role in education: children were taught letters for the purpose of memorizing poetry and ultimately of performing and interpreting it (CHLC, V.I, 74). In the ancient Greek world, poetry not only had a public nature but also served several functions which have been displaced in our world by news media, film, music, religious education, and the sciences. Ironically, as we shall see, the image of Plato himself looms behind some of these long-term displacements. The second political development pertinent to literature and criticism lay in the fact that Athens’ predominance in the Greek world did not go unchallenged. The other major power in the Greek world was Sparta, who counterbalanced Athens’ leadership of the Delian League with her own system of 25 defensive alliances known as the Peloponnesian League. The struggle between these two superpowers was not only military but also ideological: Athens everywhere attempted to foster her own style of democracy, whereas Sparta everywhere encouraged her own brand of oligarchy. This struggle convulsed the entire Greek world and eventually led to the Peloponnesian War, which lasted twenty-seven years, beginning in 431 BC and ending with the utter defeat of Athens in 404 BC. The first twenty-four years of Plato’s life were lived during this war, and the issues raised by the conflict affected many areas of his thought, including his literary theory. Even before Athens’ defeat, she had witnessed a brief coup at the hands of the oligarchical party in 411–410 BC (the regime of the “four hundred”). It was during this repressive period that Socrates was tried and executed in 399 BC on a charge of impiety. The Spartans imposed another oligarchy in 404 BC, the so-called regime of the “thirty,” which included two of Plato’s relatives, Critias and Charmides, who were also friends of Socrates. In 403, however, democracy was restored after a civil struggle. The struggle was effectively between two ways of life, between the “open-minded social and cultural atmosphere” of Athenian democracy, and the “rigidly controlled, militaristic” oligarchy of Sparta (CCP, 60–62). It was this struggle which underlay the opposition between Plato’s anti-democratic and somewhat authoritarian philosophical vision and the more fluid, skeptical, and relativistic visions expressed by poetry, sophistic, and 26 rhetoric. It is in this struggle, as we shall see, that Western philosophy as we know it was born. A third factor that shaped the evolution of literature in archaic and classical Greece was pan-Hellenism, or the development of certain literary ideals and standards among the elites of the various city-states of Greece (CHLC, V.I, 22). Gregory Nagy points out that pan-Hellenism was crucial in the process of the continuous modification and diffusion of the Homeric poems and of poetry generally. It is well known that the Iliad and the Odyssey were products of an oral tradition, cumulatively composed over a long period of time; a given poet would take a story whose basic content was already familiar and modify it in the process of his own retelling; in turn, he would pass these poetic skills and this poetic lore down through his own successors. Nagy’s point is that the process of “ongoing re composition and diffusion” of the Homeric and other poems acquired a degree of stability in virtue of the development of pan-Hellenism. The standardization of literary ideals led to a process of decreasing novelty and “textfixation” in “ever- widening circles of diffusion” (CHLC, V.I, 34). According to Nagy then, pan-Hellenism had a number of important consequences. Firstly, it provided a context in which poetry was no longer merely an expression or ritual reenactment of local myths. The traveling poet was obliged to select those aspects of myth common to the various locales he visited. The word that came to express this “convergence of features” drawn from myth was 27 aletheia or truth. Hence the concept of “poet” or singer evolved into the concept of “the master of truth.” The poet becomes the purveyor of truth, which is general, as distinct from myth, which is local and particular. Interestingly, Nagy etymologically relates the word mousa or “muse” to mne-, which means “have the mind connected with.” In this reading, the muse “is one who connects the mind with what really happens in the past, present, and future” (CHLC, V.I, 29–31). Nagy’s perception is crucial for understanding subsequent Greek literary theory: the domain of truth becomes an arena of fierce contention between poetry and philosophy. A second consequence of pan-Hellenism, furthering the process of standardization, was the evolution of a certain group or “canon” of texts into the status of classics (CHLC, V.I, 44). It was in the period of Alexandrian scholarship that the term “criticism” or “judgment” was used to differentiate between works that deserved to be included within a canon. Nagy points out that in this era, nine names comprised the “inherited canon of lyric poetry”: Alcman, Stesichorus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, Bacchylides, and Pindar. Hence, “a pre- existing multitude of local traditions in oral song” had evolved into “a finite tradition of fixed lyric compositions suited for all Hellenes” (CHLC, V.I, 44). The third, related, consequence was the development of the concept of imitation or mimesis into a “concept of authority.” Mimesis designates “the re-enactment, through ritual, of the events of myth” by the poet; it also 28 designates “the present re-enacting of previous re-enactments,” as in the performer’s subsequent imitation of the poet. Mimesis becomes an authoritative concept inasmuch as the author speaks with the authority of myth which is accepted as not local but universal, timeless, and unchanging. It becomes an “implicit promise” that the performer will coin no changes to “accommodate the interests of any local audience,” and will give rise to “the pleasure of exact performance” (CHLC, V.I, 47–49). Even after such oral performance traditions were obsolete, this authoritative or authoritarian ethic of exact mimesis was preserved in education where the text “becomes simply a sample piece of writing, potentially there to be imitated by other sample pieces of writing” (CHLC, V.I, 73). All of these developments outlined by Nagy might be seen as pointing in one general direction: over the centuries, from Homeric times onward, poetry had acquired an increasing authority, established in its function as a repository of universal myth and truth, its fixation into a canon of privileged texts which were no longer open to re-composition but merely to exact imitation or performance, and the predominating educational role of poetry in this exalted status. A final point that we can take from Nagy’s splendid account of early Greek views of poetry is that by the time of Plato, the theater had become the primary medium of poetry, absorbing the repertoire of both epic and lyric. Tragedy had become the craft of poetry par excellence (CHLC, V.I, 66– 67). The stage is almost set for our understanding of the literary theories of Plato and Aristotle; before considering these, we 29 institutions, our histories, our modern mass media, our education system, and our various modes of ascertaining truth. There are a number of intellectual currents which formed the background of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Interestingly, these currents merged in important ways with the main stream of culture that was comprised by poetry. The first of these was sophistic, which arose in fifth-century Athens, and whose major exponents such as Protagoras and Gorgias were contemporaries of Plato. The second was rhetoric, the art of public speaking, an art vital to the effective functioning of Athenian democracy. Both the Sophists and the rhetoricians offered training in public debate and speaking, often for very high fees; their curriculum aimed to prepare young men of the nobility for political life. While the two currents, sophistic and rhetoric, were so closely connected that the Sophists were indeed the first teachers of rhetoric, there was a distinction between them: rhetoric was, strictly speaking, restricted to the techniques of argument and persuasion; the more ambitious Sophists promised a more general education extending over the areas considered by philosophy: morality, politics, as well as the nature of reality and truth (CCP, 64, 66). Plato was opposed to both sophistic and rhetoric. He objected to sophistic accounts of the world, which were essentially secular, humanistic, and relativistic. These accounts rejected the authority of religion and viewed truth as a human and pragmatic construct. In other words, there was no truth which ultimately 31