Ancient Greek dramas help explain the country’s current crisis

By Time, 

THE Greeks have not had much to laugh about in recent years. Falling incomes, rising unemployment and a pervasive fear of being forced out of the euro foster a gloomy mood. Even the latest news of a third bail-out worth €86 billion ($96 billion) feels more like a reprieve than a promising new start.

Still, the holiday season usually lifts the country, and this year Greeks are cheered by summer performances of classical dramas. Perhaps the gripping plots and rich metaphors of the ancient world seem more relevant than ever. Are labours to repay foreign debts Sisyphean? Was the prime minister’s victory in a recent referendum Pyrrhic?

Aristophanes, the ancient comic playwright whose raunchy satires were first performed 25 centuries ago, is especially popular. His plays, written for an annual drama festival in Athens, first entertained weary citizens impoverished by a long-running war with Sparta. This year productions of two works, “Acharnians” and “Ecclesiazouses”, in modern Greek translation, have become unexpected hits. They opened in July to sell-out audiences at the prestigious annual festival of ancient drama held in a 14,000-seat amphitheatre at Epidaurus in southern Greece. Both productions are now touring the country’s open-air stages.

Audiences grow in difficult times, says Platon Mavromoustakos, professor of theatre studies at Athens University. “Theatre-going hasn’t suffered as a result of the crisis; in fact audiences are probably bigger now.” The production of “Acharnians” has broken box-office records, opening the week after capital controls were introduced.

In the play, first performed in 425BC, a resourceful charcoal-burner named Dikaiopolis manages to bypass corrupt Athenian politicians and a pompous general to make peace with the Spartans. This allows farmers and traders to open up markets closed by six years of conflict. A chorus line dressed in dark overalls and wearing gas masks mimics riot police spraying tear gas at anti-austerity protesters.

The play resonates with crisis-hit Greeks, says Christos Hadjipanagiotis, a well-known television actor making a cameo appearance. He cites his own role as a starving farmer taking his two young daughters to market disguised as piglets. “I get plenty of laughs but there’s a serious undertone,” he says. Praxis, a local welfare group, claims that some desperate Athenian families are sending children to live with better-off relatives in other provinces or even giving them up for adoption.

Yiannis Bezos’s production of “Ecclesiazouses” also follows the current practice among Greek directors of adapting Aristophanes’s text to lampoon recent events. “It brings the plays closer to a revue, but everyone enjoys the fact that the barbs are so relevant,” says Olga Sella, a correspondent for Kathimerini, a daily newspaper.

Mr Bezos has given an extra twist to the comedy about women taking over the all-male ancient Athenian assembly, seen as the first parliamentary democracy, and then passing measures that could undermine society, such as outlawing marriage. His performance as Praxagora, the heroine who advocates such extreme reforms (there were no female actors in classical Greece) is modelled on a Greek woman politician, Zoi Konstantopoulou, selected as the speaker of parliament by Greece’s left-wing Syriza government. Ms Konstantopoulou’s long-winded speeches and punctilious attention to details of parliamentary procedure have alienated her peers. One conservative MP recently caused an uproar in parliament by asking, “Why doesn’t Mrs Konstantopoulou’s husband keep her under control?”

To decode current Greek politics, it may help to consult some of the analysis offered by such ancient writers as Aristophanes and Thucydides of demagogues: speakers who whipped up grievance and victimhood and urged their followers to take a foolishly maximalist line. Kostas Lavdas, a Greek-born political scientist now working at Tufts University in Massachusetts, says his homeland’s atmosphere during the July referendum was full of demagoguery. But he finds the modern Athenian variant less interesting than the classical one, in which silver tongues constructed entirely new versions of reality.