Staging Greek Trauma
A Review of Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today
Hollywood may have given them a new lease of fame in recent years, but King Leonidas and his Spartans weren’t antiquity’s only famous band of 300. A little over a century after the Battle of Thermopylae, in the 370s BCE, the city of Thebes created an elite military unit called the Sacred Band, made up of 150 pairs of male lovers.
The idea behind the unit seems to be explained in Plato’s Symposium, a Socratic dialogue set at a drinking party at the house of the handsome young playwright Agathon. The prospect of the long, boozy evening ahead inspires the guests to devise a friendly competition, and they agree that each man will make a speech on the nature of love (specifically erotic love — erōs in Greek).
When Phaedrus’ turn to speak comes (178e-180b), he argues that love’s greatest virtue is the fear of shame that it arouses in us. That fear in turn makes us behave honorably; nothing, after all, could be worse than being caught in a shameful act by one’s lover. Phaedrus therefore proposes that the city create a troop exclusively of lovers and beloveds: each soldier would rather die than be seen by his lover deserting or throwing down his arms, and no man would ever abandon a lover in battle or fail to come to his aid. “No one is so terrible” (kakos), Phaedrus observes, “that Eros doesn’t inspire him to excellence” (aretē).
The Sacred Band seems to have been precisely the kind of unit that Phaedrus envisioned (scholars disagree about whether the corps already existed when Plato wrote the Symposium; some even think that Phaedrus’ speech inspired its creation). As decades passed the band developed a reputation for invincibility, but 338 BCE proved a bitter reminder that love does not, in fact, conquer all. That year the Theban 300, along with tens of thousands of Greek allied troops, clashed with the Macedonian forces of King Philip II and Alexander the Great in Chaeronea, a village in the mountainous expanse between Thebes and Delphi. Each member of the Sacred Band, down to the last man, died fighting; like Leonidas’ men, they, too, understood their mission as one of saving Greece from the yoke of barbarian empire. When the victorious Philip surveyed the carnage after the battle, one enormous, tangled mass of arms, armor and corpses caught his eye. Someone told him that these were the remains of the famed band of lovers and their beloveds. Upon hearing this, Philip wept.
When I went to a performance put on by Theater of War, a project of Bryan Doerries’ New York-based theater company Outside the Wire, last month at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, I wasn’t exactly expecting to hear echoes of Phaedrus’ speech in words spoken by American military personnel. Yet over and over again that evening I did, especially as I listened to the panel of veterans and one military spouse who had been invited to respond to the evening’s dramatic readings of writings by Vittorio Sereni and patches of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. A veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom earned particularly approving nods from fellow panelists when he described Philoctetes as, at its heart, a “story about friendships…Whatever we fought for over there, it wasn’t for some big political cause. It was for the man to our left, the man to our right.”
Fighting for your government’s policy (or even your freedom or ‘way of life’) is one thing; fighting to save a close comrade in arms — forget the erotic angle and substitute Tyrtaeus’ Spartan battle elegies (“fight, young men, keeping by each others’ sides!”), if you’d rather — is quite another. In that moment, I began to see why some soldiers today might feel a deep kinship with the ancient Greeks. Caught up in the histrionic fervor of the night, it became much easier to sympathize with the perspective that, on points of honor, duty, and heroism, the Greeks somehow just got it.
Bryan Doerries’ new book Theater of War tells, in straightforward but elegant prose, the story of how he began organizing readings of Greek tragedy for military audiences. It also documents the intense conversations he saw those first performances elicit and the astonishing, lasting effects they evidently had on their participants.
Doerries studied Classics with commitment and enthusiasm at Kenyon College in the 1990s, and the translations that he uses for the performances are his own; they were published together this year under separate cover as All That You’ve Seen Here is God. But despite the teutonically philological nature of his first encounters with Greek tragedy, Doerries’ heart has always been in the theater, and through bringing ancient plays to life he revels in the creative potential afforded by what he often refers to as “the full director’s palette.”
When it comes to recent work on the healing power of Greek tragedy, especially for veterans and other trauma survivors, classicists may be more familiar with Peter Meineck and the Aquila Theatre Company’s Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives project. That project was funded largely by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, with a lot of support and publicity from what was then the American Philological Association. In 2009 Meineck wrote an article in the journal Arion about a partnership between Aquila and Doerries; there he acknowledges Theater of War: The Philoctetes Project as Doerries’ “brainchild.” Since then, however, the two have gone their separate ways, each with his own theater company, project, and approach.
Theater of War is a book that most classicists will approach with suspicion, but which all of us need to read. It is a book about how the plays that we pick through particle by particle in classrooms and libraries are actually changing real people’s lives today — Doerries has streams of anecdotal evidence for suicides averted and calls placed for help after performances. Recent demands, especially in Britain, for humanities researchers to demonstrate the quantifiable ‘impact’ of their work has led to many a flimsy, second-thought addition of ‘outreach’ elements to grant applications. It has also had the unfortunate result of engendering a kind of widespread cynicism about whether any respectable, responsible scholarship could ever naturally have the kind of impact that the funding bodies are looking for. But Doerries’ case offers a healthy antidote to these kinds of doubts. Once he began his performances, outside institutions — the U.S. Department of Defense first among them — began reaching out to him.
The book begins with an account of how Doerries came to see the therapeutic power of Greek tragedy (though he avoids calling what he does ‘therapy’ in a clinical sense) through his own experience of watching loved ones suffer and die from merciless diseases. He was present both as his father slowly succumbed to diabetes and later as his partner passed away after a long and truly heroic battle with cystic fibrosis. In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, he recognized an unsettlingly accurate portrayal of the physical and emotional dimensions of their chronic pain. But he also found solace in recognizing himself in Neoptolemus, who struggles with his own revulsion at the sight and sounds of Philoctetes’ agony.
Doerries then discusses the three tragedies that he has used to spark frank discussions about difficult and often taboo issues. Chapters on Sophocles’ Ajax, the Prometheus Bound attributed to Aeschylus, and Sophocles’ Trachiniae each begin with a fleshed-out, simple but highly psychologized version of the tragic myth; these tellings are unapologetically informed by his experience of watching and hearing modern audiences react to readings of the plays. This, for example, is how he describes Ajax’s retrieval of the body of Achilles in “American Ajax”:
To call it survivor’s guilt does little justice to what it’s like to lose a friend this way. It’s more than guilt. It is an overwhelming sense of failure, as well as a mystery. “Why am I here when he is not?” Ajax asked himself as he trudged back to the camp with Achilles on his back. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”
Theater of War has arranged for performances of Ajax before scores of military audiences, which have proven to speak especially strongly to soldiers who feel they have experienced betrayal and are struggling with the adjustment back to ‘normal’ life. But the play has also resonated powerfully with partners of returned soldiers who, like Tecmessa, find only frustration in their attempts to reach out to a loved one whose body is safe, but whose mind is still at war.
Prometheus Bound, which Theater of War has performed before audiences of corrections officers (including at Guantanamo Bay), provides a fuzzier emotional “blueprint for felt experience.” Some of the officers mentally cast their prisoners in the role of Prometheus — acting out, bending words to justify unjustifiable crimes — while others empathized directly with the Titan: a misplaced favor to a prisoner sometimes runs the risk of severe punishment from Above. Doerries (who prefaced the discussion at the Guggenheim with the gentle confession “There are no wrong answers; you’ll notice that I validate every comment”) sees Prometheus differently on different pages, but consistently emphasizes the value and insight of the audience discussions.
The book’s last chapter (“Heracles in Hospice”) reads the death scene at the end of Trachiniae as a prompt for conversations about end-of-life care and assisted suicide. Again the ancient play is made to hum with contemporary relevance; it is an unexpected testimony that humanity has long confronted drawn-out deaths and the ethical dilemmas that they thrust onto loved ones. Writhing in pain as a poisonous cloak liquefies his flesh, Heracles calls upon his son Hyllus to take pity on him and end his suffering. The young boy thus precociously joins the ranks of other tragic characters called on to divide by zero: “No matter what / I decide to do, / I will be wrong” (Doerries’ translation).
In a recent article in the Guardian about ancient Rome and the modern world, Mary Beard compares studying Roman history to a tightrope act: “If you look down on one side, everything does look reassuringly familiar, or can be made to seem so […] On the other side of the tightrope, however, is completely alien territory.” Theater of War productions don’t come with similar health warnings; in everything that I’ve read about the project, the premium is put on sameness: the sameness, Then and Now, not just of the human condition, but of war, pain, trauma, behavior and even military and societal structures.
This is true down to the program that I took away with me from the Guggenheim event: in the list of dramatis personae for Philoctetes, Odysseus is called “Director of Greek Intelligence,” Neoptolemus is “an untested officer,” and — in language most loaded of all — Philoctetes is identified as “a wounded warrior.” One of the signature mottoes of the project is “You are not alone across time.”
The book’s second chapter, “PTSD is from BC,” makes the most extended case for the mechanics of that claim. There Doerries paints a vivid picture of the Great Dionysia, the ancient festival at which most, if not all, of the surviving Greek tragedies premiered. As the generals filed into Athens’ Theater of Dionysus, “Soldiers stand at attention, shoulder to shoulder, according to tribe, which is their military unit, and according to rank. The hoplite cadets are squeezed into the nosebleed section at the very back…” All of this sets up the scene at the chapter’s gripping heart: the first Theater of War performance, of Ajax and Philoctetes, to a group of marines in a hotel ballroom in San Diego. With no directives, those marines naturally arranged themselves (by unit or ‘tribe’; highest ranking officers at the front) in a seating pattern that recalls the earlier, compelling but certainly tendentious, account of the Greek festival.
On that first occasion, the conversation following the performance lasted over three hours. It was then Doerries realized, as he puts it in the Preface to his translations:
Tragedy is an ancient military technology, a form of storytelling that evokes powerful emotions in order to erode stigmas, elicit sympathy, generate dialogue, and stir citizens to action. When you plug a tragedy into a community that is ready to receive it, the story does what it was designed to do.
It is not wrong to observe, as Doerries often does, that these plays were written by soldiers and veterans (Sophocles was an elected general, Aeschylus one of the heroes of the Battle of Marathon) for what were effectively audiences of soldiers and veterans. As classicists we don’t tend to look at it like that; Theater of War has convinced me that we should try.
Nevertheless, in a conversation over Skype, I asked Doerries whether he perceived any danger of over-selling the similarities between two societies separated by 2,500 years. He explained that, while the most important connection that can be made is a sense of “camaraderies across time,” the distance and difference are in reality also important. Audiences, especially of soldiers in the company of their officers, might feel less license to respond honestly to performances if Theater of War pressed too hard to say “this is you.” Instead, he explained, “we’re using distance as a tool to ask the audience to reflect upon ‘what do you see of yourself in this?’”
Much of his perspective has been inspired by MacArthur ‘genius’ Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist whose pioneering work with veterans led him to write the enormously powerful and well-received Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994), followed by Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002). There is, nevertheless, still room for caution in the approach. Ashley Bowen-Murphy, a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Brown University, is one historian whose research is showing that soldiers’ responses to war are not all exactly alike across time. ‘Soldier’s heart’ (used of soldiers in the American Civil War) is not ‘shell shock’ (used of World War I veterans) is not ‘battle fatigue’ (the ailment for which 1,393,000 soldiers were treated during World War II) is not PTSD (a clinical diagnosis that emerged in the late 1970s, after the Vietnam War). Symptoms change as historical circumstances, military technologies, and the public’s attitudes towards veterans do. It is also now difficult for us to imagine, Bowen-Murphy remarked to me, how trauma manifested and was understood in a pre-Freudian world.
It is precisely on this last point that classicists, whose work consists in the study of the ancient specifics — in this case the historically and culturally contingent factors of the veteran’s experience — have something to offer. Peter Meineck and David Konstan’s 2014 volume, Combat Trauma and the Greeks, is an excellent demonstration of why it is actually very good for our field that classical texts have lives of their own. Many of that volume’s contributors were inspired by the work of Shay, Doerries and others to return to familiar ancient texts with fresh eyes and new questions. It is not, after all, the responsibility of the public to take cues from academics about how to read or perform or understand ancient texts; rather, it is our responsibility to view real human encounters with those texts (what happens “when you plug a tragedy into a community that is ready to receive it”) as serious evidence about them.
One point that Doerries might have used his book to confront more directly is the question of what could be priming audiences, even skeptical ones, to approach these performances with such open minds. Enormous swaths of American national and military culture have been inspired by ideas about how wars were fought and commemorated in the ancient Greek world. Like the Athenians, we have a national cemetery and tombs for unknown soldiers; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is effectively an inscribed ‘casualty list’ (its designer, Maya Lin, coincidentally hails from Athens, Ohio). War monuments are so important to us that a nonprofit organization, the Honor Flight Network, sponsors veterans to travel to Washington, D.C. to visit monuments of the wars in which they fought. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War has been chosen by the history department at West Point (where cadets study the military strategies of the Peloponnesian War) as one of the “top ten military classics.”
More informally, and so more invisibly to civilians, the popular culture of the American military is infused with admiration for Sparta. Steven Pressfield’s 1998 historical novel about the Battle of Thermopylae, Gates of Fire, appears on reading lists for infantry at Fort Benning and for U.S. military intelligence professionals. Some American soldiers today have tattoos bearing versions of the Spartan battle catch phrases Η ΤΑΝ Η ΕΠΙ ΤΑΣ (“with [my/your/his shield] or on it”) and ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ (“come and get it”). A meme of a shadowy modern soldier wearing a crested Spartan helmet runs rounds on the Internet, sporting the text “Weapons Change. Warriors Don’t.”
One organization that works to avert veteran suicide, “Descendants of Sparta,” even appeals to widespread reverence for the Spartan military ethos by urging veterans to take what it calls the ‘Spartan pledge.’ The pledge begins: “I will not take my own life by my own hand until I talk to my battle buddy first…” All of this leads me to wonder whether respect for the Greeks, and especially the Spartans, has all but groomed military audiences to take especial solace in learning that the unquestionably heroic ancient Greeks also bore, and were sometimes ultimately defeated by, battle’s ‘invisible wounds.’
When the Phaedrus of Plato’s Symposium proposed that the city create a military unit of lovers and their beloveds, he recognized that it was in the city’s own interest to divert attention away from war itself to the need that war creates to protect and die for fellow soldiers. Under this model, battle is conveniently recast and simplified as a fight “for the man to our left, the man to our right.” Theater of War presents itself as a project apart from politics and outside of bigger moral questions about war. It is unnerving to think of Greek tragedy as another ‘military technology’ in a world that already has far too many of them. But the reality is that wars are still being fought; if, then, these performances are helping to prevent soldiers from continuing to fight them internally once they’ve come home, they are doing something that is not just good, but necessary.
Nevertheless, the biggest question that remains for me is whether it would be useful to encourage franker discussions of the political sleight of hand that Phaedrus proposes — the bait of an ideological war switched to an ethos centered on sacrifice for comrades — in the context of the audience conversations that already make Theater of War performances so powerful.
It is not, I admit, Doerries’ own role to entwine his performances with a specific politics. To do so would, as he well recognizes, mean alienation of his audiences and the end of the enterprise. Instead it is our job — not as classicists, but as citizens — to take what those conversations have reaffirmed, something that even Homer’s characters knew well. A romantic ‘heroic code’ focused on duty, above all to comrades in arms, can be a powerful diversion from a chugging military apparatus (ancient Athens and Sparta had them, and we do, too). The evening at the Guggenheim made me see how urgent it is that we carve out a safer space in the national conversation for critiquing war without blaming or harming veterans.
After a reading of Philoctetes in fall 2008, Doerries asked the audience (as he always does, and did on the evening at the Guggenheim) why they thought that Sophocles wrote these plays. After a silence, Army Brigadier General Loree Sutton stood up and, before a room of 250 other military officers, offered that “Sophocles wrote these plays to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” The best Sophoclean scholar never put it so well.
JOHANNA HANINK is Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University and the author of Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy. She is at work on a book about how classical antiquity has affected representations of the Greek economic crisis, a project that grew out of her July 2015 Eidolon article “Ode on a Grecian crisis: What can classicists really say about the Greek economy?”
Special thanks to Ashley Bowen-Murphy, Tara Mulder, Mahmoud Samori, and Donna Zuckerberg.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
