The Oscars mark the end of the awards season, with their annual rituals of self-applause to which actors are so addicted, as Oscar nominees are to the $350,000 gift bags. The ancient Greeks are to blame. Greek luvvies and athletes formed the world’s first trade unions to wring from their sponsors privileges and guarantees which make the Olympic Committee look like beginners.
The luvvies’ worldwide union, founded in the 3rd century bc, lasted 600 years. It came to be called the ‘Artists [some said ‘Toadies’] of Dionysus’. They negotiated freedom of travel and immunity from military service, taxation and arrest, and came from all over the Greek-speaking world to perform. Inscriptions for a big festival at Delphi list 251 artists, including from Corinth 40, Athens 29, Boeotia 57, Asia Minor 11, and ten from the Black Sea. Polos from Aegina, a top luvvie, demanded public acclamation, rights of citizenship, access to the council for anything he wanted, front seat at all games and a golden crown from the people of Samos. Athletes were no better. A letter from Mark Antony (33 bc) to the ‘The Crowned Sacred Victors of the Whole World’ re-affirmed their rights and others: no military service, no taxes, the right to wear purple, etc.
Plato would not have approved. For him, the arts were valueless: first, they produced a mere copy of human life (‘a painter paints a cobbler: but what does he know of cobbling?’); this copy was itself an illusion (‘if you could make the real thing and the image, who would make the image?’); plays were morally depraved, encouraging bogus shows of emotions that were better restrained.
Being wildly popular, actors had a reputation for arrogance and bad behaviour. In the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, the question is asked: ‘Why are Artists of Dionysus mostly without principles?’ The answer is that ‘their profession does not encourage reason and wisdom, and most of their life is spent in either rank self-indulgence or poverty, conditions always productive of low moral standards… they have to work for a living and lack self-discipline’. But the crowds were thrilled. They were witnessing, did they know it, the invention of the tragic and comic theatre.
Comments