The ‘Sisyphus fragment’ is arguably the most important single document in the history of ancient atheism.Footnote 1 At 42 lines of iambic trimeters – or, strictly, 40 lines plus a separate 2-line excerpt – it is also a substantial chunk of non-canonical drama. As so often with fragments, however, it poses, in the deracinated form that we have it, complex critical questions. In this discussion I argue that it incorporates not only (as has long been noted) a sophisticated social-constructionist theory of religion derived from contemporary sophistry, but also an ingenious meditation on the role of drama and poetics precisely in the manufacture and dissemination of the concept of divinity.
The fragment is preserved most fully in the writings of the second-century CE sceptic Sextus Empiricus (Adv. Math. 9.54), who attributes it to Critias – seemingly the famous Critias, Plato's uncle and a member of the brutal Athenian regime at the end of the Peloponnesian War known as the ‘thirty tyrants’. Another second-century writer, however, the doxographer Aëtius (Plac. 1.7.2 = [Plut.] Mor. 880e–f) partially quotes it and gives it to Euripides. To Aëtius we also owe the information that the speaker of these lines is Sisyphus; but other than that we have no external information relating to context, tenor, genre or date. It consists of a single speech positing that religion (τὸ θεῖον)Footnote 2 is the invention of a ‘shrewd (πυκνός) man, wise in his counsel (σοφὸς γνώμην)’ (12). Originally, Sisyphus tells us, humans lived an ‘unordered, bestial life’, dominated by violence (1–4). Then laws were established to check this violence; but while these prevented overt transgression, people still committed crimes in secret. The shrewd man, therefore, ‘invented for mortals fear of the gods’ (13), so that they would believe that their private actions and innermost thoughts were subject to scrutiny. The shrewd man located them in the heavens, since he knew that what was most benign and most awesome came from there. Thus it was that he conquered lawlessness (42).
As critics recognise, this thesis, though in itself unparalleled, borrows a number of sophistic and Presocratic tropes and motifs. Prime among these is the anthropological ‘culture narrative’, praising humans' emergence from a state of nature into one of civilisation.Footnote 3 There are easy comparisons to be drawn between our speech and, for example, the culture myth of Prometheus bound, which has humans living in caves ‘like ants’ until they are liberated by the Titan's gifts; or Protagoras' account of the creation of humans and the emergence of law and politics in Plato's dialogue of that name, an account that shares a similar opening phrase that seems to point to jargonistic stylography (‘There was once a time when …’, ἦν γάρ ποτε χρόνος ὅτε …).Footnote 4 It also develops a by-now deeply embedded idea that that the gods themselves are fictions of human culture. Xenophanes famously mocked Homeric and Hesiodic depictions of the gods (without himself disputing that gods exist).Footnote 5 Protagoras seems to have gone a step further, claiming that he did not know if there were gods, or what they were like.Footnote 6 Most radically of all, Prodicus claimed that the gods are personifications of fundamental human needs in an earlier state of nature: Demeter represents agriculture, Dionysus wine, and so forth.Footnote 7 Importantly for our purposes, Prodicus seems to have expounded his own account of the fictionality of the gods (the traditional gods, at any rate) through a ‘culture narrative’; for this reason, Prodicus has been held to have been a decisive influence on the Sisyphus author (even if the theological reasoning is rather different).Footnote 8 The reference near the end to the heavenly bodies, meanwhile, seems to pick up fifth-century debates over the materiality or divinity of the heavenly bodies, debates most closely associated with the Presocratic philosopher Anaxagoras. In Plato's Apology, Meletus tells the jury that Socrates thinks ‘the sun is a stone and the moon made of earth’ – to which Socrates retorts ‘Is it Anaxagoras you think you're accusing, Meletus, my friend?’ (Apology 26c–d). Sisyphus' use of the rare word μύδρος, ‘lump’ (as in ‘a star's gleaming lump’) in particular seems chosen so as to point to Anaxagoras.Footnote 9 Democritus, however, also used this terminology, and in particular derives human fear of the gods from primitive beings' perceptions of meteorology.Footnote 10
The fragment then participates in that distinctive late fifth-century vogue for merging high-powered philosophical ideas with mythological drama. In this case, however, the poet seems to have gone out of his way to mix a powerful cocktail of religious heterodoxy. In a climate that saw trials of Anaxagoras, Diagoras and Socrates for asebeia,Footnote 11 the fragment offers important evidence that Greek drama was not debarred from posing searching questions about the nature and existence of the gods, and thus provides further (albeit circumstantial) evidence to support those who wish to question the long-standing view that the theatre remained throughout the classical era fundamentally a form of ritual praxis.Footnote 12
Assumptions about the inherent religiosity of Athenian drama have, I believe, shaped the critical response to the Sisyphus fragment. This may not be self-evident, since much of the scholarship has turned on rather arid, philological issues; yet these are, as I hope to show, anything but marginal. Aside from mapping out the sources of and intellectual context for Sisyphus' musings, the scholarship has in general turned on three connected questions: whether the play is a tragedy or a satyr play,Footnote 13 whether it should be attributed to Euripides or Critias,Footnote 14 and how seriously the claims are meant. Let us take a brief tour through these questions in turn.
The satyr play hypothesis, which goes back to Wilamowitz ((1875) 161–72),Footnote 15 is supported by the observations that (a) there was at least one satyr play called Sisyphus, and quite possibly two;Footnote 16 (b) the presence of the diminutive χωρίωι in line 39.Footnote 17 Neither amounts to very much. Two examples do not make a universal rule (the ‘analogical fallacy’);Footnote 18 and in any case, there was certainly a tragic Sisyphus too, just as there were both tragic and satyric Prometheuses.Footnote 19 Diminutives are certainly rare in tragedy, and χωρίον specifically seems to be an import from prose.Footnote 20 Yet that is stylistically in keeping with the passage as a whole, with its simple, repetitious vocabulary and matter-of-fact syntax.Footnote 21 That stylistic register could have been chosen deliberately to characterise this kind of sophistic discourse, or Sisyphus himself; or it could simply reflect the default preferences of a particular author who is less well known to us than Euripides et al. Other than this, there are no decisive signs that the play is satyric rather than tragic: no satyrs, no low humour or parody. It is not impossible, but nothing in the fragment necessitates that conclusion, or even makes it probable.
The authorship question is more substantial, provoked as it is in the ancient sources themselves. Yet here too, elaborate theories are castles built on sand.Footnote 22 Metrical analysis is inconclusive,Footnote 23 and any perception that the style is somehow unworthy of the great EuripidesFootnote 24 can easily be countered, again, by positing deliberate characterisation on the author's part. The safest route is via the evidence for ancient attribution: the hypothesis that the play was originally attributed to Critias and subsequently reallocated to the more famous Euripides (who already had a reputation for atheism) seems prima facie more plausible than the reverse. Critias does, in fact, appear in some ancient lists of atheoi, a tradition that seems to go back via Clitomachus of Carthage to Epicurus.Footnote 25 That Critias was deemed the author in the late fourth century is suggestive, irrespective of questions of ‘quality’.
Finally and most importantly, the seriousness of the claims in the passage. It is worth pondering why scholars have been so keen to demarcate the views expressed by Sisyphus as distinct from those of the author. There are four tactics routinely used. The first, in no particular order, is to corral biographical material to show that there is no evidence that Critias (or Euripides) was an atheist in reality.Footnote 26 The second is to argue that Sisyphus is an untrustworthy trickster, a characterisation that distances his views from any authoritative norms;Footnote 27 this position is of course buttressed by the satyr play hypothesis, which can be taken to support the notion that our speaker is an inimical rogue like Polyphemus in the Cyclops. Third, it is observed that Sisyphus is canonically defined by his punishment for transgression (although the nature of that transgression seems to have varied in different traditions),Footnote 28 and that the plot of the play probably involved divine retribution. So the ‘message’ of the play, on this reading, is likely to have been that atheism of this kind is a moral aberration that the gods punish.Footnote 29 Finally, there is the obvious methodological point that the views of a dramatic character should not automatically be identified with those of the author.Footnote 30
It is obvious, to the point of being superfluous to mention, that views expressed by a character do not express those of an author. Sisyphus is, quite clearly, not straightforwardly a normative model for religious orthodoxy, any more than Medea is for gender or Antigone for the family's relationship to the state. But such observations are ultimately banal and meaningless. It is authors who have chosen to air the views in question, to give them visibility and salience. They always have an ethical commitment, however oblique or nuanced, to the words that they pen.Footnote 31 What drama in particular offers is a safe space for exploring intellectual and narrative possibilities, and the journey is as important as the destination. Again the analogy of Prometheus is helpful. In the midst of Prometheus bound, the protagonist explores sophistic theories of human culture. Despite the fact that Zeus punishes him excruciatingly, most readers have not felt that Prometheus' views are thereby discounted.Footnote 32 Similarly, Sisyphus' punishment (if it was indeed enacted) does not necessarily undermine his claims, and certainly does not entitle us to conclude that the play's meaning can be reduced to a slogan as trite as ‘Don't disbelieve in the gods’. Drama makes space for multiple, competing voices, which can be orchestrated more or less hierarchically. A closural resolution – such as a divine punishment (as in Hippolytus or Bacchae) – certainly reorientates any reading of the play, but does not necessarily neutralise all other positions taken in the course of the narrative.Footnote 33
Let me end this brief overview with two conclusions, a negative one followed by a positive one. First, all of the critical positions discussed above are adopted in response to a discomfort with the fragment. Much scholarship has been dedicated, in effect, to marginalising it: to proving that it is not very good Greek, it does not deserve attribution to the great master Euripides but to the vile tyrant Critias, it belongs to a ‘low’ genre (the satyr play), and in any case whoever it was who wrote it intended to prove the views wrong. (I am not denying that there have been more positive interpretations, but these have focused more on the value of the piece as evidence for the development of philosophical ideas,Footnote 34 rather than on its status as literature and as an event in Athenian cultural history.) This discomfort is a discomfort with atheism, which critics of all stripes struggle to deal with. The most recent discussion – actually a positive evaluation of the fragment – explicitly urges readers to approach it uninfluenced by ‘populist, fundamentalist atheism’ and its ‘zealous preachers’,Footnote 35 and concludes that ‘an avowedly atheistic stance need not be reducible to a facile, anti-religious one’; the play is thus (he argues) not atheistic but philosophically rich.Footnote 36 A pungent reminder, this, that Classics is not always the secularised discipline we have been led to think it is since the nineteenth century. But even when the anxiety is not rooted in (apparently) confessional concerns, it is there all the same. Classicists have been conditioned to think of Greek culture as saturated with a religiosity that is ‘embedded’ so deeply that any resistance to the divine would be unthinkable.Footnote 37 Rooted in the anthropological and ‘ritual turn’ of the late nineteenth century, this assumption is designed to resist Christianising projections (e.g. of the distinction between sacred and secular space, of belief as a privileged cognitive state, etc.); but in fact it ends up simply replicating a different kind of Christianocentrism, by defining antiquity in terms solely of what Christianity lacks.Footnote 38 Greek drama in particular has often been viewed in this way, as essentially religious, fundamentally defined by its relationship to ritual.Footnote 39 My own view is that this is a deeply misguided approach,Footnote 40 especially when it is imagined to rule out of court the idea that drama could contain serious, intense questioning as to the nature (and even the existence) of the gods. The remainder of this article seeks to demonstrate not only that the Sisyphus fragment vigorously interrogates the nature of the gods, but also that it explores the role of tragedy itself in the simultaneous promulgation and deconstruction of divinity.
Poetics, fiction, world-making
Sisyphus' wise man who introduces religion/divinity (τὸ θεῖον) is never criticised for doing so; rather, his achievement is implicitly praised for its creativity. The wise man is, in effect, a fictive world-maker, someone who creates an alternative reality, much like a poet. The poet-like characteristics of Sisyphus' ‘shrewd man’ have, indeed, been occasionally noted in passing. Ruth Scodel observes the irony that dramatic poets also promote religious belief: ‘The speech thus becomes a piece of self-mockery by the poet: he too is among the deceivers’.Footnote 41 Jonathan Hesk expands: ‘His comments about religion can be read as a critical engagement with the emotional and theological machinery of tragedy ... All tragedy represents and proclaims the power of the gods ... But this fragment raises the possibility that tragedy is merely an instantiation of the lying logos (26)’.Footnote 42 These hints can and should be developed.
First of all, the ‘shrewd man’ is a composite character, who plays a number of different roles. Chief among these is the nomothetic. The transition from the state of nature has two stages: first humans spontaneously invented nomoi (κἄπειτά μοι δοκοῦσιν ἅνθρωποι νόμους | θέσθαι κολαστάς, 5–6; οἱ νόμοι, 9), then the shrewd man ‘discovered fear of the gods’ (12–13). The parallelism between the two stages is emphasised by verbal repetition, in the form of coordinated temporal clauses and assertions that ‘it seems to me’: ὅτ' … κἄπειτά μοι δοκοῦσιν (5); ἔπειτ' … τηνικαῦτά μοι δοκεῖ (11). The perception that the shrewd man's actions are on a continuum with the creation of laws is underlined in line 40, the final line of the first fragment, where we read that he ‘he extinguished lawlessness with his laws’.Footnote 43 The invention of religion, then, is a development of the invention of law.
Yet a closer look at that final sentence will reveal that this nomothetic identity is offset by another:
There is a clear parallelism between the two τε clauses: he both ‘located the deity well with his speech (τῷ λόγῳ)’ and ‘extinguished lawlessness with his laws (τοῖς νόμοις)’. Two clauses composed of third-person aorist verbs, accusative objects (in the initial sedes), and instrumental datives.Footnote 44 Those datives are the key: the shrewd man acts both with logos and with nomoi, two separate acts. It would no doubt be too literalist to separate these two acts out into chronological phases, and to imagine the shrewd man as introducing subsequent laws on the basis of his religious inventions (or is he identical to the inventor of the first set of laws?). The crucial point is, rather, that the transition from the state of nature to civilisation was effected by two parallel techniques: nomoi and logoi.
The central role of logoi is crucial. After the section telling us of the shrewd man's divine confabulations, Sisyphus concludes with a significant, cappingFootnote 45 account of the nature of these logoi:
It is, then, by wielding language that the shrewd man effects his changes. But what kind of logos are we to think of? Does it fit into a particular genre, whether poetic or prosaic? Again, the image is a composite. There is certainly a rhetorical tinge: in the second, two-line fragment (lines 41–2), the speaker is said to ‘have persuaded (πεῖσαι) mortals that the race of gods exists’. This hint of epideictic persuasion is reinforced by the prosiness of the language,Footnote 47 and by the Presocratic and particularly the sophistic texture of the argumentation. Certainly, there are plenty of philosophical and sophistic parallels for many of the shrewd man's claims.Footnote 48
Yet this is not the end of it. The description of his teaching as ‘sweet’ (in the superlative form, ἥδιστον) invokes the honeyed words of the poets. There is an echo here of Hesiod, Theogony 81–103, where the dispute (87) that arises when the people are harming themselves (88–9) is quelled by the king, thanks to the ‘sugary (γλυκερήν) dew’ poured on the singer's mouth by the Muses, as a result of which ‘honeyed words’ (ἔπε' … μείλιχα, 83–4) flow from his mouth. That discussion, indeed, segues into a praise of the singers' gifts from the Muses, and the similarly ‘sugary’ (γλυκερή, 97) voice that flows from their mouths. Like Hesiod's dyad of king and singer, the shrewd man prevents discord among the people with his sweet words. ‘Sweet’, in this context, means not straightforwardly ‘pleasurable’, but ‘beguiling’, with an intimation of manipulation. Similarly Hesiodic is the assertion that the shrewd man concealed ‘the truth with a lying speech’, which looks to the Muses' famous lines in the Theogony prologue: ‘we know how to speak many lies (ψεύδεα) like the truth (ἐτύμοισιν), and to speak the truth when we want to’ (27–8). Whatever was originally meant by those Hesiodic lines (and whatever their relationship to Odyssey 19.203), the Sisyphus poet seems to have reworked them to mean ‘concealing the truth with lies’.
In fact, Sisyphus' comment itself is a little mysterious. Does he mean that the shrewd man concealed his true intention beneath a fictional logos? Or that he concealed the truth of the matter (there are no gods) by superimposing a false one (there are gods)? This is not clear. But the important point is that the allusion to the ‘false logos’ invokes the idea of literary fiction, which at this point in Greek culture was associated with specifically poetic fiction. It is the epic poets who recount, in Xenophanes' words, ‘battles of Titans, Giants and Centaurs, the fictions (πλάσματα) of men of old’.Footnote 49 And it is, similarly, it is Hesiod and Homer who (to quote Herodotus) are ‘the ones who created (οἱ ποιήσαντες) the generation of the gods (θεογονίην) for the Greeks’ (2.53).
Hesiodic reflections
From Hesiod in particular are theogoniai. We should leave open, then, the idea that Sisyphus' shrewd man is in fact (a reading of) Hesiod, the poet who introduces sweet lies about the gods for the sake of maintaining social order. Note in particular how the shrewd man's lying speech, in the passage immediately before the one cited above, recalls a theological aperçu of Hesiod's. The shrewd man introduced the idea
Compare the following lines from the Works and days:
This idea of the omniscient, omniperceptive deity is widespread in later poetry,Footnote 50 but Hesiod's is the earliest and fullest account. Note particularly the resonances between the two descriptions of the deity's discernment of wrongdoing (νόῳ τ' ἀκούων καὶ βλέπων, φρονῶν, Sisyphus 19; … ~ ἰδὼν … νοήσας, Works and days 267), the emphasis on perception of everything (πᾶν … τὸ λεχθὲν ἐν βροτοῖς ἀκούσεται |τὸ δρώμενον δὲ πᾶν ἰδεῖν, Sisyphus 21–2; ~ πάντα ἰδὼν … καὶ πάντα νοήσας, Works and days 267), and the distinctive phrase ‘it will not [or: does not] elude’ (οὐχὶ λήσει τοὺς θεούς, Sisyphus 23; ~ οὐδέ ἑ λήθει, Works and days 268). These markers point towards an identification of the shrewd man with Hesiod himself.
On reflection, however, matters become more complex still. Not only does Sisyphus (and through him the shrewd man) appear to be quoting Hesiod, he seems even to slide into his narrative persona. In the first sentence of the Sisyphus passage quoted above, Sisyphus begins in indirect speech (ὡς …), marking the false claim that the shrewd man put forward. In the second, he has slipped into direct speech. It is he, Sisyphus, who is now making the Hesiodic claim: ‘If you plan some base act in silence, | It will not elude the gods; for they have | Thought.’ Of course, we can minimise the implications by putting this down as simply an economical façon de parler, an instance of free indirect discourse (rare though that is in ancient literature). But there seems more to it than that, for two reasons. The first is the striking symmetry between Sisyphus and the shrewd man. Sisyphus himself was known for his cunning intelligence: ‘the trickiest (κέρδιστος) of all men’, Homer calls him (Il. 6.153), while for the author of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women he is ‘shimmeringly cunning (αἰολομήτης)’ (fr. 10.2 M–W: with a play, of course, on the name of his father Aeolus). As Scodel notes, there is an inverse correspondence, which is at the very least ironic, between the shrewd man's ingenious introduction of the idea of gods and Sisyphus' own sophisticated, sophistic refutation of that very idea.Footnote 51 Particularly notable, then, are Sisyphus' playful markers of what ‘seems to me’ (μοι δοκοῦσιν, 5; μοι δοκεῖ, 11) to be the truth about the two civilising stages, the invention of nomoi and the invention of the religious logos. Both are presented not as authoritative pronouncements but as retrospective confabulations on Sisyphus' part. The shrewd man's ingenuity is, thus, in part at least, Sisyphus' own. The auctor is the actor. The shrewd man reveals himself as a complex figure, at once a Hesiodic figure and a creation of Sisyphus' own.
Making a drama out of Critias
This metafictional aspect gives particular point to the lines immediately following this section. I quote them again, since their significance is pivotal:
The deeper significance of ‘concealing the truth with a lying speech’ now begins to emerge. The shrewd man hid his own political programme behind the fictions of the gods. But the shrewd man is himself a fiction of Sisyphus, and what is more a kind of intratextual Doppelganger.
Sequences create the expectation of their continuation, and Chinese-boxed sequences are no different. If the shrewd man is, from one point of view, Sisyphus' substitute, then can we see Sisyphus himself as a metaleptic manifestation of the playwright himself? This seems likelier if the passage is a prologue, since there is always something self-reflexive about prologic poetics: an authoritative figure, aloof from the action, appears and speaks directly to the audience, disclosing facts about the fictional environment and characters in a way that none of the principal actors would. By Menander's time, the prologue would in effect merge the Euripidean prototype with the Aristophanic parabasis, to generate an explicitly reflexive commentary on the action (the paradigm case is the Aspis). In the case of Sisyphus we cannot go so far: there is nothing specifically theatrical about his words, although he does speak with the undisguised directness typical of the soliloquy. The shrewd man's actions, on the other hand, do seem to have a strongly theatrical flavour. First, his introduction of the gods to the people mirrors the practice of the tragic poet, who publicly represents deities in the theatre.Footnote 52 Second, he is said to introduce the ‘sweetest of teachings’ (διδαγμάτων ἥδιστον), in the passage quoted above (25); the idea of the dramatic poet as teacher is central in the late fifth century, most visibly of course in Aristophanes' Frogs.Footnote 53 Third, the verb used in the same line for ‘introduce’ (εἰσηγήσατο; cf. 16, τὸ θεῖον εἰσηγήσατο) seems calculated to suggest a director ‘bringing onstage’ a certain figure.Footnote 54 The shrewd man is thus imagined creating religion and presenting it to the people in just the same way as a tragic poet does with his fictitious world and characters. ‘Concealing the truth with a lying speech’, indeed, could apply equally well to tragic composition and performance, which require the actors’ true identities to be hidden behind deceptive façades that are constructed primarily linguistically.
There is, thus, a layered analogy between the shrewd man, Sisyphus, and the poet himself (whoever he was). This may strike some as an anachronistically sophisticated reading, but it was clearly available in antiquity. Let us briefly consider how Aëtius frames his quotation of the speech's opening lines:
καὶ Εὐριπίδης δ' ὁ τραγῳδοποιὸς ἀποκαλύψασθαι μὲν οὐκ ἠθέλησε, δεδοικὼς τὸν Ἄρειον πάγον, ἐνέφηνε δὲ τοῦτον τὸν τρόπον· τὸν γὰρ Σίσυφον εἰσήγαγε προστάτην ταύτης τῆς δόξης καὶ συνηγόρησεν αὐτοῦ ταύτῃ τῇ γνώμῃ “ἦν” γάρ “χρόνος” φησίν “ὅτ’ ἦν ἄτακτος ἀνθρώπων βίος …”
And Euripides the tragedian was unwilling to disclose [his disbelief in the gods], out of fear of the Areopagus, so he intimated it in this way: he introduced (εἰσήγαγε) Sisyphus as the patron of his opinion, and the latterFootnote 55 acted as the advocate for his view: ‘There was a time’, he says, ‘when humans' life was unordered …'
(Plac. 1.7.2 = [Plut.] Mor. 880e)Footnote 56Aëtius' account of Euripides' intentions is complicated by the metaphor of the prostatēs, drawn from the sphere of legal patronage, where a more powerful individual pleads as an advocate on behalf of another (an Athenian metic, say). The metaphor, together with the reference to the Areopagus, implies a level of danger and vulnerability that is no doubt designed to evoke the climate of the fifth-century asebeia trials. The central point, however, is that Aëtius draws an implicit parallel between Euripides and Sisyphus. One stands for the other, just as an advocate stands in the court for his client. There are correspondences too between Euripides and the shrewd man. Note too that Euripides ‘introduces’ (cf. εἰσήγαγε) Sisyphus in much the same way that the shrewd man ‘introduces’ religion (cf. τὸ θεῖον εἰσηγήσατο, 16; cf. 25);Footnote 57 and each uses a fictional figure as a vehicle for normative moral instruction. Particularly impressive is Aëtius' use of the verb ἐμφαίνειν, used in later Greek of allusive ‘figured speech’, to be deployed when circumstances render it expedient to speak indirectly.Footnote 58 Euripides, like the shrewd man, is ‘concealing the truth with a lying speech’ (24–5). Aëtius, in other words, draws out the theatrical implications of the shrewd man's actions, and cross-applies them to the playwright himself.
In a captivating discussion published twenty years ago, Peter Wilson and Oliver Taplin argued that Aeschylus' Oresteia obliquely narrates the story of the introduction of tragedy itself into Athens.Footnote 59 The Eumenides' integration of the Erinyes – with all their primal, eldritch otherness – into the city, in the view of Wilson and Taplin, mirrors tragedy's own incorporation of choral lyric into civic discourse. The Sisyphus fragment, I believe, does something similar, albeit in a more ironic and distanced way. Sisyphus' speech tells of the power of one man to control the people through the wielding of words, by ‘introducing’ deities into the public realm. This shrewd wordsmith is, to be sure, Hesiodic in many respects; but Sisyphus theatricalises Hesiod, drawing out the theme of concealment and disguise that was only explicit in the Theogony.
One final point. The wise man, Sisyphus tells us, did well to locate the gods in the heavens (38–9). The meteorological emphasis is strong, and takes up over a third of the speech (27–40). The reason for the shrewd man's choice of location, according to Sisyphus, lies in a desire to ‘shock’ (ἵνα ... ἐκπλήξειεν, 27–8) the people, since both ‘terrors’ (φόβους, 29) and ‘benefits’ (ὀνήσεις, 30) come from the sky. This language of emotional charge may well put us in mind of the effects of tragedy itself, which according to Polybius aims to ‘shock and divert’ (ἐκπλῆξαι καὶ ψυχαγωγῆσαι) its audience (2.56.11).Footnote 60 These ‘terrors’, picking up the ‘fears (δέη)Footnote 61 of the gods’ that the shrewd man introduced (13; cf. δεῖμα, 14), reflect a widespread association between tragedy and terror, an association self-reflexively inaugurated in the Oresteia's description of the Eumenides and captured in Aristotle's celebrated account of tragic ‘pity and fear’.Footnote 62 But there is more. The wise man's plan is rooted in his perception of the firmament, ‘where he saw | that there were flashes of lightning and fearsome claps | of thunder’ (31–3). This suggests the celebrated heresy of Salmoneus, Sisyphus' brother (the Aeolids being the most godless branch of the family). According to ps.-Apollodorus (who is surely drawing on a now-fragmentary portion of Hesiod's Catalogue of Women),Footnote 63 Salmoneus,
being arrogant and wishful to put himself on an equality with Zeus, was punished for his impiety; for he said that he was himself Zeus, and he took away the sacrifices of the god and ordered them to be offered to himself; and by dragging dried hides, with bronze kettles, at his chariot, he said that he was making thunder, and by flinging lighted torches at the sky he said that he lightened. But Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt, and wiped out the city he had founded with all its inhabitants.
(Bibl. 1.9.7)The Salmoneus connection is oblique but intriguing. That thunder and lightning can be explained by natural history rather than the divine is, certainly, a theme of Presocratic philosophy, and Sisyphus is no doubt drawing from this well.Footnote 64 But Salmoneus' artificial mechanisation of thunder and lightning suggests the possibility of human, mimetic simulacra of divine attributes. As Stephen Trzaskoma and R. Scott Smith have brilliantly observed, the kettles and hides suggest later descriptions of the bronteion, the theatrical device for replicating the sound of thunder, which (they claim) had its roots in ritual practice.Footnote 65 We might add that Pollux also in the same place (4.127) speaks of a keraunoskopeion, a lightning machine, which he glosses (unhelpfully) as ‘a high-up stage mechanism’ (4.130). Salmoneus' actions in appropriating the symbols of Zeus' power are replicated in the theatre itself.Footnote 66 The shrewd man's choice of thunder and lightning as markers of divine presence, then, also no doubt look to the theatre's mimetic signature, its own heretical usurpation of divine prerogative.
The Sisyphus fragment, then, is more than an artful compendium of modish philosophies, an atheist's magic box; it is also a powerful reflection on the creative power of theatre itself. In the embedded figure of Sisyphus, and the doubly embedded figure of the shrewd man, we have an eloquent description of the dual role of the poet himself, the master of logoi who can both confound his audience with supernatural stories of divinity and strip away their preconceptions so as to reveal the inanities of myth. What is ultimately captivating about this fragment is not that it resolves either way the question of whether ancient drama was fundamentally religious or not, but that it shows that such debates were already seeded in the texts themselves. The Sisyphus author was aware of the schizoid nature of tragedy, its participation in the very world-making processes that it exposes for their theatrical constructedness.
APPENDIX: translation
