The mystery of Greece – III: Pirates and the tragic spirit

By Andrey Mir on February 4, 2024 • ( 0 )

The tragic spirit brought by the nomads found especially fertile soil in Greece. There, the tragic spirit was elevated from a form of frustration to a sense of heroic self-actualization and the noblest dramatic genre. A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

(Previously in the chapter:
1. The pirates of the Aegean and the opportunistic mentality
2. Pirates and horses.)

As previously discussed, the life of agrarian people was a repetitive cycle of prescribed activities. They were instructed by rituals on what to do each season or even each day. This does not mean that their lives were easy; however, everything that might happen was normalized by rituals. An agrarian individual could live his or her entire life without experiencing any unexpected event.

A nomad, on the contrary, could not rely on pre-established routines. Making choices to navigate unfamiliar situations was “business as usual” for nomads. Wrong choices led to disastrous outcomes. The possibility of dramatic and tragic developments always loomed as a real probability in the life of a nomad. Coupled with the constant pressure of individual decision-making, this contributed to the emergence of the “tragic spirit,” as Jaspers called it, in nomadic people.

Looking for a possible cause for the Axial Age to begin, Jaspers considered the so-called equestrian theory – the arrival of the Steppe horse riders to all the key Axial regions. Indeed, the introduction of the opportunistic and tragic mentality of nomads into the ritualistic and traditionalist agrarian lifestyle was disruptive. After the nomadic invasion, agrarian people recognized that the old rituals, the foundation of routine and safety, could no longer ensure their security. The priests, their armies, and their gods might not be able to provide reliable protection. People revealed, in frustration, that they were exposed to the ups and downs of fate. An individual tasted a bit of, not individualism yet – individualism came later with literacy – but autonomy, mostly the autonomy of suffering. Jaspers writes:

Here the conception of that autonomy is now elevated to a plane where the soul attains its full self-realization in the power to think and to know. This is its supreme faculty; in the last resort its only one. Man is “a thinking reed”.[1]

This is how the expectation of the unexpected in nomadic consciousness could transform, after clashing with the rituals and knowledge of agrarian cultures, into thinking about the meaning of life, which can be seen as a key feature of the Axial Age.

The tragic spirit brought by the nomads found especially fertile soil in Greece. There, the tragic spirit was elevated from a form of frustration to a sense of heroic self-actualization and the noblest dramatic genre. The classical reading posits that the genre of tragedy represents the conflict between feelings and duties, between desire and destiny. Tragedy highlighted the principal unresolvedness of life for a concrete heroic character. By no means could reality “coagulate into a dogmatic fixity of definitive institutions and notions, neither into life under a caste-system nor into life under a cosmic order,” Jaspers writes.[2] Tragedy shattered dogma and ritual.

For their tragedies, the Greeks used the stories from their myths but reshaped them in a way that put the tragic occurrences with heroes front and center. In tragedies, epic stories were no longer “articles” from the “tribal encyclopedia.” They rather became explorations of human solitude and contemplations of human destiny. As Jaspers puts it,

Still creating myths out of the primeval substance of tradition, and rendering them more profound in the image, the tragic poets, despite the fact that they drew their intuition from original sources, lived by questioning and interpreting. They heightened the content and were on the road to its dissolution. They were the creators of the most profoundly significant configurations of the myth, and at the same time of the end of the myth as all-embracing truth.[3]

He concludes: “Greek tragedy stands at the transition from myth to philosophy.”[4]

But why Greece? Songs with various forms of grievance and even the tragic spirit were known to all other cultures. Why were the Greeks the ones who refined the tragic spirit into tragedies, the examples of which have remained unparalleled up to the present day?

The answer is piracy.

A seafarer, especially a militant seafarer – a pirate – had to be prepared to face a radical “shift of fate,” as Petrov called it.[5] Death or enslavement were the flip side of the trade. The high probability of such “eschatological moments” created a “psychological tension” that fostered “strong feelings,” according to Petrov. He implies that the Greek mentality was affected by this constant expectation of the “shift of fate” underlying life on the shore and at sea.

The Greeks distilled the pure tragedy out of the tragic spirit and embodied it in a genre that did not aim to recite a tribal instruction but rather used heroic characters and events to deliver the purified tragic emotion – what Petrov referred to as the “strong feeling” of “eschatological moments.” The purified tragic emotions were supposed to lead to catharsis and the comprehension of the eternally unresolved conflict between essence and existence, to use the terms of the 20^th century’s French existentialism. Recognition of this conflict was a part of fostering the noble spirit in an individual, a phenomenon that attracted Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, London, Sartre, and many others, proving Jaspers’ idea that the Axial Age created universals in which we continue to think.

The genre of tragedy formed and reached its exemplary form in Classic Greece (the 5^th– 4^th century BCE). Tragedies were composed in poetic meter and theatrically performed and thus followed the oral tradition. However, they were written before performing, and thus they were written compositions.

This is how piracy met the alphabet – via tragedy that emphasized human autonomy through the struggle with destiny.

Andrey Mir

A chapter from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

Next: Piracy and the alphabet.

See also books by Andrey Mir: