"Origins of the Creative Class: Part 2"
The second installment of critic Scott Timberg's Radio Silence articles
Last week, we left the artist-magician on the verge of civilization. This week begins with a missing piece from Part 1, plus some supplemental material outside the scope of Timberg’s articles, before turning to Archaic and Classical Greece.
Origins of the Creative Class: Part 2
As societies moved from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture, sometimes the figure of the artist “symbolized a loss of innocence.” A tragic fall from the state of nature to culture, or civilization.
Just as Adam and Eve were ejected from the garden because of their knowledge—which may be a metaphor for the very painful beginnings of farming for a race that pined for the freedom and sexual license of hunter-gatherer times—the artist emerged when the rough equality and classlessness of the pastoral lifestyle was coming to an end. They were beloved, and suspect: According to the book of Genesis, the arts, as well as the world’s original city, were developed by the descendants of Cain—the first murderer.
According to Sigmund Freud, and René Girard—the French philosopher and literary critic who wrote about “sacred violence”—cities, or the new agricultural order they represented, were often founded with a “murder.” In myth, these murders probably reflect a common occurrence, the power struggle between older and younger male members of a tribe for dominance.
Saying civilizations were founded with a murder is also another way of acknowledging that the establishment of the social order was sometimes accompanied by a bizarre cultural rite known as human sacrifice.
These rites, one of the more unsettling practices common to all cultures at some point in their development, probably existed in nomadic cultures. But in agricultural societies they became further ritualized, and eventually, sublimated into other practices like animal sacrifice, fertility worship, and in Greece, the rituals of tragic theater.
Tragedy, from tragos, means “goat,” a typical animal offering. The dramas involve the tragic demise of a hero—the goat, so to speak—who somehow elevates the audience through his death.
In the Old Testament, the entire book of Leviticus is dedicated to these rites, a veritable handbook of animal sacrifice for the Levites, or Hebrew priests.
Genesis contains two stories concerning brothers, which are thought to represent the transition to agricultural civilization. The most famous, which Timberg alluded to, involves the murder of Abel, a shepherd, by his brother Cain, a farmer—which may symbolize the transition from pastoral to agricultural society. Cain was enraged after God accepted his brother’s animal offering over his vegetable offering. So he murdered him, and went on to found the first Biblical city, “east of Eden.”
Later in Genesis there’s a similar rivalry between Jacob, a farmer, and Esau, a hunter, over their father’s birthright. Jacob (who would later assume the name Israel, and beget the tribe of Israelites) tricks his elder brother out of his birthright, then cons their father Isaac into bestowing his blessing on himself. Jacob accomplishes this con by wearing one of his brother’s animal pelts and acting like him. (Esau was hairy, and Isaac was nearly blind, so by wearing Esau’s fur pelt Jacob dupes Isaac into thinking he is blessing his hairy elder son).
The way Biblical myths are structured, with lots of doubling and repetition, the story of Cain and Abel is overlaid with that of Jacob and Esau—two stories about animal vs agricultural lifestyles, fraternal rivalry, and murder or sacrifice.
For René Girard, at least, Jacob’s donning of an animal skin and assuming his brother’s place symbolizes the historical transition from human to animal sacrifice, and from hunting to farming. Since Jacob assumes the name “Israel” afterward, it also represents the establishment of Hebrew society.
There’s also the story of Jacob and Esau’s father, Isaac, whose own father Abraham nearly sacrificed him to the Lord, only to be saved at the last second and replaced with an animal substitute.
All these warm and fuzzy bedtime stories seem to point to the replacement of human with animal offerings. By the time the reader reaches Leviticus, the Bible is only concerned with the sacrificial rites of animals—humans seem to have evolved. (Until the New Testament.)
—What does this have to do with artists?—
For one thing, note that Jacob—who conned his father and brother—was a trickster. The oldest literary trope known to man, often associated with the shaman, or artist-magician (much as Cabeza de Vaca, the “first surgeon of Texas,” was identified with a trickster deity after he was thrust into the role of indigenous American healer).
In ancient Greek, the word for a sacrificial victim is pharmakos. A similar word, pharmakon, means both “poison” and “cure.” In other words, a drug—we derive the English word “pharmacy” from it. The word for “magician” or “healer” is pharmakeus. These words are all related, nearly interchangeable in the ancient Greek imagination. Magic man, “drugs,” and sacrifice.
Recall that the artist was once the “artist-magician.”
In the logic of sacrificial rituals, the sacrificial offering, or victim, is considered the cause of, and solution to, all of society’s ills—poison and cure. Got a drought? Suffering from plague? Famine? Blame the scapegoat, a word from Leviticus.
In the handbook to Hebrew ritual, the scapegoat was an actual goat, to which the sins of society were attached. Written on strips of velum pinned to the animal’s horns, or otherwise associated with the animal through prayer, before it was exiled to the desert. Hopefully, taking the burdens of society with it.
In Greek terms, the scapegoat was considered “polluted”—profane. A stand-in for whatever was ailing the community. A mimetic, or imitative, substitute for the entire community, concentrated in one unfortunate individual.
For an endangered community trying to ward off the effects of drought, famine, or deprivation, a disabled or afflicted individual who might otherwise be a burden to society presumably made for an ideal victim. And affliction further proved the victim was “polluted” with bad luck.
At the same time, paradoxically, the scapegoat was considered good enough for the gods. Greeks called their offerings “ambrosia”—literally, the food of the gods. In other words, the pharmakos (“victim”) was pharmakon (both “poison,” and “cure”). Sacred and profane.
In this sense, the scapegoat is also a “magician” or “healer” (pharmakeus), in that once they’re sacrificed, whatever ails the community is—in the logic of magical thinking—magically cured. Just as hunter-gatherers substituted mimetic images of animals for game, or musical instruments made of animal parts to represent the real thing, ritual scapegoating chose a single victim to represent the entire community.
All this imitative magic is simply an effort to control the unknown, by substituting a copy for the real thing.
As with hunting decoys, fishing lures, or bird calls, the sacrificial substitute must’ve occasionally been associated with effective results—otherwise we wouldn’t instinctively revive such practices today.
In the case of scapegoating, the efficacy was not in actually warding off natural disasters, but in preventing future outbreaks of violence that accompany such disasters, communal strife. By placing the blame on one person, the community—if they believe in the authenticity of their ritual—is temporarily reconciled.
In some cases, as anthropologist Michael Taussig explains, the sacrificial victim is more literally an artist-magician or shaman—if he’s a bad performer. In Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism, Taussig cites Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, observing the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia in 1966. A “great part of the shamanistic procedure is based on fraud,” Boas observed; “still it is believed in by the shaman as well as by his patients and his friends.”
There’s a complicit relationship between the spiritual leader and his people, based on simultaneous skepticism and the desire to believe. (Think of some of the impossible ideas on circulating on the internet which people profess to believe, like Flat Earth-erism. The ludicrousness of the belief is itself communally binding, a symbol of group faith.)
The author Stanley Walens, also observing the Kwakiutl, in 1981 noted that while these “shamans are admired for their legerdemain, if a shaman bungles one of these tricks, he is immediately killed.” The magician whose art fails to convince, or who unskillfully reveals his secret fraud, becomes the scapegoat; pharmakeus becomes pharmakos.
What these sacred weirdos all have in common—whether artist, magician, or scapegoat—is that they all stand apart from the community in some way, while the community defines itself in opposition to the stranger on the edge of the crowd. Someone both “beloved” and “suspect,” as Timberg describes the artist-magician—poison and cure.
These figures are suspect, but they set the foundation for society itself. Scapegoating, and later rituals derived from it, provide release and bring the rest of society together… at least for a moment.
In Part 2 of “Origins of the Creative Class,” Timberg turns to classical Greek culture, after looking at its poetic foundations in the archaic myths of Homer.
Tragic drama developed during this period...It grew out of the buzz of conversation and massive gatherings of Greek democracy, with the give and take between the soloist and the chorus serving as a metaphor for the individual’s role in society. Playwriting contests, including a three-day competition during the spring festival of Dionysus, yielded serious exposure and income to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and others. (Lest three days of tragedy sound unremittingly grim, it’s worth noting that the festivals also involved animal sacrifices and officials carrying enormous erect penis sculptures, while 30,000 people crammed into an open-air theater near the Acropolis.
In the legendary history of Greek drama, much is made of the first actor to step away from the chorus (the group of players who sing in unison about the hero’s faults and deeds). Thespis (580-520 B.C.), who gives us the word “thespian,” was the first actor to distinguish his role from the chorus on stage. He was also the first person to act in character, to recite lines and pretend to be someone else (much as Jacob did with Esau).
Today, this sounds utterly unremarkable, the very definition of an actor, or thespian—acting. But at the time this innovation was considered revolutionary, even dangerous. Before it became the norm.
In a sense, the implications of playacting are still a bit unsettling. Convincing an audience you’re something you’re not—imitating someone else—is the basic maneuver of the confidence man, or “con-artist.” The Greek word for an ancient actor was “hypocrite”—someone “who speaks from beneath a mask.”
In Plato’s Republic—a thought exercise in which the writer attempts to construct the perfect form of government—the philosopher famously has one of his characters say that in the ideal republic, the poets would all be banished, for the reason that they make things up, or mislead the citizens. (Disregard the irony that Plato was making things up himself when he constructed an imaginary State and made his characters say such things.)
Plato himself was banished, or went into voluntary exile—not for poetry, but politics. For his association with Socrates, the central character in Plato’s written dialogues, who was scapegoated for spiritually corrupting the young minds of Athens through his philosophy.
Socrates never wrote anything down, never “poeticized”—but his reason for living was to irritatingly question what everyone else took for granted, including the State religion—they called him “the gadfly of State.” He was persecuted by the Athenian government and eventually chose suicide over renouncing his beliefs, such as they were—“I know nothing.” Plato, meanwhile, managed to commit his mentor’s subversive ideas to paper (along with his own), and through the artifice of his craft, put these ideas into the mouths of other people, escaping blame himself (at least compared to Socrates).
While these two philosophers are often credited with the beginnings of scientific rationalism itself, there are obvious parallels between the story of Socrates and two religious figures who lived within the span of a few centuries. All three are examples of a new type of individual defining himself against an older religious tradition—Olympian gods, Hinduism, or Judaism.
Socrates lived some two centuries after Buddha, who like himself preached asceticism and renunciation. Like Jesus four centuries after him, Socrates was scapegoated for the sins and beliefs of his followers. His final discourse, delivered before he poisoned himself with hemlock, was on the immortality of the soul. The man who secured his legacy, his disciple Plato, set the foundation for Christian theology with his philosophy of heavenly “ideal forms” beyond the realm of human perception.
About a century before Socrates another famous philosopher, now associated with mathematics, was rumored to have died for his followers. Pythagoras, who left us his famous trigonometry theorem, was the leader of a cult of mysticism preoccupied with returning from the land of the dead (they also took vegetarianism to a whole new level, and believed beans had souls).
In addition to being a mystical mathematician, Pythagoras gave us the twelve tones of the Western harmonic scale, which he inferred from the notes of a blacksmith pinging the hammer in his shop. Pythagoras’ rigid, whole-and-half tone scale, with no pitches allowed in-between the notes, set the tone for Western music for two millennia—until the sliding and bent notes of African and Asian music were finally discovered by mainstream Western ears, a whole new range of harmonic possibilities.
It’s worth noting that most of what we have left of Socrates’ philosophy survived only because Plato presented his ideas in writing—indirectly, through irony. Such as the irony of a philosopher, who was essentially a poet, calling for the exile of all poets from his ideal Republic. Or the fact that his Republic happened to sound like an exact replica of Athenian democracy’s greatest nemesis, the totalitarian regime of Sparta.
An old censorship-evasion technique—innuendo, irony and indirection—that persists in midcentury pop songs from “Tutti Frutti” to “I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends,” and the ceaselessly evolving euphemisms of rap and hip hop. To this day, readers still argue over what Plato meant in the Republic, whether he was being a cheeky ironist, or an authoritarian bent on social engineering. He was slippery enough to evade Christian censors bent on eradicating paganism, centuries after he died.
Plato wrote, and Socrates spoke, during the classical era of Athens. A Golden Age, just before Athens declined due to plague and war with Sparta. The age of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three great tragedians. The latter chronicled the fall of Athens in his tragedies. The playwright Aristophanes dramatized the decline of Athens in comic form, making several digs at Socrates in the process. A great era for Greek literature, even as society began to crumble. But the basic building blocks of this theatrical, poetic tradition were laid some four centuries earlier.
Radically progressive as it was, Greece’s Golden Age—the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.—was inspired by an ancient poet who may never have existed. We know little about Homer himself. Scholars still argue over where he came from, whether he was literate, and whether (shades of Shakespeare here) he actually authored the poems for which he’s remembered. His legend was rooted in the tradition of the Paleolithic artist-magician. Homer’s was the time of the bards and court poets, honored specialists who sang for kings and chieftains and were considered the equals of the heroes of whom they sang. (The more respectable singers worked directly for the king and lived with the court, while the wandering singers were less pious and secure, telling bawdy tales of Aphrodite’s adultery around roaring fires.) Homer took these traditions to their apogee.
This was a tradition that would survive the fall of Greece and Rome, continuing through the Dark Ages, to the days when strumming troubadours wandered the medieval countryside. Singing unmentionably-erotic comic tales, poking fun at those in power, while their more respectable counterparts were hired into the courts of dukes and kings to sing their employer’s praises.
As with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, only the latter type of songs survive in anything like their complete form. The respectable poetic forms were sanctioned, if not commissioned, by state power, because they upheld the values of the status quo. In the case of Homer—or the people who wrote under this name—his form was the epic, which fostered the masculine values of a patriarchal society.
If this term is over-politicized today, it’s because oft-derided Western civilization is so closely associated with ancient Greece, which was truly patriarchal. The result of a struggle for order and control that emerged on the road to classical civilization, based on male domination of feminine principles. The shift from earthy nature deities to the human-like gods of Olympus reflects this cultural evolution in myth—from equalitarian tribal lifestyle to rigid social hierarchy.
The feminine principles—fertility and nature—persisted in secret mystery religions: the Eleusinian Mysteries, fertility goddess ceremonies, and sacred rites of Dionysus that occurred outside the city walls at night. The latter involved orgiastic rites, female participants consorting with their androgynous male deity, lots of wine, and some scholars think, the use of psychedelic drugs. In Euripides’ Bacchae, a popular tragedy, the female participants, driven mad by wine and Dionysus, tear their male counterparts to pieces.
Sort of like adolescent Beatles fanatics.
The plays of classical Greek tragedy, under the banner of Dionysus, god of the theater, were arguably a way of containing these wild “feminine” impulses that supposedly threatened the social order, sublimating them into drama.
The first two great tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, wrote plays about heroes like Oedipus, who tried but tragically failed to uphold the values of society, thereby bolstering these values in the audience, who witnessed the consequences of transgression onstage. Euripides, who was younger, wrote towards the end of the Golden Age and witnessed, like Plato, its inevitable decline. His were more subversive tragedies like the Bacchae, depicting the unraveling of the masculine social order.
In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia argues that there has been a protracted struggle between masculine and feminine musical forms, or insider and outsider arts, with the former usually being encouraged and recorded for posterity.
However musical innovation most often comes from outsiders, before being absorbed into the status quo. In Athens, the music of Lydia—modern Turkey—the songs of female slaves and foreigners, provided this infusion of innovation from the East. Similar to the way African and Native American forms invigorated European music in nineteenth and twentieth-century America, signaling the end of Pythagoras’ Western harmonic scale as the dominant art form. For this reason, as Timberg says:
Plato saw much of music as dangerous, ascribing to various scales the power to make men effeminate (the Mixolydian mode, when played on a flute) or destructively martial (the Phrygian mode).
“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State,” he wrote in The Republic in a kind of flash-forward to Woodstock, “for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them.”
While the tales of Homer, which became the mythical building blocks of Greek tragedy, were epic songs of war and wandering, ultimately celebrating the values of perseverance, valor, homestead and city-state, there was another strain of poetry, sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. The forerunner to folk-songs and introspection, lyric poetry was concerned with more personal feelings, especially love.
The founding figure of lyric poetry was Sappho, a woman who lived about a century after the age of Homer. She was said to perform in Plato’s “effeminate,” Mixolydian mode. She may or may not have slept with women, but her birthplace, Lesbos, lent its name to the practice. With men or women, she had a spicy reputation for writing love songs.
We don’t see her much in tragedy—which was usually set in palaces or on the battlefield, and involved high-born characters struggling to uphold the masculine values of civilization. But Sappho does crop up in comedy, which more often depicted commoners, took place in the street or marketplace, and involved all manner of lewd and low subjects. The players wore giant phalluses onstage, emphasizing these plays were about fertility—which, phalluses aside, was a feminine domain. Where tragedy concluded with a death, to this day, romantic comedy always ends with a marriage. (And by implication, reproduction.)
Because tragedy depicted the death of a beloved but flawed hero, inspiring the audience to catharsis (psychological release—literally to “cleanse” or make “pure,” as the sacrificial rite was thought to do); and because comedy was about fertility and light-hearted renewal, these twin dramatic forms have been interpreted as the two sides of sacrificial ritual, a theatrical reenactment. Death and renewal, severity and fun, masculine and feminine, one following the other in the order of performance.
Aristophanes, the Athenian king of comedy, begins one play with a character taking a shit onstage. Shortly after, the women of Athens take over the senate, dressed as their husbands. Another involves the women of Athens withholding sex from their husbands in the senate, until they agree to end the war with Sparta. One, poking fun at Socrates, has the famous philosopher investigating the farts of gnats. Compared to tragedy, comedy was subversive.
It’s easy to see that with its eroticism, silliness, obsession with fertility symbols, androgynous performers, and subversive material, rock & roll derives much of its symbolic form from the comedic, rather than the tragic tradition.
With a few notable exceptions.
While tragic drama was concerned with representing virtuous ideals and the actions of the ruling caste onstage, the moral message of these performances was intended for everyone (even the many women and slaves who were not permitted to sit in the theater). And outside the amphitheater, in music, the arts were part of the fabric of daily life.
The arts were characteristically not the domain of a small elite but sat at the very center of Greek life. A single performance of a tragedy in an Athenian amphitheater could expose 15,000 to 20,000 people to music written for the play; some festivals drew even more. Those songs—disseminated in an age before paper scores, recordings, or radio—would seep into the culture and circulate over the years, changing a little with time and distance, the way folk songs did in the Scottish Highlands or the Appalachian Mountains in the days before the phonograph.
“Music played a very important part in almost every aspect of life for the ancient Greeks,” the British classics scholar John G. Wells wrote. “It was heard at their public gatherings and at their private dinner parties, at their ceremonies, both joyful and sad; it was heard at every act of worship, whenever people called upon, or prayed to, or gave thanks to the gods. It was heard in their theaters, whenever tragedies or comedies were staged, and on their sports grounds as the athletes competed. It was heard in their schools, onboard their warships, and even on the battlefield. If ever a people had a just claim to being called music lovers, it was the Greeks.”
Greece saw a kind of civic society of music and dance. Every class from king to serf took part; the children of citizens were educated to sing and play the lyre; and guests at a drinking party were expected to bring a song of their own to lead in the same way that people today typically show up at gatherings with bottles of wine.
In this musical-appreciation society, an artisanal class began to develop outside the rest of society.
During the Archaic Period of 800 B.C. to 480 B.C.—after Homer but before the Golden Age—we saw an increase in individualism within society as a whole and for artists in particular. These days we associate artists and tempestuous authors with individualism itself, but that’s a romantic and historically-specific notion. It was during the Archaic Period when the notion of an artist’s intellectual property emerged. “The poetry of the rhapsodes was a collective achievement,” [art historian Arnold] Hauser wrote, “the common and indivisible possession of school, guild, or group. None of them ever regarded the poems he recited as his own personal property.” But that all changed with Sappho…and the writers who came after.”
Similar to the way that, after the death of Pythagoras, there were Pythagoreans, or the followers of Plato and Socrates would be referred to as Platonists and Socratics, followers of an artistic personality would refer to themselves by the name of their inspiration, designating they were part of an imitative communal tradition. In the wake of Homer…
Wandering poets and actors called rhapsodes emerged across Greece… Over the ensuing centuries, they called themselves the “sons of Homer.” Organized into guilds, they recited at religious festivals, funerals, and region-wide blowouts like the Olympics. Some worked as archaic cover bands, singing the work of others alongside a piper on the aulos, a double-headed flute with reed mouthpieces. Other rhapsodes were the equivalent of Dylan-esque singer-songwriters, crooning their own verses with only their lyres as accompaniment.
The followers of another legendary archaic musical healer, Orpheus—the “first musician”—simply referred to themselves as “Orpheus” after their master’s death, like prehistoric Elvis impersonators.
But with development from epic to lyric poetry—the “Dylan-esque singer-songwriters” that Timberg mentions—artworks started to become individualized. Sculptors and painters began adding signatures to their work—“though the name of the artist’s patron and the gods to be honored were scrawled alongside the signature.”
The creative class was starting—carefully—both to honor and distance itself from religious and State power. “In the sixth century [B.C.],” according to Hauser, “a type of man appears on the scene who was hitherto practically unknown—the artist with a markedly individual personality.” And he was developing a sense of himself as a figure a bit apart.
Like Thespis, stepping away from the chorus. Sappho, with her lyrical erotic poetry. Socrates, thinking for himself and challenging State religion, and Plato, creating his mentor’s legend in literature.
By the time the Golden Age arrived, Athens and other city-states under its protective influence had passed through…
a revolution that may be the most profound change in the history of art: the beginning of art for art’s sake. Art was no longer utilitarian—no longer called the bison, calmed the gods, cured your cold—but became an end in itself. “As soon as man feels secure and free from the immediate pressure of the struggle for life,” Hauser wrote, “he begins to play with the spiritual resources which he had originally developed as weapons and tools to aid him in his necessity. He begins inquiring in to causes, seeking for explanations, researching into connection which have little or nothing to do with his struggle for life. Practical knowledge gives place to free enquiry, means for the mastery of nature become methods for discovering abstract truth.” He could have been describing postwar Greenwich Village here.
We can see the emergence of philosophy in this turn of events. At the same time, the Golden Age actors, playwrights and musical poets began to enjoy an elevated status. Writers were paid for teaching and speaking—not for writing itself, since there were no books but only scrolls, or erasable tablets covered in wax and etched with a stylus—closer to our modern iPad than a book.
However…
Being an accomplished musician was not typically enough to make a living; other skills were needed for a life in the arts. “The women who appear in the party scenes in vase-paintings are prostitutes,” Landels wrote, “many of whom were musicians; they entertained the guests with music in the early part of the evening, transferring later to the other, older aspect of their profession.” The Greek word for a female aulos player was a euphemism for high-class prostitute. This was, of course, neither the first nor last example of a connection between music and sexuality in Western culture—humanity’s most ancient art form joined with the world’s oldest profession.
Among these “high-class prostitutes,” or heterai—well-educated, skilled in the arts of conversation and music—was a woman named Aspasia. A Lydian import from the East, from the home of dangerously-erotic, feminizing music, she sort of proved Plato’s point about the subversive power of music.
Aspasia was the mistress of Pericles, the great Athenian statesman credited with constructing the architecture of Golden Age Athens. She was powerful enough to have openly produced an heir with Pericles, and was rumored to have had a hand in the affairs of State—some claimed she was responsible for provoking the war with Sparta. The lower-class practitioners of Aspasia’s profession were known as pornai, which inspired our modern “pornography.”
Greece’s Golden Age wouldn’t last forever. But even in decline, there was a new sort of benefit for the creative class. By the fourth century B.C., when there were fewer playwrights, “the Athenian State paid the production costs of anyone who could revive the great tragedies—a precursor to the National Endowment for the Arts.” Just as we regurgitate classical music from the eighteenth century, or pay for revived versions of Led Zeppelin or Appalachian bluegrass.
In the fourth century, Alexander the Great came roaring out of Macedonia, a preening conqueror whose rise to empire was a carefully-choreographed imitation of art: the myth of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. He would inspire a string of imitations in turn: Julius Caesar, who emulated Alexander, and the scores of subsequent Caesars named after him, to the Czars and Tsars named after these. He signaled the final end of Classical Greece, but Alexander was good for the arts.
The beginning of his empire, beginning around 331 B.C., saw a blending of Europe and Asia, East and West, in the first genuinely international era in world history, and Alexander became the first internationally famous man.
So Greece’s greatest days were over. The shimmering notion of art for art’s sake began to fade. It would be hard to find for more than a thousand years, but…we saw something else: the emergence of a culture of preservation and, with it, the growth of a creative class. By the third century B.C., musicians in Athens had gathered into “colleges” to preserve music of the Golden Age; they eventually became a guild called the Artists of Dionysus, who performed concerts, religious rituals, trained the young, and negotiated tax exemptions and contracts for musicians…
The creative class was now solid enough to look back on what it had accomplished, to want to save its achievements, and to protect fellow members from hardship. Given what was coming, this was one of its most consequential developments—one that would come in handy when the lights went out a few centuries later.
Rome, which would inherit part of Greece’s grandeur, was not interested in the less-practical aspects of Greek culture like philosophy and theater. And of the Greek arts that Rome did embrace, most would be annihilated during the Dark Ages beginning in the fifth century A.D.—if not for a few preservationists in the Catholic church and Islam. The glaring exception, those art forms impervious to destruction, the ones that even the Middle Passage of Atlantic slavery was powerless to erase centuries later, would be the primitive arts of music and story telling.