READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

ATHENS . 478—401 B.C.

CHAPTER V

ATTIC DRAMA IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

II

THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY

At first mere improvisation beginning with the leaders of the Dithyramb,,,,

Zeus, Zeus Accomplisher, fulfil my prayer.

What Thou intendest to accomplish be Thy care.

So Clytaemnestra prays, intending death to Agamemnon, vengeance for her child. Her creator, long before he ‘dignified the tragic trumpery’ had heard and watched the Rhapsode, staff in hand, his hair dressed high in old Ionic fashion, vested in crimson for the passion of the Iliads in sea-purple for the adventure of the Odyssey, impersonating Homer’s gods and heroes, ‘singing Odysseus as he leapt upon the threshold, or Achilles rushing against Hector, or some pitiful thing about Andromache or Hecuba or Priam till ‘his soul, enthusiastic, could not but think herself in Ithaca or Troy.’ He had pondered on the oath of Homer’s Zeus to Thetis that her son should be avenged—

Go thou apart, lest Hera note our conference. I swear,

By my own Head I promise it, these things shall be my care—

and on the sequel, when Achilles cried ‘My mother, all these things hath Zeus accomplished, but my friend is dead.’ Homer gave him the conception of a tragic hero, and from the Iliad he learnt his art of composition—Oikonomia. The Wrath, which sprang from the rejection of an old man’s prayer by Agamemnon and the insult to Achilles, developed slowly to a moment of sus­pense when Agamemnon would have made amends, had not Achilles, now himself the victim of Illusion, stubbornly rejected ‘Prayers, the daughters of high Zeus’. After the growing tension of a second movement, Achilles in his turn was stricken by Patroclus’ death. In the culminating fury of a third, he took the field and all the gods trooped down to battle, though the fight between two mortals made the tumult of the gods seem child’s play. At the end, when Achilles granted Priam’s prayer and gave the body of his enemy for burial, the discord was resolved as if by music. From the contemplation of this sequence—three move­ments with a quiet close crowning the third—the pattern of the Aeschylean trilogy evolved. Clytaemnestra’s Wrath, engendered when her husband killed her child, waits, in the Agamemnon, ‘terrible, abiding, unforgetful’, till she kills him in his triumph. In the second movement, she herself is killed by her own son. In the third, the Furies claim Orestes, and the conflict grows into a cosmic struggle, gods striving on both sides, until at last Athena’s intervention brings deliverance and peace. Homer’s technique, the shape and structure of his paragraphs, his balancing of themes and episodes, like figures on a vase or pediment, even the distribution of his images—similes of fire and flood, for instance, sparsely used at first, but afterwards reiterated, reinforced, combined, accumulated, till the images become reality, the Trojan rivers are in spate and fire devours the plain—all this was studied and adapted to dramatic purposes by Aeschylus. Whether he said it or not, his plays were slices from the Master’s feast.

They were more, of course. Since Homer’s Muses answered Apollo’s harping and Demodocus sang while the Phaeacians danced, poet-musicians, leaders of choruses, had rewoven old heroic stories into innumerable lyric patterns. Some drew inspiration from the Odyssey. Aleman, for instance, with his choir of Spartan girls, re-told the Phaeacian story—how the maidens ‘cowered helplessly like birds when a hawk hovers’, how Nausicaa whispered ‘Father Zeus, I wish he were my husband’, how Odysseus was invited to the royal table. At moments Aleman and his dancers must have mimed their tale, but the moments passed. Aleman-Odysseus was a music-master again, teaching his choir ‘the songs of all the birds.’ Yet his half-dramatic lyrics held the promise of the ‘antique honeyed songs’ of Phrynichus, the master in this kind of Aeschylus. Sometimes the music of the Surplices our earliest surviving play, echoes this lyrical apprenticeship—

Birds are calling in the land.

Is there one can understand?

He will tell you. He will know,

 ’Tis the hawk-chased bride of woe,

Tereus’ luckless bride, who wrought

Sorrow from a bitter thought,

The sweet nightingale, bereft,

Longing for the home she left,

Grieving in some leafy grove

And weaving a strange tale of love,

How love by hate to death was done

When a mother slew her son. (58-69.)

So Homer’s Penelope had mourned her husband, ‘like the nightingale in the thick leafage of the wood, lamenting Itylus, whom her own folly slew.

More important perhaps for Aeschylus was the sterner lyrical tradition which drew inspiration from the Iliad and Hesiod and Delphi. Stesichorus had retold and moralized tales of the Argonauts, Medea, Alcestis, Helen and the Sack of Troy. Above all he had made a lyric Oresteia in which Clytaemnestra took her right place as a tragic wife and mother. In particular, the Dithyramb, associated by tradition with the cult of Dionysus, was by this time a grave narrative-lyric form. Since Archilochus boasted, ‘he knew how to lead the Dithyramb in honour of King Dionysus when his wits were thunderstruck by wine’, successive masters had elaborated the convention, and evolved a stately type of dance and song, performed by fifty persons at an altar, and relating any tale of gods or heroes that the poet-leader chose. When Peisistratus inaugurated his new festival for Dionysus of Eleutherae, he could hardly fail to make provision, besides obvious delights of sacrifices and processions, for this kind of entertainment.

What was more important, he encouraged local talent with a prize for ‘Tragedy’, ‘goat-singing’, which was won by Thespis of Icaria. Why the village-mummers of Attica were called Tragoidoi, whether they dressed in goatskins, or were goatlike in behaviour, worshipped or sacrificed a goat, or danced for a goat­prize, no one knows. The use of masks, the prevalence of lively dancing, and the fact that only men took part, points to some ritual origin. But what? Icaria was a Dionysiac cult-centre. Had Thespis once impersonated the god? Was his waggon, which survived as a stock property, originally the god’s chariot? Had Eleutherae a ritual drama, representing nature’s annual death and resurrection? Was there a birth-and-passion play in the Lenaea? Or a drama of the dead in the Anthesteria, when ghosts walked abroad? What was the Eleusinian mystery-play? Out of such dromena secular drama might have sprung. That it did, there is no proof. The various villages which sent competing teams may well have had their various traditional mummeries, based on different and now irrecoverable ‘origins.’ At Sicyon in the Peloponnese, we know, a man, Adrastus, not a vegetation­spirit, had been honoured ‘with tragic choruses in reference to his sufferings’ till the despot Cleisthenes ‘duly gave them’ to Dionysus. For Attica in Solon’s time such celebrations at a hero’s tomb are not improbable, but not yet proven. Thespis may have secularized a service for the dead. We do not know, nor does it greatly matter. Savage analogies, modern ‘survivals,’ traces of ‘ritual sequences’ in extant plays, prove nothing. Suffering and struggle, death and mourning, with some hint of victory, some ‘theophany,’ often a little ‘faded’ are a common lot, and Greek Tragedy was not false to nature’s ‘ritual sequences.’ At any rate, when Peisistratus first countenanced the mummers, their shows, which the cautious Solon deprecated in his time, must have been crude and racy of the soil, primitive, rustic affairs, in some ways like the unpremeditated Dithyrambs of an Archilochus, or like the rudimentary attempts at drama, known as ‘Satyr-plays,’ performed by goatish followers of Dionysus in the Peloponnese.

Public recognition was a challenge. Let Athenian wits devise a way of story-telling as impressive as Ionic epic recitations, and more vivid than the Dorian choral lyric, yet as beautiful as either. Thanks to Peisistratus, both models were before Athenian eyes. Neither poets nor spectators were content to leave the native art a thing of shreds and patches.

In one generation ‘Tragedy’ shed its grosser elements. The jog-trot of the dancing, trochaic, measure and the clumsy rustic diction yielded, in the songs, to the subtler rhythms and the mixed poetic dialect, Aeolic with a Dorian tinge, already recognized as suitable for lyric; in the spoken interludes, to such Atticized Ionic as was used for spoken verse by Solon and to the six-footed iambic ancestor of our blank verse. The mummers’ costumes were exchanged for robes of majesty, the ritual masks ennobled, not abandoned. How far the tendency had gone when Aeschylus (524—456 b.c.) began his work, we do not know. He is said to have first competed against Pratinas (of Phlius in the Peloponnese) in 499, and Pratinas is said to have first introduced the Satyr-play about that time, as a distinct form, and a frankly comic relaxation after ‘Tragedy.’ If so, grotesqueness and buffoonery, though still popular, were beginning to seem inappropriate to the main business. On the most important point Aristotle’s testimony is decisive. If the evidence of extant plays were wanting, we should still know that the ‘origin’ of Tragedy in our sense of the word was to be sought, neither in savage ritual nor rustic mumming, but in the transformation of these beggarly elements into a new art by a man of genius, who studied, rein­terpreted, and then exploited for dramatic purposes in the theatre the high thought and the subtle music first of Homer, then of the sophisticated lyric.

II.       

AESCHYLUS: THE GROWTH OF HIS ART

Tragedy was late in acquiring dignity, because it evolved from a satyric type. Aeschylus raised the number of Interpreters from one to two, diminished the choral element, and gave the chief part to the spoken word.

Aeschylus created Attic Tragedy. In the Supplices we happily possess an early work which shows him as a master in dramatic lyric, but a novice still in the manipulation of the tools which he himself invented, the second actor and dramatic dialogue.

Into the circular orchestra, which is to represent for the imagination, as the first scene tells us, a meadow with an altar-shrine near Argos, throng the Chorus, fifty men disguised as wild and swarthy women. They are the Danaids, who have fled from Egypt to escape the persecution of their cousins who desire to force them into marriage. Danaus, their father, ‘captain of their counsel, leader of their cause,’ is with them, an impressive figure, though his part in the performance, we shall find, is strangely insignificant. He is, in fact, a primitive chorus-leader, only half transformed into an actor. From the first he stands silent, while they appeal to Zeus for help—

May the city, the soil and the bright rivers welcome us,

The gods in the height, and the heroes, dread possessors of the tomb,

And third, the Keeper of all good men’s homes, the Saviour Zeus,

Welcome this company of women and of suppliants with a breeze of pity from the land,

Driving the men, the insolent, swarming brood of Egypt,

Back to the sea, in storm-lashed hurricane to perish!

In form their invocation is a triple litany of Zeus, as god of suppliants, as lover of Io, their ancestress, an Argive maiden, third, and last, as Saviour. In effect it is dramatic, a charm to raise a storm.

A choral Ode repeats the triple formula. May Epaphus, son of Zeus and Io help them, as their sorrows are like hers. May Zeus, the Saviour, save. If not, they will appeal from Zeus above to Zeus below, pollute the shrine with blood and shame the gods by suicide—

Beware! This dark sun-smitten band

Will seek that other Zeus in Dead Man’s land,

The god who never turn'd his guest away.

And these strange garlands, we shall say,

So fast about our throats are tied

Because the gods to whom we pray

Refused us, and we died. (160—167.)

The formula which underlies the structure—‘Zeus, Lord of Io, hear! Zeus, Saviour, save! Beware, or we shall turn to Zeus, the Saviour of the dead!’—is, in its origin, Homeric—‘Sing, goddess of the Wrath of Achilles son of Peleus...and the woes it wrought in the fulfilment of the will of Zeus.. .beginning when the son of Atreus quarrelled with divine Achilles.’ The keystone and the centre of the composition is a meditation on the mystery of Zeus the Saviour, in which Homer’s phrases are transformed and blended with the thought and language of Pythagorean mysticism—

First Voice. The doom by Zeus decreed,

                    Once by His Nod confirm’d, falleth aright,

                    Thrown by no wrestler—

Second Voice.                       Blind

                 The secrets of His Mind,

                 As tangled o’er with weed,

Pathways in thickets, lost to human sight.

All.             From Hope’s ambitious height

                  He hurleth men away,

Needing no weapon for the fight

Nor armour for the fray,

No force, but in His Mind the Thought

Whereby the Harmony is wrought,

 No stirring. On the Holy Throne

He labours not, yet all is done. (88-109.)

Tragedy was born when these old stories were retold by Aeschylus in the full consciousness that this demand for justice in an ordered universe was hard to reconcile not merely with old tales but with the facts of life.

This animated choral introduction leads to an anti-climax. Our actor has been waiting, silent, dramatically useless. When he speaks, it is to give the cue for a re-grouping of the Chorus. He relapses into silence when the Argive King appears, and leaves his children to conduct negotiations. Strangest of all, when he sights the ship of the pursuers, he makes no attempt to protect his terrified charges, but retires, on the pretext that he has to fetch assistance. The truth is, he has to change for a new part. He reappears, dressed as a Herald, at the head of a wild company, the negro servants of the Egyptian suitors, shouting in broken Greek, ‘Quick to the boat! There shall be branding, plucking of hair, bloody, murderous cutting away of heads!’ The Argive King arrives in the nick of time to save the women and dismiss the savages. Our actor can return, as Danaus, with a bodyguard and in the highest spirits, to give the cue for the last Ode.

Lively and charming all this is, but dramatically rudimentary. Two transitional plays, the Persae (472 b.c.) and Septem (467), show us how Aeschylus, without abandoning his formal patterns and his silent actor, learnt to use them for dramatic purposes and concentrate the interest on a central tragic figure. The brooding lyrics of the Elders in the Persae wake expectancy, create the atmosphere required by the first actor. The Myriads of Asia have gone out with Xerxes. We are anxious, for the King is young. They have gone in their strength and splendour and the motherland that nursed them grieves for them with fierce desire. Their parents and their wives tremble because the time is long. The multitude with which the King has crossed the straits seemed irresistible. Yet when a god deceives, no man escapes. The riders and the footmen with the captains of the army have gone over. The Persian women make their beds in tears with longing for their men. Each, in a luxury of grief, because she has sent out her soldier husband, lies alone. Enter Atossa, the King’s mother, the embodiment of Persian pride, a woman haunted by bad dreams and omens. They try to comfort her, but when she hears of the Athenians, ‘called no man’s slaves’, who proved a match for a great army of Darius, ‘Terrible words’ she says ‘for those whose sons went forth.’

The colloquy is broken by a Runner with news of the destruction of the fleet. Amid his clamour and the wailing of the Elders, she stands silent, but the Prelude has enabled us to read her thought. When she speaks, she is too proud, perhaps too anxious, even to frame her question plainly, but the Messenger understands.

Atossa.            I have been silent long. Your evil news

                        Appals me. Here is a calamity

                        Too great for speech, too sad for questioning. . .

                        Who has not fallen? Whom shall we lament?

                        What Captain, or what Prince, has left his post

                         Unmann’d because he died there?

Messenger.                            Xerxes lives. (293-5, 299-302.)

It is a light to her, she says, like dayspring. She has yet to hear the catalogue of nobles who fell fighting, till her son, who watched the battle from a throne in safety, rose and tore his robe and gave the signal for retreat.

Here was the promise of a Niobe, dumb in her anguish, an Achilles, sullen while the Myrmidons clamour for battle, a Prometheus, silent till his persecutors leave him, then crying to the Earth and Sea and Sky, a Clytaemnestra, kindling incense, pouring oils, while old men mutter that no sacrifices can appease the wrath of God. Again, the fantastic ritual by which Atossa and the Magi bring Darius from the shades, is a link in the development from the grotesqueness of the black Egyptians to the vindictive energy’ of Trojan captives summoning the spirit of the murdered Agamemnon to revenge, and to the hunting of Orestes by the Furies. If we smiled when the good Argive King marched in to save the Danaids, we shall not smile when Pallas comes to save her suppliant.

So Aeschylus learnt to link the Chorus with the action, and to use the silent actor. In the Septem he has concentrated interest on one central tragic figure. The valiant young prince, for whom we tremble, though his perfect bearing almost makes us hope, is changed and driven to his crime and death by hatred of his brother and a false conception of a soldier’s honour. This climax is a great achievement. The dialogue is still clumsy, not yet fully dramatized.

In the Prometheus, where the hero is a Titan, the old stiff convention is deliberately used to make his torments seem to last an age. This is mature work, though the form is archaistic. The music of the Ocean-Nymphs, embodiments of mists that rise from waters to hover on the mountain-side as sun-flecked clouds, shows that the poet could still sing a honeyed song, like Phrynichus. But it is now a foil to a high tragedy of gods. Zeus, the author of the law, ‘By Suffering, Wisdom,’ had to learn, when he was young in power, that force without intelligence cannot prevail for ever. Prometheus, humanist and rebel, had to learn that bounds are set by nature even to intelligence, certainly to its power, perhaps to its rights. That was a lesson in high policy for Athens.

III.     

AESCHYLUS: THE ORESTES

After many changes it achieved its natural form.

Sophocles (496—406) first competed against Aeschylus in 468. Soon afterwards the number of actors was increased to three, and the Skene, or dressing-booth, beyond the orchestra, hitherto dramatically negligible, was decorated as a stately building, a low range consisting of a central block with a flat practicable roof and two projecting wings, each with its door of entry. The scheme was symmetrical, and the great door exactly in the centre of the main facade was now to prove not less significant in the dramatic picture than was the central phrase in the archaic lyrical-dramatic paragraph. Henceforth the action took place partly in the orchestra, as heretofore, but partly on a stylobate or terrace which connected the two wings of the stage-building, and to which the central door behind, and probably shallow steps from the orchestra in front, gave access to the actor.

In the Oresteia (458) the stage-building represents for the imagination, first the Fury-haunted house of the Atreidae, then Apollo’s shrine at Delphi, then Athena’s temple on the Acropolis at Athens.

On the roof of the Atreidae’s palace stands a Watchman, praying in the night—

Deliverance, O ye gods, the same prayer still

This year of nights, high on the Atreidae’s roof

Set watching, doglike, till I know by heart

The stars in their nocturnal sessions met

With those pre-eminent bright potentates

That bring men signs of storm and summer weather,

Waning and waxing—well I know the times—

Yet still must wait and watch for one bright sign,

One gleam of news from Troy, the beacon-flare

Of capture—Why? Because a woman’s will,

Strong as a man’s, controls me, sanguine still.

Pacing my beat, this dew-dank roof my bed,

Unvisited by dreams—no dreams for me,

But fear for company instead of sleep—

Fear of a sleep indeed too deep for waking—

Well, when I think to sing or hum a tune,

My dose of cheerful song, sleep’s antidote,

Turns to a sorrowful wailing for this House

That is not what it was, a home well govern’d.

Come, it is time, glad messenger of light,

Shine out with good Deliverance on the night! (1-21.)

Theme after theme from this Prologue, the night, the stars, the sleeplessness and fear, the songs that turn to wailing, the light that seems to bring relief, but is the herald of worse gloom, will be woven in the fabric of the sequel, like strands of colour in a tapestry, like the images of fire and flood in Homer’s Iliad.

The prayer for good Deliverance, the first note of the drama, is an aspiration, baffled yet persistent, which will find fulfilment only in the last words of the trilogy. Its repetition here drives home the thought that worse things in this house require a remedy than the monotony of a night watch. Within, as at the centre of the paragraph, there lurks a woman with a man’s will and a woman’s sanguine heart.

He sees and hails the beacon. ‘Many a dance shall Argos celebrate for this event.’ He shouts, ‘Ho there, within!’

That makes all plain for Agamemnon’s wife

To rise with instant pious Hallelujah

And greet the light.. . .                     (25-9.)

He dances. The side-doors open, and messengers run out, as to the city. Suddenly he stops—

As for the rest, I’m silent. A great ox,

They say, on the tongue. This house would tell a tale

If it could find a voice.. . .             (36—8.)

A woman cries a sinister ‘Hallelujah’ within.

Old men gather in the imagined morning twilight. ‘Ten years of war’ they mutter, ‘since the Kings went out for vengeance, with a war-cry like the scream of vultures, robbed of their young. God hears the cry and sends upon the malefactor an avenging Fury’. Enter, by the central door, which now flies open, Clytaemnestra. Unnoticed by the Elders for the moment, she burns incense, pours libations, while they mutter, ‘So Zeus sent the sons of Atreus against Paris, In vain the sinner pours libations, kindles sacrifice. The Wrath of God is not appeased.’ They see her at last, and question her, ‘What is the meaning of your sacrifices?’ but she gives no answer, and departs in a religious silence, as if to pray at other altars in the city.

While they wait for her return, they sing, recalling the first days of war, and the strange sign which came to the two Kings, two royal eagles, feasting on a pregnant hare. The prophet read it as a promise and a threat. No Greek sportsman should allow his hounds to kill a mother-hare with the young in the womb. Troy would fall, but Artemis be angry. What if the huntress­ goddess claimed a forfeit? A sacrifice in kind? The young of the eagle? They shudder, ‘Say Ailinon ! Woe for Linos! Yet may good prevail!’ Long ago, on Achilles’ shield, the vintagers re­sponded with shrill cries to a boy’s harping and his tale of Linos, a sweet singer whom Apollo slew. Calchas was hinting that he meant to claim, for Artemis forsooth, a sweet young singer, Clytaemnestra’s child.

Amid such memories their only comfort is the thought of Zeus, men’s chastener, who schools unwilling souls by suffering to wisdom, in the watches of the night, when old wounds ache and conscience broods on sin.

The sign was fulfilled. When the prophet clamoured for his victim, Agamemnon yielded to ‘the Wretch Temptation.’ ‘Blowing the war the wind blew, criticizing no prophet,’ he gave his daughter to the butchers. They gagged her for fear of an ill-omened cry, and she stood, waiting for the knife, ‘as in a picture, her robe of saffron falling about her, wishing to speak to them, as often in her father’s hall, after the men’s banquet, lovingly, a pure maid, with clear voice she graced the hymn for her dear father’s happiness at the outpouring of the third libation. What ensued, I did not see, nor do I tell. Only the prophet’s scheme was not without fulfilment....May the end be good, as is the wish of this, the nearest....’ Clytaemnestra has returned. When she speaks, thanks to the Prelude, every word betrays her outraged motherhood.

Clyt.     Just as the proverb has it, with good-news

         May the Dawn issue from her Mother, Night.

         The message you shall hear is fraught with Joy

         Greater than Hope, The Greeks have taken Troy.

Chor.    Is it possible?

Clyt.      It is true. The Greeks in Troy.

Chor.     I weep for joy of it. Clyt.      So the eye betrays

         The heart. Chor. Have you some proof? Clyt. Yes, I have proof, Unless the god deceive. Chor. Some happy dream?

Clyt. I am not one to prate of dreams. Chor. A breath

        Of rumour? Clyt. Nor am I a witless girl

        To be chidden thus. Chor. But when... ? Clyt. This Night, I say,

        This very Night, the Mother of today. (276-91.)

That is the consummation of the long apprenticeship. Each paragraph of Prologue, Anapaests and Ode, and even dialogue, preserves the old symmetrical design, now fully dramatized. Thanks to the form, though Clytaemnestra cannot hint her purpose to the crowd, we know she is set on vengeance.

One detail in the picture of the child whom Agamemnon sacrificed requires a word of explanation. To Athenians the scene ‘at the outpouring of the third libation’ was familiar. At their dinner-parties, when the meal was finished, the host would pour libations from a bowl of unmixed wine, first to the gods, then to the spirits of departed heroes, third and last to Zeus the Saviour. At the third was sung the Paean, a hymn to the ‘Good Spirit of the House’ for health and happiness. So Iphigeneia sang, and wished her father all good luck. He sacrificed her, and he has won the prize of his ambition. ‘Troy has fallen in the Night, the Mother of this day’ cries Clytaemnestra. ‘What messenger could come so fast?’ ‘The god of fire! ’ The beacon lit at Troy, has sped from peak to peak until it found the mainland—

Swoop’d on the Spider’s Crag near home, and thence

Reach’d Agamemnon’s palace-roof, a light

Whose first progenitor was the fire at Troy. (321-3.)

The streets of the captured city will be ringing with the ill- accordant cries of friends and foes—

Your oil and vinegar, pour’d in the same flask,

      A sorry mixture. . .                      (334—5.)

The vanquish’d ‘wail for husbands, brothers, children. . . ’—

   What of the victors? A night’s foraging

Sets them down hungry to a morning meal

Of what the city offers, discipline

Forgotten, every man as Luck provides

Snatching at Fortune. In the captured homes

Of Troy they lodge, deliver’d from the dews

And frosts of the cold sky. What happiness,

To sleep the whole night through, secure at last,

No guard kept.                                       (342-9.)

Security, she knows, is mortal’s chiefest enemy. Luck has smiled on Agamemnon. Will he be careless? She intends to tempt him, and to catch him in a net of sin and ruin. ‘Bid the King come’ she cries, ‘and find me faithful, as he left me’—

I know no touch of joy, no breath of shame

From any other man, more than I know

The way to temper sword-blades.          (616—7.)

He comes, secure as she expected, applauding his own justice. She waits. He does not speak to her. What will she say?

Good citizens, my reverend Argive Elders,

I shall not blush to publish openly

My love for this my husband. Modesty

Fades out in time.                                    (846—9.)

And so, through the long speech, to the superb conclusion—

 As for myself, the fountains of my tears

Have run themselves quite dry, not one drop left.

                                                                   (878-9.)

But words enough left for flattery. She is Deceit personified, incarnate Temptation, a second Helen. When she bids her women ‘strew his way with purple, that Justice lead him to a home scarce hoped for,’ he resists. But when she urges him again, he thinks she loves him, and he yields.

There is the Sea, and who shall drain it dry?

Breeding fresh purple, every drop worth silver,

Oozing abundantly, for dipping robes

In colour.                                                    (949-52.)

As the King goes in, the women cry ‘Hallelujah,’ and the Queen prays ‘Zeus Accomplisher, fulfil my prayer.’

After that, Cassandra sees, not as mere shadows of the fancy, but as visible realities, the evil shapes which haunt the house. The Good Spirit has become a grim Avenger, gorged, yet craving blood. The revel-song is now a chant of Furies, dancing on the roof, ingeminating sin. Cassandra’s innocence is touchingly contrasted with her vision. At the end, though she knows her fate, she is quiet, full of pity—

Alas for mortal life, its happiness

A shadow merely, and adversity

A sketch by a wet sponge at a touch dash’d out. (1326-7.)

New images are developed, but the old persist. When Clytaemnestra boasts her triumph—

    I have said much before to serve the time

    Which now I shall not blush to contradict.. . .

I stand here where I struck, the work well done.

I wrapp’d the rich robe round him, caught my fish

Fast in the blind inextricable Net,

Then struck two blows, and with a groan for each

 He slack’d his limbs there. On the fallen body

 I struck a third blow, grace of prayer to Zeus

The Saviour, who keeps dead men safe below.

So down he fell, gasping his life away,

And the sharp jet of blood which suddenly

Gush’d, and besprinkled me with a dark shower

Was welcome as the god’s bright gift of rain

To cornland in the travail of the ear. . .

If we could pour it, what drink-offering

Were fit for this dead man, just, more than just? (1371-95.)

She shows the blood on her hands and robe—

This—for the bowl of curses and of wrong

He fill’d high in his house, now drinks it, and is gone. (1396-7.)

That is the sequel to the hymn for Agamemnon’s happiness, sung long ago, ‘at the outpouring of the third libation’ to the Saviour.

‘Deliverance!’ the Watchman prayed, but Clytaemnestra, pouring oils and kindling incense, prayed for vengeance. It is granted. It will bring no light of joy.

‘Save me and fight with me,’ Orestes prays in the Choephoroe to Hermes and the dead. Clytaemnestra’s cry of fear is heard, and lights are kindled. At last she sends her husband his drink- offerings. They are useless. The offended spirit still craves ven­geance, and Cassandra’s countrywomen cry their ‘Hallelujah, for the light has come!’ over a grim libation, the drink-offering of Clytaemnestra’s blood. Orestes sees the Furies.

In the Eumenides, a gentle priestess prays to Earth the Mother, Apollo, Pallas, and last, highest Zeus. Apollo gives Orestes all the cleansing that religious ceremony can afford. But Clytaemnestra’s spirit wakes the Furies—

Sleep, would you? Fie! What use are you asleep?.. .

Behold my wounds. . ..  (94, 103.)

From the Furies, clamouring for blood in the name of Justice, Pallas, the child of Zeus, and representative of the divine Per­suasion, saves the victim. The Trilogy is a symbol of the birth, through reason, of a moral order out of chaos. Its three move­ments are conceived as three libations, to the gods, to the heroes and the nether powers, then to Zeus the Saviour. The Paean at the third drink-offering is the poet’s nunc dimittis—‘For the citizens of Pallas, Zeus and Righteousness are reconciled. Crown the song with Hallelujah.’

IV.

SOPHOCLES

The presentation of an action, serious, complete and having magni­tude, in language sweetened for delight.

When Aeschylus died, in 456, an exile, at Gela in Sicily, Athens decreed his works should not die with him, but compete at festivals with plays by Sophocles or any other on whose shoulders the mantle fell. In the next year Euripides (c. 480—406 b.c.) competed for the first time, and for half a century, with Sophocles, he continued the tradition. Both were children of the Periclean age, and Sophocles, though born some fifteen years before his rival, died a few months later. The extant plays of the ‘artist,’ and the ‘thinker,’ belong to the same decades. Both were primarily men of the theatre, concerned, by music, dance and gesture, poetry and rhetoric, to represent for the imagination and intelligence, not theories, but life.

Sophocles, it is true, had something of the Periclean reserve. His art, like that of Pheidias, was austere. With dextrous subtlety he modified the old convention, sharpened his tools of character and plot and diction, banished superfluous ornament, and concentrated interest on one single tragic issue in each play. Modern critics, faintly praising his dexterity, are wont to hint that it implies some lack of feeling or defect of vision. Could a man draw life so steadily who saw it whole? The truth is, the detachment of this artist’s contemplative mood was an achievement won from life ‘by many journeys on the roads of thought.’ No golden mediocrity created Oedipus, Antigone and Ajax.

His gods, Homeric in their clarity of outline, were, for good and evil, pagan, the embodiment of circumstance, the representatives of stern realities against which human energies are spent in vain. Ajax refused Athena’s help in battle. He trusted his own strength to win success without the gods. When the Greeks adjudged the armour of Achilles to Odysseus, he brooded on what seemed to him a slight, and formed the mad design of murdering the chieftains in their tents. Athena foiled him. At the moment of the execution of his plan, she turned his moral blindness into physical delusion, his folly into frenzy, so that he attacked the innocent flocks and herds and slaughtered them, believing them to be his enemies. In a sense, her intervention is a symbol merely of the facts of his psychology. Morbid egoism is akin to madness: there are obvious conveniences for drama in presenting, as the agent of disaster, a personal and visible divinity. So Euripides in the Hippolytus and Bacchae represented Aphrodite, Artemis and Dionysus as embodiments of human instincts.

But Sophocles, we are told, attributes to Athena a resentment which is human, or sub-human, rather than divine. Gods are gods, no doubt, and will not abide our question. But this goddess who delights in the humiliation of our hero does more credit to the poet’s orthodoxy than his heart.

It is at best a half-truth—hardly even that. Left to himself, Athena’s victim would have killed the chieftains and have died a traitor and a murderer. If she foiled him and humiliated him, at least she saved him from a ‘joy’ that would have been ‘irrepar­able.’ Nor is it mere vindictiveness that makes her force upon her favourite, Odysseus, the spectacle of Ajax in the frenzy which will lead to his despair and suicide. Odysseus is to learn the lesson of Sophrosyne—

He was my enemy, but I pity him....

For all of us, I see, are merely shadows. (121-2. . ., 125-6.)

At the end, when the two Kings, as normal men, forget their comrade’s services, it is Athena’s pupil who declares, ‘This was the best man of us all, except Achilles’—

If you dishonour him, your injury

Is done to heaven’s own laws. (1342—4.)

Aeschylean in the rhythm of events—pride, madness, outrage and disaster—the play is Sophoclean in the subtlety which makes Athena’s servant vindicate the honour of her victim, whom Athenians also loved.

Sophrosyne, safemindedness based on self-knowledge, that is, on recognition of the limitations of mortality, afforded many minds a standard and a refuge in this perilous age. But for the deeper human tragedies Sophrosyne suggests no remedy. ‘Honour the gods, your parents and the law’ said old morality; above all,’ Pericles insisted, ‘those unwritten laws of which the violation is admittedly disgraceful.’ Sophocles, accepting all these loyalties, knew that they might conflict. When Creon, in the name of Zeus and Law, denies his nephew burial, Antigone defies him—

Because Zeus made me no such proclamation.

Because the Justice of the gods below

Gives no such ordinance validity.

Because you are a man, and your decrees

I thought of no effect to override

The sure, unwritten Laws of God, which live

Not for to-day alone, or yesterday,

But always.. . . (Antig. 450-7.)

At that moment she is certain of her faith. But when Creon tells her that, by honouring the traitor, she offends the brother who was loyal, she can only falter ‘Who knows if the dead approve? My nature is to join in love, not hate.’

As the play goes on, she realizes that she stands alone. Ismene, with a touching and impulsive gesture, tries to share her sister’s danger. It is too late. At the moment of decision Ismene failed. Antigone repudiates her firmly, even harshly. She must make Creon understand, this is her business, not Ismene’s. She alone must suffer. But she loves Ismene, and the separation hurts.

She was betrothed to Creon’s son, and Creon tells her she has lost him—

                      Dearest Haemon, how your father wrongs you! (572.)

The cry is an act of faith, but no help comes. She does not hear her lover pleading with his father, and when she goes ‘to that one bridal-chamber where all rest at last,’ she thinks that, like Creon, he renounces her. That is why she harps so bitterly on marriage. ‘Alas for the disaster of my mother’s bridal. Brother, in thy marriage thou wert most unfortunate, and by thy death hast slain me.’ Her sense of betrayal makes her even wonder why she made her sacrifice—

Had I been mother of a child, I would not,

Or had it been a husband who lay dead. (905-6.)

Her friends, her lover, even the gods, she thinks, have failed her.

Why should I look to heaven? What god have I

To help? For faithful service my reward

Is this, that all the world esteems me wicked. (922-4.)

Yet, at this last, when she is least assured of faith, she is still generous—

If what they do to me seem good to heaven,

 When I have suffered I shall know my fault.

 But if the fault be theirs, may nothing worse

Befall them than the wrong they do to me. (925-8.)

Retribution strikes at Creon, blow after blow. His Hubris cul­minates in a magnificent blasphemy—

Not if God’s eagles tear the dead man’s flesh

And take the carrion to the throne of Zeus,

 Not that pollution shall dismay my soul. (1040—3.)

Then, under stress of the prophet’s fulminations, he repents. It is too late. Antigone, impulsive to the end, has killed herself, before her lover finds her. Haemon dies over her body, cursing his father, spitting in his face. Eurydice, his mother, follows him, and Creon stands alone, his life in ruins.

This swift and violent conclusion leaves us breathless, but perhaps uneasy, half-aware that interest has been somehow shifted from the heroine to Creon. Is there a flaw here in the tragic structure? Has the dramatist imperfectly combined his own discovery, the pure tragedy of heroism, with the Aeschylean formula of Hubris and its chastisement? If so, he made amends in the Oedipus Tyrannus his masterpiece, for which the character of Creon, his encounter with the prophet and the silent exit of Eurydice appear to be rough sketches. Jocasta has her guilty secret, since she sacrificed her child to Laius: but her tragedy is subordinated to the main design. The hero himself, like Creon in the earlier play, is suspicious, hasty, obstinate, over-confident, but, unlike him, he is brave, intelligent and generous. His in­tellectual and moral courage, not his defects of temper or of judgment, lead him to disaster. Acclaimed at the beginning almost as a god for wisdom and beneficence, he loses the fight with circumstance, but keeps his honour and humanity.

A sound tradition had saved Tragedy from journalism. The exceptions prove the rule. Phrynichus was fined for his Capture of Miletus. Salamis was celebrated twice—by Phrynichus and Aeschylus: Themistocles and Pericles respec­tively were their Choregi—but, for the rest, the tragic criticism of events was indirect and incidental. None the less it was signi­ficant. The Periclean claim that Athens was the school of Hellas, an embodiment of the due measure, and a mistress of whom sub­jects could be proud, was implicit in the Oresteia. It was chal­lenged by the Samian revolt, when Sophocles, the friend of Pericles, was a General. His own Antigone might have warned the statesman of incalculable forces and unwritten laws, not lightly to be disregarded. If the sequel, as recorded by Thucydides reflects the movement of an Attic Tragedy, it is not because his memories of poetry confused his judgment, but because the facts were tragic. Whether or not the dramatist so designed it, the analogy between the Alcmaeonid statesman and the hero who saved Thebes, yet proved her ruin, is instructive.

O Wealth, O Kingship, and thou, gift of wit

Surpassing in life's rivalry of skill,

What hate, what envy come with you! (Oed. Tyr. 380—2.)

So might Pericles have said in those last days, when he declared to the Athenians, ‘I am the same man still. It is you who change.’ The path he had chosen as by every calculation of material re­sources safe and profitable, led to miseries of war and plague and civil discord.

Sophocles was neither blind nor heartless, nor is it true, though it is often said, that he lived through the agony of war—he died a few months only before Aegospotami—serene, and unaffected by the tragedy of Athens. Electra’s cry, ‘Set in the midst of evil, we must needs do evil too,’ refutes the notion that the play which bears her name is optimistic, a light-hearted vindication of the legend that Apollo sanctioned matricide. She is a normal woman, changed by circumstances and a bad creed to the wretch who bids her brother ‘Strike again, if you have strength,’ although the victim is her mother. War, in fact, is ‘a violent schoolmaster, who makes men’s tempers like their circumstances.’ The creator of a Neoptolemus, discovering the clash between ambition, cun­ningly presented as the call of patriotic duty, and his impulses of honour and humanity and friendship, understood the war­ psychology of generous youth. He advocated neither a retreat from facts nor supine acquiescence in old superstition. Witness the cry of Hyllus in the Trachiniae—‘These things are pitiful for us, and shameful to the gods, but hardest of all to bear for him who suffers.’ No hint of his father’s destined apotheosis is vouch­safed him for his comfort.

If, in spite of all, the poet kept his faith in Athens as a bene­factor of humanity; if, in spite of all, he hinted to the last at the existence of high secret laws, which somehow chime with human aspirations, are we certain he was wrong? In the Oedipus at Colonus. Theseus and Athens are the representatives of old Sophrosyne, Creon and Polyneices, and in some degree even Oedipus, of Hubris, Oedipus claims that ‘suffering and long companionship of time and his own honour’ have taught him moderation. Yet, when he meets his son, his passion is ungovernable. He is deaf to Antigone’s appeal. The splendour of his passing, a majestic symbol of the mystery of life, is not allowed to veil the deeper mystery of her unfailing, unrewarded love. ‘I knew’ said Anaxagoras, when he was told his son was dead, ‘I knew my child was mortal.’ ‘You know’ said Pericles to parents, mourning for their sons, ‘the various conditions of our lives, and that to have an honourable end, like theirs, an honourable grief, like yours, is fortunate.’ ‘I knew’ Antigone once said to Creon, ‘I knew that I should die, even if you had made no proclamation.’ And now perhaps the last words written by the poet of Colonus were ‘Lament no more. These things are fixed and certain.’ He had kept his faith. He had served the Muses well. He had tried, at any rate in poetry, to realize the harmony which Aeschylus discerned as an ideal inherent in the word, in part attainable by man, in part beyond his reach.

V.

EURIPIDES

We should not try to keep at all costs to traditions.

Sophocles re-created the heroic world and peopled it with heroes. Euripides fixed his eyes on Athens. His imaginative world was peopled by Athenians. When he ascribed to them the notions, even the cant phrases, of contemporaries, he was not in general allowing a delight in controversy or in novelty to turn him from his purpose, though sometimes, no doubt, he strained the form or sacrificed his art to propaganda or sensational effect. His purpose was to represent, so tar as that was possible in the con­vention, the normal play of character and passion as he watched it in contemporary life. This meant that much which had re­mained suppressed or only half expressed in the crude jumble of the myths and in the Sophoclean presentation, had to be dragged to light and stated plainly. His puppets must expound, as fully, lucidly, and almost as ingenious as pupils of the sophists, all the arguments which bore on their own situations. They must conduct in public and in measured speech the obscure debate which half-unconsciously precedes and follows action in real life. There is hardly a topic mooted in time from which anthologists cannot collect conflicting verdicts from these characters. The time was pregnant. Systems were decaying and a new world being born. Its midwives and its educators were Euripides and Socrates.

Besides the main tradition or high Aeschylean drama, the lighter, more romantic inspiration of the Odyssey was now to claim its part in the creation of a new and charming type of play. The heritage was never quite forgotten. Phrynichus made an Alcestis and Sophocles, as a young man, a Nausicaa, in which he charmed spectators by his graceful dancing in the ball-game. But when Euripides in 438—only three years later than the Antigone—produced his own Alcestis he secured a place for Attic Tragedy in the ancestry both of New Comedy and of the romantic novel. This is a domestic play, with a happy ending, a delicate blend of humour and of pathos, and a gentle malice of portraiture. It was presented, as a substitute, we are told, for the traditional Satyric drama, in a group of ‘Tragedies’ which included a romantic melodrama, lost, but very famous, the Telephus, which shocked the orthodox by introducing a high tragic hero in a beggar’s rags, and the Achaean warriors at dice round the camp-fire, like any group of bored Athenian campaigners. The success of the new methods is attested by the long-continued onslaughts of come­dians.

Admetus, a pattern of all virtues, was rewarded with an extra span of life, if he could find a substitute to die for him. None volunteered, except his faithful wife. She died, and, in his grief, a friend claimed hospitality. He gave it readily, concealing his bereavement, and again his generous virtue was rewarded. The friend was Heracles, who, when he learnt the truth, went to the grave, fought Death, and brought Alcestis home alive.

Such was the folk-tale, but Euripides created an Alcestis who, although she loved her husband well enough to die for him, was not a fool—

You see, Admetus, how it is with me,

And I will tell you, ere I die, my thought. . .

I am dying for you, though I need not die.

I might have lived with any prince I pleased

Of Thessaly, in ease and luxury.

I would not live, parted from you, to see

Our children fatherless. I did not grudge

My gift of youth, though I had pleasure in it,

And though your parents failed you. (280—90.)

They were old. The gift for them would have been easy. She is perplexed, but unresentful—

                                                    It must have been

Some god’s will that these things are what we see.

Ah me! Then by your grateful memory

Repay—no, not repay, there is no gift

So dear as life—but what I ask of you

Is just, as you yourself will say. (297—301.)

With this quiet survey of the truth, she begs him not to take another wife, a stepmother for her children. He promises that, and more. He will never marry: no beauty or wealth shall tempt him. He will mourn, and his people too: there shall be no mirth or music in the streets. He will make an image of her, and cherish it. It would have pleased her better had he said ‘I love the children for your sake as well as for their own.’ But Admetus lives by formulas, not love. She urges him again, and again he promises. Then she entrusts her children to him, and with one word, ‘Rejoice,’ she dies.

Normal life resumes its claims. The moral pedant is to be tested and found wanting. The concealment of his wife’s death from his friend is not, as he conceives, a sacrifice to friendship, but an outrage, as his friend, a boisterous, crude, warm-hearted creature, presently will tell him. No code provides for everything, and in fact Admetus does not really know what friendship is. Still, he suffers. There is hope for him.

Worse follows. The selfish father comes to take part in the funeral, and this model son, because forsooth he would not die for him, denounces and disowns him. Admetus hears a plain analysis of egoism from a man as egoistic as himself. By his code, he stands condemned. Then, alone, by his own action friendless, he goes his way with the body.

When he returns, he is changed. The spirit of Alcestis has prevailed. Stripped of pretensions, and alone with memory, he has discovered what was meant by her choice of love and death. He has begun to know himself and love his wife.

In the Medea (431 b.c.), for the first time in our extant plays, this ruthless intellectual analysis is applied to a high tragic theme. The story of a woman’s passion, changed by a lover’s perfidy to monstrous hatred, is re-told, not as an echo from a far-off world, but as an incident which might have happened in contemporary Greece—in a Corinth of intrigue, ambition, jealousy and vengeance, not, it is true, in Athens, where ‘the Loves are throned with Wisdom.’ The Athenian interlude, which opens a window to a saner world, is essential to the poet’s scheme.

No glamour of the golden fleece redeems this Captain of the Argo who would settle down and rid himself of old entanglements. The enigmatic woman who proved useful in his dangers and has borne him children is no wife for a Greek gentleman. And respectability is more to Jason than romance—

You thought, as you grew old your foreign wife

Would cost you something of the world’s regard. (591-2.)

It is Medea’s penetrating comment, a warning to male egoists not in one generation only. The study of Medea, with her irony, her ingenuity, her scorn of the Greek commonplaces about foreigners and women, and of Jason’s talk about the golden chance she had of winning a good name for her undoubted talents from the only judges in the world that count, is a masterpiece. She is now a broken-hearted woman, weeping helplessly for her lost home and children, now a wild beast, caught and caged and tamed, it seemed, for a time by a keeper’s fascination, but with savage instincts waiting, till the keeper took another animal for his favourite.

But Euripides is happier in the portrayal of two creatures naturally lovable, the victims of their generous impulses, mis­understood and misdirected—

Chaste hath she proved, although from grace she fell.

Virtue I loved, but have not served her well

So Hippolytus thinks, when he hears that Phaedra is dead, hunted to death by his impetuous denunciation. He misunder­stood the Nurse’s garbled tale. He failed in sympathy. Nature takes vengeance for resistance to her instincts, though it be a noble instinct which resists. Theseus, with his warm heart, his hast}’ temper and his fatal lack of subtlety, is a good foil to the son whom he regards as crank and hypocrite. The Nurse, a mixture of rough sense and meanness and affection, has her own sordid reading of Sophrosyne. Nothing too much, is her motto, in love and virtue. She is a foil to Phaedra, whose resistance to dishonour is not wholly free from sophistry. When Phaedra tries to save her children’s reputation by betrayal of the youth whom, much against her will, she loved, she yields to that false Aidos— excessive pride in a good name—of which she spoke in the first scene as one of women’s ‘pleasant’ dangers. In this exquisite work the two traditions, the romantic and the heroic, meet in a harmony which marks the consummation of the Euripidean art.

Throughout the war, with a penetrating, if not quite impartial analysis—he was the champion of the under-dog—he dramatized the clash and interaction of male and female, Greek and barbarian, parents and children, rich and poor, master and slave, in the partnership and conflict of contemporary life. He has a gallery of portraits, the intriguing Spartan Menelaus in the Andromache, the plausible Odysseus and the temporizing Agamemnon of the Hecuba, to tell us what he thought of politicians—to say nothing of adventurers like Polyneices, homicidal maniacs like Pylades, Orestes and Electra. Loathing as he did the cruelty and cynicism bred by war, his inspiration sometimes flags. The patriotic com­monplaces which contrast the city of ideals with knavish enemies, become mechanical, as in the Supplices, when the Athenian de­claims his homily on the folly of aggressive war, or in the Heracleidae, when Alcmena, clamouring for her oppressor’s blood, stands rebuked by the respect of her Athenian champions for law and decency. In the Hecuba he rises to a higher plane. Polyxena, the victim of a superstitious statecraft, keeps the free­dom of her spirit—

You men of Argos who have sacked my city,

I die of my own will. Let no one touch

My body. See, I give my throat to the knife

Bravely. I pray you, let me die unbound.

Leave me free. I am royal.                  (547-52.)

Her selfless heroism turns her tragedy to beauty and enables Hecuba to keep her sanity—

I cannot so forget as not to weep.

Yet you have robbed grief of its sting, because

They say that you died noble.              (589-92.)

In the sequel this Queen, who has kept honour in adversity, hates sophistry, and can appeal sincerely to that sense of law which seems to justify the thought that there are gods, becomes a fiend of cruelty, exploiting her intelligence for an ignoble and out­rageous vengeance. We are reminded of the Thucydidean analysis of Stasis and its consequences.

The scepticism of Euripides, it has been said, ‘blurred those Hellenic ideals which were the common man’s best,’ without replacing them. It is not true. When Heracles, in his agony of shame and grief, intends to kill himself, Theseus, his friend, in­spires him to the harder, more heroic choice of life. He thinks himself an outcast from humanity, polluted, and a pollution to his neighbour. Theseus tells him, in a phrase which implies a new gospel, ‘No friend can bring pollution on a friend.’

To the brief respite of the Peace of Nicias we owe the Ion, the study of a charming youth, reared in a faith too simple to survive experience. The freshness and the ingenuity with which Euri­pides re-fashions an old patriotic myth, are admirable. Yet a certain, wholly honourable inconsistency demands indulgence. The tale implies that, by descent through Ion from Apollo, the Athenians are natural leaders of the Greeks not only in Ionia but in the Peloponnese. As a patriot and a lover of romance Euripides has told his story well. But as an honest man, for whom ‘gods who do evil are not gods at all, he probes his theme until his play becomes, if not by his intention, in effect, a damaging attack on Delphi, an exposure of the patriotic legend as immoral and improbable.

Politicians and oracle-mongers certainly were not idealists. The Troades, composed soon after the Melian outrage, is evidence both of the poet’s disillusionment and of his faith. It is inspired, as Professor Murray has well said, by ‘pity for mankind exalted into a moving principle’. When the Hecuba of this play appeals for vengeance to a half-discerned mysterious energy, world­sustaining, world-sustained, which works in silence, but for righteousness, it is idle to contend that, since no vengeance follows, the appeal can tell us nothing of the poet’s mind. A dramatist who makes his heroine identify divinity with one or other of these unexplained creative powers, Constraint of Nature or the Mind of Man, and neither choose nor dogmatize, but leave a question-mark, has made a contribution to religion.

In 412 b.c., when the city, mourning for the expedition lost in Sicily, was not grasping at supremacy, but fighting for her life, Euripides, as if to comfort, not to chasten, by the power of poetry, turned again to romance. The Andromeda, a love-story, and the Palamedes, a tale of adventure, are lost, but the Helen remains, a tragicomedy of errors, playing lightly on the folly, not the wickedness, of those who put their trust in war-mongers and prophets. When he made his Helen sing how Joy—

Died beside the streams of Troy

For the phantom of a face

And the shadow of a name, (249-51.)

Euripides was thinking of young men who died in Sicily for Athens; of whom some might say ‘They died for Helen’s sake,’ others ‘They live, as gods in starry shape’—

Silent lies the Spartan plain,

They shall never ride again.

Silent is the meadow-close

Where the reedy river flows.

They shall never more contend,

Youth with youth and friend with friend. (208—11.)

In the same play, with the sailor’s sensible advice still in our minds—

Take my advice, ’twill save you much expense,

The best of prophets is your own good sense— (756—7*)

we hear Theonoe declare—

                          Living and dead

Are subject to God’s Justice, and the soul,

Merged in immortal Aether, deathless still,

Lives not, yet keeps Intelligence.. . . (1013-6.)

We begin to understand why in the Frogs Euripides appeals to ‘Aether, Intelligence, Tongue-Trickery and the Critical Nostril’ as his gods, and why the poets of a younger generation would have hanged themselves to meet him, had they been sure of immortality.

In 408 b.c. he left Athens, for Macedon, where he was joined at the hellenizing court of Archelaus by Agathon, the youth whose victory (c. 416) was immortalized by Plato in the Symposium, and whom Dionysus in the Frogs calls ‘a good poet, and much missed by his friends.’ A disciple of Euripides, Agathon had pushed experiment far: he was the first to make his choral odes mere interludes between the acts, and he produced the Anthos, the one ancient Tragedy of which we are told the plot was freely invented, based on no myth. In the new environment Euripides found fresh inspiration, and composed a masterpiece of authentic Tragedy, the Bacchae, an unrivalled study of reli­gious ecstasy, its heights and depths, its perils and allurement, the splendour of its promise and the cruelty of its effects. The news of his death reached Athens in the spring of 406, in time for Sophocles to put his Chorus into mourning at the Dionysia.

VI.

COMEDY: ARISTOPHANES

‘I woke' he said, ‘at daybreak, when the cocks were already crowing, and found the rest had gone or were asleep. Only Socrates and Agathon and Aristophanes remained awake, drinking from a great bowl, while Socrates discoursed. He was trying to compel them to admit, it is the same man s business to have knowledge how to make both Comedy and Tragedy’.

Aristophanes (c. 446-388) began his work precisely at the moment when both Sophoclean and Euripidean Tragedy had ‘found their natural form’ in the Oedipus Tyrannus and Hippolytus. His predecessors, men of the great age which had created Tragedy, invented for him his convention and the attitude, as licensed critic of all eccentricity, in politics and poetry and thought, which so exactly fitted his own instincts, prejudices and convictions.

The development of Comedy from mere buffoonery to art came later and was less complete than that of Tragedy, though the Komos, out of which the art evolved, had from the first formed part of the Dionysiac festivals. A procession of masqueraders, fantastically dressed, often as birds or beasts or monsters, wearing and carrying the emblems of fertility, danced and gesticulated in the orchestra, and improvised both song and speech with an extravagance not only tolerated, but demanded as essential for the efficacy of the rite. At a certain moment they would throw off their disguise and their leader would harangue the people about things in general. That episode developed into the Parabasis of the convention. Sometimes they broke into disputing factions, each with its champion and spokesman. That was the germ of the comic Agon. As time went on, short farcical scenes were added, analogous to those of the contemporary Dorian farce, including characters from Attic life, as well as the stock Dorian types, cook, doctor and old woman, for example. At first, says Aristotle, the performers were volunteers. It was not till late that the Archon granted a Chorus. The conventions were already fixed when first the names of poets began to be recorded, and the framing of invented plots originally came from Sicily—that is, from Epicharmus, who was fifteen years the junior of Aeschylus. The first regular competition may have been held in 487, when Chionides is said to have been victor, or even somewhat later.

Aristophanes, though he claims much credit as a reformer, an artist, not a mere buffoon, acknowledges by implication his debt to many predecessors—to Magnes, with his choruses of ‘Lute-players and Lydians, Frogs and Flies and Birds’, to Crates of the ‘happy thought and polished phrase,’ but above all to Cratinus, whose vigorous invention and tumultuous invective, in his prime, was like a flood which swept away obstructions, ‘oaks and planes and rival poets,’ with an irresistible impetuosity. With characteristic impertinence he adds that the old man’s music has now left him, and he wanders drearily through Athens, with a withered garland, caring for nothing but drink. So said Aristophanes in 424, flushed with the consciousness of his audacity in bearding Cleon. Nemesis followed with the failure of the Clouds in 423, and the triumph of Cratinus with his Wine-Flask, a fantasy in which he posed as victim of a jealous wife, Dame Comedy, who prosecuted him for flirtation with the disreputable lady Winebottle.

From the first, scurrility in these performances was thought to be a safeguard against fortune’s malice, and indecency a help to nature in her fertilizing work. That was true in the time of Aristophanes, and was in part the explanation of the licence on the whole triumphantly retained by Comedy throughout the war. Everywhere and always war has been the enemy of freedom, but in Athens the tradition of free speech died hard. Pericles tried to clip the wings of Comedy at the time of the Samian revolt, and failed. Cleon prosecuted Aristophanes for daring in his Babylonians to criticize Athenian administration at a festival at which the Allies, whom he championed, were present. The Council rejected the bill of indictment, and two years later Aristophanes produced the Knights. No doubt, as a member of a cultivated aristocratic circle—the Symposium attests it—he had influential backing. No doubt he could rely on the support, by no means negligible, of the Knights themselves—although his claim that they consented to appear in person in his play is not intended to be taken seriously. But it needed courage to assail the demagogue who had so lately been invested with a crown of honour for his services at Pylos. There is no sign that the poet ever forfeited his independence or became a party hack. He criticized the Demos as its friend, and gave no countenance to oligarchic faction or intrigue. He denounced the war as a patriot, and he was right. The impunity which he enjoyed attests the candour of his country­men, who loved to hear both sides, and liked ideas for their own sakes.

As portraiture his caricature of Cleon is fantastic, not to be used as evidence. But his Demos is a person recognizable in all free countries—

A little old man fed on voting-beans,

Quick-tempered, rustic-minded, hard of hearing, (Knights 41-3.)

easily cajoled by promises and doles, opening and shutting his ears ‘like a parasol to the flatteries of politicians, ready to fight when they prime him with their garlic or dope him with oracles, absent-minded when the soldiers look for pay—a disreputable creature, but with such a mixture in his composition of good­humour, gaiety, and shrewdness that we like him and applaud, though we are not convinced, when, from the Sausage-Seller’s magic cauldron he emerges as a worthy representative of ‘shining, enviable, violet-crowned Athens, a young Prince, ‘fragrant with peace and myrrh.’

To make distinction in the work of this exuberant and reckless artist between foolery and serious opinion is a thankless task. It was not his business to provide material for a just estimate of Cleon, Socrates or the Tragedians. Nevertheless, besides his famous victims, he drew many Attic types in normal focus, as foils to heighten and make plausible his high fantastic comedy.

Such are Peithetairos and Euelpides in the Birds, two solid human beings, whose talk, when we first meet them, is so homely as to make their enterprise seem almost credible—

Gentlemen, we are the victims

Of a strange fancy. We don’t share the taste

Of those eccentric aliens who flock

To Athens. We’re respectable, blue-blooded

And undeportable Athenian voters

Who’ve run away from Athens. Yes, no doubt,

A great and happy land, where everyone

Is free to pay his taxes.. . . (30-8.)

The admission of absurdity disarms us. Had not Sophocles made a play about the Thracian Tereus who became a Hoopoe? What more natural than for these gentlemen, who want to lead a simple life, to visit him and ask him to suggest a suitable retreat? So gradually Aristophanes transports us from reality. We reach the Hoopoe’s nest, and are received first by a servant, plausible and human, though his beak is certainly astonishing, then by the crested Hoopoe, somewhat shabby, and still sensitive about his transformation. The serenade which wakes the Nightingale and the summons to the birds take us a further step into poetry, till at length, when a company of many-coloured birds assembles, as large as human beings, obviously human beings dressed as birds, and last of all, Athena’s bird the Owl, we are ready to believe that birds can be taught Greek, and men grow wings and Pei­thetairos rise to godhead.

Once at home among the birds, Peithetairos, as a plausible Athenian, cannot resist the impulse to create and organize. His scheme for Cloudcuckooland involves him in a hundred problems, all of which he tackles with Athenian resourcefulness and humour. His city is invaded by the pests of war-time Athens, the prophet, mouthing oracles to the effect that he is worthy of his hire, Meton, the calendar-reformer and town-planner—type of the expert who would clear away the small anomalies which make life pleasant—poets, of course, a youth deluded by the sophists, last and worst a sycophant, whose business is to trump up accu­sations against citizens and Allies, spying, threatening, black­mailing. His well-merited castigation is the climax of these farcical interludes.

At the outset Peithetairos was a commonplace, intelligent Athenian. As he conceives, expounds and executes his plan, he becomes a Themistocles or Alcibiades, contriving victory. When a Messenger reports that the bird-citadel is finished, he listens, like a poet wrapt in wonder at the beauty of his work, silent, amazed, still gaining dignity. In the end, when he has conquered gods and men we are delighted to acclaim him, more than human, as he wafts his goddess-bride in triumph to a home in the cloud­palaces of Nephelokokkugia.

The play was produced at the time of the Sicilian expedition. Was it a warning? Or, since Peithetairos is successful, a defence of Alcibiades? We shall be wise if we leave such hypotheses, and visit the Assembly in the company of Dicaeopolis, and listen to his chatter about poetry and music and the price of oil and vinegar in war-time, or go to the Council with the Sausage-Seller, and hear the patriotic cry ‘Peace at this time? Let the war go on’—since sprats are cheap. Lantern in hand we may pick our way, with Philocleon’s friends, through muddy lanes in the cold dark­ness before dawn—‘More rain in the next few days’—hurrying because we must not miss our place in the jury-courts, beguiling the way with a song from Phrynichus or gossip about our youth, a little anxious where we shall find the price of supper, if by any chance the courts are not in session, but certain, if they are, both of a feast of argument and of the happy consciousness that on our verdict will depend the fortune, and perhaps the life, of a fellow­citizen. Or, soaring with Trygaeus on the dung-beetle to Zeus, we may learn that on one theme at any rate there is no doubt about the poet’s serious conviction. Trygaeus cannot bear to hear the children—

Asking for bread and calling me papa,

With not a penny in the house.. . . (Peace 119-21.)

And so, like an Euripidean hero, he mounts his unsavoury Pegasus and rides to heaven to lodge a protest and demand an explanation.

Aristophanes was probably a youth of about fifteen when war began. For him it meant the exchange of a happy country life, never forgotten, for the narrow quarters, jostling crowds and bitter politics, as well as the alleviating humours of the town. He rebelled against the conflict between Greek and Greek, the atmosphere of mutual suspicion, and the exploitation of the Allies. For his generous Hellenism it would be hard to find a parallel in his time. It is true that in the Peace his celebration of the coming days of plenty dwells on the material side, not without grossness. That is in the traditional comic vein. The holy Mysteries themselves suggest to Xanthias the pleasant savour of roast sacrificial pork. But eating, drinking and promiscuous embracing are not the only joys of peace. At the sight of burnished pitchforks and of mattocks gleaming in the sun, Trygaeus breaks into song about his vines and figs and olives and his ‘bank of violets beside the well/ He is a statesman and a poet when he prays—

Put an end to our fights and our feuds and division, Till all men shall hail thee, our Lady of Peace, Put an end to the whispers of cunning suspicion,

And mingle all Greece

In a cup of good fellowship. Teach us at last

To forgive one another forgetting the past. (991—8.)

That was written in hope, before the Peace of Nicias. In darker times, when revolution and defeat impended, after the Sicilian disaster, the same spirit inspired Lysistrata’s fantastic and audaciously improper but effective bid for peace. She is a living refutation of the doctrine that Athenian women were reduced by their secluded lives to blank stupidity. Weary of being told to stick to her spinning, ‘War is the business of men,’ tired of the sight of swaggering hoplites, haggling for shrimps in the market­place, cavalry-captains, stowing their purchases in their helmets, Thracians, shaking their javelins and targets at the frightened market-girls, then sitting down to eat their fruit, she is determined that the women shall take charge, and end the war by their own patient method, washing the filthy fleece, picking out burs, unravelling knots, then carding, combing, spinning the good wool, till they can weave a robe of peace for the whole people. Such ideas do not convince a venerable member of the Committee for Public Safety. ‘Impertinent’ he repeats ‘for you to talk—you women, who have nothing to do with war’—

Lys.                  Nothing to do with it, wretch! When it is we

                          Who bear you sons and send them to the war.

Magistrate.       Hush, hush! No bitterness!                      (Lysistr. 588-90.)

The attacks on Socrates and on Euripides were, in intention, much less serious, though for Socrates the consequences were disastrous. The tone of the Symposium suggests that Plato did not think the poet, in whose soul the Graces sought and found a shrine, had meant to do such harm. It was traditional for a comedian to launch his shafts against whatever in the age appeared eccentric, popular, disruptive and potentially ridiculous. Aristophanes disliked the sophists. He connected, not without some sort of justice—he mistook the symptoms for the cause of the disease— the sordid scramble of the politicians and their dupes with the new education, logic-chopping, hair-splitting, phrase-hunting, the fine art of making the worse argument prevai. He idealized the past when healthy minds in healthy bodies were in fashion—

Happy runner, still contend

With your modest-hearted friend

’Neath the olives in the shade

Of the Academic glade,

Garlanded with rushes pale,

Fragrant with sweet gal ingale,

Fresh with nature’s choicest scent,

Innocence and heart’s content,

Drenched with blossom which the lime

Sheds to greet the happy time

When the planes are whispering

To the elms the news of spring. (Clouds, 1005-8.)

It is a charming picture, and, no doubt, sincere, but it was drawn by a sophisticated artist, as the epilogue shows—

If you do what I tell you, you quite understand,

Your shoulders will swell and your chest will expand,

Your complexion be glowing,

Till soon you are growing

A bottom superb, a diminutive tongue,

And a what-you-may-call-it just right and not wrong. (ib. 1009-14.)

 The version is less frank than the original. The excellence of the Aristophanic art in fact depends on its amazing combination of good spirits, ‘mindless laughter’—of the kind which finds an inexhaustible supply of entertainment in the gross indignities inflicted on our pride by nature’s queer contrivances, digestive, reproductive—with the purest poetry, with subtlety of thought, with shrewd and vivid observation. Aristophanes was himself a creature of the new age, and Cratinus made a palpable hit when he described his impudent young rival as a picker up of trifles from the Euripidean store—

‘Who are you, sir, pray who?’

Some supersophistical, would-be logistical,

Hypereuripidaristophanistical

Spark will remark.   (Frag. 307. Kock.)

For twenty years, from the Acharnians to the Frogs, he assailed Euripides with joyful and not always over-scrupulous impertinence. But it is a gross mistake to treat such pleasantries too tragically. The flexibility, lucidity and grace of his own style, the quality of his lyrical inspiration, as well as innumerable happy reminiscences, and even many of his sober judgments, reveal him as a pupil, and not merely a student of the tragic poet. From the moment in the Acharnians, when Dicaeopolis, in search of tragic gear to make a plea for peace more touching, calls on Euripides to ask a loan from his theatrical equipment, and is met at the door by the Euripidean Porter, the poet’s friend Cephisophon—

Ceph.     Who’s there?

Die.        Euripides at home?

Ceph.    Yes! No!

Die.        At home and not at home?

Ceph.   Exactly so.

His Mind goes out collecting things to say

While he lies down upstairs and writes a play— (396—400.)

to the last scene of the Frogs. when Dionysus, after the great critical encounter, can still hesitate between Euripides and Aeschylus—

The one I think so clever, and I find

The other so delightful— (Frogs, 1413.)

Aristophanes never for a moment suggested that among the myriads of tragic scribblers, ‘ Choirs of chattering swallows, pests of art,’ there was one except Euripides worth pitting against Aeschylus or Sophocles.

CHAPTER VI

SICILY

THE TYRANTS OF SYRACUSE AND ACRAGAS