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Euripides and His Age

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Title: Euripides and His Age

Author: Gilbert Murray


        
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Language: English

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Home University Library of Modern Knowledge

EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

by

GILBERT MURRAY







London
Williams & Norgate

Henry Holt & Co., New York
Canada: Wm. Briggs, Toronto
India: R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd.

                     *       *       *       *       *

Home University Library of Modern Knowledge

_Editors_:

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A., LL.D.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT., LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., LL.D.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
(Columbia University, U.S.A.)

New York
Henry Holt and Company

                     *       *       *       *       *


EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

BY

GILBERT MURRAY
LL.D., D.Litt., F.B.A.

Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford







London
Williams and Norgate

Printed by
The London and Norwich Press Limited
London and Norwich




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                                PAGE

    I Introductory                                                        7

   II Sources for a Life of Euripides: Memories remaining
      in the Fourth Century: Youth: Athens after the Persian War: the
      great Sophists                                                     20

  III What is a Greek Tragedy? Euripides' early Plays up to 438 B.C.,
      "Alcestis" and "Telephus"                                          60

   IV Beginning of the War: the Plays of Maturity from "Medea"
      to "Heracles"                                                      81

    V Full Expression: the Embittering of the War:
      Alcibiades and the Demagogues: the "Ion": the "Trojan Women"      107

   VI After 415: Euripides' last years in Athens: from
      "Andromeda" and "Iphigenia" to "Electra" and "Orestes"            142

  VII After 408: Macedonia: "Iphigenia in Aulis": "Bacchae"             165

 VIII The Art of Euripides: Traditional Form and Living Spirit:
      the Prologue, the Messenger, the "God from the Machine"           198

   IX The Art of Euripides, continued: The Chorus: Conclusion           228

      Bibliography                                                      247

      Note on the Pronunciation of Names                                251

      Index                                                             253




EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY


Most of the volumes of this series are occupied with large subjects and
subjects commonly recognized as important to great masses of people at
the present day. In devoting the present volume to the study of a single
writer, remote from us in time and civilization and scarcely known by
more than name to many readers of the Library, I am moved by the belief
that, quite apart from his disputed greatness as a poet and thinker,
apart from his amazing and perhaps unparalleled success as a practical
playwright, Euripides is a figure of high significance in the history of
humanity and of special interest to our own generation.

Born, according to the legend, in exile and fated to die in exile,
Euripides, in whatever light one regards him, is a man of curious and
ironic history. As a poet he has lived through the ages in an
atmosphere of controversy, generally--though by no means always--loved
by poets and despised by critics. As a thinker he is even to this day
treated almost as a personal enemy by scholars of orthodox and
conformist minds; defended, idealized and sometimes transformed beyond
recognition by various champions of rebellion and the free intellect.
The greatest difficulty that I feel in writing about him is to keep in
mind without loss of proportion anything like the whole activity of the
many-sided man. Recent writers have tended to emphasize chiefly his work
as a destructive thinker. Dr. Verrall, the most brilliant of all modern
critics of Euripides, to whose pioneer work my own debt is greater than
I can well express, entitled one of his books "Euripides the
Rationalist" and followed to its extreme limit the path indicated by
this particular clue. His vivid and interesting disciple Professor
Norwood has followed him. In Germany Dr. Nestle, in a sober and learned
book, treating of Euripides as a thinker, says that "all mysticism was
fundamentally repugnant to him"; a view which is certainly wrong, since
some of the finest expressions of Greek mysticism known to us are taken
from the works of Euripides. Another good writer, Steiger, draws an
elaborate parallel between Euripides and Ibsen and finds the one key to
Euripides in his realism and his absolute devotion to truth. Yet an
older generation of Euripides-lovers felt these things quite
differently. When Macaulay proclaimed that there was absolutely nothing
in literature to equal _The Bacchae_, he was certainly not thinking
about rationalism or realism. He felt the romance, the magic, the sheer
poetry. So did Milton and Shelley and Browning. And so did the older
English scholars like Porson and Elmsley. Porson, while admitting that
the critics have many things to say against Euripides as compared, for
instance, with Sophocles, answers in his inarticulate way "_illum
admiramur, hunc legimus_"--"we admire the one, but we read the other."
Elmsley, so far from regarding Euripides as mainly a thinker, remarks in
passing that he was a poet singularly addicted to contradicting himself.
To Porson and Elmsley the poetry of Euripides might or might not be good
on the highest plane, it was at any rate delightful. Quite different
again are the momentous judgments pronounced upon him as a writer of
tragedy by two of the greatest judges. Aristotle, writing at a period
when Euripides was rather out of fashion, and subjecting him to much
serious and sometimes unintelligent criticism, considers him still "the
most tragic of the poets." And Goethe, after expressing his surprise at
the general belittling of Euripides by "the aristocracy of philologists,
led by the buffoon Aristophanes," asks emphatically: "Have all the
nations of the world since his time produced one dramatist who was
worthy to hand him his slippers?" (Tagebuechern, November 22, 1831.) We
must try, if we can, to bear duly in mind all these different lines of
approach.

                     *       *       *       *       *

As a playwright the fate of Euripides has been strange. All through a
long life he was almost invariably beaten in the State competitions. He
was steadily admired by some few philosophers, like Socrates; he enjoyed
immense fame throughout Greece; but the official judges of poetry were
against him, and his own people of Athens admired him reluctantly and
with a grudge.

After death, indeed, he seemed to come into his kingdom. He held the
stage as no other tragedian has ever held it, and we hear of his plays
being performed with popular success six hundred years after they were
written, and in countries far removed from Greece. He influenced all the
higher forms of Greek writing, both in prose and poetry. He is more
quoted by subsequent writers than any other Greek tragedian; nay, if we
leave out of count mere dictionary references to rare words, he is more
quoted than all the other tragedians together. And nineteen of his plays
have survived to our own day as against seven each of Aeschylus and
Sophocles. This seems enough glory for any man. Yet the fate that
grudged him prizes in his lifetime contrived afterwards to spread a
veneer of commonplaceness over the success which it could not prevent.
To a great extent Euripides was read because he was, or seemed, easy;
the older poets were neglected because they were difficult. Attic Greek
in his hands had begun to assume the form in which it remained for a
thousand years as the recognized literary language of the east of Europe
and the great instrument and symbol of civilization. He was a
treasure-house of Attic style and ancient maxims, and eminently useful
to orators who liked quotations. Meantime the melody and meaning of his
lyrics were lost, because men had forgotten the pronunciation of
fifth-century Greek and could no longer read lyrics intelligently. The
obviously exciting quality of his plays kept its effect; but there was
no one to understand the subtlety of his craftsmanship, the intimate
study of character, the skilful forging of links and clashes between
scenes, the mastery of that most wonderful of Greek dramatic
instruments, the Chorus. Plays had practically ceased to be written.
They were thought of either as rhetorical exercises or as spectacles for
the amphitheatre. Something similar happened to the whole inward spirit
in which he worked, call it philosophy or call it religion. Its meaning
became obscured. It had indeed a powerful influence on the philosophers
of the great fourth century schools: they probably understood at least
one side of him. But the sayings of his that are quoted broadcast and
repeated through author after author of the decadence are mostly
thoughts of quite the second rank, which have lost half their value by
being torn from their context, often commonplace, often--as is natural
in fragments of dramas--mutually contradictory, though almost always
simply and clearly expressed.

It was this clear expression which the late Greeks valued so highly.
"Clarity"--_sapheneia_--was the watchword of style in Euripides' own day
and remained always the foremost aim of Greek rhetoric. Indeed what a
Greek called "rhetorike" often implied the very opposite of what we call
"rhetoric." To think clearly, to arrange your matter under formal heads,
to have each paragraph definitely articulated and each sentence simply
and exactly expressed: that was the main lesson of the Greek rhetor. The
tendency was already beginning in classical times and no classical
writer carried it further than Euripides. But here again Fate has been
ironical with him. The ages that were incapable of understanding him
loved him for his clearness: our own age, which might at last understand
him, is instinctively repelled by it. We do not much like a poet to be
very clear, and we hate him to be formal. We are clever readers, quick
in the up-take, apt to feel flattered and stimulated by a little
obscurity; mystical philosophy is all very well in a poet, but clear-cut
intellect--no. At any rate we are sharply offended by "firstlys,
secondlys and thirdlys," by divisions on the one hand and on the other
hand. And all this and more Euripides insists on giving us.

It is the great obstacle between him and us. Apart from it we have only
to exercise a little historical imagination and we shall find in him a
man, not indeed modern--half his charm is that he is so remote and
austere--but a man who has in his mind the same problems as ourselves,
the same doubts and largely the same ideals; who has felt the same
desires and indignations as a great number of people at the present day,
especially young people. Not because young people are cleverer than old,
nor yet because they are less wise; but because the poet or philosopher
or martyr who lives, half-articulate, inside most human beings is apt to
be smothered or starved to death in the course of middle life. As long
as he is still alive we have, most of us, the key to understanding
Euripides.

What, then, shall be our method in approaching him? It is fatal to fly
straight at him with modern ready-made analogies. We must see him in his
own atmosphere. Every man who possesses real vitality can be seen as the
resultant of two forces. He is first the child of a particular age,
society, convention; of what we may call in one word a tradition. He is
secondly, in one degree or another, a rebel against that tradition. And
the best traditions make the best rebels. Euripides is the child of a
strong and splendid tradition and is, together with Plato, the fiercest
of all rebels against it.

There is nothing paradoxical in this. No tradition is perfect. The best
brings only a passing period of peace or triumph or stable equilibrium;
humanity rests for a moment, but knows that it must travel further; to
rest for ever would be to die. The most thorough conformists are
probably at their best when forced to fight for their ideal against
forces that would destroy it. And a tradition itself is generally at its
best, not when it is universally accepted, but when it is being attacked
and broken. It is then that it learns to search its own heart and live
up to its full meaning. And in a sense the greatest triumph that any
tradition can accomplish is to rear noble and worthy rebels. The Greek
tradition of the fifth century B.C., the great age of Athens, not only
achieved extraordinary advances in most departments of human life, but
it trained an extraordinary band of critical or rebellious children.
Many a reader of Plato's most splendid satires against democratic
Athens will feel within him the conclusive answer: "No place but Athens
could ever have reared such a man as this, and taught him to see these
faults or conceive these ideals."

We are in reaction now against another great age, an age whose
achievements in art are memorable, in literature massive and splendid,
in science and invention absolutely unparalleled, but greatest of all
perhaps in the raising of all standards of public duty, the humanizing
of law and society, and the awakening of high ideals in social and
international politics. The Victorian Age had, amid enormous
differences, a certain similarity with the Periclean in its lack of
self-examination, its rush and chivalry and optimism, its unconscious
hypocrisy, its failure to think out its problems to the bitter end. And
in most of the current criticism on things Victorian, so far as it is
not mere fashion or folly, one seems to feel the Victorian spirit itself
speaking. It arraigns Victorian things by a Victorian standard; blames
them not because they have moved in a particular direction, but because
they have not moved far enough; because so many of the things they
attempted are still left undone, because the ideals they preached and
the standards by which they claimed to be acting were so much harder of
satisfaction than they knew. Euripides, like ourselves, comes in an age
of criticism following upon an age of movement and action. And for the
most part, like ourselves, he accepts the general standards on which the
movement and action were based. He accepts the Athenian ideals of free
thought, free speech, democracy, "virtue" and patriotism. He arraigns
his country because she is false to them.

                     *       *       *       *       *

We have spoken of the tradition as a homogeneous thing, but for any poet
or artist there are two quite different webs in it. There are the
accepted conventions of his art and the accepted beliefs of his
intellect, the one set aiming at the production of beauty, the others at
the attainment of truth.

Now for every artist who is also a critic or rebel there is a difference
of kind between these two sets of conventions. For the purposes of truth
the tradition is absolutely indifferent. If, as a matter of fact, the
earth goes round the sun, it does so not a whit the less because most
ages have believed the opposite. The seeker for truth can, as far as
truth is concerned, reject tradition without a qualm. But with art the
case is different. Art has to give a message from one man to another. As
you can only speak to a man in a language which you both know, so you
can only appeal to his artistic side by means of some common tradition.
His natural expectation, whether we try to satisfy or to surprise it, to
surpass or to disappoint it, is always an essential element in the
artistic effect. Consequently the tradition cannot be disregarded.

This distinction is often strongly marked in the practice of different
artists. One poet may be both a pioneer of new roads in thought and a
breaker of the laws of technique, like Walt Whitman--an enemy of the
tradition in both kinds. Another may be slack and anarchical in his
technique though quite conventional in his thought. I refrain from
suggesting instances. Still more clearly there are poets, such as
Shelley or Swinburne, whose works are full of intellectual rebellion
while their technique is exquisite and elaborate. The thoughts are bold
and strange. The form is the traditional form developed and made more
exquisite.

Now Euripides, except for some so-called licences in metre, belongs in
my judgment markedly to the last class. In speculation he is a critic
and a free lance; in artistic form he is intensely traditional. He seems
to have loved the very stiffnesses of the form in which he worked. He
developed its inherent powers in ways undreamed of, but he never broke
the mould or strayed away into shapelessness or mere realism. His last,
and in many respects his greatest, play, the _Bacchae_, is, as far as
our evidence goes, the most formal that he ever wrote.

These, then, are the lights in which we propose to look at Euripides. In
attempting to reconstruct his life we must be conscious of two
backgrounds against which he will be found standing, according as we
regard him as Thinker or as pure Artist. We must first try to understand
something of the tradition of thought in which he was reared, that is
the general atmosphere of fifth century Athens, and watch how he
expressed it and how he reacted against it. Next, we must understand
what Greek tragedy was, what rituals and conventions held it firm, and
what inner fire kept it living, and so study the method in which
Euripides used it for his chosen mode of expression, obeying its laws
and at the same time liberating its spirit.




CHAPTER II

THE SOURCES FOR A LIFE OF EURIPIDES: THE MEMORIES REMAINING IN THE FOURTH
     CENTURY: HIS YOUTH AND ITS SURROUNDINGS: ATHENS AFTER THE PERSIAN WAR:
     THE GREAT SOPHISTS


It is in one sense impossible to write a life of Euripides, for the
simple reason that he lived too long ago. In his time people were only
just beginning to write history at all; Herodotus, the "father of
history," was his close contemporary. They had begun to record really
great events; but it had not occurred to them that the life of any
individual was worth all the trouble of tracing out and writing down.
Biography of a sort began about two generations afterwards, when the
disciples of Aristotle and Epicurus exerted themselves to find out and
record the lives of their masters. But biography in our sense--the
complete writing of a life year by year with dates and documents--was
never practised at all in antiquity. Think of the Gospels, of the Acts,
even of Tacitus's _Life of Agricola_. They are different one from
another, but they are all unlike any modern biography in their resolute
indifference to anything like completeness. Ancient "Lives" as a rule
select a few great deeds, a few great sayings or discourses; they
concentrate upon the last years of their subject and often especially
upon his death.

The dates at which various eminent men of antiquity died are well known.
The man was then famous and his death was a memorable event. But--except
in a few aristocratic states, like Cos, which records the actual
birthday of the great physician Hippocrates--no baby was eminent and not
many young men. Very few dates of birth are known; and in the case of
almost all the famous men of antiquity their early histories are
forgotten and their early works lost. So it is with Euripides.

History in later antiquity was chiefly a branch of _belles lettres_ and
made no great effort after exactness. As a rule it contented itself with
the date at which a man "flourished," a very rough conception,
conventionally fixed either by the time when he did his most memorable
work or the year when he reached the age of forty. The year commonly
assigned to Euripides' birth is a good instance of ancient method in
these things. The system of chronology was badly confused. In the first
place there was no generally accepted era from which to date; and even
if there had been, the numerical system, before the invention of Arabic
ciphers, was as confused as English spelling is at the present day, and
made it hard to do the simplest sums. So the ordinary educational plan
was to group events together in some scheme that might not be quite
exact but was calculated to have some symbolic interest and to stay in
the memory. For instance, the three great tragedians were grouped
together round the Battle of Salamis, the great triumph of the Persian
Wars in 480 B.C. Aeschylus fought among the heavy-armed infantry,
Sophocles danced in a choir of boys to celebrate the victory, and
Euripides was born in Salamis on the day of the battle. We do not know
the origin of this pleasant fable; but we have another date given in a
very ancient chronicle called the _Parian Marble_, which was found in
the island of Paros in the seventeenth century and was composed in the
year 264 B.C. It puts the birth of Euripides in 484 B.C., and since we
cannot find any reason why this year should be invented, and since the
_Marble_ is the oldest witness now extant, we shall probably do well
provisionally to accept its statement.

In some of the MSS. which preserve Euripides' plays there are "scholia"
or ancient traditional commentaries written round the margin. A few of
the oldest notes in them come from Alexandrian scholars who lived in the
second century B.C. Others date from Roman times, in the first few
centuries of the Christian era; others from the eleventh century and
even later. And among them there is a quite ancient document called
_Life and Race of Euripides_.

It is anonymous and shapeless. Sentences may have been added or omitted
by the various people who at different times have owned or copied the
MSS. But we can see that it is derived from early sources, and notably
from a "Life" which was written by one Satyrus, a writer of the
Peripatetic or Aristotelian school, towards the end of the third century
B.C. Fragments from the same source have been detected in the Latin
authors Varro and Gellius; and it has influenced the biographical notice
in the ancient Greek lexicon of Suidas (tenth century A.D.). Suidas used
also another earlier and better source, the _Attic Chronicle_ of
Philochorus.

Philochorus was a careful and systematic annalist of the early third
century B.C., who used official documents and verified his statements.
His main work was to record all that affected Athens--history, myths,
festivals, and customs, but he also wrote various special treatises, one
of which was _On Euripides_. Satyrus wrote a series of _Lives of Famous
Men_, which was very popular, and we are now--since 1911--in a position
to judge how undeserved its popularity was. For fragments of his _Life
of Euripides_ have been unearthed in Egypt by Drs. Grenfell and Hunt and
published in their _Oxyrrhyncus Papyri_, vol. ix. The life takes the
form of a dialogue--apparently a dialogue with a lady. It is a mass of
quotations, anecdotes, bits of literary criticism, all run together with
an air of culture and pleasantness, a spice of gallantry and a
surprising indifference to historical fact. Evidently anecdotes amused
Satyrus and facts, as such, did not. He cared about literary style, but
he neither cared nor knew about history. The following considerations
will make this clear.

Euripides was, more than any other figure in ancient history, a
constant butt for the attacks of comedy. And we find, oddly enough, that
most of the anecdotes about Euripides in Satyrus are simply the jokes of
comedy treated as historical fact. For instance, in Aristophanes' play,
_The Women at the Thesmophoria_, the women, while alone at this private
festival, agree to murder Euripides because, by his penetrating study of
female character on the stage, he has made life too difficult for them.
Euripides, hearing of the plot, persuades his elderly father-in-law to
go in disguise to the forbidden celebration and defend him--which he
does in a ruinously tactless way. Some scenes of brilliant farce are
succeeded by a solemn truce between Euripides and the women of Athens.
It shows what our tradition is worth when we find that both the "_Life
and Race_," and Gellius and Satyrus himself, give as sober fact this
story which we know--and if we did not know could surely see--to be
comic invention. There is another class of fabulous anecdote which plays
an even larger part in the Satyrus tradition. In Aristophanes' _Frogs_
(1.1048), in a scene where Euripides is defending his plays against the
attacks of Aeschylus, there occurs the chance suggestion that Euripides
had learnt from his own experience all the varied villanies of his
wicked heroines. The idea took root, and he is represented in the
anecdotes as a deceived husband, like his own Theseus or Proetus, and
uttering lines suitable to the occasion out of his own tragedies; as
having two wives at once, like his own Neoptolemus--one of them named
Choirile, or "Piggy," and each of course worse than the other; as torn
to pieces by hounds, like his own Actaeon, or by wild women, like his
own Pentheus.

Something of this sort is possibly the origin of a famous joke about
Euripides' mother, which runs through Aristophanes and is repeated as a
fact in all the Lives. We know from Philochorus that it was not true.
The joke is to connect her with chervil--a grassy vegetable which grew
wild and was only eaten in time of famine--or with wild green-stuff in
general, or simply to call her a greengrocer. It was also a joke to say
anything about beet-root. (_Acharn._ 894, _Frogs_ 942), A man begs
Euripides to bring

  "A new-born chervil from thy mother's breast."
                                    (_Acharn._ 478.)

Or we hear that

                      "Wild wrongs he works on women,
  Wild as the greens that waved about his cradle."
                                     (_Thesm._ 455.)

When some one is about to quote Euripides his friend cries:

  "Don't, don't, for God's sake! Don't be-chervil me!"
                                     (_Knights_ 19.)

Now a much-quoted line from Euripides' tragedy _Melanippe the Wise_
runs: "It is not my word but my mother's word"; and we know that
Melanippe, and still more her mother, was an authority on potent herbs
and simples. Turn his heroine's mother into his own mother and the
potent herbs into some absurd vegetable, and the fable is made.

Setting aside this fog of misunderstanding and reckless anecdote, let us
try to make out the method on which our best authority, Philochorus, may
have put together his account of Euripides. He had almost no written
materials; he had no collection of letters and papers such as go to the
making of a modern biography. He could, however, consult the public
records of tragic performances as collected and edited by Aristotle and
his pupils and thus fix the dates of Euripides' plays, especially his
first and last performance, his first victory, and the like. He would
also find a few public inscriptions in which the poet's name was
mentioned, for the archives of that time were mostly engraved on stone
and put up in public places. There was also a portrait bust, authentic
though slightly idealized, taken in the poet's old age, and showing the
worn and beautiful face, the thin hair, and the lips somewhat fallen in.
These sources would give him a few skeleton facts; for anything more he
would have to depend on the accidental memories that survived. If he
wrote about 300-290 B.C. there was no one living who could remember a
man who died in 406. But there might be men of seventy whose fathers had
spoken to Euripides and whose grandfathers had known him well. Thus he
might with luck have struck some vein of intimate and intelligent
memory, which would have helped us to understand the great man. But he
did not. The memories are all about the poet's old age, and they are all
very external. We hear that he wore a long beard and had moles on his
face. He lived very much alone, and hated visitors and parties. He had a
quantity of books and could not bear women. He lived on the island of
Salamis in a cave which had two openings and a beautiful view--a good
cave was probably more comfortable than many a Greek house, so this may
not have been a great eccentricity--and there you could see him "all day
long, thinking to himself and writing, for he simply despised anything
that was not great and high." It is like the memories of a child, rather
a puzzled child, watching the great man from a distance.

Some few things come out clearly. He lived in his last years with a
small knot of intimates. Mnesilochus, his wife's father--or, perhaps,
another Mnesilochus of the same family--was a close friend. So was his
servant or secretary, Cephisophon. We do not hear of Socrates as an
intimate: the two owed a great debt to one another, and we hear that
Socrates never went to the theatre except when Euripides had a play
performing: to see a Euripides play he would even stir himself so far as
to walk all the way to the Piraeus. But it is likely enough that both
men were too vivid and original, perhaps too much accustomed to dominate
their respective circles, to be quite comfortable in the same room. And
we never find Euripides conversing with Socrates in Plato's dialogues.

Some of Euripides' older friends were by this time driven out from
Athens. The great "Sophist," Protagoras, had read his famous book, _On
the Gods_, in Euripides' own house. But he was now dead, drowned at sea,
and the poet's master, Anaxagoras, had died long before. Some of the
younger artists seem to have found a friend in Euripides. There was
Timotheus, the young Ionian composer, who--like most musicians of any
originality--was supposed to have corrupted the music of the day by his
florid style and bold inventions. His first performance in Athens was a
mortifying failure, and we are told that the passionate Ionian was on
the point of killing himself when the old poet came and encouraged him.
He had only to hold fast, and the people who now hissed would turn and
applaud.

One fact is especially clear, the restless enmity of the comic writers.
Of the eleven comedies of Aristophanes which have come down to us three
are largely devoted to Euripides, and not one has managed altogether to
avoid touching him. I know of no parallel to it in all the history of
literature. Has there ever again been a tragic poet, or any poet, who so
centred upon himself year after year till he was nearly eighty the
mocking attention of all the popular wits? And how was it that the
Athenian public never tired of this incessant poet-baiting, these
incessant appeals to literary criticism in the midst of farce? The
attacks are sometimes rough and vicious, sometimes acute and searching,
often enough they hide a secret admiration. And the chief enemy,
Aristophanes, must, to judge from his parodies, have known a large
number of Euripides' ninety-two plays by heart, and been at least half
fascinated by the object of his satire. However that may be, the
hostility of the comic writers had evidently a general hostility behind
it. Our tradition states this definitely and the persistency of the
attacks proves it. You cannot go on constantly deriding on the stage a
person whom your audience does not wish derided. And the unpopularity of
Euripides, as we shall see later, is not hard to understand. The Satyrus
tradition puts it down to his personal aloofness and austerity. He
avoided society, and he "made no effort to please his audience." So that
at least he did not soften by personal pleasantness the opposition they
felt to his whole view of life. It was not only that he was utterly
alienated from the War Party and the mob leaders: here he only agreed
with Aristophanes. It was that he had pierced through to a deeper
stratum of thought, in which most of the pursuits and ideals of the men
about him stood condemned. Socrates reached the same plane, and they
killed Socrates.

It is somewhat harder to understand the universal assumption of our
authorities that Euripides was a notorious castigator of the female sex
and that the women of Athens naturally hated him. To us he seems an
aggressive champion of women; more aggressive, and certainly far more
appreciative, than Plato. Songs and speeches from the _Medea_ are
recited to-day at suffragist meetings. His tragic heroines are famous
and are almost always treated with greater interest and insight than his
heroes. Yet not only the ancients, but all critics up to the last
generation or so, have described him as a woman-hater. What does it
mean? Is Aristophanes ironical, and are the scholiasts and grammarians
merely stupid? Or is there some explanation for this extraordinary
judgment?

I think the explanation is that the present age is the first, or almost
the first, that has learned to treat its heroines in fiction as real
human beings, with what are called "mixed characters." As lately as the
time of Sir Walter Scott, perhaps as lately as Dickens, common
convention demanded that a heroine, if sympathetic, should be so free
from faults as to be almost without character. Ibsen's heroines, who
were real human beings studied with sympathy but with profound
sincerity, seemed to their generation shocking and even horrible. All
through the ages the ideal of womanhood in conventional fiction has
mostly been of the type praised by one great Athenian thinker: "the
greatest glory for a woman is to be as little mentioned as possible
among men." If that ideal was really predominant among the women of
Athens, it is no wonder that they felt outraged by Euripides. They had
not reached, and most of their husbands had not reached, the point of
being interested in good study of character, much less the point of
demanding a freer and more strenuous life. To the average stupid
Athenian it was probably rather wicked for a woman to have any
character, wicked for her to wish to take part in public life, wicked
for her to acquire learning, or to doubt any part of the conventional
religion, just as it was wicked for her to deceive her husband. Such
women should not be spoken about; above all they should not be treated
with understanding and sympathy. The understanding made it all
infinitely worse. To people of this type the women of Euripides must
have been simply shocking and the poet himself a cruel enemy of the sex.
One only wonders that they could stand Sophocles' heroines, such as
Antigone and Jocasta. To cleverer men, like Aristophanes, the case
would, no doubt, seem rather more complicated. But Aristophanes, amid
the many flashes of sympathy he shows for "advanced" women, was not the
man to go against his solid conservative audience or to forgo such rich
material for jokes.

In any case this is the kind of picture we have of Euripides in his last
years; a figure solitary, austere, with a few close intimates, wrapped
up in living for what he would call "the service of the Muses," in
music, poetry and speculation; capable still of thrilling his audiences
with an intensity of tragic emotion such as no other poet had ever
reached; but bowed with age, somewhat friendless, and like other
solitaries a little strange in his habits; uncomprehendingly admired and
hated, and moving always through a mist of half-envious, half-derisive
laughter. _Calvus et calvinista_--one is reminded, amid many
differences, of the quaint words in which William the Silent describes
his own passage from youth to age, till the brilliant Catholic prince,
leader of courts and tourneys, sate at last in his lonely council
chamber "bald and a Calvinist." Let us try to trace the path of life
which led him to this end.

                     *       *       *       *       *

He was the son of Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides--such names often have
alternative forms--who is said to have been a merchant. His mother,
Cleito, the supposed greengrocer, was, according to Philochorus, "of
very high birth." He was born at Phlya, a village in the centre of
Attica. The neighbourhood is celebrated still for its pleasant trees and
streams in the midst of a sunburnt land. In Euripides' time it was more
famous for its temples. It was the seat of Demeter Anesidora (Earth,
Upsender of Gifts), of Dionysus of the Blossom, and the Dread Virgins,
old-world and mysterious names, not like the prevailing gods of the
Homeric mythology. Most famous of all, it possessed the mystery temple
of Eros, or Love. Owing to the researches of recent years, these
mysteries can now be in their general nature understood. They are
survivals of an old tribal society, in which all the boys as they
reached maturity were made to pass through certain ordeals and
initiations. They were connected both with vegetation and with re-birth
after death, because they dated from a remote age in which the
fruitfulness of the tribal fields was not differentiated from the
fruitfulness of the flocks and the human families, and the new members
born into the community were normally supposed to be the old ancestors
returning to their homes. By Euripides' day such beliefs had faded into
mystical doctrines, to be handled with speechless reverence, not to be
questioned or understood, but they had their influence upon his mind.
There were other temples too, belonging to the more aristocratic gods of
heroic mythology, as embodied in Homer. Euripides was in his youth
cup-bearer to a certain guild of Dancers--dancing in ancient times had
always religious associations about it--who were chosen from the "first
families in Athens" and danced round the altar of the Delian Apollo. He
was also Fire-bearer to the Apollo of Cape Zoster; that is, it was his
office to carry a torch in the procession which on a certain night of
each year met the Delian Apollo at Cape Zoster, and escorted him on his
mystic path from Delos to Athens.

When the child was four years old he had to be hurried away from his
home and then from his country. The Persians were coming. The awful
words lost none of their terror from the fact that in Greek the word
"Persai," Persians, meant "to destroy." So later it added something to
the dread inspired by Rome that her name, "Roma," meant "strength." The
family must have crossed the narrow seas to Salamis or further, and seen
the smoke of the Persian conflagrations rising daily from new towns and
villages of Attica and at last from the Acropolis, or Citadel, itself.
Then came the enormous desperate sea-battle; the incredible victory; the
sight of the broken oriental fleet beating sullenly away for Asia and
safety, and the solemn exclamation of the Athenian general,
Themistocles, "It is not we who have done this!" The next year the
Athenians could return to Attica and begin to build up their ruined
farms. Then came the final defeat of the Persian land army at Plataea,
and the whole atmosphere lifted. Athens felt that she had acted like a
hero and was reaping a hero's reward. She had borne the full brunt of
the war; she had voluntarily put herself under the orders of Sparta
rather than risk a split in the Greek forces; and now she had come out
as the undisputed mistress of the sea, the obvious champion round whom
the eastern Greeks must rally. Sparta, not interested in matters outside
her own borders, and not capable of any constructive policy, dropped
sulkily out, and left her to carry on the offensive war for the
liberation of the Greeks in Asia. The current of things was with her.

But this great result was not merely the triumph of a particular city;
it was the triumph of an ideal and a way of life. Freedom had defeated
despotism, democracy had defeated kings, hardy poverty had defeated all
the gold of the East. The men who fought of their free will for home and
country had proved more lasting fighters than the conscripts who were
kept in the lines by fear of tortures and beheadings and impalements.
Above all "virtue," as the Greeks called it, or "virtue" and "wisdom"
together, had shown their power. The words raise a smile in us; indeed,
our words do not properly correspond with the Greek, because we can not
get our ideas simple enough. "Virtue" is what makes a man, or anything
else, good; it is the quality of a good soldier, a good general, a good
citizen, a good bootmaker, a good horse or almost a good sword. And
"wisdom" is that by which a man knows how to do things--to use a spear,
or a tool, to think and speak and write, to do figures and history and
geometry, to advise and convince his fellow-citizens. All these great
forces moved, or so it seemed at the time, in the same direction; and
probably it was hardly felt as a dangerous difference when many people
preferred to say that it was "piety" that had won in the war against
"impiety," and that the Persians had been destroyed because, being
monotheists, they had denied the Gods. No doubt "piety," properly
understood, was a kind of "wisdom." Let us take a few passages from the
old Ionian historian, Herodotus, to illustrate what the feeling for
Athens was in Euripides' youth.

Athens represented Hellenism. (_Hdt._ I. 60.) "The Greek race was
distinguished of old from the barbarian as more intelligent and more
emancipated from silly nonsense (or 'savagery') . . . And of all the
Greeks the Athenians were counted first in Wisdom." Athens, as the old
epigram put it, was "The Hellas of Hellas."

And this superior wisdom went with freedom and democracy. "So Athens
grew. It is clear wherever you test it, what a good thing is equality
among men. Athens under the tyrants was no better than her neighbours,
even in war; when freed from the tyrants she was far the first of all."
(V. 78.)

And what did this freedom and democracy mean? A speaker in Herodotus
tells us (III. 80): "A tyrant disturbs ancient laws, violates women,
kills men without trial. But a people ruling--first the very name of it
is beautiful, and secondly a people does none of these things."

And the freedom is not mere licence. When Xerxes heard the small numbers
of the Greeks who were opposed to him he asked why they did not all run
away, "especially as you say they are free and there is no one to stop
them?" And the Spartan answered: "They are free, O King, but not free to
do everything. For there is a master over them named Law, whom they fear
more than thy servants fear thee." (VII. 104. This refers specially to
the Spartans, but the same tale is told by Aeschylus of the Athenians.
It applies to any free Greeks as against the enslaved barbarian.)

The free Athenian must also have _arete_, "virtue." He must be a better
man in all senses than the common herd. As Themistocles put it; at every
turn of life there is a choice between a higher and a lower, and they
must choose the higher always. Especially there is one sense in which
Athens must profess _arete_; the sense of generosity or chivalry. When
the various Greek states were contending for the leadership before the
battle of Artemisium, the Athenians, though contributing much the
largest fleet, "thought that the great thing was that Greece should be
saved, and gave up their claims." (_Hdt._ VIII. 3.) In the similar
dispute for the post of honour and danger, before the battle of Plataea,
the Athenians did plead their cause and won it. But they pleaded
promising to abide loyally by Sparta's decision if their claims were
rejected, and their arguments show what ideal they had formed of
themselves. They claim that in recent years they alone have met the
Persians single-handed on behalf of all Greece; that in old times it was
they who gave refuge to the children of Heracles when hunted through
Greece by the tyrant Eurystheus; it was they who, at the cost of war,
prevented the conquering Thebans from leaving their dead enemies to rot
unburied and thus offending against the laws of Greece and humanity.

This is the light in which Athens conceived herself; the ideal up to
which, amid much confused, hot-headed and self-deceiving patriotism, she
strove to live. She was to be the Saviour of Hellas.

                     *       *       *       *       *

Euripides was about eight when the ruined walls of Athens were rebuilt
and the city, no longer defenceless against her neighbours, could begin
to rebuild the "House of Athena" on the Acropolis and restore the
Temples and the Festivals throughout Attica. He can hardly have been
present when the general Themistocles, then at the height of his fame,
provided the Chorus for the earliest of the great tragedians,
Phrynichus, in 476 B.C. But he must have watched the new paintings being
put up by the same Themistocles in the temples at Phlya, with scenes
from the Persian War. And through his early teens he must have watched
the far more famous series of pictures with which Polygnotus, the first
of the great Greek painters, was adorning the Acropolis; pictures that
canonized scenes from the Siege of Troy and other legendary history.
When he was ten he may probably have seen a curious procession which
brought back from the island of Skyros the bones of Theseus, the
mythical king of Athens and the accepted symbol, king though he was, of
Athenian enlightenment and democracy. Athens was now too great and too
self-conscious to allow Theseus to lie on foreign soil. When he was
twelve he may have seen Aeschylus' _Persae_, "the one great play dealing
with an historical event that exists in literature." When he was
seventeen he pretty certainly saw the _Seven against Thebes_ and was
much influenced by it; but the Choregus this time was a new statesman,
Pericles. Themistocles was in banishment; and the other great heroes of
the Persian time, Aristides and Miltiades, dead.

Next year, 466 B.C. Euripides became officially an "Ephebus," or
"Youth." He was provided with a shield and spear, and set to garrison
and police duty in the frontier forts of Attica. Full military service
was to follow in two years. Meantime the current of his thoughts must
have received a shock. For, while his shield and spear were still fresh,
news came of one of the most stunning military disasters in Athenian
history. A large colony which had been established on the river Strymon
in Thrace had been lured into dangerous country by the Thracian tribes,
then set upon by overwhelming numbers and massacred to the number of ten
thousand. No wonder that one of Euripides' earliest plays, when he took
to writing, was the story of _Rhesus_, the Thracian, and his rushing
hordes of wild tribesmen.

But meantime Euripides had not found his work in life. We hear that he
was a good athlete; there were records of his prize-winning in Athens
and in Eleusis. Probably every ambitious boy in Greece did a good deal
of running and boxing. More serious was his attempt at painting.
Polygnotus was at work in Athens, and the whole art advancing by leaps
and bounds. He tried to find his true work there, and paintings by his
hand were discovered by antiquarians of later times--or so they
believed--in the town of Megara. His writings show a certain interest in
painting here and there, and it is perhaps the painter in him that
worked out in the construction of his dramas such fine and varied
effects of grouping.

But there was more in the air than painting and sculpture. The youth of
Euripides fell in an age which saw perhaps the most extraordinary
intellectual awakening known to human history. It had been preparing for
about a century in certain cities of Ionian Greece, on the coast of Asia
Minor, rich and cultivated states, subject for the most part to Lydian
or Persian governors. The revolt of these cities and its suppression by
Persia had sent numbers of Ionian "wise men," philosophers, poets,
artists, historians, men of science, to seek for refuge in Greece, and
especially in Athens. Athens was held to be the mother-city of all the
Ionian colonies, and had been their only champion in the revolt. She
became now, as one of these Ionian exiles put it, "the hearth on which
the fire of Hellas burned." It is difficult to describe this great
movement in a few pages, but one can, perhaps, get some idea of it by an
imaginary comparison. Imagine first the sort of life that was led in
remote parts of Yorkshire or Somerset towards the end of the eighteenth
century, a stagnant rustic life with no moving ideas, and unquestioning
in its obedience to authority, in which hardly any one could read except
the parson, and the parson's reading was not of a kind to stir a man's
pulse. And next imagine the intellectual ferment which was then in
progress in London or Paris; the philosophers, painters, historians and
men of science, the voices proclaiming that all men were equal, that the
laws of England were unjust to the poor, that slavery was a crime, and
that monarchy was a false form of government, or that no action was
morally wrong except what tended to produce human misery. Imagine then
what would occur in the mind of a clever and high-thinking boy who was
brought suddenly from the one society into the heart of the second, and
made to realise that the battles and duties and prizes of life were
tenfold more thrilling and important than he had ever dreamed. That is
the kind of awakening that must have occurred in the minds of a large
part of the Greek people in the early fifth century.

A thoroughly backward peasant in a Greek village--even an Attic village
like Phlya--had probably as few ideas as other uneducated peasants. In
Athens some fifty years later we hear that it was impossible, with the
best will in the world, to find any one who could not read or write.
(_Ar. Knights_ 188 ff.) But the difference in time and place is
cardinal. The countryman who voted for the banishment of Aristides the
Just had to ask some one else to write the name for him. Such a man did
not read nor yet think. He more or less hated the next village and
regarded its misfortunes as his own advantage. He was sunk in
superstition. His customs were rigid and not understood. He might
worship a goddess with a horse's head or a hero with a snake's tail. He
would perform for the welfare of his fields traditional sacrifices that
were often filthy and sometimes cruel. On certain holy days he would
tear small beasts to pieces or drive them into a fire; in very great
extremities he would probably think no medicine so good as human blood.
His rules of agriculture would be a mixture of rough common sense and
stupid taboos: he would not reap till the Pleiades were rising, and he
would carefully avoid sitting on a fixed stone. When he sought for
learning, he would get it in old traditional books like _Hesiod_, which
taught him how Ouranos had been mutilated by his son Cronos, and Cronos
bound with chains by his son Zeus; how Zeus was king of gods and men,
but had been cheated by Prometheus into accepting bones instead of meat
in a sacrifice. He would believe that Tantalus had given the gods his
son Pelops to eat, to see if they would know the difference, and some
of them had eaten bits of him. He would perhaps be ready, with great
hesitation, to tolerate certain timid attempts to expurgate the story,
like Pindar's, for instance, which results, according to our judgment,
in making it rather worse. And this man, rooted in his customs, his
superstitions, his narrow-minded cruelties, will of course regard every
departure from his own way of life as so much pure wickedness. In every
contest that goes on between Intelligence and Stupidity, between
Enlightenment and Obscurantism, the powers of the dark have this immense
advantage: they never understand their opponents, and consequently
represent them as always wrong, always wicked, whereas the intelligent
party generally makes an effort to understand the stupid and to
sympathize with anything that is good or fine in their attitude. Many of
our Greek Histories still speak as if the great spiritual effort which
created fifth century Hellenism was a mass of foolish chatter and
intellectual trickery and personal self-indulgence.

It was not that, nor anything like that. Across the mind of our stupid
peasant the great national struggle against Persia brought first the
idea that perhaps really it was better to die than to be a slave; that
it was well to face death not merely for his own home but
actually--incredible as it seemed--for other people's homes, for the
homes of those wretched people in the next village. Our own special
customs and taboos, he would reflect with a shiver, do not really matter
when they are brought into conflict with a common Hellenism or a common
humanity. There are greater things about us than we knew. There are also
greater men. These men who are in everybody's mouth: Themistocles above
all, who has defeated the Persian and saved Greece: but crowds of others
besides, Aristides the Just and Miltiades, the hero of Marathon;
Demokedes, the learned physician, who was sought out by people in need
of help from Italy to Susa; Hecataeus, who had made a picture of the
whole earth, showing all the countries and cities and rivers and how far
each is from the next, and who could have saved the Ionians if they had
only listened to him; Pythagoras, who had discovered all about numbers
and knew the wickedness of the world and had founded a society, bound by
strict rules, to combat it. What is it about these men that has made
them so different from you and me and the other farmers who meet in the
agora on market-day? It is _sophia_, wisdom; it is _arete_, virtue. They
are not a bit stronger in the arm, not bigger, not richer, or more
high-born: they are just wiser, and thus better men. Cannot we be made
wise? We know we are stupid, we are very ignorant, but we can learn.

The word Sophistes means either "one who makes wise," or, possibly, as
some scholars think, "one who deals in wisdom." The difference is
slight. In any case it was in answer to this call for _sophia_ that the
Sophists arose. Doubtless they were of all kinds; great men and small,
honest and dishonest; teachers of real wisdom and of pretence. Our
tradition is rather bitter against them, because it dates from the
bitter time of reaction and disappointment, when the hopes of the fifth
century and the men who guided it seemed to have led Athens only to her
fall. Plato in particular is against them as he is against Athens
herself. In the main the judgment of the afterworld upon them will
depend on the side we take in a never-ending battle: they fought for
light and knowledge and freedom and the development of all man's powers.
If we prefer blinkers and custom, subordination and the rod, we shall
think them dangerous and shallow creatures. But, to see what the
sophists were like, let us consider two of them who are recorded as
having specially been the teachers of Euripides.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, in Ionia, was about fifteen years older than
Euripides, and spent some thirty years of his life in Athens. He
discovered for the first time that the moon shines by the reflection of
the sun's light; and he explained, in the main correctly, the cause of
eclipses. The sun was not a god: it was a white-hot mass of stone or
earth, in size perfectly enormous. In describing its probable size,
language failed him; he only got as far as saying--what must have seemed
almost a mad exaggeration--that it was many times larger than the
Peloponnese. He held, if he did not invent, a particular form of the
atomic theory which has played such a great role in the history of
modern science. He was emphatic on the indestructibility of matter.
Things could be broken up into their elements and could grow together
again, but nothing could be created or destroyed. There was order in the
world and purpose, and this was the work of a conscious power which he
called "Nous," or Mind. "All things were together in a mass, till Mind
came and put order into them." Mind is outside things, not mixed with
them, and some authorities say that Anaxagoras called it "God."
Meantime, he showed by experiment the reality and substance of air, and
disproved the common notion of "empty space." It will be seen that these
ideas, if often crudely expressed, are essentially the same ideas which
gave new life to modern science after the sleep of the Middle Ages.
Almost every one of them is the subject of active dispute at the present
day.

Apart from physical science, we learn that Anaxagoras was a close friend
and adviser of the great Athenian statesman, Pericles; and we have by
chance an account of a long discussion between the two men about the
theory of punishment--whether the object of it is to do "justice" upon a
wrong-doer apart from any result that may accrue, or simply to deter
others from doing the same and thus make society better. The question is
the subject of a vigorous correspondence in the _Times_ while these
words are writing. We can understand what an effect such a teacher as
this would have on the eager young man from Phlya. One great word of
liberation was already in the air and belongs to no one sophist or
philosopher. This was the distinction between Nature on the one hand and
Custom or Convention on the other. The historian Herodotus, who was no
sophist but loved a good story, tells how the Persian king, Darius,
called some Greeks and some Indian tribesmen together into his presence.
He then asked the Greeks what payment would induce them to eat the dead
bodies of their fathers. "Nothing in the world," they cried in
indignation. "They would reverently burn them." He proceeded to ask the
Indians what they would take to burn their fathers' bodies, and they
repelled the bare thought with horror; they would do nothing but eat
them with every mark of love and respect. "Fire burns in the same way
both here and in Persia," the saying was, "but men's notions of right
and wrong are not at all the same." The one is Nature; the other is
man's Custom or Convention. This antithesis between "Phusis" and "Nomos"
ran vividly through the whole of Greek philosophy, and awoke with
renewed vigour in Rousseau and the radical writers of the eighteenth
century. It is an antithesis against which conformist dialecticians
have always turned their sharpest weapons. It has again and again been
dissected and refuted and shown to be philosophically untenable: but it
still lives and has still something of the old power to shatter and to
set free. All the thinkers of Greece at the time we are treating were
testing the laws and maxims of their day, and trying to find out what
really rested on Nature and what was the mere embroidery of man. It is
always a dangerous and exciting inquiry; especially because the most
irrational conventions are apt also to be the most sacrosanct.

This whole spirit was specially incarnate in another of Euripides'
teachers. We hear of Protagoras in his old age from that enemy of the
sophists, Plato. But for this sophist even Plato's satire is kindly and
almost reverent. Protagoras worked not at physical science, but at
language and philosophy. He taught men to think and speak; he began the
study of grammar by dividing sentences into four kinds, Optative,
Interrogative, Indicative, Imperative. He taught rhetoric; he formulated
the first theory of democracy. But it was as a sceptic that he struck
men's imaginations most. "About the Gods, I have no means of knowing
either that they are or are not. For the hindrances to knowledge are
many, the darkness of the subject and the shortness of man's life."
Numbers of people, no doubt, went as far as this, and without suffering
for it as Protagoras did; but his scepticism cut deeper and raised
questions still debated in modern thought. "Man is the measure of
things"; there is no truth to be had beyond the impression made on a
man's mind. When this given object seems one thing to A and another
thing to B, it _is_ to each one exactly what it seems; just as honey not
only seems sweet but _is_ sweet to a healthy man, and not only seems
bitter but _is_ bitter to a man with jaundice. Then you can not say, we
may ask, that one or other impression is false, and will prove false on
further inquiry? No: he answers; each impression is equally true. The
only difference is that each state of mind is not equally good. You
cannot prove to the jaundiced man that his honey is sweet, for it is
not: or to the drunkard that he does not desire his drink, for he does:
what you can do is to alter the men's state of mind, to cure the
jaundice or the drunkenness. Our cognition flows and changes. It is the
result of an active impact upon a passive percipient. And, resulting
from this change, there are in practice always two things to be said, a
pro and a con. about every possible proposition. There is no general
statement that cannot be contradicted.

Other teachers also are represented as having influenced Euripides;
Archelaus, who tried to conceive Anaxagoras's "Mind" in some material
form, as air or spirit--for _spiritus_, of course, means "breath";
Prodicus, who, besides his discoveries in grammar, is the author of a
popular and edifying fable which has served in many schoolrooms for many
centuries. It tells how Heracles once came to some cross roads, one road
open, broad, and smooth and leading a little downhill, the other narrow
and uphill and rough: and on the first you gradually became a worse and
worse man, on the second a better one. There was Diogenes of Apollonia,
whose theories about air seem to have had some effect on Euripides'
writings; and of course there was, among the younger men, Socrates.
Socrates is too great and too enigmatic a teacher to be summed up in a
few sentences, and though a verse of ancient comedy has come down to us,
saying, "Socrates piles the faggots for Euripides' fire," his influence
on his older friend is not very conspicuous. Euripides must have caught
something from his scepticism, his indifference to worldly standards,
his strong purpose, and something also from his resolute rejection of
all philosophy except that which was concerned with the doings and
feelings of men. "The fields and trees will not talk to me; it is only
the human beings in the city that will." That saying of Socrates might
be the motto of many a dramatist.

The greatness of these philosophers or sophists of the fifth century
does not, of course, lie in the correctness of their scientific results.
The dullest and most unilluminated text-book produced at the present day
is far more correct than Anaxagoras. Their greatness lies partly in the
pioneer quality of their work. They first struck out the roads by which
later workers could advance further. Partly in the daring and felicity
with which they hit upon great and fruitful ideas, ideas which have
brought light and freedom with them whenever they have recurred to men's
minds, and which, as we have seen, are to a great extent still, after
more than two thousand years, living issues in philosophic thought.
Partly it lies in the mere freedom of spirit with which they set to
work, unhampered by fears and taboos, to seek the truth, to create
beauty, and to improve human life. The difference of atmosphere between
the sophists of the Periclean circle and the ordinary backward Attic
farmer must have been visible to every observer. If more evidence of the
great gulf was needed, it was supplied emphatically enough in the
experience of Euripides. He was himself prosecuted by Cleon, the
demagogue, for "impiety." The same charge had been levelled even against
his far less destructive predecessor, Aeschylus. Of these three special
friends whom we have mentioned, Euripides did not live to see Socrates
condemned to death and executed. But he saw Anaxagoras, in spite of the
protection of Pericles, accused of "impiety" and compelled to fly for
his life. He saw Protagoras, for the book which he had read aloud in
Euripides' own house, prosecuted and condemned. The book was publicly
burned; the author escaped, it is said, only to be drowned at sea, a
signal mark in the eyes of the orthodox of how the gods regarded such
philosophy.

Thought was no doubt freer in ancient Athens than in any other city
within two thousand years of it. Those who suffered for religious
advance are exceedingly few. But it was not in human nature, especially
in such early times, for individuals to do such great service to their
fellow men and not occasionally be punished for it. They induced men for
a time to set reason and high ideals above the instincts of the herd:
and sooner or later the herd must turn and trample them.

One of the ancient lives says that it was this sense of the antagonism
between Anaxagoras and the conservative masses that turned Euripides
away from philosophy. One need scarcely believe that. The way he took
was not the way to escape from danger or unpopularity. And when a man
shows extraordinary genius for poetry one need not search for the
reasons which induced him not to write prose. He followed in the wake
not of Anaxagoras but of Aeschylus.




CHAPTER III

LIFE CONTINUED: WHAT IS A GREEK TRAGEDY? EURIPIDES' EARLY PLAYS: "ALCESTIS"
    AND "TELEPHUS"


To the public of the present day a play is merely an entertainment, and
it was the same to the Elizabethans. Shakespeare can say to his audience
"Our true intent is all for your delight," and we feel no particular
shock in reading the words. The companies were just noblemen's servants;
and it was natural enough that if Lord Leicester's players did not amuse
Lord Leicester's guests, they should be sent away and others hired. If
they too proved dull, the patron could drop the play altogether and call
for tumblers and dancing dogs.

To a playwright of the twelfth century, who worked out in the church or
in front of it his presentation of the great drama of the Gospel, such
an attitude would have seemed debased and cynical. However poor the
monkish players or playwright might be, surely that which they were
presenting was in itself enough to fill the mind of a spectator. To
them, as the great mediaevalist, Gaston Paris, puts it, "the universe was
a vast stage, on which was played an eternal drama, full of tears and
joy, its actors divided between heaven, earth and hell; a drama whose
end is foreseen, whose changes of fortune are directed by the hand of
God, yet whose every scene is rich and thrilling." The spectator was
admitted to the councils of the Trinity; he saw the legions of darkness
mingling themselves with the lives of humanity, tempting and troubling,
and the saints and angels at their work of protection or intercession;
he saw with his own eyes the kiss of Judas, the scourging and
crucifixion, the descent into Hell, the resurrection and ascension; and,
lastly, the dragging down to red and bloody torment of the infinite
multitudes of the unorthodox or the wicked. Imagine what passed in the
minds of those who witnessed in full faith such a spectacle! [_Poesie du
Moyen Age I_, Essay I.]

Now, in spite of a thousand differences of social organization and
religious dogma, the atmosphere of primitive Greek tragedy must have
been most strangely similar to this. It is not only that, like the
mediaeval plays, Greek tragedy was religious; that it was developed out
of a definite ritual; not even that the most marked links of historical
continuity can be traced between the death-and-resurrection ritual of
certain Pagan "saviours" and those of the mediaeval drama. It is that the
ritual on which tragedy was based embodied the most fundamental Greek
conceptions of life and fate, of law and sin and punishment.

When we say that tragedy originated in a dance, ritual or magical,
intended to represent the death of the vegetation this year and its
coming return in triumph next year, the above remarks may seem hard to
justify. But we must remember several things. First, a dance was in
ancient times essentially religious, not a mere capering with the feet
but an attempt to express with every limb and sinew of the body
those emotions for which words, especially the words of simple and
unlettered men, are inadequate (see p. 229). Again, vegetation is to us
an abstract common noun; to the ancient it was a personal being, not
"it" but "He." His death was as our own deaths, and his re-birth a thing
to be anxiously sought with prayers and dances. For if He were not
re-born, what would happen? Famine, and wholesale death by famine, was a
familiar thought, a regularly returning terror, in these primitive
agricultural villages. Nay, more, why must the cycle of summer and
winter roll as it does? Why must "He" die and men die? Some of the
oldest Greek philosophers have no doubt about the answer: there has been
"Hubris" or "Adikia," Pride or Injustice, and the result thereof must
needs be death. Every year He waxes too strong and commits "Hubris," and
such sin has its proper punishment. "The sun shall not transgress his
measures," says Heraclitus; "if he does he shall be pursued by Erinyes,
till justice be re-fulfilled." It is the law of all existing things.
"They all pay retribution for injustice, one to another, according to
the Ordinance of Time" (_Heraclitus_, fr. 94, _Anaximander_, fr. 9). And
the history of each year's bloom was an example of this refluent
balance. The Year Daemon--Vegetation Spirit or Corn God or whatever we
call him--waxes proud and is slain by his enemy, who becomes thereby a
murderer and must in turn perish at the hands of the expected avenger,
who is at the same time the Wronged One re-risen. The ritual of this
Vegetation Spirit is extraordinarily wide-spread in all quarters of the
globe, and may best be studied in Dr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_,
especially in the part entitled, "_The Dying God_." Dionysus, the daemon
of tragedy, is one of these Dying Gods, like Attis, Adonis, Osiris.

The Dionysiac ritual which lay at the back of tragedy, may be
conjectured in its full form to have had six regular stages: (1) an Agon
or Contest, in which the Daemon fights against his enemy, who--since it
is really this year fighting last year--is apt to be almost identical
with himself; (2) a Pathos, or disaster, which very commonly takes the
shape of a "Sparagmos," or Tearing in pieces; the body of the Corn God
being scattered in innumerable seeds over the earth; sometimes of some
other sacrificial death; (3) a Messenger, who brings the news; (4) a
Lamentation, very often mixed with a Song of Rejoicing, since the death
of the Old King is also the accession of the new; (5) the Discovery or
Recognition of the hidden or dismembered god; and (6) his Epiphany or
Resurrection in glory.[1]

[Footnote 1: The above is the present writer's re-statement, published
in Miss Harrison's _Themis_, pp. 341 ff., of the orthodox view of the
origin of tragedy. _See_ also Cornford _From Religion to Philosophy_,
first few chapters. The chief non-Dionysiac theory is Professor
Ridgeway's, who derives tragedy directly from the funeral cult of
individual heroes: _Origin of Tragedy_, Cambridge, 1910.]

This ritual of Dionysus, being made into a drama and falling into the
hands of a remarkable set of creative artists, developed into what we
know as Greek tragedy. The creative passion of the artist gradually
conquered the emotion of the mere worshipper.

Exactly the same development took place in mediaeval drama, or rather it
was taking place when new secular influences broke in and destroyed it.
The liturgical plays first enacted the main story of the New Testament;
then they emphasized particular parts--there is a beautiful play, for
instance, on the Massacre of the Innocents; then they developed
imaginatively scenes that are implied but not mentioned in the Gospel,
such as the experiences of the Magdalen when she lived "in joy," her
dealings with cosmetic-sellers and the like; then, ranging right outside
the Gospel histories, they dealt with the lives of St. Nicholas, St.
Antony or any person who provided a good legend and had some claim to an
atmosphere of sanctity.

In the same way Greek tragedy extended its range first to embrace the
histories of other Heroes or Daemons--the difference is slight--who were
essentially like Dionysus: Pentheus, Lycurgus, Hippolytus, Actaeon and
especially, I should be inclined to add, Orestes. Then it took in any
heroes to whose memory some ritual was attached. For the play is, with
the rarest and most doubtful exceptions, essentially the enactment of a
ritual, or rather of what the Greeks called an "aition"--that is, a
supposed historical event which is the origin or "cause" of the ritual.
Thus the death of Hippolytus is the "aition" of the lamentation-rite
performed at the grave of Hippolytus; the death of Aias is the "aition"
of the festival called Aianteia; the death of Medea's children, the
"aition" of a certain ritual at Corinth; the story of Prometheus the
"aition" of a certain Fire-festival in Athens. The tragedy, as ritual,
enacts its own legendary origin.

There is then a further extension of the theme, to include a very few
events in recent history. But we must observe that only those events
were chosen which were felt to have about them some heroic grandeur or
mystery; I think we may even say, only those events which, like the
Battle of Salamis or the Fall of Miletus, had been made the subject of
some religious celebration.

However that may be, the general temper of tragedy moved strongly away
from the monotony of fixed ritual. The subjects thus grew richer and
more varied; the mode of representation loftier and more artistic. What
had begun as almost pure ritual ended by being almost pure drama. By the
time Euripides began to write the master-tragedian Aeschylus had already
lifted Greek drama to its highest level: whole generations have read his
plays without even suspecting the ritual form that lies behind them.
Aeschylus had also made the whole performance much longer and more
impressive: he composed three continuous tragedies forming a single
whole and followed by the strange performance called a Satyr-play. The
wild element of revelry which was proper to Dionysus worship, with its
bearded dancing half-animal satyrs, had been kept severely away from the
stage during the three tragedies and must burst in to have its fling
when they were finished. The other tragedians do not seem to have
written in trilogies, and Euripides at any rate moved gradually away
from satyr-plays. In their stead he put a curious sort of pro-satyric
tragedy, a play in the tragic convention and free from the satyric
coarseness, but containing at least one half-comic figure and preserving
some fantastic quality of atmosphere.

On the Great Festival of Dionysus each year--and sometimes on other
festivals--this ritual of tragedy was solemnly performed in the theatre
of the god. Like most Greek festivals the performance took the form of a
competition. The ground of this custom was, I suspect, religious. It was
desired to get a spirit of "Nike," or victory, into the celebration, and
you could only get this by means of a contest. The Archon, or
magistrate, in charge of the festival selected three poets to compete,
and three rich men to be their "Choregoi," that is, to provide all the
expenses of the performance. The poet was then said to have "obtained a
chorus," and his work now was to "teach the chorus." At the end of the
festival a body of five judges, somewhat elaborately and curiously
chosen, awarded a first, second and third prize. Even the last
competitor must have a kind of "victory"; any mention of "failure" at
such a time would be ill-omened.

This, in rough outline, was the official mould in which our poet's
creative activity had to run. The record of his early work is, as we
had reason to expect, terribly defective. But we do happen to know the
name and subject of the first play for which he "was granted a chorus."
It was called the _Daughters of Pelias_. Its story was based on the old
ritual of the Year-god, who is cut to pieces or scattered like the seed,
and then restored to life and youth. Medea, the enchantress maiden from
the further shores of the Friendless Sea, had fled from her home with
the Greek adventurer Jason, the winner of the Golden Fleece. She came
with him to Thessaly, where his uncle Pelias was king. Pelias had
usurped Jason's ancestral crown and therefore hated him. The daughters
of Pelias doubtless sneered at Medea and encouraged Jason's growing
distaste for his barbarian prize. The savage woman determined at one
blow to be rid of Pelias, to punish his daughters, and reconquer Jason's
love. She had the power of renovating the life of the old. She persuaded
the daughters of Pelias to try her method on their father, with the
result that he died in agony, and they stood guilty of a hideous murder.
Medea, we may conjecture, was triumphant, till she found she had made
Jason a ruined man and taught him really to hate her. The play is
characteristic in two ways. It was clearly based on the old ritual, and
it treated one of Euripides' great subjects, the passions of a suffering
and savage woman.

The _Daughters of Pelias_ was produced in 455, when the poet was
twenty-nine, just a year after the death of Aeschylus and thirteen years
after the first victory of Sophocles. Euripides' own first victory--we
do not know the name of the successful play--did not come till 442, a
year before Sophocles' masterpiece, the _Antigone_.

We have only two examples, and those not certain, of Euripides' work
before that time. The _Cyclops_ is a satyr-play pure and simple, and the
only complete specimen of its class. It is probably earlier than the
_Alcestis_, and is interesting because it shows Euripides writing for
once without any _arriere pensee_, or secondary intention. It is a gay
and grotesque piece, based on Homer's story of Odysseus in the Cyclops'
cave. The farcical and fantastic note is firmly held, so that the climax
of the story, in which the monster's eye is burnt out with a log of
burning wood, is kept unreal and not disgusting. The later Euripides
would probably have made it horrible and swung our sympathies violently
round to the side of the victim.

The _Rhesus_ has come down to us in a very peculiar condition and is
often considered spurious. We know, however, that Euripides wrote a
_Rhesus_, and tradition says that he was "very young" when he wrote it.
My own view--explained in the preface to my translation--would make it
probably a very early pro-satyric play which was produced after the
poet's death and considerably rewritten. It is a young man's play, full
of war and adventure, of spies in wolf-skins and white chargers and
gallant chivalry. That is not much like the Euripides whom we know
elsewhere; but his mark is upon the last scene, in which the soldiers
stand embarrassed and silent while a solitary mother weeps over her dead
son. The poetry of the scene is exquisite; but what is most
characteristic is the sudden flavour of bitterness, the cold wind that
so suddenly takes the heart out of joyous war. Some touch of that bitter
flavour will be found hereafter in every play, however beautiful or
romantic, that comes from the pen of Euripides.

Up to the year 438, when the poet was forty-six, the records, as we have
said, almost fail us. But in that year he produced a set of four plays,
_The Cretan Women_, _Alcmaeon in Psophis_, _Telephus_, and, in place of
a satyr-play, the _Alcestis_. The last is still extant and is very
characteristic of the master's mind. The saga told how Admetus, a king
in Thessaly, was fated to die on a certain day, but, in return for his
piety of old, was allowed to find a substitute to die for him. His old
father and mother refused; his young wife, Alcestis, gladly consented to
die. Amid exquisite songs of mourning she is carried to her grave, when
the wild hero, Heracles, comes to the house seeking hospitality.
Admetus, with primitive courtesy, conceals what has happened and orders
him to be given entertainment. The burial is finished when Heracles,
already revelling and drunken and crowned with flowers, learns the
truth. Sobered at the touch he goes out into the night to wrestle with
Death amid the tombs and crush his ribs for him till he yields up his
prey. One sees the fantastic satyr note. The play is not truly tragic;
it touches its theme tenderly and with romance. But amid all the romance
Euripides cannot keep his hand from unveiling the weak spot in the
sacred legend. Alcestis, no doubt, is beautiful, and it was beautiful of
her to die. But what was it of Admetus to let her die? An ordinary
playwright would elude the awkward question. Admetus would refuse his
wife's sacrifice and she would perform it against his will or without
his knowledge. We should somehow save our hero's character. Not so
Euripides. His Admetus weeps tenderly over his wife, but he thinks it
entirely suitable that she should die for him. The veil is not removed
from his eyes till his old father, Pheres, who has bluntly refused to
die for anybody, comes to bring offerings to Alcestis' funeral. A
quarrel breaks out between the two selfish men, brilliantly written,
subtle and merciless, in which Admetus's weakness is laid bare. The
scene is a great grief to the purely romantic reader, but it just makes
the play profound instead of superficial.

All the plays of 438 are, in different ways, typical of their author.
And we will spend a little time on each. The _Alcmaeon in Psophis_ was
what we should call a romance. Alcmaeon was the son of that Eriphyle who
betrayed her husband to death for the sake of a charmed necklace which
had once belonged to Harmonia, the daughter of Ares. Alcmaeon slew his
mother and became in consequence mad and accursed. Seeking purification
he fled to the land of Psophis, where the King cleansed him and gave him
the hand of his daughter Arsinoe, who duly received the necklace.
However, Alcmaeon's sin was too great for any such cleansing. He
wandered away, all the earth being accursed to him, till he should find
some land that had not been in existence at the time of his sin and was
consequently unpolluted. He discovered it in some alluvial islands, just
then making their appearance at the mouth of the River Achelous. Here he
at last found peace and married the daughter of Achelous, Callirrhoe.
She asks for the necklace and Alcmaeon goes back to get it from Arsinoe.
He professes to need it for his own purification and she willingly gives
it him; then she finds that he really wants it for his new bride, and in
fury has him murdered on his road home. A romantic and varied story with
one fine touch of tragic passion.

The _Telephus_ also deserves special mention. It had apparently the
misfortune to be seen by Aristophanes, then a boy about sixteen. At any
rate the comedian was never able to forget it, and we know it chiefly
from his parodies. It struck out a new style in Attic drama, the style
of adventure and plot-interest, which threw to the winds the traditional
tragic dignities and pomps. The usual convention in tragedy was to
clothe the characters in elaborate priestly dress with ritual masks
carefully graduated according to the rank of the character. Such
trappings came to Tragedy as an inheritance from its old
magico-religious days, and it never quite succeeded in throwing them
off, even in its most vital period. It is very difficult for us to form
a clear notion what the ordinary Greek tragedy looked like in 438, and
how much we should have noticed any great change of dressing in the
_Telephus_. But there was a change which raised a storm of comment.
Telephus was a King of Mysia, not very far from the Troad. The Greeks in
sailing for Troy had missed their way and invaded Telephus' country by
mistake. He had fought them with great effect but had been wounded by
Achilles with his magic spear. The wound would not close, and an oracle
told Telephus "the wounder shall heal." The Greeks were back in Greece
by this time, planning a new invasion of Troy. The king goes, lame and
disguised as a beggar, into the heart of the Greek army and into
Agamemnon's palace. Euripides, since the king had to be a beggar,
dressed him as a beggar, with rags and a wallet. It is hard to see how
he could possibly have done otherwise, but we may surmise that his
beggar's dress was a little more realistic and less merely symbolical
than his audience expected. In any case, though critics were shocked,
the practice established itself. Telephus and Philoctetes were
afterwards regularly allowed to dress in "rags," even in the work of
Sophocles.

There were great scenes owing to the boldness of the ragged and
intrusive stranger. The Greek chieftains proposed to kill him, but
granted him at last the right of making one speech to save his life. He
seems to have spoken beside, or over, the headsman's block. And the case
he had to plead was characteristic of Euripides. The Greeks considered
quite simply that Telephus was their enemy and must be destroyed on
their next expedition. The beggar explained that Telephus had found his
country ravaged and was bound to defend it. Every man among the Greeks
would have done the same; there is nothing to blame Telephus for. At the
end of this scene, apparently, the beggar was discovered. It is Telephus
himself speaking! They fly to their spears. But Telephus has snatched up
the baby prince, Orestes, from his cradle and stands at bay; if one of
his enemies moves the child shall die. Eventually they accept his terms
and make peace with him. A fine melodrama, one would guess, and a move
in the direction of realism--a direction which Euripides only followed
within certain strict limits. But we find two marks of Euripides the
philosopher. The beggar who pleads for reasonable justice towards the
national enemy strikes a note which Euripides himself often had to sound
afterwards. It was not for nothing that Aristophanes in his
_Acharnians_, thirteen years later, used a parody of this scene in order
to plead the dangerous cause of reasonableness towards Sparta. The other
mark is a curious tang of sadness at the close. The Greeks demand that
Telephus, so brave and resourceful, shall be their ally against Troy.
But his wife is a Trojan princess and he refuses. He consents
reluctantly to show the army the road to his wife's fatherland and then
turns away.

The remaining play of the trilogy performed in 438 strikes a chord that
proved more dangerous to Euripides. The _Cretan Women_ told the story of
Aerope, a Cretan princess who secretly loved a squire or young soldier.
Her intrigue is discovered, and her father gives her to a Greek sailor
to throw into the sea. The sailor spares her life and takes her to
Greece. The story as it stands is a common ballad motive and not
calculated to disturb any one. But the disciple of the sophists did not
leave these romances where he found them. He liked to think them out in
terms of real life. The songs in which Aerope poured out her love were
remembered against Euripides after his death. It was all very well to
sympathize in a remote artistic way with these erring damsels; but
Euripides seemed to come too near raising an actual doubt whether the
damsel had done anything so very wrong at all, that respectable people
should want to murder her. Euripides is, as a matter of fact, not loose
but highly austere in his moral tone. But next to religion itself, the
sphere of sexual conduct has always been the great field for irrational
taboos and savage punishments, and the sophists naturally marked it as a
battle-field. The kings of Egypt commonly married their sisters, and did
so on religious grounds: to a Greek such marriage was an unspeakable
sin. There is a problem here, and Euripides raised it sharply in a play,
_Aeolus_, based on the old fairy-tale of the King of the winds who
dwells as a patriarch on his floating island with his twelve sons
married to his twelve daughters. "Canst face mine eyes, fresh from thy
deed of shame?" says the angry father in this play; and his son answers,
"What _is_ shame, when the doer feels no shame?" Euripides also treated
several times legends where a god became the lover of a mortal maiden,
and, as we shall see in the _Ion_, he loved to rouse sympathy for the
maiden and contempt for the god (p. 121). In one case he even treats,
through a mist of strange religious mysticism, the impossible amour of
Pasiphae of Crete with the Cretan Bull-god. It is interesting, however,
to observe that there is in Euripides no trace of sympathy for the one
form of perverted indulgence on which the ancient tone was markedly
different from ours. It is reserved for the bestial Cyclops and Laius
the accursed.

Adventure, brilliance, invention, romance and scenic effect; these
together with delightful lyrics, a wonderful command over the Greek
language, and a somewhat daring admixture of sophistic wisdom which
sometimes took away a spectator's breath, were probably the qualities
which the ordinary public had felt in Euripides' work up to the year
438. They perhaps felt also that these pleasant gifts were apt to be
needlessly marred by a certain unintelligible note of discord. It was a
pity; and, as the man was now forty-six, he ought surely to have learnt
how to smooth it out!

It was not smoothness that was coming.




CHAPTER IV

BEGINNING OF THE WAR: THE PLAYS OF MATURITY, "MEDEA" TO "HERACLES"


The next play of which we have full knowledge must have staggered its
audience. The _Medea_ was promptly put by the official judges at the
bottom of the list of competing plays, and thereafter took its place, we
do not know how soon, as one of the consummate achievements of the Greek
tragic genius. Its stamp is fixed on all the imagination of antiquity.

The plot of the Medea begins where that of the _Daughters of Pelias_ (p.
69) ended. Jason had fled with Medea and her two children to Corinth,
which is ruled by Creon, an old king with a daughter but no son to
succeed him. The famous warrior-prince will just suit Creon as a
son-in-law, if only he will dismiss his discreditable barbarian
mistress. Jason has never been able to tell the truth to Medea yet; who
could? He secretly accepts Creon's terms; he marries the princess; and
Creon descends on Medea with soldiers to remove her instantly from the
territory of Corinth. Medea begs for one day in which to make ready for
exile, for the children's sake. One day will be enough. By desperate
flattery and pleading she gets it. There follows a first scene with
Jason, in which man and woman empty their hearts on one another--at
least they try to; but even yet some fragments of old habit and
conventional courtesy prevent Jason from telling the full truth. Still
it is a wonderful scene, Jason reasonable and cold, ready to recognize
all her claims and provide her with everything she needs except his own
heart's blood; Medea desolate and half mad, asking for nothing but the
one thing he will not give. Love to her is the whole world, to him it is
a stale memory. This scene ends in defiance, but there is another in
which Medea feigns repentance and submission, and sends Jason with the
two children to bear a costly gift to the new bride. It may, she
suggests, induce Creon to spare the children and let her go to exile
alone. The gift is really a robe of burning poison, which has come to
Medea from her divine ancestor, the Sun. The bride dies in agony
together with her father who tries to save her. Jason rushes to save his
two children from the vengeance which is sure to come upon them from the
kinsmen of the murdered bride; but Medea has already slain them with her
own hand and stands laughing at him over their bodies. She too suffers,
but she loves the pain, since it means that he shall have happiness no
more. The Daughter of the Sun sails away on her dragon-chariot and an
ecstasy of hate seems to blind the sky.

The _Medea_ shows a new mastery of tragic technique, especially in the
extraordinary value it gets out of the chorus (p. 240). But as
illustrating the life of Euripides there are one or two special points
in it that claim notice. In the first place it states the cause of a
barbarian woman against a Greek man who has wronged her. Civilized men
have loved and deserted savage women since the world began, and I doubt
if ever the deserted one has found such words of fire as Medea speaks.
The marvel is that in such white-hot passion there is room for satire.
But there is; and even a reader can scarcely withhold a bitter laugh
when Jason explains the advantage he has conferred on Medea by bringing
her to a civilized country. But Medea is not only a barbarian; she is
also a woman, and fights the horrible war that lies, an eternally latent
possibility, between woman and man. Some of the most profound and
wounding things said both by Medea and by Jason might almost be labelled
in a book of extracts "Any wife to any husband," or "Any husband to any
wife." And Medea is also a witch; she is also at heart a maniac. It is
the madness produced by love rejected and justice denied, by the sense
of helpless, intolerable wrong. A lesser poet might easily have made
Medea a sympathetic character, and have pretended that long oppression
makes angels of the oppressed. In the great chorus which hymns the rise
of Woman to be a power in the world it would have been easy to make the
Woman's day a day of peace and blessing. But Euripides, tragic to the
heart and no dealer in pleasant make-believe, saw things otherwise; when
these oppressed women strike back, he seems to say, when these despised
and enslaved barbarians can endure no longer, it will not be justice
that comes but the revenge of madmen.

This kind of theme was not in itself likely to please an audience; but
what always galls the average theatre-goer most in a new work of genius
is not the subject but the treatment. Euripides' treatment of his
subject was calculated to irritate the plain man in two ways. First it
was enigmatic. He did not label half his characters bad and half good;
he let both sides state their case and seemed to enjoy leaving the
hearer bewildered. And further, he made a point of studying closely and
sympathetically many regions of thought and character which the plain
man preferred not to think of at all. When Jason had to defend an
obviously shabby case, no gentleman cared to hear him; but Euripides
insisted on his speaking. He enjoyed tracking out the lines of thought
and feeling which really actuate men, even fine men like Jason, in
Jason's position. When Medea was revealed as obviously a wicked woman
the plain man thought that such women should simply be thrashed, not
listened to. But Euripides loved to trace all her complicated sense of
injustice to its origins, and was determined to understand and to
explain rather than to condemn. The plain man had a kind of
justification for saying that Euripides actually seemed to like these
traitors and wicked women; for such thorough understanding as this
involves always a good deal of sympathy.

This charge could with even more reason be brought against another
masterpiece of drama, which followed three years after the Medea. The
_Hippolytus_ (428 B.C.) did indeed win the first prize from the official
judges, besides establishing itself in the admiration of after ages and
inspiring Seneca and Racine to their finest work. But it profoundly
shocked public opinion at the same time. The plot is a variant of a very
old theme found in ancient Egypt and in the Pentateuch. Theseus, not
here the ideal democrat on the Athenian throne, but the stormy and
adventurous hero of the poets, had early in life conquered the Amazons
and ravished their virgin Queen. She died, leaving a son like herself,
Hippolytus. Theseus some twenty years after married Phaedra, the young
daughter of Minos, king of Crete, and she by the evil will of Aphrodite
fell in love with Hippolytus. She told no one her love, and was trying
to starve herself to death, when her old Nurse contrived to worm the
secret from her and treacherously, under an oath of secrecy, told it to
Hippolytus. Phaedra, furious with the Nurse and with Hippolytus, in a
blind rage of self-defence, writes a false accusation against Hippolytus
and hangs herself. Hippolytus, charged by Theseus with the crime, will
not break his oath and goes out to exile under his father's curse. The
gods, in fulfilment of the curse, send death to him, but before he
actually dies reveal his innocence. The story which might so easily be
made ugly or sensual is treated by Euripides with a delicate and austere
purity. In construction, too, and general beauty of workmanship, though
not in greatness of idea or depth of passion, the _Hippolytus_ is
perhaps the finest of all his plays, and has still a great appeal on the
stage. But the philistine was vaguely hurt and angered by the treatment,
so tender and yet so inexorable, accorded to a guilty love, and
doubtless the more conventional Athenian ladies shocked themselves over
the bare idea of such a heroine being mentioned. It gives us some
measure of the stupidity of public criticism at the time, that we find
special attacks made upon one phrase of Hippolytus. In his first rage
with the Nurse he vows he will tell Theseus of her proposal. She reminds
him of his oath, and he cries:

"'Twas but my tongue, 'twas not my heart that swore."

It is a passing flash of indignation at the trap in which he has been
caught. When the time comes he keeps his oath at the cost of his life.
Yet the line is repeatedly cited as showing the dreadful doctrines of
Euripides and the sophists; doctrines that would justify any perjury!

The _Hippolytus_, as we have it, is a rewritten play. In his first
version Euripides had a scene in which Phaedra actually declared her
love. This more obvious treatment was preferred by Seneca and Racine;
but Euripides in his second thoughts reached a far more austere and
beautiful effect. His Phaedra goes to her death without having spoken
one word to Hippolytus: she has heard him but has not answered. The
_Hippolytus_ has more serene beauty than any of Euripides' plays since
the _Alcestis_, and is specially remarkable as the first great drama on
the subject of tragic or unhappy love, a theme which has been so
extraordinarily fruitful on the modern stage. To contemporaries it was
also interesting as one of the earliest treatments of a purely local
Attic story, which had not quite found its way into the great sagas of
epic tradition.

The note of the _Medea_ was struck again some two years later (426?) in
a play almost equally powerful and more horrible, the _Hecuba_. The
heroine is the famous Queen of Troy, a barbarian woman like Medea,
majestic and beautiful at the beginning of the action and afterwards
transformed by intolerable wrongs into a kind of devil. Her "evils" are
partly the ordinary evils that come to the conquered in war, but they
are made worse by the callousness of her Greek conquerors. The play
strikes many notes of special bitterness. For instance, the one champion
whom Hecuba finds among her conquerors is the general, Agamemnon. He
pleads her cause in the camp, because, God help him! he has taken her
daughter Cassandra, the mad prophetess vowed to eternal virginity, to be
his concubine, and consequently feels good-natured. There is another
note, remarkable in an Athenian. The mob of the Greek army, in a frenzy
of superstition, clamour to have a Trojan princess sacrificed at
Achilles' tomb. In the debate on this subject we are told that several
princes spoke; among them the two sons of Theseus, the legendary kings
of Athens. They would surely, as enlightened Athenians, prevent such
atrocities? On the contrary, all we hear is that they spoke against one
another, but both were for the murder! At the end of the _Hecuba_, as at
the end of the _Medea_, we are wrought to a pitch of excitement at which
incredible legends begin to seem possible. History related that the
Queen of Troy, maddened by her wrongs, had been transformed into a kind
of Hell-hound with fiery eyes, whom sailors saw at night prowling round
the hill where she was stoned. In her bloody revenge on the only enemy
she can trap into her power, she seems already to have become this sort
of being in her heart, and when her blind and dying victim prophesies
the coming transformation, it seems natural. One only feels that perhaps
the old miraculous stories are true after all. The one light that shines
through the dark fury of the _Hecuba_ is the lovely and gentle courage,
almost the joy, with which the virgin martyr, Polyxena, goes to her
death.

I have taken the _Hecuba_ slightly before its due date, because of its
return with increased bitterness to the tone and subject of the _Medea_.
We will now go back. There had been in the interim a change in the
poet's mind, or, at the least, a strong clash of conflicting emotions.
The _Medea_ was produced in 431, the first year of the Peloponnesian
War. This war, between the Athenian empire, representing the democratic
and progressive forces of Greece, and the Peloponnesian confederacy with
Sparta at its head, lasted with one interruption for twenty-seven years
and ended in the capture of Athens and the destruction of her power.
When war was first declared it represented the policy of Pericles, the
great statesman of the Enlightenment, the friend of Anaxagoras, and of
those whom Euripides honoured most. It seemed at first like a final
struggle between the forces of progress and those of resolute darkness.
Pericles in a famous speech, which is recorded for us by Thucydides, had
explained to his adherents the great causes for which Athens stood; had
proclaimed her as the Princess of Cities for whom it was a privilege to
die; and urged them, using a word more vivid in Greek than it is in
English, to stand about her like a band of Lovers round an Immortal
Mistress. Euripides was as a matter of fact still going through his
military service and must have seen much hard fighting in these first
years of the war.

He responded to Pericles' call by a burst of patriotic plays. Even in
the _Medea_ there is one chorus, a little out of place perhaps, but
famous in after days, describing the glories of Athens. They are not at
all the conventional glories attributed by all patriots to their
respective countries. "It is an old and happy land which no conqueror
has ever subdued; its children walk delicately through air that shines
with sunlight; and Wisdom is the very bread that they eat." (The word is
"sophia," embracing Wisdom, Knowledge, Art, Culture; there is no one
word for it in English, and the names for the various parts of it have
lost their poetry.) "A river," he continues, "flows through the land;
and legend tells that Cypris, the Goddess of Love, has sailed upon it
and dipped her hand in the water; and now when the river-wind at evening
blows it comes laden with a spirit of longing; but it is not ordinary
love, it is a Passion and a great Desire for all kinds of godlike
endeavour, a Love that sits with Wisdom upon her throne." . . . "A pity
the man should be so priggish." We may imagine the comment of the
average Athenian paterfamilias.

Towards the beginning of the war we may safely date the _Children of
Heracles_, a mutilated but beautiful piece, which rings with this
particular spirit of patriotism (cf. p. 41 above). Heracles is dead; his
children and mother are persecuted and threatened with death by his
enemy, Eurystheus, king of Argos. Under the guidance of their father's
old comrade, Iolaus, they have fled from Argos, and tried in vain to
find protectors in every part of Greece. No city dares protect them
against the power of Argos. At the opening of the play we find the
children and Iolaus clinging as suppliants to an altar in Athens. The
herald of Argos breaks in upon them, flings down the old man and
prepares to drag the children off. "What hope can Iolaus possibly
cherish?" Iolaus trusts in two things, in Zeus who will protect the
innocent, and in Athens which is a free city and not afraid. The king of
Athens, a son of Theseus, appears and rebukes the herald. The herald's
argument is clear: "These children are Argive subjects and are no
business of yours; further, they are utterly helpless and will be no
possible good to you as allies. And if you do not give them up
peacefully, Argos declares instant war." The king "wishes for peace with
all men; but he will not offend God, nor betray the innocent; also he
rules a free city and will take no orders from any outside power. As to
the fate of these children not being his business, it is always the
business of Athens to save the oppressed." One remembers the old claim,
emphatically approved by the historian of the Persian Wars, that Athens
was the saviour of Hellas. One remembers also the ultimatum of the
Peloponnesian confederacy which Pericles rejected on the eve of the
present war; and the repeated complaints of the Corinthians that Athens
"will neither rest herself nor let others rest." These supply the clue
to a large part of the patriotism of the _Children of Heracles_. There
is another element also, and perhaps one that will better stand the test
of impartial criticism, in Euripides' ideal of Athens. She will be true
to Hellas and all that Hellas stands for: for law, for the gods of
mercy, for the belief in right rather than force. Also, as the king of
Athens is careful to observe, for democracy and constitutional
government. He is no despot ruling barbarians.

The same motives recur with greater fulness and thoughtfulness in
another play of the early war time--the exact year is not certain--the
_Suppliant Women_. Scholars reading the play now, in cool blood, with
the issues at stake forgotten, are inclined to smile at a sort of
pedantry in the poet's enthusiasm. It reminds one of the punctiliousness
with which Shelley sometimes gives one the sincere milk of the word
according to Godwin. This play opens, like the last, with a scene of
supplication. A band of women--Argive mothers they are this time, whose
sons have been slain in war against Thebes--have come to Athens as
suppliants. They are led by Adrastus, the great and conquered lord of
Argos, and finding Aethra, the king's mother, at her prayers beside the
altar, have surrounded her with a chain of suppliant branches which she
dares not break. They only ask that Theseus, her son, shall get back for
them the bodies of their dead sons, whom the Thebans, contrary to all
Hellenic law, have flung out unburied for dogs to tear. Theseus at first
refuses, on grounds of policy, and the broken-hearted women take up
their branches and begin to go, when Aethra, who has been weeping
silently, breaks out: "Is this kind of wrong to be allowed to exist?"

  "Thou shalt not suffer it, thou being my child!
  Thou hast seen men scorn thy City, call her wild
  Of counsel, mad; thou hast seen the fire of morn
  Flash from her eyes in answer to their scorn.
  Come toil on toil; 'tis this that makes her grand;
  Peril on peril! And common states, that stand
  In caution, twilight cities, dimly wise--
  Ye know them, for no light is in their eyes.
  Go forth, my son, and help. My fears are fled.
  Women in sorrow call thee, and men dead."
                                  (_Suppl._ 320 ff.)

Theseus accepts his mother's charge. It has been his old habit to strike
wherever he saw oppression without counting the risk; and it shall never
be said of him that an ancient Law of God was set at naught when he and
Athens had power to enforce it. It is Athens as the "saviour of Hellas"
that we have here. It is Athens the champion of Hellenism and true
piety, but it is also the Athens of free thought and the Enlightenment.
For later on, when the dead bodies are recovered from the battle-field,
they are a ghastly sight. The old unreflecting Greece would in the first
place have thought them a pollution, a thing which only slaves must be
sent to handle. In the second place, since the mothers were making
lamentation, the bodies must be brought to their eyes, so as to improve
the lamentation. But Theseus feels differently on both points. Why
should the mothers' grief be made more bitter? Let the bodies be burned
in peace and the decent ashes given to the mothers. And as to the
defilement, the king himself, we hear, has taken up the disfigured
bodies in his arms and washed their wounds and "shown them love." No
slave touched them. "How dreadful! Was he not ashamed?" asks a
bystander--the Greek word means something between "ashamed" and
"disgusted." "No," is the answer: "Why should men be repelled by one
another's sufferings?" (768) It is a far-reaching answer, with great
consequences. It is the antique counterpart of St. Francis kissing the
leper's sores. The man of the herd is revolted by the sight of great
misery and inclines to despise and even hate the sufferer; the man of
the enlightenment sees deeper, and the feeling of revulsion passes away
in the wish to help.

We spoke of a slight pedantry in the enthusiasms of the _Suppliant
Women_. It is illustrated even by points like this, and by a tendency in
Theseus to lecture on good manners and the Athenian constitution. The
rude Theban herald enters asking, "Who is monarch of this land?" using
the word "tyrannos" for "monarch." Theseus corrects him at once. "There
is no 'tyrannos' here. This is a free city; and when I say a free city,
I mean one in which the whole people by turns takes part in the
sovereignty, and the rich have no privilege as against the poor"
(399-408). These dissertations on democratic government could stir men's
passions and force their way into scenes of high poetry legitimately
enough at a time when men were fighting and dying for their democracy.
To those who are not "Lovers" of the beautiful city they will seem cold
and irrelevant.

Other plays of this period show marks of the same great wave of love for
Athens. The lost plays _Aigeus_, _Theseus_, _Erechtheus_, all on Attic
subjects, can be dated in the first years of the war; the _Hippolytus_
is built on an old legend of the Acropolis and a poetic love of Athens
shines through the story. The _Andromache_ especially is a curious
document, the meaning of which is discussed later on (p. 112). But the
two plays we have described at length, _The Children of Heracles_ and
the _Suppliant Women_, give the best idea of what patriotism meant to
our poet. With most men patriotism is a matter of association and
custom. They stick to their country because it is theirs; to their own
habits and prejudices and even neighbours for the same reason. But with
Euripides his ideals came before his actual surroundings. He loved
Athens because Athens meant certain things, and if the real Athens
should cease to mean those things he would cast her out of his heart. At
least he would try to do so; in point of fact that is always a very
difficult thing to do. But if ever Athens should be false, it was pretty
certain that Euripides would find hatred mingling with his betrayed
love. There were signs of this even in the _Medea_ and the _Hecuba_.

But before dealing with that subject we must dwell for a few moments
upon another fine play, which marks in more than one sense the end of a
period. The _Heracles_, written about the year 423, shows Theseus in the
same role of Athenian hero. In the _Suppliant Women_ he had helped
Adrastus and the Argive mothers and shown them the path of true
Hellenism; in the _Heracles_ he comes to the rescue of Heracles in his
fall. That hero has been mad and slain his own children; he has
recovered and awakes to find himself bound to a pillar, with dead bodies
that he cannot recognize round about him. He rages to be set free. He
compels those who know to tell him the whole truth. Frantic with shame
and horror, he wishes to curse God and die, when he sees Theseus
approaching. Theseus has been his friend in many hard days and Heracles
dares not face him nor speak to him. The touch of one so blood-guilty,
the sound of his voice, the sight of his face, would bring pollution. He
shrouds himself in his mantle and silently waves Theseus away. In a
moment his friend's arms are round him, and the shrouding mantle is
drawn off. There is no such thing as pollution; no deed of man can stain
the immortal sunlight, and a friend's love does not fear the infection
of blood. Heracles is touched: he thanks Theseus and is now ready to
die. God has tempted him too far, and he will defy God. Theseus reminds
him of what he is: the helper of man, the powerful friend of the
oppressed; the Heracles who dared all and endured all; and now, like a
common, weak-hearted man, he speaks of suicide! "Hellas will not suffer
you to die in your blindness!" (1254). The great adventurer is softened
and won over by the "wisdom" of Theseus, and goes to Athens to fulfil,
in spite of suffering, whatever further tasks life may have in store for
him.

This condemnation of suicide was unusual in antiquity; and the
_Heracles_ also contains one remarkable denial of the current myths, the
more remarkable because, as Dr. Verrall has pointed out, it seems almost
to upset the plot of the play. Heracles' madness is sent upon him by the
malignity of Hera; we see her supernatural emissary entering the room
where Heracles lies. And the hero himself speaks of his supernatural
adventures. Yet he also utters the lines:

    Say not there be adulterers in Heaven
    Nor prisoner gods and gaoler. Long ago
    My heart has known it false and will not alter.
    God, if he be God, lacketh naught. All these
   Are dead unhappy tales of minstrelsy.
(_Her._ 1341; cf. _Iph. Taur._ 380-392; _Bellerophon_ fr. 292.)

But in another way, too, the _Heracles_ marks an epoch in the poet's
life. It seems to have been written in or about the year 423, and it was
in 424 that Euripides had reached the age of sixty and was set free from
military service. He had had forty years of it, steady work for the most
part; fighting against Boeotians, Spartans, Corinthians, against
Thracian barbarians, in all probability also against other people
further overseas. We have no record of the campaigns in which Euripides
served; but we have by chance an inscription of the year 458, when he
was twenty-six, giving the names of the members of one particular tribe,
the Sons of Erechtheus, who fell in war in that one year. They had
fallen "in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, in Aegina and at
Megara." There were ten such tribes in Athens. And this record gives
some notion of the extraordinary energy and ubiquity of the Athenian
armies.

It is strange to reflect on the gulf that lies between the life of an
ancient poet and his modern descendants. Our poets and men of letters
mostly live either by writing or by investments eked out by writing.
They are professional writers and readers and, as a rule, nothing else.
It is comparatively rare for any one of them to face daily dangers, to
stand against men who mean to kill him and beside men for whom he is
ready to die, to be kept a couple of days fasting, or even to work in
the sweat of his body for the food he eats. If such things happen by
accident to one of us we cherish them as priceless "copy," or we even go
out of our way to compass the experience artificially.

But an ancient poet was living hard, working, thinking, fighting,
suffering, through most of the years that we are writing about life. He
took part in the political assembly, in the Council, in the jury-courts;
he worked at his own farm or business; and every year he was liable to
be sent on long military expeditions abroad or to be summoned at a day's
notice to defend the frontier at home. It is out of a life like this, a
life of crowded reality and work, that Aeschylus and Sophocles and
Euripides found leisure to write their tragedies; one writing 90, one
127, and the third 92! Euripides was considered in antiquity a bookish
poet. He had a library--in numbers probably not one book for every
hundred that Tennyson or George Meredith had: he was a philosopher, he
read to himself. But on what a background of personal experience his
philosophy was builded! It is probably this immersion in the hard
realities of life that gives ancient Greek literature some of its
special characteristics. Its firm hold on sanity and common sense, for
instance; its avoidance of sentimentality and paradox and various
seductive kinds of folly; perhaps also its steady devotion to ideal
forms and high conventions, and its aversion from anything that we
should call "realism." A man everlastingly wrapped round in good books
and safe living cries out for something harsh and real--for blood and
swear-words and crude jagged sentences. A man who escapes with eagerness
from a life of war and dirt and brutality and hardship to dwell just a
short time among the Muses, naturally likes the Muses to be their very
selves and not remind him of the mud he has just washed off. Euripides
has two long descriptions of a battle, one in the _Children of Heracles_
and one in the _Suppliant Women_; both are rhetorical Messenger's
Speeches, conventionally well-written and without one touch that
suggests personal experience. It is curious to compare these, the
writings of the poet who had fought in scores of hand-to-hand battles,
with the far more vivid rhapsodies of modern writers who have never so
much as seen a man pointing a gun at them. Aeschylus indeed has written
one splendid battle piece in the _Persians_. But even there there is no
realism; it is the spirit of the war of liberation that thrills in us as
we read, it is not the particular incidents of the battle.

Forty years of military service finished: as the men of sixty stepped
out of the ranks they must have had a feeling of mixed relief and
misgiving. They are now officially "Gerontes," Old Men: they are off
hard work, and to be at the end of hard work is perilously near being
at the end of life. There is in the _Heracles_ a wistful chorus, put in
the mouths of certain Theban elders (637 ff.), "Youth is what I love for
ever; Old Age is a burden upon the head, a dimness of light in the eyes,
heavier than the crags of Etna. Fame and the crown of the East and
chambers piled with gold, what are they all compared with Youth?" A
second life is what one longs for. To have it all again and live it
fully; if a man has any _arete_ in him, any real life left in his heart,
that is what ought to be possible. . . . For Euripides himself it seems
there is still a life to be lived. The words are important and almost
untranslatable. "I will never cease mingling together the Graces and the
Muses"--such words are nearly nonsense, like most literal translations.
The "Graces" or Charities are the spirits of fulfilled desire, the Muses
are all the spirits of "Music" or of "Wisdom"--of History and
Mathematics, by the way, just as much as Singing and Poetry. "I will not
rest. I will make the spirits of Fulfilled Desire one with the spirits
of Music, a marriage of blessedness. I care not to live if the Muses
leave me; their garlands shall be about me for ever. Even yet the
age-worn minstrel can turn Memory into song."

Memory, according to Greek legend, was the mother of the Muses; and the
"memory" of which Euripides is thinking is that of the race, the saga of
history and tradition, more than his own. The Muses taught him long ago
their mystic dance, and he will be theirs for ever; he will never from
weariness or faint heart ask them to rest. He was thinking doubtless of
the lines of the old poet Alcman to his dancing maidens, lines almost
the most beautiful ever sung by Greek lips: "No more, ye maidens
honey-throated, voices of longing; my limbs will bear me no more. Would
God I were a ceryl-bird, over the flower of the wave with the halcyons
flying, and never a care in his heart, the sea-blue bird of the spring!"
Euripides asks for no rest: cares and all, he accepts the service of the
Muses and prays that he may bear their harness to the end. It was a bold
prayer, and the Muses in granting it granted it at a heavy price.




CHAPTER V

LIFE CONTINUED: THE EMBITTERING OF THE WAR: ALCIBIADES AND THE DEMAGOGUES:
    THE "ION": THE "TROJAN WOMEN"


Our Greek historians, with Thucydides at their head, are practically
unanimous in associating with the Peloponnesian War a progressive
degradation and embitterment in Greek public life, and a reaction
against the old dreams and ideals. We can measure the change by many
slight but significant utterances.

When Herodotus records his opinion that in the Persian Wars the
Athenians had been "the Saviours of Hellas" he has to preface the remark
by a curious apology (VII. 139): "Here I am compelled by necessity to
express an opinion which will be offensive to most of mankind, but I
cannot refrain from putting it in the way which I believe to be true."
He was writing at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and by that
time Athens was not the Saviour but "the Tyrant City." Her "allies" had
from time to time refused to serve or tried to secede from the alliance;
and one by one she had reduced them to compulsory subjection. The
"League" had become confessedly an "Empire."

Even Pericles, the great statesman of the good time, who had sought and
achieved so many fine ends, had failed to build up a free League based
on a representative elected body. The possibility of such a plan had
hardly yet been conceived in the world, though a rudimentary system of
international councils did in some places exist between neighbouring
villages; and Pericles must not be personally blamed for an error,
however fatal, which no one living knew how to avoid. But he realized at
last in 430 B.C. what Athens had come to (_Thuc._ II. 63): "Do not
imagine you are fighting about a simple issue, the subjection or
independence of certain cities. You have an Empire to lose, and a danger
to face from those who hate you for your empire. To resign it now would
be impossible--if at this crisis some timid and inactive spirits are
hankering after Righteousness even at that price! For by this time your
empire has become a Despotism (Tyrannis), a thing which it is
considered unjust to acquire, but which can never be safely
surrendered."

The same thought is emphasized more brutally by Cleon (_Thuc._ III. 37):

"I have remarked again and again that a democracy cannot govern an
empire, and never more clearly than now. . . . You do not realize that
when you make a concession to the allies out of pity, or are led away by
their specious pleading, you commit a weakness dangerous to yourselves
without receiving any gratitude from them. Remember that your empire is
a Despotism exercised over unwilling men who are always in conspiracy
against you." "Do not be misled," he adds a little later, "by the three
most deadly enemies of empire, pity and charm of words and the
generosity of strength" (_Thuc._ III. 40).

So much for the ideals of chivalry and freedom and "Sophia": for I think
the second of Cleon's "enemies" refers especially to the eloquent wisdom
of the philosophers. And as for democracy we do not hear now that "the
very name of it is beautiful": we hear that it is no principle on which
to govern an empire. And later on we shall hear Alcibiades, an Athenian
of democratic antecedents, saying at Sparta: "Of course all sensible men
know what democracy is, and I better than most, from personal
experience; but there is nothing new to be said about acknowledged
insanity" (_Thuc._ VI. 89).

The ideals failed, and, if we are to believe our contemporary authors,
the men failed too. Pericles, with all his errors, was a man of noble
mind; he was pure in motive, lofty, a born ruler; he led his people
towards "beauty and wisdom," and he wished it to be written on his grave
that no Athenian had put on mourning through his act. Cleon, they all
tell us, was a bellowing demagogue; violent, not over honest,
unscrupulous, blundering; only resolute to fight for the demos of Athens
till he dropped and to keep the poor from starving at whatever cost of
blackmailing the rich and flaying the allied cities. And when he--by
good luck, as Thucydides considers--was killed in battle, he was
succeeded by Hyperbolus, a caricature of himself--as a pun of the comic
poets' puts it, a "Cleon in hyperbole." This picture has been subjected
to just criticism in many details, but it represents on the whole the
united voice of our ancient witnesses.

One character only shines out in this period with a lurid light.
Alcibiades, so far as one can understand him at all from our fragmentary
and anecdotal records, must have been something like a Lord Byron on a
grand scale, turned soldier and statesman instead of poet. His
disastrous end and his betrayal of all political parties have probably
affected his reputation unfairly. Violent and unprincipled as he
certainly was, the peculiar dissolute caddishness implied in the
anecdotes is probably a misrepresentation of the kind that arises so
easily against a man who has no friends. It needs an effort to imagine
what he looked like before he was found out. Of noble birth and a nephew
of Pericles; famous for his good looks and his distinguished, if
insolent, manners; a brilliant soldier, an ambitious and far-scheming
politician; a pupil of the philosophers and an especially intimate
friend of Socrates, capable both of rising to great ideas and of
expounding them to the multitude; he was hailed by a large party as the
destined saviour of Athens, and seems for a time at least to have made
the same impression upon Euripides. Even in the _Suppliant Women_,
peace-play as it is, Euripides congratulates Athens on possessing in
Theseus "a general good and young," and critics have connected the
phrase with the election of Alcibiades, at a very early age, to be
General in the year 420. More significant perhaps is the curious case of
the _Andromache_. The ancient argument tells us definitely that it was
not produced in Athens. And we find from another source that it was
produced by one Democrates or Timocrates. Now Euripides had a friend
called Timocrates, who was an Argive; so it looks as if the play had
been produced in Argos. This would be astonishing but by no means
inexplicable. It was an old Athenian policy to check Sparta by
organizing a philo-Athenian league in the Peloponnese itself (_Ar.
Knights_, 465 ff.). The nucleus was to consist in three states, Argos,
Elis and Mantinea, which had been visited by Themistocles just after the
Persian wars and had set up democracies on the Athenian model. It was
Alcibiades who eventually succeeded in organizing this league in 420,
and it seems likely that the _Andromache_ was sent to Argos for
production in much the same spirit in which Pindar used to send his
Chorus of Dancers with a new song to compliment some foreign king. The
play seems to contain a reference to the Peloponnesian War (734), it
indulges in curiously direct denunciations of the Spartans (445 ff., 595
ff.), and the Spartan Menelaus is the villain of the piece--a more
stagey villain than Euripides in his better moments would have
permitted. We have also one doubtful external record of our poet's
temporary faith in Alcibiades. In the year 420 there fell an observance
of the Olympian Festival, the greatest of all the Pan-Hellenic Games,
which carried with it a religious truce. Alcibiades succeeded in getting
Sparta convicted of a violation of this truce, and consequently excluded
from the Festival, which was a marked blow at her prestige. Then,
entering himself as a competitor, he won with his own horses a whole
series of prizes, including the first, in the four-horse chariot
competition. And Plutarch, in his _Life of Alcibiades_, refers to a
Victory Ode which was written for him on this occasion, "as report goes,
by the poet Euripides" (ch. 11). This revival of the Pindaric
_Epinikion_ for a personal victory would fit in with the known character
of Alcibiades; and it would be a sharp example of the irony of history
if Euripides consented to write the Ode.

Euripides' delusion was natural and it was short-lived. The _Suppliant
Women_ points towards peace, and the true policy of Alcibiades was to
make peace impossible. And even apart from that the ideals of the two
men were antipathetic. The matter is summed up in the _Frogs_ of
Aristophanes, produced in 405, when the only question remaining about
Alcibiades was whether he was more dangerous to the city as an honoured
leader or as an enemy and exile. The two great poets of the Dead are
asked for their advice on this particular subject and their answers are
clear. Aeschylus says: "Submit to the lion's whelp;" Euripides rejects
him with three scathing lines (_Frogs_, 1427 ff., cf. 1446 ff.). Long
before the date of the _Frogs_ Alcibiades had probably grown to be in
the mind of Euripides the very type and symbol of the evil times.

All Greece--we have the emphatic and disinterested testimony of
Thucydides for the statement--was gradually corrupted and embittered by
the long war. Probably all war, as it accustoms people more and more to
desperate needs and desperate expedients for meeting them, and sets more
and more aside the common generosities and humanities of life, tends to
some degradation of character. But this particular war was specially
harmful. For one thing it was a struggle not simply between two foreign
powers, but between two principles, oligarchy and democracy. In almost
all the cities of the Athenian alliance there were large numbers of
malcontent rich, who were only too ready, if chance offered, to
overthrow the constitution, massacre the mob, and revolt to Sparta. In a
good many of the cities on the other side there were masses of
discontented poor who had been touched by the breath of democratic
doctrines, and were anxious for a chance to cut the throats of the
ruling Few. It was like the state of things produced in many cities of
Europe by the French Revolution. A secret civil strife lay in the
background behind the open war; and the open war itself was a long
protracted struggle for life or death. Probably the most high-minded man
when engaged in a death-grapple fights in much the same way as the most
low-minded. And there can be no doubt that as the toils of war closed
tighter round Athens, and she began to feel herself fighting, gasp by
gasp, for both her empire and her life, the ideals of the Saviour of
Hellas fell away from her. She fought with every weapon that came.

Such times called forth naturally the men that suited them. The assembly
cared less to listen to decent and thoughtful people, not to speak of
philosophers. It was feeling bitter and fierce and frightened and it
liked speakers who were feeling the same. The same fear that made it
cruel made it also superstitious. On one occasion the whole city went
mad with alarm because of a prank played on some ancient figures of
Hermes. On another a great army was lost because it and its general were
afraid to move during an eclipse of the moon. So soon had Anaxagoras
been forgotten.

Is this the result, one is inclined to ask, of the great ideals of
democracy and enlightenment? Of course the old Tory type of Greek
historian, like Mitford, revelled in an affirmative answer. But a more
reflective view of history suggests a different explanation. We must
distinguish carefully between the two notions, Enlightenment and
Democracy. They happen to have gone together in two or three of the
greatest periods of human progress and we are apt to regard them as
somehow necessarily allied. But they are not. Doubtless Democracy is
itself an exalted conception and belongs naturally to the ideas of the
Enlightenment, just as does the belief in Reason, in the free pursuit of
knowledge, in justice to the weak, the wish to be right rather than to
be victorious, or the hatred of violence and superstition as such. But
the trouble is that, in a backward and untrained people, the victory of
democracy may result in the defeat of the other exalted ideas. The
Athenian democracy as conceived by Pericles, Euripides or Protagoras was
a free people, highly civilized and pursuing "wisdom," free from
superstition and oppression themselves and helping always to emancipate
others. But the actual rustics and workmen who voted for Pericles had
been only touched on the surface by the "wisdom" of the sophists. They
liked him because he made them great and admired and proud of being
Athenians. But one must suspect that, when they were back at their farms
and the spell of Pericles' "wisdom" was removed, they practised again
the silliest and cruellest old agricultural magic, were terrified by the
old superstitions, beat their slaves and wives and hated the "strangers"
a few miles off, just as their grandfathers had done in the old times.
What seems to have happened at the end of the war-time is that, owing
largely to the democratic enthusiasm of the sophistic movement in
Athens, the common people is strongly in power; owing to the same
movement its old taboos and rules of conduct are a little shaken and
less able to stand against strong temptation; but meantime the true
moral lessons of the enlightenment, the hardest of all lessons for man
to learn, have never worked into their bones. Just as the French
Revolution called into power the brutal and superstitious peasant who
was the product of the Old Regime and could never rise to the ideas of
the Revolution, so the Athenian enlightenment had put into power the old
unregenerate mass of sentiment that had not been permeated by the
enlightenment. Cleon was no friend of sophists, but their avowed enemy.
And when he told the Assembly in its difficulties simply to double the
tribute of the allies and sack their towns if they did not pay; when he
urged the killing in cold blood of all the Mitylenean prisoners, he was
preaching doctrines that would probably have seemed natural enough in
the old days, before any sophists had troubled men's minds with talk
about duties towards dirty foreigners. And the people who followed his
lead were the same sort of people who would naturally be terrified about
the mutilation of a taboo image or an eclipse of the divine moon. What
they had, perhaps, acquired from the sophistic movement was a touch of
effrontery. Boeotians or Acarnanians might commit crimes, when they
needed to, by instinct, without stating their reasons: in Athens you had
at least to discuss the principle of the proposed crime and accept it
for what it was worth. A cynic or a hypocrite trained in a sophistic
school might offer occasional help with the theory.

Perhaps the earliest touch of Euripides' bitterness against his country
comes, as we have seen, in the _Hecuba_ (p. 89). But the period we have
just reached, soon after the _Heracles_, is marked by one of the most
ironic and enigmatical plays he ever wrote. The _Ion_ is interesting in
every line and contains one scene which is sometimes considered the most
poignant in all Greek tragedy, yet it leaves every reader unsatisfied.
Is it a pious offering to Apollo, the ancestor of the Ionian race? If
so, why is Apollo the villain of the piece? Is it a glorification of
ancient Athens, her legends and her shrines? If so, why are the shrines
polluted by lustful gods, the legends made specially barbaric, and the
beautiful earth-born Princess shown as a seduced woman and a would-be
murderess? Nay, further, why does the hero of the play explain in a
careful speech that he would sooner live a friendless slave in the
temple at Delphi than a free man and a prince in such a place as
Athens--a city "full of terror," where men "who are good and might show
wisdom are silent and never come forward," while the men in power watch
enviously round to destroy any possible rival? (598 ff. _Cf._ Euripides'
words in _Frogs_, 1446 ff.) In Delphi he has peace, and is not jostled
off the pavement by the scum of the earth (635)--a complaint which is
often made in Greek literature about democratic Athens.

I think the best way to understand the _Ion_ is to suppose that
Euripides, in his usual manner, is just taking an old canonical legend,
seeing the human drama and romance in it, and working it together in his
own clear ironic mind till at last he throws out his play, saying:
"There are your gods and your holy legends; see how you like them!" The
irony is lurking at every corner, though of course the drama and romance
come first.

The _Ion_ is, of all the extant plays, the most definitely blasphemous
against the traditional gods. Greek legend was full of stories of heroes
born of the love of a god and a mortal woman. Such stories could be
turned into high religious mysteries, as by Aeschylus in his _Suppliant
Women_; into tender and reverent legends, as by Pindar in one or two
odes. Euripides uses no such idealization. In play after play, _Auge_,
_Melanippe_, _Danae_, _Alope_, he seems to have scarified such gods, as
he does now in the _Ion_. Legend told that Ion, the hero-ancestor of the
Ionians, was the son of the Athenian princess Creusa. Creusa was married
to one Xuthus, an Aeolian soldier, but the real father of Ion was the
god Apollo. Euripides treats the story as if Apollo were just a lawless
ravisher, utterly selfish and ready to lie when pressed, though
good-natured in his way when he lost nothing by it--a sort of
Alcibiades, in fact. Xuthus is a butt; a foreigner with abrupt and
violent manners, lied to by Apollo, befooled by his wife, disobeyed by
her maids, and eventually made happy by the belief that her illegitimate
son is really his own. Creusa herself, though drawn with extraordinary
sympathy and beauty, is at heart a savage.

Creusa, when she bore her child, laid him, in her terror, in the same
cavern where Apollo had ravished her: surely the god would save his own
son. She came again and the child was gone. As a matter of fact the god
had carried him in his cradle to Delphi, where he was discovered by the
priestess and reared as a foundling in the temple courts. Creusa was
then married to Xuthus, who knew nothing of her adventure. Some
seventeen years or so afterwards, since the pair had no children, they
came to Delphi to consult the god. Creusa there meets the foundling,
Ion, and the two are strangely attracted to one another. She almost
confides to him her story, and he tells her what he knows of his own.
Meantime Xuthus goes in to ask the god for a child; the god tells him
that the first person he meets on leaving the shrine will be his son.
(This, of course, is a lie.) He meets Ion, salutes him as his son and
embraces him wildly. The boy protests: "Do not," cries Xuthus, "fly from
what you should love best on earth!" "I do not love teaching manners to
demented foreigners," retorts the youth. Sobered by this, Xuthus tries,
with Ion's help, to think out what the god can mean by saying that this
youth is his son. His married life has always been correct; but once
when he was a young man, there was a time . . . It was a great
religious feast at Delphi and he was drunk. Ion accepts the explanation,
though he evidently does not much like his new father. He makes
difficulties about going to Athens. He is sorry for Creusa. He wishes to
stay as he is. Xuthus decides that Creusa must be deceived; he will say
he has taken a fancy to Ion and wishes to adopt him. Meantime let them
have a great birth-feast . . . and if any of the Chorus say a word to
Creusa they shall be hanged! Creusa enters, accompanied by one of
Euripides' characteristic Old Slaves. The man has tended Creusa from
childhood, lives for her and thinks of nothing else; he is utterly
without scruple apart from her. The Chorus immediately tell Creusa what
they know of the story. Ion is Xuthus's illegitimate son; he must have
known it all the time; he has now, with the god's connivance, arranged
to take the son back to Athens; as for Creusa, the god says she shall
have no child. Stung to fury to think that her child is dead, that the
boy whom she so loved is deliberately deceiving her, and that Apollo is
adding this deliberate insult to his old brutal wrong, Creusa casts away
shame and standing up in front of the great Temple cries out her
reproach against the god. She is disgraced publicly and for ever, but
at least she will drag down this devil who sits crowned and singing to
the lyre while the women he has ravished go mad with grief and his babes
are torn by wild beasts. In the horror-stricken silence that follows
there is none to advise Creusa except the old Slave. Blindly devoted and
fostering all her passions, he wrings from her line by line the detailed
story of her seduction, and then calls for revenge. "Burn down the god's
temple!" She dare not. "Poison Xuthus!" No; he was good to her when she
was miserable. "Kill the bastard!" . . . Yes: she will do that. . . .
The Slave takes poison with him and goes to poison Ion at the
birth-feast. The plot fails; the Slave is taken and Creusa, pursued by
the angry youth, flies to the altar. It is fury against fury, each
bewildered to find such evil in the other, after their curious mutual
attraction. Here the Delphian Prophetess enters, bringing with her the
tokens that were with the foundling when she first came upon him in the
temple courts. Creusa, amazed, recognizes the old basket-cradle in which
she had exposed her own child.

She leaves the altar and gives herself up to Ion. For a moment it seems
as if he would kill her; but he tests her story. What else is there in
the basket? She names the things, her own shawl with gorgons on it, her
own snake-twined necklace and wreath of undying olive. The mother
confesses to the son and the son forgives her. But Apollo? What of him?
He has lied. . . . Ion, temple-child as he is, is roused to rebellion:
he will break through the screen of the sanctuary and demand of the god
one plain answer--when he is stopped by a vision of Athena. She comes
instead of Apollo, who fears to face the mortals he has wronged; she
bids them be content and seek no further. Creusa forgives the god; Ion
remains moodily silent.

The _Ion_ is so rich in romantic invention that it sometimes seems to a
modern reader curiously old-fashioned; it is full of motives--lost
children, and strawberry-marks, and the cry of the mother's heart, and
obvious double meanings--which have been repeated by so many plays since
that we instinctively regard them as "out of date." It is redeemed by
its passion and its sincere psychology. On the other hand, it is more
ironical than any other extant Greek play. The irony touches every part
of the story, excepting the actual tragedy of the wronged woman and the
charming carelessness of the foundling's life. We should remember that
an attack on the god of Delphi was not particularly objectionable in
Athens. For that god, by the mouth of his official prophets, at the
beginning of the war, had assured the Spartans that if they fought well
they would conquer and that He, the God, would be fighting for them. The
best that a pious Athenian could do for such a god as that was to
suppose that the official prophets were liars. Still Euripides attacks
much more than Delphi. If his thoughts ever strike home, it is not
merely Delphi that will fall, it is the whole structure of Greek ritual
and mythology. It is against the gods and against Athens that his irony
cuts sharpest.

Irony is the mood of one who has some strong emotion within but will not
quite trust himself on the flood of it. And romance is largely the mood
of one turning away from realities that disgust him. In the year 416
B.C. Euripides, in his relation to Athens, was shaken for the first time
out of any thought of either romance or irony. During the summer and
winter of that year there occurred an event of very small military
importance and no direct political consequences, to which nevertheless
Thucydides devotes twenty-six continuous chapters in a very significant
part of his work, the part just before the final catastrophe. The event
is the siege and capture by the Athenians of a little island called
Melos, the massacre of all its adult men and the enslavement of the
women and children. The island had no military power. It had little
commerce and lived on its own poor agriculture. Its population was not
large: when it was depopulated five hundred colonists were enough to
people it again. Why then this large place in Thucydides' brief and
severe narrative? Only, I think, because of the moral issue involved and
the naked clarity of the crime. Thucydides tells us of a long debate
between the Athenian envoys and the Melian Council and professes to
report the arguments used on each side. No doubt there is conscious
artistic composition in the reports. We cannot conclude that any
Athenian envoy used exactly these horrible words. But we can be sure
that Thucydides took the war on Melos as the great typical example of
the principles on which the Athenian war party were led to act in the
later part of the war; we can go further and be almost sure that he
selected it as a type of sin leading to punishment--that sin of
"Hubris" or Pride which according to Greek ideas was associated with
some heaven-sent blindness and pointed straight to a fall.

In cool and measured language the Athenian envoys explain to the Melian
Senate--for the populace is carefully excluded--that it suits their
purpose that Melos should become subject to their empire. They will not
pretend--being sensible men and talking to sensible men--that the
Melians have done them any wrong or that they have any lawful claim to
Melos, but they do not wish any islands to remain independent: it is a
bad example to the others. The power of Athens is practically
irresistible: Melos is free to submit or to be destroyed. The Melians,
in language carefully controlled but vibrating with suppressed
bitterness, answer as best they can. Is it quite safe for Athens to
break all laws of right? Empires are mortal; and the vengeance of
mankind upon such a tyranny as this . . . ? "We take the risk of that,"
answer the Athenians; "the immediate question is whether you prefer to
live or die." The Melians plead to remain neutral; the plea is, of
course, refused. At any rate they will not submit. They know Athens is
vastly stronger in men and ships and military skill; still the gods may
help the innocent ("That risk causes us no uneasiness," say the envoys:
"we are quite as pious as you"); the Lacedaemonians are bound by every
tie of honour and kinship to intervene ("We shall of course see that
they do not"); in any case we choose to fight and hope rather than to
accept slavery. "A very regrettable misjudgement," say the Athenians;
and the war proceeds to its hideous end.

As I read this Melian Dialogue, as it is called, again and again, I feel
more clearly the note of deep and angry satire. Probably the Athenian
war-party would indignantly have repudiated the reasoning put into the
mouths of their leaders. After all they were a democracy; and, as
Thucydides fully recognizes, a great mass of men, if it does commit
infamies, likes first to be drugged and stimulated with lies: it seldom,
like the wicked man in Aristotle's Ethics, "calmly sins." But in any
case the massacre of Melos produced on the minds of men like Thucydides
and Euripides--and we might probably add almost all the great writers
who were anywise touched by the philosophic spirit--this peculiar
impression. It seemed like a revelation of naked and triumphant sin.
And we can not but feel the intention with which Thucydides continues
his story. "They put to death all the Melians whom they found of man's
estate, and made slaves of the women and children. And they sent later
five hundred colonists and took the land for their own.

"And the same winter the Athenians sought to sail with a greater fleet
than ever before and conquer Sicily. . . ." This was the great Sicilian
expedition that brought Athens to her doom.

                     *       *       *       *       *

Euripides must have been brooding on the crime of Melos during the
autumn and winter. In the spring, when the great fleet was still getting
ready to sail, he produced a strange play, the work rather of a prophet
than a mere artist, which was reckoned in antiquity as one of his
masterpieces but which set a flame of discord for ever between himself
and his people. One would like to know what Archon accepted that play
and what rich man gave the chorus. It was called _The Trojan Women_, and
it tells of the proudest conquest wrought by Greek arms in legend, the
taking of Troy by the armies of Agamemnon. But it tells the old legend
in a peculiar way. Slowly, reflectively, with little stir of the blood,
we are made to look at the great glory, until we see not glory at all
but shame and blindness and a world swallowed up in night. At the very
beginning we see gods brooding over the wreck of Troy; as they might be
brooding over that wrecked island in the Aegean, whose walls were almost
as ancient as Troy's own. It is from the Aegean that Poseidon has risen
to look upon the city that is now a smoking ruin, sacked by the Greeks.
"The shrines are empty and the sanctuaries run red with blood." The
unburied corpses lie polluting the air; and the conquering soldiers,
home-sick and uneasy, they know not why, roam to and fro waiting for a
wind that will take them away from the country they have made horrible.
Such is the handiwork of Athena, daughter of Zeus! (47).

The name gives one a moment of shock. Athena is so confessedly the
tutelary goddess of Athens. But Euripides was only following the regular
Homeric story, in which Athena had been the great enemy of Troy, and the
unscrupulous friend of the Greeks. Her name is no sooner mentioned than
she appears. But she is changed. Her favourites have gone too far; they
have committed "Hubris," insulted the altars of the gods and defiled
virgins in holy places. Athena herself is now turned against her people.
Their great fleet, flushed with conquest and stained with sin, is just
about to set sail: Athena has asked Zeus the Father for vengeance
against it, and Zeus has given it into her hand. She and Poseidon swear
alliance; the storm shall break as soon as the fleet sets sail, and the
hungry rocks of the Aegean be glutted with wrecked ships and dying men
(95 ff.).

                  How are ye blind
    Ye treaders down of Cities; ye that cast
    Temples to desolation and lay waste
    Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
    The ancient dead, yourselves so soon to die!

And the angry presences vanish into the night. Were the consciences of
the sackers of Melos quite easy during that prologue?

Then the day dawns and the play begins, and we see what, in plain words,
the great glory has amounted to. We see the shattered walls and some
poor temporary huts where once was a city; and presently we see a human
figure rising wearily from sleep. It is an old woman, very tired, her
head and her back aching from the night on the hard ground. The old
woman is Hecuba, lately the queen of Troy, and in the huts hard by are
other captives, "High women chosen from the waste of war" to be slaves
to the Greek chieftains. They are to be allotted this morning. She calls
them and they come startled out of sleep, some terrified, some quiet,
some still dreaming, one suddenly frantic. Through the rest of the play
we hear bit by bit the decisions of the Greek army-council. Cassandra,
the virgin priestess, is to be Agamemnon's concubine. The stupid and
good-natured Herald who brings the news thinks it good news. How lucky
for the poor helpless girl! And the King, too! There is no accounting
for tastes; but he thinks it was that air of unearthly holiness in
Cassandra which made Agamemnon fancy her. The other women are
horror-stricken, but Cassandra is happy. God is leading her; her flesh
seems no longer to be part of her; she has seen something of the mind of
God and knows that the fate of Troy and of dead Hector is better than
that of their conquerors. She sees in the end that she must discrown
herself, take off the bands of the priestess and accept her desecration;
she sees to what end she is fated to lead Agamemnon, sees the vision of
his murdered body--murdered by his wife--cast out in precipitous places
on a night of storm; and beside him on the wet rocks there is some one
else, dead, outcast, naked . . . who is it? She sees it is herself, and
goes forth to what is appointed (445 ff.).

The central portion of the play deals with the decision of the Greeks
about Hector's little boy, Astyanax. He is only a child now; but of
course he will grow, and he will form the natural rallying point for all
the fugitive Trojans and the remnants of the great Trojan Alliance. On
the principles of the Melian dialogue he is best out of the way. The
Herald is sent to take the child from his mother, Andromache, and throw
him over the battlements. He comes when the two women, Andromache and
Hecuba, are talking together and the child playing somewhere near.
Andromache has been allotted as slave to Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles,
and is consulting with Hecuba about the horror she has to face. Shall
she simply resist to the end, in the hope that Pyrrhus may hate and kill
her, or shall she try, as she always has tried, to make the best of
things? Hecuba advises: "Think of the boy and think of your own gentle
nature. You are made to love and not to hate; when things were happy you
made them happier; when they are miserable you will tend to heal them
and make them less sore. You may even win Pyrrhus to be kind to your
child, Hector's child; and he may grow to be a help to all who have once
loved us. . . ." As they speak the shadow of the entering Herald falls
across them; he cannot speak at first, but he has come to take the child
to its death, and his message has to be given. This scene, with the
parting between Andromache and the child which follows, seems to me
perhaps the most absolutely heart-rending in all the tragic literature
of the world. After rising from it one understands Aristotle's judgment
of Euripides as "the most tragic of the poets."

For sheer beauty of writing, for a kind of gorgeous dignity that at
times reminds one of Aeschylus and yet is compatible with the subtlest
clashes of mood and character, the _Trojan Women_ stands perhaps first
among all the works of Euripides. But that is not its most remarkable
quality. The action works up first to a great empty scene where the
child's body is brought back to his grandmother, Hecuba, for the funeral
rites. A solitary old woman with a dead child in her arms; that, on the
human side, is the result of these deeds of glory. Then, in the finale,
come scenes of almost mystical tone, in which Hecuba appeals first to
the gods, who care nothing; then to the human dead who did at least care
and love; but the dead, too, are deaf like the gods and cannot help or
heed. Out of the noise and shame of battle there has come Death the most
Holy and taken them to his peace. No friend among the dead, no help in
God, no illusion anywhere, Hecuba faces That Which Is and finds
somewhere, in the very intensity of Troy's affliction, a splendour which
cannot die. She has reached in some sense not the bottom, but the
crowning peak of her fortunes. Troy has already been set on fire by the
Greeks in preparation for their departure, and the Queen rushes to throw
herself into the flames. She is hurled back by the guards, and the women
watch the flaming city till with a crash the great tower falls. The
Greek trumpet sounds through the darkness. It is the sign for the women
to start for their ships; and forth they go, cheated of every
palliative, cheated even of death, to the new life of slavery. But they
have seen in their very nakedness that there is something in life which
neither slavery nor death can touch.

The play is a picture of the inner side of a great conquest, a thing
which then, even more than now, formed probably the very heart of the
dreams of the average unregenerate man. It is a thing that seemed
beforehand to be a great joy, and is in reality a great misery. It is
conquest seen when the heat of battle is over, and nothing remains but
to wait and think; conquest not embodied in those who achieved it--we
have but one glimpse of the Greek conquerors, and that shows a man
contemptible and unhappy--but in those who have experienced it most
fully, the conquered women.

We have so far treated the _Trojan Women_ as though it stood alone. In
reality of course it belonged to a group, and one cannot but ask what
the other plays were, and whether their themes were such as could stand
beside this and not be shrivelled into commonplace or triviality.
Fortunately, though the plays are both lost, we know something about
them. They were _Palamedes_ and _Alexander_; and both are on great
subjects. The _Palamedes_ tells of the righteous man condemned by an
evil world; the _Alexander_ has for its hero a slave.

Slavery had always been one of the subjects that haunted Euripides. We
do not happen to find in our remains of his work any definite
pronouncement that slavery is "contrary to nature," as was held by most
Greek philosophers of the succeeding century. Probably no practical man
of the time could imagine a large industrial city living without the
institution of slavery. But it is clear that Euripides hates it. It
corrupts a man; it makes the slave cowardly and untrustworthy. Yet "many
slaves are better men than their masters"; "many so-called free men are
slaves at heart." And again, in the style of a Stoic, "A man without
fear cannot be a slave" (fr. 958: cf. fr. 86, 511, etc.). Much more
important than such statements as these, which are, according to his
manner, generally put in the mouth of a slave, are the many instances of
"sympathetic" and courageous slaves, and the panegyrics on men who have
no slaves but work with their own hands. These show the bent of the
poet's mind. It is not, however, till the year of the _Trojan Women_
that he takes the bold step of actually making a slave his hero and
filling his play with discussions of slavery, including a definite
contest in _arete_ between the slaves and the masters. True, the slave
turns out in the end to be a prince. The herdsman whose favourite bull
the young nobles have seized for a sacrifice, and who pursues and
challenges and eventually conquers them in strength and skill as well as
magnanimity, turns out to be Alexander, son of Priam, who has been
reared by the slave herdsmen of Mt. Ida. By our standards that is a
pity. We should have preferred him a real slave. But probably on the
Greek stage thus much of romance was inevitable, and after all it had
its connection with real life. Many a Scythian and Thracian and even
Phrygian chief, like this Alexander, must have stood for sale in Greek
slave markets.

The root idea of the _Palamedes_, the righteous man falsely slain, has a
momentous place in the history of Greek thought. It starts, of course,
as a bitterness or a paradox. Righteousness to the fifth century
Athenian was almost identical with social service, and, in a healthy
society with normal conditions, the man who serves his city well will
naturally be honoured by his city. But then comes the thought, itself
fraught with the wisdom of the sophists: "What if the multitude is bent
on evil, or is blind? There are many men who are evil but seem
righteous; what if the man who is righteous seems to be evil?" Hence
come the story of Aias in Pindar, and Palamedes in this play, and the
ideal Righteous Man of Plato's Republic who "shall be scourged,
tortured, bound . . . and at last impaled or crucified" (_Rep._ p.
362a). The idea runs through the various developments of later Greek
mysticism and attains its culminating point in Christianity. It is in
full concord with the tone of the _Trojan Women_.

We know little of the _Palamedes_. That hero was the true wise man, and
his enemy was Odysseus, the evil man who "seemed wise" and had the ear
of the multitude. Palamedes is falsely accused of treason, condemned by
the unanimous voice of his judges and sent to death. Fragments tell us
of some friend, perhaps a prisoner, carving message after message upon
oar-blades and throwing them into the sea that the truth might be known;
and we have two beautiful untranslatable lines uttered by the Chorus:
"Ye have slain, ye Greeks, ye have slain the nightingale; the winged-one
of the Muses who sought no man's pain." Tradition saw in the words a
reference to the wise Protagoras, lately slandered to his death.

The consideration of these other plays of the same trilogy strengthens
the impression that I receive already from the _Trojan Women_, an
impression of some deepening of experience, some profound change that
has worked into the writer's soul. Other critics, and notably Wilamowitz
and Mr. Glover, have similarly felt that this play marks a turning
point. It was not a change of front; it was not sudden; it was not
dependent on visions or supernatural messages. It was the completion of
a long process of strong feeling and intense thought, not the less sane
because of its decided element of mysticism. It probably differed in
many ways from the sudden and conscious conversions which began the
ministry of certain Greek philosophers, both Cynic and Stoic, in the
fourth and third centuries before Christ. It differed still more from
the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus or Augustine beneath the
fig-tree. But it does seem to me that in this tragedy the author shows a
greatly increased sense of some reality that is behind appearances, some
loyalty higher than the claims of friends or country, which supersedes
as both false and inadequate the current moral code and the current
theologies.




CHAPTER VI

AFTER THE "TROJAN WOMEN": EURIPIDES' LAST YEARS IN ATHENS: FROM THE
     "IPHIGENIA" TO THE "ORESTES"


Critics have used various words to describe the change of mood which
followed the _Trojan Women_. They speak of a period of despair,
pessimism, progressive bitterness, _Verzweiflung und Weltschmertz_. But
such phrases seem to me misleading. In the first place I do not think
they describe quite truly even the particular plays they are meant to
describe; in the second, they do not allow for the great variety which
subsists in the plays of this period. The mood of the _Trojan Women_ is
not exactly pessimism or despair; and whatever it is, it does not colour
all the subsequent plays.

The plays after 415 fall into two main divisions. First the works of
pure fancy or romance, in which the poet seems to turn intentionally
away from reality. Such are the _Iphigenia in Tauris_, the _Helena_ and
the _Andromeda_; they move among far seas and strange adventures and
they have happy endings. Next there are the true tragedies, close to
life, ruthlessly probing the depths of human nature; not more acutely
bitter than such earlier works as the _Medea_ and _Hecuba_, but with a
bitterness more profound because it is comparatively free from
indignation. The glory has fallen away and the burning anger with it.
The poor miserable heroes and heroines . . . what else can you expect of
them? Rage is no good; punishment worse than useless. The road to
healing lies elsewhere.

A good key to the first of these types of play is to be seen in
Aristophanes' comedy, _The Birds_. The gayest, sweetest and most
irresponsible of all his plays, it was written just after the news of
the final disaster in Sicily, when ruin stared Athens in the face. And
the two heroes of it, disgusted with the ways of man, depart to live
among the birds and build, with their help, a splendid Cloud City. In
much the same spirit Euripides must have written his _Andromeda_. He
produced it in 412, the same year in which he was invited by the
anti-war government which came into power after the news of the great
disaster to write the national epitaph on the soldiers slain in Sicily.
He wrote the epitaph in the old severe untranslatable style of
Simonides: "These men won eight victories over the Syracusans when the
hand of God lay even between both." In English it seems cold; it seems
hardly poetry. But in Greek it is like carved marble. Then, one must
imagine, he turned right away from the present and spent his days with
Andromeda. Only a few fragments of the _Andromeda_ remain, but they are
curiously beautiful; and the play as a whole seems to have been the one
unclouded love-romance that Euripides ever wrote. It was fantastic,
remote from life, with its heroine chained to a cliff over the blue sea
awaiting the approach of the sea-monster, and its hero, Perseus, on
winged sandals, appearing through the air to save her. Yet the fragments
have a wistful ring: "O holy Night, how long is the path of thy
chariot!" "By the Mercy that dwelleth in the sea caves, cease, O Echo;
let me weep my fill in peace." Or the strange lines (fr. 135):

    Methinks it is the morrow, day by day,
    That cows us, and the coming thing alway
    Greater than things to-day or yesterday.

There was a story told, in later times, of a tragedy-fever that fell on
the folk of Abdera, in Thrace, through this play, till in every street
you could see young men walking as though in a dream, and murmuring to
themselves the speech beginning, "O Love, high monarch over gods and
men. . . ." The _Andromeda_ was five hundred years old when people told
that story.

The _Iphigenia in Tauris_ came one year earlier. It is one of the most
beautiful of the extant plays, not really a tragedy in our sense nor yet
merely a romance. It begins in gloom and rises to a sense of peril, to
swift and dangerous adventure, to joyful escape. So far it is like
romance. But it is tragic in the sincerity of the character-drawing.
Iphigenia, especially, with her mixed longings for revenge and for
affection, her hatred of the Greece that wronged her and her love of the
Greece that is her only home, her possibilities of stony cruelty and her
realities of swift self-sacrifice, is a true child of her great and
accursed house. The plot is as follows:--Iphigenia, daughter of
Agamemnon, who was supposed to have been sacrificed by her father at
Aulis, was really saved by Artemis and is now priestess to that goddess
in the land of the Taurians at the extremity of the Friendless Sea. The
Taurians are savages who kill all strangers, and if ever a Greek shall
land in the wild place it will be her task to prepare him for sacrifice.
She lives with this terror hanging over her, and the first Greek that
comes is her unknown brother, Orestes. Their recognition of one another
is, perhaps, the finest recognition-scene in all Tragedy; and with its
sequels of stratagem and escape forms a thrilling play, haunted not,
like a tragedy, by the shadow of death but rather by the shadow of
homesickness. The characters are Greeks in a far barbarian land, longing
for home or even for the Greek sea. The lyrics are particularly fine,
and most of them full of sea-light and the clash of waters.

In the same year as the _Andromeda_ came another romantic play, the
_Helena_. It is a good deal like the _Iphigenia_ in structure, but it is
lighter, harder, and more artificial. The romance of Euripides is never
quite the easy dreaming of lighter-hearted writers. And the _Helena_, in
which he seems to have attempted a work of mere fancy, is, if we
understand it rightly, a rather brilliant failure. Some critics--quite
mistakenly in my judgment--have even argued that it is a parody. The
plot is based on a variant of the canonical legend about Helen, a
variant generally associated with the ancient lyric poet, Stesichorus.
Story tells that Stesichorus at one time lost his eyesight and took it
into his head that this was a punishment laid on him by the goddess
Helen, because he had told the story of her flight with Paris from her
husband's house. He wrote a recantation, based on another form of the
Helen-legend, in which Helen was borne away by the God Hermes to Egypt
and there lived like a true wife till Menelaus came and found her. The
being that went with Paris to Troy was only a phantom image of Helen,
contrived by the gods in order to bring about the war, and so reduce the
wickedness and multitude of mankind. In Euripides' play there is a
wicked king of Egypt, who seeks to marry Helen against her will and
kills all Greeks who land in his country. The war at Troy is over, and
Menelaus, beaten by storms out of his way, is shipwrecked on the coast
of Egypt. He and Helen meet, recognize one another, and by the help of
the king's sister, who has second sight, contrive to escape. It is hard
to say what exactly is wrong with the _Helena_; and it may only be that
we moderns do not know in what spirit to take it. But the illusion is
difficult to keep up and the work seems cold. Reality has gone out of
it. For one thing, Helen, in her thorough process of rehabilitation, has
emerged that most insipid of fancies, a perfectly beautiful and
blameless heroine with no character except love of her husband, whom, by
the way, she has not seen for seventeen years.

Another large experiment of this time is the _Phoenissae_, or _Tyrian
Women_ (410?). It is the longest Greek tragedy in existence, and covers
the greatest stretch of story. Aeschylus, we remember, had the habit of
writing true "trilogies"--three continuous dramas, carrying on the same
history. The _Phoenissae_ seems like an attempt to run the matter of a
whole trilogy into one play. It does not fall into either of the
divisions which I have sketched above: it is neither a play of fancy nor
yet a realistic tragedy. But even if we had no external tradition of its
date we could tell to what part of the author's life it belongs. It is
written, as it is conceived, in the large and heroic style; but it shows
in the regular manner of this period a general clash of hatreds and
frantic ambitions and revenges and cruel statesmanship standing out
against the light of a young man's heroism and a mother's and a sister's
love. It is like Euripides, too, that this beautiful mother should be
Jocasta, whose unknowing incest had made her an abomination in the eyes
of orthodox Greece.

The play tells the story of Thebes. The sin of Oedipus and Jocasta is a
thing of the past; Oedipus has blinded himself and cursed his children,
and they have in course of time imprisoned him in the vaults of the
palace. Jocasta still lives. The sons Polyneices and Eteocles have
agreed to reign by turns; Polyneices, the elder, has reigned his year
and gone abroad to Argos; Eteocles having once got the crown has refused
to yield it up. Polyneices comes with an Argive army to lay siege to
Thebes and win his rights by war. The drama is developed in a series of
great pictures. We have first the Princess Antigone with an old slave
looking from the wall out towards the enemy's camp, seeking for a
glimpse of her brother. Next comes a man with face hidden and sword
drawn stealing through the gates, seeking for Jocasta. It is Polyneices.
The mother has induced her sons to have one meeting before they fight.
The meeting reveals nothing but ambition and mutual hatred. They agree
to look for one another on the field, and Polyneices goes. There are
consultations in the beleaguered city. Creon, who is Jocasta's brother
and a sort of Prime Minister, advises the rash Eteocles; but the
prophets must be consulted too, that the gods may be favourable. The
prophet Tiresias--blind and old and jealous, as so often in Greek
tragedy--proclaims that the only medicine to save the state is for
Creon's son, Menoikeus, to be slain as a sin-offering in the lair of the
ancient Dragon whom Cadmus slew. Creon quickly refuses; he dismisses the
prophet and arranges for his son to escape from Thebes and fly to the
ends of Greece. The boy feigns consent to the plan of escape, but, as
soon as his father has left him, rushes enthusiastically up to a tower
of the city and flings himself over into the Dragon's den. A messenger
comes to Jocasta with news of the battle. "Are her sons slain?" No; both
are alive and unhurt. He tells his story of the Argive attack and its
repulse from every gate.--"But what of the two brothers?"--He must go
now and will bring more news later.--Jocasta sees he is concealing
something and compels him to speak. The truth comes out; the brothers
are preparing a single combat. With a shriek the mother calls Antigone;
and the two women, young and old, make their way through the army to
try to separate the blood-mad men. We learn from a second messenger how
the brothers have slain each other "in a meadow of wild lotus," and
Jocasta has killed herself with one of their swords. Antigone returns
and to bring the news to her only friend, the blind Oedipus. Creon by
Eteocles' charge takes over the government, he, too, a broken-hearted
man, but none the less ruthless; he proclaims that Polyneices' body
shall lie unburied and that Oedipus, the source of pollution, shall be
cast out of the land; Antigone meantime shall marry Creon's son, Haemon.
Antigone defies him. She will not wed Haemon nor any of Creon's kin: her
father shall not be cast out to die, for she will go with him and
protect him. Polyneices shall not lie unburied, for she herself will
return by stealth and bury him. There is still one human love that
Oedipus yearns for most; that of the sin-stained wife and mother who is
lying dead in the meadow of wild lotus. But meantime he takes the hand
of his daughter. Old man and young maiden they go forth together, away
from the brutalities of human kind, to the high mountains, to the holy
inviolate places on Kithairon where only the wild White Women of
Dionysus dance their mystic dances.

The _Phoenissae_ stands half way between the pure Romances and the
tragedies of the last period. Of these latter the clearest type is the
_Electra_ (probably 413), a play which before it was understood used to
receive the unstinted abuse of Critics, as "the meanest of Greek
tragedies," "the very worst of all Euripides' plays." It deals with the
moral problem of the Blood-Feud, stated in its sharpest terms.

Now the blood-feud, we must realize, in any society where there is no
public law and no police, is a high moral duty. A man commits an
abominable crime and revels in comfort on the proceeds; his victim is
dead, and there is no law which will act automatically. It becomes the
duty of some one--normally the heir or representative of the dead
man--to devote himself to the work of justice, to forsake all business
and pleasure in life till the wrong has been righted and the dead man
avenged. A man who would let his kinsman be murdered and then live on at
his ease rather than pursue the murderer, would obviously be a poor
false creature. Now comes the problem. The strongest possible claim is
that of a father murdered; the most horrible act a Greek could conceive
was for a man to slay his mother. Suppose a wife murdered her husband,
ought her son to slay her? The law of the blood-feud, as traditionally
preached from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, answered, in spite of all
repugnances, Yes.

The story had been treated before Euripides by many poets, including
Homer, Stesichorus, Pindar, Aeschylus and possibly--though the dates are
not certain--Sophocles. Clytemnestra had with the help of her lover
Aegisthus murdered her husband Agamemnon; her son Orestes slays her in
obedience to Apollo's command, and his sister Electra aids him.
Aeschylus in his _Libation-Bearers_ had dealt with this theme on broad
lines and with gorgeous intensity of imagination. His Orestes is carried
to the deed on a great wave of religious passion and goes mad as soon as
it is done. The deed as commanded by God is right, but it is too much
for human nature to endure. In an ensuing play Orestes, after long
sufferings, is tried for the matricide and, when the human judges are
evenly divided, acquitted by the divine voice of Athena. Sophocles
treats the subject very differently. He makes a most brilliant play with
extraordinary clashes of emotion and moments of tragic beauty. But,
evidently of set purpose, he makes the whole treatment hard and archaic.
There is no shrinking back, no question of conscience at all.
Clytemnestra is a furious tyrant; she beats Electra with her fists, and
Aegisthus does worse (1196, 517). The climax of the play is not the
mother-murder but the killing of Aegisthus, which was presumably the
harder and more exciting job. When Orestes and his friend Pylades come
out of the palace streaming with Clytemnestra's blood their nerves are
unshaken and the Chorus is careful to say that they are not to be in any
way blamed (1423).

The spirit of Euripides is exactly the opposite; so much so indeed that
most critics feel clear that the two _Electra_ plays are closely
related, and related in opposition. The one is a deliberate protest
against the other; unfortunately the play of Sophocles cannot be dated
and it is not clear from internal evidence which play was written first.

In the _Electra_ of Euripides we find two main qualities. First, there
is psychological realism of the subtlest kind. Secondly, there is a new
moral atmosphere. With a power of sympathy and analysis unrivalled in
ancient drama he has imagined just what kind of people these children
must have been, who would thus through long years nurse the seeds of
hatred and at the end kill their mother. He studies them all; Electra, a
mixture of heroism and broken nerves; a poisoned and haunted woman,
eating her heart in ceaseless broodings of hate and love, both alike
unsatisfied; for he suggests, somewhat cruelly, that she might have
lived contentedly enough, had she only had a normal married life. The
name in its original Doric form suggested the meaning, "_Unmated_."
Orestes is a youth bred in the unwholesome dreams of exile, and now
swept away by his sister's stronger will; subject also, as Orestes
always is in Greek tragedy, to delusions and melancholy madness. The
mother herself is not forgotten, and a most piteous figure she shows,
"this sad, middle-aged woman, whose first words are an apology;
controlling quickly her old fires, anxious to be as little hated as
possible; ready even to atone for her crime, if only there were some
safe way of atonement." Thus, in the first place, Euripides has stripped
the old bloody deed of the heroic glamour that surrounded it. His actors
are not clear-minded heroes moving straight to their purpose. They are
human creatures, erring, broken by passion, mastered by their own
inhibitions and doubts and regrets. In the second place he has no doubt
at all about the ethics of the mother-murder. It was an abomination, and
the god who ordained it--if any did--was a power of darkness.

After the deed the two murderers come forth as in Sophocles. But this
time they are not triumphant and the Chorus does not hail them as having
done right. They reel from the door, "red-garmented and ghastly" and
break into a long agony of remorse. The Chorus share their horror.
Electra's guilt is the greater since she drove her brother to the deed
against his will; even while they love her, they can not quite forget
that, though they feel that now at last, by this anguish, her heart may
be "made clean within." The play ends with an appearance of the gods.
The Heavenly Horsemen, Castor and Polydeuces, who were kinsmen of the
dead, appear on a cloud, and speak in judgement and comfort. With a
definiteness rare in Euripides they pronounce the deed of vengeance to
be evil:

            "And Phoebus, Phoebus . . . Nay:
  He is my lord, therefore I hold my peace.
  But though in light he dwell, not light was this
  He showed to thee, but darkness."

Another note is also struck, that of pity for the suffering of humanity.
Orestes and Electra, condemned to part, break, as they bid one another
farewell, into a great cry, and the gods, hearing it, are shaken:

      Alas! what would ye? For that cry
        Ourselves and all the sons of heaven
        Have pity; yea, our peace is riven
      By the strange pain of these that die.

            *     *     *     *     *

      But hark! The far Sicilian sea
        Calls, and a noise of men and ships
        That labour sunken to the lips
      In bitter billows; forth go we
      With saving.

They speak such words of comfort and groping wisdom as they can find--no
one has ever claimed that they are omniscient--and depart upon their own
eternal task, which is not to punish but to save.

The appearance of the gods in the _Electra_ is so beautiful that no
critics have yet tried to explain it away as nonsense; and the lesson of
it so clear that its meaning is seldom denied. But I find just the same
lesson in the final scene of the _Orestes_, which is commonly taken as
the very worst instance of Euripides' habit of closing with a "God from
the machine."

The _Orestes_ (408 B.C.) deals with the fate of Orestes some days after
his mother's murder. He is mad and sick; his sister is nursing him with
devotion. The people have risen against them and they are held prisoners
in the palace till an assembly shall try them for murder and pronounce
their fate. Meantime Menelaus--Orestes' uncle and king of Sparta--has
arrived at the harbour with his wife Helen and their daughter Hermione.
He has sent on his wife and daughter to the palace and is expected
hourly himself. He is Agamemnon's brother; he has with him an army of
Trojan veterans; he can surely be counted on to cow the Argive populace
and save his dead brother's son. All our hopes hang on Menelaus, and
when at last he comes he proves false. He would like to help; but it
would be wrong for him, a foreigner, to dictate to the Argives; and he
has only a very small force with him. However, he will reason with
Orestes' enemies. One does not forget that, if Argos is left without a
king, Menelaus will normally inherit. The sick man blazes into rage
against him and Menelaus becomes an open enemy. Exasperation follows on
exasperation: Orestes' friend Pylades breaks through the guards and
enters the palace to share the prisoners' fate. The assembly hears and
at length condemns them. They are given a day in which to die as they
best please. Like scorpions surrounded by fire, the three, Orestes,
Electra and Pylades, begin to strike blindly. A brilliant idea! They can
kill Helen: that will punish Menelaus, and Helen deserves many deaths.
Better still, kill Helen and then capture Hermione! Hold a dagger at her
throat and then bargain with Menelaus for help even at the last hour!
Murder his wife and then force him to help! Splendid! The madness of
Orestes infects the whole play. Helen escapes, being half-divine; but
they catch Hermione, who, as a matter of fact, has always been kind to
them. Menelaus, who has heard news from an escaping slave, rushes up to
save Helen, but he finds no sign of her; he finds only the palace barred
and the madman on the roof, shrieking derision and holding the knife at
his daughter's throat. There is a brief wild attempt at bargaining; then
hate in Menelaus overcomes fear. He rejects all terms. Orestes' party
sets fire to the palace; and Menelaus at the head of his soldiers beats
blindly at the barred gate. "The fire of Hell," to use Dr. Verrall's
phrase, has been let loose; rage, hatred, revenge, all blazing to the
point of madness; what more can befall?

What does befall is strange and daring. An entry of a god not in
gentleness, not with any preparation or introduction, but sudden and
terrific, striking all beholders into a trance from which they awaken
changed men. The point has not been generally observed, though it is, I
think, clear.

At Apollo's first sudden cry "Menelaus, be still!" (line 1625) we know
that Orestes is supporting Hermione in one arm while with the other hand
he is holding the knife at her throat. He is in exactly the same
position at line 1653; he only moves from it at 1671. That is the
conduct of a man in a trance, suddenly, as it were, struck rigid. And we
shall find that the words spoken by both Menelaus and Orestes when
Apollo has finished his charge, are like nothing but the words of men
emerging from a trance; a trance, too, of some supernatural kind, like
that for instance which falls on the raging world in Mr. Wells's book,
_In the Days of the Comet_. Here, too, a raging world wakes to find
itself at peace and its past hatreds unintelligible. And the first
thought that comes to the surface is, in each case, the great guiding
preoccupation of each man's life; with Menelaus it is Helen; with
Orestes the oracle that made him sin. Nay more; when Orestes wakens,
half-conscious, to find Hermione lying in his arms, his natural
movement, as experiments on hypnotized persons have shown, is to accept
the suggestion and draw her to him in love. Greek legend knew well that,
as a matter of history, Hermione became Orestes' bride. There is daring,
perhaps excessive daring, in making it occur this way; but the
psychology of something like hypnotism had a fascination for both
Aeschylus and Euripides. For the rest, Apollo has spoken the word of
forgiveness and reconciliation. He concludes:

        Depart now, each upon his destined way,
        Your hates dead and forgotten.

MEN.                                   I obey.

OR.     I too; mine heart is as a wine of peace
        Poured with the past and thy dark mysteries.

APOLLO  Go now your ways: and without cease
          Give honour in your hearts to one,
          Of spirits all beneath the sun
        Most beautiful; her name is Peace.

        I rise with Helen Zeus-ward, past
          The orb of many a shining star;
          Where Heracles and Hebe are
        And Hera, she shall reign at last,

        A goddess in men's prayers to be
          For ever, with her Brethren twain
          Enthroned, a great help in pain
        And queen of the eternal sea.

"Helen a goddess!" say some critics; "the notion is impossible. We have
seen her in this same play, a heartless ordinary woman." Yet I think
Euripides was serious enough. I do not say he believed either this or
any other particular bit of the mythology. But he was writing seriously
and aiming at beauty, not at satire. All legend said that Helen was made
a goddess; and Euripides was always curiously haunted by the thought of
Helen and by the mysterious and deadly power of mere superlative beauty.
As Apollo had said to Menelaus (1638):

    Thy bride shall be another: none may know
    _Her_. For the Gods, to work much death and woe,
    Devised this loveliness all dreams above,
    That men in Greece and Troy for thirst thereof
    Should strive and die, and so the old Earth win
    Peace from mankind's great multitude and sin.

The superlative beauty may probably enough be found in company with
heartlessness and treachery; but cannot these things be purged away,
like the hates of Menelaus and Orestes, and the pure beauty remain a
thing to pray to and be helped by, much as the old sagas pretend? There
is here again the touch of mysticism.

But however it be about Helen, or even about the above explanation in
detail of the last scene of the _Orestes_, it is clear that both the
most characteristic plays of the so-called period of gloom end with a
strong, almost a mystically strong, note of peace and reconciliation.
This note occurs, though with less intensity, at the end of other late
plays, such as the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ and the _Helena_; and, though
without a god, in the _Phoenissae_. It does not occur at all in the
early plays. The _Medea_ and _Hecuba_ end in pure hate; the _Hippolytus_
ends in wonderful beauty and a reconciliation between the hero and his
father, who are natural friends, but it keeps up the feud of Aphrodite
and Artemis and contains a strange threat of vengeance (v. 1420 ff.) The
lovely Thetis of the _Andromache_ brings comfort and rest but preaches
no forgiveness; on the contrary the body of Pyrrhus is to be buried at
Delphi as an eternal reproach. Euripides all through his life was
occupied with the study of revenge. It was a time, as Thucydides tells
us, when "men tried to surpass all the record of previous times in the
ingenuity of their enterprises and the enormity of their revenges."
Euripides seems first to have been almost fascinated by the enormous
revenges, at least when they were the work of people who had suffered
enormous wrong. He seems, in plays like the _Medea_, to be saying: "If
you goad people beyond endurance, this is the sort of thing you must
expect them to do . . . and serve you right!" In the plays after 415 the
emphasis has rather changed: "You must expect to be wronged, and revenge
will do good to nobody. Seek peace and forgive one another."




CHAPTER VII

MACEDONIA: THE "IPHIGENIA IN AULIS": THE "BACCHAE"


Thus we come round to the figure from which we started, the old sad man
with the long beard, who seldom laughed and was not easy to speak to;
who sat for long hours in his seaward cave on Salamis, meditating and
perhaps writing one could not tell what, except indeed that it was
"something great and high." It was natural that he should be sad. His
dreams were overthrown; his City, his Beloved, had turned worse than
false. Public life was in every way tenfold more intimate and important
to an ancient Greek than it is to us moderns who seldom eat a
mutton-chop the less when our worst political enemies pass their most
detested bills. And Athens had not only been false to her ideals; she
had sinned for the sake of success and had then failed. And her failure
probably made the daily life of her citizens a thing of anxiety and
discomfort. You were never quite sure of your daily food. You were never
quite safe from a triumphant raid of the enemy. And the habitual bodily
discomfort which is the central fact of old age must have had for
Euripides much to aggravate and little to soften it.

It was natural, too, that his people should hate him. Nations at war do
not easily forgive those who denounce their wars as unjust; when the
war, in spite of all heroism, goes against them, their resentment is all
the bitterer. There is, of course, not the ghost of a suggestion in
Euripides that he thought the Spartans right or that he wished Athens to
be defeated; far from it. But the Athenian public was not in a mood for
subtle distinctions, and his air of disapproval was enough. Besides,
thought the meaner among them, the man was a known blasphemer. He had
been the friend of the sophists; he had denied the gods; worse, he had
denounced the doings of the gods as evil. These misfortunes that hurtled
round the City's head must surely be sent for some good reason. Very
likely just because the City, corrupted by the "charm of words," had
allowed such wicked sophists to live? He was at one time prosecuted for
impiety; we do not know the date or the details, but he seems to have
been acquitted. The day of Socrates had not yet come. But other charges
remained. He was a wicked old man: he had preached dreadful things about
women; he had defended in his plays adulteresses and perjurers and
workers of incest. What must his personal life be, if these were his
principles? No wonder that he lived so secretly, he and his wife and
that dark-skinned secretary, Cephisophon!

Perhaps he was a miser and had secret stores of wealth? We hear of an
action brought against him on these lines. A certain Hygiainon was
selected, as a rich man, to perform some "Liturgy" or public service at
his own cost, and he claimed that Euripides was richer and should be
made to do it instead. We do not know the result of the trial; we only
know that the plaintiff attempted to create prejudice against Euripides
by quoting the line of the _Hippolytus_ (see above p. 88) which was
supposed to defend perjury.

These things were annoyances enough. But there must have been some
darker cloud that fell over Euripides' life at this time. For we are
not only told in the Lives that "The Athenians bore a grudge against
him," and that "he lost patience with the ill-will of his
fellow-citizens," but one of our earliest witnesses, Philodemus, says
that when he left Athens he did so "in grief, because almost all in
Athens were rejoicing over him." The word used means, like the German
"Schadenfreude," rejoicing at another's injury. So there must have been
some injury for them to rejoice at.

The old Satyrus tradition, with its tone of scandal and
misunderstanding, says that his wife was false to him, but the story
will not bear historical criticism. And it would not be safe to use so
rotten a foundation to build any theory upon, however likely it may be
in itself that a man of this kind should meet with domestic unhappiness
in one or other of its many forms. In thinking of Euripides one is
constantly reminded of Tolstoy. And there are many ways of making
husbands miserable besides merely betraying them.

Whatever the cause, shortly after the production of the _Orestes_ in 408
the old poet's endurance snapped, and, at the age apparently of
seventy-six, he struck off into voluntary exile. It is only one
instance among many of his extraordinary vital force. The language of
the ancient Life is unfortunately confused just here, but it seems to
say that he went first to Magnesia, with which city he had had relations
in earlier days. He had been granted some civic honours there, and had
acted as Proxenus--a kind of consul or general protector--for Magnesians
in Athens. There was more than one town of the name. But the one meant
is probably a large town in the Maeander Valley, not far from Ephesus.
It lay in Persian territory, but had been granted by Artaxerxes to the
great Themistocles as a gift, and was still ruled, subject to the
Persian king, by Themistocles' descendants. Doubtless it was to them
that the poet went. We know nothing more, except that he did not stay
long in Magnesia, but went on to another place where barbarians or
semi-barbarians were ruled by a Greek dynasty.

The king of Macedon, Archelaus, an able despot who was now laying the
seeds of the great kingdom which, before the lapse of a century, was to
produce Philip and Alexander the Great, had always an eye for men of
genius who might be attracted to his court. He had invited Euripides
before and now renewed his invitation. Other men of "wisdom" were
already with Archelaus. Agathon, the tragic poet; Timotheus, the now
famous musician whom Euripides had once saved, so the story ran, from
suicide; Zeuxis, the greatest painter of the time; and perhaps also
Thucydides, the historian. It would not be like living among barbarians
or even uncultivated Greeks. And it is likely enough that the old man
hankered for the ease and comfort, for the atmosphere of daily
"spoiling," which the royal patron was likely to provide for a lion of
such special rarity. For it must have been a little before this time
that Greece was ringing with a tale of the value set on Euripides in
distant and hostile Sicily. Seven thousand Athenians had been made
slaves in Syracuse after the failure of the expedition; and the story
now came that some of them had been actually granted their freedom
because they were able to recite speeches and choruses of Euripides.
Apparently there was no book trade between the warring cities; and the
Syracusans could only learn the great poems by word of mouth. Sicily and
Macedonia were proud to show that they appreciated the highest poetry
better than Athens did.

It was a curious haven that Euripides found. In many ways Macedonia must
have been like a great fragment of that Homeric or heroic age from which
he had drawn most of his stories. The scenery was all on the grand
scale. There were greater plains and forests and rivers, wilder and
higher mountain ranges than in the rest of Greece. And the people,
though ruled by a dynasty of Greek descent and struggling up towards
Hellenism, was still tribal, military and barbaric. A century later we
hear of the "old" Macedonian customs. A young man might not dine at the
men's tables till he had killed his first wild boar. He had to wear a
leathern halter round his waist until he had killed his first man. We
hear that when some Macedonian at the court made a rude remark to
Euripides the King straightway handed him over to the Athenian to be
scourged, a well-meant but embarrassing intervention. And the story told
of Euripides' own death, if mythical, is very likely faithful in its
local colour. There was a village in Macedonia where some Thracians had
once settled and their descendants still lived. One of the king's big
Molossian hounds once strayed into this place, and the natives promptly
killed and ate her. The king fined the village a talent, which was more
than it could possibly pay, and some dreadful fate might have overtaken
the dog-eaters had not Euripides interceded and begged them off. And not
long afterwards, the story continues, Archelaus was preparing a hunt,
and the hungry hounds were set loose. And it so happened that Euripides
was sitting alone in a wood outside the city, and the hounds fell on him
and tore him to pieces. And behold, these hounds proved to be the
children of that Molossian who, through the poet's interference, had
died unavenged! The story can hardly be true, or we should hear some
echo of it in Aristophanes' _Frogs_; but no doubt it was the kind of
fate that a lonely man might well meet in Macedonia when the king's
hounds were astir.

How the poet really died we do not know. We know that he left Athens
after the spring of 408, and that he was dead some time before the
production of the _Frogs_ in January, 405. And there is reason to
believe the story given in the Life that when Sophocles in the previous
year was introducing his Chorus in the "Proagon," or Preliminary
Appearance, he brought them on without the customary garlands in
mourning for his great rival's death. The news, therefore, must have
reached Athens by the end of March, 406. Euripides had lived only some
eighteen months in Macedon.

The time was not long but it was momentous. After his death three plays
were found, _Iphigenia in Aulis_, _Alcmaeon_ and _Bacchae_, sufficiently
finished to be put on the stage together by his third son, the Younger
Euripides. Two of them are still extant, and one, the _Bacchae_, remains
for all time to testify to the extraordinary return of youth which came
to the old poet in his last year. A "lightning before death" if ever
there was one!

But let us take first the _Iphigenia in Aulis_. It is a play full of
problems. We can make out

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