CHAPTER VII

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

There was a story told, in later times, of a tragedy-fever that fell on the folk of Abdêra, 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. . . ." TheAndromedawas five hundred years old when people told that story.

TheIphigenîa in Tauriscame 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. Iphigenîa, 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:—Iphigenîa, 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 FriendlessSea. 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 theAndromedacame another romantic play, theHelena. It is a good deal like theIphigenîain structure, but it is lighter, harder, and more artificial. The romance of Euripides is never quite the easy dreaming of lighter-hearted writers. And theHelena, 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 canonicallegend 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 theHelena; 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 workseems 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 thePhoenissae, orTyrian 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. ThePhoenissaeseems 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 beleagueredcity. 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 waythrough 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.

ThePhoenissaestands half way between the pure Romances and the tragedies of the last period. Of these latter the clearest type is theElectra(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 aman 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 hisLibation-Bearershad 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 oftragic 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 twoElectraplays 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 theElectraof 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 thesechildren 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 Phœbus, Phœbus . . . Nay:He is my lord, therefore I hold my peace.But though in light he dwell, not light was thisHe 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 cryOurselves and all the sons of heavenHave pity; yea, our peace is rivenBy the strange pain of these that die.* * * * *But hark! The far Sicilian seaCalls, and a noise of men and shipsThat labour sunken to the lipsIn bitter billows; forth go weWith saving.

Alas! what would ye? For that cryOurselves and all the sons of heavenHave pity; yea, our peace is rivenBy the strange pain of these that die.

* * * * *

But hark! The far Sicilian seaCalls, and a noise of men and shipsThat labour sunken to the lipsIn bitter billows; forth go weWith 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 theElectrais 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 theOrestes, which is commonly taken as the very worst instance of Euripides' habit of closing with a "God from the machine."

TheOrestes(408b.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 toshare 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, allblazing 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'slife; 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 peacePoured with the past and thy dark mysteries.ApolloGo now your ways: and without ceaseGive honour in your hearts to one,Of spirits all beneath the sunMost beautiful; her name is Peace.I rise with Helen Zeus-ward, pastThe orb of many a shining star;Where Heracles and Hebe areAnd Hera, she shall reign at last,A goddess in men's prayers to beFor ever, with her Brethren twainEnthronèd, a great help in painAnd queen of the eternal sea.

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 peacePoured with the past and thy dark mysteries.

ApolloGo now your ways: and without ceaseGive honour in your hearts to one,Of spirits all beneath the sunMost beautiful; her name is Peace.

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

A goddess in men's prayers to beFor ever, with her Brethren twainEnthronèd, a great help in painAnd 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 knowHer.For the Gods, to work much death and woe,Devised this loveliness all dreams above,That men in Greece and Troy for thirst thereofShould strive and die, and so the old Earth winPeace 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 theold 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 theOrestes, 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 theIphigenîa in Taurisand theHelena; and, though without a god, in thePhoenissae. It does not occur at all in the early plays. TheMedeaandHecubaend in pure hate; theHippolytusends 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 theAndromachebrings 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 enormityof 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 theMedea, 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."

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 anxietyand 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? Hewas 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 theHippolytus(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 theOrestesin 408 the old poet's endurance snapped, and, at the age apparently of seventy-six, he struck off into voluntaryexile. 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 finedthe 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 theFrogsin 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. Thenews, 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,Iphigenîa in Aulis,AlcmaeonandBacchae, sufficiently finished to be put on the stage together by his third son, the Younger Euripides. Two of them are still extant, and one, theBacchae, 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 theIphigenîa in Aulis. It is a play full of problems. We can make out that it was seriously incomplete at the poet's death and was finished by another hand, presumably that of its producer. Unfortunately we do not possess even that version in a complete form. For the archetype of our MSS. was at some time mutilated, and the present end of the play is a patent forgery. But if we allow for these defects, theIphigenîa in Aulisis a unique and most interesting example of a particular moment in the history of Greek drama. It shows the turning-point between the old fifth century tragedy and the so-called New Comedy which, in the hands ofMenander, Philemon and others, dominated the stage of the fourth and third centuries.

Euripides had united two tendencies: on the one hand he had moved towards freedom in metre, realism in character-drawing, variety and adventure in the realm of plot; on the other he had strongly maintained the formal and musical character of the old Dionysiac ritual, making full use of such conventions as the Prologue, the Epiphany, the traditional tragic diction, and above all the Chorus. The New Comedy dropped the chorus, brought the diction close to real life, broke up the stiff forms and revelled in romance, variety, and adventure. Its characters ceased to be legendary Kings and Queens; they became fictional characters from ordinary city life.

TheIphigenîa in Aulisshows an unfinished Euripidean tragedy, much in the manner of theOrestes, completed by a man of some genius whose true ideals were those of modernity and the New Comedy. Two openings of the play are preserved. One is the old stiff Euripidean prologue; the other a fine and vigorous scene of lyric dialogue, which must have suited the taste of the time far better, just as it suits our own. We have early in the play a Messenger; but instead ofhis entrance being formally prepared and announced in the Euripidean manner, he bursts on to the stage interrupting a speaker in the middle of a verse and the middle of a sentence. There are also peculiarities of metre, such as the elision of -ai, which are unheard of in tragic dialogue but regular in the more conversational style of the New Comedy.

The plot runs thus.—It is night in the Greek camp at Aulis; Agamemnon calls an Old Slave outside his tent and gives him secretly a letter to carry to Clytemnestra. She is at home, and has been directed in previous letters to send her daughter, Iphigenîa, to Aulis to be wedded to Achilles. This letter simply bids her not send the girl.—The Old Slave is bewildered; "What does it mean?" It means that the marriage with Achilles was a blind. Achilles knew nothing of it. It was a plot to get Iphigenîa to the camp and there slaughter her as a sacrifice for the safe passage of the fleet. So Calchas, the priest, had commanded and he was backed by Odysseus and Menelaus. Agamemnon had been forced into compliance, and is now resolved to go back upon his word. The Old Slave goes. Presently comes the entrance of the Chorus,women of Aulis who are dazzled and thrilled by the spectacle of the great army and the men who are prepared to die overseas for the honour of Hellas. But we hear a scuffle outside, and the Old Slave returns pursued by Menelaus, who seizes the letter. He calls for help. Agamemnon comes out and commands Menelaus to give the letter back. A violent scene ensues between the brothers, each telling the other home truths. Menelaus's besotted love for his false wife, his reckless selfishness and cruelty; Agamemnon's consuming ambition, his falseness and weakness, his wish to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, are all laid bare in a masterly quarrel scene. At last Agamemnon flatly refuses to give his daughter: "Let the army break up, let Menelaus go without his accursed wife, and the barbarians laugh as loudly as they will! Agamemnon will not have his child slain and his own heart broken to please any one." "Is that so?" says Menelaus: "Then I go straight to. . . ." He is interrupted by a Messenger who announces that Iphigenîa has come and her mother, Clytemnestra, is with her. Agamemnon sends them a formal message of welcome; dismisses the Messenger, and then bursts into tears.This shakes Menelaus; he hesitates; then abruptly says, "I cannot force you. Save the girl as best you can." But now it is too late. The army knows that the Queen has come; Calchas and Odysseus know. Agamemnon has lost the power of action. The next scene is between the mother, father and daughter; Clytemnestra, full of questions about the marriage, Iphigenîa full of excitement and shy tenderness, which expresses itself in special affectionateness towards her father. He tries to persuade Clytemnestra to go home and leave the child with him; she is perplexed and flatly refuses to go.

The next scene is close to comedy, though comedy of a poignant kind. Achilles, knowing naught of all these plots and counter-plots, comes to tell the General that his men—the Myrmidons—are impatient and want to sail for Troy at once. At the door of the tent he meets Clytemnestra, who greets him with effusive pleasure and speaks of "the marriage that is about to unite them." The young soldier is shy, horrified, anxious to run away from this strange lady who is so more than friendly, when suddenly a whisper through the half-closed door startles them. "Is the coast clear? Yes?"—then the whispererwill come. It is the Old Slave, who can bear it no more but reveals the whole horrible plot; Iphigenîa is to be slaughtered by the priests; the marriage with Achilles was a bait for deceiving Clytemnestra.—Clytemnestra is thunderstruck, Achilles furious with rage. "He is dishonoured; he is made a fool of. What sort of man do they take him for, to use his name thus without his authority? Why could not they ask his consent? They could sacrifice a dozen girls for all he cares, and he would not have stood in the way. But now they have dishonoured him, and he will forbid the sacrifice. . . ." Clytemnestra, who has watched like a drowning woman to see which way the youth's fierce vanity would leap, throws herself at his feet in gratitude; "Shall her daughter, also, come and embrace his knees?" No; Achilles does not want any woman to kneel to him. Let the women try to change Agamemnon's mind; if they can do it, all is well. If not, Achilles will fight to the last to save the girl.

There follows the inevitable scene in which mother and daughter—the latter inarticulate with tears—convict the father and appeal to him. A fine scene it is, in which each character comes out clear, and through the still youngand obedient Clytemnestra one descries the shadow of the great murderess to be. Agamemnon is broken but helpless. It is too late to go back.

The two women are left weeping at the door of the tent, when they hear a sound of tumult. It is Achilles, and men behind stoning him. Iphigenîa's first thought is to fly; she dare not look Achilles in the face. Yet she stays. Achilles enters. The whole truth has come out; the army clamours for the sacrifice and is furious against him. . . . "Will not his own splendid Myrmidons protect him?"—"It is they who were the first to stone him! Nevertheless he will fight. He has his arms. Clytemnestra must fight too; cling to her daughter by main force when they come, as they presently will, to drag her to the altar. . . ." "Stay!" says Iphigenîa: "Achilles must not die for her sake. What is her miserable life compared with his? One man who can fight for Hellas is worth ten thousand women, who can do nothing. Besides, she has been thinking it over; she has seen the great gathered army, ready to fight and die for a cause, and, like the Chorus, has fallen under the spell of it. She realizes that it lies with her, a weak girl, to help them tovictory. All great Hellas is looking to her; and she is proud and glad to give her life for Hellas."—It is a beautiful and simple speech. And the pride of Achilles withers up before it. In a new tone he answers: "God would indeed have made him blessed if he had won her for his wife. As it is, Iphigenîa is right. . . ." Yet he offers still to fight for her and save her. She does not know what death is; and he loves her.—She answers that her mind is made up. "Do not die for me, but leave me to save Hellas, if I can." Achilles yields. Still he will go and stand beside the altar, armed; if at the last moment she calls to him, he is ready. So he goes. The mother and daughter bid one another a last farewell, and with a song of triumph Iphigenîa, escorted by her maidens, goes forth to meet the slaughterers. . . . Here the authentic part of our play begins to give out. There are fragments of a messenger's speech afterwards, and it is likely on the whole that Artemis saved the victim, as is assumed in the otherIphigenîaplay.

TheIphigenîa in Aulis, in spite of its good plot, is not really one of Euripides' finest works; yet, if nothing else of his were preserved, it would be enough to mark him outas a tremendous power in the development of Greek literature. Readers who enjoy drama but have never quite accustomed themselves to the stately conventions of fifth century tragedy very often like it better than any other Greek play. It is curiously different from its twin sister theBacchae.

A reader of theBacchaewho looks back at the ritual sequence described above (p. 64) will be startled to find how close this drama, apparently so wild and imaginative, has kept to the ancient rite. The regular year-sequence is just clothed in sufficient myth to make it a story. The daemon must have his enemy who is like himself; then we must have the Contest, the Tearing Asunder, the Messenger, the Lamentation mixed with Joy-cries, the Discovery of the scattered members—and by a sort of doubling the Discovery of the true God—and the Epiphany of the Daemon in glory. All are there in theBacchae. The god Dionysus, accompanied by his Wild Women, comes to his own land and is rejected by his kinsman, King Pentheus, and by the women of the royal house. The god sends his divine madness on the women. The wise Elders of the tribe warn the king; but Pentheus first binds and imprisons the god;then yielding gradually to the divine power, agrees to go disguised in woman's garb to watch the secret worship of the Maenads on Mt. Kithairon. He goes, is discovered by the Maenads and torn in fragments. His mother, Agave, returns in triumph dancing with her son's head, which, in her madness, she takes for a lion's. There is Lamentation mixed with mad Rejoicing. The scattered body is recovered; Agave is restored to her right mind and to misery; the god appears in majesty and pronounces doom on all who have rejected him. The mortals go forth to their dooms, still faithful, still loving one another. The ghastly and triumphant god ascends into heaven. The whole scheme of the play is given by the ancient ritual. It is the original subject of Attic tragedy treated once more, as doubtless it had already been treated by all or almost all the other tragedians.

But we can go further. We have enough fragments and quotations from the Aeschylean plays on this subject—especially the Lycurgus trilogy—to see that all kinds of small details which seemed like invention, and rather fantastic invention, on the part of Euripides, are taken straight from Aeschylus or the ritual or both. The timbrels, the fawnskin, the ivy,the sacred pine, the god taking the forms of Bull and Lion and Snake; the dances on the mountain at dawn; the Old Men who are by the power of the god made young again; the god represented as beardless and like a woman; the god imprisoned and escaping; the earthquake that wrecks Pentheus' palace; the victim Pentheus disguised as a woman; all these and more can be shown to be in the ritual and nearly all are in the extant fragments of Aeschylus. Even variants of the story which have been used by previous poets have somehow a place found for them. There was, for instance, a variant which made Pentheus lead an army against the Wild Women; in theBacchaethis plan is not used, but Pentheus is made to think of it and say he will perhaps follow it, and Dionysus is made to say what will happen if he does. (Aesch. Eum.25 f.;Bac.50 ff. 809, 845.) There never was a great play so steeped in tradition as theBacchae.

TheIphigenîawas all invention, construction, brilliant psychology; it was a play of new plot and new characters. TheBacchaetakes an old fixed plot, and fixed formal characters: Dionysus, Pentheus, Cadmus, Teiresias, they are characters that hardly need proper names. One might just as well callthem—The God, the Young King, the Old King, the Prophet; and as for Agave, our MSS. do as a rule simply call her "Woman." TheIphigenîais full of informalities, broken metres, interruptions. Its Chorus hardly matters to the plot and has little to sing. TheBacchaeis the most formal Greek play known to us; its Chorus is its very soul and its lyric songs are as long as they are magnificent. For the curious thing is that in this extreme of formality and faithfulness to archaic tradition Euripides has found both his greatest originality and his most perfect freedom.

He is re-telling an old story; but he is not merely doing that. In theBacchaealmost every reader feels that there is something more than a story. There is a meaning, or there is at least a riddle. And we must try in some degree to understand it. Now, in order to keep our heads cool, it is first necessary to remember clearly two things. TheBacchaeis not free invention; it is tradition. And it is not free personal expression, it is drama. The poet cannot simply and without a veil state his own views; he can only let his own personality shine through the dim curtain in front of which his puppets act their traditional parts and utter their appropriate sentiments.Thus it is doubly elusive. And therein no doubt lay its charm to the poet. He had a vehicle into which he could pour many of those "vaguer faiths and aspirations which a man feels haunting him and calling to him, but which he cannot state in plain language or uphold with a full acceptance of responsibility." But our difficulties are even greater than this. The personal meaning of a drama of this sort is not only elusive; it is almost certain to be inconsistent with itself or at least incomplete. For one only feels its presence strongly when in some way it clashes with the smooth flow of the story.

Let us imagine a great free-minded modern poet—say Swinburne or Morris or Victor Hugo, all of whom did such things—making for some local anniversary a rhymed play in the style of the old Mysteries on some legend of a mediaeval saint. The saint, let us suppose, is very meek and is cruelly persecuted by a wicked emperor, whom he threatens with hell fire; and at the end let us have the emperor in the midst of that fire and the saint in glory saying, "What did I tell you?" And let us suppose that the play in its course gives splendid opportunities for solemn Latin hymns, such as Swinburne and Hugodelighted in. We should probably have a result something like theBacchae.

For one thing, in such a play one would not be troubled by little flaws and anachronisms and inconsistencies. One would not be shocked to hear St. Thomas speaking about Charlemagne, or to find the Mouth of Hell situated in the same street as the emperor's lodging. Just so we need not be shocked in theBacchaeto find that, though the god is supposed to be appearing for the first time in Thebes, his followers appeal to "immemorial custom" as the chief ground for their worship (201, 331, 370: cf.Aesch.fr. 22?), nor to observe that the Chorus habitually makes loud professions of faith under the very nose of the tyrant without his ever attending to them (263 f., 328 f., 775 f.). Nor even that the traditional earthquake which destroys the palace causes a good deal of trouble in the thinking out. It had to be there; it was an integral part of the story in Aeschylus (fr. 58), and in all probability before him. One may suppose that the Greek stage carpenter was capable of some symbolic crash which served its purpose. The language used is carefully indefinite. It suggests that the whole palace is destroyed, but leaves a spectator free, if he sochooses, to suppose that it is only the actual prison of Dionysus, which is "off-stage" and unseen. In any case the ruins are not allowed to litter the stage and, once over, the earthquake is never noticed or mentioned again.

Again, such a play would involve a bewildering shift of sympathy, just as theBacchaedoes. At first we should be all for the saint and against the tyrant; the persecuted monks with their hymns of faith and endurance would stir our souls. Then, when the tables were turned and the oppressors were seen writhing in Hell, we should feel that, at their worst, they did not quite deserve that: we should even begin to surmise that perhaps, with all their faults, they were not really as horrible as the saint himself, and reflect inwardly what a barbarous thing, after all, this mediaeval religion was.

This bewildering shift of sympathy is common in Euripides. We have had it before in such plays as theMedeaandHecuba: oppression generates revenge, and the revenge becomes more horrible than the original oppression. In these plays the poet offers no solution. He gives us only the bitterness of life and the unspoken "tears that are inthings." The first serious attempt at a solution comes in theElectraandOrestes.

In a Mystery-play such as we have imagined, re-told by a great modern poet, the interest and meaning would hardly lie in the main plot. They would lie in something which the poet himself contributed. We might, for instance, find that he had poured all his soul into the Latin hymns, or into the spectacle of the saint, alone and unterrified, defying all the threats and all the temptations which the Emperor can bring to bear upon him. There might thus be a glorification of that mystic rejection of the world which lies at the heart of mediaeval monasticism, without the poet for a moment committing himself to a belief in monasticism or an acceptance of the Catholic Church.

We have in theBacchae—it seems to me impossible to deny it—a heartfelt glorification of "Dionysus." No doubt it is Dionysus in some private sense of the poet's own; something opposed to "the world"; some spirit of the wild woods and the sunrise, of inspiration and untrammelled life. The presentation is not consistent, however magical the poetry. At one moment we have the Bacchantes raving for revenge, at the nextthey are uttering the dreams of some gentle and musing philosopher. A deliberate contrast seems to be made in each Chorus between the strophe and the antistrophe. It is not consistent; though it is likely enough that, if one had taxed Euripides with the contradiction, he might have had some answer that would surprise us. His first defence, of course, would be a simple one; it is not the playwright's business to have any views at all; he is only re-telling a traditional story and trying to tell it right. But he might also venture outside his defences and answer more frankly: "This spirit that I call Dionysus, this magic of inspiration and joy, is it not as a matter of fact the great wrecker of men's lives? While life seems a decent grey to you all over, you are safe and likely to be prosperous; when you feel the heavens opening, you may begin to tremble. For the vision you see there, as it is the most beautiful of things, is likely also to be the most destructive." For the poet himself, indeed, the only course is to pursue it across the world to the cold mountain tops (410 ff.):

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