Tragedy and Comedy

Plate LI.THE “AGIAS” OF LYSIPPUSEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate LI.THE “AGIAS” OF LYSIPPUS

English Photo Co., Athens

front only. The upper story was reached by a rock-terrace cut out of the hill-side at the back. The whole temple, with out-buildings, was enclosed by a wall.

Summing up the architectural character of the period, we should say that it was severely limited by the conservatism of religion to the austerest outlines and the simplest plans. Such laws it loyally obeyed, and yet found scope for exquisite workmanship and subtle varieties within them. Ictinus and Mnesicles were quite capable of adapting themselves to any local peculiarities, but the strict Doric style still reigned supreme. Finally we note that fine architecture is almost entirely confined to the service of religion and patriotism, while private and secular buildings are still on the most unpretentious scale. The only architectural work of a strictly utilitarian character that we can mention is the planning of the Peiræus, which was as orderly, as regular and as dull as “town-planned” towns generally are.

It was the policy of Pericles, when he trusted his fellow-citizens with so much power, to train them to be fit to wield it. Fond as the Athenian was of political and social equality within his own circle of citizenship, his tone and temper were, I think, like those of all the other Greeks, inherently aristocratic. The Greeks were a chosen people. They stood aloof, with slaves and helots beneath them, and with barbarians all round them. Few Greeks would have disputed the doctrine by which Aristotle justified slavery: the Greek is by nature superior; set him down in a barbarian city, and in a short time the Greek would be king. They would have laughed sweetly at Lafayette’s “Rights of Man.” Man only gets his rights as a member of a partnership, a corporate community—to wit, a city. This community he entered, when he was acknowledged as a citizen, not without a strict scrutiny into his claims, as formally as we enter a club. Having once joined partnership with such a state as Athens, his rights became precise andimportant. Among other rights, a democracy offered him that of taking his turn in the government if the lot or the votes of his fellow-citizens designated him for office. Political philosophy maintains as an axiom that the better people ought to rule over the worse, condemning all democracy, and Athens in particular, because there the many ruled over the few, and therefore necessarily the worse over the better. Pericles would not have denied the doctrine, but only its applicability to Athens. He would have claimed that the whole Athenian citizen body possessed “virtue” in the political philosopher’s sense of the word; they were allaristoi, for he had seen to it that the Athenian citizens should all receive a training, which, though utterly different from the Spartan in its aims and methods, was even more capable of turning the masses into an aristocracy of manners and intelligence.

It was a liberal education even to walk in the streets of that wonderful city, to worship in her splendid shrines, to sail the Mediterranean in her fleets, to lounge in her colonnades and listen to the wisdom of the wise. The temple services, the festivals, and the banquets were intended with solemn symbolism to uplift the minds of the worshippers. There was actual practice in public business for every one, whether in the Assembly or the Council Hall or the large Jury Courts. Thus it was hoped that any man whom the lot might appoint to be archon or president would be fit for his duties.

But of all instruments of public education perhaps the most important was the Drama. This word, which we associate with entertainment after dinner, with tinsel and bad ventilation, meant to the Greeks a religious solemnity destined to the praise of gods and the edification of men. During the fifth century at Athens the stage was far the most powerful form of literary and artistic expression—so much so that as Greek literature in this period is almost entirely absorbed by Athens, all the other voices of poetry are for a time reduced to silence. The amazingly rapid development of this form of expression was largely due to the concentration with which the literary

Plate LII.THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT PHIGALEIA [BASSÆEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate LII.THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT PHIGALEIA [BASSÆ

English Photo Co., Athens

genius of Greece pursued it. Athenian drama, Tragic, Comic, and Satyric, was produced at the festivals of Dionysus, and it has generally been supposed to have taken its rise from rude choruses in honour of the wine-god, developed by Arion and others into the Dithyramb. This is an ancient and respectable theory. The Satyric Drama is obviously connected with wine and the wine-god’s goatish followers, the Satyrs. Comedy was derived fromkōmē, a village, being originally the rustic form of the same species of mimetic worship. As for Tragedy, that was traced etymologically to the Greek for a goat, and of course the goat has a family relationship with Dionysus. But it has recently been argued that Tragedy was certainly the earliest form of the drama to be developed, and thoughwemay wind up an evening’s jollification by going to see “Othello,” yet ancient Tragedy has, as was often remarked by the ancients themselves, nothing to do with wine or Dionysus, and is scarcely of the festive character that we should associate with that cheerful deity. Professor Ridgeway has shown some reason to believe that the drama took its rise in quite a different manner—namely, from the funeral ceremonies held at the tomb of a dead hero. He shows the frequent appearance of tombs in the scenery of Tragedy, and adduces evidence to prove that the Greeks did include mimetic representations of the dead hero and his deeds among the ceremonies performed in his honour. This would account not only for the character of Tragedy, with its sombre musings upon Death and Fate, but also for the milieu in which its scenes invariably moved—namely, the Epic circle of heroes. Professor Ridgeway further points out that the worship of Dionysus was itself not a very ancient nor a strictly Greek cult. Theatres and dancing-floors are, however, as old as Cnossos.

But this very plausible and suggestive theory has scarcely yet had time to stand its trial. What is certain and most important for the understanding of Tragedy is that the Drama was evolved from the song and dance of the Chorus. First one and then two members of thecorps de balletwere broughtout from the ranks to perform solo impersonations, to narrate an episode in descriptive rhapsody, or to exchange information by rapid question and answer. Important stages in this evolutionary process were attributed in antiquity to Thespis, the so-called “inventor” of Tragedy, and to Phrynichus and Æschylus, all Athenians of the late sixth and early fifth centuries. Then the part played by the “Answerers” (hypocrites), as the actors were called, gradually gained in magnitude and importance. In Æschylus the choric passages are still the main feature of the play. In Sophocles they form a kind of lyric commentary on the action of the drama, in which the interest now begins to centre. In the later work of Euripides the Chorus is largely a superfluous concession to dramatic conventions. Already by the end of Sophocles’ career there were as many as four actors, and since each performed numerous impersonations, the range of character was considerable. Grand as Athenian drama is, even regarded as a vehicle of literary composition, the mere writing of the “book” was a subordinate part of the work of producing a play. In fact Greek tragedy is far more closely akin to the modern oratorio than to the modern stage-play. The task of providing, equipping, and training a chorus was one of the “liturgies” or public duties laid by the Athenian state upon her richer citizens. It lay in the archon’s discretion to “grant a chorus” to a poet.

The stage consisted originally of a circular dancing-floor (orchestra) with an altar in the middle. Here the fifteen members of the chorus marched in, headed by a single flute-player, chanting in unison. As soon as they had arrived in position they formed line three deep, the coryphæus in the middle of the front row, with the leader of each semichorus on his right and left. While they sang they performed simple rhythmic movements of a solemn character. At first the individual actors simply stepped out from the ranks to deliver their lines, but in later times (when precisely, is a matter of burning controversy) they appeared behind the orchestra on a raised stage. The performance was, of course, always given

COMBAT BETWEEN CENTAURS AND LAPITHÆ [WEST SIDE, SLAB 528

COMBAT BETWEEN GREEKS AND AMAZONS [EAST SIDE, SLAB 537Mansell & Co.Plate LIII.PORTIONS OF THE PHIGALEIAN FRIEZE

COMBAT BETWEEN GREEKS AND AMAZONS [EAST SIDE, SLAB 537

Mansell & Co.

Plate LIII.PORTIONS OF THE PHIGALEIAN FRIEZE

Theatrical Figures, Comic and Tragic

in the open air.[70]In the fifth century there was no regular theatre; only a flat circular orchestra where the dramas were produced in the “Place of the Wine-press” to the west of the Acropolis, and the spectators sat round on wooden benches. It was not until late in the fourth century that the great Theatre of Dionysus, with its tiers of stone seats resting on the living rock, was constructed under the south cliff of the citadel. It has been remarked that the Greek stage was not, as ours is, pictorial, but rather plastic, giving the effect of figures in relief against a background. This was one reason why the actors wore high boots which gave them superhuman stature, and padded garments and trailing skirts. The masks they wore were part of the traditional convention of Greek drama. The mask would, of course, preclude any facial expression whatsoever. The Greek actor showed his skill in the grace of his movements, the expressiveness of his gestures, and the clearness and force of his articulation. Dramatic declamation was his main business. Under these circumstances it is clear that wemust not expect subtle nuances of meaning to be conveyed by the actors in Greek tragedy, though modern interpreters are always on the look-out for them. Conceive Henry Irving with an immovable eyebrow, or Coquelin with his mouth fixed open in a perpetual grimace. It is obvious that the whole character of the representation is transformed. The female parts, too, were, as on our own Elizabethan stage, invariably taken by men or boys. The scenery was of the simplest. The costume was one conventional to the tragic stage; there was only the slightest attempt to dress the parts. The plays thus had the simplicity and breadth of treatment which we have seen in the statuary and architecture of the period. The art of Pheidias is the most illuminating commentary upon that of Sophocles. As we saw in Cresilas’ portrait of Pericles, idealistic treatment is maintained so faithfully as a principle that realistic characterisation is only admitted so far as it does not conflict with the ideal. In both arts the heroes and heroines must have the profile and contours of physical and moral perfection. It is only within these limits that Deianira can be soft and womanly, Antigone stern and faithful unto death, Ajax bluff and bold, Neoptolemus young and generous. There are broader strokes of character-drawing in the minor characters. Messengers, slaves, and sentinels are sometimes permitted the homely sententiousness of Juliet’s Nurse. But there is nothing that can truly be called relief from the stern shadows that encompass the world of Greek tragedy.

It must not be forgotten that the themes upon which Tragedy drew were, almost exclusively, the heroic or epic legends. One or two exceptions there are; the “Persæ” of Æschylus is one such, for reasons which I have already explained. Phrynichus also wrote a tragedy founded on contemporary history, “The Sack of Miletus,” an episode of the Ionian revolt. But such a theme came too near home, touched too closely on politics, and the poet was punished with a fine. Otherwise the dramatist had no scope for originality or for the element of the unexpected in the choice of his plot. It is as if

Plate LIV.THEATRE AT EPIDAURUSEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate LIV.THEATRE AT EPIDAURUS

English Photo Co., Athens

our dramatists were restricted to the Bible for their choice of subjects instead of being entirely debarred from it. The audience knew the main outline of the story as soon as the play began. Thus the audience was often in the secret while the characters on the stage were not, and this fact gave scope for dramatic irony, which is especially connected with the name of Sophocles.

Sophocles is for literature the supreme embodiment of the Athenian spirit at this its purest and highest period. The tragedies of Æschylus have the grandeur and incompleteness of archaic art. He wrestles with the most awful problems of human destiny and divine purpose. His style matches his themes; it is a whirlpool of foaming imagery in which great masses of poetry in phrase and metaphor appear and disappear continually. He continually baffles the transcriber and the modern interpreter, and it is only the most reverential spirit that can refrain from occasional sensations of ludicrous bathos. Euripides, on the other hand, is so fluent and easy in his craftsmanship that he often seems by contrast commonplace. He is probably the cleverest of all dramatists, and he often dealt with his religious themes in the spirit of an unabashed sceptic. Like Plato, he saw that the gods of anthropomorphic creation were very far from ideal; and he used all the craft and subtlety of the rationalist to exhibit them at their weakest. Æschylus is the poet of the religious men of Marathon; Euripides, “the human,” is the prophet of the New Age of the fourth century, liberal, cosmopolitan, restless and fearless in inquiry. Sophocles is the true exponent of Periclean Athens in the realm of literature.

With his inflexible idealism, the poetry of Sophocles is sublimated almost beyond human ken. Moderns sometimes find him too perfect, too statuesque to be interesting. It is both their misfortune and their fault. The appreciation of Sophocles is a test of refined scholarship and an ear sensitive to the inner voices of poetry. This makes translation almost impossible, but Mr. Whitelaw, of Rugby, has come so near to achieving thatimpossible that I would venture, through his medium, to present a specimen of this poet’s exquisite art. This is the famous choric ode on Love from the “Antigone.”

Strophe“O Love, our conqueror, matchless in might,Thou prevailest, O Love, thou dividest the prey:In damask cheeks of a maidenThy watch through the night is set.Thou roamest over the sea;On the hills, in the shepherd’s huts, thou art;Nor of deathless gods, nor of shortlived men,From thy madness any escapeth.Antistrophe“Unjust, through thee, are the thoughts of the just;Thou dost bend them, O Love, to thy will, to thy spite.Unkindly strife thou hast kindled,This wrangling of son with sire.For great laws, throned in the heart,To the sway of a rival power give place,To the love-light flashed from a fair bride’s eyes:In her triumph laughs Aphrodite.Me, even now, me also,Seeing these things, a sudden pityBeyond all governance transports:The fountains of my tearsI can refrain no more,Seeing Antigone here to the bridal chamberCome, to the all-receiving chamber of Death.”

Strophe

“O Love, our conqueror, matchless in might,Thou prevailest, O Love, thou dividest the prey:In damask cheeks of a maidenThy watch through the night is set.Thou roamest over the sea;On the hills, in the shepherd’s huts, thou art;Nor of deathless gods, nor of shortlived men,From thy madness any escapeth.

Antistrophe

“Unjust, through thee, are the thoughts of the just;Thou dost bend them, O Love, to thy will, to thy spite.Unkindly strife thou hast kindled,This wrangling of son with sire.For great laws, throned in the heart,To the sway of a rival power give place,To the love-light flashed from a fair bride’s eyes:In her triumph laughs Aphrodite.Me, even now, me also,Seeing these things, a sudden pityBeyond all governance transports:The fountains of my tearsI can refrain no more,Seeing Antigone here to the bridal chamberCome, to the all-receiving chamber of Death.”

In this ode we have the Greek tragic view of the passion of Love, as the destroyer and distractor of man’s peace and sanity. Love is one of the means whereby tragic fate fulfils its purposes of vengeance. The circumstances of this particular case are these: Of Antigone’s two brothers one had marched against his native city, and the other had taken arms in its defence. Both had fallen on the field of battle. Creon, the city’s tyrant, forbade any one, under pain of death, to give burial to the slain enemy. In this, of course, he was violating one ofthe most sacred laws of Greek religion. Now Antigone was betrothed to Creon’s own son, Hæmon; nevertheless her duty was to brave the tyrant’s decree and give the honours of formal burial to her dead brother. She did so. Creon thereupon pronounced her doom, and Hæmon in his despair slew himself upon the tomb in which she was immured. The whole story is but an episode in the doom of the house of Œdipus, father of Antigone. The Greek view of Love, then, is the antithesis of the romantic view of it. Where Love conflicts with duty it must be rigorously suppressed, as a source of folly, weakness, and wickedness. So much is this the case that Sophocles puts into the mouth of Antigone words which he had probably borrowed from Herodotus, and which give a view of the Great Passion so painfully unromantic that the modern commentator, who for all his prosiness is a thoroughly romantic person, is tempted to use the shears by which he commonly cuts his knots and call it an interpolation. “My duty,” says Antigone, “is to my brother first. You speak of my duty to my future husband, and my future children. I reply that a brother is more than a husband or children;they can be replaced, a brother cannot.”

An even more disconcerting display of common sense in a presumably romantic situation is seen in that amazing play the “Alcestis” of Euripides—surely the most conspicuous failure in all dramatic literature. Every one knows the tale, how Admetus was allowed as a boon from Apollo to get some one else as a substitute in his place when Death came to fetch him. His faithful wife, Alcestis, took his place, being consoled by Admetus with the promise of a handsome funeral. Then the king’s old father appears upon the scene to offer his condolences to the widower, but is immediately assailed with the most vehement reproaches for not having himself, as an old man with one foot in the grave already, shown sufficient pluck to volunteer death. He not unnaturally retorts that if it is a question of daring to die, Admetus himself had not been remarkable for courage. The point is one that pleases Euripides;it is a nice point of casuistry; he lets the speakers dispute it at some length. I think these two passages are significant of much. When we think of the Greeks as a race of poetic and artistic genius we must not forget that practical, unsentimental common sense is among their most prominent characteristics. They habitually exposed weakly infants to death. Their comedy is singularly merciless to disease and deformity. Plato’s treatment of the sex problem in his ideal republic is strikingly cold-blooded, but hardly more so than the actual treatment of the same problem in the real republic of Sparta. Before we leave this question of the romantic in the Greek character two things should be observed. The romantic element unquestionably grows stronger as Greek civilisation approaches its decline: there is a good deal of it in Menander and Theocritus, still more in Heliodorus; Alexander the Great is romantic to the finger-tips. Secondly, although there is so little of it in Tragedy, or generally in the relations between the two sexes, it is found in a degree of almost modern intensity in the relations between Heracles and Hylas, between Theseus and Peirithous, between Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It was not foolishness to the Greeks for a man to face death for the youth he loved. Indeed, upon that theory Epaminondas the Theban organised that Sacred Band which for a time revolutionised Greek history.

Another characteristic excellence of Greek drama, and especially of Sophocles, is its extraordinary power of narrative. With its severe scenic limitations, the Attic stage wisely refrained from attempting to reproduce realistically exciting spectacular incidents. The actual “tragedies” seldom occur in the sight of the audience. Far more often the hero or heroine leaves the stage in despair, the chorus intervenes with a mournful ode, and then a messenger arrives with a narrative of the fatal occurrence. Shakespeare, with scarcely less severe limitations, faced the impossible, and courted ridicule by representing battles in full detail on the stage by means of a handful of overworked “supers.” What they could not represent the Greeks narrated; and Horace, indeed, exalts it into a principle of dramatic art that “Medea must not butcher her babes in public.” That the Greek dramatists so refrained was probably due to dramatic tradition as well as to the practical necessities of the case. When there was only one speaking actor in addition to the chorus his part must have been chiefly what our composers of oratorios call “recitative.” For these two reasons, and perhaps also in obedience to the Greek spirit of self-restraint, narrative declamation by “messengers” is a striking feature of all Greek tragedy.

We have seen already the religious theory upon which tragedy is generally based, the logical succession of Success, Pride, Vengeance, and Ruin. The tragedians deal largely with stories of the doom which had pursued certain of the heroic houses like that of Labdacus or Atreus. In such cases a prophetic curse rests upon the entire dynasty: Atreus slays his brother’s children and bequeaths doom for Agamemnon. Agamemnon is slain by his guilty wife Clytæmnestra, whereby a duty of vengeance devolves upon their son Orestes, whomustslay his mother, and thereforemustincur the celestial doom of the matricide, unless Apollo himself can intervene to release him from the vengeance of the Furies. Such stories were pursued by all three great tragedians, often in sequences of three tragedies called trilogies. They have no “moral,” except that sin breeds suffering to the third and fourth generation, but the sin is often an involuntary one. The purpose of the tragedian is to show the struggles of man against fate. According to Aristotle’s oft-quoted theory, the purpose of Tragedy is to act as a “purgative of the emotions by means of pity and terror.” As the surgeon lets blood in order to reduce fever, so the drama enables the spectator to acquire peace of soul through the vicarious sorrows of its heroes and heroines. Aristotle declares every tragedy to consist of two parts, the tying of the knot and the loosing of it. The “loosing” commonly involves aperipeteia, or sudden reversal of fortune, as when Agamemnon’s triumphant return is changedto death and mourning; often it is brought about by ananagnōrĭsis, or recognition, as when the stranger in the palace is found to be Orestes come home for revenge. The so-called Aristotelian “unities,” which have loomed so bulkily in the history of dramatic criticism, and under the fear of which the classical dramatists of France were imprisoned, are not to be found in Aristotle. He does, indeed, advocate unity of subject, but unity of time and place are nowhere demanded. The natural limitations and the consequent simplicity of the Greek stage generally imposed these unities as a practical necessity.

Greek simplicity is often, as we have seen, a studiously contrived impression and the result of elaborate concealment of art. That it is not entirely so in the case of the drama is proved by the astonishing fertility of the principal dramatists. Æschylus wrote more than 70 plays, Sophocles 113, Euripides 92, and another tragic poet whose work has not survived 240. They were written and produced in competition. In 468B.C.Sophocles began his public career by competing against Æschylus for the prize of tragedy. As the house seemed equally divided, the presiding archon left the decision to the ten generals who had just come back victorious from their warfare in Thrace. The prize was awarded to Sophocles, who, it is significant to notice, had been specially trained under a famous musician. Euripides only won the prize five times in a poetical career of fifty years. A prize was likewise awarded to the choregus who produced and trained the best chorus. It was the custom for the successful choregus, who was always, of course, a rich man, to dedicate his prize—a tripod—in a certain street in Athens. One such monument of the fourth century by a certain Lysicrates is still standing in fair preservation. It was a pretty example of the luxurious Corinthian order of architecture.[71]

Tragedies were performed three times a year at the three festivals of Dionysus. The poet had an audience of 13,000,

Plate LV.MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES AT ATHENSEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate LV.MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES AT ATHENS

English Photo Co., Athens

including strangers from all parts of Greece. At first, it would seem, admission was free, but so great was the crush that a small entrance fee was charged. It was one of the really popular measures of Pericles to start a fund not only for enabling the poorer citizens to enter free, but actually to compensate them for their loss of employment while engaged in this public duty. After all, why should the privileges of free education be lost by the citizen merely because he is over fourteen years of age? Why should we have to pay to enter the theatre, when the doors of the National Gallery are opened to us for nothing?

I find it much more difficult to speak of Athenian Comedy with candour and discrimination. Scholars of unblemished reputation and unimpeachable sense of humour do unquestionably find the plays of Aristophanes, even when produced by English schoolboys on speech-day, excessively diverting. There is, it is true, in Aristophanes a good deal of simple honest fun of the type represented by Mr. Punch or Mr. Pickwick and his spectacles in the wheelbarrow. When the wrong man gets a thwacking or when an ignorant amateur told to sittothe oar proceeds to sitonit, it is, I suppose, no less funny in the twentieth centuryanno Dominithan it was in the fifth century before Christ. But there I must leave the humour of Aristophanes to those who can appreciate it and still laugh even when they have laboriously picked out the point of the joke from the notes at the end of their text-book. Most of the humour is of this type. It was written to burlesque the well-known figures of the day, and no doubt served its purpose extremely well. Indeed, there is no more certain proof of the liberty of speech which prevailed in Athens than the fact that Aristophanes was permitted to represent Cleon the Prime Minister in successive plays in the most ludicrous and offensive situations. The Old Comedy of Athens rested largely upon a basis of venomous personal slander and libel without self-restraint, without even common decency. It must be added that all ancient humour was corrupted at the sourcewith obscenity. Anthropology, no doubt, explains this satisfactorily for the anthropologist. Comedy took its rise from obscene representations of the power of fecundity. Women and children were properly forbidden to be present at comic representations. It is not only thus with literature; the comic vase-paintings of Athens and the comic frescoes of Pompeii are not suitable to modern taste.

Aristophanes as a poet is in a very different category. Every now and then in a parabasis he turns to talk to his audience, so to speak, in his own person, dropping for the moment into serious vein. In such passages he is often superb.

In the following dialogue from “The Frogs” we have an interesting and characteristic piece of literary criticism. Aristophanes is, as we have seen, a Tory. The Athenian he loves is remarkably like the John Bull of our national ideal. Here Æschylus as the poet of the old order is at issue with Euripides, and Dionysus himself is there to umpire, disguised as an irrelevant Philistine. The spirited and very free translation is by Hookham Frere. Euripides has already expounded his principles, and Æschylus now takes his turn.

Æschylus“Observe then, and mark, what our citizens were,When first from my care they were trusted to you;Not scoundrel informers, or paltry buffoons,Evading the services due to the State;But with hearts all on fire, for adventure and war,Distinguished for hardiness, stature, and strength,Breathing forth nothing but lances and darts,Arms, and equipment, and battle array,Bucklers, and shields, and habergeons, and hauberks,Helmets, and plumes, and heroic attire.Euripides“But how did you manage to make ’em so manly?What was the method, the means that you took?Dionysus“Speak, Æschylus, speak, and behave yourself better,And don’t, in your rage, stand so silent and stern.

Æschylus

“Observe then, and mark, what our citizens were,When first from my care they were trusted to you;Not scoundrel informers, or paltry buffoons,Evading the services due to the State;But with hearts all on fire, for adventure and war,Distinguished for hardiness, stature, and strength,Breathing forth nothing but lances and darts,Arms, and equipment, and battle array,Bucklers, and shields, and habergeons, and hauberks,Helmets, and plumes, and heroic attire.

Euripides

“But how did you manage to make ’em so manly?What was the method, the means that you took?

Dionysus

“Speak, Æschylus, speak, and behave yourself better,And don’t, in your rage, stand so silent and stern.

Plate 56.—Red-figured Vase; and Pyxis

Æschylus“A drama, brimful with heroical spirit.Euripides“What did you call it?Æschylus“‘The Chiefs against Thebes,’That inspired each spectator with martial ambition,Courage, and ardour, and prowess, and pride.Dionysus“But you did very wrong to encourage the Thebans.Indeed you deserve to be punished, you do,For the Thebans are grown to be capital soldiers.You’ve done us a mischief by that very thing.Æschylus“The fault was your own, if you took other courses;The lesson I taught was directed to you;Then I gave you the glorious theme of ‘The Persians,’Replete with sublime patriotical strains,The record and example of noble achievement,The delight of the city, the pride of the stage.Dionysus“I rejoiced, I confess, when the tidings were carriedTo old King Darius, so long dead and buried,And the chorus in concert kept wringing their hands,Weeping and wailing, and crying, Alas!Æschylus“Such is the duty, the task of a poet,Fulfilling in honour his office and trust.Look to traditional history, lookTo antiquity, primitive, early, remote:See there what a blessing illustrious poetsConferr’d on mankind, in the centuries past.Orpheus instructed mankind in religion,Reclaimed them from bloodshed and barbarous rites;Musæus delivered the doctrine of medicine,And warnings prophetic for ages to come.Next came old Hesiod, teaching us husbandry,Ploughing, and sowing, and rural affairs,Rural economy, rural astronomy,Homely morality, labour and thrift:Homer himself, our adorable Homer,What was his title to praise and renown?What but the worth of the lessons he taught us,Discipline, arms, and endurance of war?”

Æschylus

“A drama, brimful with heroical spirit.

Euripides

“What did you call it?

Æschylus

“‘The Chiefs against Thebes,’That inspired each spectator with martial ambition,Courage, and ardour, and prowess, and pride.

Dionysus

“But you did very wrong to encourage the Thebans.Indeed you deserve to be punished, you do,For the Thebans are grown to be capital soldiers.You’ve done us a mischief by that very thing.

Æschylus

“The fault was your own, if you took other courses;The lesson I taught was directed to you;Then I gave you the glorious theme of ‘The Persians,’Replete with sublime patriotical strains,The record and example of noble achievement,The delight of the city, the pride of the stage.

Dionysus

“I rejoiced, I confess, when the tidings were carriedTo old King Darius, so long dead and buried,And the chorus in concert kept wringing their hands,Weeping and wailing, and crying, Alas!

Æschylus

“Such is the duty, the task of a poet,Fulfilling in honour his office and trust.Look to traditional history, lookTo antiquity, primitive, early, remote:See there what a blessing illustrious poetsConferr’d on mankind, in the centuries past.Orpheus instructed mankind in religion,Reclaimed them from bloodshed and barbarous rites;Musæus delivered the doctrine of medicine,And warnings prophetic for ages to come.Next came old Hesiod, teaching us husbandry,Ploughing, and sowing, and rural affairs,Rural economy, rural astronomy,Homely morality, labour and thrift:Homer himself, our adorable Homer,What was his title to praise and renown?What but the worth of the lessons he taught us,Discipline, arms, and endurance of war?”

All Greek literature and art is judged by critics of all sorts from a standard almost exclusively moral. “Did he teach well?” “Did his art make people better?” Such are the questions constantly applied. The doctrine of Art for Art’s sake would have seemed to the Greeks monstrous and wicked. The actual charges made against Euripides in these scenes are (1) that he was an innovator; (2) that he was a realist, introducing lame people and beggars in rags on the idealist tragic stage; (3) that he was fond of casuistry, and thereby cultivated dishonesty; (4) that he chose immoral subjects dealing with such revolting topics as women in love! Sophocles is evidently regarded by our irrepressible bard as a personage too sacred to be brought upon his stage. That gentle spirit would have no part in such a strife either here or in the underworld.

I look upon Greek Comedy as a Saturnalian product. A people accustomed to a strict, self-imposed discipline in the rest of its art and morals deliberately throws off its restraints and lets itself go on occasions, like a Scotchman at Hogmanay. The Greeks were not in the least shocked by occasional and seasonable ebullitions of high spirits. If you had an enemy or an opponent in politics, the production of a comedy was the time when you might reasonably assert that his deceased mother had been a greengrocer, or that his wife had eloped with a Thracian footman, or that his face was ugly and his person offensive to the senses. You were expected to include some references to Melanthius, a tragic poet who was notoriously and most laughably afflicted with leprosy, or Opuntius, who provoked great mirth by having only one eye, or Cleonymus, who lost his shield on the field of battle, or Patroclides, who

Plate 57.—White Polychrome Vases (“Lecythi”)

suffered a celebrated accident in the theatre. Any reference to leather was sure of a hearty laugh, for Cleon was interested in the leather-market. Anything about crabs tickled the audience, because they all knew Carcinus, the tragic poet. Impudent personalities are generally amusing for the moment, and they were the mainstay of old comedy. May it rest in peace!

Almost to weariness the chronicler of Greek culture has to reiterate this virtue of Moderation, Self-knowledge, Self-restraint, as the secret of all that is highest in the great period. It is a very remarkable phenomenon after all. There was nothing in the Greek temperament to account for it: on the contrary, they were excitable and hot-blooded people of the South. There was nothing at all in their religion to preach asceticism. It was not a product of reaction, a result of surfeit from extravagance, because it belongs to the earlier phases of culture only. I think it was due in a large measure to the force of historical circumstances. The same influences of external barbarism which forced them to fence their states behind a ring-wall on a rocky citadel also led them to enclose their souls within a wall of reserve. The West was not yet awake; it was against the East that they had to fight, spiritually as well as bodily. Eastern “barbarism,” which was really civilisation, ancient and splendid, visibly exhibited all the lusts of the flesh, all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. Notably the Ionian philosophers, who saw the East close at hand, were the first to preach “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much!” And the Athenians, who had personally inflicted the Nemesis that attends pride, were the first to practise it.

But they seem to have had some congenital craving for perfection. Some have attributed it to their perfect physical health. Aristophanes, as we have just seen, laughs scornfully at disease and deformity. Euripides is arraigned for getting dramatic pathos out of rags and tatters. When Periclesdelivers his oration over the dead soldiers he never once alludes to an individual’s prowess or fate. When Pheidias designs his long frieze, though there is infinite variety in the poses of his people, though every fold of drapery, every limb of man and beast is separately arranged with an eye to its own value in the design, the faces are not allowed to express any transient or personal emotion. A monster, such as a Centaur, or a Giant, or a Barbarian, may be allowed a wrinkled forehead to express age, or a twisted mouth to express pain or emotion, but a Greek must be perfect and serene.

This principle may be studied in detail upon the tombstones of Athens. You may often get much illumination about the character of people from their attitude in presence of death. The Turk plants cypresses in his cemeteries, carves a turban on a shaft over his graves, and then leaves the dead to keep their own graveyards tidy. The Frenchman adorns his tombs with conventional wreaths of tin flowers. The Englishman advertises the virtues of the wealthy deceased and the emotions of the survivors in Biblical texts or rather insincere epitaphs. The Italian, when he can afford it, erects florid monuments in Carrara marble. The nomad barbarian burns his dead, the jungle savage leaves the corpse in a tree for sepulture by the birds of heaven. The Egyptian preserves the body in balms and spices for the great awakening. The Roman generally used the pyre and stored the ashes methodically in tombs and catacombs.

We have seen that a divergence in funeral practice probably marks the difference between the two races which went to make up the population of ancient Greece. The aboriginal Southerners seem to have preserved their dead in shaft-graves and dome-graves, when their means allowed, sometimes only in earthenware jars. Rock-tombs of a similar character are found in great numbers all over Asia Minor, especially in Phrygia and Lycia. Sometimes in more civilised times they are replaced by large sarcophagi of stone, wood, or earthenware. Such is the Harpy Tomb at Xanthus, and the sculptures upon

Plate LVIII.ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE. [TOMBSTONE RELIEF

it indicate the religious beliefs which accompany that form of burial—the winged angels which carry the soul away after death, whether called Fates or Harpies. Then the soul itself is often represented as a tiny winged figure, sometimes issuing from the mouth of the dead. It was thus that the Greek word Psyche came to mean both “soul” and “butterfly.” Tombs of this architectural character were obviously intended as houses for the dead, and, indeed, their design often follows the character of the houses occupied by the living. In accordance with the same idea, objects dear to the living are buried with the dead, such as the weapons and accoutrements of a warrior, the jewels and personal belongings of a woman, the toys of a child. Sometimes economical motives lead to a mere conventional copying of the real object, and many of the axes and swords found in the old tombs are far too weak ever to have been made for practical use. Blood and libations were sometimes poured into the graves, and vessels containing oil, or even food and drink, were often placed in the tomb, and when money came into use as much of that as could conveniently be spared. That too was conventionalised into the penny due to Charon, who ferried souls across the Styx. The “sop to Cerberus” was also a mythological explanation of the food buried with the body.

But Charon and Cerberus seem to belong to a different series of ideas about the dead. The Northerners, such as the Achæans of Homer, burned their dead upon the funeral pyre, collecting their ashes in jars and urns, and in the case of a great man raising a barrow over the spot. They believed that the soul of the happy warrior departed to a Valhalla or Paradise in the Isles of the Blessed, where he lived thenceforth as he had lived on earth at his best, in continual feasting and athletic exercise. The soul could not attain to this blessed relief until it had received the rites of burial, and to deny burial was an awful crime against Greek morality. After a battle one side generally had to acknowledge its defeat by asking for a truce in order that it might bury its dead.

Historical Athens practised both burial and cremation, aftera period of lying in state. Burial would seem to have been the older custom, for it was assumed that the bones of Theseus must still be in existence somewhere, until they were eventually discovered in the island of Scyros. The Blessed Isles and the Heroic Valhalla doubtless survived as a literary tradition, but the “Hades” of ordinary Greek religion was the “grisly home” of Pluto and Persephone, a place of darkness and lamentation. We have seen that Pythagoras taught the immortality of the soul; but then, as now, it was not philosophy which created the popular ideas about death. The belief in immortality which undoubtedly prevailed generally in Greece seems to have been connected rather with the oldest religion of agricultural days. Such was the mystical hope given to the initiated in the secret nocturnal rites of Eleusis. It was intimately connected with the agricultural deities, Demeter the Earth Mother, Persephone the Maiden, her daughter, Triptolemus, the boy-god, and Eubouleus, the divine swineherd. The beautiful mythological representation of the doctrine in the story of Persephone, who was carried off by Hades to be his bride in the underworld while she was gathering flowers, and then at her mother’s powerful intercession was granted as a compromise the liberty to return to earth for half the year, is visibly a parable of summer and winter. It seems that current Greek theology so far as it related to Death was founded on naturalistic observation of the revival of the seasons and the rebirth of the crops. This theology was strongest across the water in Asia Minor, in its connection with the worship of Adonis.

Nevertheless, belief in immortality was not in Greece any more than it is with us strong enough to assuage the sting of Death or to enable the Greeks to dispense with the formalities of funerals. The Athenians practised the usual rites of mourning with professional musicians and dirge-singers, black clothes, women tearing their hair and beating their breasts. All this was and is inevitable, but the public sense of Greece continually demanded decency and reserve in the presence of

Back to Index Next