problems, is a living gallery of woman types: Clytemnestra and Cassandra,
Electra and the Nurse, the chorus of maidens in the _Choephoroi_, and
the chorus of women furies in the _Eumenides_. In the _Agamemnon_ the
two women are sharply contrasted; Clytemnestra, the queen who will not
submit to man’s rule; Cassandra, the victim predestined by fate to
suffer the caprices of a master, and to pass from the treacherous lover,
Apollo, to the brutal owner, Agamemnon. No one can read the play and feel
much sympathy with the murdered king. He is done to death with every
circumstance of horror; returning home after many years’ absence in a
foreign land, where he has been fighting for his country, he finds within
his house not a faithful wife, but a secret enemy; she conceals her
hatred, allures him to the bath, and there, with her own hands, murders
him.
And yet the dramatist, and his readers, find the wife rather than
the husband the sympathetic character. It is partly the intolerable
callousness and brutal pride of Agamemnon, who has sacrificed his
daughter’s life to help on his political schemes, and now brings home
with him from Troy the concubine whom he has compelled to share his bed.
But there is also the feeling that Clytemnestra is really the better man
of the pair: that she is naturally born to rule, and that her subjection
to a man would be against the law of nature. Certainly in the play she
takes the first place, and Cassandra, a part vocally the most important
of any, comes next. The men, Agamemnon, the Watchman, the Herald,
Ægisthus, and the helpless chorus of aged councillors, are merely foils
to the ‘manlike’ queen. The contrast, indeed, between the resolute woman
and the irresolute men in the closing scenes is almost comic, and the
play ends with her triumph. In the sequel, _The Libation Bearers_, the
main action is again in the hands of women, Electra and her friends, the
maidens of the chorus. Orestes, it is true, does the actual killing; but
there is this difference between brother and sister: Electra acts on her
own initiative, and is a woman as strong-willed as Clytemnestra herself;
Orestes acts only in obedience to the promptings of others. Electra feels
no remorse; Orestes, as soon as he has killed his mother, is tormented
by imaginary terrors. Among the characters of the second play, by far
the most interesting is the old Nurse. She is obviously studied from the
life, and is one of the most vivid figures of Greek Drama: her kindly
temper and affection for her former charge are contrasted with the
fierce bitterness of Electra, and she supplies the one touch of humour
that lightens the mournful music of this play.
Last comes the _Eumenides_, which discusses with almost embarrassing
frankness the physical problems of relationship. ‘Is the mother who
conceives, or the father who begets the child, the nearer relative?’ And
again, ‘Is not the murder of a husband, who is no relation by blood, less
heinous than the murder of the mother who brought you into the world?’
These are some of the questions that are raised but not answered, for the
final reconciliation satisfies the religious rather than the practical
sense. The plot may be put briefly:
A band of women are pursuing a man over the earth; pursuing relentlessly
until he shall die of fatigue. Whenever the pursuit slackens, another
woman—or rather her spirit—urges on the chase. The man appeals in vain
for help from men, and at last a third woman by skilful diplomacy
persuades the avengers—or at least some of them—to agree to a
reconciliation.
Such is the Æschylean theatre; but, as we have said, Æschylus is a
lonely spirit in Athens. The general view of women is represented by
the next generation, Pericles, Sophocles, and Thucydides, the greatest
statesman, dramatist, and historian of their time. The last of the
three is particularly significant. You may read through his History
from beginning to end—and if you are a student of affairs you will not
find any other book in the world quite so valuable—but, concerning
one-half of the human race, you will get scarcely a word. Even in the
hortatory speeches, when soldiers are being encouraged to fight for their
possessions, women only come in the second place after the children. In
the rest of the History they are practically never mentioned.
To Thucydides, women, even such a woman as Aspasia, hardly existed.
Politics were to him the serious business, war the great game of life,
and in neither of these did women take part. He probably would have
agreed with his hero Pericles, ‘a woman’s highest glory is not to fall
below the standard of such natural powers as she possesses: that woman
is best of whom there is the least talk among men, whether in the way of
praise or blame.’
In his indifference the historian faithfully follows the example of the
statesman. Pericles, of whose mistress, Aspasia, we hear so much, and
of whose wife, the mother of his sons, we hear so little, appears never
to have considered the part that nature has assigned to women in the
creation and management of a state. In his day Athens was faced by a war
that in one year robbed her of many of the bravest of her sons. A state
funeral was given them at which, as Thucydides tells us: ‘Any one who
wished, stranger or citizen, could be present: even women were there
to mourn for their relatives at the grave.’ At the end of the ceremony
Pericles made that Funeral Oration in praise of Athens of which echoes
are to be found in all contemporary Greek literature. Most of the speech
dwells resolutely on the glory of these heroic deaths and the grandeur
of the sacrifices made, but at the last the orator condescends to human
feeling and addresses some noble words of comfort to the men before him,
taking them in succession as fathers, sons, and brothers of the dead.
Then comes the one final cold sentence addressed not to the mothers, but
to the widows in his audience: ‘a few words of advice,’ Pericles calls
it, and it is the language of reproof rather than that of sympathy.
Their ignorance of women made even the greatest minds in Athens
insensible to women’s true position, and in the case of Thucydides there
is a further reason. When the historian came to compose his work he was
too bitterly disillusioned to concern himself with anything but his main
subject, the failure of Athens to maintain the Periclean system. In a
world where blind chance seemed to rule and the highest political ideals
went unrealised, the social position of women may well have seemed to him
a trifle.
But Thucydides’ testimony is chiefly negative: we get clearer evidence
from Sophocles. Sophocles is the typical Athenian, versatile and
ingratiating, ‘_eutrapelos, eukolos_.’ Actor, poet, priest, and general,
he was one of the most popular men of his time—_with men_. Of his family
life we have not quite such a brilliant picture. His wife is one of
the many anonymous women, the wives of great men. His children did not
apparently regard their father with as much affection as did the outside
world, and in his old age tried to deprive him of the control of his
property. As to women, and the softer affections of life, outside his own
writing we have the anecdote in Plato’s _Republic_. The poet in his old
age was asked how he felt in regard to love: ‘Hush, hush,’ he replied; ‘I
have escaped and right gladly. I feel like a slave who has escaped from a
mad master.’
That was the feeling which the conditions of life at Athens engendered.
Woman and woman’s love was a necessary weakness: happy the man who could
break free, and if we believe the stories in Athenæus, Sophocles also
in escaping from women fell into the Ionian snare. In his plays women
are generally a negligible quantity; at least the only women whom he
succeeds in making lifelike are the slave women, the ministering angels
like Deianira and Tecmessa who meekly respect their master’s words, ‘oft
dinned into their ears’—‘Woman, for women silence is the finest robe.’
Tecmessa, beautiful character though she is, and far superior to Ajax
in moral strength, has no independent existence apart from her lord and
master. Deianira, deserted by her errant husband, has no thought of
resentment: she only wants to get her master back, and is prepared to
stoop to any means if she may regain his company. And it is obvious that
these two ladies, who would make a modern woman despair, are Sophocles’
ideals of feminine excellence.
Of the other plays, the _Œdipus Tyrannus_ contains only one woman
character—Jocasta; the mother married to her own son, a dreadful figure,
and one almost impossible to dramatise successfully. In the play she
takes only a minor part, and her silent exit is the most effective touch;
but it is interesting here to compare Sophocles with Euripides, who in
the _Phœnician Women_ does succeed in making Jocasta a real and most
pathetic figure. The _Œdipus at Colonus_ has the two girls, Antigone and
Ismene, but they are sexless and dramatically only important as types of
girlish devotion. The _Philoctetes_, like the two Œdipus plays, has a
male chorus and alone among Greek tragedies, if we except the _Rhesus_,
has no female characters. It is also, whatever the reason, the dullest
play we possess.
There remain the _Electra_ and the _Antigone_, and the first of these
is a signal example of the importance for a dramatist of choice of
subject. Æschylus and Euripides have both left us plays dealing with
the same story, and a comparison with the three tragedies will reveal
the essential differences between the three poets. A dramatist must
share—imaginatively at least—in his characters’ thoughts; and women
like Clytemnestra and Electra were so beyond the range of Sophocles’
experience and sympathy that he is quite unable to make them live. Like
everything that Sophocles wrote, the _Electra_ is full of literary
accomplishment. The epic method, for example, is most ingeniously adapted
to the theatre, and a vivid narrative of the chariot race in which
Orestes is supposed to meet his death forms the centre of the play, but
there is no real grip on the dramatic situation: it is literature, not
life.
In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, the poet is dealing with a subject
thoroughly congenial to his temperament, the conflict between law and the
individual, and one independent of sex, and the play is a magnificent
example of his art.
Here certainly the central figure is a woman, or, at least, a girl; but
the interest does not depend upon her sex, for little dramatic use is
made of the Hæmon episode. It is not her sex but her social position that
affects the problem of the play, a problem vital enough in itself without
any sex interest—‘How far is an individual justified in setting his or
her conscience against the law of the State?’
Antigone is a girl orphan, born out of legal wedlock, a slave without a
master; and it is a crowning stroke of irony to pit her lonely figure
against the majesty of man-made law. To modern readers she seems
intensely pathetic, and an Athenian audience would, doubtless, have
sympathised with her as a rebel, if not as a woman. There is no word
in Greek for ‘to command,’ and their only word for ‘to obey’ means
literally ‘to allow oneself to be persuaded,’ so that the conscientious
objector was not uncommon. But Sophocles had been a general, and knew by
experience the way of Athenian soldiers, and it is not certain that he
appreciates his heroine’s wilfulness in quite so favourable a light; for,
as we see in his other plays, he was essentially on the side of law. He
was rather an observer, with a wonderful command of language, than an
original thinker or critic of the established order; and it is a curious
turn of fortune for a poet, who had by no means a close or a sympathetic
knowledge of woman’s character, that the _Antigone_, the only play where
a woman takes a vital part, should be by far the greatest of his works.
The titles and fragments of his lost plays confirm the impression given
by the extant tragedies. We have nearly a hundred names of lost plays,
and barely one-fifth are called after women. Moreover, a consideration
of the titles of those plays that bear one woman’s name will reveal the
fact that the majority were probably rather anti-feminist than feminist.
Helen, Eriphylë, Pandora, Procris, Tyro: Helen, who deserted her husband
and her home; Eriphylë, who sold her husband for gold; Pandora, the
incarnate cause of trouble among men; Procris, bought by a paramour;
Tyro, seduced by a second lover: the legends of these ladies were
arranged to please the Athenian public. Venal and fickle creatures, they
show plainly how necessary it is to keep a close guard over women, and it
may be suspected that Sophocles, in his treatment of the plot, did not
disappoint the expectations of his audience.
In five plays only is the title taken from the chorus, the _Spartan
Women_, the _Lemnian Women_, the _Water-carriers_, the _Women of Scyros_,
and the _Captive Women_; and it is very unlikely, considering the titles,
that any one of the five was written with much sympathy with feminine
ideals. ‘Spartan’ and ‘Lemnian’ women were at Athens almost proverbial
for ‘unwomanly’ females; a ‘Water-carrier’ was synonymous with a gossip.
Of the other two we have a little definite information. Philostratus
tells us that the _Women of Scyros_ treated of the not very pleasant
tale of the young Achilles, disguised as a girl in the king’s harem,
and becoming there the father of Neoptolemus, by the young princess,
Deidameia. Of the _Captive Women_ we know that it had the same plot as
Euripides’ _Trojan Women_, but the incidents were treated—_humorously_.
It is not, perhaps, impossible that an author even to-day might regard
the troubles of women in war as a fit subject for a jest; but things
have advanced so far that we should hardly regard him now as a flawless
genius, or hold him up as the highest product of our civilisation.
VII.—EURIPIDES
All Greek literature has one peculiar quality. As the tribe of scholiasts
and translators have found from the beginning, it lends itself to
interpretation; and Euripides has suffered more than most authors from
his interpreters. The ancient belief that Euripides was a misogynist is
still sometimes held, and such a misconception is not altogether our own
fault. It is partly due to Euripides himself, for the poet’s favourite
weapon is irony, and irony is a double-edged sword which can be turned
against those who dare to use it. Euripides does not say plainly and
straightforwardly ‘You men think yourselves naturally superior to women:
braver, more truthful, more unselfish: in reality this superiority is
a mere figment of your imagination.’ Neither the poet nor his audience
would have cared for such brutal frankness. Euripides exhibits the
facts of life, with some little malicious arrangement, and leaves the
judgment to others. He is too good an artist, as indeed were Æschylus and
Sophocles, to make all his women angels and all his men the reverse. Many
of his women have very obvious faults, so that if you come to his plays
with a fixed and comfortable conviction of the superiority of man, and
can shut your eyes to more than half of the action you will probably find
in what remains convincing proof of woman’s weakness.
But often our belief in Euripides’ misogyny has quite another source: our
inveterate habit of taking a joke seriously. Aristophanes, who probably
knew Euripides—the man and his plays—better than anyone in this world,
represents him as a woman-hater in danger from woman’s vengeance. We draw
the inference that Euripides did really dislike women.
Now the exact opposite of the truth was what the audience at the
performance of an Attic comedy expected. It was allowed, it was
considered proper in the case of a comic poet, that he should turn his
facts upside down. Socrates, for example, always professed himself unable
to teach anything and thought the practice of taking fees for teaching
immoral. _Therefore_, he is represented in the ‘Clouds’ as keeping a
school and teaching for hire. Euripides is the champion of woman’s
equality; _therefore_, he is represented by Aristophanes as a misogynist.
There are similar cases in our own social life. An intelligent foreigner,
if he read our literature at the time of a general election and took
the election posters seriously, would form a very wrong idea of the
estimation in which—we will say the Prime Minister—is held by most of
his countrymen. A perversion of the facts is even with us regarded as
humorous in politics, and it is thus that we should regard Aristophanes.
Classical scholars, however, have always been a serious class and while
they recognise the grossness of Aristophanes they often fail to see his
humour. The irony of Euripides and the humour of Aristophanes are both
alien to the Puritan spirit, when they are understood, and to appreciate
the first it is necessary to make a close study of all the plays.
Euripides was, first of all, a dramatist, and his main business is with
his play. But behind the playwright stands the poet and idealist, a man
not at all inclined to look on life with philosophic detachment, but
feeling, as deeply and as bitterly as any man has ever done, the basis of
injustice on which too often human society has been reared.
Euripides championed the cause of woman’s freedom against the decadents
of Ionia as he championed the cause of religious freedom against the
reactionaries of Delphi. He realised that the best method of defence is
to attack the other side: that successful defence is impossible, unless
at any rate you are prepared to take the aggressive. Open militancy in
his case was impossible, for the dramatic poet was ostensibly a servant
of the state and the majority, but by no means all, of his countrymen
supported the doctrines of the infallibility of the Delphian god and the
Athenian man, so that he is compelled to work in exactly the opposite
method to that of the misogynists. He does not labour his argument: he
does not paint with a heavy brush. If you like to disregard this point of
view you can do so, and still find much that is supremely interesting—his
gift of vivid narrative, the light music of his verse, and his
unrivalled sense of dramatic effect. But every dramatist, consciously or
unconsciously, has some groundwork of thought, some criticism of life,
which will appear more or less plainly through the dramatic action of his
plays. In Euripides that criticism is directed chiefly to the testing of
three assumptions current in his day: that God reveals his purposes to
men, that war has an ennobling effect on a nation and on individuals,
that women are by nature inferior to men.
With the first two of these dogmas we are not now concerned. As to the
real nature of Euripides’ ideas on the third, we shall get the clearest
view if we consider first the characters of his theatre, then the general
body of his plays, and lastly, those four dramas which are particularly
concerned with the relations between men and women.
The two sexes may be sub-divided, according to Greek fashion, into six
classes: Old man, man, young man, old woman, woman, young woman; and it
must be acknowledged at once that Euripides, like most Greeks, is quite
lacking in any reverence for age. His old men are apt to be dotards and
are treated with humorous contempt. Amphitryon in the Hercules is a type:
he lives in a world of illusion: he sees visions and dreams dreams, but
when serious counsel or vigorous action are necessary he is useless.
Cadmus and Teiresias in the Bacchæ are characters of the same sort.
They are meant to be humorous, and the scene in which the two old men,
wagging their hoary heads, prepare to dance and sing is pure burlesque.
Cadmus agrees with Amphitryon in his religious views: he is ready to
accept the miraculous, if it is profitable; and he scarcely troubles to
make any pretence. As regards the divinity of the new god Dionysus, his
sentiments are that, as ‘The fellow anyhow is my daughter’s son: it is my
duty as head of the family to make out that he is a great god’. Cadmus
and Amphitryon are at least partly self-deceived; Ægeus is a mere butt.
The old gentleman, who believes that his virility can be restored by
magic art, is a child in Medea’s hands, and the scene between the two is
Aristophanic in its outspoken frankness.
Generally speaking, old men in Euripides are impotent: when they are
allowed to act, their energies—Tyndareus for example, and the old
servant in the Ion—are mischievous. In one case only do old men play
a worthy part; when they are resisting the wanton violence of some
full-grown man who is attacking women and children. Sometimes, as with
Peleus and Iolaus, they succeed; sometimes they fail; but in either case
their essential weakness is a foil to the presumptuous strength of their
opponent.
Coming now to the second class, that of grown men, we get three main
types: there is the mean man, the blusterer, and the simpleton. Jason
and Admetus are mean men: mean, selfish and cowardly: capable of asking
a woman to save their lives at the risk of her own, but incapable of
gratitude. Still they are handsome, good company, and quite unconscious
of their own shortcomings. Menelaus is a worse type and one that the
poet especially disliked. He adds to meanness the vices of cruelty and
treachery and is the slave of passion. In the Orestes he is coldly
treacherous, in the Andromache treacherous and cruel, in the other plays
where he appears merely despicable. Then come the blusterers: Agamemnon
and Heracles, Lycus and Eurystheus. The first two are the ordinary
sensual man: brave enough and capable of great deeds, but unfaithful,
untruthful and self-indulgent: they seem to be strong, and they are
strong in body; but they have no strength of mind. Lycus and Eurystheus
are men of a lower type, mere bullies depending solely on force, and
Euripides does not attempt to make them interesting. Lastly, there
are the simpletons: Xuthus, Thoas and Theoclymenus—an easy prey for
the clever women—the Priestess, Iphigenia, Helen who use them as they
will. They are the men who with advancing age will be such as Ægeus and
Amphitryon. And they almost exhaust the list in our second class. There
remain only Theseus, a patriotic abstraction, the male counterpart of
Athena; Creon, ‘the King’—the name is given to more than one person—an
official rather than a living character; and some few persons in the
second plan of action: such as the herald Talthybius and the peasant
farmer in the Electra. These two latter occupy very subordinate
positions, but they are in every way more manly, more generous, more
lovable than the great men whom they serve. If we except them, there is
not a grown man in the whole theatre of Euripides who can be regarded
with sympathy.
When we come to the young men we are in a brighter world. Euripides is
essentially the poet of youth, and his younger characters are always
lovable. The heroic boy Menœceus and the kind lad Ion are figures drawn
with a tender hand. But soon the shadows of the prison house draw in,
and the slight hardness which is visible even in Ion becomes intensified
in Achilles, and still more in Hippolytus. The older the person, the
less attractive he becomes. Achilles and Hippolytus are very much like
the public school boy of our day; in many spheres of conduct they are
thoroughly reliable: truthful, self-denying and courageous: but they
are cruelly hampered by the influence of an environment which shuts
out the influence of woman at the most impressionable time of a man’s
life. Hippolytus is something of a prig and into his mouth, in the
well-known speech, Euripides puts all the stock invective against women.
The words are not the lad’s own views: he is too young to have had much
experience of women, good or bad: they are literature, the views of other
men expressed in books and unconsciously assimilated by the younger
generation.
Hippolytus is an ascetic and exaggerates: Achilles is a more manly
character. His first impulses are generous, but he does not carry them
into effect, for he is too much under the influence of other people’s
opinion: ‘good form’ is his guide in life. He has moreover, all a young
man’s vanity. ‘Countless girls are setting traps to catch me as husband’
he says; and he is deeply hurt to think that he is not consulted—‘I would
have agreed to her death, if I had been asked, but I was not; so I will
help you.’ This is the best champion that Clytemnestra can find to save
her daughter.