interesting. Pentheus is the typical ‘self-pleaser’: wilful, violent and
intolerant. That he happens to be right in his particular case does not
make him more sympathetic nor does it alter the justice of his fate. His
mode of thought is wrong. Savage repression is not the way to deal with
a cause which enlists women as its chief votaries and is kept active by
their enthusiasm. The other pairs, Orestes and Pylades, Eteocles and
Polynices, require little notice. All four have the curse of Cain upon
them: they draw the sword and fall by the sword. They are murderers first
and foremost, and chiefly interesting to the criminologist.
So much then for Euripides’ men. Let us now contrast them in their
monotony of type—impute it to the poet or the sex as you will—with the
infinite variety of his women: Phædra, Andromache, Hermionë, Creüsa,
Megara, Helen, Alcestis, Clytemnestra, Medea. There is every shade
of conduct here and nearly every form of marital complication, if we
remember that none of these wives are in love with their husbands and
that romantic affection between husband and wife is impossible. They
are all—when they have children—mothers first and wives afterwards; the
childless woman—Hermionë and, apparently, Creüsa—is embittered by her
state and her conduct also is abnormal: she is anxious to take life
because she has not given life.
The poet is at pains to show the impossibility of married love under
Greek conditions. Phædra is married to an old man, who years before had
seduced her sister. Andromache has been forcibly taken by the son of the
man who slew her first husband. Hermionë has been compelled for political
reasons to give up her cousin-lover and marry a stranger. Medea after
abandoning everything for her husband is deserted by him. Creüsa has been
seduced as a girl and as a ‘pis aller’ has married an elderly man. Megara
has been abandoned by her roving husband: she and her children are on the
point of being killed by a stranger when Heracles returns and murders
them himself. Helen runs away from her lord; Clytemnestra has no words
bad enough to use of hers.
None of these women are impeccable—Alcestis is the only flawless
character and she is meant to be a saint—their tempers are as composite
as we find them in real life; but, however wrong or mistaken some of
their actions may be, not one is altogether unsympathetic. So with the
old women. They are sometimes malignant, but they are never contemptible.
Their worst deeds are prompted by maternal affection. Phædra’s
foster-mother is a mischievous and immoral old lady, but her only wish
is to gratify her foster child. Hecuba takes a ruthless vengeance on
the Thracian king, but she is a mother avenging a murdered son. It is a
favourite motive with Euripides; the pathos of the old mother, her sons
killed, her daughters ravished, her grandchildren sold into slavery.
Hecuba in the _Trojan Women_, Jocasta in the _Phœnician Women_, the
chorus of old women in the _Suppliants_: all represent the reverse side
of war’s pomp and glory. The men triumph and the women suffer. The method
is realistic: there is little romance, in the baser sense of the word, in
these unkempt, miserable, old figures, and yet they supply the poet with
some of his most poignant passages.
But Euripides is especially successful with his pictures of young girls,
virgin martyrs—the type is not extinct—anxious and willing to sacrifice
themselves for their male relatives. Iphigenia, Polyxena and Macaria are
subtle variations of one character, and upon the figure of the first the
poet spends all his skill. At the time of the sacrifice at Aulis she is
a sentimental girl, so full of timid modesty that the very thought of
marriage fills her with shame. ‘I hid my face,’ she says, ‘in the soft
wrappings of my veil and would not take my baby brother in my arms nor
kiss my sister on the lips—I felt ashamed before them. No, I laid up for
myself many a fond embrace which I would give them when I should come
back, a married woman.’ The arguments she uses to her mother to justify
her sacrifice are poor enough: vague talk of honour, patriotism and the
insignificance of women—’Tis better that one man should live than ten
thousand women’; but her heart is right.
For Iphigenia both marriage and sacrifice prove a delusion. She never
returns home; she is defrauded of the joy of motherhood, and spends
many years of lonely virginity among strangers and in a strange land.
When we see her again she is a bitter woman, more sensible, indeed,
than the simple girl, but infinitely less lovable. Her thoughts are
all of vengeance: against Menelaus, against Helen, against mankind.
She performs her horrible task of human sacrifice with no very great
reluctance; ‘Parcelling out a tear in sympathy for kindred blood’ when
any Greek victims fall into her hands; but killing them all the same.
For one person alone she still cherishes some affection, her brother
Orestes, whom she had left a baby at home, and on him she concentrates
her frustrated motherhood.
The final stage of this rancour against life is seen in the character of
Iphigenia’s sister Electra—‘the unwed’—as we have her in the Orestes and
the play that bears her name.
Electra’s loneliness and suffering, her long brooding, her craving for
revenge have turned her mad: she again has only one sound sentiment, her
love for her brother. She is a dreadful figure, but a real one. Fire and
the knife: murder, treachery, arson: she is ready for all. Her character
is the logical outcome of many years of injuries and insults: of denial
of rights and of subjection. She is a proud spirit and will not submit,
but her pride cannot alter the situation. At last the strain of hopeless
rebellion is too great, and she becomes mad.
They make, indeed, a gloomy picture, these unmarried women, for Euripides
does not shrink from the darker side of a woman’s revolt. As Medea
bitterly says ‘Even a bad husband is better than none,’ and for the
unwedded girl there are only two alternatives, a voluntary sacrifice,
such as that whereby Macaria escapes from life, or a hopeless struggle
against the powers that be, such as Electra tries to wage.
We have now taken all the characters of the Euripidean theatre, except
one, and that one the most important of all—the permanent character of
tragedy, the chorus.
The chorus is the ideal spectator, the intermediary between audience and
actor, the interpreter of the poet’s own thoughts. It might be expected
that a poet who was a feminist at heart would usually have his chorus
composed of women, while a poet who had little sympathy with women would
prefer a chorus of men. In our extant plays this is exactly what happens.
It is a curious fact that most of the received ideas about the Greek
drama; the chorus of elders, the statuesque movements, the dignity of
tragedy, etc., etc., are drawn from the theatre of Sophocles, the most
academic of the three dramatists: they would never be deduced from the
usage of Æschylus or Euripides.
In the seven plays of Æschylus, the chorus is composed five times of
women, twice only of men. In both cases they are old men, and the
weakness of their old age is necessary to the dramatic action. In
Sophocles the proportion is exactly reversed. The chorus is five times
composed of men, twice of women. Moreover, it is not the dramatic
action that fixes either the sex or the age of the chorus in the Œdipus
Tyrannus, the Œdipus Colonus, or the Antigone. In the latter play,
indeed, most readers will feel that a chorus of women would be more
appropriate; the chorus with Sophocles are old men because the old man is
the poet’s ideal character.
Of the seventeen plays of Euripides, in only three cases—the Heracles,
the Heraclidæ and the Alcestis—is the chorus composed of men. In the
first two cases, as in Æschylus, the ineffectiveness of old men in actual
danger is part of the plot; the chorus strengthens the impression made
by Iolaus and Amphitryon. In the Alcestis, that the chorus are men is
part of the general irony of the play.
In the other fourteen plays the chorus is composed of women, and it is
into the mouth of these women that Euripides puts all the most intimate
part of his work. Sometimes it is a scene of home life as in the Hecuba
where a woman describes her last night in Troy.
‘It was at midnight that ruin came. Dinner was over and upon men’s eyes
sweet sleep began to spread. All the songs had been sung: my lord had
done with the sacrificial feast and its revelry and was lying in my
bower, spear on peg, for no longer had he to keep watch against the
throng of shipmen who had set foot on our Ilian land of Troy. As for me,
one ringlet of hair I had still to bring to order under my tight-bound
snood, and I was gazing into the infinite reflections of my golden
mirror ere I should throw myself upon the pillows of my bed. But lo! a
cry went through the city and a cheer rang out in Troy-town—“Sons of the
Greeks—when, ah when, will you sack the watch tower of Ilion and get you
home at last?” Then I fled from my dear couch, with only my smock upon
me, like some Dorian maid, and crouched by Artemis’ holy shrine. But woe
is me, no help found I there. My own man, my bed-fellow, I saw slain
before me; and then I was dragged down to the sea shore, and in anguish
swooned away.’
Sometimes it is a vivid description of outdoor life, such as the picture
of the washing-place, where the humbler sort of women could meet and
enjoy a little leisure, ‘that pleasant evil,’ and gossip together. ‘There
is a rock that drips, men say, with water from the Ocean’s bed and sends
from the cliff an ever-running stream, for us to catch in our pitchers.
There I met a friend who was washing pieces of fresh-dyed cloth in the
river water and laying them in the warm sun upon the flat stones. From
her lips first this news of my lady came to me.’
Every mood of a woman’s mind is represented: now sad—
‘Discordant is the music of a woman’s life: pitiable
helplessness is her lot, an evil housemate, indeed. There
is the trouble of child birth, the trouble of woman’s
weakness.’—(_Hippolytus._)
or—
‘A censorious thing is womankind. If women get a small basis
for scandal they soon add more. Women take a kind of pleasure
in talking insincerely about one another.’—(_Phoenissae._)
now triumphant—
‘Children, promise of children’s children to be,
Children to help their sorrow, to make more sweet their pleasure,
To speak with their enemy!
Rather, I say, than gold, than a palace of pride,
Give me children at home, right heritors of my blood.
Let the miser plead for the childless side:
I will none of it. Wealth denied,
Children given, I bless them and cleave to the better good’
—(_Ion. Verrall’s translation._)
or—
A strange and wondrous thing for women are the children they
bear in travail. Womankind loves a baby.—(_Phoenissae._)
All the questions of sex are considered and judged with clearest sense.
‘Man’s love when it is excessive is neither excellent nor,
indeed, creditable. But still, sex is a divine thing and
a gracious, if kept within bounds. A moderate temper, for
that I pray: avaunt, contentious anger and the ceaseless
bickering that drives a husband astray to another woman’s
arms.’—(_Medea._)
Sometimes the question takes a wider range as in the difficult chorus of
the Iphigenia in Aulis.
‘The stuff of which men and women are made is different: their ways are
different too. But what is really good, of that there is no doubt. The
different methods of rearing and education have a great influence on
ideas of excellence. Humble modesty is a form of wisdom; and yet it is
wondrous good to use your own judgment and see your duty for yourself.
Then life is honourable and your frame grows not old. It is a great
thing to seek after excellence. For us women the quest is secret down the
secret ways of love; for men the marshalled state and the thronging crowd
make a city to increase and prosper.’
But the topic on which Euripides insists most is the scandal of
literature, the unfair ideas of woman that have been created and fostered
by the perversity of writers. Two quotations will suffice. One from the
Ion:—
‘Ye scandal-masters of the lyre,
That harping still upon the lust
Of losel women never tire,
Her lewdness ever, now be just.
How doth her faith superior show
Beside the lust of losel man!
See it, and change your music. Go
Another way than once ye ran,
Ye lyric libels, go, and vex
The faithless found, the elder sex.’—(_Ion. Verrall’s translation._)
another from the Medea:
‘It is men now that are crafty in counsel, and keep not their
pledges by the gods; the scandal will turn and honour come to a
woman’s life. ’Tis coming—respect for womankind. No longer will
pestilent scandal attack women, and women alone. The music of
ancient bards will die away, harping ever on woman’s perfidy.
Phœbus is the guide of melody and in my heart he never set the
wondrous music of his lyre. Else I would soon have raised a
song that would have stayed the brood of male singers. The
long years have many a tale to tell, of men as well as of
women.’
This last sentence represents Euripides’ reasoned judgment on the
problems of feminism. Women are different from men, but they are not
inferior: all the arguments that are used to prove woman’s weakness could
be used equally well against men.
So we may leave the characters and turn now to the separate plays.
Of the complete dramas that we now possess, the Rhesus is probably
spurious, the Cyclops is a comic play, the Helena is a burlesque of the
tragic manner. Of the remaining sixteen, two, the Suppliant Women and
the Children of Heracles, are political plays, written to glorify Athens
as the champion of oppressed nationalities, and their interest is mainly
political. But nothing that Euripides wrote is altogether lacking in
vivid touches of feminism. In the Children of Heracles, for example,
there is one character who in a few words reveals the position of women
in Athenian life: ‘For a woman silence and discretion are best, and to
remain quiet within doors.’ So speaks the maiden Macaria before she
consents to a voluntary death. She has had bitter experience of life and
she is willing to die, for existence offers her no very pleasant prospect.
‘A friendless girl—’ she says ‘who will take me for his wife? Who will
have children by me? It is better for me to die.’ Her one pathetic desire
is to die, not on compulsion but as a willing sacrifice,—to escape from
life _nobly_ (the word recurs as often in Euripides as it does in Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler), to leave the ignoble servitude of woman’s lot. She begs
Iolaus to deal the death-blow and to cover her dead body. But Iolaus,
brave old man though he is, cannot bring himself to see her die, and
her last request is that at least she may die not among men, but in the
arms of women. These are her final words: ‘For my people I die. That
is my treasure in death: that I take instead of children and my virgin
bloom; if indeed anything exists below. I pray for my part that there be
_nothing_ there: if we mortals who must die shall find life’s business
in that land also, I know not where to turn. Death is counted the surest
potion against pain.’
A similar incident forms the most striking scene of the Suppliant Women.
Here it is not a young girl, but a married woman, Evadne, who of her own
accord goes to death. But her motive is much the same: ‘for the sake of a
noble repute I die,’ she cries ‘that I may surpass all women in generous
courage.’ Her husband is dead, she is a childless woman, and she refuses
to live on as a widow. Her father is anxious that she should nurse him
in his old age, but with strange perversity she prefers death and the
old man is left to make lament. ‘My daughter is dead;’ he cries, ‘she who
used to draw down my face to her lips and would hold my head fast in her
arms. Nothing is so sweet as a daughter when a father grows old. A son’s
life is a thing of greater importance, but sons are not so pleasant when
we need fond endearments.’
The main interest of the Suppliant Women is the same as that of
three other plays: the Phoenician Women, the Trojan Women, and the
Hecuba. They are concerned with war; but war, as seen from the woman’s
side, a thing of unredeemed and useless suffering. All the ‘glory of
conquest’ disappears: women and children are seen paying the price
of men’s ambition and pride. The Trojan Women is the most lamentable
and the most effective of the series. Written according to the oldest
formula of tragedy, the chorus are the chief persons in the action.
Hecuba, Cassandra and Andromache are only particular representatives
of the sufferings which all the women in the play endure. The two male
characters, the lustful hypocrite Menelaus and the honest servant
Talthybius are of quite subordinate interest.
The play is an accumulation of sorrow upon sorrow, but the climax is the
murder of the little child Astyanax, a political crime, not inspired by
any of the human feelings of hatred and revenge, but coldly calculated
by men for the sake of future advantage. It is the women, the mother
and grandmother of the child, who have to suffer, that men may sleep in
safety. As Andromache bitterly says, she has always followed out the
whole duty of woman.
‘Those things that have been invented as virtuous pursuits for women, at
those I laboured ever in Hector’s house. To begin with—whether censure
should attach to women for it or not, I may not say—but at any rate, the
thing in itself brings a woman an evil name when she does not remain ever
within doors. So I put aside the desire for going out and stayed at home.
Moreover, I never admitted within our house the fantastic talk that some
females enjoy: I found my own sound sense the best teacher in domestic
matters, and made myself sufficing. A silent tongue and a quiet face—that
was what I rendered to my lord.’
And now she has her reward: she is to become a concubine in the house of
her husband’s murderer, and is told that one night in the arms of her new
lord will make her forget the past. As for her baby boy; ‘dear youngling
nestling in your mother’s arms, your skin so sweet and fragrant,’ he is
torn away and hurled down to death.
But Andromache is not worse treated than the other women. Hecuba is
handed over to Odysseus to be his slave, to sweep the floor and grind
the daily corn. The virgin Polyxena is reserved to be slain over the
tomb of Achilles; for it is not enough that living men should make women
their chattels; even the dead hero demands the tribute of a maiden’s
life. Cassandra has lived a vestal, dedicated to the service of the god,
and she too has her reward. The great king deigns to take her to his
bed, and in a scene of the grimmest irony the unhappy girl sings her own
marriage hymn. There is all the music of the hymeneal chorus, but we have
one solitary figure—the unwedded bride—instead of the joyful procession
of youths and maidens.
The Hecuba deals with the same events as the Trojan Women and in the
same spirit. The sacrifice of Polyxena is consummated and Hecuba
takes vengeance on one of her children’s murderers, the Thracian king
Polymnestor. Beguiled into the captive women’s tent he sees his own
children murdered and is then blinded. The scene where he comes reeling
out with blood-dripping eyes reaches the limits of the horrible, but
Euripides does not forget to draw the feminist moral.
‘If any one,’ the king says, ‘has spoken ill of women in the past, or is
now in the act of speaking or will some day speak, I will cut all his
words short—listen—Neither sea nor land breeds such a race as women are:
only the man who has to do with them from time to time knows what they
can do.’
The unhappy victim of a single woman forgets his logic and imputes the
fault of an individual to the sex. If the aggressor had been a man, his
thoughts would have been different and so the chorus tell him.
‘Be not over-fierce against us nor bring the feminine element into your
troubles. There is no need to blame all womankind.’
The particular note of realistic horror that marks the closing scenes
of the Hecuba appears in another group of four plays, the Iphigenia in
Tauris, the Heracles, the Orestes and the Electra. The first three have
been exhaustively studied by Dr. Verrall, and it is enough now to say
that the methods of criticism which Thucydides and Euripides use upon
the Trojan War, are here applied to other tales of the remote and heroic
past. Both writers—the historian and the dramatist—know that human nature
does not change, and they strip away remorselessly the glamour of ancient
legend. If such things happened, _this_ is how they happened, says
Euripides; and so we have the half-mad, half-heroic figure of Heracles:
the sinister Orestes always ready to unsheath his dagger: the ludicrous
yet pitiable Phrygian eunuch stuttering and trembling in panic fear,
and most terrible of all the unsexed woman Electra. Each play has its
own scene of horror, but the climax, perhaps, comes when Electra takes
the head of the murdered Ægisthus in both hands and pours forth all her
bitterness into the deaf ears.
The Hippolytus strikes an entirely different note, and is, perhaps,
the best known of all the plays. It has been adapted by Seneca and
Racine, used as material by Ovid and transposed into a romantic drama
by Professor Murray. But in spite of all this, Phædra’s position and
motives are often misunderstood. Hippolytus is her natural enemy and the
enemy of her children. The bastard son of Theseus, if his father died,
would probably oust the legitimate but younger children of the wife
from their father’s throne and himself seize the power. Phædra, a young
woman married to an old husband, is possessed by a physical desire for
the young man, but she struggles against her passion _for her children’s
sake_. When she finally gives up the struggle, she secures her children’s
safety by ensuring Hippolytus’ death or banishment. She knows Theseus
and she knows that he will bitterly resent any trespass on his property
and punish that trespass with all the severity in his power. The charge
is a false one, but it is only thus that her children’s future can be
protected.
The last two plays, the Bacchæ and the Iphigenia in Aulis, written in old
age and in exile at Macedonia, still deal with the double problem, the
sacrifice to God and the sacrifice to man; and they are constructed on
the same lines.
In the Bacchæ the men are of three sorts. There is the Adept—an imposter,
who has taken to religion as a trade; the old men Cadmus and Teiresias
who are ‘religious’ for social and family reasons: finally the young
Pentheus who is openly ‘irreligious’ and comes to a bad end.
The women alone _believe_: they are deceived by the adept, and much of
their belief is delusion, but it is a real spiritual benefit—to them. The
ritual of Bacchus was the one chance of escape in a Greek woman’s life
from the stifling seclusion of the harem home. For a few days at least
she became a free creature, allowed to roam at large upon the mountains.
The thyrsus of the god took the place of her master’s company: the sky
was her roof: the grass was her bed: she could put aside the wine press
and the flour mill and live on milk and honey. The ecstasy of such an
escape has never found more intense expression than in the narrative
speeches and the choric songs of the Bacchæ.
In the Iphigenia at Aulis the men again are of three types, foils
all and each to the idealism of Iphigenia and the practical sense of
Clytemnestra. Menelaus is the meanest: the slave of desire, ready for
any crime to gratify his passions. Agamemnon is the ordinary middle-aged
man, afraid of his wife and fond of his family, but capable of
deceiving the one and ruining the other. Achilles is the young man of
the governing classes, brought up to despise women, and to think that
every girl is anxious to become his wife. The men quarrel and plot for
their own selfish ends, but their schemes are detected by the keen wit of
Clytemnestra and rendered useless by the unselfish devotion of Iphigenia.
VIII.—EURIPIDES. THE FOUR FEMINIST PLAYS