feminist—to use our ugly jargon—are to be found in all his theatre; but
there are four plays which are especially concerned with the relations
between women and men, the Alcestis, Medea, Ion and Andromache. They are
not pleasant plays: indeed, to a lover of sentimental idealism they would
be conspicuously unpleasant if they were fully understood. Nor are they
to be recommended to women readers. The relations between the sexes are a
delicate thing; and human nature, male humanity at any rate, is generally
none the worse for discreet reticence and tender handling. But in these
plays Euripides uses the surgeon’s knife. They were meant for an audience
of men, grown callous by time and custom; and the treatment is ruthless.
They should be regarded as the painful but necessary operation, needed to
rid a patient of some long-festering ulcer, and the dramatist deserves
the thanks that we give to the skillful surgeon.
The particular flaws in the male character with which Euripides deals in
the four plays are these—meanness, cowardice, selfishness, and treachery.
They are not the faults, it will be noticed, that are especially
appropriate to a ruling class. Man is not indicted on the score of
haughtiness, pride or cruelty: his weaknesses are of a less ‘manly’ sort.
It is his position as the natural lord of creation that is questioned and
put to the test of dramatic action.
If Jason, Admetus, Apollo and Menelaus are _impossible_ characters,
then Euripides fails altogether in his lesson: if their actions, though
possible, are improbable, then again he fails in an artistic sense. Some
may think that no one could be quite so mean as Jason, quite so cowardly
and selfish as Apollo and Admetus, quite so treacherous as Menelaus; but
if we apply the test of experience, the cruel facts of life will justify
the poet. None of the four are ‘tragedies,’ in the sense in which we use
the word. They are as good examples as we are ever likely to see of ‘la
haute comédie’; the Ion and Andromache, perhaps, a little melodramatic,
the Alcestis and the Medea in places almost farcical; but all depending
eventually on a subtle study of psychology and social relationships.
It is probable that they were not originally composed for public
representation in the great theatre of Dionysus. They are intimate
studies of humanity and can quite easily be divested of the official
chorus, prologue and epilogue, which are independent of the dramatic
action of the play. What is left is Euripides’ own teaching, put as
plainly as the ironical spirit will allow. The frequency of translation
must not blind us to the fact that in essentials Euripides is
untranslatable. He is one of the greatest masters of irony and there is
nothing that is so apt to vanish in translation, or create confusion in
the English mind.
All four plays are concerned with problems of motherhood and children,
especially male children. In three, child-actors are required and play an
important part in the action: the fourth play, the Ion, has for its hero
a lad, just emerging from the ‘awkward age’ of boyhood.
Between the Ion and the Andromache there is a curious resemblance
of plot. The case was probably not uncommon in the circumstances of
race-degeneration that prevailed at Athens during the fifth century. In
both plays a husband has a childless wife, but a son by an irregular
union. There are two women to one man, and in each case there is another
man in the background, Apollo who has seduced Creüsa, and Orestes who has
been the affianced lover to Hermionë. The husbands, Xuthus and Pyrrhus,
are the least important figures in the action; indeed, Pyrrhus does not
appear in person at all. They are represented as colourless characters;
men of position and personal courage, dangerous, perhaps, when roused,
but generally negligible. Their young wives, Hermionë and Creüsa, regard
them with a mixture of contemptuous fear and jealous affection.
The interest is concentrated on the women, and the plays are studies
of wifely jealousy—‘Why should my husband have a child, while I am
childless?’—and maternal love.
Euripides knows well that motherhood is a woman’s natural sphere:
a childless woman is for him an abnormal woman, and behaves in an
abnormal and anti-social fashion. Both wives attribute their barrenness,
probably the natural result of their past history, to supernatural
causes. Hermionë believes that the foreign concubine Andromache has
bewitched her: Creüsa, that she has incurred the anger of a god. Hermionë
accordingly proposes to break the spell by killing the witch; Creüsa goes
to Delphi to propitiate the divinity and seek his aid.
Both women, also, in their jealous hate are anxious to kill their
husband’s bastard. Hermionë uses her father’s help and nearly succeeds
in murdering the boy Molossus. Creüsa employs her father’s old slave
as her agent, and all but poisons the boy Ion. In neither case is the
crime accomplished, for the plays are not ‘tragedies’; but the criminal
purpose is there. The women have been injured in the past and they are
childless. They are embittered against life and ready to requite evil for
evil. On the other hand, the unwedded mothers in both plays are ready
to sacrifice themselves for their children. Andromache offers her life
to save her son—‘What pleasure have I in life?’ she cries, ‘In him all
my hopes centre: it would be a disgrace for me not to die on behalf of
the child I bore. Children, indeed, are life: those who in ignorance
disparage them, may feel less pain than we do, but they are miserable in
their happiness.’
In the Ion Pythia consents to an even harder sacrifice: she hands over
her child to another woman, saves him thereby from the guilt of murder
and makes him prince of Athens. Andromache and the Priestess have been
injured in the past, but they are saved by their children: the maternal,
not the marital, is the holy state.
But in both plays the feminist interest is complicated by other motives,
political and religious. In the Andromache a bitter attack is made upon
the Spartan system in the person of Menelaus. ‘You a man?’ old Peleus
cries, ‘You dastard son of dastard parents. What claim have you to be
counted among men? A fine _man_ it was, a Phrygian, that robbed you of
your wife. You left your hearth and home without a lock, without a
servant to guard, as though, forsooth, you had a virtuous wife within
doors, she who was the worst of all women. Why, even if she wished, none
of your Spartan girls could be virtuous. They leave the shelter of home
and go about with young men; their legs bare, their dresses open; and
run and wrestle like men. It all seems to be abominable. We need not be
surprised that your system of education does not produce virtuous women.’
In the Ion the system of Delphi and the oracle is assailed, and a vein
of bitter irony runs through the play. So ironical is the poet’s method
that, if we take the prologue seriously and confine ourselves to the
statements there made, we are apt to get a somewhat misleading idea of
the play’s purpose. Dr. Way, for example, who gives the traditional
interpretation with the greatest clearness, supplies the following
summary of the action.
‘In the days when Erechtheus ruled over Athens, Apollo wrought violence
to the king’s young daughter Creüsa. And she, having borne a son, left
him, by reason of her fear and shame, in the cave wherein the God had
humbled her. But Apollo cared for him, and caused the babe to be brought
to Delphi, even to his temple. Therein was the child nurtured, and
ministered in the courts of the God’s house. And in process of time
Erechtheus died, and left no son nor daughter save Creüsa, and evil
days came upon Athens, that she was hard bestead in war. Then Xuthus, a
chief of the Achæan folk, fought for her and prevailed against her Eubœan
enemies, and for guerdon of victory received the princess Creüsa to wife,
and so became king-consort in Athens. But to these twain was no child
born; so, after many years, they journeyed to Delphi to inquire of the
oracle of Apollo touching issue. And there the God ordered all things
so that the lost was found, and an heir was given to the royal house of
Athens. Yet, through the blind haste of mortals, and their little faith,
was the son well-nigh slain by the mother, and the mother by the son.’
This summary quite faithfully represents the statements of the divine
Hermes; but Euripides knows as well as we do that gods do not walk the
earth and that children are not miraculously wafted through the air. The
prologue satisfies convention: the play itself is realistic and one of
the chief characters is a woman of whom the prologue tells us nothing.
The real plot, as opposed to the idealistic version, is as follows:—the
facts are put down crudely instead of being conveyed by subtle hints and
innuendo as they are in the Greek.
A young Athenian girl, Creüsa, wandering one day alone in the fields is
attacked by a brutal satyr. He drags her into a cave, violates her and
then makes his escape. She faints, and on awakening imagines that her
assailant, who has disappeared as suddenly as he came, was a being from
another world: she had seen him in the full sunlight; he is the sun-god
Apollo. She tells no one of her adventure, conceals her condition and
when her time comes, makes her way alone to the same cave. The child
is born, wrapped by the girl mother in a piece of cloth, and placed,
together with a golden bracelet as token, in a wicker basket. Then he is
abandoned, and of his fate we hear no more.
About the same time at Delphi, in one of those periods of promiscuous
sexual intercourse allowed and encouraged by temple ritual, one of the
Delphian women becomes a mother, by a roving soldier of fortune named
Xuthus. The latter leaves Delphi, ignorant of his paternity, and the
woman is soon after appointed priestess of the temple. Her child, Ion,
ostensibly a foundling, is reared within the temple precinct and regards
the priestess as his foster mother. Meanwhile, the soldier Xuthus makes
his way to Athens and marries Creüsa. They have no children, and come
to Delphi to ask advice of the oracle. The priestess recognises Xuthus
as the father of her son, and so arranges matters—remaining herself
unseen—that after a conversation with the boy he acknowledges him as his
child, the result of the former hasty connexion.
But though Xuthus has now got a son, Creüsa is still a childless wife. In
passionate anger she reveals her long hidden secret, denounces the god as
the author of her ruin, and with the help of a slave, attempts to poison
Ion. The plot fails, she is pursued as a murderess by Ion and is on the
point of being put to death. Then the priestess once more intervenes.
She has heard Creüsa’s story—in some details not unlike though more
lamentable than her own—and she determines to help a fellow sufferer.
She has already given up her son to his father, and she now arranges a
second trick whereby Creüsa shall believe Ion to be her child. She has in
her possession a baby’s wicker cradle, a piece of cloth similar to that
in which the dead baby was wrapped, and Creüsa’s own bracelet which has
been used in the poisoning plot. By an ingenious subterfuge she makes all
three appear to be the recognition tokens of Creüsa’s child. Creüsa with
joy, Ion with some painful doubts, accept the new relationship; and so
the play ends.
The Ion and the Andromache both abound in incident: the Medea and the
Alcestis depend more on a psychological interest. They are ‘one-part’
plays—the strong woman Medea and the weak man Admetus—and they have many
points of resemblance. In the Medea a mother kills her children to save
her own pride: in the Alcestis a mother consents to death to save her
children’s position. Alcestis is a saint: Medea—to some people—a devil.
Medea is certainly not meant to be a pleasant character. She has laboured
too long under a sense of injustice to be pleasant either in her thoughts
or behaviour. ‘You are always abusing the government;’ Jason says to
her, ‘and so you will have to be ejected.’ She expresses the revolt of
women in its bitterest form. ‘Of all things that draw breath,’ she cries,
‘and have understanding, we women are the most miserable; we are merely
_a thing that exists_. To begin with, we must outbid each other to buy
ourselves a lord and take a master of our body. ’Tis a risky business—we
may get a knave or an honest man. To leave her husband brings a woman
no honour, and we may not refuse our lords. When a woman comes to fresh
ways and pastures new, she needs must be a prophet, for she has never
been taught at home how best to use the man who now shares her bed. If
we work our task aright, and our lord keeps house with us, and does not
kick against the yoke, then our life is enviable. If not—better to be
dead. A man, if he is vexed with the company of his household, goes out
and purges away his heart’s annoyance; but we women are compelled to look
ever at one soul.’
This isolation was the worst feature in a Greek woman’s life: to a clever
woman it was soul-destroying, and Medea is incomparably cleverer than
any man in the play. The scenes where she forces the two old men, ‘King’
Creon and ‘King’ Ægeus to do, not what they want, but what she wants,
are masterpieces of satirical humour. With her husband her cleverness
fails her: she is too angry to reason: she hisses her scorn and foams her
disgust. Jason keeps cool and so far has the best of the argument.
‘You certainly are a clever woman,’ he says, ‘but you are only a woman. I
am a very fine figure of a man: you fell in love with me; and it was only
natural.’
Jason is in many ways like Admetus. Both are lovers of outward show and
have a great regard for men’s opinion. Both say with some emphasis that a
family of two children is quite large enough. Both have the same opinion
of women; and this is how Jason concludes—‘Men ought to be able to get
their children from some other source: the female sex should not exist:
and then there would be no trouble for mankind.’
Such sentiments naturally fail to please either the chorus or Medea.
The comment of the chorus is, ‘You have made the best of your case, but
still, surprising though it may seem to you, I think you are acting
unfairly in betraying the woman who has shared your bed.’ Medea gives
full vent to her anger: she contemptuously refuses the help in money
which Jason says he is ‘ready to give with an ungrudging hand,’ and at
last scornfully dismisses him—‘Be off with you. You are yearning for the
new girl you have broken in, all the time that you linger outside her
house. Go and play the bridegroom with her.’
But in the next scene Medea has mastered her temper and pretends to
submit. ‘We are but what we are,’ she says, ‘just women. You must not
take pattern by the evil nor answer folly with foolishness. I give way: I
acknowledge that I was wrong.’ Jason is patronising and friendly in his
answer: ‘I approve your present attitude, and, indeed, I do not blame
your past behaviour: it is only to be expected: woman is a thing of
moods.’ He consents to ask his new wife for a remission of the children’s
exile. ‘Certainly I will, and I fancy that I shall persuade her.’ ‘Yes,
indeed, you will,’ Medea says, ‘if she is one of us: all women are alike.
But I will help you once again in this enterprise, too.’ And as in the
past she had given him an antidote against the fire-breathing bulls, so
now she gives him the fiery robe which is to destroy the young bride.
Then comes the crucial scene of the play: Medea kills her children and
we are faced by the problem—when is killing murder?
A mother who kills her child is to us a dreadful figure, and the death
penalty is invoked against the deserted girl-mother: no punishment is
inflicted upon the father, perhaps because no punishment can be adequate.
Greek law and custom went further and in a different direction. The
father was allowed to decide whether the child whom his wife had brought
forth should be reared. Child killing in this fashion, when done by the
father, was not a crime, and the exposure of children after birth was a
common, and by no means held to be a reprehensible act. Plato, indeed,
thinks it a fit subject for a jest in the Theætetus (p. 161). ‘Do you
think,’ says Socrates, ‘that it is right in all cases to rear your own
child? Will you be very angry if we take it—the argument—from you, as we
might take a baby from a young mother with her first child?’ ‘Oh, no,’
answers the other. ‘Theætetus will not mind: he is not at all hard to get
on with.’
The mother who did mind was regarded as a difficult person, but whether
she minded or not, decision lay with the father—as we see in Terence’s
play, The Self Tormentor. There the wife says to her husband, ‘You
remember, don’t you, when I was pregnant, you told me emphatically that
if the child should be a girl you would refuse to rear it.’ The child
proved to be a girl, and so without further question it was got rid of.
Male children were more valuable, and unless the circumstances of their
birth were exceptional, as in the case of Paris and Œdipus, they were not
often exposed.
There is this further point: what differentiates killing from murder is
the question of risk. You kill, you do not murder, when you risk your
own life. A soldier is not a murderer, and in sport a fox-hunter is a
man of different type from a pigeon shooter. Now the Athenian women were
not Amazons, but they fought a battle no less dangerous. ‘They say of
us,’ cries Medea, ‘that we live a life free from danger within doors,
while men are fighting like heroes with the spear. But men are fools.
Rather would I stand three times in the battle line of shields than bear
one child.’ A mother had already risked her life in bringing a child
to birth; is she not far more justified than the father in ending that
child’s life, if such be her will? Moreover, children are the pledges of
marriage, the securities given for a business arrangement. Is it right
that the party who wilfully breaks the compact should retain possession
of the securities?
Such I believe are some of the questions that Euripides meant to suggest.
It is no answer to them to say that it is an unnatural crime for a mother
to kill her children, for it is equally unnatural and criminal for a
father, and yet ancient fathers killed their children without compunction
and without blame.
The Medea then is realistic and little else: the Alcestis, the first
in time of Euripides’ plays, is a blend of style, and demands a fuller
treatment.
There are no villains in the Alcestis, and there are no heroes. There
is one heroic character, but her heroism is of so common a type that it
usually passes unnoticed. The three men, Admetus, Pheres and Heracles,
in varying degrees are animated by the strongest of all male motives,
self-preservation. Alcestis lacks their sound common-sense; she is guided
by passion, by the strongest of all female passions and that which comes
nearest to the divine, the maternal passion of self-sacrifice. She has
given life once, she is prepared to give it again.
It is commonly assumed—and even Verrall tacitly allows this to go
unchallenged—that Alcestis ‘is in love with’ Admetus, and Admetus ‘is in
love with’ Alcestis. The affection which, happily for us, may usually be
expected to exist between husband and wife, is taken for granted in the
very different conditions of Euripides’ time.
Now, as we have seen, this is a cardinal error. Mutual affection and
esteem did _not_ reign in an ordinary Athenian household. Husband and
wife were usually indifferent one to another, and even this indifference
was an improvement upon the Ionian relationship when husband and wife
were often natural enemies.
That a wife should give up her life out of love for her husband is a
state of things so agreeable to the natural man that it is, perhaps,
not surprising if the language of the play has never been too closely
examined.
_Alcestis’ motive is not love for her husband, but love for her
children._ Euripides, following Æschylus, knew that maternal love is a
far stronger force than conjugal affection, even when the latter exists.
The mother and the children—on them he spends all the resources of his
unrivalled pathos—the husband is a mark for his bitterest irony. It is
because Alcestis does not wish her children to be left _fatherless_ that
she consents to death.
The position of the widow—as indeed, is implied in our language by the
form of the word—is definitely worse than that of the widower. The
orphan in ancient times was the fatherless child, and the position of
the chief’s son whose father died in his childhood was particularly
unenviable. It is described in two of the most pathetic passages in Greek
literature, by Andromache in the twenty-second book of the Iliad and by
Tecmessa, in the most Euripidean of all the plays of Sophocles, the
Ajax. Under the old tribal system, a chief’s power depended very largely
on personal ascendency, so that old men like Laertes and Pheres found it
expedient to retire in favour of their grown-up son. A small boy like
Eumelus could not have maintained his father’s position, and his father’s
death would probably have meant considerable danger to his life. All this
in Euripides’ time was a commonplace and needed no emphasis. He prefers,
indeed, to deal with the reverse picture—the sorrows of the motherless
children and especially of the motherless girl; for the pathos of the
sacrifice is partly this. It is for the sake of the boy and his future
position in life, and not so much for the girl, that the mother dies.
Let us now examine the play itself. Admetus, chief of Pheræ, has been
told by his medicine man that he is a very bad life: that, indeed, he
cannot hope to live much longer—three months, perhaps; six months, say,
at the most. But he has been a generous benefactor to the profession,
and in particular has rendered some quite exceptional services to the
arch-physician, Apollo himself. Accordingly a special provision is made
in his case. If he can get some one of his own family to transfer to him
their vitality, the operation may be feasible. The problem is, to find
the man—or woman—for his family is very small. Admetus goes to his father
and his mother, but both, even his mother, refuse; for, as we shall see,
Admetus is not a very sympathetic character, or likely to arouse the
spirit of self-sacrifice even in a mother’s heart. Finally he asks his
young wife, the mother of his two little children, and she consents.
At this point the play opens. Admetus believes what he is told; Alcestis
believes what she is told: the sixth month is ending and she is marked
out for death. So Death appears, and the burlesque dialogue between
Death and the Doctor, Thanatos and Apollo, forms the prologue, where the
arch-physician, who can cure all diseases but one, is confronted by that
One himself. But the prologue and the entrance of the chorus need not
detain us. The first intimate details about Alcestis are given by the
servant woman in her long speech to the chorus, and it will be noticed
that in the picture of the household which she draws for them the central
point is the marriage bed. Twice already has Alcestis risked her life
upon that bed, and now another sacrifice has to be made. A childless
woman might refuse. Her husband demands her life, and she must give it
for the sake of the children whom on that bed she has borne. It is of her
children that Alcestis thinks: for them she prays: she has no petition to
make on her husband’s behalf. In all the narrative, indeed, the husband
scarcely appears. The chorus—_of men_—notice the omission and enquire of
him, and this is the answer they get:
‘_Oh, yes he is weeping_ as he holds the woman he loves, his bed-fellow,
in both arms. He is begging her not to abandon him: _he wants what he
cannot have_.’
The chorus then burst into a lament which is interrupted by the
appearance of Alcestis and her husband outside the house. The following
scene is an extreme example of that combination of pathos and irony from
which Euripides never shrinks. The lamentation of Alcestis, expressed in
lyrics of the purest quality, is answered at regular intervals by Admetus
in iambic couplets where style and thought alike are cruelly commonplace.