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Home University Library of Modern Knowledge
EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE
by
GILBERT MURRAY
London
Williams & Norgate
Henry Holt & Co., New York
Canada: Wm. Briggs, Toronto
India: R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd.
* * * * *
Home University Library of Modern Knowledge
_Editors_:
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A., LL.D.
PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT., LL.D., F.B.A.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., LL.D.
PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
(Columbia University, U.S.A.)
New York
Henry Holt and Company
* * * * *
EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE
BY
GILBERT MURRAY
LL.D., D.Litt., F.B.A.
Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford
London
Williams and Norgate
Printed by
The London and Norwich Press Limited
London and Norwich
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Introductory 7
II Sources for a Life of Euripides: Memories remaining
in the Fourth Century: Youth: Athens after the Persian War: the
great Sophists 20
III What is a Greek Tragedy? Euripides' early Plays up to 438 B.C.,
"Alcestis" and "Telephus" 60
IV Beginning of the War: the Plays of Maturity from "Medea"
to "Heracles" 81
V Full Expression: the Embittering of the War:
Alcibiades and the Demagogues: the "Ion": the "Trojan Women" 107
VI After 415: Euripides' last years in Athens: from
"Andromeda" and "Iphigenia" to "Electra" and "Orestes" 142
VII After 408: Macedonia: "Iphigenia in Aulis": "Bacchae" 165
VIII The Art of Euripides: Traditional Form and Living Spirit:
the Prologue, the Messenger, the "God from the Machine" 198
IX The Art of Euripides, continued: The Chorus: Conclusion 228
Bibliography 247
Note on the Pronunciation of Names 251
Index 253
EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Most of the volumes of this series are occupied with large subjects and
subjects commonly recognized as important to great masses of people at
the present day. In devoting the present volume to the study of a single
writer, remote from us in time and civilization and scarcely known by
more than name to many readers of the Library, I am moved by the belief
that, quite apart from his disputed greatness as a poet and thinker,
apart from his amazing and perhaps unparalleled success as a practical
playwright, Euripides is a figure of high significance in the history of
humanity and of special interest to our own generation.
Born, according to the legend, in exile and fated to die in exile,
Euripides, in whatever light one regards him, is a man of curious and
ironic history. As a poet he has lived through the ages in an
atmosphere of controversy, generally--though by no means always--loved
by poets and despised by critics. As a thinker he is even to this day
treated almost as a personal enemy by scholars of orthodox and
conformist minds; defended, idealized and sometimes transformed beyond
recognition by various champions of rebellion and the free intellect.
The greatest difficulty that I feel in writing about him is to keep in
mind without loss of proportion anything like the whole activity of the
many-sided man. Recent writers have tended to emphasize chiefly his work
as a destructive thinker. Dr. Verrall, the most brilliant of all modern
critics of Euripides, to whose pioneer work my own debt is greater than
I can well express, entitled one of his books "Euripides the
Rationalist" and followed to its extreme limit the path indicated by
this particular clue. His vivid and interesting disciple Professor
Norwood has followed him. In Germany Dr. Nestle, in a sober and learned
book, treating of Euripides as a thinker, says that "all mysticism was
fundamentally repugnant to him"; a view which is certainly wrong, since
some of the finest expressions of Greek mysticism known to us are taken
from the works of Euripides. Another good writer, Steiger, draws an
elaborate parallel between Euripides and Ibsen and finds the one key to
Euripides in his realism and his absolute devotion to truth. Yet an
older generation of Euripides-lovers felt these things quite
differently. When Macaulay proclaimed that there was absolutely nothing
in literature to equal _The Bacchae_, he was certainly not thinking
about rationalism or realism. He felt the romance, the magic, the sheer
poetry. So did Milton and Shelley and Browning. And so did the older
English scholars like Porson and Elmsley. Porson, while admitting that
the critics have many things to say against Euripides as compared, for
instance, with Sophocles, answers in his inarticulate way "_illum
admiramur, hunc legimus_"--"we admire the one, but we read the other."
Elmsley, so far from regarding Euripides as mainly a thinker, remarks in
passing that he was a poet singularly addicted to contradicting himself.
To Porson and Elmsley the poetry of Euripides might or might not be good
on the highest plane, it was at any rate delightful. Quite different
again are the momentous judgments pronounced upon him as a writer of
tragedy by two of the greatest judges. Aristotle, writing at a period
when Euripides was rather out of fashion, and subjecting him to much
serious and sometimes unintelligent criticism, considers him still "the
most tragic of the poets." And Goethe, after expressing his surprise at
the general belittling of Euripides by "the aristocracy of philologists,
led by the buffoon Aristophanes," asks emphatically: "Have all the
nations of the world since his time produced one dramatist who was
worthy to hand him his slippers?" (Tagebuechern, November 22, 1831.) We
must try, if we can, to bear duly in mind all these different lines of
approach.
* * * * *
As a playwright the fate of Euripides has been strange. All through a
long life he was almost invariably beaten in the State competitions. He
was steadily admired by some few philosophers, like Socrates; he enjoyed
immense fame throughout Greece; but the official judges of poetry were
against him, and his own people of Athens admired him reluctantly and
with a grudge.
After death, indeed, he seemed to come into his kingdom. He held the
stage as no other tragedian has ever held it, and we hear of his plays
being performed with popular success six hundred years after they were
written, and in countries far removed from Greece. He influenced all the
higher forms of Greek writing, both in prose and poetry. He is more
quoted by subsequent writers than any other Greek tragedian; nay, if we
leave out of count mere dictionary references to rare words, he is more
quoted than all the other tragedians together. And nineteen of his plays
have survived to our own day as against seven each of Aeschylus and
Sophocles. This seems enough glory for any man. Yet the fate that
grudged him prizes in his lifetime contrived afterwards to spread a
veneer of commonplaceness over the success which it could not prevent.
To a great extent Euripides was read because he was, or seemed, easy;
the older poets were neglected because they were difficult. Attic Greek
in his hands had begun to assume the form in which it remained for a
thousand years as the recognized literary language of the east of Europe
and the great instrument and symbol of civilization. He was a
treasure-house of Attic style and ancient maxims, and eminently useful
to orators who liked quotations. Meantime the melody and meaning of his
lyrics were lost, because men had forgotten the pronunciation of
fifth-century Greek and could no longer read lyrics intelligently. The
obviously exciting quality of his plays kept its effect; but there was
no one to understand the subtlety of his craftsmanship, the intimate
study of character, the skilful forging of links and clashes between
scenes, the mastery of that most wonderful of Greek dramatic
instruments, the Chorus. Plays had practically ceased to be written.
They were thought of either as rhetorical exercises or as spectacles for
the amphitheatre. Something similar happened to the whole inward spirit
in which he worked, call it philosophy or call it religion. Its meaning
became obscured. It had indeed a powerful influence on the philosophers
of the great fourth century schools: they probably understood at least
one side of him. But the sayings of his that are quoted broadcast and
repeated through author after author of the decadence are mostly
thoughts of quite the second rank, which have lost half their value by
being torn from their context, often commonplace, often--as is natural
in fragments of dramas--mutually contradictory, though almost always
simply and clearly expressed.
It was this clear expression which the late Greeks valued so highly.
"Clarity"--_sapheneia_--was the watchword of style in Euripides' own day
and remained always the foremost aim of Greek rhetoric. Indeed what a
Greek called "rhetorike" often implied the very opposite of what we call
"rhetoric." To think clearly, to arrange your matter under formal heads,
to have each paragraph definitely articulated and each sentence simply
and exactly expressed: that was the main lesson of the Greek rhetor. The
tendency was already beginning in classical times and no classical
writer carried it further than Euripides. But here again Fate has been
ironical with him. The ages that were incapable of understanding him
loved him for his clearness: our own age, which might at last understand
him, is instinctively repelled by it. We do not much like a poet to be
very clear, and we hate him to be formal. We are clever readers, quick
in the up-take, apt to feel flattered and stimulated by a little
obscurity; mystical philosophy is all very well in a poet, but clear-cut
intellect--no. At any rate we are sharply offended by "firstlys,
secondlys and thirdlys," by divisions on the one hand and on the other
hand. And all this and more Euripides insists on giving us.
It is the great obstacle between him and us. Apart from it we have only
to exercise a little historical imagination and we shall find in him a
man, not indeed modern--half his charm is that he is so remote and
austere--but a man who has in his mind the same problems as ourselves,
the same doubts and largely the same ideals; who has felt the same
desires and indignations as a great number of people at the present day,
especially young people. Not because young people are cleverer than old,
nor yet because they are less wise; but because the poet or philosopher
or martyr who lives, half-articulate, inside most human beings is apt to
be smothered or starved to death in the course of middle life. As long
as he is still alive we have, most of us, the key to understanding
Euripides.
What, then, shall be our method in approaching him? It is fatal to fly
straight at him with modern ready-made analogies. We must see him in his
own atmosphere. Every man who possesses real vitality can be seen as the
resultant of two forces. He is first the child of a particular age,
society, convention; of what we may call in one word a tradition. He is
secondly, in one degree or another, a rebel against that tradition. And
the best traditions make the best rebels. Euripides is the child of a
strong and splendid tradition and is, together with Plato, the fiercest
of all rebels against it.
There is nothing paradoxical in this. No tradition is perfect. The best
brings only a passing period of peace or triumph or stable equilibrium;
humanity rests for a moment, but knows that it must travel further; to
rest for ever would be to die. The most thorough conformists are
probably at their best when forced to fight for their ideal against
forces that would destroy it. And a tradition itself is generally at its
best, not when it is universally accepted, but when it is being attacked
and broken. It is then that it learns to search its own heart and live
up to its full meaning. And in a sense the greatest triumph that any
tradition can accomplish is to rear noble and worthy rebels. The Greek
tradition of the fifth century B.C., the great age of Athens, not only
achieved extraordinary advances in most departments of human life, but
it trained an extraordinary band of critical or rebellious children.
Many a reader of Plato's most splendid satires against democratic
Athens will feel within him the conclusive answer: "No place but Athens
could ever have reared such a man as this, and taught him to see these
faults or conceive these ideals."
We are in reaction now against another great age, an age whose
achievements in art are memorable, in literature massive and splendid,
in science and invention absolutely unparalleled, but greatest of all
perhaps in the raising of all standards of public duty, the humanizing
of law and society, and the awakening of high ideals in social and
international politics. The Victorian Age had, amid enormous
differences, a certain similarity with the Periclean in its lack of
self-examination, its rush and chivalry and optimism, its unconscious
hypocrisy, its failure to think out its problems to the bitter end. And
in most of the current criticism on things Victorian, so far as it is
not mere fashion or folly, one seems to feel the Victorian spirit itself
speaking. It arraigns Victorian things by a Victorian standard; blames
them not because they have moved in a particular direction, but because
they have not moved far enough; because so many of the things they
attempted are still left undone, because the ideals they preached and
the standards by which they claimed to be acting were so much harder of
satisfaction than they knew. Euripides, like ourselves, comes in an age
of criticism following upon an age of movement and action. And for the
most part, like ourselves, he accepts the general standards on which the
movement and action were based. He accepts the Athenian ideals of free
thought, free speech, democracy, "virtue" and patriotism. He arraigns
his country because she is false to them.
* * * * *
We have spoken of the tradition as a homogeneous thing, but for any poet
or artist there are two quite different webs in it. There are the
accepted conventions of his art and the accepted beliefs of his
intellect, the one set aiming at the production of beauty, the others at
the attainment of truth.
Now for every artist who is also a critic or rebel there is a difference
of kind between these two sets of conventions. For the purposes of truth
the tradition is absolutely indifferent. If, as a matter of fact, the
earth goes round the sun, it does so not a whit the less because most
ages have believed the opposite. The seeker for truth can, as far as
truth is concerned, reject tradition without a qualm. But with art the
case is different. Art has to give a message from one man to another. As
you can only speak to a man in a language which you both know, so you
can only appeal to his artistic side by means of some common tradition.
His natural expectation, whether we try to satisfy or to surprise it, to
surpass or to disappoint it, is always an essential element in the
artistic effect. Consequently the tradition cannot be disregarded.
This distinction is often strongly marked in the practice of different
artists. One poet may be both a pioneer of new roads in thought and a
breaker of the laws of technique, like Walt Whitman--an enemy of the
tradition in both kinds. Another may be slack and anarchical in his
technique though quite conventional in his thought. I refrain from
suggesting instances. Still more clearly there are poets, such as
Shelley or Swinburne, whose works are full of intellectual rebellion
while their technique is exquisite and elaborate. The thoughts are bold
and strange. The form is the traditional form developed and made more
exquisite.
Now Euripides, except for some so-called licences in metre, belongs in
my judgment markedly to the last class. In speculation he is a critic
and a free lance; in artistic form he is intensely traditional. He seems
to have loved the very stiffnesses of the form in which he worked. He
developed its inherent powers in ways undreamed of, but he never broke
the mould or strayed away into shapelessness or mere realism. His last,
and in many respects his greatest, play, the _Bacchae_, is, as far as
our evidence goes, the most formal that he ever wrote.
These, then, are the lights in which we propose to look at Euripides. In
attempting to reconstruct his life we must be conscious of two
backgrounds against which he will be found standing, according as we
regard him as Thinker or as pure Artist. We must first try to understand
something of the tradition of thought in which he was reared, that is
the general atmosphere of fifth century Athens, and watch how he
expressed it and how he reacted against it. Next, we must understand
what Greek tragedy was, what rituals and conventions held it firm, and
what inner fire kept it living, and so study the method in which
Euripides used it for his chosen mode of expression, obeying its laws
and at the same time liberating its spirit.