THE SOURCES FOR A LIFE OF EURIPIDES: THE MEMORIES REMAINING IN THE FOURTH
CENTURY: HIS YOUTH AND ITS SURROUNDINGS: ATHENS AFTER THE PERSIAN WAR:
THE GREAT SOPHISTS
It is in one sense impossible to write a life of Euripides, for the
simple reason that he lived too long ago. In his time people were only
just beginning to write history at all; Herodotus, the "father of
history," was his close contemporary. They had begun to record really
great events; but it had not occurred to them that the life of any
individual was worth all the trouble of tracing out and writing down.
Biography of a sort began about two generations afterwards, when the
disciples of Aristotle and Epicurus exerted themselves to find out and
record the lives of their masters. But biography in our sense--the
complete writing of a life year by year with dates and documents--was
never practised at all in antiquity. Think of the Gospels, of the Acts,
even of Tacitus's _Life of Agricola_. They are different one from
another, but they are all unlike any modern biography in their resolute
indifference to anything like completeness. Ancient "Lives" as a rule
select a few great deeds, a few great sayings or discourses; they
concentrate upon the last years of their subject and often especially
upon his death.
The dates at which various eminent men of antiquity died are well known.
The man was then famous and his death was a memorable event. But--except
in a few aristocratic states, like Cos, which records the actual
birthday of the great physician Hippocrates--no baby was eminent and not
many young men. Very few dates of birth are known; and in the case of
almost all the famous men of antiquity their early histories are
forgotten and their early works lost. So it is with Euripides.
History in later antiquity was chiefly a branch of _belles lettres_ and
made no great effort after exactness. As a rule it contented itself with
the date at which a man "flourished," a very rough conception,
conventionally fixed either by the time when he did his most memorable
work or the year when he reached the age of forty. The year commonly
assigned to Euripides' birth is a good instance of ancient method in
these things. The system of chronology was badly confused. In the first
place there was no generally accepted era from which to date; and even
if there had been, the numerical system, before the invention of Arabic
ciphers, was as confused as English spelling is at the present day, and
made it hard to do the simplest sums. So the ordinary educational plan
was to group events together in some scheme that might not be quite
exact but was calculated to have some symbolic interest and to stay in
the memory. For instance, the three great tragedians were grouped
together round the Battle of Salamis, the great triumph of the Persian
Wars in 480 B.C. Aeschylus fought among the heavy-armed infantry,
Sophocles danced in a choir of boys to celebrate the victory, and
Euripides was born in Salamis on the day of the battle. We do not know
the origin of this pleasant fable; but we have another date given in a
very ancient chronicle called the _Parian Marble_, which was found in
the island of Paros in the seventeenth century and was composed in the
year 264 B.C. It puts the birth of Euripides in 484 B.C., and since we
cannot find any reason why this year should be invented, and since the
_Marble_ is the oldest witness now extant, we shall probably do well
provisionally to accept its statement.
In some of the MSS. which preserve Euripides' plays there are "scholia"
or ancient traditional commentaries written round the margin. A few of
the oldest notes in them come from Alexandrian scholars who lived in the
second century B.C. Others date from Roman times, in the first few
centuries of the Christian era; others from the eleventh century and
even later. And among them there is a quite ancient document called
_Life and Race of Euripides_.
It is anonymous and shapeless. Sentences may have been added or omitted
by the various people who at different times have owned or copied the
MSS. But we can see that it is derived from early sources, and notably
from a "Life" which was written by one Satyrus, a writer of the
Peripatetic or Aristotelian school, towards the end of the third century
B.C. Fragments from the same source have been detected in the Latin
authors Varro and Gellius; and it has influenced the biographical notice
in the ancient Greek lexicon of Suidas (tenth century A.D.). Suidas used
also another earlier and better source, the _Attic Chronicle_ of
Philochorus.
Philochorus was a careful and systematic annalist of the early third
century B.C., who used official documents and verified his statements.
His main work was to record all that affected Athens--history, myths,
festivals, and customs, but he also wrote various special treatises, one
of which was _On Euripides_. Satyrus wrote a series of _Lives of Famous
Men_, which was very popular, and we are now--since 1911--in a position
to judge how undeserved its popularity was. For fragments of his _Life
of Euripides_ have been unearthed in Egypt by Drs. Grenfell and Hunt and
published in their _Oxyrrhyncus Papyri_, vol. ix. The life takes the
form of a dialogue--apparently a dialogue with a lady. It is a mass of
quotations, anecdotes, bits of literary criticism, all run together with
an air of culture and pleasantness, a spice of gallantry and a
surprising indifference to historical fact. Evidently anecdotes amused
Satyrus and facts, as such, did not. He cared about literary style, but
he neither cared nor knew about history. The following considerations
will make this clear.
Euripides was, more than any other figure in ancient history, a
constant butt for the attacks of comedy. And we find, oddly enough, that
most of the anecdotes about Euripides in Satyrus are simply the jokes of
comedy treated as historical fact. For instance, in Aristophanes' play,
_The Women at the Thesmophoria_, the women, while alone at this private
festival, agree to murder Euripides because, by his penetrating study of
female character on the stage, he has made life too difficult for them.
Euripides, hearing of the plot, persuades his elderly father-in-law to
go in disguise to the forbidden celebration and defend him--which he
does in a ruinously tactless way. Some scenes of brilliant farce are
succeeded by a solemn truce between Euripides and the women of Athens.
It shows what our tradition is worth when we find that both the "_Life
and Race_," and Gellius and Satyrus himself, give as sober fact this
story which we know--and if we did not know could surely see--to be
comic invention. There is another class of fabulous anecdote which plays
an even larger part in the Satyrus tradition. In Aristophanes' _Frogs_
(1.1048), in a scene where Euripides is defending his plays against the
attacks of Aeschylus, there occurs the chance suggestion that Euripides
had learnt from his own experience all the varied villanies of his
wicked heroines. The idea took root, and he is represented in the
anecdotes as a deceived husband, like his own Theseus or Proetus, and
uttering lines suitable to the occasion out of his own tragedies; as
having two wives at once, like his own Neoptolemus--one of them named
Choirile, or "Piggy," and each of course worse than the other; as torn
to pieces by hounds, like his own Actaeon, or by wild women, like his
own Pentheus.
Something of this sort is possibly the origin of a famous joke about
Euripides' mother, which runs through Aristophanes and is repeated as a
fact in all the Lives. We know from Philochorus that it was not true.
The joke is to connect her with chervil--a grassy vegetable which grew
wild and was only eaten in time of famine--or with wild green-stuff in
general, or simply to call her a greengrocer. It was also a joke to say
anything about beet-root. (_Acharn._ 894, _Frogs_ 942), A man begs
Euripides to bring
"A new-born chervil from thy mother's breast."
(_Acharn._ 478.)
Or we hear that
"Wild wrongs he works on women,
Wild as the greens that waved about his cradle."
(_Thesm._ 455.)
When some one is about to quote Euripides his friend cries:
"Don't, don't, for God's sake! Don't be-chervil me!"
(_Knights_ 19.)
Now a much-quoted line from Euripides' tragedy _Melanippe the Wise_
runs: "It is not my word but my mother's word"; and we know that
Melanippe, and still more her mother, was an authority on potent herbs
and simples. Turn his heroine's mother into his own mother and the
potent herbs into some absurd vegetable, and the fable is made.
Setting aside this fog of misunderstanding and reckless anecdote, let us
try to make out the method on which our best authority, Philochorus, may
have put together his account of Euripides. He had almost no written
materials; he had no collection of letters and papers such as go to the
making of a modern biography. He could, however, consult the public
records of tragic performances as collected and edited by Aristotle and
his pupils and thus fix the dates of Euripides' plays, especially his
first and last performance, his first victory, and the like. He would
also find a few public inscriptions in which the poet's name was
mentioned, for the archives of that time were mostly engraved on stone
and put up in public places. There was also a portrait bust, authentic
though slightly idealized, taken in the poet's old age, and showing the
worn and beautiful face, the thin hair, and the lips somewhat fallen in.
These sources would give him a few skeleton facts; for anything more he
would have to depend on the accidental memories that survived. If he
wrote about 300-290 B.C. there was no one living who could remember a
man who died in 406. But there might be men of seventy whose fathers had
spoken to Euripides and whose grandfathers had known him well. Thus he
might with luck have struck some vein of intimate and intelligent
memory, which would have helped us to understand the great man. But he
did not. The memories are all about the poet's old age, and they are all
very external. We hear that he wore a long beard and had moles on his
face. He lived very much alone, and hated visitors and parties. He had a
quantity of books and could not bear women. He lived on the island of
Salamis in a cave which had two openings and a beautiful view--a good
cave was probably more comfortable than many a Greek house, so this may
not have been a great eccentricity--and there you could see him "all day
long, thinking to himself and writing, for he simply despised anything
that was not great and high." It is like the memories of a child, rather
a puzzled child, watching the great man from a distance.
Some few things come out clearly. He lived in his last years with a
small knot of intimates. Mnesilochus, his wife's father--or, perhaps,
another Mnesilochus of the same family--was a close friend. So was his
servant or secretary, Cephisophon. We do not hear of Socrates as an
intimate: the two owed a great debt to one another, and we hear that
Socrates never went to the theatre except when Euripides had a play
performing: to see a Euripides play he would even stir himself so far as
to walk all the way to the Piraeus. But it is likely enough that both
men were too vivid and original, perhaps too much accustomed to dominate
their respective circles, to be quite comfortable in the same room. And
we never find Euripides conversing with Socrates in Plato's dialogues.
Some of Euripides' older friends were by this time driven out from
Athens. The great "Sophist," Protagoras, had read his famous book, _On
the Gods_, in Euripides' own house. But he was now dead, drowned at sea,
and the poet's master, Anaxagoras, had died long before. Some of the
younger artists seem to have found a friend in Euripides. There was
Timotheus, the young Ionian composer, who--like most musicians of any
originality--was supposed to have corrupted the music of the day by his
florid style and bold inventions. His first performance in Athens was a
mortifying failure, and we are told that the passionate Ionian was on
the point of killing himself when the old poet came and encouraged him.
He had only to hold fast, and the people who now hissed would turn and
applaud.
One fact is especially clear, the restless enmity of the comic writers.
Of the eleven comedies of Aristophanes which have come down to us three
are largely devoted to Euripides, and not one has managed altogether to
avoid touching him. I know of no parallel to it in all the history of
literature. Has there ever again been a tragic poet, or any poet, who so
centred upon himself year after year till he was nearly eighty the
mocking attention of all the popular wits? And how was it that the
Athenian public never tired of this incessant poet-baiting, these
incessant appeals to literary criticism in the midst of farce? The
attacks are sometimes rough and vicious, sometimes acute and searching,
often enough they hide a secret admiration. And the chief enemy,
Aristophanes, must, to judge from his parodies, have known a large
number of Euripides' ninety-two plays by heart, and been at least half
fascinated by the object of his satire. However that may be, the
hostility of the comic writers had evidently a general hostility behind
it. Our tradition states this definitely and the persistency of the
attacks proves it. You cannot go on constantly deriding on the stage a
person whom your audience does not wish derided. And the unpopularity of
Euripides, as we shall see later, is not hard to understand. The Satyrus
tradition puts it down to his personal aloofness and austerity. He
avoided society, and he "made no effort to please his audience." So that
at least he did not soften by personal pleasantness the opposition they
felt to his whole view of life. It was not only that he was utterly
alienated from the War Party and the mob leaders: here he only agreed
with Aristophanes. It was that he had pierced through to a deeper
stratum of thought, in which most of the pursuits and ideals of the men
about him stood condemned. Socrates reached the same plane, and they
killed Socrates.
It is somewhat harder to understand the universal assumption of our
authorities that Euripides was a notorious castigator of the female sex
and that the women of Athens naturally hated him. To us he seems an
aggressive champion of women; more aggressive, and certainly far more
appreciative, than Plato. Songs and speeches from the _Medea_ are
recited to-day at suffragist meetings. His tragic heroines are famous
and are almost always treated with greater interest and insight than his
heroes. Yet not only the ancients, but all critics up to the last
generation or so, have described him as a woman-hater. What does it
mean? Is Aristophanes ironical, and are the scholiasts and grammarians
merely stupid? Or is there some explanation for this extraordinary
judgment?
I think the explanation is that the present age is the first, or almost
the first, that has learned to treat its heroines in fiction as real
human beings, with what are called "mixed characters." As lately as the
time of Sir Walter Scott, perhaps as lately as Dickens, common
convention demanded that a heroine, if sympathetic, should be so free
from faults as to be almost without character. Ibsen's heroines, who
were real human beings studied with sympathy but with profound
sincerity, seemed to their generation shocking and even horrible. All
through the ages the ideal of womanhood in conventional fiction has
mostly been of the type praised by one great Athenian thinker: "the
greatest glory for a woman is to be as little mentioned as possible
among men." If that ideal was really predominant among the women of
Athens, it is no wonder that they felt outraged by Euripides. They had
not reached, and most of their husbands had not reached, the point of
being interested in good study of character, much less the point of
demanding a freer and more strenuous life. To the average stupid
Athenian it was probably rather wicked for a woman to have any
character, wicked for her to wish to take part in public life, wicked
for her to acquire learning, or to doubt any part of the conventional
religion, just as it was wicked for her to deceive her husband. Such
women should not be spoken about; above all they should not be treated
with understanding and sympathy. The understanding made it all
infinitely worse. To people of this type the women of Euripides must
have been simply shocking and the poet himself a cruel enemy of the sex.
One only wonders that they could stand Sophocles' heroines, such as
Antigone and Jocasta. To cleverer men, like Aristophanes, the case
would, no doubt, seem rather more complicated. But Aristophanes, amid
the many flashes of sympathy he shows for "advanced" women, was not the
man to go against his solid conservative audience or to forgo such rich
material for jokes.
In any case this is the kind of picture we have of Euripides in his last
years; a figure solitary, austere, with a few close intimates, wrapped
up in living for what he would call "the service of the Muses," in
music, poetry and speculation; capable still of thrilling his audiences
with an intensity of tragic emotion such as no other poet had ever
reached; but bowed with age, somewhat friendless, and like other
solitaries a little strange in his habits; uncomprehendingly admired and
hated, and moving always through a mist of half-envious, half-derisive
laughter. _Calvus et calvinista_--one is reminded, amid many
differences, of the quaint words in which William the Silent describes
his own passage from youth to age, till the brilliant Catholic prince,
leader of courts and tourneys, sate at last in his lonely council
chamber "bald and a Calvinist." Let us try to trace the path of life
which led him to this end.
* * * * *
He was the son of Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides--such names often have
alternative forms--who is said to have been a merchant. His mother,
Cleito, the supposed greengrocer, was, according to Philochorus, "of
very high birth." He was born at Phlya, a village in the centre of
Attica. The neighbourhood is celebrated still for its pleasant trees and
streams in the midst of a sunburnt land. In Euripides' time it was more
famous for its temples. It was the seat of Demeter Anesidora (Earth,
Upsender of Gifts), of Dionysus of the Blossom, and the Dread Virgins,
old-world and mysterious names, not like the prevailing gods of the
Homeric mythology. Most famous of all, it possessed the mystery temple
of Eros, or Love. Owing to the researches of recent years, these
mysteries can now be in their general nature understood. They are
survivals of an old tribal society, in which all the boys as they
reached maturity were made to pass through certain ordeals and
initiations. They were connected both with vegetation and with re-birth
after death, because they dated from a remote age in which the
fruitfulness of the tribal fields was not differentiated from the
fruitfulness of the flocks and the human families, and the new members
born into the community were normally supposed to be the old ancestors
returning to their homes. By Euripides' day such beliefs had faded into
mystical doctrines, to be handled with speechless reverence, not to be
questioned or understood, but they had their influence upon his mind.
There were other temples too, belonging to the more aristocratic gods of
heroic mythology, as embodied in Homer. Euripides was in his youth
cup-bearer to a certain guild of Dancers--dancing in ancient times had
always religious associations about it--who were chosen from the "first
families in Athens" and danced round the altar of the Delian Apollo. He
was also Fire-bearer to the Apollo of Cape Zoster; that is, it was his
office to carry a torch in the procession which on a certain night of
each year met the Delian Apollo at Cape Zoster, and escorted him on his
mystic path from Delos to Athens.
When the child was four years old he had to be hurried away from his
home and then from his country. The Persians were coming. The awful
words lost none of their terror from the fact that in Greek the word
"Persai," Persians, meant "to destroy." So later it added something to
the dread inspired by Rome that her name, "Roma," meant "strength." The
family must have crossed the narrow seas to Salamis or further, and seen
the smoke of the Persian conflagrations rising daily from new towns and
villages of Attica and at last from the Acropolis, or Citadel, itself.
Then came the enormous desperate sea-battle; the incredible victory; the
sight of the broken oriental fleet beating sullenly away for Asia and
safety, and the solemn exclamation of the Athenian general,
Themistocles, "It is not we who have done this!" The next year the
Athenians could return to Attica and begin to build up their ruined
farms. Then came the final defeat of the Persian land army at Plataea,
and the whole atmosphere lifted. Athens felt that she had acted like a
hero and was reaping a hero's reward. She had borne the full brunt of
the war; she had voluntarily put herself under the orders of Sparta
rather than risk a split in the Greek forces; and now she had come out
as the undisputed mistress of the sea, the obvious champion round whom
the eastern Greeks must rally. Sparta, not interested in matters outside
her own borders, and not capable of any constructive policy, dropped
sulkily out, and left her to carry on the offensive war for the
liberation of the Greeks in Asia. The current of things was with her.
But this great result was not merely the triumph of a particular city;
it was the triumph of an ideal and a way of life. Freedom had defeated
despotism, democracy had defeated kings, hardy poverty had defeated all
the gold of the East. The men who fought of their free will for home and
country had proved more lasting fighters than the conscripts who were
kept in the lines by fear of tortures and beheadings and impalements.
Above all "virtue," as the Greeks called it, or "virtue" and "wisdom"
together, had shown their power. The words raise a smile in us; indeed,
our words do not properly correspond with the Greek, because we can not
get our ideas simple enough. "Virtue" is what makes a man, or anything
else, good; it is the quality of a good soldier, a good general, a good
citizen, a good bootmaker, a good horse or almost a good sword. And
"wisdom" is that by which a man knows how to do things--to use a spear,
or a tool, to think and speak and write, to do figures and history and
geometry, to advise and convince his fellow-citizens. All these great
forces moved, or so it seemed at the time, in the same direction; and
probably it was hardly felt as a dangerous difference when many people
preferred to say that it was "piety" that had won in the war against
"impiety," and that the Persians had been destroyed because, being
monotheists, they had denied the Gods. No doubt "piety," properly
understood, was a kind of "wisdom." Let us take a few passages from the
old Ionian historian, Herodotus, to illustrate what the feeling for
Athens was in Euripides' youth.
Athens represented Hellenism. (_Hdt._ I. 60.) "The Greek race was
distinguished of old from the barbarian as more intelligent and more
emancipated from silly nonsense (or 'savagery') . . . And of all the
Greeks the Athenians were counted first in Wisdom." Athens, as the old
epigram put it, was "The Hellas of Hellas."
And this superior wisdom went with freedom and democracy. "So Athens
grew. It is clear wherever you test it, what a good thing is equality
among men. Athens under the tyrants was no better than her neighbours,
even in war; when freed from the tyrants she was far the first of all."
(V. 78.)
And what did this freedom and democracy mean? A speaker in Herodotus
tells us (III. 80): "A tyrant disturbs ancient laws, violates women,
kills men without trial. But a people ruling--first the very name of it
is beautiful, and secondly a people does none of these things."
And the freedom is not mere licence. When Xerxes heard the small numbers
of the Greeks who were opposed to him he asked why they did not all run
away, "especially as you say they are free and there is no one to stop
them?" And the Spartan answered: "They are free, O King, but not free to
do everything. For there is a master over them named Law, whom they fear
more than thy servants fear thee." (VII. 104. This refers specially to
the Spartans, but the same tale is told by Aeschylus of the Athenians.
It applies to any free Greeks as against the enslaved barbarian.)
The free Athenian must also have _arete_, "virtue." He must be a better
man in all senses than the common herd. As Themistocles put it; at every
turn of life there is a choice between a higher and a lower, and they
must choose the higher always. Especially there is one sense in which
Athens must profess _arete_; the sense of generosity or chivalry. When
the various Greek states were contending for the leadership before the
battle of Artemisium, the Athenians, though contributing much the
largest fleet, "thought that the great thing was that Greece should be
saved, and gave up their claims." (_Hdt._ VIII. 3.) In the similar
dispute for the post of honour and danger, before the battle of Plataea,
the Athenians did plead their cause and won it. But they pleaded
promising to abide loyally by Sparta's decision if their claims were
rejected, and their arguments show what ideal they had formed of
themselves. They claim that in recent years they alone have met the
Persians single-handed on behalf of all Greece; that in old times it was
they who gave refuge to the children of Heracles when hunted through
Greece by the tyrant Eurystheus; it was they who, at the cost of war,
prevented the conquering Thebans from leaving their dead enemies to rot
unburied and thus offending against the laws of Greece and humanity.
This is the light in which Athens conceived herself; the ideal up to
which, amid much confused, hot-headed and self-deceiving patriotism, she
strove to live. She was to be the Saviour of Hellas.
* * * * *
Euripides was about eight when the ruined walls of Athens were rebuilt
and the city, no longer defenceless against her neighbours, could begin
to rebuild the "House of Athena" on the Acropolis and restore the
Temples and the Festivals throughout Attica. He can hardly have been
present when the general Themistocles, then at the height of his fame,
provided the Chorus for the earliest of the great tragedians,
Phrynichus, in 476 B.C. But he must have watched the new paintings being
put up by the same Themistocles in the temples at Phlya, with scenes
from the Persian War. And through his early teens he must have watched
the far more famous series of pictures with which Polygnotus, the first
of the great Greek painters, was adorning the Acropolis; pictures that
canonized scenes from the Siege of Troy and other legendary history.
When he was ten he may probably have seen a curious procession which
brought back from the island of Skyros the bones of Theseus, the
mythical king of Athens and the accepted symbol, king though he was, of
Athenian enlightenment and democracy. Athens was now too great and too
self-conscious to allow Theseus to lie on foreign soil. When he was
twelve he may have seen Aeschylus' _Persae_, "the one great play dealing
with an historical event that exists in literature." When he was
seventeen he pretty certainly saw the _Seven against Thebes_ and was
much influenced by it; but the Choregus this time was a new statesman,
Pericles. Themistocles was in banishment; and the other great heroes of
the Persian time, Aristides and Miltiades, dead.
Next year, 466 B.C. Euripides became officially an "Ephebus," or
"Youth." He was provided with a shield and spear, and set to garrison
and police duty in the frontier forts of Attica. Full military service
was to follow in two years. Meantime the current of his thoughts must
have received a shock. For, while his shield and spear were still fresh,
news came of one of the most stunning military disasters in Athenian
history. A large colony which had been established on the river Strymon
in Thrace had been lured into dangerous country by the Thracian tribes,
then set upon by overwhelming numbers and massacred to the number of ten
thousand. No wonder that one of Euripides' earliest plays, when he took
to writing, was the story of _Rhesus_, the Thracian, and his rushing
hordes of wild tribesmen.
But meantime Euripides had not found his work in life. We hear that he
was a good athlete; there were records of his prize-winning in Athens
and in Eleusis. Probably every ambitious boy in Greece did a good deal
of running and boxing. More serious was his attempt at painting.
Polygnotus was at work in Athens, and the whole art advancing by leaps
and bounds. He tried to find his true work there, and paintings by his
hand were discovered by antiquarians of later times--or so they
believed--in the town of Megara. His writings show a certain interest in
painting here and there, and it is perhaps the painter in him that
worked out in the construction of his dramas such fine and varied
effects of grouping.
But there was more in the air than painting and sculpture. The youth of
Euripides fell in an age which saw perhaps the most extraordinary
intellectual awakening known to human history. It had been preparing for
about a century in certain cities of Ionian Greece, on the coast of Asia
Minor, rich and cultivated states, subject for the most part to Lydian
or Persian governors. The revolt of these cities and its suppression by
Persia had sent numbers of Ionian "wise men," philosophers, poets,
artists, historians, men of science, to seek for refuge in Greece, and
especially in Athens. Athens was held to be the mother-city of all the
Ionian colonies, and had been their only champion in the revolt. She
became now, as one of these Ionian exiles put it, "the hearth on which
the fire of Hellas burned." It is difficult to describe this great
movement in a few pages, but one can, perhaps, get some idea of it by an
imaginary comparison. Imagine first the sort of life that was led in
remote parts of Yorkshire or Somerset towards the end of the eighteenth
century, a stagnant rustic life with no moving ideas, and unquestioning
in its obedience to authority, in which hardly any one could read except
the parson, and the parson's reading was not of a kind to stir a man's
pulse. And next imagine the intellectual ferment which was then in
progress in London or Paris; the philosophers, painters, historians and
men of science, the voices proclaiming that all men were equal, that the
laws of England were unjust to the poor, that slavery was a crime, and
that monarchy was a false form of government, or that no action was
morally wrong except what tended to produce human misery. Imagine then
what would occur in the mind of a clever and high-thinking boy who was
brought suddenly from the one society into the heart of the second, and
made to realise that the battles and duties and prizes of life were
tenfold more thrilling and important than he had ever dreamed. That is
the kind of awakening that must have occurred in the minds of a large
part of the Greek people in the early fifth century.
A thoroughly backward peasant in a Greek village--even an Attic village
like Phlya--had probably as few ideas as other uneducated peasants. In
Athens some fifty years later we hear that it was impossible, with the
best will in the world, to find any one who could not read or write.
(_Ar. Knights_ 188 ff.) But the difference in time and place is
cardinal. The countryman who voted for the banishment of Aristides the
Just had to ask some one else to write the name for him. Such a man did
not read nor yet think. He more or less hated the next village and
regarded its misfortunes as his own advantage. He was sunk in
superstition. His customs were rigid and not understood. He might
worship a goddess with a horse's head or a hero with a snake's tail. He
would perform for the welfare of his fields traditional sacrifices that
were often filthy and sometimes cruel. On certain holy days he would
tear small beasts to pieces or drive them into a fire; in very great
extremities he would probably think no medicine so good as human blood.
His rules of agriculture would be a mixture of rough common sense and
stupid taboos: he would not reap till the Pleiades were rising, and he
would carefully avoid sitting on a fixed stone. When he sought for
learning, he would get it in old traditional books like _Hesiod_, which
taught him how Ouranos had been mutilated by his son Cronos, and Cronos
bound with chains by his son Zeus; how Zeus was king of gods and men,
but had been cheated by Prometheus into accepting bones instead of meat
in a sacrifice. He would believe that Tantalus had given the gods his
son Pelops to eat, to see if they would know the difference, and some
of them had eaten bits of him. He would perhaps be ready, with great
hesitation, to tolerate certain timid attempts to expurgate the story,
like Pindar's, for instance, which results, according to our judgment,
in making it rather worse. And this man, rooted in his customs, his
superstitions, his narrow-minded cruelties, will of course regard every
departure from his own way of life as so much pure wickedness. In every
contest that goes on between Intelligence and Stupidity, between
Enlightenment and Obscurantism, the powers of the dark have this immense
advantage: they never understand their opponents, and consequently
represent them as always wrong, always wicked, whereas the intelligent
party generally makes an effort to understand the stupid and to
sympathize with anything that is good or fine in their attitude. Many of
our Greek Histories still speak as if the great spiritual effort which
created fifth century Hellenism was a mass of foolish chatter and
intellectual trickery and personal self-indulgence.
It was not that, nor anything like that. Across the mind of our stupid
peasant the great national struggle against Persia brought first the
idea that perhaps really it was better to die than to be a slave; that
it was well to face death not merely for his own home but
actually--incredible as it seemed--for other people's homes, for the
homes of those wretched people in the next village. Our own special
customs and taboos, he would reflect with a shiver, do not really matter
when they are brought into conflict with a common Hellenism or a common
humanity. There are greater things about us than we knew. There are also
greater men. These men who are in everybody's mouth: Themistocles above
all, who has defeated the Persian and saved Greece: but crowds of others
besides, Aristides the Just and Miltiades, the hero of Marathon;
Demokedes, the learned physician, who was sought out by people in need
of help from Italy to Susa; Hecataeus, who had made a picture of the
whole earth, showing all the countries and cities and rivers and how far
each is from the next, and who could have saved the Ionians if they had
only listened to him; Pythagoras, who had discovered all about numbers
and knew the wickedness of the world and had founded a society, bound by
strict rules, to combat it. What is it about these men that has made
them so different from you and me and the other farmers who meet in the
agora on market-day? It is _sophia_, wisdom; it is _arete_, virtue. They
are not a bit stronger in the arm, not bigger, not richer, or more
high-born: they are just wiser, and thus better men. Cannot we be made
wise? We know we are stupid, we are very ignorant, but we can learn.
The word Sophistes means either "one who makes wise," or, possibly, as
some scholars think, "one who deals in wisdom." The difference is
slight. In any case it was in answer to this call for _sophia_ that the
Sophists arose. Doubtless they were of all kinds; great men and small,
honest and dishonest; teachers of real wisdom and of pretence. Our
tradition is rather bitter against them, because it dates from the
bitter time of reaction and disappointment, when the hopes of the fifth
century and the men who guided it seemed to have led Athens only to her
fall. Plato in particular is against them as he is against Athens
herself. In the main the judgment of the afterworld upon them will
depend on the side we take in a never-ending battle: they fought for
light and knowledge and freedom and the development of all man's powers.
If we prefer blinkers and custom, subordination and the rod, we shall
think them dangerous and shallow creatures. But, to see what the
sophists were like, let us consider two of them who are recorded as
having specially been the teachers of Euripides.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, in Ionia, was about fifteen years older than
Euripides, and spent some thirty years of his life in Athens. He
discovered for the first time that the moon shines by the reflection of
the sun's light; and he explained, in the main correctly, the cause of
eclipses. The sun was not a god: it was a white-hot mass of stone or
earth, in size perfectly enormous. In describing its probable size,
language failed him; he only got as far as saying--what must have seemed
almost a mad exaggeration--that it was many times larger than the
Peloponnese. He held, if he did not invent, a particular form of the
atomic theory which has played such a great role in the history of
modern science. He was emphatic on the indestructibility of matter.
Things could be broken up into their elements and could grow together
again, but nothing could be created or destroyed. There was order in the
world and purpose, and this was the work of a conscious power which he
called "Nous," or Mind. "All things were together in a mass, till Mind
came and put order into them." Mind is outside things, not mixed with
them, and some authorities say that Anaxagoras called it "God."
Meantime, he showed by experiment the reality and substance of air, and
disproved the common notion of "empty space." It will be seen that these
ideas, if often crudely expressed, are essentially the same ideas which
gave new life to modern science after the sleep of the Middle Ages.
Almost every one of them is the subject of active dispute at the present
day.
Apart from physical science, we learn that Anaxagoras was a close friend
and adviser of the great Athenian statesman, Pericles; and we have by
chance an account of a long discussion between the two men about the
theory of punishment--whether the object of it is to do "justice" upon a
wrong-doer apart from any result that may accrue, or simply to deter
others from doing the same and thus make society better. The question is
the subject of a vigorous correspondence in the _Times_ while these
words are writing. We can understand what an effect such a teacher as
this would have on the eager young man from Phlya. One great word of
liberation was already in the air and belongs to no one sophist or
philosopher. This was the distinction between Nature on the one hand and
Custom or Convention on the other. The historian Herodotus, who was no
sophist but loved a good story, tells how the Persian king, Darius,
called some Greeks and some Indian tribesmen together into his presence.
He then asked the Greeks what payment would induce them to eat the dead
bodies of their fathers. "Nothing in the world," they cried in
indignation. "They would reverently burn them." He proceeded to ask the
Indians what they would take to burn their fathers' bodies, and they
repelled the bare thought with horror; they would do nothing but eat
them with every mark of love and respect. "Fire burns in the same way
both here and in Persia," the saying was, "but men's notions of right
and wrong are not at all the same." The one is Nature; the other is
man's Custom or Convention. This antithesis between "Phusis" and "Nomos"
ran vividly through the whole of Greek philosophy, and awoke with
renewed vigour in Rousseau and the radical writers of the eighteenth
century. It is an antithesis against which conformist dialecticians
have always turned their sharpest weapons. It has again and again been
dissected and refuted and shown to be philosophically untenable: but it
still lives and has still something of the old power to shatter and to
set free. All the thinkers of Greece at the time we are treating were
testing the laws and maxims of their day, and trying to find out what
really rested on Nature and what was the mere embroidery of man. It is
always a dangerous and exciting inquiry; especially because the most
irrational conventions are apt also to be the most sacrosanct.
This whole spirit was specially incarnate in another of Euripides'
teachers. We hear of Protagoras in his old age from that enemy of the
sophists, Plato. But for this sophist even Plato's satire is kindly and
almost reverent. Protagoras worked not at physical science, but at
language and philosophy. He taught men to think and speak; he began the
study of grammar by dividing sentences into four kinds, Optative,
Interrogative, Indicative, Imperative. He taught rhetoric; he formulated
the first theory of democracy. But it was as a sceptic that he struck
men's imaginations most. "About the Gods, I have no means of knowing
either that they are or are not. For the hindrances to knowledge are
many, the darkness of the subject and the shortness of man's life."
Numbers of people, no doubt, went as far as this, and without suffering
for it as Protagoras did; but his scepticism cut deeper and raised
questions still debated in modern thought. "Man is the measure of
things"; there is no truth to be had beyond the impression made on a
man's mind. When this given object seems one thing to A and another
thing to B, it _is_ to each one exactly what it seems; just as honey not
only seems sweet but _is_ sweet to a healthy man, and not only seems
bitter but _is_ bitter to a man with jaundice. Then you can not say, we
may ask, that one or other impression is false, and will prove false on
further inquiry? No: he answers; each impression is equally true. The
only difference is that each state of mind is not equally good. You
cannot prove to the jaundiced man that his honey is sweet, for it is
not: or to the drunkard that he does not desire his drink, for he does:
what you can do is to alter the men's state of mind, to cure the
jaundice or the drunkenness. Our cognition flows and changes. It is the
result of an active impact upon a passive percipient. And, resulting
from this change, there are in practice always two things to be said, a
pro and a con. about every possible proposition. There is no general
statement that cannot be contradicted.
Other teachers also are represented as having influenced Euripides;
Archelaus, who tried to conceive Anaxagoras's "Mind" in some material
form, as air or spirit--for _spiritus_, of course, means "breath";
Prodicus, who, besides his discoveries in grammar, is the author of a
popular and edifying fable which has served in many schoolrooms for many
centuries. It tells how Heracles once came to some cross roads, one road
open, broad, and smooth and leading a little downhill, the other narrow
and uphill and rough: and on the first you gradually became a worse and
worse man, on the second a better one. There was Diogenes of Apollonia,
whose theories about air seem to have had some effect on Euripides'
writings; and of course there was, among the younger men, Socrates.
Socrates is too great and too enigmatic a teacher to be summed up in a
few sentences, and though a verse of ancient comedy has come down to us,
saying, "Socrates piles the faggots for Euripides' fire," his influence
on his older friend is not very conspicuous. Euripides must have caught
something from his scepticism, his indifference to worldly standards,
his strong purpose, and something also from his resolute rejection of
all philosophy except that which was concerned with the doings and
feelings of men. "The fields and trees will not talk to me; it is only
the human beings in the city that will." That saying of Socrates might
be the motto of many a dramatist.
The greatness of these philosophers or sophists of the fifth century
does not, of course, lie in the correctness of their scientific results.
The dullest and most unilluminated text-book produced at the present day
is far more correct than Anaxagoras. Their greatness lies partly in the
pioneer quality of their work. They first struck out the roads by which
later workers could advance further. Partly in the daring and felicity
with which they hit upon great and fruitful ideas, ideas which have
brought light and freedom with them whenever they have recurred to men's
minds, and which, as we have seen, are to a great extent still, after
more than two thousand years, living issues in philosophic thought.
Partly it lies in the mere freedom of spirit with which they set to
work, unhampered by fears and taboos, to seek the truth, to create
beauty, and to improve human life. The difference of atmosphere between
the sophists of the Periclean circle and the ordinary backward Attic
farmer must have been visible to every observer. If more evidence of the
great gulf was needed, it was supplied emphatically enough in the
experience of Euripides. He was himself prosecuted by Cleon, the
demagogue, for "impiety." The same charge had been levelled even against
his far less destructive predecessor, Aeschylus. Of these three special
friends whom we have mentioned, Euripides did not live to see Socrates
condemned to death and executed. But he saw Anaxagoras, in spite of the
protection of Pericles, accused of "impiety" and compelled to fly for
his life. He saw Protagoras, for the book which he had read aloud in
Euripides' own house, prosecuted and condemned. The book was publicly
burned; the author escaped, it is said, only to be drowned at sea, a
signal mark in the eyes of the orthodox of how the gods regarded such
philosophy.
Thought was no doubt freer in ancient Athens than in any other city
within two thousand years of it. Those who suffered for religious
advance are exceedingly few. But it was not in human nature, especially
in such early times, for individuals to do such great service to their
fellow men and not occasionally be punished for it. They induced men for
a time to set reason and high ideals above the instincts of the herd:
and sooner or later the herd must turn and trample them.
One of the ancient lives says that it was this sense of the antagonism
between Anaxagoras and the conservative masses that turned Euripides
away from philosophy. One need scarcely believe that. The way he took
was not the way to escape from danger or unpopularity. And when a man
shows extraordinary genius for poetry one need not search for the
reasons which induced him not to write prose. He followed in the wake
not of Anaxagoras but of Aeschylus.