LIFE CONTINUED: WHAT IS A GREEK TRAGEDY? EURIPIDES' EARLY PLAYS: "ALCESTIS"
AND "TELEPHUS"
To the public of the present day a play is merely an entertainment, and
it was the same to the Elizabethans. Shakespeare can say to his audience
"Our true intent is all for your delight," and we feel no particular
shock in reading the words. The companies were just noblemen's servants;
and it was natural enough that if Lord Leicester's players did not amuse
Lord Leicester's guests, they should be sent away and others hired. If
they too proved dull, the patron could drop the play altogether and call
for tumblers and dancing dogs.
To a playwright of the twelfth century, who worked out in the church or
in front of it his presentation of the great drama of the Gospel, such
an attitude would have seemed debased and cynical. However poor the
monkish players or playwright might be, surely that which they were
presenting was in itself enough to fill the mind of a spectator. To
them, as the great mediaevalist, Gaston Paris, puts it, "the universe was
a vast stage, on which was played an eternal drama, full of tears and
joy, its actors divided between heaven, earth and hell; a drama whose
end is foreseen, whose changes of fortune are directed by the hand of
God, yet whose every scene is rich and thrilling." The spectator was
admitted to the councils of the Trinity; he saw the legions of darkness
mingling themselves with the lives of humanity, tempting and troubling,
and the saints and angels at their work of protection or intercession;
he saw with his own eyes the kiss of Judas, the scourging and
crucifixion, the descent into Hell, the resurrection and ascension; and,
lastly, the dragging down to red and bloody torment of the infinite
multitudes of the unorthodox or the wicked. Imagine what passed in the
minds of those who witnessed in full faith such a spectacle! [_Poesie du
Moyen Age I_, Essay I.]
Now, in spite of a thousand differences of social organization and
religious dogma, the atmosphere of primitive Greek tragedy must have
been most strangely similar to this. It is not only that, like the
mediaeval plays, Greek tragedy was religious; that it was developed out
of a definite ritual; not even that the most marked links of historical
continuity can be traced between the death-and-resurrection ritual of
certain Pagan "saviours" and those of the mediaeval drama. It is that the
ritual on which tragedy was based embodied the most fundamental Greek
conceptions of life and fate, of law and sin and punishment.
When we say that tragedy originated in a dance, ritual or magical,
intended to represent the death of the vegetation this year and its
coming return in triumph next year, the above remarks may seem hard to
justify. But we must remember several things. First, a dance was in
ancient times essentially religious, not a mere capering with the feet
but an attempt to express with every limb and sinew of the body
those emotions for which words, especially the words of simple and
unlettered men, are inadequate (see p. 229). Again, vegetation is to us
an abstract common noun; to the ancient it was a personal being, not
"it" but "He." His death was as our own deaths, and his re-birth a thing
to be anxiously sought with prayers and dances. For if He were not
re-born, what would happen? Famine, and wholesale death by famine, was a
familiar thought, a regularly returning terror, in these primitive
agricultural villages. Nay, more, why must the cycle of summer and
winter roll as it does? Why must "He" die and men die? Some of the
oldest Greek philosophers have no doubt about the answer: there has been
"Hubris" or "Adikia," Pride or Injustice, and the result thereof must
needs be death. Every year He waxes too strong and commits "Hubris," and
such sin has its proper punishment. "The sun shall not transgress his
measures," says Heraclitus; "if he does he shall be pursued by Erinyes,
till justice be re-fulfilled." It is the law of all existing things.
"They all pay retribution for injustice, one to another, according to
the Ordinance of Time" (_Heraclitus_, fr. 94, _Anaximander_, fr. 9). And
the history of each year's bloom was an example of this refluent
balance. The Year Daemon--Vegetation Spirit or Corn God or whatever we
call him--waxes proud and is slain by his enemy, who becomes thereby a
murderer and must in turn perish at the hands of the expected avenger,
who is at the same time the Wronged One re-risen. The ritual of this
Vegetation Spirit is extraordinarily wide-spread in all quarters of the
globe, and may best be studied in Dr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_,
especially in the part entitled, "_The Dying God_." Dionysus, the daemon
of tragedy, is one of these Dying Gods, like Attis, Adonis, Osiris.
The Dionysiac ritual which lay at the back of tragedy, may be
conjectured in its full form to have had six regular stages: (1) an Agon
or Contest, in which the Daemon fights against his enemy, who--since it
is really this year fighting last year--is apt to be almost identical
with himself; (2) a Pathos, or disaster, which very commonly takes the
shape of a "Sparagmos," or Tearing in pieces; the body of the Corn God
being scattered in innumerable seeds over the earth; sometimes of some
other sacrificial death; (3) a Messenger, who brings the news; (4) a
Lamentation, very often mixed with a Song of Rejoicing, since the death
of the Old King is also the accession of the new; (5) the Discovery or
Recognition of the hidden or dismembered god; and (6) his Epiphany or
Resurrection in glory.[1]
[Footnote 1: The above is the present writer's re-statement, published
in Miss Harrison's _Themis_, pp. 341 ff., of the orthodox view of the
origin of tragedy. _See_ also Cornford _From Religion to Philosophy_,
first few chapters. The chief non-Dionysiac theory is Professor
Ridgeway's, who derives tragedy directly from the funeral cult of
individual heroes: _Origin of Tragedy_, Cambridge, 1910.]
This ritual of Dionysus, being made into a drama and falling into the
hands of a remarkable set of creative artists, developed into what we
know as Greek tragedy. The creative passion of the artist gradually
conquered the emotion of the mere worshipper.
Exactly the same development took place in mediaeval drama, or rather it
was taking place when new secular influences broke in and destroyed it.
The liturgical plays first enacted the main story of the New Testament;
then they emphasized particular parts--there is a beautiful play, for
instance, on the Massacre of the Innocents; then they developed
imaginatively scenes that are implied but not mentioned in the Gospel,
such as the experiences of the Magdalen when she lived "in joy," her
dealings with cosmetic-sellers and the like; then, ranging right outside
the Gospel histories, they dealt with the lives of St. Nicholas, St.
Antony or any person who provided a good legend and had some claim to an
atmosphere of sanctity.
In the same way Greek tragedy extended its range first to embrace the
histories of other Heroes or Daemons--the difference is slight--who were
essentially like Dionysus: Pentheus, Lycurgus, Hippolytus, Actaeon and
especially, I should be inclined to add, Orestes. Then it took in any
heroes to whose memory some ritual was attached. For the play is, with
the rarest and most doubtful exceptions, essentially the enactment of a
ritual, or rather of what the Greeks called an "aition"--that is, a
supposed historical event which is the origin or "cause" of the ritual.
Thus the death of Hippolytus is the "aition" of the lamentation-rite
performed at the grave of Hippolytus; the death of Aias is the "aition"
of the festival called Aianteia; the death of Medea's children, the
"aition" of a certain ritual at Corinth; the story of Prometheus the
"aition" of a certain Fire-festival in Athens. The tragedy, as ritual,
enacts its own legendary origin.
There is then a further extension of the theme, to include a very few
events in recent history. But we must observe that only those events
were chosen which were felt to have about them some heroic grandeur or
mystery; I think we may even say, only those events which, like the
Battle of Salamis or the Fall of Miletus, had been made the subject of
some religious celebration.
However that may be, the general temper of tragedy moved strongly away
from the monotony of fixed ritual. The subjects thus grew richer and
more varied; the mode of representation loftier and more artistic. What
had begun as almost pure ritual ended by being almost pure drama. By the
time Euripides began to write the master-tragedian Aeschylus had already
lifted Greek drama to its highest level: whole generations have read his
plays without even suspecting the ritual form that lies behind them.
Aeschylus had also made the whole performance much longer and more
impressive: he composed three continuous tragedies forming a single
whole and followed by the strange performance called a Satyr-play. The
wild element of revelry which was proper to Dionysus worship, with its
bearded dancing half-animal satyrs, had been kept severely away from the
stage during the three tragedies and must burst in to have its fling
when they were finished. The other tragedians do not seem to have
written in trilogies, and Euripides at any rate moved gradually away
from satyr-plays. In their stead he put a curious sort of pro-satyric
tragedy, a play in the tragic convention and free from the satyric
coarseness, but containing at least one half-comic figure and preserving
some fantastic quality of atmosphere.
On the Great Festival of Dionysus each year--and sometimes on other
festivals--this ritual of tragedy was solemnly performed in the theatre
of the god. Like most Greek festivals the performance took the form of a
competition. The ground of this custom was, I suspect, religious. It was
desired to get a spirit of "Nike," or victory, into the celebration, and
you could only get this by means of a contest. The Archon, or
magistrate, in charge of the festival selected three poets to compete,
and three rich men to be their "Choregoi," that is, to provide all the
expenses of the performance. The poet was then said to have "obtained a
chorus," and his work now was to "teach the chorus." At the end of the
festival a body of five judges, somewhat elaborately and curiously
chosen, awarded a first, second and third prize. Even the last
competitor must have a kind of "victory"; any mention of "failure" at
such a time would be ill-omened.
This, in rough outline, was the official mould in which our poet's
creative activity had to run. The record of his early work is, as we
had reason to expect, terribly defective. But we do happen to know the
name and subject of the first play for which he "was granted a chorus."
It was called the _Daughters of Pelias_. Its story was based on the old
ritual of the Year-god, who is cut to pieces or scattered like the seed,
and then restored to life and youth. Medea, the enchantress maiden from
the further shores of the Friendless Sea, had fled from her home with
the Greek adventurer Jason, the winner of the Golden Fleece. She came
with him to Thessaly, where his uncle Pelias was king. Pelias had
usurped Jason's ancestral crown and therefore hated him. The daughters
of Pelias doubtless sneered at Medea and encouraged Jason's growing
distaste for his barbarian prize. The savage woman determined at one
blow to be rid of Pelias, to punish his daughters, and reconquer Jason's
love. She had the power of renovating the life of the old. She persuaded
the daughters of Pelias to try her method on their father, with the
result that he died in agony, and they stood guilty of a hideous murder.
Medea, we may conjecture, was triumphant, till she found she had made
Jason a ruined man and taught him really to hate her. The play is
characteristic in two ways. It was clearly based on the old ritual, and
it treated one of Euripides' great subjects, the passions of a suffering
and savage woman.
The _Daughters of Pelias_ was produced in 455, when the poet was
twenty-nine, just a year after the death of Aeschylus and thirteen years
after the first victory of Sophocles. Euripides' own first victory--we
do not know the name of the successful play--did not come till 442, a
year before Sophocles' masterpiece, the _Antigone_.
We have only two examples, and those not certain, of Euripides' work
before that time. The _Cyclops_ is a satyr-play pure and simple, and the
only complete specimen of its class. It is probably earlier than the
_Alcestis_, and is interesting because it shows Euripides writing for
once without any _arriere pensee_, or secondary intention. It is a gay
and grotesque piece, based on Homer's story of Odysseus in the Cyclops'
cave. The farcical and fantastic note is firmly held, so that the climax
of the story, in which the monster's eye is burnt out with a log of
burning wood, is kept unreal and not disgusting. The later Euripides
would probably have made it horrible and swung our sympathies violently
round to the side of the victim.
The _Rhesus_ has come down to us in a very peculiar condition and is
often considered spurious. We know, however, that Euripides wrote a
_Rhesus_, and tradition says that he was "very young" when he wrote it.
My own view--explained in the preface to my translation--would make it
probably a very early pro-satyric play which was produced after the
poet's death and considerably rewritten. It is a young man's play, full
of war and adventure, of spies in wolf-skins and white chargers and
gallant chivalry. That is not much like the Euripides whom we know
elsewhere; but his mark is upon the last scene, in which the soldiers
stand embarrassed and silent while a solitary mother weeps over her dead
son. The poetry of the scene is exquisite; but what is most
characteristic is the sudden flavour of bitterness, the cold wind that
so suddenly takes the heart out of joyous war. Some touch of that bitter
flavour will be found hereafter in every play, however beautiful or
romantic, that comes from the pen of Euripides.
Up to the year 438, when the poet was forty-six, the records, as we have
said, almost fail us. But in that year he produced a set of four plays,
_The Cretan Women_, _Alcmaeon in Psophis_, _Telephus_, and, in place of
a satyr-play, the _Alcestis_. The last is still extant and is very
characteristic of the master's mind. The saga told how Admetus, a king
in Thessaly, was fated to die on a certain day, but, in return for his
piety of old, was allowed to find a substitute to die for him. His old
father and mother refused; his young wife, Alcestis, gladly consented to
die. Amid exquisite songs of mourning she is carried to her grave, when
the wild hero, Heracles, comes to the house seeking hospitality.
Admetus, with primitive courtesy, conceals what has happened and orders
him to be given entertainment. The burial is finished when Heracles,
already revelling and drunken and crowned with flowers, learns the
truth. Sobered at the touch he goes out into the night to wrestle with
Death amid the tombs and crush his ribs for him till he yields up his
prey. One sees the fantastic satyr note. The play is not truly tragic;
it touches its theme tenderly and with romance. But amid all the romance
Euripides cannot keep his hand from unveiling the weak spot in the
sacred legend. Alcestis, no doubt, is beautiful, and it was beautiful of
her to die. But what was it of Admetus to let her die? An ordinary
playwright would elude the awkward question. Admetus would refuse his
wife's sacrifice and she would perform it against his will or without
his knowledge. We should somehow save our hero's character. Not so
Euripides. His Admetus weeps tenderly over his wife, but he thinks it
entirely suitable that she should die for him. The veil is not removed
from his eyes till his old father, Pheres, who has bluntly refused to
die for anybody, comes to bring offerings to Alcestis' funeral. A
quarrel breaks out between the two selfish men, brilliantly written,
subtle and merciless, in which Admetus's weakness is laid bare. The
scene is a great grief to the purely romantic reader, but it just makes
the play profound instead of superficial.
All the plays of 438 are, in different ways, typical of their author.
And we will spend a little time on each. The _Alcmaeon in Psophis_ was
what we should call a romance. Alcmaeon was the son of that Eriphyle who
betrayed her husband to death for the sake of a charmed necklace which
had once belonged to Harmonia, the daughter of Ares. Alcmaeon slew his
mother and became in consequence mad and accursed. Seeking purification
he fled to the land of Psophis, where the King cleansed him and gave him
the hand of his daughter Arsinoe, who duly received the necklace.
However, Alcmaeon's sin was too great for any such cleansing. He
wandered away, all the earth being accursed to him, till he should find
some land that had not been in existence at the time of his sin and was
consequently unpolluted. He discovered it in some alluvial islands, just
then making their appearance at the mouth of the River Achelous. Here he
at last found peace and married the daughter of Achelous, Callirrhoe.
She asks for the necklace and Alcmaeon goes back to get it from Arsinoe.
He professes to need it for his own purification and she willingly gives
it him; then she finds that he really wants it for his new bride, and in
fury has him murdered on his road home. A romantic and varied story with
one fine touch of tragic passion.
The _Telephus_ also deserves special mention. It had apparently the
misfortune to be seen by Aristophanes, then a boy about sixteen. At any
rate the comedian was never able to forget it, and we know it chiefly
from his parodies. It struck out a new style in Attic drama, the style
of adventure and plot-interest, which threw to the winds the traditional
tragic dignities and pomps. The usual convention in tragedy was to
clothe the characters in elaborate priestly dress with ritual masks
carefully graduated according to the rank of the character. Such
trappings came to Tragedy as an inheritance from its old
magico-religious days, and it never quite succeeded in throwing them
off, even in its most vital period. It is very difficult for us to form
a clear notion what the ordinary Greek tragedy looked like in 438, and
how much we should have noticed any great change of dressing in the
_Telephus_. But there was a change which raised a storm of comment.
Telephus was a King of Mysia, not very far from the Troad. The Greeks in
sailing for Troy had missed their way and invaded Telephus' country by
mistake. He had fought them with great effect but had been wounded by
Achilles with his magic spear. The wound would not close, and an oracle
told Telephus "the wounder shall heal." The Greeks were back in Greece
by this time, planning a new invasion of Troy. The king goes, lame and
disguised as a beggar, into the heart of the Greek army and into
Agamemnon's palace. Euripides, since the king had to be a beggar,
dressed him as a beggar, with rags and a wallet. It is hard to see how
he could possibly have done otherwise, but we may surmise that his
beggar's dress was a little more realistic and less merely symbolical
than his audience expected. In any case, though critics were shocked,
the practice established itself. Telephus and Philoctetes were
afterwards regularly allowed to dress in "rags," even in the work of
Sophocles.
There were great scenes owing to the boldness of the ragged and
intrusive stranger. The Greek chieftains proposed to kill him, but
granted him at last the right of making one speech to save his life. He
seems to have spoken beside, or over, the headsman's block. And the case
he had to plead was characteristic of Euripides. The Greeks considered
quite simply that Telephus was their enemy and must be destroyed on
their next expedition. The beggar explained that Telephus had found his
country ravaged and was bound to defend it. Every man among the Greeks
would have done the same; there is nothing to blame Telephus for. At the
end of this scene, apparently, the beggar was discovered. It is Telephus
himself speaking! They fly to their spears. But Telephus has snatched up
the baby prince, Orestes, from his cradle and stands at bay; if one of
his enemies moves the child shall die. Eventually they accept his terms
and make peace with him. A fine melodrama, one would guess, and a move
in the direction of realism--a direction which Euripides only followed
within certain strict limits. But we find two marks of Euripides the
philosopher. The beggar who pleads for reasonable justice towards the
national enemy strikes a note which Euripides himself often had to sound
afterwards. It was not for nothing that Aristophanes in his
_Acharnians_, thirteen years later, used a parody of this scene in order
to plead the dangerous cause of reasonableness towards Sparta. The other
mark is a curious tang of sadness at the close. The Greeks demand that
Telephus, so brave and resourceful, shall be their ally against Troy.
But his wife is a Trojan princess and he refuses. He consents
reluctantly to show the army the road to his wife's fatherland and then
turns away.
The remaining play of the trilogy performed in 438 strikes a chord that
proved more dangerous to Euripides. The _Cretan Women_ told the story of
Aerope, a Cretan princess who secretly loved a squire or young soldier.
Her intrigue is discovered, and her father gives her to a Greek sailor
to throw into the sea. The sailor spares her life and takes her to
Greece. The story as it stands is a common ballad motive and not
calculated to disturb any one. But the disciple of the sophists did not
leave these romances where he found them. He liked to think them out in
terms of real life. The songs in which Aerope poured out her love were
remembered against Euripides after his death. It was all very well to
sympathize in a remote artistic way with these erring damsels; but
Euripides seemed to come too near raising an actual doubt whether the
damsel had done anything so very wrong at all, that respectable people
should want to murder her. Euripides is, as a matter of fact, not loose
but highly austere in his moral tone. But next to religion itself, the
sphere of sexual conduct has always been the great field for irrational
taboos and savage punishments, and the sophists naturally marked it as a
battle-field. The kings of Egypt commonly married their sisters, and did
so on religious grounds: to a Greek such marriage was an unspeakable
sin. There is a problem here, and Euripides raised it sharply in a play,
_Aeolus_, based on the old fairy-tale of the King of the winds who
dwells as a patriarch on his floating island with his twelve sons
married to his twelve daughters. "Canst face mine eyes, fresh from thy
deed of shame?" says the angry father in this play; and his son answers,
"What _is_ shame, when the doer feels no shame?" Euripides also treated
several times legends where a god became the lover of a mortal maiden,
and, as we shall see in the _Ion_, he loved to rouse sympathy for the
maiden and contempt for the god (p. 121). In one case he even treats,
through a mist of strange religious mysticism, the impossible amour of
Pasiphae of Crete with the Cretan Bull-god. It is interesting, however,
to observe that there is in Euripides no trace of sympathy for the one
form of perverted indulgence on which the ancient tone was markedly
different from ours. It is reserved for the bestial Cyclops and Laius
the accursed.
Adventure, brilliance, invention, romance and scenic effect; these
together with delightful lyrics, a wonderful command over the Greek
language, and a somewhat daring admixture of sophistic wisdom which
sometimes took away a spectator's breath, were probably the qualities
which the ordinary public had felt in Euripides' work up to the year
438. They perhaps felt also that these pleasant gifts were apt to be
needlessly marred by a certain unintelligible note of discord. It was a
pity; and, as the man was now forty-six, he ought surely to have learnt
how to smooth it out!
It was not smoothness that was coming.