LIFE CONTINUED: THE EMBITTERING OF THE WAR: ALCIBIADES AND THE DEMAGOGUES:
THE "ION": THE "TROJAN WOMEN"
Our Greek historians, with Thucydides at their head, are practically
unanimous in associating with the Peloponnesian War a progressive
degradation and embitterment in Greek public life, and a reaction
against the old dreams and ideals. We can measure the change by many
slight but significant utterances.
When Herodotus records his opinion that in the Persian Wars the
Athenians had been "the Saviours of Hellas" he has to preface the remark
by a curious apology (VII. 139): "Here I am compelled by necessity to
express an opinion which will be offensive to most of mankind, but I
cannot refrain from putting it in the way which I believe to be true."
He was writing at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and by that
time Athens was not the Saviour but "the Tyrant City." Her "allies" had
from time to time refused to serve or tried to secede from the alliance;
and one by one she had reduced them to compulsory subjection. The
"League" had become confessedly an "Empire."
Even Pericles, the great statesman of the good time, who had sought and
achieved so many fine ends, had failed to build up a free League based
on a representative elected body. The possibility of such a plan had
hardly yet been conceived in the world, though a rudimentary system of
international councils did in some places exist between neighbouring
villages; and Pericles must not be personally blamed for an error,
however fatal, which no one living knew how to avoid. But he realized at
last in 430 B.C. what Athens had come to (_Thuc._ II. 63): "Do not
imagine you are fighting about a simple issue, the subjection or
independence of certain cities. You have an Empire to lose, and a danger
to face from those who hate you for your empire. To resign it now would
be impossible--if at this crisis some timid and inactive spirits are
hankering after Righteousness even at that price! For by this time your
empire has become a Despotism (Tyrannis), a thing which it is
considered unjust to acquire, but which can never be safely
surrendered."
The same thought is emphasized more brutally by Cleon (_Thuc._ III. 37):
"I have remarked again and again that a democracy cannot govern an
empire, and never more clearly than now. . . . You do not realize that
when you make a concession to the allies out of pity, or are led away by
their specious pleading, you commit a weakness dangerous to yourselves
without receiving any gratitude from them. Remember that your empire is
a Despotism exercised over unwilling men who are always in conspiracy
against you." "Do not be misled," he adds a little later, "by the three
most deadly enemies of empire, pity and charm of words and the
generosity of strength" (_Thuc._ III. 40).
So much for the ideals of chivalry and freedom and "Sophia": for I think
the second of Cleon's "enemies" refers especially to the eloquent wisdom
of the philosophers. And as for democracy we do not hear now that "the
very name of it is beautiful": we hear that it is no principle on which
to govern an empire. And later on we shall hear Alcibiades, an Athenian
of democratic antecedents, saying at Sparta: "Of course all sensible men
know what democracy is, and I better than most, from personal
experience; but there is nothing new to be said about acknowledged
insanity" (_Thuc._ VI. 89).
The ideals failed, and, if we are to believe our contemporary authors,
the men failed too. Pericles, with all his errors, was a man of noble
mind; he was pure in motive, lofty, a born ruler; he led his people
towards "beauty and wisdom," and he wished it to be written on his grave
that no Athenian had put on mourning through his act. Cleon, they all
tell us, was a bellowing demagogue; violent, not over honest,
unscrupulous, blundering; only resolute to fight for the demos of Athens
till he dropped and to keep the poor from starving at whatever cost of
blackmailing the rich and flaying the allied cities. And when he--by
good luck, as Thucydides considers--was killed in battle, he was
succeeded by Hyperbolus, a caricature of himself--as a pun of the comic
poets' puts it, a "Cleon in hyperbole." This picture has been subjected
to just criticism in many details, but it represents on the whole the
united voice of our ancient witnesses.
One character only shines out in this period with a lurid light.
Alcibiades, so far as one can understand him at all from our fragmentary
and anecdotal records, must have been something like a Lord Byron on a
grand scale, turned soldier and statesman instead of poet. His
disastrous end and his betrayal of all political parties have probably
affected his reputation unfairly. Violent and unprincipled as he
certainly was, the peculiar dissolute caddishness implied in the
anecdotes is probably a misrepresentation of the kind that arises so
easily against a man who has no friends. It needs an effort to imagine
what he looked like before he was found out. Of noble birth and a nephew
of Pericles; famous for his good looks and his distinguished, if
insolent, manners; a brilliant soldier, an ambitious and far-scheming
politician; a pupil of the philosophers and an especially intimate
friend of Socrates, capable both of rising to great ideas and of
expounding them to the multitude; he was hailed by a large party as the
destined saviour of Athens, and seems for a time at least to have made
the same impression upon Euripides. Even in the _Suppliant Women_,
peace-play as it is, Euripides congratulates Athens on possessing in
Theseus "a general good and young," and critics have connected the
phrase with the election of Alcibiades, at a very early age, to be
General in the year 420. More significant perhaps is the curious case of
the _Andromache_. The ancient argument tells us definitely that it was
not produced in Athens. And we find from another source that it was
produced by one Democrates or Timocrates. Now Euripides had a friend
called Timocrates, who was an Argive; so it looks as if the play had
been produced in Argos. This would be astonishing but by no means
inexplicable. It was an old Athenian policy to check Sparta by
organizing a philo-Athenian league in the Peloponnese itself (_Ar.
Knights_, 465 ff.). The nucleus was to consist in three states, Argos,
Elis and Mantinea, which had been visited by Themistocles just after the
Persian wars and had set up democracies on the Athenian model. It was
Alcibiades who eventually succeeded in organizing this league in 420,
and it seems likely that the _Andromache_ was sent to Argos for
production in much the same spirit in which Pindar used to send his
Chorus of Dancers with a new song to compliment some foreign king. The
play seems to contain a reference to the Peloponnesian War (734), it
indulges in curiously direct denunciations of the Spartans (445 ff., 595
ff.), and the Spartan Menelaus is the villain of the piece--a more
stagey villain than Euripides in his better moments would have
permitted. We have also one doubtful external record of our poet's
temporary faith in Alcibiades. In the year 420 there fell an observance
of the Olympian Festival, the greatest of all the Pan-Hellenic Games,
which carried with it a religious truce. Alcibiades succeeded in getting
Sparta convicted of a violation of this truce, and consequently excluded
from the Festival, which was a marked blow at her prestige. Then,
entering himself as a competitor, he won with his own horses a whole
series of prizes, including the first, in the four-horse chariot
competition. And Plutarch, in his _Life of Alcibiades_, refers to a
Victory Ode which was written for him on this occasion, "as report goes,
by the poet Euripides" (ch. 11). This revival of the Pindaric
_Epinikion_ for a personal victory would fit in with the known character
of Alcibiades; and it would be a sharp example of the irony of history
if Euripides consented to write the Ode.
Euripides' delusion was natural and it was short-lived. The _Suppliant
Women_ points towards peace, and the true policy of Alcibiades was to
make peace impossible. And even apart from that the ideals of the two
men were antipathetic. The matter is summed up in the _Frogs_ of
Aristophanes, produced in 405, when the only question remaining about
Alcibiades was whether he was more dangerous to the city as an honoured
leader or as an enemy and exile. The two great poets of the Dead are
asked for their advice on this particular subject and their answers are
clear. Aeschylus says: "Submit to the lion's whelp;" Euripides rejects
him with three scathing lines (_Frogs_, 1427 ff., cf. 1446 ff.). Long
before the date of the _Frogs_ Alcibiades had probably grown to be in
the mind of Euripides the very type and symbol of the evil times.
All Greece--we have the emphatic and disinterested testimony of
Thucydides for the statement--was gradually corrupted and embittered by
the long war. Probably all war, as it accustoms people more and more to
desperate needs and desperate expedients for meeting them, and sets more
and more aside the common generosities and humanities of life, tends to
some degradation of character. But this particular war was specially
harmful. For one thing it was a struggle not simply between two foreign
powers, but between two principles, oligarchy and democracy. In almost
all the cities of the Athenian alliance there were large numbers of
malcontent rich, who were only too ready, if chance offered, to
overthrow the constitution, massacre the mob, and revolt to Sparta. In a
good many of the cities on the other side there were masses of
discontented poor who had been touched by the breath of democratic
doctrines, and were anxious for a chance to cut the throats of the
ruling Few. It was like the state of things produced in many cities of
Europe by the French Revolution. A secret civil strife lay in the
background behind the open war; and the open war itself was a long
protracted struggle for life or death. Probably the most high-minded man
when engaged in a death-grapple fights in much the same way as the most
low-minded. And there can be no doubt that as the toils of war closed
tighter round Athens, and she began to feel herself fighting, gasp by
gasp, for both her empire and her life, the ideals of the Saviour of
Hellas fell away from her. She fought with every weapon that came.
Such times called forth naturally the men that suited them. The assembly
cared less to listen to decent and thoughtful people, not to speak of
philosophers. It was feeling bitter and fierce and frightened and it
liked speakers who were feeling the same. The same fear that made it
cruel made it also superstitious. On one occasion the whole city went
mad with alarm because of a prank played on some ancient figures of
Hermes. On another a great army was lost because it and its general were
afraid to move during an eclipse of the moon. So soon had Anaxagoras
been forgotten.
Is this the result, one is inclined to ask, of the great ideals of
democracy and enlightenment? Of course the old Tory type of Greek
historian, like Mitford, revelled in an affirmative answer. But a more
reflective view of history suggests a different explanation. We must
distinguish carefully between the two notions, Enlightenment and
Democracy. They happen to have gone together in two or three of the
greatest periods of human progress and we are apt to regard them as
somehow necessarily allied. But they are not. Doubtless Democracy is
itself an exalted conception and belongs naturally to the ideas of the
Enlightenment, just as does the belief in Reason, in the free pursuit of
knowledge, in justice to the weak, the wish to be right rather than to
be victorious, or the hatred of violence and superstition as such. But
the trouble is that, in a backward and untrained people, the victory of
democracy may result in the defeat of the other exalted ideas. The
Athenian democracy as conceived by Pericles, Euripides or Protagoras was
a free people, highly civilized and pursuing "wisdom," free from
superstition and oppression themselves and helping always to emancipate
others. But the actual rustics and workmen who voted for Pericles had
been only touched on the surface by the "wisdom" of the sophists. They
liked him because he made them great and admired and proud of being
Athenians. But one must suspect that, when they were back at their farms
and the spell of Pericles' "wisdom" was removed, they practised again
the silliest and cruellest old agricultural magic, were terrified by the
old superstitions, beat their slaves and wives and hated the "strangers"
a few miles off, just as their grandfathers had done in the old times.
What seems to have happened at the end of the war-time is that, owing
largely to the democratic enthusiasm of the sophistic movement in
Athens, the common people is strongly in power; owing to the same
movement its old taboos and rules of conduct are a little shaken and
less able to stand against strong temptation; but meantime the true
moral lessons of the enlightenment, the hardest of all lessons for man
to learn, have never worked into their bones. Just as the French
Revolution called into power the brutal and superstitious peasant who
was the product of the Old Regime and could never rise to the ideas of
the Revolution, so the Athenian enlightenment had put into power the old
unregenerate mass of sentiment that had not been permeated by the
enlightenment. Cleon was no friend of sophists, but their avowed enemy.
And when he told the Assembly in its difficulties simply to double the
tribute of the allies and sack their towns if they did not pay; when he
urged the killing in cold blood of all the Mitylenean prisoners, he was
preaching doctrines that would probably have seemed natural enough in
the old days, before any sophists had troubled men's minds with talk
about duties towards dirty foreigners. And the people who followed his
lead were the same sort of people who would naturally be terrified about
the mutilation of a taboo image or an eclipse of the divine moon. What
they had, perhaps, acquired from the sophistic movement was a touch of
effrontery. Boeotians or Acarnanians might commit crimes, when they
needed to, by instinct, without stating their reasons: in Athens you had
at least to discuss the principle of the proposed crime and accept it
for what it was worth. A cynic or a hypocrite trained in a sophistic
school might offer occasional help with the theory.
Perhaps the earliest touch of Euripides' bitterness against his country
comes, as we have seen, in the _Hecuba_ (p. 89). But the period we have
just reached, soon after the _Heracles_, is marked by one of the most
ironic and enigmatical plays he ever wrote. The _Ion_ is interesting in
every line and contains one scene which is sometimes considered the most
poignant in all Greek tragedy, yet it leaves every reader unsatisfied.
Is it a pious offering to Apollo, the ancestor of the Ionian race? If
so, why is Apollo the villain of the piece? Is it a glorification of
ancient Athens, her legends and her shrines? If so, why are the shrines
polluted by lustful gods, the legends made specially barbaric, and the
beautiful earth-born Princess shown as a seduced woman and a would-be
murderess? Nay, further, why does the hero of the play explain in a
careful speech that he would sooner live a friendless slave in the
temple at Delphi than a free man and a prince in such a place as
Athens--a city "full of terror," where men "who are good and might show
wisdom are silent and never come forward," while the men in power watch
enviously round to destroy any possible rival? (598 ff. _Cf._ Euripides'
words in _Frogs_, 1446 ff.) In Delphi he has peace, and is not jostled
off the pavement by the scum of the earth (635)--a complaint which is
often made in Greek literature about democratic Athens.
I think the best way to understand the _Ion_ is to suppose that
Euripides, in his usual manner, is just taking an old canonical legend,
seeing the human drama and romance in it, and working it together in his
own clear ironic mind till at last he throws out his play, saying:
"There are your gods and your holy legends; see how you like them!" The
irony is lurking at every corner, though of course the drama and romance
come first.
The _Ion_ is, of all the extant plays, the most definitely blasphemous
against the traditional gods. Greek legend was full of stories of heroes
born of the love of a god and a mortal woman. Such stories could be
turned into high religious mysteries, as by Aeschylus in his _Suppliant
Women_; into tender and reverent legends, as by Pindar in one or two
odes. Euripides uses no such idealization. In play after play, _Auge_,
_Melanippe_, _Danae_, _Alope_, he seems to have scarified such gods, as
he does now in the _Ion_. Legend told that Ion, the hero-ancestor of the
Ionians, was the son of the Athenian princess Creusa. Creusa was married
to one Xuthus, an Aeolian soldier, but the real father of Ion was the
god Apollo. Euripides treats the story as if Apollo were just a lawless
ravisher, utterly selfish and ready to lie when pressed, though
good-natured in his way when he lost nothing by it--a sort of
Alcibiades, in fact. Xuthus is a butt; a foreigner with abrupt and
violent manners, lied to by Apollo, befooled by his wife, disobeyed by
her maids, and eventually made happy by the belief that her illegitimate
son is really his own. Creusa herself, though drawn with extraordinary
sympathy and beauty, is at heart a savage.
Creusa, when she bore her child, laid him, in her terror, in the same
cavern where Apollo had ravished her: surely the god would save his own
son. She came again and the child was gone. As a matter of fact the god
had carried him in his cradle to Delphi, where he was discovered by the
priestess and reared as a foundling in the temple courts. Creusa was
then married to Xuthus, who knew nothing of her adventure. Some
seventeen years or so afterwards, since the pair had no children, they
came to Delphi to consult the god. Creusa there meets the foundling,
Ion, and the two are strangely attracted to one another. She almost
confides to him her story, and he tells her what he knows of his own.
Meantime Xuthus goes in to ask the god for a child; the god tells him
that the first person he meets on leaving the shrine will be his son.
(This, of course, is a lie.) He meets Ion, salutes him as his son and
embraces him wildly. The boy protests: "Do not," cries Xuthus, "fly from
what you should love best on earth!" "I do not love teaching manners to
demented foreigners," retorts the youth. Sobered by this, Xuthus tries,
with Ion's help, to think out what the god can mean by saying that this
youth is his son. His married life has always been correct; but once
when he was a young man, there was a time . . . It was a great
religious feast at Delphi and he was drunk. Ion accepts the explanation,
though he evidently does not much like his new father. He makes
difficulties about going to Athens. He is sorry for Creusa. He wishes to
stay as he is. Xuthus decides that Creusa must be deceived; he will say
he has taken a fancy to Ion and wishes to adopt him. Meantime let them
have a great birth-feast . . . and if any of the Chorus say a word to
Creusa they shall be hanged! Creusa enters, accompanied by one of
Euripides' characteristic Old Slaves. The man has tended Creusa from
childhood, lives for her and thinks of nothing else; he is utterly
without scruple apart from her. The Chorus immediately tell Creusa what
they know of the story. Ion is Xuthus's illegitimate son; he must have
known it all the time; he has now, with the god's connivance, arranged
to take the son back to Athens; as for Creusa, the god says she shall
have no child. Stung to fury to think that her child is dead, that the
boy whom she so loved is deliberately deceiving her, and that Apollo is
adding this deliberate insult to his old brutal wrong, Creusa casts away
shame and standing up in front of the great Temple cries out her
reproach against the god. She is disgraced publicly and for ever, but
at least she will drag down this devil who sits crowned and singing to
the lyre while the women he has ravished go mad with grief and his babes
are torn by wild beasts. In the horror-stricken silence that follows
there is none to advise Creusa except the old Slave. Blindly devoted and
fostering all her passions, he wrings from her line by line the detailed
story of her seduction, and then calls for revenge. "Burn down the god's
temple!" She dare not. "Poison Xuthus!" No; he was good to her when she
was miserable. "Kill the bastard!" . . . Yes: she will do that. . . .
The Slave takes poison with him and goes to poison Ion at the
birth-feast. The plot fails; the Slave is taken and Creusa, pursued by
the angry youth, flies to the altar. It is fury against fury, each
bewildered to find such evil in the other, after their curious mutual
attraction. Here the Delphian Prophetess enters, bringing with her the
tokens that were with the foundling when she first came upon him in the
temple courts. Creusa, amazed, recognizes the old basket-cradle in which
she had exposed her own child.
She leaves the altar and gives herself up to Ion. For a moment it seems
as if he would kill her; but he tests her story. What else is there in
the basket? She names the things, her own shawl with gorgons on it, her
own snake-twined necklace and wreath of undying olive. The mother
confesses to the son and the son forgives her. But Apollo? What of him?
He has lied. . . . Ion, temple-child as he is, is roused to rebellion:
he will break through the screen of the sanctuary and demand of the god
one plain answer--when he is stopped by a vision of Athena. She comes
instead of Apollo, who fears to face the mortals he has wronged; she
bids them be content and seek no further. Creusa forgives the god; Ion
remains moodily silent.
The _Ion_ is so rich in romantic invention that it sometimes seems to a
modern reader curiously old-fashioned; it is full of motives--lost
children, and strawberry-marks, and the cry of the mother's heart, and
obvious double meanings--which have been repeated by so many plays since
that we instinctively regard them as "out of date." It is redeemed by
its passion and its sincere psychology. On the other hand, it is more
ironical than any other extant Greek play. The irony touches every part
of the story, excepting the actual tragedy of the wronged woman and the
charming carelessness of the foundling's life. We should remember that
an attack on the god of Delphi was not particularly objectionable in
Athens. For that god, by the mouth of his official prophets, at the
beginning of the war, had assured the Spartans that if they fought well
they would conquer and that He, the God, would be fighting for them. The
best that a pious Athenian could do for such a god as that was to
suppose that the official prophets were liars. Still Euripides attacks
much more than Delphi. If his thoughts ever strike home, it is not
merely Delphi that will fall, it is the whole structure of Greek ritual
and mythology. It is against the gods and against Athens that his irony
cuts sharpest.
Irony is the mood of one who has some strong emotion within but will not
quite trust himself on the flood of it. And romance is largely the mood
of one turning away from realities that disgust him. In the year 416
B.C. Euripides, in his relation to Athens, was shaken for the first time
out of any thought of either romance or irony. During the summer and
winter of that year there occurred an event of very small military
importance and no direct political consequences, to which nevertheless
Thucydides devotes twenty-six continuous chapters in a very significant
part of his work, the part just before the final catastrophe. The event
is the siege and capture by the Athenians of a little island called
Melos, the massacre of all its adult men and the enslavement of the
women and children. The island had no military power. It had little
commerce and lived on its own poor agriculture. Its population was not
large: when it was depopulated five hundred colonists were enough to
people it again. Why then this large place in Thucydides' brief and
severe narrative? Only, I think, because of the moral issue involved and
the naked clarity of the crime. Thucydides tells us of a long debate
between the Athenian envoys and the Melian Council and professes to
report the arguments used on each side. No doubt there is conscious
artistic composition in the reports. We cannot conclude that any
Athenian envoy used exactly these horrible words. But we can be sure
that Thucydides took the war on Melos as the great typical example of
the principles on which the Athenian war party were led to act in the
later part of the war; we can go further and be almost sure that he
selected it as a type of sin leading to punishment--that sin of
"Hubris" or Pride which according to Greek ideas was associated with
some heaven-sent blindness and pointed straight to a fall.
In cool and measured language the Athenian envoys explain to the Melian
Senate--for the populace is carefully excluded--that it suits their
purpose that Melos should become subject to their empire. They will not
pretend--being sensible men and talking to sensible men--that the
Melians have done them any wrong or that they have any lawful claim to
Melos, but they do not wish any islands to remain independent: it is a
bad example to the others. The power of Athens is practically
irresistible: Melos is free to submit or to be destroyed. The Melians,
in language carefully controlled but vibrating with suppressed
bitterness, answer as best they can. Is it quite safe for Athens to
break all laws of right? Empires are mortal; and the vengeance of
mankind upon such a tyranny as this . . . ? "We take the risk of that,"
answer the Athenians; "the immediate question is whether you prefer to
live or die." The Melians plead to remain neutral; the plea is, of
course, refused. At any rate they will not submit. They know Athens is
vastly stronger in men and ships and military skill; still the gods may
help the innocent ("That risk causes us no uneasiness," say the envoys:
"we are quite as pious as you"); the Lacedaemonians are bound by every
tie of honour and kinship to intervene ("We shall of course see that
they do not"); in any case we choose to fight and hope rather than to
accept slavery. "A very regrettable misjudgement," say the Athenians;
and the war proceeds to its hideous end.
As I read this Melian Dialogue, as it is called, again and again, I feel
more clearly the note of deep and angry satire. Probably the Athenian
war-party would indignantly have repudiated the reasoning put into the
mouths of their leaders. After all they were a democracy; and, as
Thucydides fully recognizes, a great mass of men, if it does commit
infamies, likes first to be drugged and stimulated with lies: it seldom,
like the wicked man in Aristotle's Ethics, "calmly sins." But in any
case the massacre of Melos produced on the minds of men like Thucydides
and Euripides--and we might probably add almost all the great writers
who were anywise touched by the philosophic spirit--this peculiar
impression. It seemed like a revelation of naked and triumphant sin.
And we can not but feel the intention with which Thucydides continues
his story. "They put to death all the Melians whom they found of man's
estate, and made slaves of the women and children. And they sent later
five hundred colonists and took the land for their own.
"And the same winter the Athenians sought to sail with a greater fleet
than ever before and conquer Sicily. . . ." This was the great Sicilian
expedition that brought Athens to her doom.
* * * * *
Euripides must have been brooding on the crime of Melos during the
autumn and winter. In the spring, when the great fleet was still getting
ready to sail, he produced a strange play, the work rather of a prophet
than a mere artist, which was reckoned in antiquity as one of his
masterpieces but which set a flame of discord for ever between himself
and his people. One would like to know what Archon accepted that play
and what rich man gave the chorus. It was called _The Trojan Women_, and
it tells of the proudest conquest wrought by Greek arms in legend, the
taking of Troy by the armies of Agamemnon. But it tells the old legend
in a peculiar way. Slowly, reflectively, with little stir of the blood,
we are made to look at the great glory, until we see not glory at all
but shame and blindness and a world swallowed up in night. At the very
beginning we see gods brooding over the wreck of Troy; as they might be
brooding over that wrecked island in the Aegean, whose walls were almost
as ancient as Troy's own. It is from the Aegean that Poseidon has risen
to look upon the city that is now a smoking ruin, sacked by the Greeks.
"The shrines are empty and the sanctuaries run red with blood." The
unburied corpses lie polluting the air; and the conquering soldiers,
home-sick and uneasy, they know not why, roam to and fro waiting for a
wind that will take them away from the country they have made horrible.
Such is the handiwork of Athena, daughter of Zeus! (47).
The name gives one a moment of shock. Athena is so confessedly the
tutelary goddess of Athens. But Euripides was only following the regular
Homeric story, in which Athena had been the great enemy of Troy, and the
unscrupulous friend of the Greeks. Her name is no sooner mentioned than
she appears. But she is changed. Her favourites have gone too far; they
have committed "Hubris," insulted the altars of the gods and defiled
virgins in holy places. Athena herself is now turned against her people.
Their great fleet, flushed with conquest and stained with sin, is just
about to set sail: Athena has asked Zeus the Father for vengeance
against it, and Zeus has given it into her hand. She and Poseidon swear
alliance; the storm shall break as soon as the fleet sets sail, and the
hungry rocks of the Aegean be glutted with wrecked ships and dying men
(95 ff.).
How are ye blind
Ye treaders down of Cities; ye that cast
Temples to desolation and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead, yourselves so soon to die!
And the angry presences vanish into the night. Were the consciences of
the sackers of Melos quite easy during that prologue?
Then the day dawns and the play begins, and we see what, in plain words,
the great glory has amounted to. We see the shattered walls and some
poor temporary huts where once was a city; and presently we see a human
figure rising wearily from sleep. It is an old woman, very tired, her
head and her back aching from the night on the hard ground. The old
woman is Hecuba, lately the queen of Troy, and in the huts hard by are
other captives, "High women chosen from the waste of war" to be slaves
to the Greek chieftains. They are to be allotted this morning. She calls
them and they come startled out of sleep, some terrified, some quiet,
some still dreaming, one suddenly frantic. Through the rest of the play
we hear bit by bit the decisions of the Greek army-council. Cassandra,
the virgin priestess, is to be Agamemnon's concubine. The stupid and
good-natured Herald who brings the news thinks it good news. How lucky
for the poor helpless girl! And the King, too! There is no accounting
for tastes; but he thinks it was that air of unearthly holiness in
Cassandra which made Agamemnon fancy her. The other women are
horror-stricken, but Cassandra is happy. God is leading her; her flesh
seems no longer to be part of her; she has seen something of the mind of
God and knows that the fate of Troy and of dead Hector is better than
that of their conquerors. She sees in the end that she must discrown
herself, take off the bands of the priestess and accept her desecration;
she sees to what end she is fated to lead Agamemnon, sees the vision of
his murdered body--murdered by his wife--cast out in precipitous places
on a night of storm; and beside him on the wet rocks there is some one
else, dead, outcast, naked . . . who is it? She sees it is herself, and
goes forth to what is appointed (445 ff.).
The central portion of the play deals with the decision of the Greeks
about Hector's little boy, Astyanax. He is only a child now; but of
course he will grow, and he will form the natural rallying point for all
the fugitive Trojans and the remnants of the great Trojan Alliance. On
the principles of the Melian dialogue he is best out of the way. The
Herald is sent to take the child from his mother, Andromache, and throw
him over the battlements. He comes when the two women, Andromache and
Hecuba, are talking together and the child playing somewhere near.
Andromache has been allotted as slave to Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles,
and is consulting with Hecuba about the horror she has to face. Shall
she simply resist to the end, in the hope that Pyrrhus may hate and kill
her, or shall she try, as she always has tried, to make the best of
things? Hecuba advises: "Think of the boy and think of your own gentle
nature. You are made to love and not to hate; when things were happy you
made them happier; when they are miserable you will tend to heal them
and make them less sore. You may even win Pyrrhus to be kind to your
child, Hector's child; and he may grow to be a help to all who have once
loved us. . . ." As they speak the shadow of the entering Herald falls
across them; he cannot speak at first, but he has come to take the child
to its death, and his message has to be given. This scene, with the
parting between Andromache and the child which follows, seems to me
perhaps the most absolutely heart-rending in all the tragic literature
of the world. After rising from it one understands Aristotle's judgment
of Euripides as "the most tragic of the poets."
For sheer beauty of writing, for a kind of gorgeous dignity that at
times reminds one of Aeschylus and yet is compatible with the subtlest
clashes of mood and character, the _Trojan Women_ stands perhaps first
among all the works of Euripides. But that is not its most remarkable
quality. The action works up first to a great empty scene where the
child's body is brought back to his grandmother, Hecuba, for the funeral
rites. A solitary old woman with a dead child in her arms; that, on the
human side, is the result of these deeds of glory. Then, in the finale,
come scenes of almost mystical tone, in which Hecuba appeals first to
the gods, who care nothing; then to the human dead who did at least care
and love; but the dead, too, are deaf like the gods and cannot help or
heed. Out of the noise and shame of battle there has come Death the most
Holy and taken them to his peace. No friend among the dead, no help in
God, no illusion anywhere, Hecuba faces That Which Is and finds
somewhere, in the very intensity of Troy's affliction, a splendour which
cannot die. She has reached in some sense not the bottom, but the
crowning peak of her fortunes. Troy has already been set on fire by the
Greeks in preparation for their departure, and the Queen rushes to throw
herself into the flames. She is hurled back by the guards, and the women
watch the flaming city till with a crash the great tower falls. The
Greek trumpet sounds through the darkness. It is the sign for the women
to start for their ships; and forth they go, cheated of every
palliative, cheated even of death, to the new life of slavery. But they
have seen in their very nakedness that there is something in life which
neither slavery nor death can touch.
The play is a picture of the inner side of a great conquest, a thing
which then, even more than now, formed probably the very heart of the
dreams of the average unregenerate man. It is a thing that seemed
beforehand to be a great joy, and is in reality a great misery. It is
conquest seen when the heat of battle is over, and nothing remains but
to wait and think; conquest not embodied in those who achieved it--we
have but one glimpse of the Greek conquerors, and that shows a man
contemptible and unhappy--but in those who have experienced it most
fully, the conquered women.
We have so far treated the _Trojan Women_ as though it stood alone. In
reality of course it belonged to a group, and one cannot but ask what
the other plays were, and whether their themes were such as could stand
beside this and not be shrivelled into commonplace or triviality.
Fortunately, though the plays are both lost, we know something about
them. They were _Palamedes_ and _Alexander_; and both are on great
subjects. The _Palamedes_ tells of the righteous man condemned by an
evil world; the _Alexander_ has for its hero a slave.
Slavery had always been one of the subjects that haunted Euripides. We
do not happen to find in our remains of his work any definite
pronouncement that slavery is "contrary to nature," as was held by most
Greek philosophers of the succeeding century. Probably no practical man
of the time could imagine a large industrial city living without the
institution of slavery. But it is clear that Euripides hates it. It
corrupts a man; it makes the slave cowardly and untrustworthy. Yet "many
slaves are better men than their masters"; "many so-called free men are
slaves at heart." And again, in the style of a Stoic, "A man without
fear cannot be a slave" (fr. 958: cf. fr. 86, 511, etc.). Much more
important than such statements as these, which are, according to his
manner, generally put in the mouth of a slave, are the many instances of
"sympathetic" and courageous slaves, and the panegyrics on men who have
no slaves but work with their own hands. These show the bent of the
poet's mind. It is not, however, till the year of the _Trojan Women_
that he takes the bold step of actually making a slave his hero and
filling his play with discussions of slavery, including a definite
contest in _arete_ between the slaves and the masters. True, the slave
turns out in the end to be a prince. The herdsman whose favourite bull
the young nobles have seized for a sacrifice, and who pursues and
challenges and eventually conquers them in strength and skill as well as
magnanimity, turns out to be Alexander, son of Priam, who has been
reared by the slave herdsmen of Mt. Ida. By our standards that is a
pity. We should have preferred him a real slave. But probably on the
Greek stage thus much of romance was inevitable, and after all it had
its connection with real life. Many a Scythian and Thracian and even
Phrygian chief, like this Alexander, must have stood for sale in Greek
slave markets.
The root idea of the _Palamedes_, the righteous man falsely slain, has a
momentous place in the history of Greek thought. It starts, of course,
as a bitterness or a paradox. Righteousness to the fifth century
Athenian was almost identical with social service, and, in a healthy
society with normal conditions, the man who serves his city well will
naturally be honoured by his city. But then comes the thought, itself
fraught with the wisdom of the sophists: "What if the multitude is bent
on evil, or is blind? There are many men who are evil but seem
righteous; what if the man who is righteous seems to be evil?" Hence
come the story of Aias in Pindar, and Palamedes in this play, and the
ideal Righteous Man of Plato's Republic who "shall be scourged,
tortured, bound . . . and at last impaled or crucified" (_Rep._ p.
362a). The idea runs through the various developments of later Greek
mysticism and attains its culminating point in Christianity. It is in
full concord with the tone of the _Trojan Women_.
We know little of the _Palamedes_. That hero was the true wise man, and
his enemy was Odysseus, the evil man who "seemed wise" and had the ear
of the multitude. Palamedes is falsely accused of treason, condemned by
the unanimous voice of his judges and sent to death. Fragments tell us
of some friend, perhaps a prisoner, carving message after message upon
oar-blades and throwing them into the sea that the truth might be known;
and we have two beautiful untranslatable lines uttered by the Chorus:
"Ye have slain, ye Greeks, ye have slain the nightingale; the winged-one
of the Muses who sought no man's pain." Tradition saw in the words a
reference to the wise Protagoras, lately slandered to his death.
The consideration of these other plays of the same trilogy strengthens
the impression that I receive already from the _Trojan Women_, an
impression of some deepening of experience, some profound change that
has worked into the writer's soul. Other critics, and notably Wilamowitz
and Mr. Glover, have similarly felt that this play marks a turning
point. It was not a change of front; it was not sudden; it was not
dependent on visions or supernatural messages. It was the completion of
a long process of strong feeling and intense thought, not the less sane
because of its decided element of mysticism. It probably differed in
many ways from the sudden and conscious conversions which began the
ministry of certain Greek philosophers, both Cynic and Stoic, in the
fourth and third centuries before Christ. It differed still more from
the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus or Augustine beneath the
fig-tree. But it does seem to me that in this tragedy the author shows a
greatly increased sense of some reality that is behind appearances, some
loyalty higher than the claims of friends or country, which supersedes
as both false and inadequate the current moral code and the current
theologies.