AFTER THE "TROJAN WOMEN": EURIPIDES' LAST YEARS IN ATHENS: FROM THE
"IPHIGENIA" TO THE "ORESTES"
Critics have used various words to describe the change of mood which
followed the _Trojan Women_. They speak of a period of despair,
pessimism, progressive bitterness, _Verzweiflung und Weltschmertz_. But
such phrases seem to me misleading. In the first place I do not think
they describe quite truly even the particular plays they are meant to
describe; in the second, they do not allow for the great variety which
subsists in the plays of this period. The mood of the _Trojan Women_ is
not exactly pessimism or despair; and whatever it is, it does not colour
all the subsequent plays.
The plays after 415 fall into two main divisions. First the works of
pure fancy or romance, in which the poet seems to turn intentionally
away from reality. Such are the _Iphigenia in Tauris_, the _Helena_ and
the _Andromeda_; they move among far seas and strange adventures and
they have happy endings. Next there are the true tragedies, close to
life, ruthlessly probing the depths of human nature; not more acutely
bitter than such earlier works as the _Medea_ and _Hecuba_, but with a
bitterness more profound because it is comparatively free from
indignation. The glory has fallen away and the burning anger with it.
The poor miserable heroes and heroines . . . what else can you expect of
them? Rage is no good; punishment worse than useless. The road to
healing lies elsewhere.
A good key to the first of these types of play is to be seen in
Aristophanes' comedy, _The Birds_. The gayest, sweetest and most
irresponsible of all his plays, it was written just after the news of
the final disaster in Sicily, when ruin stared Athens in the face. And
the two heroes of it, disgusted with the ways of man, depart to live
among the birds and build, with their help, a splendid Cloud City. In
much the same spirit Euripides must have written his _Andromeda_. He
produced it in 412, the same year in which he was invited by the
anti-war government which came into power after the news of the great
disaster to write the national epitaph on the soldiers slain in Sicily.
He wrote the epitaph in the old severe untranslatable style of
Simonides: "These men won eight victories over the Syracusans when the
hand of God lay even between both." In English it seems cold; it seems
hardly poetry. But in Greek it is like carved marble. Then, one must
imagine, he turned right away from the present and spent his days with
Andromeda. Only a few fragments of the _Andromeda_ remain, but they are
curiously beautiful; and the play as a whole seems to have been the one
unclouded love-romance that Euripides ever wrote. It was fantastic,
remote from life, with its heroine chained to a cliff over the blue sea
awaiting the approach of the sea-monster, and its hero, Perseus, on
winged sandals, appearing through the air to save her. Yet the fragments
have a wistful ring: "O holy Night, how long is the path of thy
chariot!" "By the Mercy that dwelleth in the sea caves, cease, O Echo;
let me weep my fill in peace." Or the strange lines (fr. 135):
Methinks it is the morrow, day by day,
That cows us, and the coming thing alway
Greater than things to-day or yesterday.
There was a story told, in later times, of a tragedy-fever that fell on
the folk of Abdera, in Thrace, through this play, till in every street
you could see young men walking as though in a dream, and murmuring to
themselves the speech beginning, "O Love, high monarch over gods and
men. . . ." The _Andromeda_ was five hundred years old when people told
that story.
The _Iphigenia in Tauris_ came one year earlier. It is one of the most
beautiful of the extant plays, not really a tragedy in our sense nor yet
merely a romance. It begins in gloom and rises to a sense of peril, to
swift and dangerous adventure, to joyful escape. So far it is like
romance. But it is tragic in the sincerity of the character-drawing.
Iphigenia, especially, with her mixed longings for revenge and for
affection, her hatred of the Greece that wronged her and her love of the
Greece that is her only home, her possibilities of stony cruelty and her
realities of swift self-sacrifice, is a true child of her great and
accursed house. The plot is as follows:--Iphigenia, daughter of
Agamemnon, who was supposed to have been sacrificed by her father at
Aulis, was really saved by Artemis and is now priestess to that goddess
in the land of the Taurians at the extremity of the Friendless Sea. The
Taurians are savages who kill all strangers, and if ever a Greek shall
land in the wild place it will be her task to prepare him for sacrifice.
She lives with this terror hanging over her, and the first Greek that
comes is her unknown brother, Orestes. Their recognition of one another
is, perhaps, the finest recognition-scene in all Tragedy; and with its
sequels of stratagem and escape forms a thrilling play, haunted not,
like a tragedy, by the shadow of death but rather by the shadow of
homesickness. The characters are Greeks in a far barbarian land, longing
for home or even for the Greek sea. The lyrics are particularly fine,
and most of them full of sea-light and the clash of waters.
In the same year as the _Andromeda_ came another romantic play, the
_Helena_. It is a good deal like the _Iphigenia_ in structure, but it is
lighter, harder, and more artificial. The romance of Euripides is never
quite the easy dreaming of lighter-hearted writers. And the _Helena_, in
which he seems to have attempted a work of mere fancy, is, if we
understand it rightly, a rather brilliant failure. Some critics--quite
mistakenly in my judgment--have even argued that it is a parody. The
plot is based on a variant of the canonical legend about Helen, a
variant generally associated with the ancient lyric poet, Stesichorus.
Story tells that Stesichorus at one time lost his eyesight and took it
into his head that this was a punishment laid on him by the goddess
Helen, because he had told the story of her flight with Paris from her
husband's house. He wrote a recantation, based on another form of the
Helen-legend, in which Helen was borne away by the God Hermes to Egypt
and there lived like a true wife till Menelaus came and found her. The
being that went with Paris to Troy was only a phantom image of Helen,
contrived by the gods in order to bring about the war, and so reduce the
wickedness and multitude of mankind. In Euripides' play there is a
wicked king of Egypt, who seeks to marry Helen against her will and
kills all Greeks who land in his country. The war at Troy is over, and
Menelaus, beaten by storms out of his way, is shipwrecked on the coast
of Egypt. He and Helen meet, recognize one another, and by the help of
the king's sister, who has second sight, contrive to escape. It is hard
to say what exactly is wrong with the _Helena_; and it may only be that
we moderns do not know in what spirit to take it. But the illusion is
difficult to keep up and the work seems cold. Reality has gone out of
it. For one thing, Helen, in her thorough process of rehabilitation, has
emerged that most insipid of fancies, a perfectly beautiful and
blameless heroine with no character except love of her husband, whom, by
the way, she has not seen for seventeen years.
Another large experiment of this time is the _Phoenissae_, or _Tyrian
Women_ (410?). It is the longest Greek tragedy in existence, and covers
the greatest stretch of story. Aeschylus, we remember, had the habit of
writing true "trilogies"--three continuous dramas, carrying on the same
history. The _Phoenissae_ seems like an attempt to run the matter of a
whole trilogy into one play. It does not fall into either of the
divisions which I have sketched above: it is neither a play of fancy nor
yet a realistic tragedy. But even if we had no external tradition of its
date we could tell to what part of the author's life it belongs. It is
written, as it is conceived, in the large and heroic style; but it shows
in the regular manner of this period a general clash of hatreds and
frantic ambitions and revenges and cruel statesmanship standing out
against the light of a young man's heroism and a mother's and a sister's
love. It is like Euripides, too, that this beautiful mother should be
Jocasta, whose unknowing incest had made her an abomination in the eyes
of orthodox Greece.
The play tells the story of Thebes. The sin of Oedipus and Jocasta is a
thing of the past; Oedipus has blinded himself and cursed his children,
and they have in course of time imprisoned him in the vaults of the
palace. Jocasta still lives. The sons Polyneices and Eteocles have
agreed to reign by turns; Polyneices, the elder, has reigned his year
and gone abroad to Argos; Eteocles having once got the crown has refused
to yield it up. Polyneices comes with an Argive army to lay siege to
Thebes and win his rights by war. The drama is developed in a series of
great pictures. We have first the Princess Antigone with an old slave
looking from the wall out towards the enemy's camp, seeking for a
glimpse of her brother. Next comes a man with face hidden and sword
drawn stealing through the gates, seeking for Jocasta. It is Polyneices.
The mother has induced her sons to have one meeting before they fight.
The meeting reveals nothing but ambition and mutual hatred. They agree
to look for one another on the field, and Polyneices goes. There are
consultations in the beleaguered city. Creon, who is Jocasta's brother
and a sort of Prime Minister, advises the rash Eteocles; but the
prophets must be consulted too, that the gods may be favourable. The
prophet Tiresias--blind and old and jealous, as so often in Greek
tragedy--proclaims that the only medicine to save the state is for
Creon's son, Menoikeus, to be slain as a sin-offering in the lair of the
ancient Dragon whom Cadmus slew. Creon quickly refuses; he dismisses the
prophet and arranges for his son to escape from Thebes and fly to the
ends of Greece. The boy feigns consent to the plan of escape, but, as
soon as his father has left him, rushes enthusiastically up to a tower
of the city and flings himself over into the Dragon's den. A messenger
comes to Jocasta with news of the battle. "Are her sons slain?" No; both
are alive and unhurt. He tells his story of the Argive attack and its
repulse from every gate.--"But what of the two brothers?"--He must go
now and will bring more news later.--Jocasta sees he is concealing
something and compels him to speak. The truth comes out; the brothers
are preparing a single combat. With a shriek the mother calls Antigone;
and the two women, young and old, make their way through the army to
try to separate the blood-mad men. We learn from a second messenger how
the brothers have slain each other "in a meadow of wild lotus," and
Jocasta has killed herself with one of their swords. Antigone returns
and to bring the news to her only friend, the blind Oedipus. Creon by
Eteocles' charge takes over the government, he, too, a broken-hearted
man, but none the less ruthless; he proclaims that Polyneices' body
shall lie unburied and that Oedipus, the source of pollution, shall be
cast out of the land; Antigone meantime shall marry Creon's son, Haemon.
Antigone defies him. She will not wed Haemon nor any of Creon's kin: her
father shall not be cast out to die, for she will go with him and
protect him. Polyneices shall not lie unburied, for she herself will
return by stealth and bury him. There is still one human love that
Oedipus yearns for most; that of the sin-stained wife and mother who is
lying dead in the meadow of wild lotus. But meantime he takes the hand
of his daughter. Old man and young maiden they go forth together, away
from the brutalities of human kind, to the high mountains, to the holy
inviolate places on Kithairon where only the wild White Women of
Dionysus dance their mystic dances.
The _Phoenissae_ stands half way between the pure Romances and the
tragedies of the last period. Of these latter the clearest type is the
_Electra_ (probably 413), a play which before it was understood used to
receive the unstinted abuse of Critics, as "the meanest of Greek
tragedies," "the very worst of all Euripides' plays." It deals with the
moral problem of the Blood-Feud, stated in its sharpest terms.
Now the blood-feud, we must realize, in any society where there is no
public law and no police, is a high moral duty. A man commits an
abominable crime and revels in comfort on the proceeds; his victim is
dead, and there is no law which will act automatically. It becomes the
duty of some one--normally the heir or representative of the dead
man--to devote himself to the work of justice, to forsake all business
and pleasure in life till the wrong has been righted and the dead man
avenged. A man who would let his kinsman be murdered and then live on at
his ease rather than pursue the murderer, would obviously be a poor
false creature. Now comes the problem. The strongest possible claim is
that of a father murdered; the most horrible act a Greek could conceive
was for a man to slay his mother. Suppose a wife murdered her husband,
ought her son to slay her? The law of the blood-feud, as traditionally
preached from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, answered, in spite of all
repugnances, Yes.
The story had been treated before Euripides by many poets, including
Homer, Stesichorus, Pindar, Aeschylus and possibly--though the dates are
not certain--Sophocles. Clytemnestra had with the help of her lover
Aegisthus murdered her husband Agamemnon; her son Orestes slays her in
obedience to Apollo's command, and his sister Electra aids him.
Aeschylus in his _Libation-Bearers_ had dealt with this theme on broad
lines and with gorgeous intensity of imagination. His Orestes is carried
to the deed on a great wave of religious passion and goes mad as soon as
it is done. The deed as commanded by God is right, but it is too much
for human nature to endure. In an ensuing play Orestes, after long
sufferings, is tried for the matricide and, when the human judges are
evenly divided, acquitted by the divine voice of Athena. Sophocles
treats the subject very differently. He makes a most brilliant play with
extraordinary clashes of emotion and moments of tragic beauty. But,
evidently of set purpose, he makes the whole treatment hard and archaic.
There is no shrinking back, no question of conscience at all.
Clytemnestra is a furious tyrant; she beats Electra with her fists, and
Aegisthus does worse (1196, 517). The climax of the play is not the
mother-murder but the killing of Aegisthus, which was presumably the
harder and more exciting job. When Orestes and his friend Pylades come
out of the palace streaming with Clytemnestra's blood their nerves are
unshaken and the Chorus is careful to say that they are not to be in any
way blamed (1423).
The spirit of Euripides is exactly the opposite; so much so indeed that
most critics feel clear that the two _Electra_ plays are closely
related, and related in opposition. The one is a deliberate protest
against the other; unfortunately the play of Sophocles cannot be dated
and it is not clear from internal evidence which play was written first.
In the _Electra_ of Euripides we find two main qualities. First, there
is psychological realism of the subtlest kind. Secondly, there is a new
moral atmosphere. With a power of sympathy and analysis unrivalled in
ancient drama he has imagined just what kind of people these children
must have been, who would thus through long years nurse the seeds of
hatred and at the end kill their mother. He studies them all; Electra, a
mixture of heroism and broken nerves; a poisoned and haunted woman,
eating her heart in ceaseless broodings of hate and love, both alike
unsatisfied; for he suggests, somewhat cruelly, that she might have
lived contentedly enough, had she only had a normal married life. The
name in its original Doric form suggested the meaning, "_Unmated_."
Orestes is a youth bred in the unwholesome dreams of exile, and now
swept away by his sister's stronger will; subject also, as Orestes
always is in Greek tragedy, to delusions and melancholy madness. The
mother herself is not forgotten, and a most piteous figure she shows,
"this sad, middle-aged woman, whose first words are an apology;
controlling quickly her old fires, anxious to be as little hated as
possible; ready even to atone for her crime, if only there were some
safe way of atonement." Thus, in the first place, Euripides has stripped
the old bloody deed of the heroic glamour that surrounded it. His actors
are not clear-minded heroes moving straight to their purpose. They are
human creatures, erring, broken by passion, mastered by their own
inhibitions and doubts and regrets. In the second place he has no doubt
at all about the ethics of the mother-murder. It was an abomination, and
the god who ordained it--if any did--was a power of darkness.
After the deed the two murderers come forth as in Sophocles. But this
time they are not triumphant and the Chorus does not hail them as having
done right. They reel from the door, "red-garmented and ghastly" and
break into a long agony of remorse. The Chorus share their horror.
Electra's guilt is the greater since she drove her brother to the deed
against his will; even while they love her, they can not quite forget
that, though they feel that now at last, by this anguish, her heart may
be "made clean within." The play ends with an appearance of the gods.
The Heavenly Horsemen, Castor and Polydeuces, who were kinsmen of the
dead, appear on a cloud, and speak in judgement and comfort. With a
definiteness rare in Euripides they pronounce the deed of vengeance to
be evil:
"And Phoebus, Phoebus . . . Nay:
He is my lord, therefore I hold my peace.
But though in light he dwell, not light was this
He showed to thee, but darkness."
Another note is also struck, that of pity for the suffering of humanity.
Orestes and Electra, condemned to part, break, as they bid one another
farewell, into a great cry, and the gods, hearing it, are shaken:
Alas! what would ye? For that cry
Ourselves and all the sons of heaven
Have pity; yea, our peace is riven
By the strange pain of these that die.
* * * * *
But hark! The far Sicilian sea
Calls, and a noise of men and ships
That labour sunken to the lips
In bitter billows; forth go we
With saving.
They speak such words of comfort and groping wisdom as they can find--no
one has ever claimed that they are omniscient--and depart upon their own
eternal task, which is not to punish but to save.
The appearance of the gods in the _Electra_ is so beautiful that no
critics have yet tried to explain it away as nonsense; and the lesson of
it so clear that its meaning is seldom denied. But I find just the same
lesson in the final scene of the _Orestes_, which is commonly taken as
the very worst instance of Euripides' habit of closing with a "God from
the machine."
The _Orestes_ (408 B.C.) deals with the fate of Orestes some days after
his mother's murder. He is mad and sick; his sister is nursing him with
devotion. The people have risen against them and they are held prisoners
in the palace till an assembly shall try them for murder and pronounce
their fate. Meantime Menelaus--Orestes' uncle and king of Sparta--has
arrived at the harbour with his wife Helen and their daughter Hermione.
He has sent on his wife and daughter to the palace and is expected
hourly himself. He is Agamemnon's brother; he has with him an army of
Trojan veterans; he can surely be counted on to cow the Argive populace
and save his dead brother's son. All our hopes hang on Menelaus, and
when at last he comes he proves false. He would like to help; but it
would be wrong for him, a foreigner, to dictate to the Argives; and he
has only a very small force with him. However, he will reason with
Orestes' enemies. One does not forget that, if Argos is left without a
king, Menelaus will normally inherit. The sick man blazes into rage
against him and Menelaus becomes an open enemy. Exasperation follows on
exasperation: Orestes' friend Pylades breaks through the guards and
enters the palace to share the prisoners' fate. The assembly hears and
at length condemns them. They are given a day in which to die as they
best please. Like scorpions surrounded by fire, the three, Orestes,
Electra and Pylades, begin to strike blindly. A brilliant idea! They can
kill Helen: that will punish Menelaus, and Helen deserves many deaths.
Better still, kill Helen and then capture Hermione! Hold a dagger at her
throat and then bargain with Menelaus for help even at the last hour!
Murder his wife and then force him to help! Splendid! The madness of
Orestes infects the whole play. Helen escapes, being half-divine; but
they catch Hermione, who, as a matter of fact, has always been kind to
them. Menelaus, who has heard news from an escaping slave, rushes up to
save Helen, but he finds no sign of her; he finds only the palace barred
and the madman on the roof, shrieking derision and holding the knife at
his daughter's throat. There is a brief wild attempt at bargaining; then
hate in Menelaus overcomes fear. He rejects all terms. Orestes' party
sets fire to the palace; and Menelaus at the head of his soldiers beats
blindly at the barred gate. "The fire of Hell," to use Dr. Verrall's
phrase, has been let loose; rage, hatred, revenge, all blazing to the
point of madness; what more can befall?
What does befall is strange and daring. An entry of a god not in
gentleness, not with any preparation or introduction, but sudden and
terrific, striking all beholders into a trance from which they awaken
changed men. The point has not been generally observed, though it is, I
think, clear.
At Apollo's first sudden cry "Menelaus, be still!" (line 1625) we know
that Orestes is supporting Hermione in one arm while with the other hand
he is holding the knife at her throat. He is in exactly the same
position at line 1653; he only moves from it at 1671. That is the
conduct of a man in a trance, suddenly, as it were, struck rigid. And we
shall find that the words spoken by both Menelaus and Orestes when
Apollo has finished his charge, are like nothing but the words of men
emerging from a trance; a trance, too, of some supernatural kind, like
that for instance which falls on the raging world in Mr. Wells's book,
_In the Days of the Comet_. Here, too, a raging world wakes to find
itself at peace and its past hatreds unintelligible. And the first
thought that comes to the surface is, in each case, the great guiding
preoccupation of each man's life; with Menelaus it is Helen; with
Orestes the oracle that made him sin. Nay more; when Orestes wakens,
half-conscious, to find Hermione lying in his arms, his natural
movement, as experiments on hypnotized persons have shown, is to accept
the suggestion and draw her to him in love. Greek legend knew well that,
as a matter of history, Hermione became Orestes' bride. There is daring,
perhaps excessive daring, in making it occur this way; but the
psychology of something like hypnotism had a fascination for both
Aeschylus and Euripides. For the rest, Apollo has spoken the word of
forgiveness and reconciliation. He concludes:
Depart now, each upon his destined way,
Your hates dead and forgotten.
MEN. I obey.
OR. I too; mine heart is as a wine of peace
Poured with the past and thy dark mysteries.
APOLLO Go now your ways: and without cease
Give honour in your hearts to one,
Of spirits all beneath the sun
Most beautiful; her name is Peace.
I rise with Helen Zeus-ward, past
The orb of many a shining star;
Where Heracles and Hebe are
And Hera, she shall reign at last,
A goddess in men's prayers to be
For ever, with her Brethren twain
Enthroned, a great help in pain
And queen of the eternal sea.
"Helen a goddess!" say some critics; "the notion is impossible. We have
seen her in this same play, a heartless ordinary woman." Yet I think
Euripides was serious enough. I do not say he believed either this or
any other particular bit of the mythology. But he was writing seriously
and aiming at beauty, not at satire. All legend said that Helen was made
a goddess; and Euripides was always curiously haunted by the thought of
Helen and by the mysterious and deadly power of mere superlative beauty.
As Apollo had said to Menelaus (1638):
Thy bride shall be another: none may know
_Her_. For the Gods, to work much death and woe,
Devised this loveliness all dreams above,
That men in Greece and Troy for thirst thereof
Should strive and die, and so the old Earth win
Peace from mankind's great multitude and sin.
The superlative beauty may probably enough be found in company with
heartlessness and treachery; but cannot these things be purged away,
like the hates of Menelaus and Orestes, and the pure beauty remain a
thing to pray to and be helped by, much as the old sagas pretend? There
is here again the touch of mysticism.
But however it be about Helen, or even about the above explanation in
detail of the last scene of the _Orestes_, it is clear that both the
most characteristic plays of the so-called period of gloom end with a
strong, almost a mystically strong, note of peace and reconciliation.
This note occurs, though with less intensity, at the end of other late
plays, such as the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ and the _Helena_; and, though
without a god, in the _Phoenissae_. It does not occur at all in the
early plays. The _Medea_ and _Hecuba_ end in pure hate; the _Hippolytus_
ends in wonderful beauty and a reconciliation between the hero and his
father, who are natural friends, but it keeps up the feud of Aphrodite
and Artemis and contains a strange threat of vengeance (v. 1420 ff.) The
lovely Thetis of the _Andromache_ brings comfort and rest but preaches
no forgiveness; on the contrary the body of Pyrrhus is to be buried at
Delphi as an eternal reproach. Euripides all through his life was
occupied with the study of revenge. It was a time, as Thucydides tells
us, when "men tried to surpass all the record of previous times in the
ingenuity of their enterprises and the enormity of their revenges."
Euripides seems first to have been almost fascinated by the enormous
revenges, at least when they were the work of people who had suffered
enormous wrong. He seems, in plays like the _Medea_, to be saying: "If
you goad people beyond endurance, this is the sort of thing you must
expect them to do . . . and serve you right!" In the plays after 415 the
emphasis has rather changed: "You must expect to be wronged, and revenge
will do good to nobody. Seek peace and forgive one another."