MACEDONIA: THE "IPHIGENIA IN AULIS": THE "BACCHAE"
Thus we come round to the figure from which we started, the old sad man
with the long beard, who seldom laughed and was not easy to speak to;
who sat for long hours in his seaward cave on Salamis, meditating and
perhaps writing one could not tell what, except indeed that it was
"something great and high." It was natural that he should be sad. His
dreams were overthrown; his City, his Beloved, had turned worse than
false. Public life was in every way tenfold more intimate and important
to an ancient Greek than it is to us moderns who seldom eat a
mutton-chop the less when our worst political enemies pass their most
detested bills. And Athens had not only been false to her ideals; she
had sinned for the sake of success and had then failed. And her failure
probably made the daily life of her citizens a thing of anxiety and
discomfort. You were never quite sure of your daily food. You were never
quite safe from a triumphant raid of the enemy. And the habitual bodily
discomfort which is the central fact of old age must have had for
Euripides much to aggravate and little to soften it.
It was natural, too, that his people should hate him. Nations at war do
not easily forgive those who denounce their wars as unjust; when the
war, in spite of all heroism, goes against them, their resentment is all
the bitterer. There is, of course, not the ghost of a suggestion in
Euripides that he thought the Spartans right or that he wished Athens to
be defeated; far from it. But the Athenian public was not in a mood for
subtle distinctions, and his air of disapproval was enough. Besides,
thought the meaner among them, the man was a known blasphemer. He had
been the friend of the sophists; he had denied the gods; worse, he had
denounced the doings of the gods as evil. These misfortunes that hurtled
round the City's head must surely be sent for some good reason. Very
likely just because the City, corrupted by the "charm of words," had
allowed such wicked sophists to live? He was at one time prosecuted for
impiety; we do not know the date or the details, but he seems to have
been acquitted. The day of Socrates had not yet come. But other charges
remained. He was a wicked old man: he had preached dreadful things about
women; he had defended in his plays adulteresses and perjurers and
workers of incest. What must his personal life be, if these were his
principles? No wonder that he lived so secretly, he and his wife and
that dark-skinned secretary, Cephisophon!
Perhaps he was a miser and had secret stores of wealth? We hear of an
action brought against him on these lines. A certain Hygiainon was
selected, as a rich man, to perform some "Liturgy" or public service at
his own cost, and he claimed that Euripides was richer and should be
made to do it instead. We do not know the result of the trial; we only
know that the plaintiff attempted to create prejudice against Euripides
by quoting the line of the _Hippolytus_ (see above p. 88) which was
supposed to defend perjury.
These things were annoyances enough. But there must have been some
darker cloud that fell over Euripides' life at this time. For we are
not only told in the Lives that "The Athenians bore a grudge against
him," and that "he lost patience with the ill-will of his
fellow-citizens," but one of our earliest witnesses, Philodemus, says
that when he left Athens he did so "in grief, because almost all in
Athens were rejoicing over him." The word used means, like the German
"Schadenfreude," rejoicing at another's injury. So there must have been
some injury for them to rejoice at.
The old Satyrus tradition, with its tone of scandal and
misunderstanding, says that his wife was false to him, but the story
will not bear historical criticism. And it would not be safe to use so
rotten a foundation to build any theory upon, however likely it may be
in itself that a man of this kind should meet with domestic unhappiness
in one or other of its many forms. In thinking of Euripides one is
constantly reminded of Tolstoy. And there are many ways of making
husbands miserable besides merely betraying them.
Whatever the cause, shortly after the production of the _Orestes_ in 408
the old poet's endurance snapped, and, at the age apparently of
seventy-six, he struck off into voluntary exile. It is only one
instance among many of his extraordinary vital force. The language of
the ancient Life is unfortunately confused just here, but it seems to
say that he went first to Magnesia, with which city he had had relations
in earlier days. He had been granted some civic honours there, and had
acted as Proxenus--a kind of consul or general protector--for Magnesians
in Athens. There was more than one town of the name. But the one meant
is probably a large town in the Maeander Valley, not far from Ephesus.
It lay in Persian territory, but had been granted by Artaxerxes to the
great Themistocles as a gift, and was still ruled, subject to the
Persian king, by Themistocles' descendants. Doubtless it was to them
that the poet went. We know nothing more, except that he did not stay
long in Magnesia, but went on to another place where barbarians or
semi-barbarians were ruled by a Greek dynasty.
The king of Macedon, Archelaus, an able despot who was now laying the
seeds of the great kingdom which, before the lapse of a century, was to
produce Philip and Alexander the Great, had always an eye for men of
genius who might be attracted to his court. He had invited Euripides
before and now renewed his invitation. Other men of "wisdom" were
already with Archelaus. Agathon, the tragic poet; Timotheus, the now
famous musician whom Euripides had once saved, so the story ran, from
suicide; Zeuxis, the greatest painter of the time; and perhaps also
Thucydides, the historian. It would not be like living among barbarians
or even uncultivated Greeks. And it is likely enough that the old man
hankered for the ease and comfort, for the atmosphere of daily
"spoiling," which the royal patron was likely to provide for a lion of
such special rarity. For it must have been a little before this time
that Greece was ringing with a tale of the value set on Euripides in
distant and hostile Sicily. Seven thousand Athenians had been made
slaves in Syracuse after the failure of the expedition; and the story
now came that some of them had been actually granted their freedom
because they were able to recite speeches and choruses of Euripides.
Apparently there was no book trade between the warring cities; and the
Syracusans could only learn the great poems by word of mouth. Sicily and
Macedonia were proud to show that they appreciated the highest poetry
better than Athens did.
It was a curious haven that Euripides found. In many ways Macedonia must
have been like a great fragment of that Homeric or heroic age from which
he had drawn most of his stories. The scenery was all on the grand
scale. There were greater plains and forests and rivers, wilder and
higher mountain ranges than in the rest of Greece. And the people,
though ruled by a dynasty of Greek descent and struggling up towards
Hellenism, was still tribal, military and barbaric. A century later we
hear of the "old" Macedonian customs. A young man might not dine at the
men's tables till he had killed his first wild boar. He had to wear a
leathern halter round his waist until he had killed his first man. We
hear that when some Macedonian at the court made a rude remark to
Euripides the King straightway handed him over to the Athenian to be
scourged, a well-meant but embarrassing intervention. And the story told
of Euripides' own death, if mythical, is very likely faithful in its
local colour. There was a village in Macedonia where some Thracians had
once settled and their descendants still lived. One of the king's big
Molossian hounds once strayed into this place, and the natives promptly
killed and ate her. The king fined the village a talent, which was more
than it could possibly pay, and some dreadful fate might have overtaken
the dog-eaters had not Euripides interceded and begged them off. And not
long afterwards, the story continues, Archelaus was preparing a hunt,
and the hungry hounds were set loose. And it so happened that Euripides
was sitting alone in a wood outside the city, and the hounds fell on him
and tore him to pieces. And behold, these hounds proved to be the
children of that Molossian who, through the poet's interference, had
died unavenged! The story can hardly be true, or we should hear some
echo of it in Aristophanes' _Frogs_; but no doubt it was the kind of
fate that a lonely man might well meet in Macedonia when the king's
hounds were astir.
How the poet really died we do not know. We know that he left Athens
after the spring of 408, and that he was dead some time before the
production of the _Frogs_ in January, 405. And there is reason to
believe the story given in the Life that when Sophocles in the previous
year was introducing his Chorus in the "Proagon," or Preliminary
Appearance, he brought them on without the customary garlands in
mourning for his great rival's death. The news, therefore, must have
reached Athens by the end of March, 406. Euripides had lived only some
eighteen months in Macedon.
The time was not long but it was momentous. After his death three plays
were found, _Iphigenia in Aulis_, _Alcmaeon_ and _Bacchae_, sufficiently
finished to be put on the stage together by his third son, the Younger
Euripides. Two of them are still extant, and one, the _Bacchae_, remains
for all time to testify to the extraordinary return of youth which came
to the old poet in his last year. A "lightning before death" if ever
there was one!
But let us take first the _Iphigenia in Aulis_. It is a play full of
problems. We can make out that it was seriously incomplete at the poet's
death and was finished by another hand, presumably that of its producer.
Unfortunately we do not possess even that version in a complete form.
For the archetype of our MSS. was at some time mutilated, and the
present end of the play is a patent forgery. But if we allow for these
defects, the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ is a unique and most interesting
example of a particular moment in the history of Greek drama. It shows
the turning-point between the old fifth century tragedy and the
so-called New Comedy which, in the hands of Menander, Philemon and
others, dominated the stage of the fourth and third centuries.
Euripides had united two tendencies: on the one hand he had moved
towards freedom in metre, realism in character-drawing, variety and
adventure in the realm of plot; on the other he had strongly maintained
the formal and musical character of the old Dionysiac ritual, making
full use of such conventions as the Prologue, the Epiphany, the
traditional tragic diction, and above all the Chorus. The New Comedy
dropped the chorus, brought the diction close to real life, broke up the
stiff forms and revelled in romance, variety, and adventure. Its
characters ceased to be legendary Kings and Queens; they became
fictional characters from ordinary city life.
The _Iphigenia in Aulis_ shows an unfinished Euripidean tragedy, much in
the manner of the _Orestes_, completed by a man of some genius whose
true ideals were those of modernity and the New Comedy. Two openings of
the play are preserved. One is the old stiff Euripidean prologue; the
other a fine and vigorous scene of lyric dialogue, which must have
suited the taste of the time far better, just as it suits our own. We
have early in the play a Messenger; but instead of his entrance being
formally prepared and announced in the Euripidean manner, he bursts on
to the stage interrupting a speaker in the middle of a verse and the
middle of a sentence. There are also peculiarities of metre, such as the
elision of -ai, which are unheard of in tragic dialogue but regular in
the more conversational style of the New Comedy.
The plot runs thus.--It is night in the Greek camp at Aulis; Agamemnon
calls an Old Slave outside his tent and gives him secretly a letter to
carry to Clytemnestra. She is at home, and has been directed in previous
letters to send her daughter, Iphigenia, to Aulis to be wedded to
Achilles. This letter simply bids her not send the girl.--The Old Slave
is bewildered; "What does it mean?" It means that the marriage with
Achilles was a blind. Achilles knew nothing of it. It was a plot to get
Iphigenia to the camp and there slaughter her as a sacrifice for the
safe passage of the fleet. So Calchas, the priest, had commanded and he
was backed by Odysseus and Menelaus. Agamemnon had been forced into
compliance, and is now resolved to go back upon his word. The Old Slave
goes. Presently comes the entrance of the Chorus, women of Aulis who
are dazzled and thrilled by the spectacle of the great army and the men
who are prepared to die overseas for the honour of Hellas. But we hear a
scuffle outside, and the Old Slave returns pursued by Menelaus, who
seizes the letter. He calls for help. Agamemnon comes out and commands
Menelaus to give the letter back. A violent scene ensues between the
brothers, each telling the other home truths. Menelaus's besotted love
for his false wife, his reckless selfishness and cruelty; Agamemnon's
consuming ambition, his falseness and weakness, his wish to run with the
hare and hunt with the hounds, are all laid bare in a masterly quarrel
scene. At last Agamemnon flatly refuses to give his daughter: "Let the
army break up, let Menelaus go without his accursed wife, and the
barbarians laugh as loudly as they will! Agamemnon will not have his
child slain and his own heart broken to please any one." "Is that so?"
says Menelaus: "Then I go straight to. . . ." He is interrupted by a
Messenger who announces that Iphigenia has come and her mother,
Clytemnestra, is with her. Agamemnon sends them a formal message of
welcome; dismisses the Messenger, and then bursts into tears. This
shakes Menelaus; he hesitates; then abruptly says, "I cannot force you.
Save the girl as best you can." But now it is too late. The army knows
that the Queen has come; Calchas and Odysseus know. Agamemnon has lost
the power of action. The next scene is between the mother, father and
daughter; Clytemnestra, full of questions about the marriage, Iphigenia
full of excitement and shy tenderness, which expresses itself in special
affectionateness towards her father. He tries to persuade Clytemnestra
to go home and leave the child with him; she is perplexed and flatly
refuses to go.
The next scene is close to comedy, though comedy of a poignant kind.
Achilles, knowing naught of all these plots and counter-plots, comes to
tell the General that his men--the Myrmidons--are impatient and want to
sail for Troy at once. At the door of the tent he meets Clytemnestra,
who greets him with effusive pleasure and speaks of "the marriage that
is about to unite them." The young soldier is shy, horrified, anxious to
run away from this strange lady who is so more than friendly, when
suddenly a whisper through the half-closed door startles them. "Is the
coast clear? Yes?"--then the whisperer will come. It is the Old Slave,
who can bear it no more but reveals the whole horrible plot; Iphigenia
is to be slaughtered by the priests; the marriage with Achilles was a
bait for deceiving Clytemnestra.--Clytemnestra is thunderstruck,
Achilles furious with rage. "He is dishonoured; he is made a fool of.
What sort of man do they take him for, to use his name thus without his
authority? Why could not they ask his consent? They could sacrifice a
dozen girls for all he cares, and he would not have stood in the way.
But now they have dishonoured him, and he will forbid the sacrifice. . . ."
Clytemnestra, who has watched like a drowning woman to see which way
the youth's fierce vanity would leap, throws herself at his feet in
gratitude; "Shall her daughter, also, come and embrace his knees?" No;
Achilles does not want any woman to kneel to him. Let the women try to
change Agamemnon's mind; if they can do it, all is well. If not,
Achilles will fight to the last to save the girl.
There follows the inevitable scene in which mother and daughter--the
latter inarticulate with tears--convict the father and appeal to him. A
fine scene it is, in which each character comes out clear, and through
the still young and obedient Clytemnestra one descries the shadow of
the great murderess to be. Agamemnon is broken but helpless. It is too
late to go back.
The two women are left weeping at the door of the tent, when they hear a
sound of tumult. It is Achilles, and men behind stoning him. Iphigenia's
first thought is to fly; she dare not look Achilles in the face. Yet she
stays. Achilles enters. The whole truth has come out; the army clamours
for the sacrifice and is furious against him. . . . "Will not his own
splendid Myrmidons protect him?"--"It is they who were the first to
stone him! Nevertheless he will fight. He has his arms. Clytemnestra
must fight too; cling to her daughter by main force when they come, as
they presently will, to drag her to the altar. . . ." "Stay!" says
Iphigenia: "Achilles must not die for her sake. What is her miserable
life compared with his? One man who can fight for Hellas is worth ten
thousand women, who can do nothing. Besides, she has been thinking it
over; she has seen the great gathered army, ready to fight and die for a
cause, and, like the Chorus, has fallen under the spell of it. She
realizes that it lies with her, a weak girl, to help them to victory.
All great Hellas is looking to her; and she is proud and glad to give
her life for Hellas."--It is a beautiful and simple speech. And the
pride of Achilles withers up before it. In a new tone he answers: "God
would indeed have made him blessed if he had won her for his wife. As it
is, Iphigenia is right. . . ." Yet he offers still to fight for her and
save her. She does not know what death is; and he loves her.--She
answers that her mind is made up. "Do not die for me, but leave me to
save Hellas, if I can." Achilles yields. Still he will go and stand
beside the altar, armed; if at the last moment she calls to him, he is
ready. So he goes. The mother and daughter bid one another a last
farewell, and with a song of triumph Iphigenia, escorted by her maidens,
goes forth to meet the slaughterers. . . . Here the authentic part of
our play begins to give out. There are fragments of a messenger's speech
afterwards, and it is likely on the whole that Artemis saved the victim,
as is assumed in the other _Iphigenia_ play.
The _Iphigenia in Aulis_, in spite of its good plot, is not really one
of Euripides' finest works; yet, if nothing else of his were preserved,
it would be enough to mark him out as a tremendous power in the
development of Greek literature. Readers who enjoy drama but have never
quite accustomed themselves to the stately conventions of fifth century
tragedy very often like it better than any other Greek play. It is
curiously different from its twin sister the _Bacchae_.
A reader of the _Bacchae_ who looks back at the ritual sequence
described above (p. 64) will be startled to find how close this drama,
apparently so wild and imaginative, has kept to the ancient rite. The
regular year-sequence is just clothed in sufficient myth to make it a
story. The daemon must have his enemy who is like himself; then we must
have the Contest, the Tearing Asunder, the Messenger, the Lamentation
mixed with Joy-cries, the Discovery of the scattered members--and by a
sort of doubling the Discovery of the true God--and the Epiphany of the
Daemon in glory. All are there in the _Bacchae_. The god Dionysus,
accompanied by his Wild Women, comes to his own land and is rejected by
his kinsman, King Pentheus, and by the women of the royal house. The god
sends his divine madness on the women. The wise Elders of the tribe warn
the king; but Pentheus first binds and imprisons the god; then yielding
gradually to the divine power, agrees to go disguised in woman's garb to
watch the secret worship of the Maenads on Mt. Kithairon. He goes, is
discovered by the Maenads and torn in fragments. His mother, Agave,
returns in triumph dancing with her son's head, which, in her madness,
she takes for a lion's. There is Lamentation mixed with mad Rejoicing.
The scattered body is recovered; Agave is restored to her right mind and
to misery; the god appears in majesty and pronounces doom on all who
have rejected him. The mortals go forth to their dooms, still faithful,
still loving one another. The ghastly and triumphant god ascends into
heaven. The whole scheme of the play is given by the ancient ritual. It
is the original subject of Attic tragedy treated once more, as doubtless
it had already been treated by all or almost all the other tragedians.
But we can go further. We have enough fragments and quotations from the
Aeschylean plays on this subject--especially the Lycurgus trilogy--to
see that all kinds of small details which seemed like invention, and
rather fantastic invention, on the part of Euripides, are taken straight
from Aeschylus or the ritual or both. The timbrels, the fawnskin, the
ivy, the sacred pine, the god taking the forms of Bull and Lion and
Snake; the dances on the mountain at dawn; the Old Men who are by the
power of the god made young again; the god represented as beardless and
like a woman; the god imprisoned and escaping; the earthquake that
wrecks Pentheus' palace; the victim Pentheus disguised as a woman; all
these and more can be shown to be in the ritual and nearly all are in
the extant fragments of Aeschylus. Even variants of the story which have
been used by previous poets have somehow a place found for them. There
was, for instance, a variant which made Pentheus lead an army against
the Wild Women; in the _Bacchae_ this plan is not used, but Pentheus is
made to think of it and say he will perhaps follow it, and Dionysus is
made to say what will happen if he does. (_Aesch. Eum._ 25 f.; _Bac._ 50
ff. 809, 845.) There never was a great play so steeped in tradition as
the _Bacchae_.
The _Iphigenia_ was all invention, construction, brilliant psychology;
it was a play of new plot and new characters. The _Bacchae_ takes an old
fixed plot, and fixed formal characters: Dionysus, Pentheus, Cadmus,
Teiresias, they are characters that hardly need proper names. One might
just as well call them--The God, the Young King, the Old King, the
Prophet; and as for Agave, our MSS. do as a rule simply call her
"Woman." The _Iphigenia_ is full of informalities, broken metres,
interruptions. Its Chorus hardly matters to the plot and has little to
sing. The _Bacchae_ is the most formal Greek play known to us; its
Chorus is its very soul and its lyric songs are as long as they are
magnificent. For the curious thing is that in this extreme of formality
and faithfulness to archaic tradition Euripides has found both his
greatest originality and his most perfect freedom.
He is re-telling an old story; but he is not merely doing that. In the
_Bacchae_ almost every reader feels that there is something more than a
story. There is a meaning, or there is at least a riddle. And we must
try in some degree to understand it. Now, in order to keep our heads
cool, it is first necessary to remember clearly two things. The
_Bacchae_ is not free invention; it is tradition. And it is not free
personal expression, it is drama. The poet cannot simply and without a
veil state his own views; he can only let his own personality shine
through the dim curtain in front of which his puppets act their
traditional parts and utter their appropriate sentiments. Thus it is
doubly elusive. And therein no doubt lay its charm to the poet. He had a
vehicle into which he could pour many of those "vaguer faiths and
aspirations which a man feels haunting him and calling to him, but which
he cannot state in plain language or uphold with a full acceptance of
responsibility." But our difficulties are even greater than this. The
personal meaning of a drama of this sort is not only elusive; it is
almost certain to be inconsistent with itself or at least incomplete.
For one only feels its presence strongly when in some way it clashes
with the smooth flow of the story.
Let us imagine a great free-minded modern poet--say Swinburne or Morris
or Victor Hugo, all of whom did such things--making for some local
anniversary a rhymed play in the style of the old Mysteries on some
legend of a mediaeval saint. The saint, let us suppose, is very meek and
is cruelly persecuted by a wicked emperor, whom he threatens with hell
fire; and at the end let us have the emperor in the midst of that fire
and the saint in glory saying, "What did I tell you?" And let us suppose
that the play in its course gives splendid opportunities for solemn
Latin hymns, such as Swinburne and Hugo delighted in. We should
probably have a result something like the _Bacchae_.
For one thing, in such a play one would not be troubled by little flaws
and anachronisms and inconsistencies. One would not be shocked to hear
St. Thomas speaking about Charlemagne, or to find the Mouth of Hell
situated in the same street as the emperor's lodging. Just so we need
not be shocked in the _Bacchae_ to find that, though the god is supposed
to be appearing for the first time in Thebes, his followers appeal to
"immemorial custom" as the chief ground for their worship (201, 331,
370: cf. _Aesch._ fr. 22?), nor to observe that the Chorus habitually
makes loud professions of faith under the very nose of the tyrant
without his ever attending to them (263 f., 328 f., 775 f.). Nor even
that the traditional earthquake which destroys the palace causes a good
deal of trouble in the thinking out. It had to be there; it was an
integral part of the story in Aeschylus (fr. 58), and in all probability
before him. One may suppose that the Greek stage carpenter was capable
of some symbolic crash which served its purpose. The language used is
carefully indefinite. It suggests that the whole palace is destroyed,
but leaves a spectator free, if he so chooses, to suppose that it is
only the actual prison of Dionysus, which is "off-stage" and unseen. In
any case the ruins are not allowed to litter the stage and, once over,
the earthquake is never noticed or mentioned again.
Again, such a play would involve a bewildering shift of sympathy, just
as the _Bacchae_ does. At first we should be all for the saint and
against the tyrant; the persecuted monks with their hymns of faith and
endurance would stir our souls. Then, when the tables were turned and
the oppressors were seen writhing in Hell, we should feel that, at their
worst, they did not quite deserve that: we should even begin to surmise
that perhaps, with all their faults, they were not really as horrible as
the saint himself, and reflect inwardly what a barbarous thing, after
all, this mediaeval religion was.
This bewildering shift of sympathy is common in Euripides. We have had
it before in such plays as the _Medea_ and _Hecuba_: oppression
generates revenge, and the revenge becomes more horrible than the
original oppression. In these plays the poet offers no solution. He
gives us only the bitterness of life and the unspoken "tears that are
in things." The first serious attempt at a solution comes in the
_Electra_ and _Orestes_.
In a Mystery-play such as we have imagined, re-told by a great modern
poet, the interest and meaning would hardly lie in the main plot. They
would lie in something which the poet himself contributed. We might, for
instance, find that he had poured all his soul into the Latin hymns, or
into the spectacle of the saint, alone and unterrified, defying all the
threats and all the temptations which the Emperor can bring to bear upon
him. There might thus be a glorification of that mystic rejection of the
world which lies at the heart of mediaeval monasticism, without the poet
for a moment committing himself to a belief in monasticism or an
acceptance of the Catholic Church.
We have in the _Bacchae_--it seems to me impossible to deny it--a
heartfelt glorification of "Dionysus." No doubt it is Dionysus in some
private sense of the poet's own; something opposed to "the world"; some
spirit of the wild woods and the sunrise, of inspiration and
untrammelled life. The presentation is not consistent, however magical
the poetry. At one moment we have the Bacchantes raving for revenge, at
the next they are uttering the dreams of some gentle and musing
philosopher. A deliberate contrast seems to be made in each Chorus
between the strophe and the antistrophe. It is not consistent; though it
is likely enough that, if one had taxed Euripides with the
contradiction, he might have had some answer that would surprise us. His
first defence, of course, would be a simple one; it is not the
playwright's business to have any views at all; he is only re-telling a
traditional story and trying to tell it right. But he might also venture
outside his defences and answer more frankly: "This spirit that I call
Dionysus, this magic of inspiration and joy, is it not as a matter of
fact the great wrecker of men's lives? While life seems a decent grey to
you all over, you are safe and likely to be prosperous; when you feel
the heavens opening, you may begin to tremble. For the vision you see
there, as it is the most beautiful of things, is likely also to be the
most destructive." For the poet himself, indeed, the only course is to
pursue it across the world to the cold mountain tops (410 ff.):
For there is Grace, and there is the Heart's Desire,
And peace to adore Thee, Thou spirit of guiding fire!
He will clasp it even though it slay him.
The old critics used to assume that the _Bacchae_ marked a sort of
repentance. The veteran free-lance of thought, the man who had
consistently denounced and ridiculed all the foul old stories of
mythology, now saw the error of his ways and was returning to orthodoxy.
Such a view strikes us now as almost childish in its incompetence. Yet
there is, I think, a gleam of muddled truth somewhere behind it. There
was no repentance; there was no return to orthodoxy; nor indeed was
there, in the strict sense, any such thing as "orthodoxy" to return to.
For Greek religion had no creeds. But there is, I think, a rather
different attitude towards the pieties of the common man.
It is well to remember that, for all his lucidity of language, Euripides
is not lucid about religion. His general spirit is clear: it is a spirit
of liberation, of moral revolt, of much denial; but it is also a spirit
of search and wonder and surmise. He was not in any sense a "mere"
rationalist. We find in his plays the rule of divine justice often
asserted, sometimes passionately denied; and one tragedy, the
_Bellerophontes_, is based on the denial. It is in a fragment of this
play that we have the outcry of some sufferer:
Doth any feign there is a God in heaven?
There is none, none!
And afterwards the hero, staggered by the injustice of things, questions
Zeus himself and is, for answer, blasted by the thunderbolt. A clearer
form of this same question, and one which vexed the age a good deal, was
to ask whether or no the world is governed by some great Intelligence or
Understanding ("_Sunesis_"), or, more crudely, whether the gods are
"_sunetoi_." Euripides at times "hath deep in his hope a belief in some
Understanding," and is represented in the _Frogs_ as actually praying to
it by that name; but he sometimes finds the facts against him
(_Hippolytus_, 1105; _Frogs_, 893; _Iph. Aul._, 394_a_; _Her._, 655;
_Tro._, 884 ff., compared with the sequel of the play). The question
between polytheism and monotheism, which has loomed so large to some
minds, never troubled him. He uses the singular and plural quite
indifferently, and probably his "gods," when used as identical with
"God" or "the Divine," would hardly even suggest to him the gods of
mythology. If one is to venture a conjecture, his own feeling may,
perhaps, be expressed by a line in the _Orestes_ (418):
We are slaves of gods, whatever gods may be.
That is, there are unknown forces which shape or destroy man's life, and
which may be conceived as in some sense personal. But morally, it would
seem, these forces are not better, but less good, than man, who at least
loves and pities and tries to understand. Such is the impression, I
think, left on readers of the _Bacchae_, the _Hippolytus_ or the _Trojan
Women_.
But there is one thought which often recurs in Euripides in plays of all
periods, and is specially thrown in his teeth by Aristophanes. That
satirist, when piling up Euripides' theatrical iniquities, takes as his
comic climax "women who say Life is not Life." The reference is to
passages like fr. 833, from the _Phrixus_:
Who knoweth if the thing that we call death
Be Life, and our Life dying--who knoweth?
Save only that all we beneath the sun
Are sick and suffering, and those foregone
Not sick, nor touched with evil any more.
(_Cf._ fr. 638, 816; also _Helena_, 1013; _Frogs_, 1082, 1477). The idea
recurs again and again, as also does the thought that death is "some
other shape of life" in the _Medea_ and even in the _Ion_ (_Med._, 1039;
_Ion_, 1068). Nay, more, death may be the state that we unconsciously
long for, and that really fulfils our inmost desires: "There is no rest
on this earth," says a speaker in the _Hippolytus_ (191 f.),
"And whatever far-off state there be,
Dearer than Life to mortality,
The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof
And mist is under and mist above:
and thus," she continues, "we cling to this strange thing that shines in
the sunlight, and are sick with love for it, because we have not seen
beyond the veil." A stirring thought this, and much nearer to the heart
of mysticism than any mere assertion of human immortality. Thus it is
not from any position like what we should call "dogmatic atheism" or
"scientific materialism" that the child of the Sophists started his
attacks on the current mythology. The Sophists themselves had no
orthodoxy.
Euripides was always a rejecter of the Laws of the Herd. He was in
protest against its moral standards, its superstitions and follies, its
social injustices; in protest also against its worldliness and its
indifference to those things which, both as a poet and a philosopher, he
felt to be highest. And such he remained throughout his life. But in his
later years the direction of his protest did, I think, somewhat change.
In the Athens of Melos and the Sicilian expedition there was something
that roused his aversion far more than did the mere ignorance of a
stupid Greek farmer. It was a deeper "_amathia_," a more unteachable
brutality. The men who spoke in the Melian Dialogue were full of what
they considered "Sophia." It is likely enough that they conformed
carefully to the popular religious prejudices--such politicians always
do: but in practice they thought as little of "the gods" as the most
pronounced sceptic could wish. They had quite rejected such unprofitable
ideals as "pity and charm of words and the generosity of strength," to
which the simple man of the old times had always had the door of his
heart open. They were haunters of the market-place, mockers at all
simplicity, close pursuers of gain and revenge; rejecters, the poet
might feel in his bitterness, both of beauty and of God. And the Herd,
as represented by Athens, followed them. Like other ideal democrats he
turned away from the actual Demos, which surrounded him and howled him
down, to a Demos of his imagination, pure and uncorrupted, in which the
heart of the natural man should speak. His later plays break out more
than once into praises of the unspoiled countryman, neither rich nor
poor, who works with his own arm and whose home is "the solemn mountain"
not the city streets (_cf._ especially _Orestes_, 917-922, as contrasted
with 903 ff.; also the Peasant in the _Electra_; also _Bac._, 717). In
the _Bacchae_ we have not only several denunciations--not at all
relevant to the main plot--of those whom the world calls "wise"; we have
the wonderful chorus about the fawn escaped from the hunters, rejoicing
in the green and lonely places where no pursuing voice is heard and the
"little things of the woodland" live unseen. (866 ff.) That is the
poetry of this emotion. The prose of it comes in a sudden cry:
The simple nameless herd of humanity
Have deeds and faith that are truth enough for me;
though even that prose has followed immediately on the more mystical
doctrine that man must love the Day and the Night, and that Dionysus has
poured the mystic Wine that is Himself for all things that live
(421-431, 284). In another passage, which I translate literally, he
seems to make his exact position more clear: "As for Knowledge, I bear
her no grudge; I take joy in the pursuit of her. But the other things"
(_i.e._, the other elements of existence) "are great and shining. Oh,
for Life to flow towards that which is beautiful, till man through both
light and darkness should be at peace and reverent, and, casting from
him Laws that are outside Justice, give glory to the gods!"[2]
Those "Laws which are outside Justice" would make trouble enough between
Euripides and the "simple herd" if ever they reached the point of
discussing them. He who most loves the ideal Natural Man seldom agrees
with the majority of his neighbours. But for the meantime the poet is
wrapped up in another war, in which he and religion and nature and the
life of the simple man seem to be standing on one side against a
universal enemy.
I am not attempting to expound the whole meaning of the _Bacchae_. I am
only suggesting a clue by which to follow it. Like a live thing it seems
to move and show new faces every time that, with imagination fully
working, one reads the play. There were many factors at work,
doubtless, to produce the _Bacchae_: the peculiar state of Athens, the
poet's ecstasy of escape from an intolerable atmosphere, the simple
Homeric life in Macedonian forests and mountains, and perhaps even the
sight of real Bacchantes dancing there. But it may be that the chief
factor is simply this. When a man is fairly confronted with death and is
consciously doing his last work in the world, the chances are that, if
his brain is clear and unterrified, the deepest part of his nature will
assert itself. Euripides was both a reasoner and a poet. The two sides
of his nature sometimes clashed and sometimes blended. But ever since
the _Heracles_ he had known which service he really lived for; and in
his last work it is the poet who speaks, and reveals, so far as such a
thing can be revealed, the secret religion of poetry.
[Footnote 2: In my verse translation I took a slightly different
reading, being then misinformed about the MS., but the general sense is
the same. ("Knowledge, we are not foes," etc.)]