GRECIAN LITERATURE AND ART I FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE PERSIAN
TO THE CLOSE OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WARS. (500-403 B.C.)
LITERATURE.
In a former chapter we briefly traced the growth of Grecian
literature and art from their beginnings down to the time of
the Persian wars. Within this period, as we noticed, their progress
was the greatest in the Grecian colonies, while, of the cities
of central Greece, the one destined to become pre-eminent in
literature and the fine arts--Athens--contributed less than several
others to intellectual advancement. "She produced no artists to
be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Si'cy-on, and of many
other cities, while she could boast of no poets as celebrated
as those of the Ionian and Æolian schools." But at the opening
of the Persian wars the artistic and literary talent of Greece
began to center in Athens, and with the close of that contest
properly begins the era of Athenian greatness. Athens, hitherto
inferior in magnitude and political importance, having borne
the brunt and won the highest martial honor of the conflict with
Persia, now took the lead, as well in intellectual progress as
in political ascendancy. To this era PROFESSOR SYMONDS refers,
as follows:
"It was the struggle with Xerxes which developed all the latent
energies of the Greeks, which intensified their national existence,
and which secured for Athens, as the central power on which the
scattered forces of the race converged, the intellectual
dictatorship of Hellas. It was a struggle of spiritual energy
against brute force, of liberty against oppression, of intellectual
freedom against superstitious ignorance, of civilization against
barbarism; and Athens, who had fought and won this battle of the
Spirit--by spirit we mean the greatness of the soul, liberty,
intelligence, and everything which raises men above brutes and
slaves, and makes them free beneath the arch of heaven--became
immediately the recognized impersonation of the spirit itself.
Whatever was superb in human nature found its natural home and
sphere in Athens. We hear no more of the colonies. All great
works of art and literature are now produced in Athens, and it
is to Athens that the sages come to teach and to be taught."
[Footnote: "The Greek Poets." First Series, p. 19.]
* * * * *
I. LYRIC POETRY.
SIMON'IDES AND PINDAR.
The rapid progress made in the cultivation of lyric poetry
preceding the Persian wars found its culmination, during those
wars, in Simonides of Ceos, the most brilliant period of whose
life was spent at Athens; and in Pindar, a native of Thebes,
who is considered the greatest lyric poet of all ages. The life
of Simonides was a long one, reaching from 556 to 469 B.C.
"Coming forward at a time," says MAHAFFY, "when the tyrants had
made poetry a matter of culture, and dissociated it from politics,
we find him a professional artist, free from all party struggles,
alike welcome at the courts of tyrants and among the citizens of
free states; he was respected throughout all the Greek world,
and knew well how to suit himself, socially and artistically,
to his patrons. The great national struggle with Persia gave
him the opportunity of becoming the spokesman of the nation in
celebrating the glories of the victors and the heroism of the
fallen patriots; and this exceptional opportunity made him quite
the foremost poet of his day, and decidedly better known and
more admired than Pindar, who has so completely eclipsed him
in the attention of posterity." [Footnote: "Classical Greek
Literature," vol. i., p. 207.]
Simonides was the intimate friend of Miltiades and Themistocles
at Athens, of Pausanias at Sparta, and of the tyrants of Sicily.
In the first named city he composed his epigrams on Marathon,
Thermopylæ, Salamis, and Platæa--"poems not destined to be merely
sung or consigned to parchment, but to be carved in marble or
engraved in letters of imperishable bronze upon the works of
the noblest architects and statuaries." In his elegy upon Marathon
he carried away the prize from Æschylus. He was a most prolific
poet, and his writings, comprising all the subjects that human
life, with its joys and sorrows, its hopes and disappointments,
could furnish, are noted for their sweetness and pure and exquisite
polish. He particularly excelled in the pathetic; and the most
celebrated of the existing fragments of his muse, the "Lamentation
of Dan'a-ë," is a piece of this character. The poem is based
upon a tradition concerning Danaë, the daughter of Acris'ius,
King of Argos, and her infant son, the offspring of Jove.
Acrisius had been told by the oracle that his life would be taken
by a son that his daughter should bear, and, for his own
preservation, when the boy had reached the age of four years,
Acrisius threw both him and his mother into a chest and set them
adrift on the sea. But they were rescued by Dictys, a fisherman
of the Island of Seri'phus, whose brother Polydec'tes, king of
the country, received and protected them. The boy grew up to
manhood, and became the famous hero Per'seus, who accidentally
killed Acrisius at the funeral games of Polydectes. The following
is the
Lamentation of Dan'a-ë.
While, around her lone ark sweeping,
Wailed the winds and waters wild,
Her young cheeks all wan with weeping,
Danae clasped her sleeping child;
And "Alas!" cried she, "my dearest,
What deep wrongs, what woes are mine;
But nor wrongs nor woes thou fearest
In that sinless rest of thine.
Faint the moonbeams break above thee,
And within here all is gloom;
But, fast wrapped in arms that love thee,
Little reck'st thou of our doom.
Not the rude spray, round thee flying,
Has e'en damped thy clustering hair;
On thy purple mantlet lying,
O mine Innocent, my Fair!
Yet, to thee were sorrow sorrow,
Thou wouldst lend thy little ear;
And this heart of thine might borrow,
Haply, yet a moment's cheer.
But no: slumber on, babe, slumber;
Slumber, ocean's waves; and you,
My dark troubles, without number--
Oh, that ye would slumber too!
Though with wrongs they've brimmed my chalice,
Grant, Jove, that, in future years,
This boy may defeat their malice,
And avenge his mother's tears!"
--Trans. by W. PETER.
Simonides was nearly eighty years old when he gained his last
poetical prize at Athens, making the fiftieth that he had won.
He then retired to Syracuse, at the invitation of Hi'ero, where
he spent the remaining ten years of his life. He was a philosopher
as well as poet, and his wise sayings made him a special favorite
with the accomplished Hiero. When inquired of by that monarch
concerning the nature of God, Simonides requested one day for
deliberating on the subject; and when Hiero repeated the question
the next day, the poet asked for two days more. As he still went
on doubling the number of days, the monarch, lost in wonder,
asked him why he did so. "Because," replied Simonides, "the longer
I reflect on the subject, the more obscure does it appear to
me to be."
Pindar, the most celebrated of all the lyric poets of Greece,
was born about 520 B.C. At an early age he was sent to Athens
to receive instruction in the art of poetry: returning to Thebes
at twenty, his youthful genius was quickened and guided by the
influence of Myr'tis and Corin'na, two poetesses who then enjoyed
great celebrity in Bœotia. At a later period "he undoubtedly
experienced," says THIRLWALL, "the animating influence of that
joyful and stirring time which followed the defeat of the barbarian
invader, though, as a Theban patriot, he could not heartily enjoy
a triumph by which Thebes as well as Persia was humbled." But
his enthusiasm for Athens, which he calls "the buttress of Hellas,"
is apparent in one of his compositions; and the Athenians specially
honored him with a valuable present, and, after his death, erected
a bronze statue to his memory. It is probable, however, that
while he was sincerely anxious for the success of Greece in the
great contest, he avoided as much as possible offending his own
people, whose sympathies and hopes lay the other way.
The reputation of Pindar early became so great that he was employed,
by various states and princes, to compose choral songs for special
occasions. Like Simonides, he "loved to bask in the sunshine
of courts;" but he was frank, sincere, and manly, assuming a
lofty and dignified position toward princes and others in authority
with whom he came in contact. He was especially courted by Hiero,
despot of Syracuse, but remained with him only a few years, his
manly disposition creating a love for an independent life that
the courtly arts of his patron could not furnish. As his poems
show, he was a reserved man, learned in the myths and ceremonies
of the times, and specially devoted to the worship of the gods.
"The old myths," says a Greek biographer, "were for the most part
realities to him, and he accepted them with implicit credence,
except when they exhibited the gods in a point of view which
was repugnant to his moral feelings; and he accordingly rejects
some tales, and changes others, because they are inconsistent
with his moral conceptions." As a poet correctly describes him,
using one of the names commonly applied to him,
Pindar, that eagle, mounts the skies,
While virtue leads the noble way.
--PRIOR.
The poems of Pindar were numerous, and comprised triumphal odes,
hymns to the gods, pæans, dirges, and songs of various kinds.
His triumphal odes alone have come down to us entire; but of
some of his other compositions there are a few sublime and beautiful
fragments. The poet and his writings cannot be better described
than in the following general characterization by SYMONDS:
"By the force of his originality Pindar gave lyrical poetry a
wholly new direction, and, coming last of the great Dorian lyrists,
taught posterity what sort of thing an ode should be. His grand
pre-eminence as an artist was due, in great measure, to his
personality. Frigid, austere, and splendid; not genial like that
of Simonides, not passionate like that of Sappho, not acrid like
that of Archil'ochus; hard as adamant, rigid in moral firmness,
glittering with the strong, keen light of snow; haughty,
aristocratic, magnificent--the unique personality of the man
Pindar, so irresistible in its influence, so hard to characterize,
is felt in every strophe of his odes. In his isolation and elevation
Pindar stands like some fabled heaven-aspiring peak, conspicuous
from afar, girdled at the base with ice and snow, beaten by winds,
wreathed round with steam and vapor, jutting a sharp and dazzling
outline into cold blue ether. Few things that have life dare
to visit him at his grand altitude. Glorious with sunlight and
with stars, touched by rise and set of day with splendor, he
shines when other lesser lights are dulled. Pindar among his
peers is solitary. He had no communion with the poets of his
day. He is the eagle; Simonides and Bacchyl'ides are jackdaws.
He soars to the empyrean; they haunt the valley mists. Noticing
this rocky, barren, severe, glittering solitude of Pindar's soul,
critics have not infrequently complained that his poems are devoid
of individual interest. Possibly they have failed to comprehend
and appreciate the nature of this sublime and distant genius,
whose character, in truth, is just as marked as that of Dante
or of Michael Angelo."
After giving some illustrations of the impression produced upon
the imagination by a study of Pindar's odes, the writer proceeds
with his characterization, in the following language: "He who
has watched a sunset attended by the passing of a thunder-storm
in the outskirts of the Alps--who has seen the distant ranges
of the mountains alternately obscured by cloud and blazing with
the concentrated brightness of the sinking sun, while drifting
scuds of hail and rain, tawny with sunlight, glistening with
broken rainbows, clothe peak and precipice and forest in the
golden veil of flame-irradiated vapor--he who has heard the thunder
bellow in the thwarting folds of hills, and watched the lightning,
like a snakes tongue, flicker at intervals amid gloom and glory
--knows, in Nature's language, what Pindar teaches with the voice
of Art. It is only by a metaphor like this that any attempt to
realize the Sturm and Drang of Pindar's style can be communicated.
As an artist he combines the strong flight of the eagle, the
irresistible force of the torrent, the richness of Greek wine,
and the majestic pageantry of Nature in one of her sublimer
moods." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." First Series, pp. 171, 174.]
Pindar, as we have seen, was compared to an eagle, because of
the daring flights and lofty character of his poetry--a simile
which has been beautifully expressed in the following lines by
GRAY:
The pride and ample pinion
That the Theban eagle bare,
Sailing with supreme dominion,
Through the azure deeps of air.
Another image, also, has been employed to show these features
of his poetry. The poet POPE represents him riding in a gorgeous
chariot sustained by four swans:
Four swans sustain a car of silver bright,
With heads advanced and pinions stretched for flight;
Here, like some furious prophet, Pindar rode,
And seemed to labor with th' inspiring god.
A third image, given to us by HORACE, represents another
characteristic of Pindar, which may be called "the stormy violence
of his song:"
As when a river, swollen by sudden showers,
O'er its known banks from some steep mountain pours;
So, in profound, unmeasurable song,
The deep-mouthed Pindar, foaming, pours along.
--Trans. by FRANCIS.
As a sample of the religious sentiment of Pindar we give the
following fragment of a threnos translated by MR. SYMONDS, which,
he says, "sounds like a trumpet blast for immortality, and,
trampling underfoot the glories of this world, reveals the gladness
of the souls that have attained Elysium:"
For them, the night all through,
In that broad realm below,
The splendor of the sun spreads endless light;
'Mid rosy meadows bright,
Their city of the tombs, with incense-trees
And golden chalices
Of flowers, and fruitage fair,
Scenting the breezy air,
Is laden. There, with horses and with play,
With games and lyres, they while the hours away.
On every side around
Pure happiness is found,
With all the blooming beauty of the world;
There fragrant smoke, upcurled
From altars where the blazing fire is dense
With perfumed frankincense,
Burned unto gods in heaven,
Through all the land is driven,
Making its pleasant place odorous
With scented gales, and sweet airs amorous.
* * * * *
II. THE DRAMA.
One of the most striking proofs that we possess of the rapid
growth and expansion of the Greek mind, is found in the rise
of the Drama, a new kind of poetical composition, which united
the leading features of every species before cultivated, in a
new whole "breathing a rhetorical, dialectical, and ethical spirit"
--a branch of literature that peculiarly characterized the era
of Athenian greatness. Its elements were found in the religious
festivals celebrated in Greece from the earliest ages, and
especially in the feast of Bacchus, where sacred odes of a grave
and serious character, intermixed with episodes of mythological
story recited by an actor, were sung by a chorus that danced
around the altar. A goat was either the principal sacrifice on
these occasions, or the participants, disguised as Satyrs, had
a goat-like appearance; and from the two Greek words representing
"goat" and "song" we get our word tragedy, [Footnote: From the
Greek tragos, "a goat," and o'de, "a song."] or goat-song. At
some of the more rustic festivals in honor of the same god the
performance was of a more jocose or satirical character; and
hence arose the term comedy, [Footnote: From the Greek ko'me,
"a village," and o'de, "a song."] from the two Greek words
signifying "village" and "song"--village-song. In the teller of
mythological legends we find the first germ of dialogue, as the
chorus soon came to assist him by occasional question and remark.
This feature was introduced by Thespis, a native of Ica'ria,
in 535 B.C., under whose direction, and that of Phryn'icus, his
pupil, the first feeble rudiments of the drama were established.
In this condition it was found by Æschylus, in 500 B.C., who
brought a second actor upon the scene; whence arose the increased
prominence of the dialogue, and the limitation and subsidiary
character of the chorus. Æschylus also added more expressive
masks, and various machinery and scenes calculated to improve
and enlarge dramatic representation. Of the effect of this new
creation upon all kinds of poetical genius we have the following
fine illustration from the pen of BULWER:
"It was in the very nature of the Athenian drama that, when once
established, it should concentrate and absorb almost every variety
of poetical genius. The old lyrical poetry, never much cultivated
in Athens, ceased in a great measure when tragedy arose; or,
rather, tragedy was the complete development, the new and perfected
consummation, of the dithyrambic ode. Lyrical poetry transmigrated
into the choral song as the epic merged into the dialogue and
plot of the drama. Thus, when we speak of Athenian poetry we
speak of dramatic poetry--they were one and the same. In Athens,
where audiences were numerous and readers few, every man who
felt within himself the inspiration of the poet would necessarily
desire to see his poetry put into action--assisted with all the
pomp of spectacle and music, hallowed by the solemnity of a
religious festival, and breathed by artists elaborately trained
to heighten the eloquence of words into the reverent ear of
assembled Greece. Hence the multitude of dramatic poets; hence
the mighty fertility of each; hence the life and activity of
this--the comparative torpor and barrenness of every other--
species of poetry."
1. TRAGEDY.
MELPOM'ENE, one of the nine Muses, whose name signifies "To
represent in song," is said to have been the inventress of tragedy,
over which she presided, always veiled, bearing in one hand the
lyre, as the emblem of her vocation, and in the other a tragic
mask. As queen of the lyre, every poet was supposed to proclaim
the marvels of her song, and to invoke her aid.
Queen of the lyre, in thy retreat
The fairest flowers of Pindus glow,
The vine aspires to crown thy seat,
And myrtles round thy laurel grow:
Thy strings adapt their varied strain
To every pleasure, every pain,
Which mortal tribes were born to prove;
And straight our passions rise or fall,
As, at the wind's imperious call,
The ocean swells, the billows move.
When midnight listens o'er the slumbering earth,
Let me, O Muse, thy solemn whispers hear:
When morning sends her fragrant breezes forth,
With airy murmurs touch my opening ear,
--AKENSIDE.
ÆSCHYLUS.
Æschylus, the first poet who rendered the drama illustrious,
and into whose character and writings the severe and ascetic
doctrines of Pythagoras entered largely, was born at Eleu'sis,
in Attica, in 525 B.C. He fought, as will be remembered, in the
combats of Marathon and Salamis, and also in the battle of Platæa.
He therefore flourished at the time when the freedom of Greece,
rescued from foreign enemies, was exulting in its first strength;
and his writings are characteristic of the boldness and vigor
of the age. In his works we find the fundamental idea of the
Greek drama--retributive justice. The sterner passions alone
are appealed to, and the language is replete with bold metaphor
and gigantic hyperbole. Venus and her inspirations are excluded;
the charms of love are unknown: but the gods--vast, majestic,
in shadowy outline, and in the awful sublimity of power-pass
before and awe the beholder. [Footnote: see Grote's "History
of Greece," Chap. lxvii.] Says a prominent reviewer: "The
conceptions of the imagination of Æschylus are remarkable for
a sort of colossal sublimity and power, resembling the poetry of
the Book of Job; and those poems of his which embody a connected
story may be said to resemble the stupendous avenues of the
Temple of Elora, [See Index.] with the vast scenes and vistas;
its strange, daring, though rude sculptures; its awful, shadowy,
impending horrors. Like the architecture, the poems, too, seem
hewn out of some massy region of mountain rock. Æschylus appears
as an austere poet-soul, brooding among the grand, awful, and
terrible myths which have floated from a primeval world, in which
traditions of the Deluge, of the early, rudimental struggle between
barbaric power and nascent civilization, were still vital."
"The personal temperament of the man," says DR. PLUMPTRE, [Footnote:
"The Tragedies of Æschylus," by E. H. Plumptre, D.D.] seems to
have been in harmony with the characteristics of his genius.
Vehement, passionate, irascible; writing his tragedies, as later
critics judged, as if half drunk; doing (as Sophocles said of
him) what was right in his art without knowing why; following
the impulses that led him to strange themes and dark problems,
rather than aiming at the perfection of a complete, all-sided
culture; frowning with shaggy brows, like a wild bull, glaring
fiercely, and bursting into a storm of wrath when annoyed by
critics or rival poets; a Marlowe rather than a Shakspeare: this
is the portrait sketched by one who must have painted a figure
still fresh in the minds of the Athenians. [Footnote: Aristophanes,
in The Frogs.] Such a man, both by birth and disposition, was
likely to attach himself to the aristocratic party, and to look
with scorn on the claims of the demos to a larger share of power;
and there is hardly a play in which some political bias in that
direction may not be traced."
Æschylus wrote his plays in trilogies, or three successive dramas
connected. Of the eighty tragedies that he wrote, only seven
have been preserved. From three of these, The Persians, Prome'theus,
and Agamemnon, we have given extracts descriptive of historical
and mythological events. The latter is the first of three plays
on the fortunes of the house of A'treus, of Myce'næ; and these
three, of which the Choëph'oroe and Eumenides are the other two,
are the only extant specimen of a trilogy. The Agamemnon is the
longest, and by some considered the grandest, play left us by
Æschylus. "In the Agamemnon," says VON SCHLEGEL, "it was the
intention of Æschylus to exhibit to us a sudden fall from the
highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the abyss of ruin.
The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of the
Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement
of the destruction of Troy, the fame of which is to be re-echoed
from the mouths of the greatest poets of all ages, in the very
act of crossing the threshold of his home, after which he had
so long sighed, and amidst the fearless security of preparations
for a festival, is butchered, according to the expression of
Homer, 'like an ox in the stall,' slain by his faithless wife,
his throne usurped by her worthless seducer, and his children
consigned to banishment or to hopeless servitude." [Footnote:
"Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," by Augustus William
on Schlegel. Black's translation.]
Among the fine passages of this play, the death of Agamemnon, at
the hand of Clytemnes'tra, is a scene that the poet paints with
terrible effect. Says MR. EUGENE LAWRENCE, [Footnote: "A Primer
of Greek Literature," by Eugene Lawrence, p.55.] "Mr. E. C.
Stedman's version of the death of Agamemnon is an excellent one.
A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenæ; there is a scent of
blood, the exhalations of the tomb. The queen, Clytemnestra, enters
the inner room, terrible as Lady Macbeth. A cry is heard:
"'Agam. Woe's me! I'm stricken a deadly blow within!'
"'Chor. Hark! who is't cries "a blow?" Who meets his death?'
"'Agam. Woe's me! Again! again! a second time I'm stricken!'
"'Chor. The deed, methinks, from the king's cry, is done.'
At length the queen appears, standing at her full height, terrible,
holding her bloody weapon in her hand. She seeks no concealment.
She proclaims her guilt:
"'I smote him! nor deny that thus I did it;
So that he could not flee or ward off doom.
A seamless net, as round a fish, I cast
About him, yea, a deadly wealth of robe,
Then smote him twice; and with a double cry
He loosed his limbs; and to him fallen I gave
Yet a third thrust, a grace to Hades, lord
Of the under-world and guardian of the dead.'"
But the most finished of the tragedies of Æschylus is Choëphoroe,
which is made the subject of the revenge of Ores'tes, son of
Agamemnon, who avenges the murder of his father by putting his
mother to death. For this crime the Eumenides represents him as
being driven insane by the Furies; but his reason was subsequently
restored. It is the chief object of the poet, in this tragedy, to
display the distress of Orestes at the necessity he feels of
avenging his father's death upon his mother. To this BYRON refers
in Childe Harold:
O thou! who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale--great Nem'esis!
Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss
For that unnatural retribution--just,
Had it but been from hands less near--in this,
Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!
At the close of an interesting characterization of Æschylus and
his works--much too long for a full quotation here--PROFESSOR
MAHAFFY observes as follows:
"We always feel that Æschylus thought more than he expressed,
that his desperate compounds are never affected or unnecessary.
Although, therefore, he violated the rules that bound weaker
men, it is false to say that be was less an artist than they.
His art was of a different kind, despising what they prized, and
attempting what they did not dare, but not the less a conscious
and thorough art. Though the drawing of character was not his
main object, his characters are truer and deeper than those of
poets who attempted nothing else. Though lyrical sweetness had
little place in the gloom and terror of his Titanic stage, yet
here too, when he chooses, he equals the masters of lyric song.
So long as a single Homer was deemed the author of the Iliad
and the Odyssey, we might well concede to him the first place,
and say that Æschylus was the second poet of the Greeks. But
by the light of nearer criticism, and with a closer insight into
the structure of the epic poems, we must retract this judgment,
and assert that no other poet among the Greeks, either in grandeur
of conception or splendor of execution, equals the untranslatable,
unapproachable, inimitable Æschylus." [Footnote: "Classical Greek
Literature," vol. i., p.275.]
SOPHOCLES.
Æschylus was succeeded, as master of the drama, by Sophocles--
the Raffaelle of the drama, as Bulwer calls him--who was also
one of the generals of the Athenian expedition against Samos
in the year 440 B.C. He brought the drama to the greatest
perfection of which it was susceptible. In him we find a greater
range of emotions than in Æschylus--figures more distinctly
seen, a more expanded dialogue, simplicity of speech mixed with
rhetorical declamation, and the highest degree of poetic beauty.
Says a late writer: "The artist and the man were one in Sophocles.
We cannot but think of him as specially created to represent
Greek art in its most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection.
It is impossible to imagine a more plastic nature, a genius more
adapted to its special function, more fittingly provided with
all things needful to its full development, born at a happier
moment in the history of the world, and more nobly endowed with
physical qualities suited to its intellectual capacity."
Sophocles composed one hundred and thirteen plays, but only seven
of them are extant. Of these the most familiar is the tragedy
of OEd'ipus Tyran'nus--"King OEdipus." It is not only considered
his masterpiece, but also, as regards the choice and disposition
of the fable on which it is founded, the finest tragedy of
antiquity. A new interest has been given to it in this country
by its recent representation in the original Greek. Of its many
translations, it is conceded that none have done, and none can
do it justice; they can do little more than give its plan and
general character. The following, in brief, is the story of this
famous tragedy:
OEdipus Tyrannus.
La'i-us, King of Thebes, was told by the Delphic oracle that if
a son should be born to him, by the hand of that son he should
surely die. When, therefore, his queen, Jocasta, bare him a son,
the parents gave the child to a shepherd, with orders to cast
it out, bound, on the hill Cithæ'ron to perish. But the shepherd,
moved to compassion, deceived the parents, and intrusted the
babe to a herdsman of Pol'ybus, King of Corinth; and the wife
of Polybus, being childless, named the foundling OEdipus, and
reared it as her own.
Thirty years later, OEdipus, ignorant of his birth, and being
directed by the oracle to shun his native country, fled from
Corinth; and it happened at the same time that his father (Laius)
was on his way to consult the oracle at Delphi, for the purpose
of ascertaining whether the child that had been exposed had
perished or not. As father and son, strangers to each other, met
in a narrow path in the mountains, a dispute arose for the right
of way, and in the contest that ensued the father was slain.
Immediately after this event the goddess Juno, always hostile to
Thebes, sent a monster, called the sphinx, to propound a riddle
to the Thebans, and to ravage their territory until some one
should solve the riddle--the purport of which was, "What animal
is that which goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noon,
and on three at evening?" OEdipus, the supposed son of Polybus,
of Corinth, coming to Thebes, solved the riddle, by answering
the sphinx that it was man, who, when an infant, creeps on all
fours, in manhood goes on two feet, and when old uses a staff.
The sphinx then threw herself down to the earth and perished;
whereupon the Thebans, in their joy, chose OEdipus as king, and
he married the widowed queen Jocasta, by whom he had two sons
and two daughters. Although everything prospered with him--as
he loved the Theban people, and was beloved by them in turn for
his many virtues--soon the wrath of the gods fell upon the city,
which was visited by a sore pestilence. Creon, brother of the
queen, is now sent to consult the oracle for the cause of the
evil; and it is at the point of his return that the drama opens.
He brings back the response
"That guilt of blood is blasting all the state;"
that this guilt is connected with the death of Laius, and that
"Now the god clearly bids us, he being dead,
To take revenge on those who shed his blood,"
OEdipus engages earnestly in the business of unraveling the mystery
connected with the death of Laius, the cause of all the Theban
woes. Ignorant that he himself bears the load of guilt, he charges
the Thebans to be vigilant and unremitting in their efforts,--
"And for the man who did the guilty deed,
Whether alone he lurks, or leagued with more,
I pray that he may waste his life away,
For vile deeds vilely dying; and for me,
If in my house, I knowing it, he dwells,
May every curse I spake on my head fall."
A blind and aged priest and prophet, Tire'sias, is brought before
OEdipus, and, being implored to lend the aid of prophecy to "save
the city from the curse" that had fallen on it, he at first refuses to
exert his prophetic power.
Tiresias. Ah! Reason fails you an, but ne'er will I
Say what thou bidd'st, lest I thy troubles show.
I will not pain myself nor thee. Why, then,
All vainly question? Thou shalt never know.
But, urged and threatened by the king, he at length exclaims:
Tier. And has it come to this? I charge thee, hold
To thy late edict, and from this day forth
Speak not to me, nor yet to these, for thou--
Thou art the accursed plague-spot of the land!
OEdipus at first believes that the aged prophet is merely the
tool of others, who are engaged in a conspiracy to expel him
from the throne; but when Jocasta, in her innocence, informs
him of the death of Laius, names the mountain pass in which he
fell, slain, as was supposed, by a robber band, and describes
his dress and person, OEdipus is startled at the thought that
he himself was the slayer, and he exclaims,
"Great Zeus! what fate hast thou decreed for me?
Woe! woe! 'tis all too clear."
Yet there is one hope left. The man whom he slew in that same
mountain pass fell by no robber band, and, therefore, could not
have been Laius. Soon even this hope deserts him, when the story
is truly told. He learns, moreover, that he is not the son of
Polybus, the Corinthian king, but a foundling adopted by his
queen. Connecting this with the story now told him by Jocasta,
of her infant son, whom she supposed to have perished on the
mountain, the horrid truth begins to dawn upon all. Jocasta rushes
from the presence of OEdipus, exclaiming,
"Woe! woe! ill-fated one! my last word this,
This only, and no more for evermore."
When the old shepherd, forced to declare the truth, tells how
he saved the life of the infant, and gave it into the keeping
of the herdsman of Polybus, the evil-starred OEdipus exclaims,
in agony of spirit:
"Woe! woe! woe! all cometh clear at last.
O light! may this my last glance be on thee,
Who now am seen owing my birth to those
To whom I ought not, and with whom I ought not
In wedlock living, whom I ought not slaying."
Horrors still thicken in this terrible tragedy. Word is brought
to OEdipus that Jocasta is dead--dead by her own hand! He rushes in:
Then came a sight
Most fearful. Tearing from her robe the clasps,
All chased with gold, with which she decked herself,
He with them struck the pupils of his eyes,
With words like these--"Because they had not seen
What ills he suffered and what ills he did,
They in the dark should look, in time to come,
On those whom they ought never to have seen,
Nor know the dear ones whom he fain had known."
With such-like wails, not once or twice alone,
Raising his eyes, he smote them; and the balls,
All bleeding, stained his cheek, nor poured they forth
Gore drops slow trickling, but the purple shower
Fell fast and full, a pelting storm of blood.
The now blind and wretched OEdipus, bewailing his fate and the
evils he had so unwittingly brought upon Thebes, begs to be cast
forth with all speed from out the land.
OEdipus. Lead me away, my friends, with utmost speed
Lead me away; the foul, polluted one,
Of all men most accursed,
Most hateful to the gods.
Chorus. Ah, wretched one, alike in soul and doom,
I fain could wish that I had never known thee.
OEdipus. Ill fate be his who from the fetters freed
The child upon the hills,
And rescued me from death,
And saved me--thankless boon!
Ah! had I died but then,
Nor to my friends nor me had been such woe.
A touching picture is presented in the farewell of OEdipus, on
departing from Thebes to wander an outcast upon the earth. The
tragedy concludes with the following moral by the chorus:
Chorus. Ye men of Thebes, behold this OEdipus,
Who knew the famous riddle, and was noblest.
Whose fortune who saw not with envious glances?
And lo! in what a sea of direst trouble
He now is plunged! From hence the lesson learn ye,
To reckon no man happy till ye witness
The closing day; until he pass the border
Which Severs life from death unscathed by sorrow.
--Trans. by E. H. PLUMPTRE.
Character of the Works of Sophocles.
The character of the works of Sophocles is well described in the
following extract from an Essay on Greek Poetry, by THOMAS NOON
TALFOURD: "The great and distinguishing excellence of Sophocles
will be found in his excellent sense of the beautiful, and the
perfect harmony of all his powers. His conceptions are not on
so gigantic a scale as those of Æschylus; but in the circle which
he prescribes to himself to fill, not a place is left unadorned;
not a niche without its appropriate figure; not the smallest
ornament which is incomplete in the minutest graces. His judgment
seems absolutely perfect, for he never fails; he is always fully
master of himself and his subject; he knows the precise measure
of his own capacities; and while he never attempts a flight beyond
his reach, he never debases himself nor his art by anything beneath
him.
"Sophocles was undoubtedly the first philosophical poet of the
ancient world. With his pure taste for the graceful he perceived,
amidst the sensible forms around him, one universal spirit of
Jove pervading all things. Virtue and justice, to his mind, did
not appear the mere creatures of convenience, or the means of
gratifying the refined selfishness of man; he saw them, having
deep root in eternity, unchanging and imperishable as their divine
author. In a single stanza he has impressed this sentiment with
a plenitude of inspiration before which the philosophy of expediency
vanishes--a passage that has neither a parallel nor equal of its
kind, that we recollect, in the whole compass of heathen poetry,
and which may be rendered thus: 'Oh for a spotless purity of
action and of speech, according to those sublime laws of right
which have the heavens for their birthplace, and God alone for
their author--which the decays of mortal nature cannot vary,
nor time cover with oblivion, for the divinity is mighty within
them and waxes not old!'"
Sophocles died in extreme old age, "without disease and without
suffering, and was mourned with such a sincerity and depth of
grief as were exhibited at the death of no other citizen of Athens."
Thrice happy Sophocles! in good old age,
Blessed as a man, and as a craftsman blessed,
He died: his many tragedies were fair,
And fair his end, nor knew be any sorrow.
--PHRYN'ICHUS.
Wind, gentle evergreen, to form a shade
Around the tomb where Sophocles is laid;
Sweet ivy wind thy boughs, and intertwine
With blushing roses and the clustering vine.
Thus will thy lasting leaves, with beauties hung,
Prove grateful emblems of the lays he sung,
Whose soul, exalted by the god of wit,
Among the Muses and the Graces writ.
--SIM'MIAS, the Theban.
EURIP'IDES.
Contemporary with Sophocles was Euripides, born in 480 B.C., the
last of the three great masters of the drama--the three being
embraced within the limits of a single century. Under Sophocles
the principal changes effected in the outward form of the drama
were the introduction of a third actor, and a consequent limitation
of the functions of the chorus. Euripides, however, changed the
mode of handling tragedy. Unlike Sophocles, who only limited
the activity of the chorus, he disconnected it from the tragic
interest of the drama by giving but little attention to the
character of its songs. He also made some other changes; and,
as one writer expresses it, his innovations "disintegrated the
drama by destroying its artistic unity." But although perhaps
inferior, in all artistic point of view, to his predecessors,
the genius of Euripides supplied a want that they did not meet.
Although his plays are all connected with the history and mythology
of Greece, in them rhetoric is more prominent than in the plays
of either Æschylus or Sophocles; the legendary characters assume
more the garb of humanity; the tender sentiments--love, pity,
compassion--are invoked to a greater degree, and an air of exquisite
delicacy and refinement embellishes the whole. These were the
qualities in the plays of Euripides that endeared him to the
Greeks of succeeding ages, and that gave to his works such an
influence on the Roman and modern drama.
Of Euripides MR. SYMONDS remarks: "His lasting title to fame
consists in his having dealt with the deeper problems of life
in a spirit which became permanent among the Greeks, so that
his poems never lost their value as expressions of current
philosophy. Nothing strikes the student of later Greek literature
more strongly than this prolongation of the Euripidean tone of
thought and feeling. In the decline of tragic poetry the literary
sceptre was transferred to comedy; and the comic playwrights may
be described as the true successors of Euripides. The dialectic
method, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more
harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy
by Menan'der, when the Athenians, after passing through their
disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation
of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and
purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides.
Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said, and well
said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon important
matters; and his sensitive, susceptible temperament repeated
itself over and over again among his literary successors. The
exclamation of Phile'mon that, if he could believe in immortality,
he would hang himself to see Euripides, is characteristic not
only of Philemon, but also of the whole Macedonian period of
Greek literature." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." Second Series,
p. 300.]
Euripides wrote about seventy-five plays, of which eighteen have
come down to us. The Me-de'a, which is thought to be his best
piece, is occupied with the circumstances of the vengeance taken
by Medea on the ungrateful Jason, the hero of the Argonautic
expedition, for whom she had sacrificed all, and who, after his
return, abandoned her for a royal Corinthian bride. [Footnote:
See Argonautic Expedition, p. 81.] But the most touching of the
plays of Euripides is the Alces'tis, founded on the fable of
Alcestis dying for her husband, Adme'tus. MILTON thus alludes
to the story, in his sonnet on his deceased wife:
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
The substance of the story is as follows:
Admetus, King of Phe'ræ, in Thessaly, married Alcestis, who became
noted for her conjugal virtues. Apollo, when banished from heaven,
received so kind treatment from Admetus that he induced the Fates
to prolong the latter's life beyond the ordinary limit, on
condition that one of his own family should die in his stead.
Alcestis at once consented to die for her husband, and when the
appointed time came she heroically and composedly gave herself
to death. Soon after her departure, however, the hero Hercules
visited Admetus, and, pained with the profound grief of the
household, he rescued Alcestis from the grim tyrant Death and
restored her to her family. The whole play abounds in touching
scenes and descriptions; and the best modern critics concede that
there is no female character in either Æschylus or Sophocles,
not even excepting Antig'one, that is so great and noble, and
at the same time so purely tender and womanly, as Alcestis.
"Where has either Greek or modern literature," says MAHAFFY,
"produced a nobler ideal than the Alcestis of Euripides? Devoted
to her husband and children, beloved and happy in her palace,
she sacrifices her life calmly and resignedly--a life which is
not encompassed with afflictions, but of all the worth that life
can be, and of all the usefulness which makes it precious to
noble natures." [Footnote: "Social Life in Greece, p. 189.] We
give the following short extract from the poet's account of the
preparations made by Alcestis for her approaching end:
Alcestis Preparing for Death.
When she knew
The destined day was come, in fountain water
She bathed her lily-tinctured limbs, then took
From her rich chests, of odorous cedar formed,
A splendid robe, and her most radiant dress.
Thus gorgeously arrayed, she stood before
The hallowed flames, and thus addressed her prayer:
"O queen, I go to the infernal shades;
Yet, ere I go, with reverence let me breathe
My last request: protect my orphan children;
Make my son happy with the wife he loves,
And wed my daughter to a noble husband;
Nor let them, like their mother, to the tomb
Untimely sink, but in their native land
Be blessed through lengthened life to honored age."
Then to each altar in the royal house
She went, and crowned it, and addressed her vows,
Plucking the myrtle bough: nor tear, nor sigh
Came from her; neither did the approaching ill
Change the fresh beauties of her vermeil cheek.
Her chamber then she visits, and her bed;
There her tears flowed, and thus she spoke: "O bed
To which my wedded lord, for whom I die,
Led me a virgin bride, farewell! to thee
No blame do I impute, for me alone
Hast thou destroyed: disdaining to betray
Thee, and my lord, I die: to thee shall come
Some other woman, not more chaste, perchance
More happy." As she lay she kissed the couch,
And bathed it with a flood of tears: that passed,
She left her chamber, then returned, and oft
She left it, oft returned, and on the couch
Fondly, each time she entered, cast herself.
Her children, as they hung upon her robes,
Weeping, she raised, and clasped them to her breast
Each after each, as now about to die.
--Trans. by POTTER.
Euripides died in the year 406 B.C., in Macedon, to which country
he had been compelled to go on account of domestic troubles;
and the then king, Archela'us honored his remains with a sumptuous
funeral, and erected a monument over them.
Divine Euripides, this tomb we see
So fair is not a monument for thee,
So much as thou for it; since all will own
That thy immortal fame adorns the stone.
We have now observed the transitions through which Grecian tragedy
passed in the hands of its three great masters, Æschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides. As GROTE says, "The differences between these
three poets are doubtless referable to the working of Athenian
politics and Athenian philosophy on the minds of the two latter.
In Sophocles we may trace the companion of Herodotus; in Euripides
the hearer of Anaxag'oras, Socrates, and Prod'icus; in both,
the familiarity with that wide-spread popularity of speech, and
real, serious debate of politicians and competitors before the
dikastery, which both had ever before their eyes, but which the
genius of Sophocles knew how to keep in subordination to his
grand poetical purpose." To properly estimate the influence which
the tragedies exerted upon the Athenians, we must remember that
a large number of them was presented on the stage every year;
that it was rare to repeat anyone of them; that the theatre of
Bacchus, in which they were represented, accommodated thirty
thousand persons; that, as religious observances, they formed
part of the civil establishment; and that admission to them was
virtually free to every Athenian citizen. Taking these things
into consideration, GROTE adds: "If we conceive of the entire
population of a large city listening almost daily to those
immortal compositions whose beauty first stamped tragedy as a
separate department of poetry, we shall be satisfied that such
powerful poetic influences were never brought to act upon any
other people; and that the tastes, the sentiments, and the
intellectual standard of the Athenians must have been sensibly
improved and exalted by such lessons." [Footnote: "History of
Greece," Chap, lxvii.]
2. COMEDY.
Another marked feature of Athenian life, and one but little less
influential than tragedy in its effects upon the Athenian character,
was comedy. It had its origin, as we have seen, in the vintage
festivals of Bacchus, where the wild songs of the participants
were frequently interspersed with coarse witticisms against the
spectators. Like tragedy, it was a Dorian invention, and Sicily
seems to have early become the seat of the comic writers.
Epichar'mus, a Dorian poet and philosopher, was the first of
these to put the Bacchic songs and dances into dramatic form.
The place of his nativity is uncertain, but he passed the greater
part of his life at Syracuse, in the society of the greatest
literary men of the age, and there he is supposed to have written
his comedies some years prior to the Persian war. It seems, however,
that comedy was introduced into Attica by Susa'rion, a native
of Meg'ara, long before the time of Epichar'mus (578 B.C.). But
the former's plays were so largely made up of rude and abusive
personalities that they were not tolerated by the Pisistrati'dæ,
and for over a century we bear nothing farther of comedy in
Attica--not until it was revived by Chion'ides, about 488 B.C.,
or, according to some authorities, twenty years later.
Under the contemporaries or successors of Chionides comedy became
an important agent in the political warfare of Athens, although
it was frequently the subject of prohibitory or restrictive legal
enactments. "Only a nation," says a recent writer, "in the plenitude
of self-contentment, conscious of vigor, and satisfied with its
own energy, could have tolerated the kind of censorship the comic
poets dared to exercise."
Characterization of the Old Comedy.
In the preliminary discourse to his translation of the Comedies
of Aristophanes, MR. THOMAS MITCHELL, an English critic of note,
makes these observations upon the character of the Old Comedy:
"The Old Comedy, as it is called, in contradistinction to what
was afterward named the Middle and the New, stood in the extreme
relation of contrariety and parody to the tragedy of the Greeks
--it was directed chiefly to the lower orders of society at Athens;
it served in some measure the purposes of the modern journal, in
which public measures and the topics of the day might be fully
discussed; and in consequence the dramatis personæ were generally
the poet's own contemporaries, speaking in their own names and
acting in masks, which, as they bore only a caricature resemblance
of their own faces, showed that the poet, in his observations,
did not mean to be taken literally. Like tragedy, comedy
constituted part of a religious ceremony; and the character of
the deity to whom it was more particularly dedicated was stamped
at times pretty visibly upon the work which was composed in his
honor. The Dionysian festivals were the great carnivals of
antiquity--they celebrated the returns of vernal festivity or
the joyous vintage, and were in consequence the great holidays
of Athens--the seasons of universal relaxation.
"The comic poet was the high-priest of the festival; and if the
orgies of his divinity (the god of wine) sometimes demanded a
style of poetry which a Father of our Church probably had in
his eye when he called all poetry the devil's wine, the organ
of their utterance (however strange it may seem to us) no doubt
considered himself as perfectly absolved from the censure which
we should bestow on such productions: in his compositions he
was discharging the same pious office as the painter, whose duty
it was to fill the temples of the same deity with pictures which
our imaginations would consider equally ill-suited to the
habitations of divinity. What religion therefore forbids among
us, the religion of the Greeks did not merely tolerate but enjoin.
Nor was the extreme and even profane gayety of the comedy without
its excuse. To unite extravagant mirth with a solemn seriousness
was enjoined by law, even in the sacred festival of Ceres.
"While the philosophers, therefore, querulously maintained that
man was the joke and plaything of the gods, the comic poet reversed
the picture, and made the gods the playthings of men; in his hands,
indeed, everything was upon the broad grin: the gods laughed,
men laughed, and animals laughed. Nature was considered as a
sort of fantastic being, with a turn for the humorous; and the
world was treated as a sort of extended jest-book, where the
poet pointed out the bon-mots [Footnote: French; pronounced
bong-mos.] and acted in some degree as corrector of the Press.
If he discharged this office sometimes in the sarcastic spirit
of a Mephistopheles, this, too, was considered as part of his
functions. He was the Ter'roe Fil'ius [Footnote: Terroe Filius,
son of the earth; that is, a human being.] of the day; and
lenity would have been considered, not as an act of discretion,
but as a cowardly dereliction of duty."
It was in the time of Pericles that the comedy just described
first dealt with men and subjects under their real names; and
in one of the plays of Crati'nus--under whom comedy received
its full development--Cimon is highly eulogized, and his rival,
Pericles, is bitterly derided. With unmeasured and unsparing
license comedy attacked, under the veil of satire, not only all
that was really ludicrous or base, but often cast scorn and derision
on that which was innocent, or even meritorious. For the reason
that the comic writers were so indiscriminate in their attacks,
frequently making transcendent genius and noble personality, as
well as demagogism and personal vice, the butt of comic scorn;
their writings have but little historical value except in the
few instances in which they are corroborated by higher authority.
ARlSTOPH'ANES.
Among the contemporaries of Cratinus were Eu'polis and Aristophanes,
the latter of whom became the chief of what is known as the Old
Attic Comedy. Of his life little is known; but he was a member
of the conservative or aristocratic party at Athens, directing
his attacks chiefly against the democratic or popular party of
Pericles, and continuing to write comedies until about 392 B.C.
While his comedies are replete with coarse wit, they are wonderfully
brilliant, and contain much, also, that is pure and beautiful.
As a late writer has well said, "Beauty and deformity came to
him with equal abundance, and his wonderful pieces are made up
of all that is low and all that is pure and lovely."
The Muses, seeking for a shrine
Whose glories ne'er should cease,
Found, as they strayed, the soul divine
Of Aristophanes.
--PLATO, trans. by MERIVALE.
MR. GROTE characterizes the comedies of Aristophanes as follows:
"Never probably will the full and unshackled force of comedy be
so exhibited again. Without having Aristophanes actually before
us it would have been impossible to imagine the unmeasured and
unsparing license of attack assumed by the old comedy upon the
gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets,
private citizens, specially named--and even the women, whose life
was entirely domestic--of Athens. With this universal liberty
in respect of subject there is combined a poignancy of derision
and satire, a fecundity of imagination and variety of turns, and
a richness of poetical expression such as cannot be surpassed,
and such as fully explains the admiration expressed for him by
the philosopher Plato, who in other respects must have regarded
him with unquestionable disapprobation. His comedies are popular
in the largest sense of the word, addressed to the entire body
of male citizens on a day consecrated to festivity, and providing
for their amusement or derision, with a sort of drunken abundance,
out of all persons or things standing in any way prominent before
the public eye." [Footnote: "History or Greece," Chap. lxvii.]
In his introduction to the Dialogues of Plato, REV. WILLIAM SEWELL,
an English clergyman and author, observes that "Men smile when
they hear the anecdote of Chrys'ostom, one of the most venerable
fathers of the Church, who never went to bed without something
from Aristophanes under his pillow." He adds: "But the noble
tone of morals, the elevated taste, the sound political wisdom,
the boldness and acuteness of the satire, the grand object, which
is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and
improving the condition of his country--all these are features
in Aristophanes which, however disguised, as they intentionally
are, by coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest
respect from every reader of antiquity." Yet, while the purposes
of Aristophanes were in the main praiseworthy, and the persons
and things he attacked generally deserving of censure, he spared
the vices of his own party and associates; and, like all satirists,
for effect he often traduced character, as in the case of the
virtuous Socrates. In an attack on the Sophists, in his play
of the Clouds, he gives to Socrates the character of a vulgar
Sophist, and holds him up to the derision of the Athenian people.
But, as another has said, "Time has set all even; and 'poor
Socrates,' as Aristophanes called him--as a far loftier bard
has sung--
'Poor Socrates,
By what he taught, and suffered for so doing,
For truth's sake suffering death unjust, lives now,
Equal in fame to proudest conquerors.'"
--MILTON.
The Comedy of the "Clouds."
It is curious to observe in the Clouds of Aristophanes that while
the main object of the poet is to ridicule Socrates, and through
him to expose what he considers the corrupt state of education
in Athens, he does not disdain to mingle with his low buffoonery
the loftiest flights of the imagination--reminding us of the
not unlike anomaly of Shakspeare's sublime simile of the
"cloud-capp'd towers," in the Tempest. In one part of the play,
Strepsi'ades, who has been nearly ruined in fortune by his
spendthrift son, goes to Socrates to learn from him the logic
that will enable him "to talk unjustly and--prevail," so that
he may shirk his debts! He finds the master teacher suspended
in air, in a basket, that he may be above earthly influences,
and there "contemplating the sun," and endeavoring to search
out "celestial matters." To the appeal of Strepsiades, Socrates,
interrupted in his reveries, thus answers:
Socrates. Old man, sit you still, and attend to my will, and
hearken in peace to my prayer. (He then addresses the Air.)
O master and king, holding earth in your swing, O measureless
infinite Air;
And thou, glowing Ether, and Clouds who enwreathe her with
thunder and lightning and storms,
Arise ye and shine, bright ladies divine, to your student, in
bodily forms.
Then we have the farther prayer of Socrates to the Clouds, in
which is pictured a series of the most sublime images, colored
with all the rainbow hues of the poet's fancy. We are led, in
imagination, to behold the dread Clouds, at first sitting, in
glorious majesty, upon the time-honored crest of snowy Olympus
--then in the soft dance beguiling the nymphs "'mid the stately
advance of old Ocean"--then bearing away, in their pitchers
of sunlight and gold, "the mystical waves of the Nile," to refresh
and fertilize other lands; at one time sporting on the foam of
Lake Mæo'tis, and at another playing around the wintry summits
of Mi'mas, a mountain range of Ionia, The farther invocation
of the Clouds is thus continued:
Socrates. Come forth, come forth, ye dread Clouds, and to
earth your glorious majesty show;
Whether lightly ye rest on the time-honored crest of Olympus,
environed in snow,
Or tread the soft dance 'mid the stately advance of old Ocean,
the nymphs to beguile,
Or stoop to enfold, with your pitchers of gold, the mystical
waves of the Nile,
Or around the white foam of Mæotis ye roam, or Mimas all
wintry and bare,
O hear while we pray, and turn not away from the rites which
your servants prepare.
Then the chorus comes forward and answers, as if the Clouds were
speaking:
Chorus. Clouds of all hue,
Now rise we aloft with our garments of dew,
We come from old Ocean's unchangeable bed,
We come till the mountains' green summits we tread,
We come to the peaks with their landscapes untold,
We gaze on the earth with her harvests of gold,
We gaze on the rivers in majesty streaming,
We gaze on the lordly, invisible sea;
We come, for the eye of the Ether is beaming,
We come, for all Nature is flashing and free.
Let us shake off this close-clinging dew
From our members eternally new,
And sail upward the wide world to view,
Come away! Come away!
Socr. O goddesses mine, great Clouds and divine, ye have
heeded and answered my prayer.
Heard ye their sound, and the thunder around, as it thrilled
through the petrified air?
Streps. Yes, by Zeus! and I shake, and I'm all of a quake,
and I fear I must sound a reply,
Their thunders have made my soul so afraid, and those terrible
voices so nigh--
Socr. Don't act in our schools like those comedy-fools, with
their scurrilous, scandalous ways.
Deep silence be thine, while these Clusters divine their
soul-stirring melody raise.
To which the chorus again responds. But we have not room for
farther extracts. The description of the floating-cloud character
of the scene is acknowledged by critics to be inimitable. There
is one passage, in particular, in which Socrates, pointing to
the clouds that have taken a sudden slanting downward motion, says:
"They are drifting, an infinite throng,
And their long shadows quake over valley and brake"--
which, MR. RUSKIN declares, "could have been written by none
but an ardent lover of the hill scenery--one who had watched
hour after hour the peculiar, oblique, sidelong action of
descending clouds, as they form along the hollows and ravines
of the hills. [Footnote: The line in Greek, which is so vividly
descriptive of this peculiar appearance and motion of the clouds--
dia toy koiloy kai toy daseoy autai plagiai--
loses so much in the rendering, that the beauty of the passage
can be fully appreciated only by the Greek scholar.] There are
no lumpish solidities, no billowy protuberances here. All is
melting, drifting, evanescent, full of air, and light as dew."
Choral Song from "The Birds."
In the following extract from the comedy of The Birds, Aristophanes
ridicules the popular belief of the Greeks in signs and omens
drawn from the birds of the air. Though undoubtedly an exaggeration,
it may nevertheless be taken as a fair exposition of the
superstitious notions of an age that had its world-renowned
"oracles," and as a good example of the poet's comic style. The
extract is from the Choral Song in the comedy, and is a true
poetic gem.
Ye children of man! whose life is a span,
Protracted with sorrow from day to day;
Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,
Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay!
Attend to the words of the sovereign birds,
Immortal, illustrious lords of the air,
Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye,
Your struggles of misery, labor, and care.
Whence you may learn and clearly discern
Such truths as attract your inquisitive turn--
Which is busied of late with a mighty debate,
A profound speculation about the creation,
And organical life and chaotical strife--
With various notions of heavenly motions,
And rivers and oceans, and valleys and mountains,
And sources of fountains, and meteors on high,
And stars in the sky.... We propose by-and-by
(If you'll listen and hear) to make it all clear.
All lessons of primary daily concern
You have learned from the birds (and continue to learn),
Your best benefactors and early instructors.
We give you the warnings of seasons returning:
When the cranes are arranged, and muster afloat
In the middle air, with a creaking note,
Steering away to the Libyan sand,
Then careful farmers sow their lands;
The craggy vessel is hauled ashore;
The sail, the ropes, the rudder, and oar
Are all unshipped and housed in store.
The shepherd is warned, by the kite re-appearing,
To muster his flock and be ready for shearing.
You quit your old cloak at the swallow's behest,
In assurance of summer, and purchase a vest.