to those views as to the relative positions of men and women which, as
has been already pointed out, were current in all Greek erotic stories of
early date; the woman falls in love with the man, never, apparently, the
reverse. Striking examples are the stories of Calyce, and probably also
of Scylla; another, perhaps, that of Daphnis;[60] that of Rhadina seems
at first sight a contradiction, but it must be noticed that Strabo (viii.
347) gives no information as to how the intrigue first began.[61]
That in addition to these poems concerned with women, Stesichorus
interested himself also in the treatment of love in its more
characteristically Greek aspect, may be gathered from Athenaeus xiii.
601 A, though, perhaps, no fragment dealing with this subject is
preserved.[62] This side is, however, very strongly developed in his
fellow-countryman Ibycus, who is again a most interesting figure in the
history of the artistic development of Greek love.
Ibycus would seem to have been the first of the choral lyric poets who
made use of this form of art for the expression of personal emotion.
All the important fragments of him that remain seem to have belonged to
passages of this kind. Two at least we know of as being addressed to
particular individuals. Those who have been following the development of
Greek feeling on this matter will not be surprised to find that these
poems were addressed exclusively, as far as we know, to boys. It was a
bold thing to introduce personal feelings at all into these choral odes,
for a certain odour of sanctity was still hanging about them, and the
Greeks had a natural aversion to the public expression of all violent
emotions; but to have introduced anything so entirely sensual as woman’s
love was then felt to be would not have been allowed. If love was to
be tolerated at all, it must be that form of love which was generally
recognised as dignified and ennobling. This amalgamation of ceremonial
and personal poetry does not seem to have been popular or to have found
imitators. The Greeks probably felt, what the modern glee-singer does
not, the absurdity of a whole chorus expressing their undying devotion to
one and the same person; but it is at least a very characteristic fact,
and, for those that will not learn, a very instructive one, that boy-love
was the only form of the passion which it was considered possible to
attempt to treat in this way.
Of Ibycus’ views on women we know little.[63] That he followed the
tendencies of Stesichorus, sometimes rather wildly,[64] and gave
considerable prominence to love stories between women and men, is clear
enough; but there is no evidence to show that these stories of his
were any different in their essential characteristics to those of his
predecessor.
The other choral lyric poets have remarkably little to say on this
subject.
Myrtis’ story of Ochne is but one of the usual type, showing to what
_spretae iniuria formae_ may lead a woman. If Corinna tells of the
heroism of the daughters of Orion, it is, after all, only what one would
expect occasionally from a poetess.
Neither Pindar nor Simonides has anything of interest to say about women.
For Bacchylides the climax of the charms of peace is
παιδικοί θ’ ὕμνοι φλέγονται.[65]
Among the dithyrambic writers, Licymnius tells the story of the treachery
of Nanis, but the sort of legends which seem to interest him more are
those of Hypnus and Endymion, Hymenaeus and Argynnus, and the like.
The same was perhaps true of Cydias. But one interesting figure these
writers do supply; that is the Cyclops of Philoxenus. A good deal has
been written about this “romantic” conception, and it has been generally
considered as a proof of how strongly the romantic feeling must have been
already developed that it was possible to represent Polyphemus as in
love with Galatea. Those who have considered what has already been said
may perhaps be tempted to come to a somewhat different conclusion. The
barbarous and boorish Polyphemus spends his time in singing of his love
to Galatea, because no one who was not a barbarian and a boor would be
such a fool as to waste so much time about a woman. This view spoils the
idyllic charm of the picture rather, perhaps, but it may be the true one
for all that.[66]
In the foregoing examination of the remains of the lyric writers, it was
always necessary to regard, not only the date of each writer, but also
the country to which he belonged; for, as we have already had occasion
to notice, the social position of women differed widely in different
parts of Greece, and this fact could not fail to be, to a certain extent,
reflected in such literature as dealt with them.
In examining the work of the tragedians, this necessity will no longer
be present. Early Greek tragedy is entirely under the influence of
Athens. The only tragedians whose works have been to any considerable
extent preserved were Athenians; and such fragments of the non-Athenian
dramatists as have survived do not in any way lead one to suppose that
their work was in any essential characteristic different from that of
their Athenian contemporaries.
At Athens the social position of women was, on the whole, a very low
one, and consequently the relations between men and women were not on a
particularly high level. The men cared very little either for or about
the women, and there is nothing therefore surprising in the generally
admitted fact that the love-element as between the sexes plays but a very
unimportant part in the early tragedians. Aeschylus seems well-nigh to
have ignored it; in Sophocles it played a prominent part in but two, or
at most three tragedies;[67] even in Euripides the proportion of plays in
which love of any sort supplies the main interest is very small.[68]
But one question may very naturally be asked. Assuming that the way
of regarding women at Athens rendered it difficult or impossible to
interest an Athenian audience with a love-story, as between man and
woman, why should not the tragedians have made more use of the many
stories that told of the love of men for men? If, it may be argued, this
form of love was really so important an element in the life of the time,
if it really occupied that place in the hearts of men as a whole that is
now occupied by the love of women, why did Aeschylus and Sophocles only
devote a couple of plays between them to its treatment?[69] Sophocles, at
any rate, ought to have understood all about it.
The answer is probably to be found in the fact that the passion of love,
in any shape or form, is foreign to the true spirit of Greek tragedy. The
taste of the Greeks, refined in this as in most other things, considered
love as essentially unfitted for the stage. That two people should stand
up and make love to one another with a crowd looking on was, to the
Greek mind, essentially unfitting. Love was an emotion which concerned
individuals; it was an emotion which ought to be controlled in public,
and only find expression in private.
The whole history of Greek poetry is so much commentary on this one fact.
The love-poems of Sappho or Anacreon, just like the later love-poems of
Asclepiades or Poseidippus, were meant to be sung by a single singer
to a small and select audience. In the choral poetry, which required
a number of performers, and was listened to by a large audience, the
personal love-element is well-nigh non-existent. The attempt of Ibycus to
introduce it, and his failure to find imitators, we have already noticed.
And in the choral poetry sung in honour of Dionysus, from which tragedy
had its rise, it is obvious, when one considers the intimate connection
between the rites of Dionysus and Artemis, and the ascetic principle
underlying their worship, how especially out of place a love-element
would have been.
The fact, therefore, that love as between man and man does not play any
very prominent part in the early tragedies, must simply be explained by
the Greek dislike to the public display of violent private emotions.
It took a long time to overcome this old-fashioned prejudice, and
establish the love-element as an integral part of tragedy; and it is not
uninstructive to observe how the movement began. The earliest love-story
admitted on the Greek stage was the story of Achilles and Patroclus.[70]
But before entering upon the more detailed examination of the relations
between the sexes, as illustrated by the Attic tragedians, it is
necessary once more to call attention to, and warn against, a very
fertile source of confusion.
It is above all things necessary that the reader should carefully
distinguish between two very different things, two very different ways of
regarding women, which are not uncommonly confused—woman as an object of
interest, and woman as an object of love. As objects of interest, we find
the female characters of the tragedians steadily developing throughout
the fifth century; as objects of love, we do not find them develop at
all. The relations between women and men are, in reality, as far from
the modern in the last plays of Euripides as in the first of Aeschylus.
Towards the close of the century, a very considerable proportion of the
tragedies concern themselves with studies of female character in its
various phases; the power of women for good and evil (especially the
latter) is very generally acknowledged; their passions and their emotions
are carefully analysed and elaborately discussed; and yet in all this
analysis and discussion the love-element, in any modern sense of the
word, plays no part whatever. By this time, woman at Athens held an
important place in the mind of man; as yet she held no place in his heart
at all. From end to end of the three great tragedians, there can hardly a
single passage be quoted which so much as suggests the possibility of an
unselfish and unsensual attachment between man and woman, playing at all
an important part in the life of either; and this important fact it will
be the object of the following pages to make clear.
Aeschylus, as has been said often enough, never brought on the stage a
woman “in love.”[71] That he should never have brought on the stage a man
in such a condition went of course without saying; even Euripides was
never accused of that. Indeed, Aeschylus’ characters do not think much
of women at all. That girls should not misbehave, if left to themselves,
even their own father finds it hard to believe;[72] that in any sort of
difficulty they should be a hindrance rather than a help, is only what
one would expect.[73] Women are certainly not worth fighting about;[74]
what really acquits Orestes is the fact that, after all, it was only a
woman he killed.[75]
An apparent exception to all this is of course Clytemnestra. Why should
Aeschylus, having so poor an opinion of women, have given so prominent a
place to Clytemnestra in the murder of Agamemnon? The answer is doubtless
to be found in the very significant fact that between Homer and Aeschylus
the story had been treated by Stesichorus, to whom the prominence of
Clytemnestra was beyond all reasonable doubt due.[76]
Aeschylus, then, has little enough to say about women; but in Sophocles
there is fortunately somewhat more to be found; indeed, it is probably
the female characters of Sophocles that are most generally appreciated by
modern readers. And yet, for all the great part played by women in the
Sophoclean drama, the part played by women’s love is wonderfully small.
Take a woman like Deianira; the man who can listen to her without feeling
a positive shock must be more in sympathy with Athens than I ever wish to
be.
She guesses the truth from Lichas about Heracles and Iole (_Trach._
436), and begs him to tell her all, for she is no coward, nor yet is
she the sort of woman who would refuse to admit a husband’s right to an
occasional infidelity.
οὐ γὰρ γυναικὶ τοὺς λόγους ἐρεῖς κακῇ,
οὐδ’ ἥτις οὐ κάτοιδε τἀνθρώπων, ὅτι
χαίρειν πέφυκεν οὐχὶ τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἀεί.
“Love is irresistible,” she says; “if I were to blame my husband or this
woman for falling victims to it, I should be a fool. Do not be afraid
to tell me all. Has not Heracles often done this sort of thing before
without making me jealous? Why should he make me jealous now? And as for
the woman, why, I can only pity her, when I see how her beauty has made
her lose her home and her home comforts, for which, _expertae crede_, the
love of Heracles is hardly a sufficient compensation.”
ᾤκτειρα δὴ μάλιστα προσβλέψασ’ ὅτι
τὸ κάλλος αὐτῆς τὸν βίον διώλεσεν.[77]
When this is Sophocles’ ideal wife, one can hardly wonder that Haemon
owes the only word of sympathy he gets from his Antigone to the
editors.[78]
But even Deianira has her human moments, and in one of these she utters
that wonderful lament of hers for the joys of her lost maidenhood, and
the sorrows of her married life (_Trach._ 144 _seqq._), a passage which
may well be compared with one from the _Tereus_. (_Fr._ 524, Nauck). Both
these dwell sympathetically on the slavery of married life, and almost
make one think at first sight that the poet must have felt what a mockery
his “ideal wife” really was. But a little further examination will show
clearly enough that Sophocles is not expressing his own views in either
of these two passages. The protest in the _Tereus_ is merely the direct
outcome of the decidedly exceptional circumstances in which Procne finds
herself—a woman who has just cooked her only son is hardly likely to have
unprejudiced views on matrimony—and as such it is not meant to be more
than one of those outcries against irresistible destiny, which one may
pity if one likes, or even pardon, but which one cannot pretend to treat
seriously. For a girl to complain of having to marry was as reasonable as
for a man to complain of having to die.
τί ταῦτα δεῖ
στένειν, ἅπερ δεῖ κατὰ φύσιν διεκπερᾶν;
As for the passage from the _Trachiniae_, that seems to be simply an echo
from Sappho, and Sappho’s views on marriage were naturally different from
those of Sophocles.[79]
To suppose from these passages that Sophocles saw anything inappropriate
in the existing conditions of married life, or that he would have
welcomed any change in them, is an unjustifiable inference.[80]
But the one play of Sophocles which is generally considered to be of
supreme importance for this particular subject is the _Phaedra_. This
play, which is supposed to have been the model for the _Hippolytus_ of
Euripides, is generally looked upon as the first “love-tragedy” of the
Greeks. But was it a “love-tragedy” at all, in any sense in which the
words are now understood? To judge by analogy, there is every reason to
suppose that it was not.
The fragments unfortunately prove little, for no very important ones are
preserved, and the one or two of them that do speak of love, merely speak
of it in the regular Sophoclean way, not as a human passion, but as an
unavoidable kind of disease, something like measles or distemper.[81]
But in spite of the paucity of the fragments, the main principle on
which the legend (of which we have already spoken)[82] was treated,
is sufficiently clear; and this principle is such as is, I venture
to submit, incompatible with the presence in the play of any real
love-element.
Phaedra’s love is not passion but madness, it is not an emotion but a
disease. Aphrodite treats her in exactly the same way as Athene treats
Ajax. Her love is so entirely outside her control, it is so entirely the
result of external influences, that while one can perhaps pity her, one
certainly cannot sympathise with her, for the simple reason that her
misfortune is entirely outside human experience. She loves Hippolytus,
as Oedipus kills Laius, for no earthly reason except that the story said
the god made her do so. The Phaedra of Sophocles, like the Clytemnestra
of Aeschylus, is made an instrument of divine vengeance for reasons which
do not concern her personally in the least; one pities her, not as an
unhappy lover, but as the victim of fate. She is no longer a human being
influenced by human emotions; she is simply a tool in the hands of a
relentless deity. In other words, she is never in love with Hippolytus at
all, in any commonly-accepted sense of the term.
And thus it must be sufficiently clear to anyone who is able to get rid
of preconceived ideas on the matter, that the _Phaedra_ was in reality
no more “romantic” than the _Trachiniae_ or the _Antigone_. Like the
rest of the plays of Sophocles, it merely drew the usual picture of the
gods playing shove-halfpenny with human souls; the fact that Aphrodite
for once took a hand in the game gave it on this occasion a peculiar
character of its own, but of anything in any way resembling a modern
love-element there is no more trace here than there is anywhere else.[83]
But what really affords a more conclusive proof than any other of how
utterly anything of the nature of modern love between man and woman was
unknown to Sophocles, is the remarkable prominence given in his plays
to the affection between brother and sister.[84] The relations between
Electra and Orestes, or Antigone and Polynices, are absolutely those
of modern lovers; but Sophocles could not conceive of such relations
as existing between people whom he would have called “lovers,” and,
therefore, he had to think of the parties to them as brother and sister.
He wished to draw a picture of pure, noble, and unselfish devotion
existing between man and woman; the only conditions under which such a
thing seemed to him possible were that the man and the woman should be
close blood relations.
There are those who complain of the indifference of Electra to Pylades,
or of Antigone to Haemon, and think that a little love infused into
these heroines would make them more human. These people have overlooked
the fact that Electra and Antigone are in reality quite as much in love
as ever woman was; but they are in love with their brothers. They did
not know it perhaps; Sophocles did not know it; but the fact remains.
Antigone despises love—what she and her audience thought was love.
Between Polynices and Haemon there is never a moment’s hesitation; almost
her last words are an exclamation of the bitterest contempt for marriage:
“If my husband had died, I could have married another; if he had failed
to get me children, I could have committed adultery; but—my brother is
dead!”[85]
And yet, Antigone comes far nearer to a modern lover than Phaedra ever
does.
This is a fact of the greatest importance in the present connection,
and one that cannot be too much emphasised. The relation of the sexes
was such among the early Greeks that a pure love between man and woman
seemed to them a sheer impossibility, and yet their instinct told them
that pure love was not really an impossible thing. The ways in which the
difficulty was surmounted were various. Of the love of man for man and of
woman for woman we have already spoken; in Sophocles a third alternative
is suggested. The lovers are made man and woman, but the possibility of
sensuality is first removed by making them brother and sister. A woman
who loves a man may love him purely, says Sophocles, if she is in such a
position that she cannot love him otherwise.[86]
In the first two of the Athenian dramatists there are then, as we have
seen, practically no traces whatever to be found of a love-element in any
real sense of the term. But this, it may be said, is nothing wonderful.
This everyone will admit. For the love-element one looks to Euripides. In
the following examination of Euripides, I hope to show that not only is
love, in any modern sense, quite unknown to his characters, but also that
the whole “romantic” element of his plays, on which it is the custom to
lay such stress, is much less pronounced than is generally supposed; in
other words, that his men take really very little interest in his women.
But before discussing what Euripides did not do, it is well to have a
clear conception of what he did do; for he did do a great deal. The
great service of Euripides to art was that he emphasised unmistakably
the importance of women. He seems to have been the first emphatically
to enunciate that doctrine of _cherchez la femme_, which has been the
groundwork of all modern art. He was not the first man to discover it;
the men who made the story of Troy knew it as well as he did; but he was
the first, as far as we know, consciously to adopt it as an artistic
canon. He was the first deliberately to maintain that the highest
artistic effects were to be obtained by the contrast of the sexes. The
women of the earlier tragedians, as far as they are of any interest,
are merely women, as it were by accident; they are men in everything
but their dress. The women of Euripides, however unpleasant they may
be, are always intensely feminine. The emphasis which Euripides laid on
the feminine as opposed to the masculine element is at once his chief
characteristic and his chief merit.
The ways in which he emphasises the importance of women are various.
Everyone knows the stress he lays on their power of doing harm; the
“misogyny” of Euripides need hardly be illustrated here.[87] At the same
time, he is fully aware of their power for good.[88] He dwells on their
cleverness repeatedly: “If supremacy were a matter of brains, and not
of brute force, men would not have a chance.”[89] He is convinced of
their heroism: Iphigeneia goes to her death with far more dignity than
Antigone. He is even convinced, in a way that not all his successors have
been, of their reasonableness: there are few men who could discuss their
own deaths as calmly and clearly as Phaedra[90] or Polyxena.[91] It would
be easy to multiply instances if there were any need to do so.
All this Euripides did. He made his women powerful, intelligent, heroic,
reasonable. He did not make them loved or loveable. In this Euripides is
well-nigh as old-fashioned as any of his predecessors. In all the extant
plays there is not a single instance of a man in love with a woman;
there is no evidence, except perhaps in one isolated case,[92] of such a
character in any of the plays that have been lost. So far from Euripides
being the poet of love between man and woman, there are numerous
situations in his plays where it seems simply extraordinary to the modern
reader how such obvious opportunities for the introduction of such love
can have been missed or ignored.[93]
A detailed examination of some of the plays will bring this out clearly;
but before proceeding to this, it would be well to observe certain of
the more general features of the Euripidean conception of the relations,
other than social and intellectual, existing between men and women.
The first point to be noticed is that Euripides, too, just like
Sophocles, speaks of love as a sort of irresistible madness or
disease,[94] which seizes on its victims without any particular reason,
and can only be cured or borne by being allowed to have free course.
It is, as I have said before, exactly like measles; the only proper
treatment is to help it as much as you can to “come out,” as then it is
less painful at the time, and less likely to have serious consequences.
Instances of this view are sufficiently numerous. It forms the chief
framework of the _Hippolytus_, and all attempts to interpret the emotions
of that play in accordance with more modern notions, are without success.
The same was still more the case in the _Phoenix_, as Suidas distinctly
implies by his use of the words τῷ υἱῷ ἐπέμηνε τὴν παλλακήν in this
connection.[95] It is enunciated by Jason to Medea in the _Medea_
(526 _seqq._) as a proof that he owes nothing to her, as she was not
responsible for her actions in saving him; by Helen to Menelaus in the
_Troades_ (945 _seqq._) as a perfect excuse for her conduct with Paris.