ORATORY AND LYRIC POETRY
Of all branches of literature there is none more closely interwoven with
political life than oratory. This art could only have been developed
among the Ionians, for no other race had the same innate taste for
vivacious utterance, or the same feeling for fluency, copiousness, and
brilliancy of speech. Nor is there any doubt that the kind of oratory
which aims at influencing the feeling and directing the resolutions of
the civic body was first practised in the cities of Ionia. But it was
at Athens that Greek oratory was brought to its true perfection. There
the public oration developed side by side with freedom of speech and the
duty of speaking which was encumbent on every Attic citizen. It seemed so
intimately connected with the life of Attica that the state of Theseus
was represented as founded by it.
For this reason oratory was not the subject of a special study that could
be conceived of apart from public life, but the simple expression of
practical experience and statesman-like prudence; for at that period men
could not have imagined a popular leader who was not at the same time a
statesman proved in peace and war and had not won by his public career
the right to be listened to by his fellow citizens. And as oratory grew
into a power which dominated the life of the community, so language
itself was advanced to a new stage in development, when Athens became the
centre of the world. What grew out of the local dialect was a new idiom,
in which the power inherent in the Greek language first came to its full
maturity by becoming the vehicle of Attic culture.
The Greek language had undergone a many-sided development in Ionia.
The Ionic dialect was the repository not only of the Homeric and
post-Homeric epics and hymns, but of the whole treasure of elegiac and
iambic poetry. Ionia was the first country to avail herself largely of
the art of writing. This was first put to use in connection with the
art of the country; the epic poems which had been composed without the
aid of writing, and had become the property of the nation, were by its
aid disseminated, cast into permanent form, and continued. Reading
and writing were first introduced into the schools of the Rhapsodists,
which is the reason why Homer himself is represented as a schoolmaster;
and when the later epic poets--Arctinus, Lesches, and others--who sang
in Ionia after the beginning of the Olympiads, made the great epic the
starting-point of their own poems, in which they endeavoured to amplify,
supplement, and connect the substance of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_,
writing was a common accomplishment among poets, and the rhapsodic art
itself took on more of the character of a science in consequence.
At this point, however, and in Ionia as before, there came into being a
wholly novel method of literary statement, intended, not to rouse the
emotions of a crowded audience, but to spread abroad the results of
scientific research. Philosophers and historians wrote for the public
in prose, and in the sixth century the taste for reading and writing
spread with great rapidity through the whole of Ionia, where Samos, in
particular, became a school for the cultivation of the art of writing.
At this time, however, prose did not develop in contrast to poetry; as
yet no distinction was made between the two classes of composition. The
colloquial language of ordinary life, the lively popular note, was simply
adopted by writers of fables, and from the tales of Æsop the maxims of
homely wit and wisdom passed into literature. Archilochus was fond of
using them, so was Herodotus. Men were so accustomed to learn from the
poets that even speculative philosophers set forth their theories in
poetic garb, like Xenophanes, who wandered about reciting his doctrines
in the form of a rhapsody. The narratives of Herodotus are composed with
a view to stirring the listening crowd, and the poetic character of his
descriptions is unmistakable. His style flows on with the ease of an epic
recitation, his sentences hang together loosely; poet-like he sees around
him the audience which he desires to enchant and thrill with the charm
of his story. Even in philosophy no attempt was made to reproduce the
sequence of ideas in clear and exact terms. The teachings of Heraclitus
bore the character of Sibylline oracles; he delighted in figurative
language which suggested rather than followed up an idea, and apart
from the abstruseness of his thought the construction of his sentences
was so far from plain that it was impossible to determine precisely the
grammatical sequence of his discourse.
Thus, great as was the wealth of Ionian literature, it had as yet
no prose, while other parts of the country were even more backward.
Generally speaking, we may say that the distinction between poetry and
prose as two separate forms of literature was not recognised by the
Greeks till late. We need only recall the hymns of Pindar to see how
phrases and ideas of an entirely prosaic order occur side by side with
the loftiest flights of poetic imagery. It was reserved for Athenian
literature to create a prose style. The language was sufficiently new
and supple to take and reproduce the peculiar impress of the Attic
spirit; and this, as compared with the Ionic spirit, manifests itself in
language, as in garb and manners, by greater simplicity and smoothness of
form.
The dialect spoken in Attica occupied a sort of intermediate position
among the dialects of the various tribes of Greece, and was therefore
admirably fitted to become the medium of communication among all educated
Greeks. For, although closely akin to Ionic, the Attic dialect had
remained free from many Ionic peculiarities developed in the islands and
on the further coast--particularly from the tendency to soften the vowel
sounds.
Side by side with the eloquence which subserved political ends and was
designed to guide the masses, there developed in Athens the speech of
the law courts, which from the outset was more strictly in accordance
with regular rules and bore more likeness to a literary exercise, by
reason of the rise of a class of writers who composed pleas for others.
For it was the law in Attica that every man must conduct his own case,
so that even those who had their speeches composed by counsel were
themselves obliged to deliver them. Accordingly the personality of the
orator, which carried such weight in political speeches, fell completely
into the background; he was a mere writer of orations (_logographos_),
and dealt with public instead of private affairs. This kind of oratory
entered into much closer relations with sophistry, because the latter
aimed at giving the mind such versatility as would enable it to handle
with skill any subject presented to it and to discover in each the
greatest variety of interesting matter.
[Illustration: A GREEK ORATOR]
A peculiar kind of public oration which attained to importance in the
Athens of Pericles was the speech in honour of citizens who had fallen
in battle. By a special statute which dates from the time of Cimon, a
speech of this character was associated with a public funeral; and it was
the custom to commission the most approved orator of the day to deliver
this funeral oration in the name of the community, as an honourable
distinction and acknowledgment of the public services of the deceased.
Wordy and elaborate eulogiums did not suit the taste of the time. At such
moments, when the citizens felt themselves smitten with grievous loss, it
seemed a worthier task to bid them take courage, to turn their mourning
into thanksgiving, their sorrow into joy and pride, by holding up before
them the lofty interests of the public service for which their fellow
citizens had laid down their lives, and to encourage the hearers to the
same joyful self sacrifice.
Considering that all the arts and sciences flourished most vigorously
during the period of the Persian wars, the fruits of which came to
maturity in the years of peace under Pericles, it may well surprise
us that the lyric art, the very one which is wont to be most closely
associated with every spiritual movement, did not keep pace with
the development of the other arts; and that the Wars of Liberation,
so national, so just, and crowned, after grievous trials, with such
amazing success, found no fuller echo in popular minstrelsy. Various
circumstances combine to explain the fact.
The home of Æolian lyric poetry was more remote from the agitations
of the times, and the inspiration which had called forth the poems of
Alcæus and Sappho a hundred years before had burnt low. Choral lyric
poetry, on the other hand, was too completely interwoven with religious
worship and earlier conditions of life, it was too much accustomed to
put its art at the service of the old families whose glories belonged
to the past rather than the present, to find itself at home in these
changed times. The Theban bard, in particular, was too deeply concerned
for his native city--which had reaped nothing but shame and misery
from the Wars of Liberation--and for Delphi--which had from the first
looked with disfavour on the national aspirations after liberty--to
appreciate dispassionately the glories of the new era, though he was
too large hearted and liberal minded to refuse the victorious city of
Athens its meed of admiration and praise in song. The Thebans punished
Pindar for calling Athens “the pillar of Hellas”; the Athenians rewarded
him, rightly esteeming his tribute a triumph of the good cause. In
Sparta nothing was done to celebrate the Wars of Liberation. The Spartan
constitution allowed no freedom of intellectual life, and furnished too
little in the way of comfort and contentment to prove a favourable soil
for poetry.
[Illustration: GREEK COMEDIAN]
In the elegy, the oldest form of Greek lyric--so perfect an expression
of the Ionic spirit in its varied measures and uses--a new form had
been evolved in Ionia itself, side by side with the older one in which
Theognis had expounded his party rancour and Solon his statesman-like
wisdom--a lighter form which touched upon life in accents untinged by
grief, the song of joyous conviviality, giving the gaiety of the banquet
a higher consecration by the introduction of ethical ideas. “To drink,
to jest, to bear a just mind,” sang Ion, and brought public affairs
gracefully into the conversation. Dionysius the Athenian, a statesman of
note in the age of Pericles, associated himself with Ion in this form
of verse, and the lighter kind of elegy so appealed to the intellectual
character of contemporary Athens that even Sophocles and Æschylus
composed elegies of this sort. The fifth century was so rich in life and
movement that these occasional verses were produced in great abundance;
the epigram itself is no more than a subsidiary kind of elegiac verse.
Its concise form was due to its original purpose, which was to serve as
an inscription on some public monument, and it is therefore more closely
connected with the great events of the time than any other kind of
poetry. Simonides of Ceos was esteemed above all other Greeks as a writer
of occasional verse in the best sense of the term, so much so that Sparta
commissioned the Ionian poet to sing the praise of her Leonidas. With
inimitable felicity he immortalised the events of the Wars of Liberation
in brief pregnant epigrams inscribed on monuments of every sort,
sang the praises of the fallen in elegies, and celebrated the days of
Artemisium and Marathon in grand cantatas which were performed by festal
choirs.
The state did what it could to advance the cause of art. It offered poets
brilliant opportunities for distinguishing themselves at the celebrations
held in honour of its victories, and gave prizes for the best
performances. As Themistocles had been assisted by Simonides, so Cimon
was assisted by the genius of Ion, who in like manner laboured to hand
down his fame to posterity. Pericles was led by his own tastes as well
as by political considerations to do all that lay in his power to foster
the art of song in Athens. For this purpose he introduced the musical
competitions at the Panathenæa, and so summoned all men of talent to vie
publicly one with another. He himself was the organiser and lawgiver in
this department, and settled with profound artistic knowledge the manner
in which the singers and cithara-players should appear at the festivals.
If in spite of all these efforts lyric poetry did not take the place we
might have anticipated in the Athens of Pericles, and Simonides found no
worthy successors, the principal reason must be sought in the fact that
another stronger and richer voice of poetry arose, into which the lyric
was merged and so lost its individual importance.
Of all kinds of lyric poetry none was cultivated in Athens so admirably
and successfully as the dithyrambus, the chant in praise of the god
Dionysus, the giver of blessings--the branch of religious poetry which
showed a capacity for development beyond all others. Lasus of Hermione,
the tutor of Pindar, had changed this form of song (originally no more
than the medium of an enthusiastic nature worship) into an artistically
constructed choral chant and invested it with such splendour by bold and
varied measures and the rippling music of flutes, as to cast the fame of
Arion, its original inventor, into the shade. From the Peloponnesus Lasus
brought the new art to the court of the Pisistratidæ at Athens. At that
time everything connected with the worship of Dionysus was regarded with
special favour, the dithyrambus was introduced into state festivals, and
wealthy citizens vied with one another in equipping and training Bacchic
choirs, composed of fifty singers who danced circling the flaming altars
of Dionysus; and no expense was spared to procure new songs for the
Attic Dionysia from the greatest masters, such as Pindar and Simonides.
The latter could boast that he had won no less than fifty dithyrambic
victories at Athens. But the evolution of the dithyrambus did not stop
there.
The dithyrambus not only included every metre and rhythm known to earlier
kinds of lyric poetry, but it contained elements which tended to pass
beyond the limitations of the lyric. For the festal chorus regarded the
god whose praises they, sang as an immanent presence and, as it were,
lived through all that befell him, whether of persecution or victory;
and it was therefore but a short step to pass beyond the assumption that
their audience was acquainted with the events which formed the subject
of their chants, and to call them to mind by narration or set them forth
by spectacular representation. The leaders of the dithyrambic chorus
accordingly interspersed their singing with recitations, and thus epic
and song were combined. The epic recitation was then rendered more
effective by the aid of action and costume, the god himself was made
visible in his suffering and triumph, the leader of the chorus undertook
the part, the dancers were transformed into satyrs--attendants of the
god and partakers of his fortunes; and thus from the union of the old
forms of poetry there sprang a new form, the drama, the richest and most
perfect of all.
The Greeks were by nature gifted with dramatic talent. Their natural
vivacity induced them to clothe every doubt or deliberation in the form
of a dialogue. Thus even in Homer we find the germ of the drama, which
now reaped the benefit of the entire evolution of the older art methods.
For all that dance and song had invented in the way of balanced rhythm,
effective metre, and poetic imagery, was here united, enlivened by
the art of mimicry, which made the person of the actor the instrument
of artistic exposition, and warmed by the joyous fires of the Bacchic
festival.
The cycle of representation could not but be limited so long as the
action was confined by ceremonial considerations to the subjects offered
by the worship of Bacchus. The Greeks therefore went a step farther and
in place of the fortunes of Bacchus took other subjects equally well
calculated to arouse lively sympathy, and thus (when this form of art
had been invented) there flowed in an abundance of materials and fertile
themes, the storehouse of Homeric and post-Homeric epos was flung open,
the national heroes were introduced to the nation in a novel and striking
guise, and a vast field of activity was opened to dramatic art.
This advance had already been made beyond the borders of Attica; for
before the time of Clisthenes the hero Adrastus had been substituted
for Dionysus, and it may be that a similar enlargement of the scope of
dithyrambic poetry had also taken place at Corinth. But it was at Athens
alone that these rudiments of the drama reached their full development.
As the epic had mirrored the heroic days of old, as the lyric kept pace
with the development of the nation for three centuries after the decline
of the epic, so the drama was the form of poetry which began to flower
at the moment when Athens became the pivot of Greek history. Originating
from humble beginnings in the time of Solon, it grew in magnitude and
importance with the growth of the city’s greatness, and is associated
with the history of Athens in every stage of its development.
TRAGEDY
Thespis was the founder of Attic tragedy, for it was he who introduced
the alternation of recitation and song and arranged the stage and
costumes. The story goes that Solon had small liking for the new art,
believing the violent excitement of the emotions by the representation of
imaginary events to be prejudicial, but that the tyrants favoured this
popular diversion, like everything else connected with the democratic
worship of Dionysus, because it suited the purpose of their policy to
provide brilliant entertainments for the population at the expense of
wealthy citizens. About 550 B.C. they summoned the chorus leader from
Icaria to the city, competitions between rival tragic choruses were
introduced, and the stage near the black poplar in the market place
became a centre of Attic festivity.
With the restoration of peace all civic festivals took a higher flight,
the various constituents fell apart, tragedy rejected the baser elements
of Bacchic festivity and assumed greater dignity, it was cast into
definite artistic forms by Pratinas and Chœrilus, and became freer and
freer in its choice of subject. The old element was not abandoned for
all that, the rustic youth would not be deprived of their accustomed
masquerade, and the people were left their satyr choruses. But the
two forms, which could not be combined without mutual detriment, were
separated, and thus the satyr drama grows up side by side with tragedy.
Pratinas, who migrated to Athens from Phlius, gave these plays their
typical form, and they retained their original character of Bacchic
jollity, their rustic and homely features, and the merry rout of the
satyrs with their wild dances and rude jests. Thus these elements were
preserved to literature and yet prevented from molesting or hampering the
further development of tragedy.
The period in which Athens took her place as a great power and sent
her triremes across the sea to support the Ionian revolt, likewise
constituted an epoch in the history of Attic tragedy. About that time the
wooden scaffoldings from which the audience had looked on at the plays
of Pratinas, Chœrilus, Phrynichus, and the youthful Æschylus, gave way;
and the drama had already attained such consequence in Athens that the
building of a magnificent theatre was taken in hand. A permanent stage of
stone was built within the precincts sacred to Dionysus on the southern
declivity of the citadel, and seats for spectators, rising one above the
other in semi-circular rows, were built into the rock of the Acropolis in
such wise that the audience commanded a view of Hymettus and the Ilissus
on the left and of the harbour on the right.
[Illustration: GREEK POET]
Meanwhile the artistic structure of tragedy was steadily advancing
towards perfection. The subject-matter grew more varied, music and the
dance were used in a greater variety of forms, female characters were
added. Nevertheless the lyric element remained predominant down to the
time of the Persian wars; and Phrynichus, the greatest predecessor of
Æschylus, was most admired for his charming choral songs. It was with
the great drama of the War of Liberation that the theatrical drama began
to unfold its full powers, and nowhere do we perceive more clearly
the manifestation of the newly-acquired energy which pervaded every
department of Attic life.
The man destined to give utterance in tragic art to the spirit of the
great age was Æschylus, the son of Euphorion of Eleusis, a scion of an
ancient family, through which he claimed association with one of the
most venerable sanctuaries of the land. This is why he calls himself the
pupil of Demeter, thus testifying that the solemn services of the temple
at Eleusis had not failed to exercise a lasting influence upon his mind.
As a boy he witnessed the fall of the tyrants: when come to man’s estate
he fought at Marathon, being then thirty-five years old, and he himself
declared, in the inscription on his tombstone, that he took pride, not in
his tragedies, but in his share in that great day, though there he had
been but a citizen among citizens, while as a poet he was without peer
among his contemporaries. For it was he whose creative genius laid the
foundations of Attic tragedy, making all previous achievements look like
imperfect attempts.
He introduced a second actor on the stage, and thus made the play a real
drama, by which means lively colloquy first became possible. Dialogue,
for which the Athenians were singularly well qualified by their love of
talking, readiness and acute reasoning faculty, was thus transferred
to the stage, and this gave it a wholly novel interest. The language
of the dialogue was in the main that of ordinary life, while older
phonetic principles prevailed in the chorus, which was thus less familiar
to the ear and produced an impression of solemnity and dignity which
suited well with its character of the oldest element of tragedy and the
religious centre about which it had crystallised. The choruses were
shortened to allow the action to proceed more vigorously, the characters
of the _dramatis personæ_ were more sharply defined, a distinction was
made between leading and secondary parts, and the parts of secondary
characters of lower station bore the stamp of the common people, as
distinguished from the heroic figures of the play. The stage itself was
brought to a higher pitch of perfection. It was effectively fitted up as
an ideal scene by Agatharchus, the son of Eudemus, an artist from Samos,
who cultivated scene painting scientifically as a branch of art, and
mechanism was pressed into the service to raise shades from the depths
of the earth or cause gods to hover in the air by artificial means. The
spectacle as a whole gained in solemn dignity no less than in spiritual
import and moral significance.
The principal aim of the earlier poets had been to express and induce
emotional moods; but the object of the drama was to present the legends
of olden times completely in their general connection, and for this
purpose Attic drama was so arranged that three tragedies were joined
to form a single whole, in order to display upon a harmonious plan
the successive developments of the mythical story, and these three
tragedies, which were so many acts of one great drama, were followed by
a Satyr-drama as afterpiece. This led back from the affecting solemnity
of the tragedies to the popular sphere of the Dionysian festival, where
the diverting adventures witnessed and enacted by the satyrs restored
the minds of the spectators to innocent mirth. It was a healthy trait of
popular sentiment which thus mingled jest and earnest, and one of which
we see other evidences in vase painting and the sculptures of the temples.
Such was the tetralogy of Attic drama, which, if not invented by Æschylus
yet received its artistic consummation at his hands. The dithyrambic
chorus was divided into groups, each consisting of twelve (and later of
fifteen) persons, so that there was a special chorus for each part of the
tetralogy, to follow sympathetically the action of the _dramatis personæ_
and fill up the pauses with dance and song. The _orchestra_, where the
chorus was placed, lay between the stage and the spectators, just as the
chorus itself symbolically occupied an intermediate position between the
audience and the heroes of the drama.
The Greeks were accustomed to look upon the poets as their teachers, and
no man could gain recognition as a poet among them who had only talent,
imagination, and artistic skill to show as proofs of his poetic vocation;
this required a thorough education of heart and mind and clear insight
into things human and divine. Hence the calling of a poet laid claim to
the whole man and the man’s whole life, and none conceived of it more
nobly than Æschylus. Like Pindar he takes his hearers into the very
heart of the myth, drawing out its moral earnestness and illuminating
it with the light of historical experience. Humanity, as represented by
Æschylus in the Titan Prometheus, with its constancy through struggles
and misery, its proud self-respect, its indefatigable inventive genius,
with its tendency, too, to rashness and arrogant boasting, is the
generation of his own contemporaries, with their reckless aspirations;
but no wisdom avails man save that which comes from Zeus, no skill and
intelligence save that which is based on devout morality. Thus, without
petty premeditation the poet becomes a true teacher of the people; in an
age of incipient scepticism he endeavours to uphold the religion of his
forefathers, to purify popular conceptions and to draw forth the kernel
of wholesome truth from the many-hued tinsel of popular fables. It was
the mission of the poet to maintain harmony between popular tradition and
advancing knowledge.
But the poets lived in the midstream of civic life, and it is not to
be supposed that, in a city like Athens, men who at public festivals
set forth the creations of their genius in the public eye, could remain
indifferent to the questions of their own day. They were obliged of
necessity to belong to one party or another, and if they were sincere
and candid, their views as to what was for the good of the commonwealth
could not but appear in their works. Their choice of subject was still
limited in the main to mythology; man’s strength of will, his deeds and
sufferings, the contradiction between laws human and divine, were still
set forth by preference in the characters of the Homeric age of which the
tradition survived in the epos. These were the prototypes of the human
race, their sufferings were the sufferings and entanglements incident
to the whole human race; in contemplating them the spectators were to
be freed from what was personal in their sorrows and cares, the narrow
bounds of their self-consciousness were to be widened, and they were to
receive from the performance not only the highest artistic pleasure, but
a cheering and healing purification of their hearts. These heroes of
olden times were in harmony with the ideal character which the dramatists
were bent on giving to the whole world of the stage; but the impression
was none the less striking because the audience was transported into a
dim and legendary past. We feel the spirit of the warrior of Marathon in
the warlike plays of Æschylus, and the spectator of his _Seven against
Thebes_ glowed with eagerness to strike a blow for his country.
Meanwhile Phrynichus had ventured to put modern events on the stage, and
his _Fall of Miletus_ and _Phœnissæ_ were no doubt fraught with political
intention. Æschylus followed the example of his predecessor in a far
grander style when, four years after the production of the _Phœnissæ_
of Phrynichus, he produced his drama of the _Persæ_. He depicted the
fall of the Great King. But with fine artistic instinct he chose Persia,
not Attica, for the scene of his tragedy. He brings before our eyes the
consequences of the battle, its reaction upon the hostile empire, in its
own capital. Darius is conjured from the grave that in the person of
the pious and prudent ruler may be set forth the glory of the inviolate
Persian empire, while his successor returns from Hellas shorn of all
dignity, a warning example of the ruin which foolish arrogance brings
upon all sovereign power. The whole composition is pervaded by the idea
of retribution, which had been awakened in the Greek mind by the Persian
wars.
In the tragedy of Phrynichus, Themistocles is extolled above all other
men, while Æschylus only alludes to him in passing as the inventor of a
subtle stratagem. On the other hand the latter gives a detailed account
of the fight on Psyttalea, so exalting the fame of Aristides, who
contributed substantially to the victory of Salamis, not by sea, but by
land.
The _Persæ_ was the middle play of a trilogy and comes to no final
conclusion. The shade of Darius hints at other defeats in the future,
and at the struggles of Platæa. From _Glaucus_, the third play of the
trilogy, an allusion to Himera has been preserved. The first part,
_Phineus_, takes its name from the mythical seer who revealed to the
Argonauts their coming voyage to the land of the northern barbarians.
Hence, it is extremely probable that all three plays were linked together
by a single idea, the idea (present to all thinking men of the time) of
the great struggle between barbarian and Greek, between Asia and Europe,
which had its mythical prelude in the voyage of the Argonauts, and came
to its glorious issue on the battlefields of Greece and Sicily. In like
manner Herodotus had conceived of the Persian War as one link in a great
chain of historical development, and Pindar had associated Salamis,
Platæa, and Himera as ranking equally among the glorious days of the
Greeks; and we may be sure that the trilogy of the _Persæ_ would not
have been acted at the court of Hiero unless it had fully satisfied the
tyrant’s love of praise.
Æschylus represented the legendary history of the house of Pelops in the
three plays of the _Oresteia_, and that of the royal house of Thebes
and the Thracian king, Lycurgus, each in a cycle of three dramas; he
worked up the legend of Prometheus so that the conflicts and discords
of the several parts find a satisfactory solution in a larger order of
things; and thus the poet wove legend and history into a single piece.
Prehistoric and present times, East and West, the mother-country and the
colonies, all form parts of a grand picture, of a chain of events linked
together by prophecy and reciprocal reaction. The poet looks forward
and backward, and prophet-like interprets the course of history, seeing
the inner necessity revealed to the eye of the spirit. He uplifts the
hearts of his people by setting forth the waxing power of the Greeks, the
waning might of the barbarians on every side, without a taint of scorn or
malicious triumph to vitiate the moral majesty of his work. At the same
time he moderates the pride of victory, by pointing to the guilt which
brought about the Persian overthrow and to the eternal laws of divine
justice, the observance of which is the inexorable condition of the
prosperity of the Greeks.
In the tragedies on mythical subjects there was no lack of passages which
permitted of or actually challenged application to the events of the
day. Next to Aristides, it was Cimon to whom the muse of Æschylus did
homage. Like Cimon, the poet was the champion of a common Hellenism, of
patriarchal customs, the rule of the best, the discipline of the good
old times, and so when the waves of popular agitation rose higher and
higher till they threatened the very Areopagus, the last bulwark, the
septuagenarian poet led his muse into the strife of conflicting parties
and exerted his utmost powers to impress upon his fellow-citizens the
sacred dignity of the Areopagus as a divine institution and to warn them
of the consequences of sinful license. The _Eumenides_ of Æschylus is
a brilliant example of the way in which a great imaginative work may
be made to serve a special purpose and express a particular tendency
without losing anything of its transparent lucidity or of the sublimity
which stamps it as a masterpiece for all time. But though the Areopagus
remained unmolested as a court of justice (and we should like to fancy
the poem of Æschylus an influential factor in the matter) the poet felt
alien and solitary in the city where democracy had completely gained the
ascendant. This was not the freedom for which he had bled in the field;
the band of those who had fought in the Wars of Liberation dwindled and
dwindled; the _Oresteia_ was the last work he produced in Athens; and
he died in his seventieth year at Gela in Sicily (456 B.C.), after a
residence there of about two years.
The day of the warriors of Marathon was past, and the new age, the age
of Pericles, found exponents in a younger generation, and on the Attic
stage in Sophocles. Like Æschylus he was of noble birth, as is indicated
by his appointment to be a priest of the hero, Halon, but his father
was a craftsman and the head of a great smithy for the manufacture of
weapons. He was born in the metalliferous district of Colonus about
B.C. 496 and grew up amidst the delightful rural scenery of the valley
of the Cephisus, in the shade of the sacred olives that had witnessed
the first beginnings of national history, yet near the capital and near
the sea, which he overlooked from the crags of Colonus, and where he
saw the port grow up during his boyhood years. In the early bloom of
youthful beauty he led the dance at the festival held in honour of the
victory of Salamis; twelve years later he entered the lists as a rival
of the great poet Æschylus, whose inspiring art had attracted him to
follow the same path to poetic fame. It was a day of unwonted excitement
throughout Athens when all men awaited the issue of the contest between
the ambitious young poet and Æschylus, then close upon sixty years of
age and twice already the wearer of the laurel crown. The occasion was
the same Dionysian festival on which Cimon, having brought the Thracian
campaign to a glorious close, came up from the Piræus and offered his
thank-offerings to the gods in the orchestra of the theatre. The people
were in raptures over the relics of Theseus which he had brought back,
and amidst the assenting acclamations of the assembled citizens the
archon Apsephion appointed Cimon and his fellow-generals umpires, as
being the worthiest representatives of the ten tribes. The result was
that the prize was awarded to the _Triptolemus_ trilogy of Sophocles.
[Illustration: REPRESENTATION OF A RECEPTION OF BACCHUS]
There was no opposition between the art of Sophocles and that of his
predecessor. The former looked up reverentially to the man whose
original genius had led the way to the consummation of tragic art. Envy
and jealousy were foreign to his lovable disposition. But he was an
independent-minded pupil of his great master, and a man of very different
endowments. His genius was gentler, simpler, and more tranquil, the
extremes of pathos and pomp were repugnant to his taste. Accordingly
he toned down the force of the theatrical diction which Æschylus had
introduced, and, without degrading his characters to the common level,
tried to make them more human, so that the spectators could feel more
closely akin to them. This method is intimately connected with the
altered treatment of the subjects of tragedy. In the treatment of
tragic legend Æschylus reached the greatest heights to which the genius
of Greece ever soared; in this sphere no man could surpass him. But
Sophocles realised that the legends could not always be presented to the
people with the same breadth of handling without their interest being
gradually exhausted. It was therefore necessary to develop more vital
action within the various tragedies, to conceive the characters more
definitely, and excite a more vivid psychological interest.
Æschylus had already treated the trilogy in such a manner that it was
not bound to the thread of a single myth, and the combination, if not
dissolved by Sophocles, was so far loosened as to make each tragedy of
the three complete in itself, leading up to its appropriate close within
the limits of the action and capable of being judged as a separate
composition. The result was much greater freedom, the motive of each
play could be treated in fuller detail and the poetic picture enhanced
by the prominence given to secondary characters. Thus, in his treatment
of the legend of Orestes, Sophocles suffers the act of matricide and its
perpetrator to fall into the background and gives quite a new turn to
the familiar subject by making Electra the leading character in place of
her brother Orestes, showing the whole course of the action as reflected
in her spirit, and thus securing an opportunity of creating a study of
varied emotion and a type of womanly heroism to which the picture of her
sister’s dissimilar temperament serves as an admirable foil.
In order to take full advantage of the resources of a more refined and
advanced style of art, Sophocles introduced a third actor on the stage
and thus opened the way to incomparably greater vividness of treatment
no less than to much greater variety of colouring and grouping in the
_dramatis personæ_. Moreover, Sophocles, though an adept in the song and
dance, was the first poet to abandon the practice of appearing in the
parts he had created. From that time the professions of poet and actor
were distinct, and the art of the latter acquired greater independent
value. A less active part, outside the scope of the action, was assigned
to the chorus, and the dramatic element became more significantly
prominent as the nucleus of the tragedy. Æschylus himself recognised the
advance, for he not only adopted the improvements in the outward setting
of tragedy thus effected, but spurred on by his younger rival, rose to
the height of a maturer art in his dramas.
To the influence of Sophocles was due the increased fondness for Attic
subjects; his _Triptolemus_ extolled Attica as the home of a superior
civilisation, which spread victoriously from that centre to distant
lands, he brings the legend of Œdipus to an harmonious close on Attic
soil, at Colonus, his own birth-place, and even in the _Electra_ he
manifests the Athenian point of view by taking the overthrow of unlawful
dominion and the successful struggle for liberty as the purpose of the
action.
His tragedies contributed more than any other works to give spiritual
significance, as Pericles strove to do, to the age of Athenian might
and splendour. Like Pericles, Sophocles endeavoured to maintain the
ascendency of the ancient worship and customs of the country, the
unwritten precepts of sacred law, while at the same time mastering
every step of intellectual progress and every enlargement of the bounds
of knowledge. His diction bears the stamp of a trained and powerful
intellect, which often carries terseness to the verge of obscurity; but
with what skill does he preserve the charm of graceful expression, what
a spirit of felicitous harmony pervades all his works! He was a man
after Pericles’ own heart, and his personal intimacy with the latter is
proved by the gay and unaffected manner in which the statesman treats
the poet as his colleague in the camp. Sophocles was never a partisan
or party writer in the same sense as Æschylus, and as Phrynichus seems
to have been, but his art was a mirror of the noblest tendencies of the
time, a glorified version of the Athens of Pericles. We meet with his
clear and sound judgment on civil affairs in every passage in which he
praises prudent counsel as the safeguard of states, and the Attic people
rightly appreciated him as the true poet of his age, for none ever won
so many prizes or enjoyed his fame so unmolested as Sophocles, nor could
Euripides (who though only fifteen or sixteen years his junior belonged
to a totally different era) gain any success as his rival until the age
of Pericles was past. And even to him Sophocles was never obliged to
yield the palm.
COMEDY
Side by side with tragedy, and from the same germ, _i.e._, from the
Bacchic festivities, comedy developed. It is full sister to tragedy, but
grew up longer in rustic freedom and fell much later under the discipline
and training of the city; and for that reason it retained more faithfully
the character of its source. For its origin was the jollity of the
vintage, the merry-making of country folk over the increase of another
year, which is found in all wine-growing districts. Swarms of masked
holiday-makers sang the praises of the genial god and in tipsy merriment
played all kinds of jokes and tricks on every one who met the procession
and gave an opening for pranks and raillery, the events of the day were
freely exploited, and he who hit upon the merriest quips was rewarded by
the hearty laughter and applause of a grateful audience.
Thus the autumnal festival was kept in Attica in its day, and more
particularly in the district of Icaria, not far from Marathon. The
worship of Dionysus as there celebrated made it in a manner the nursery
of the whole body of Athenian drama, for Thespis came from Icaria.
Thither, too, came Susarion of Megara, bringing from his native place
the rude wit of Megarian farce and setting the fashion which remained
in vogue for the time in Attica. From his school arose Mæson, who was
very popular in the time of the Pisistratidæ. The next step was the
transference of the rustic stage to the capital, where it was recognised
by the government as a part of the Dionysian festival and supported out
of the public funds. This took place in the time of Cimon, after the
Persian wars, and the energetic temper which at that time pervaded the
life of Athens proved its vigour by transforming the rude, half-foreign
farce into a well-organised form of art, full of significance and
thoroughly Attic in character, of which we must regard Chionides and
Magnes of Icaria as the founders.
When once the Icarian drama was naturalised in the home of tragedy
many of the concomitants of the tragic drama were transferred to it,
public contests in comedy were instituted by the state, prizes were
adjudicated and awarded, and the cost of the chorus was defrayed from
the public funds; moreover it was similarly arranged in such matters as
the stage, the dialogue, the chorus, and the number of actors, without,
however, forfeiting its peculiar characteristics. For tragedy carried
the spectators into a loftier sphere, and strove by every means at her
command to present figures and conditions on a grander scale than that
of ordinary life, while comedy maintained the closest relations with
contemporary and common life. It remained more unaffected in dance,
versification, and diction no less than in poetic design; nay, to such
an extent did it retain its topical character and its adaptation to the
events of the hour that the poet used the choir to interrupt the course
of the action entirely in order to discuss his personal affairs or the
burning questions of the time with the audience in lengthy _parabases_.
This kind of dramatic composition could only flourish in a democratic
atmosphere, and it was associated with the democracy in every stage
of its development. Occupied from the outset with the preposterous
and ridiculous side of life, it castigated all follies, defects, and
weaknesses, and amidst the variety and publicity of the civic life
of Athens it could never lack either subjects for mirth or a witty,
ingenious, and laughter-loving audience ready to catch at every allusion.
But it also served the purpose of bringing abuses and contradictions
in public life to light. This was the serious side of its calling, for
unless inspired by a serious and patriotic temper its humour would have
grown dull, ineffective, and contemptible. The aim of the comic poets was
to be not mere frivolous provokers of mirth, but teachers of men, and
leaders of the people, even as the tragic poets were; and in an age of
feverish excitement the severest of their censures were directed against
new-fangled ways. Comedy was aristocratic in character, it championed
native custom against foreign ways, it ruthlessly denounced every evil
tendency in life and art, and every instance of misconduct or abuse of
power. It cherished the memory of the heroes of the Wars of Liberation
and encouraged others to emulate their example, and it was fond of
subjects which had some bearing on important contemporary events, as we
see in the _Thracian Women_ of Cratinus, which was associated with the
establishment of colonies in Thrace.
The founders of comedy as an Attic art are Crates and Cratinus. Cratinus
was slightly younger than Æschylus, and like him was endowed with
original creative genius, but his taste for unrestrained freedom and his
inexhaustible fund of humour marked him out as a born comic poet, while
his rude veracity qualified him to make comedy a power in the state.
It became so about the time that Pericles came into power, and though
Cratinus was not the sort of man to commit himself unreservedly to one
or other of the contesting parties, we know that in his _Archilochi_ (a
comedy in which the chorus was composed of scoffers like Archilochus)
he brought an Attic citizen upon the stage immediately after the death
of Cimon and put in his mouth a lament for “the divine man,” “the most
hospitable, the best of all Panhellenes, with whom he had hoped to spend
a serene old age--but now he had passed away before him.” The mighty
Cratinus was succeeded by Aristophanes and Eupolis, both unmistakably
akin to him in mind and feeling, but gentler, more moderate, and stricter
in their adherence to the rules of art. But Aristophanes alone combined
with these qualities a wealth of creative invention in nothing inferior
to the genius of Cratinus.
THE GLORY OF ATHENS
All these men,--philosophers and historians, orators and poets,--each
one of whom marks an epoch in the development of art and science, were
not merely contemporaries, but lived together in the same city, some
born there and nourished from their youth on the glories of their
native place, others attracted thither by the same glory; nor was their
association merely local, they laboured, consciously or unconsciously,
at a common task. For whether they were personally intimate or not with
the great statesman who was the centre of the Attic world, nay, even
if they were numbered among his opponents, they could not but render
him substantial help in his life-work of making Athens the intellectual
capital of Greece.
Here whatever germs of culture were introduced from foreign parts gained
new life, the Ionian study of countries and peoples became history
as soon as Herodotus came into touch with Athens; the Peloponnesian
dithyrambus grew into tragedy at Athens, the farce of Megara into Attic
comedy; here the philosophy of Ionia and Magna Græcia met to supplement
each other’s defects and prepare the way for the development of Attic
philosophy; even sophistry was nowhere turned to such account as at
Athens. In earlier times every district, city, and island had had its
peculiar school and tendencies, but now all vigorous intellectual
movements crowded together at Athens; local and tribal peculiarities of
temperament and dialect were reconciled; and as the drama (the most Attic
of all the arts) absorbed all art-methods into itself, to reproduce them
in organic harmony, so from all the achievements of the genius of Greece
there grew a general culture which was at once the heritage of Attica
and of the Greek nation. Vehemently as other states might oppose the
political predominance of Athens, none could deny that the city where
Æschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Crates, and
Cratinus all laboured together, was the focus of all lofty aspirations,
the heart of the nation, Hellas in Hellas.
[Illustration: HERODOTUS]
Slight as is our knowledge of the personal relations of these great
contemporaries, there are a few traditions from which we can gather some
idea of the intercourse of Pericles with the most eminent among them and
of their intercourse with one another. We know that Pericles equipped
the chorus for a theatrical performance in which Æschylus carried off
the prize. We know of the friendship of Herodotus and Sophocles, and
we actually possess the beginning of some occasional verses addressed
to Herodotus by the poet, then in the fifty-fifth year of his age; a
letter in elegiac metre dating from the time when the historian migrated
to Thurii, and withdrew from the delightful society of the best men of
Athens. Sophocles was before all things sociable, and we hear that he
formed a circle of men skilled in the fine arts and dedicated it to
the Muses, and that it held regular meetings. This reciprocal stimulus
resulted in a steady advance in all directions. In every branch of art
we can trace the epochs of development as surely as in the structure of
the trimetre of the drama. But as, generally speaking, Greek art owed
its unfaltering progress to the fact that the younger artists did not
endeavour to gain a start by rash attempts at originality, but held fast
the good in all things and readily adopted and perfected methods that had
once gained acceptance, so in Athens we see the elder masters gratefully
praised and honoured by their pupils, like Æschylus by Sophocles and
Cratinus by Aristophanes.
It is one of the most notable characteristics of the intellectual
life of Athens that her eminent men, however high a view they took
of their own calling, did not owe their pre-eminence in it to any
narrow-minded restriction of their interest to their own peculiar sphere.
This versatility was rendered possible by the vitality for which the
contemporaries of Pericles were remarkable, and it seems as though the
brilliant prime of the Greek nation manifested itself most plainly in
the frequent combination of extraordinary mental and physical powers. We
cannot but admire the men who retained their vital force unimpaired to
extreme old age and advanced in the practice of their art to the last.
Sophocles, after having composed 113 dramas, is said to have read the
chorus of the _Œdipus at Colonus_ aloud, to disprove the rumour that he
was incapable of managing his own affairs by reason of the infirmities
of old age. Cratinus was ninety-one when he produced _Dame Bottle_, the
saucy comedy with which he defeated Aristophanes, who had looked upon
him as a rival whose day was over. Simonides, Xenophanes, Parmenides,
and Zeno, were likewise examples of healthy and vigorous old age.
Timocreon combined the skill of an athlete with the profession of a poet.
Polus, Sophocles’ favourite actor, was competent to take the leading
part in eight tragedies in four days. Lastly, the sterling capacity
and versatility of the masters of those days is shown by the fact that
though extraordinarily prolific authors of imaginative works, they spared
time to strive after scientific certainty concerning the problems and
resources of their art, and combined absolute self-possession and the
love of theoretical study with the enthusiasm of the artist temperament.
Thus Lasus, the inventor of the perfected form of the dithyrambus, was
at the same time an accomplished critic and one of the first writers on
the theory of music; and Sophocles himself wrote a treatise on the tragic
chorus, to set forth his views as to its place and purpose in tragedy. In
like manner the most distinguished architects wrote scientific treatises
on the principles of their art, Polyclitus worked out the theory of
numbers which lies at the root of plastic symmetry, and Agatharchus the
principles of optics, according to which he had arranged the decoration
of the stage. In so doing he took the first step towards the teaching
of perspective, which was subsequently developed by Democritus and
Anaxagoras.[b]
[Illustration: ARISTOPHANES]
[Illustration]