to death. See how many of the passages on death you can recall in
writers not ancient are inspired by a grotesque or reflective horror,
or ring with a hopeful or hopeless defiance. Think of Villon on death,
and Raleigh, and Donne, and Shakespeare’s Claudio, and _Hydriotaphia_,
and Browning, and Swinburne. There is nothing in the great age of
Greek literature even remotely comparable to the gorgeous variety of
these dreams and invocations. But if the question is of realism (as we
are understanding it), if we resolve to see death as it is, neither
transformed by hope nor blurred by tears, see if the ancients have not
the advantage.
They will disappoint you at first. (But remember you are asking for
realism.) Thus when Aristotle in his dry manner says, _Death is the
most fearful thing; for it is an end, and nothing after it seems to
the dead man either good or bad_, you may think it a poor attitude to
strike. But Aristotle is not striking an attitude at all, he is simply
facing a fact. He may be wrong, of course, but that is how death looks
to Aristotle, and he is not going to gild the pill either for you or
for himself. But if you miss in Aristotle the thrill of the greatest
literature, you must feel it in the last words of Socrates to the
judges who had condemned him. _But now is come the hour of departure,
for me that have to die, for you that have still to live; but which
path leads to a better lot is hidden from all but God._ And with that
Socrates falls silent, leaving the reader silent too, and a little
ashamed perhaps of our importunate hells and heavens.
Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles in Hades and speaks of the great
honour in which the young hero is held here. _Not of death_, replies
Achilles, _speak thou in words of comfort, glorious Odysseus! Rather
above ground would I be the hired servant of a man without a lot,
whose livelihood is but small, than reign over all the perished dead._
The truth as he sees it is what you get from the Greek every time.
Odysseus hears it from Achilles, the greatest of the dead. He hears it
from Elpênor, one of the least. (Elpênor got drunk in Circe’s house
and, feeling hot, wandered on to the roof, where he fell asleep, and
everybody forgot about him. In the morning he was aroused by the noise
of people moving about and jumped up, forgetting where he was, and fell
backwards from the roof and broke his neck.) _Ah, go not and leave
me behind unwept and unburied, turning thy back on me, lest I become
a vessel of the wrath of gods upon thee; but bury me with all mine
armour, and by the margin of the whitening sea heap me a high grave
of a man that had no luck, that even after ages may know. This do for
me, and on my grave plant the oar with which, alive, I rowed among
my comrades._ The natural pathos of this must touch everybody. But I
wonder if everybody feels how much of its effect is due to an almost
harsh avoidance of sentimentality, as in that hidden threat of the
pleading ghost. And even that piercing last line about the oar—it may
grieve certain readers to know that setting up an oar on the grave
was merely part of a ritual usually observed in the burial of a dead
mariner.
The _corpus_ of Greek inscriptions naturally contains a great many
epitaphs. There is not one, belonging to what we think of as the great
age of Greece, that has the least grain of smugness or hypocrisy or
sentimentality. It must be confessed that these “pagans” could die with
a good grace. Here is an inscription, _incerti loci_, “of uncertain
provenience,” but in the Greek of Attica. _The tomb of Phrasikleia,
“I shall be called a maid for evermore, having won from the gods this
name instead of marriage.”_ I ought to add at once that the original
is grave and beautiful poetry. I can only give the sense. One must
read the Greek to feel entirely how good Phrasikleia is. At least she
is not Little Nell. Some of the most famous epitaphs are by known
authors; the most famous of all by Simonides. Over the Tegeans who
fell in battle against the Barbarian he wrote: _Here lie the men whose
valour was the cause that smoke went not up to heaven from broad Tegea
burning; who resolved to leave their city flourishing in freedom to
their children, and themselves to die among the foremost fighters_. All
these little poems are beyond translation. The art of them lies in a
deliberate bareness or baldness, which ought to be shockingly prosaic
(and in English almost inevitably is so), but contrives to be thrilling
poetry. The finest of all the epigrams is that on the Three Hundred who
fell at Thermopylae. _O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie
here, following their instructions._ Literally that is what it says.
Yet I suppose that even a man who does not know Greek may feel in an
instinctive way that it may be extraordinarily good in the original.
It is. It is an instance of the famous Laconic brevity, whose virtue
it was to cut at once to the heart of things. One other epigram I will
add, partly because it also refers to the time of the Persian Wars,
partly because the author was said (perhaps rightly) to be Plato. It is
on the people of Eretria, a town in Euboea by the seashore, who were
carried off into captivity and settled by Darius far away, hopelessly
far, “at Arderikka in the Kissian land” beyond the Tigris. _We who
one day left the deep-voiced swell of the Aegean lie here midmost the
Plain of Ecbatana. Good-bye Eretria, our city famous once; good-bye
Athens, the neighbour of Eretria; good-bye dear sea._ By the side of
this mere “pathos” looks almost vulgar. If Plato wrote it, he was
certainly a poet; but it is improbable that he did. I notice that
Professor Burnet thinks Plato did not write any of the poems attributed
to him in the manuscripts. In any case, when people say that Plato was
“really a poet” they are thinking of his prose. I cannot help adding
the irrelevancy that I wish they would not go on repeating this. He is
an incomparably great master of imaginative prose. Is that not enough?
He may have been no better at poetry than Ruskin or Carlyle. A poet is
a man who writes poems.
Next to death the great test of sincerity is love. There used to be a
general opinion that love, as we understand it, did not exist among
the ancients at all. That point has been already discussed, but we may
consider for a little the treatment of love in the Attic dramatists,
who best represent the great period of Athenian development. There
is plenty of love in them, only they don’t mention it. “Please do
not be impatient,” as the Greek orators say, “until you hear what I
mean.” Let us take Aeschylus, the earliest of the dramatists, first,
and for a play let us take his _Agamemnon_. The great character is
Clytaemnestra. She has allowed herself to become the paramour of a vile
and cowardly relation of her husband called Aegisthus, who apparently
seduced her out of mere idleness and hatred of King Agamemnon. When
her husband returns she treacherously murders him.... What are you
going to make of a subject like that? How are you going to make
Clytaemnestra, I will not say “sympathetic,” but merely human and
tolerable? It seems an insoluble problem. Yet Aeschylus solves it. For
one thing, he represents Agamemnon, the nominal hero of the play, as
rather wooden, weak and bombastic—not very unlike Julius Caesar, the
nominal hero of Shakespeare’s play, where the dramatist had a similar
but less difficult problem. The result is that the sympathies of the
reader are not too deeply stirred in favour of the victim. Again,
Clytaemnestra appears to be really in love with Aegisthus, while her
feeling towards her husband is not merely the thirst for revenge or the
hate a woman conceives of the man she has wronged; it is a physical
abhorrence. She loathes him in her flesh. It is impossible to explain
by what miracle of genius we are led to receive this impression, for
she speaks nothing but flatteries and cajolery. Yet every speech of
hers to him, as he dimly feels, shudders with a secret disgust. These
long, glittering, coiling sentences are certainly not politic; they are
the expression of a morbid loathing, which has ended by fascinating
itself. When the blood of her lord bursts over her she _rejoices no
less than the sown ground in the heaven’s bright gift of rain_. Now
in the play Agamemnon is rather ineffective, but at any rate he is
more a man than the immeasurably contemptible Aegisthus. Is it to be
supposed that Clytaemnestra does not know that? Of course she knows,
but she does not cease to love Aegisthus on that account. So the matter
stands. Aeschylus does not make it any easier for you. A bad modern
playwright would make Clytaemnestra a sadly misunderstood woman with a
pitiful “case.” It so happens that the queen does have something of a
case, really a good case, but she does not much insist on it. She knows
quite well that it is not for her murdered daughter’s sake that she
has killed the king. Neither is it from fear of detection; the woman
does not know the meaning of fear. Aeschylus will not purchase your
sympathy for her by any pretences. One of his unexpected, wonderful
touches is to make her superbly intelligent. She feels herself so much
superior intellectually to every one else that she hardly takes the
trouble to deceive them. Nobody is asked to like Clytaemnestra, but
surely she gives food for some reflection on the power and subtlety of
Greek psychology, and the unswerving truthfulness of Greek realism, in
a peculiarly complex affair of the heart.
There are in Sophocles at least two fine and tender studies of conjugal
love of the conventional (but not silly conventional) type, namely
Tekmessa in the _Ajax_ and Dêianeira in the _Trachinian Women_; and
one study not conventional in the very least, the Iokasta of _Oedipus
the King_. She is the woman who slew herself because she had borne
children to her own son, who had murdered his father, who begot him by
her. The legend has made her a thing of night and horror. Sophocles has
made her grand, proud, sceptical, lonely, pitiful, ravaged by thoughts
not to be breathed, horribly pathetic. But these three are wives. Of
love between man and maid Sophocles has hardly a word to say. People
quote Haimon and Antigone. There is no doubt of the young man’s love
for Antigone; he dies for her. But is she in love with Haimon? She is
betrothed to him of course, but in ancient Greece these matters were
arranged. She probably liked him a good deal; everybody likes him; but
we are speaking of love. Those who have little doubts on the subject
quote her cry, _Dearest Haimon, how thy father slights thee!_ which
she utters when Kreon has said, _I hate bad wives for my sons_. But
they have no right to quote the cry as hers until they have proved
she utters it; which they don’t, but merely assume the manuscripts be
wrong. The manuscripts give the line to Ismênê, the sister of Antigone,
and they appear to be clearly right. Any one who looks at the context
will see that it is Ismênê who brings the mention of Haimon into the
dispute with Kreon. Antigone stands apart in proud and indignant
silence. She will die rather than let the man who has outraged her dead
brother see how much her resistance is costing her. Besides, I think
the manuscripts are right anyway. Imagine the case of an extremely
high-minded young lady, who for the very best reasons has quarrelled
with her prospective father-in-law. The young lady’s sister reminds the
old man that after all Octavia is engaged to his son, which provokes
the retort, “I object to bad wives for my boys.” Would Octavia then
exclaim, “Dearest William, how your father insults you!”? Well, would
she? But it looks delightfully like what Octavia’s sister would say.
Therefore, I vote for the manuscripts and giving the line to Ismênê.
Antigone had two brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes. After their father
had been driven from Thebes the brethren disputed the succession
to his throne. Polyneikes lost, and took refuge in Argos, where he
gathered assistance and marched against his native city. The attempt
had no success, and Polyneikes and Eteokles fell in single combat.
This mutual fratricide left Kreon, their uncle, king. He, in a flame
of “patriotism,” had Eteokles interred with honour and commanded that
the body of Polyneikes should be left unburied. Such an order might
be compared to excommunication, for the effect of it was for ever to
bar the spirit of the dead from peace. Antigone sprinkled dust on the
naked corpse, which satisfied the gods of the underworld and eluded
the penalty of the ban. When Kreon asks her if the spirit of Eteokles
will not resent the saining of his fraternal enemy—which would be the
orthodox opinion—she replies, beautifully but inconsequently, _It is
not my nature to join in hating, but in loving_. She also speaks of
a higher, unwritten law. But Polyneikes is the favourite brother. I
hardly think any one can read carefully the _Antigone_ and the _Oedipus
at Colonus_ without seeing that. All through the _Antigone_ he is never
out of her thoughts. “Natural enough,” you may be inclined to say. But
is it? On the supposition that she is in love with Haimon? There is
another play, the _Electra_, in which Sophocles portrays the love of a
sister for a brother; and there are a good many points of resemblance
between Electra and Antigone. Only there is in the love of Electra for
Orestes (whom she brought up) a fierce, hungry, maternal quality, which
would be out of place between the children of Oedipus.
When we pass to Euripides we seem by comparison to approach the modern.
The impression is largely illusory, but not wholly false. It is the
fact that he is troubled by many of the problems that trouble us, and
it is the fact that he sometimes answers, or does not answer, them in
a way we should regard as modern. This comes out in his treatment of
love. It is best seen in the _Medea_ and the _Hippolytus_. Medea has a
special interest for us because she is a Barbarian (princess of Colchis
in the eastern corner of the Black Sea). But her case is quite simple.
She is a woman in love with a man who is tired of her. Necessarily
he cuts a poor figure in the story. She had saved his life. On the
other hand, she had thrown herself at his head, she had done her best
to ruin his chances in life, and all she had now to offer him was a
perfect readiness to murder anybody who stood in his way. She is one
of those women who are never satisfied unless the man is making love
to them all the time, so that one may have a sneaking sympathy for
that embarrassed, if rather contemptible, Jason. Indeed, Euripides’
opinion of this kind of “Romantic” love is probably no higher than Mr.
Shaw’s. It is the passion of the Barbarian woman. That does not prevent
Euripides from sympathizing profoundly with Medea, the passionate,
wronged, foreign woman. Why, indeed, should it? The case of Medea, as
Euripides with the pregnant brevity of Greek art presents it, has
seemed to many as true as death. It is an excellent example of realism.
More definitely than the _Medea_, the _Hippolytus_ is a tragedy
of love. Yet in the eloquence of the Romantic lover the one is as
deficient as the other. Phaedra was dying for love of Hippolytus. Her
secret is discovered and she dies of shame. What an opportunity for
the sentimentalist! However, adds the relentless poet, that is not all
the story. Before killing herself she forged a message to her husband
making the charge of Potiphar’s wife against Hippolytus. She could
not die without the pleasure of hurting him. Yet Euripides does not
represent her as an odious woman; quite the contrary. The question
for us is, does she, when we read the play, strike us as real or not?
The poet has set himself a difficult task—to convince us that a soul
overthrown by desire, cruel, lying, unjust was yet essentially modest,
gentle and honourable. If she is almost too convincing, so that a
sentimental part of you bleeds inside, you will perceive that realism
was not invented in Norway. And there is this about the Greek sort: it
never exaggerates.
It is hardly to be believed how startling an effect of truth this
moderation of the Greek writers can produce. Sappho, in the most
famous of her odes, says that love makes her “sweat” with agony and
look “greener than grass.” Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as
that, although (commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive
complexion and had never seen British grass. But, even if it contain
a trace of artistic exaggeration, the ode as a whole is perhaps the
most convincing love-poem ever written. It breathes veracity. It has
an intoxicating beauty of sound and suggestion, and it is as exact
as a physiological treatise. The Greeks can do that kind of thing.
Somehow we either overdo the “beauty” or we overdo the physiology. The
weakness of the Barbarian, said they, is that he never hits the mean.
But the Greek poet seems to do it every time. We may beat them at
other things, but not at that. And they do it with so little effort;
sometimes, it might appear, with none at all. Thus Aeschylus represents
Prometheus as the proudest of living beings. The _Prometheus Bound_
opens with a scene in which Hephaistos, urged on by two devils called
Strength and Force, nails Prometheus to a frozen, desert rock. While
the hero of the play endures this horrible torture, he has to listen to
the clumsy sympathy of Hephaistos, who does not like his job, and the
savage taunts of the two demons. To all this he replies—nothing at all.
No eloquence could express the pride of that tremendous silence. Of
course there is, or there used to be, a certain kind of commentator who
hastens to point out that a convention of the early Attic stage forbade
more than two persons of a tragedy to speak together at any time, so
that in any event it was not permissible for Prometheus to speak. All
you can do with a critic like that is (mentally, I fear) to hang a
millstone round his neck and cast him into the deepest part of the sea.
Not but what the point about convention, if rightly taken, is extremely
notable. It is an undying wonder how the kind of realism we have been
discussing could be combined with, could even, as in that instance
from the _Prometheus Bound_, make use of, the limitations imposed on
the ancient poet. To a reader who has not looked into the case it
is hard to give even an idea of it. If a man were to tell you that
he had written a novel in which the hero was Sir Anthony Dearborn
and the heroine Sophia Wilde, while other characters were Squire
Crabtree, Parson Quackenboss, Lieutenant Dashwood and the old Duchess
of Grimthorpe, you would think to yourself you knew exactly what to
expect. Yet you must admit there is nothing to prevent the man leaving
out (if he can) Gretna Green, and the duel, and the eighteenth-century
oaths. But if a Greek tragic dramatist put on the stage a play dealing,
say, with the House of Atreus, he positively could not leave out any
part of the family history. It was not done. So the audience knew your
story already, and knew, roughly, your characters. Nor, as historians
say, was that all. There had to be a Chorus, which had to sing lyrical
odes of a mythological sort at regular intervals between the episodes
of your drama; while the episodes themselves had to be composed in the
iambic metre and in a certain “tragic diction” about as remote from
ordinary speech as _Paradise Lost_. How Aeschylus and Sophocles and
Euripides contrive under such conditions to give a powerful impression
of novelty and naturalness it is easier to feel than explain. About the
feeling at least there is no doubt. Let us look again for a moment at
that singular convention, the tragic Chorus. Very often it consists of
old men who ... sing and dance. Consider the incredible difficulty of
keeping a number of singing and dancing old men solemn and beautiful
and even holy. Yet the great tragic poets have overcome that difficulty
so completely that I suppose not one reader in a hundred notices that
there is a difficulty at all. The famous Chorus of old men in the
_Agamemnon_, whose debility is made a point in the play, never for a
moment remind one of Grandfer Cantle. Rather they remind us of that
“old man covered with a mantle,” whom Saul beheld rising from the grave
to pronounce his doom. It is, in their own words, as if God inspired
their limbs to the dance and filled their mouths with prophecy.
There is only one way of redeeming the conventional, and that is by
sincerity. I am very far from maintaining that the moral virtue of
sincerity was eminently characteristic of the ancient Greek; but
intellectual sincerity was. None has ever looked upon gods and men
with such clear, unswerving eyes; none has understood so well to
communicate that vision. To see that essential beauty is truth and
truth is beauty—that is the secret of Greek art, as it is the maxim of
true realism. To keep measure in all things, that no drop of life may
spill over—that is the secret of Greek happiness. To be a Greek and not
a Barbarian.
NOTES
THE AWAKENING
The beginnings of Ionia, the earlier homes and the racial affinities
of the Ionians, are still obscure, although the point is cardinal
for Greek history. There is perhaps a growing tendency to find
“Mediterranean” elements in the Ionian stock, and this would explain
much, if the Ionians of history did not seem so very “Aryan” in speech
and habits of thought. On the other hand the “Aryan” himself is
daily coming to look more cloudy and ambiguous, and so is his exact
contribution to western culture.
The chief ancient sources of our information concerning the Ionians are
Herodotus, Pausanias and Strabo.
P. 14. Thuc. I. 2. Thuc. I. 6. Herod. I. 57.
P. 15. See especially D. G. Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_
(1909).
J. Burnet, _Who was Javan?_ in Proceedings of the Class.
Assoc. of Scot. 1911-12. Herod. I. 142.
P. 16. Herod. I. 171 f.
P. 17. An authoritative little book dealing with (among
other peoples) the Anatolian races is D. G. Hogarth’s
_The Ancient East_ (Home Univ. Ser.), 1914. Also H. R.
Hall, _The Ancient History of the Near East_ (1913).
P. 18. V. Bérard, _Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée_ is full
of instruction on the ways of the ancient mariner.
For the Colchians, see Hippocrates _de aer. aq. loc._ 15.
_Cf._ Herod. II. 104 f.
P. 19. Chalybes. _Il._ II. 857. Herod. I. 203.
P. 20. Herod. IV. 93 f. Olbia. Herod. IV. 18. Scythian
bow. Plato, _Laws_, 795-.
P. 21. Herod. IV. 18 f.
P. 22. Herod. IV. 172 f.
P. 25. Herod. II. 152. Abusimbel inscr. in Hicks and
Hill’s _Manual_.
P. 26 f. Fragments of Archilochus in Bergk’s _Poet. Lyr.
Gr._
KEEPING THE PASS
The Battle of Thermopylae as related by Herodotus (practically our sole
authority) is an epic. Therefore in telling it again I have frankly
attempted an epical manner as being really less misleading than any
application of the historical method. This is not to say that the
narrative of Herodotus has not been greatly elucidated by the research
of modern historians, especially by the exciting discovery of the path
Anopaia by Mr. G. B. Grundy. I have followed his reconstruction of the
battle (which may not be very far from the truth) in his book, _The
Great Persian War_ (1901). See also Mr. Macan’s commentary in his great
edition of Herodotus.
P. 34. See Frazer’s note on Thermopylae in his edition of
Pausanias.
P. 36. _Cf._ Xen. _Anab._ VII. 4, 4 (Thracians of Europe).
P. 39. Tiara. _schol._ Ar. _Birds_ 487. The King’s tiara
was also called _kitaris_.
P. 39. For Persian dress _cf._ with Herod. Strabo 734.
Xen. _Cyrop._ VII. 1, 2. There are also representations
in ancient art, e.g. a frieze at Susa.
THE ADVENTURERS
P. 45. Strabo IV.
P. 46. Herod. IV. 44.
P. 47. _The Greek Tradition_ (1915), Allen and Unwin, p.
6f.
P. 48. Herod. IV. 151-153.
P. 50. For an account of the Oasis at Siwah, see A. B.
Cook, _Zeus_, vol. I.
P. 51. Hymn _ad Apoll._ 391 f.
P. 52. Pind. _Ol._ 3 _ad fin._
P. 53. Herod. VI. 11, 12, 17. _Cf._ Strabo on foundation
of Marseille, IV (from Aristotle).
P. 54. Herod. III. 125, 129-137 (Demokêdês).
P. 55. Polycrates. Herod. II. 182 and III _passim_.
P. 61 f. Xen. _Anab._ I-IV.
P. 63. Pisidians. _Cf._ Xen. _Memor._ V. 2, 6.
P. 67. _L’Anabase de Xenophon avec un commentaire
historique et militaire_, by Col. (General) Arthur
Boucher, Paris, 1913.
P. 69. There is a fine imaginative picture of Nineveh in
the Book of Jonah.
P. 71. The famous Moltke was nearly drowned from a
“tellek.”
P. 77. The hot spring may be the sulphurous waters of
Murad, which have wonderful iridescences.
The Armenian underground houses are still to be seen.
These earth-houses are found elsewhere—in Scotland, for
instance. See J. E. Harrison, in _Essays and Studies
presented to W. Ridgeway_, p. 136 f.
ELEUTHERIA
P. 82. Aesch. _Pers._ 241 f. Herod. VII. 104.
P. 83. _Pers._ 402 f. Eur. _Helen_ 276.