Ictinus, for the Peloponnesian War put a stop to the Eleusinian
worshippers from Athens--not the least of their deprivations. But they
were resumed when Alcibiades came home, and continued until Alaric the
Goth destroyed the temple. The peculiarity of this building is that it
cuts into the living rock. The interior somewhat resembled a theatre,
with eight stone tiers all round it, and an upper story supported on
columns. The building itself was square, with a portico in
[Illustration: PLATE LI. THE “AGIAS” OF LYSIPPUS
_English Photo Co., Athens_]
front only. The upper story was reached by a rock-terrace cut out of the
hill-side at the back. The whole temple, with out-buildings, was
enclosed by a wall.
Summing up the architectural character of the period, we should say that
it was severely limited by the conservatism of religion to the austerest
outlines and the simplest plans. Such laws it loyally obeyed, and yet
found scope for exquisite workmanship and subtle varieties within them.
Ictinus and Mnesicles were quite capable of adapting themselves to any
local peculiarities, but the strict Doric style still reigned supreme.
Finally we note that fine architecture is almost entirely confined to
the service of religion and patriotism, while private and secular
buildings are still on the most unpretentious scale. The only
architectural work of a strictly utilitarian character that we can
mention is the planning of the Peiræus, which was as orderly, as regular
and as dull as “town-planned” towns generally are.
TRAGEDY AND COMEDY
It was the policy of Pericles, when he trusted his fellow-citizens with
so much power, to train them to be fit to wield it. Fond as the Athenian
was of political and social equality within his own circle of
citizenship, his tone and temper were, I think, like those of all the
other Greeks, inherently aristocratic. The Greeks were a chosen people.
They stood aloof, with slaves and helots beneath them, and with
barbarians all round them. Few Greeks would have disputed the doctrine
by which Aristotle justified slavery: the Greek is by nature superior;
set him down in a barbarian city, and in a short time the Greek would be
king. They would have laughed sweetly at Lafayette’s “Rights of Man.”
Man only gets his rights as a member of a partnership, a corporate
community--to wit, a city. This community he entered, when he was
acknowledged as a citizen, not without a strict scrutiny into his
claims, as formally as we enter a club. Having once joined partnership
with such a state as Athens, his rights became precise and important.
Among other rights, a democracy offered him that of taking his turn in
the government if the lot or the votes of his fellow-citizens designated
him for office. Political philosophy maintains as an axiom that the
better people ought to rule over the worse, condemning all democracy,
and Athens in particular, because there the many ruled over the few, and
therefore necessarily the worse over the better. Pericles would not have
denied the doctrine, but only its applicability to Athens. He would have
claimed that the whole Athenian citizen body possessed “virtue” in the
political philosopher’s sense of the word; they were all _aristoi_, for
he had seen to it that the Athenian citizens should all receive a
training, which, though utterly different from the Spartan in its aims
and methods, was even more capable of turning the masses into an
aristocracy of manners and intelligence.
It was a liberal education even to walk in the streets of that wonderful
city, to worship in her splendid shrines, to sail the Mediterranean in
her fleets, to lounge in her colonnades and listen to the wisdom of the
wise. The temple services, the festivals, and the banquets were intended
with solemn symbolism to uplift the minds of the worshippers. There was
actual practice in public business for every one, whether in the
Assembly or the Council Hall or the large Jury Courts. Thus it was hoped
that any man whom the lot might appoint to be archon or president would
be fit for his duties.
But of all instruments of public education perhaps the most important
was the Drama. This word, which we associate with entertainment after
dinner, with tinsel and bad ventilation, meant to the Greeks a religious
solemnity destined to the praise of gods and the edification of men.
During the fifth century at Athens the stage was far the most powerful
form of literary and artistic expression--so much so that as Greek
literature in this period is almost entirely absorbed by Athens, all the
other voices of poetry are for a time reduced to silence. The amazingly
rapid development of this form of expression was largely due to the
concentration with which the literary
[Illustration: PLATE LII. THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT PHIGALEIA [BASSÆ]
_English Photo Co., Athens_]
genius of Greece pursued it. Athenian drama, Tragic, Comic, and Satyric,
was produced at the festivals of Dionysus, and it has generally been
supposed to have taken its rise from rude choruses in honour of the
wine-god, developed by Arion and others into the Dithyramb. This is an
ancient and respectable theory. The Satyric Drama is obviously connected
with wine and the wine-god’s goatish followers, the Satyrs. Comedy was
derived from _kōmē_, a village, being originally the rustic form of the
same species of mimetic worship. As for Tragedy, that was traced
etymologically to the Greek for a goat, and of course the goat has a
family relationship with Dionysus. But it has recently been argued that
Tragedy was certainly the earliest form of the drama to be developed,
and though _we_ may wind up an evening’s jollification by going to see
“Othello,” yet ancient Tragedy has, as was often remarked by the
ancients themselves, nothing to do with wine or Dionysus, and is
scarcely of the festive character that we should associate with that
cheerful deity. Professor Ridgeway has shown some reason to believe that
the drama took its rise in quite a different manner--namely, from the
funeral ceremonies held at the tomb of a dead hero. He shows the
frequent appearance of tombs in the scenery of Tragedy, and adduces
evidence to prove that the Greeks did include mimetic representations of
the dead hero and his deeds among the ceremonies performed in his
honour. This would account not only for the character of Tragedy, with
its sombre musings upon Death and Fate, but also for the milieu in which
its scenes invariably moved--namely, the Epic circle of heroes.
Professor Ridgeway further points out that the worship of Dionysus was
itself not a very ancient nor a strictly Greek cult. Theatres and
dancing-floors are, however, as old as Cnossos.
But this very plausible and suggestive theory has scarcely yet had time
to stand its trial. What is certain and most important for the
understanding of Tragedy is that the Drama was evolved from the song and
dance of the Chorus. First one and then two members of the _corps de
ballet_ were brought out from the ranks to perform solo impersonations,
to narrate an episode in descriptive rhapsody, or to exchange
information by rapid question and answer. Important stages in this
evolutionary process were attributed in antiquity to Thespis, the
so-called “inventor” of Tragedy, and to Phrynichus and Æschylus, all
Athenians of the late sixth and early fifth centuries. Then the part
played by the “Answerers” (hypocrites), as the actors were called,
gradually gained in magnitude and importance. In Æschylus the choric
passages are still the main feature of the play. In Sophocles they form
a kind of lyric commentary on the action of the drama, in which the
interest now begins to centre. In the later work of Euripides the Chorus
is largely a superfluous concession to dramatic conventions. Already by
the end of Sophocles’ career there were as many as four actors, and
since each performed numerous impersonations, the range of character was
considerable. Grand as Athenian drama is, even regarded as a vehicle of
literary composition, the mere writing of the “book” was a subordinate
part of the work of producing a play. In fact Greek tragedy is far more
closely akin to the modern oratorio than to the modern stage-play. The
task of providing, equipping, and training a chorus was one of the
“liturgies” or public duties laid by the Athenian state upon her richer
citizens. It lay in the archon’s discretion to “grant a chorus” to a
poet.
The stage consisted originally of a circular dancing-floor (orchestra)
with an altar in the middle. Here the fifteen members of the chorus
marched in, headed by a single flute-player, chanting in unison. As soon
as they had arrived in position they formed line three deep, the
coryphæus in the middle of the front row, with the leader of each
semichorus on his right and left. While they sang they performed simple
rhythmic movements of a solemn character. At first the individual actors
simply stepped out from the ranks to deliver their lines, but in later
times (when precisely, is a matter of burning controversy) they appeared
behind the orchestra on a raised stage. The performance was, of course,
always given
[Illustration: PLATE LIII. PORTIONS OF THE PHIGALEIAN FRIEZE
COMBAT BETWEEN CENTAURS AND LAPITHÆ [WEST SIDE, SLAB 528]
COMBAT BETWEEN GREEKS AND AMAZONS [EAST SIDE, SLAB 537]
_Mansell & Co._]
[Illustration: Theatrical Figures, Comic and Tragic]
in the open air.[70] In the fifth century there was no regular theatre;
only a flat circular orchestra where the dramas were produced in the
“Place of the Wine-press” to the west of the Acropolis, and the
spectators sat round on wooden benches. It was not until late in the
fourth century that the great Theatre of Dionysus, with its tiers of
stone seats resting on the living rock, was constructed under the south
cliff of the citadel. It has been remarked that the Greek stage was not,
as ours is, pictorial, but rather plastic, giving the effect of figures
in relief against a background. This was one reason why the actors wore
high boots which gave them superhuman stature, and padded garments and
trailing skirts. The masks they wore were part of the traditional
convention of Greek drama. The mask would, of course, preclude any
facial expression whatsoever. The Greek actor showed his skill in the
grace of his movements, the expressiveness of his gestures, and the
clearness and force of his articulation. Dramatic declamation was his
main business. Under these circumstances it is clear that we must not
expect subtle nuances of meaning to be conveyed by the actors in Greek
tragedy, though modern interpreters are always on the look-out for them.
Conceive Henry Irving with an immovable eyebrow, or Coquelin with his
mouth fixed open in a perpetual grimace. It is obvious that the whole
character of the representation is transformed. The female parts, too,
were, as on our own Elizabethan stage, invariably taken by men or boys.
The scenery was of the simplest. The costume was one conventional to the
tragic stage; there was only the slightest attempt to dress the parts.
The plays thus had the simplicity and breadth of treatment which we have
seen in the statuary and architecture of the period. The art of Pheidias
is the most illuminating commentary upon that of Sophocles. As we saw in
Cresilas’ portrait of Pericles, idealistic treatment is maintained so
faithfully as a principle that realistic characterisation is only
admitted so far as it does not conflict with the ideal. In both arts the
heroes and heroines must have the profile and contours of physical and
moral perfection. It is only within these limits that Deianira can be
soft and womanly, Antigone stern and faithful unto death, Ajax bluff and
bold, Neoptolemus young and generous. There are broader strokes of
character-drawing in the minor characters. Messengers, slaves, and
sentinels are sometimes permitted the homely sententiousness of Juliet’s
Nurse. But there is nothing that can truly be called relief from the
stern shadows that encompass the world of Greek tragedy.
It must not be forgotten that the themes upon which Tragedy drew were,
almost exclusively, the heroic or epic legends. One or two exceptions
there are; the “Persæ” of Æschylus is one such, for reasons which I have
already explained. Phrynichus also wrote a tragedy founded on
contemporary history, “The Sack of Miletus,” an episode of the Ionian
revolt. But such a theme came too near home, touched too closely on
politics, and the poet was punished with a fine. Otherwise the dramatist
had no scope for originality or for the element of the unexpected in the
choice of his plot. It is as if
[Illustration: PLATE LIV. THEATRE AT EPIDAURUS
_English Photo Co., Athens_]
our dramatists were restricted to the Bible for their choice of subjects
instead of being entirely debarred from it. The audience knew the main
outline of the story as soon as the play began. Thus the audience was
often in the secret while the characters on the stage were not, and this
fact gave scope for dramatic irony, which is especially connected with
the name of Sophocles.
Sophocles is for literature the supreme embodiment of the Athenian
spirit at this its purest and highest period. The tragedies of Æschylus
have the grandeur and incompleteness of archaic art. He wrestles with
the most awful problems of human destiny and divine purpose. His style
matches his themes; it is a whirlpool of foaming imagery in which great
masses of poetry in phrase and metaphor appear and disappear
continually. He continually baffles the transcriber and the modern
interpreter, and it is only the most reverential spirit that can refrain
from occasional sensations of ludicrous bathos. Euripides, on the other
hand, is so fluent and easy in his craftsmanship that he often seems by
contrast commonplace. He is probably the cleverest of all dramatists,
and he often dealt with his religious themes in the spirit of an
unabashed sceptic. Like Plato, he saw that the gods of anthropomorphic
creation were very far from ideal; and he used all the craft and
subtlety of the rationalist to exhibit them at their weakest. Æschylus
is the poet of the religious men of Marathon; Euripides, “the human,” is
the prophet of the New Age of the fourth century, liberal, cosmopolitan,
restless and fearless in inquiry. Sophocles is the true exponent of
Periclean Athens in the realm of literature.
With his inflexible idealism, the poetry of Sophocles is sublimated
almost beyond human ken. Moderns sometimes find him too perfect, too
statuesque to be interesting. It is both their misfortune and their
fault. The appreciation of Sophocles is a test of refined scholarship
and an ear sensitive to the inner voices of poetry. This makes
translation almost impossible, but Mr. Whitelaw, of Rugby, has come so
near to achieving that impossible that I would venture, through his
medium, to present a specimen of this poet’s exquisite art. This is the
famous choric ode on Love from the “Antigone.”
STROPHE
“O Love, our conqueror, matchless in might,
Thou prevailest, O Love, thou dividest the prey:
In damask cheeks of a maiden
Thy watch through the night is set.
Thou roamest over the sea;
On the hills, in the shepherd’s huts, thou art;
Nor of deathless gods, nor of shortlived men,
From thy madness any escapeth.
ANTISTROPHE
“Unjust, through thee, are the thoughts of the just;
Thou dost bend them, O Love, to thy will, to thy spite.
Unkindly strife thou hast kindled,
This wrangling of son with sire.
For great laws, throned in the heart,
To the sway of a rival power give place,
To the love-light flashed from a fair bride’s eyes:
In her triumph laughs Aphrodite.
Me, even now, me also,
Seeing these things, a sudden pity
Beyond all governance transports:
The fountains of my tears
I can refrain no more,
Seeing Antigone here to the bridal chamber
Come, to the all-receiving chamber of Death.”
In this ode we have the Greek tragic view of the passion of Love, as the
destroyer and distractor of man’s peace and sanity. Love is one of the
means whereby tragic fate fulfils its purposes of vengeance. The
circumstances of this particular case are these: Of Antigone’s two
brothers one had marched against his native city, and the other had
taken arms in its defence. Both had fallen on the field of battle.
Creon, the city’s tyrant, forbade any one, under pain of death, to give
burial to the slain enemy. In this, of course, he was violating one of
the most sacred laws of Greek religion. Now Antigone was betrothed to
Creon’s own son, Hæmon; nevertheless her duty was to brave the tyrant’s
decree and give the honours of formal burial to her dead brother. She
did so. Creon thereupon pronounced her doom, and Hæmon in his despair
slew himself upon the tomb in which she was immured. The whole story is
but an episode in the doom of the house of Œdipus, father of Antigone.
The Greek view of Love, then, is the antithesis of the romantic view of
it. Where Love conflicts with duty it must be rigorously suppressed, as
a source of folly, weakness, and wickedness. So much is this the case
that Sophocles puts into the mouth of Antigone words which he had
probably borrowed from Herodotus, and which give a view of the Great
Passion so painfully unromantic that the modern commentator, who for all
his prosiness is a thoroughly romantic person, is tempted to use the
shears by which he commonly cuts his knots and call it an interpolation.
“My duty,” says Antigone, “is to my brother first. You speak of my duty
to my future husband, and my future children. I reply that a brother is
more than a husband or children; _they can be replaced, a brother
cannot_.”
An even more disconcerting display of common sense in a presumably
romantic situation is seen in that amazing play the “Alcestis” of
Euripides--surely the most conspicuous failure in all dramatic
literature. Every one knows the tale, how Admetus was allowed as a boon
from Apollo to get some one else as a substitute in his place when Death
came to fetch him. His faithful wife, Alcestis, took his place, being
consoled by Admetus with the promise of a handsome funeral. Then the
king’s old father appears upon the scene to offer his condolences to the
widower, but is immediately assailed with the most vehement reproaches
for not having himself, as an old man with one foot in the grave
already, shown sufficient pluck to volunteer death. He not unnaturally
retorts that if it is a question of daring to die, Admetus himself had
not been remarkable for courage. The point is one that pleases
Euripides; it is a nice point of casuistry; he lets the speakers
dispute it at some length. I think these two passages are significant of
much. When we think of the Greeks as a race of poetic and artistic
genius we must not forget that practical, unsentimental common sense is
among their most prominent characteristics. They habitually exposed
weakly infants to death. Their comedy is singularly merciless to disease
and deformity. Plato’s treatment of the sex problem in his ideal
republic is strikingly cold-blooded, but hardly more so than the actual
treatment of the same problem in the real republic of Sparta. Before we
leave this question of the romantic in the Greek character two things
should be observed. The romantic element unquestionably grows stronger
as Greek civilisation approaches its decline: there is a good deal of it
in Menander and Theocritus, still more in Heliodorus; Alexander the
Great is romantic to the finger-tips. Secondly, although there is so
little of it in Tragedy, or generally in the relations between the two
sexes, it is found in a degree of almost modern intensity in the
relations between Heracles and Hylas, between Theseus and Peirithous,
between Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It was not foolishness to the Greeks
for a man to face death for the youth he loved. Indeed, upon that theory
Epaminondas the Theban organised that Sacred Band which for a time
revolutionised Greek history.
Another characteristic excellence of Greek drama, and especially of
Sophocles, is its extraordinary power of narrative. With its severe
scenic limitations, the Attic stage wisely refrained from attempting to
reproduce realistically exciting spectacular incidents. The actual
“tragedies” seldom occur in the sight of the audience. Far more often
the hero or heroine leaves the stage in despair, the chorus intervenes
with a mournful ode, and then a messenger arrives with a narrative of
the fatal occurrence. Shakespeare, with scarcely less severe
limitations, faced the impossible, and courted ridicule by representing
battles in full detail on the stage by means of a handful of overworked
“supers.” What they could not represent the Greeks narrated; and
Horace, indeed, exalts it into a principle of dramatic art that “Medea
must not butcher her babes in public.” That the Greek dramatists so
refrained was probably due to dramatic tradition as well as to the
practical necessities of the case. When there was only one speaking
actor in addition to the chorus his part must have been chiefly what our
composers of oratorios call “recitative.” For these two reasons, and
perhaps also in obedience to the Greek spirit of self-restraint,
narrative declamation by “messengers” is a striking feature of all Greek
tragedy.
We have seen already the religious theory upon which tragedy is
generally based, the logical succession of Success, Pride, Vengeance,
and Ruin. The tragedians deal largely with stories of the doom which had
pursued certain of the heroic houses like that of Labdacus or Atreus. In
such cases a prophetic curse rests upon the entire dynasty: Atreus slays
his brother’s children and bequeaths doom for Agamemnon. Agamemnon is
slain by his guilty wife Clytæmnestra, whereby a duty of vengeance
devolves upon their son Orestes, who _must_ slay his mother, and
therefore _must_ incur the celestial doom of the matricide, unless
Apollo himself can intervene to release him from the vengeance of the
Furies. Such stories were pursued by all three great tragedians, often
in sequences of three tragedies called trilogies. They have no “moral,”
except that sin breeds suffering to the third and fourth generation, but
the sin is often an involuntary one. The purpose of the tragedian is to
show the struggles of man against fate. According to Aristotle’s
oft-quoted theory, the purpose of Tragedy is to act as a “purgative of
the emotions by means of pity and terror.” As the surgeon lets blood in
order to reduce fever, so the drama enables the spectator to acquire
peace of soul through the vicarious sorrows of its heroes and heroines.
Aristotle declares every tragedy to consist of two parts, the tying of
the knot and the loosing of it. The “loosing” commonly involves a
_peripeteia_, or sudden reversal of fortune, as when Agamemnon’s
triumphant return is changed to death and mourning; often it is brought
about by an _anagnōrĭsis_, or recognition, as when the stranger in the
palace is found to be Orestes come home for revenge. The so-called
Aristotelian “unities,” which have loomed so bulkily in the history of
dramatic criticism, and under the fear of which the classical dramatists
of France were imprisoned, are not to be found in Aristotle. He does,
indeed, advocate unity of subject, but unity of time and place are
nowhere demanded. The natural limitations and the consequent simplicity
of the Greek stage generally imposed these unities as a practical
necessity.