impression and the result of elaborate concealment of art. That it is
not entirely so in the case of the drama is proved by the astonishing
fertility of the principal dramatists. Æschylus wrote more than 70
plays, Sophocles 113, Euripides 92, and another tragic poet whose work
has not survived 240. They were written and produced in competition. In
468 B.C. Sophocles began his public career by competing against Æschylus
for the prize of tragedy. As the house seemed equally divided, the
presiding archon left the decision to the ten generals who had just come
back victorious from their warfare in Thrace. The prize was awarded to
Sophocles, who, it is significant to notice, had been specially trained
under a famous musician. Euripides only won the prize five times in a
poetical career of fifty years. A prize was likewise awarded to the
choregus who produced and trained the best chorus. It was the custom for
the successful choregus, who was always, of course, a rich man, to
dedicate his prize--a tripod--in a certain street in Athens. One such
monument of the fourth century by a certain Lysicrates is still standing
in fair preservation. It was a pretty example of the luxurious
Corinthian order of architecture.[71]
Tragedies were performed three times a year at the three festivals of
Dionysus. The poet had an audience of 13,000,
[Illustration: PLATE LV. MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES AT ATHENS
_English Photo Co., Athens_]
including strangers from all parts of Greece. At first, it would seem,
admission was free, but so great was the crush that a small entrance fee
was charged. It was one of the really popular measures of Pericles to
start a fund not only for enabling the poorer citizens to enter free,
but actually to compensate them for their loss of employment while
engaged in this public duty. After all, why should the privileges of
free education be lost by the citizen merely because he is over fourteen
years of age? Why should we have to pay to enter the theatre, when the
doors of the National Gallery are opened to us for nothing?
I find it much more difficult to speak of Athenian Comedy with candour
and discrimination. Scholars of unblemished reputation and unimpeachable
sense of humour do unquestionably find the plays of Aristophanes, even
when produced by English schoolboys on speech-day, excessively
diverting. There is, it is true, in Aristophanes a good deal of simple
honest fun of the type represented by Mr. Punch or Mr. Pickwick and his
spectacles in the wheelbarrow. When the wrong man gets a thwacking or
when an ignorant amateur told to sit _to_ the oar proceeds to sit _on_
it, it is, I suppose, no less funny in the twentieth century _anno
Domini_ than it was in the fifth century before Christ. But there I must
leave the humour of Aristophanes to those who can appreciate it and
still laugh even when they have laboriously picked out the point of the
joke from the notes at the end of their text-book. Most of the humour is
of this type. It was written to burlesque the well-known figures of the
day, and no doubt served its purpose extremely well. Indeed, there is no
more certain proof of the liberty of speech which prevailed in Athens
than the fact that Aristophanes was permitted to represent Cleon the
Prime Minister in successive plays in the most ludicrous and offensive
situations. The Old Comedy of Athens rested largely upon a basis of
venomous personal slander and libel without self-restraint, without even
common decency. It must be added that all ancient humour was corrupted
at the source with obscenity. Anthropology, no doubt, explains this
satisfactorily for the anthropologist. Comedy took its rise from obscene
representations of the power of fecundity. Women and children were
properly forbidden to be present at comic representations. It is not
only thus with literature; the comic vase-paintings of Athens and the
comic frescoes of Pompeii are not suitable to modern taste.
Aristophanes as a poet is in a very different category. Every now and
then in a parabasis he turns to talk to his audience, so to speak, in
his own person, dropping for the moment into serious vein. In such
passages he is often superb.
In the following dialogue from “The Frogs” we have an interesting and
characteristic piece of literary criticism. Aristophanes is, as we have
seen, a Tory. The Athenian he loves is remarkably like the John Bull of
our national ideal. Here Æschylus as the poet of the old order is at
issue with Euripides, and Dionysus himself is there to umpire, disguised
as an irrelevant Philistine. The spirited and very free translation is
by Hookham Frere. Euripides has already expounded his principles, and
Æschylus now takes his turn.
ÆSCHYLUS
“Observe then, and mark, what our citizens were,
When first from my care they were trusted to you;
Not scoundrel informers, or paltry buffoons,
Evading the services due to the State;
But with hearts all on fire, for adventure and war,
Distinguished for hardiness, stature, and strength,
Breathing forth nothing but lances and darts,
Arms, and equipment, and battle array,
Bucklers, and shields, and habergeons, and hauberks,
Helmets, and plumes, and heroic attire.
EURIPIDES
“But how did you manage to make ’em so manly?
What was the method, the means that you took?
DIONYSUS
“Speak, Æschylus, speak, and behave yourself better,
And don’t, in your rage, stand so silent and stern.
[Illustration: Plate 56.--Red-figured Vase; and Pyxis]
ÆSCHYLUS
“A drama, brimful with heroical spirit.
EURIPIDES
“What did you call it?
ÆSCHYLUS
“‘The Chiefs against Thebes,’
That inspired each spectator with martial ambition,
Courage, and ardour, and prowess, and pride.
DIONYSUS
“But you did very wrong to encourage the Thebans.
Indeed you deserve to be punished, you do,
For the Thebans are grown to be capital soldiers.
You’ve done us a mischief by that very thing.
ÆSCHYLUS
“The fault was your own, if you took other courses;
The lesson I taught was directed to you;
Then I gave you the glorious theme of ‘The Persians,’
Replete with sublime patriotical strains,
The record and example of noble achievement,
The delight of the city, the pride of the stage.
DIONYSUS
“I rejoiced, I confess, when the tidings were carried
To old King Darius, so long dead and buried,
And the chorus in concert kept wringing their hands,
Weeping and wailing, and crying, Alas!
ÆSCHYLUS
“Such is the duty, the task of a poet,
Fulfilling in honour his office and trust.
Look to traditional history, look
To antiquity, primitive, early, remote:
See there what a blessing illustrious poets
Conferr’d on mankind, in the centuries past.
Orpheus instructed mankind in religion,
Reclaimed them from bloodshed and barbarous rites;
Musæus delivered the doctrine of medicine,
And warnings prophetic for ages to come.
Next came old Hesiod, teaching us husbandry,
Ploughing, and sowing, and rural affairs,
Rural economy, rural astronomy,
Homely morality, labour and thrift:
Homer himself, our adorable Homer,
What was his title to praise and renown?
What but the worth of the lessons he taught us,
Discipline, arms, and endurance of war?”
All Greek literature and art is judged by critics of all sorts from a
standard almost exclusively moral. “Did he teach well?” “Did his art
make people better?” Such are the questions constantly applied. The
doctrine of Art for Art’s sake would have seemed to the Greeks monstrous
and wicked. The actual charges made against Euripides in these scenes
are (1) that he was an innovator; (2) that he was a realist, introducing
lame people and beggars in rags on the idealist tragic stage; (3) that
he was fond of casuistry, and thereby cultivated dishonesty; (4) that he
chose immoral subjects dealing with such revolting topics as women in
love! Sophocles is evidently regarded by our irrepressible bard as a
personage too sacred to be brought upon his stage. That gentle spirit
would have no part in such a strife either here or in the underworld.
I look upon Greek Comedy as a Saturnalian product. A people accustomed
to a strict, self-imposed discipline in the rest of its art and morals
deliberately throws off its restraints and lets itself go on occasions,
like a Scotchman at Hogmanay. The Greeks were not in the least shocked
by occasional and seasonable ebullitions of high spirits. If you had an
enemy or an opponent in politics, the production of a comedy was the
time when you might reasonably assert that his deceased mother had been
a greengrocer, or that his wife had eloped with a Thracian footman, or
that his face was ugly and his person offensive to the senses. You were
expected to include some references to Melanthius, a tragic poet who was
notoriously and most laughably afflicted with leprosy, or Opuntius, who
provoked great mirth by having only one eye, or Cleonymus, who lost his
shield on the field of battle, or Patroclides, who
[Illustration: Plate 57.--White Polychrome Vases (“Lecythi”)]
suffered a celebrated accident in the theatre. Any reference to leather
was sure of a hearty laugh, for Cleon was interested in the
leather-market. Anything about crabs tickled the audience, because they
all knew Carcinus, the tragic poet. Impudent personalities are generally
amusing for the moment, and they were the mainstay of old comedy. May it
rest in peace!
AIDÔS
Almost to weariness the chronicler of Greek culture has to reiterate
this virtue of Moderation, Self-knowledge, Self-restraint, as the secret
of all that is highest in the great period. It is a very remarkable
phenomenon after all. There was nothing in the Greek temperament to
account for it: on the contrary, they were excitable and hot-blooded
people of the South. There was nothing at all in their religion to
preach asceticism. It was not a product of reaction, a result of surfeit
from extravagance, because it belongs to the earlier phases of culture
only. I think it was due in a large measure to the force of historical
circumstances. The same influences of external barbarism which forced
them to fence their states behind a ring-wall on a rocky citadel also
led them to enclose their souls within a wall of reserve. The West was
not yet awake; it was against the East that they had to fight,
spiritually as well as bodily. Eastern “barbarism,” which was really
civilisation, ancient and splendid, visibly exhibited all the lusts of
the flesh, all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. Notably the
Ionian philosophers, who saw the East close at hand, were the first to
preach “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much!” And the Athenians, who had
personally inflicted the Nemesis that attends pride, were the first to
practise it.
But they seem to have had some congenital craving for perfection. Some
have attributed it to their perfect physical health. Aristophanes, as we
have just seen, laughs scornfully at disease and deformity. Euripides is
arraigned for getting dramatic pathos out of rags and tatters. When
Pericles delivers his oration over the dead soldiers he never once
alludes to an individual’s prowess or fate. When Pheidias designs his
long frieze, though there is infinite variety in the poses of his
people, though every fold of drapery, every limb of man and beast is
separately arranged with an eye to its own value in the design, the
faces are not allowed to express any transient or personal emotion. A
monster, such as a Centaur, or a Giant, or a Barbarian, may be allowed a
wrinkled forehead to express age, or a twisted mouth to express pain or
emotion, but a Greek must be perfect and serene.
This principle may be studied in detail upon the tombstones of Athens.
You may often get much illumination about the character of people from
their attitude in presence of death. The Turk plants cypresses in his
cemeteries, carves a turban on a shaft over his graves, and then leaves
the dead to keep their own graveyards tidy. The Frenchman adorns his
tombs with conventional wreaths of tin flowers. The Englishman
advertises the virtues of the wealthy deceased and the emotions of the
survivors in Biblical texts or rather insincere epitaphs. The Italian,
when he can afford it, erects florid monuments in Carrara marble. The
nomad barbarian burns his dead, the jungle savage leaves the corpse in a
tree for sepulture by the birds of heaven. The Egyptian preserves the
body in balms and spices for the great awakening. The Roman generally
used the pyre and stored the ashes methodically in tombs and catacombs.
We have seen that a divergence in funeral practice probably marks the
difference between the two races which went to make up the population of
ancient Greece. The aboriginal Southerners seem to have preserved their
dead in shaft-graves and dome-graves, when their means allowed,
sometimes only in earthenware jars. Rock-tombs of a similar character
are found in great numbers all over Asia Minor, especially in Phrygia
and Lycia. Sometimes in more civilised times they are replaced by large
sarcophagi of stone, wood, or earthenware. Such is the Harpy Tomb at
Xanthus, and the sculptures upon
[Illustration: PLATE LVIII. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE. [TOMBSTONE RELIEF]
_Alinari_]
it indicate the religious beliefs which accompany that form of
burial--the winged angels which carry the soul away after death, whether
called Fates or Harpies. Then the soul itself is often represented as a
tiny winged figure, sometimes issuing from the mouth of the dead. It was
thus that the Greek word Psyche came to mean both “soul” and
“butterfly.” Tombs of this architectural character were obviously
intended as houses for the dead, and, indeed, their design often follows
the character of the houses occupied by the living. In accordance with
the same idea, objects dear to the living are buried with the dead, such
as the weapons and accoutrements of a warrior, the jewels and personal
belongings of a woman, the toys of a child. Sometimes economical motives
lead to a mere conventional copying of the real object, and many of the
axes and swords found in the old tombs are far too weak ever to have
been made for practical use. Blood and libations were sometimes poured
into the graves, and vessels containing oil, or even food and drink,
were often placed in the tomb, and when money came into use as much of
that as could conveniently be spared. That too was conventionalised into
the penny due to Charon, who ferried souls across the Styx. The “sop to
Cerberus” was also a mythological explanation of the food buried with
the body.
But Charon and Cerberus seem to belong to a different series of ideas
about the dead. The Northerners, such as the Achæans of Homer, burned
their dead upon the funeral pyre, collecting their ashes in jars and
urns, and in the case of a great man raising a barrow over the spot.
They believed that the soul of the happy warrior departed to a Valhalla
or Paradise in the Isles of the Blessed, where he lived thenceforth as
he had lived on earth at his best, in continual feasting and athletic
exercise. The soul could not attain to this blessed relief until it had
received the rites of burial, and to deny burial was an awful crime
against Greek morality. After a battle one side generally had to
acknowledge its defeat by asking for a truce in order that it might bury
its dead.
Historical Athens practised both burial and cremation, after a period
of lying in state. Burial would seem to have been the older custom, for
it was assumed that the bones of Theseus must still be in existence
somewhere, until they were eventually discovered in the island of
Scyros. The Blessed Isles and the Heroic Valhalla doubtless survived as
a literary tradition, but the “Hades” of ordinary Greek religion was the
“grisly home” of Pluto and Persephone, a place of darkness and
lamentation. We have seen that Pythagoras taught the immortality of the
soul; but then, as now, it was not philosophy which created the popular
ideas about death. The belief in immortality which undoubtedly prevailed
generally in Greece seems to have been connected rather with the oldest
religion of agricultural days. Such was the mystical hope given to the
initiated in the secret nocturnal rites of Eleusis. It was intimately
connected with the agricultural deities, Demeter the Earth Mother,
Persephone the Maiden, her daughter, Triptolemus, the boy-god, and
Eubouleus, the divine swineherd. The beautiful mythological
representation of the doctrine in the story of Persephone, who was
carried off by Hades to be his bride in the underworld while she was
gathering flowers, and then at her mother’s powerful intercession was
granted as a compromise the liberty to return to earth for half the
year, is visibly a parable of summer and winter. It seems that current
Greek theology so far as it related to Death was founded on naturalistic
observation of the revival of the seasons and the rebirth of the crops.
This theology was strongest across the water in Asia Minor, in its
connection with the worship of Adonis.
Nevertheless, belief in immortality was not in Greece any more than it
is with us strong enough to assuage the sting of Death or to enable the
Greeks to dispense with the formalities of funerals. The Athenians
practised the usual rites of mourning with professional musicians and
dirge-singers, black clothes, women tearing their hair and beating their
breasts. All this was and is inevitable, but the public sense of Greece
continually demanded decency and reserve in the presence of
[Illustration: PLATE LIX. THE MOURNING ATHENA
_English Photo Co., Athens_]
Death. Solon’s old laws attempt to limit funeral displays. The Spartan
system was very rigorous on the point, and there the women were held in
such discipline that the death of a warrior on the field of battle was
sometimes even actually received with patriotic rejoicing by the women
of his family.
Our archæological museums are much indebted to the practice of burying
with the deceased the objects of his use in life. An athlete would have
the strigil, with which he scraped off the dust and oil of the arena,
buried in his tomb; a lady would have her mirror, in its chiselled
copper case, or her “pyxis” (jewel-box).[72] Most of the little
terra-cotta figures in our museums come from the tombs. Some of them
were children’s toys: often the figures seem to have been deliberately
broken before interment. Among the most beautiful of such relics of the
tomb are the funeral oil-jars, or lecythi, of the fifth and early fourth
centuries. They were specially painted for the purpose, as we can
perceive by their choice of funereal subjects, and they are of a
distinct type of pottery. The usual vase technique of the best period
has its background painted with a rich black glaze and its figures left
plain in the natural colour of the terra-cotta.[73] But these funeral
lecythi have the body of the vase covered with a slip of white or cream
colour, and upon it the figures and scenes are painted in polychrome. In
this way we have surviving very rare and beautiful effects of
colour-drawing in this the noblest period of Greek art. The work of the
great artists Polygnotus and Zeuxis has, of course, perished utterly,
and we must rely on these little oil-jars, probably the work of quite
obscure craftsmen, for our nearest representation of it.[74] Here again
we are amazed at the effect produced by simple means. Even where the
colours have faded we trace a delicacy and precision of line in the
drawing which is simply astonishing. No artists have ever done so much
with a single stroke of the brush. It implies a wonderful confidence and
mastery of technique.
Our museums also contain a great number of the marble slabs, decorated
in high relief, which formed the ordinary tombstone of the Athenians
buried in the cemetery of Cerameikos, outside the Dipylon Gate at
Athens. A few of them are still _in situ_, and present a remarkable
picture as they stand. One of the most famous is the tomb of Hegeso, in
the Athenian Museum. But there are a great many more, less known but
equally beautiful, both there and elsewhere. None of them are, so far as
we know, the work of named artists. The great works constructed under
Pericles and Pheidias on the Acropolis must have collected dozens of
competent minor craftsmen to Athens, and given them a noble training in
their craft. Some show the round contours and delicate drapery of the
Pheidian style, some the heavy muscularity of Polycleitus, and some show
the small, finely poised heads of the school of Lysippus.
The subjects represented on the lecythi generally depict some part of
the funeral rites, and the sepulchral slabs generally exhibit a scene of
departure, which is always treated with extraordinary dignity and
reserve. Not a lamentation is uttered, not a tear falls. Perhaps the
gaze of our athlete’s father is more searching and intense than if it
were a mere earthly separation from his stalwart son. There is, I think,
no portraiture even here. If it is a woman who has gone to her long
home, she is sometimes shown putting away her jewels for the journey. On
one archaic relief now at Rome, a mother, with a smile upon her face, is
placing her child on the knees of Persephone. A very beautiful one, also
at Rome, bears the mythological scene of the parting between those types
of married love and constancy, Orpheus and Eurydice. The head of Orpheus
is bent a little, but Eurydice is smiling farewell, and the hand of
Hermes, the Escort of Souls, is very light upon her wrist.[75] Most
typical of all, perhaps, is the Mourning Athena,[76] which was probably
a public memorial of soldiers fallen in the wars, since it was found
built into a wall on the
[Illustration: FIG. 1
FIG. 2
PLATE LX. TWO TOMBSTONE RELIEFS, FROM THE CERAMEIKOS, ATHENS]
Acropolis. It is strangely simple and restrained. The goddess, clad in
her helmet, leans upon her spear, with head bent down, to read the names
once painted on a short pillar which is part of the relief. The severe
lines of her drapery indicate the austerity of the unknown artist’s
treatment of his patriotic theme. This is the speech of Pericles in
stone. I have chosen also two less-known monuments from the Athenian
Museum to show the Athenian view of death more clearly. The dead hero
does not mourn, but his humbler friends, like the Giants and Barbarians
of the friezes, may express their emotion visibly and indecently. Young
men nearly always have their hounds to accompany them upon their
tombstones. They are big animals, perhaps of the famed Molossian breed,
akin to our pointers. Their descendants may be seen (and felt, unless
the traveller knows the local artifice of sitting down and pretending
not to be afraid) on any upland farm in Greece to-day. Girls are often
accompanied by small pet dogs, curly and excitable. The big hounds
clearly show dejection in every line.[77] Commentators tell us that the
cat (_Felis domesticus_) was not kept as a pet in Greece, but that when
the ancient writers talk of the “wavy-tail” who catches mice they mean
the weasel. Would any one but a commentator keep a weasel for a pet? And
what is that headless animal upon the shelf, if not the primeval cat
imported from Egypt? The young man in this relief[78] is letting his
doves go free. And, as you see, the little slave-boys may look sorry
when their masters go. They are not Greeks; they may express human
emotions.
V
THE FOURTH CENTURY
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Throned on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.
SHELLEY.
ATHENS
The pre-eminence of Thucydides among Greek historians has, I venture to
think, somewhat distorted the true perspective of Greek history. The
absorbing interest with which we follow his account of the Peloponnesian
War to its close in the downfall of Athens leads us to regard all the
rest of Greek history with that slackening of interest with which we
commonly regard a sequel. The truth is that Athens rose from her knees
after an interval, much chastened, considerably exhausted, certainly
poorer, but with as much intellectual vigour and power of artistic
creation as before. The Athens that we know intimately is the Athens of
the Restoration. Really we know almost nothing of fifth-century Athens
but her external politics and the remains of her monuments. The restored
Athens is the city of Plato, of Demosthenes, and of Praxiteles. She has
still to be the mother of philosophy, ethics, oratory, political
science, comedy of manners, logic, grammar, and the essay and the
dialogue as forms of literature. This is the only Athens which we know
at all intimately from within.
[Illustration:
_Anderson._
Fig. 1.--Apollo Sauroctonos.
_Mansell & Co._
Fig. 2.--The Cnidian Aphrodite.
Plate 61.]