The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  God hath undone me, and I cannot lift

  One hand, one hand, to save my child from death.

  She becomes delirious, and swoons; soldiers carry her away. Menelaus appears, and bids his soldiers bring Helen to him. He has sworn that he will kill her, and Hecuba is comforted at the thought that punishment is at last to find Helen.

  I bless thee, Menelaus, I bless thee,

  If thou wilt slay her! Only fear to see

  Her visage, lest she snare thee and thou fall!

  Helen enters, untouched and unafraid, proud in the consciousness of her beauty.

  Hecuba. And comest thou now

  Forth, and hast decked thy bosom and thy brow,

  And breathest with thy lord the same blue air,

  Thou evil heart? Low, low, with ravaged hair,

  Rent raiment, and flesh shuddering, and within,

  Oh, shame at last, not glory for thy sin. . . .

  Be true, O King; let Hellas bear the crown

  Of justice. Slay this woman. . . .

  Menelaus. Peace, aged woman, peace. . . . (To the soldiers)

  Have some chambered galley set for her,

  Where she may sail the seas. . . .

  Hecuba. A lover once, will always love again.

  As Helen and Menelaus leave, Talthybius returns, bearing the dead body of Astyanax.

  Talth. Andromache . . . hath charmed these tears into mine eyes,

  Weeping her fatherland, as o’er the wave.

  She gazed, speaking words to Hector’s grave.

  Howbeit, she prayed us that due rites be done

  For burial of this babe. . . . And in thine hands

  She bade me lay him, to be swathed in bands

  Of death and garments . . . (Hecuba takes the body.)

  Hecuba. Ah, what a death hath found thee, little one! . . .

  Ye tender arms, the same dear mold have ye

  As his. . . . And dear proud lips, so full of hope,

  And closed forever! What false words ye said

  At daybreak, when ye crept into my bed,

  Called me kind names, and promised, “Grandmother,

  When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair

  And lead out all the captains to ride by

  Thy tomb.” Why didst thou cheat me so? ’Tis I,

  Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed

  Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead.

  Dear God! the pattering welcomes of thy feet,

  The nursing in my lap; and oh, the sweet

  Falling asleep together! All is gone.

  How should a poet carve the funeral stone

  To tell thy story true? “There lieth here

  A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear

  Slew him.” Aye, Greece will bless the tale it tells! . . .

  Oh, vain is man,

  Who glorieth in his joy and hath no fears, While to and fro the chances of the years

  Dance like an idiot in the wind! . . . (She wraps the child in the burial garments.)

  Glory of Phrygian raiment, which my thought

  Kept for thy bridal day with some far-sought

  Queen of the East, folds thee for evermore . . .93

  In the Electra the ancient theme is far advanced. Agamemnon is dead, Orestes is in Phocis, and Electra has been married off by her mother to a peasant whose simple fidelity, and awe of her royal descent, survive her brooding negligence of him. To her, wondering will Orestes never find her, Orestes comes, bidden by Apollo himself (Euripides drives this point home) to avenge Agamemnon’s death. Electra stirs him on; if he will not kill the murderers she will. The lad finds Aegisthus and slays him, and then turns upon his mother. Clytaemnestra is here a subdued and aging woman, gray-haired and frail, haunted by the memory of her crimes, at once fearing and loving the children who hate her; asking, but not begging, for mercy; and half reconciled to the penalty of her sins. When the killing is over Orestes is overcome with horror.

  Sister, touch her again,

  Oh, veil the body of her,

  Shed on her raiment fair,

  And close that death-red stain.—

  Mother! And didst thou bear,

  Bear in thy bitter pain,

  To life, thy murderer?94

  The final act of the drama, in Euripides, is called Iphigenia in Tauris—i.e., Iphigenia among the Tauri. Artemis, it now appears, substituted a deer for Agamemnon’s daughter on the pyre at Aulis, snatched the girl from the flames, and made her a priestess at the shrine of Artemis among the half-savage Tauri of the Crimea. The Tauri make it a rule to sacrifice to the goddess any stranger who sets foot unasked upon their shores; and Iphigenia is the unhappy, brooding ministrant who consecrates the victims. Eighteen years of separation from Greece and those she loved have dulled her mind with grief. Meanwhile the oracle of Apollo has promised Orestes peace if he will capture from the Tauri the sacred image of Artemis, and bring it to Attica. Orestes and Pylades set sail, and at last reach the land of the Tauri, who gladly accept them as gifts of the sea for Artemis, and hurry them off to be slain at her altar. Orestes, exhausted, falls in an epileptic fit at Iphigenia’s feet; and though she does not recognize him, she is overwhelmed with pity as she sees the two comrades, in the fairest years of youth, faced with death.

  Iphig. To none is given

  To know the coming nor the end of woe;

  So dark is God, and to great darkness go

  His paths, by blind chance mazed from our ken.

  Whence are ye come, O most unhappy men? . . .

  What mother then was yours, O strangers, say,

  And father? And your sister, if you have

  A sister: both at once, so young and brave To leave her brotherless. . . .

  Orestes. Would that my sister’s hand could close mine eyes!

  Iphig. Alas, she dwelleth under distant skies,

  Unhappy one, and vain is all thy prayer.

  Yet, oh, thou art from Argos; all of care

  That can be I will give, and fail thee not.

  Rich raiment to thy burial shall be brought,

  And oil to cool thy pyre in golden floods,

  And sweet that from a thousand mountain buds

  The murmuring bee hath garnered, I will throw

  To die with thee in fragrance.

  She promises to save them if they will carry back to Argos the message which she bids them store in their memories.

  Iphig. Say, “To Orestes, Agamemnon’s son,

  She that was slain in Aulis, dead to Greece

  Yet quick, Iphigenia, sendeth peace.”

  Orestes. Iphigenia! Where? Back from the dead?

  Iphig. ’Tis I. But speak not, lest thou break my thread.

  “Take me to Argos, brother, ere I die.”

  Orestes wishes to clasp her in his arms, but the attendants forbid it; no man may touch the priestess of Artemis. He declares himself Orestes, but she cannot believe him. He convinces her by recalling the tales Electra told them.

  Iphig. Is this the babe I knew,

  The little babe, light-lifted like a bird? . . .

  O Argos land, O hearth and holy flame

  That old Cyclopes lit,

  I bless ye that he lives, that he is grown,

  A light and strength, my brother and mine own;

  I bless your name for it.95

  They offer to rescue her, and in turn she helps them to capture the image of Artemis. By her subtle ruse they reach their ship safely, and carry the statue to Brauron; there Iphigenia becomes a priestess, and there, after her death, she is worshiped as a deity. Orestes is released from the Furies, and knows some years of peace. The thirst of the gods is sated, and the drama of The Children of Tantalus is complete.

  2. The Dramatist

  We must agree with Aristotle that these plays, from the viewpoint of dramatic technique, fall short of the standards set by Aeschylus and Sophocles.96 The Medea, the Hippolytus, and The Bacchae are well planned, but even the
y cannot compare with the structural integrity of the Oresteia, or the complex unity of Oedipus the King. Instead of plunging at once into the action, and explaining its antecedents gradually and naturally in the course of the story, Euripides employs the artificial expedient of a pedagogical prologue, and, worse still, puts it sometimes into the mouth of a god. Instead of showing us the action directly, which is the function of drama, he too often introduces a messenger to describe the action, even when no violence is involved. Instead of making the chorus a part of the action he transforms it into a philosophical aside, or uses it to interrupt the development with lyrics always beautiful, but often irrelevant. Instead of presenting ideas through action, he sometimes displaces action with ideas, and turns the stage into a school for speculation, rhetoric, and argument. Too often his plots depend upon coincidences and “recognition”—though these are well arranged and dramatically presented. Most of the plays (like a few by his predecessors) end with intervention by the deus ex machina, the god from the crane—a device that can be forgiven only on the assumption that for Euripides the real play ended before this theophany, and the god was let down to provide the orthodox with a virtuous conclusion to what would otherwise have been a scandalous performance.97 With such prologues and epilogues the great humanist won the privilege of presenting his heresies on the stage.

  The material, like the form, is a medley of genius and artifice. Euripides is above all sensitive, as every poet must be; he feels the problems of mankind intensely, and expresses them with passion; he is the most tragic and the most human of all dramatists. But his feeling is too frequently sentimentality; his “droppings of warm tears”98 are too easily released; he loses no chance to show a mother parting from her children, and wrings all possible pathos out of every situation. These scenes are always moving, and sometimes are described with a power unequaled in tragedy before or since; but they descend occasionally to melodrama, and a surfeit of violence and horror, as at the close of the Medea. Euripides is the Byron and Shelley and Hugo of Greece, a Romantic Movement in himself.

  He easily surpasses his rivals in the delineation of character. Psychological analysis replaces with him, even more than with Sophocles, the operation of destiny; he is never weary of investigating the morals and motives of human conduct. He studies a great variety of men, from Electra’s peasant husband to the kings of Greece and Troy; no other dramatist has drawn so many types of women, or drawn them with such sympathy; every shade of vice and virtue interests him, and is realistically portrayed. Aeschylus and Sophocles were too absorbed in the universal and eternal to see the temporal and the particular clearly; they created profound types, but Euripides creates living individuals; neither of the older men, for example, realized Electra so vividly. In these plays the drama of the conflict with fate yields more and more to the drama of situation and character, and the way is prepared by which, in the following centuries, the Greek stage will be captured by the comedy of manners under Philemon and Menander.

  3. The Philosopher

  But it would be foolish to judge Euripides chiefly as a playwright; his ruling interest is not dramatic technique but philosophical inquiry and political reform. He is the son of the Sophists, the poet of the Enlightenment, the representative of the radical younger generation that laughed at the old myths, flirted with socialism, and called for a new social order in which there should be less exploitation of man by man, of women by men, and of all by the state. It is for these rebel souls that Euripides writes; for them he adds his skeptical innuendoes, and inserts a thousand heresies between the lines of supposedly religious plays. He covers his tracks with pious passages and patriotic odes; he presents a sacred myth so literally that its absurdity is manifest and yet his orthodoxy cannot be impeached; he gives the body of his plays over to doubt, but surrenders the first and last words to the gods. His subtlety and brilliance, like those of the French Encyclopedists, is due in some part to the compulsion laid upon him to speak his mind while saving his skin.

  His theme is that of Lucretius—

  Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

  —so great are the evils to which religion has led men: oracles that breed violence upon violence, myths that exalt immorality with divine example, and shed supernatural sanctions upon dishonesty, adultery, theft, human sacrifice, and war. He describes a soothsayer as “a man who speaks few truths but many lies”;99 he calls it “sheer folly” to chart the future from the entrails of birds;100 he denounces the whole apparatus of oracles and divination.101 Above all he resents the immoral implications of the legends:

  Men shall know there is no God, no light

  In heaven, if wrong to the end shall conquer right. . . .

  Say not there be adulterers in heaven,

  Nor prisoner gods and gaolers: long ago

  My heart hath named it vile, and shall not alter. . . .

  These tales be false, false as those feastings wild

  Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child.

  This land of murderers to its gods hath given

  Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven. . . .

  All these

  Are dead unhappy tales of minstrelsy.102

  Sometimes such passages are softened with hymns to Dionysus, or psalms of pantheistic piety; but occasionally a character extends the Euripidean doubt to all the gods:

  Doth some one say that there be gods above?

  There are not, no, there are not. Let no fool,

  Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.

  Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words

  No undue credence; for I say that kings

  Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,

  And doing thus are happier than those

  Who live calm pious lives day after day.103

  He begins his lost Melanippe with a startling couplet—

  O Zeus, if there be a Zeus,

  For I know of him only by report—

  whereupon the audience, we are told, rose to its feet in protest. And he concludes:

  The gods, too, whom mortals deem so wise,

  Are nothing clearer than some winged dream;

  And all their ways, like man’s ways, but a stream

  Of turmoil. He who cares to suffer least,

  Not blind as fools are blinded by a priest,

  Goes straight. . . to what death, those who know him know.104

  The fortunes of men, he thinks, are the result of natural causes, or of aimless chance; they are not the work of intelligent supernatural beings.105 He suggests rational explanations of supposed miracles; Alcestis, for example, did not really die, but was sent off to burial while still alive; Heracles caught up with her before she had time to die.106 He does not clearly tell us what his belief is, perhaps because he feels that the evidence does not lend itself to clear belief; but his most characteristic expressions are those of the vague pantheism that was now replacing polytheism among the educated Greeks.

  Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high Throne

  Above the World, whoe’er thou art, unknown

  And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be,

  Or Reason of our Reason; God to thee

  I lift my praise, seeing the silent road

  That bringeth justice ere the end be trod

  To all that breathes and dies.107

  Social justice is the minor theme of his songs; like all sympathetic spirits he longs for a time when the strong will be more chivalrous to the weak, and there will be an end to misery and strife.108 Even in the midst of war, with all its compulsion to a patriotic belligerency, he presents the woes and horrors of war with unsparing realism.

  How are ye blind,

  Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast

  Temples to desolation, and lay waste

  Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie

  The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die.109

  He gnaws his heart out at the sight of Athenians fighting Spartan
s for half a century, each enslaving the other, and both killing off their best; and he indites in a late play a touching apostrophe to peace:

  O Peace, thou givest plenty as from a deep spring; there is no beauty like unto thine; no, not even among the blessed gods. My heart yearneth within me, for thou tarriest; I grow old and thou returnest not. Shall weariness overcome mine eyes before they see thy bloom and thy comeliness? When the lovely songs of the dancers are heard again, and the thronging feet of them that wear garlands, shall grey hairs and sorrow have destroyed me utterly? Return, thou holy one, to our city; abide not far from us, thou that quencheth wrath. Strife and bitterness shall depart if thou art with us; madness and the edge of the sword shall flee from our doors.109a

  Almost alone among the great writers of his time he dares to attack slavery; during the Peloponnesian War it became obvious that most slaves were such not by nature but by the accidents of life. He does not recognize any natural aristocracy; environment rather than heredity makes the man. The slaves in his dramas play important parts, and often speak his finest lines. With the imaginative sympathy of a poet he considers women. He knows the faults of the sex, and exposes them so realistically that Aristophanes was able to make him out a misogynist; but he did more than any other playwright of antiquity to present the case for women, and to support the dawning movement for their emancipation Some of his plays are almost modern, post-Ibsen studies in the problems of sex, even of sexual perversion.110 He describes men with realism, but women with gallantry; the terrible Medea gets more compassion from him than he accords to the heroic but unfaithful Jason. He is the first dramatist to make a play turn upon love; his famous ode to Eros in the lost Andromeda was mouthed by thousands of young Greeks:

  O Love, our Lord, of gods and men the king,

  Either teach not how beauteous beauty is,

  Or help poor lovers, whom like clay thou moldest,