The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

  Prometheus, helpless and faced by irresistible force, is unconquered. There is no yielding in him, even to pronounce the one word of submission which will set him free; no repentance in dust and ashes before almighty power. To the herald of the gods who bids him yield to Zeus’ commands, he answers:

  There is no torture and no cunning trick,

  There is no force, which can compel my speech,

  Until Zeus wills to loose these deadly bonds.

  So let him hurl his blazing thunderbolt,

  And with the white wings of the snow,

  With lightning and with earthquake,

  Confound the reeling world.

  None of all this will bend my will.

  HERALD: Submit, you fool. Submit. In agony learn wisdom.

  PROMETHEUS: Seek to persuade the sea wave not to break.

  You will persuade me no more easily.

  With his last words as the universe crashes upon him, he asserts the justice of his cause: “Behold me, I am wronged”—greater than the universe which crushes him, said Pascal. In this way Æschylus sees mankind, meeting disaster grandly, forever undefeated. “Take heart. Suffering, when it climbs highest, lasts but a little time”—that line from a lost play gives in brief his spirit as it gives the spirit of his time.

  He was a pioneer who hews his way through by the magnificence of sheer strength and does not stay to level and finish. There is no smooth perfection of form in him such as ever gives a hint that the summit has been reached and just beyond lies decadence. He could have heaved the mighty stones of the Mycenæan gate; he could not have polished the lovely beauty of the Praxiteles Hermes. Aristophanes, keenest of critics and true lover of Æschylus even when caricaturing him, describes his adjectives, those touchstones of a poet, as “new, torrent-swept timbers, blown loose by a giant at war,” and the words recall that storm of “high-engendered battles,” of “sulphurous and thought-executing fires, vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts” that beat upon Lear’s head. A kind of splendid carelessness goes with surpassing power. The labor of the file was not for Æschylus as it was not for Shakespeare. These are not to be pictured pacing the floor through nights of anguish, searching for le mot unique.

  There is a kinship between the two. Shakespeare also had seen men achieve and suffer on a plane above the level of mere human life and had been moved by the high hope and courage of an age when heroes like those of Marathon and Salamis walked the earth. The sense of the wonder of human life, its beauty and terror and pain, and the power in men to do and to hear, is in Æschylus and in Shakespeare as in no other writer.

  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

  And love and man’s unconquerable mind.

  These words from a nineteenth-century poet are as characteristic of both Shakespeare and Æschylus as anything either of them ever wrote.

  One of Shakespeare’s plays, indeed, Macbeth, is completely like Æschylus in conception, more so by far than any of Sophocles’ or Euripides’ plays. The atmosphere of Macbeth’s castle and Agamemnon’s palace is the same. It is always night there; a heavy murk is in the air; death drifts through the doorways. It is not a mere case of dark deeds done in both. Œdipus’ palace is as deeply stained with blood; horror is there, and the slow footsteps of fate, clearly heard, ever inexorably drawing nearer to the doom that must be. But in the Oresteia and Macbeth the horror consists of the fact that those footsteps are not clearly heard; they are muffled; the ear listens and is not sure; what moves on is shrouded in blackness; the unknown is there and the mystery of evil.

  It is impossible to show by quotations the similarity in the general impression the two tragedies make, but the way each is continually pointing to an undefined terror to come can be illustrated by many passages. Again and again in both plays the note of foreboding is struck. Some dreadful deed is impending—what, none may say, but any moment we may be face to face with it.

  MACBETH

  ACT I, SC. 3

  MACBETH: Why do I yield to that suggestion

  Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,

  And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

  Against the use of nature? Present fears

  Are less than horrible imaginings.

  ACT I, SC. 4

  MACBETH: Stars, hide your fires!

  Let not light see my black and deep desires;

  The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be

  Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

  LADY MACBETH: Come, thick night,

  And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

  That my keen knife sees not the wound it makes,

  Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

  To cry: “Hold, hold!”—

  ACT III, SC. 4

  MACBETH: Avaunt! and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!

  Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold!

  Thou hast no speculation in those eyes

  Which thou dost glare with…Hence, horrible shadow!

  Unreal mockery, hence!

  AGAMEMNON

  CHORUS: But dark fear now

  Shows me dim

  Dreadful forms

  Hid in night.

  Men who shed the blood of men,

  Their ways are not unseen of God.

  Black the spirits that avenge…

  Why for me so steadfastly

  Hovers still this terror dark

  At the portals of my heart prophetic…

  Spirit of vengeance, your music is sung to no lyre.

  Heart that throbs,

  Breast that swells,

  Tides of pain that shake the spirit,

  Are you but fools?

  Nay, you presage what shall be…

  CASSANDRA: Where have you brought me—

  and to what a house!

  CHORUS: The house of Atreus’ sons—

  CASSANDRA: No—but a house God hates.

  Murders and strangling deaths—

  Kin…striking down kin. Oh, they kill men here.

  House that knows evil and evil—the floor drips red.

  O God, O God. What would they bring to pass?

  Is there a woe that this house knows not?

  Oh, dark deed, beyond cure, beyond hope.

  —And help stands far away.

  CASSANDRA: See them—those yonder by the wall—there, there!

  So young—like forms that hover in a dream.

  Children they seem, murdered by those they loved.

  And in their hands is flesh—It is their own!

  And inward parts—O load most horrible!

  I see them…

  Vengeance, I swear, from these is shaping still.

  The similarity in the effect produced by these quotations is unmistakable, and it could be illustrated at far greater length. It is not a chance resemblance that through one drama come and go the weird sisters and through the other the three avenging furies of crime. Neither band could have found a place in Œdipus’ palace.

  Another notable resemblance: both poets can laugh. That can be said of no other tragedian. The poets, indeed, of whatsoever description, are not given to laughter; they are a serious company. Æschylus and Shakespeare alone stand for the soundness of Socrates’ opinion, that it is within the province of the same writer to compose both tragedy and comedy. Lesser men would feel the intrusion of the comic into the tragic a fault against good taste, as witness all the critics who have suffered over the porter in Macbeth. But the great two, one surmises, were not concerned with good taste. They did what they pleased. A moment of tragic suspense, hardly to be equalled, is when the doors of Agamemnon’s palace close upon the son who has come to kill his mother and has gained admission to her by pretending to be the bearer of the news of his own death. As he passes into the palace and the mind is full of the awful deed to be done, an old woman enters whom the chorus address as Orestes’ nurse. She is crying:

  Oh, I’m a wretched woman. I’ve known troubles eno
ugh but never any like this. Oh, Orestes, my darling! Oh, dear, he was the trouble of my life. His mother gave him to me to nurse, and the shrill screams at night that routed me out of bed, and all the useless bother of him. I had to put up with it. A child hasn’t any sense, any more than a dumb beast. You’ve got to follow its whims. A baby can’t tell you when it’s hungry or thirsty or going to wet its clothes. And a child’s stomach can do it all alone—and sometimes I knew what was coming, but often I didn’t, and then all the clothes had to be washed. I wasn’t only nurse, I was washerwoman too—

  And so exits the forerunner of Juliet’s nurse and the play moves on to the murder of the mother by her son.

  Shakespeare, it may be said, was above all a man of the theatre as Æschylus, it is the current opinion, was not. He is generally held to be a philosophic poet who strayed by some mischance upon the stage. So far is this from being true that he was first and foremost the born dramatist, a man who saw life so dramatically that to express himself he had to invent the drama. For that is what he did. Until he came there was only a chorus with a leader. He added a second actor, thus contriving the action of character upon character which is the essence of the drama. He was at least as much a man of the theatre as Shakespeare, not only the founder of it, but an actor and a practical producer as well. He designed the dress all Greek actors wore; he developed stage scenery and stage machinery; he laid down the lines for the Attic theatre.

  Small wonder that with all this on his shoulders his technique was often faulty. No doubt he could write bad lines and bad scenes; he was a careless workman, negligent of detail. Sometimes he ignored legitimate minor interests; sometimes he dragged them out to a wearisome length, as in the Libation-Bearers, where Orestes’ recognition by Electra is given briefly and tamely, while the discovery of the lock of hair on the tomb holds the stage for a hundred and fifty long lines. But he always realized the essential drama of the story he was dramatizing, and he always went straight to it. There he was not careless. The great central theme of each play he presented with consummate theatrical skill as well as dramatic power. The plays of his two great successors are often better theatre than his. They were more skillful craftsmen and had a far more developed technique, but there are scenes in his plays of a dramatic intensity which is beyond anything in Sophocles or Euripides. He not only invented the drama, he raised it to a height which has only once been equalled, and in the glory of that twofold achievement he stands alone.

  One quotation to support the point must suffice, for the reason that only a fairly long passage can show this special power of dramatic effect. In the Libation-Bearers Clytemnestra learns that Orestes is alive and has killed her lover. She knows then what is to come. She bids a slave:

  Swift! Bring me an axe that can slay. I will know now if I am to win or lose. I stand here on the height of misery.

  (ORESTES enters with PYLADES.)

  ORESTES: It is you I seek. The other has had his fill. You love him—you shall lie in the same grave.

  CLYTEMNESTRA: Stop—oh, my son. Look—my breast. Your heavy head dropped on it and you slept, oh, many a time, and your baby mouth where never a tooth was, sucked the milk, and so you grew—

  ORESTES: Oh, Pylades, what shall I do? My mother—Awe holds me. May I spare?

  PYLADES: Where then Apollo’s words and the dread compact? Make all men enemies but not the gods.

  ORESTES: Good counsel. I obey. You—follow me. I lead you where he lies to kill you there.

  CLYTEMNESTRA: It seems, my son, that you will kill your mother.

  ORESTES: Not I. You kill yourself.

  CLYTEMNESTRA: I am alive—I stand beside my grave. I hear the song of death. (They go out and the CHORUS sing that her fate is just.) Lift up your head, oh, house. The light! I see the light.

  (The palace doors roll back. ORESTES stands over two dead bodies.)

  ORESTES: I am blameless of the one. He died the death adulterers must die. But she who planned this thing of horror against her husband by whom she had borne beneath her girdle the burden of children—what think you of her? Snake or viper was she? Her very touch would rot a man.

  CHORUS: Woe—woe—Oh, fearful deeds!

  ORESTES: Did she do it or did she not? The proofs you know—the deed and the death. I am victor but vile, polluted.

  CHORUS: One trouble is here—another comes.

  ORESTES: Hear me and learn, for I know not how it will end. I am borne along by a runaway horse. My thoughts are out of bounds. Fear at my heart is leaping up. Before my reason goes—oh, you my friends, I say I killed my mother—yet not without reason—she was vile and she killed my father and God hated her—Look—Look—Women—there—there—Black—all black, and long hair twisting like snakes. Oh, let me go.

  CHORUS: What fancies trouble you, O son, faithful to your father? Do not fear.

  ORESTES: No fancies. My mother has sent them. They throng upon me and from their eyes blood drips, blood of hate. You see them not? I—I see them. They drive me. I cannot stay.

  (He rushes out.)

  CHORUS: Oh, where will this frenzy of evil end?

  And on this note the play closes. There is not in all literature any scene more dramatic.

  This inventor of a new form of art was by temperament an innovator who saw the old go down and joyfully helped make the new. He was the leader of thought for Greece at that moment when ideas the world had never known before were stirring, but he soon left his followers far out of sight. That piercing intellect of his saw through false and foolish notions which were to hold the world enslaved for many a century to come. He was the forerunner of Euripides, the arch-rationalist. Long before Euripides had brought his terrible indictment against war in the Trojan Women, Æschylus, Marathon-warrior though he was, had stripped away its glory. He had fought in the ranks and he knew what war was like as only the man can who has seen it at close quarters. It is curious that he perceived how money and war are bound up together:

  For all who sped

  forth from Greece,

  joining company,

  such grief as passes power to bear

  in each man’s home,

  plain to see.

  Many things

  there to pierce a heart through.

  Women know whom they sent forth,

  but instead of the living,

  back there comes to every house

  armor and dust from the burning.

  And war who trades

  men for gold,

  living for dead,

  and holds his scales

  where the spear-points meet and clash,

  to their beloved,

  back from Troy

  he sends them dust

  from the flame,

  heavy dust,

  dust wet with tears,

  filling urns in seemly wise,

  freight well-stowed, the dust of men.

  There are many passages like that in the Agamemnon.

  In one brief sentence he dismisses a central—perhaps the central—dogma of the Greeks, that great prosperity is viewed jealously by heaven and ends in misery: “I hold my own mind and think apart from other men. Not prosperity but sin brings misery.”

  It is usually held that the radical and the religious temperaments are antagonistic, but in point of fact the greatest religious leaders have been radicals. Æschylus was profoundly religious and a radical, and so he pushed aside the outside trappings of religion to search into the thing itself. The gods come and go bewilderingly in his plays for the reason that they are only shadows to him, whose inconsistencies and incongruities do not interest him. He is looking past them, beyond the many to the one, “the Father, Ancient of Days, who fashioned us with his own hand.” In Him, in God, he holds, rests the final and reconciling truth of this mystery that is human life, which is above all the mystery of undeserved suffering. The innocent suffer—how can that be and God be just? That is not only the central problem of tragedy, it is the great problem everywhere w
hen men begin to think, and everywhere at the same stage of thought they devise the same explanation, the curse, which, caused by sin in the first instance, works on of itself through the generations—and lifts from God the awful burden of injustice. The haunted house, the accursed race, literature is full of them. “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children.” Œdipus and Agamemnon must pay for their forefathers’ crimes. The stolen gold dooms the Volsungs. It is a kind of half-way house of explanation which satisfies for a time men’s awakening moral sense. It did not satisfy Æschylus.