The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

  He was a lonely thinker when he began to think “those thoughts that wander through eternity.” The Hebrew Ezekiel at about the same time perceived the injustice of this way of maintaining God’s justice and protested against the intolerable wrong of children’s suffering for their father’s sins, but his way out was to deny that they did. As ever, the Jew was content with a “Thus saith the Lord,” an attitude that leaves no place for tragedy in the world. He could accept the irrational and rest in it serenely; the actual fact before him did not confront him inescapably as it did the Greek.

  Æschylus was conscious of his own isolation when he went beneath the accepted explanation. “I alone do not believe thus,” he wrote. He took the problem at its worst, a wife driven to murder her husband, a son driven to kill his mother, and back of them an inheritance of black deed upon black deed. No easy way out that would “heal the hurt” of the world “slightly” would do for him. He saw the inexorable working out of the curse; he knew that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children; he believed in the justice of God. The truth to reconcile these truths he found in the experience of men, which the men of his generation must have realized far beyond others, that pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps of the ladder of knowledge:

  God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

  A great and lonely thinker. Only here and there in the very greatest have the depth and penetration of his thought been equalled, and his insight into the riddle of the world has not yet been superseded.

  XIII

  Sophocles

  Quintessence of the Greek

  Tragic pleasure, Schopenhauer said, is in the last analysis a matter of acceptance. The great philosopher of gloom was defining all tragedy in terms of one tragedian. His definition applies to Sophocles alone, but it compresses into a single word the spirit of the Sophoclean drama. Acceptance is not acquiescence or resignation. To endure because there is no other way out is an attitude that has no commerce with tragedy. Acceptance is the temper of mind that says, “Thy will be done” in the sense of “Lo, I come to do thy will.” It is active, not passive. Yet it is distinct from the spirit of the fighter, with which, indeed, it has nothing in common. It accepts life, seeing clearly that thus it must be and not otherwise. “We must endure our going hence even as our coming hither.” To strive to understand the irresistible movement of events is illusory; still more so to set ourselves against what we can affect as little as the planets in their orbits. Even so, we are not mere spectators. There is nobility in the world, goodness, gentleness. Men are helpless so far as their fate is concerned, but they can ally themselves with the good, and in suffering and dying, die and suffer nobly. “Ripeness is all.”

  This is the spirit of Sophocles, as unlike that of Æschylus as the spirit of a man on a foundering vessel who stands aside to let the women and children fill the life-boats and accepts death calmly as his portion, is unlike that of the Elizabethan gentlemen who sailed the little Revenge against the Spanish Armada in that most glorious fight of history. There were scarcely two decades between the two tragedians, but the tremendous stream of the life of Athens flowed so swiftly that by the time Sophocles had reached manhood the outlook on life which had made Marathon, Thermopylæ, Salamis, possible had passed away. Their very names have power to-day to move us to great memories. “Gods then were men and walked upon the earth.” Even to-day we can catch a glimpse of what it must have meant to watch the decline of that heroic endeavor and the failure of those high hopes. Athens had brought to birth freedom for the world, and then straightway turned to compass the destruction of her own glorious offspring. She grew powerful, imperial, tyrannical. She was for bringing all Greece beneath her yoke so that the rest of Greece turned upon her, and before Sophocles died, Sparta was at her gates and her sun was setting. As a very old man, when death the deliverer was close at hand, he wrote the well-known lines:

  The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy.

  …Death at the last, the deliverer.

  Not to be born is past all prizing best.

  Next best by far when one has seen the light

  Is to go thither swiftly whence he came.

  When youth and its light carelessness are past,

  What woes are not without, what griefs within,

  Envy and faction, strife and sudden death.

  And last of all, old age, despised,

  Infirm, unfriended.

  These words are not his creed. They were written when he was as full of grief as age, wretched in both. They are a record of his life: his youth in the bright day of Athens’ hope; his manhood when war and party strife were assailing the city; and his old age when the enemy of beauty and tolerance and fair living, of all that Athens had stood for, was conqueror. An old man summing up his life after all the taste for life and all the reason for it, too, were gone, not the great poet’s final judgment passed upon it. He gave that judgment in no uncertain words. Such times as those he lived in test the temper of men. To the weaker spirits they bring the despair of all things. The starry heavens are darkened and truth and justice are no more. But to men like Sophocles outside change does not bring the loss of inner steadfastness. The strong can keep the transient and the eternal separate. Sophocles despaired for the city he loved; to him himself evil had come and not good; but, as he saw life, outside circumstance was in the ultimate sense powerless; within himself, he held, no man is helpless. There is an inner citadel where we may rule our own spirits; live as free men; die without dishonoring humanity. A man can always live nobly or die nobly, Ajax says. Antigone goes to her death not uncomforted: death was her choice, and she dies, the chorus tell her, “mistress of her own fate.” Sophocles saw life hard but he could bear it hard. When Deianira is being told of her husband’s infidelity and her unwilling informant falters in his tale, she bids him, “Do not cheat me of the truth. Not to know the truth—that indeed would be my hurt.” The last words of the second Œdipus strike the dominant note of all his plays: “Cease lamentation, for verily these things stand fast.” He offers no refuge from things as they are except the refuge of suffering and death accepted in calm of mind, with strength unshaken.

  For the rest, in the outside world nothing is sure and most things are sad. Sophocles is melancholy, not with a black or bitter melancholy; Milton’s “pensive nun.” “Friendship is often false” “Faith does not abide” “Human life is a shadow”—such sayings are on every page:

  For never all days free from pain

  are given mortals by the son of Kronos.

  But joy and grief

  the wheels of time

  roll round to all,

  even as the circling pathways of the stars.

  Nothing abides for men, not bright-bespangled night,

  not doom, not death.

  Wealth comes and goes,

  and grief and gladness.

  The danger of this kind of moralizing is that it is easy and separated by a hair’s-breadth only from the commonplace. Sophocles often grows sententious: “For all men it is appointed to die” “Before he sees it no man can read the future or his fate” “The honor of life lies not in words but in deeds.” Not even the sweep of his mighty wing can lift this sort of thing into the realm of poetry, but here as in all else he is a Greek of the Greeks, lovers ever of antithesis and of a pithy saying. The wonder is not that Sophocles must draw the moral but that Æschylus signally does not. The point is only one of many that mark the fundamental difference between the two.

  Sophocles was conservative, the upholder of an established order. In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism. Sophocles puts on the same level “to walk with no regard for justice” and to have “no reverence for images of gods.” He took contentedly the orthodox view of the hierarchy of Olympus, but
a mind and a spirit such as his could not rest there. His beatific vision has nothing to do with the fancies and fables of a childish mythology. The word forever on his lips is law and when he searched the heavens seeking to understand, what he found was, “Laws of purity and reverence which no forgetfulness shall ever put to sleep, and God through them is great and grows not old.” He has substituted law for that proud word freedom which Æschylus so loved. Athens is to him the city which has “the perfect fear of Heaven in righteous laws.” He loves “order” and “fair harmony” and “sobriety.” Freedom, one suspects, looked to him a noisy, disorderly, intemperate business, not to be contained within decent limits. “And ever shall this law hold good,” sing the chorus in the Antigone, “nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.” That is the Greek speaking. All Greek words that mean literally boundless, indefinite, unlimited, have a bad connotation. The Greek liked what he could see clearly. The indefinite was unpleasant to him.

  In every way Sophocles is the embodiment of what we know as Greek, so much so that all definitions of the Greek spirit and Greek art are first of all definitions of his spirit and his art. He has imposed himself upon the world as the quintessential Greek, and the qualities pre-eminently his are ascribed to all the rest. He is direct, lucid, simple, reasonable. Excess—the word is not to be mentioned in his presence. Restraint is his as no other writer’s. Beauty to him does not inhere in color, or light and shade, or any method of adornment, but in structure, in line and proportion, or, from another point of view, it has its roots not in mystery but in clear truthfulness. This is the classic spirit as we have conceived it, and contrasted with Sophocles, Æschylus is a romanticist. How sober is Sophocles’ utterance even in despair. His most desperate sayings have an air of reasonableness:

  Only the base will long for length of life

  that never turns another way from evil.

  What joy is there in day that follows day,

  now swift, now slow, and death the only goal.

  I count as nothing him who feels within

  the glow of empty hopes.

  And how romantic is Æschylus’ despair:

  Black smoke I would be,

  nearing the clouds of God.

  All unseen, soaring aloft,

  as dust without wings I would perish.

  Oh, for a seat high in air,

  where the dripping clouds turn snow,

  a sheer, bare cliff, outranging sight,

  brooding alone, aloft.

  Down I would hurl myself, deep down,

  and only the eagles would see.

  The last words spoken by the two Antigones bring into clear relief the difference between the two men’s temperaments. Sophocles’ Antigone mourns:

  Unwept, unfriended, without marriage song,

  I pass on my last journey to my grave.

  Behold me, what I suffer and from whom,

  because I have upheld that which is high.

  Not so Æschylus’ heroine:

  No one shall ever thus decree for me.

  I am a woman and yet will I make

  a grave, a burying for him…With my own hands!

  Courage! For I will find the power to act.

  Speak not to stay me.

  Aristophanes in the Frogs gives a sketch of Sophocles which is in singular contrast to the mocking portraits of everybody else. The rest brawl like fishwives and fight like bad little boys, Æschylus and Euripides foremost. Sophocles stands aloof, gentle and courteous and ready to give place to others, “blameless in life and blameless, too, in death.” Not even Aristophanes could then jeer at Sophocles to an Athenian audience.* There is no other proof so convincing of the general level of intelligence and cultivated understanding in Athens as the fact that Sophocles was the popular playwright. But however great and sad the difference between the taste of the theatre public then and now, in one respect they are the same: general popularity always means warmth of human sympathy. In Sophocles’ plays one may catch a glimpse here and there of that tender and gentle spirit which so endeared him to the Athenians, and which is moving as only the tenderness and the gentleness of the very strong can be. The blinded Œdipus begging for his children:

  Let me touch them—Oh, could I but touch them with my hands, I would think that they were with me as when once I could behold them. Do I hear weeping? My beloved near me? Come to me, my children. Come here to my hands.

  That is a new note. There is nothing like it in Æschylus.

  Warmth of nature does not argue a passionate soul. Sophocles is warm, but underneath all he is passionless. A great tragedian and a supremely great poet, and yet a detached observer of life. Of another such it was said, “Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart,” and those who love Milton will always understand Sophocles best. The periods the two men lived in were as alike as the periods of Æschylus and Shakespeare were alike. Milton, too, passed through a time of exultant hope, when Cromwell put England on the map of Europe, and he, too, had to watch the failure of all he cared for and die at last, a very old man, seeing his country, to use his own words, “shamed and defiled.” He, too, learned to accept life and view it as a thing apart from himself “in calm of mind, all passion spent.” His world of lofty and solemn poetry is the world of the Antigone and the Œdipus at Colonus.

  The supreme excellence of both men is the same. Alas for us, that it is one which for Sophocles was lost in its complete perfection when classic Greek ceased to be a spoken language. A great thought can live forever, passed on from tongue to tongue, but a great style lives only in one language. Of all English poets Milton is least read by non-English-speaking people. Shakespeare may almost be called German as well as English, but Milton is English alone. Sophocles and Milton are the two incomparable stylists. They are always artists of the great style. They maintain a continuous level of loveliness of word, of phrase, of musical sweep and pause. Compared to them Æschylus and Shakespeare are faulty workmen, capable of supreme felicity of expression side by side with grotesque distortion. Milton’s poetry is typically English in its genius; it is poetry of magnificent opulence, of weighted phrase and gorgeous adjective, but there are times when he becomes so limpid, simple, clear, direct, that he is classic, and for one who cannot read Greek easily the surest way to catch a glimpse of that flawless perfection of utterance which is Sophocles, is to read Milton:

  Sabrina fair,

  Listen where thou art sitting

  Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave…

  While the still morn went out with sandals gray…

  That is the way Sophocles can write.

  And completely Sophoclean in substance and in style is:

  Come, come; no time for lamentations now,

  Nor much more cause. Samson hath quit himself

  Like Samson and heroicly hath finished

  A life heroic…

  Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail

  Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,

  Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair,

  And what may calm us in a death so noble.

  It is hard to believe that Sophocles did not write that.

  Milton was no dramatist. Thought was his great interest, not action. Sophocles turned naturally to the drama. He was a man of Periclean Athens where pre-eminently the play was the thing, but it is open to question whether his own bent would have led him that way. It is certain that he is a greater poet than dramatist. In dramatic power he stands below Æschylus. On the other hand, in good theatre, as distinguished from sheer drama, he is his superior, but that is only to say that he possessed in the highest degree the Athenian technical gift: in whatever direction he turned he was a consummate workman. If he wrote a play it would be done as well as it could be done from every point of view of theatrical craftsmanship. One imagines the young man watching a performance of Æschylus’ Libation-Bearers and noting every crude detail and the passing over of many a chance for a tense moment: t
hat lock of Orestes’ hair they will never have done talking about; the patent silliness of Electra’s divining that her brother has arrived because the footprints she has found are like her own; the scene where she recognizes him, so quickly passed over when it held most admirable dramatic possibilities. And off he goes to do a really well-made play. Such is the Electra. So brief, but not a word wasted; Electra’s character given in a moment by the sharp contrast to her sister; the intense, compressed dialogue, where every word means something different to the speakers and the spectators, and the effect is electric; that lock of hair relegated far to the background; the recognition scene worked to the full of all its possibilities; and in the end a thrilling moment. The son has come to avenge his father’s death at the hands of his wife and her lover by murdering the two murderers. He has killed his mother, having gained admission to her by declaring that he is bringing her news of his own death. His sister waits at the palace door. To her comes their mother’s lover, rejoicing that the one man they feared is dead: