The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

  so pitilessly killed—my brother, trusted, reverenced,

  you are them all to me.

  And in the dialogue that follows while the chorus cry exultantly that they will shout in triumph when the murderers are killed, and Orestes says:

  Let me but take her life, then let me die.

  she wishes only that her father’s murderers had been slain in some far-off land. Her final prayer is that no mortal hand but Zeus himself would bring down justice on the murderers. So she passes from the scene. From first to last she never speaks of her brother’s killing her mother, and she has no share in the deed. As Æschylus has drawn her, she could not have.

  Completely different is Sophocles’ Electra. She is burning with resentment for every wrong that she has ever suffered. She tells the chorus that she lives like a servant in her father’s halls:

  Clad in mean clothing, eating a slave’s food,

  taunted and insulted by “that woman,” her mother, and “that abject dastard,” Ægisthus, her mother’s lover. When her sister tells her they have decided to imprison her in a dungeon as soon as he returns from his journey, she cries:

  If that be all, then may he come with speed

  that I may be removed far from you, every one.

  To her mother who reproaches her for perpetually insulting her and thinking only of her father, never of her sister whom her father killed, she retorts:

  Call me disloyal, insolent, outrageous.

  If I am so accomplished, then be sure

  I am your very child.

  But now and again there is something pitiful in her. At the beginning of the play she prays:

  Send me my brother, for I have no more

  The strength to bear alone my load of grief—

  To the chorus who reproach her gently for her “sullen soul” that must “forever be breeding conflicts,” she answers:

  I know my passion—it escapes me not—

  I am ashamed before your chiding.

  And when Orestes arriving speaks kindly to her before they recognize each other, she says:

  Know this, you are the first to pity me.

  But when he goes within to kill their mother and a shriek is heard:

  Oh, I am struck down—smitten.

  she cries to him:

  Smite if you can once more!

  As he comes out from the murder she greets him exultantly:

  The guilty now is dead—is dead…

  At the end when her mother’s lover pleads for his life, she bids her brother:

  No—slay him and forthwith, and cast him dead

  Far from our sight, to dogs—to birds of prey.

  They are her last words.

  Euripides’ Electra is unlike both of the others. In his play she has been married to a peasant so that her children might never have power to work harm to Clytemnestra and Ægisthus. Her first words are addressed to him as she comes out from their hut. Tenderness and gratitude are in them:

  O friend, my friend, as God might be my friend,

  Thou only hast not trampled on my tears.

  Life scarce can be so hard, ’mid many fears

  And many shames, when mortal heart can find

  Somewhere one healing touch, as my sick mind

  Finds thee.

  He bids her gently not to work so hard for him:

  So soft thy nurture was—

  but she answers as a generous nature would:

  Not pour

  My strength out in thy toiling fellowship?

  Thou hast enough with fields and kine to keep.

  ’Tis mine to make all bright within the door.

  But when he departs she speaks to herself what she really feels:

  Onward, O laboring tread,

  As on move the years;

  Onward amid thy tears,

  O happier dead!

  Let me remember: I am she,

  Agamemnon’s child, and the mother of me

  Clytemnestra, the evil queen…My name

  Electra…God protect my shame.

  Oh, toil, toil is a weary thing,

  And life is heavy.

  She cannot endure the peasant’s life of squalor and unending work, she who was once a princess. When Orestes comes and tells her at first that her brother has sent him to find out how matters are, she speaks with fierce passion. If he will but come back she will stand with him and kill her mother:

  Yea—with the selfsame axe that slew my father.

  Let me shed my mother’s blood and I die happy—

  And then she pours out all her misery and her humiliation and her hatred:

  Tell him this grime and reek of toil that choke

  My breathing; this low roof that bows my head

  After a king’s. This raiment—thread by thread

  ’Tis I must weave it or go bare…

  And she—she! The spoils

  Of Troy gleam round her throne, and by each hand

  Queens of the East, my father’s prisoners, stand,

  A cloud of Orient webs and tangling gold.

  And there upon the floor, the blood, the old

  Black blood, yet crawls and cankers, like a rot

  In the stone.

  When Orestes has revealed himself to her, she is passionate with him to kill their mother and never spare. He sees Clytemnestra coming from afar and memory stirs in him:

  My mother comes, my mother, my own

  That bare me.

  But she is exultant:

  Straight into the snare!

  Aye, there she comes—

  And then that ever-present wrong of her rough clothing that she loathes, and her mother’s soft Eastern gold-embroidered stuffs, stings her again. She says:

  All in her brave array—

  Orestes is thinking only of one thing:

  What would we with our mother? Didst thou say

  Kill her?

  ELECTRA: What? Pity? Is it pity?

  ORESTES: She gave me suck.

  How can I strike her?

  ELECTRA: Strike her as she struck

  Our father!

  When her mother arrives she goes with her into the house so that she can help in the murder, with never a hesitation, never a thought to hold her back. But after it is done and brother and sister re-enter, all her passion has gone. She is horror-struck, but her thought is for Orestes, not herself. She wants to take all the guilt and spare him, warm and generous as in the first scene with the peasant:

  Brother, mine is the blame—

  And I was the child at her knee—

  “Mother,” I named her name.

  What clime shall hold

  My evil or roof it above?

  I cried in my heart for love—

  What love shall kiss my brow

  Nor blench at the brand stamped there?

  Orestes cries that the deed was his:

  I lifted over mine eyes

  My mantle: blinded I smote

  As one smiteth a sacrifice,

  And the sword found her throat.

  But she will have it the guilt is hers who planned and urged him on:

  I gave thee the sign and the word.

  I touched with mine hand the sword—

  Then she kneels to cover the body:

  Her that I loved of yore,

  Her that I hated sore—

  her last words, except at the end to bid her brother farewell.

  The three women have nothing in common but their situation. Æschylus’ Electra is gentle and loving and dutiful, driven on against her own nature by the duty so all-important in antiquity, to exact vengeance for a father’s death; but not only completely incapable herself of carrying it out, not even equal to facing her brother’s doing so.

  To Sophocles she is an embittered, stern, strong woman, who lives for one thing only, vengeance. Completely brave, never stooping to submit to those who have absolute power over her; resolved if Orestes does not return, to try to kill her father’s murderers herself
or die; knowing no least hesitation before killing her mother or shadow of regret when she is dead; and yet touched here and there with something of pathos.

  Euripides’ picture is by far the most carefully studied. He too draws an embittered woman, but one in whom the lesser insults rankle as much as the great wrongs done her. She hates her poverty and her grimy hut and her poor clothes, along with her father’s murderers. She is as determined as Sophocles’ heroine that her mother shall be killed, indeed she helps in the murder, as Sophocles does not have her do, but the moment the deed is done she turns upon herself with a passion of loathing and remorse, and at the end, covering her mother’s body, she remembers that she loved her.

  Each of the three is an individual woman different from the other two but all are drawn with complete clarity. There is nothing complicated in them, nothing to be doubtfully analyzed. There they stand, unmistakably outlined, each herself, a person, greatly suffering and able to exalt us by the passion of her pain, but simple, direct, easy to understand, an example of “the plain reporting of the significant.” Our attention is to be directed elsewhere, to matters of a wider scope than the inner conflicts of a complex nature.

  If types were what the Greek drama had centered in, bloodless representatives of humanity, and all three Electras were essentially the same—a woman, any woman, possessed by the spirit of vengeance—the plays so written would not have been tragedies. The idea of the type is as indefensible theoretically as it is false actually. A tragedy cannot take place around a type. There is no such thing as typical suffering except in the mind, a pallid image of the philosopher’s making, not the artist’s. Pain is the most individualizing thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well but that realization comes only when it is over. To suffer is to be alone; to watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself. Only individuals can suffer and only individuals have a place in tragedy. The personages of the Greek drama show first and foremost what suffering is in a great soul, and therefore they move us to pity and awe. Emotions are not aroused by an abstraction of the mind, but Hecuba is forever something to us to stir the feelings and quicken the spirit. Tragedy belongs to the domain of poetry which has nothing to do with the type.

  The type belongs to comedy, intellectual comedy, the comedy of wit and satire. According as an art is strongly intellectual or not, the balance is tipped toward the type or toward the individual. In modern days the art which is inclined toward the typical, which is centered in what the mind and the eye perceive, is best exemplified by the French. The individualizing tendency, the preoccupation with the deep and lonely life of each human being, marks the English. The French are interested in what things are; the English in what things mean. They are the great poets of the modern world as the French are the great intellectualists.

  In a Molière comedy the central character is a type, only slightly individualized. Tartuffe is not a hypocrite, he is the hypocrite. His creator has not only depicted his hypocrisy with such complete fidelity that the vice is stamped clearly forevermore, but he has at the same time so heightened it—l’exagération juste is the French phrase—that hypocrisy is embodied in Tartuffe. He is a great artistic creation; he is not a living human being. Like all Molière’s characters he moves on the stage, not in real life. Molière is called by common consent a great comic poet but he has nothing of the poet in him unless the word is used to cover all creative genius. His comedy of wit, irony, and satire is the creation of the crystal-clear intellect, the farthest remove from that which allies the lunatic, the lover, and the poet. But to Shakespeare, the poet, types meant nothing at all. His characters are people in real life, never thought of as personages of the stage. Falstaff sits at his ease in his inn; he walks the London streets; always he moves against the background of life; it is inconceivable that he should be placed forever on the theatre boards. Is it a stage wood and moonlight of the electric arc that come to mind with Bottom and his crew? The green plot is their stage, the hawthorn brake their tiring house, the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon their light. To think of Beatrice and Benedict is to be transported to an orchard as inevitably as to think of Alceste and Célimène is to be in fancy seated before the footlights.

  Life is what the spirit is concerned with, the individual. Abstractions from life are what the mind is concerned with, the classified, the type. The Greeks were concerned with both. They wanted to know what things are and what things mean. They did not lose the individual in the type nor the type in the individual, Tartuffe’s universal truth or Falstaff’s living reality. The most familiar of all the sayings that has come down to us from classic times was spoken indeed by a Roman but it is a purely Greek conception, the basic idea of one of the greatest of Greek philosophies, “I am a man and nothing in mankind do I hold alien to me.”

  In Greek tragedy the figures are seen very simply from afar, parts of a whole that has no beginning and no end, and yet in some strange fashion their remoteness does not diminish their profoundly tragic and individual appeal. They suffer greatly and passionately and therefore they are greatly, passionately alive.

  There is only one other masterpiece that can help us to an understanding of this method, the life of Christ. It is the supreme tragedy but it is tragedy after the Greek model. The figure of Christ is outlined with complete simplicity, and yet by no possibility could He be thought of as a type. In a Shakespeare tragedy the moving power is that the characters are so shown to us, we can look deep into the mystery of the human soul, as we cannot even with our nearest and our dearest. And the result is that we identify ourselves with them; we ourselves become in our degree Hamlet or Lear. That is not the moving power of a Greek drama nor has it anything to do with what moves us in the Gospels. The Evangelists never let us know what went on within when the words they record were spoken and the deeds they tell of done. “And Peter said, Man, I know not what thou sayest. And immediately while he yet spake, the cock crew. And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.”

  Our sense of the tragedy of the Gospels does not come from our identifying ourselves with Christ nor from any sense of deep personal knowledge. He is given to us more simply drawn than any other character anywhere, and more unmistakable in His individuality than any other. He stands upon the tremendous stage of the conflict of good and evil for mankind, and we are far removed; we can only watch. That agony is of another sort from ours. Yet never, by no other spectacle, has the human heart been so moved to pity and to awe. And after some such fashion the Greek dramatists worked.

  It is an achievement possible only when mind and spirit are balanced. The mind simplifies, for it sees everything related, everything part of a whole, as Christ in the Gospel story is the mediator between God and man. The spirit individualizes. The figure of the Son of Man, so depicted that throughout the centuries a great multitude which no man could number, of all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues, have suffered with Him and understood through Him, is the creation of the spirit.

  So too the characters in Greek drama were the result of the Greek balance, individuals that showed a truth for all humanity in every human being, mankind in a man. The Greek mind that must see a thing never in and for itself but always connected with what was greater, and the Greek spirit that saw beauty and meaning in each separate thing, made Greek tragedy as they made Greek sculpture and Greek architecture, each an example of something completely individual at once simplified and given its significance by being always seen as connected with something universal, an expression of the Greek ideal, “beauty, absolute, simple, and everlasting…the irradiation of the particular by the general.”

  XVII

  The Way of the Modern World

  In its ultimate analysis the balance between the particular and the general is that between the spirit and the mind. All that the Greeks achieved was stamped by that balance. In a sense, it was the cause of all they did. The flowering of genius in Greece was due to the immense impetus given when
clarity and power of thought was added to great spiritual force. That union made the Greek temples, statues, writings, all the plain expression of the significant; the temple in its simplicity; the statue in its combination of reality and ideality; the poetry in its dependence upon ideas; the tragedy in its union of the spirit of inquiry with the spirit of poetry. It made the Athenians lovers of fact and of beauty; it enabled them to hold fast both to the things that are seen and to the things that are not seen, in all they have left behind for us, science, philosophy, religion, art.