CHAPTER II.
THE SOLDIER-POET.
To us Æschylus is a poet, and a poet he has been to all ages since his own; but to himself he was a soldier, so that when he was to write an epitaph for himself, the one fact which he wished inscribed upon his tomb was this—that the long-haired Persians knew how he could fight. To the men of his own age he was both soldier and poet, and from their stand-point we must try to regard him.
Æschylus was born about the year 525 B. C. at Eleusis, near Athens, a village celebrated for the secret rites of Demeter there performed,—those Eleusinian mysteries which are among the most remarkable institutions that the world has seen. The great goddess of Eleusis, Demeter, or Mother Earth, was one of the most august of the divinities of Greece. She represented the earth in its power and its kindliness; in the conception formed of her, the earth's venerable age and greatness, and the mysterious influence by which she quickens seed and nourishes life, were combined with the genial fertility and rich healthy fruitfulness of the soil; and so was made up the notion of a goddess, awful from her power, but a kind mother still to men. Eleusis was one of the chief seats of her worship, and thence originated a sort of sacred freemasonry, which was widely spread among the different tribes of Greece. For there were certain secret doctrines which only the initiated might learn, and rites at which only the initiated might assist; and these rites and doctrines, whatever they were, were no formal or trifling thing, but furnished a creed and an interest which raised the initiated, in some degree, to a higher level than his fellow-men. We have no means of guessing what it was that was taught in them. It has been supposed that some vestiges of the true faith, ideas of the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, were kept alive and handed down by these mysteries: however that may be, they were regarded as peculiarly holy, and the place on which the shadow of their solemnity fell could not fail to suggest grand thoughts to a powerful and imaginative mind. It can hardly be merely fanciful to ascribe, in some degree at least, to this influence the delight which Æschylus shows, throughout his extant works, in all that is mysterious and awful, as well as his preference for the more dimly known and ancient of the gods. A boyhood passed in longing to know the meaning of the crowds that constantly were coming to his native village, and of the long processions which sometimes passed through its fields; in wondering at the awestruck look of the men who came out from the sacred place, or in guessing the import of the dim allusions which he heard from time to time;—a boyhood so passed must surely give a solemnity and earnestness to the whole nature of the man. And certainly Æschylus, if we may believe his biographers, was from an early age haunted by solemn imaginations, and by a consciousness of the presence of the gods. It is said that he told this story of himself. Once, when quite a child, he was left in a vineyard to guard or watch the grapes, and, tired with the sun, he lay down and slept; and he saw coming through the rows of vines the flushed face of Bacchus, merry, yet terrible; and Bacchus bade him give himself henceforth to the tragic art. On this anecdote we cannot place much reliance—it sounds like a later fabrication; but we may well believe that a "fine frenzy" was early seen in the eyes of Æschylus, and that his character was early marked by a fiery earnestness and pride.
He was born of noble family, and in after-years, when he saw changes passing over the society of Athens, by which the prestige of nobility was lowered, and new men were helped to rise to the highest offices in the state, his pride of birth showed itself in a spirit of haughty reserve and stern conservatism. But in this contempt for the rising citizens of his day there was at least one great truth implied; a truth, that is, very needful for the time in which he lived. Love of moderation and due proportion, and a hatred of the vulgarity of excess—this, the characteristic principle of Greek art in all its branches, was beginning to make itself felt and consciously accepted; and this is the very principle which new men, in every age, are most apt to violate. And Æschylus, as a leader in the development of the artistic spirit, could not but be rightly indignant at the arrogance of newly-gotten wealth. To him, as to all true Greeks, such arrogance was a sin against the gods. A man exulting in his great prosperity, and presuming on it, was a sight at which the gods were angry: they would impel such a man to violent deeds, and make his pride the instrument of his destruction. The moderate wealth and well-founded dignity of an ancient family had all charms for Æschylus; he loved all that was venerable, and hated arrogance above all crimes. Of this influence of his noble birth we shall find frequent indications.
But an Athenian citizen, though he might plume himself in private on his birth, would not think of disdaining to mingle on equal terms with the mass of his fellow-citizens in the field and the assembly. In many a stern battle Æschylus fought as readily as any; and his hardihood was not, as with some of our own well-born soldiers, a virtue rarely shown, called out by the occasion, and contrasting strangely with the almost effeminate indolence and luxury of ordinary days. Something of this character appeared afterwards in Alcibiades, but we may be very sure there was none of it in Æschylus. He, like all the Greeks of his day, was hardy and warlike always; more warlike than most, almost fierce perhaps he was; and though he could turn to elegant pursuits,—though he was a courtier and a poet as well as a soldier,—yet this was not to be noticed in him as an exceptional combination. For an Athenian was expected to be a man of many powers, and not, because he excelled in one thing, therefore to fail in every other: rather, to be excellent was with them to excel in all things to which a free and cultivated man might turn his hand. This point it is which makes Æschylus, as soldier-poet, so remarkable an object for our consideration.
Haste and pressure of business make division of labour necessary among ourselves, and each man must cultivate a specialty; so that if a man should appear who was well qualified for all posts, we should not believe in him; and more than that, we should not find him out. So soon as he showed excellence in one matter, he would be ticketed with that and tied down to it: any attempts in any other subject would be regarded as graceful by-works, but not as likely to lead to high success. Now in Athens there was not so much pressure, there was not so much tyranny of public opinion, and the state was smaller.
Yet, even in that small state, it is matter for our admiration that excellence should have succeeded so uniformly as it did in attracting attention and reward. Æschylus, though holding no high command, was selected, with his two brothers, for the prize of pre-eminent bravery at Marathon, and his brother again won the highest honour in the battle of Salamis. Posterity may well admire the judgment of his contemporaries. No doubt all the Athenians fought well at those two battles, and it must have been hard to assign pre-eminence to any; but we, looking at the writings and history of Æschylus, can be sure that there was that strength and majestic energy about him, which must have made him do acts worthy of such distinction. And to be distinguished at Marathon was something worth living for. Civilisation, art, and culture, against barbarism, wealth, and numbers; freedom against despotism; Europe against Asia,—no less a strife than this was decided that day. The Greeks came to the encounter with the anxiety of men who were trying a new weapon against an enemy of new powers. They were unused to the vast numbers and imposing equipment of the Persians, and the power of freedom and culture had hardly yet been tried. It would have been impious to distrust such weapons and such a cause, but still it was an anxious crisis. And when it ended in the utter rout of Darius and his innumerable hosts, the triumph was proportionate to that anxiety. Greece was greater that day than any country has ever been since, and on that day Æschylus was among the greatest of Greece. And ten years afterward there came a day, less critical, indeed, but even more splendid, when "ships by thousands lay" off Salamis, and the Athenians led the Greeks to the fullest victory. The Athenians then had sacrificed their homes and the temples of their gods to fight for fellow-countrymen who were ungrateful and remiss; the virtue of one Athenian and the genius of another had made the victory possible; and on this proudest day that Athens ever saw the brother of Æschylus was named as having borne himself the best, and the poet himself was doubtless not far behind.
During the interval between these two battles our poet had produced many plays, and several times won the prize; and a few years after the battle of Salamis he wrote the "Persians," a tragedy founded on that event, and representing the tragical end of Xerxes as brought on him by his overweening confidence and pride. In some other plays as well as in this—in "The Seven against Thebes," for instance, and the "Eumenides"—Æschylus treated political subjects directly or indirectly, and inculcated a conservative policy which should not seek through violence the aggrandisement of the state, nor carelessly change her venerable institutions. But in Athens at that time all was progress. Æschylus had neither the taste nor the opinions which would tend to make a man popular there. Discouraged perhaps by the changes effected in the constitution, piqued at the success of younger men, and, in particular, of Sophocles, and annoyed by a charge of sacrilege which he was supposed to have incurred by disclosing on the stage some details of the Eleusinian mysteries, he left Athens in his old age, never to return.
He retired to the court of Hiero in Syracuse, where he had before been a frequent guest, and there, in the midst of a literary circle, with Pindar, Simonides, and Epicharmus, he passed the remainder of his life. Several plays he wrote during his stay there, and these were probably produced at Athens by the care of his friends. It is likely that his greatest work, the Story of Orestes, was among them. He died at Gela, in Sicily, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. The inhabitants of Gela gave him a splendid funeral, and inscribed his own epitaph upon his tomb:—
"This tomb the dust of Æschylus doth hide,
Euphorion's son, and fruitful Gela's pride:
How tried his valour Marathon may tell,
And long-haired Medes who know it all too well."[1]
Not much is known of his life; indeed the few facts mentioned here form the greater part of what we are told, but even these are at least enough to show in what great times he lived, and how wide was the range of his gigantic powers. The character which we should be led by his works and his life to attribute to him is supported by the contemporary testimony of Aristophanes, who caricatures him, but with marked respect, in his comedy of "The Frogs." He is represented there as proud and intolerant, but brave, noble, and dignified; given to big words and long pompous compounds, but not at all as frothy or empty of sound sense; as a sturdy representative of the genuine spirit of tragedy and of all that was best in the old Athenian temper; one of those "hearts of oak who had fought at Marathon," and, like the rest of these, a little slow to follow the times, but made of a solid stuff of which there was too little remaining.
Two things then, in particular, are to be noticed in Æschylus by the modern reader. First, the "many-sidedness" of which we have already spoken, by which he was a soldier-poet; and, secondly, the prominent part which he played in a very stirring epoch of the world's history. By this prominence he was qualified, on the one hand, to represent his countrymen; on the other, to speak to the common sympathies of mankind. As a genuine Athenian citizen, mixed up in the battles and politics of his city, engaged in providing for Athenian taste, and to no small degree in guiding it, he cannot fail to express most truthfully the significant features of the Athenian mind. And since Athens was in a sense the world—represented the future civilisation against Persia, and was the chief scene of its growth—a citizen of Athens was a citizen of the world, and his character was not only not provincial, but not even transitory. Hence it is that, speaking from the Athenian stage, Æschylus can address men of all ages. Hence it is that his views of life, as well as the passions he represents, have interest for us still; and the pagan creed with which they are connected does not seem to impair their value.
What, then, was his view of life, or did he take any consistent view of life at all? It is possible, perhaps, that men should go through life, as some savages indeed probably do, without any attempt at explanation of the events that occur to them, regarding each as a separate fact, and not comparing them together. This, however, is only possible where there is not only no history, but not even any continuous memory of the past; and a nation like the Athenian, which had enjoyed for centuries a noble literature, could not be in any such case as this. To them the freewill of man and his responsibility, and such questions as these, had long been suggesting themselves. Was their view of the answer to these questions a cheerful one or the reverse?
All that is bright and sunny, all that savours, as it were, of out-of-doors, seems to belong to the Greek, and cheerfulness, or even thoughtlessness, seems to characterise his temper. He loved light and sought it. Yet even out of this very search comes sadness, for there is not light enough in the world for man's needs.[2] The inquirer is baffled at every turn, and from that very brightness of his outward life which makes him love light and seek it, he is only led the more to find in the inner meaning of things darkness and mystery, to think the dealings of heaven inscrutable, and to believe in dreadful deities of dim and unknown, even of cruel, powers. So while on the one hand the Greek believed in gods of daylight, as it were, clad with sunny youth like Apollo, or fair like Venus, or wise and kind like Minerva; on the other hand there were Erinnys and Nemesis and the Furies, who pursued the proud or the impious, and Atè, who clung to a man or to a family in punishment of some half-forgotten crime, and led them into an infatuation under which they should incur new guilt and new vengeance. Hence a dark cloud hung over history: it was but the gloomy record of men raised to success and wealth, then waxing insolent and forgetting to give the gods their due, then by the angry gods abandoned to a reprobate hardihood, in which they began a course of crime whose consequences clung to them and their descendants, till some one holier than the rest, by a long course of expiation, should win the pardon of heaven, and free his family from the curse. Over each step of this dismal round a deity presided. To the prosperous man came the goddess Insolence, and if he admitted her to his hearth, she led him into sin. Often Atè, who clung to him for some ancestral fault, would send Persuasion to him, to make him open his doors to Insolence. Then he would kill or wrong a man, a brother perhaps, or a father, and the righteous indignation of the spectators of his crime would be embodied in or expressed by Nemesis and the stern Erinnys, and these would never cease to cry for vengeance on him, until the Furies seized the hapless victim, and dragged him to destruction. But when the curse at length is to be removed, then the bright gods come upon the scene: Apollo is the cleanser and the advocate; wise Minerva dictates the decision which sets the suppliant free. So strong was the light and shadow in the Greek creed, Æschylus is prone, perhaps, to dwell in the shadow, but his masterpiece, the "Story of Orestes," exhibits both in a beautiful and consistent whole.
Over these two worlds, as it were, one supreme ruler was dimly apprehended. Through all his mention of numerous deities there is ever in Æschylus a constant reference to one God, by whose will all the principles which govern the life of man have been eternally decreed. Sometimes he is identified with Jove,[3] but oftener he is vaguely thought of as an unknown God, in whom men may still trust that all is ultimately right.
We have spoken of two distinct classes of gods; the gloomy deities which belong to the sphere of conscience and moral responsibility, and the cheerful gods of the natural world. This distinction is a just one, but it must not be confounded with another. According to the old mythologies, before Jove became king of heaven, and all the young gods, Apollo and the rest, took their places by his side, the throne of Olympus had been filled by an older race of deities—Cronus, and Oceanus, and Prometheus, and the Titans—who had been exiled at the fall of their dynasty, or bound in prisons and tortures. About these there was something venerable from their age, and something mysterious from the slightness of the knowledge possessed about them. They were therefore favourite subjects with Æschylus, as we shall see in his "Prometheus." But their darkness and mystery was of a different kind from that of Atè and Erinnys.
What, then, in this strange medley is true and permanent? The brightness of the natural world—this is our first and greatest lesson from the Greeks; the deep, dreadful responsibility of man; the possibility of restoration from sin to purity; the overruling providence of a supreme Creator. We shall enjoy Æschylus more if we trace these truths in his poems, and we shall learn how much was good in the pagan creeds, instead of only being disgusted by their falsehood.
- ↑ Translated by Professor Plumptre, to whom this chapter is very largely indebted throughout.
- ↑ See Ruskin's Oxford Lectures on Art, Lect. vii.
- ↑ Or, as the Greeks call him, Zeus.