EURIPIDES.
CHAPTER I.
ATHENS IN THE DAYS OF EURIPIDES.
"Behold
Where on the Ægean shore a city stands,
Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil,
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits
Or hospitable."—Par. Regained.
The greater poets of all times and countries, no less than historians and philosophers, admit of being contemplated under a twofold aspect—literary and historical. Under the former, we may mark how they acted upon their age; under the latter, how far they reflected it. Of the form and spirit of their generation, they are the representatives to later ages—throwing light on its history, on the state of its language and cultivation, and in return receiving light from those sources. Euripides was no exception to this general law: he materially affected the time he lived in; he derived from the circumstances in which his lot was cast many of the features that distinguish him from Æschylus and Sophocles. As a citizen, he differed from them almost as widely as if he had not been born in their days; and still more widely did he stand apart from them in the practice and theory of dramatic composition. Accordingly, a few remarks on Athens in the time of Euripides may not be an inappropriate prelude to an account of his life and writings.
The Athens in which the boyhood of Euripides was spent was little more than an ordinary town, the capital of a district about the size of an average English county. Pisistratus and his sons had begun to adorn the city with some temples, and at least erected a portion of the Dionysiac theatre; but it is doubtful whether this commencement, or anticipation of the structures of Pericles, was not either destroyed or seriously injured by the Persian invader. Before that calamity had aroused the spirit of her citizens, Athens was indeed little more than a cluster of villages surrounded by a common wall. A wooden rampart was the only defence of the citadel. No fortifications connected the city with its harbours, two of which were still open roads. Even the Pisistratids appear not to have ventured on building for themselves stately mansions, or to have called in the art of painters or sculptors to adorn Athens itself. They did not possess the funds that Cimon and Pericles commanded for great public works. They presided over a jealous people by force of arms, and dreaded provoking it by offensive displays either of wealth or power. Not until the democracy was satisfied with its representatives, and proud of its land and its capital, was it possible to indulge in lavish, expenditure, or to win for Athens the titles of "the eye of Greece" and "the violet Queen." The period that elapsed between the first and second invasion by the Persians was fraught with too much anxiety to admit of beautifying the city: all that could be done was to supply at least one tenable outwork, and that some miles distant from Athens itself. It was the wisdom of Themistocles to discern that the very existence of his country, if it were not to become a Persian satrapy, depended on ships and not on walls. To insure the security and efficiency of the fleet, a fortified harbour was indispensable. The mud-built or wooden cottages, the narrow and crooked streets of the capital, must be abandoned to the Mede; and such treasure as was then available be employed on the port and docks of Peiræus.
The victories that finally expelled the Persian from Hellenic ground were consummated in B.C. 466 by the battles at the Eurymedon, "when Cimon triumphed both by land and sea." Athens, after the retreat of Mardonius, was little better than a ruinous heap. The fire-worshippers had done their worst on her temples; had levelled her streets, torn down her feeble walls, and trampled under foot with their horsemen and archers the gardens and olive-yards that environed her. The first care of the Athenians was to restore the city, after a desolation more complete than even that with which Brennus visited Rome; for the banner of the Gauls never waved over the Capitol, whereas the wrath of Xerxes was poured especially on the Athenian Acropolis. Nor was it enough to rebuild the walls: it was necessary to protect the city in future from enemies near at hand; from the never-friendly Thebans; from the Dorians of Peloponnesus, whose fears and jealousy had been awakened by the prowess, so unlooked for by them, of their Ionian ally. The long walls had to be constructed—the harbours of Munychium and Phalerus connected with Peiræus, and riveted by strong links to Athens itself. Before such works could be finished, there can have been neither means, motives, nor leisure for embellishing the capital of Attica. Earlier than 472 B.C., in which year the common treasury of the Allies was transferred from Delos to Athens, Polycletus, Phidias, Zeuxis, and their compeers can hardly have been employed on their immortal labours. The new Athens accordingly grew up under his eyes, and that at a period of life when curiosity is most alert, and memory most tenacious. It was his privilege to watch the growth of temple and hall, colonnade and theatre, gymnasium and court of law, which the people, now a sovereign one, demanded, and their leaders willingly supplied. The poet, most susceptible, as his plays often show him to have been, of the arts allied to his own, beheld in all the freshness of their youth the Painted Porch, adorned by Micon, Polygnetus, and Pantænus, with cartoons of Athenian triumphs and heroes—the ivory and gold statue of Pallas Athene, the tutelary goddess—the Virgin's House, the Parthenon—the Portico, a work of Mnesides—the Propylæa, leading up to "the roof and crown" of Athens—the Acropolis—and other sacred and secular monuments for which the spoils of the Persian or the tribute of the Allies furnished means. Nor were these unrivalled works, some of which he may have seen on the easel of Zeuxis or in the studio of Phidias, the only features of the time likely to nurture his imagination, or give it the bias towards an expanding future so apparent in his writings. For him the narrow and often gloomy region of legends, national or Achæan, faded before the bright and picturesque glories of the hour. In his time the boundaries of the Grecian world were enlarged. Strangers, attracted to the new centre of Hellas[1] by business or pleasure, now flocked to Athens from Ægean islands, from the coasts and cities of Western Asia and the Euxine, from the Greek colonies of Sicily, Cyrene, and southern Italy, from Massilia on the Celtic border, from Tartessus near the bourne of the habitable world, from the semi-barbarous Cyprus, and from the cradles of civilisation, Egypt and Phœnicia. For now was there room in Athens for all cunning workers in marble or metal, for those who dealt in Tyrian purple or unguents of Smyrna, or brought bars of silver and golden ingots from Iberian mines; room also for armourers and dockyard men in Athenian ports, where—
"Boiled
Through wintry months tenacious pitch to smear
Their unsound vessels; when the inclement time
Seafaring men restrains, and in that while
His bark one builds anew, another stops
The ribs of his that hath made many a voyage.
One hammers at the prow, one at the poop;
This shapeth oars, that other cables twirls,
The mizzen one repairs and mainsail rent."[2]
Artists, too, who wrought neither with brush nor chisel, were drawn to Athens by the magnet of public or private demand—poets eager to celebrate her glories, and contend for lyric or dramatic prizes; philosophers no less eager to broach new theories in morals, or to teach new devices in rhetoric and logic. It was a new world in comparison with the severe and simple Marathonian time in which Æschylus was trained; and, like most new worlds, it was worse in some things, better in others—removed further from gods and god-like heroes, approaching nearer to man, his sorrows and joys; less awful and august, more humane and civilised. And the change is visible in the worst no less than in the best plays of Euripides, and one to be borne in mind by all who would judge of them fairly.
Pass over a few years of the poet's life, and we come to a period when this scene of political, artistic, and social activity is at first clouded over, and in the end rent and dislimned. Among other effects of the Peloponnesian war, one was, that a stop was put to public buildings and the costly arts by which they are adorned: while those that, like the Erectheium, were unfinished at the outbreak of that war, were left incomplete. But the drama did not suffer with other branches of art. Sophocles, Euripides, and a numerous band of competitors, yearly strove for the crown, and the decorations of the stage were even costlier than ever. The suspension of public works, however, was a trifle in comparison with the corruption of morals at Athens—an effect of the war, and of the great plague especially, which there is the authority of Thucydides for stating. But our business now is not with the Athenian people so much as with the stage in the time of Euripides, particularly with a view to the character of the audience.
Attica was a land favorable to varieties of labour and cultivation. At the present moment its light and dry soil produces little corn; but want of capital and industry, not the soil, is to blame. Cereals, indeed, were never its principal produce, though small and well-tilled farms, such as are seen in Belgium and Lombardy, abounded. Rather was it a land of olives and figs, of vines and honey. Sheep and goats, particularly the latter, were kept in large flocks on the mountain slopes: even such delicacies as hams of bear and wild boar were not inaccessible to the hunter on Mount Parnes. The seas swarmed with fish, and inexhaustible were the marble quarries of Mount Pentelicus, while the silver mines of Laurium supplied the public treasury with the purest coinage in Greece. These various products of the soil furnished its occupiers with as varied occupations; and again we have the testimony of Thucydides, that Athenians in general were fond of country pursuits, and before the Peloponnesian war preferred their fields, villages, and small towns to the attractions of the city. The statement of the historian is confirmed by the great comic poet of the time. Aristophanes, with a wholesome hatred of unjust and unnecessary wars, frequently sets before the spectators how much the worse they were for dwelling within walls, and for leaving their oliveyards and vineyards, their meadows and cornland, where informers ceased from troubling, and booted and bearded soldiers were at rest.
The enforced removal of the country population into the capital can hardly have failed to produce a change, and that not a salutary one, in the character of the Athenians, even if the pestilence had not sapped the foundations of morals by loosening domestic ties, by rendering the sick and even the strong reckless of the morrow, and thousands at once irreligious and superstitious. Such levity and despair as were exhibited by the Parisians under the Reign of Terror, prevailed in Athens during the worst days of the plague. Even the general breaking up of homes, and the want of customary occupations, had evil results for the peasant turned townsman. For some hundreds of farmers and labourers the small towns and hill-forts of the country may have afforded shelter during the almost yearly inroads of the Peloponnesian host; yet the bulk of the rural population was compelled to move, with such goods and chattels as were portable, into the narrow space of the city—the Long Walls or the harbours; where, if they did not suffer from want of food, they were indifferently lodged. War is ever "work of waste and ruin." If the land were tilled at all, the green corn was taken by the enemy for horse-fodder; fruit-trees were cut down for fuel or fencing of camps; villages and homesteads, when no longer wanted by the Dorian invader, were wantonly destroyed. In place of the rich tillage, woodland, or pasturage which greeted the eyes of spectators from the walls or the citadel, there presented itself a wide and various scene of desolation. All that an Athenian, during many weeks in the year, could call his own, was the sea. He yearned for his bee-hives, his garden, his oil-vats and wine-press, his fig-trees, his sheep and kine. A sorry exchange was it for him, his wife and children! Even his recreations were lost to him. He missed the chat of the market-place and the rural holiday. The city fountains did not compensate to him for the clear stream he had left behind; and his imprisonment was the more irksome because the hated Dorian was trampling on the graves of his kindred. Small comfort to him was such employment as the city supplied or demanded of him. Hard-handed ploughmen or vine-dressers were made to stand sentinels on the walls, or clapped on board a ship of war; or they sweltered in the law courts as jurymen, or listened ignorantly or apathetically to brawling orators in the assembly. He who, until that annual flight of locusts came to plague the land, had been a busy man, was now often an idle one; and weary is a life of enforced leisure. Possibly also he and the town-bred Athenians may not always have been on the best terms. Great mockers, unless they are much belied, were those town-folks. His clouted shoon and ill-fitting tunic may have cost the peasant, or even the country gentleman, uncomfortable hours, and perhaps led him to break the heads of city wits, or to get his own head broken by them. Town amusements were never much to his liking. The music, vocal and instrumental, which he would hear at the Odeum—the Athenian opera-house—might be all very fine; but, for his part, give him the pipe and tabor, the ballads and minstrels, of his deserted village. Then as to the playhouse: the performances there were not to his taste. A farce at a wake, acted on boards and tressels, a well-known hymn sung to the rural deities, pleased him far more than comedies of which he did not catch the drift, or tragedies that scared him by their furies and ghosts, and perhaps gave him bad dreams. The sudden infusion of a new element into the mass of a people cannot fail to affect it materially, whether for good or ill; and such a wholesale migration as this reacted on the townsmen themselves. Some civic virtues they might easily exchange for some rural vices. Cooped as the Athenians, urban and rustic, were within the walls, ill-housed, and often idle, with few if any sanitary or police regulations, we need not history to inform us that Athens came forth from the pestilence the worse in some respects for its visitation.
And besides these changes from without, others of a less palpable but more subtle kind were, in the age of Euripides, affecting the national character, and with it also the spirit, and in a measure the form, of the national drama. "It was a period of great intellectual activity; and the simple course of education under which the conquerors of Salamis and Marathon had been reared no longer satisfied the wants of the noble, wealthy, and aspiring part of the Athenian youth. Their learning had not gone beyond the rudiments of music, and such a knowledge of their own language as enabled them to enjoy the works of their writers, and to express their own thoughts with ease and propriety; and they bestowed at least as much care on the training of the body as on the cultivation of the mind. But in the next generation the speculations of the Ionian and Eleatic schools began to attract attention at Athens: the presence of several celebrated philosophers, and the example of Pericles, made them familiar to a gradually widening circle; and they furnished occasion for the discussion of a variety of questions intimately connected with subjects of the highest practical moment."[3] The latter half of Euripides's life was passed, as we may judge even from the sober Xenophon, as well as from the witty Aristophanes, among a generation of remarkable loquacity, in which the young aspired to know a little of every subject, thought themselves fit to hold the state-rudder, and justified in looking down upon their less learned or more modest elders. Every young man, indeed, who aspired to become a statesman, must be an adept in rhetorical arts, since no one could pretend to pilot the ship who could not persuade, or at least cajole, his fellow-citizens. If, on the other hand, he wished to be a public lecturer—that is to say, a philosopher—plain Pythagorean rules for the conduct of life, or Solon's elegiac maxims, no longer sufficed. Such old truisms would not bring him a single pupil or hearer. He must be able, and was always ready, to probe the very foundations of truth and law; to argue on any subject; to change his opinions as often as it suited himself;—in short, to be supreme in talk, however shallow he might be in knowledge. To what extent Euripides fell in with the new philosophy will be considered in another chapter.
Let not, however, the English reader suppose that young Athens had it all its own way; that the ancient spirit was quite dead; or that philosophy was merely a game of riddles, and ethics little better than the discovery that there is "neither transgression nor sin." Had it been so, Plato, in the next generation, would have addressed empty benches in his Academy; and at a still later period, Demosthenes have failed to inspire his hearers with either that deliberate valour or that spirit of self-sacrifice which they displayed in their struggles with "the man of Macedon." In spite of some grave defects or some superficial blemishes, the Athens that crowned or refused to crown Euripides was the home of a noble and generous people, easily led astray, but still willing to return to the right path; not impatient of reproof, and sincere, if somewhat sudden, in its repentance. Her citizens were a strange mixture of refinement and coarseness, of intelligence and ignorance. For intellect and taste, no city, ancient or modern, has ever made for its members so varied and sumptuous a provision as she afforded to her children, her friends, and the stranger within her gates. In the days of Euripides, a resident in Athens might in one week assist at a solemn religions festival; at the performance of plays that for more than two thousand years were unsurpassed; might listen in the Odeum to music worthy of the verse to which it was wedded; might watch in the Great Harbour the war-galleys making ready for the next foray on the Lacedæmonian coast, or the heavy-armed infantry training for their next encounter with Spartan or Theban phalanx. In the intervals of these mimic or serious spectacles, he could study the works of the most consummate artists the earth has ever produced; gaze in the gymnasium on living beauty, grace, and strength; or, if meditatively given, could hear Prodicus and Protagoras in their lecture-rooms, or Socrates in the market-place, discoursing upon "divine philosophy." If he were in any way remarkable for worth or ability, the saloons of Pericles, Nicias, or Glaucon were not closed against him by any idle ceremonies of good introductions, fine clothes, or long pedigrees. Athens, it is well said by Milton, was "native or hospitable to famous wits." And though he had not "three white luces on his coat," nor any coat of arms at all, he was "a gentleman born." His heraldry was the belief that before a Dorian set foot in Peloponnesus, or a tribe of Persian mountaineers had vanquished the Assyrian or the Mede, his forefathers had established themselves in Attica, and taken part in the Trojan war. All other Greek communities, with the single exception of the Arcadians and Achæans—poor bucolical folks then, but destined a century later to hold a prominent place in Greece—were in comparison with the Athenian the creatures of yesterday. One Attic king had been the friend of Hercules, and so was coeval with the Argonauts: and even Theseus had his royal predecessors. And if the Athenian studied the national chronicles, or listened by the winter fireside to the stories of old times, he did not blush for his progenitors. They had ever been redressers of wrongs, harbourers of the exile, hospitable to the stranger; and their virtues supplied Euripides with themes for several of his plays.
The poet, who had watched the growth of his native city, witnessed also the rapid extension of its empire. When Euripides was in his boyhood, Athens was but a secondary power in Hellas;—inferior to Corinth in wealth and commercial enterprise; to Sparta in war and the number of its allies. In his twenty-sixth year—the year in which he exhibited his first play—Athens had become the head of a league far more powerful than the confederacy which the "king of men" led to the siege of Troy. She stepped into the place which the proud, selfish, and custom-bound Spartan had abandoned. An active democracy eclipsed a sullen and ceremonious oligarchy; and although the Dorian in the end prevailed, it was partly owing to Persian gold that he did so, and partly because the Ionian city had squandered her strength, as France so often has done, in unjustifiable and prodigal wars. At all times, and especially while the "breed of noble blood" flowed in her veins—while to be just as Aristides, chivalrous as Cimon, temperate in the execution of high office as Pericles, continued to be accounted virtues—Athens held, and deserved to hold, her supremacy. Proud, and justly so, were her sons of their beautiful city. The tribute paid to her by the allies for protecting them from the Persian was fairly expended upon the maintenance of the fleet and the encouragement of art. Her citizens were, and felt themselves to be, in the van of Greek cultivation. They hailed with applause the praises addressed to them by the dramatic poets—and the praises were no idle flattery. Was it not a truth that, had it not been for the Athenians, northern Greece would have given earth and water to the Persian envoys, and Peloponnesus have selfishly abandoned the sea to the Phœnician galleys? True also, that but for the Athenians, "dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed" might have been seen in the citadels of Corinth and Thebes? Of a city that had so well deserved of every state, insular or on the mainland, where Greek was spoken, the most appropriate ornaments were the triumphs of the artist. Rightfully proud were the Athenians of their beautiful city; as rightfully employed were the pens of poets in giving these monuments perpetual fame.
With history, direct or indirect, before us, it may be possible to describe, or at least divine, the spectacle presented at the Dionysiac theatre when Sophocles or Euripides brought out a new play. The audience consisted of nearly as many elements as, centuries later, were to crowd and elbow one another in the vast space of the Roman Colosseum. The lowest and best seats, those nearest the orchestra, were reserved for men of mark and dignity, for the judges who would award the prizes, for sage, grave members of the Areopagus, for archons in office, or for those who had already held office, for soldiers "famoused in fight," for ambassadors from Greek or foreign lands, for all who had some claim to precedence from their rank or their services to the commonwealth. Women were admitted to the tragedies at least, boys as well as men to all performances; even slaves were permitted to be present. The women, by Greek usage secluded at home, were probably assigned a particular apartment in the playhouse; the boys were perhaps of use, as often as an unpopular competitor for the crown tried his fortune once more; and possibly Euripides may have occasionally regretted the presence of these youthful censors. No registered citizen could plead poverty as a reason for not witnessing these theatrical contests; if he had not money in his purse, the state paid for his ticket of admission. To foreigners were commonly allotted the back seats; but so many mechanical devices were employed for the conveyance of sound, that unless a sitter in the gallery were hard of hearing, he could probably catch every line of the choral chant or the recitative of the dialogue. Nor might short-sighted people be quite forlorn; he was pitiable indeed who could not discern, vast as was the space between himself and the stage, the colossal actors mounted on their high boots, and raised by their tall head-dress above ordinary mortal stature. A purblind stranger might perchance regret that he could not distinguish in the stalls bald-headed Nicias from the long-haired Alcibiades; and that although Socrates was certainly in the house he could not identify him among a batch of ugly fellows, with whom, he was told, the celebrated street-preacher was sitting.
The gallery in which foreigners sat is perhaps the most interesting feature of the audience to English readers—interesting, because it represented the various members of the Athenian empire, as well as of the Hellenic race. A merchant whose warehouse was near the Pillars of Hercules, would find himself seated beside one who had brought a cargo of wheat from Sinope, on the Euxine Sea. A hybrid—half-Greek, half-Egyptian—of Canopus, would have on his right hand a tent-maker from Tarsus, on his left a Thessalian bullock-drover. The "broad Scotch" of the Greeks—the Dorian patois—would be spoken by a group of spectators in front of him; while a softer dialect than even the Attic, pure Ionic, was used by a party of islanders behind him. "What gorgeously-attired personage is that on your left?" "A Tyrian merchant, rich enough to buy up any street in Athens—a prince in his own city, a suitor here. He has come on law business; and although at home he struts like any peacock, here he is obliged to salute any ragged rascal in the streets who may be a juror when his cause is heard. To my certain knowledge, the great emerald column in the temple of Melcarth, at Tyre, is mortgaged to him." "And who is that queerly-dressed man a little beyond the Tyrian? By his garb and short petticoat I should take him for a Scythian policeman,[4] but he has not the yellow hair and blue eyes of those gentry." "That, sir, is a Gaul from Massilia; he is on his road to Bithynia, where the satrap Pharnabazus, I think his name is, is offering good pay to western soldiers—and where there is gold there also is sure to be a Gaul. The fellow speaks Greek fairly well, for he was for some time in a Massilian counting-house, his mother being a Greek woman." We should tire our readers' patience long before we exhausted the portraits of sitters in the strangers' gallery in the Dionysiac theatre; and it is only due to the Athenian portion of the audience to turn for a few moments to them.
Samuel Johnson could not conceive there could be "livers out of" London; or that a people ignorant of printing could be other than barbarous. Had he been as well acquainted with Greek as he was with some portions of Latin literature, he might have found cause for altering his opinion. The Athenians were not in general book-learned, but such knowledge as can be obtained by the eye and the ear they possessed abundantly; and the thirty thousand registered citizens, to say nothing of resident aliens, were better informed than an equal number of average Londoners are at the present time. In the rows of the theatre, as on the benches of the Pnyx,[5] might be seen men who, if judged by their apparel, would have been set down for paupers, if not street-Arabs; and yet these shabby folk were able to correct orators who mispronounced a word, singers when out of tune, and actors who tripped in their delivery of dialogue. Their moral sense, indeed, was not on a level with their taste and shrewd understandings: yet we shall have to record more than one instance of their calling Euripides to account for opinions which they deemed unwholesome, or for innovations which they regarded as needless departures from established custom. It may he doubted whether they were a very patient audience. They seem to have had little scruple in expressing their approbation or disapprobation, as well of the poet as the actor; and their mode of doing so was sometimes very rough, inasmuch as, besides hissing and hooting at them strenuously, they pelted bad or unpopular actors with stones.
The varied appearance of the spectators on the higher benches did not extend to the lower ones, which the citizens proper occupied. Fops and dandies there were in the wealthy classes, and especially among the immediate followers of Alcibiades, or those who aped their extravagances. But generally no democrat brooked in a brother democrat display or singularity. A house better than ordinary, or fine raiment, were considered marks of an oligarchic disposition; and the owner of such gauds, if he aspired to public office, was pretty sure to have them cast in his teeth at the hustings. But sobriety in raiment, in dwelling, or equipage, did not abate the vivacious spirit of the Ionians of the west. When offended or wearied by a play, they employed all the artillery of displeasure against the spectators as well as the performers. Sometimes an unpopular citizen attracted notice; and then the wit at his expense flowed fast and furious, as it occasionally does now from a Dublin gallery. Were there a hole in his coat, it was likely to be mentioned with "additional particulars:" if he had ever gone through the bankruptcy court, it was not forgotten: swindling or perjury were joyfully commemorated: still more so any current rumours about poisoning a wife, a rich uncle, troublesome step-sons, wards, mothers-in-law, and other family inconveniences.
Such were the audiences who sat in judgment on the great drama of the ancient world. It may be probably conjectured that Euripides found more favour with the resident aliens and the visitors from foreign parts than with the born citizens. To these, his somewhat arbitrary treatment of old legends—his familiar dealing with, or perhaps humanising of, the Hellenic deities, his softening of the terrors of destiny, his modification of the songs and functions of the Chorus, and other deviations from the ancient severity of dramatic art—would give little, if any, offence. For such spectators the dooms hanging over Argive or Theban royal houses would have but little interest. Their forefathers had taken no part in the quarrel between Eteocles and Polynices, cared little for the authority of the Areopagus, had local deities and myths of their own, among whom were not reckoned Pallas Athene, Apollo, or the Virgin Huntress. To the foreigner, that triumphal song, the "Persians" of Æschylus, and his "Prometheus," were perhaps more welcome than his Orestean trilogy. The fables of these plays were common and catholic to the whole Hellenic world. The friend and protector of mankind, the long-suffering Titan, touched chords in the heart of a Greek spectator, whether he drank the water of the Meander or that of the fountain of Arethusa. The flight of Xerxes and the humiliation of the Mede were the story of his own deliverance from the dread or oppression of the great king. Even the tragi-comedy of Euripides might be more agreeable to him than the sombre grandeur of Æschylus, or the serene and perfect art of Sophocles.
But to the purely Athenian portion the innovations of Euripides were less acceptable. If we are to judge by the number of prizes he gained, at no period of his career was he so popular as Sophocles. He was rather a favourite with a party than with the Athenian public. In some respects the restless democracy was very conservative in its taste. The deeds of its forefathers it associated with Achæan legends: the gods of the commonwealth, although it laughed heartily at them when travestied by the comic poets, still were held to be the rightful tenants of Olympus; whereas the Euripidean deities were either ordinary men and women, or "airy nothings," without any "local habitation." Marriage-vows, again, were not very strictly kept by Athenian husbands, yet they did not approve of questionable connections, and thought that Euripides abused poetic licence when he made use of them in his dramas. Moreover, there may have been something in his habits unpalatable to them: he lived apart; conversed with few; cared not for news; held strange opinions, as will be seen presently, about women and slaves, wits and politicians; was no "masker or reveller;" and, in short, took no pains to make himself publicly or privately agreeable. Englishmen are devout worshippers of public opinion, as it is conveyed through the press. Athenians, without a press, were quite as subservient to their leaders in opinion. They liked not eccentricity, or even the show of pride. In a few cases, indeed, they condoned apparent neglect: Pericles, who rarely went among them unless weighty matters were in hand, they pardoned for his good services to democracy; the grave and tristful visage of Demosthenes, who was rarely seen to smile, they overlooked in consideration of his stirring appeals to their patriotic feelings; but they could not pardon a man who sought fame, if not money, by his plays, for being uncivil to playgoers. And little civility they got from him, beyond a few compliments to their sires or their city.
A very heterogeneous mass were these unofficial judges of dramatic poets. Between twenty and thirty thousand spectators could be assembled in the theatre of Bacchus. Beyond the seats occupied by privileged persons, and below those allotted to strangers, sat the sovereign people. The war party and the peace party were not separated by barriers. Aristophanes might be next to Lamachus, and the tanner Anytus next to barefooted Socrates. Government contractors, enriched by the war, were mixed up with farmers who were ruined by it. The man who could calculate an eclipse was wedged in with people who thought that the sun or moon when obscured was bewitched; Strepsiades's pleasure might be spoilt by the near neighbourhood of his creditors; and Euelpides, who dropped on his knees on seeing a kite, be close to Diagoras the Melian, who knelt not even to Jupiter.
The social, intellectual, and perhaps also the moral changes, which affected Athenians during the long life of Euripides, may be partly gathered from the Greek orators, as well as from the satirical comedians. Isocrates, referring to "the good old times"—often, as respects superior virtue or wisdom, a counterpart of the "oldest inhabitant"—and comparing his own generation with that of Marathon and Salamis, points out the causes of backsliding. "Then," says the orator, "our young men did not waste their days in the gambling-house, nor with music girls, nor in the assemblies, in which whole days are now consumed. Then did they shun the Agora, or if they passed through its haunts, it was with modest and timorous forbearance; then to contradict an elder was a greater offence than nowadays to offend a parent; then not even a servant would have been seen to eat or drink within a tavern." It was this golden or this dreamland age for which Aristophanes sighs in his comedy of "The Clouds," deploring the degeneracy of the young men in his time, when sophists were in the room of statesmen, and the gymnasium was empty and the law courts were filled. Into the mouth of old Athens, addressing the young one, are put the following verses:—
"Oh listen to me, and so shall you be stout-hearted and fresh as a daisy;
Not ready to chatter on every matter, nor bent over books till you're hazy:
No splitter of straws, no dab at the laws, making black seem white so cunning;
But wandering down outside the town, and over the green meadow running,
Ride, wrestle, and play with your fellows so gay, like so many birds of a feather,
All breathing of youth, good-humour, and truth, in the time of the jolly spring-weather,
In the jolly spring-time, when the poplar and lime dishevel their tresses together."[6]
Such were Athens, its people, and its theatre, when Euripides was boy and man: we now proceed to inquire what manner of person he was himself.
- ↑ "Hellas," although a word unknown in the time of Euripides, and indeed of much later date, is used, here and elsewhere, in these pages, as a convenient and comprehensive term for Greece and its numerous offsets from the Euxine Sea to the Gulf of Marseilles.
- ↑ Dante, 'Divine Comedy,' Cant, xxi., Cary's translation. The poet is speaking of Venice, but his verses are applicable to the earlier Queen of the Seas.
- ↑ Bishop Thirlwall's Hist. of Greece, iv. 268.
- ↑ Scythian bowmen were the gendarmes of Athens.
- ↑ The Pnyx was the place where the people of Athens assembled to hear political debates—in fact, their House of Parliament.
- ↑ The extract from the Areopagitic oration of Isocrates is taken from Bulwer's Athens—its Rise and Fall,' vol. ii. ch. 5, p. 577; the translation of Aristophanes from a most wise and beautiful little book, entitled 'Euphranor, a Dialogue on Youth' (1851).