CHAPTER III.
THE SCENIC PHILOSOPHER.
"In all his pieces there is the sweet human voice, the fluttering human heart."—Kenelm Digby.
Whether it were devised "by friend or foe, the title of "Scenic Philosopher" for Euripides was given by one who had read his writings attentively.[1] His early studies, his intercourse with Socrates and other philosophers of the time, encouraged in so contemplative a mind as his habits of speculation on human and divine nature, and on such physical science as then existed. And as regarded dramatic composition, he was the first to bring philosophy on the stage. The sublime and gloomy genius of Æschylus was far more active than contemplative. His sentences are masses of concrete thought, when he descends from mere passion or imagination. Such inquiries as occupied Euripides appeared to him, as they did to Aristophanes, profane, or at the best idle, curiosity. To Æschylus, the new rulers of Olympus, and the Titans they supplanted, were persons as real as Miltiades or Themistocles. To him, Olympus was but a yet more august court of Areopagus, and Fates and Furies were dread realities, not metaphysical abstractions. Sophocles lived for art: in his devotion to it, and in the unruffled calmness of his temper, he was an Hellenic Goethe; one, the central fire of whose genius, while it glowed under all he wrote, rarely disturbed the equanimity of his spirit. Moral or theological problems vexed him not. He cared not for the physics of Anaxagoras. Protagoras's sceptical disquisitions touched him no nearer than Galileo's discoveries touched Shakespeare, or Hume's Essays Samuel Johnson. The Jupiter of Sophocles was the Jupiter of Phidias; his Pallas Athene, the living counterpart of her image on the Acropolis. In abstaining from such questions, he and Æschylus were perhaps wiser than Euripides—considered as an artist—was in his fondness for them. Had Shakespeare been deeply versed in Roger Bacon's works, or in those of Aquinas, his plays would not have been better, and might have been worse, for such physical or metaphysical studies. Entertainments of the stage are meant for the many rather than for the few; and subjects that the many, if they listen to them at all, can scarcely fail to misinterpret, it is safer, as well as more artistic, to avoid.
There were, however, at the time when Euripides was writing for the theatre, especially after he had passed middle age, changes silently at work in Athens that rendered contact between poets and philosophers almost unavoidable. The rapid growth of speculative and rhetorical studies in the age, and perhaps with the sanction, of Pericles, has already been noticed. The understanding, hardly affected by the simple training of the young in the Æschylean period, had become, fifty years later, the primary aim of liberal education. He who could recite the whole Iliad or Odyssey was now looked upon, when compared with an acute rhetorician, as little better than a busy idler—all very well, perhaps, for enlivening the guests at a formal supper, or entertaining a loitering group in the streets. Even fools have sometimes portentous memories, but no fool could handle adroitly the weapons of a sound logician. Man was born to be something better than a parrot; he was meant to cultivate and to use "discourse of reason." To argue logically upon almost any premises,—to have words at command, to be ready in reply, fertile in objection, averse from granting propositions, to possess much general knowledge, were accomplishments which no well-educated young Athenian, aspiring to make a figure in public, could do without. The imaginative epoch of Æschylus was departing, the scientific epoch of Aristotle was approaching, and the analytical stamp of Euripides's mind, great as its poetical force was, complied with those tendencies of the time.
In thus reflecting the spirit of the age, Euripides only did what others before him had done, and what great poets will ever continue to do:—
"In ancient days the name
Of poet and of prophet was the same:"
the genuine poet being always in advance of his fellow-men, and therefore frequently misunderstood or undervalued by them. The era of Dante is as deeply stamped, both on his prose and verse, as if he had designed to portray it. He belonged partly to a period that was passing away, and partly to one that was near at hand. Trained in the lore of the schoolmen, he has something in common with Duns Scotus and the Master of Sentences; while by his homage to Virgil and Statius, he anticipated in his tastes the revival of classical literature. Milton, affected by the influence of Jonson and Fletcher, composed in his youth a masque and songs of Arcady; in his mature manhood, the serious and severe Independent is manifest in all he wrote. Schiller is the herald of a revolutionary period, impatient of and discontented with the present. Pope, in his moral essays and satires, represents a time when sense and decorum ranked among the cardinal virtues, and when loftier and more robust forms of imagination or faith were accounted extravagances. To this general law Euripides was no exception. He went before them, and so was misinterpreted by many among whom he lived. Within half a century after his death, his name stood foremost on the roll of Greek dramatic poets. If not a deeper, a more genial spirit—a spirit we constantly meet with in Euripidean plays—had superseded the grim theology of the Marathonian period; stage-poetry was indeed shorn of some of its grandeur, but it gained, in recompense for what it lost, profounder human feelings.
That the Athenian theatre was not only a national but a religious institution, and to what extent and in what particulars it was so, has already been told in the volume of this series assigned to Æschylus. There had been, however, after the Persian had been humbled and Hellas secured and exalted, a silent change in the faith of the Athenian people, as well as in their mental training. As years rolled on over their renovated city, though the forms of their myths and legends were retained, living belief in them was on the wane. They were accepted as respectable traditions, and when they recorded the brave deeds of their forefathers, were jealously cherished, but no longer regarded with awe, or exempted from innovation. In the time of Euripides, there had appeared an historian, or perhaps more properly a chronicler—a man of much faith and honest piety, and yet one who scrupled not to canvass the credibility of tale and tradition, and sometimes even to find a secular explanation for spiritual doctrines. Herodotus, as well as Euripides, was under the influence of the age, though he usually apologises for his doubts. Yet doubt he did. The Father of History, no less than the pupil of Anaxagoras, disbelieved in the baneful effects of an eclipse, and had, for his time, very fair notions of geography; and if he thought that the gods envy human greatness, and sooner or later punish the pride of man, his faith, as contrasted with that of Phrynicus and Æschylus, was feeble, and his view of Destiny and the Benign Deities savoured more of habit than earnest conviction. In such matters the beginning of distrust is the dawn of a rationalistic epoch. The ancient faith of the Athenians in the names and acts of their founders is on a par with that in the once accredited tale of Brutus and other Trojans settling in Britain; or of Joseph of Arimathea planting the first shoot of the holy thorn at Glastonbury. Joseph and Brutus, like Cecrops and Erectheus, have vanished from history, and nothing except the genius of a poet could recall from the shades and clothe with living interest King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Readers will perhaps pardon a short digression, if it tend to throw light on the dramatic art of Euripides, when contrasted with that of Æschylus; or rather, on a change that took place in the taste of their respective audiences.
The story of Orestes, in the handling of which Æschylus and Sophocles stand farthest apart from Euripides, is chosen as perhaps the most striking instance of the struggle between old faith and new rationalism, as exhibited in the Athenian drama. To the elder of these poets the symbolisms of the legend were perfectly clear. Apollo, a purifying and avenging god, prescribes the duty and the mode of retribution, and protects the avengers of blood. After the command has been issued to visit the death of Agamemnon on his murderers, Pylades, in the legend, though almost a mute person in the drama, is Apollo's principal agent in nerving Orestes to the execution of his dreadful task. Pylades was a Crisean by descent. Now, from the Homeric hymn to Apollo, it appears that the original Pythian temple was in the domain of the town of Crisa. At Crisa Orestes dwelt as an exile; and it is from that town that, accompanied by his monitor, the destined avenger set forth on his errand to Mycenæ. The near connection between Pylades and Apollo is implied also in the belief that he was the founder of the Amphictyonic Council which was held at Delphi. In the "Eumenides" he does not appear; his function ceased when, in the "Libation Bearers," Clytemnestra and her paramour had paid the penalty of their crime: but in the latter play, it is the reproach of Pylades which screws to the sticking-point the failing courage of Orestes.
Sophocles had studied the same old legend. In his "Electra," the bearer of the false intelligence that Orestes has been killed in the chariot-race at the Pythian games reports himself as sent by Phanoteus, the Phocian, a friend of Clytemnestra, and so a likely person to apprise her that she need no longer live in dread of her son. Now this Phanoteus is no other than a foe, though a brother, of Crisus, the father of Strophius, and grandfather of Pylades. Like Orosmanes and Ahriman, the brothers—Strophius and Phanoteus—dwelt in hostile regions: the former in the bright and cheerful city of Crisa, where the sun-god had his first temple; the latter in another Crisa, a dark and dreary spot, where Apollo's enemies, giants or gigantic warriors—Tityus, Autolycus, Phorbas, and the Phlegyans—had their abode. Agamemnon's children accordingly look to Strophius for the coming avenger; Ægisthus and Clytemnestra to Phanoteus for timely warning of his approach.[2]
It is not necessary to probe further the original legend. Enough has been shown to prove that Æschylus and Sophocles wove into their Orestean story portions of it, and therefore thought it suitable for their tragedies. Euripides, on the contrary, seems to have quite neglected it. He makes, indeed, Pylades a Delphian, but by banishing him from his country, after the work of retribution is complete, he severs the links of the symbolic story.
Is there any improbability in supposing Euripides, a man of the new era, to have viewed the grim though picturesque stories of the old and waning times as inconsistent with the bright, free, and intelligent Athens in which he dwelt? The pupil of Anaxagoras and Prodicus might well regard a people as little beyond the verge of barbarism for whom the priest was the philosopher, whose heroes yet strove with wild beasts, who trembled at the phenomena of nature, and among whom ignorance generally prevailed. And among such a people it was that the legends were created and cherished. Imagination was strong, while reason was weak; but did it therefore follow that men capable of reason should always remain children? Perhaps some insight into the feelings of Euripides on theological questions may be gleaned from the story of Socrates, who, while scrupulously worshipping the gods of the state, made no secret that he regarded them as little more than masks—nay, often as unworthy disguises—of the divine nature. For the opinions of the philosopher, the reader is referred to the volume of this series in which the writings of Xenophon are treated of. There is, however, a remarkable passage in Plato's dialogue entitled 'Phædo,' in which Socrates enumerates as one among the boons death will confer on him, the privilege he will have, when he has shaken off this mortal coil, of knowing better the great gods, and of seeing them with a clearness of vision unattainable by mortals on earth. Euripides, on his side, may have held it to be part of a poet's high position to hint, if not to expound formally to his hearers, that the deities whom the tragedians represented as severe, revengeful, and relentless beings, were merciful as well as just,—that the humanity of Prometheus was at least as divine as the tyranny of Jupiter, or the feuds and caprices of Apollo and Artemis. It was, perchance, among the offences given by Euripides to the comic poets, that his spiritual and intangible god could not, like Neptune, Iris, Hercules, or Bacchus, be parodied by them on the stage. The idols of the temple were by the vulgar esteemed true portraits of the beings whom they affected to revere, but at whom they were always ready to laugh. Neptune and Hercules, in the comedy of the "Birds" of Aristophanes, might be bribed by savoury meats, or hide themselves under an umbrella; but the "great gods" whom the pious Socrates yearned to behold were beyond the reach, and perhaps the comprehension, of the satirist.
We can afford only to hint that the poet's religious opinions, so far as they can be gathered from his writings, may easily have been misconstrued by men of the time, who appear to have had other motives also for disliking him. The singularity of his habits may have been one reason for their distaste of his opinions. If, as is possible, he belonged to none of the political factions of his time—neither a Cleonite, nor a partisan of Nicias, nor a hanger-on of the gracious-mannered and giddy Alcibiades—here may have been a rock of offence. "Depend upon it, my Phidippides, no man of such odd ways as the son of Mnesarchus can be sound in morals or politics. Folks that shut themselves up have something in them wrong requiring seclusion." Perhaps a brief inquiry into his views on some matters may help to a better understanding of his opinions generally. Was he a bad citizen, as many reputed him to be? Was he a woman-hater to the extent he is accused of being, and beyond the provocation given by his wives? What were his notions about the condition and treatment of slaves? Can we discover from his writings how he thought or voted in politics? Was he an idle dreamer? Was he a home-bred Diagoras of Melos, only less respectable, because less courageous, than that open scoffer? Bad taste he may have had, but it does not follow that he was therefore a bad man.
The charge of being a bad citizen scarcely accords with the political opinions of Euripides, so far as they can be inferred from his plays. A similar accusation has been brought against Plato; and both the one and the other may have proceeded from similar causes. Neither the poet nor the philosopher took part in public affairs, or held, so far as we know, office under the state. By the speech-loving Athenians, for whom the law courts and the assembly of the people were theatres open all the year round, this was regarded as an odious singularity, if not a grave neglect of civic duty. Socrates, meditative as he was, could strike a good blow in the field when required, and filled an office under the thirty tyrants with credit to himself. Euripides and Plato may fairly have thought the public had advisers enough and to spare—that a good citizen could serve his country with his pen or his lectures as effectively as by becoming one of the clamorous demagogues who grew under every hedge. It will hardly be denied that the patriarch of the Academy strengthened the foundations or enlarged the boundaries of moral science. Is the poet quite disentitled to a similar concession? Has any stage-poet, if we except Shakespeare, supplied moralists and philosophers with more grave or shrewd maxims than he has done? Has any ancient poet taken wider or more liberal views of humanity?
Again, the scenic philosopher was reputed unsound in his theology; and this, no doubt, is an offence in every well-regulated community. Without going beyond the bounds of England, we find that it was no want of will on the part of their opponents that saved Chillingworth, Hobbes, or even John Locke, from something akin to the cup of hemlock tendered to Socrates. Many thousands of honest English householders accounted Milton a heretic, a traitor, and a man of evil life and conversation. To allow our view of his character to be biassed by a person's opinions is not a discovery of modern times. It was by no means prudent for any one residing in Athens to be wiser than his neighbours in physical science, or to speak or write of the gods otherwise than custom sanctioned. The most orthodox of spectators at the theatre was justly shocked by being told, that the gods he had no scruples about laughing at in the "Frogs" or "Birds" of Aristophanes, were really little more than men's inventions—caricatures rather than portraits of the deity as contemplated by the philosopher. Why could not these dreamers be content with the gods that satisfied Solon the wise, or Aristides the just? And under every class of these offences Euripides seems to have come. He was neither a useful citizen nor a sound believer; he meddled with matters too high for him; the heresies he had imbibed in youth from Anaxagoras clung to him in riper years; and, like his tutor, he deserved a decree of exile at least. He was a proud fellow, and thought himself too clever or too good for mixed society. He read much—he talked little; and was that proper conduct in an Athenian? In an evil hour came the Sophists to Athens, and it was with Sophists alone that Euripides delighted to consort. So reasoned the vulgar, after the wisdom that was in them, and so they will reason unto the end of time. There can, however, be no doubt that Euripides in his heart despised the popular religion. He could not accept traditional belief: his masters in philosophy had trained him to think for himself; and with his strong sympathy for his fellow-men, he strove, ineffectually indeed, to deliver them, as he had been delivered himself, from the bondage of custom, from apathy or ignorance. Compelled, by the laws that regulated scenic exhibitions, to deal with the gods as the state prescribed, or the multitude required, he could only insinuate, not openly proclaim, his opinions, either on politics or religion. Yet if unsocial, he was not timid, and it is really with extraordinary boldness that he attacks soothsayers in his plays. He puts into the mouth of the ingenuous Achilles—then a youth whose heart had not been hardened by war—the following attack on Calchas the seer:—
"His lustral lavers and his salted cakes
With sorrow shall the prophet Calchas bear:
Away! The prophet!—what is he? a man
Who speaks 'mongst many falsehoods but few truths,
Whene'er chance leads him to speak true; when false,
The prophet is no more."
In the "Electra," Orestes says that he believes Apollo will justify his oracle, but that he deems lightly of human—that is, of professional—prophecies. Perhaps his dislike of prophets may have received new edge and impulse from the mischief done by them in encouraging by their idle predictions the Athenians to undertake the expedition to Sicily. And a time was at hand when the dupes of the soothsayers viewed their pretensions with as small favour as Euripides himself did. Deep was the wrath in the woe-stricken city, when the worst reports of the destruction of their fleet and army at Syracuse were confirmed by eye-witnesses, against the orators who had advised, and the oracle-mongers and prophets who had guaranteed, the success of that disastrous expedition.[3]
There was, indeed, much in the Homeric theology that, however well suited to the artist, was intolerable to the philosopher. The gods themselves were criminals, and Euripides made no secret that he thought them so. "He could not," says K. O. Müller, "bring his philosophical convictions into harmony with the contents of the old legends, nor could he pass over their incongruities." Yet far advanced as he was beyond his time, the time itself was not quite unprogressive. Æschylus, who belonged to an earlier generation, and Sophocles, who avoided every disturbing force as perilous to the composure of art, accepted the Homeric deities as they found them. Nevertheless faith in them was in the sear and yellow leaf, and the reverence that should accompany old age was nearly worn out. The court of Areopagus in Athens was, without any similar external violence, sharing the fate of our High Commission Court in the seventeenth century. It no longer took cognisance of every slight offence against religion; it consulted its own safety by letting the gods, in many instances, look after their own affairs. Euripides was at the most a pantheist. He believed in the unity of God, in His providence, His omnipotence, His justice, His care for human beings. Supreme mind or intelligence was his Jupiter—the destroyer of the Typhon, unreasoning faith, his Apollo. Aristophanes, who professed to believe, and not Euripides, who professed to doubt, was the real scoffer.
There is space for only a few samples of the moral opinions of Euripides, Shakespeare's reputation with posterity might have fared very scurvily had there been a great comic poet among his detractors, opposed to him in theology or politics, or jealous of the company kept by him at the Mermaid. Only impute to the author personally the sentiments he ascribes to Iago, Iachimo, Richard of Gloucester, Edmund in "Lear," or Lady Macbeth,—refer to certain things connected with his marriage or his poaching,—and the purest in morals as well as the loftiest in thought of our own scenic poets would have made as poor a figure as Euripides did in his time, whether it were on the grounds of his creed, his civic character, or his private life and conversation. "Envie," says Chaucer, in his 'Legende of Good Women,'
"Is lavender to the court alway,
For she ne parteth neither night ne day
Out of the house of Cæsar;"
and the envy of one generation becomes with the credulous the fact of another. "In the first place," as Mr Paley most justly observes, "many of his sentiments which may be said to wear an equivocal complexion, as the famous one,—
"If the tongue swore, the heart abides unsworn,"—
have been misconstrued as undermining the very foundations of honour and virtue. They are assumed to be general statements, whereas they really have only a special reference to existing circumstances, or are at least susceptible of important modifications." The same may be said of a verse of Euripides that Julius Cæsar was fond of quoting;—
"If ever to do ill be good, 'tis for a crown;
For that 'tis lawful to push right aside:
In other things let virtue be the guide."
But the Roman perverted to his own ends a sentiment well suited to the character—a false and violent one—of the speaker, Eteocles.[4]
Some injury has been done to Euripides by the abundance of fragments from his plays that are preserved. Undoubtedly many of these "wear an equivocal complexion,"—as, for example—
"What must be done by mortals may be done;"
or—
"Nor shameful aught unless one deem it so;"
but we know not the speakers of the words, nor the circumstances under which they were spoken.
What are the proofs of an often-repeated assertion that Euripides was a sensual poet? On the score of indecency the comic poets are rather damaging witnesses—to themselves. Have the Germans, have we ourselves, no poets infinitely more culpable in this respect than Euripides? A very third-rate contributor to the English drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would the Greek poet have been, had he written nothing worse than we find in his extant plays or the fragments of his lost ones. And on this delicate question we have a most unexceptionable witness in his favour—no less a person than the decent and pious Aristophanes himself! The "Phædras" and "Sthenebœas" of Euripides, we are told by him, were dangerous to morals.[5] Yet in another of his comedies he says that in consequence of Euripides's plays women mended their manners.[6] Here, with a vengeance, has "a Daniel come to judgment!"—the woman-hater, it seems, had been preaching with some success to a female congregation. The purity of the poet's morals, so far as they can be inferred from his writings, is displayed in his Hippolytus, in the chaste Parthenopæus in the "Suppliant Women," in the Achilles of his "Iphigenia," and above all, in the character of the boy Ion. "Consecrated to Apollo, and devoting himself wholly to the service of the altar, he speaks of his patron god in language that would not dishonour a better cause. One cannot help feeling that the poet must have been at heart a good man who could make a virtuous asceticism appear in so amiable a light."[7]
"Let me tell you," says Councillor Pleydell, "that Glossin would have made a very pretty lawyer, had he not been so inclined to the knavish side of his profession." It cannot be denied that Euripides has some tendency of the sort. He employs frequently, and seemingly without much compunction, the arts of falsehood and deceit. The tricksters in his tragedy are the forerunners of the tricksters of the New Comedy—the "fallax servus" of the Menandrian drama. But as respects truth, in the modern import of the word, the morality of the ancients was not that of the moderns. The latter profess to abhor a lie; the former—more prudently and consistently perhaps—made no professions at all on the subject. The crafty Ulysses, rather than the bold Achilles, is the type of an Achæan; Themistocles, far more than Aristides, that of an Athenian Greek. Euripides, who represents men as they are, and not as they ought to be, did not disdain to employ in his plays this common feature of his age and nation, but in none of them has he depicted such a thorough-going scoundrel as the Sophoclean Ulysses in the "Philoctetes."
In what sense of the word was Euripides a hater of women—for that he occasionally spoke ill of them is beyond doubt? His character is indeed a difficult one to interpret—on the surface full of inconsistencies; and seeing these only, it is easy to understand why he was less revered than Æschylus, less esteemed or beloved than Sophocles. Below the surface, however, it is possible to discover a certain unity of purpose in him, and it is traceable in his sentiments on the female sex. First, let the position of women among the Greeks in general be remembered. They lived in almost Oriental seclusion. What was expected from a good wife is shown in a very instructive passage of Xenophon's treatise, 'The Economist or Householder.'
Ischomachus, the principal speaker in the dialogue, describes how he had "trained his wife, at the time he espoused her, an inexperienced girl of fourteen, to the duties of her position. The account that ensues of the functions of an Athenian married lady would be applicable, if we except the greater restriction on her personal liberty, to a hired housekeeper of the present day. Her business is to nurse her children, to maintain discipline among her slaves; to be diligent herself at her web, in the management of her kitchen, larder, and bakehouse, and in her care of the furniture, wardrobe, and household property of all kinds; to select a well-qualified stewardess to act under herself, but to allow no undue confidence in her to interfere with her own habits of personal superintendence; to remain continually within doors; she will find abundance of exercise in her walks to and from different parts of the premises, in dusting clothes and carpets, and baking bread or pastry." "From all this it appears, that what are now considered essential qualifications in a married lady of the upper class—presiding at her husband's table, receiving his guests, or enlivening by her conversation his hours of domestic retirement—entered as little into the philosopher's estimate of a model wife as into that of his countrymen at large. Like Pericles, Socrates"—and, we may add, Euripides—"could appreciate female accomplishments in an Aspasia or a Theodota,"[8] but hardly looked for them in wives so trained and employed as was that of Ischomachus.
If Euripides were generally a woman-hater, he was at least not always consistent in his aversion. No one of the Athenian stage-poets has written more to the credit of good women, or more delicately or tenderly delineated female characters. For this assertion it is sufficient to cite Polyxena in his "Hecuba," Macaria in "The Children of Hercules," Evadne in "The Suppliant Women," the sisterly devotion of Electra in his "Orestes," Iphigenia in both of the plays bearing her name, and the sublime self-sacrifice of the noble and loving Alcestis. Even Hecuba and Jocasta are braver and wiser than the men about them, and these old, afflicted, and discrowned queens have neither youth nor personal charms to recommend them. Phædra he represents not as a vicious woman, but as the helpless victim of an irate deity; while in the "Medea" the fierce and revengeful heroine has all our sympathy, while Jason has all our contempt.[9]
And if Euripides were reprehensible for his opinions on women, what shall we say of his antagonist Aristophanes? Had the wives and daughters of Athens no cause of complaint against their caricaturist? If the pictures drawn of them in his "Lysistrata" and "Thesmophoriazusæ" be not wholly fanciful, what woman sketched by Euripides would not be too good for such profligate companions? The female characters of Sophocles are perhaps worthier of admiration than those of his rival; but the pencil that traced Antigone, Deianara, and Tecmessa, drew ideal heroines: that of Euripides painted human beings, creatures with strong passions, yet stronger affections, with a deep sense of duty, of religion, as in the instances of Theonoe in his "Helen," of Andromache, and Antigone,—women who may be esteemed or loved, women who walk the earth, sharing heroically, sympathising tenderly with, the sorrows and sufferings of their partners in affliction. The zealous champion of the gods of the state was, we have seen, an arch-scoffer at all loftier forms of belief; the satiric pen that wrote down Euripides as a hater of women was held by the arch-libeller of their sex.[10]
Nor was the humanity of the poet less conspicuous in his feelings towards slaves. And again we have to notice something inconsistent with his supposed austere disposition. We have no reason for thinking that the lot of home-bred or purchased slaves was particularly hard in Athens; certainly they had there less rigorous masters than the Spartans or Romans were. But there can be little doubt of the contempt with which non-Hellenic races were viewed by Greeks in general, or of the broad line they drew between themselves and barbarians. Even in Attica, the happiness or misery of a bondman must have depended in great measure upon the disposition of his owner. He might be half starved or cruelly flogged—but no law protected him: overworked, without comment from the neighbours; tortured, if his evidence were required in a court of justice; cashiered, when his services were rendered useless by age or infirmity. Euripides, if his writings be in accordance with his practice, anticipated the humane sentiments of Seneca and the younger Pliny in his consideration for this, at the best, unhappy order of men. He did not regard it as the mark of an unsound mind to look on a slave as a human being. He introduces him in his plays as a faithful nurse, or an honest and attached herdsman, shepherd, or household servant. He endows him with good abilities, and at times shrewd and ready wit, with kindly affection to his fellows, and love and loyalty to his masters. He even goes almost to an extreme in putting into his mouth saws, maxims, and opinions meet for a philosopher. He perceived, and he strove to make others perceive, that servitude does not necessarily extinguish virtue or good sense. He left it to the comic poets to exhibit the slave as necessarily a cheating, lying, and sensual varlet. He may have imbibed from his friend Socrates some of his humane notions on women or slaves, or he may have forestalled them; or, which is quite as possible, have reflected in his dramas a liberal feature of the time fostered alike by the poet and the philosopher.
The feelings of slaves towards a kind and gracious mistress are thus described in the "Alcestis." She, immediately after bidding the last farewell to her children, takes leave of her servants:—
"All of the household servants wept as well,
Moved to compassion for their mistress: she
Extended her right hand to all and each,
And there was no one of such low degree
She spoke not to, nor had an answer from."—(B.)
And again, in the same play, the slave appointed to wait on Hercules thus expresses himself:—
"Neither was it mine
To follow in procession, nor stretch forth
Hand, wave my lady dear a last farewell,
Lamenting who to me and all of us
Domestics was a mother: myriad harms
She used to ward away from every one,
And mollify her husband's ireful mood."—(B.)
The messenger, a slave, in the "Orestes," thus recounts to Electra his loyalty to her family:—
"Hither I from the country came, and entered
The gates, solicitous to hear the doom
Of thee and of Orestes; for thy sire
I ever loved, and in thy house was nurtured.
True, I am poor, yet not the less am loyal
To those who have been kind to me of yore."
—(Alford.)
Connected perhaps with his sympathy with women and an oppressed class of men is his practice of bringing on the scene young children. He puts them in situations that cannot fail to have touched the hearts of a susceptible people. In the "Iphigenia in Aulis," the infant Orestes is employed to work on Agamemnon's parental love. The little sons of Alcestis add to the pathos of her parting words. In the "Trojan Women," a drama of weeping and lamentation nearly "all compact," the fate of Astyanax is the most touching incident. In the "Andromache," the little Molossus is held up by his great-grandsire Peleus in order that he may loosen the cords by which his mother's hands are bound. Maternal love adds a human element to the wild and whirling passion of Medea. Racine, who profoundly studied Euripides, did not neglect this device for producing emotion. In his "Andromaque," Astyanax is made to contribute to the pity of the scene, although the etiquette of the French stage did not permit of his appearing on it. Did this innovation—if it were one—take its rise from a practice not uncommon in the law courts, for defendants to appeal to the mercy of the jurors by exhibiting their wives and children? Whether the courts borrowed it from the theatre, or the theatre from the courts, such a display, however foreign to our notions of the sobriety of justice, indicates a kind, if not an equitable, feeling in the audience, and one which the advocate of the slave would share with them.
We must now dismiss the scenic philosopher, trusting that some of the facts, if not the arguments, adduced on his behalf, may prevail with English readers so far as to lead them to take a more favourable view of his character than has been given in some ancient or modern accounts of it. Had he been less philosophic, he would probably have been more successful at the time, and less obvious to critical shafts then and afterwards. Yet that so many of his works should have been preserved, can scarcely have been a mere accident. Some attraction or charm there was in them that touched the heart of Hellas from its eastern to its western border, and so held above water a fourth at least of his writings, when the deluge of barbarism or bigotry swept away so many thousands of Greek dramas, and among them some that had borne off the crown from Æschylus or Sophocles. "Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt." The very tenderness of Euripides, though taxed with effeminacy or degradation of art by critics of the Aristophanic school, may have had its influence in the salvage of seventeen plays and fragments of others, exceeding in number the sum of those of both his extant compeers.
Having passed in review the times, the life, and other circumstances relating to Euripides, we may now pass on to a survey of his dramas.
- ↑ It appears as an accepted title in Vitruvius's work on Architecture, book viii.
- ↑ These remarks on the symbolism in the Orestean legend are taken, greatly abridged, from K. O. Müller's "Essay on the 'Eumenides' of Æschylus," p. 131, English translation.
- ↑ Thucydides, viii. c. 1.
- ↑ Phœnician Women, v. 673.
- ↑ "Frogs," 1049.
- ↑ "Thesmoph." 398.
- ↑ Paley, Preface to Euripides.
- ↑ Colonel Mure's Hist. of Greek Literature, v. 463.
- ↑ Adolph Schöll, the author of an excellent Life of Sophocles, reminds his readers that the very female characters which Euripides is sometimes taxed with selecting, because they were particularly wicked, for his themes, were brought on the stage by Sophocles in dramas now lost—e.g., Phædra, Sthenebœa, Ino, Medea often, Ærope, Althæa, Eriphyle, &c. &c.; and he notices also that Euripides, in many of his dramas, atoned, if there was any occasion to do so, for his portraits of the bad, by his numerous delineations of good women.
- ↑ Might not our Fletcher be fairly taxed with woman-hating by readers who pick out such passages only as suit their own views, or ascribe to the author himself the opinions he puts into the mouths of his dramatis personæ? The Greek poet has not written anything half so injurious to women as the following lines from the "Night-Walker," act ii. sc. 4:—
Oh! I hate
Their noise, and do abhor the whole sex heartily.
They are all walking devils, harpies. I will study
A week together, how to rail sufficiently
Upon 'em all; and that I may. be furnish't,
Thou shalt buy all the railing books and ballads
That malice has invented against women.
I will study nothing else, and practise 'em,
Till I grow fat with curses."