Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

by Erwin Rohde

§ 4

The Attic Tragedy of the fifth century must of its own accord, even if the conscious purpose of the dramatists had not tended in the same direction, have developed into an artistic product based on psychological interest. The real theatre of that drama must inevitably have become the interior of its hero’s mind.

The tragic poet attempted something hitherto unknown. The characters and events of ancient legend or history which had passed shadowlike before the minds of the hearers or readers of all earlier poetry, at the mercy of those hearers’ own private and variously limited imagination—these same events and characters were now to take form and body and appear visibly before the eyes of all beholders alike in equal clearness. What had hitherto seemed a dream-vision of the imagination now visibly presented itself to the eyes of the beholder, unchanging, precise, independent of the limitations of intellect among the audience, a concrete and self-moving object of waking perception. Thus reawakened to a palpable and fully realized life, the myth was seen in a new light. What in it was mere incident became subordinated to the personality of the man who plays his part in these events before our eyes, and whose importance and content is not exhausted in the single particular action. The old legend in becoming drama has undergone an extension both spatial and temporal, and even in externals the plot that unfolds itself in a series of momentary acts plays the least part in the story. The speeches and counter-speeches of the hero and the other actors who take part in the story were bound to take up the greater part of the time. Motives of action, expressed, debated and fought out in words, become more important than their eventual outcome in passionate deed or mortal woe. With the advance of artistic skill the intellect seeks to grasp the permanent outlines of the character that in the given circumstances can be moved by particular motives to particular acts. Thus, the complete materialization of the myth leads to its complete spiritualization. The eyes and mind of the beholder are directed less to the external events—these, being familiar from the ancient legend, could [422] awaken little curiosity—and more to the inward meaning and import of what the hero does and suffers.

And it was here that the dramatic poet was faced with his special and peculiar problem. What was to happen in his drama was settled out of hand by the course of the ancient legend (in a few cases by the course of historical events) and the lines along which his invention must move were planned out for him in advance. To give life to the personages of the drama, motivation and justification to the events of the drama—that was his particular business. But in this he was thrown entirely upon his own resources. Even if he could he was not permitted to derive the inner motive forces of the action from the real modes of feeling and thinking that had belonged to the distant past in which the myth had first been conceived. Such motives would have remained unintelligible to the audience, and his play would have been stillborn. But on the other hand, how was he to make plausible and intelligible to the vastly different mentality and changed feelings of the age in which he lived actions which really sprang from the habits and moral ideas of a long since vanished age? It is open to him (if he is not content to be a mere annalist simply stringing together bare events) to take the actual incident given him by the mythical legend and set over against it the actor in the story whose emotions are those of a modern man, and upon whose shoulders the burden of the event is laid; he may represent this opposition as beyond reconciliation, and so lead to the most simple and overwhelming of tragic conflicts. This simple opposition of character and destiny which places both the poet and his hero—another Hamlet—in a position of direct hostility to the mythological background can, however, never become the rule. It is the business of the poet as far as possible to assimilate and make his own the spirit that actually called forth the dark and cruel legend of the past, while yet remaining true to the mode of perception proper to his own time. He must manage to leave undisturbed the full primitive sense of the mythical story and bring it about that by its marriage with the spirit of a later age its meaning is not destroyed but deepened. He is committed to the search for an adjustment between the mental attitudes of an older and a newer age.

Such an adjustment came most easily to Aeschylus and satisfied the needs of his temperament. As one who had grown to manhood in the Athens of the period before the Persian wars his own character had its roots in ancient and traditional modes of thought. These he built up under the guiding [423] influence of his own special ways of thinking and feeling into a new and loftier whole: to corroborate this whole, which appeared to him as a law of the moral world, by reference to typical examples taken from mythology—examples chosen by him with deliberate care to serve as subjects of his dramatic poetry—this was one of the chief aims of his art. To the plot in its moral—nay, its religious—sense, all his thoughts are directed; the characters of the actors themselves are only illuminated from the standpoint of this special interest; their wider, independent existence outside the life of the drama which completely envelops them is not meant to draw attention to itself. He himself gives us the right, in studying his plays, to leave out of sight for a moment the representational aspect of the particular and the personal—all that in fact makes them essentially works of art—in order to observe more closely the under-current of generalized belief which we may reasonably call the ethic and theology of the poet.

Behind the living tissue of his artistic creation Aeschylus allows us to perceive pretty clearly the firm outlines of his own ethical and religious convictions. He fuses together elements prescribed to him from without with that which was dictated by his own spirit. What is prescribed to him by legend—which he allows to run its full course, in strictly dramatic form and by preference as a trilogy, a form in this case uniquely adapted to the subject—is a history that deals with the continued operation of the forces of evil and suffering upon several generations of a family, persisting from father to son and from son to son’s son. The belief also in such interconnexion of human destinies is prescribed to him from without. That the sins of the ancestors were visited upon their descendants here upon earth was an ancient article of faith especially strong in Attica.[65] What Aeschylus contributes on his part is the unswerving conviction that the son and grandson of the sinner are punished for their own sin too. Suffering is punishment,[66] and suffering would not have overtaken Oedipus, nor the sons of Oedipus, if Laïos had been the only guilty one—if their own sin had not deserved punishment.

And yet it does not lie within their power to choose whether the guilt shall be theirs or not: they cannot escape the deed of sin. How, we may ask, can a guilty deed be necessitated, imposed upon the guilty one by the decree of a higher power, and yet at the same time the fault of the doer of the deed, as though he had acted of his own free will? [424] The question is a perplexing and a formidable one, and it was by no means unnoticed by the poet. Behind the external apparatus of myth he finds himself faced by the problem of the freedom or determination of man’s will, which, as civilization and culture advance, feels itself morally responsible for every decision. He finds a way out of the difficulty in the view that it is not merely the deed of wickedness itself, but the conscious decision that leads up to the deed that arises out of the family inheritance of crime. The conscious choice and decision, though regarded as necessary, seemed to demonstrate fully the personal guilt and responsibility of the doer.[67] The cloud of evil that proceeds from the deed of the ancestor casts a dark shadow also over the minds of his son and his son’s son. Not from his own mind or character does the will to do wrong take its origin. The noble, pure and resolute Eteokles, the model of intelligent manhood, the shield and protection of his people, falls in a moment, a victim to ominous destiny; his clear-sighted spirit is darkened, he gives himself up—his better self—for lost,[68] and rushes upon his doom with awful resolve. The “sins derived from his ancestors”[69] drive him on. Then, and not till then, is the full measure of penance at last paid for the crime done by the ancestor;[70] his descendants are his representatives, and become guilty on his behalf and then, for their own guilt as well as his, they suffer retribution. Divinity, or a spirit of vengeance sent with a divine mission, drives the victims burdened with the inheritance of crime to the criminal deed. The divine guidance is actuated no longer, as in ancient and undying popular belief, by personal desire of vengeance, anger or malice,[71] but by divine justice, acting with “just deceit”,[72] that the measure of guilt may be fulfilled, and that the divine will to justice may have a means to complete satisfaction. The evil Spirit of the House assists Klytaimnestra to conceive the thought of murdering her husband;[73] God himself guides and urges forward Orestes to the act of matricide which he plans and carries out with fully conscious purpose—a crime that is also a duty. To the poet the old ideas of the duty of avenging murder are a very living reality. The right to worship and cult possessed by the souls, their claim to vengeance when they have been violently done to death, their ghostly influence exerted upon the life and destinies of their immediate kinsfolk upon whom the duty of taking vengeance rests—all these things are for him not the obsolete fancies of an older generation but true and awful realities.[74] Whole dramas, the Choephoroi and the Eumenides, for [425] instance, would appear as a meaningless beating of the air if they were not animated and made significant by unaltered faith in the right and the might of the souls, the reality and potency of the daimonic counsel, the Erinyes,[75] who appear on behalf of the murdered mother. And now at last light breaks through the dark and clouded sky of awful imagination: where Duty and Crime have become inextricably confused, divine grace, though yielding nothing of its rights, finds at last a solution.

All these things, however—conflict and solution, crime and its expiation in ever-renewed crime and the suffering that arises thence—fulfil themselves in this world. Guilt is avenged always upon earth. The “other” world is by no means an indispensable link in this chain of conceptions and fancies; the poet’s view is rarely turned in that direction. Speculation upon the state of the soul after death, upon a blessed life in the kingdom of the spirits,[76] does not interest him. Only such portions of the eschatological imaginings of the theologians as might serve the purposes of moral inspiration or support, found favour with the poet. There are occasional allusions to the judgment that, in Hades, “another Zeus” holds over the deeds of earthly life,[77] but they remain dark and vague. It is not explained in what relation this judgment in Hades stands to the complete equivalence of guilt and destiny that, here upon earth, Zeus and Moira bring to completion in the person of the criminal himself and, after his death, of his descendants. Side by side with the allusions to the judgment in the underworld implying the complete consciousness of the dead, stand expressions that call up a picture of the senseless, twilight existence of the souls in Hades like that described in Homer.[78] The poet, to whom every feature of the beliefs derived from the cult of the souls about the relations of the departed to the life of the dwellers on earth was intensely and vividly real, never cared to fix his attention for long upon the nature and condition of the dead in their separate other-world existence. In fact his chosen work of giving a moral significance and deeper meaning to popular and ancient faith was wholly derived from this faith itself; and so also was the lofty and consistent idea of divinity which fills the background of his picture of life. The generation which had fought at Marathon, in spite of a profounder and even more sombre meditation upon life and destiny, could still dispense almost entirely with the assistance of the theological doctrines of the sects who sought refuge from the dark and austere [426] realities of this unsatisfying world in thoughts of an imagined hereafter.