CHAPTER XXIX. GREEK LITERATURE
ORATORY AND LYRIC POETRY
Of all branches of literature there is none more closely interwoven with political life than oratory. This art could only have been developed among the Ionians, for no other race had the same innate taste for vivacious utterance, or the same feeling for fluency, copiousness, and brilliancy of speech. Nor is there any doubt that the kind of oratory which aims at influencing the feeling and directing the resolutions of the civic body was first practised in the cities of Ionia. But it was at Athens that Greek oratory was brought to its true perfection. There the public oration developed side by side with freedom of speech and the duty of speaking which was encumbent on every Attic citizen. It seemed so intimately connected with the life of Attica that the state of Theseus was represented as founded by it.
For this reason oratory was not the subject of a special study that could be conceived of apart from public life, but the simple expression of practical experience and statesman-like prudence; for at that period men could not have imagined a popular leader who was not at the same time a statesman proved in peace and war and had not won by his public career the right to be listened to by his fellow citizens. And as oratory grew into a power which dominated the life of the community, so language itself was advanced to a new stage in development, when Athens became the centre of the world. What grew out of the local dialect was a new idiom, in which the power inherent in the Greek language first came to its full maturity by becoming the vehicle of Attic culture.
The Greek language had undergone a many-sided development in Ionia. The Ionic dialect was the repository not only of the Homeric and post-Homeric epics and hymns, but of the whole treasure of elegiac and iambic poetry. Ionia was the first country to avail herself largely of the art of writing. This was first put to use in connection with the art of the country; the epic poems which had been composed without the aid of writing, and had become the property of the nation, were by its aid disseminated, cast into permanent form, and continued. Reading and writing were first introduced into the schools of the Rhapsodists, which is the reason why Homer himself is represented as a schoolmaster; and when the later epic poets—Arctinus, Lesches, and others—who sang in Ionia after the beginning of the Olympiads, made the great epic the starting-point of their own poems, in which they endeavoured to amplify, supplement, and connect the substance of the Iliad and the Odyssey, writing was a common accomplishment among poets, and the rhapsodic art itself took on more of the character of a science in consequence.
At this point, however, and in Ionia as before, there came into being a wholly novel method of literary statement, intended, not to rouse the emotions of a crowded audience, but to spread abroad the results of scientific research. Philosophers and historians wrote for the public in prose, and in the sixth century the taste for reading and writing spread with great rapidity through the whole of Ionia, where Samos, in particular, became a school for the cultivation of the art of writing.
At this time, however, prose did not develop in contrast to poetry; as yet no distinction was made between the two classes of composition. The colloquial language of ordinary life, the lively popular note, was simply adopted by writers of fables, and from the tales of Æsop the maxims of homely wit and wisdom passed into literature. Archilochus was fond of using them, so was Herodotus. Men were so accustomed to learn from the poets that even speculative philosophers set forth their theories in poetic garb, like Xenophanes, who wandered about reciting his doctrines in the form of a rhapsody. The narratives of Herodotus are composed with a view to stirring the listening crowd, and the poetic character of his descriptions is unmistakable. His style flows on with the ease of an epic recitation, his sentences hang together loosely; poet-like he sees around him the audience which he desires to enchant and thrill with the charm of his story. Even in philosophy no attempt was made to reproduce the sequence of ideas in clear and exact terms. The teachings of Heraclitus bore the character of Sibylline oracles; he delighted in figurative language which suggested rather than followed up an idea, and apart from the abstruseness of his thought the construction of his sentences was so far from plain that it was impossible to determine precisely the grammatical sequence of his discourse.
Thus, great as was the wealth of Ionian literature, it had as yet no prose, while other parts of the country were even more backward. Generally speaking, we may say that the distinction between poetry and prose as two separate forms of literature was not recognised by the Greeks till late. We need only recall the hymns of Pindar to see how phrases and ideas of an entirely prosaic order occur side by side with the loftiest flights of poetic imagery. It was reserved for Athenian literature to create a prose style. The language was sufficiently new and supple to take and reproduce the peculiar impress of the Attic spirit; and this, as compared with the Ionic spirit, manifests itself in language, as in garb and manners, by greater simplicity and smoothness of form.
The dialect spoken in Attica occupied a sort of intermediate position among the dialects of the various tribes of Greece, and was therefore admirably fitted to become the medium of communication among all educated Greeks. For, although closely akin to Ionic, the Attic dialect had remained free from many Ionic peculiarities developed in the islands and on the further coast—particularly from the tendency to soften the vowel sounds.
Side by side with the eloquence which subserved political ends and was designed to guide the masses, there developed in Athens the speech of the law courts, which from the outset was more strictly in accordance with regular rules and bore more likeness to a literary exercise, by reason of the rise of a class of writers who composed pleas for others. For it was the law in Attica that every man must conduct his own case, so that even those who had their speeches composed by counsel were themselves obliged to deliver them. Accordingly the personality of the orator, which carried such weight in political speeches, fell completely into the background; he was a mere writer of orations (logographos), and dealt with public instead of private affairs. This kind of oratory entered into much closer relations with sophistry, because the latter aimed at giving the mind such versatility as would enable it to handle with skill any subject presented to it and to discover in each the greatest variety of interesting matter.
A Greek Orator
A peculiar kind of public oration which attained to importance in the Athens of Pericles was the speech in honour of citizens who had fallen in battle. By a special statute which dates from the time of Cimon, a speech of this character was associated with a public funeral; and it was the custom to commission the most approved orator of the day to deliver this funeral oration in the name of the community, as an honourable distinction and acknowledgment of the public services of the deceased. Wordy and elaborate eulogiums did not suit the taste of the time. At such moments, when the citizens felt themselves smitten with grievous loss, it seemed a worthier task to bid them take courage, to turn their mourning into thanksgiving, their sorrow into joy and pride, by holding up before them the lofty interests of the public service for which their fellow citizens had laid down their lives, and to encourage the hearers to the same joyful self sacrifice.
Considering that all the arts and sciences flourished most vigorously during the period of the Persian wars, the fruits of which came to maturity in the years of peace under Pericles, it may well surprise us that the lyric art, the very one which is wont to be most closely associated with every spiritual movement, did not keep pace with the development of the other arts; and that the Wars of Liberation, so national, so just, and crowned, after grievous trials, with such amazing success, found no fuller echo in popular minstrelsy. Various circumstances combine to explain the fact.
The home of Æolian lyric poetry was more remote from the agitations of the times, and the inspiration which had called forth the poems of Alcæus and Sappho a hundred years before had burnt low. Choral lyric poetry, on the other hand, was too completely interwoven with religious worship and earlier conditions of life, it was too much accustomed to put its art at the service of the old families whose glories belonged to the past rather than the present, to find itself at home in these changed times. The Theban bard, in particular, was too deeply concerned for his native city—which had reaped nothing but shame and misery from the Wars of Liberation—and for Delphi—which had from the first looked with disfavour on the national aspirations after liberty—to appreciate dispassionately the glories of the new era, though he was too large hearted and liberal minded to refuse the victorious city of Athens its meed of admiration and praise in song. The Thebans punished Pindar for calling Athens “the pillar of Hellas”; the Athenians rewarded him, rightly esteeming his tribute a triumph of the good cause. In Sparta nothing was done to celebrate the Wars of Liberation. The Spartan constitution allowed no freedom of intellectual life, and furnished too little in the way of comfort and contentment to prove a favourable soil for poetry.
Greek Comedian
In the elegy, the oldest form of Greek lyric—so perfect an expression of the Ionic spirit in its varied measures and uses—a new form had been evolved in Ionia itself, side by side with the older one in which Theognis had expounded his party rancour and Solon his statesman-like wisdom—a lighter form which touched upon life in accents untinged by grief, the song of joyous conviviality, giving the gaiety of the banquet a higher consecration by the introduction of ethical ideas. “To drink, to jest, to bear a just mind,” sang Ion, and brought public affairs gracefully into the conversation. Dionysius the Athenian, a statesman of note in the age of Pericles, associated himself with Ion in this form of verse, and the lighter kind of elegy so appealed to the intellectual character of contemporary Athens that even Sophocles and Æschylus composed elegies of this sort. The fifth century was so rich in life and movement that these occasional verses were produced in great abundance; the epigram itself is no more than a subsidiary kind of elegiac verse. Its concise form was due to its original purpose, which was to serve as an inscription on some public monument, and it is therefore more closely connected with the great events of the time than any other kind of poetry. Simonides of Ceos was esteemed above all other Greeks as a writer of occasional verse in the best sense of the term, so much so that Sparta commissioned the Ionian poet to sing the praise of her Leonidas. With inimitable felicity he immortalised the events of the Wars of Liberation in brief pregnant epigrams inscribed on monuments of every sort, sang the praises of the fallen in elegies, and celebrated the days of Artemisium and Marathon in grand cantatas which were performed by festal choirs.
The state did what it could to advance the cause of art. It offered poets brilliant opportunities for distinguishing themselves at the celebrations held in honour of its victories, and gave prizes for the best performances. As Themistocles had been assisted by Simonides, so Cimon was assisted by the genius of Ion, who in like manner laboured to hand down his fame to posterity. Pericles was led by his own tastes as well as by political considerations to do all that lay in his power to foster the art of song in Athens. For this purpose he introduced the musical competitions at the Panathenæa, and so summoned all men of talent to vie publicly one with another. He himself was the organiser and lawgiver in this department, and settled with profound artistic knowledge the manner in which the singers and cithara-players should appear at the festivals. If in spite of all these efforts lyric poetry did not take the place we might have anticipated in the Athens of Pericles, and Simonides found no worthy successors, the principal reason must be sought in the fact that another stronger and richer voice of poetry arose, into which the lyric was merged and so lost its individual importance.
Of all kinds of lyric poetry none was cultivated in Athens so admirably and successfully as the dithyrambus, the chant in praise of the god Dionysus, the giver of blessings—the branch of religious poetry which showed a capacity for development beyond all others. Lasus of Hermione, the tutor of Pindar, had changed this form of song (originally no more than the medium of an enthusiastic nature worship) into an artistically constructed choral chant and invested it with such splendour by bold and varied measures and the rippling music of flutes, as to cast the fame of Arion, its original inventor, into the shade. From the Peloponnesus Lasus brought the new art to the court of the Pisistratidæ at Athens. At that time everything connected with the worship of Dionysus was regarded with special favour, the dithyrambus was introduced into state festivals, and wealthy citizens vied with one another in equipping and training Bacchic choirs, composed of fifty singers who danced circling the flaming altars of Dionysus; and no expense was spared to procure new songs for the Attic Dionysia from the greatest masters, such as Pindar and Simonides. The latter could boast that he had won no less than fifty dithyrambic victories at Athens. But the evolution of the dithyrambus did not stop there.
The dithyrambus not only included every metre and rhythm known to earlier kinds of lyric poetry, but it contained elements which tended to pass beyond the limitations of the lyric. For the festal chorus regarded the god whose praises they, sang as an immanent presence and, as it were, lived through all that befell him, whether of persecution or victory; and it was therefore but a short step to pass beyond the assumption that their audience was acquainted with the events which formed the subject of their chants, and to call them to mind by narration or set them forth by spectacular representation. The leaders of the dithyrambic chorus accordingly interspersed their singing with recitations, and thus epic and song were combined. The epic recitation was then rendered more effective by the aid of action and costume, the god himself was made visible in his suffering and triumph, the leader of the chorus undertook the part, the dancers were transformed into satyrs—attendants of the god and partakers of his fortunes; and thus from the union of the old forms of poetry there sprang a new form, the drama, the richest and most perfect of all.
The Greeks were by nature gifted with dramatic talent. Their natural vivacity induced them to clothe every doubt or deliberation in the form of a dialogue. Thus even in Homer we find the germ of the drama, which now reaped the benefit of the entire evolution of the older art methods. For all that dance and song had invented in the way of balanced rhythm, effective metre, and poetic imagery, was here united, enlivened by the art of mimicry, which made the person of the actor the instrument of artistic exposition, and warmed by the joyous fires of the Bacchic festival.
The cycle of representation could not but be limited so long as the action was confined by ceremonial considerations to the subjects offered by the worship of Bacchus. The Greeks therefore went a step farther and in place of the fortunes of Bacchus took other subjects equally well calculated to arouse lively sympathy, and thus (when this form of art had been invented) there flowed in an abundance of materials and fertile themes, the storehouse of Homeric and post-Homeric epos was flung open, the national heroes were introduced to the nation in a novel and striking guise, and a vast field of activity was opened to dramatic art.
This advance had already been made beyond the borders of Attica; for before the time of Clisthenes the hero Adrastus had been substituted for Dionysus, and it may be that a similar enlargement of the scope of dithyrambic poetry had also taken place at Corinth. But it was at Athens alone that these rudiments of the drama reached their full development. As the epic had mirrored the heroic days of old, as the lyric kept pace with the development of the nation for three centuries after the decline of the epic, so the drama was the form of poetry which began to flower at the moment when Athens became the pivot of Greek history. Originating from humble beginnings in the time of Solon, it grew in magnitude and importance with the growth of the city’s greatness, and is associated with the history of Athens in every stage of its development.
TRAGEDY
Thespis was the founder of Attic tragedy, for it was he who introduced the alternation of recitation and song and arranged the stage and costumes. The story goes that Solon had small liking for the new art, believing the violent excitement of the emotions by the representation of imaginary events to be prejudicial, but that the tyrants favoured this popular diversion, like everything else connected with the democratic worship of Dionysus, because it suited the purpose of their policy to provide brilliant entertainments for the population at the expense of wealthy citizens. About 550 B.C. they summoned the chorus leader from Icaria to the city, competitions between rival tragic choruses were introduced, and the stage near the black poplar in the market place became a centre of Attic festivity.
With the restoration of peace all civic festivals took a higher flight, the various constituents fell apart, tragedy rejected the baser elements of Bacchic festivity and assumed greater dignity, it was cast into definite artistic forms by Pratinas and Chœrilus, and became freer and freer in its choice of subject. The old element was not abandoned for all that, the rustic youth would not be deprived of their accustomed masquerade, and the people were left their satyr choruses. But the two forms, which could not be combined without mutual detriment, were separated, and thus the satyr drama grows up side by side with tragedy. Pratinas, who migrated to Athens from Phlius, gave these plays their typical form, and they retained their original character of Bacchic jollity, their rustic and homely features, and the merry rout of the satyrs with their wild dances and rude jests. Thus these elements were preserved to literature and yet prevented from molesting or hampering the further development of tragedy.
The period in which Athens took her place as a great power and sent her triremes across the sea to support the Ionian revolt, likewise constituted an epoch in the history of Attic tragedy. About that time the wooden scaffoldings from which the audience had looked on at the plays of Pratinas, Chœrilus, Phrynichus, and the youthful Æschylus, gave way; and the drama had already attained such consequence in Athens that the building of a magnificent theatre was taken in hand. A permanent stage of stone was built within the precincts sacred to Dionysus on the southern declivity of the citadel, and seats for spectators, rising one above the other in semi-circular rows, were built into the rock of the Acropolis in such wise that the audience commanded a view of Hymettus and the Ilissus on the left and of the harbour on the right.
Greek Poet
Meanwhile the artistic structure of tragedy was steadily advancing towards perfection. The subject-matter grew more varied, music and the dance were used in a greater variety of forms, female characters were added. Nevertheless the lyric element remained predominant down to the time of the Persian wars; and Phrynichus, the greatest predecessor of Æschylus, was most admired for his charming choral songs. It was with the great drama of the War of Liberation that the theatrical drama began to unfold its full powers, and nowhere do we perceive more clearly the manifestation of the newly-acquired energy which pervaded every department of Attic life.
The man destined to give utterance in tragic art to the spirit of the great age was Æschylus, the son of Euphorion of Eleusis, a scion of an ancient family, through which he claimed association with one of the most venerable sanctuaries of the land. This is why he calls himself the pupil of Demeter, thus testifying that the solemn services of the temple at Eleusis had not failed to exercise a lasting influence upon his mind. As a boy he witnessed the fall of the tyrants: when come to man’s estate he fought at Marathon, being then thirty-five years old, and he himself declared, in the inscription on his tombstone, that he took pride, not in his tragedies, but in his share in that great day, though there he had been but a citizen among citizens, while as a poet he was without peer among his contemporaries. For it was he whose creative genius laid the foundations of Attic tragedy, making all previous achievements look like imperfect attempts.
He introduced a second actor on the stage, and thus made the play a real drama, by which means lively colloquy first became possible. Dialogue, for which the Athenians were singularly well qualified by their love of talking, readiness and acute reasoning faculty, was thus transferred to the stage, and this gave it a wholly novel interest. The language of the dialogue was in the main that of ordinary life, while older phonetic principles prevailed in the chorus, which was thus less familiar to the ear and produced an impression of solemnity and dignity which suited well with its character of the oldest element of tragedy and the religious centre about which it had crystallised. The choruses were shortened to allow the action to proceed more vigorously, the characters of the dramatis personæ were more sharply defined, a distinction was made between leading and secondary parts, and the parts of secondary characters of lower station bore the stamp of the common people, as distinguished from the heroic figures of the play. The stage itself was brought to a higher pitch of perfection. It was effectively fitted up as an ideal scene by Agatharchus, the son of Eudemus, an artist from Samos, who cultivated scene painting scientifically as a branch of art, and mechanism was pressed into the service to raise shades from the depths of the earth or cause gods to hover in the air by artificial means. The spectacle as a whole gained in solemn dignity no less than in spiritual import and moral significance.
The principal aim of the earlier poets had been to express and induce emotional moods; but the object of the drama was to present the legends of olden times completely in their general connection, and for this purpose Attic drama was so arranged that three tragedies were joined to form a single whole, in order to display upon a harmonious plan the successive developments of the mythical story, and these three tragedies, which were so many acts of one great drama, were followed by a Satyr-drama as afterpiece. This led back from the affecting solemnity of the tragedies to the popular sphere of the Dionysian festival, where the diverting adventures witnessed and enacted by the satyrs restored the minds of the spectators to innocent mirth. It was a healthy trait of popular sentiment which thus mingled jest and earnest, and one of which we see other evidences in vase painting and the sculptures of the temples.
Such was the tetralogy of Attic drama, which, if not invented by Æschylus yet received its artistic consummation at his hands. The dithyrambic chorus was divided into groups, each consisting of twelve (and later of fifteen) persons, so that there was a special chorus for each part of the tetralogy, to follow sympathetically the action of the dramatis personæ and fill up the pauses with dance and song. The orchestra, where the chorus was placed, lay between the stage and the spectators, just as the chorus itself symbolically occupied an intermediate position between the audience and the heroes of the drama.
The Greeks were accustomed to look upon the poets as their teachers, and no man could gain recognition as a poet among them who had only talent, imagination, and artistic skill to show as proofs of his poetic vocation; this required a thorough education of heart and mind and clear insight into things human and divine. Hence the calling of a poet laid claim to the whole man and the man’s whole life, and none conceived of it more nobly than Æschylus. Like Pindar he takes his hearers into the very heart of the myth, drawing out its moral earnestness and illuminating it with the light of historical experience. Humanity, as represented by Æschylus in the Titan Prometheus, with its constancy through struggles and misery, its proud self-respect, its indefatigable inventive genius, with its tendency, too, to rashness and arrogant boasting, is the generation of his own contemporaries, with their reckless aspirations; but no wisdom avails man save that which comes from Zeus, no skill and intelligence save that which is based on devout morality. Thus, without petty premeditation the poet becomes a true teacher of the people; in an age of incipient scepticism he endeavours to uphold the religion of his forefathers, to purify popular conceptions and to draw forth the kernel of wholesome truth from the many-hued tinsel of popular fables. It was the mission of the poet to maintain harmony between popular tradition and advancing knowledge.
But the poets lived in the midstream of civic life, and it is not to be supposed that, in a city like Athens, men who at public festivals set forth the creations of their genius in the public eye, could remain indifferent to the questions of their own day. They were obliged of necessity to belong to one party or another, and if they were sincere and candid, their views as to what was for the good of the commonwealth could not but appear in their works. Their choice of subject was still limited in the main to mythology; man’s strength of will, his deeds and sufferings, the contradiction between laws human and divine, were still set forth by preference in the characters of the Homeric age of which the tradition survived in the epos. These were the prototypes of the human race, their sufferings were the sufferings and entanglements incident to the whole human race; in contemplating them the spectators were to be freed from what was personal in their sorrows and cares, the narrow bounds of their self-consciousness were to be widened, and they were to receive from the performance not only the highest artistic pleasure, but a cheering and healing purification of their hearts. These heroes of olden times were in harmony with the ideal character which the dramatists were bent on giving to the whole world of the stage; but the impression was none the less striking because the audience was transported into a dim and legendary past. We feel the spirit of the warrior of Marathon in the warlike plays of Æschylus, and the spectator of his Seven against Thebes glowed with eagerness to strike a blow for his country.
Meanwhile Phrynichus had ventured to put modern events on the stage, and his Fall of Miletus and Phœnissæ were no doubt fraught with political intention. Æschylus followed the example of his predecessor in a far grander style when, four years after the production of the Phœnissæ of Phrynichus, he produced his drama of the Persæ. He depicted the fall of the Great King. But with fine artistic instinct he chose Persia, not Attica, for the scene of his tragedy. He brings before our eyes the consequences of the battle, its reaction upon the hostile empire, in its own capital. Darius is conjured from the grave that in the person of the pious and prudent ruler may be set forth the glory of the inviolate Persian empire, while his successor returns from Hellas shorn of all dignity, a warning example of the ruin which foolish arrogance brings upon all sovereign power. The whole composition is pervaded by the idea of retribution, which had been awakened in the Greek mind by the Persian wars.
In the tragedy of Phrynichus, Themistocles is extolled above all other men, while Æschylus only alludes to him in passing as the inventor of a subtle stratagem. On the other hand the latter gives a detailed account of the fight on Psyttalea, so exalting the fame of Aristides, who contributed substantially to the victory of Salamis, not by sea, but by land.
The Persæ was the middle play of a trilogy and comes to no final conclusion. The shade of Darius hints at other defeats in the future, and at the struggles of Platæa. From Glaucus, the third play of the trilogy, an allusion to Himera has been preserved. The first part, Phineus, takes its name from the mythical seer who revealed to the Argonauts their coming voyage to the land of the northern barbarians. Hence, it is extremely probable that all three plays were linked together by a single idea, the idea (present to all thinking men of the time) of the great struggle between barbarian and Greek, between Asia and Europe, which had its mythical prelude in the voyage of the Argonauts, and came to its glorious issue on the battlefields of Greece and Sicily. In like manner Herodotus had conceived of the Persian War as one link in a great chain of historical development, and Pindar had associated Salamis, Platæa, and Himera as ranking equally among the glorious days of the Greeks; and we may be sure that the trilogy of the Persæ would not have been acted at the court of Hiero unless it had fully satisfied the tyrant’s love of praise.
Æschylus represented the legendary history of the house of Pelops in the three plays of the Oresteia, and that of the royal house of Thebes and the Thracian king, Lycurgus, each in a cycle of three dramas; he worked up the legend of Prometheus so that the conflicts and discords of the several parts find a satisfactory solution in a larger order of things; and thus the poet wove legend and history into a single piece. Prehistoric and present times, East and West, the mother-country and the colonies, all form parts of a grand picture, of a chain of events linked together by prophecy and reciprocal reaction. The poet looks forward and backward, and prophet-like interprets the course of history, seeing the inner necessity revealed to the eye of the spirit. He uplifts the hearts of his people by setting forth the waxing power of the Greeks, the waning might of the barbarians on every side, without a taint of scorn or malicious triumph to vitiate the moral majesty of his work. At the same time he moderates the pride of victory, by pointing to the guilt which brought about the Persian overthrow and to the eternal laws of divine justice, the observance of which is the inexorable condition of the prosperity of the Greeks.
In the tragedies on mythical subjects there was no lack of passages which permitted of or actually challenged application to the events of the day. Next to Aristides, it was Cimon to whom the muse of Æschylus did homage. Like Cimon, the poet was the champion of a common Hellenism, of patriarchal customs, the rule of the best, the discipline of the good old times, and so when the waves of popular agitation rose higher and higher till they threatened the very Areopagus, the last bulwark, the septuagenarian poet led his muse into the strife of conflicting parties and exerted his utmost powers to impress upon his fellow-citizens the sacred dignity of the Areopagus as a divine institution and to warn them of the consequences of sinful license. The Eumenides of Æschylus is a brilliant example of the way in which a great imaginative work may be made to serve a special purpose and express a particular tendency without losing anything of its transparent lucidity or of the sublimity which stamps it as a masterpiece for all time. But though the Areopagus remained unmolested as a court of justice (and we should like to fancy the poem of Æschylus an influential factor in the matter) the poet felt alien and solitary in the city where democracy had completely gained the ascendant. This was not the freedom for which he had bled in the field; the band of those who had fought in the Wars of Liberation dwindled and dwindled; the Oresteia was the last work he produced in Athens; and he died in his seventieth year at Gela in Sicily (456 B.C.), after a residence there of about two years.
The day of the warriors of Marathon was past, and the new age, the age of Pericles, found exponents in a younger generation, and on the Attic stage in Sophocles. Like Æschylus he was of noble birth, as is indicated by his appointment to be a priest of the hero, Halon, but his father was a craftsman and the head of a great smithy for the manufacture of weapons. He was born in the metalliferous district of Colonus about B.C. 496 and grew up amidst the delightful rural scenery of the valley of the Cephisus, in the shade of the sacred olives that had witnessed the first beginnings of national history, yet near the capital and near the sea, which he overlooked from the crags of Colonus, and where he saw the port grow up during his boyhood years. In the early bloom of youthful beauty he led the dance at the festival held in honour of the victory of Salamis; twelve years later he entered the lists as a rival of the great poet Æschylus, whose inspiring art had attracted him to follow the same path to poetic fame. It was a day of unwonted excitement throughout Athens when all men awaited the issue of the contest between the ambitious young poet and Æschylus, then close upon sixty years of age and twice already the wearer of the laurel crown. The occasion was the same Dionysian festival on which Cimon, having brought the Thracian campaign to a glorious close, came up from the Piræus and offered his thank-offerings to the gods in the orchestra of the theatre. The people were in raptures over the relics of Theseus which he had brought back, and amidst the assenting acclamations of the assembled citizens the archon Apsephion appointed Cimon and his fellow-generals umpires, as being the worthiest representatives of the ten tribes. The result was that the prize was awarded to the Triptolemus trilogy of Sophocles.
Representation of a Reception of Bacchus
There was no opposition between the art of Sophocles and that of his predecessor. The former looked up reverentially to the man whose original genius had led the way to the consummation of tragic art. Envy and jealousy were foreign to his lovable disposition. But he was an independent-minded pupil of his great master, and a man of very different endowments. His genius was gentler, simpler, and more tranquil, the extremes of pathos and pomp were repugnant to his taste. Accordingly he toned down the force of the theatrical diction which Æschylus had introduced, and, without degrading his characters to the common level, tried to make them more human, so that the spectators could feel more closely akin to them. This method is intimately connected with the altered treatment of the subjects of tragedy. In the treatment of tragic legend Æschylus reached the greatest heights to which the genius of Greece ever soared; in this sphere no man could surpass him. But Sophocles realised that the legends could not always be presented to the people with the same breadth of handling without their interest being gradually exhausted. It was therefore necessary to develop more vital action within the various tragedies, to conceive the characters more definitely, and excite a more vivid psychological interest.
Æschylus had already treated the trilogy in such a manner that it was not bound to the thread of a single myth, and the combination, if not dissolved by Sophocles, was so far loosened as to make each tragedy of the three complete in itself, leading up to its appropriate close within the limits of the action and capable of being judged as a separate composition. The result was much greater freedom, the motive of each play could be treated in fuller detail and the poetic picture enhanced by the prominence given to secondary characters. Thus, in his treatment of the legend of Orestes, Sophocles suffers the act of matricide and its perpetrator to fall into the background and gives quite a new turn to the familiar subject by making Electra the leading character in place of her brother Orestes, showing the whole course of the action as reflected in her spirit, and thus securing an opportunity of creating a study of varied emotion and a type of womanly heroism to which the picture of her sister’s dissimilar temperament serves as an admirable foil.
In order to take full advantage of the resources of a more refined and advanced style of art, Sophocles introduced a third actor on the stage and thus opened the way to incomparably greater vividness of treatment no less than to much greater variety of colouring and grouping in the dramatis personæ. Moreover, Sophocles, though an adept in the song and dance, was the first poet to abandon the practice of appearing in the parts he had created. From that time the professions of poet and actor were distinct, and the art of the latter acquired greater independent value. A less active part, outside the scope of the action, was assigned to the chorus, and the dramatic element became more significantly prominent as the nucleus of the tragedy. Æschylus himself recognised the advance, for he not only adopted the improvements in the outward setting of tragedy thus effected, but spurred on by his younger rival, rose to the height of a maturer art in his dramas.
To the influence of Sophocles was due the increased fondness for Attic subjects; his Triptolemus extolled Attica as the home of a superior civilisation, which spread victoriously from that centre to distant lands, he brings the legend of Œdipus to an harmonious close on Attic soil, at Colonus, his own birth-place, and even in the Electra he manifests the Athenian point of view by taking the overthrow of unlawful dominion and the successful struggle for liberty as the purpose of the action.
His tragedies contributed more than any other works to give spiritual significance, as Pericles strove to do, to the age of Athenian might and splendour. Like Pericles, Sophocles endeavoured to maintain the ascendency of the ancient worship and customs of the country, the unwritten precepts of sacred law, while at the same time mastering every step of intellectual progress and every enlargement of the bounds of knowledge. His diction bears the stamp of a trained and powerful intellect, which often carries terseness to the verge of obscurity; but with what skill does he preserve the charm of graceful expression, what a spirit of felicitous harmony pervades all his works! He was a man after Pericles’ own heart, and his personal intimacy with the latter is proved by the gay and unaffected manner in which the statesman treats the poet as his colleague in the camp. Sophocles was never a partisan or party writer in the same sense as Æschylus, and as Phrynichus seems to have been, but his art was a mirror of the noblest tendencies of the time, a glorified version of the Athens of Pericles. We meet with his clear and sound judgment on civil affairs in every passage in which he praises prudent counsel as the safeguard of states, and the Attic people rightly appreciated him as the true poet of his age, for none ever won so many prizes or enjoyed his fame so unmolested as Sophocles, nor could Euripides (who though only fifteen or sixteen years his junior belonged to a totally different era) gain any success as his rival until the age of Pericles was past. And even to him Sophocles was never obliged to yield the palm.
COMEDY
Side by side with tragedy, and from the same germ, i.e., from the Bacchic festivities, comedy developed. It is full sister to tragedy, but grew up longer in rustic freedom and fell much later under the discipline and training of the city; and for that reason it retained more faithfully the character of its source. For its origin was the jollity of the vintage, the merry-making of country folk over the increase of another year, which is found in all wine-growing districts. Swarms of masked holiday-makers sang the praises of the genial god and in tipsy merriment played all kinds of jokes and tricks on every one who met the procession and gave an opening for pranks and raillery, the events of the day were freely exploited, and he who hit upon the merriest quips was rewarded by the hearty laughter and applause of a grateful audience.
Thus the autumnal festival was kept in Attica in its day, and more particularly in the district of Icaria, not far from Marathon. The worship of Dionysus as there celebrated made it in a manner the nursery of the whole body of Athenian drama, for Thespis came from Icaria. Thither, too, came Susarion of Megara, bringing from his native place the rude wit of Megarian farce and setting the fashion which remained in vogue for the time in Attica. From his school arose Mæson, who was very popular in the time of the Pisistratidæ. The next step was the transference of the rustic stage to the capital, where it was recognised by the government as a part of the Dionysian festival and supported out of the public funds. This took place in the time of Cimon, after the Persian wars, and the energetic temper which at that time pervaded the life of Athens proved its vigour by transforming the rude, half-foreign farce into a well-organised form of art, full of significance and thoroughly Attic in character, of which we must regard Chionides and Magnes of Icaria as the founders.
When once the Icarian drama was naturalised in the home of tragedy many of the concomitants of the tragic drama were transferred to it, public contests in comedy were instituted by the state, prizes were adjudicated and awarded, and the cost of the chorus was defrayed from the public funds; moreover it was similarly arranged in such matters as the stage, the dialogue, the chorus, and the number of actors, without, however, forfeiting its peculiar characteristics. For tragedy carried the spectators into a loftier sphere, and strove by every means at her command to present figures and conditions on a grander scale than that of ordinary life, while comedy maintained the closest relations with contemporary and common life. It remained more unaffected in dance, versification, and diction no less than in poetic design; nay, to such an extent did it retain its topical character and its adaptation to the events of the hour that the poet used the choir to interrupt the course of the action entirely in order to discuss his personal affairs or the burning questions of the time with the audience in lengthy parabases.
This kind of dramatic composition could only flourish in a democratic atmosphere, and it was associated with the democracy in every stage of its development. Occupied from the outset with the preposterous and ridiculous side of life, it castigated all follies, defects, and weaknesses, and amidst the variety and publicity of the civic life of Athens it could never lack either subjects for mirth or a witty, ingenious, and laughter-loving audience ready to catch at every allusion. But it also served the purpose of bringing abuses and contradictions in public life to light. This was the serious side of its calling, for unless inspired by a serious and patriotic temper its humour would have grown dull, ineffective, and contemptible. The aim of the comic poets was to be not mere frivolous provokers of mirth, but teachers of men, and leaders of the people, even as the tragic poets were; and in an age of feverish excitement the severest of their censures were directed against new-fangled ways. Comedy was aristocratic in character, it championed native custom against foreign ways, it ruthlessly denounced every evil tendency in life and art, and every instance of misconduct or abuse of power. It cherished the memory of the heroes of the Wars of Liberation and encouraged others to emulate their example, and it was fond of subjects which had some bearing on important contemporary events, as we see in the Thracian Women of Cratinus, which was associated with the establishment of colonies in Thrace.
The founders of comedy as an Attic art are Crates and Cratinus. Cratinus was slightly younger than Æschylus, and like him was endowed with original creative genius, but his taste for unrestrained freedom and his inexhaustible fund of humour marked him out as a born comic poet, while his rude veracity qualified him to make comedy a power in the state. It became so about the time that Pericles came into power, and though Cratinus was not the sort of man to commit himself unreservedly to one or other of the contesting parties, we know that in his Archilochi (a comedy in which the chorus was composed of scoffers like Archilochus) he brought an Attic citizen upon the stage immediately after the death of Cimon and put in his mouth a lament for “the divine man,” “the most hospitable, the best of all Panhellenes, with whom he had hoped to spend a serene old age—but now he had passed away before him.” The mighty Cratinus was succeeded by Aristophanes and Eupolis, both unmistakably akin to him in mind and feeling, but gentler, more moderate, and stricter in their adherence to the rules of art. But Aristophanes alone combined with these qualities a wealth of creative invention in nothing inferior to the genius of Cratinus.
THE GLORY OF ATHENS
All these men,—philosophers and historians, orators and poets,—each one of whom marks an epoch in the development of art and science, were not merely contemporaries, but lived together in the same city, some born there and nourished from their youth on the glories of their native place, others attracted thither by the same glory; nor was their association merely local, they laboured, consciously or unconsciously, at a common task. For whether they were personally intimate or not with the great statesman who was the centre of the Attic world, nay, even if they were numbered among his opponents, they could not but render him substantial help in his life-work of making Athens the intellectual capital of Greece.
Here whatever germs of culture were introduced from foreign parts gained new life, the Ionian study of countries and peoples became history as soon as Herodotus came into touch with Athens; the Peloponnesian dithyrambus grew into tragedy at Athens, the farce of Megara into Attic comedy; here the philosophy of Ionia and Magna Græcia met to supplement each other’s defects and prepare the way for the development of Attic philosophy; even sophistry was nowhere turned to such account as at Athens. In earlier times every district, city, and island had had its peculiar school and tendencies, but now all vigorous intellectual movements crowded together at Athens; local and tribal peculiarities of temperament and dialect were reconciled; and as the drama (the most Attic of all the arts) absorbed all art-methods into itself, to reproduce them in organic harmony, so from all the achievements of the genius of Greece there grew a general culture which was at once the heritage of Attica and of the Greek nation. Vehemently as other states might oppose the political predominance of Athens, none could deny that the city where Æschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Crates, and Cratinus all laboured together, was the focus of all lofty aspirations, the heart of the nation, Hellas in Hellas.
Herodotus
Slight as is our knowledge of the personal relations of these great contemporaries, there are a few traditions from which we can gather some idea of the intercourse of Pericles with the most eminent among them and of their intercourse with one another. We know that Pericles equipped the chorus for a theatrical performance in which Æschylus carried off the prize. We know of the friendship of Herodotus and Sophocles, and we actually possess the beginning of some occasional verses addressed to Herodotus by the poet, then in the fifty-fifth year of his age; a letter in elegiac metre dating from the time when the historian migrated to Thurii, and withdrew from the delightful society of the best men of Athens. Sophocles was before all things sociable, and we hear that he formed a circle of men skilled in the fine arts and dedicated it to the Muses, and that it held regular meetings. This reciprocal stimulus resulted in a steady advance in all directions. In every branch of art we can trace the epochs of development as surely as in the structure of the trimetre of the drama. But as, generally speaking, Greek art owed its unfaltering progress to the fact that the younger artists did not endeavour to gain a start by rash attempts at originality, but held fast the good in all things and readily adopted and perfected methods that had once gained acceptance, so in Athens we see the elder masters gratefully praised and honoured by their pupils, like Æschylus by Sophocles and Cratinus by Aristophanes.
It is one of the most notable characteristics of the intellectual life of Athens that her eminent men, however high a view they took of their own calling, did not owe their pre-eminence in it to any narrow-minded restriction of their interest to their own peculiar sphere. This versatility was rendered possible by the vitality for which the contemporaries of Pericles were remarkable, and it seems as though the brilliant prime of the Greek nation manifested itself most plainly in the frequent combination of extraordinary mental and physical powers. We cannot but admire the men who retained their vital force unimpaired to extreme old age and advanced in the practice of their art to the last.
Sophocles, after having composed 113 dramas, is said to have read the chorus of the Œdipus at Colonus aloud, to disprove the rumour that he was incapable of managing his own affairs by reason of the infirmities of old age. Cratinus was ninety-one when he produced Dame Bottle, the saucy comedy with which he defeated Aristophanes, who had looked upon him as a rival whose day was over. Simonides, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno, were likewise examples of healthy and vigorous old age. Timocreon combined the skill of an athlete with the profession of a poet. Polus, Sophocles’ favourite actor, was competent to take the leading part in eight tragedies in four days. Lastly, the sterling capacity and versatility of the masters of those days is shown by the fact that though extraordinarily prolific authors of imaginative works, they spared time to strive after scientific certainty concerning the problems and resources of their art, and combined absolute self-possession and the love of theoretical study with the enthusiasm of the artist temperament. Thus Lasus, the inventor of the perfected form of the dithyrambus, was at the same time an accomplished critic and one of the first writers on the theory of music; and Sophocles himself wrote a treatise on the tragic chorus, to set forth his views as to its place and purpose in tragedy. In like manner the most distinguished architects wrote scientific treatises on the principles of their art, Polyclitus worked out the theory of numbers which lies at the root of plastic symmetry, and Agatharchus the principles of optics, according to which he had arranged the decoration of the stage. In so doing he took the first step towards the teaching of perspective, which was subsequently developed by Democritus and Anaxagoras.[b]
Aristophanes
