The moving impulse which since the end of the sixth century had collected together at Athens all the intellectual forces of Greece for a final expansion of their capacity now began, in the middle of the fifth century, to take hold of philosophy as it had long since done literature and the fine arts. Athens saw the last representatives of Ionian physiology gathered together within her walls. Some, like Anaxagoras, took up their residence there for a long period, and left the impress of their teaching upon the foremost minds of the city. The others who paid briefer visits were those who in conscious opposition to the recent trend of thinking, stoutly upheld the older principles of philosophic Monism or Hylozoism, such as Diogenes of Apollonia or Hippon of Samos; or who sought like Archelaos to reconcile the old and the new Ionic doctrine. Besides these, Athens was a headquarters of the wandering exponents of the newest wisdom, the Sophists. Nowhere did unfettered discussion find such cultivated appreciation of its daring; nowhere was such an eager welcome given to the dialectical word-play that, seeming to be an end in itself, was destined to become the most fruitful nursery of native Athenian philosophy. All traditional beliefs and customs that had not their origin or their justification in reflexion were already doomed as soon as they, together with every conventional view of life and the world, were deprived of their natural protection of unchallenged self-evidence by the cold scrutiny of the sovereign tyrant Dialectic. The Sophists, those skirmishers of a new and as yet unrecognizable philosophy, scattered and put to flight the old guard of positive and doctrinal wisdom, but to the individual, who was bidden to depend upon his own resources, they offered stimulus to reflection in abundance but no permanent foothold in the shifting sands of opinion. It would be but a final assertion of the principle that there are no principles if by any chance the Sophists themselves should for a moment speak in the language of edification and, for example, lend the support of their eloquence to certain articles of doctrine that provided a positive teaching as to the nature and life of the soul.[120]
If Sophokles remained quite unaffected by this whole movement which reached its flood tide in Athens, Euripides was drawn completely into its current. He sought out philosophers and sophists personally and in their writings. His was a spirit that urgently desired to know the truth and he followed every available guide to knowledge and wisdom for a stage upon their journey. But he was never able to continue permanently in any one direction; in the restlessness [433] and bewilderment of search and experiment he is the true son of his age.
His philosophical and sophistical leanings were sufficiently marked to make it impossible for him to accept any part of the belief or tradition of his countrymen without trial. So far as it is possible within the limits of dramatic art, he instituted an unsparing and unhesitating criticism of all accepted things, and in the process felt himself immeasurably superior to the wit and wisdom of the past. And yet he never satisfied himself. He could never rest content with a merely negative position, for all onesidedness was foreign to his nature. The tremendous honesty of his nature made it impossible for him to admit that element of frivolity which made the sophistic movement and the dialectical negation of all certainty so simple and attractive, and at the same time took away half its sting. But he could take nothing easily; and so with all his sophistic enlightenment he was never happy. The pupil of the Sophists would hear every other side as well; there were even moments when he longed to take refuge in the restful narrowness of old and traditional piety. But it was not given to him to settle down in any fixed set of opinions; all his convictions were provisional, mere hypotheses adopted for the purposes of experiment. Afloat on a changeful sea, he let himself be driven hither and thither by every wind of intellectual excitement or artistic necessity.
When all convictions were involved together in a state of perpetual change and instability, the conception of the nature and being of the soul and its relation to the powers of life and death could not alone remain in fixed and dogmatic certainty.
Where the content and character of the fable chosen as the subject of his drama demand it, the poet frankly adopts the popular view of the nature and destiny of the departed soul, its power and claim upon the worship of the survivors upon earth. In the fairy-tale play of the “Alcestis” the whole apparatus of popular belief plays its part; the God of Death and his awful office, the dwelling of the dead in the underworld, are spoken of as facts and creatures of experience and reality.[121] The elaborate funeral ceremonies owed to the dead are treated with the utmost seriousness and precision.[122] A whole drama, the “Suppliant Women”, has as its real subject, or at least as its ostensible motive, the religious importance of a ritual burial,[123] nor is there any lack of isolated passages in which the importance of burial and the honour paid to graves is stressed.[124] The survivors on earth give pleasure to the dead by offerings at their graves,[125] [434] and in this way obtain their goodwill and can count upon their support.[126] Power and honour belong not only to the great ones of antiquity translated to a higher state of being;[127] not only “Heroes” can extend their influence beyond their graves and affect the course of earthly events:[128] from the soul of his murdered father, the son expects assistance and succour in his time of need. The dread creatures of antique faith, the Erinyes, exact vengeance for the murdered mother.[129]
But at this point it becomes apparent that the poet only associates himself for his own purposes with this circle of ancient and sanctified popular fancy—so long in fact as it suits the tone that he wishes to give to the drama and its characters. The Erinyes are excellent material for the play—that in reality their horrid figures only exist in the imagination of the mentally diseased is clearly asserted in the “Orestes”.[130] The whole series of beliefs and demands—murder ever calling forth fresh murder in accordance with the sacred duty of vengeance, the Erinyes, the bloodthirsty patrons of the murdered victim who leaves no proper avenger behind him—all these have ceased to have any validity for him. The “animal and bloodthirsty” part of these figures of ancient belief call forth the loathing of the poet living in the days of organized justice and humaner manners.[131] He does not believe in the souls’ right to blood; the ancient legends which depend on this right are an abomination to him. In fact, he only seems to have written his plays about them in order, by the manner of his presentation, to have his revenge upon this material that was almost unavoidably thrust upon him by the tradition of the tragic stage. The duty of the living to offer a cult to the departed souls becomes doubtful in its turn. The seriousness with which that cult is sometimes handled in the plays is compromised by such reflections as these: it is certain that it matters little to the dead whether rich offering are placed in their graves or not; such things only satisfy the idle vanity of the living;[132] honour and dishonour are of no further consequence to the dead.[133] How should they be, if the departed no longer feel either pleasure or pain, are nothing at all, as is repeatedly declared even in the middle of the “Alcestis”?[134]
It is evident that only from an arbitrarily adopted point of view do the picturesque creations of popular belief in the soul and of the cult of souls seem real to the poet; apart from this they disappear from his mind like the creatures of a dream.[135] The teachings of the theologians supplied him with no real substitute for popular faith; at the most they were a [435] momentary and passing stimulus. No doubt he did not shut his eyes completely to these manifestations of the spiritual life of his time. His plays contain allusions to Orphic poetry and he joins the asceticism of the Orphics to the cold virtue of his Hippolytos.[136] The thought that the soul has fallen from a higher state of being and is enclosed within the body like the dead man in his coffin takes captive his imagination for a moment. “Who knows then whether life is not a kind of death,” so that in death the soul awakes to its real life?[137] The gloomy view of human destiny upon this earth to which the poet so often gives expression, might seem to hint at a consolation to come in a more satisfactory hereafter; but the poet has no longing for the consolation offered by the theologians. Among the many and various reflections of the poet upon the reality that may reveal itself when the curtain is drawn aside by death, we never meet with the conception that lies at the bottom of the assurances made by the theologians—the conception that the spiritual individual is certain of its immortality because in its individuality it is of divine nature and is itself a god.[138] True, he is the author of the bold saying so often quoted and varied in later times, that God is nothing else but the mind that dwells in men.[139] But this makes no allusion to the theological doctrine of the multiplicity of individual gods or daimones banished into the life of men; it rather implies a semi-philosophic doctrine of the soul in which one may perceive for the first time the expression of a permanent conviction on the part of the poet.
In quite inapposite contexts Euripides sometimes introduces passing allusions to a philosophical view of the world and humanity, that is the more certainly to be regarded as the private conviction of the poet himself as the utterances fail to correspond fully with the character of the person in the play who makes them, and do not arise necessarily from the dramatic situation. Everything in the world has had its origin from Earth and “the Aether of Zeus”; the Earth is the maternal womb from which the Aether brings everything to birth.[140] Both constituents combine to produce the multiplicity of appearance; they are not fused together nor are they to be derived from a single common original element;[141] they remain in dualistic contrast side by side.[142] It was probably the dualism of this cosmological fancy that reminded the ancients of Anaxagoras; but these statements cannot be regarded as simply a poetical version of the doctrine of Anaxagoras;[143] for they derive the multiplicity of matter and things from the simple element of “Earth” from which [436] they arise only by a process of change and transformation, while in the “seedmixture” of Anaxagoras, the unchangeable seeds of all things only separate themselves out from the whole and give rise by mechanical reassemblings to all the perceived appearances of the world. The “Aether” of Euripides in its relations with the “Earth” is besides being the active partner also the intellectual and animated element. The isolation of such an element from the rest of matter does indeed remind us of the procedure of Anaxagoras. But the poet’s Aether is still an element though it may be penetrated by mind and animated by spirit; it is not a mental being standing over against all the other elements in essential distinctness like the Nous of Anaxagoras. The fact that it is the element of the Aether, i.e. the dry and hot air, in which intellectual capacity is said to inhere, may be regarded as having been borrowed from Diogenes of Apollonia, a philosopher who was held in considerable estimation at Athens at that time, and who was well known to Euripides.[144] In his doctrine, the air (which indeed, in contrast to the view of Euripides, produces all other things simply out of itself) is expressly identified with the “Soul” and is itself described as “having understanding”.[145]
This view of the elementary forces and constitution of the universe, made up as it is from philosophical suggestions of a scarcely reconcilable character, in which the dualistic tendency is in fact finally predominant, suggests itself to the poet whenever in an exalted mood he speaks of the final destiny of the human soul. The soul on its separation from the body will depart to join the “Aether”. But in such conceptions it is not always the imagination of the philosopher-poet that finds expression. On this subject it is accompanied or replaced by a more popular view that only distantly resembles it, but which led to the same result. When we hear now and again of the Aether, the luminous atmosphere above the clouds, as being the dwelling place of the departed souls,[146] the view—more theological than philosophic in its character—seems to be implied that after death the liberated soul will float upwards to the seat of the gods[147] which has long ceased to be situated upon Olympos, but is in “heaven” or in this same Aether. This, too, was the meaning of a saying traditionally ascribed to Epicharmos the comic-poet of Sicily who was himself versed in philosophy. In this saying the pious man is assured that for him death will bring no evil for his “mind” will dwell permanently in “heaven”.[148] This conception, which appears so frequently in later epitaphs, [437] must have been familiar to popular imagination at Athens at an early period; at least in the grave-epigram officially dedicated by the state to the memory of the Athenians who fell in the year 432 before Poteidaia, we find the belief expressed (as a commonly received opinion) that the souls of these brave men have been received by the “Aether” just as the earth has received their bodies.[149] Such official use implies a commonly accepted opinion and the fundamental ideas of the popular cult of the souls might have led to similar results. From the beginning popular belief had regarded the psyche, which got its name from the air or breath, as closely akin to the winds, the mobile air and its spirits. It would not be difficult for the idea to arise that the soul, as soon as it was free to decide for itself what should become of it, should go to join the elemental spirits that are its kinsfolk. Perhaps this, too, is what Epicharmos means when on another occasion he says that in death when the united are parted asunder each returns whence it came, the body to earth, but the soul up to the heights—its name, in which allusion is made to its perpetual mobility, being now after the example of Xenophanes derived from the breath of the wind, the moving air (πνεῦμα), a usage which became very common in later times.[150]
But perhaps the use of such a name is an indication that this poet also regards the soul as standing in a close relation and kinship with the Aether that is destined to receive it after its release from the body; so that from this side, too[151]—in addition to the more popular conception just mentioned—Euripides may have received a hint for his peculiar version of the physiological theory of Diogenes. In his view the soul participates in the nature of the Aether. But it is more important to notice that the Aether participates in the nature and true reality of the soul; it possesses life, consciousness and power of thought. They both belong to one family. The Aether according to the poet—and here the speculations of Anaximenes as revived by Diogenes are unmistakable[152]—is a true vital atmosphere, an all-embracing psychic element, so that it becomes, not a mere vehicle of mind, but the All-Mind itself. The concept is even condensed and half-personified, it is called by the name of the highest divine power, Zeus,[153] and the poet as though speaking of a personal god, calls it “immortal”.[154] The human mind, too, as akin to the universal god and the All-Mind, appears, as it had been in the teaching of Diogenes,[155] as a part of this God, this universal Mind. God is the mind, and the mind and understanding in us is God—so the poet clearly asserts.[156] In death, when [438] the separation of the mind from its earthly elements takes place, the Pneuma of man will “not indeed live”, as it had done in the separate existence of the individual man, but it will “preserve an immortal consciousness”, entering into the immortal Aether and fusing itself with the All-living and the All-thinking.[157] None of the physiologists who conceived the same idea of an immortality excluding the personal immortality of the individual, of the universal spirit of life in mankind, has expressed his meaning with such distinctness as this philosophic layman.