The particular note of realistic horror that marks the closing scenes of the Hecuba appears in another group of four plays, the Iphigenia in Tauris, the Heracles, the Orestes and the Electra. The first three have been exhaustively studied by Dr. Verrall, and it is enough now to say that the methods of criticism which Thucydides and Euripides use upon the Trojan War, are here applied to other tales of the remote and heroic past. Both writers—the historian and the dramatist—know that human nature does not change, and they strip away remorselessly the glamour of ancient legend. If such things happened, this is how they happened, says Euripides; and so we have the half-mad, half-heroic figure of Heracles: the sinister Orestes always ready to unsheath his dagger: the ludicrous yet pitiable Phrygian eunuch stuttering and trembling in panic fear, and most terrible of all the unsexed woman Electra. Each play has its own scene of horror, but the climax, perhaps, comes when Electra takes the head of the murdered Ægisthus in both hands and pours forth all her bitterness into the deaf ears.
The Hippolytus strikes an entirely different note, and is, perhaps, the best known of all the plays. It has been adapted by Seneca and Racine, used as material by Ovid and transposed into a romantic drama by Professor Murray. But in spite of all this, Phædra’s position and motives are often misunderstood. Hippolytus is her natural enemy and the enemy of her children. The bastard son of Theseus, if his father died, would probably oust the legitimate but younger children of the wife from their father’s throne and himself seize the power. Phædra, a young woman married to an old husband, is possessed by a physical desire for the young man, but she struggles against her passion for her children’s sake. When she finally gives up the struggle, she secures her children’s safety by ensuring Hippolytus’ death or banishment. She knows Theseus and she knows that he will bitterly resent any trespass on his property and punish that trespass with all the severity in his power. The charge is a false one, but it is only thus that her children’s future can be protected.
The last two plays, the Bacchæ and the Iphigenia in Aulis, written in old age and in exile at Macedonia, still deal with the double problem, the sacrifice to God and the sacrifice to man; and they are constructed on the same lines.
In the Bacchæ the men are of three sorts. There is the Adept—an imposter, who has taken to religion as a trade; the old men Cadmus and Teiresias who are ‘religious’ for social and family reasons: finally the young Pentheus who is openly ‘irreligious’ and comes to a bad end.
The women alone believe: they are deceived by the adept, and much of their belief is delusion, but it is a real spiritual benefit—to them. The ritual of Bacchus was the one chance of escape in a Greek woman’s life from the stifling seclusion of the harem home. For a few days at least she became a free creature, allowed to roam at large upon the mountains. The thyrsus of the god took the place of her master’s company: the sky was her roof: the grass was her bed: she could put aside the wine press and the flour mill and live on milk and honey. The ecstasy of such an escape has never found more intense expression than in the narrative speeches and the choric songs of the Bacchæ.
In the Iphigenia at Aulis the men again are of three types, foils all and each to the idealism of Iphigenia and the practical sense of Clytemnestra. Menelaus is the meanest: the slave of desire, ready for any crime to gratify his passions. Agamemnon is the ordinary middle-aged man, afraid of his wife and fond of his family, but capable of deceiving the one and ruining the other. Achilles is the young man of the governing classes, brought up to despise women, and to think that every girl is anxious to become his wife. The men quarrel and plot for their own selfish ends, but their schemes are detected by the keen wit of Clytemnestra and rendered useless by the unselfish devotion of Iphigenia.
VIII.—Euripides. The Four Feminist Plays
The three main interests of Euripides’ mind, realist, pacificist and feminist—to use our ugly jargon—are to be found in all his theatre; but there are four plays which are especially concerned with the relations between women and men, the Alcestis, Medea, Ion and Andromache. They are not pleasant plays: indeed, to a lover of sentimental idealism they would be conspicuously unpleasant if they were fully understood. Nor are they to be recommended to women readers. The relations between the sexes are a delicate thing; and human nature, male humanity at any rate, is generally none the worse for discreet reticence and tender handling. But in these plays Euripides uses the surgeon’s knife. They were meant for an audience of men, grown callous by time and custom; and the treatment is ruthless. They should be regarded as the painful but necessary operation, needed to rid a patient of some long-festering ulcer, and the dramatist deserves the thanks that we give to the skillful surgeon.