In reference to individual men, and to Sokratês[527] especially, the Athenians seem to have been unfavorably biased by the misapplied wit and genius of Aristophanês, in “The Clouds,” aided by other comedies of Eupolis, and Ameipsias and Eupolis; but on the general march of politics, philosophy, or letters, these composers had little influence. Nor were they ever regarded at Athens in the light in which they are presented to us by modern criticism; as men of exalted morality, stern patriotism, and genuine discernment of the true interests of their country; as animated by large and steady views of improving their fellow-citizens, but compelled, in consequence of prejudice or opposition, to disguise a far-sighted political philosophy under the veil of satire; as good judges of the most debatable questions, such as the prudence of making war or peace, and excellent authority to guide us in appreciating the merits or demerits of their contemporaries, insomuch that the victims of their lampoons are habitually set down as worthless men.[528] There cannot be a greater misconception of the old comedy than to regard it in this point of view; yet it is astonishing how many subsequent writers, from Diodorus and Plutarch down to the present day, have thought themselves entitled to deduce their facts of Grecian history, and their estimate of Grecian men, events, and institutions, from the comedies of Aristophanês. Standing pre-eminent as the latter does in comic genius, his point of view is only so much the more determined by the ludicrous associations suggested to his fancy, so that he thus departs the more widely from the conditions of a faithful witness or candid critic. He presents himself to provoke the laugh, mirthful or spiteful, of the festival crowd, assembled for the gratification of these emotions, and not with any expectation of serious or reasonable impressions.[529] Nor does he at all conceal how much he is mortified by failure; like the professional jester, or “laughter-maker,” at the banquets of rich Athenian citizens;[530] the parallel of Aristophanês as to purpose, however unworthy of comparison in every other respect.
This rise and development of dramatic poetry in Greece—so abundant, so varied, and so rich in genius—belongs to the fifth century B.C. It had been in the preceding century nothing more than an unpretending graft upon the primitive chorus, and was then even denounced by Solon, or in the dictum ascribed to Solon, as a vicious novelty, tending—by its simulation of a false character, and by its effusion of sentiments not genuine or sincere—to corrupt the integrity of human dealings;[531] a charge of corruption, not unlike that which Aristophanês worked up, a century afterwards, in his “Clouds,” against physics, rhetoric, and dialectics, in the person of Sokratês. But the properties of the graft had overpowered and subordinated those of the original stem; so that dramatic poetry was now a distinct form, subject to laws of its own, and shining with splendor equal, if not superior, to the elegiac, choric, lyric, and epic poetry which constituted the previous stock of the Grecian world.
Such transformations in the poetry, or, to speak more justly, in the literature—for before the year 500 B.C. the two expressions were equivalent—of Greece, were at once products, marks, and auxiliaries, in the expansion of the national mind. Our minds have now become familiar with dramatic combinations, which have ceased to be peculiar to any special form or conditions of political society. But if we compare the fifth century B.C. with that which preceded it, the recently born drama will be seen to have been a most important and impressive novelty: and so assuredly it would have been regarded by Solon, the largest mind of his own age, if he could have risen again, a century and a quarter after his death, to witness the Antigonê of Sophoklês, the Medea of Euripidês, or the Acharneis of Aristophanês.
Its novelty does not consist merely in the high order of imagination and judgment required for the construction of a drama at once regular and effective. This, indeed, is no small addition to Grecian poetical celebrity as it stood in the days of Solon, Alkæus, Sappho, and Stesichorus: but we must remember that the epical structure of the Odyssey, so ancient and long acquired to the Hellenic world, implies a reach of architectonic talent quite equal to that exhibited in the most symmetrical drama of Sophoklês. The great innovation of the dramatists consisted in the rhetorical, the dialectical, and the ethical spirit which they breathed into their poetry. Of all this, the undeveloped germ doubtless existed in the previous epic, lyric, and gnomic composition; but the drama stood distinguished from all three by bringing it out into conspicuous amplitude, and making it the substantive means of effect. Instead of recounting exploits achieved, or sufferings undergone by the heroes,—instead of pouring out his own single-minded impressions in reference to some given event or juncture,—the tragic poet produces the mythical persons themselves to talk, discuss, accuse, defend, confute, lament, threaten, advise, persuade, or appease; among one another, but before the audience. In the drama, a singular misnomer, nothing is actually done: all is talk; assuming what is done, as passing, or as having passed, elsewhere. The dramatic poet, speaking continually, but at each moment through a different character, carries on the purpose of each of his characters by words calculated to influence the other characters, and appropriate to each successive juncture. Here are rhetorical exigencies from beginning to end:[532] while, since the whole interest of the piece turns upon some contention or struggle carried on by speech; since debate, consultation, and retort, never cease; since every character, good or evil, temperate or violent, must be supplied with suitable language to defend his proceedings, to attack or repel opponents, and generally to make good the relative importance assigned to him, here again dialectical skill in no small degree is indispensable.
Lastly, the strength and variety of ethical sentiment infused into the Grecian tragedy, is among the most remarkable characteristics which distinguish it from the anterior forms of poetry. “To do or suffer terrible things,” is pronounced by Aristotle to be its proper subject-matter; and the internal mind and motives of the doer or sufferer, on which the ethical interest fastens, are laid open by the Greek tragedians with an impressive minuteness which neither the epic nor the lyric could possibly parallel. Moreover, the appropriate subject-matter of tragedy is pregnant not only with ethical sympathy, but also with ethical debate and speculation. Characters of mixed good and evil; distinct rules of duty, one conflicting with the other; wrong done, and justified to the conscience of the doer, if not to that of the spectator, by previous wrong suffered, all these are the favorite themes of Æschylus and his two great successors. Klytæmnestra kills her husband Agamemnôn on his return from Troy: her defence is, that he had deserved this treatment at her hands for having sacrificed his own and her daughter, Iphigeneia. Her son Orestês kills her, under a full conviction of the duty of avenging his father, and even under the sanction of Apollo. The retributive Eumenides pursue him for the deed, and Æschylus brings all the parties before the court of Areopagus, with Athênê as president, where the case is fairly argued, with the Eumenides as accusers, and Apollo as counsel for the prisoner, and ends by an equality of votes in the court: upon which Athênê gives her casting-vote to absolve Orestês. Again; let any man note the conflicting obligations which Sophoklês so forcibly brings out in his beautiful drama of the Antigonê. Kreon directs that the body of Polyneikês, as a traitor and recent invader of the country, shall remain unburied: Antigonê, sister of Polyneikês, denounces such interdict as impious, and violates it, under an overruling persuasion of fraternal duty. Kreon having ordered her to be buried alive, his youthful son Hæmon, her betrothed lover, is plunged into a heart-rending conflict between abhorrence of such cruelty on the one side, and submission to his father on the other. Sophoklês sets forth both these contending rules of duty in an elaborate scene of dialogue between the father and the son. Here are two rules both sacred and respectable, but the one of which cannot be observed without violating the other. Since a choice must be made, which of the two ought a good man to obey? This is a point which the great poet is well pleased to leave undetermined. But if there be any among the audience in whom the least impulse of intellectual speculation is alive, he will by no means leave it so, without some mental effort to solve the problem, and to discover some grand and comprehensive principle from whence all the moral rules emanate; a principle such as may instruct his conscience in those cases generally, of not unfrequent occurrence, wherein two obligations conflict with each other. The tragedian not only appeals more powerfully to the ethical sentiment than poetry had ever done before, but also, by raising these grave and touching questions, addresses a stimulus and challenge to the intellect, spurring it on to ethical speculation.
Putting all these points together, we see how much wider was the intellectual range of tragedy, and how considerable is the mental progress which it betokens, as compared with the lyric and gnomic poetry, or with the Seven Wise Men and their authoritative aphorisms, which formed the glory, and marked the limit, of the preceding century. In place of unexpanded results, or the mere communication of single-minded sentiment, we have even in Æschylus, the earliest of the great tragedians, a large latitude of dissent and debate, a shifting point of view, a case better or worse, made out for distinct and contending parties, and a divination of the future advent of sovereign and instructed reason. It was through the intermediate stage of tragedy that Grecian literature passed into the rhetoric, dialectics, and ethical speculation, which marked the fifth century B.C.
Other simultaneous causes, arising directly out of the business of real life, contributed to the generation of these same capacities and studies. The fifth century B.C. is the first century of democracy at Athens, in Sicily, and elsewhere: moreover, at that period, beginning from the Ionic revolt and the Persian invasions of Greece, the political relations between one Grecian city and another became more complicated, as well as more continuous; requiring a greater measure of talent in the public men who managed them. Without some power of persuading or confuting,—of defending himself against accusation, or in case of need, accusing others,—no man could possibly hold an ascendent position. He had probably not less need of this talent for private, informal, conversations to satisfy his own political partisans, than for addressing the public assembly formally convoked. Even as commanding an army or a fleet, without any laws of war or habits of professional discipline, his power of keeping up the good-humor, confidence, and prompt obedience of his men, depended not a little on his command of speech.[533] Nor was it only to the leaders in political life that such an accomplishment was indispensable. In all the democracies,—and probably in several governments which were not democracies, but oligarchies of an open character,—the courts of justice were more or less numerous, and the procedure oral and public: in Athens, especially, the dikasteries—whose constitution has been explained in a former chapter—were both very numerous, and paid for attendance. Every citizen had to go before them in person, without being able to send a paid advocate in his place, if he either required redress for wrong offered to himself, or was accused of wrong by another.[534] There was no man, therefore, who might not be cast or condemned, or fail in his own suit, even with right on his side, unless he possessed some powers of speech to unfold his case to the dikasts, as well as to confute the falsehoods, and disentangle the sophistry, of an opponent. Moreover, to any man of known family and station, it would be a humiliation hardly less painful than the loss of the cause, to stand before the dikastery with friends and enemies around him, and find himself unable to carry on the thread of a discourse without halting or confusion. To meet such liabilities, from which no citizen, rich or poor, was exempt, a certain training in speech became not less essential than a certain training in arms. Without the latter, he could not do his duty as an hoplite in the ranks for the defence of his country; without the former, he could not escape danger to his fortune or honor, and humiliation in the eyes of his friends, if called before a dikastery, nor lend assistance to any of those friends who might be placed under the like necessity.
Here then were ample motives, arising out of practical prudence not less than from the stimulus of ambition, to cultivate the power both of continuous harangue, and of concise argumentation, or interrogation and reply:[535] motives for all, to acquire a certain moderate aptitude in the use of these weapons; for the ambitious few, to devote much labor and to shine as accomplished orators.
Such political and social motives, it is to be remembered, though acting very forcibly at Athens, were by no means peculiar to Athens, but prevailed more or less throughout a large portion of the Grecian cities, especially in Sicily, when all the governments became popularized after the overthrow of the Gelonian dynasty. And it was in Sicily and Italy, that the first individuals arose, who acquired permanent name both in rhetoric and dialectics: Empedoklês of Agrigentum in the former; Zeno of Elea, in Italy, in the latter.[536]
Both these distinguished men bore a conspicuous part in politics, and both on the popular side; Empedoklês against an oligarchy, Zeno against a despot. But both also were yet more distinguished as philosophers, and the dialectical impulse in Zeno, if not the rhetorical impulse in Empedoklês, came more from his philosophy than from his politics. Empedoklês (about 470-440 B.C.) appears to have held intercourse at least, if not partial communion of doctrine, with the dispersed philosophers of the Pythagorean league; the violent subversion of which, at Kroton and elsewhere, I have related in a previous chapter.[537] He constructed a system of physics and cosmogony, distinguished for first broaching the doctrine of the Four elements, and set forth in a poem composed by himself: besides which he seems to have had much of the mystical tone and miraculous pretensions of Pythagoras; professing not only to cure pestilence and other distempers, but to teach how old age might be averted and the dead raised from Hades; to prophesy, and to raise and calm the winds at his pleasure. Gorgias, his pupil, deposed to having been present at the magical ceremonies of Empedoklês.[538] The impressive character of his poem is sufficiently attested by the admiration of Lucretius,[539] and the rhetoric ascribed to him may have consisted mainly in oral teaching or exposition of the same doctrines. Tisias and Korax of Syracuse, who are also mentioned as the first teachers of rhetoric, and the first who made known any precepts about the rhetorical practice, were his contemporaries; and the celebrated Gorgias was his pupil.