Euripides and His Age

by Gilbert Murray

When Herodotus records his opinion that in the Persian Wars the Athenians had been "the Saviours of Hellas" he has to preface the remark by a curious apology (VII. 139): "Here I am compelled by necessity to express an opinion which will be offensive to most of mankind, but I cannot refrain from putting it in the way which I believe to be true." He was writing at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and by that time Athens was not the Saviour but "the Tyrant City." Her "allies" had from time to time refused to serve or tried to secede from the alliance; and one by one she had reduced them to compulsory subjection. The "League" had become confessedly an "Empire."

Even Pericles, the great statesman of the good time, who had sought and achieved so many fine ends, had failed to build up a free League based on a representative elected body. The possibility of such a plan had hardly yet been conceived in the world, though a rudimentary system of international councils did in some places exist between neighbouring villages; and Pericles must not be personally blamed for an error, however fatal, which no one living knew how to avoid. But he realized at last in 430 b.c. what Athens had come to (Thuc. II. 63): "Do not imagine you are fighting about a simple issue, the subjection or independence of certain cities. You have an Empire to lose, and a danger to face from those who hate you for your empire. To resign it now would be impossible—if at this crisis some timid and inactive spirits are hankering after Righteousness even at that price! For by this time your empire has become a Despotism (Tyrannis), a thing which it is considered unjust to acquire, but which can never be safely surrendered."

The same thought is emphasized more brutally by Cleon (Thuc. III. 37):

"I have remarked again and again that a democracy cannot govern an empire, and never more clearly than now. . . . You do not realize that when you make a concession to the allies out of pity, or are led away by their specious pleading, you commit a weakness dangerous to yourselves without receiving any gratitude from them. Remember that your empire is a Despotism exercised over unwilling men who are always in conspiracy against you." "Do not be misled," he adds a little later, "by the three most deadly enemies of empire, pity and charm of words and the generosity of strength" (Thuc. III. 40).

So much for the ideals of chivalry and freedom and "Sophia": for I think the second of Cleon's "enemies" refers especially to the eloquent wisdom of the philosophers. And as for democracy we do not hear now that "the very name of it is beautiful": we hear that it is no principle on which to govern an empire. And later on we shall hear Alcibiades, an Athenian of democratic antecedents, saying at Sparta: "Of course all sensible men know what democracy is, and I better than most, from personal experience; but there is nothing new to be said about acknowledged insanity" (Thuc. VI. 89).

The ideals failed, and, if we are to believe our contemporary authors, the men failed too. Pericles, with all his errors, was a man of noble mind; he was pure in motive, lofty, a born ruler; he led his people towards "beauty and wisdom," and he wished it to be written on his grave that no Athenian had put on mourning through his act. Cleon, they all tell us, was a bellowing demagogue; violent, not over honest, unscrupulous, blundering; only resolute to fight for the demos of Athens till he dropped and to keep the poor from starving at whatever cost of blackmailing the rich and flaying the allied cities. And when he—by good luck, as Thucydides considers—was killed in battle, he was succeeded by Hyperbolus, a caricature of himself—as a pun of the comic poets' puts it, a "Cleon in hyperbole." This picture has been subjected to just criticism in many details, but it represents on the whole the united voice of our ancient witnesses.

One character only shines out in this period with a lurid light. Alcibiades, so far as one can understand him at all from our fragmentary and anecdotal records, must have been something like a Lord Byron on a grand scale, turned soldier and statesman instead of poet. His disastrous end and his betrayal of all political parties have probably affected his reputation unfairly. Violent and unprincipled as he certainly was, the peculiar dissolute caddishness implied in the anecdotes is probably a misrepresentation of the kind that arises so easily against a man who has no friends. It needs an effort to imagine what he looked like before he was found out. Of noble birth and a nephew of Pericles; famous for his good looks and his distinguished, if insolent, manners; a brilliant soldier, an ambitious and far-scheming politician; a pupil of the philosophers and an especially intimate friend of Socrates, capable both of rising to great ideas and of expounding them to the multitude; he was hailed by a large party as the destined saviour of Athens, and seems for a time at least to have made the same impression upon Euripides. Even in the Suppliant Women, peace-play as it is, Euripides congratulates Athens on possessing in Theseus "a general good and young," and critics have connected the phrase with the election of Alcibiades, at a very early age, to be General in the year 420. More significant perhaps is the curious case of the Andromache. The ancient argument tells us definitely that it was not produced in Athens. And we find from another source that it was produced by one Democrates or Timocrates. Now Euripides had a friend called Timocrates, who was an Argive; so it looks as if the play had been produced in Argos. This would be astonishing but by no means inexplicable. It was an old Athenian policy to check Sparta by organizing a philo-Athenian league in the Peloponnese itself (Ar. Knights, 465 ff.). The nucleus was to consist in three states, Argos, Elis and Mantinea, which had been visited by Themistocles just after the Persian wars and had set up democracies on the Athenian model. It was Alcibiades who eventually succeeded in organizing this league in 420, and it seems likely that the Andromache was sent to Argos for production in much the same spirit in which Pindar used to send his Chorus of Dancers with a new song to compliment some foreign king. The play seems to contain a reference to the Peloponnesian War (734), it indulges in curiously direct denunciations of the Spartans (445 ff., 595 ff.), and the Spartan Menelaus is the villain of the piece—a more stagey villain than Euripides in his better moments would have permitted. We have also one doubtful external record of our poet's temporary faith in Alcibiades. In the year 420 there fell an observance of the Olympian Festival, the greatest of all the Pan-Hellenic Games, which carried with it a religious truce. Alcibiades succeeded in getting Sparta convicted of a violation of this truce, and consequently excluded from the Festival, which was a marked blow at her prestige. Then, entering himself as a competitor, he won with his own horses a whole series of prizes, including the first, in the four-horse chariot competition. And Plutarch, in his Life of Alcibiades, refers to a Victory Ode which was written for him on this occasion, "as report goes, by the poet Euripides" (ch. 11). This revival of the Pindaric Epinikion for a personal victory would fit in with the known character of Alcibiades; and it would be a sharp example of the irony of history if Euripides consented to write the Ode.

Euripides' delusion was natural and it was short-lived. The Suppliant Women points towards peace, and the true policy of Alcibiades was to make peace impossible. And even apart from that the ideals of the two men were antipathetic. The matter is summed up in the Frogs of Aristophanes, produced in 405, when the only question remaining about Alcibiades was whether he was more dangerous to the city as an honoured leader or as an enemy and exile. The two great poets of the Dead are asked for their advice on this particular subject and their answers are clear. Aeschylus says: "Submit to the lion's whelp;" Euripides rejects him with three scathing lines (Frogs, 1427 ff., cf. 1446 ff.). Long before the date of the Frogs Alcibiades had probably grown to be in the mind of Euripides the very type and symbol of the evil times.