Euripides and His Age

by Gilbert Murray

All Greece—we have the emphatic and disinterested testimony of Thucydides for the statement—was gradually corrupted and embittered by the long war. Probably all war, as it accustoms people more and more to desperate needs and desperate expedients for meeting them, and sets more and more aside the common generosities and humanities of life, tends to some degradation of character. But this particular war was specially harmful. For one thing it was a struggle not simply between two foreign powers, but between two principles, oligarchy and democracy. In almost all the cities of the Athenian alliance there were large numbers of malcontent rich, who were only too ready, if chance offered, to overthrow the constitution, massacre the mob, and revolt to Sparta. In a good many of the cities on the other side there were masses of discontented poor who had been touched by the breath of democratic doctrines, and were anxious for a chance to cut the throats of the ruling Few. It was like the state of things produced in many cities of Europe by the French Revolution. A secret civil strife lay in the background behind the open war; and the open war itself was a long protracted struggle for life or death. Probably the most high-minded man when engaged in a death-grapple fights in much the same way as the most low-minded. And there can be no doubt that as the toils of war closed tighter round Athens, and she began to feel herself fighting, gasp by gasp, for both her empire and her life, the ideals of the Saviour of Hellas fell away from her. She fought with every weapon that came.

Such times called forth naturally the men that suited them. The assembly cared less to listen to decent and thoughtful people, not to speak of philosophers. It was feeling bitter and fierce and frightened and it liked speakers who were feeling the same. The same fear that made it cruel made it also superstitious. On one occasion the whole city went mad with alarm because of a prank played on some ancient figures of Hermes. On another a great army was lost because it and its general were afraid to move during an eclipse of the moon. So soon had Anaxagoras been forgotten.

Is this the result, one is inclined to ask, of the great ideals of democracy and enlightenment? Of course the old Tory type of Greek historian, like Mitford, revelled in an affirmative answer. But a more reflective view of history suggests a different explanation. We must distinguish carefully between the two notions, Enlightenment and Democracy. They happen to have gone together in two or three of the greatest periods of human progress and we are apt to regard them as somehow necessarily allied. But they are not. Doubtless Democracy is itself an exalted conception and belongs naturally to the ideas of the Enlightenment, just as does the belief in Reason, in the free pursuit of knowledge, in justice to the weak, the wish to be right rather than to be victorious, or the hatred of violence and superstition as such. But the trouble is that, in a backward and untrained people, the victory of democracy may result in the defeat of the other exalted ideas. The Athenian democracy as conceived by Pericles, Euripides or Protagoras was a free people, highly civilized and pursuing "wisdom," free from superstition and oppression themselves and helping always to emancipate others. But the actual rustics and workmen who voted for Pericles had been only touched on the surface by the "wisdom" of the sophists. They liked him because he made them great and admired and proud of being Athenians. But one must suspect that, when they were back at their farms and the spell of Pericles' "wisdom" was removed, they practised again the silliest and cruellest old agricultural magic, were terrified by the old superstitions, beat their slaves and wives and hated the "strangers" a few miles off, just as their grandfathers had done in the old times. What seems to have happened at the end of the war-time is that, owing largely to the democratic enthusiasm of the sophistic movement in Athens, the common people is strongly in power; owing to the same movement its old taboos and rules of conduct are a little shaken and less able to stand against strong temptation; but meantime the true moral lessons of the enlightenment, the hardest of all lessons for man to learn, have never worked into their bones. Just as the French Revolution called into power the brutal and superstitious peasant who was the product of the Old Régime and could never rise to the ideas of the Revolution, so the Athenian enlightenment had put into power the old unregenerate mass of sentiment that had not been permeated by the enlightenment. Cleon was no friend of sophists, but their avowed enemy. And when he told the Assembly in its difficulties simply to double the tribute of the allies and sack their towns if they did not pay; when he urged the killing in cold blood of all the Mitylenean prisoners, he was preaching doctrines that would probably have seemed natural enough in the old days, before any sophists had troubled men's minds with talk about duties towards dirty foreigners. And the people who followed his lead were the same sort of people who would naturally be terrified about the mutilation of a taboo image or an eclipse of the divine moon. What they had, perhaps, acquired from the sophistic movement was a touch of effrontery. Boeotians or Acarnanians might commit crimes, when they needed to, by instinct, without stating their reasons: in Athens you had at least to discuss the principle of the proposed crime and accept it for what it was worth. A cynic or a hypocrite trained in a sophistic school might offer occasional help with the theory.

Perhaps the earliest touch of Euripides' bitterness against his country comes, as we have seen, in the Hecuba (p. 89). But the period we have just reached, soon after the Heracles, is marked by one of the most ironic and enigmatical plays he ever wrote. The Ion is interesting in every line and contains one scene which is sometimes considered the most poignant in all Greek tragedy, yet it leaves every reader unsatisfied. Is it a pious offering to Apollo, the ancestor of the Ionian race? If so, why is Apollo the villain of the piece? Is it a glorification of ancient Athens, her legends and her shrines? If so, why are the shrines polluted by lustful gods, the legends made specially barbaric, and the beautiful earth-born Princess shown as a seduced woman and a would-be murderess? Nay, further, why does the hero of the play explain in a careful speech that he would sooner live a friendless slave in the temple at Delphi than a free man and a prince in such a place as Athens—a city "full of terror," where men "who are good and might show wisdom are silent and never come forward," while the men in power watch enviously round to destroy any possible rival? (598 ff. Cf. Euripides' words in Frogs, 1446 ff.) In Delphi he has peace, and is not jostled off the pavement by the scum of the earth (635)—a complaint which is often made in Greek literature about democratic Athens.

I think the best way to understand the Ion is to suppose that Euripides, in his usual manner, is just taking an old canonical legend, seeing the human drama and romance in it, and working it together in his own clear ironic mind till at last he throws out his play, saying: "There are your gods and your holy legends; see how you like them!" The irony is lurking at every corner, though of course the drama and romance come first.

The Ion is, of all the extant plays, the most definitely blasphemous against the traditional gods. Greek legend was full of stories of heroes born of the love of a god and a mortal woman. Such stories could be turned into high religious mysteries, as by Aeschylus in his Suppliant Women; into tender and reverent legends, as by Pindar in one or two odes. Euripides uses no such idealization. In play after play, Auge, Melanippe, Danae, Alope, he seems to have scarified such gods, as he does now in the Ion. Legend told that Ion, the hero-ancestor of the Ionians, was the son of the Athenian princess Creusa. Creusa was married to one Xuthus, an Aeolian soldier, but the real father of Ion was the god Apollo. Euripides treats the story as if Apollo were just a lawless ravisher, utterly selfish and ready to lie when pressed, though good-natured in his way when he lost nothing by it—a sort of Alcibiades, in fact. Xuthus is a butt; a foreigner with abrupt and violent manners, lied to by Apollo, befooled by his wife, disobeyed by her maids, and eventually made happy by the belief that her illegitimate son is really his own. Creusa herself, though drawn with extraordinary sympathy and beauty, is at heart a savage.

Creusa, when she bore her child, laid him, in her terror, in the same cavern where Apollo had ravished her: surely the god would save his own son. She came again and the child was gone. As a matter of fact the god had carried him in his cradle to Delphi, where he was discovered by the priestess and reared as a foundling in the temple courts. Creusa was then married to Xuthus, who knew nothing of her adventure. Some seventeen years or so afterwards, since the pair had no children, they came to Delphi to consult the god. Creusa there meets the foundling, Ion, and the two are strangely attracted to one another. She almost confides to him her story, and he tells her what he knows of his own. Meantime Xuthus goes in to ask the god for a child; the god tells him that the first person he meets on leaving the shrine will be his son. (This, of course, is a lie.) He meets Ion, salutes him as his son and embraces him wildly. The boy protests: "Do not," cries Xuthus, "fly from what you should love best on earth!" "I do not love teaching manners to demented foreigners," retorts the youth. Sobered by this, Xuthus tries, with Ion's help, to think out what the god can mean by saying that this youth is his son. His married life has always been correct; but once when he was a young man, there was a time . . . It was a great religious feast at Delphi and he was drunk. Ion accepts the explanation, though he evidently does not much like his new father. He makes difficulties about going to Athens. He is sorry for Creusa. He wishes to stay as he is. Xuthus decides that Creusa must be deceived; he will say he has taken a fancy to Ion and wishes to adopt him. Meantime let them have a great birth-feast . . . and if any of the Chorus say a word to Creusa they shall be hanged! Creusa enters, accompanied by one of Euripides' characteristic Old Slaves. The man has tended Creusa from childhood, lives for her and thinks of nothing else; he is utterly without scruple apart from her. The Chorus immediately tell Creusa what they know of the story. Ion is Xuthus's illegitimate son; he must have known it all the time; he has now, with the god's connivance, arranged to take the son back to Athens; as for Creusa, the god says she shall have no child. Stung to fury to think that her child is dead, that the boy whom she so loved is deliberately deceiving her, and that Apollo is adding this deliberate insult to his old brutal wrong, Creusa casts away shame and standing up in front of the great Temple cries out her reproach against the god. She is disgraced publicly and for ever, but at least she will drag down this devil who sits crowned and singing to the lyre while the women he has ravished go mad with grief and his babes are torn by wild beasts. In the horror-stricken silence that follows there is none to advise Creusa except the old Slave. Blindly devoted and fostering all her passions, he wrings from her line by line the detailed story of her seduction, and then calls for revenge. "Burn down the god's temple!" She dare not. "Poison Xuthus!" No; he was good to her when she was miserable. "Kill the bastard!" . . . Yes: she will do that. . . . The Slave takes poison with him and goes to poison Ion at the birth-feast. The plot fails; the Slave is taken and Creusa, pursued by the angry youth, flies to the altar. It is fury against fury, each bewildered to find such evil in the other, after their curious mutual attraction. Here the Delphian Prophetess enters, bringing with her the tokens that were with the foundling when she first came upon him in the temple courts. Creusa, amazed, recognizes the old basket-cradle in which she had exposed her own child.

She leaves the altar and gives herself up to Ion. For a moment it seems as if he would kill her; but he tests her story. What else is there in the basket? She names the things, her own shawl with gorgons on it, her own snake-twined necklace and wreath of undying olive. The mother confesses to the son and the son forgives her. But Apollo? What of him? He has lied. . . . Ion, temple-child as he is, is roused to rebellion: he will break through the screen of the sanctuary and demand of the god one plain answer—when he is stopped by a vision of Athena. She comes instead of Apollo, who fears to face the mortals he has wronged; she bids them be content and seek no further. Creusa forgives the god; Ion remains moodily silent.

The Ion is so rich in romantic invention that it sometimes seems to a modern reader curiously old-fashioned; it is full of motives—lost children, and strawberry-marks, and the cry of the mother's heart, and obvious double meanings—which have been repeated by so many plays since that we instinctively regard them as "out of date." It is redeemed by its passion and its sincere psychology. On the other hand, it is more ironical than any other extant Greek play. The irony touches every part of the story, excepting the actual tragedy of the wronged woman and the charming carelessness of the foundling's life. We should remember that an attack on the god of Delphi was not particularly objectionable in Athens. For that god, by the mouth of his official prophets, at the beginning of the war, had assured the Spartans that if they fought well they would conquer and that He, the God, would be fighting for them. The best that a pious Athenian could do for such a god as that was to suppose that the official prophets were liars. Still Euripides attacks much more than Delphi. If his thoughts ever strike home, it is not merely Delphi that will fall, it is the whole structure of Greek ritual and mythology. It is against the gods and against Athens that his irony cuts sharpest.

Irony is the mood of one who has some strong emotion within but will not quite trust himself on the flood of it. And romance is largely the mood of one turning away from realities that disgust him. In the year 416 b.c. Euripides, in his relation to Athens, was shaken for the first time out of any thought of either romance or irony. During the summer and winter of that year there occurred an event of very small military importance and no direct political consequences, to which nevertheless Thucydides devotes twenty-six continuous chapters in a very significant part of his work, the part just before the final catastrophe. The event is the siege and capture by the Athenians of a little island called Melos, the massacre of all its adult men and the enslavement of the women and children. The island had no military power. It had little commerce and lived on its own poor agriculture. Its population was not large: when it was depopulated five hundred colonists were enough to people it again. Why then this large place in Thucydides' brief and severe narrative? Only, I think, because of the moral issue involved and the naked clarity of the crime. Thucydides tells us of a long debate between the Athenian envoys and the Melian Council and professes to report the arguments used on each side. No doubt there is conscious artistic composition in the reports. We cannot conclude that any Athenian envoy used exactly these horrible words. But we can be sure that Thucydides took the war on Melos as the great typical example of the principles on which the Athenian war party were led to act in the later part of the war; we can go further and be almost sure that he selected it as a type of sin leading to punishment—that sin of "Hubris" or Pride which according to Greek ideas was associated with some heaven-sent blindness and pointed straight to a fall.