Euripides and His Age

by Gilbert Murray

In cool and measured language the Athenian envoys explain to the Melian Senate—for the populace is carefully excluded—that it suits their purpose that Melos should become subject to their empire. They will not pretend—being sensible men and talking to sensible men—that the Melians have done them any wrong or that they have any lawful claim to Melos, but they do not wish any islands to remain independent: it is a bad example to the others. The power of Athens is practically irresistible: Melos is free to submit or to be destroyed. The Melians, in language carefully controlled but vibrating with suppressed bitterness, answer as best they can. Is it quite safe for Athens to break all laws of right? Empires are mortal; and the vengeance of mankind upon such a tyranny as this . . . ? "We take the risk of that," answer the Athenians; "the immediate question is whether you prefer to live or die." The Melians plead to remain neutral; the plea is, of course, refused. At any rate they will not submit. They know Athens is vastly stronger in men and ships and military skill; still the gods may help the innocent ("That risk causes us no uneasiness," say the envoys: "we are quite as pious as you"); the Lacedaemonians are bound by every tie of honour and kinship to intervene ("We shall of course see that they do not"); in any case we choose to fight and hope rather than to accept slavery. "A very regrettable misjudgement," say the Athenians; and the war proceeds to its hideous end.

As I read this Melian Dialogue, as it is called, again and again, I feel more clearly the note of deep and angry satire. Probably the Athenian war-party would indignantly have repudiated the reasoning put into the mouths of their leaders. After all they were a democracy; and, as Thucydides fully recognizes, a great mass of men, if it does commit infamies, likes first to be drugged and stimulated with lies: it seldom, like the wicked man in Aristotle's Ethics, "calmly sins." But in any case the massacre of Melos produced on the minds of men like Thucydides and Euripides—and we might probably add almost all the great writers who were anywise touched by the philosophic spirit—this peculiar impression. It seemed like a revelation of naked and triumphant sin. And we can not but feel the intention with which Thucydides continues his story. "They put to death all the Melians whom they found of man's estate, and made slaves of the women and children. And they sent later five hundred colonists and took the land for their own.

"And the same winter the Athenians sought to sail with a greater fleet than ever before and conquer Sicily. . . ." This was the great Sicilian expedition that brought Athens to her doom.

Euripides must have been brooding on the crime of Melos during the autumn and winter. In the spring, when the great fleet was still getting ready to sail, he produced a strange play, the work rather of a prophet than a mere artist, which was reckoned in antiquity as one of his masterpieces but which set a flame of discord for ever between himself and his people. One would like to know what Archon accepted that play and what rich man gave the chorus. It was called The Trojan Women, and it tells of the proudest conquest wrought by Greek arms in legend, the taking of Troy by the armies of Agamemnon. But it tells the old legend in a peculiar way. Slowly, reflectively, with little stir of the blood, we are made to look at the great glory, until we see not glory at all but shame and blindness and a world swallowed up in night. At the very beginning we see gods brooding over the wreck of Troy; as they might be brooding over that wrecked island in the Aegean, whose walls were almost as ancient as Troy's own. It is from the Aegean that Poseidon has risen to look upon the city that is now a smoking ruin, sacked by the Greeks. "The shrines are empty and the sanctuaries run red with blood." The unburied corpses lie polluting the air; and the conquering soldiers, home-sick and uneasy, they know not why, roam to and fro waiting for a wind that will take them away from the country they have made horrible. Such is the handiwork of Athena, daughter of Zeus! (47).

The name gives one a moment of shock. Athena is so confessedly the tutelary goddess of Athens. But Euripides was only following the regular Homeric story, in which Athena had been the great enemy of Troy, and the unscrupulous friend of the Greeks. Her name is no sooner mentioned than she appears. But she is changed. Her favourites have gone too far; they have committed "Hubris," insulted the altars of the gods and defiled virgins in holy places. Athena herself is now turned against her people. Their great fleet, flushed with conquest and stained with sin, is just about to set sail: Athena has asked Zeus the Father for vengeance against it, and Zeus has given it into her hand. She and Poseidon swear alliance; the storm shall break as soon as the fleet sets sail, and the hungry rocks of the Aegean be glutted with wrecked ships and dying men (95 ff.).

How are ye blind Ye treaders down of Cities; ye that cast Temples to desolation and lay waste Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie The ancient dead, yourselves so soon to die!

And the angry presences vanish into the night. Were the consciences of the sackers of Melos quite easy during that prologue?

Then the day dawns and the play begins, and we see what, in plain words, the great glory has amounted to. We see the shattered walls and some poor temporary huts where once was a city; and presently we see a human figure rising wearily from sleep. It is an old woman, very tired, her head and her back aching from the night on the hard ground. The old woman is Hecuba, lately the queen of Troy, and in the huts hard by are other captives, "High women chosen from the waste of war" to be slaves to the Greek chieftains. They are to be allotted this morning. She calls them and they come startled out of sleep, some terrified, some quiet, some still dreaming, one suddenly frantic. Through the rest of the play we hear bit by bit the decisions of the Greek army-council. Cassandra, the virgin priestess, is to be Agamemnon's concubine. The stupid and good-natured Herald who brings the news thinks it good news. How lucky for the poor helpless girl! And the King, too! There is no accounting for tastes; but he thinks it was that air of unearthly holiness in Cassandra which made Agamemnon fancy her. The other women are horror-stricken, but Cassandra is happy. God is leading her; her flesh seems no longer to be part of her; she has seen something of the mind of God and knows that the fate of Troy and of dead Hector is better than that of their conquerors. She sees in the end that she must discrown herself, take off the bands of the priestess and accept her desecration; she sees to what end she is fated to lead Agamemnon, sees the vision of his murdered body—murdered by his wife—cast out in precipitous places on a night of storm; and beside him on the wet rocks there is some one else, dead, outcast, naked . . . who is it? She sees it is herself, and goes forth to what is appointed (445 ff.).

The central portion of the play deals with the decision of the Greeks about Hector's little boy, Astyanax. He is only a child now; but of course he will grow, and he will form the natural rallying point for all the fugitive Trojans and the remnants of the great Trojan Alliance. On the principles of the Melian dialogue he is best out of the way. The Herald is sent to take the child from his mother, Andromache, and throw him over the battlements. He comes when the two women, Andromache and Hecuba, are talking together and the child playing somewhere near. Andromache has been allotted as slave to Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, and is consulting with Hecuba about the horror she has to face. Shall she simply resist to the end, in the hope that Pyrrhus may hate and kill her, or shall she try, as she always has tried, to make the best of things? Hecuba advises: "Think of the boy and think of your own gentle nature. You are made to love and not to hate; when things were happy you made them happier; when they are miserable you will tend to heal them and make them less sore. You may even win Pyrrhus to be kind to your child, Hector's child; and he may grow to be a help to all who have once loved us. . . ." As they speak the shadow of the entering Herald falls across them; he cannot speak at first, but he has come to take the child to its death, and his message has to be given. This scene, with the parting between Andromache and the child which follows, seems to me perhaps the most absolutely heart-rending in all the tragic literature of the world. After rising from it one understands Aristotle's judgment of Euripides as "the most tragic of the poets."

For sheer beauty of writing, for a kind of gorgeous dignity that at times reminds one of Aeschylus and yet is compatible with the subtlest clashes of mood and character, the Trojan Women stands perhaps first among all the works of Euripides. But that is not its most remarkable quality. The action works up first to a great empty scene where the child's body is brought back to his grandmother, Hecuba, for the funeral rites. A solitary old woman with a dead child in her arms; that, on the human side, is the result of these deeds of glory. Then, in the finale, come scenes of almost mystical tone, in which Hecuba appeals first to the gods, who care nothing; then to the human dead who did at least care and love; but the dead, too, are deaf like the gods and cannot help or heed. Out of the noise and shame of battle there has come Death the most Holy and taken them to his peace. No friend among the dead, no help in God, no illusion anywhere, Hecuba faces That Which Is and finds somewhere, in the very intensity of Troy's affliction, a splendour which cannot die. She has reached in some sense not the bottom, but the crowning peak of her fortunes. Troy has already been set on fire by the Greeks in preparation for their departure, and the Queen rushes to throw herself into the flames. She is hurled back by the guards, and the women watch the flaming city till with a crash the great tower falls. The Greek trumpet sounds through the darkness. It is the sign for the women to start for their ships; and forth they go, cheated of every palliative, cheated even of death, to the new life of slavery. But they have seen in their very nakedness that there is something in life which neither slavery nor death can touch.