Euripides and His Age

by Gilbert Murray

CHAPTER VI

AFTER THE "TROJAN WOMEN": EURIPIDES' LAST YEARS IN ATHENS: FROM THE "IPHIGENIA" TO THE "ORESTES"

Critics have used various words to describe the change of mood which followed the Trojan Women. They speak of a period of despair, pessimism, progressive bitterness, Verzweiflung und Weltschmertz. But such phrases seem to me misleading. In the first place I do not think they describe quite truly even the particular plays they are meant to describe; in the second, they do not allow for the great variety which subsists in the plays of this period. The mood of the Trojan Women is not exactly pessimism or despair; and whatever it is, it does not colour all the subsequent plays.

The plays after 415 fall into two main divisions. First the works of pure fancy or romance, in which the poet seems to turn intentionally away from reality. Such are the Iphigenîa in Tauris, the Helena and the Andromeda; they move among far seas and strange adventures and they have happy endings. Next there are the true tragedies, close to life, ruthlessly probing the depths of human nature; not more acutely bitter than such earlier works as the Medea and Hecuba, but with a bitterness more profound because it is comparatively free from indignation. The glory has fallen away and the burning anger with it. The poor miserable heroes and heroines . . . what else can you expect of them? Rage is no good; punishment worse than useless. The road to healing lies elsewhere.

A good key to the first of these types of play is to be seen in Aristophanes' comedy, The Birds. The gayest, sweetest and most irresponsible of all his plays, it was written just after the news of the final disaster in Sicily, when ruin stared Athens in the face. And the two heroes of it, disgusted with the ways of man, depart to live among the birds and build, with their help, a splendid Cloud City. In much the same spirit Euripides must have written his Andromeda. He produced it in 412, the same year in which he was invited by the anti-war government which came into power after the news of the great disaster to write the national epitaph on the soldiers slain in Sicily. He wrote the epitaph in the old severe untranslatable style of Simonides: "These men won eight victories over the Syracusans when the hand of God lay even between both." In English it seems cold; it seems hardly poetry. But in Greek it is like carved marble. Then, one must imagine, he turned right away from the present and spent his days with Andromeda. Only a few fragments of the Andromeda remain, but they are curiously beautiful; and the play as a whole seems to have been the one unclouded love-romance that Euripides ever wrote. It was fantastic, remote from life, with its heroine chained to a cliff over the blue sea awaiting the approach of the sea-monster, and its hero, Perseus, on winged sandals, appearing through the air to save her. Yet the fragments have a wistful ring: "O holy Night, how long is the path of thy chariot!" "By the Mercy that dwelleth in the sea caves, cease, O Echo; let me weep my fill in peace." Or the strange lines (fr. 135):

Methinks it is the morrow, day by day, That cows us, and the coming thing alway Greater than things to-day or yesterday.

There was a story told, in later times, of a tragedy-fever that fell on the folk of Abdêra, in Thrace, through this play, till in every street you could see young men walking as though in a dream, and murmuring to themselves the speech beginning, "O Love, high monarch over gods and men. . . ." The Andromeda was five hundred years old when people told that story.

The Iphigenîa in Tauris came one year earlier. It is one of the most beautiful of the extant plays, not really a tragedy in our sense nor yet merely a romance. It begins in gloom and rises to a sense of peril, to swift and dangerous adventure, to joyful escape. So far it is like romance. But it is tragic in the sincerity of the character-drawing. Iphigenîa, especially, with her mixed longings for revenge and for affection, her hatred of the Greece that wronged her and her love of the Greece that is her only home, her possibilities of stony cruelty and her realities of swift self-sacrifice, is a true child of her great and accursed house. The plot is as follows:—Iphigenîa, daughter of Agamemnon, who was supposed to have been sacrificed by her father at Aulis, was really saved by Artemis and is now priestess to that goddess in the land of the Taurians at the extremity of the Friendless Sea. The Taurians are savages who kill all strangers, and if ever a Greek shall land in the wild place it will be her task to prepare him for sacrifice. She lives with this terror hanging over her, and the first Greek that comes is her unknown brother, Orestes. Their recognition of one another is, perhaps, the finest recognition-scene in all Tragedy; and with its sequels of stratagem and escape forms a thrilling play, haunted not, like a tragedy, by the shadow of death but rather by the shadow of homesickness. The characters are Greeks in a far barbarian land, longing for home or even for the Greek sea. The lyrics are particularly fine, and most of them full of sea-light and the clash of waters.

In the same year as the Andromeda came another romantic play, the Helena. It is a good deal like the Iphigenîa in structure, but it is lighter, harder, and more artificial. The romance of Euripides is never quite the easy dreaming of lighter-hearted writers. And the Helena, in which he seems to have attempted a work of mere fancy, is, if we understand it rightly, a rather brilliant failure. Some critics—quite mistakenly in my judgment—have even argued that it is a parody. The plot is based on a variant of the canonical legend about Helen, a variant generally associated with the ancient lyric poet, Stesichorus. Story tells that Stesichorus at one time lost his eyesight and took it into his head that this was a punishment laid on him by the goddess Helen, because he had told the story of her flight with Paris from her husband's house. He wrote a recantation, based on another form of the Helen-legend, in which Helen was borne away by the God Hermes to Egypt and there lived like a true wife till Menelaus came and found her. The being that went with Paris to Troy was only a phantom image of Helen, contrived by the gods in order to bring about the war, and so reduce the wickedness and multitude of mankind. In Euripides' play there is a wicked king of Egypt, who seeks to marry Helen against her will and kills all Greeks who land in his country. The war at Troy is over, and Menelaus, beaten by storms out of his way, is shipwrecked on the coast of Egypt. He and Helen meet, recognize one another, and by the help of the king's sister, who has second sight, contrive to escape. It is hard to say what exactly is wrong with the Helena; and it may only be that we moderns do not know in what spirit to take it. But the illusion is difficult to keep up and the work seems cold. Reality has gone out of it. For one thing, Helen, in her thorough process of rehabilitation, has emerged that most insipid of fancies, a perfectly beautiful and blameless heroine with no character except love of her husband, whom, by the way, she has not seen for seventeen years.