Greek tragedy

by Gilbert Norwood

Certain peculiarities of detail in the plot strongly support the view that Deianira is the subject of the whole drama. First is the conduct of Lichas. This part is carefully constructed so as to lead up to the great appeal in which the heroine describes the might of Love. If Lichas had really kept his secret instead of tattling to the townsfolk, Deianira would not have known it and so appealed to Lichas. If, on the other hand, Lichas had not tried to deceive his mistress, she would not have needed to offer any appeal. His conduct has been devised solely to portray her character by means of this marvellous speech. A second point is the way in which Hyllus learns his mother’s innocence. After his speech of denunciation she goes without a word into the house. The Trachinian maidens know the truth and have heard from Deianira[339] herself that she will not survive her husband, but they say nothing to Hyllus. Yet the playwright who is here so strangely reticent allows the prince to learn the facts in a few minutes “from the people in the house” as he casually phrases it. The reason is that if Hyllus were informed at once he would prevent his mother’s suicide. This would have destroyed the dramatic treatment without altering events. For Deianira is not concerned in being proved innocent; she wishes to die now that Heracles is destroyed. Hyllus’ intervention would only mean procrastination of death.[340] In the interests of drama, it must happen now. Further he must learn the truth as soon as she is dead, for some one must confront Heracles with a defence of the dead woman, if her fate and her love are, as we said, dominant throughout the play. Here, too, there is a resemblance between the Trachiniæ and the Ajax; Hyllus, in this last scene, resembles Teucer championing the fame of Ajax.

The character-drawing is here as admirable as elsewhere. Lichas, well-meaning but foolish and shifty, is contrasted with the messenger who is perfectly honest though spiteful. Hyllus is a character of a type which we have often discussed already—he has no personality, and we are interested in him not because of what he is but because of what happens to him. The women of the chorus are simply a band of sympathetic friends. Heracles, on the customary reading of the tragedy, is the most callously brutal figure in literature. One need not labour the proof; his treatment of Deianira, of Iole, of Hyllus, of Lichas, of every one whom he meets,[341] is enough. The poet has taken the only possible course to make us witness the hero’s pangs at the close with a certain satisfaction. But the other possible theory does away with this sham “tragedy”. Heracles as a coarse stupid “man of action” who is yet capable of reflection and a touch of “the melting mood” shown by his giving Iole to Hyllus when the secret of his wife’s heart is at last irresistibly pressed upon him, is dramatic indeed.

But the glory of this work is Deianira. A comparison of the Trachiniæ with the Ajax illustrates the development of ideas in the poet’s mind. Tecmessa’s character and position have been analysed, and we find, instead of one woman, two—Iole and Deianira. Iole is mute; it is not her conduct, but her involuntary influence, which contributes to the tragedy. In Deianira, however, we meet the Trojan princess once more, older and with more initiative—tenderer she could not be. It is this union of gentleness with force of mind, of love and sad knowledge of the world, which makes her character so appealing and gracious. A smaller poet would have made her haughty or abject, revengeful or contemptible; Sophocles has portrayed a noble lady, who will bend, but not kneel. Her interview with Iole and the later conversations in which first she excuses her husband and then on reflection finds that she cannot share his home with the newcomer—these scenes, painted with quiet mastery, are the greatest work of Sophocles in the portraiture of women.

There can be no doubt that the Trachiniæ is the work of Sophocles; considerations of style, hard to describe but overwhelming, settle the case beyond dispute. None the less we cannot ignore the influence of another school of drama—the Euripidean. The features more or less certainly due to this influence are: (i) The subject itself. Sophocles has studied a woman’s love and its possibilities of unintended mischief in a way which recalls many plots[342] of Euripides. (ii) The “prologue,” especially the explanatory speech of Deianira, is not in the usual manner of the playwright, but quite in that of Euripides. (iii) The last lines, with their reproach against the hardness of the gods who neglect their children, and the total silence about the deification of Heracles, which was the most familiar fact of this story, a silence emphatic throughout, are in spirit Euripidean. (iv) The chorus is almost negligible as a dramatic factor, and one of its songs—the first stasimon—is literally “commonplace”; it would fit any kind of joyous occasion. (v) The turns of expression occasionally recall those of the younger poet. The colloquial ποίαν δόκησιν[343] cannot be paralleled in tragedy except in his work. One line[344] seems borrowed almost without change. Deianira’s homely, almost coarse, words, “and now we two await his embrace beneath one rug,” are not what one expects from the stately Sophocles. The prosaic φαρμακεύς[345] and the allusion[346] to Heracles’ unheroic side (ἡνίκ’ ἦν ᾠνωμένος, “when he was deep in wine”) are on the same level. But most Euripidean of all is the description[347] Deianira gives of her dreadful suitor. There is nothing unlike Sophocles in this acceptance of the legend that Deianira was wooed by a river-god. But the studied nonchalance of the first line “my suitor was a river, Acheloüs that is,” and the absurdity of the second, in which the divine wooer is represented as applying (with a punctilio strange to river-gods of legend) to the lady’s father for her hand, and “calling” (φοιτῶν) on different occasions as a different animal—all this mixture of horror and comedy is absolute Euripides. The fact appears to be that Sophocles deliberately took up the attitude of Euripides, for two reasons—firstly, for the sheer delight of a strange and difficult feat of artistry; secondly, in order to show how Euripides, even from his own standpoint, ought to have written.[348]

Philoctetes[349] (Φιλοκτήτης) was produced in the spring of 409 B.C., when the poet was eighty-seven years old, and won the first prize. The hero Philoctetes was one of the chieftains who sailed for Troy. When the fleet touched at Chryse, he was stung in the foot by a snake. The wound was incurable and its noxious odour, together with the cries of the sufferer, were so troublesome to the Greeks that they deserted him when asleep upon the island of Lemnos, leaving with him a little food and clothing, and his bow and arrows, the last a legacy from Heracles. In the tenth year of the war the Greeks learned that Troy could only be taken by help of Philoctetes and the weapons of Heracles. Two men were sent to Lemnos with the purpose of bringing the maimed warrior to Troy—Odysseus because of his craft, Neoptolemus because he was unknown to Philoctetes.

The scene is a desolate spot on the island, in front of the cliff-face in which is the cave inhabited by Philoctetes. Neoptolemus wins the confidence of the sufferer while Odysseus keeps in the background, though by a subtle device of a false message he aids the plot greatly. But when the fated weapons are secured and Philoctetes (who supposes he is to be conveyed back to Greece) is ready to accompany Neoptolemus, the latter tells him the truth. Philoctetes’ misery, rage, and reproaches induce the youth to restore the weapons despite Odysseus’ opposition, and to promise Philoctetes a passage home. But at the last moment Heracles appears in glory above their heads and commands Philoctetes to proceed Troywards. He willingly consents, and bids farewell to the scene of his long sorrow.

In structure this play is perhaps the most interesting extant work of Sophocles. As elsewhere, we find a great simple character of vast will-power exposed to a strong temptation—Philoctetes confronted by the chance of healing, happiness, and glory, if only he will meet in friendship men whom he is determined to hate. But for once there is a secondary interest which is not purely secondary. Many will even find the development of Neoptolemus more impressive than the situation of Philoctetes. While the latter shows the heroic character as it appears after the experience of life, strong, reflective, sad, a little fierce if not soured, the other is the hero before such experience, eager and noble but too responsive to suggestion. Neoptolemus has just begun life, and his first task is to betray—for the public good, no doubt, but still to betray—a noble stranger who merits not only respect but instant pity and tendance. “Oh! that never had I left Scyros!” he exclaims. Life after all is not a blaze of glorious war as his father Achilles found it, but a sordid affair of necessary compromises. One of the most charming things in the drama is the clearness with which Philoctetes, in the midst of his rage, sees the tragedy of his youthful captor.[350] Confronted by the kindness of the youth, he reveals himself not as a mere savage, living only on thoughts of revenge; he becomes more flexible, open-hearted, almost sociable. So revealed, he is the direct cause of the change in Neoptolemus’ purpose.

Beside these stands Odysseus, only less striking and equally indispensable. For a chief note of this drama is the skill with which the poet avails himself of the three actors, whose possibilities are here for perhaps the first time fully employed. It is easy, but mistaken, to label Odysseus as “the villain”. In reality he is the State personified. There is no modern reader who does not hate and contemn him, but it remains true that whereas Philoctetes whom we pity and Neoptolemus whom we love both take a strictly personal view, Odysseus at the risk of his life insists on pressing the claim of the community. It is necessary to Greece that Troy should fall. She can only fall through the arrows of Heracles. The man who owns them will assuredly not consent. It follows that he must be compelled to help, by force or guile. A conquering nation must have its Philip as well as its Alexander; Odysseus stands for facts which twenty years of the Peloponnesian war had driven home into Athenian minds. Neoptolemus is the type of many a young warrior who has learned with aching disgust that the knightly exploits which tales of Marathon had fired him to perform must be thwarted unceasingly by the politic meanderings of Nicias, by considerations of corn-supply, or the “representations” of some remote satrap.

And in the end Odysseus gets his way. As the two friends start for home, leaving the Greeks at Troy to defeat and the oracles of Heaven to non-fulfilment, a god appears to command from the sky that self-sacrifice shall be revoked and hate forgotten. What are we to think of this intervention of Heracles? Is he not an extreme instance of the deus ex machina? Is not mere compulsion employed to change a settled resolve? This is the most striking and the most difficult feature of the construction: rather it seems the negation of structure. Why is it employed? Some[351] have been content to suggest Euripidean influence—of course no answer at all. Some[352] have thought that Heracles is personified conscience, rising to remind Philoctetes of his duty to Greece; a suggestion ruled out by the fact that his duty has been urged clearly by Neoptolemus. A more attractive idea[353] is that the genuine peripeteia of the play consists in Neoptolemus’ change of front; in this way an inner dramatic unity is secured, while the external change induced by Heracles is a mere concession to the data of legend. This in its turn is vitiated by the fact that for the dramatist Philoctetes, and not Neoptolemus, is the central figure: this is proved by the work as a whole and by the title which the poet himself gave it. If the deus ex machina is not to be condemned utterly, it follows from the basic law of Attic art that the play up to the moment of Heracles’ appearance, however complete it seemed to us a moment ago, is not complete—that some coping-stone is still needed. And if we consider the action up to that point we cannot really be content. To disregard the oracles which tradition said were fulfilled, the action, as Sophocles depicts it, is unsatisfactory. Philoctetes is to get the revenge which seems rightly his, and we approve his young companion who aids him at such cost. But by this time we feel a little dubious about the sufferer. There has been perhaps too much detail in his outcries and his account of his sufferings. Hatred which will refuse both health and fame, without any loss but that of aged intentions, has begun to seem a moral falsetto. But who can say, without misgiving, that (on pagan principles) he is wrong? One person only in Heaven and earth—Heracles. Every ordinary consideration of public and personal interest has been put before Philoctetes in vain. But there is another thought which neither the victim himself nor Odysseus nor Neoptolemus has strength enough to suggest, or even to remember. One character alone in Greek story rises above the conception of personal injury or personal benefit as a motive to action; Heracles is the great reminder, not so much that wrongs to oneself should be forgiven, as that life is too short and precious to be wasted on revenge. Heracles would return a blow with vigour, but a vendetta, in the light of his career, seems a childish folly. One does not forget that some pictures of his character (that, for instance, in the Trachiniæ) belie this conception; but Sophocles here sees fit to choose a different, and the more usual, view. Suddenly the husk of selfish spite falls away from the sufferer’s soul. He who has just promised[354] to use the weapons of Heracles in a private quarrel and has already attempted[355] so to use them, at last remembers that they are the rightful instrument of well-doing, and that it was for such a reason[356] that he received them from the hero at his passing into glory. Heracles then is introduced as the only person who can press upon Philoctetes an argument which the cunning of Odysseus and the candour of Neoptolemus have alike ignored. That he appears as a deus ex machina is in part accident—he is not selected by the poet for that reason. But it is a happy accident, for the glory which envelops him is the visible warrant of his inspiring behests—anything rather than the sign of overwhelming might summoned to break a reasonable human resolve. Thus the close of this play is a real ending, not a breakdown; it is the pagan analogue of the Quo Vadis legend.