Greek tragedy

by Gilbert Norwood

The Laocoon, which dealt with a famous episode in the capture of Troy, supplies a fragment describing Æneas’ escape from the city with his father upon his shoulders; one or two other passages[387] besides this recall Vergil’s treatment. Another tragedy from the same cycle of stories, the Polyxena, is praised by “Longinus”[388] in the same terms of eulogy as the culmination of the Œdipus Coloneus itself. The Tereus,[389] to judge from the number of fragments, was very popular; it dealt with the frightful fable of the Thracian King Tereus, his wife Procne, and her sister Philomela, all of whom were at last changed into birds. Aristophanes[390] has an obscure series of jests about this play and the beak-mask with which Sophocles “outraged” the Thracian monarch. A solitary relic of the Orithyia tells how the maiden was carried off by the wind-god Boreas

Unto Earth’s verge, beyond the farthest sea,

Vistas of Heaven, and well-springs of the dark,

To the Sun’s ancient garden.

In 1907 there came to light at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt considerable fragments[391] of two Sophoclean dramas.

Most of these once formed part of the Ichneutæ (Ἰχνευταί) or Detectives. Formerly we had only two brief and obscure fragments, and one word quoted by Athenæus; it was known that the play was satyric. The theme was quite uncertain; and conjecture[392] is now shown to have gone quite astray. Sophocles, we find, has dramatized the myth so admirably treated in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. A considerable portion of the work can now be read. The god Apollo announces that his cattle have been stolen and that he cannot trace them; he offers a reward to anyone who catches the thief. Silenus and the chorus of satyrs undertake the quest; they are the “trackers” from whom the play is named. After a time they spy the footprints of oxen and exclaim that “some god is leading the colony”. A noise[393] which they cannot understand is heard behind the scenes. The numerous tracks now give them trouble; they point backwards here and there—“an odd confusion must have possessed the herdsman!” Next the satyrs fall on their faces, to the amazement of Silenus who likens this “trick of hunting on your stomach” to the position of “a hedgehog in a bush”. They bid him listen; he importantly replies that they are not helping “my investigation,” loses his temper, and roundly reviles their cowardice. They recover themselves and soon arrive at a cave. Silenus kicks at the door until the nymph Cyllene comes forth. She protests against their boisterous behaviour, but is appeased by their apologies. When they ask the meaning of the strange sound, Cyllene reports the birth of the god Hermes whom she is tending within, and his amazingly rapid growth. The noise is produced by the babe from “a vessel filled with pleasure made from a dead beast”. The “detectives” are still perplexed; what is this creature? The goddess describes the creature in riddling language. They make laughably divergent guesses: a cat, a panther, a lizard, a crab, a big-horned beetle; and at last they are told that the beast is a tortoise. She describes the delight[394] which the child draws from his playing. The satyrs inform Cyllene that her nursling is the thief; she indignantly denies that a son of Zeus can have so acted, and takes the accusation as a joke. They vigorously repeat their charge, and begin to quarrel with Cyllene. From this point onwards practically nothing can be made of the papyrus-scraps, except that Apollo re-appears, and seems to be giving the “detectives” their reward.

The papyrus which contained the other play, the Eurypylus,[395] is in tiny fragments, but some of these, combined with our independent knowledge of the story, enable us to give an outline of the plot. Astyoche, mother of Eurypylus, was induced by Priam to allow her son to help the Trojans against the Greeks. He met Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, in battle and was slain. A messenger related the encounter to (it seems) his mother Astyoche. The body was received by Priam with lamentation as if for a son of his own. This fragment is much the most striking of the collection.

Sophocles’ position in literary history has already been indicated.[396] We shall here discuss his mind and his art in general outline. Of his political opinions little is known. Though his work abounds in saws of statecraft, these are of quite general application;[397] and it would be dangerous to declare which side, if any, he took in the political crises which were so numerous and so grave in fifth-century Athens; there is perhaps one hint[398] that he did not approve the ascendancy of Pericles. As for religion, he seems to have accepted both the orthodox cults of his country and the current beliefs of the ordinary Athenian with little reserve or none. This brings us at once to a fact which must not be ignored—the feeling among readers of our own day, that Sophocles for all his merits is a little too complacent, too urbane, lacking somehow in profundity and real grip upon the soul. The answer is that we come to Sophocles pre-occupied by the religious questionings which fill our own time and which, moreover, interest both Æschylus and Euripides; but there is no reason why Sophocles should share our disquiet or that of his fellow-craftsmen. That which for Æschylus is the foreground of his work, forms for Sophocles only the background. He is not especially interested in religion itself, but in humanity. For Æschylus religion is an affair of the intellect; for Euripides it is an affair of morals; for Sophocles it belongs to the sphere of emotion. And the two great instruments with which he constructs his plays are human emotions and human will. For all the plays which we possess the same genesis exists: the chief character experiences some mighty appeal to the emotions—the feeling of self-respect in Ajax and Œdipus at Athens, of family love in Antigone and Electra, of revengefulness in Philoctetes, of wifely dignity and affection in Deianira, of pity in Œdipus at Thebes; and then creates drama by the magnificent pathetic staunchness wherewith the will, taking its direction from the emotion so aroused, presses on ruthlessly in its attempt to satisfy this impulse. Nothing seems so dear to him as a purpose which flaunts cold reason, the purpose of any others, and indeed every other emotion save that which has started the action upon its course. He sets before us a person determined on some striking act, and subjects him to all conceivable assaults of reason and preachments on expediency, showing him unbroken throughout. The onslaughts upon Ajax, Antigone, Philoctetes, Œdipus, are not mere stage-rhetoric; they are “sound common-sense,” “appeals to one’s better self”; and no logical denial can be opposed to them. Only one power in man is able to withstand them—the will, taking its stand once for all upon some instinct for clear, simple action. If we never listen to reason we are lost; but if we always listen we are lost equally. That these heroes of the will so often come to misery or death matters little; they have saved their souls alive instead of sinking themselves in a sordid acceptance of a second-hand morality. Over against these figures, to emphasize their defiant grandeur, the poet loves to set persons admirable indeed, but more commonplace, who emerge in the dread hour when the haughty will has brought ruin, and approve themselves as the pivot of the situation. The hero is great and strikes the imagination, but it is on the shoulders of men like Creon in the Œdipus Tyrannus, Odysseus, Hyllus, Theseus in the Œdipus Coloneus, that the real burden of the world’s work may be safely cast. None the less he loves Antigone better than he loves Ismene, Œdipus rather than Theseus. In one place at least, in his dislike for the “reasonable” spirit of compromise, he suffers himself a malicious little reductio ad absurdum. When Chrysothemis finds Electra uttering her resentment at the palace gate she says:—[399]