[124] 1003-4, 1110-14; 1133.
CHAPTER III
EURIPIDES
The extant dramas of Euripides are permeated with references to homicide. It will be necessary to examine seventeen out of the nineteen extant plays. We need not discuss the Cyclops or the Rhesus. The Oresteian dramas will be our first concern. In attempting a legal analysis of Euripides we are confronted with a difficulty which is present only in a minor degree in the case of Aeschylus and of Sophocles, namely the difficulty of deciding how far Euripides followed mythological tradition, or how far he ignored this tradition and invented characters and plots which reflect mainly his own mental outlook and the ideas of his time. Owing to the prominence which he gives to the prologue and to the deus ex machina, and owing to the frequency of his allusions to contemporary ideas and developments, it is often maintained that the main elements of Euripidean drama are derived from fifth-century Athenian life, and that, therefore, the plots and the scenes are incongruous and impossible. Thus Jevons says[1]: ‘If Sophocles laid his scenes in “a past which never was present,” he at any rate adhered to his imaginary period with fidelity. But Euripides lays his scenes in a time which is neither past nor present, but an incongruous and impossible epoch, in which Theseus defends the republican institutions of Athens and Hecuba regrets the high price of Sophists’ lectures’; and again[2]: ‘The motive seems to have been to give as little time as possible to the myth as traditionally related, in order to concentrate attention on the incidents and situations of Euripides’ own making. Euripides could not throw off the myths altogether, but he got rid of them as much as possible by relegating them to the prologue and to the deus ex machina’.... ‘Compelled[3] by the tradition of the tragic art to take his subjects from mythology, Euripides was impelled by his instinct as an artist to draw his characters from real life: and to present the heroes of mythology acting from everyday motives and with everyday feelings was to attempt in most cases an impossible fusion. The slaying of Clytaemnestra by Orestes is a proper subject for the art of Sophocles or Aeschylus, but is wholly unsuited to the new form of art which Euripides was making for.... The discords[4] which exist in Euripides’ plays between his character-drawing and his situations, between his sentiments and his mythical subjects ... are discords which Sophocles avoided and Euripides could not or would not convert into harmonies.’ On this subject, Verrall also holds a similar view.[5]
It would be obviously impossible for us to discuss this matter with any degree of completeness, but we must point out that we do not agree with this interpretation of Euripides. In Attic drama, as we conceive it, it was customary for the poet to derive the skeleton of his plots and situations from traditional myth. In clothing that skeleton with vitality and movement and with organic unity, the dramatist was compelled to translate himself into the past, to reconstruct from his data the details of speech, of action, and of character. In a word, he consciously archaised. Now we admit that in this vital point of ancient dramatic art Euripides is not so correct, so unimpeachable, as Sophocles or as Aeschylus. He could not always shake off the influences of his time. But to suggest that Euripides deliberately set himself to create a new form of drama admittedly incongruous, unhistorical and unreal, seems to us, as far as we can judge, as nonsensical as to suppose that Pheidias could have created a statue of Olympian Zeus with an Asiatic turban on its head and ‘barbarian slippers’[6] on its feet. In our view, Euripides followed traditional legend not only in the prologue and in the epilogue, but also in the dramatic ‘episodes.’ To depart from tradition, it would have been necessary and, for a dramatist with new and advanced ideas, it would have been easy to invent new characters, new names, new situations. In such an event, Euripides could at least have been consistent. But since in actual fact we find that he concerned himself less with questions of consistency than with situations involving surprise and horror, with problems of human passion, and with incidents of human interest, we must attribute his inconsistencies to the fact that he was fettered by traditional legend and that he overreached himself in his desire to give to the characters of mythology a really living personality. He was, of course, aware of variations in the legend. Like Sophocles and Aeschylus, he had to become an ‘eclectic,’ to choose certain elements from different stories for dramatic purposes, and to ignore other elements. But whereas the eclecticism of Sophocles and also to a great extent of Aeschylus is dominated by the canon of consistency, that of Euripides is dominated mainly by a less orthodox canon which is more conducive to human interest and which we may call the canon of psychic hedonism. Judged by the criterion of the Horatian maxim
aut famam sequere aut sibi convenientia finge,[7]
Euripides stands condemned if the latter alternative is applicable to the former. But if the maxim be interpreted to mean ‘Follow tradition and if there are variations in the story do not trouble about consistency[8] provided that every character and every situation has a traditional basis, but if you abandon tradition consistency is absolutely necessary,’ then Euripides is canonical. Of the real meaning of this maxim we cannot be certain, but to our mind it seems to mean: ‘Consistency is the aim of all literary art, but tragedians must be guided by traditional myth, and therefore in tragedy consistency, though desirable, is not indispensable, whereas in all other domains of art consistency is essential.’ Miss Harrison and Gilbert Murray[9] have suggested a theory of the origin of Greek tragedy which supposes, in effect, that its forms or characteristic ‘events’ were derived from an ancient ritual of the Year Spirit, while its actual ‘content,’ its characters, situations, episodes, were derived from Homeric saga. This theory we need not now discuss, but we must point out that Homer was not the only source of ancient mythology. When Horace says[10]:
rectius Iliacum carmen deducis in actus
quam si proferres ignota indictaque primus,