For instance, we have of late almost made a speciality of wounds and death. You could not say this of any ancient writer. Curiously enough, you might say it with less impropriety of Homer than of any other. A warrior, he says, was pierced to the heart by a spear, and the throbbing of the heart made also the butt of the spear to quiver. That gives you a pretty satisfactory shiver. Menelaos smote Peisandros above the root of the nose; and the bones cracked, and his eyes dropped bloody in the dust of the ground at his feet. This is how Peneleos treated Ilioneus. He wounded him under the eyebrow where the eye is embedded and forced out the ball, and the spear went [(Note 190)]clean through the eye and through the muscle behind, and the wounded man crouched down, spreading out his hands; but Peneleos drawing his sharp sword smote his neck in the midst and dashed the head on the ground, helmet and all; and the heavy spear was still in the eye, and he raised up the head like a poppy. I suspect your modern realist of envying that image of the bloody head stuck “through the eye” on a spear and looking like a “poppy” or a “poppy-head” on its stalk. Another unfortunate fighter was hit down the mouth with a spear, which penetrated under the brain and broke the white bones; and the teeth were shaken out and both his eyes were filled with blood, and with a gape he sent the blood gushing up his mouth and down his nostrils. The youngest son of King Priam was wounded by Achilles beside the navel, and so dropped moaning on his knees and clutched his entrails to him with his hands—a passage remembered by Pater.
From it and the others it may be seen that Homer, when he likes, can be as grisly as Mr. Sassoon. But they are not typical of Homer, still less of the ancient Greek writers in general. It is not their way to obtrude details. Their aim is to give you the whole situation, and to give it truly. Their method is to select the significant, rather than the merely striking, details. Such a theory and method are best entitled, on reflection, to the name of realism. Kebriones, the charioteer in Homer, has his forehead crushed in by a stone, and a terrible battle is waged over his body. The poet in the heat of his battle thinks for a moment of the dead man. But he in the whirling dust-storm lay, with large limbs largely fallen, forgetful of his horsemanship. No insistence here on the ghastly wound. [(Note 191)]The reader for a breathing space is rapt from the blood and the horror into quiet spaces of oblivion. Is not this, just here, the right note to strike—and not the other? It gives the whole situation—the roaring tumult above, the unheeding body underneath—not merely one aspect. It is the more real because it is not simply painful.
Contrast, again, the Greek with the mediæval and the modern attitudes to death. See how many of the passages on death you can recall in writers not ancient are inspired by a grotesque or reflective horror, or ring with a hopeful or hopeless defiance. Think of Villon on death, and Raleigh, and Donne, and Shakespeare’s Claudio, and Hydriotaphia, and Browning, and Swinburne. There is nothing in the great age of Greek literature even remotely comparable to the gorgeous variety of these dreams and invocations. But if the question is of realism (as we are understanding it), if we resolve to see death as it is, neither transformed by hope nor blurred by tears, see if the ancients have not the advantage.
They will disappoint you at first. (But remember you are asking for realism.) Thus when Aristotle in his dry manner says, Death is the most fearful thing; for it is an end, and nothing after it seems to the dead man either good or bad, you may think it a poor attitude to strike. But Aristotle is not striking an attitude at all, he is simply facing a fact. He may be wrong, of course, but that is how death looks to Aristotle, and he is not going to gild the pill either for you or for himself. But if you miss in Aristotle the thrill of the greatest literature, you must feel it in the last words of Socrates to the judges who had condemned him. But now is come the hour of departure, [(Note 192)]for me that have to die, for you that have still to live; but which path leads to a better lot is hidden from all but God. And with that Socrates falls silent, leaving the reader silent too, and a little ashamed perhaps of our importunate hells and heavens.
Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles in Hades and speaks of the great honour in which the young hero is held here. Not of death, replies Achilles, speak thou in words of comfort, glorious Odysseus! Rather above ground would I be the hired servant of a man without a lot, whose livelihood is but small, than reign over all the perished dead. The truth as he sees it is what you get from the Greek every time. Odysseus hears it from Achilles, the greatest of the dead. He hears it from Elpênor, one of the least. (Elpênor got drunk in Circe’s house and, feeling hot, wandered on to the roof, where he fell asleep, and everybody forgot about him. In the morning he was aroused by the noise of people moving about and jumped up, forgetting where he was, and fell backwards from the roof and broke his neck.) Ah, go not and leave me behind unwept and unburied, turning thy back on me, lest I become a vessel of the wrath of gods upon thee; but bury me with all mine armour, and by the margin of the whitening sea heap me a high grave of a man that had no luck, that even after ages may know. This do for me, and on my grave plant the oar with which, alive, I rowed among my comrades. The natural pathos of this must touch everybody. But I wonder if everybody feels how much of its effect is due to an almost harsh avoidance of sentimentality, as in that hidden threat of the pleading ghost. And even that piercing last line about the oar—it may grieve certain readers to know that setting up an [(Note 193)]oar on the grave was merely part of a ritual usually observed in the burial of a dead mariner.
The corpus of Greek inscriptions naturally contains a great many epitaphs. There is not one, belonging to what we think of as the great age of Greece, that has the least grain of smugness or hypocrisy or sentimentality. It must be confessed that these “pagans” could die with a good grace. Here is an inscription, incerti loci, “of uncertain provenience,” but in the Greek of Attica. The tomb of Phrasikleia, “I shall be called a maid for evermore, having won from the gods this name instead of marriage.” I ought to add at once that the original is grave and beautiful poetry. I can only give the sense. One must read the Greek to feel entirely how good Phrasikleia is. At least she is not Little Nell. Some of the most famous epitaphs are by known authors; the most famous of all by Simonides. Over the Tegeans who fell in battle against the Barbarian he wrote: Here lie the men whose valour was the cause that smoke went not up to heaven from broad Tegea burning; who resolved to leave their city flourishing in freedom to their children, and themselves to die among the foremost fighters. All these little poems are beyond translation. The art of them lies in a deliberate bareness or baldness, which ought to be shockingly prosaic (and in English almost inevitably is so), but contrives to be thrilling poetry. The finest of all the epigrams is that on the Three Hundred who fell at Thermopylae. O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, following their instructions. Literally that is what it says. Yet I suppose that even a man who does not know Greek may feel in an instinctive way that it may be extraordinarily good in the original. It is. It is an instance of the famous Laconic brevity, whose virtue it was to cut at once to the heart of things. One other epigram I will add, partly because it also refers to the time of the Persian Wars, partly because the author was said (perhaps rightly) to be Plato. It is on the people of Eretria, a town in Euboea by the seashore, who were carried off into captivity and settled by Darius far away, hopelessly far, “at Arderikka in the Kissian land” beyond the Tigris. We who one day left the deep-voiced swell of the Aegean lie here midmost the Plain of Ecbatana. Good-bye Eretria, our city famous once; good-bye Athens, the neighbour of Eretria; good-bye dear sea. By the side of this mere “pathos” looks almost vulgar. If Plato wrote it, he was certainly a poet; but it is improbable that he did. I notice that Professor Burnet thinks Plato did not write any of the poems attributed to him in the manuscripts. In any case, when people say that Plato was “really a poet” they are thinking of his prose. I cannot help adding the irrelevancy that I wish they would not go on repeating this. He is an incomparably great master of imaginative prose. Is that not enough? He may have been no better at poetry than Ruskin or Carlyle. A poet is a man who writes poems.
Next to death the great test of sincerity is love. There used to be a general opinion that love, as we understand it, did not exist among the ancients at all. That point has been already discussed, but we may consider for a little the treatment of love in the Attic dramatists, who best represent the great period of Athenian development. There is plenty of love in them, only they don’t mention it. “Please [(Note 195)]do not be impatient,” as the Greek orators say, “until you hear what I mean.” Let us take Aeschylus, the earliest of the dramatists, first, and for a play let us take his Agamemnon. The great character is Clytaemnestra. She has allowed herself to become the paramour of a vile and cowardly relation of her husband called Aegisthus, who apparently seduced her out of mere idleness and hatred of King Agamemnon. When her husband returns she treacherously murders him.... What are you going to make of a subject like that? How are you going to make Clytaemnestra, I will not say “sympathetic,” but merely human and tolerable? It seems an insoluble problem. Yet Aeschylus solves it. For one thing, he represents Agamemnon, the nominal hero of the play, as rather wooden, weak and bombastic—not very unlike Julius Caesar, the nominal hero of Shakespeare’s play, where the dramatist had a similar but less difficult problem. The result is that the sympathies of the reader are not too deeply stirred in favour of the victim. Again, Clytaemnestra appears to be really in love with Aegisthus, while her feeling towards her husband is not merely the thirst for revenge or the hate a woman conceives of the man she has wronged; it is a physical abhorrence. She loathes him in her flesh. It is impossible to explain by what miracle of genius we are led to receive this impression, for she speaks nothing but flatteries and cajolery. Yet every speech of hers to him, as he dimly feels, shudders with a secret disgust. These long, glittering, coiling sentences are certainly not politic; they are the expression of a morbid loathing, which has ended by fascinating itself. When the blood of her lord [(Note 196)]bursts over her she rejoices no less than the sown ground in the heaven’s bright gift of rain. Now in the play Agamemnon is rather ineffective, but at any rate he is more a man than the immeasurably contemptible Aegisthus. Is it to be supposed that Clytaemnestra does not know that? Of course she knows, but she does not cease to love Aegisthus on that account. So the matter stands. Aeschylus does not make it any easier for you. A bad modern playwright would make Clytaemnestra a sadly misunderstood woman with a pitiful “case.” It so happens that the queen does have something of a case, really a good case, but she does not much insist on it. She knows quite well that it is not for her murdered daughter’s sake that she has killed the king. Neither is it from fear of detection; the woman does not know the meaning of fear. Aeschylus will not purchase your sympathy for her by any pretences. One of his unexpected, wonderful touches is to make her superbly intelligent. She feels herself so much superior intellectually to every one else that she hardly takes the trouble to deceive them. Nobody is asked to like Clytaemnestra, but surely she gives food for some reflection on the power and subtlety of Greek psychology, and the unswerving truthfulness of Greek realism, in a peculiarly complex affair of the heart.
There are in Sophocles at least two fine and tender studies of conjugal love of the conventional (but not silly conventional) type, namely Tekmessa in the Ajax and Dêianeira in the Trachinian Women; and one study not conventional in the very least, the Iokasta of Oedipus the King. She is the woman who slew herself because she had borne children to her own son, who had murdered his father, who begot him by her. The legend has made her a thing of night and horror. Sophocles has made her grand, proud, sceptical, lonely, pitiful, ravaged by thoughts not to be breathed, horribly pathetic. But these three are wives. Of love between man and maid Sophocles has hardly a word to say. People quote Haimon and Antigone. There is no doubt of the young man’s love for Antigone; he dies for her. But is she in love with Haimon? She is betrothed to him of course, but in ancient Greece these matters were arranged. She probably liked him a good deal; everybody likes him; but we are speaking of love. Those who have little doubts on the subject quote her cry, Dearest Haimon, how thy father slights thee! which she utters when Kreon has said, I hate bad wives for my sons. But they have no right to quote the cry as hers until they have proved she utters it; which they don’t, but merely assume the manuscripts be wrong. The manuscripts give the line to Ismênê, the sister of Antigone, and they appear to be clearly right. Any one who looks at the context will see that it is Ismênê who brings the mention of Haimon into the dispute with Kreon. Antigone stands apart in proud and indignant silence. She will die rather than let the man who has outraged her dead brother see how much her resistance is costing her. Besides, I think the manuscripts are right anyway. Imagine the case of an extremely high-minded young lady, who for the very best reasons has quarrelled with her prospective father-in-law. The young lady’s sister reminds the old man that after all Octavia is engaged to his son, which provokes the retort, “I object to bad wives for my boys.” Would Octavia then exclaim, “Dearest William, how your father insults you!”? Well, would she? But it looks delightfully like what Octavia’s sister would say. Therefore, I vote for the manuscripts and giving the line to Ismênê.
Antigone had two brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes. After their father had been driven from Thebes the brethren disputed the succession to his throne. Polyneikes lost, and took refuge in Argos, where he gathered assistance and marched against his native city. The attempt had no success, and Polyneikes and Eteokles fell in single combat. This mutual fratricide left Kreon, their uncle, king. He, in a flame of “patriotism,” had Eteokles interred with honour and commanded that the body of Polyneikes should be left unburied. Such an order might be compared to excommunication, for the effect of it was for ever to bar the spirit of the dead from peace. Antigone sprinkled dust on the naked corpse, which satisfied the gods of the underworld and eluded the penalty of the ban. When Kreon asks her if the spirit of Eteokles will not resent the saining of his fraternal enemy—which would be the orthodox opinion—she replies, beautifully but inconsequently, It is not my nature to join in hating, but in loving. She also speaks of a higher, unwritten law. But Polyneikes is the favourite brother. I hardly think any one can read carefully the Antigone and the Oedipus at Colonus without seeing that. All through the Antigone he is never out of her thoughts. “Natural enough,” you may be inclined to say. But is it? On the supposition that she is in love with Haimon? There is another play, the Electra, in which Sophocles portrays the love of a sister for a brother; and there are a good many points of resemblance between Electra and Antigone. Only there is in the love of Electra for Orestes (whom she brought up) a fierce, hungry, maternal quality, which would be out of place between the children of Oedipus.
When we pass to Euripides we seem by comparison to approach the modern. The impression is largely illusory, but not wholly false. It is the fact that he is troubled by many of the problems that trouble us, and it is the fact that he sometimes answers, or does not answer, them in a way we should regard as modern. This comes out in his treatment of love. It is best seen in the Medea and the Hippolytus. Medea has a special interest for us because she is a Barbarian (princess of Colchis in the eastern corner of the Black Sea). But her case is quite simple. She is a woman in love with a man who is tired of her. Necessarily he cuts a poor figure in the story. She had saved his life. On the other hand, she had thrown herself at his head, she had done her best to ruin his chances in life, and all she had now to offer him was a perfect readiness to murder anybody who stood in his way. She is one of those women who are never satisfied unless the man is making love to them all the time, so that one may have a sneaking sympathy for that embarrassed, if rather contemptible, Jason. Indeed, Euripides’ opinion of this kind of “Romantic” love is probably no higher than Mr. Shaw’s. It is the passion of the Barbarian woman. That does not prevent Euripides from sympathizing profoundly with Medea, the passionate, wronged, foreign woman. Why, indeed, should it? The case of Medea, as Euripides with the pregnant brevity of Greek art presents it, has seemed to many as true as death. It is an excellent example of realism.