More definitely than the Medea, the Hippolytus is a tragedy of love. Yet in the eloquence of the Romantic lover the one is as deficient as the other. Phaedra was dying for love of Hippolytus. Her secret is discovered and she dies of shame. What an opportunity for the sentimentalist! However, adds the relentless poet, that is not all the story. Before killing herself she forged a message to her husband making the charge of Potiphar’s wife against Hippolytus. She could not die without the pleasure of hurting him. Yet Euripides does not represent her as an odious woman; quite the contrary. The question for us is, does she, when we read the play, strike us as real or not? The poet has set himself a difficult task—to convince us that a soul overthrown by desire, cruel, lying, unjust was yet essentially modest, gentle and honourable. If she is almost too convincing, so that a sentimental part of you bleeds inside, you will perceive that realism was not invented in Norway. And there is this about the Greek sort: it never exaggerates.
It is hardly to be believed how startling an effect of truth this moderation of the Greek writers can produce. Sappho, in the most famous of her odes, says that love makes her “sweat” with agony and look “greener than grass.” Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as that, although (commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive complexion and had never seen British grass. But, even if it contain a trace of artistic exaggeration, the ode as a whole is perhaps the most convincing love-poem ever written. It breathes veracity. It has an intoxicating beauty of sound and suggestion, and it is as exact as a physiological treatise. The Greeks can do that kind of thing. Somehow we either overdo the “beauty” or we overdo the physiology. The weakness of the Barbarian, said they, is that he never hits the mean. But the Greek poet seems to do it every time. We may beat them at other things, but not at that. And they do it with so little effort; sometimes, it might appear, with none at all. Thus Aeschylus represents Prometheus as the proudest of living beings. The Prometheus Bound opens with a scene in which Hephaistos, urged on by two devils called Strength and Force, nails Prometheus to a frozen, desert rock. While the hero of the play endures this horrible torture, he has to listen to the clumsy sympathy of Hephaistos, who does not like his job, and the savage taunts of the two demons. To all this he replies—nothing at all. No eloquence could express the pride of that tremendous silence. Of course there is, or there used to be, a certain kind of commentator who hastens to point out that a convention of the early Attic stage forbade more than two persons of a tragedy to speak together at any time, so that in any event it was not permissible for Prometheus to speak. All you can do with a critic like that is (mentally, I fear) to hang a millstone round his neck and cast him into the deepest part of the sea.
Not but what the point about convention, if rightly taken, is extremely notable. It is an undying wonder how the kind of realism we have been discussing could be combined with, could even, as in that instance from the Prometheus Bound, make use of, the limitations imposed on the ancient poet. To a reader who has not looked into the case it is hard to give even an idea of it. If a man were to tell you that he had written a novel in which the hero was Sir Anthony Dearborn and the heroine Sophia Wilde, while other characters were Squire Crabtree, Parson Quackenboss, Lieutenant Dashwood and the old Duchess of Grimthorpe, you would think to yourself you knew exactly what to expect. Yet you must admit there is nothing to prevent the man leaving out (if he can) Gretna Green, and the duel, and the eighteenth-century oaths. But if a Greek tragic dramatist put on the stage a play dealing, say, with the House of Atreus, he positively could not leave out any part of the family history. It was not done. So the audience knew your story already, and knew, roughly, your characters. Nor, as historians say, was that all. There had to be a Chorus, which had to sing lyrical odes of a mythological sort at regular intervals between the episodes of your drama; while the episodes themselves had to be composed in the iambic metre and in a certain “tragic diction” about as remote from ordinary speech as Paradise Lost. How Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides contrive under such conditions to give a powerful impression of novelty and naturalness it is easier to feel than explain. About the feeling at least there is no doubt. Let us look again for a moment at that singular convention, the tragic Chorus. Very often it consists of old men who ... sing and dance. Consider the incredible difficulty of keeping a number of singing and dancing old men solemn and beautiful and even holy. Yet the great tragic poets have overcome that difficulty so completely that I suppose not one reader in a hundred notices that there is a difficulty at all. The famous Chorus of old men in the Agamemnon, whose debility is made a point in the play, never for a moment remind one of Grandfer Cantle. Rather they remind us of that “old man covered with a mantle,” whom Saul beheld rising from the grave to pronounce his doom. It is, in their own words, as if God inspired their limbs to the dance and filled their mouths with prophecy.
There is only one way of redeeming the conventional, and that is by sincerity. I am very far from maintaining that the moral virtue of sincerity was eminently characteristic of the ancient Greek; but intellectual sincerity was. None has ever looked upon gods and men with such clear, unswerving eyes; none has understood so well to communicate that vision. To see that essential beauty is truth and truth is beauty—that is the secret of Greek art, as it is the maxim of true realism. To keep measure in all things, that no drop of life may spill over—that is the secret of Greek happiness. To be a Greek and not a Barbarian.
NOTES
THE AWAKENING
The beginnings of Ionia, the earlier homes and the racial affinities of the Ionians, are still obscure, although the point is cardinal for Greek history. There is perhaps a growing tendency to find “Mediterranean” elements in the Ionian stock, and this would explain much, if the Ionians of history did not seem so very “Aryan” in speech and habits of thought. On the other hand the “Aryan” himself is daily coming to look more cloudy and ambiguous, and so is his exact contribution to western culture.
The chief ancient sources of our information concerning the Ionians are Herodotus, Pausanias and Strabo.
P. [14.] Thuc. I. 2. Thuc. I. 6. Herod. I. 57.
P. [15.] See especially D. G. Hogarth, Ionia and the East (1909).
J. Burnet, Who was Javan? in Proceedings of the Class. Assoc. of Scot. 1911-12. Herod. I. 142.
P. [16.] Herod. I. 171 f.
P. [17.] An authoritative little book dealing with (among other peoples) the Anatolian races is D. G. Hogarth’s The Ancient East (Home Univ. Ser.), 1914. Also H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East (1913).
P. [18.] V. Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée is full of instruction on the ways of the ancient mariner.
For the Colchians, see Hippocrates de aer. aq. loc. 15. Cf. Herod. II. 104 f.
P. [19.] Chalybes. Il. II. 857. Herod. I. 203.
P. [20.] Herod. IV. 93 f. Olbia. Herod. IV. 18. Scythian bow. Plato, Laws, 795-.
P. [21.] Herod. IV. 18 f.
P. [22.] Herod. IV. 172 f.
P. [25.] Herod. II. 152. Abusimbel inscr. in Hicks and Hill’s Manual.
P. [26 f.] Fragments of Archilochus in Bergk’s Poet. Lyr. Gr.
KEEPING THE PASS
The Battle of Thermopylae as related by Herodotus (practically our sole authority) is an epic. Therefore in telling it again I have frankly attempted an epical manner as being really less misleading than any application of the historical method. This is not to say that the narrative of Herodotus has not been greatly elucidated by the research of modern historians, especially by the exciting discovery of the path Anopaia by Mr. G. B. Grundy. I have followed his reconstruction of the battle (which may not be very far from the truth) in his book, The Great Persian War (1901). See also Mr. Macan’s commentary in his great edition of Herodotus.
P. [34.] See Frazer’s note on Thermopylae in his edition of Pausanias.
P. [36.] Cf. Xen. Anab. VII. 4, 4 (Thracians of Europe).
P. [39.] Tiara. schol. Ar. Birds 487. The King’s tiara was also called kitaris.
P. 39. For Persian dress cf. with Herod. Strabo 734. Xen. Cyrop. VII. 1, 2. There are also representations in ancient art, e.g. a frieze at Susa.
THE ADVENTURERS
P. [45.] Strabo IV.
P. [46.] Herod. IV. 44.
P. [47.] The Greek Tradition (1915), Allen and Unwin, p. 6f.
P. [48.] Herod. IV. 151-153.
P. [50.] For an account of the Oasis at Siwah, see A. B. Cook, Zeus, vol. I.
P. [51.] Hymn ad Apoll. 391 f.
P. [52.] Pind. Ol. 3 ad fin.
P. [53.] Herod. VI. 11, 12, 17. Cf. Strabo on foundation of Marseille, IV (from Aristotle).
P. [54.] Herod. III. 125, 129-137 (Demokêdês).
P. [55.] Polycrates. Herod. II. 182 and III passim.
P. [61 f.]61 f. Xen. Anab. I-IV.
P. [63.] Pisidians. Cf. Xen. Memor. V. 2, 6.
P. [67.] L’Anabase de Xenophon avec un commentaire historique et militaire, by Col. (General) Arthur Boucher, Paris, 1913.
P. [69.] There is a fine imaginative picture of Nineveh in the Book of Jonah.
P. [71.] The famous Moltke was nearly drowned from a “tellek.”
P. [77.] The hot spring may be the sulphurous waters of Murad, which have wonderful iridescences.
The Armenian underground houses are still to be seen. These earth-houses are found elsewhere—in Scotland, for instance. See J. E. Harrison, in Essays and Studies presented to W. Ridgeway, p. 136 f.
ELEUTHERIA
P. [82.] Aesch. Pers. 241 f. Herod. VII. 104.
P. [83.] Pers. 402 f. Eur. Helen 276.
P. [84.] Thuc. I. 3, 3 (“Hellenes” and “Barbarians” correlative terms).
Herod. I. 136.
P. [85.] Aeschines 3, 132. Letter to Gadatas, Dittenb. Syllog.2 2.
Herod. III. 31. Cf. Daniel VI. 37, 38. Ezekiel xxvi. 7.
P. [86.] Herod. IX. 108-113.
P. [88.] Cf. vengeance of Persians on Ionians, Herod. VI. 32.
Herod. VII. 135.
P. [89.] Herod. VIII. 140 f.
P. [90 f.] “The ancients were attached to their country by three things—their temples, their tombs, and their forefathers. The two great bonds which united them to their government were the bonds of habit and antiquity. With the moderns, hope and the love of novelty have produced a total change. The ancients said our forefathers, we say posterity; we do not, like them, love our patria, that is to say, the country and the laws of our fathers, rather we love the laws and the country of our children; the charm we are most sensible to is the charm of the future, and not the charm of the past.” Joubert, transl. by M. Arnold.
P. [92.] See J. E. Harrison on Anodos Vases in her Prolegomena, p. 276 f.
Herod. VIII. 109. Herod. VIII. 65.
P. [96.] Herod. IX. 27. Supplices 314 f. But see the whole speech of Aithra, and indeed the whole play, which is full of the mission of Athens as the champion of Hellenism. Cf. also Eur. Heraclid. G. Murray, Introduction to trans. of Eur. Hippol. etc., on “Significance of Bacchae” (1902).
P. [97.] Thuc. I. 70, 9. Herod. VII. 139. Dem. de Cor. 199 f.
P. [98.] Arist. Pol. 13172 40, agreeing with Plato Resp. 562B.
P. [99.] Plato Resp. 563c. Herod. III. 80.
Herod. V. 78. Cf. Hippocr. de aer. aq. loc. 23, 24. Both agree that a high spirit may be produced by suitable nomoi and that man’s spirits are “enslaved” under autocracy. This is a more liberal doctrine than that discussed in Aristotle, that Barbarians are slaves “by nature.”
P. [100.] Supplices 403 f. Medea 536 f.
The association of Liberty and Law is exhibited both positively and negatively (as in the breach of both by the tyrant) in the tragic poets, etc. Thus the Suppliants of Aeschylus is concerned with a point of marriage-law, the Antigone of Sophocles with a point of burial-law, and so on.
Another “romantic” hero is Cadmus.
P. [104.] Hom. Il. VI. 447 f.
SOPHROSYNE
P. [110.] Plato Resp. 329B. ib. 439E.
P. [111.] Plato Resp. 615c. Xen. Hellen. VI. 4, 37.
P. [112.] Plut. Pelop. 29. Herod. III. 50; V. 92.
P. [120.] Herod. VIII. 26.
P. [121.] Purg. XXIV. 137-8.
GODS AND TITANS
P. [122.] Od. III. 48.
P. [123 f.] I may allow myself to refer, for more detailed evidence, to my article The Religious Background of the “Prometheus Vinctus” in Harvard Studies in Class. Philol. vol. XXXI, 1920. Cf. Prof. G. Murray in Anthropology and the Classics, ed. R. R. Marett.
P. [124.] Theog. 126 f. Theog. 147 f. “ill to name,” οὐκ ὀνομαστοί. I think the meaning may be that to mention their names was dangerous—especially if you got them wrong. Cf. Aesch. Ag. 170. The Romans provided against this danger by the indigitamenta.
P. [126.] Theog. 453 f.
P. [128.] Theog. 617 f. Theog. 503 f.
P. [129.] Solmsen, Indog. Forsch. 1912, XXX, 35 n. 1. Theog. 886 f. Theog. 929h f.
P. [130.] Heracl. fr. 42 (Diels). Xenophan. fr. 11.
Pind. Ol. I. 53 f.
P. [136.] On the “anarchic life,” see Plato Laws 693-699. Democritus (139) says, “Law aims at the amelioration of human life and is capable of this, when men are themselves disposed to accept it; for law reveals to every man who obeys it his special capacity for excellence.”
Zeus, acc. to Plato Crit. sub fin. is a constitutional ruler.
P. [137.] Herod. I. 34 f.
CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC
I
P. [147.] Plut. Alex. I.
P. [150.] Il. II. 459 f. Il. IV. 452 f. Il. XIX. 375 f.
Od. XIX. 431 f. Od. XIX. 518 f.
P. [151.] Il. VI. 418 f. Il. XIV. 16 f. Il. XXIV. 614 f.
P. [152.] Il. XIV. 347 f. Od. XI. 238 f.
P. [153.] Pind. Ol. I. 74 f. Ol. VI. 53.
P. [155.] Il. XXIII. 597 f.
P. [161 f.] See my Studies in the Odyssey, Oxford, 1914.
P. [163.] Il. III. 243 f. Il. XVI. 453 f. Od. XIX. 36 f.
P. [164.] Od. XX. 351 f. ad Cererem 5 f. ad Dion. 24 f.
II
P. [168.] Thuc. III. 38. ζητοῦντές τε ἄλλο τι ὡς εἰπεῖν ἢ ἐν οἷς ζῶμεν.
On Elpis, see F. M. Cornford in Thucydides Mythistoricus, ch. IX, XII, XIII.
P. [172.] Od. XI. 235 f. Plato Resp. 573B.
P. [175.] See Prof. Burnet, Greek Philosophy (1914), Part I, p. 146 f.
P. [182.] Il. XVIII. 205 f.
P. [183.] Il. XII. 378 f.
P. [184.] J. M. Synge said, “It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.” But this merely shows how much we are suffering from a reaction against sentimental romanticism.
III
P. [189.] Il. XIII. 444. Il. XIII. 616 f. Il. XIV. 493 f. Il. XVI. 345 f. Il. XX. 416 f.
P. [190.] Il. XVI. 751 f.
P. [191.] Arist. Nic. Eth. III. 6, 6. Plato Apol. ad fin.
Od. XI. 488 f. Od.. XI. 72 f. Note the effect of the καί before ζωός. It is “simple pathos” if you like, hardly self-conscious enough to be called “wistful.” There are some wonderful touches of it in Dante’s Inferno.
P. [192.] Phrasikleia. Kaibel, Epigr. Sepulchr. Attic. 6.
P. [193.] The Eretrian epigram is preserved in the Palatine Anthology.
P. [195.] Ag. 1391 f.
P. [196.] Ant. 571 f.