In this ode we have the Greek tragic view of the passion of Love, as the destroyer and distractor of man’s peace and sanity. Love is one of the means whereby tragic fate fulfils its purposes of vengeance. The circumstances of this particular case are these: Of Antigone’s two brothers one had marched against his native city, and the other had taken arms in its defence. Both had fallen on the field of battle. Creon, the city’s tyrant, forbade any one, under pain of death, to give burial to the slain enemy. In this, of course, he was violating one of the most sacred laws of Greek religion. Now Antigone was betrothed to Creon’s own son, Hæmon; nevertheless her duty was to brave the tyrant’s decree and give the honours of formal burial to her dead brother. She did so. Creon thereupon pronounced her doom, and Hæmon in his despair slew himself upon the tomb in which she was immured. The whole story is but an episode in the doom of the house of Œdipus, father of Antigone. The Greek view of Love, then, is the antithesis of the romantic view of it. Where Love conflicts with duty it must be rigorously suppressed, as a source of folly, weakness, and wickedness. So much is this the case that Sophocles puts into the mouth of Antigone words which he had probably borrowed from Herodotus, and which give a view of the Great Passion so painfully unromantic that the modern commentator, who for all his prosiness is a thoroughly romantic person, is tempted to use the shears by which he commonly cuts his knots and call it an interpolation. “My duty,” says Antigone, “is to my brother first. You speak of my duty to my future husband, and my future children. I reply that a brother is more than a husband or children; they can be replaced, a brother cannot.”
An even more disconcerting display of common sense in a presumably romantic situation is seen in that amazing play the “Alcestis” of Euripides—surely the most conspicuous failure in all dramatic literature. Every one knows the tale, how Admetus was allowed as a boon from Apollo to get some one else as a substitute in his place when Death came to fetch him. His faithful wife, Alcestis, took his place, being consoled by Admetus with the promise of a handsome funeral. Then the king’s old father appears upon the scene to offer his condolences to the widower, but is immediately assailed with the most vehement reproaches for not having himself, as an old man with one foot in the grave already, shown sufficient pluck to volunteer death. He not unnaturally retorts that if it is a question of daring to die, Admetus himself had not been remarkable for courage. The point is one that pleases Euripides; it is a nice point of casuistry; he lets the speakers dispute it at some length. I think these two passages are significant of much. When we think of the Greeks as a race of poetic and artistic genius we must not forget that practical, unsentimental common sense is among their most prominent characteristics. They habitually exposed weakly infants to death. Their comedy is singularly merciless to disease and deformity. Plato’s treatment of the sex problem in his ideal republic is strikingly cold-blooded, but hardly more so than the actual treatment of the same problem in the real republic of Sparta. Before we leave this question of the romantic in the Greek character two things should be observed. The romantic element unquestionably grows stronger as Greek civilisation approaches its decline: there is a good deal of it in Menander and Theocritus, still more in Heliodorus; Alexander the Great is romantic to the finger-tips. Secondly, although there is so little of it in Tragedy, or generally in the relations between the two sexes, it is found in a degree of almost modern intensity in the relations between Heracles and Hylas, between Theseus and Peirithous, between Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It was not foolishness to the Greeks for a man to face death for the youth he loved. Indeed, upon that theory Epaminondas the Theban organised that Sacred Band which for a time revolutionised Greek history.
Another characteristic excellence of Greek drama, and especially of Sophocles, is its extraordinary power of narrative. With its severe scenic limitations, the Attic stage wisely refrained from attempting to reproduce realistically exciting spectacular incidents. The actual “tragedies” seldom occur in the sight of the audience. Far more often the hero or heroine leaves the stage in despair, the chorus intervenes with a mournful ode, and then a messenger arrives with a narrative of the fatal occurrence. Shakespeare, with scarcely less severe limitations, faced the impossible, and courted ridicule by representing battles in full detail on the stage by means of a handful of overworked “supers.” What they could not represent the Greeks narrated; and Horace, indeed, exalts it into a principle of dramatic art that “Medea must not butcher her babes in public.” That the Greek dramatists so refrained was probably due to dramatic tradition as well as to the practical necessities of the case. When there was only one speaking actor in addition to the chorus his part must have been chiefly what our composers of oratorios call “recitative.” For these two reasons, and perhaps also in obedience to the Greek spirit of self-restraint, narrative declamation by “messengers” is a striking feature of all Greek tragedy.
We have seen already the religious theory upon which tragedy is generally based, the logical succession of Success, Pride, Vengeance, and Ruin. The tragedians deal largely with stories of the doom which had pursued certain of the heroic houses like that of Labdacus or Atreus. In such cases a prophetic curse rests upon the entire dynasty: Atreus slays his brother’s children and bequeaths doom for Agamemnon. Agamemnon is slain by his guilty wife Clytæmnestra, whereby a duty of vengeance devolves upon their son Orestes, who must slay his mother, and therefore must incur the celestial doom of the matricide, unless Apollo himself can intervene to release him from the vengeance of the Furies. Such stories were pursued by all three great tragedians, often in sequences of three tragedies called trilogies. They have no “moral,” except that sin breeds suffering to the third and fourth generation, but the sin is often an involuntary one. The purpose of the tragedian is to show the struggles of man against fate. According to Aristotle’s oft-quoted theory, the purpose of Tragedy is to act as a “purgative of the emotions by means of pity and terror.” As the surgeon lets blood in order to reduce fever, so the drama enables the spectator to acquire peace of soul through the vicarious sorrows of its heroes and heroines. Aristotle declares every tragedy to consist of two parts, the tying of the knot and the loosing of it. The “loosing” commonly involves a peripeteia, or sudden reversal of fortune, as when Agamemnon’s triumphant return is changed to death and mourning; often it is brought about by an anagnōrĭsis, or recognition, as when the stranger in the palace is found to be Orestes come home for revenge. The so-called Aristotelian “unities,” which have loomed so bulkily in the history of dramatic criticism, and under the fear of which the classical dramatists of France were imprisoned, are not to be found in Aristotle. He does, indeed, advocate unity of subject, but unity of time and place are nowhere demanded. The natural limitations and the consequent simplicity of the Greek stage generally imposed these unities as a practical necessity.
Greek simplicity is often, as we have seen, a studiously contrived impression and the result of elaborate concealment of art. That it is not entirely so in the case of the drama is proved by the astonishing fertility of the principal dramatists. Æschylus wrote more than 70 plays, Sophocles 113, Euripides 92, and another tragic poet whose work has not survived 240. They were written and produced in competition. In 468 B.C. Sophocles began his public career by competing against Æschylus for the prize of tragedy. As the house seemed equally divided, the presiding archon left the decision to the ten generals who had just come back victorious from their warfare in Thrace. The prize was awarded to Sophocles, who, it is significant to notice, had been specially trained under a famous musician. Euripides only won the prize five times in a poetical career of fifty years. A prize was likewise awarded to the choregus who produced and trained the best chorus. It was the custom for the successful choregus, who was always, of course, a rich man, to dedicate his prize—a tripod—in a certain street in Athens. One such monument of the fourth century by a certain Lysicrates is still standing in fair preservation. It was a pretty example of the luxurious Corinthian order of architecture.[71]
Tragedies were performed three times a year at the three festivals of Dionysus. The poet had an audience of 13,000,
Plate LV. MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES AT ATHENS
English Photo Co., Athens