Rambles and Studies in Greece

by J. P. Mahaffy

They, too, had not despised human nature—how could they? Both Æschylus and Sophocles were great painters of human character, as well in its passions as in its reasonings. But the former had made it accessory, so to speak, to the great religious lessons which he taught; the latter had at least affected to do so, or imagined that he did, while really the labyrinths of human character had enticed and held him in their endless maze. Thus, all through Greek tragedy there was on the one hand a strong element of conventional stiffness, of adherence to fixed subjects, and scenes, and masks, and dresses—of adherence to fixed metres, and regular dialogues, where question and answer were balanced line for line, and the [pg 131]cast of characters was as uniform as it is in the ordinary Italian operas of our own day. But on the other hand, these tragic poets were great masters of expression, profound students not only of the great world problems, but of the problems of human nature, exquisite masters too of their language, not only in its dramatic force, but in its lyric sweetness; they summed up in their day all that was great and beautiful in Greek poetry, and became the fullest and ripest fruit of that wonderful tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which even now makes those that taste it to be as gods.

Such, then, were the general features of the tragedy which the Athenian public, and the married women, including many strangers, assembled to witness in broad daylight under the Attic sky. They were not sparing of their time. They ate a good breakfast before they came. They ate sweetmeats in the theatre when the acting was bad. Each play was short, and there was doubtless an interval of rest. But it is certain that each poet contended as a rule with four plays against his competitors; and as there were certainly three of them, there must have been twelve plays acted; this seems to exceed the endurance of any public, even allowing two days for the performance. We are not fully informed on these points. We do not even know how Sophocles, who contended with single plays, managed to compete against Euripides, who con[pg 132]tended with sets of four. But we know that the judges were chosen by lot, and we strongly suspect, from the records of their decisions, that they often decided wrongly. We also know that the poets sought to please the audience by political and patriotic allusions, and to convey their dislike of opposed cities or parties by drawing their representatives in odious colors on the stage. Thus Euripides is never tired of traducing the Spartans in the character of Menelaus. Æschylus fights the battle of the Areopagus in his Eumenides.

But besides all this, it seems that tragic poets were regarded as the proper teachers of morality, and that the stage among the Greeks occupied somewhat the place of the modern pulpit. This is the very attitude which Racine assumes in the Preface to his Phèdre. He suggests that it ought to be considered the best of his plays, because there is none in which he has so strictly rewarded virtue and punished vice.[48] He [pg 133]alters, in his Iphigénie, the Greek argument from which he copied, because as he tells us (again in the Preface) it would never do to have so virtuous a person as Iphigenia sacrificed. This, however, would not have been a stumbling-block to the Greek poet, whose capricious and spiteful gods, or whose deep conviction of the stain of an ancestral curse, would justify catastrophies which the Christian poet, with his trust in a benevolent Providence, could not admit. But, indeed, in most other points the so-called imitations of the Greek drama by Racine and his school are anything but imitations. The main characters and the general outline of the plot are no doubt borrowed. The elegance and power of the dialogue are more or less successfully copied. But the natural and familiar scenes, which would have been shocking to the court of Louis XIV.—“ces scenes entremêlées de bas comique, et ces fréquents exemples de mauvais ton et d’une [pg 134]familiarité choquante,” as Barthélémy says—such characters as the guard in the Antigone, the nurse in the Choephorœ, the Phrygian in the Orestes, were carefully expunged. Moreover, love affairs and court intrigues were everywhere introduced, and the language was never allowed to descend from its pomp and grandeur. Most of the French dramatists were indeed bad Greek scholars,[49] and knew the plays from which they copied either through very poor translations, or through the rhetorical travesties surviving under the name of Seneca, which were long thought fully equal to the great and simple originals.

So the French of the seventeenth century, starting from these half-understood models, and applying rigidly the laws of tragedy which they had deduced, with questionable logic, from that very untrustworthy guide, our text of the Poetics of Aristotle, created a drama which became so unlike what it professed to imitate, that most good modern French critics have occupied themselves with showing the contrasts of old Greek tragedy to that of the modern stage. They are always praising the naiveté, the familiarity, the irregularity of the old dramatists; they are always noting touches of common life and of ordinary motive quite foreign to the dignity of Racine, and Voltaire, and Alfieri.[50] They think that the real [pg 135]parallel is to be found not among them, but in Shakespeare. Thus their education makes them emphasize the very qualities which we admit, but should not cite, as the peculiarities of Greek tragedy. We are rather struck with its conventionalities, with its strict adherence to fixed form, with its somewhat stilted diction, and we wonder how it came to be so great and natural within these trammels.

Happily the tendency in our own day to reproduce antiquity faithfully, and not in modern recasting, has led to the translating, and even to the representing, of Greek tragedies in their purity, and it does not require a knowledge of Greek to obtain some real acquaintance with these great masterpieces. Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Dean Milman, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Whitelaw, and many others, have placed faithful and elegant versions within our reach. But since I have cautioned the reader not versed in Greek against adopting Racine’s or Alfieri’s plays as adequate substitutes, I venture to give the same advice concerning the more Greek and antique plays of Mr. Swinburne, which, in spite of their splendor, are still not really Greek plays, but modern plays based on Greek models. The relief produced by ordinary [pg 136]talk from ordinary characters, which has been already noticed, is greatly wanting in his very lofty, and perhaps even strained, dialogue. Nor are his choruses the voice of the vulgar public, combining high sentiments with practical meanness, but elaborate and very difficult speculations, which comment metaphysically on the general problems of the play. There is nothing better worth reading than the Atalanta in Calydon. The Greek scholar sees everywhere how thoroughly imbued the author is with Greek models. But it will not give to the mere English reader any accurate idea of a real Greek tragedy. He must go to Balaustion’s Adventure, or Aristophanes’s Apology, or some other professed translation, and follow it line for line, adding some such general reviews as the Etudes of M. Patin.

As for revivals of Greek plays, it seems to me not likely that they will ever succeed. The French imitations of Racine laid hold of the public because they were not imitations. And as for us nowadays, who are more familiar with the originals, a faithless reproduction would shock us, while a literal one would weary us. This at least is the effect which the Antigone produces, even with the modern choruses of Mendelssohn to relieve the slowness of the action. But, of course, a reproduction of the old chorus would be simply impossible. The whole pit in the theatre of Dionysus seems to have been left empty. A part somewhat larger than our orchestra [pg 137]was covered with a raised platform, though still lower than the stage.[51] Upon this the chorus danced and sang and looked on at the actors, as in the play within the play in Hamlet. Above all, they constantly prayed to their gods, and this religious side of the performance has of course no effect upon us.[52]

As to old Attic comedy, it would be even more impossible to recover it for a modern public. Its local and political allusions, its broad and coarse humor, its fantastic dresses, were features which made it not merely ancient and Greek, but Athenian, and Athenian of a certain epoch. Without the Alexandrian scholiasts, who came in time to recover and note down most of the allusions, these comedies would be to the Greek scholar of to-day hardly intelligible. The new Attic comedy, of which Terence is a copy, is indeed on a modern basis, and may be faithfully reproduced, if not admired, in our day. But here, alas! the great originals of Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus are lost to us, and we must be content with the Latin accommodations.

But I have delayed too long over these Greek [pg 138]plays, and must apologize for leading away the reader from the actual theatre in which he is sitting. Yet there is hardly a place in Athens which calls back the mind so strongly to the old days, when all the crowd came jostling in, and settled down in their seats, to hear the great novelties of the year from Sophocles or Euripides. No doubt there were cliques and cabals and claqueurs, noisy admirers and cold critics, the supporters of the old, and the lovers of the new, devotees and skeptics, wondering foreigners and self-complacent citizens. They little thought how we should come, not only to sit in the seats they occupied, but to reverse the judgments which they pronounced, and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, of passion, and of pride.

Plato makes Socrates say, in his Apologia (pro vita sua), that a copy of Anaxagoras could be bought on the orchestra, when very dear, for a drachme, that is to say for about 9d. of our money, which may then have represented our half-crown or three shillings in value.[53] The commentators have made desperate attempts to explain this. Some say the orchestra was used as a book-stall when plays were not going on—an assumption justified by no [pg 139]other hint in Greek literature. Others have far more absurdly imagined that Plato really meant you could pay a drachme for the best seat in the theatre, and read the writings of Anaxagoras in a fashionable play of Euripides, who was his friend and follower. Verily a wonderful interpretation!

If the reader will walk with me from the theatre of Dionysus past the newly excavated site of the temple of Æsculapius, and past the Roman-Greek theatre which was erected by Hadrian or Herodes Atticus, I will show him what Plato meant. Of course, this later theatre, with its solid Roman back scenes of masonry, is equally interesting with the Theatre of Dionysus to the advocates of the unity of history! But to us who are content to study Greek Athens, it need not afford any irrelevant delays. Passing round the approach to the Acropolis, we come on to a lesser hill, separated from it by a very short saddle, so that it looks like a sort of outpost or spur sent out from the rock of the Acropolis. This is the Areopagus—Mars’ Hill—which we can ascend in a few minutes. There are marks of old staircases cut in the rock. There are underneath, on our left and right, as we go up, deep black caverns, once the home of the Eumenides. On the flat top there are still some signs of a rude smoothing of the stone for seats. Under us, to the north-west, is the site of the old agora, once surrounded with colonnades, the crowded market-place of all those [pg 140]who bought and sold and talked. But on the descent from the Areopagus, and, now at least, not much higher than the level of the market-place beneath, there is a small semicircular platform, backed by the rising rock. This, or some platform close to it, which may now be hidden by accumulated soil, was the old orchestra, possibly the site of the oldest theatre, but in historical times a sort of reserved platform, where the Athenians, who had their town bristling with statues, allowed no monument to be erected save the figures of Harmodius and Aristogiton, which were carried into Persia, replaced by others, afterwards recovered, and of which we may have a copy in the two fighting figures, of archaic character, now in the Museum of Naples. It was doubtless on this orchestra, just above the bustle and thoroughfare of the agora, that booksellers kept their stalls, and here it was that the book of Anaxagoras could be bought for a drachme.