Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

The special point selected by Goethe for criticism is the celebrated last speech of Antigone:

"At last, when she is led to death, she brings forward a motive which is quite unworthy, and almost borders on the comic. She says that if she had been a mother she would not have done either for her dead children or for her dead husband what she has done for her brother. 'For,' says she, 'if my husband died I could have had another, and if my children died I could have had others by my new husband. But with my brother the case is different. I cannot have another brother; for since my mother and father are dead, there is none to beget one.' This is, at least, the bare sense of the passage, which, in my opinion, when placed in the mouth of a heroine going to her death, disturbs the tragic tone, and appears to me very far-fetched—to savor too much of dialectical calculation. As I said, I should like a philologist to show us that the passage is spurious."

In truth this last speech of Antigone is exactly what the severer critics of Euripides would have selected in a play of his for condemnation. It exhibits, after all allowance for peculiar Greek sentiments, the rhetorical development of a sophistic thesis. In the simple thought there is pathos. But its elaboration makes it frigid.

Sophocles, though he made the subsequent method of Euripides not only possible but natural by the law of progressive evolution, was very far indeed from disintegrating the tragic structure as Euripides was destined to do. The deus ex machinâ of the Philoctetes, for example, was only employed because there was absolutely no other way to solve the situation. Rhetoric and wrangling matches were never introduced for their own sake. The choric odes did not degenerate into mere musical interludes. Description and narration in no case took the place of action, by substituting pictures to the ear under conditions where true art required dramatic presentation. It remains the everlasting glory of Sophocles that he realized the mean between Æschylus and Euripides, sacrificing for the sake of his ideal the passionate and enthusiastic extremes of the older dramatist, without imperilling the fabric of Greek tragedy by the suicidal innovations of Euripides. He and he alone knew how to use all forms of art, to express all motives, and to hazard all varieties, with the single purpose of maintaining artistic unity.

What remains to be said about Sophocles, and in particular about his delineation of character, may be introduced in the course of an analysis of his tragedies upon the tale of Thebes.

These three plays do not, like the three plays of Æschylus upon the tale of the Atridæ, form a trilogy. That is to say, they are not so connected in subject as to form one continued series. A drama, for example, similar to the Seven against Thebes might be interpolated between the Œdipus Coloneüs and Antigone; while the Œdipus Tyrannus might have been followed by a tragedy upon the subject of the king's expulsion from Thebes. Nor, again, are they artistically designed as a trilogy. There is no change of form, suggesting the beginning, middle, and ending of a calculated work of art, like that which we notice in the Oresteia. Moreover, the protagonist is absent from the Antigone, and, therefore, to call the three plays an Œdipodeia is impossible. Finally, they were composed at different periods: the Antigone is the first extant tragedy of Sophocles; the Œdipus Coloneüs is the last.

So much it was necessary to premise in order to avoid the imputation of having treated the three masterpieces of Sophocles as in any true sense a trilogy. The temptation to do so is at first sight almost irresistible; for they are written on the same legend, and the same characters are throughout sustained with firmness, proving that, though Sophocles composed the last play of the series first and the second last of all, he had conceived them in his brain before he undertook to work them out in detail. Or, if this assumption seem unwarranted, we may at least affirm with certainty that at some point of time anterior to the production of the Antigone he had subjected the whole legend of the house of Laius to his plastic imagination, and had given it coherence in his mind. In other words, it was impossible for him to change his point of view about this mythus in the same way as Euripides when he handled that of Helen according to two different versions. It so happens, moreover, that the climax of the Œdipus Tyrannus prepares us, by the revolution in the character of the protagonist, for the Œdipus Coloneüs; while the last act of the second tragedy, by the prominence given to Antigone, serves as a prelude to the third and final play.

The house of Laius was scarcely less famous among the Greeks than the house of Atreus for its overwhelming disasters, the consequences of an awful curse which rested on the family. Laius, the son of Labdacus, was supposed to have introduced an unnatural vice into Hellas; and from this first crime sprang all the subsequent disasters of his progeny. He took in marriage Jocasta, the sister of Prince Creon, and swayed the State of Thebes. To him an oracle was given that a son of his by Jocasta should kill him. Yet he did not therefore, in obedience to the divine warning, put away his wife or live in chastity. A boy was born to the royal pair, who gave him to one of their shepherds, after piercing his feet and tying them together, and bound the hind to expose him on Cithæron. Thus they hoped to defeat the will of heaven. The shepherd, moved by pity, saved the baby's life and handed him over to a friend of his, who used to feed his master's sheep upon the same hill-pastures. This man carried the infant, named Œdipus because of his wounded and swollen feet, to Polybus of Corinth, a childless king, who brought him up as his own son. Œdipus when he had grown to manhood, was taunted with his obscure birth by his comrades in Corinth. Thereupon he journeyed alone to Delphi to make inquiry concerning his parentage from Phœbus. Phœbus told him naught thereof, but bade him take heed lest he slay his father and wed his mother. Œdipus, deeming that Polybus was his father and Merope his mother, determined to return to Corinth no more. At that time Thebes was troubled with the visitation of the Sphinx, and no man might rede her riddle. Œdipus, passing through the Theban land, was met in a narrow path, where three roads joined, by an old man on a chariot attended by servants. The old man spoke rudely to him, commanding him to make way for his horses, and one of the servants struck him. Whereupon Œdipus slew the master, knowing not that he was his own father, Laius, and the men too, all but one, who fled. Thereafter he passed on to Thebes, and solved that riddle of the Sphinx, and the Thebans made him their king, and gave him the lady Jocasta to be his wife. Thus were both the oracles accomplished, and yet Œdipus and Jocasta remained ignorant of their doom. For many years Œdipus ruled Thebes like a great and warlike prince; and to him and Jocasta in wedlock were born two daughters and two sons—Antigone and Ismene, Polyneices and Eteocles. These grew to youth, and a seeming calm of fair weather and prosperity abode upon their house. Yet the gods were mindful of the abomination, and in course of time a plague was sent, which ravaged the people of Thebes. Sorely pressed by calamity, Œdipus sent his brother-in-law Creon to inquire at Delphi of the causes of the plague and of the means of staying it. This brings us to the opening of Œdipus the King. At this point something should be said about the mythus itself and about the position of the several persons at the commencement of the tragedy.

The fable is obviously one of those which Max Müller and his school describe as solar. Œdipus, who slays his father and weds his mother, may stand for the Sun, who slays the Night and is married to the Dawn. We know how all legends can fall into this mould, and how easy it is to clap the Dawn on to the end of every Greek tale, like the ληκύθιον ἀπώλεσεν of the Frogs. This, however, is nothing to our purpose; for Sophocles had never heard of solar myths. The tale of Thebes supplied him with the subject of three dramas; he used it as a story well suited for displaying passions in their strongest and most tragic workings. As usual, he was not contented with merely following the traditional version of the legend, nor did he insist upon its superstitious elements. That the gods had a grudge against the Labdacidæ, that the oracles given to Laius and Œdipus were not warnings so much as sinister predictions of a doom inevitable, that the very powers who uttered them were bent on blinding the victims of fate to their true import, were thoroughly Greek notions, consistent with the divine φθόνος, or envy, of Herodotus, and not wholly inconsistent with the gloomy theology of Æschylus. But it was no part of the method of Sophocles to emphasize this horrible doctrine of destiny. On the contrary, he moralized it. While preserving all the essential features of the myth, he made it clear that the characters of men constitute their fatality.

As our own Fletcher has nobly written: