Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 2 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

Both the tragedy and comedy of the Greeks were intimately connected with the religious rites of Dionysus. Up to the very last, they formed a portion of the cultus of the vintage-god, to whom the theatre was consecrated, and at whose yearly festivals the plays were acted. The Chorus, which originally formed the chief portion of the dramatic body, took its station at the altar of Bacchus in the centre of the theatre. Now the worship of Bacchus in Greece had from the first a double aspect—joyous and sorrowful. The joyous festivals were held in celebration of the vigor and the force of nature, in the spring and summer of the year; the sorrowful commemorated the sadness of the autumn and the winter. There were, therefore, two distinct branches of musical and choral art connected with the Dionysiac rites—the one jovial, the other marked by the enthusiasm of a wild grief. From the former of these, or the revel-song, sprang Comedy; from the latter, or the dithyramb, sprang Tragedy. Arion is named as the first great poet who cultivated the dithyramb and wrote elaborate odes for recitation by the Chorus in their evolutions round the Bacchic altar. His Chorus were attired like satyrs in goat-skins, to represent the woodland comrades of the god; hence came the name of tragedy or goat-song. At first the dithyrambic odes celebrated only the mystical woes of Dionysus: then they were extended so as to embrace the mythical incidents connected with his worship; and at last the god himself was forgotten, and the tragic sufferings of any hero were chanted by the Chorus. This change is marked by an old tradition concerning Sicyon, where it is said that the woes of the hero Adrastus were sung by the Bacchic choir, and that Cleisthenes, wishing to suppress the national mythology, restored the antique Dionysiac function. It also may explain the Greek proverb: "What has this to do with Dionysus?"—a question which might reasonably have been asked when the sacred representation diverged too widely from the line of Bacchic legend.

Thus the original element of Greek tragedy was the dithyramb, as cultivated by Arion; and the first step in the progress of the dithyrambic Chorus towards the Drama was the introduction of heroic legends into the odes. The next step was the addition of the actor. It has been ingeniously conjectured that the actor was borrowed from the guild of rhapsodes. The iambics of Archilochus and other poets were recited, as we know, at the feasts of Demeter, whose cult had points of similarity with that of Bacchus. It is not improbable that when the heroic element was added to the dithyramb, and the subjects handled by the professional reciters of the Homeric and cyclic epics began to form a part of the Dionysiac celebration, a rhapsode was then introduced to help the Chorus in their office. That he declaimed iambics and not hexameters may be accounted for by the prevalence of the iambic in the sister-cult of Demeter. This, then, was the third step in the development of tragedy. To the dithyrambic chorus of Arion was added an interlocutor, who not only recited passages of narrative, but also exchanged speech with the Chorus, and who, in course of time, came to personate the hero whose history was being celebrated. Thus far had the art advanced in the age of Thespis. The Chorus stood and danced round the altar of Bacchus. The rhapsode, whom we now begin to call the actor, stood on a raised stage (λογεῖον) above them. The whole history of Greek tragedy exhibits a regular expansion of these simple elements. The function of the Chorus, the peculiar nature of the masks and dresses, and the very structure of the theatres, can only be explained by reference to this primitive constitution of the dramatic art.

To Thespis the Athenian, whose first regular exhibition of the tragic show preceded the birth of Æschylus by about ten years, belongs the credit of having brought the various elements of tragedy into harmony, and of having fixed the outlines of the tragic art. The destruction of Athens by the Persian army, like the burning of London, which inflicted so severe an injury upon our early dramatic literature, obliterated the monuments of the genuine Thespian tragedy. Some of the names of these dramas—Pentheus, Phorbas, the Funeral Games of Pelias, the Priests—have been preserved; from which we may conjecture that Thespis composed interludes with regular plots, combining choric passages and monologues uttered by the actor with elucidatory dialogues. His Chorus was the traditional band of mummers clad in goat-skins—the τράγοι of the ancient Dionysiac festival. The poet himself was the actor, and his portion of the interlude was written either in iambic or, as we may gather from a passage in the Poetics of Aristotle, in trochaic metre. The next great name after Thespis is Phrynichus, who composed a tragic interlude on the taking of Miletus by the Persians. This fact is important, since it proves that even at this early period a dramatist felt justified not merely in departing from the myths of Dionysus, but also in treating the events of contemporary history in his choric tragedy. The Athenians, however, were indignant at so abrupt a departure from usage, and at the unæsthetical exhibition of disasters which had recently befallen their race. They fined the poet, and confirmed their tragedians in the custom of handling only ancient and religious legends. It is well known that the single exception to this custom which has been preserved to us is the splendid triumph of Æschylus composed upon the ruin of the godless Xerxes. Phrynichus introduced one important change into the Thespian drama: he established female characters. After him came Pratinas, who altered the old form of the Chorus. Hitherto, whatever may have been the subject of the play, the Bacchic τράγοι stood in their quaint goat-skins round the thymelé, or altar of the god. Pratinas contrived that in future the Chorus should be attired to suit the action of the piece. If the play were written on the fall of Troy, for instance, they appeared as ancient Trojans; or if it had reference to the house of Laius, they came forth as senators of Thebes. At the same time special pieces for the traditional tragic chorus were retained, and these received the name of satyric dramas. Henceforth it was customary for a tragic author to produce at the same time three successive dramas on the subject he selected, together with a satyric play. The only essential changes which were afterwards made in Greek tragedy were the introduction of a second actor by Æschylus and of a third actor by Sophocles, the abandonment of the stricter rule of the tetralogy, and the gradual diminution of the importance of the Chorus. The choric element, which had been everything at the commencement, gave way to the dialogue, as the art of developing dramatic situations and characters advanced; until in the days of Euripides the Chorus formed a comparatively insignificant part of the tragic machinery. This curtailment of the function of the Chorus was a necessary consequence of progress in the art of exhibiting an imitation of human action and passion. Yet the Chorus never lost its place in Greek tragedy. It remained to mark the origin of the drama, and as a symbol of the essentially religious purpose of the tragic spectacle.

An event is said to have happened during the age of Pratinas which greatly influenced the future of the Attic drama. The Thespian interludes had been acted on a wooden scaffolding. This fell down on one occasion, and caused so much alarm that the Athenians erected a permanent stone theatre, which they constructed on the southeast side of the Acropolis. Whether this old story is a fiction, and whether the time had not naturally arrived for a more substantial building, may admit of question. At any rate the new theatre was designed as though it were destined to exist for all time, as though its architects were prescient that the Attic drama would become the wonder of the world. The spectators were seated on semicircular tiers scooped out of the rock of the Acropolis. Their faces turned towards Hymettus and the sea. The stage fronted the Acropolis; the actors had in view the cliffs upon which stood the Parthenon and the gleaming statue of Protective Pallas. The whole was open to the air. Remembering these facts, we are enabled to understand the peculiar grandeur and propriety of those addresses to the powers of the earth and sky, to the temples of the gods, to the all-seeing sun and glittering ocean-waves, which are so common in Greek tragedy. The Athenian theatre was brought into close connection with all that was most brilliant in the architecture and the sculpture of Athens, with all that is most impressive in the natural environments of the city, with the very deities of the Hellenic worship in their visible manifestations to the senses of men. This circumstance alone determined many peculiarities of the Greek drama, which make it wholly unlike our own. If the hero of a modern play, for instance, calls the sun to witness, he must point to a tissue-paper transparency in the centre of a painted scene; if he apostrophizes ocean, he must turn towards a heaving mass of agitated canvas. But Ajax or Electra could raise their hands to the actual sun, gilding the statue of Athene with living rays; Prometheus, when he described the myriad laughter of the dimpling waves, knew that the sea was within sight of the audience; and sun and sea were regarded by the nation at large, not merely as phenomena of our universe, but as beings capable of sympathizing with humanity in its distress. For the same reason nearly all the scenes of the Greek tragedies are laid in daytime and in the open air. The work of art exhibited in an unparalleled combination of æsthetical definiteness with the actual facts of nature. The imagination is scarcely more wrought upon than the senses; whereas the tragedy of Shakespeare makes a direct appeal to the inner eye and to the highly stimulated fancy of the audience. It is generally before a temple or a palace that the action of a Greek play proceeds. Nor was there anything artificial in this custom; for the Greeks lived in the air of heaven, nor could events of such magnitude as those which their tragedy represented have been appropriately enacted beneath the shadow of a private roof. Far different were the conditions which the modern dramatist undertook to illustrate. The hesitations of Hamlet, the spiritual conflict of Faustus, the domestic sufferings of the Duchess of Malfi, are evolved with peculiar propriety within the narrow walls of palace-chambers, college-cells, and prisons or madhouses. Scenery, in our sense of the word, was scarcely required by the Greeks. The name of a tragedy sufficed to determine what palace-gate was represented by the stage: the statue of a god was enough to show whose temple was intended. This simplicity of theatrical arrangement led to a corresponding simplicity of dramatic construction, to rarity of changes in the scene, and to the stationary character of Greek tragedy in general.

Hollowed out of the hillside, the seats of the Athenian spectators embraced rather more than a full semicircle, and this large arc was subtended by a long straight line—the σκηνή, or background of the stage. In front of this wall ran a shallow platform, not coextensive with the σκηνή, but corresponding to the middle portion of it. This platform was the stage proper. It was, in fact, a development of the Thespian λογεῖον. The stage was narrow and raised a little above the ground, to which a flight of steps led from it. On the stage, very long in proportion to its depth, all the action of the play took place: the actors entered it through three openings in the σκηνή, of which the central was larger and the two side ones smaller. When they stood upon the stage, they had not much room for grouping or for complicated action: they moved and stood like the figures in a bass-relief, turning their profiles to the audience, and so arranging their gestures that a continually harmonious series of figures was relieved upon the background of the σκηνή. The central opening had doors capable of being thrown back and exhibiting a chamber, in which, at critical moments of the action, such spectacles as the murdered body of Agamemnon, or the suicide of Jocasta, were revealed to the spectators. The Chorus had their own allotted station in the centre of the whole theatre—the semicircular pit left between the lowest tier of spectators and the staircase leading to the stage. In the middle of this pit or orchestra was placed the thymelé, or altar of Bacchus, round which the Chorus moved on its first entrance, and where it stood while witnessing the action on the stage. The Chorus entered by side passages leading from the back of the σκηνή, on a lower level than that of the stage; nor did they ever leave their orchestra to mount the stage and mingle with the actors. The dressing-rooms and offices of the theatre were concealed behind the σκηνή. Above the stage was suspended an aerial platform for the gods, while subterranean stairs were constructed for the appearance of ghosts ascending from the nether regions.

These details about the vast size of the theatre, its system of construction, and its exposure to the air, make it clear that no acting similar to that of the modern drama could have been possible on the Attic stage. Any one who has visited the Roman theatre of Orange, where the σκηνή is still in tolerable preservation, must have felt that a classical audience could not have enjoyed the subtle intonations of the voice and the delicate changes in the features, expressive of varying passions, which constitute the charm of modern acting. Our intricate and minute effects were out of the question. Everything in the Greek theatre had to be colossal, statuesque, almost stationary. The Greeks had so delicate a sense of proportion and of fitness that they adjusted their art to these necessities. The actors were raised on thick-soled and high-heeled boots: they wore masks, and used peculiar mouth-pieces, by means of which their voices were made more resonant. The dresses which they swept along the stage were the traditional costumes of the Bacchic festivals—brilliant and trailing mantles, which added volume to their persons. All their movements partook of the dignity befitting demigods and heroes. To suppose that these pompous figures were of necessity ridiculous would be a great mistake. Everything we know about Greek art makes it certain that in the theatre, no less than in sculpture and architecture, this nation of artists achieved a perfectly harmonious effect. How dignified, for example, were their masks, may be imagined from the sculptured heads of Tragedy and Comedy preserved in the Vatican—marble faces of sublime serenity, surmounted by the huge mass of curling hair, which was built up above the mask to add height to the figure. But in order to maintain the grandeur of these personages on the stage, it was necessary that they should never move abruptly or struggle violently. This is perhaps the chief reason why Greek tragedy was so calm and so processional in character, why all its vehement action took place off the stage, why some of its most impassioned expressions of emotion were cadenced in elaborate lyrics with a musical accompaniment. An actor, mounted on his buskins, and carrying the weight of the tragic mask, could never have encountered a similar gigantic being in personal combat without betraying some awkwardness of movement or exhibiting some unseemly gesture. It was, therefore, necessary to create the part of the Messenger as an artistic correlative to the peculiarly artificial conditions of the stage. We find in the same circumstance a reason why the tragic situation was sustained with such intensity, why the action was limited to a short space of time and to a single locality, and why few changes were permitted in the characters during the conduct of the same piece. For the mask depicted one fixed cast of features; and though, as in the case of Œdipus, who tears out his eyes in a play of Sophocles, the actor might appear twice upon the stage with different masks, yet he could not be constantly changing them. Therefore the strong point of the Greek dramatist lay in the construction of such plots and characters as admitted of sustained and steady passion, whereas a modern playwright aims at providing parts which shall enable a great actor to exhibit lights and shades of varying expression. It still remains a problem how such parts as the Cassandra of Æschylus and the Orestes of Euripides could have been adequately acted with a mask to hide the features; but such effects as those for which Garrick, Rachel, and Talma were celebrated would have been utterly impossible at Athens.

In attempting to form any conception of a Greek drama, we must imbue our minds with the spirit of Greek sculpture, and animate some frieze or bass-relief, supplying the accompaniment of simple and magnificent music, like that of Gluck, or like the recitatives of Porpora. Flaxman's designs for Æschylus are probably the best possible reconstruction of the scenes of a Greek tragedy, as they appeared to the eyes of the spectators, relieved upon the background of the σκηνή. Schlegel is justly indignant with those critics who affirm that the modern opera affords an exact parallel to the Greek drama. Yet the combination of music, acting, scenery, and dancing in such an opera as Gluck's Orfeo or Cherubini's Medea may come nearer than anything else towards giving us a notion of one of the tragedies of Euripides. This remark must be qualified by the acknowledgment of a radical and fundamental difference between the two species of dramatic art. Music, dancing, acting, and scenery, with the Greeks, were sculptural, studied, stately; with the moderns they are picturesque, passionate, mobile. If the opera at all resembles the Greek drama, it is because of the highly artificial development of the histrionic art which it exhibits. The expression of passion in a stationary and prolonged aria, with which we are familiar in the opera, and which is far removed from nature, was of common occurrence in Greek tragedy.[106]

So far we have been occupied with those characteristics of the ancient drama which were immediately determined by the external circumstances of the Attic stage. I have tried to show that some of the most marked qualities of the work of art were necessitated by the conditions of its form. But other and not less important points of difference between the ancient and the modern drama were due to the subject-matter of the former. The Greek playwrights confined themselves to a comparatively narrow circle of mythical stories;[107] each in succession had recourse to Homer and to the poets of the epic cycle. Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, not to mention their numerous forgotten rivals, handled and rehandled the same themes. We have, for example, extant three tragedies, the Choëphorœ of Æschylus, the Electra of Sophocles, and the Electra of Euripides, composed upon precisely the same incident in the tale of Agamemnon's children. Modern dramatists, on the contrary, start with the whole stuff of human history; they seek out their subjects where they choose, or invent motives with a view to the exhibition of varied character, force of passion, tragic effect; nor have they any fixed basis of solid thought like the doctrine of Nemesis[108] whereon to rear their tragic superstructure. In this respect the mystery-plays of the Catholic Church offer a close parallel to the Greek drama. In these dramatic shows the whole body of Christian tradition—the Bible, the acts of the saints, and the doctrines of the Church about the Judgment and the final state of the soul—was used as the material from which to fashion sacred plays. But between the mysteries and the early Attic tragedies there was one great point of difference. The sanctity of the Christian tradition, by giving an immovable form to the legends, precluded all freedom of the fancy. There could be no inventive action of the poet's mind when he was engaged in setting forth the mysteries of the Incarnation, the Atonement, or the final Judgment. His object was to instruct the people in certain doctrines, and all he could do was to repeat over and over again the same series of events in which God had dealt with man. Therefore, when the true dramatic instinct awoke in modern Europe, the playwrights had to quit this narrow sphere of consecrated thoughts. Miracle-plays were succeeded by moralities, by histories, and by those unfettered creations of which Marlowe in England offered the first illustrious examples. Had the Thespian interludes been as purely didactic in their object as the early mystery-plays of the Church, we should either have possessed no Attic drama at all or else have received from the Greek poets a very different type of tragedy. As it was, the very essence of Greek religion reached its culminating point in art. Epical mythology attained to final development in the free artistic creations of Sophocles. Meanwhile the dramatists were hampered in their choice of subjects by the artificial restraints imposed upon them. They were never at liberty to invent. They were always bound to keep in view the traditional interpretation of legends to which a semi-religious importance attached.

Many distinctions between the ancient and the modern drama may be deduced from this original difference in the sources of their materials. The conception of retributive justice pervades the whole tragedy of the Greeks; and the maintenance of this one animating idea is due no doubt in a great measure to the continued treatment of a class of subjects which not only remarkably exhibited its working, but which also were traditionally interpreted in its light. The modern drama has no such central idea. Our tragedy imports no dominant religious or moral conception into the sphere of art. Even Shakespeare and Goethe, the most highly moralized of modern dramatists, have been contented with bringing close before our eyes the manifold spectacle of human existence, wonderful and brilliant, from which we draw such lessons only as can be learned from life itself. They do not undertake, like the Greek tragedians, to supply the solution as well as the problem. It is enough for them to exhibit humanity in conflict, to enlist our sympathies on the side of what is noble, or to arouse our pity by the sight of innocence in misery. The struggle of Lear with his unnatural daughters, the death of Cordelia when the very doors of hope have just been opened; Desdemona dying by her husband's hand, without one opportunity of explanation; Imogen flouted as a faithless wife; Hamlet wrestling with Laertes in the grave of Ophelia; Juliet and Romeo brought by a mistake to death in the May-time of their love; Faust inflicting by his bitter gift of selfish passion woe after woe on Margaret and her family—these are the subjects of our tragedy. We have to content ourselves as we can with this "mask and antimask of impassioned life, breathing, moving, acting, suffering, laughing," and to moralize it as we may. The case is different with Greek tragedy. There we always learn one lesson—τῷ δράσαντι παθεῖν, the guilty must suffer. It is only in a few such characters as Antigone or Polyxena that pure pathos seems to weigh down the balance of the law.

A minor consequence of the fixed nature of Attic tragedy was that the dramatists calculated on no surprise in order to enlist the interest of their audience. The name, Œdipus or Agamemnon, informed the spectators what course the action of the play would take. The art of the poet, therefore, consisted in so displaying his characters, so preparing his incidents, and so developing the tragic import of the tale, as to excite attention. From this arose a peculiar style of treatment, and in particular that irony of which so much is spoken. The point, for example, about the Œdipus Tyrannus was that the spectators knew his horrible story, but that he did not. Therefore, every word he uttered in his pride of prosperity was charged with sinister irony, was pregnant with doom. Every minute incident brought him nearer to the final crash, which all the while was ready waiting for him. In reading this tragedy of Sophocles we seem to be watching a boatful of careless persons gliding down a river, and gradually approaching its fall over a vast cliff. If we take interest in them, how terrible is our anxiety when they come within the irresistible current of the sliding water, how frightful is their cry of anguish when at last they see the precipice ahead, how horror-stricken is the silence with which they shoot the fall, and are submerged! Of this nature is the interest of a good Greek tragedy. But in the case of the modern drama all is different. When our Elizabethan ancestors went to the theatre to hear Othello for the first time, very few of them knew the story: as the play proceeded, they could not be sure whether Iago would finally prevail. At every moment the outcome was doubtful. Tragic irony is, therefore, not a common element in the modern drama. The forcible exhibition of a new and striking subject, the gradual development of passions in fierce conflict, the utmost amount of pathos accumulated round the victims of malice or ill-luck, exhaust the resources of the tragedian. The ancient dramatist plays with his cards upon the table: the modern dramatist conceals his hand. Euripides prefixed a prologue descriptive of the action to his pieces. Our tragedies open only with such scenes as render the immediate conduct of the play intelligible.