Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 2 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

"Come, then, ye reverend Clouds, honor this neophyte with your dread beauty! whether upon Olympus's holy snow-swept peaks ye sit, or in the gardens of father Ocean weave the dance with nymphs, or in golden pitchers draw the waters of Nile, or in Mæotis bide, or on the white eyries of Mimas: listen, receive our sacrifice, be gracious to our rites."

With what radiance of imagination the haunts of the clouds are here enumerated! Sometimes we see them floating in virginal processions above unfooted snows, sometimes enthroned like queens in solemn silence on aerial watch-towers, sometimes dissolved in dew far down among the Oceanides, or brooding, filmy vapors, on the face of broad untroubled lakes.

Aristophanes, it may be said in passing, never dwells upon the more tempestuous functions of the clouds as stormy and angry powers: that would be to violate his allegory, which must always show them deceitfully beautiful, spreading illusion over earth and sky.

In answer to the invitation of Socrates, the Clouds are heard behind the stage chanting a choric hymn;[119] and here it must be remarked that the poet has revealed subtle instinct, for before exhibiting his Chorus, arrayed in veils of filmy gauze, to the people, by which he might have risked the possibility of exciting ludicrous instead of solemn ideas, he enlists the imagination of the audience by a sublime strain of preparatory music, vocally realizing the splendor of the coming Clouds before they strike the eyes of the spectators.

It is to the repeated roll of distant thunder that they sing their untranslatable entrance hymn. Behold them rising, silent domes and pinnacles and towers, from the burnished mirror of the noonday sea: how the sunlight flashes on their pearly slopes and fills their deeply cloven valleys: how dewy bright and glistening they are! Then watch them scale the vault of heaven, quitting the horizon with its mists, marching in tranquil state across the spaces of blue ether, gliding to their thrones among the mountain pines! There they repose, and at their feet is heard the clamor of the streams, the deep rebounding boom of sea waves; but they are seated in serenity, and below them lies the champaign with its fruits of holy earth, and on their broad immortal marble fronts the unwearied light of the sun-god plays. From their girdles to their sandals falls the robe of mist that wrapped them round, and on the watch-towers of the world they sit, bare in their beauty, godlike forms.

Such is the vision which this inimitable Chorus evokes. Its truth has been felt by all who have seen the rising of summer clouds from the waters of the Mediterranean. Indeed, this Chorus belongs to the highest order of poetry. Not only does it furnish an example of the freshness which is peculiar to Aristophanes, but it is in the deepest sense an intuition into the inmost life of nature. We hear in it the voice of a true seer or interpreter, who knows by choice of words and rhythms how to convey his own impressions to our mind. Even Shelley, when he wrote his Cloud, had grasped perhaps the secret of the pomp and splendor of cloudland less firmly than Aristophanes has done, though his images are piled so multitudinously, and every thought or fancy that a cloud suggests is whirled, as it were, in the drift of brilliant and radiant shapes. Aristophanes has this advantage—that something of the mythopœic power still survived in Greece, and that he shared the sculptural genius of his race. Moreover, his audience were prepared by their religious associations to conceive of his Clouds as living creatures, and he was writing for the stage, where the poetry of personification is made easy by direct appeal to the eyesight.

In the Clouds as it has been transmitted to us, Aristophanes employs another and more direct form of allegory. He brings upon the stage the δίκαιος λόγος in controversy with the ἄδικος λόγος—the former representing the old conservative education of Athens; the other the new theories and modes of life which were beginning to spring up. It has been conjectured that δίκαιος λόγος wore the mask of Aristophanes himself, and ἄδικος λόγος that of Thrasymachus the sophist. If this conjecture hits the truth, it is curious that the vulgar logician whom Socrates handles so severely in Plato's Republic should have been chosen as the ideal of his doctrine and influence—the special pleader of the Phrontisterion. The contest between these two impersonations of modesty and impudence, of manliness and effeminacy, offers a unique example in Greek comic literature of what was common on our own stage about three centuries ago. The Just and Unjust Logoi dispute and wrangle for the favor of Pheidippides precisely like the abstractions in Hycke Scorner or Lusty Juventus. Of course this kind of allegory is much coarser and affords less scope for poetical treatment than the exquisite mythus of the Clouds. The Logoi are but masks or hollow automata, from behind which the poet utters his arguments: there is no illusion of the senses, no enchantment of the fancy in their presentation. Yet the speech of Dikaios Logos forms one of the purest and most beautiful passages that Aristophanes has written, in its simple and affectionate picture of old Athenian life. The poet, we fear, was very far behind his age: he looked back to the good times when the sailor only knew enough to sing out "Ahoy!" and call for biscuit: he wanted the Athenian lads to have broad backs and sluggish tongues: he was dead to the advantages of dialectic and Socratic definition: he kept trying to bring back the days of Marathon, when nothing could avert the coming days of Syracuse and Ægospotami and Chæronea. We who read the history of Athens by the light of our Grote, we who are rolling our waves towards the rising instead of the setting sun, know now how very perverse and un-advanced the poet was. Yet, for all that, can we fail to be charmed with the picture that he draws of Greek boyhood in the good old times, and to contrast it favorably with the acknowledged impudence and profligacy of Critias and Agathon and Alcibiades—the friends and pupils of Socrates? "In that blissful time," says Dikaios Logos, "when I flourished, and modesty and temperance were practised, a boy's voice was never heard; but he would set off at daybreak, in snow or sunshine, with his comrades to the school of the harper, where he learned the ballads of our forefathers in praise of Pallas; and from the harper he would run to the training-ground and exercise himself with the decorum befitting virtuous youth." The rules for the behavior of boys which Aristophanes here enunciates provoke a modern smile; for the morality of Athens obliged lads to observe the same sort of propriety which we expect from girls. But for all his modesty, the youth of those days was not a milksop. He did indeed shun the public baths and the agora, repel the advances of profligate persons, respect his parents, avoid Hetairai, and form in his breast an image of Aidos; yet he frequented the wrestling-ground, and grew fair in form and color with generous exercises, not "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," nor bent and jaded by the restless wrangling of the law courts; but among the sacred olive-trees of the Academy he ran races with his comrade, "crowned with white reeds, smelling of bindweed and careless hours and leaf-shedding poplar, rejoicing in the prime of spring, when the plane-tree whispers to the elm." In these last lines we touch the very core of Greek aristocratic conservatism—that imperious demand for leisure, for σχολὴ τῶν ἀναγκαίων, of which Aristotle speaks as an essential in the life of free men; that contempt of all serious time-consuming business which we find in Plato; that respect for the beauty of the body, and that dislike of every occupation that tended to degrade its form or spoil the freshness of its color; that sympathy with nature in her graceful moods; that well-bred nonchalance; that love of the gymnasium with its poplar sacred to Herakles, the god of endurance, and its plane-tree of swift Hermes—in a word, those accumulated æsthetical prejudices which marked the race pre-eminent for its artistic faculty, the caste of rich and idle citizens supported by a nation of slaves, the unique and never-again-to-be-imitated people, who once and for all upon this earth of ours attained perfection, realized the ideal towards which we vainly strive.

With the last lines of this speech in our memory, we may turn to the dialogues of Plato, whose Phædrus and Charmides and Lysis are true children and disciples of Dikaios Logos; or to the Autolycus of Xenophon's Symposium, whose breast is as smooth, and skin as bright, and shoulders as broad, and tongue as short, as even Aristophanes could wish; or we may set before us some statue like the Apoxyomenos of Lysippus, or the Discobolos of Myron, and feel that we have gathered, in fancy at least, the flower of the perfection of the pride of Hellas.

Much of the allegory of Aristophanes consists of metaphors taken literally and expressed by appropriate symbolism to the audience. Thus, Trugaios actually drags the goddess Peace, with her attendants Opora and Theoria, from the well, the Chorus, while they help him, singing "Yoho!" like sailors at a capstan. In the same comedy, War and Havoc are exhibited with a gigantic mortar, in which they bray the States of Greece. Socrates suspended in his basket is a metaphorical allegory of this sort, his posture being peculiarly expressive of star-gazing and abstract speculation at a time when the objects of such contemplations were called τὰ μετέωρα. Of the same kind is the balance in which the lines of Æschylus and Euripides are weighed. Any poet might use the metaphor (weighed in the balance and found wanting); but it is a stretch of metaphorical license to exhibit an actual pair of scales upon the stage. Many of the figurative actions of the Hebrew prophets were practical appeals to the imagination, similar to these allegories of Aristophanes. Indeed, such dramatic metaphors may be reckoned among the most powerful instruments in the hands of a great master. Had Dante conceived a mask upon the politics of Italy, we doubt not but that he would have employed some energetic symbols of this sort; and, in passing, it may be said that no artist has appeared in modern times so capable of constructing an allegorical drama in the style of Aristophanes as Dante. The symbolism of the Wasps is somewhat different from that with which we have been dealing. In this play the Chorus were armed, no doubt, with lance-like stings; but there was no attempt on the poet's part, as in the case of the Clouds and Birds, to maintain the illusion of their being wasps. They talk and act like old men; their waspishness is merely metaphorical, and the allegory ends in an appeal to the eyesight. The Plutus, on the other hand, presents an example of allegory in the strictly modern sense. It is a Greek anticipation of our moralities, of such a play as might be founded on a portion of the Pilgrim's Progress. Wealth and Poverty appear upon the stage, and speak appropriately. Avarice and Prodigality are satirized. The use and abuse of riches are contrasted in a series of incidents framed with expressly moral purpose. The whole play is singularly un-Aristophanic. We have here no "Weltvernichtungsidee"—no nightingales or climbing apes to speak of. For this very reason it has been copied in modern times (its inner nature rendering it capable of adaptation to our tastes) by Ben Jonson in the Staple of News, and by Goethe in the second part of Faust.

One word must be devoted to the Thesmophoriazusæ. In the history of dramatic literature, the chief interest of the play is that it differs from the other works of Aristophanes in its structure. It has a regular plot—an intrigue and a solution—and its persons are not allegorical, but real. Thus it approaches the standard of modern comedy. But the plot, though gigantic in its scale, and prodigious in its wealth of wit and satire, is farcical. The artifices by which Euripides endeavors to win Agathon to undertake his cause, the disguise of Mnesilochus in female attire, the oratory of the old man against the women in the midst of their assembly, his detection, the momentary suspension of the dramatic action by his seizure of the supposed baby, his slaughter of the swaddled wine-jar, his apprehension by Cleisthenes, the devices and disguises by which Euripides (in parody of his own tragic scenes) endeavors to extricate his father-in-law from the scrape, and the final ruse by which he eludes the Scythian bowmen, and carries off Mnesilochus in triumph—all these form a series of highly diverting comic scenes. There is no passage in Aristophanes more amusing than the harangue of Mnesilochus. The other women have abused Euripides for slandering their sex in his tragedies. Mnesilochus, the humorous and coarse old rustic, gets up in his flimsy female gear, and eloquently reminds them of the truths which Euripides might have divulged. One crime after another is glibly and facetiously recorded, until the little heap of calumnies uttered by Euripides disappears beneath the mountain of confessions piled up by the supposed matron. The portrait, too, of Agathon in the act of composition is exquisitely comic. By comparing it with that drawn by Plato in the Banquet, we may to some extent estimate the amount of truth in Aristophanic caricature. The meaningless melodious style—the stream of honeyed words,[120] summa delumbe saliva—with which Agathon and his Chorus greet our ears is scarcely more a parody of his poetry than the speech on love is of his prose. Agathon is discovered lying on a sofa, arrayed in female garments and smelling of cosmetics; when asked why thus attired, he lisps a languid answer that he is composing a tragedy about women, and wants to be in character: