Pindar’s freedom and sense of irresponsibility in regard to myths has a certain value in that it shows that the futilities and improprieties of mythology—the “unhappy stories of bards”—were not necessarily a burden on the stronger religious minds of Hellas, and that they could be greatly excised from the polytheism without endangering the popular worship and faith, which in the main was independent of them.
As for the two dramatists, his contemporaries, mythology was their public business, and they accepted it genially because they were not, in the first place, moral teachers, but dramatists; it did not therefore occur to them to protest or violently to reform. But they might select, discard and reshape; they could take the great legends of the past, legends of Thebes, the story of the Niobids, of Prometheus, the death of Ajax, all of them irreconcilable in parts with higher morality and religion, and invest them with as much morality as the tradition admitted. This they did with force and subtlety. And generally the moral spirit and imagination of Æschylus and Sophocles must be counted among the spiritual facts of this period with which the history of Greek ethics and religion must deal. Doubtless the older and robuster poet was the stronger moral and religious force; his protests against the non-moral doctrine of Nemesis, his profound utterances concerning moral responsibility and the moral continuity that links our lives and actions, his discovery that suffering brings moral wisdom—these are landmarks in the ethical story of Greece; while with Sophocles the conviction is no less deep of the eternity and divinity of the moral law.
They were the last spokesmen of a civic-imperial system with a civic religion and morality that had not yet passed its zenith.
Euripides.—The part played by Euripides in this spiritual history of Hellas was wholly different. Younger contemporary of Sophocles as he was, he seems to belong to a different age. In his work and thought is reflected far more vividly than in the older poets of the same century the new mental life which was fostered by the philosophers and the sophists. The influence of the physical speculations of the sixth century and of those of Demokritos and Anaxagoras of the fifth, which at some points advanced further in materialism, has had time to penetrate the more gifted minds and to compel the public to a certain attention. The paid ‘Sophist,’ the pioneer of modern education and the first champion of the critical spirit, was travelling around. And after 470 B.C. the imperial greatness of Athens had begun to attract the greatest teachers and thinkers of the age. It was of great moment for Euripides that such men as Anaxagoras and Protagoras were active in Athens for many years, and that he had enjoyed familiar intercourse with them as he also enjoyed with Sokrates. It is clear that the poet imbibed deeply their teaching and their spirit; he was also learned in Orphism, antiquarianism and remote folklore. Being by nature a great poet, he has also something of the weakness of the ‘polymath’ or the ‘intellectual’; he had not the steadiness of brain or strong conviction enough to evolve a systematic philosophy or clear religious faith; his was, in fact, the stimulating, eager, critical spirit, not the constructive. His mental sympathies and interests shift and range from pole to pole. He is a secularist in his view of a physical universe, and he foreshadows a secular treatment of ethics based on ideas of φύσις and heredity, though a chorus of his maidens may praise chastity as “the fairest gift of the Gods.” It was therefore possible, though most unjust, that Aristophanes should call him an atheist. On the other hand, he is capable of profound religious sentiment and exalted religious utterance, and strikes out flashes of light that might kindle and illuminate a higher religion. Therefore it was possible for Clemens of Alexandria to find in some of his words a foreshadowing of Christ.[112.1] He remains for us an enigma, and probably no final judgment will ever be pronounced upon him, in which we shall all agree.
But the student of Greek religion must confront these two questions about him: (a) What was his real sentiment concerning the popular religion? (b) What were his contributions to religious thought, and what was likely to be his influence on the religious temperament? To make up one’s mind on these questions demands a long and critical study, also a tactful sense of the distinction between Euripides the playwright and Euripides the thinker. It is the confusion of this distinction that leads, for instance, to the strangely erroneous views held concerning the religious significance of his ‘Bacchæ.’ A sympathetic reading of many of the plays must convey the impression that certain cult-figures and legends of the polytheism filled the poet with scorn and loathing; and at times he seems to compose as if he had a personal hatred of Apollo and Aphrodite in particular, for instance, in the Ion and Hippolytus. When he can interpret Aphrodite as a cosmic force he can dilate on this as beautifully and ardently as Lucretius; if he could have believed that Apollo was merely the Sun, as he tells us ‘the wise’ were well aware, he might have forgiven him. But it is the real personal Aphrodite of Homer and Helen, the personal Apollo, the father of Ion, the seducer of Kreusa, and the beloved ancestor of the Athenians, that rankled in his mind. When he handles the story of the madness of Herakles and brings madness on the stage, he uses her first as his mouthpiece to convey to the Athenians what he thought of Hera;[113.1] just as he puts into the mouth of Amphitryon his own mordant criticism of the action of Zeus.[113.2] Yet with other parts of the polytheism he seems at times in the most glowing sympathy; in the Hippolytus, for instance, where he expresses for the first time in literature the religious rapture of purity; in the Bacchæ where he discovers the necessary phrase for the expression of the Bacchic communion, for the ecstasy of the Mænad-revel on the mountain, in verses that tingle with the nature-magic which was at the root of this wild cult. Yet no one should be deceived into thinking that he is preaching the cause of Dionysiac worship; for the Bacchæ closes with that depressing anti-climax, where Dionysos plays the sorriest part, and Euripides’ own sour dislike of the personal traditional God gives an unpleasant flavour to the last scene. It is this bitterness of protestantism and criticism in this poet that strikes a new note in Greece; and Euripides may be regarded as the first in European history to be possessed with the theologic temper. It cannot be said that he preached a new religion; he was no votary even of Orphism, for though, as the Bacchæ and the fragment of his ‘Cretans’ attest, he felt something of its spell, he was not of that cast of mind that could be deceived by its pharisaic ritual and laws of diet, and he certainly cherished no mystic belief concerning the life after death; for even in the ‘Bacchæ’ there is no reference to this attractive dogma, which was the main anchor of the Orphic faith. Nor can he be truly described as a zealous reformer of the people’s faith and practice; for the reformer must have some belief in that which he wishes to reform; and that Euripides firmly believed in any part of the polytheism is hard to maintain; his final attitude is generally a doubt. Nevertheless, his protests might have been of value to the more cultured citizen who still clave to his civic worship. They are directed mainly and most forcibly against the stories of divine vindictiveness and divine licentiousness. He is evidently touched with the new idea that vengeance is alien to the perfect nature of God; this was still more insistently proclaimed by Plato and by the Pythagoreans and later philosophers.[115.1] On the second count his protest is suggested by the notion that was dawning in him that purity in every sense was essential to the divine nature; he is then the herald in literature of a thought which Orphism may have prompted and which was to play a leading part in later religion and religious speculation, but which was unfamiliar to his contemporaries either in Hellas or anywhere in the Mediterranean except in Israel. His leading principle of criticism in all these matters is expressed in the Iphigeneia in Tauris, namely, that the evil in religious practice and legend arises from men imputing their own evil nature to God.[115.2] We owe much to the man who first uttered this warning against a debasing anthropomorphism.
The immoral elements in Greek mythology, which have been constantly reprobated by ancient and modern writers, have often blinded them to the fact that Greek religion in its forms of worship and sacred formulæ was mainly pure and refined. The stories about the Gods, often of the type natural to savage folklore, did not constitute ancient religion; and they were the less able to choke the growth of a higher ethical-religious spirit in that they were not enshrined in sacred books that could speak with authority to the people. Yet we have not infrequent proofs in Greek literature, notably in Plato’s Euthyphron, that they might exercise at times an immoral influence on men’s conduct. Meantime the educational movement in the sixth and fifth centuries had awakened men’s minds to the importance of the moral question in literature. And the protests of Euripides are developed by Plato in his scheme of education in the Republic, and the same point of view prompts him to his puritanical legislation against poets. Such moral movements in the polytheistic societies of Greece are interesting to mark, though their effect is often difficult to estimate. The new puritanical spirit had probably a wholesome influence on the more cultured minds; it had little influence on the mass of the people, nor does the later poetry of the Hellenistic period show much trace of it.
As regards the actual forms of Greek ritual and worship, Euripides has nothing revolutionary to say. He appears to have a strong dislike for prophets, and in this he was in some accord with Æschylus, Sophocles, and the Athenian people. He shows great distrust for Delphi; and its influence was doubtless impaired at Athens during the Peloponnesian war. He protests against human sacrifice as a barbaric and non-Hellenic institution[116.1]—though he appears fond of it as a dramatic motive—and on one occasion the speaker argues that the Gods need nothing from mortals at all;[116.2] the thought was suggested merely by dramatic exigencies; and Euripides nowhere attempts a crusade against the value of sacrifice in general. He has only one important thing to say about it, namely that the small sacrifice of the pious often outweighs the hecatomb.[116.3] This thought implies a more spiritual view of the divine nature and is not infrequently expressed in the later literature; according to Theophrastos and Theopompos this higher view of sacrifice was even encouraged by the Delphic oracle.[116.4]
There is much indeed in the sententious poetry of Euripides that might have elevated and cleared the religious thoughts of his age; but it is doubtful if his ultimate conception of Godhead, as it tends towards pantheism, could have been reconciled with the anthropomorphic polytheism of the people or if those most conversant with his tone and inspired by his spirit could have remained long in sympathy with orthodoxy. And there is an instinct in Euripides which enhances his value for the modern man, but which was to be subversive in the longrun of the old civic religion, namely, the humanitarian or cosmopolitan instinct; that which allowed him to sympathise with Trojans, women, children and slaves, which inspired him with the beautiful thought that “the whole earth is the good man’s fatherland,” which also prompted him to despise the life of civic duty and activity and to recommend, as Aristotle does, the secluded and contemplative life. The further development of this cosmopolitan spirit and its effect on the old civic religion will be noted below.
It has been necessary to dwell so long on Euripides, not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also because owing to the vogue that he won in his lifetime and that was greatly to increase after his death, he more than any other of the great men of letters must be regarded as the populariser of the new enlightenment.
Whether he individually exercised any immediate religious influence upon the popular religious mind, for good or for harm, is not easy to decide with precision; for there were other exponents than he of the same freer and more advanced thought, which began to express itself early in the sixth century. As a result we are able to discern the religious view of human life and conduct, becoming what we should term more spiritual, more inward. The moral judgment begins to look to the soul or the inner principle; the doctrine begins to be proclaimed that God as a spiritual power can read the heart of man and judges him by that; that sin lies not in the external act alone; that external ritualistic purity is of less avail than purity of soul. Such thoughts as these which could serve as the foundation-stones of a new religion and which helped to shape the later religious history of Europe were mainly a heritage from the speculation of the sixth century and were in the air of the fifth. We cannot think that they were confined to the philosophic circles until Euripides gave them publicity; for the notable oracle quoted and commented on by Herodotus had proclaimed to the people the novel view that a sinful purpose was the same in the sight of God as a sinful act;[118.1] Epicharmos, the Sicilian poet of the earlier fifth century, had preached the higher ideal of purity—“if thou art pure in mind, thou art pure in thy whole body.” It was probably in the latter part of the same century that some rhetorician of the school of Gorgias interpolated the proem of Hesiod’s Works and Days, which reveals an exalted view of the High God.[118.2]