Women of the Classics

by Mary Sturgeon

[25]. From Professor Lewis Campbell’s translation of the Œdipus at Colonus (Clarendon Press).

[26]. From Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of a fragment of the Œdipus Coloneus in his History of Ancient Greek Literature (William Heinemann).

[27]. From Professor Lewis Campbell’s translation of the Seven against Thebes (Clarendon Press).

Euripides: Alcestis

In the story of Alcestis, we step at once into light and sweet air. Here is no taint of an hereditary curse; no excess of passion to offend the sight of gods and men; no foul crime to be avenged by other crime, and expiated in its turn by bitter remorse. The Trojan Cycle and the Theban Cycle, with all the tragic grandeur with which Æschylus and Sophocles have invested them, are left behind. We come to a new theme, fair as a garden and clean as a morning breeze. It is the tale of a wife’s supreme love: of the friendship of a god for a mortal man: of an unique act of hospitality and its magnificent requital. The oppressive sense of destiny, of something almost malign in the heart of things, has lifted. Human error and wrongdoing and impotence, which have hitherto made such a sombre background for heroic figures, are lost in a glow of human love. And instead of a brooding menace, there is the presence of a benign divinity, seeking to protect and recompense virtue.

But while we turn to the Alcestis of Euripides with a refreshing sense of contrast, we are soon reminded that the elements of the story itself are unfavourable to the work as dramatic art. We could not expect from such a theme a tragedy so intense and powerful as the works of the two elder dramatists. The spectacle of virtue rewarded may satisfy a primary moral sense; but for that very reason it will not evoke the strong emotions which are the life of drama. While perfect accord with the divine power, and harmony amongst the human agents of the story, utterly preclude the sense of conflict without which tragedy can hardly be. For that reason, it would seem, Euripides did not treat the legend as pure tragedy. In any case, the happy ending of the legend upon which he worked would forbid it; and he has further departed from convention by introducing two scenes which, by their flavour of satire and their stinging realism, partake of the nature of comedy.

It would therefore appear that the critics have had some cause of complaint against Euripides, on account of technical defects in the Alcestis. They have indeed been very severe, not only on this play, but on his drama generally, charging him with all sorts of artistic sins which need not trouble us in the least. Fortunately, we are not much concerned with criticism: and in this case there is opposed to the censure a vast body of praise, ranking most of the poets on its side, and all the minds which are attuned most nearly to the reflective note of Euripidean poetry.

If, however, we had time for a comparison with Sophocles, we should quickly find for ourselves the one fact which gives colour to much of the critics’ grumbling. Euripides was not, like Sophocles, a consummate artist. But we should not stop at such profitless negation; for a larger truth would spring to light a moment afterward. While the art is less, the thought is much greater: there is a wider range, and a higher ideal. Euripides is not content to make perfect drama: he must give humanity the fullest and most complete expression possible to him. And since he saw into the human heart with an eye at once so keen and pitiful; since he felt with such insistence the ethical and intellectual problems of the transition period in which he lived, it is no wonder if the artist in him was sometimes taxed beyond his powers. The great Periclean Age was passing; and the new era had some curious intellectual resemblances to our own time. It had begun to examine the bases of its religion; it had seen a great development of the democratic spirit; and it was awakening to something wrong in the position of women. That these questions greatly exercised the mind of Euripides we may see from the prominent place they occupy in his drama; and that he must have been an original and advanced thinker upon them is evident from certain facts of his personal unpopularity, and from the freshness of his ideas to the modern mind. That modernity is indeed one cause of his intimate appeal to the thought of our own day; and so far as it touches the question of womanhood, it has a peculiar interest for us.

The political aspect of the woman’s question will not detain us for one moment, save to note in passing that it is at least as old as Attic Drama. We have little clue to the political significance, if any, of the many references to the status of women which are to be found in the plays of Euripides; and it does not matter. The broad fact is clear, that the poet was profoundly interested in womanhood: that he had studied feminine character with care and sympathy; and that he felt and strove to reveal something of the evil which must result to the race when the woman is treated unjustly. Hence we have the Troades, a drama which looks steadily at the horrors of war from the standpoint of the women who suffer because of it. Hence too, there is an Iphigenia exerting all the energies of an acute mind to rescue her brother from imminent danger; a Medea, transformed from a tender mother into a destroying Fury by Jason’s infidelity; a Phædra literally consumed by love which she will not declare; and an Alcestis, type of enduring feminine courage, placed side by side with the weak amiability of Admetus.

The character of Admetus is of some importance in the story we are now to consider, and hence has received a great deal of attention. It has been interpreted variously. On the one hand he is made to appear improbably base, a poltroon who was not only willing that his wife should die in his stead, but who hurried her to the tomb with indecent haste, to avoid the awkward questions of her relatives. On the other hand, he is shown as incredibly virtuous, a man whom the gods delighted to honour—with this doubtful gift of life at another’s cost—and who could not, from very piety, refuse it. But the Admetus of Euripides is not found in either of these two extremes. He is a much more real figure poised somewhere along a middle line between the two; an average man, compounded of good and bad: a warm friend, a tender husband, generously hospitable and of evident charm of nature; but with a fatal weakness of will. Thus, in the common level which the balance shows, he is much more convincing as a man, and for the purpose of the dramatist, an excellent foil to his heroic wife.