There is then, sometimes in the heroines themselves and almost always in their environment, an element of barbarism which troubles us. The touch of savagery repels us all the more from its contrast with the exquisite poetry in which it is enshrined, and the noble spirit of that poetry. We wonder why the dramatist should have placed creatures so sensitive and highly wrought in situations which are so crudely appalling; and the incongruity is not shaken off until we remember the nature of the material upon which the poet is constrained to work. For the Attic dramatists went for the subjects of their poetry directly to stories out of the primitive past—old legends which, though sometimes very beautiful, nearly always contain elements of cruelty and horror. The reason why they did this is interesting, and explains some curious points about Greek Drama.
To us it seems strange that these poets, whose ideas were probably as ‘advanced’ to their contemporaries as our modern Drama is to us, did not take their themes out of the vastly interesting and even momentous life of their own day. Very occasionally they did this, as we know from the drama of Æschylus called The Persians, which deals directly with that tremendous event of Greek history the Persian Invasion. But almost always, as we have said, they turned away from their own time, and looked back upon the ancient past for the subject-matter of Drama. It is probable that poetical motives influenced them to some extent—the same that made Milton turn back to the Hebrew story of the creation, and Tennyson occupy himself for nearly fifty years with the Arthurian legend. But there was another, and more compelling reason; and it lay in the religious character of the Attic theatre.
Greek Drama was a ritual, performed in honour of the gods. It had its origin in the worship of the Thracian god Dionysus or in a still older cult of ancestor-worship; and it had an established convention that its themes should be taken from legendary heroic subjects. So that the poet, however he might modify character, was bound by tradition to the main outline of the early stories. As we shall see, he imbued those themes and characters with new significance. Just as Milton puts the Reformation spirit into the story of Adam and Eve, and Tennyson makes the Arthur of Celtic legend into an ideal of modern gentlehood, Æschylus and Sophocles and Euripides vitalize the old legendary forms with the spirit of their own age. The spirit of that age was profoundly interested in religion—perhaps because it was beginning to lose its religion. It was passing out of unquestioning belief in the old Olympian hierarchy; but it had not yet attained to a new belief with any clearness. And an extremely interesting fact is that here in the drama, in the very cradle of religion, the new thought begins to manifest itself quite clearly, despite the trammels of convention. Each of the three tragedians represents some phase of it; each shows, in greater or less degree, evidence of the transition period in which old superstition was being broken down; but each steadily maintained, through the crash of falling faith, the sanctity of the moral law. It is this clear view, this austere purpose and steady aim at the highest, which gives Attic Tragedy its grandeur, and the women of Attic Tragedy their surpassing interest.
What has been said above about the barbarity of the legends on which Greek Drama is based, applies particularly to the story from which the figure of Clytemnestra was taken. It was a history of wrongdoing, of foul guilt going back for generations: or rather, the history of a sin which, to use the words of the poet himself, begot more sin in each succeeding generation. Æschylus wrote his greatest work around this theme, a trilogy of three dramas called the Agamemnon, the Choephorœ, and the Eumenides. The first two of these dramas furnish the material for the story of Clytemnestra. The last deals with the remorse of Orestes, her son, and the atonement by which the long record of crime is finally closed and a new era of hope begins. Clytemnestra is, as it were, the last sacrifice demanded by the Furies which had pursued the house of Tantalus so long, and she represents in herself the two forces by which that vengeance had always been effected—a wrong done and a wrong suffered. For Æschylus makes us see that it is not only by the first sin of Tantalus that all his descendants have been relentlessly pursued; but that each in his turn has added something of his own—some crime of passion or of pride—to bring the penalty on himself.
It is from this standpoint that we must look at Clytemnestra and judge of her action. She was the instrument of a power beyond herself, the dread fate which had marked Agamemnon the king, her husband, as another victim of the hereditary curse. But she was not merely an instrument. She had fallen prey to her own unlawful passion, and when she struck the blow which fate ordained, it was not impelled by the single motive of revenge for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, but a confusion of passionate anger and conscious guilt.
The Agamemnon opens with the joyful announcement of the fall of Troy. The scene is laid in the wealthy city of Mycenæ, in the palace of Agamemnon the king, where a watch had been kept for many months for the return of the Greek fleet. Ten years before, when the fleet had sailed for Troy to avenge the carrying-off of Helen, there had been left behind in the royal home a mother stricken by an awful grief. For the King Agamemnon, delayed at Aulis by adverse winds, and in brutal haste to be gone, had offered up to the gods a human sacrifice—the sacrifice of his own young daughter Iphigenia. The prayers of Clytemnestra the queen, and the tears of the beautiful girl herself, could not prevail upon him. Iphigenia’s life was forfeited to a hideous superstition, and the host sailed away, leaving Clytemnestra overwhelmed with sorrow and wrath. Here then are the two contributing elements to the tragedy—the wrong done and the wrong suffered. Agamemnon, driven on by the curse which lay over his house, blinded by his own pride and headstrong impatience to the true nature of the crime that he was committing, was forging the weapon of his own destruction. And here too we have the deed which accounts for and explains Clytemnestra—making of her not the mere savage murderess of tradition, without a touch of humanity, but an outraged mother, the avenger of her child.
It is necessary to emphasize this point a little because we have been used to regard Clytemnestra as a mere monster of cruelty. It is therefore a shock of surprise, when we come to Æschylus for her story, to find that he has made her quite human. He is not concerned in her case, any more than with the other persons of his Drama, to expose intricate motive, or to paint delicate shades of character. In his task of hewing out dramatic form—of virtually creating Drama—he left subtlety and ingenuity and stagecraft to be perfected by his successors. Hence he is not exercised very much about making his plot a plausible one, or to explain how its incidents are effected. He has a great religious purpose; and this, with the ritual form in which he had to work, subordinates the purely dramatic elements. But he does clearly let us see—and this is all the more important from his usual reticence—that the whole course of Clytemnestra’s action was determined by Agamemnon’s inconceivable cruelty.
This point eludes us often, because we accept the sacrifice of Iphigenia as an act belonging to a barbarous age. So it is, but we forget that the age of Agamemnon had practically left barbarism behind it. The slaughter of Iphigenia must have been almost as revolting to the ideas of that time as it is to us; and although in times of national crisis fanatical minds may have been capable of reviving the savage custom of human sacrifice, that is no justification of Agamemnon. And that he submitted to the superstitious frenzy, and offered up the life of his child, was the act which armed Clytemnestra against him.
The deed was, however, of a piece with his character. He was haughty, passionate, headstrong, brooking no resistance and no rivalry: a man of tremendous force of character who had grown too great and who in his pride had even dared to dishonour Apollo himself in the person of his votaries. To such a man, who after ten years’ preparation found his fleet hindered by unfavourable gales, the slaying of his daughter was merely an unpleasant step toward the fulfilment of his purpose. Her beauty and her youth were of little account, and her mother’s tears and entreaties were brushed aside as weakness.