The Life of Greece

His opponents objected that he tore down but never built, that he rejected every answer but gave none of his own, and that the results demoralized morals and paralyzed thought. In many cases he left the idea that he had set out to clarify more obscure than before. When a resolute fellow like Critias tried to question him he turned his reply into another question, and at once recaptured the advantage. In the Protagoras he offers to answer instead of asking, but his good resolution lasts but a moment; whereupon Protagoras, being an old hand at the game of logic, quietly withdraws from the argument.¹⁴⁹ Hippias rages at Socrates’ elusiveness: “By Zeus!” he cries, “you shall not hear [my answer] until you yourself declare what you think justice to be; for it is not enough that you laugh at others, questioning and confuting everybody, while you yourself are unwilling to give a reason to anybody, or to declare your opinion on any subject.”¹⁵⁰ To such taunts Socrates replied that he was only a midwife like his mother. “The reproach which is often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just. The reason is that the god compels me to be a midwife, but forbids me to bring forth”¹⁵¹—a deus ex machina worthy of his friend Euripides.

In many ways he resembled the Sophists, and the Athenians applied the name to him without hesitation, and usually without reproach.¹⁵² Indeed, he was often a Sophist in the modern sense: he was rich in crafty dodges and argumentative tricks, slyly changed the scope or meaning of terms, drowned the problem in loose analogies, quibbled like a schoolboy, and beat the wind bravely with words.¹⁵³ The Athenians might be excused for giving him hemlock, since there is no pest like a conscious logician. In four points he differed from the Sophists: he despised rhetoric, he wished to strengthen morality, he did not profess to teach anything more than the art of examining ideas, and he refused to take pay for his instruction—though he appears to have accepted occasional help from his rich friends.¹⁵⁴ With all his irritating faults his students loved him deeply. “Perhaps,” he says to one of them, “I may be able to assist you in the pursuit of honor and virtue, from being mutually disposed to love; for whenever I conceive a liking for persons I devote myself with ardor, and with my whole mind, to love them, and be loved by them in return, regretting their absence and having mine regretted by them, and longing for their society while they long for mine.”¹⁵⁵

Aristophanes’ Clouds represents the pupils of Socrates as forming a school with a regular meeting place; and a passage in Xenophon lends some color to this conception.¹⁵⁶ Usually he is pictured as teaching wherever he found a pupil or a listener. But no common doctrine united his followers; they differed so widely among themselves that they became the leaders of the most diverse philosophical schools and theories in Greece—Platonism, Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism. There was the proud and humble Antisthenes, who took from his master the doctrine of simplicity in life and needs, and founded the Cynic school; perhaps he was present when Socrates said to Antiphon: “You seem to think that happiness consists in luxury and extravagance; but I think that to want nothing is to resemble the gods, and that to want as little as possible is to make the nearest approach to the gods.”¹⁵⁷ There was Aristippus, who derived from Socrates’ placid acceptance of pleasure as a good the doctrine which he later developed at Cyrene, and which Epicurus would preach at Athens. There was Eucleides of Megara, who sharpened the Socratic dialectic into a skepticism that denied the possibility of any real knowledge. There was the young Phaedo, who had been reduced to slavery, and had been ransomed by Crito at the behest of Socrates; Socrates loved the lad, and “made him a philosopher.”¹⁵⁸ There was the restless Xenophon who, though he gave up philosophy for soldiering, testified that “nothing was of greater benefit than to associate with Socrates, and to converse with him, on any occasion, on any subject whatever.”¹⁵⁹ There was Plato, upon whose vivid imagination the sage made so lasting an impression that the two minds are mingled forever in philosophical history. There was the rich Crito, who “looked upon Socrates with the greatest affection, and took care that he should never be in want of anything.”¹⁶⁰ There was the dashing young Alcibiades, whose infidelities were to discredit and endanger his teacher, but who now loved Socrates with characteristic abandon, and said:

When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, his words produce absolutely no effect upon us in comparison, whereas the very fragments of your words, Socrates, even at second hand, and however imperfectly reported, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman and child who comes within hearing of them. . . . I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him and fly from the voice of the siren, he would detain me until I grew old sitting at his feet. . . . I have known in my soul, or in my heart . . . that greatest of pangs, more violent in ingenuous youth than any serpent’s tooth, the pang of philosophy. . . . And you, Phaedrus, you, Agathon, you, Eryximachus, you, Pausanias, you, Aristodemus, you, Aristophanes, all of you, and I need not say Socrates himself, have all had experience of the same madness and passion for philosophy.¹⁶¹

There was the oligarchic leader Critias, who enjoyed Socrates’ quips against democracy, and helped to incriminate him by writing a play in which he described the gods as the invention of clever statesmen who used them as night watchmen to frighten men into decency.¹⁶² And there was the son of the democratic leader Anytus, a lad who preferred to hear Socrates discourse rather than to attend to his business, which was dealing in leather. Anytus complained that Socrates had unsettled the boy with skepticism, that the boy no longer respected his parents or the gods; moreover, Anytus resented Socrates’ criticisms of democracy.*¹⁶³ “Socrates,” says Anytus, “I think you are too ready to speak evil of men; and if you will take my advice, I would recommend you to be careful. Perhaps there is no city in which it is not easier to do men harm than to do them good; and this is certainly the case at Athens.”¹⁶⁵ Anytus bided his time.

3. The Philosophy of Socrates

Behind the method was a philosophy, elusive, tentative, unsystematic, but so real that in effect the man died for it. At first sight there is no Socratic philosophy; but this is largely because Socrates, accepting the relativism of Protagoras, refused to dogmatize, and was certain only of his ignorance.

Though condemned for irreligion, Socrates gave at least lip service to the gods of his city, participated in its religious ceremonies, and was never known to utter an impious word.¹⁶⁶ He professed to follow, in all important negative decisions, an inner daimonion which he described as a sign from heaven. Perhaps this spirit was another play of the Socratic irony; if so, it was remarkably well sustained; and it is but one class of many appeals, in Socrates, to oracles and dreams as messages from the gods.¹⁶⁷ He argued that there were too many instances of amazing adaptation and apparent design to allow us to ascribe the world to chance or any unintelligent cause. On immortality he was not so definite; he pleads for it tenaciously in the Phaedo, but in the Apology he says, “Were I to make any claim to be wiser than others, it would be because I do not think that I have any sufficient knowledge of the other world, when in fact I have none.”¹⁶⁸ In the Cratylus he applies the same agnosticism to the gods: “Of the gods we know nothing.”¹⁶⁹ He advised his followers not to dispute of such matters; like Confucius, he asked them did they know human affairs so well that they were ready to meddle with those of heaven?¹⁷⁰ The best thing to do, he felt, was to acknowledge our ignorance, and meanwhile to obey the oracle at Delphi, which, when asked how one should worship the gods, answered, “According to the law of your country.”¹⁷¹

He applied this skepticism even more rigorously to the physical sciences. One should study them only so far as to guide his life; beyond that they are an inscrutable maze; each mystery, when solved, reveals a deeper mystery.¹⁷³ In his youth he had studied science with Archelaus; in his maturity he turned from it as a more or less plausible myth, and interested himself no longer in facts and origins but in values and ends. “He discoursed,” says Xenophon, “always of human affairs.”¹⁷⁴ The Sophists had also “turned around” from natural science to man, and had begun the study of sensation, perception, and knowledge; Socrates went further inward to study human character and purpose. “Tell me, Euthydemus, have you ever gone to Delphi?” “Yes, twice.” “And did you observe what is written on the temple wall—Know thyself?” “I did.” “And did you take no thought of that inscription, or did you attend to it, and try to examine yourself, and ascertain what sort of character you are?”¹⁷⁵

Philosophy, therefore, was for Socrates neither theology nor metaphysics nor physics, but ethics and politics, with logic as an introduction and a means. Coming at the close of the Sophistic period, he perceived that the Sophists had created one of the most critical situations in the history of any culture—the weakening of the supernatural basis of morals. Instead of a frightened return to orthodoxy, he moved forward to the profoundest question that ethics can ask: is a natural ethic possible? Can morality survive without supernatural belief? Can philosophy, by molding an effective secular moral code, save the civilization which its freedom of thought has threatened to destroy? When, in the Euthyphro, Socrates argues that the good is not good because the gods approve of it, but that the gods approve of it because it is good, he is proposing a philosophical revolution. His conception of good, so far from being theological, is earthly to the point of being utilitarian. Goodness, he thinks, is not general and abstract, but specific and practical, “good for something.” Goodness and beauty are forms of usefulness and human advantage; even a dung basket is beautiful if it is well formed for its purpose.¹⁷⁶ Since (Socrates thought) there is nothing else so useful as knowledge, knowledge is the highest virtue, and all vice is ignorance¹⁷⁸—though “virtue” (arete) here means excellence rather than sinlessness. Without proper knowledge right action is impossible; with proper knowledge right action is inevitable. Men never do that which they know to be wrong—i.e., unwise, injurious to themselves. The highest good is happiness, the highest means to it is knowledge or intelligence.

If knowledge is the highest excellence, Socrates argues, aristocracy is the best form of government, and democracy is nonsense. “It is absurd,” says Xenophon’s Socrates, “to choose magistrates by lot where no one would dream of drawing lots for a pilot, a mason, a flute-player, or any craftsman at all, though the shortcomings of such men are far less harmful than those that disorder our government.”¹⁷⁹ He condemns the litigiousness of the Athenians, their noisy envy of one another, the bitterness of their political factions and disputes: “On these accounts,” he says, “I am constantly in the greatest fear lest some evil should happen to the state too great for it to bear.”¹⁸⁰ Nothing could save Athens, he thought, except government by knowledge and ability; and this was no more to be determined by voting than the qualifications of a pilot, a musician, a physician, or a carpenter. Nor should power or wealth choose the officials of the state; tyranny and plutocracy are as bad as democracy; the reasonable compromise is an aristocracy in which office would be restricted to those mentally fit and trained for it.¹⁸¹ Despite these criticisms of Athenian democracy Socrates recognized its advantages, and appreciated the liberties and opportunities that it gave him. He smiled at the tendency of some followers to preach a “return to Nature,” and adopted towards Antisthenes and the Cynics the same attitude that Voltaire would take towards Rousseau—that with all its faults civilization is a precious thing, not to be abandoned for any primeval simplicity.¹⁸²

Nevertheless the majority of the Athenians looked upon him with irritated suspicion. The orthodox in religion considered him to be the most dangerous of the Sophists; for while he observed the amenities of the ancient faith he rejected tradition, wished to subject every rule to the scrutiny of reason, founded morality in the individual conscience rather than in social good or the unchanging decrees of heaven, and ended with a skepticism that left reason itself in a mental confusion unsettling to every custom and belief. To him, as well as to Protagoras and Euripides, praisers of the past like Aristophanes attributed the irreligion of the age, the disrespect of the young for the old, the loosened morals of the educated classes, and the disorderly individualism that was consuming Athenian life. Though Socrates refused to support the oligarchic faction, many of its leaders were his pupils or his friends. When one of them, Critias, led the oligarchs in a rich man’s revolution and a ruthless terror, democrats like Anytus and Meletus branded Socrates as the intellectual source of the oligarchic reaction, and determined to remove him from Athenian life.

They succeeded, but they could not destroy his immense influence. The dialectic he had received from Zeno was passed down through Plato to Aristotle, who turned it into a system of logic so complete that it remained unaltered for nineteen hundred years. Upon science his influence was injurious: students were turned away from physical research, and the doctrine of external design offered no encouragement to scientific analysis. The individualist and intellectualist ethic of Socrates had a modest share, perhaps, in undermining Athenian morals; but its emphasis on conscience as above the law became one of the cardinal tenets of Christianity. Through his pupils the many suggestions of his thought became the substance of all the major philosophies of the next two centuries. The most powerful element in his influence was the example of his life and character. He became for Greek history a martyr and a saint; and every generation that sought an exemplar of simple living and brave thinking turned back to nourish its ideals with his memory. “In contemplating the man’s wisdom and nobility of character,” said Xenophon, “I find it beyond my power to forget him, or, in remembering him, to refrain from praising him. And if, among those who make virtue their aim, any one has ever been brought into contact with a person more helpful than Socrates, I count that man worthy to be called most blessed.”¹⁸³

CHAPTER XVII

The Literature of the Golden Age

I. PINDAR

NORMALLY the philosophy of one age is the literature of the next: the ideas and issues that in one generation are fought out on the field of research and speculation provide in the succeeding generation the background of drama, fiction, and poetry. But in Greece the literature did not lag behind the philosophy; the poets were themselves philosophers, did their own thinking, and were in the intellectual vanguard of their time. That same conflict between conservatism and radicalism which agitated Greek religion, science, and philosophy found expression also in poetry and drama, even in the writing of history. Since excellence of artistic form was added, in Greek letters, to depth of speculative thought, the literature of the Golden Age reached heights never touched again until the days of Shakespeare and Montaigne.

Because of this burden of thought, and the decay of royal or aristocratic patronage, the fifth century was less rich than the sixth in lyric poetry as an independent art. Pindar is the transition between the two periods: he inherits the lyric form, but fills it with dramatic magnificence; after him poetry breaks through its traditional limits, and, in the Dionysian drama, combines with religion, music, and the dance to make a greater vehicle for the splendor and passion of the Golden Age.

Pindar came of a Theban family that traced its lineage back to primitive times, and claimed to include many of the ancient heroes commemorated in his verse. His uncle, an accomplished flutist, passed down to Pindar much of his love for music, and something of his skill. For advanced musical instruction the parents sent the boy to Athens, where Lasus and Agathocles taught him choral composition. Before he was twenty—i.e., by 502—he returned to Thebes, and studied with the poetess Corinna. Five times he competed against Corinna in public song, and five times was beaten; but Corinna was very pleasing to behold, and the judges were men.¹ Pindar called her a sow, Simonides a crow, himself an eagle.² Despite this myopia his reputation rose so high that his fellow Thebans soon concocted a story that told how once, as the young poet slept in the fields, some bees had settled upon his lips, and had left their honey there.³ Soon he was handsomely commissioned to write odes in honor of princes and rich men; he was the guest of noble families in Rhodes, Tenedos, Corinth, and Athens, and for a time lived as royal bard at the courts of Alexander I of Macedon, Theron of Acragas, and Hieron I of Syracuse. Usually his songs were paid for in advance, very much as if a city should in our days engage a composer to celebrate it with an original composition for chorus and dance, and to conduct the performance himself. When Pindar returned to Thebes, towards his forty-fourth year, he was acclaimed as Boeotia’s greatest gift to Greece.

He worked painstakingly, composing the music for each poem, and often training a chorus to sing it. He wrote hymns and paeans for deities, dithyrambs for the festivals of Dionysus, parthenaia for maidens, enkomia for celebrities, skolia for banquets, threnoi, or dirges, for funerals, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for winners at the Panhellenic competitions. Of all these only fortyfive odes remain, named after the games whose heroes they honored. Of these odes, again, only the words survive, none of the music; in judging them, we are in the position of some future historian who, having the librettos of Wagner’s operas but nothing of the scores, should list him as a poet rather than a composer, and should rank him by the words that once attended upon his harmonies. Or if we picture some Chinese scholar, unfamiliar with Christian story, reading in one evening, in lame translation, ten Bach chorals divorced from their music and ritual, we shall measure our justice to Pindar. When read today, ode after ode, in the silence of the study, he is beyond comparison the dreariest outpost in the classical landscape.

Only the analogy of music can explain the structure of these poems. To Pindar, as to Simonides and Bacchylides, the form to be followed in an epinician ode was as compulsory as sonata form in the sonatas and symphonies of modern Europe. First came the statement of the theme—the name and story of the athlete who had gained the prize, or of the nobleman whose horses had drawn their chariot to victory. In general Pindar celebrates “the wisdom of man, and his beauty, and the splendor of his fame.”⁴ In truth he was not much interested in his formal subject; he sang in praise of runners, courtesans, and kings, and was willing to accept any promptly paying tyrant as a patron saint⁵ if the occasion gave scope to his rich imagination and his proudly intricate verse. His topic might be anything from a mule race to the glory of Greek civilization in all its variety and spread. He was loyal to Thebes, and not more inspired than the Delphic oracle when he defended Theban neutrality in the Persian War; but later he was ashamed of his error, and went out of his way to praise the leader of the Greek defense as “renowned Athens, rich, violet-crowned, worthy of song, bulwark of Hellas, god-protected city.”⁶ The Athenians are said to have given him ten thousand drachmas ($10,000) for the dithyrambs, or processional song, in which these lines occurred;⁷ Thebes, we are less reliably informed, fined him for his implied reproof, and Athens paid the fine.⁸

The second part of a Pindaric ode was a selection from Greek mythology. Here Pindar was discouragingly lavish; as Corinna complained, he “sowed with the whole sack rather than with the hand.”⁹ He had a high conception of the gods, and honored them as among his best clients. He was the favorite poet of the Delphic priesthood; during his life he received many privileges from them, and after his death his spirit was, with Caledonian generosity, invited to share in the first fruits offered at Apollo’s shrine.¹⁰ He was the last defender of the orthodox faith; even the pious Aeschylus seems wildly heretical beside him; Pindar would have been horrified by the blasphemies of Prometheus Bound. Sometimes he rises to an almost monotheistic conception of Zeus as “the All, governing all things and seeing all things.”¹¹ He is a friend of the Mysteries, and shares the Orphic hope of paradise. He preaches the divine origin and destiny of the individual soul,¹² and offers one of the earliest descriptions of a Last Judgment, a Heaven, and a Hell. “Immediately after death the lawless spirits suffer punishment, and the sins committed in this realm of Zeus are judged by One who passeth sentence stern and inevitable.”

But in sunshine ever fair

Abide the good, and all their nights and days

An equal splendor wear.

And never as of old with thankless toil

For their poor empty needs they vex the soil,

And plough the watery seas;

But dwelling with the glorious gods in ease

A tearless life they pass,

Whose joy on earth it was

To keep their plighted word. But, far from these,

Torments the rest sustain too dark for human gaze.¹³

The third and concluding section of a Pindaric ode was usually a word of moral counsel. We must not expect any subtle philosophy here; Pindar was no Athenian, and had probably never met or read a Sophist; his intellect was consumed in his art, and no force remained for original thought. He was satisfied to urge his victorious athletes or princes to be modest in their success, and to show respect for the gods, their fellow men, and their own best selves. Now and then he mingled reproof with praise, and dared to warn Hieron against greed;¹⁴ but neither was he afraid to say a kind word for that most maligned and loved of all goods—money. He abhorred the revolutionists of Sicily, and warned them almost in the words of Confucius: “Even for the feeble it is an easy thing to shake a city to its foundation, but it is a sore struggle to set it in its place again.”¹⁵ He liked the moderate democracy of Athens after Salamis, but sincerely believed aristocracy to be the least harmful of all forms of government. Ability, he thought, lies in the blood rather than in schooling, and tends to appear in families that have shown it before. Only good blood can prepare a man for those rare deeds that ennoble and justify human life. “Things of a day! What are we and what not? A dream about a shadow is man; yet when some god-given splendor falls, a glory of light comes over him, and his life is sweet.”¹⁶

Pindar was not popular in his lifetime, and for some centuries yet he will continue to enjoy the lifeless immortality of those writers whom all men praise and no one reads. While the world was moving forward he asked it to stand still, and it left him so far behind that though younger than Aeschylus he seems older than Alcman. He wrote a poetry as compact, involved, and devious as Tacitus’ prose, in an artificial and deliberately archaic dialect of his own, in meters so elaborate that few poets have ever cared to follow them,* and so varied that only two of the forty-five odes have the same metrical form. He is so obscure, despite the naïvete of his thought, that grammarians spend a lifetime unraveling his Teutonic constructions, only to find, beneath them, a mine of sonorous platitudes. If despite these faults, and his frigid formality, and turgid metaphors, and tiresome mythology, some curious scholars are still persuaded to read him, it is because his narratives are swift and vivid, his simple morality is sincere, and the splendor of his language lifts to a passing grandeur even the humblest themes.

He lived to the age of eighty, secure in Thebes from the turmoil of Athenian thought. “Dear to a man,” he sang, “is his own home city, his comrades and his kinsmen, so that he is well content. But to foolish men belongeth a love for things afar.”¹⁷ Ten days before his end (442), we are told, he sent to ask the oracle of Ammon, “What is best for man? “—to which the Egyptian oracle answered, like a Greek, “Death.”¹⁸ Athens put up a statue to him at the public cost, and the Rhodians inscribed his seventh Olympian ode—a panegyric of their island—in letters of gold upon a temple wall. When, in 335, Alexander ordered rebellious Thebes to be burned to the ground he commanded his soldiers to leave unharmed the house in which Pindar had lived and died.

II. THE DIONYSIAN THEATER

The story is told in the Lexicon of Suidas¹⁹ that during the performance of a play by Pratinas, about 500 B.C., the wooden benches upon which the auditors sat gave way, injuring some, and causing such alarm that the Athenians built, on the southern slope of the Acropolis, a theater of stone, words.” Most of the dialogue is spoken or declaimed; some of it is chanted in recitative; but the leading roles contain lyrical passages that must be sung as solos, duets, trios, or in unison or alternation with the chorus.²⁴ The singing is simple, without “parts” or harmony. The accompaniment is usually given by a single flute, and accords with the voices note for note; in this way the words can be followed by the audience, and the poem is not drowned out in the song. These plays cannot be judged by reading them silently; to the Greeks the words are but a part of a complex art form that weaves poetry, music, acting, and the dance into a profound and moving unity.*

Nevertheless the play is the thing, and the prize is awarded less for the music than for the drama, and less for the drama than for the acting; a good actor can make a success of a middling play.²⁶ The actor—who is always a male—is not disdained as in Rome, but is much honored; he is exempt from military service, and is allowed safe passage through the lines in time of war. He is called hypokrites, but this word means answerer—i.e., to the chorus; only later will the actor’s role as an impersonator lead to the use of the word as meaning hypocrite. Actors are organized in a strong union or guild called the Dionysian Artists, which has members throughout Greece. Troupes of players wander from city to city, composing their own plays and music, making their own costumes, and setting up their own stages. As in all times, the incomes of leading actors are very high, that of secondary actors precariously low;²⁷ and the morals of both are what might be expected of men moving from place to place, fluctuating between luxury and poverty, and too high-strung to be capable of a stable and normal life.

In both tragedy and comedy the actor wears a mask, fitted with a resonant mouthpiece of brass. The acoustics of the Greek theater, and the visibility of the stage from every seat, are remarkable; but even so it is found advisable to reinforce the voice of the actor, and help the eye of the distant spectator to distinguish readily the various characters portrayed. All subtle play of vocal or facial expression is sacrificed to these needs. When real individuals are represented on the stage, like the Euripides of’ the Ecclesiazusae and the Socrates of the Clouds, the masks imitate, and largely caricature, their actual features. The masks have come down into the drama from religious performances, in which they were often instruments of terror or humor; in comedy they continue this tradition, and are as grotesque and extravagant as Greek fancy can make them. Just as the actor’s voice is strengthened and his countenance enlarged by the mask, so his dimensions are extended with padding, and his height is enhanced by an onkos, or projection on his head, and by kothornoi, or thick-soled shoes, on his feet. All in all, as Lucian puts it, the ancient actor makes a “hideous and appalling spectacle.”²⁸

The audience is as interesting as the play. Men and women of all ranks are admitted,²⁹ and after 420 all citizens who need it receive from the state the two obols required for entrance. Women sit apart from men, and courtesans have a place to themselves; custom keeps all but the looser ladies away from comedy.³⁰ It is a lively audience, not less or more mannerly than such assemblages in other lands. It eats nuts and fruit and drinks wine as it listens; Aristotle proposes to measure the failure of a play by the amount of food eaten during the presentation. It quarrels about seats, claps and shouts for its favorites, hisses and groans when it is displeased; when moved to more vigorous protest it kicks the benches beneath it; if it becomes angry it may frighten an actor off the stage with olives, figs, or stones.³¹ Aeschines is almost stoned to death for an offensive play; Aeschylus is nearly killed because the audience believes that he has revealed some secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries. A musician who has borrowed a supply of stones to build a house promises to repay it with those that he expects to collect from his next performance.³² Actors sometimes hire a claque to drown out with applause the hisses they fear, and comic actors may throw nuts to the crowd as a bribe to peace.³³ If it wishes, the audience can by deliberate noise prevent a drama from continuing, and compel the performance of the next play;³⁴ in this way a long program may be shortened within bearing.

There are three days of drama at the city Dionysia; on each day five plays are presented—three tragedies and a satyr play by one poet, and a comedy by another.³⁵ The performance begins early in the morning and continues till dusk. Only in exceptional cases is a play performed twice in the Theater of Dionysus; those who have missed it there may see it in the theaters of other Greek cities, or with less splendor on some rural stage in Attica. Between 480 and 380 some two thousand new dramas are performed at Athens.³⁶ In early times the prize for the best tragic trilogy was a goat, for the best comedy a basket of figs and a jug of wine; but in the Golden Age the three prizes for tragedy and the single prize for comedy take the form of grants of money by the state. The ten judges are chosen by lot in the theater itself on the first morning of the competition, out of a large list of candidates nominated by the Council. At the end of the last play each of the judges writes his selections for first, second, and third prizes upon a tablet; the tablets are placed in an urn, and an archon draws out five tablets at random. These five judgments, summed up, constitute the final award, and the other five are destroyed unread; no one, therefore, can know in advance who the judges are to be, or which of them will really judge. Despite these precautions there is some corruption or intimidation of judges.³⁷ Plato complains that the judges, through fear of the crowd, almost always decide according to the applause, and argues that this “theatrocracy” is debasing both the dramatists and the audience.³⁸ When the contest is over the victorious poet and his choragus are crowned with ivy, and sometimes the victors set up a monument, like the choragic monument of Lysicrates, to commemorate their triumph. Even kings compete for this crown.

The size of the theater and the traditions of the festival determine in large measure the nature of the Greek drama. Since nuances cannot be conveyed by facial expression or vocal inflection, subtle character portraits are rare in the Dionysian theater. The Greek drama is a study of fate, or of man in conflict with the gods; the Elizabethan drama is a study of action, or of man in conflict with man; the modern drama is a study of character, or of man in conflict with himself. The Athenian audience knows in advance the destiny of each person represented, and the issue of each action; for religious custom is still strong enough in the fifth century to limit the theme of the Dionysian drama to some story from the accepted myths and legends of the early Greeks.* There is no suspense and no surprise, but, instead, the pleasures of anticipation and recognition. Dramatist after dramatist tells the same tale to the same audience; what differs is the poetry, the music, the interpretation, and the philosophy. Even the philosophy, before Euripides, is determined in large measure by tradition: throughout Aeschylus and Sophocles the prevailing theme is the nemesis of punishment, by jealous gods or impersonal fate, for insolent presumption and irreverent pride (hybris); and the recurring moral is the wisdom of conscience, honor, and a modest moderation (aidos). It is this combination of philosophy with poetry, action, music, song, and dance that makes the Greek drama not only a new form in the history of literature, but one that almost at the outset achieves a grandeur never equaled again.

III. AESCHYLUS

Not quite at the outset; for as many talents, in heredity and history, prepare the way for a genius, so some lesser playwrights, who may here be forgotten with honor, intervened between Thespis and Aeschylus. Perhaps it was the successful resistance to Persia that gave Athens the pride and stimulus necessary to an age of great drama, while the wealth that came with trade and empire after the war provided for the costly Dionysian contests in dithyrambic singing and the choral play. Aeschylus felt both the stimulus and the pride in person. Like so many Greek writers of the fifth century, he lived as well as wrote, and knew how to do as well as to speak. In 499, at the age of twenty-six, he produced his first play; in 490 he and his two brothers fought at Marathon, and so bravely that Athens ordered a painting to commemorate their deeds; in 484 he won his first prize at the Dionysian festival; in 480 he fought at Artemisium and Salamis, and in 479 at Plataea; in 476 and 470 he visited Syracuse, and was honored at the court of Hieron I; in 468, after dominating Athenian literature for a generation, he lost the first prize for drama to the youthful Sophocles; in 467 he recaptured supremacy with his Seven against Thebes; in 458 he won his last and greatest victory with the Oresteia trilogy; in 456 he was again in Sicily; and there, in that year, he died.

It took a man of such energy to mold the Greek drama into its classic form. It was Aeschylus who added a second actor to the one drawn out from the chorus by Thespis, and thereby completed the transformation of the Dionysian chant from an oratorio into a play.* He wrote seventy (some say ninety) dramas, of which seven remain. Of these, the earliest three are minor works;* the most famous is the Prometheus Bound; the greatest make up the Oresteia trilogy.

The Prometheus Bound, too, may have been part of a trilogy, though no ancient authority vouches for this. We hear of a satyr play by Aeschylus called Prometheus the Fire Bringer; but it was produced apart from the Prometheus Bound, in a quite different combination.⁴¹ Fragments survive of a Prometheus Unbound by Aeschylus; these are well-nigh meaningless, but anxious scholars assure us that if we had the full text we should find Aeschylus answering satisfactorily all the heresies which the extant play puts into the hero’s lines. Even so it is noteworthy that an Athenian audience, at a religious festival, should have put up with the Titan’s blasphemies. As the play opens we find Prometheus being chained to a rock in the Caucasus by Hephaestus at the command of a Zeus irate because Prometheus has taught men the art of fire. Hephaestus speaks:

High-thoughted son of Themis, who is sage!

Thee loath I loath must rivet fast in chains

Against this rocky height unclomb by man,

Where never human voice nor face shall find

Out thee who lov’st them; and thy beauty’s flower,

Scorched in the sun’s clear heat shall fade away.

Night shall come up with garniture of stars

To comfort thee with shadow, and the sun

Disperse with retrickt beams the morning frosts;

But through all dangers sense of present woe

Shall vex thee sore, because with none of them

There comes a hand to free. Such fruit is plucked

From love of man! . . . For Zeus is stern,

And new-made kings are cruel.⁴²

Hanging helpless on the crag, Prometheus hurls defiance to Olympus, and recounts proudly the steps by which he brought civilization to primitive men, who till then

lived like silly ants beneath the ground

In hollow caves unsunned. There came to them

No steadfast sign of winter, nor of spring

Flower-perfumed, nor of summer full of fruit;

But blindly and lawlessly they did all things,

Until I taught them how the stars do rise

And set in mystery, and devised for them

Number, the inducer of philosophies,

The synthesis of letters, and besides,

The artificer of all things, memory

That sweet muse-mother. I was first to yoke

The servile beasts. . . .

And none but I originated ships. . . .

And I,

Who did devise for mortals all these arts,

Have no device left now to save myself.⁴³

The whole earth mourns with him. “There is a cry in the waves of the sea as they fall together, and a groaning in the deep; a wail comes up from the cavern realms of death.” All the nations send their condolences to this political prisoner, and bid him remember that suffering visits all: “Grief walks the earth, and sits down at the feet of each by turns.” But they do nothing to free him. Oceanus advises him to yield, “seeing that who reigns, reigns by cruelty instead of right”; and the chorus of Oceanids, daughters of the sea, wonder whether humanity deserves to be suffered for with such a crucifixion. “Nay, thine was a helpless sacrifice, O beloved. . . . Didst thou not see the race of men, how little in effort and energy, dreamers bound in chains?”⁴⁴ Nevertheless they so admire him that when Zeus threatens to hurl him down into Tartarus they stay by him, and face with him the thunderbolt that blasts them and Prometheus into the abyss. But Prometheus, being a god, is denied the easement of death. In the lost conclusion of the trilogy he is raised up from Tartarus to be again chained to a mountain rock, and a vulture is commissioned by Zeus to gnaw out the Titan’s heart. The heart grows by night as fast as the vulture consumes it by day; in this way Prometheus suffers through thirteen generations of men. Then the kindly giant Heracles kills the vulture, and persuades Zeus to free Prometheus. The Titan repents, makes his peace with Omnipotence, and places upon his finger the iron ring of necessity.

In this simple and powerful trilogy Aeschylus set the theme of Greek drama—the struggle of human will against inescapable destiny—and the theme of the life of Greece in the fifth century—the conflict between rebellious thought and traditional belief. His conclusion is conservative, but he knows the case for the rebel, and gives it all his sympathy; not even in Euripides shall we find so critical a view of Olympus. This is another Paradise Lost in which the Fallen Angel, despite the poet’s piety, is the hero of the tale. Probably Milton often recalled Aeschylus’ Titan when he composed such eloquent speeches for Satan. Goethe was fond of this play, and used Prometheus as a mouthpiece in irreverent youth; Byron made him the model of nearly all his selves; and Shelley, always at odds with fate, brought the story back to life in Prometheus Unbound, where the rebel never yields. The legend hides a dozen allegories: suffering is the fruit of the tree of knowledge; to know the future is to gnaw one’s heart away; the liberator is always crucified; and in the end one must accept limits, man muss entsagen, must accomplish his purpose within the nature of things. This is a noble theme, and helps the majestic language of Aeschylus to make the Prometheus a tragedy in the “grand style.” Never has the war between knowledge and superstition, enlightenment and obscurantism, genius and dogma, been more powerfully pictured, or lifted to a higher reach of symbol and utterance. “The other productions of the Greek tragedians,” said Schlegel, “are so many tragedies; but this is Tragedy herself.”⁴⁵

Nevertheless the Oresteia is greater still—by common consent the finest achievement in Greek drama, perhaps in all drama.⁴⁶ It was produced in 458, probably two years after Prometheus Bound, and two years before the author’s death. The theme is the fateful breeding of violence by violence, and the inescapable punishment, through generation after generation, of insolent pride and excess. We call it a legend but the Greeks, perhaps rightly, called it history. The story, as told by each of the greater dramatists of Greece, might be called The Children of Tantalus, for it was he, the Phrygian king so recklessly proud in his wealth, who began the long chain of crime, and called down the vengeance of the Furies, by stealing the nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and giving the divine food to Pelops, his son; in every age some men acquire more wealth than befits a man, and use it to spoil their children. We have seen how Pelops, by foul means, won the throne of Elis, slew his accomplice, and married the daughter of the king whom he had deceived and killed. By Hippodameia he had three children: Thyestes, Aerope, and Atreus. Thyestes seduced Aerope; Atreus, to avenge his sister, served up his brother’s children to him at a banquet; whereupon Aegisthus, son of Thyestes by Thyestes’ daughter, vowed vengeance upon Atreus and his line. Atreus had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Agamemnon married Clytaemnestra, and had by her two daughters, Iphigenia and Electra, and one son, Orestes. At Aulis, where his ships were becalmed on the way to Troy, Agamemnon, to the horror of Clytaemnestra, sacrificed Iphigenia to induce the winds to blow. While Agamemnon besieged Troy, Aegisthus courted his brooding wife, won her, and plotted with her to kill the King. It is at this point that Aeschylus takes up the tale.

The news has come to Argos that the war is over, and proud Agamemnon—“robed in steel, and armies trembled at his wrath”—has landed on Peloponnesian shores, and is approaching Mycenae. A Chorus of Elders appears before the royal palace, and in ominous chant recalls Agamemnon’s abandonment of Iphigenia:

In that which Must Be he armed him slowly,

And a strange wind within his bosom tossed,

A wind of dark thought, unclean, unholy;

And he rose up, daring to the uttermost.

For men are boldened by a Blindness, straying

Toward base desire, which brings grief hereafter,

Yea, and itself is grief.

So this man hardened to his own child’s slaying,

As help to avenge him for a woman’s laughter,

And bring his ships relief. . . .

With violence and a curb’s voiceless wrath

Her stole of saffron to the ground she threw,

And her eye with an arrow of pity found its path

To each man’s heart that slew:

A face in a picture, striving amazedly;

The little maid who danced at her father’s board,

The innocent voice man’s love came never nigh,

Who joined to his her little paean-cry

When the third cup was poured.⁴⁷

Agamemnon’s herald enters to announce the coming of the King. Aeschylus realizes with fine imagination the joy of the simple soldier as he sets foot, after a long absence, upon his native soil; now, says the herald, “I am ready, if God will, to die.” He describes to the Chorus the terror and filth of the war, the rain that sent a moisture into the bones, the vermin that multiplied in the hair, the breathless heat of Ilion’s summer, and the winter so cold that all the birds fell dead. Clytaemnestra comes from the palace, somber, nervous, and yet proud, and orders rich hangings to be strewn for Agamemnon’s path. The King enters in the royal chariot, escorted by his troops, and erect in the pride of victory. Behind him is another chariot, bearing the darkly beautiful Cassandra, Trojan princess and prophetess, the resentful slave of Agamemnon’s lust, who bitterly predicts his punishment, and gloomily foresees her own death. With clever speech Clytaemnestra recounts to the King her years of longing for this return. “For you indeed the rushing fountains of my tears have run dry, and there is no drop left. But in my eyes, worn with late watching, you may see how I sorrowed for the signals of your victory that ever tarried; and in my disturbed sleep I started at the faint buzzing of the gnat’s wing, for I dreamt of you long tales of woe, crowded into a short moment of repose.”⁴⁸ He suspects her sincerity, and reproves her dourly for the lavish outlay of broidered hangings under his horses’ feet; but he follows her into the palace, and Cassandra resignedly accompanies him. Through an intense pause in the action the Chorus intones softly a song of evil premonition. Then from within comes the cry towards which every line of the drama has moved, the death cry of Agamemnon slain by Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. The portals open; Clytaemnestra is shown with ax in hand and blood on her brow, standing triumphant over the corpses of Cassandra and the King; and the Chorus chants the end:

Would God that suddenly,

With no great agony,

No long sick-watch to keep,

My hour would come to me,

My hour, and presently

Bring the eternal, the

Unwaking Sleep,

Now that my Shepherd, he

Whose love watched over me,

Lies in the deep.⁴⁹

The second play in the trilogy, the Choephoroe, or Libation Bearers, takes its title from the chorus of women who bring offerings to the grave of the King. Clytaemnestra has sent her young son Orestes to be reared in distant Phocis, hoping that he may forget his father’s death. But old men there teach him the ancient law of vengeance: “The shed drop doth crave new blood”; the state, in those dark days, left the punishment of murder to the dead man’s kin; and men believed that the soul of the slain would know no peace till he had been avenged. Orestes, haunted and horrified with the thought of his mission—to kill his mother and Aegisthus—comes secretly to Argos with his comrade Pylades, seeks out his father’s tomb, and lays upon it a lock of his hair. Hearing the approach of the Libation Bearers, the young men withdraw, and listen in fascination as Electra, Orestes’ brooding sister, comes with the women, stands over the grave, and calls upon Agamemnon’s spirit to arouse Orestes to avenge him. Orestes reveals himself; and from her bitter heart she pours into his simple mind the thought that he must kill their mother. The youths, disguised as merchants, proceed to the royal palace; Clytaemnestra softens them with hospitality; but when Orestes tests her by saying that the boy she sent to Phocis is dead, he is shocked to see a secret joy hiding in her grief. She calls Aegisthus to share with him the news that the avenger whom they feared is no more. Orestes slays him, drives his mother into the palace, and comes out a moment later already half insane with the consciousness that he is a matricide.

While I am still not mad I here declare

To all who love me, and confess, that I

Have slain my mother.⁵⁰

In the third play Orestes is pursued, in the poet’s externalization of the boy’s wild fancy, by the Erinnyes, or Furies, whose task it is to punish crime; and from their euphemistic, deprecatory title, the Eumenides, or Well-Wishers, the play derives its name. Orestes is an outcast, shunned by all men; wherever he goes the Furies hang over him as black ghosts crying out for his blood. He flings himself upon the altar of Apollo at Delphi, and Apollo comforts him; but the shade of Clytaemnestra rises from the earth to urge the Furies not to desist from torturing her son. Orestes goes to Athens, kneels before Athena’s shrine, and cries out to her for deliverance. Athena hears him, and calls him “perfect by suffering.” When the Erinnyes protest she summons them to try Orestes’ case before the Council of the Areopagus; the concluding scene shows this strange trial, symbolical of the replacement of blood revenge with law. Athena, goddess of the city, presides; the Furies state the case for vengeance against Orestes, and Apollo defends him. The court divides evenly; Athena casts the deciding ballot in favor of Orestes, and declares him free. She solemnly establishes the Council of the Areopagus as henceforth the supreme court of Attica, whose swift condemnation of the murderer shall free the land from feuds, and whose wisdom will guide the state through the dangers that beset every people. The goddess by her fair speech appeases the disappointed Furies, and so wins them that their leader says, “This day a new Order is born.”

After the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Oresteia is the highest achievement in Greek literature. Here is a breadth of conception, a unity of thought and execution, a power of dramatic development, an understanding of character, and a splendor of style which in their sum we shall not find again before Shakespeare. The trilogy is as closely knit as the three acts of a well-designed drama; each part foreshadows and requires the next with logical inevitability. As play succeeds play the terror of the theme grows until we begin dimly to realize how deeply this story must have moved the Greeks. It is true that there is too much talk, even for four murders; that the lyrics are often obscure, their metaphors exaggerated, their language sometimes heavy and rough and strained. Nevertheless these chorals are supreme in their kind, full of grandeur and tenderness, eloquent with their plea for a new religion of forgiveness, and for the virtues of a political order that was passing away.

For the Oresteia is as conservative as the Prometheus is radical, though only two years seem to have separated them in time. In 462 Ephialtes deprived the Areopagus of its powers; in 461 he was assassinated; in 458 Aeschylus offered in the Oresteia a defense of the Council of the Areopagus as the wisest body in the Athenian government. The poet was now full of years, and could understand the old more easily than the young; like Aristophanes he longed for the virtues of the men of Marathon. Athenaeus would have us believe that Aeschylus was a great drinker;⁵¹ but in the Oresteia he is a Puritan preaching a sermon in buskins on sin and its punishment, and the wisdom born of suffering. The law of hybris and nemesis is another doctrine of karma, or of original sin; every evil deed will be found out, and be avenged in one life or another. In this way Greek thought made its trial at reconciling evil with God: all suffering is due to sin, even if it is the sin of a generation that is dead. The author of Prometheus was no naive pietist; his plays, even in the Oresteia, are studded with heresies; he was attacked for revealing ritual secrets, and was saved only by the intercession of his brother Ameinias, who bared before the Assembly the wounds he had received at Salamis.⁵² But Aeschylus was convinced that morality, to hold its own against unsocial impulse, required supernatural sanctions; he hoped that

One there is who heareth on high—

Some Pan or Zeus, some seer Apollo—

And sendeth down, for the law transgressed,

The Wrath of the Feet that follow.⁵³

—i.e., the Furies of conscience and retribution. Therefore he speaks with a solemn reverence for religion, and makes an effort to reach beyond polytheism to the conception of one God.

Zeus, Zeus, whate’er He be,

If this name He love to hear,

This He shall be called of me.

Searching earth and sea and air

Refuge nowhere can I find

Save Him only, if my mind

Will cast off, before it die,

The burden of this vanity.⁵⁴

He identifies Zeus with the personified Nature of Things, the Law or Reason of the World; “The Law that is Fate and the Father and All-comprehending are here met together as one.”⁵⁵

Perhaps these concluding lines of his masterpiece were his last words as a poet. Two years after the Oresteia we find him again in Sicily. Some believe that the audience, being more radical than the judges, did not like the trilogy; but this hardly accords with the fact that the Athenians, a few years later, and directly contrary to custom, decreed that his plays might be repeated in the Theater of Dionysus, and that a chorus should be granted to anyone who offered to produce them. Many did, and Aeschylus continued to win prizes after his death. Meanwhile in Sicily, says an old story, an eagle had killed him by dropping a tortoise upon his bald head, mistaking it for a stone.⁵⁶ There he was buried over his own epitaph, so strangely silent about his plays, so humanly proud of his scars:

Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus;

Of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,

Or the long-haired Persian, who knows it well.

IV. SOPHOCLES

The first prize for tragedy was won from Aeschylus in 468 by a newcomer, aged twenty-seven, and bearing a name that meant the Wise and Honored One. Sophocles was the most fortunate of men, and almost the darkest of pessimists. He came from Colonus, a suburb of Athens, and was the son of a sword manufacturer, so that the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, which impoverished nearly all Athenians, left the dramatist a comfortable income.⁵⁷ In addition to wealth he had genius, beauty, and good health. He won the double prize for wrestling and music—a combination that would have pleased Plato; his skill as a ballplayer and a harpist enabled him to give public performances in both fields; and after the battle of Salamis it was he who was chosen by the city to lead the nude youths of Athens in a dance and song of victory.⁵⁸ Even in later years he was handsome; the Lateran Museum statue shows him old and bearded and rounded, but still vigorous and tall. He grew up in the happiest age of Athens; he was the friend of Pericles, and held high offices under him; in 443 he was Imperial Treasurer; in 440 he was one of the generals who commanded the Athenian forces in Pericles’ expedition against Samos—though it should be added that Pericles preferred his poetry to his strategy. After the Athenian debacle in Syracuse he was appointed to the Committee of Public Safety;⁵⁹ and in this capacity he voted for the oligarchical constitution of 411. His character pleased the people more than his politics; he was genial, witty, unassuming, pleasure-loving, and endowed with a charm that atoned for all his errors. He had a fancy for money⁶⁰ and boys,⁶¹ but in his old age he turned his favor to courtesans.⁶² He was very pious, and occasionally filled the office of priest.⁶³

He wrote 113 plays; we have only seven, and do not know the order in which they were produced. Eighteen times he won the first award at the Dionysian, twice at the Lenaean, festivals; he received his first prize at twenty-five, his last at eighty-five; for thirty years he ruled the Athenian stage more completely than Pericles contemporaneously ruled Athens. He increased the number of actors to three, and played a role himself until he lost his voice. He (and after him Euripides) abandoned the Aeschylean form of trilogy, preferring to compete with three independent plays. Aeschylus was interested in cosmic themes that overshadowed the persons of his drama; Sophocles was interested in character, and was almost modern in his flair for psychology. The Trachinian Women is on its surface a sensational melodrama: Deianeira, jealous of her husband and Heracles’ love for Iola, sends him unwittingly a poisoned robe, and, when it consumes him, kills herself; what draws Sophocles here is not the punishment of Heracles, which would have seemed central to Aeschylus—nor even the passion of love, which would have attracted Euripides—but the psychology of jealousy. So in the Ajax no attention is paid to the mighty deeds of the hero; what lures the author is the study of a man going mad. In the Philoctetes there is almost no action, but a frank analysis of injured simplicity and diplomatic dishonesty. In the Electra the story is as slight as it is old; Aeschylus was fascinated by the moral issues involved; Sophocles almost ignores them in his eagerness to study with psychoanalytic ruthlessness the young woman’s hatred of her mother. The play has given its name to a neurosis once widely discussed, as Oedipus the King has provided a name for another.

Oedipus Tyrannus is the most famous of Greek dramas. Its opening scene is impressive: a motley throng of men, women, boys, girls, and infants sit before the royal palace in Thebes, carrying boughs of laurel and olive as symbols of supplication. A plague has fallen upon the city, and the people have gathered to beg King Oedipus to offer some appeasing sacrifice to the gods. An oracle announces that the plague will leave Thebes with the unknown assassin of Laius, the former king. Oedipus lays a bitter curse upon the murderer, whoever he may be, whose crime has brought such misery to Thebes. This is a perfect instance of that method which Horace advised, of plunging in medias res, and letting explanations enter afterward. But the audience, of course, knew the story, for the tale of Laius, Oedipus, and the Sphinx was part of the folklore of the Greeks. Tradition said that a curse had been laid upon Laius and his children because he had introduced an unnatural vice into Hellas;⁶⁴ the consequences of this sin, ruining generation after generation, formed a typical theme for Greek tragedy. Laius and his queen Jocasta, said an oracle, would have a son who would slay his father and marry his mother. For once in the world’s history two parents wanted a girl for their first child. But a son came; and to avoid fulfillment of the oracle he was exposed on the hills. A shepherd found him, called him Oedipus from his swollen feet, and gave him to the king and queen of Corinth, who reared him as their son. Grown to manhood, Oedipus learned, again from the oracle, that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Believing the king and queen of Corinth to be his parents, he fled from that city and took the road to Thebes. On the way he met an old man, quarreled with him, and slew him, not knowing that the old man was his father. Nearing Thebes he encountered the Sphinx, a creature with the face of a woman, the tail of a lion, and the wings of a bird. To Oedipus the Sphinx presented its renowned riddle: “What is that which is four-footed, three-footed, and two-footed?” All who failed to answer correctly were destroyed by the Sphinx; and the terrified Thebans, longing to clear the highway of this monster, had vowed to have as their next king whoever should solve the riddle, for the Sphinx had agreed to commit suicide if anyone answered it. Oedipus replied: “Man; for as a child he crawls on four feet, as an adult he walks on two, and as an old man he adds a cane.” It was a lame answer, but the Sphinx accepted it, and loyally plunged to its death. The Thebans hailed Oedipus as their savior, and when Laius failed to return they made the newcomer king. Obeying the custom of the land, Oedipus married the queen, and had by her four children: Antigone, Polynices, Eteocles, and Ismene. In the second scene in Sophocles’ play—the most powerful scene in Greek drama—an old high priest, commanded by Oedipus to reveal, if he can, the identity of Laius’ murderer, names Oedipus himself. Nothing could be more tragic than the King’s reluctant and terrified realization that he is the slayer of his father and the mate of his mother. Jocasta refuses to believe it, and explains it away as a Freudian dream: “It has been the lot of many men in dreams,” she reassures Oedipus, “to think themselves partners of their mother’s bed; but he passes through life most easily to whom these things become trifles.”⁶⁵ When the identification is complete she hangs herself; and Oedipus, mad with remorse, gouges out his own eyes, and leaves Thebes as an exile, with only Antigone to help him.

In Oedipus at Colonus, the second play of an unintentional trilogy,* the former king is a white-haired outcast leaning upon his daughter’s arm and begging his bread from town to town. He comes in his wandering to shady Colonus, and Sophocles takes the opportunity to sing to his native village, and its faithful olive groves, an untranslatable song which ranks high in Greek poetry:

Stranger, where thy feet now rest

In this land of horse and rider,

Here is earth all earth excelling,

White Colonus here doth shine.

Oftenest here, and homing best

Where the close green coverts hide her,

Warbling her sweet mournful tale,

Sings the melodious nightingale . . .

Fresh with heavenly dews, and crowned

With earliest white in shining cluster,

Each new morn the young narcissus

Blooms. . . .

And a marvelous herb of the soil grows here,

Whose match I never had heard it sung

In the Dorian Isle of Pelops near

Or in Asia far hath sprung.

’Tis a plant that flourishes unsubdued,

Self-engendering, self-renewed,

To her armed foes’ dismay:

That never so fair but in this land bloomed,—

With the grey-blue silvery leaf soft-plumed,

Her nurturing Olive-Spray.

No force, no ravaging hand shall raze it,

In youth so rash or in age so wise,

For the orb of Zeus in heaven surveys it,

And blue-grey light of Athena’s eyes.⁶⁶

An oracle has foretold that Oedipus will die in the precincts of the Eumenides; and when he learns that he is now in their sacred grove at Colonus the old man, having found no loveliness in life, thinks that here it would be sweet to die. To Theseus, King of Athens, he speaks lines that sum up with clairvoyant insight the forces that were weakening Greece—the decay of the soil, of faith, of morals, and of men:

Only to gods in heaven

Comes no old age, nor death of anything;

All else is turmoiled by our master Time.

The earth’s strength fades, and manhood’s glory fades,

Faith dies, and unfaith blossoms like a flower.

And who shall find in the open streets of men,

Or secret places of his own heart’s love,

One wind blow true forever?⁶⁷

Then, seeming to hear the call of a god, Oedipus bids a tender farewell to Antigone and Ismene, and walks into the dark grove, Theseus alone accompanying him.

Going on

A little space we turned. And lo, we saw

The man no more; but he, the King,* was there,

Holding a hand to shade his eyes, as one

To whom there comes a vision drear and dread

He may not bear to look upon. . . .

What form of death

He died, knows no man but our Theseus only. . . .

But either some one whom the gods had sent

To guide his steps, or else the abyss of earth

In friendly mood had opened wide its jaws

Without one pang. And so the man was led

With naught to mourn for—did not leave the world

As worn with pain and sickness; but his end,

If any ever was, was wonderful.⁶⁸

The last play in the sequence, but apparently the first of the three to be composed, carries the faithful Antigone to her grave. Hearing that her brothers Polynices and Eteocles are warring for the kingdom, she hurries back to Thebes in the hope of bringing peace. But she is ignored, and the brothers fight to their death. Creon, ally of Eteocles, seizes the throne, and, as punishment for Polynices’ rebellion, forbids his burial. Antigone, sharing the Greek belief that the spirit of the dead is tortured so long as the corpse is not interred, violates the edict and buries Polynices. Meanwhile the chorus sings one of the most renowned of Sophocles’ odes:

Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man.

Over the surging sea, with a whitening south wind wan,

Through the foam of the firth man makes his perilous way;

And the eldest of deities, Earth that knows not toil or decay,

Ever he furrows and scores, as his team, year in year out,

With breed of the yoked horse the ploughshare turneth about.

The light-witted birds of the air, the beasts of the weald and the wood,

He traps with his woven snare, and the brood of the briny flood.

Master of cunning he: the savage bull, and the hart

Who roams the mountain free, are tamed by his infinite art;

And the shaggy rough-maned steed is broken to bear the bit.

Speech, and the wind-swift speed of counsel and civic wit,

He hath learned for himself all these; and the arrowy rain to fly,

And the nipping airs that freeze, ’neath the open winter sky.

He hath provision for all; fell plague he hath learned to endure;

Safe whate’er may befall: yet for death he hath found no cure.⁶⁹

Antigone is condemned by Creon to be buried alive. Creon’s son Haemon protests against the awful sentence, and, being repulsed swears to his father “thou shalt never more set eyes upon my face.” Here for a moment love plays a part in a Sophoclean tragedy and the poet intones to Eros a hymn long remembered in antiquity:

Love resistless in fight, all yield at a glance of thine eye;

Love who pillowed all night on a maiden’s cheek doth lie;

Over the upland folds thou roamest, and the trackless sea.

Love the gods captive holds; shall mortals not yield to thee?⁷⁰

Haemon disappears; and in search for him Creon orders his soldiers to open the cave in which Antigone has been entombed. There they find Antigone dead and beside her Haemon, resolved to die.

We looked, and in the cavern’s vaulted gloom

I saw the maiden lying strangled there,

A noose of linen twined about her neck;

And hard beside her, clasping her cold form,

Her lover lay bewailing his dead bride . . .

When the King saw him, with a terrible groan

He moved towards him, crying, “O my son,

What hast thou done? What ailed thee? What mischance

Has reft thee of thy reason? Oh, come forth,

Come forth, my son; thy father supplicates.”

But the son glared at him with tiger eyes,

Spat in his face, and then, without a word,

Drew his two-hilted sword and smote, but

Missed his father flying backwards. Then the boy,

Wroth with himself, poor wretch, incontinent,

Fell on his sword and drove it through his side

Home; but, yet breathing, clasped in his lax arms

The maid, her pallid cheek incarnadined

With his expiring gasps. So there they lay

Two corpses, one in death.⁷¹

The dominant qualities of these plays, surviving time and translation, are beauty of style and mastery of technique. Here is the typically “classic” form of utterance: polished, placid, and serene; vigorous but restrained, dignified but graceful, with the strength of Pheidias and the smooth delicacy of Praxiteles. Classic too is the structure; every line is relevant, and moves towards that moment in which the action finds its climax and its significance. Each of these plays is built like a temple, wherein every part is carefully finished in detail, but has its proper and subordinate place in the whole; except that the Philoctetes lazily accepts the deus ex machina (which is a jest in Euripides) as a serious solution of a knotty plot. Here, as in Aeschylus, the drama moves upward towards the hybris of some crowning insolence (as in Oedipus’ bitter curse upon the unknown murderer); turns around some anagnorisis or sudden recognition, some peripeteia or reversal of fortune; arid moves downward toward the nemesis of inevitable punishment. Aristotle, when he wished to illustrate perfection of dramatic structure, always referred to Oedipus the King, and the two plays that deal with Oedipus illustrate well the Aristotelian definition of tragedy as a purging of pity and terror through their objective presentation. The characters are more clearly drawn than in Aeschylus, though not as realistically as in Euripides. “I draw men as they ought to be drawn,” said Sophocles, “Euripides draws them as they are”⁷²—as if to say that drama should admit some idealization, and that art should not be photography. But the influence of Euripides appears in the argumentativeness of the dialogue and the occasional exploitation of sentiment; so Oedipus wrangles unroyally with Teiresias, and, blinded, gropes about touchingly to feel the faces of his daughters. Aeschylus, contemplating the same situation, would have forgotten the daughters and thought of some eternal law.

Sophocles, too, is a philosopher and a preacher, but his counsels rely less than those of Aeschylus upon the sanctions of the gods. The spirit of the Sophists has touched him, and though he maintains a prosperous orthodoxy, he reveals himself as one who might have been Euripides had he not been so fortunate. But he has too much of the poet’s sensitivity to excuse the suffering that comes so often undeserved to men. Says Lyllus, over Heracles’ writhing body:

We are blameless, but confess

That the gods are pitiless.

Children they beget, and claim

Worship in a father’s name,

Yet with apathetic eye

Look upon such agony.⁷³

He makes Jocasta laugh at oracles, though his plays turn upon them creakingly; Creon denounces the prophets as “all a money-getting tribe”; and Philoctetes asks the old question, “How justify the ways of Heaven, finding Heaven unjust?”⁷⁴ Sophocles answers hopefully that though the moral order of the world may be too subtle for us to understand it, it is there, and right will triumph in the end.⁷⁵ Following Aeschylus, he identifies Zeus with this moral order, and comes even more closely to monotheism. Like a good Victorian he is uncertain of his theology, but strong in his moral faith; the highest wisdom is to find that law which is Zeus, the moral compass of the world, and follow it.

Oh, may my constant feet not fail,

Walking in paths of righteousness.

Sinless in word and deed,

True to those eternal laws

That scale forever the high steep

Of heaven’s pure ether, whence they sprang:

For only in Olympus is their home,

Nor mortal wisdom gave them birth;

And howsoe’er men may forget,

They will not sleep.⁷⁶

It is the pen of Sophocles, but the voice of Aeschylus, faith making the last stand against unbelief. In this piety and resignation we see the figure of Job repentant and reconciled; but between the lines we catch premonitions of Euripides.

Like Solon, Sophocles counts that man most blessed who has never been born, and him next happiest who dies in infancy. A modern pessimist has taken pleasure in translating the somber lines of the chorus on the death of Oedipus, lines that reflect a world-weariness brought on by old age, and the bitter fratricide of the Peloponnesian War:

What man is he that yearneth

For length unmeasured of days?

Folly mine eye discerneth

Encompassing all his ways.

For years over-running the measure

Shall change thee in evil wise:

Grief draweth nigh thee; and pleasure,

Behold it is hid from thine eyes.

This to their wage have they

Which overlive their day. . . .

Thy portion esteem I highest

Who wast not ever begot;

Thine next, being born, who diest

And straightway again art not.

With follies light as the feather

Doth Youth to man befall;

Then evils gather together,

There wants not one of them all—

Wrath, envy, discord, strife,

The sword that seeketh life.

And sealing the sum of trouble

Doth tottering Age draw nigh,

Whom friends and kinsfolk fly;

Age, upon whom redouble

All sorrows under the sky. . . .

And he that looseth from labor

Doth one with other befriend,

Whom bride nor bridesmen attend,

Song, nor sound of the tabor,

Death that maketh an end.⁷⁷

Every scholastic gossip knows that Sophocles consoled his old age with the hetaira Theoris, and had offspring by her.⁷⁸ His legitimate son Iophon, fearing, perhaps, that the poet would bequeath his wealth to Theoris’ child, brought his father to court on a charge of financial incompetence. Sophocles read to the jury, as evidence of his mental clarity, certain choruses from the play which he was writing, probably the Oedipus at Colonus; whereupon the judges not only acquitted him, but escorted him to his home.⁷⁹ Born many years before Euripides, he lived to put on mourning for him; and then, in that same year 406, he too died. Legend tells how, as the Spartans besieged Athens, Dionysus, god of the drama, appeared to Lysander and obtained a safe-conduct for the friends of Sophocles, who wished to bury him in the sepulcher of his fathers at Deceleia. The Greeks rendered him divine honors, and the poet Simmias composed for him a quiet epitaph:

Creep gently, ivy, ever gently creep,

Where Sophocles sleeps on in calm repose;

Thy pale green tresses o’er the marble sweep,

While all around shall bloom the purple rose.

There let the vine with rich full clusters hang,

Its fair young tendrils flung around the stone;

Due meed for that sweet wisdom which he sang,

By Muses and by Graces called their own.

V. EURIPIDES

1. The Plays

As Giotto rough-hewed the early path of Italian painting, and Raphael subdued the art with a quiet spirit into technical perfection, and Michelangelo completed the development in works of tortured genius; as Bach with incredible energy forced open a broad road to modern music, and Mozart perfected its form in melodious simplicity, and Beethoven completed the development in works of unbalanced grandeur; so Aeschylus cleared the way and set the forms for Greek drama with his harsh verse and stern philosophy, Sophocles fashioned the art with measured music and placid wisdom, and Euripides completed the development in works of passionate feeling and turbulent doubt. Aeschylus was a preacher of almost Hebraic intensity; Sophocles was a “classic” artist clinging to a broken faith; Euripides was a romantic poet who could never write a perfect play because he was distracted by philosophy. They were the Isaiah, Job, and Ecclesiastes of Greece.

Euripides was born in the year—some say on the day—of Salamis, probably on the island itself, to which, we are told, his parents had fled for refuge from the invading Medes.⁸⁰ His father was a man of some property and prominence in the Attic town of Phyla; his mother was of noble family,⁸¹ though the hostile Aristophanes insists that she kept a grocer’s shop and hawked fruit and flowers on the street. In later life he lived on Salamis, loving the solitude of its hills, and its varied prospects of blue sea. Plato wished to be a dramatist and became a philosopher; Euripides wished to be a philosopher and became a dramatist. He “took the entire course of Anaxagoras,” says Strabo;⁸² he studied for a while with Prodicus, and was so intimate with Socrates that some suspected the philosopher of having a hand in the poet’s plays.⁸³ The whole Sophistic movement entered into his education, and through him captured the Dionysian stage. He became the Voltaire of the Greek Enlightenment, worshiping reason with destructive innuendo in the midst of dramas staged to celebrate a god.

The records of the Dionysian Theater credit him with seventy-five plays, from The Daughters of Pelias in 455 to The Bacchae in 406; eighteen survive, and a medley of fragments from the rest.* Their subject matter tells again the legends of the early Greeks, but with a note of skeptical protest sounding timidly and then boldly between the lines. The Ion presents the reputed founder of the Ionian tribes in a delicate dilemma: the oracle of Apollo declares Xuthus to be his father, but Ion discovers that he is the son of Apollo, who seduced his mother and then palmed her off on Xuthus; can it be, Ion asks, that the noble god is a liar? In Heracles and Alcestis the mighty son of Zeus and Alcmena is described as a good-natured drunkard, with the appetite of Gargantua and the brains of Louis XVI. The Alcestis recounts the unprepossessing story of how the gods, as a condition of allowing further life to Admetus (king of Thessalian Pherae), required that some other should consent to die in his stead. His wife offers herself as a sacrifice, and bids him a hundred-line farewell, which he hears with magnanimous patience. Alcestis is carried out for dead; but Heracles, between solitary drinking bouts and banquets, goes forth, argues and browbeats Death into relinquishing Alcestis, and brings her back alive. The play can be understood only as a subtle attempt to make the legend ridiculous.*

The Hippolytus applies with more finesse and grace the same method of reduction to the absurd. The handsome hero is a youthful huntsman who vows to Artemis, virgin goddess of the chase, that he will always be faithful to her; will ever shun women, and will find his greatest pleasure in the woods. Aphrodite, incensed by this insulting celibacy, pours into the heart of Phaedra, Theseus’ wife, a mad passion for Hippolytus, Theseus’ son by the Amazon Antiope. Here is the first love tragedy in extant literature, and here at the outset are all the symptoms of love at the crisis of its fever: Phaedra, rejected by Hippolytus, languishes and fades to the point of death. Her nurse, suddenly become a philosopher, muses with Hamletlike skepticism about a life beyond the grave:

Yet all man’s life is but ailing and dim,

And rest upon the earth comes never.

But if any far-off state there be,

Dearer than life to mortality,

The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof,

And mist is under and mist above.

And some are sick for life, and cling

On earth to this nameless and shining thing;

For other life is a fountain sealed,

And the deeps below us are unrevealed,

And we drift on legends forever.⁸⁴

The nurse bears a message to Hippolytus that Phaedra’s bed will welcome him; he, knowing that she is his father’s wife, is horrified, and bursts into one of those passages that earned Euripides a reputation for misogyny:

Oh God, why hast thou made this gleaming snare,

Woman, to dog us on the happy earth?

Was it thy will to make man, why his birth

Through love and woman?⁸⁵

Phaedra dies; and in her hand her husband finds a note saying that Hippolytus seduced her. Theseus wildly calls upon Poseidon to slay Hippolytus. The youth protests his innocence, but is not believed. He is driven out of the land by Theseus; and as his chariot passes along the shore a sea lion emerges from the waves and pursues him; his horses run away, upset the chariot, and drag the entangled Hippolytus (i.e., “torn by horses”) over the rocks to a mangled death. And the chorus cries out, in lines that must have startled Athens,

Ye gods that did snare him,

Lo, I cast in your faces

My hate and my scorn!

In the Medea Euripides forgets for a while his war against the gods, and transforms the story of the Argonauts into his most powerful play. When Jason reaches Colchis, the royal princess Medea falls in love with him, helps him to get the Golden Fleece, and, to shield him, deceives her father and kills her brother. Jason vows eternal love to her, and takes her back with him to Iolcus. There the almost savage Medea poisons King Pelias to secure the throne that Pelias promised to Jason. Since the law of Thessaly forbids him to marry a foreigner, Jason lives with Medea in unwedded love, and has two children by her. But in time he tires of her barbarian intensity, looks about him for a legal wife and heir, and proposes to marry the daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. Creon accepts him, and exiles Medea. Medea, brooding upon her wrongs, speaks one of the famous passages of Euripides in defense of woman:

Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow,

A herb most bruised is woman. We must pay

Our store of gold, hoarded for that one day,

To buy us some man’s love; and lo, they bring

A master of our flesh! There comes the sting

Of the whole shame. And then the jeopardy,

For good or ill, what shall that master be. . . .

Home never taught her that—how best to guide

Toward peace the thing that sleepeth at her side.

And she who, laboring long, shall find some way

Whereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray

His yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath

That woman draws! Else let her pray for death.

Her lord, if he be wearied of her face

Within doors, gets him forth; some merrier place

Will ease his heart; but she waits on, her whole

Vision enchained on a single soul.

And then they say ’tis they that face the call

Of war, while we sit sheltered, hid from all

Peril! False mocking! Sooner would I stand

Three times to face their battles, shield in hand,

Than bear one child.⁸⁶

Then follows the terrible story of her revenge. She sends to her rival, in pretended reconciliation, a set of costly robes; the Corinthian princess puts one on, and is consumed in fire; Creon, trying to rescue her, is burned to death. Medea kills her own children and drives off with their dead bodies before Jason’s eyes. The chorus chants a philosophic end:

Great treasure halls hath Zeus in heaven,

From whence to man strange dooms be given,

Past hope or fear.

And the end men looked for cometh not,

And a path is there where no man thought:

So hath it fallen here.

The remaining plays turn for the most part upon the tale of Troy. In Helen we get the revised version of Stesichorus and Herodotus:⁸⁷ the Spartan queen does not elope with Paris to Troy; she is carried against her will to Egypt, and chastely awaits her master there; all Greece, Euripides suggests, has been hoodwinked by the legend of Helen in Troy. In Iphigenia in Aulis he pours into the old story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice a profusion of sentiment new to the Greek drama, and a Lucretian horror of the crimes to which the ancient faith persuaded men. Aeschylus and Sophocles had also written on this theme, but their plays were soon forgotten in the brilliance of this new performance. The arrival of Clytaemnestra and her daughter is visioned with Euripidean tenderness; Orestes, “yet a wordless babe,” is present to witness the superstitious murder that will dictate his destiny. The girl is all shyness and happiness as she runs to greet the King:

Iphig. Fain am I, father, on thy breast to fall,

After so long! Though others I outrun—

For oh, I yearn for thy face!—be not wroth . . .

So glad to see me—yet what troubled look!

Agam. On kings and captains weigheth many a care.

Iphig. This hour be mine—this one! Yield not to care!

Agam. Yea, I am all thine now; my thoughts stray not. . .

Iphig. And yet—and yet—thine eyes are welling tears!

Agam. Yea, for the absence yet to come is long.

Iphig. I know not, know not, dear my sire, thy meaning.

Agam. Thy wise discernment stirs my grief the more.

Iphig. So I may please thee, folly will I talk.⁸⁸

When Achilles comes she finds that he knows nothing of their supposed marriage; instead she learns that the army is impatient for her sacrifice. She throws herself at Agamemnon’s feet, and begs for her life.

I was thy first-born—first I called thee Sire,

And sat, thy child, upon thy knees the first;

And we exchanged sweet charities of life.

And this was thy discourse with me—“My child,

Shall I behold thee happy in the home

Of thy liege lord and husband, as befits?”

And nestling in the beard which now I clasp

A suppliant, I made answer unto thee:

“I too will welcome thee, when grey with years,

In the sweet shelter of my home, my Sire,

And with fond fostering recompense thy love.”

Such were our words, which I remember well;

But thou forgettest, and wouldst take my life.⁸⁹

Clytaemnestra denounces Agamemnon’s surrender to a savage ritual, and utters a threat that contains many tragedies—“Constrain me not to turn traitress to thee.” She encourages Achilles’ attempt to rescue the girl, but Iphigenia, changing her mood, refuses to escape.

Hear the thing that flashed upon me, mother, as I thought hereon:

Lo, I am resolved to die; and fain am I that this be done

Gloriously—that I thrust ignoble thoughts away. . . .

Unto me all mighty Hellas looks; I only can bestow

Boons upon her—sailing of her galleys, Phrygia’s overthrow,

Safety for her daughters from barbarians in the days to come,

That the ravisher no more may snatch them from a happy home,

When the penalty is paid for Paris’ outrage, Helen’s shame.

All this great deliverance I in death shall compass, and my name,

As of one who gave to Hellas freedom, shall be blessing-crowned.⁹⁰

When the soldiers come for her she forbids them to touch her, and moves of her own accord to the sacrificial pyre.

In the Hecuba the war is over; Troy has been taken, and the victors are apportioning the spoils. Hecuba, widow of King Priam, sends her youngest son Polydorus with a treasure of gold to Priam’s friend Polymnestor, King of Thrace. But Polymnestor, thirsting for the gold, slays the boy and throws his corpse into the sea; it is cast up on the shores of Ilion, and is brought to Hecuba. Meanwhile the shade of dead Achilles holds the winds from blowing the Greek fleet homeward till he has received in human sacrifice the fairest of Priam’s daughters, Polyxena. The Greek herald, Talthybius, comes to take the girl from Hecuba. Finding her prostrate, disheveled, and distraught who had so recently been a queen, he utters some lines of Euripidean doubt:

What shall I say, Zeus?—that thou look’st on men?

Or that this fancy false we vainly hold

For naught, who deem there is a race of gods,

While chance controlleth all things among men?⁹¹

The next act of the composite drama takes the form of The Trojan Women. It was produced in 415, shortly after the Athenian destruction of Melos (416), and almost on the eve of the expedition that aimed to conquer Sicily for the Athenian Empire. It was at this moment that Euripides, shocked by the massacre in Melos and by the brutal imperialism of the proposed attack upon Syracuse, dared to present a powerful plea for peace, a brave portrayal of victory from the standpoint of the defeated, “the greatest denunciation of war in ancient literature.”⁹² He begins where Homer ends—after the capture of Troy. The Trojans lie dead after a general slaughter, and their women, bereaved to madness, pass down from their ruined city to be the concubines of the victors. Hecuba enters with her daughters Andromache and Cassandra. Polyxena has already been sacrificed, and now Talthybius comes to lead Cassandra to Agamemnon’s tent. Hecuba falls to the ground in grief. Andromache tries to console her, but she too breaks down, as clasping the little prince Astyanax to her breast, she thinks of his dead father.

Andromache. And I. . . long since I drew my bow

Straight at the heart of good fame; and I know

My shaft hit; and for that am I the more

Fallen from peace. All that men praise us for,

I loved for Hector’s sake, and sought to win.

I knew that always, be there hurt therein

Or utter innocence, to roam abroad

Hath ill report for women; so I trod

Down the desire thereof, and walked my way

In mine own garden. And light words and gay

Parley of women never passed my door.

The thoughts of mine own heart—I craved no more-

Spake with me, and I was happy. Constantly

I brought fair silence and a tranquil eye

For Hector’s greeting, and watched well the way

Of living, where to guide and where obey . . .

One night—aye, men have said it—maketh tame

A woman in a man’s arms. O shame, shame!

What woman’s lips can so forswear her dead,

And give strange kisses in another’s bed?

Why, not a dumb beast, not a colt will run

In the yoke untroubled, when her mate is gone . . .

O my Hector! best beloved

That, being mine, wast all in all to me,

My prince, my wise one, O my majesty

Of valiance! No man’s touch had ever come

Near me, when thou from out my father’s home

Didst lead me and make me thine . . . And thou art dead,

And I war-flung to slavery and the bread

Of shame in Hellas, over bitter seas!

Hecuba, dreaming of some distant revenge, bids Andromache accept her new master graciously, that he may allow her to rear Astyanax, and that Astyanax may some day restore the house of Priam and the splendor of Troy. But the Greeks have thought of this too; and Talthybius comes to announce that Astyanax must die: “’Tis their will thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death.” He tears the child from its mother’s arms, and Andromache, holding it for a last moment, bids it an hysterical farewell.

Go, die, my best beloved, my cherished one,

In fierce men’s hands, leaving me here alone.

Thy father was too valiant; that is why

They slay thee. . . .

And none to pity thee! . . . Thou little thing

That curlest in my arms, what sweet scents cling

All round thy neck! Beloved, can it be

All nothing, that this bosom cradled thee

And fostered, all the weary nights wherethrough

I watched upon thy sickness, till I grew

Wasted with watching? Kiss me. This one time;

Not ever again. Put up thine arms, and climb

About my neck; now kiss me, lips to lips . . .

Oh, ye have found an anguish that outstrips

All tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks! . . .

Quick, take him; drag him; cast him from the wall,

If cast ye will! Tear him, ye beasts, be swift!

God hath undone me, and I cannot lift

One hand, one hand, to save my child from death.

She becomes delirious, and swoons; soldiers carry her away. Menelaus appears, and bids his soldiers bring Helen to him. He has sworn that he will kill her, and Hecuba is comforted at the thought that punishment is at last to find Helen.

I bless thee, Menelaus, I bless thee,

If thou wilt slay her! Only fear to see

Her visage, lest she snare thee and thou fall!

Helen enters, untouched and unafraid, proud in the consciousness of her beauty.

Hecuba. And comest thou now

Forth, and hast decked thy bosom and thy brow,

And breathest with thy lord the same blue air,

Thou evil heart? Low, low, with ravaged hair,

Rent raiment, and flesh shuddering, and within,

Oh, shame at last, not glory for thy sin. . . .

Be true, O King; let Hellas bear the crown

Of justice. Slay this woman. . . .

Menelaus. Peace, aged woman, peace. . . . (To the soldiers)

Have some chambered galley set for her,

Where she may sail the seas. . . .

Hecuba. A lover once, will always love again.

As Helen and Menelaus leave, Talthybius returns, bearing the dead body of Astyanax.

Talth. Andromache . . . hath charmed these tears into mine eyes,

Weeping her fatherland, as o’er the wave.

She gazed, speaking words to Hector’s grave.

Howbeit, she prayed us that due rites be done

For burial of this babe. . . . And in thine hands

She bade me lay him, to be swathed in bands

Of death and garments . . . (Hecuba takes the body.)

Hecuba. Ah, what a death hath found thee, little one! . . .

Ye tender arms, the same dear mold have ye

As his. . . . And dear proud lips, so full of hope,

And closed forever! What false words ye said

At daybreak, when ye crept into my bed,

Called me kind names, and promised, “Grandmother,

When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair

And lead out all the captains to ride by

Thy tomb.” Why didst thou cheat me so? ’Tis I,

Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed

Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead.

Dear God! the pattering welcomes of thy feet,

The nursing in my lap; and oh, the sweet

Falling asleep together! All is gone.

How should a poet carve the funeral stone

To tell thy story true? “There lieth here

A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear

Slew him.” Aye, Greece will bless the tale it tells! . . .

Oh, vain is man,

Who glorieth in his joy and hath no fears, While to and fro the chances of the years

Dance like an idiot in the wind! . . . (She wraps the child in the burial garments.)

Glory of Phrygian raiment, which my thought

Kept for thy bridal day with some far-sought

Queen of the East, folds thee for evermore . . .⁹³

In the Electra the ancient theme is far advanced. Agamemnon is dead, Orestes is in Phocis, and Electra has been married off by her mother to a peasant whose simple fidelity, and awe of her royal descent, survive her brooding negligence of him. To her, wondering will Orestes never find her, Orestes comes, bidden by Apollo himself (Euripides drives this point home) to avenge Agamemnon’s death. Electra stirs him on; if he will not kill the murderers she will. The lad finds Aegisthus and slays him, and then turns upon his mother. Clytaemnestra is here a subdued and aging woman, gray-haired and frail, haunted by the memory of her crimes, at once fearing and loving the children who hate her; asking, but not begging, for mercy; and half reconciled to the penalty of her sins. When the killing is over Orestes is overcome with horror.

Sister, touch her again,

Oh, veil the body of her,

Shed on her raiment fair,

And close that death-red stain.—

Mother! And didst thou bear,

Bear in thy bitter pain,

To life, thy murderer?⁹⁴

The final act of the drama, in Euripides, is called Iphigenia in Tauris—i.e., Iphigenia among the Tauri. Artemis, it now appears, substituted a deer for Agamemnon’s daughter on the pyre at Aulis, snatched the girl from the flames, and made her a priestess at the shrine of Artemis among the half-savage Tauri of the Crimea. The Tauri make it a rule to sacrifice to the goddess any stranger who sets foot unasked upon their shores; and Iphigenia is the unhappy, brooding ministrant who consecrates the victims. Eighteen years of separation from Greece and those she loved have dulled her mind with grief. Meanwhile the oracle of Apollo has promised Orestes peace if he will capture from the Tauri the sacred image of Artemis, and bring it to Attica. Orestes and Pylades set sail, and at last reach the land of the Tauri, who gladly accept them as gifts of the sea for Artemis, and hurry them off to be slain at her altar. Orestes, exhausted, falls in an epileptic fit at Iphigenia’s feet; and though she does not recognize him, she is overwhelmed with pity as she sees the two comrades, in the fairest years of youth, faced with death.

Iphig. To none is given

To know the coming nor the end of woe;

So dark is God, and to great darkness go

His paths, by blind chance mazed from our ken.

Whence are ye come, O most unhappy men? . . .

What mother then was yours, O strangers, say,

And father? And your sister, if you have

A sister: both at once, so young and brave To leave her brotherless. . . .

Orestes. Would that my sister’s hand could close mine eyes!

Iphig. Alas, she dwelleth under distant skies,

Unhappy one, and vain is all thy prayer.

Yet, oh, thou art from Argos; all of care

That can be I will give, and fail thee not.

Rich raiment to thy burial shall be brought,

And oil to cool thy pyre in golden floods,

And sweet that from a thousand mountain buds

The murmuring bee hath garnered, I will throw

To die with thee in fragrance.

She promises to save them if they will carry back to Argos the message which she bids them store in their memories.

Iphig. Say, “To Orestes, Agamemnon’s son,

She that was slain in Aulis, dead to Greece

Yet quick, Iphigenia, sendeth peace.”

Orestes. Iphigenia! Where? Back from the dead?

Iphig. ’Tis I. But speak not, lest thou break my thread.

“Take me to Argos, brother, ere I die.”

Orestes wishes to clasp her in his arms, but the attendants forbid it; no man may touch the priestess of Artemis. He declares himself Orestes, but she cannot believe him. He convinces her by recalling the tales Electra told them.

Iphig. Is this the babe I knew,

The little babe, light-lifted like a bird? . . .

O Argos land, O hearth and holy flame

That old Cyclopes lit,

I bless ye that he lives, that he is grown,

A light and strength, my brother and mine own;

I bless your name for it.⁹⁵

They offer to rescue her, and in turn she helps them to capture the image of Artemis. By her subtle ruse they reach their ship safely, and carry the statue to Brauron; there Iphigenia becomes a priestess, and there, after her death, she is worshiped as a deity. Orestes is released from the Furies, and knows some years of peace. The thirst of the gods is sated, and the drama of The Children of Tantalus is complete.

2. The Dramatist

We must agree with Aristotle that these plays, from the viewpoint of dramatic technique, fall short of the standards set by Aeschylus and Sophocles.⁹⁶ The Medea, the Hippolytus, and The Bacchae are well planned, but even they cannot compare with the structural integrity of the Oresteia, or the complex unity of Oedipus the King. Instead of plunging at once into the action, and explaining its antecedents gradually and naturally in the course of the story, Euripides employs the artificial expedient of a pedagogical prologue, and, worse still, puts it sometimes into the mouth of a god. Instead of showing us the action directly, which is the function of drama, he too often introduces a messenger to describe the action, even when no violence is involved. Instead of making the chorus a part of the action he transforms it into a philosophical aside, or uses it to interrupt the development with lyrics always beautiful, but often irrelevant. Instead of presenting ideas through action, he sometimes displaces action with ideas, and turns the stage into a school for speculation, rhetoric, and argument. Too often his plots depend upon coincidences and “recognition”—though these are well arranged and dramatically presented. Most of the plays (like a few by his predecessors) end with intervention by the deus ex machina, the god from the crane—a device that can be forgiven only on the assumption that for Euripides the real play ended before this theophany, and the god was let down to provide the orthodox with a virtuous conclusion to what would otherwise have been a scandalous performance.⁹⁷ With such prologues and epilogues the great humanist won the privilege of presenting his heresies on the stage.

The material, like the form, is a medley of genius and artifice. Euripides is above all sensitive, as every poet must be; he feels the problems of mankind intensely, and expresses them with passion; he is the most tragic and the most human of all dramatists. But his feeling is too frequently sentimentality; his “droppings of warm tears”⁹⁸ are too easily released; he loses no chance to show a mother parting from her children, and wrings all possible pathos out of every situation. These scenes are always moving, and sometimes are described with a power unequaled in tragedy before or since; but they descend occasionally to melodrama, and a surfeit of violence and horror, as at the close of the Medea. Euripides is the Byron and Shelley and Hugo of Greece, a Romantic Movement in himself.

He easily surpasses his rivals in the delineation of character. Psychological analysis replaces with him, even more than with Sophocles, the operation of destiny; he is never weary of investigating the morals and motives of human conduct. He studies a great variety of men, from Electra’s peasant husband to the kings of Greece and Troy; no other dramatist has drawn so many types of women, or drawn them with such sympathy; every shade of vice and virtue interests him, and is realistically portrayed. Aeschylus and Sophocles were too absorbed in the universal and eternal to see the temporal and the particular clearly; they created profound types, but Euripides creates living individuals; neither of the older men, for example, realized Electra so vividly. In these plays the drama of the conflict with fate yields more and more to the drama of situation and character, and the way is prepared by which, in the following centuries, the Greek stage will be captured by the comedy of manners under Philemon and Menander.

3. The Philosopher

But it would be foolish to judge Euripides chiefly as a playwright; his ruling interest is not dramatic technique but philosophical inquiry and political reform. He is the son of the Sophists, the poet of the Enlightenment, the representative of the radical younger generation that laughed at the old myths, flirted with socialism, and called for a new social order in which there should be less exploitation of man by man, of women by men, and of all by the state. It is for these rebel souls that Euripides writes; for them he adds his skeptical innuendoes, and inserts a thousand heresies between the lines of supposedly religious plays. He covers his tracks with pious passages and patriotic odes; he presents a sacred myth so literally that its absurdity is manifest and yet his orthodoxy cannot be impeached; he gives the body of his plays over to doubt, but surrenders the first and last words to the gods. His subtlety and brilliance, like those of the French Encyclopedists, is due in some part to the compulsion laid upon him to speak his mind while saving his skin.

His theme is that of Lucretius—

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

—so great are the evils to which religion has led men: oracles that breed violence upon violence, myths that exalt immorality with divine example, and shed supernatural sanctions upon dishonesty, adultery, theft, human sacrifice, and war. He describes a soothsayer as “a man who speaks few truths but many lies”;⁹⁹ he calls it “sheer folly” to chart the future from the entrails of birds;¹⁰⁰ he denounces the whole apparatus of oracles and divination.¹⁰¹ Above all he resents the immoral implications of the legends:

Men shall know there is no God, no light

In heaven, if wrong to the end shall conquer right. . . .

Say not there be adulterers in heaven,

Nor prisoner gods and gaolers: long ago

My heart hath named it vile, and shall not alter. . . .

These tales be false, false as those feastings wild

Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child.

This land of murderers to its gods hath given

Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven. . . .

All these

Are dead unhappy tales of minstrelsy.¹⁰²

Sometimes such passages are softened with hymns to Dionysus, or psalms of pantheistic piety; but occasionally a character extends the Euripidean doubt to all the gods:

Doth some one say that there be gods above?

There are not, no, there are not. Let no fool,

Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.

Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words

No undue credence; for I say that kings

Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,

And doing thus are happier than those

Who live calm pious lives day after day.¹⁰³

He begins his lost Melanippe with a startling couplet—

O Zeus, if there be a Zeus,

For I know of him only by report—

whereupon the audience, we are told, rose to its feet in protest. And he concludes:

The gods, too, whom mortals deem so wise,

Are nothing clearer than some winged dream;

And all their ways, like man’s ways, but a stream

Of turmoil. He who cares to suffer least,

Not blind as fools are blinded by a priest,

Goes straight. . . to what death, those who know him know.¹⁰⁴

The fortunes of men, he thinks, are the result of natural causes, or of aimless chance; they are not the work of intelligent supernatural beings.¹⁰⁵ He suggests rational explanations of supposed miracles; Alcestis, for example, did not really die, but was sent off to burial while still alive; Heracles caught up with her before she had time to die.¹⁰⁶ He does not clearly tell us what his belief is, perhaps because he feels that the evidence does not lend itself to clear belief; but his most characteristic expressions are those of the vague pantheism that was now replacing polytheism among the educated Greeks.

Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high Throne

Above the World, whoe’er thou art, unknown

And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be,

Or Reason of our Reason; God to thee

I lift my praise, seeing the silent road

That bringeth justice ere the end be trod

To all that breathes and dies.¹⁰⁷

Social justice is the minor theme of his songs; like all sympathetic spirits he longs for a time when the strong will be more chivalrous to the weak, and there will be an end to misery and strife.¹⁰⁸ Even in the midst of war, with all its compulsion to a patriotic belligerency, he presents the woes and horrors of war with unsparing realism.

How are ye blind,

Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast

Temples to desolation, and lay waste

Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie

The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die.¹⁰⁹

He gnaws his heart out at the sight of Athenians fighting Spartans for half a century, each enslaving the other, and both killing off their best; and he indites in a late play a touching apostrophe to peace:

O Peace, thou givest plenty as from a deep spring; there is no beauty like unto thine; no, not even among the blessed gods. My heart yearneth within me, for thou tarriest; I grow old and thou returnest not. Shall weariness overcome mine eyes before they see thy bloom and thy comeliness? When the lovely songs of the dancers are heard again, and the thronging feet of them that wear garlands, shall grey hairs and sorrow have destroyed me utterly? Return, thou holy one, to our city; abide not far from us, thou that quencheth wrath. Strife and bitterness shall depart if thou art with us; madness and the edge of the sword shall flee from our doors.^109a

Almost alone among the great writers of his time he dares to attack slavery; during the Peloponnesian War it became obvious that most slaves were such not by nature but by the accidents of life. He does not recognize any natural aristocracy; environment rather than heredity makes the man. The slaves in his dramas play important parts, and often speak his finest lines. With the imaginative sympathy of a poet he considers women. He knows the faults of the sex, and exposes them so realistically that Aristophanes was able to make him out a misogynist; but he did more than any other playwright of antiquity to present the case for women, and to support the dawning movement for their emancipation Some of his plays are almost modern, post-Ibsen studies in the problems of sex, even of sexual perversion.¹¹⁰ He describes men with realism, but women with gallantry; the terrible Medea gets more compassion from him than he accords to the heroic but unfaithful Jason. He is the first dramatist to make a play turn upon love; his famous ode to Eros in the lost Andromeda was mouthed by thousands of young Greeks:

O Love, our Lord, of gods and men the king,

Either teach not how beauteous beauty is,

Or help poor lovers, whom like clay thou moldest,

Through toil and labor to a happy end.¹¹¹

Euripides is naturally a pessimist, for every romantic becomes a pessimist when reality impinges upon romance. “Life,” said Horace Walpole, “is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”¹¹² “Long ago,” says our poet,

I looked upon man’s days, and found a grey

Shadow. And this thing more I surely say

That those of all men who are counted wise,

Strong wits, devisers of great policies,

Do pay the bitterest toll. Since life began

Hath there in God’s eye stood one happy man?¹¹³

He wonders at the greed and cruelty of men, the resourcefulness of evil, and the obscene indiscriminateness of death. At the beginning of the Alcestis Death says, “Is it not my function to take the doomed?”—to which Apollo answers, “No; only to dispatch those who have ripened into full old age.” When death comes after life has been fully lived it is natural, and does not offend us. “We should not lament our fate if, like the harvests that follow each other in the passage of the years, one generation of men after another flowers, fades, and is carried off. So it is ordered in the course of Nature; and we must not be dismayed by anything that is rendered inevitable by her laws.”¹¹⁴ His conclusion is stoicism: “Do thou endure as men must, chafing not.”¹¹⁵ Now and then, following Anaximenes and anticipating the Stoics, he consoles himself with the thought that the spirit of man is part of the divine Air or pneuma, and will, after death, be preserved in the Soul of the World.¹¹⁶

Who knows if that be life which we call death,

And life be dying?—save alone that men

Living bear grief, but when they yield their breath

They have no sorrow then, and grieve no more.¹¹⁷

4. The Exile

The man whom we picture from these plays resembles sufficiently the sitting statue in the Louvre, and the busts at Naples, to let us believe that these are faithful copies of authentic Greek originals. The bearded face is handsome, but overwrought with meditation, and softened with a tender melancholy. His friends agreed with his enemies that he was gloomy, almost morose, not given to conviviality or laughter, and spending his later years in the seclusion of his island home. He had three sons, and derived some happiness from their childhood.¹¹⁸ He found solace in books, and was the first private citizen in Greece, so far as we know, to collect a substantial library.*¹¹⁹ He had excellent friends, including Protagoras and Socrates; the latter, who ignored other dramas, said that to see a play by Euripides he would walk to the Piraeus—a serious matter for a stout philosopher. The younger generation of emancipated souls looked up to him as their leader. But he had more enemies than any other writer in Greek history. The judges, who felt themselves bound, presumably, to protect religion and morals from his skeptical arrows, crowned only five of his efforts with victory; even so it was liberal of the archon basileus to admit so many Euripidean plays to a religious stage. Conservatives in all fields looked upon the dramatist as responsible with Socrates for the growth of unbelief among Athenian youth. Aristophanes declared war upon him at the outset in The Acharnians, satirized him with hilarious caricature in The Thesmophoriazusae, and, in the year after the poet’s death, continued the attack in The Frogs; nevertheless, we are told, the tragic and the comic dramatist were on friendly terms to the end.¹²⁰ As for the audience, it denounced his heresies and crowded to his plays. When, at line 612 of the Hippolytus, the young hunter said, “My tongue hath sworn, but my mind remains unbound,” the crowd protested so loudly against what seemed to be an outrageously immoral proposition that Euripides had to rise in his seat and comfort them with the assurance that Hippolytus would suffer edifyingly before the story closed—a safe promise for almost any character in Greek tragedy.

About 410 he was indicted on a charge of impiety; and soon afterward Hygiaonon brought against him another suit, involving much of the poet’s fortune, and adduced Hippolytus’ line as proof of Euripides’ dishonesty. Both accusations failed; but the wave of public resentment that met The Trojan Women led Euripides to feel that he had hardly a friend left in Athens. Even his wife, it is said, turned against him because he could not join in the martial enthusiasm of the city. In 408, at the age of seventy-two, he accepted the invitation of King Archelaus to be his guest in the Macedonian capital. At Pella, under the protection of this Frederick—who had no fears for the orthodoxy of his people—Euripides found peace and comfort; there he wrote the almost idyllic Iphigenia in Aulis, and the profound religious play, The Bacchae. Eighteen months after his arrival he died, attacked and dismembered, said pious Greeks, by the royal hounds.¹²¹

A year later his son produced the two dramas at the city Dionysia, and the judges gave them the first prize. Even modern scholars have thought that The Bacchae was Euripides’ apology to Greek religion;¹²² and yet the play may have been intended as a bitter allegory of Euripides’ treatment by the public of Athens. It is the story of how Pentheus, King of Thebes, was torn to pieces by a mob of female Dionysian orgiasts, led by his own mother Agave because he had denounced their wild superstition and intruded upon their revelry. It was no invention; the tale belonged to the religious tradition; the dismemberment and sacrifice of an animal, or of any man who dared to attend the ceremonies, was part of the Dionysian rite; and this powerful drama, by returning for its plot to the legend of Dionysus, bound Greek tragedy at its culmination with Greek tragedy at its birth. The play was composed among the Macedonian mountains which it describes in lyrics of unfailing power; and perhaps it was intended for performance in Pella, where the Bacchic cult was especially strong. Euripides enters with surprising insight into the mood of religious ecstasy, and puts into the mouths of the Bacchantes psalms of passionate devotion; it may indeed be that the old poet had gone to the limits of rationalism and beyond it, and recognized now the frailty of reason, and the persistency of the emotional needs of women and men. But the story does dubious honor to the Dionysian religion; its theme is once more the evils that may come of superstitious creeds.

The god Dionysus visits Thebes in disguise as a Bacchus, or incarnation of himself, and preaches the worship of Dionysus. The daughters of Cadmus reject the message; he hypnotizes them into pious ecstasy, and they go up into the hills to worship him with wild dances. They clothe themselves with the skins of animals, girdle themselves with snakes, crown themselves with ivy, and suckle the young of wolves and deer. The Theban king Pentheus opposes the cult as hostile to reason, morals, and order, and imprisons its preacher, who bears his punishment with Christian gentleness. But the god in the preacher asserts himself, opens the prison walls, and uses his miraculous power to hypnotize the young ruler. Under this influence Pentheus dresses himself as a woman, climbs the hills, and joins the revelers. The women discover that he is a man, and tear him limb from limb; his own mother, drunk with “possession,” carries Pentheus’ severed head in her hands, thinking it the head of a lion, and sings a song of triumph over it. When she comes to her senses and sees that it is the head of her son, she is revolted with the cult that intoxicated her; and when Dionysus says, “Ye mocked me, being God; this is your wage,” she answers, “Should God be like a proud man in his rage?” The last lesson is the same as the first; even in his dying play the poet remained Euripides.

After his death he achieved popularity even in Athens. The ideas for which he had fought became the dominant conceptions of the following centuries, and the Hellenistic age looked back to him and to Socrates as the greatest intellectual stimuli that Greece had ever known. He had dealt with living problems rather than “dead tales of minstrelsy,” and it took the ancient world a long time to forget him. The plays of his predecessors slipped into oblivion while his own were repeated in every year, and wherever the Greek world had a stage. When, in the collapse of that expedition to Syracuse (415) whose failure had been forecast in The Trojan Women, the captive Athenians faced a living death as chained slaves in the quarries of Sicily, those were given their freedom (Plutarch tells us) who could recite passages from the plays of Euripides.¹²³ The New Comedy molded itself upon his dramas, and grew out of them; one of its leaders, Philemon, said, “If I were sure that the dead have consciousness, I would hang myself to see Euripides.”¹²⁴ The revival of skepticism, liberalism, and humanitarianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made Euripides almost a contemporary figure, more modern than Shakespeare. All in all, only Shakespeare has equaled him; and Goethe did not think so. “Have all the nations of the world since Euripides,” asked Goethe of Eckermann, “produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?”¹²⁵ Not more than one.

VI. ARISTOPHANES

1. Aristophanes and the War

Greek tragedy is more somber than the Elizabethan, because it seldom employs that principle of comic relief by which, through a humorous interruption of the tragical, the auditor’s tolerance for tragedy is increased. The Greek playwright preferred to keep his tragic drama on a persistently high plane, and relegated comedy to a “satyr” play which carried no serious import, but allowed the excited emotions of the audience to subside into humor and ease. In the course of time the comic drama declared its independence of tragedy, and a day was allotted to it, at the Dionysian festivals, when the entire program consisted of three or four comedies, written by different authors, played in succession, and competing for a separate prize.

Comedy, like oratory, had its first Greek bloom in Sicily. About 484 there came to Syracuse from Cos a philosopher, physician, poet, and dramatist, Epicharmus, who expounded Pythagoras, Heracleitus, and rationalism in thirty-five comedies, of which only occasional quotations remain. Twelve years after Epicharmus’ arrival in Sicily the Athenian archon allowed its first chorus to comedy. The new art developed rapidly under the stimulus of democracy and freedom, and became the principal medium, in Athens, of moral and political satire. The wide license of speech permitted to comedy was a tradition of the Dionysian phallic procession. The abuse of this freedom led in 440 to a law against personal attacks in comedy; but this prohibition was repealed three years later, and full freedom of criticism and abuse continued even during the Peloponnesian War. The Greek comedy took the place, as political critic, of a free press in modern democracies.

We hear of many comic dramatists before Aristophanes, and the great Rabelais of antiquity even condescended to praise some of them when the smoke of his battles with them had cleared away. Cratinus was the mouthpiece of Cimon, and made rabid war against Pericles, whom he called “the squill-headed God Almighty”;¹²⁶ merciful time has spared us the necessity of reading him. Another forerunner was Pherecrates, who, about 420, satirized, in The Wild Men, those Athenians who professed to dislike civilization and to long for a “return to nature”: so old are the brave innovations of our youth. The ablest competitor of Aristophanes was Eupolis; they at first co-operated, then quarreled and parted, after which they satirized each other vigorously, but still agreed in attacking the democratic party. If comedy throughout the fifth century was hostile to democracy, it was partly because poets like money and the aristocracy was rich, but chiefly because the function of Greek comedy was to amuse with criticism, and the democratic party was in power. Since the leader of the democracy, Pericles, was sympathetic to new ideas like the emancipation of woman and the development of a rationalist philosophy, the comic dramatists ranged themselves, with suspicious unanimity, against all forms of radicalism, and called for a return to the ways and reputed morals of the “Men of Marathon.” Aristophanes became the voice of this reaction, as Socrates and Euripides were the protagonists of the new ideas. The conflict between religion and philosophy captured the comic stage.

Aristophanes had some excuse for liking aristocracy, since he came of a cultured and prosperous family, and appears to have owned land in Aegina. His very name was a patent of nobility, meaning “the best made manifest.” Born about 450, he was in the springtime of life when Athens and Sparta began that war which was to be a bitter theme of his plays. The Spartan invasion of Attica compelled him to abandon his country estate and come to live in Athens. He disliked city life, and resented the sudden demand upon him to hate Megarians, Corinthians, and Spartans; he denounced this conflict of Greek killing Greek, and called, in play after play, for peace.

After the death of Pericles in 429 supreme power in Athens passed into the hands of the rich tanner, Cleon, who represented those commercial interests that wanted a “knock-out blow”—i.e., the utter destruction of Sparta as a competitor for the mastery of Greece. In a lost play, The Babylonians (426), Aristophanes subjected Cleon and his policies to such stinging ridicule that the burly strategos prosecuted him for treason, and had him fined. Two years later Aristophanes revenged himself by presenting The Knights. Its leading character was Demos (i.e., the People), whose major-domo was called the Tanner; everyone understood the transparent allegory, including Cleon, who saw the play. The satire was so sharp that no actor would play the part of the Tanner for fear of political misfortune, whereupon Aristophanes took the role himself. Nicias (the name of the superstitious leader of the oligarchic faction) announces that an oracle has told him that the next ruler of Demos’ house will be a sausage-seller. Such a huckster comes along, and the slaves hail him as “Chief that shall be of our glorious Athens!” “Prithee,” says the Sausage-Seller, “let me go wash my tripes . . . you make a fool of me.” But one Demosthenes assures him that he has just the qualifications for ruling the people—is he not a rascal, and free from all education? The Tanner, fearing that he is to be deposed, protests his services and his loyalty to Demos; no one except the harlots, he urges, has done so much for Demos as he. There is the usual Aristophanic burlesque: the Sausage-Seller belabors the Tanner with tripe, and primes himself for an oratorical contest in the Assembly by eating garlic. A contest in adulation ensues, to see which of the candidates can praise Demos the more lavishly, and “deserve better of Demos and his belly.” The rivals bring a feast of good things and lay them before Demos like a platter of pre-election promises. The Sausage-Seller proposes that as a test of their honesty each candidate’s locker shall be searched. In the Tanner’s locker a heap of succulent dainties is found, in particular a massive cake, from which he has cut only a tiny slice for Demos (a reference to a current charge that Cleon had embezzled state funds). The Tanner is dismissed, and the Sausage-Seller becomes the ruler of Demos’ house.

The Wasps (422) continues the satire on democracy in a milder and weaker vein; the chorus is composed of idle citizens—dressed as wasps—who seek to make an obol or two every day by serving as jurymen, in order that they may, by listening to “sycophants” and levying confiscatory fines, vote the money of the rich into the coffers of the state and the pockets of the poor. But Aristophanes’ ruling interest in these early plays is to ridicule war and promote peace. The hero of The Acharnians (425) is Diceopolis (“Honest Citizen”), a farmer who complains that his land has been devastated by armies, so that he can no longer live by squeezing wine from his vineyards. He sees no reason for war, and is clear that he himself has no quarrel with the Spartans. Tired of waiting for the generals or the politicians to make peace, he signs a personal treaty with the Lacedaemonians; and when a chorus of war-patriotic neighbors denounces him he replies:

Well, the very Spartans even, I’ve my doubts and scruples whether

They’ve been totally to blame, in every instance, altogether.

Chorus. Not to blame in every instance? Villain, vagabond, how dare ye,

Talking treason to our faces, to suppose that we will spare ye?

He agrees to let them kill him if he cannot prove that Athens is as much to blame for the war as Sparta. His head is laid upon a chopping block, and he begins his argument. Presently an Athenian general enters, defeated, blustering, and profane; the Chorus is disgusted with him, and releases Diceopolis, who pleases all by selling a wine called Peace. It was a play of considerable audacity, possible only among a people trained to hear the other side. Taking advantage of the parabasis or digression in which the custom of comedy allowed the author to address the audience through the chorus or one of the characters, Aristophanes explained his function as a comic gadfly among the Athenians:

Never since our poet presented comedies has he praised himself upon the stage. . . . But he maintains that he has done you much that is good. If you no longer allow yourselves to be too much hoodwinked by strangers or seduced by flattery, if in politics you are no longer the ninnies you once were, it is thanks to him. Formerly, when delegates from other cities wanted to deceive you, they had but to style you “the people crowned with violets”; at the word “violets” you at once sat erect on the tips of your bums. Or if, to tickle your vanity, some one spoke of “rich and sleek Athens,” he would get all, because he spoke of you as he would have of anchovies in oil. In cautioning you against such wiles, the poet has done you great service.¹²⁷

In The Peace (421) the poet was triumphant: Cleon was dead, and Nicias was about to sign for Athens a treaty pledging peace and friendship with Sparta for fifty years. But a few years later hostilities were resumed; and in 411 Aristophanes, abandoning hope in his fellow citizens, invited the women of Greece to end the bloodshed. As the Lysistrata opens, the ladies of Athens, while their men are still asleep, gather at dawn in council near the Acropolis. They agree to withhold the comforts of love from their spouses until these come to terms with the enemy; and they send an embassy to the women of Sparta to invite their co-operation in this novel campaign for peace. The men, awake at last, call to the women to come home; when these refuse, the men besiege them, but the attackers are repulsed with pails of hot water and torrents of speech. Lysistrata (“Dissolver of Armies”) reads the men a lesson:

During the wars of old we bore with you. . . . But we observed you carefully; and oftentimes, when we were at home, we used to hear that you had decided some matter badly. When we inquired about it, the men would answer, “What’s that to you? Be silent.” And we asked, “How is it, husband, that you men manage these affairs so foolishly?”

The leader of the men answers that women must keep out of public matter? because they cannot manage the treasury. (As they debate, some of the women steal away to their husbands, muttering Aristophanic excuses.) Lysistrata replies, “Why not? The wives have long had the management of their husbands’ purses, to the great advantage of both.” She argues so well that the men are finally persuaded to call a conference of the warring states. When the delegates are gathered, Lysistrata arranges that they shall have all the wine they can drink. Soon they are in a happy mood, and the long-delayed treaty is signed. The chorus ends the play with a paean to peace.

2. Aristophanes and the Radicals

Behind the disintegration of Athenian public life, in the view of Aristophanes, lay two basic evils: democracy and irreligion. He agreed with Socrates that the sovereignty of the people had become a sovereignty of politicians; but he was convinced that the skepticism of Socrates, Anaxagoras, and the Sophists had helped to loosen those moral bonds which had once made for social order and personal integrity. In The Clouds he made uproarious fun of the new philosophy. An old-fashioned gentleman by the name of Strepsiades, who is looking for an argument that may justify him in repudiating his debts, is delighted to hear that Socrates operates a Thinking Shop where one may learn to prove anything, even if it is false. He finds his way to the “School of Very Hard Thinkers.” In the middle of the classroom he sees Socrates suspended from the ceiling in a basket, engrossed in thought, while some of the students are bent down with noses to the ground.

Strep. What are those people doing, stooping so oddly?

Student. They are probing the secrets that lie deep as Tartarus.

Strep. But why—excuse me, but—their hind quarters—why are they stuck up so strangely in the air?

Stud. Their other ends are studying astronomy. (Strepsiades asks Socrates for lessons.)

Socr. By what gods do you swear? For the gods are not a current coin with us. (Points to the chorus of clouds.) These are the real gods.

Strep. But come, is there no Zeus?

Socr. There is no Zeus.

Strep. But who makes it rain, then?

Socr. These clouds. For have you ever seen rain without clouds? But if it were Zeus he ought to rain in fine weather as well as when clouds appear. . . .

Strep. But tell me, who is it that thunders? This makes me tremble.

Socr. These clouds, as they roll, thunder.

Strep. How?

Socr. When they are full of water, and are driven along, they fall heavily upon each other, and burst with a clap.

Strep. But who drives them? Is it not Zeus?

Socr. Not at all; the ethereal Vortex drives them on.

Strep. So the greatest of gods is Vortex. But what makes the clap of thunder?

Socr. I will teach you from your own case. Were you ever, after being stuffed with broth at a festival, later disturbed in your stomach, and did a tumult suddenly rumble through you?

In another scene Pheidippides, son of Strepsiades, meets in personification Just Argument and Unjust Argument. The first tells him that he must imitate the stoic virtues of the men of Marathon, but the other preaches to him the new morality. What good, asks Unjust Argument, have men ever gained by justice, or virtue, or moderation? For one honest successful and respected man there can always be found ten dishonest successful and respected men. Consider the gods themselves: they lied, stole, murdered, and committed adultery; and they are worshiped by all the Greeks. When Just Argument doubts that most successful men have been dishonest, Unjust Argument asks him:

Come now, from what class do our lawyers spring?

J. A. Well—from the blackguards.

U. A. Surely. Tell me, again, what are our tragic poets?

J. A. Blackguards.

U. A. And our public orators?

J. A. Blackguards all.

U. A. Now look about you. (Turning and pointing to the audience.) Which class among our friends here seems the most numerous? (J. A. gravely examines the audience.)

J. A. The blackguards have it by a large majority.

Pheidippides is so apt a pupil of Unjust Argument that he beats his father, on the ground that he is strong enough to do it and enjoys it; and besides, he asks, “Did you not beat me when I was a boy?” Strepsiades begs for mercy in the name of Zeus, but Pheidippides informs him that Zeus no longer exists, having been replaced by Vortex. The enraged father runs out into the streets, and calls upon all good citizens to destroy this new philosophy. They attack and burn down the Thinking Shop, and Socrates barely escapes with his life.

We do not know what part this comedy played in the tragedy of Socrates. It was brought out in 423, twenty-four years before the famous trial. Its good-humored satire does not seem to have offended the philosopher; we are told that he stood throughout the performance,¹²⁸ to give his enemies a better shot. Plato pictures Socrates and Aristophanes as friends after the performance; Plato himself recommended the play to Dionysius I of Syracuse as a jolly extravaganza, and maintained his own friendship with Aristophanes even after his master’s death.¹²⁹ Of the three accusers of Socrates in 399 one, Meletus, was a child when the comedy was presented, and another Anytus, was on friendly terms with Socrates after the play.¹³⁰ Probably the later circulation of the play as literature did the sage more harm than its original performance; Socrates himself, in Plato’s report of his defense, referred to the play as one of the major sources of that bad reputation which was prejudicing his case with the jurors.

There was another target in Athens at which Aristophanes aimed his satire; and in this case the mood was one of implacable hostility. He distrusted the skepticisms of the Sophists, the moral, economic, and political individualism that was undermining the state, the sentimental feminism that was agitating the women, and the socialism that was arousing the slaves. All these evils he saw at their clearest in Euripides; and he resolved to destroy with laughter the influence of the great dramatist upon the mind of Greece.

He began in 411 with a play which he called The Thesmophoriazusae, from the women who celebrated in sexual exclusiveness the feast of Demeter and Persephone. The assembled devotees discuss the latest quips of Euripides against their sex, and plan revenge. Euripides gets wind of the proceedings, and persuades his father-in-law Mnesilochus to dress as a woman and enter the meeting to defend him. The first complainant alleges that the tragic dramatist has deprived her of a living: formerly she made wreaths for the temples, but since Euripides has shown that there are no gods, the temple business has been ruined. Mnesilochus defends Euripides on the ground that his worst sayings about women are visibly and audibly true, and are mild compared with what women themselves know to be their faults. The ladies suspect that this traducer of the sex cannot be a woman; they tear off Mnesilochus’ disguise, and he saves himself from dismemberment only by snatching a babe from a woman’s arms and threatening to kill it if they touch him. As they nevertheless attack him, he unwraps the child, and finds that it is a wineskin disguised to escape the collector of internal revenue. He proposes to cut its throat just the same, much to the distress of its owner. “Spare my darling!” she cries; “or at least bring a bowl, and if it must die, let us catch its blood.” Mnesilochus solves the problem by drinking the wine, and meanwhile sending an appeal to Euripides for rescue. Euripides appears in various parts from his plays—now as Menelaus, now as Perseus, now as Echo—and finally arranges Mnesilochus’ escape.

The Frogs (405) returns to the assault despite Euripides’ death. Dionysus, god of the drama, is dissatisfied with the surviving playwrights of Athens, and descends to Hades to bring back Euripides. As he is ferried over to the lower world a choir of frogs greets him with a croaking chorus that must have provided a month’s catchword for young Athenians. Aristophanes pokes much fun at Dionysus in passing, and boldly parodies the Mysteries of Eleusis. When the god arrives in Hades he finds Euripides attempting to unseat Aeschylus as king of all dramatists. Aeschylus accuses Euripides of spreading skepticism and a dangerous casuistry, and of corrupting the morals of Athenian women and youth; ladies of refinement, he says, have been known to kill themselves through shame at having heard Euripides’ obscenities. A pair of scales is brought in, and each poet throws into it lines from his plays; one mighty phrase of Aeschylus (here the satire strikes the older poet too) tips the scale against a dozen of Euripides. At last Aeschylus proposes that the younger dramatist shall leap into one scale with wife, children, and baggage, while he will guarantee to find a couplet that will outweigh them all. In the end the great skeptic loses the contest, and Aeschylus is brought back to Athens as victor.* This oldest known essay in literary criticism received the first prize from the judges, and so pleased the audience that another performance of it was given a few days afterward.

In a middling play called The Ecclesiazusae (393)—i.e., The Assemblywomen—Aristophanes turned his laughter upon the radical movement in general. The ladies of Athens disguise themselves as men, pack the Assembly, outvote their husbands, brothers, and sons, and elect themselves rulers of the state. Their leader is a fiery suffragette, Praxagora, who berates her sex as fools for letting themselves be ruled by such dolts as men, and proposes that all wealth shall be divided equally among the citizens, leaving the slaves uncontaminated with gold. The attack upon Utopia takes a more graceful form in Aristophanes’ masterpiece, The Birds (414). Two citizens who despair of Athens climb up to the abode of the birds, hoping to find there an ideal life. With the help of the birds they build, between earth and heaven, a Utopian city, Nephelococcygia, or Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. The birds, in a chorus as lyrically perfect as anything in the tragic poets, apostrophize mankind:

Ye children of man, whose life is a span,

Protracted with sorrow from day to day,

Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,

Sickly calamitous creatures of clay,

Attend to the words of the sovereign birds,

Immortal, illustrious lords of the air,

Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye,

Your struggles of misery, labor, and care.

The birds plan to intercept all communication between the gods and men; no sacrifices shall be allowed to mount to heaven; soon, say the reformers, the old gods will starve, and the birds will be supreme. New gods are invented in the image of birds, and those conceived in the image of men are deposed. Finally an embassy comes from Olympus, seeking a truce; the leader of the birds agrees to take as his wife the handmaiden of Zeus, and the play ends in a happy marriage.

3. The Artist and the Thinker

Aristophanes is an unclassifiable mixture of beauty, wisdom, and filth. When the mood is upon him he can write lyrics of purest Greek serene, which no translator has ever yet conveyed. His dialogue is life itself, or perhaps it is swifter, racier, more vigorous than life dares be. He belongs with Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Dickens in the lusty vitality of his style; and like theirs his characters give us more keenly the shape and aroma of the time than all the works of the historians; no one who has not read Aristophanes can know the Athenians. His plots are ridiculous, and are put together with an almost extempore carelessness; sometimes the main theme is exhausted before the play is half through, and the remainder limps forward on the crutches of burlesque. The humor is generally of a low order; it cracks and groans with facile puns, drags itself out to tragic lengths, and too often depends upon digestion, reproduction, and excretion. In The Acharnians we hear of a character who eases himself continuously for eight months;¹³¹ in The Clouds the major forms of human waste are mingled with sublime philosophy;¹³² every second page offers us rumps, wind, bosoms, gonads, coitus, pederasty, onanism; everything is here.¹³³ He charges his old rival, Cratinus, with nocturnal incontinence.”¹³⁴ He is the most contemporary of ancient poets, for nothing is so timeless as obscenity. Coming to him after any other Greek author—worst of all, after Euripides—he seems depressingly vulgar, and we find it difficult to imagine the same audience enjoying them both.

If we are good conservatives we can stomach all this on the ground that Aristophanes attacks every form of radicalism, and upholds devotedly every ancient virtue and vice. He is the most immoral of all Greek writers known to us, but he hopes to make up for it by attacking immorality. He is always found on the side of the rich, but he denounces cowardice; he lies pitilessly about Euripides, living and dead, but he assails dishonesty; he describes the women of Athens as unbelievably coarse, but he exposes Euripides for defaming them; he burlesques the gods so boldly* that in comparison with the pious Socrates we must picture him as an hilarious atheist—but he is all for religion, and accuses the philosophers of undermining the gods. Yet it took real courage to caricature the powerful Cleon, and to paint the faults of Demos to Demos’ face; it took insight to see, in the trend of religion and morals from sophistic skepticism to epicurean individualism, a basic danger to the life of Athens. Perhaps Athens would have fared better if it had taken some of his advice, moderated her imperialism, made an early peace with Sparta, and mitigated with aristocratic leadership the chaos and corruption of post-Periclean democracy.

Aristophanes failed because he did not take his own counsels seriously enough to observe them himself. His excesses of pornography and abuse were partly responsible for the law forbidding personal satire; and though the law was soon repealed, the Old Comedy of political criticism died before the death of Aristophanes (385), and was replaced, even in his later plays, by the Middle Comedy of manners and romance. But the vitality of the Greek comic theater disappeared along with its extravagance and brutality. Philemon and Menander rose and passed and were forgotten, while Aristophanes survived all changes of moral and literary fashions to come down to our own time with eleven of his forty-two plays intact. Even today, despite all difficulties of understanding and translation, Aristophanes is alive; and, if we hold our noses, we can read him with profane delight.

VII. THE HISTORIANS

Prose was not completely forgotten in this heyday of dramatic poetry. Oratory, stimulated by democracy and litigation, became one of the passions of Greece. As early as 466 Corax of Syracuse wrote a treatise, Techne Logon (The Art of Words), to guide the citizen who wished to address an assembly or a jury; here already are the traditional divisions of an oration into introduction, narrative, argument, subsidiary remarks, and peroration. Gorgias brought the art to Athens, and Antiphon used the ornate style of Gorgias in speeches and pamphlets devoted to oligarchical propaganda. In Lysias Greek oratory became more natural and vivid; but it was only in the greatest statesmen, like Themistocles and Pericles, that the public address rose above all visible artifice, and proved the effectiveness of simple speech. The new weapon was sharpened by the Sophists, and so thoroughly exploited by their pupils that when the oligarchic party seized power in 404 it forbade the further teaching of rhetoric.”¹³⁶

The great achievement of Periclean prose was history. In a sense it was the fifth century that discovered the past, and consciously sought for a perspective of man in time. In Herodotus historiography has all the charm and vigor of youth; in Thucydides fifty years later, it has already reached a degree of maturity which no later age has ever surpassed. What separates and distinguishes these two historians is the Sophist philosophy. Herodotus was the simpler, perhaps the kindlier, certainly the more cheerful spirit. He was born in Halicarnassus about 484, of a family exalted enough to participate in political intrigue; because of his uncle’s adventures he was exiled at the age of thirty-two, and began those far-reaching travels that supplied the background for his Histories. He passed down through Phoenicia to Egypt, as far south as Elephantine; he moved west to Cyrene, east to Susa, and north to the Greek cities on the Black Sea. Wherever he went he observed and inquired with the eye of a scientist and the curiosity of a child; and when, about 447, he settled down in Athens, he was armed with a rich assortment of notes concerning the geography, history, and manners of the Mediterranean states. With these notes, and a little plagiarizing of Hecataeus and other predecessors, he composed the most famous of all historical works, recording the life and history of Egypt, the Near East, and Greece from their legendary origins to the close of the Persian War. An ancient story tells how he read parts of his book publicly at Athens and Olympia, and so pleased the Athenians with his account of the war. and their exploits in it, that they voted him twelve talents ($60,000)—which any historian will consider too pleasant to be true.¹³⁷

The introduction announces the purpose of the book in grand style:

This is a presentation of the Inquiries (Historiai) of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, to the end that time may not obliterate the great and marvelous deeds of the Hellenes and the Barbarians; and especially that the causes for which they waged war with one another may not be forgotten.

Since all the nations of the eastern Mediterranean are brought into the narrative, the book is, in a limited sense, a “universal history,” much broader in its scope than the narrow subject of Thucydides. The story is unconsciously unified by the contrast of barbarian despotism with Greek democracy, and moves, though by halting steps and confusing digressions, to a foreshadowed and epic end at Salamis. The purpose is to record “wondrous deeds and wars,”¹³⁸ and in truth the tale sometimes recalls Gibbon’s regrettable misunderstanding of history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”¹³⁹ Nevertheless Herodotus, though he speaks in only the most incidental way of literature, science, philosophy, and art, finds room for a thousand interesting illustrations of the dress, manners, morals, and beliefs of the societies he describes. He tells us how Egyptian cats jump into the fire, how the Danubians get drunk on smells, how the walls of Babylon were built, how the Massagetae eat their parents, and how the priestess of Athena at Pedasus grew a mighty beard. He presents not only kings and queens, but men of all degrees; and women, who are excluded from Thucydides, enliven these pages with their scandals, their beauty, their cruelties, and their charm.

There is, as Strabo says, “much nonsense in Herodotus”;”¹⁴⁰ but our historian, like Aristotle, covers a vast field, and has many opportunities to err. His ignorance is as wide as his learning, his credulity is as great as his wisdom. He thinks that the semen of Ethiopians is black,¹⁴¹ accepts the legend that the Lacedaemonians won battles because they had brought the bones of Orestes to Sparta,¹⁴² and reports incredible figures for the size of Xerxes’ army, the casualties of the Persians, and the almost woundless victories of the Greeks. His account is patriotic, but not unjust; he gives both sides of most political disputes,* signalizes the heroism of the invaders, and testifies to the honor and chivalry of the Persians. When he depends upon foreign informants he makes his greatest mistakes; so he thinks that Nebuchadrezzar was a woman, that the Alps are a river, and that Cheops came after Rameses III. But when he deals with matters that he has had a chance to observe in person he is more reliable, and his statements are increasingly confirmed as our knowledge grows.

He swallows many superstitions, records many miracles, quotes oracles piously, and darkens his pages with omens and auguries; he gives the dates of Semele, Dionysus, and Heracles; and presents all history, like a Greek Bossuet, as the drama of a Divine Providence rewarding the virtues and punishing the sins, crimes, and insolent prosperity of men. But he has his rationalistic moments, perhaps having heard the Sophists in his later years: he suggests that Homer and Hesiod gave name and form to the Olympian deities, that custom determines men’s faiths, and that one man knows as much as another about the gods;¹⁴³ having accepted Providence as the final arbiter of history, he puts it aside, and looks for natural causes; he compares and identifies the myths of Dionysus and Osiris in the manner of a scientist; he smiles tolerantly at some tales of divine intervention, and offers a possible natural explanation;¹⁴⁴ and he reveals his general method with a twinkle in his eye when he says: “I am under obligation to tell what is reported, but I am not obliged to believe it; and let this hold for every narrative in this history.”¹⁴⁵ He is the first Greek historian whose works have come down to us; and in that sense Cicero may be forgiven for calling him the Father of History. Lucian, like most of the ancients, ranked him above Thucydides.¹⁴⁶

Nevertheless the difference between the mind of Herodotus and that of Thucydides is almost the difference between adolescence and maturity. Thucydides is one of the phenomena of the Greek Enlightenment, a descendant of the Sophists as Gibbon was a spiritual nephew of Bayle and Voltaire. His father was a rich Athenian who owned gold mines in Thrace; his mother was a Thracian of distinguished family. He received all the education available in Athens, and grew up in the odor of skepticism. When the Peloponnesian War broke out he kept a record of it from day to day. In 430 he suffered from the plague. In 424, aged thirty-six (or forty), he was chosen one of two generals to command a naval expedition to Thrace. Because he failed to lead his forces to Amphipolis in time to relieve it from siege, he was exiled by the Athenians. He spent the next twenty years of his life in travel, especially in the Peloponnesus; to this direct acquaintance with the enemy we owe something of the impressive impartiality that distinguishes his book. The oligarchic revolution of 404 ended his exile, and he returned to Athens. He died—some say by murder—in or before 396, leaving unfinished his History of the Peloponnesian War.

He begins it simply:

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians from the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be an important war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.

He opens his introductory narrative where Herodotus left off, at the close of the Persian War. It is a pity that the genius of the greatest Greek historians saw nothing worthier of relation in Greek life than its wars. Herodotus wrote partly with an eye to entertain the educated reader; Thucydides writes to furnish information for future historians, and the guidance of precedent for future statesmanship. Herodotus wrote in a loose and easygoing style, inspired perhaps by the rambling epics of Homer; Thucydides, like one who has heard the philosophers, the orators, and the dramatists, writes in a style often involved and obscure because it attempts to be at once brief, precise, and profound, a style occasionally spoiled by Gorgian rhetoric and embellishment, but sometimes as terse and vivid as Tacitus, and rising, in the more crucial moments, to a dramatic power as intense as anything in Euripides; nothing in the dramatists can surpass the pages that describe the expedition to Syracuse, the vacillations of Nicias, and the horrors that followed his defeat. Herodotus ranged from place to place and from age to age; Thucydides forces his story into a rigid chronological frame of seasons and years, sacrificing the continuity of his narrative. Herodotus wrote in terms of personalities rather than processes, feeling that processes operate through personalities; Thucydides, though he recognizes the role of exceptional individuals in history, and occasionally lightens his theme with a portrait of Pericles or Alcibiades or Nicias, leans rather to impersonal recording and the consideration of causes, developments, and results. Herodotus wrote of far-off events reported to him in most cases at second or third hand; Thucydides speaks often as an eyewitness, or as one who has spoken with eyewitnesses, or has seen the original documents; in several instances he gives the documents concerned. He has a keen conscience for accuracy; even his geography has been verified in detail. He seldom passes moralistic judgments upon men or events; he lets his patrician scorn of Athenian democracy get the better of him in picturing Cleon, but for the greater part he keeps himself aloof from his story, gives the facts with fairness to both sides, and recounts the story of Thucydides’ brief military career as if he had never known, much less been, the man. He is the father of scientific method in history, and is proud of the care and industry with which he has worked. “On the whole,” he says, with a glance at Herodotus,

the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, be safely relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth’s expense—the subjects they treat being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend. Turning from these, we can rest satisfied with having proceeded upon the clearest data, and having arrived at conclusions as exact as can be expected in matters of such antiquity. . . . The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future—which, in the course of human affairs, must resemble, if it does not reflect, the past—I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.¹⁴⁷

Nevertheless, he yields accuracy to interest in one particular: he has a passion for putting elegant speeches into the mouths of his characters. He frankly admits that these orations are mostly imaginary, but they help him to explain and vivify personalities, ideas, and events. He claims that each speech represents the substance of an address actually given at the time; if this is true, all Greek statesmen and generals must have studied rhetoric with Gorgias, philosophy with the Sophists, and ethics with Thrasymachus. The speeches have all the same style, the same subtlety, the same realism of view; they make the laconic Laconian as windy as any Sophistbred Athenian. They put the most undiplomatic arguments into the mouths of diplomats,* and the most compromising honesty into the words of generals. The “Funeral Oration” of Pericles is an excellent essay on the virtues of Athens, and comes with fine grace from the pen of an exile; but Pericles was famous for simplicity of speech rather than for rhetoric; and Plutarch spoils the romance by saying that Pericles left nothing written, and that of his sayings hardly anything was preserved.¹⁴⁸

Thucydides has defects corresponding to his virtues. He is as severe as a Thracian, and lacks the vivacity and wit of the Athenian spirit; there is no humor in his book. He is so absorbed in “this war, of which Thucydides is the historian” (a proudly recurring phrase) that he has an eye only for political and military events. He fills his pages with martial details, but makes no mention of any artist, or any work of art. He seeks causes sedulously, but seldom sinks beneath political to economic factors in the determination of events. Though writing for future generations, he tells us nothing of the constitutions of the Greek states, nothing of the life of the cities, nothing of the institutions of society. He is as exclusive towards women as towards the gods; he will not have them in his story; and he makes the gallant Pericles, who risked his career for a courtesan advocate of feminine freedom, say that “a woman’s best fame is to be as seldom as possible mentioned by men, either for censure or for praise.”¹⁴⁹ Face to face with the greatest age in the history of culture, he loses himself in the logic-chopping fluctuations of military victory and defeat, and leaves unsung the vibrant life of the Athenian mind. He remains a general even after he has become an historian.

We are grateful for him, nevertheless, and must not complain too much that he did not write what he did not undertake to write. Here at least is an historical method, a reverence for truth, an acuteness of observation, an impartiality of judgment, a passing splendor of language and fascination of style, a mind both sharp and profound, whose ruthless realism is a tonic to our naturally romantic souls. Here are no legends, no myths, and no miracles. He accepts the heroic tales, but tries to explain them in naturalistic terms. As for the gods, he is devastatingly silent; they have no place in his history. He is sarcastic about oracles and their safe ambiguity,¹⁵⁰ and scornfully exposes the stupidity of Nicias in relying upon oracles rather than knowledge. He recognizes no guiding Providence, no divine plan, not even “progress”; he sees life and history as a tragedy at once sordid and noble, redeemed now and then by great men, but always relapsing into superstition and war. In him the conflict between religion and philosophy is decided; and philosophy wins.

Plutarch and Athenaeus refer to hundreds of Greek historians. Nearly all of them but Herodotus and Thucydides, in the Golden Age, have been covered up by the silt of time; and of the later historians only paragraphs remain. The case is no different with the other forms of Greek literature. Of the hundreds of tragic dramatists who won prizes at the Dionysia, we have a few plays by three; of the many comic writers we have one; of the great philosophers we have two. All in all, not more than one-twentieth survives from the critically acclaimed literature of fifth-century Greece; and from the earlier and later centuries even less.¹⁵¹ Most of what we have comes from Athens; the other cities, as we can tell from the philosophers that they sent to Athens, were fertile in genius too, but their culture was sooner engulfed by barbarism from without and from below, and their manuscripts were lost in the disorder of revolution and war. We must judge the whole from the fragments of a part.

Even so it is a rich heritage, if not in quantity (but who has absorbed it all?), surely in form. Form and order are the essence of the classic style in literature as well as in art: the typical Greek writer, like the Greek artist, is never satisfied with mere expression, but longs to give form and beauty to his material. He cuts his matter down to brevity, rearranges it into clarity, transforms it into a complex simplicity; he is always direct, and seldom obscure; he shuns exaggeration and bias, and even when he is romantic in feeling he struggles to be logical in thought. This persistent effort to subordinate fancy to reason is the dominant quality of the Greek mind, even of Greek poetry. Therefore Greek literature is “modern,” or rather contemporary; we find it hard to understand Dante or Milton, but Euripides and Thucydides are kin to us mentally, and belong to our age. And that is because, though myths may differ, reason remains the same, and the life of reason makes brothers of its lovers in all times, and everywhere.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Suicide of Greece

I. THE GREEK WORLD IN THE AGE OF PERICLES

LET us, before facing the melancholy spectacle of the Peloponnesian War, glance at the Greek world outside of Attica. Our knowledge of these other states in this period is so fragmentary that we are left to assume—what we cannot prove—that they shared to a minor degree in the cultural blossoming of the Golden Age.

In 459 Pericles, anxious to control Egyptian grain, sent a great fleet to expel the Persians from Egypt. The expedition failed, and thereafter Pericles adopted the policy of Themistocles—to win the world by commerce rather than by war. Throughout the fifth century Egypt and Cyprus continued under Persian rule. Rhodes remained free, and the merger of its three cities into one in 408 prepared it to become in the Hellenistic period one of the richest commercial centers in the Mediterranean. The Greek cities of Asia preserved their independence, won at Mycale in 479, until the destruction of the Athenian Empire left them helpless again before the tribute collectors of the Great King. The Greek colonies in Thrace and on the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Euxine prospered under Athenian domination, but were impoverished by the Peloponnesian War. Under Archelaus Macedonia passed out of barbarism and became one of the powers of the Greek world: good roads were laid down, a disciplined army was formed out of the hardy mountaineers, a handsome new capital was built at Pella, and many Greek geniuses, like Timotheus, Zeuxis, and Euripides, found welcome at the court. Boeotia in this period produced Pindar, and gave to Greece, in the Boeotian Confederacy, an unappreciated example of how independent states might live in peace and co-operation.

In Italy the Greek cities suffered from frequent wars, and from Athenian ascendancy in maritime trade. In 443 Pericles sent out a group of Hellenes, gathered from different states, to establish near the site of Sybaris the new colony of Thurii, as an experiment in Panhellenic unity. Protagoras drew up a code of laws for the city, and Hippodamus the architect laid out the streets on a rectangular plan that was to be widely imitated in the following centuries. Within a few years the colonists divided into factions according to their origin, and most of the Athenians, probably including Herodotus, went back to Athens.

Sicily, always turbulent but always fertile, continued to grow in wealth and culture. Selinus and Acragas built massive temples; and under Theron Acragas became so rich that Empedocles remarked: “The men of Acragas devote themselves wholly to luxury as if they were to die tomorrow, but they furnish their houses as if they were to live forever.”¹ Gelon I, when he died in 478, left Syracuse a system of administration almost as effective as that which Napoleon bequeathed to modern France. Under his brother and successor, Hieron I, the city became a center not only of trade and wealth, but of literature, science, and art. There, too, luxury reached dizzy heights: Syracusan banquets became a byword for extravagance, and “Corinthian girls” were so numerous in the city that any man who slept at home was considered a saint.² The citizens were quick of mind and sharp of tongue; they enjoyed good oratory to their ruin, and crowded to hear, in their magnificent open-air theater, the comedies of Epicharmus and the tragedies of Aeschylus.* Hieron was a tyrant of bad temper and good will, cruel to his enemies and generous to his friends. He opened his court and purse to Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar, and Aeschylus, and with their help made Syracuse for a moment the intellectual capital of Greece.

But man cannot live on art alone. The Syracusans thirsted for the wine of freedom, and after the death of Hieron they deposed his brother and set up a limited democracy. The other Greek cities in the island took courage and likewise expelled their dictators; the trading classes overthrew the landowning aristocracies, and established a commercial democracy superimposed upon a system of ruthless slavery. After some sixty years, war ended this interlude of liberty as it had ended another through Gelon I. In 409 the Carthaginians, who had kept alive through three generations the memory of Hamilcar’s defeat at Himera, invaded Sicily with an armada of fifteen hundred ships and twenty thousand men under Hamilcar’s grandson, Hannibal. He laid siege to Selinus, which had become pacific under prosperity, and had neglected to keep its defenses in repair. The surprised city appealed for help to Acragas and Syracuse, whose comfortable citizens responded with Spartan leisureliness. Selinus was taken, all the survivors were massacred and mutilated, and the city became a part of the Carthaginian Empire. Hannibal proceeded to Himera, captured it with ease, and put three thousand prisoners to torture and death to appease the shade of his grandfather. A plague decimated his troops and took off Hannibal himself as they besieged Acragas, but his successor mollified the gods of Carthage by burning alive his own son as an offering. The Carthaginians took the city, took Gela and Camarina, and marched on toward Syracuse. The terrified Syracusans, interrupted in their banquets, gave absolute power to their ablest general, Dionysius. But Dionysius made peace with the Carthaginians, ceded to them all southern Sicily, and used his troops to establish a second dictatorship (405). It was not all treachery. Dionysius knew that resistance was useless; he surrendered everything but his army and his city, and resolved to strengthen both until he too, like Gelon, could expel the invaders from Sicily.

II. HOW THE GREAT WAR BEGAN

Just as the simple soul must picture deity in the form of a man, so the simple citizen must conceive the causes of war to be personal—usually one person. Even Aristophanes, like some gossips of his time, would have it that Pericles brought on the Peloponnesian War by attacking Megara, because Megara had offended Aspasia.³

It is probable that Pericles, who had not hesitated to conquer Aegina, had dreamed of completing Athens’ control of Greek trade by dominating not only Megara but Corinth, which was to Greece what Istanbul is to the eastern Mediterranean today—a door and a key to half a continent’s trade. But the basic cause of the war was the growth of the Athenian Empire, and the development of Athenian control over the commercial and political life of the Aegean. Athens allowed free trade there in time of peace, but only by imperial sufferance; no vessel might sail that sea without her consent. Athenian agents decided the destination of every vessel that left the grain ports of the north; Methone, starving with drought, had to ask Athens’ leave to import a little corn.⁴ Athens defended this domination as a vital necessity; she was dependent upon imported food, and was determined to guard the routes by which that food came. In policing the avenues of international trade Athens performed a real service to peace and prosperity in the Aegean, but the process became more and more irksome as the pride and wealth of the subject cities grew. The funds that these had contributed for defense against Persia were being used for the adornment of Athens, even for the financing of Athenian wars upon other Greeks.⁵ Periodically the assessment had been increased until it was now, in 432, some 460 talents ($2,300,000) per year. Athens reserved to Athenian courts the right to try all cases, arising within the Confederacy, that involved Athenian citizens or major crimes. If any city resisted, it was reduced by force; so Pericles with efficient dispatch suppressed rebellions in Aegina (457), Euboea (446), and Samos (440). If we may believe Thucydides, the democratic leaders at Athens, while making liberty the idol of their policy among Athenians, frankly recognized that the Confederacy of free cities had become an empire of force. “You should remember,” says Thucydides’ Cleon to the Assembly (427), “that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are always conspiring against you; they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them to your own injury, but only in so far as you are their master; they have no love for you, but they are held down by force.”⁶ The inherent contradiction between the worship of liberty and the despotism of empire co-operated with the individualism of the Greek states to end the Golden Age.

The resistance to Athenian policy came from nearly every state in Greece.⁷ Boeotia fought off at Coronea (447) the attempt of Athens to include it in the Empire. Some subject cities, and others that feared to become subject, appealed to Sparta to check the Athenian power. The Spartans were not eager for war, knowing the strength and valor of the Athenian fleet; but the old racial antipathy between Dorian and Ionian inflamed them, and the Athenian custom of establishing in every city democracies dependent upon the Empire seemed to the landowning oligarchy of Sparta a threat to aristocratic government everywhere. For a time the Spartans contented themselves with supporting the upper classes in every city, and slowly forging a united front against Athens.

Surrounded by enemies abroad and at home, Pericles worked for peace and prepared for war. The army, he calculated, could protect Attica, or all of Attica’s population gathered within Athens’ walls; and the navy could keep open the routes by which Euxine or Egyptian grain might enter Athens’ walled port. It was his judgment that no real concessions could be made without endangering that supply of food; it seemed to him, as now to England, a choice between empire and starvation. Nevertheless he sent envoys to all the Greek states, inviting them to an Hellenic Conference which would seek a peaceful solution of the problems that were leading to war. Sparta refused to attend, feeling that her acceptance would be construed as an acknowledgment of Athenian hegemony, and at her secret suggestion⁸ so many other states rejected the invitation that the project fell through. Meanwhile, says Thucydides, in a sentence that explains much history, “The Peloponnesus and Athens were both full of young men whose inexperience made them eager to take up arms.”⁹

These basic factors being present, the coming of war awaited some provocative incident. In 435 Corcyra, a Corinthian colony, declared itself independent of Corinth; and presently she joined the Athenian Confederacy for protection. Corinth sent a fleet to reduce the island; Athens, appealed to by the victorious democrats of Corcyra, sent a fleet to help them. An indecisive battle took place, in which the navies of Corcyra and Athens fought against those of Megara and Corinth. In 432 Potidaea, a city in Chalcidice tributary to Athens but Corinthian in blood, attempted to expel the Athenian power. Pericles sent an army to besiege it, but its resistance continued for two years, and weakened the military resources and prestige of Athens. When Megara gave further help to Corinth Pericles ordered all Megarian products excluded from the markets of Attica and the Empire. Megara and Corinth appealed to Sparta; Sparta proposed to Athens a repeal of this Megarian decree; Pericles agreed on condition that Sparta permit foreign states to trade with Laconia. Sparta refused; instead, she laid down as a prerequisite to peace, that Athens should acknowledge the full independence of all Greek cities—i.e., that Athens should surrender her Empire. Pericles persuaded the Athenians to reject this demand; and Sparta declared war.¹⁰

III. FROM THE PLAGUE TO THE PEACE

Nearly all Greece ranged itself on one or the other side. Every state in the Peloponnesus except Argos supported Sparta; so did Corinth, Megara, Boeotia, Locris, and Phocis. Athens, at the outset, had the half-hearted help of the Ionian and Euxine cities and the Aegean isles. Like the World War of our own time, the first phase of the struggle was a contest between sea power and land power. The Athenian fleet laid waste the coastal towns of the Peloponnesus, while the Spartan army invaded Attica, seized the crops, and ruined the soil. Pericles called the population of Attica within the walls of Athens, refused to let his troops go out to battle, and advised the excited Athenians to bide their time and wait for their navy to win the war.

His calculations were strategically sound, but they ignored a factor that almost decided the conflict. The crowding of Athens led (430) to a plague—probably malaria¹¹—which raged for nearly three years, killing a fourth of the soldiers and a great number of the civilian population.* The people, desperate with the combined sufferings of epidemic and war, accused Pericles of responsibility for both. Cleon and others indicted him on the charge of misusing public funds; since he had apparently employed state money to bribe the Spartan kings to peace, he was unable to give a satisfactory accounting; he was convicted, deposed from office, and fined the enormous sum of fifty talents ($300,000). About the same time (429) his sister and his two legitimate sons died of the plague. The Athenians, finding no leader to replace him, recalled him to power (429); and, to show their esteem for him, and their sympathy in his bereavement, they overrode a law that he himself had passed, and bestowed citizenship upon the son that Aspasia had borne to him. But the aging statesman had himself been infected by the plague; he grew weaker day by day, and died within a few months after his restoration to office. Under him Athens had reached her zenith; but because that height had been attained in part through the wealth of an unwilling Confederacy, and through a power that invited almost universal hostility, the Golden Age was unsound in its foundations, and was doomed to disaster when Athenian statesmanship failed in the strategy of peace.

Perhaps, as Thucydides suggests, Athens might have come through to victory nevertheless, if it had pursued to the end the Fabian policy laid down by Pericles. But his successors were too impatient to carry out a program that required a proud self-control. The new masters of the democratic party were merchants like Cleon the dealer in leather, Eucrates the rope seller, Hyperbolus the lampmaker; and these men demanded an active war on land as well as sea. Cleon was the ablest of them, the most eloquent, unscrupulous, and corrupt. Plutarch describes him as “the first orator among the Athenians that pulled off his cloak and smote his thigh when addressing the people”;¹² Cleon made it a point, says Aristotle, to appear on the rostrum in the garb of a workingman.¹³ He was the first in a long line of demagogues that ruled Athens from the death of Pericles to the loss of Athenian independence at Chaeronea (338).

Cleon’s ability was proved in 425 when the Athenian fleet besieged a Spartan army on the island of Sphacteria, near Messenian Pylus. No admiral seemed capable of taking the stronghold; but when the Assembly gave Cleon charge of the siege (half hoping that he would be killed in action), he surprised all by carrying through the attack with a skill and courage that forced the Lacedaemonians to an unprecedented surrender. Sparta, humbled, offered peace and alliance in return for the captured men, but Cleon’s oratory persuaded the Assembly to reject the offer and continue the war. His hold on the populace was strengthened by a proposal, easily carried, that the Athenians should henceforth pay no taxes to the support of the war, but should finance it by raising the tribute exacted of the subject cities in the Empire (424). In these cities, as in Athens, the policy of Cleon was to get as much money out of the rich as he could find.

When the upper classes of Mytilene rebelled, overthrew the democracy, and declared Lesbos free of allegiance to Athens (429), Cleon moved that all adult males in the disaffected city be put to death. The Assembly—perhaps a mere quorum—agreed, and sent a ship with orders to that effect to Paches, the Athenian general who had put down the revolt. When word of the ruthless edict got about Athens the steadier heads called for another meeting of the Assembly, secured the repeal of the decree, and dispatched a second ship which reached Paches just in time to prevent a massacre. Paches sent to Athens a thousand ringleaders, who, at Cleon’s suggestion, and in accordance with the custom of the age, were all put to death.¹⁴

Cleon redeemed himself by dying in battle against the Spartan hero Brasidas, who was capturing one after another of the cities subject or allied to Athens in the mainland north. It was in this campaign that Thucydides lost his naval commission and his Athenian residence by coming up too tardily to the relief of Amphipolis, which commanded the gold mines of Thrace. Brasidas having died in the same campaign, Sparta, left leaderless in the face of a threatened Helot revolt, offered peace again; and Athens, for once taking the advice of the oligarchic leader, signed the Peace of Nicias (421). The rival cities not only declared the war ended, but signed an alliance for fifty years; and Athens committed herself to go to the help of Sparta should the Helots rise.¹⁵

IV. ALCIBIADES

Three factors turned this pledge of a half century of friendship into a brief truce of six years: the diplomatic corruption of the peace into “war by other means”; the rise of Alcibiades as the leader of a faction that favored renewed hostilities; and the attempt of Athens to conquer the Dorian colonies in Sicily. Sparta’s allies refused to sign the agreement; they fell away from Sparta as now a weakened state, and transferred their alliance to Athens. Alcibiades, while keeping Athens formally at peace, maneuvered them into a war with Sparta, and united them in battle against her at Mantinea (418). Sparta won, and Greece relapsed into an angry truce.

Meanwhile Athens sent a fleet to the Dorian isle of Melos to demand its entrance as a subject state into the Athenian Empire (416). According to Thucydides, who here probably sinks the historian into the sophistical philosopher or the revengeful exile, the Athenian envoys gave no other reason for their action than that might is right. “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it; we found it existing before, and shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.”¹⁶ The Melians refused to yield, and announced that they would put their trust in the gods. Later, as irresistible reinforcements came to the Athenian fleet, they surrendered at the discretion of the conquerors. The Athenians put to death all adult males who fell into their hands, sold the women and children as slaves, and gave the island to five hundred Athenian colonists. Athens rejoiced in the conquest, and prepared to illustrate in a living tragedy the theme of her dramatists, that a vengeful nemesis pursues all insolent success.

Alcibiades was one of those who, in the Assembly, defended the resolution condemning the male population of Melos to death.¹⁷ His support for any motion usually sufficed to carry it, for he was now the most famous man in Athens, admired for his eloquence, his good looks, his versatile genius, even his faults and crimes. His father, the rich Cleinias, had been killed at the battle of Coronea; his mother, an Alcmaeonid and near relative of Pericles, had persuaded the statesman to bring up Alcibiades in his home. The boy was troublesome, but intelligent and brave; at twenty he fought beside Socrates at Potidaea, and at twenty-six at Delium (424). The philosopher seems to have felt a warm attachment for the youth, and called him to virtue, says Plutarch, with words that “so overcame Alcibiades as to draw tears from his eyes, and disturb his very soul. Yet sometimes he would abandon himself to flatterers, when they proposed to him varieties of pleasure, and would desert Socrates, who would then pursue him as if he had been a fugitive slave.”¹⁸

The wit and pranks of the young man became the shocked and fascinated gossip of Athens. When Pericles reproved his immodest dogmatism by saying that he too had talked cleverly in his youth, Alcibiades answered, “Pity I couldn’t have known you when your brain was at its best.”¹⁹ Purely to meet the challenge of his fellow roisterers, he publicly struck in the face one of Athens’ richest and most powerful men, Hipponicus. The next morning he entered the house of the frightened magnate, bared his body, and begged Hipponicus to scourge him in punishment. The old man was so overwhelmed that he gave the youth his daughter Hipparete in marriage, with a dowry of ten talents; Alcibiades persuaded him to double it, and spent most of it on himself. He lived on a scale of luxury never known in Athens before. He filled his home with costly furniture, and engaged artists to paint pictures on the walls. He kept a stud of racing horses, and often won the chariot race at Olympia; once his entries took the first, second, and fourth prizes in one contest, whereupon he feasted the whole Assembly.²⁰ He fitted out triremes, and paid the expenses of choruses; and when the state called for war contributors his donations topped all the rest. Free from any inhibition of conscience, convention, or fear, he frolicked through youth and early manhood with such animal spirits that all Athens seemed to enjoy his happiness. He lisped a little, but with a charm that made all fashionable young men lisp; he wore a new cut of shoe, and soon all the gilded youth of the city were wearing “Alcibiades shoes.” He violated a hundred laws and injured a hundred men, but no one dared bring him before a court. His popularity with the hetairai was so general that he wore on his golden shield an Eros with a thunderbolt, as if to announce his victories in love.²¹ His wife, after bearing his infidelities with patience, returned to her father’s house, and prepared to sue for divorce; but when she appeared before the archon Alcibiades caught her up in his arms and carried her home through the market place, no one venturing to oppose him. Thereafter she gave him full freedom, and contented herself with the crumbs of his love; but her early death suggests a heart broken by his inconstancy.

Entering politics after the death of Pericles, he found only one rival—the rich and pious Nicias. But Nicias favored the aristocracy, and peace; therefore Alcibiades set himself to favor the commercial classes, and preached an imperialism that touched Athenian pride; the Peace of Nicias was sufficiently discredited in his eyes by bearing his rival’s name. In 420 he was elected one of the ten generals, and began those ambitious schemes that led Athens back into war. When the Assembly acclaimed him Timon the misanthrope rejoiced, predicting great calamities.²²

V. THE SICILIAN ADVENTURE

It was the imagination of Alcibiades that ruined the work of Pericles. Athens had recovered from the plague and the war, and trade was again bringing her the wealth of the Aegean. But the law of every being is self-development; no ambition, no empire, is ever content. Alcibiades dreamed of carving out a new realm for Athens in the rich cities of Italy and Sicily; there Athens would find grain, materials, and men; there she would control the foreign food supply of the Peloponnesus; there she might double the tribute that was making her the greatest city in Greece. Only Syracuse could rival her; and that was a thought hard for Athens to bear. If she could take Syracuse all the western Mediterranean would fall into her lap, and a splendor would come to Athens such as even Pericles had not conceived.

In 427 Sicily, imitating the mainland, had divided into warring camps, one led by Dorian Syracuse, the other by Ionian Leontini. Leontini sent Gorgias to Athens to seek help, but Athens was then too weak to respond. Now, in 416, Segesta dispatched envoys to Athens to say that Syracuse was planning to subjugate all Sicily, make the island Dorian in government, and supply food and money to Sparta should the great war be renewed. Alcibiades leaped to his opportunity. He argued that the Sicilian Greeks were hopelessly divided, even within each city; that it would be a simple matter—given a little courage—to annex the whole island to the Empire; that the Empire must continue to grow, or begin to decay; and that a little war now and then was a necessary training for an imperial race.²³ Nicias pled with the Assembly not to listen to any man whose personal extravagance tempted him to wild schemes of aggrandizement; but the eloquence of Alcibiades and the imagination of a people now dangerously free from moral scruples won the day. The Assembly declared war against Syracuse, voted funds for a vast armada, and, as if to ensure defeat, divided the command between Alcibiades and Nicias.

Preparations went on with the characteristic fever of war, and the occasion of the fleet’s departure was awaited as a patriotic festival. But shortly before this appointed day a strange occurrence shocked a city that had lost much of its piety but none of its superstitions. Some unknown persons, under cover of night, had knocked off the noses, ears, and phalli from the figures of the god Hermes that stood before public buildings and many private dwellings as an emblem of fertility and a guardian of the home. An excited investigator brought forward the unreliable evidence of aliens and slaves that the prank had been perpetrated by a drunken party of Alcibiades’ friends, led by Alcibiades himself. The young general protested his innocence, and demanded to be tried at once, that he might be convicted or cleared before the departure of the fleet; but his enemies, foreseeing his acquittal, succeeded in postponing the trial. And so in 415 the great flotilla set sail, led by a timid pacifist who hated war, and by an audacious militarist whose genius of leadership was frustrated by the divided command, and the dread, among the crews, that he had incurred the enmity of the gods.

The fleet had been gone some days when new evidence, as unreliable as before, was brought out to the effect that Alcibiades and his friends had participated in an impious mimicry of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Urged on by an enraged populace, the Assembly sent the swift galley Salaminia to overtake Alcibiades and bring him back for trial. Alcibiades accepted the summons and went aboard the Salaminia; but when the vessel stopped at Thurii he secretly made his way to shore, and escaped. The Athenian Assembly, baffled, pronounced judgment of exile upon him, with confiscation of all his property, and a decree of death in case the Athenians should ever capture him. Bitter at the thought that his plans for empire and glory had been frustrated by a condemnation which he continued to call unjust, Alcibiades took refuge in the Peloponnesus, and, appearing before the Spartan Assembly, proposed to help Sparta defeat Athens and establish there an aristocratic government. “As for democracy,” Thucydides makes him say, “the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have the more cause to complain of it; but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity.”²⁴ He advised them to send a fleet to help Syracuse and an army to capture Deceleia—an Attic town whose possession should give Sparta military command of everything in Attica but Athens. The silver mines at Laurium would cease to finance Athenian resistance, and the subject cities, foreseeing the defeat of Athens, would stop their payment of tribute. Sparta took his advice.

The intensity of his own resolution appeared in the completeness with which he, so accustomed to luxury, took up the Spartan way of life. He became frugal and reserved, eating coarse food, wearing a rough tunic and no shoes, bathing in the Eurotas winter and summer, and observing all Lacedaemonian laws and customs faithfully. Even so his good looks and personal fascination ruined his plans. The Queen fell in love with him, bore him a son, and proudly whispered to her friends that he was the father. He excused himself to his intimates on the ground that he could not resist the chance to establish his race as kings over Laconia. King Agis, who had been away with the army, started home, and Alcibiades conveniently secured a commission in a Spartan squadron that was sailing to Asia. The King disowned the child and sent out secret orders for the assassination of Alcibiades; but the latter’s friends warned him, and he escaped and joined the Persian admiral Tissaphernes at Sardis.

At the other end of the war front Nicias was encountering a resistance which only Alcibiades’ genius for strategy and intrigue could have overcome. Nearly all of Sicily came to the aid of Syracuse. In 414 a Spartan fleet under Gylippus helped the Sicilian navy to bottle up the Athenian ships in the harbor of Syracuse, cutting them off from any supply of food. A final chance to escape was lost because of an eclipse of the moon, which frightened Nicias and many of his soldiers into awaiting an opportunity more satisfactory to the gods. On the next day, however, they found themselves surrounded, and were forced to give battle. They were defeated, first on sea and then on land. Nicias, though ill and weak, fought bravely, and at last surrendered to the mercy of the Syracusans. He was at once put to death; and the surviving Athenians, almost all of the citizen class, were sent to die at hard labor in the quarries of Sicily, where they tasted the fate of the men who for generations had worked the mines of Laurium.

VI. THE TRIUMPH OF SPARTA

The disaster broke the spirit of Athens. Nearly half the citizen body was now enslaved or dead; half the women of the citizen class were in effect widows, and the children were orphans. The funds that Pericles had accumulated in the treasury were almost exhausted; in another year the last penny would be gone. Thinking the fall of Athens imminent, the subject cities refused further tribute; most of her allies abandoned her, and many flocked to the side of Sparta. In 413 Sparta, claiming that the “fifty years” peace had been repeatedly violated by Athens, renewed the war. The Lacedaemonians now took and fortified Deceleia; the supply of food from Euboea and of silver from Laurium stopped; the slaves in the mines at Laurium revolted, and went over to the Spartans in a body of twenty thousand men. Syracuse sent an army to join in the attack; and the Persian King, seeing an opportunity to avenge Marathon and Salamis, provided funds for the growing Spartan fleet, on the shameful understanding that Sparta would assist Persia in regaining mastery over the Greek cities of Ionia.²⁵