Aeschylus (Copleston)/Chapter 1
ÆSCHYLUS.
CHAPTER I.
THE FEAST OF BACCHUS.
In order rightly to understand the drama of the Greeks, and especially their tragedy, we must rid ourselves, as far as possible, of those associations which now cling in England round the names of "play" and "theatre." For our modern plays are so unlike a Greek tragedy, and the position which they occupy is so entirely different from that of the Athenian theatre, that the few points which both have in common are more likely to impede than assist us.
The Athenian theatre was a national institution; no private speculation, but the pride and glory of a great people; somewhat like, in this respect, to the celebrated theatres of some of the small German states, such as those of Dresden or Mannheim. It was also a religious institution; not merely a scene of national amusement, but at the same time a solemn ceremony in honour of the god Bacchus. The performances took place only at rare intervals, when the festivals of that divinity came round, and so were invested with, a dignity which cannot attach to our modern theatres, open as these are every day in the year or in the season. And as a consequence of the rarity of the representations, each play was, as a rule, enacted only once.
All these facts—that the theatre was national, and religious, and rarely open—combined to make the audience on each occasion very numerous. It was a point of national pride, of religious duty, and of common prudence on the part of every citizen, not to miss the two great dramatic festivals of the year when their season came. Accordingly, we hear that thirty thousand people used to be present together; and we may infer from this, as well as from other indisputable evidence, the vast size of the theatre itself. The performance took place in the day-time, and lasted nearly all day, for several plays were presented in succession; and the theatre was open to the sky and to the fields, so that when a man looked away from the solemn half-mysterious representation of the legendary glories of his country, his eye would fall on the city itself, with its temples and its harbours, or on the rocky cliffs of Salamis and the sunny islands of the Ægean. Finally, the performance was musical, and so more like an opera than an ordinary play, though we shall see that even this resemblance is little more than superficial.
From these few facts it will probably be clear that we shall do best if we entirely discard our modern notions of a theatre, and start quite afresh in our attempt to understand what a Greek play was like.
We must carry our thoughts back to the boyhood of the world. That expression does not only mean that in years the world once was young and now is older, nor only that once men lived of necessity simple lives, not knowing many sciences, and possessing no steam-engines or telegraphs; it means much more than these—that the tone of mind, the buoyancy, the thoughtlessness, which now are found only in boyhood, were then common, in a great measure, to all periods of life. This is a matter infinitely more important than any outward simplicity of life and manners. Let us see a little more closely what it means. The chief source of seriousness in later times is religion. A series of religions, of speculations about the meaning of life, the future to be expected after death, the system of punishments and rewards,—these have gradually sobered the nations of the civilised world. Secondly, the extension of civilisation itself has made each generation more busy than the last, and has deepened the sense of constant responsibility involved in transactions of commerce, in legal and official relations, and so contributed to take away the thoughtless ease and gaiety which existed in the boyhood of the world. To a Greek, in the early days, there were two serious occupations—war, and commerce or piracy; but both were rather opportunities for enterprise than subjects for anxiety. Religion, to a Greek, consisted in an intense love of all that is beautiful, and a firm belief that every stream and tree and cloud was tenanted by a god. All that for us is mere senseless imagery was for him a reality. In the sound of a stream he really believed that he heard the sighing or the laughter of a nymph—how should the stream move and speak if it were not so possessed? The clouds gathered and the lightning flashed, not of themselves, or in obedience to laws of nature—of those mysterious powers the Greek had never heard—but simply because some person moved the clouds and hurled the lightning; and this was Zeus, or Jove.
Living thus with no anxieties; surrounded by the constant presence of deities who showed themselves to him through every form of natural beauty; reared on sunny hills amid the olive and the vine, and looking out always on bright bays and islands of the eastern sea; trained in every exercise of health; beautiful in face and person as the gods he believed in,—every Greek was in his measure an Apollo, always young in spirit, and cheerful and strong. The epochs of his simple life were the seasons of seed-time and harvest, of pruning and vintage; and they were marked by rustic ceremonies in honour of the gods of fruit and flowers and corn and wine.
Of all these seasons, those connected with the grape were naturally the merriest and most famous. When the rich clusters were carried home, all the country-side would gather round a rustic altar of Bacchus, at the foot of the warm hills on which the vines grew so richly, and there they danced, and sang, and played games,—simple indeed, but marked by the grace and beauty which seems inseparable from the nature of a Greek. This Bacchus whom they worshipped was not, as he is to us, a statue, or a picture, or a name, but a real merry boy with a crown of ivy-leaves and a strange power of inspiring wild thoughts in the human breast. His laughing eyes had often peeped through the thick coverts of vines at the village maidens, and stories were told how once he had leapt from his tiger-chariot to win the love of Ariadne. When spring came round, and the last year's wine was opened, there was another festival, even more joyous, and merriment became boisterous as the power of the god made itself felt; and these spring festivals grew to be the chief ones of the year. Many rude games arose, in which the young men contended for a goat,[1] the victim sacrificed, or for a cup or tripod. One of the sports was to dance upon the slippery changing surface of a skin of wine, and he who kept his footing best carried off the skin of wine for his prize. Another was to sing extemporised songs in honour of the god; and when, in any district, a poetical spirit sprang up, this became a leading feature of the contests. Some particular village, we may suppose, would get famous for the hymns sung yearly at its spring festival, and become the centre of a district: the villagers made themselves a name, and went about to sing at neighbouring feasts; then matches were made up between different companies of singers, or individual poets contended together; and the thing grew until there were organised bands of twelve or more, who danced round the altar of Bacchus singing their hymns in his praise, and ballads describing his birth, and his loves, and his exploits. The first systematising of this form of entertainment is connected with the name of one Arion of Corinth. In his hands the dithyrambic dance and song (such was the name) became an orderly and solemn ceremony, and as such was kept up for many years in different parts of Greece. The number of the chorus was raised to fifty, and set music and words were composed for it. But it was in Attica, the land of the drama, that the first great addition was made to the simplicity of this chorus. Thespis, an inhabitant of one of the country districts, introduced into the pauses of the choric song a rude dialogue, maintained probably at first by himself on the one hand, and the leader of the singers on the other. This may have been sometimes comic, not much more dignified than the repartees with which our clowns fill up the pauses in a circus; sometimes it consisted of questions and answers concerning some story or exploit of Bacchus or Hercules;—at any rate, it soon grew to more. The actor, for so we must now begin to call him, would narrate, not without explanatory gesture and action, some mythical story, while the chorus would sing from time to time songs in continuation of his tale, or in comment upon it; songs of triumph when a victory was described, of mourning when the action was sad, and at all times of moral and pious reflection upon the dealings of the gods with men.
Such was the earliest form of the Attic tragedy, and much as it was afterwards developed, it never entirely lost this form. To the one actor of Thespis another was soon added, so that there was now a complete dialogue independent of the chorus; but to anything like the modern system, of many parts, each supported by a separate actor, the Greek tragedy never attained. Three is the largest number of actors employed in any of the plays of Æschylus; so that, although each took more than one part in succession, there could never be more than three speaking characters upon the stage at once, except when, as was often the case, the chorus took part in the action.
The chorus of Thespis had danced upon a raised platform, in the midst of which stood the altar of the god; the introduction of a second actor made an increase of space and means of entrance and exit necessary, and thus the platform grew into the stage. In course of time a separate place was made for the chorus, and called the orchestra, or dancing stage, while the stage proper was left for the actors, and for the chorus when it assumed an actor's part. Further, as there were now two actors exhibiting a story by means of dialogue, each naturally presented a different hero or deity; to make this assumption of character more effective, masks were introduced, and before long great perfection was arrived at in their construction.
From the very first, as we have seen, these choric songs were produced at annual contests during the spring festival of the god of wine; and the same custom was continued when the dialogue had been added to the chorus, and the now developed dramas were presented in succession to compete for an annual prize. Having its origin in the country villages of Attica, this form of poetic contest found its centre in Athens, and the two spring festivals there became distinguished among the chief solemnities of Greece. When Athens began to take the lead among Grecian states, as she did after the Persian war, while her art and literature, though still only in embryo, were preparing to rise to that eminence which soon afterwards they attained, all that was most solemn in religion, most enthusiastic in national feeling, most beautiful in art, found its expression in the rival dramas which twice in every spring were presented, one after another, in the great theatre of Bacchus to contend for the tragic prize. Foremost among the poets for many years was Æschylus; but there must have been many others who rivalled and sometimes defeated him, and these contributed their share towards the advances which were made in his time by the art. We, to whom a theatre means something so utterly different, can hardly fancy the enthusiasm with which the Athenian citizen, on the great religious day, went into the assembly of his countrymen to see the land's most gifted sons, in grand words decked out with every aid of art and dance and music, rival one another in celebrating the great deeds of gods and kings and heroes, the founders and patrons of the Grecian race. Let us endeavour as far as we may to realise the scene.
At the time of such a festival Athens was crowded. The city always contained a large number of resident foreigners, who lived there for commerce or security, and enjoyed a special legal protection. Then there were a great many passing merchants and sailors, and strangers impelled by one motive or another to visit the state which, was fast becoming the leader of Greece, and many no doubt were brought together by the feast itself. There were the country people of Attica, come in, as it were, from the suburbs; and lastly, there were the regular inhabitants themselves. A busy, energetic people these were, living half their time at sea or in foreign cities; full of all a sailor's vivacity and vigour and enterprise, yet without the sailor's ignorance and rudeness—their hardihood tempered by the culture which was fast gaining ground, and which this festival did much to foster. We have lively descriptions given us of the hurry and the bustle and the clamour in the docks and marts of this most stirring city; and now all was at its height. The city itself was only just beginning to be beautified with the temples and groves and statues which were afterwards its glory; but at present, while the heroes of Marathon were still in its streets, it needed no better decoration, and the rough walls and narrow roads spoke still of the haste with which they were built up, after the Athenians had so nobly left their homes to destruction to fight at Salamis for the liberty of Greece. Never has there been a city of which its people might be more justly proud, whether they looked to its past or to its future, than Athens in the days of Æschylus.
But all are tending, early in the day, to the great theatre of Bacchus, under the Acropolis. This sacred citadel stands high above the rest of the city, crowned even now with temples of the gods, and especially of Minerva, the patron goddess. Its south side is a steep precipice of rock, from which the ground slopes gradually down. Here is the theatre.[2] The part occupied by the audience is semicircular, and consists of seats rising like steps one above the other, and cut in the solid rock. This vast semicircle is filled already with the mass of citizens, men and women, except in the lower ranges of seats, which are reserved for the magistrates and senators. In the centre a small area is left, on which is a raised platform with the altar of Bacchus upon it; across the front, from end to end of the semicircle, runs a high wall which closes the theatre, and in front of this wall is the stage. The stage is long and narrow;—it runs, that is, across nearly the whole front, but is only deep enough for four or five men to walk abreast—and steps lead down from it into the central area or orchestra; while, parallel to the stage, but on the lower level, run long passages to right and left, by which the chorus may enter or leave the theatre. As, then, we take our seat among the noisy crowd, we see before us, down on the floor of the house, as we should call it, the altar on its raised platform in the orchestra, and beyond it, fronting us, a high columned wall, fashioned perhaps like a temple, with great folding doors in the middle, opening upon the stage. We are going to stay here all day and see piece after piece, and join in approving the verdict of the judges when, at the end, they award the prize to the play which has been best written, best put on the stage, best acted, sung, and danced, richest in free and patriotic sentiments or hits at the defeated Persians, and most illustrative of the glory of the city.
The sun shines full in the faces of the expectant multitude, but a Greek is not fastidious about weather;—besides, there is a pleasant breeze blowing over us from the sea. And the time is passed in discussion of the probable character of the different plays, and the chances of the competitors. These are not, as we might have expected, the poets whose plays are to be presented, but the rich men who put the several plays upon the stage. A poet is not usually a rich man, and could not of course afford to hire, as he must, a chorus and actors, and get dresses and scenery arranged; left to himself, he could no more bring out his piece than the ordinary composer could bring out an opera. So the plan in Athens was this. The rich men in each tribe were required to contribute out of their wealth to the benefit and amusement of their fellow-citizens. When ships were wanted, the burden of supplying them was laid on the wealthier citizens, to each of whom, or to several clubbed together, the duty of providing a ship was assigned. Similarly, when the festivals were to be supplied with plays, the office of putting a piece on the stage—of furnishing a chorus, as it was called—devolved upon some one very rich citizen, or upon several of moderate wealth who bore the expense between them. The play to be thus provided for was assigned by the magistrates out of those which the rival poets had sent in. The furnisher of the chorus then collected men who could sing and dance to be trained for the chorus, chose the two or the three actors among whom the parts should be distributed, had scenes painted and dresses hired, and provided whatever else was needed for the due performance of the piece. It was a point of honour to do the whole as liberally and artistically as possible; and an ambitious man would gain popularity by introducing new stage-machinery, new effects in the music, or new inventions for making the gestures of the actors visible and their voices audible throughout the immense building. For it will seem most wonderful, if we consider the case, that any actor could make himself heard by thirty thousand people in the open air; still more that his voice, so elevated as to penetrate through all that multitude, should be able to preserve distinct the various tones of grief or joy, of submission or command. To meet this difficulty the Greeks contrived masks, which enclosed, it seems, the whole head, and were fitted with acoustic arrangements such as are unknown to us, by which the power of the human voice was wonderfully increased. In the same way, in order that the persons of the actors might not appear diminutive from the great distance at which most of the spectators saw them, they were made taller by very thick-soled boots, and broader by the judicious arrangement of their dresses; while the mask, no doubt, rendered the appearance of the head proportionate to this enlarged stature. There were, too, in the building of the wall which formed the back of the stage, acoustic principles observed, by which those who spoke from the interior—as from within a house or a room—might be heard more distinctly. And improvements in these matters were made from time to time by those to whom the equipment of plays was assigned. So when the names of such and such men are mentioned as probable competitors, it is these furnishers of the chorus who are meant, though the success of any one of them would no doubt be considered the more probable if he had Æschylus or Sophocles for his poet.
On such matters the crowd are now exchanging rumours. Cimon, they say, is rich and liberal, and his play will be put on the stage with every advantage of art and machinery that money can procure, and he has a piece written by a favourite poet; but then Lysias has secured the best dancers, and the great actor is retained by Xenocles. "But after all," says some one, "not much depends upon the actor; he is little more than a mouthpiece; any one who can strike a good attitude and walk with dignity, and who has good lungs, will make an excellent Agamemnon." Some one has heard that the ghost of Clytemnestra is actually to appear and talk; another beats that piece of news by the information that the whole band of the Furies is to be brought upon the stage. With such conversation the time is beguiled till the first play begins; conversation for which topics were never wanting, since the entertainment provided for each festival was quite new, or rather there was always a series of entertainments to be expected, so that the interest of many "first nights," as it were, was concentrated in a single morning.
But now the contest is to begin. The magistrates and generals have arrived and taken their places in the lowest tier, the senators in the benches just above them; and many have been the remarks made on each as he came in, for in this small city every distinguished man is well known, by sight at least, to all his fellow-citizens. At length the curtain is removed, and the scene in which the action is laid is disclosed to view. Perhaps it is the outside of a temple, whose columned front the wall itself of the theatre may adequately represent; or often it is the front of a royal palace, with the statues of the three great gods standing before the gates; or it is a lonely island, where a hero is to suffer, deserted by his fellow-chiefs; or a wild mountain scene, on whose craggy cliffs Prometheus is to expiate his unlawful kindness to mankind. At the sides are painted views of the country surrounding each scene of action; the neighbouring city, if there be one, is seen upon the left, and on the right are fields or open sea. And all this is executed with consummate skill, and knowledge of perspective, such as even modern scene-painters hardly, perhaps, surpass. In such a scene the two actors appear. Their dress soon makes it clear what characters they represent,[3] and the first few sentences explain to us sufficiently the position of affairs. They use no elaborate gestures, and make no attempt to express feeling by changes of countenance—such efforts would be useless in so large a place, even if the face were not hidden by the mask—they stand generally still in solemn dignified attitudes, so as to look very much like coloured statues or figures in a bas-relief; and they utter the sonorous verse in a kind of recitative, yet so distinctly that the words may be accurately heard by all the audience, who would instantly perceive and notice any slip in accent or pronunciation. After perhaps a quarter of an hour, or generally less, the actors, or one of them, retire to set on foot the main action of the piece: then the chorus, if they have not already entered, appear in solemn procession, and take their station in the orchestra to sing. There are usually twelve of them, all dressed alike as old men, or maidens, or soldiers, or as the case may be, and they enter generally three abreast, and form and wheel with the stately regularity of a regiment. They move in time to music, marching or dancing, and sing as they advance a solemn hymn, which dimly prophesies the events that are to come, pointing out their connection with the past, and showing how all the history is ordered by the providence or vengeance of the gods. They are marshalled under a leader who walks in their midst; and if they engage, as sometimes they do, in dialogue with the actor, this leader is their spokesman. As they group themselves round the altar, they still sing their grand mysterious chant, and there from time to time they execute various complicated dances, illustrative of the emotions which their words express. And here a word must be said of this expressive dance.
It seems to be an art entirely lost—so entirely that we now cannot well guess what difference of steps or figures would represent even the most marked difference of feelings; but to the Greeks such variation was most certainly represented. And thus much may be noticed in explanation. The Greeks, in accordance with the general simplicity and natural frankness of their manners, were in the habit of giving much more unreserved expression to their feelings by gesture than is thought among ourselves consistent with dignity or culture; so we may suppose that their eyes became more accustomed to such outward indications than ours are, and their taste was not offended by gestures which to us would seem forced and ridiculous. Further, we must consider the facility with which a conventional system of expressing passion by the dance might become generally recognised, until movements, which originally were only conventionally significant, might appear spontaneous to an eye habituated to their use. Lastly, the notion, so difficult to get rid of, that in dancing there is something trivial and undignified, must be as far as possible discarded; for, to the Athenian, the dances of the chorus were probably among the most impressive, even the most awful, spectacles which ever met his eyes; and if to us dancing seems fit only for merriment and trifling, the cause lies not in our advance in culture, but in our having lost an art or a sensibility.
The relation of the chorus to the rest of a Greek play may be well learned from Milton's imitation of an Attic tragedy in the "Samson Agonistes;" and as corresponding in many respects to the choral ode, we might instance Gray's "Bard." In a tragedy whose subject was the death of Edward II., that impassioned and mysterious ode in which the punishment of the royal line is dimly prophesied would form a good opening chorus.
The ode comes to an end, and then, with successive periods of dialogue interspersed with more choric odes, the play goes on, till the catastrophe, generally a mournful one, has been effected. Then follow comments upon it from actor and from chorus, and all ends, it may be, with a grand procession, during which the chorus sums up the moral of the whole. In all this there is not much acting, not much that is really what we call dramatic: we have rather a series of tableaux, majestic, colossal, statuesque; dialogues or soliloquies intentionally stilted, in order that a certain distance and mystery may attach to them; while, giving tone to it all, and relieving the monotony of the long quiet speeches by comments such as a sensible spectator might be supposed to make, we have the stately dance and chant of the chorus.
One play would probably seldom occupy more than an hour and a half; but often three plays were connected together in one grand whole called a trilogy, somewhat as the several parts of Shakespeare's historical plays are connected; and these were followed by a comic piece by the same poet, which might relieve the seriousness of so much tragedy. Each competitor, therefore, produced in these cases not one play, but a series of four, and several competitors followed one another throughout the day. Wearisome, dry, unimpassioned, all this may seem to us; but we must remember that to the Greek it meant religious service, literary culture, and the celebration of the national greatness. As he sat in the theatre, the gods of his country looked down approvingly from the Acropolis above, and his fellow-citizens, whom he loved with intense patriotism, were all about him. He might say of the assembly, what an old poet had said of the Ionians gathered for festival at Delos, that you would think them blessed with endless youth, so glorious they were and so blooming; and as the rocks under which he sat re-echoed to the applause of that great assembly, he must indeed have felt the thrill of sympathetic enthusiasm which Plato describes as produced by such occasions.
One word about the mental condition of a people whose masses could take pleasure in such an entertainment. That their culture must in some degree have exceeded our own is evident from a comparison of the plays in which we and they respectively delight. The majority of Englishmen, even among the so-called educated, do not care to see Shakespeare's tragedies; the effort of attention is too great, the beauties too subtle, the plot too simple. Now Shakespeare's plays stand to the Greek drama much as a picture does to a statue. And a picture most men can enjoy, but very few can really appreciate a statue. Shakespeare, then, is too severe for us, and Æschylus is much more severe than Shakespeare; yet the ordinary Athenian citizen could enjoy Æschylus at the first hearing, and those of the next generation knew his plays almost by heart, and could appreciate the most distant allusion to them. In what lies the reason of their superiority? For that it is in some sense a superiority we cannot but feel. To have lost any power of enjoyment is in some sense a fall; and to have lost the power of enjoying what is simple, to want more piquancy, more excitement, is a fall somewhat like losing the innocence of childhood. The multiplication of our interests has made the ordinary course of life so exciting, that we want something still more violent for our amusements. This is one cause. The other lies in the leisure which the ordinary Athenian possessed, and the literature with which he was imbued. There were so many slaves in Attica, that the free population was but a small minority, and it is with the freemen only that we have to deal. These formed, therefore, virtually an aristocracy, freed, to a great extent, from servile work, so that they were provided with abundant leisure. But from their word for leisure our word "school" is derived, for their unoccupied time was all a time of learning. The great sculptors were already beginning to adorn Athens with the masterpieces which have not since been equalled, and in every man's mouth, as the national literature, were the noble poems of Homer. Against such means of forming a simple and natural taste there were no newspapers, or novels, or waxworks to be set; happily for the Athenians, their books and models were few and good. Our taste has been spoilt by the multiplication of bad books, bad pictures, and bad statues. To recover the correctness of taste which is natural to a healthy and happy man, we must study from the Greek models, and imbibe insensibly the harmony and grace by which they are distinguished. Æschylus, it is true, does not present the most finished example of tragic art; his works are rather sublime than polished; but they possess a very high degree of beauty and moderation, and are executed on so large a scale that they may bear to dispense with finish. If all Greek art is typified by the statue, those statues which correspond to the plays of Æschylus are colossal. And to gain even a slight knowledge of his poetry is to enrich the mind with a store of beauty which cannot fail to be a joy for ever.
- ↑ The memory of this custom is probably still preserved in the name of "Tragedy," which means "the goat-song."
- ↑ Some readers may remember the representation of the "Antigone" of Sophocles in London some years ago. The Greek stage and its accessories were all carefully reproduced, and the result is described in the 'Times' of January 3, 1845. The same performance, as afterwards repeated in Edinburgh, forms the subject of one of De Quincey's most instructive papers.
- ↑ The dress, however, of the actors was in great measure conventional, following closely that of worshippers in the rites of Bacchus. It was generally gay and bright in colour, and admitted but little distinction between men and women.