Euripides (Mahaffy)/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
THE POET'S LIFE AND STUDIES.
13. Euripides was born in the year of the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.), and apparently on the island, among the refugees. Later legends fixed the day of the battle as his birthday, with that love of coincidences and curious accidents which often takes far larger liberties with chronology. In after days the poet is said to have frequented his native island, and to have written his tragedies in a secluded spot, looking out upon the sea—from which he borrows so many striking metaphors—and within sight of the myriad traffic which passed in and out of the Piræus. His father Mnesarchus, or Mnesarchides,[1] was said to have once lived in Bœotia, apparently as an Attic citizen abroad; afterwards in the deme called Phlyia. Some of the Greek Lives of the poet call Mnesarchides a petty trader, and his wife Kleito a seller of pot-herbs; evidently a repetition of the random scandal of the comic poets, whose constant attacks on Kleito seem to rest on some anecdote, or coincidence of name now lost to us. The ample means and liberal education of the poet, as well as his holding of certain sinecure priestly offices, rather incline us to believe that his parents were of the better classes. He is said to have been trained with success by his father for athletic contests, a pursuit which is alluded to with contempt and aversion in his tragedies; so that he may have been set to it against his will, and may have had closer experience than most men of the habits and the character of professional athletes.[2] There were also shown at Megara pictures ascribed to him, so that he certainly possessed the reputation of large and varied culture. The caricature of Aristophanes describes him as a recluse student, occupied with metaphysical speculations; and his collection of books was early celebrated. He was certainly the friend, possibly the pupil, of Anaxagoras (to whom he alludes pathetically in his Alcestis, v, 904), probably, too, of Protagoras and of Prodicus. He is mentioned in maturer life as a friend and the favourite tragic poet of Socrates. Thus we find him distinctly one of the new school, early breaking loose from traditional orthodoxy, and taking no part in public affairs; but devoting all his life, from the age of twenty-five, to the composition of plays, in which he shadowed out his studies in theology, in metaphysics, and in the changing moods of human nature. He was certainly a prolific and a very popular poet; but though he must have contended about twenty times with groups of four plays on each occasion, he only won the prize four times during his life, and once with plays brought out shortly after his death. When he produced his first play, Æschylus was just dead, and though Sophocles was in the zenith of his fame, and the delight of all Athens, men must have looked anxiously for the appearance of a new poet, who would succeed to the place left vacant by the veteran dramatist. To such Euripides must have been indeed disappointing. His last plays came out about the time of Sophocles' death, when men despaired of seeing any worthy heir of either in tragedy, for the younger generation had tried in vain to rival these poets even in their old age, as Aristophanes plainly informs us. Thus our poet's life extended from the noon to the sunset of Greek tragedy—his posthumous plays were the rich afterglow when that glorious day was gone.
14. He was twice married, and it was said unhappily; first to Chœrile, who was the mother of his three sons—Mnesarchides, a merchant; Mnesilochus, an actor; and the younger Euripides, who produced his father's last plays and composed tragedies of his own. The comic poets do not scruple to reflect upon the unfaithfulness of his wives, from which they deduce the inference that he hated and traduced the sex in his plays. Late in life he removed to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, where he was received with the highest honours, and where he wrote some plays (the Bacchæ and the Archelaus) on local Thracian and Macedonian legends. He is said to have died, at the age of seventy-four, from the effects of wounds by dogs which were maliciously set upon him. A pompous tomb was erected to him in Macedonia. His cenotaph at Athens contained the following inscription, which was alleged (I know not why) to be the composition of Thucydides:
Μνῆμα μὲν Ἑλλὰς ἅπας Ἐὐριπίδου, ὀστέα δ᾽ ἴσχει
Γῆ Μακέδων τῇ γὰρ δέξατο τέρμα βίου.
Πατρὶς δ᾽ Ἑλλάδος Ἑλλὰς Ἀθῆναι, πλεῖστα δὲ Μούσας
Τέρψας ἐκ πολλῶν καὶ τὸν ἔπαινον ἔχει.
We willingly believe the story that the aged Sophocles showed deep sorrow at the death of the rival from whom he learned so much; but, by way of painful contrast, we find Aristophanes composing upon the death of Euripides his bitter and unsparing onslaught in the Frogs. For at this time, as we shall see in the sequel, the play-going world at Athens was rapidly veering round in favour of the much-abused and oft-slighted poet; and Aristophanes must have felt, with disappointment, that the matchless brilliancy of his satire was, after all, powerless against the spirit of the times and the genius of his opponent.
15. Late and doubtful authorities speak of Euripides as of gloomy and morose temper, vexed with domestic troubles, harassed by adverse criticism, cut to the heart by the miseries which befell his unhappy city in her protracted wars.
But, far deeper than these personal griefs, there lay upon his spirit the constant melancholy of unsolved doubts, of unsettled problems, of seeking for the light in vain, and of hoping against hope for the moral reformation of mankind. Hence our beautiful extant busts and statue represent him worthily as the "poet of the world's grief"—gentle, subdued, and full of sorrowing sympathy. Nor is there any authentic portrait left us from the great days of Athens so interesting or so thoroughly cosmopolitan as that of the poet Euripides.
16. Innumerable attempts have been made to gather from his writings an estimate of his politics, his social principles, and his religion. The ancients have here led the way, and, considering the dramatic poet always as a moral teacher, have assumed that the declarations of the poet's characters were meant to convey his own opinions. But such an inference must be thoroughly unsafe in the case of an essentially dramatic author, who paints upon the stage, not only the violence of human passion, but the conflicts of hostile principles—the mixed good and evil in every aspect of human society. There are, indeed, very few broad assertions on social questions in his plays which cannot be contradicted by assertions in other plays or in altered situations. Even the Athenian public seem to have forgotten that a dramatic poet must speak in character. Thus Plutarch tells us about the Ixion, that the audience cried out against a passage in which wealth was praised above virtue, and that the piece would have been hissed down had not the poet rushed on the scene and bid them have patience to see the punishment consequent on such principles. Whether the story be true or false of the Attic audience, it is certainly applicable to the narrow and stupid criticisms of later writers. For example, had the famous line in the Hippolytus: "My tongue has sworn, but my heart is free," which so many authors quote with reprobation, been preserved to us by itself, without the context of the play, none of us could have guessed that Hippolytus, who utters it, actually loses his life rather than break the very oath in question, though at the first moment of anger he indignantly repudiates it as extorted from him by fraud. Thus, again, the many slanderous attacks upon the female sex spoken by angry or disappointed characters, which are commonly regarded as decisive proofs of the poet's hatred of women, fade out in a wider and truer estimate before the splendour of the leading female characters throughout his plays.
17. It is therefore an inquiry of no little difficulty, though of engrossing interest, to gather the poet's mind and views from these conflicting evidences. There are, perhaps, two sources a little more trustworthy than the rest, and on which I suggest that any estimate should be based: (1) The soliloquies so frequent in Euripides' plays, when the actor turns aside from the immediate subject of the play to reflect upon the broader question it suggests.[3] We are the more likely here to find a Greek dramatist's mind, seeing that in earlier times he had himself been an actor and appeared in person; even in Euripides' day the chief actor seems to have stood in intimate personal relations with his author. There are also (2) The opening strophe and antistrophe of many choral odes, which are general and even irrelevant in import, though the ode reverts afterwards to the subject in hand.
These, then, are the safest materials for such a purpose. It is, moreover, likely that the dramatic poets of that day had some special means of indicating their own sentiments when they occurred in a play; though not so clearly as the comic poets in their parabasis. For we find even the comic poets, who had this recognised vehicle, often passing out of the character of the actor into personal relations with the audience. But if such helps existed for the Attic public, they are lost for us. This much is certain, that, like Racine in the seventeenth century,[4] so the Greek dramatists of the Periclean age regarded themselves as essentially moral teachers; nay, almost as a sort of established clergy. It was the recognition of this claim by the Attic public which created Euripides' greatest difficulties when he endeavoured to rise above traditional dogma and conventional morals into speculations on divine philosophy and burning pictures of intense passion.
18. As to the poet's studies and the materials he had before him, we may notice, first, that though deeply learned in epic lore, and familiar with every obscure legend of the Trojan and Theban cycle,[5] he seems (like Sophocles) to have avoided direct contact with Homer in his tragedies, and even in his language there are few Homeric reminiscences. That he knew the Iliad and Odyssey well is certain, both from his extant Cyclops and from the profound veneration expressed by Plato for our Homer as the originator and forerunner of tragedy. Now Plato was a younger contemporary of Euripides, certainly old enough to have witnessed the production of all his later plays.[6]
But it was doubtless with Homer as with Æschylus in the mind of the poet; they were the representatives of the old school; on the one hand, of shallow and immoral polytheism; on the other, of harsh and rough obscurity. The one failed in depth of thought and seriousness of aim, the other in clearness of style and smoothness of expression. But Homer he passes by with simple neglect; in more than one passage he reflects upon the dramatic faults of Æschylus. Nevertheless, in his first studies he must have made this great poet his model, for Sophocles was only beginning his splendid career. Afterwards the continual rivalry with this most successful of all tragic poets, the darling of Athens, the most consummate artist of his day, must have powerfully affected him. The two poets, indeed, differed widely in their conception of the drama; when they treated the same subjects (as they often did), they appealed to different interests, and seem never to have copied, seldom to have criticised, one another. But we find that Euripides, the more conscious and theoretical artist, showed the stronger character, even in his art; for the latest extant drama of Sophocles (the Philoctetes) shows a striking likeness to the plays of Euripides, while the reverse is anything but true; the latest plays Euripides (the Bacchæ and Aulid Iphigenia) show no traces of an increased influence from the side of Sophocles.
19. Yet, broadly speaking, it is plain that our poet was no originator in the external appliances, or even in the general internal plan, of the Greek drama. His great predecessors had introduced him to the muse of tragedy, as it were, dwelling in a splendid temple, and honoured with an established worship.
The great stone theatre of Dionysus had long replaced the old wooden seats, and if the marble chairs, and sculptured front of the stage, which we can now admire at Athens, were not added till the days of the orator Lycurgus, we may yet he sure that the theatre of Sophocles, in which Pericles sat, was not wanting in splendour. Even the illusion of scenes in perspective was attempted by the genius of the painter Agatharchus about the time when Euripides began his poetical career. Thus, though the absence of actresses and the stiff conventional costume of the puffed and padded-out actors must have been a serious hindrance to the subtler graces of acting, the dramatic poets were provided with scenery and accompaniments quite adequate to stimulate their imagination, and yet not so perfect as to provide them with splendid stage effects as a cloak for dramatic feebleness. In all probability, they were more adequate to their purpose than the theatres for which Shakspere composed his plays.
The alterations Euripides attempted were indeed very serious, but not such as would strike the observation of the vulgar. The outer dress, the stage arrangements, the chorus of Greek tragedy, he left as he found them.[7] But the deeper student who penetrated beneath the surface found that the whole edifice was renewed within, as in the so-called restorations of our day, though the outer shell is ingeniously propped up and appears undisturbed.
20. It was not otherwise with his treatment of religion. A deep study of the Orphic books and of the Mysteries, a close friendship with Anaxagoras, the daily contact with the fashionable sophists—this schooling had shown him all the flaws of the common creeds, had furnished him with keen weapons to assail them, nay, had supplied the basis of a larger and purer faith, in which one great Intelligence controlled all matter, and supplanted the crowd of conflicting gods by physical agencies. Yet though all these things are constantly suggested in his plays, he never breaks outright with orthodoxy. He brings the gods upon his stage as frequently as his rivals did, he makes them intervene in human affairs, nor does he always purify the myths by justifying or modifying the divine interferences. He even declares, in more than one weighty passage, the idleness of theological speculation, and the duty of a modest submission to the received faith. The only declared atheist in his extant plays is the brutal and ignorant Cyclops, whose coarse and sensual unbelief is surely intended for a keen satire on such vulgarity in speculation.
21. Thus again in morals, all the violences of passion, all the coldness of self-love, seem palliated, nay, even justified by the cruelty and ruthlessness of Fate, which smites down the just and spares the unjust, which refuses a reward to self-sacrifice and devotion, which indulges the spendthrift and the libertine at the world's cost and damage. Nevertheless, though the gods seem unjust, if we accept their rule, and though there is no sanction or reward for good if we abolish their empire, yet the poet holds a deep moral conviction that all will yet be well, and that the delays in divine justice are no warrant for its denial.
These reservations are, indeed, but rare streaks of light amid the storms of passion and the gloom of doubt which occupy his stage. He felt that the great world problems needed some new solution; that the nature of man did not correspond with his supposed destiny; that in the decay of society and of morals, by reason of long and barbarous wars, the optimists were playing the game into their adversaries' hands, and that scepticism or nihilism was the natural consequence of an enforced acceptance of worn-out dogmas. But though he seems to hold that some solution was possible—and a solution not of despair, but of hope—he never attempts to offer more rich materials for its attainment. Like the Platonic Socrates in the pursuit of morals, who often discussed all the sides of a question and then stopped without a result, so in his tragedies Euripides seeks to give a complete panorama of all the varieties of human character and of human passion, of human misery and human wickedness, of human devotion and human valour; and from these to suggest all the helps and all the difficulties in forming a new religion, a new society, and a remodelled state. But he never even hints at the reconstruction of the State, though such dreams were common in his day; he seems an advocate for gradual reform, and for the bringing out of the purer elements into better prominence; yet, as I have said, it is not the remedy but the diagnosis which engrosses him. Like some of the greatest physicians of our day, he is more intent on describing the disease than on curing the patient.
22. Side by side with these profound views of life we find another aspect of the poet's mind: the desire to please his audience by all the arts which ordinary playwrights adopt—pathetic situations, striking scenery, ingenious plot, and patriotic commonplace. Nor is there any evidence that he did this against his better judgment, or with any sense that he was lowering a high and solemn calling. The latest novelties in music, the sentimental melodies in the style of Timotheus, were constantly introduced in his monodies, to the great disgust of the older classical school. Whole plays were devoted to tearful situations, where the luxury of pity was indulged without teaching the higher lessons of awe and of indignation. Again, long scenes were occupied with rhetorical argument, in which the actors became pleaders in court, and discussed point after point with pertinacious subtlety, a feature not censured by any ancient critic, and to be found even in Sophocles, but to us a very jarring interruption in many a splendid scene. Lastly, among the ephemeral features—or at least the features which are not for all time—is an almost vulgar patriotism, which makes the national heroes paragons of perfection, the action of Athens the noble feature of the play, and the heroes of Sparta or of Thebes mean and disgusting. One whole play, the Andromache, is thus devoted to blackening the characters of Hermione and Menelaus, and of their country—a cheap highroad to popularity with an audience at hitter enmity and to deadly conflict with Sparta.
23. These curious anomalies and contradictions make Euripides the most difficult of all the ancients to understand. It is very easy to draw distinct sketches of his life and art, which without being untrue are yet broadly inconsistent. We may follow the reckless and brilliant vituperation of Aristophanes, sometimes among many brazen falsehoods hitting the truth with perfect aim; or we may follow the enthusiastic admiration of the genteel comedy in the next century, which regarded him as very perfection. We may side with August Schlegel, who anxiously detracts from Euripides lest the Iphigenia of Goethe might suffer by comparison; or with Hartung, who finds in him every moral, social, and civic virtue which is drawn in any of his characters. But we must combine all these portraits with all their contradictions, to obtain an adequate idea of that infinitely various, unequal, suggestive mind, which was at the same time practically shrewd and mystically vague, clear in expression but doubtful in thought, morose in intercourse and yet a profound lover of mankind, drawing ideal women and yet perpetually sneering at the sex, doubting the gods and yet reverencing their providence, above his age and yet not above it, stooping to the interests of the moment and yet missing the reward of momentary fame, despairing of future life and yet revolving problems which owe all their interest to the fact that they are perpetual.
24. Such being our poet's character and aims, there seems no ground to wonder at the apparently curious combination in his long career of great, general, and immediate popularity, with few definite victories. He was precisely that sort of broad-minded sympathetic thinker who refuses to adopt the views of any party, but holds sometimes with the one and sometimes with the other. Thus in matters of education and of general enlightenment, he certainly stood with the advanced Radicals and Freethinkers, with Anaxagoras, with the sophists and rhetoricians, who were breaking down the old barriers of thought. But in politics his plays produce strong conviction that he opposed this very party, and held with the old Conservatives and the peace policy, represented by a section of the nobility and the stout farmers of Attica. For these latter, indeed, he shows a special preference, and his praise of them must have greatly annoyed the enlightened city wits, who looked down upon such rustic simplicity as clumsy and boorish. Here, then, he actually sides with Aristophanes, whose party hated him so bitterly for his intellectual tendencies.
Now we know that though the prizes for tragedies were awarded by judges chosen at the time by lot, their decisions must have been altogether guided by the public reception of the piece, by the applause or silence or disapprobation of the great audience in the theatre of Dionysus. And it need hardly be added that party feeling, that political cabals, that previous intrigues were as common at Athens as in the theatre of Louis XIV. Accordingly the decisions of this most competent of all audiences were not only commonly reversed by the verdict of posterity, but were even a marvel to men of succeeding generations. Before such an audience what chance could a half-way politician have of success—a man who offended both sides by exposing their weaknesses, who perhaps offended them still more because he puzzled them by advocating portions of their policy with extraordinary force and clearness? So the great outsider would be cheered by opposite sides of the house, but make enemies everywhere, for never was party spirit more violent and uncompromising than among the people who thought, as Thucydides says, τὸ πρὸς ἅπαν συνετὸν, ἐπὶ πᾶν ἀργόν—to be clever at everything was to be good for nothing—in politics. When the decision came, quieter poets, who did not tamper with the questions of the day, or professed party-men, carried off the prize. But for all that Euripides was more discussed, and quoted, and quarrelled about in Athenian society than any of them. Thus the popular feeling of his age corroborates and justifies the portrait which scholars have derived from his works.
- ↑ I incline to the form Mnesarchides, as a son of Euripides was called by that name, no doubt after his grandfather.
- ↑ Cf. especially the fragments of his Autolycus, in which this feeling is very strongly expressed, no doubt in character, but probably in accordance also with the poet's own sentiments.
- ↑ Let the reader examine the soliloquy of the nurse in Medea, v. 190 sq.; of Iphis in the Supplices, 1080 sq.; of Orestes in the Electra, 367 sq.; as specimens. I quote throughout from Dindorf 's Poetæ Scenici.
- ↑ Cf. the Preface to his Phèdre: "Au reste, je n'ose encore assurer que cette pièce soit en effet la meilleure de mes tragédies; je laisse aux lecteurs et au temps à décider de son véritable prix. Ce que je puis assurer, c'est que je n'en ai point fait où la vertu soit plus mise en jour que dans celle-ci. Les moindres fautes y sont sévèrement punies: la seule pensée du crime y est regardée avec autant d'horreur que le crime même: les faiblesses de l'amour y passent pour de vraies faiblesses: les passions n'y sont présentées aux yeux que pour montrer tout le désordre dont elles sont cause; et le vice y est peint partout avec des couleurs qui en font connaître et buïr la difformité. C'est là proprement le but que tout homme qui travaille pour le public se doit proposer; et c'est ce que les premiers poètes tragiques avaient en vue sur toute chose." Milton, in his preface to the Samson Agonistes, though he does not go so far, censures the English dramatists for abandoning the classical models, by which he considers that they have lost the countenance of the serious portion of society.
- ↑ Of his eighteen extant plays, eight—Iphigenia in Aulis, [Rhesus], Hecuba, Troades, Helena, Electra, Orestes, Andromache, Iphigenia among the Tauri—are on the Trojan cycle and the fortunes of the houses of Agamemnon and of Priam. Three—Phœnissæ, Supplices, Raging Hercules—are connected with Thebes.
- ↑ I had not mentioned this but for the persistent arguments of Mr. Paley, that our Homer was not composed till the Periclean age, and was not popularly known till after the days of Euripides.
- ↑ For the external appliances of the Greek stage and the form of Greek plays, I must refer the reader to the Primer of Greek Literature.