Euripides (Mahaffy)/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
PROLOGUES, EPILOGUES, LESSER CHARACTERISTICS, &C.
96. The use of prologues was common among the earlier dramatists. The Eumenides of Æschylus and the Trachiniæ of Sophocles afford signal examples, and other plays of both, such as the Agamemnon and Electra, the Choephoræ and the Prometheus, have substantially the same kind of opening. But Euripides is so constant in its use that critics assume a mutilation in the few cases where it is absent, very unjustly, as I have already pointed out. It was, moreover, the supplement most easily added by subsequent arrangers when they produced the old master's play before a strange or ignorant audience, which required a special introduction to the subject of the piece. This, indeed, seems from the beginning the proper intention of the prologue, and of great use to an audience who had no printed arguments, and apparently no play-bills, and may often have required some refreshing of their legendary lore. But to us these prologues reach too far into the action, and anticipate, more than we desire, the interest of the plot I have above (p. 45) indicated that this arose from the traditional habit of the dramatists, of taking up well-known and national subjects, and depending rather upon effective treatment for their success than upon surprises or novelties of plot. Euripides followed no fixed rule as regards the characters to whom he assigned his prologue. In about an equal number of cases he has given it to the leading personage, to a secondary personage, and to a god who does not reappear in the play at all.
97. But in two of the last cases he has even expanded the prologue into a dialogue among gods, which is very peculiar. In the first (Alcestis), Apollo, as he is leaving the house of Admetus, after his prologue, meets Death on the way to seize his prey, and in a short dialogue expresses his adverse will, but his powerlessness to do more than effect an exchange of victims; while Death, by his stern and gloomy harshness, increases our wonder at the extraordinary nature of the subsequent conflict and victory of Heracles. This result is, however, plainly indicated in the parting words of Apollo, evidently spoken aside. In the second case (Troades), the prologue of Poseidon, leaving his favourite haunt, the ruined Troy, passes into a dialogue, in which Athene expresses her anger at the insulting desecration of her temple by the Greeks, and asks the god to aid her in punishing the returning host, to which he willingly accedes. This dialogue actually reaches beyond the argument, and as it were an anticipated epilogue, reconciles us to the harrowing scenes which follow, by the consciousness that the Greeks will suffer condign punishment, though it is beyond the scope of the play. It need not be objected that possibly the divine vengeance was exhibited in a later play of the same group, as might be imagined, for we know that the Troades was the last of the three tragedies brought out together at the representation in Ol.91.1.
Thus there is great variety and no little importance in these prologues. The gods who speak them, not being characters in the play, are not drawn as such, and seem as purely stage machinery as the mechanical contrivance in which they were sometimes shown aloft. The best and most suitable speakers of such introductions are undoubtedly, like the nurse in the Medea, secondary characters, who are the most natural exponents of the external circumstances of the action, which the main heroes presently clothe and colour with their eloquence and their passion.
98. As to the epilogue, or appearance of an interfering god—the deus ex machinâ— Euripides is by no means so regular. This device, which also appears in the Philoctetes of Sophocles, is absent from eight of plays—the Alcestis, Medea, Hecuba, Troades, Heracleidæ, Heracles, Phœnissæ, Bacchæ; that is to say, from extant plays of all dates. Where it occurs it is sometimes the mere authoritative declaration of the divine will, sometimes it becomes a dialogue or argument with the actors, though never approaching controversy, for its distinct purpose is to bring the action to a peaceful close, and calm the minds excited and disturbed with the calamities, and still more the apparent injustices, suffered by the actors.[1] The poet's intention may have been conservative; he may have wished to calm in the minds of the vulgar and thoughtless those sceptical questionings which constantly appear in his plays; but deeper students felt at once that this mechanical interference of the gods, this artificial and external righting of injustice and oppression in the course of human affairs, was no real solution of the evil, and that therefore the inner tendency of the plays was to unsettle men's minds, and produce religious, if not moral, scepticism. Thus the use of lay figures of gods—any character they do exhibit is spiteful and vindictive—seems an unfortunate concession of the poet to his age, and one which obscures the deep moral faith he feels in the ultimate supremacy of justice.
99. Far more effective are his lay figures of a very different kind—his children, who with their cry of pain, or still more, with their unconscious silence, enlist the spectator's profoundest sympathy for the helpless sorrows of a helpless age. Such are Eumelus the child of Alcestis, the children of the fallen Thebans in the Supplices, the children of Medea, and, above all, the little Orestes in the Iphigenia, who is brought in a mute and unwitting suppliant for the life of his sister.
100. In the other minor features, the plays even of Euripides seem very simple to modern critics. Complicated scenes were against the tradition of the Greek stage, and could not indeed be effective on the large scale in which open-air performances were held for enormous audiences. It is indeed ridiculous to assert, upon the authority of a general statement in Plato, that thirty thousand Athenians could attend a single performance. The unearthed theatre of Dionysus at once proves to any observer that such a thing was impossible. But, the greatest theatres elsewhere, as at Megalopolis and Syracuse, were so happily constructed that even now ordinary speaking on the site of the stage, though the scenes are gone, can he perfectly heard in the furthest and highest back seats, as I can assert from personal experiments. Still the audiences were immense, and included the common people, who were not so learned, even in Periclean Athens, as the historians would have us believe. Hence the great body of the plays are made up of soliloquy, dialogue (strictly so called), and lyrical odes. Even when more than two characters occupy the stage, or when the chorus is drawn into the action, two of them usually monopolise the attention, and the chorus either speaks as a single person in the mouth of the coryphæus (a rare case, as in the Heracles, v. 352), or listens as an arbiter, who, when one party has pleaded, asks what is to be said on the other side.
101. Indeed this perpetual arguing of disputes upon the stage, with all the arts of rhetoric, is one of the most Athenian, but to us disagreeable, features in the old tragedies. The nation were awaking to the delights of legal argument, and the sophists and rhetoricians were discovering and perfecting the weapons which would assure a victory in the courts or before the assembly. Euripides shows a mastery of the art earlier than the exercises of Antiphon, and far clearer than the contorted subtleties of Thucydides. Thus a feature disagreeable to us may probably have had a peculiar zest for an Attic audience; nor did Sophocles disdain to adopt it in his later plays. It was even a rule that attack and reply should occupy the same number of lines, not only in the quick retort of the stichomuthia (one line each), but in longer speeches, where a slight difference might be inappreciable to the audience. And so strict is here the rule, that critics have detected mutilation and interpolation by its absence. When the chorus is to be employed in the action, the poet sometimes divides it into semi-choruses, which speak in dialogue like two actors. Of this there are instances in the older poets also. Euripides has employed it with great effect in the opening of the Ion, of the Alcestis, and in the Cyclops. But it is, I think, unique that Iphigenia should address the chorus of fellow-exiles one by one (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1068–1074) in beseeching them to aid her in her flight. The chorus being the recognised spectators of the action, asides of the actors not intended for their ears do not, I think, occur in any Greek play. Indeed, asides of any kind, beyond anxious exclamations, like those of Agamemnon in the Aulid Iphigenia, are rare, and could hardly have been effective in very large theatres, and with actors stuffed and padded out into a conventional and unwieldy majesty. I have noticed one in Ion (above, p. 48), and there are two others, which are a sort of double asides, in the Alcestis and the Hecuba. In the former, as Apollo and Death leave each other, one departing from, and the other entering the palace, each speaks a parting soliloquy not intended to be heard by the other. In the Hecuba, when Agamemnon comes in to hurry the queen to the burial of her daughter, she soliloquises whether she will appeal to him to aid her in avenging her new grief, the murder of Polydorus; and in this scene Agamemnon observes her soliloquy, and expresses impatience at it.
102. It is remarkable that though the poet had a reputation for great learning, his plays show remarkable carelessness in certain details, where we should not have expected it. Thus Strabo was struck with the random geographical statements of both Sophocles and Euripides; and we wonder, in several plays, at the complete confusion of such places as Argos and Mycenæ, which might easily have been distinguished by the mere study of the Homeric poems. But the instances of this confusion are obtrusive in the Orestes and Heracleidæ, and elsewhere, and are no doubt owing to the very ancient destruction of Mycenæ. Still its ruins were there, and any Argive visitor could have told him the truth.
Similarly in astronomy, though the authenticity of the Rhesus was suspected, on account of a blunder about the position of the Eagle (a constellation) in the heavens, we find, at the opening of the Iphigenia in Aulis, a still greater blunder; the Pleiades are put next to Orion in the sky, and the latter is placed high in the heavens at dawn, while the fleet is wind-bound at Aulis—a position which Sirius could only occupy late in October. But of course the armament assembled in spring, and allowing for some weeks' delay, we should have a dawn in May or June, and not in October, described. Again there is the historical blunder of making the Trojan captives (Troades, 221) speak of Sicily as a Hellenic land rivalling in splendour Thessaly, Sparta, and Athens. These carelessnesses, however, detract nothing from our enjoyment of his poetry, and prove an important point—that though a recluse and a student, he was no pedant. To use a simile of Cicero's, provided he had rightly drawn his Hercules, he cared little about the lion's skin and the Hydra.
103. Nevertheless, he seems strict in finding dramatic blunders in his forerunner Æschylus, to whom he felt himself no doubt formally opposed in style and character, and mare than once be points with ridicule at some simplicity of economy in the old poet. Thus, in the Phœnissæ (751–752), and again in the Supplices (v. 846), "One thing I will not tell you, lest I incur ridicule, to whom each was individually opposed in battle," pointing to Æschylus' enumeration in the Seven against Thebes. This censure is even more elaborate in reviewing Æschylus' recognition scene (in the Choephoræ) between Orestes and his sister, in his Electra (vv. 524–544)—an early and interesting piece of dramatic criticism. The older poet had somewhat simply based the recognition on the similarity of Orestes' lock of hair (found at the tomb) to Electra's, on the agreement of their footprints, and on a piece of embroidery made for Orestes, when a child, by his sister. All these grounds are justly ridiculed by Euripides; and moreover, the economy of Sophocles, who makes Orestes penetrate within the palace without hindrance, is rejected as improbable (v. 615). The poet was therefore, in his Electra, deliberately criticising older versions. But this very critical tone has injured his own play, and though it has peculiar beauties, he has completely failed to enlist the critics fur his modern version of the story against either of its rivals.
104. To us, indeed, there is one feature of peculiar interest in this tragedy. With an originality which perhaps shocked old Attic playgoers as much as it shocked the French and German critics of the last century, Euripides introduces us to idyllic scenes of peasant life, which he paints with a peculiar simplicity, vividness, and homeliness of detail. The peasant princess surprised with her pitcher upon her shoulder, the heedless hospitality of the honest great-hearted peasant, the anxiety of the housewife about supplying the sudden and noble visitors, the hurried borrowing of provisions from a good neighbour—here are scenes which may shock a Voltaire or a Schlegel, but which impress an English critic with a sense of the power and the love of human nature shown in our best tragedies. It is indeed here that the French school, with great propriety, point out the analogies between the Greek and the wholly independent English drama, as opposed to the professed imitations of the courtly French poets. But at present I wish merely to call attention to the idyllic tone we catch at stray moments in Euripides—a tone which enriches the brilliant descriptions in the Bacchæ and the Ion, and strikes us even more directly in the opening chorus of the Cyclops—truly the most Theocritean passages in older Greek poetry,[2] which show how even the still undiscovered or little heeded loveliness of the world's quieter aspects found a place in this cor cordium of antiquity.
- ↑ It is a remarkable analogy between Greek tragedy and oratory, that great Greek speeches do not end with pathetic or exciting passages, but with some calm address to the reason, or tame recapitulation, as if the orator thought it inartistic to leave his audience in a state of high tension. No doubt the same æsthetic feeling gave rise to this curious parallelism in widely different branches of art.
- ↑ I know of nothing else that can be cited as a parallel except the very little known and most picturesque Hymn to Pan, among the Homeric hymns.