10. Iphigenia among the Tauri, which metre and diction mark as one of the later plays, is also one of the best—excellent both in the management of a romantic plot and in the delineation of character. The scene is laid at the temple of Artemis in the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea)—on the site of the modern Balaklava. Iphigenia, who had been doomed to die at Aulis for the Greeks, had been snatched from that death by Artemis, and had become priestess of the goddess at the Tauric shrine, where human victims were immolated. Two strangers, who had landed among the Tauri, have been sentenced to die at the altar. She discovers in them her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades. They plan an escape, are recaptured, and are finally delivered by the goddess Athena, who commands Thoas, king of the land, to permit their departure. Iphigenia, Orestes and Pylades return to Greece, and establish the worship of the Tauric Artemis at Brauron and Halae in Attica. The drama of Euripides necessarily suggests a comparison with that of Goethe; and many readers will probably also feel that, while Goethe is certainly not inferior in fineness of ethical portraiture, he has the advantage in his management of the catastrophe. But it is only just to Euripides to remember that, while his competitor had free scope of treatment, he, a Greek dramatist, was bound to the motive of the Greek legend, and was obliged to conclude with the foundation of the Attic worship.
11. The Troades appeared in 415 B.C. along with the Alexander, the Palamedes, and a satyr-play, the Sisyphus. It is a picture of the miseries endured by noble Trojan dames—Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra—immediately after the capture of Troy. There is hardly a plot in the proper sense—only an accumulation of sorrows on the heads of the passive sufferers. The piece is less a drama than a pathetic spectacle, closing with the crash of the Trojan towers in flame and ruin. The Troades is indeed remarkable among Greek tragedies for its near approach to the character of melodrama. It must be observed that there is no ground for the inference—sometimes made an accusation against the poet—that the choral passage, v. 794 f., was intended to encourage the Sicilian expedition, sent forth in the same year (415 B.C.). The mention of the “land of Aetna over against Carthage” (v. 220) speaks of it as “renowned for the trophies of prowess”—a topic, surely, not of encouragement but of warning.
12. The Helena—produced, as we learn from the Aristophanic scholia, in 412 B.C., the year of the lost Andromeda—is not one of its author’s happier efforts. It is founded on a strange variation of the Trojan myth, first adopted by Stesichorus in his Palinode—that only a wraith of Helen passed to Troy, while the real Helen was detained in Egypt. In this play she is rescued from the Egyptian king, Theoclymenus, by a ruse of her husband Menelaus, who brings her safely back to Greece. The romantic element thus engrafted on the Greek myth is more than fantastic: it is well-nigh grotesque. The comic poets—notably Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae—felt this; nor can we blame them if they ridiculed a piece in which the mode of treatment was so discordant with the spirit of Greek tradition, and so irreconcilable with all that constituted the higher meaning of Greek tragedy.
13. The Phoenissae was brought out, with the Oenomaus and the Chrysippus, in 411 B.C., the year in which the recall of Alcibiades was decreed by the army at Samos, and, after the fall of the Four Hundred, ratified by the Assembly at Athens (Thuc. viii. 81, 97). The dialogue between Iocaste and Polynices on the griefs of banishment (τἰ τὸ στέρεσθαι πατρίδος, v. 388 f.) has a certain emphasis which certainly looks like an allusion to the pardon of the famous exile. The subject of the play is the same as that of the Aeschylean Seven against Thebes—the war of succession in which Argos supported Polynices against his brother Eteocles. The Phoenician maidens who form the chorus are imagined to have been on their way from Tyre to Delphi, where they were destined for service in the temple, when they were detained at Thebes by the outbreak of the war—a device which affords a contrast to the Aeschylean chorus of Theban elders, and which has also a certain fitness in view of the legends connecting Thebes with Phoenicia. But Euripides has hardly been successful in the rivalry—which he has even pointed by direct allusions—with Aeschylus. The Phoenissae is full of brilliant passages, but it is rather a series of effective scenes than an impressive drama.
14. Plutarch (Lys. 15) says that, when Athens had surrendered to Lysander (404 B.C.) and when the fate of the city was doubtful, a Phocian officer happened to sing at a banquet of the leaders the first song of the chorus in the Electra of Euripides—
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Ἀγαμέμνονος ὦ κόρα, |
and that “when they heard it, all were touched, so that it seemed a cruel deed to destroy for ever the city so famous once, the mother of such men.” The character of the Electra, in metre and in diction, seems to show that it belongs to the poet’s latest years. If Müller were right in referring to the Sicilian expedition the closing passage in which the Dioscuri declare that they haste “to the Sicilian sea, to save ships upon the deep” (v. 1347), then the play could not be later than 413 B.C. But it may with more probability be placed shortly before the Orestes, which in some respects it much resembles: perhaps in or about the year 410 B.C. No play of Euripides has been more severely criticized. The reason is evident. The Choephori of Aeschylus and the Electra of Sophocles appear to invite a direct comparison with this drama. But, as R. C. Jebb suggested,[1] such criticism as that of Schlegel should remember that works of art are proper subjects of direct comparison only when the theories of art which they represent have a common basis. It is surely unmeaning to contrast the elaborate homeliness of the Euripidean Electra with the severe grandeur of its rivals. Aeschylus and Sophocles, as different exponents of an artistic conception which is fundamentally the same, may be profitably compared; Euripides interprets another conception, and must be tried by other principles. His Electra is, in truth, a daring experiment—daring, because the theme is one which the elder school had made peculiarly its own.
15. The Orestes, acted in 408, bears the mark of the age in the prominence which Euripides gives to the assembly of Argos—which has to decide the fate of Orestes and Electra—and to rhetorical pleading. The plot proceeds with sufficient clearness to the point at which Orestes and Electra have been condemned to death. But the later portion of the play, containing the intrigues for their rescue and the final achievement of their deliverance, is both too involved and too inconsequent for a really tragic effect. Just as in the Electra, the heroic persons of the drama are reduced to the level of commonplace. There is not a little which borders on the ludicrous, and it can be seen how easy would have been the passage from such tragedy as this to the restrained parody in which the Middle Comedy delighted. It is, however, inconceivable that, as some have supposed, the Orestes can have been a deliberate compromise between tragedy and farce. It cannot have been meant to be played, as a fourth piece, instead of a regular satyric drama. Rather it indicates the level to which the heroic tragedy itself had descended under the treatment of a school which was at least logical. The celebrity of the play in the ancient world—as Paley observes, there are more ancient quotations from the Orestes than from all the extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles together—is perhaps partly explained by the unusually frequent combination in this piece of striking sentiment with effective situation.
16. The Iphigenia at Aulis, like the Bacchae, was brought out only after the death of Euripides. It is a very brilliant and beautiful play,—probably left by the author in an unfinished state,—and has suffered from interpolation more largely, perhaps, than any other of his works. As regards its subject, it forms a prelude to the Iphigenia in Tauris. Iphigenia has been doomed by her father Agamemnon to die at Aulis, as Calchas declares that Artemis claims such a sacrifice before the adverse winds can fall.
The genuine play, as we have it, breaks off at v. 1508, when Iphigenia has been led to the sacrificial altar. A spurious epilogue, of wretched workmanship (v. 1509–1628), relates, in the speech of a messenger, how Artemis saved the maiden.
17. The Bacchae, unlike the preceding play, appears to have been finished by its author, although it is said not to have been acted, on the Athenian stage at least, till after his death. It was composed, or completed, during the residence of Euripides with Archelaus, and in all probability was originally designed for representation in Macedonia—a region with whose traditions of orgiastic worship the Dionysus myth was so congenial. The play is sometimes quoted as the Pentheus. It has been justly observed that Euripides seldom named a piece from the chorus, unless the chorus bore an important part in the action or the leading action was divided between several persons. Possibly, however, in this instance he may designedly have chosen a title which would at once interest the Macedonian public. Pentheus would suggest a Greek legend about which they might know or care little. The Bacchae would at once announce a theme connected with rites familiar to the northern land.
It is a magnificent play, alone among extant Greek tragedies in picturesque splendour, and in that sustained glow of Dionysiac enthusiasm to which the keen irony lends the strength of contrast. If Euripides had left nothing else, the Bacchae would place him in the first rank of poets, and would prove his possession of a sense rarely manifested by Greek poets,—perhaps by no one of his own contemporaries in equal measure except Aristophanes,—a feeling for natural beauty lit up by the play of fancy. R. Y. Tyrrell, in his edition of the Bacchae, has given the true answer to the theory that the Bacchae is a recantation. Euripides had never rejected the facts which formed the basis of the popular religion. He had rather sought to interpret them in a manner consistent with belief in a benevolent Providence. The really striking thing in the Bacchae is the spirit of contentment and of composure which it breathes,—as if the poet had ceased to be vexed by the seeming contradictions which had troubled him before. Nor should it be forgotten that, for the Greek mind of his age, the victory of Dionysus in the Bacchae carried a moral even more direct than the victory of Aphrodite in the Hippolytus. The great nature-powers who give refreshment to mortals cannot be robbed of their due tribute without provoking a nemesis. The refusal of such a homage is not, so the Greeks deemed, a virtue in itself: in the sight of the gods it may be only a cold form of ὕβρις, overweening self-reliance—the quality personified in Pentheus.
- ↑ Introduction to the Electra of Sophocles, p. xiii., in Catena Classicorum, 2nd ed.
