by Will Durant
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 t
heir 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:
