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STUDIES

OF

THE GREEK POETS


BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

AUTHOR OF "SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN SOUTHERN EUROPE" ETC.

    _Im Ganzen, Guten, Schoenen
    Resolut zu leben_

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS

FRANKLIN SQUARE

1880




CONTENTS OF VOL. II.


                             CHAPTER XIV.

                    _GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES._

Two Conditions for the Development of a National Drama.--The
Attic Audience.--The Persian War.--Nemesis the Cardinal Idea of
Greek Tragedy.--Traces of the Doctrine of Nemesis in Early Greek
Poetry.--The Fixed Material of Greek Tragedy.--Athens in the Age
of Euripides.--Changes introduced by him in Dramatic Art.--The
Law of Progress in all Art.--AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.--The
Treatment of #eupsychia# by Euripides.--Menoikeus.--The Death of
Eteocles and Polynices.--Polyxena.--Medea.--Hippolytus.--Electra and
Orestes.--Injustice done to Euripides by Recent Critics.          Page 9

                              CHAPTER XV.

          _THE FRAGMENTS OF AESCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES._

Alexandrian and Byzantine Anthologies.--Titles of the Lost Plays
of AEschylus.--The _Lycurgeia_.--The Trilogy on the Story of
Achilles.--The Geography of the _Prometheus Unbound_.--Gnomic Character
of the Sophoclean Fragments.--Providence, Wealth, Love, Marriage,
Mourning.--What is True of the Sophoclean is still more True of the
Euripidean Fragments.--Mutilated Plays.--_Phaethon_, _Erechtheus_,
_Antiope_, _Danae_.--Goethe's Restitution of the _Phaethon_.--Passage
on Greek Athletes in the _Autolycus_.--Love, Women, Marriage, Domestic
Affection, Children.--Death.--Stoical Endurance.--Justice and the
Punishment of Sin.--Wealth.--Noble Birth.--Heroism.--Miscellaneous
Gnomic Fragments.--The Popularity of Euripides.                  Page 74

                             CHAPTER XVI.

               _THE FRAGMENTS OF THE LOST TRAGIC POETS._

Apparent Accident in the Preservation of Greek Poetry.--Criticism
among the Ancients.--Formation of Canons.--Libraries.--The Political
Vicissitudes of Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople.--Byzantine
Scholarship in the Ninth Century.--The Lost MS. of Menander.--Tragic
Fragments preserved by the Comic Poets and their Scholiasts; by
Athenaeus, by Stobaeus.--Aristotle.--Tragedy before AEschylus.--Fragments
of Aristarchus.--The _Medea_ of Neophron.--Ion.--The _Games_
of Achaeus.--Agathon; his Character for Luxurious Living.--The
_Flower_.--Aristotle's Partiality for Agathon.--The Family of
AEschylus.--Meletus and Plato among the Tragic Playwrights.--The
School of Sophocles.--Influence of Euripides.--Family of
Carkinus.--Tragedians Ridiculed by Aristophanes.--The _Sisyphus_
of Critias.--Cleophon.--Cynical Tragedies ascribed to
Diogenes.--Extraordinary Fertility of the Attic Drama.--The Repetition
of Old Plots.--Mamercus and Dionysius.--Professional Rhetoricians
appear as Playwrights.--The School of Isocrates.--The _Centaur_ of
Chaeremon.--His Style.--The _Themistocles_ of Moschion.--The Alexandrian
Pleiad.--The _Adonis_ of Ptolemy Philopator.                    Page 113

                             CHAPTER XVII.

                     _ANCIENT AND MODERN TRAGEDY._

Greek Tragedy and the Rites of Dionysus.--A Sketch of its Origin and
History.--The Attic Theatre.--The Actors and their Masks.--Relation
of Sculpture to the Drama in Greece.--The Legends used by the Attic
Tragedians.--Modern Liberty in the Choice of Subjects.--Mystery
Plays.--Nemesis.--Modern Tragedy has no Religious Idea.--Tragic
Irony.--Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy.--Modern Tragedy offers
no #katharsis# of the Passions.--Destinies and Characters.--Female
Characters.--The Supernatural.--French Tragedy.--Five
Acts.--Bloodshed.--The Unities.--Radical Differences in the Spirit of
Ancient and Modern Art.                                         Page 145

                            CHAPTER XVIII.

                            _ARISTOPHANES._

Heine's Critique on Aristophanes.--Aristophanes as a Poet of the
Fancy.--The Nature of his Comic Grossness.--Greek Comedy in its
Relation to the Worship of Dionysus.--Greek Acceptance of the Animal
Conditions of Humanity.--His Burlesque, Parody, Southern Sense of
Fun.--Aristophanes and Menander.--His Greatness as a Poet.--Glimpses
of Pathos.--His Conservatism and Serious Aim.--Socrates, Agathon,
Euripides.--German Critics of Aristophanes.--Ancient and Modern
Comedy.--The _Birds_.--The _Clouds_.--Greek Youth and Education.--The
Allegories of Aristophanes.--The _Thesmophoriazusae_.--Aristophanes and
Plato.                                                          Page 171

                             CHAPTER XIX.

                        _THE COMIC FRAGMENTS._

Three Periods in Attic History.--The Three Kinds of Comedy: Old,
Middle, New.--Approximation of Comedy to the Type of Tragedy.--Athenaeus
as the Source of Comic Fragments.--Fragments of the Old Comedy.--Satire
on Women.--Parasites.--Fragments of the Middle Comedy.--Critique of
Plato and the Academic Philosophers.--Literary Criticism.--Passages
on Sleep and Death.--Attic Slang.--The Demi-monde.--Theophrastus
and the Later Rhetoricians.--Cooks and Cookery-books.--Difficulty
of Defining the Middle from the New Comedy.--Menander.--Sophocles
and Menander.--Epicureanism.--Menander's Sober Philosophy of
Life.--Goethe on Menander.--Philemon.--The Comedy of Manners culminated
in Menander.--What we mean by Modernism.--Points of Similarity and
Difference between Ancient and Modern Comedy.--The Freedom of Modern
Art.                                                            Page 216

                              CHAPTER XX.

                           _THE IDYLLISTS._

Theocritus: his Life.--The Canon of his Poems.--The Meaning of the
Word Idyl.--Bucolic Poetry in Greece, Rome, Modern Europe.--The
Scenery of Theocritus.--Relation of Southern Nature to Greek
Mythology and Greek Art.--Rustic Life and Superstitions.--Feeling
for Pure Nature in Theocritus.--How Distinguished from the same
Feeling in Modern Poets.--Galatea.--Pharmaceutria.--Hylas.--Greek
Chivalry.--The Dioscuri.--Thalysia.--Bion.--The Lament for
Adonis.--Moschus.--Europa.--Megara.--Lament for Bion.--The Debts of
Modern Poets to the Idyllists.                                  Page 240

                             CHAPTER XXI.

                           _THE ANTHOLOGY._

The History of its Compilation.--Collections of Meleager, Philippus,
Agathias, Cephalas, Planudes.--The Palatine MS.--The Sections
of the Anthology.--Dedicatory Epigrams.--Simonides.--Epitaphs:
Real and Literary.--Callimachus.--Epigrams on Poets.--Antipater
of Sidon.--Hortatory Epigrams.--Palladas.--Satiric
Epigrams.--Lucillius.--Amatory Epigrams.--Meleager, Straton,
Philodemus, Antipater, Rufinus, Paulus Silentiarius, Agathias,
Plato.--Descriptive Epigrams.                                   Page 281

                             CHAPTER XXII.

                          _HERO AND LEANDER._

Virgil's Mention of this Tale.--Ovid and Statius.--Autumnal
Poetry.--Confusion between the Mythical Musaeus and the Grammarian.--The
Introduction of the Poem.--Analysis of the Story.--Hallam's Judgment
on Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_.--Comparison of Marlowe and
Musaeus.--Classic and Romantic Art.                              Page 345

                            CHAPTER XXIII.

                      _THE GENIUS OF GREEK ART._

Separation between the Greeks and us.--Criticism.--Greek Sense of
Beauty.--Greek Morality.--Greece, Rome, Renaissance, the Modern Spirit.
Page 363

                             CHAPTER XXIV.

                             _CONCLUSION._

Sculpture, the Greek Art _par excellence_.--Plastic Character of the
Greek Genius.--Sterner Aspects of Greek Art.--Subordination of Pain
and Discord to Harmony.--Stoic-Epicurean Acceptance of Life.--Sadness
of Achilles in the _Odyssey_.--Endurance of Odysseus.--Myth of
Prometheus.--Sir H. S. Maine on Progress.--The Essential Relation of
all Spiritual Movement to Greek Culture.--Value of the Moral Attitude
of the Greeks for us.--Three Points of Greek Ethical Inferiority.--The
Conception of Nature.--The System of Marcus Aurelius.--Contrast
with the _Imitatio Christi_.--The Modern Scientific
Spirit.--Indestructible Elements in the Philosophy of Nature.   Page 391


                           THE GREEK POETS.



CHAPTER XIV.

_GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES._

    Two Conditions for the Development of a National
        Drama.--The Attic Audience.--The Persian War.--Nemesis
        the Cardinal Idea of Greek Tragedy.--Traces of the
        Doctrine of Nemesis in Early Greek Poetry.--The
        Fixed Material of Greek Tragedy.--Athens in the
        Age of Euripides.--Changes introduced by him in
        Dramatic Art.--Law of Progress in all Art.--AEschylus,
        Sophocles, Euripides.--The Treatment of #eupsychia#
        by Euripides.--Menoikeus.--Death of Polyneices and
        Eteocles.--Polyxena.--Iphigenia.--Medea.--Hippolytus.--Electra
        and Orestes.--Lustspiele.--The _Andromache_.--The Dramas
        of Orestes.--Friendship and Pylades.--Injustice done to
        Euripides by Recent Critics.


The chapters on AEschylus and Sophocles have already introduced the
reader to some of the principal questions regarding Attic tragedy in
general. Yet the opening of a new volume justifies the resumption
of this subject from the beginning, while the peculiar position of
Euripides, in relation to his two great predecessors, suggests the
systematic discussion of the religious ideas which underlay this
supreme form of national art, as well as of the aesthetical rules which
it obeyed in Greece.

Critics who are contented with referring the origin of the Greek drama
to the mimetic instinct inherent in all humanity are apt to neglect
those circumstances which render it an almost unique phenomenon in
literature. If the mimetic instinct were all that is requisite for
the origination of a national drama, then we might expect to find that
every race at a certain period of its development produced both tragedy
and comedy. This, however, is far from being the case. A certain rude
mimesis, such as the acting of descriptive dances or the jesting of
buffoons and mummers, is indeed common in all ages and nations. But
there are only two races which can be said to have produced the drama
as a fine art originally and independently of foreign influences. These
are the Greeks and the Hindoos. With reference to the latter, it is
even questionable whether they would have composed plays so perfect as
their famous _Sakountala_ without contact with Hellenic civilization.
All the products of the modern drama, whether tragic or comic, must
be regarded as the direct progeny of the Greek stage. The habit of
play-acting, continued from Athens to Alexandria, and from Rome to
Byzantium, never wholly expired. The "Christus Patiens," attributed
to Gregory of Nazianzus, was an adaptation of the art of Euripides
to Christian story; and the representation of "Mysteries" during the
Middle Ages kept alive the dramatic tradition, until the discovery of
classic literature and the revival of taste in modern Europe led to the
great works of the English, Spanish, French, and subsequently of the
German theatre.

Something more than the mere instinct of imitation, therefore, caused
the Greeks to develop their drama. Like sculpture, like the epic,
the drama was one of the artistic forms through which the genius of
the Greek race expressed itself--by which, to use the language of
philosophical mysticism, it fulfilled its destiny as a prime agent
in the manifestation of the World-Spirit. In their realization of
that perfect work of art for which they seem to have been specially
ordained, the drama was no less requisite than sculpture and
architecture, than the epic, the ode, and the idyl.

Two conditions, both of which the Greeks enjoyed in full perfection at
the moment of their first dramatic energy, seem to be requisite for the
production of a great and thoroughly national drama. These are, first,
an era of intense activity or a period succeeding immediately to one
of excitement, by which the nation has been nobly agitated; secondly,
a public worthy of the dramatist spurring him on by its enthusiasm and
intelligence to the creation of high works of art. A glance at the
history of the drama in modern times will prove how necessary these
conditions are. It was the gigantic effort which we English people made
in our struggle with Rome and Spain, it was the rousing of our keenest
thought and profoundest emotion by the Reformation, which prepared us
for the Elizabethan drama, by far the greatest, next to the Greek, in
literature. The nation lived in action, and delighted to see great
actions imitated. Races in repose or servitude, like the Hebrews under
the Roman empire, may, in their state of spiritual exaltation and by
effort of pondering on the mysteries of God and man, give birth to
new theosophies; but it requires a free and active race, in which
young and turbulent blood is flowing, to produce a drama. In England,
again, at that time, there was a great public. All classes crowded to
the theatres. London, in whose streets and squares martyrs had been
burned, on whose quays the pioneers of the Atlantic and Pacific, after
disputing the Indies with Spain, lounged and enjoyed their leisure,
supplied an eager audience, delighting in the dreams of poets which
recalled to mind the realities of their own lives, appreciating the
passion of tragedy, enjoying the mirth of comic incident. The men
who listened to _Othello_ had both done and suffered largely; their
own experience was mirrored in the scenes of blood and struggle set
before them. These two things, therefore--the awakening of the whole
English nation to activity, and the presence of a free and haughty
audience--made our drama great.

In the Spanish drama only one of the requisite conditions was
fulfilled--activity. Before they began to write plays the Spaniards had
expelled the Moors, discovered the New World, and raised themselves to
the first place among European nations. But there was not the same free
audience in Spain as in England. Papal despotism and the tyranny of the
court checked and coerced the drama, so that, with all its richness and
imaginative splendor, the Spanish theatre is inferior to the English.
The French drama suffered still more from the same kind of restriction.
Subject to the canons of scholastic pedants, tied down to an imitation
of the antique, made to reflect the manners and sentiments of a highly
artificial court, animated by the sympathies of no large national
audience, the French playwrights became courtiers, artists obedient
to the pleasures of a king--not, like the dramatists of Greece and
England, the prophets of the people, the leaders of a chorus triumphant
and rejoicing in its mighty deeds.

Italy has no real theatre. In Italy there has been no stirring of a
national, united spirit; no supreme and central audience; no sudden
consciousness of innate force and freedom in the sovereign people.
The requisite conditions have always failed. The German drama, both
by its successes and shortcomings, illustrates the same position.
Such greatness as it achieved in Goethe and Schiller it owed to the
fermentation of German nationality, to the so-called period of "storm
and stress" which electrified the intellects of Germany and made the
Germans eager to assert their manhood among nations. But listen to
Goethe complaining that there was no public to receive his works;
study the petty cabals of Weimar; estimate the imitative and laborious
spirit of German art, and it is clear why Germany produced but
scattered and imperfect results in the drama.

The examples of England, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, all tend
to prove that for the creation of a drama it is necessary that the
condition of national activity should be combined with the condition of
a national audience--not an audience of courtiers or critics or learned
persons. In Greece, both of these conditions were united in unrivalled
and absolute perfection. While in England, during the Elizabethan
period, the public which crowded our theatres were uncultivated, and
formed but a small portion of the free nation they represented, in
Athens the people, collectively and in a body, witnessed the dramatic
shows provided for them in the theatre of Bacchus. The same set of men,
when assembled in the Pnyx, constituted the national assembly; and
in that capacity made laws, voted supplies, declared wars, ratified
alliances, ruled the affairs of dependent cities. In a word, they were
Athens. Every man among them--by intercourse with the greatest spirits
of the Greek world in the agora and porches of the wrestling-grounds,
by contemplation of the sculptures of Pheidias, by familiarity with
Eleusinian processions, by participation in solemn sacrifices and
choric dances, by listening to the recitations of Homer, by attendance
on the lectures of the sophists, by debates in the ecclesia, by
pleadings in the law-courts--had been multifariously educated and
rendered capable of appreciating the subtleties of rhetoric and
argument, as well as of comprehending the aesthetical beauty with
which a Greek play was enriched. It is easy to imagine the influence
which this potent, multitudinous, and highly cultivated audience must
have exercised over the dramatists, and what an impulse it must have
communicated to their genius. In England the playwright and the actor
were both looked down upon with pity or contempt; they wrote and acted
for money in private speculations, and in rivalry with several petty
theatres. In Athens the tragedian was honored. Sophocles was elected a
general with Pericles, and a member of the provisional government after
the dissolution of the old democracy. The actor, too, was respected.
The State itself defrayed the expenses of the drama, and no ignoble
competition was possible between tragedian and tragedian, since all
exhibited their plays to the same audience, in the same sacred theatre,
and all were judged by the same judges.

The critical condition of the Greek people itself at the epoch of the
drama is worth minute consideration. During the two previous centuries,
the whole of Hellas had received a long and careful education: at the
conclusion came the terrible convulsion of the Persian war. After
the decay of the old monarchies, the Greek states seethed for years
in the process of dissolution and reconstruction. The colonies had
been founded. The aristocratic families had striven with the mob in
every city; and from one or the other power at times tyrants had risen
to control both parties and oppress the commonwealth. Out of these
political disturbances there gradually arose a sense of law, a desire
for established constitutions. There emerged at last the prospect
of political and social stability. Meanwhile, in all departments of
art and literature, the Greeks had been developing their genius.
Lyrical, satirical, and elegiac poetry had been carried to perfection.
The Gnomic poets and the Seven Sages had crystallized morality in
apothegms. Philosophy had taken root in the colonies. Sculpture had
almost reached its highest point. The Greek games, practised through
nearly three hundred years, had created a sense of national unity. It
seemed as if all the acquirements and achievements of the race had
been spread abroad to form a solid and substantial base for some most
comprehensive superstructure. Then, while Hellas was at this point of
magnificent but still incomplete development, there followed, first,
the expulsion of the Peisistratids from Athens, which aroused the
spirit of that mighty nation, and then the invasion of Xerxes, which
electrified the whole Greek world. It was this that inflamed the genius
of Greece; this transformed the race of thinkers, poets, artists,
statesmen, into a race of heroes, actors in the noblest sense of the
word. The struggle with Persia, too, gave to Athens her right place.
Assuming the hegemony of Hellas, to which she was fore-destined by her
spiritual superiority, she flashed in the supreme moment which followed
the battle of Salamis into the full consciousness of her own greatness.
It was now, when the Persian war had made the Greeks a nation of
soldiers, and had placed the crown on Athens, that the drama--that form
of art which combines all kinds of poetry in one, which subordinates
sculpture, painting, architecture, music, dancing, to its own use, and
renders all arts subservient to the one end of action--appeared in its
colossal majesty upon the Attic stage.

At this point of history the drama was a necessary product. The
forces which had given birth to all the other forms of art were still
exuberant and unexhausted, needing their completion. At the same time,
nothing but the impassioned presentation of humanity in action could
possibly have satisfied the men who had themselves enacted on the
plains and straits of Attica the greatest and most artistic drama of
real history. It was one of the chief actors of Marathon and Salamis
who composed the _Prometheus_, and personated his own hero on the stage.

If we proceed to analyze the cardinal idea of Greek tragedy, we shall
again observe the close connection which exists between the drama
and the circumstances of the people at the time of its production.
Schlegel, in his _Lectures on the Drama_, defines the prevailing
idea of Greek tragedy to be the sense of an oppressive destiny--a
fate against which the will of man blindly and vainly dashes. This
conception of hereditary destiny seems to be strongly illustrated by
many plays. Orestes, Oedipus, Antigone, are unable to escape their
doom. Beautiful human heroism and exquisite innocence are alike
sacrificed to the fatality attending an accursed house. Yet Schlegel
has not gone far enough in his analysis. He has not seen that this
inflexible fate is set in motion by a superior and anterior power, that
it operates in the service of offended justice. When Oedipus slays his
father, he does so in contempt of oracular warnings. Orestes, haunted
by the Furies, has a mother's blood upon his hands, and unexpiated
crimes of father and of grandsire to atone for. Antigone, the best of
daughters and most loving of sisters, dies miserably, not dogged by
Fate, but having of her own free will exposed her life in obedience to
the pure laws of the heart. It is impossible to suppose that a Greek
would have been satisfied with the bald fate-theory of Schlegel. Not
fate, but Nemesis, was the ruling notion in Greek tragedy. A profound
sense of the divine government of the world, of a righteous power
punishing pride and vice, pursuing the children of the guilty to the
tenth generation, but showing mercy to the contrite--in short, a
mysterious and almost Jewish ideal of offended holiness pervades the
whole work of the tragedians. This religious conception had gradually
defined itself in the consciousness of the Greek race. Homer in both
his epics presents us with the spectacle of crime punished. It is the
sin of Paris and the obstinacy of the Trojan princes which lead to the
fall of Troy. It is the insolence of the suitors in the _Odyssey_ which
brings them to their death. The Cyclical poets seem to have dwelt on
the same theme. The storm which fell on the Achaian fleet, dispersing
or drowning the heroes, was a punishment for their impiety and pride
during the sack of Troy. The madness of Ajax followed his violence upon
Cassandra. When conscious morality begins in Greece the idea is at once
made prominent. Hesiod continually insists on justice, whose law no man
may violate unpunished. The Gnomic poets show how guilt, if unavenged
at the moment, brings calamity upon the offspring of the evil-doer.
This notion of an inheritance of crime is particularly noticeable,
since it tinged the whole tragedy of the Greeks. Solon, again, in his
dialogue with Croesus, develops another aspect of the same idea. With
him the Deity is jealous of all towering greatness, of all insolent
prosperity; his Nemesis punishes the pride of wealth and the lust of
life. Some of the most prominent personages of Greek tragedy--Creon,
Oedipus, Theseus, Agamemnon--illustrate this phase of the idea. In the
sayings of the Seven Sages we trace another shade of the conception.
All of them insist on moderation, modesty, the right proportion, the
due mean. The lyrists take up a somewhat different position. The
vicissitudes of life, both independent of and connected with personal
guilt, fascinate their imagination. They have a deep and awful sense
of sudden catastrophes. Pindar rises to a loftier level: his odes are
pervaded by reverence for a holy power, before whom the insolent are
forced to bow, by whom the humble are protected and the good rewarded.

Such are the traces of a doctrine of Nemesis to be found in all the
literature of the pre-dramatic period. That very event which determined
the sudden splendor of the drama gave a sublime and terrific sanction
to the already existing morality. The Persian war exhibited the
downfall of a haughty and insolent race, cut off in all its pomp and
power. Before the eyes of the men who witnessed the calamities of
Oedipus and Agamemnon on the stage, the glory of godless Asia had
vanished like a dream. Thus the idea of Nemesis quelling the insolent
and smiting the unholy was realized in actual history; and to add to
the impression produced on Greek imagination by the destruction of the
Persian hosts, Pheidias carved his statue of Nemesis to be a monument
in enduring marble of the