Aeschylean Tragedy

Front matter

SATHER CLASSICAL LECTURES

VOLUME TWO

1923

Prefatory Note

PREFATORY NOTE

These Lectures, here printed as written for delivery, were prepared during my residence in Europe in 1922, and at places without libraries containing books on Greek literature. Since my return I have had the advantage of consulting Heinemann’s Die tragischen Gestalten der Griechen in der Weltliteratur, published in 1922. To this work I am indebted for information concerning certain German tragedies that deal with the chief personages of the Prometheus and the Orestea.

By agreement with the authorities of the University of California, these Lectures are designed to serve as an introduction to a further study of the Mind and Art of Aeschylus, to be published by Harvard University at some future date.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In rapid succession the Greeks created many forms of poetry, until in the tragic drama they united the dialogue and narrative speech of epic with the choral ode. The rise of tragedy was as rapid as its decline. Thespis, its nominal founder, was still living ten years before the traditional year of the birth of Aeschylus, who shaped the nascent art into the mould it retained throughout antiquity. The narrow bounds of a single century contain all of Greek tragic art in its highest perfection. Exhausted by the teeming fertility of their genius, the Greeks surrendered to the moderns the opportunity to attempt to surpass what they had begun. With Euripides, Greek tragedy virtually came to an end. No one of his successors could dispute his preëminence as the voice of a common humanity. The stars of the Alexandrian Pleiad cast no radiance beyond the court of the Ptolemies. Of the predecessors of Aeschylus scarcely a fragment remains. Before and behind, darkness—only the figures of the Tragic Three emerge like a triple peak amid the surrounding gloom.

Nearest of the Three to the beginnings of that sovereign art which, by its triune harmony of music, the dance, the spoken and the sung word, seemed to the Greeks themselves the most perfect of all forms of poetry, stands the poet whom a famous modern critic has ventured to rank along with Shakespeare as the greatest dramatic genius of all time. Aeschylus’ genius is to be first measured only by comparison with that of his fellow craftsmen who went before and who came after him in his own ancient world. For, as the Life of the poet, compiled in antiquity, truly says, “the opinion which regards Sophocles as a more finished tragic poet is indeed correct; but let it be borne in mind that after Thespis, Phrynichus, and Choerilus, to raise tragedy to such a pitch of greatness was more difficult for Aeschylus than it was for Sophocles, the successor of Aeschylus, to bring it to its perfection.” Sophocles is indeed the greater artist, but Aeschylus is the greater genius; yet not solely by reason of his priority in time. “Be born a genius” was Ruskin’s first rule.

It has required no little exercise of will to limit my theme to the absolute art of Aeschylus. For I purpose to deal with the first great dramatist of the world without regard to the lesser stars whose earlier light he overpowered, and, unless the pressure on my self-restraint proves too insistent, without much reference to his successors, who shine partly in their own radiance, partly by reflection of his earlier rising. Were I to adventure my fortunes even on the subject, no less compelling than alluring, of the origin of tragedy and the evolution of the art to the year 499 B.C. when Aeschylus first appeared as a contestant for the prize which had been established only a generation earlier, these Lectures had ended before they had fairly begun; and I should unconsciously have followed the illustrious example of the story of the life and opinions of Tristam Shandy, most of which was covered by the large discourse of his Uncle Toby during the prenatal existence of the hero proper.

In truth not only the genesis of tragedy but the early history of the tragic art is a land where the light is as darkness; nor would I here contribute any counsel of my own in the effort to clear away the immemorial obscurity. Much reading may indeed make a man at least negatively wise. It is not without profit that I have followed after Dieterich and Ridgeway and Gilbert Murray and many others in their quest to discover the great secret of the origin of that “goat song,” from which, in the fulness of time, arose the majestic choral chants, the magniloquent description, and the incisive dialogue of the Agamemnon. From that quest some emerge with the assurance that from the ritual of the spirits of vegetation came the contest of will that pervades tragedy, the resultant disaster, the messenger’s speech, and the epiphany of a god. It was the worship of Dionysus, which, by the alchemy of Hellenic genius, was shaped into the art that symbolized the processes of nature, forever dying, forever reborn. Others would dethrone Dionysus as the god of tragedy at its inception, and banish him to his original province, the satyric drama, itself named from the wild Satrae dwelling about Mt. Pangaeus in Thrace. It was the worship of the spirits of ancestors in tomb-ritual that gave the primal impetus to the creation of tragedy. The “master of those who know” knew little or nothing, it would seem, about the rude beginnings of the art.

I confess to a certain insecurity in the possession of this late and hard-won knowledge. Advancing years teach caution, and I am still content to be impounded among the reactionaries who will not abandon the authority of Aristotle. Now the author of the Poetics, when he does not know a thing, is wont to say that he does not know it, and he is apparently well aware that there were disputable questions about the early history of the drama. Yet he entertains no doubt that tragedy took its rise from the leaders of the dithyramb, the song sacred to Dionysus; a statement expressly supported by that fiery spirit Archilochus in the seventh century: “Well do I know,” he says, “how to lead the dithyramb when my senses are thundered away by wine.” Revolt from the authority of Aristotle opens the perilous path to the trackless wastes of anthropology; and with the result that a current tendency in the study of Greek drama no longer seeks to interpret that drama primarily out of itself or its immediate antecedents. It seeks to discover at every hand survivals of the most primitive rituals or beliefs, and to let those survivals, charged with all their primitive significance, determine the character and the structure of the play. With the attempt to discover beneath the surface in any monument of literature indications of an earlier stage of thought, I have of course only the heartiest sympathy. But, as in days long past it was said by some one more caustic than truthful, that Greek literature seemed to exist for no other reason than to afford illustrations of the rules of Greek grammar, so now it looks as if Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides owe their capital importance to the happy fact that their plays are material for the anthropologist, who alone holds the master key to open the treasure house of poesy.

I will not surrender the Agamemnon, nor even the Eumenides, to the anthropologist, much as I respect that worthy when he does not glean amid an alien corn. My obligations to Miss Jane Harrison are profound; yet when I read Aeschylus in the light of her researches I seem to be suffering from an attack of intellectual delirium tremens. My eyes are dimmed to the splendor of his majesty by insistent images not only of snakes, proper to the pathology of that disease, but also of sprites, goblins, and demons that seem to peer out between the sonorous verses seeking to regain their ancient potency; even as the vaporous spirits fluttered about Odysseus on his descent to the dolorous regions of the lower world and with shrilling cries sought a taste of the blood that would restore to them their former consciousness. Long association with Westermarck’s great work on the origin of human marriage has had an untoward effect on an otherwise estimable academic person of my acquaintance. He maintains to the wife of his bosom that their marriage owes its happiness to the sole fact that it is a survival of the primitive capture of woman—a custom fortunately (for the anthropologist) still existing among the savage tribes of Australia.

In a word I cannot view without apprehension the growing tendency to let the unsubstantial ghosts of the illimitable past of man’s infancy direct the interpretation of the Greek drama in the period of its full splendor. Solomon’s temple, for all that it was builded of the cedars of Lebanon, was greater than the sum of its structural parts—it was the temple of the Living God. Nor is the majesty of the shrine of art to suffer diminution of its glory by decomposition into terms of stated dimension.

Another aspect of pre-Aeschylean tragedy I here leave likewise in the obscurity of silence. The few and bare facts concerning the forerunners of our poet, are they not set down in the books of the chronicles of Greek literature? But obstinate questionings assail us the moment we would go deeper and seek to define the nature of primitive tragedy and the satyric drama, once they had been evolved out of the dithyramb. What, for example, were the so-called “spoken lines” by which Arion interrupted the progress of the choral song of fifty voices in honor of Dionysus? Were they uttered by the chorus-leader in answer to the questions of the chorus and did they thus prompt Thespis to his significant innovation—the introduction of a single actor who impersonated now the god of wine and now some other character? As for the satyric drama, the invention of which is ascribed to Pratinas, an elder contemporary of Aeschylus, not even the Croisets have clarified it to a perfect understanding; but that noble pair of brothers wrote too early to have burned much incense on the altar of anthropology. Pratinas is indeed known in another field as a tolerable lyric poet whose soul rebelled against the encroachment of flute instrumentation on the song. Choerilus, “King among the Satyrs,” is reported to have improved masks. Greater than either was Phrynichus, of whom we shall hear later. His figure is not altogether unsubstantial. He is said to have introduced female parts, which were of course taken by men, as they were in Shakespeare’s time. Aeschylus, his debtor in the Persians and elsewhere, may owe to him, his older contemporary, the impetus to give to women the prominent part that constitutes a marked feature of his dramatic economy. Nevertheless, all in all, of the immediate spiritual kindred of the poet who gave direction to the later history of tragedy, nothing remains whereby his genius may be measured with theirs. Eclipsed by his greater radiance, and by the injuries of time, their works have perished in oblivion. From the bare titles of Thespis’ plays, if genuine, and from those of his pre-Aeschylean successors, it may be inferred that other choruses than those attendant on the god of wine might sing the lyric odes, the essential portion of the play; and that heroes were impersonated who had no concern with the life of the son of hapless Semele blasted by the lightning splendor of her omnipotent lover, the high god Zeus. Yet for Aeschylus, as for his successors, the theater in which the legends of the heroic past were envisaged, remained the sanctuary of the god, compacted of divinity and humanity; whose mortal part entailed on him suffering and struggle with a rejecting world, and whose immortal part so triumphed that, latest of the gods, he was received into the celestial society of Olympus.

If thus far by cautious steering I have escaped the whirlpool of Charybdis that sucks in and casts forth the too adventurous mariner, I am too wary likewise to be dashed against the rock of Scylla—the theory of the absolute nature of tragic art.

From his very primacy in time, Aeschylus has long been a magnet that has attracted philosophic aesthetics to the determination of the essence of the tragic—to the veritable Ding an sich. In the Agamemnon, which he reverenced as if divine, Goethe found the keystone of all aesthetic inquiry; and lesser critics than Goethe, though of the same race (for which the problem of the relation of moral to tragic guilt has a particular fascination), hold that Aeschylus discovered the absolute conception of tragic art and that he fixed that conception for all time. On this limitless theme I will say here only this much.

The purely aesthetic, as distinguished from the intellectual, effect of the tragic drama of the Greeks was attained by elevated action and melodious verse, by satisfaction of the just demands of emotion in its deeper forms, and, as regards sensible embodiment, only herein differing from the loftiest modern tragedies, by harmonious musical and orchestric accompaniment. What we call “the tragedies of life” are our defeats, due for the most part to lapses of reason, to inability to scan the horizon of our acts, to flaws of character, which hurt most ourselves and others less or even not at all. Tragedy, as art, is the mirror of these defeats. Greek tragedy, as tragedy, because it is “heroic,” deals with the sufferings of immortal beings or of mortal men and women normally of loftier station than ourselves, or, if of like common clay with ourselves, who appear to enjoy a loftier estate through the ennobling dignity of time. Greek tragedy does not inevitably end with death or a similar catastrophe. Its theme, however, is generally, in the last issue, such defects of character as occasion exceptional calamities, calamities that bring ruin to men set between a cruel choice, and not only to themselves but to the lives of others. In Aeschylean tragedy, in particular, that ruin involves not only the individual but also his descendants, whole families, and even entire nations. In Agamemnon ambition overmastered his nobler self: he sacrificed his daughter to retain his authority as commander of the expedition against Troy. That crime destroyed himself, his wife’s honor, and her life at the hands of her own son. Eteocles lacked self-restraint: of his own headstrong will he slew his brother. Xerxes’ desire to take vengeance on a land beyond the sea brought defeat to himself and disaster to his people.

In the last analysis, Aeschylean tragic drama presents the features common to the tragic drama of later times. As drama, it is the spectacle of a conflict of will, human or divine, or of man’s will encountering obstacles internal or external, such as the sense of moral rectitude, the reasonable or unreasonable judgments of others, the sheer force of circumstance, the very contradictions of life itself. It sets forth, in condensed form, a story normally of antique times, acted by people who impersonate the characters of the story. It presents a series of crises culminating in a supreme crisis. It depicts action or the growth of action (all in fact that Aristotle’s πρᾶχις connotes) as determined by character and circumstance; and conversely, the influence of action on character and circumstance. Aeschylean tragedy seeks to find peace for the soul troubled by the spectacle of limitless capacity for good involved in limitless ruin; peace for the soul, because it discerns that human life is somehow correlated to the demands of a moral world by the mystical union of Fate with the will of God.

On some aspects and illustrations of these statements I propose to dwell in the further course of these Lectures. My present concern is not with the question of tragic guilt and the relation of punishment to the offense, nor indeed with any part of the terminology of aesthetics. I am dealing with the ever-living drama, the drama of a great artistic craftsman. As drama, his plays must be visualized by the imagination. No grace of style, no cunning art of description, can in the faintest degree supply the place of that contribution which we must bring to the understanding of a play twenty-five centuries old: the spoken word, the choral song alternating with the dialogue, the statuesque grouping of the main actors, the freer movements of the secondary personages, and the nature of the chorus on whom the words and deeds of the actors react as they react on ourselves—all must be reborn by the coöperation of our individual creative faculty.

Aeschylean tragedy is full of startling and thrilling scenes, scenes that at times outdo the sensationalism of Euripides; yet they were not designed to produce a mere emotional effect. Aeschylus would not let emotion be secured at the sacrifice of tragic pity and tragic fear: pity for undeserved misfortune, fear lest a like misfortune befall ourselves. By the intensified life of his characters he raises us to a heightened consciousness of living. The legends which form the substratum of his plays, legends that are more often a national possession than severely local, he has so shaped that at the outset we discover ourselves confronted by moral and religious problems of profound significance. Io, wandering transformed through the world, arrives at the rocky height in uttermost Scythia where Prometheus is riveted by command of Zeus: is the supreme god a just god? The daughters of Danaüs, fleeing from the persecution of their detested suitors, seek the protection of the land of their primal ancestress: is mercy due the suppliant when hospitality spells peril? Is neutrality possible when the choice lies between war and the recognition of the rights of the oppressed? A free people is justly triumphant at its victory that rendered a barbarous enemy impotent for the conquest of the world: is the thrill of triumph to be tempered by no warning to the victor to beware the divine justice that brings low all arrogance? The mysterious beckonings of Fate, the awfulness of the battle waged by ambition against duty to man and God, the ways of God to man—these are the conceptions that interpenetrate the tragic dramas of the soldier-poet Aeschylus. Not the exquisite refinement of the art of Sophocles, not Euripides’ varied portrayal of man as he is, can vie with the massive imagination linked with moral grandeur that distinguishes their predecessor.

Thus it is, in the presence of such an art, ancient no less than modern, by grace of the contributive sympathy of reason and emotion, we make a startling discovery. We had thought to have been merely witnesses of the actions or feelings of others in the mimic world of art. We have, however, for the moment, been actual participants in the shock of will against will at its utmost tension, have been participants in the struggle of passion with duty as it has been visualized on the stage. From the representation of that shock of conflict, condensed into the crisis of a lifetime, we depart tranquilized, rejoiced to realize that it is not ourselves who have suffered, but constrained to pity by the sufferings of others. The burden of our mistakes and misdoings has been lightened by the high consolation of art. In such moments, when we are transported above the level of our petty selves, whether by a Greek or a modern dramatist (for it is equally possible with both), we are tempted to the belief that art, the symbol of beauty, wedded to reason, is, save for the Divine, the true, the permanent reality, the rest but shadow; tempted to accept in full the equation of that Hellene cast upon the shores of a northern world, surrendered in his youth to death because he was loved of the gods, the poet who discerned the equivalence of beauty and truth, now in a Grecian urn, now in the splendor of nature shaped by no mortal hand.

Genius is wont to display its most authentic quality when it works in a restricted field or with a stubborn material. The Greek choral ode is obligated to preserve all but mathematical balance of rigid quantitative responsion. Greek tragedy marks the supremacy of the artist working in a field and with a material imposed on him from without and therefore an invigorating challenge to his imagination and his fancy. Aeschylus might not survey at will the varied incidents of life showing forth a spectacle charged with tragic value. He rested under the compulsion to use an ancient story as the medium for his picture of mankind, the drama of human personality and its environment, and the crisis of a human life. To this rule there are only three certain exceptions in the period of the bloom of classical tragedy: the Capture of Miletus and the Women of Phoenicia by Aeschylus’ contemporary Phrynichus, and the Perstans by Aeschylus himself. All three were pièces d’occasion, their themes actual events of recent date. Only the magnitude of the struggle between Orient and Occident could cause tragedy to desert its proper domain, the heroic past. With themes derived from the ancient myths Greek tragedy could make a more universal appeal because it was not under the compulsion of the realities of present circumstance.

The Athenian tragic poets were rarely self-conscious as regards their art. Sophocles knew that his proper style had passed through two preparative periods. Aeschylus, for his part, voiced his indebtedness to Homer. His famous saying that his tragedies were only morsels from the great banquet of the sovereign epic poet has no deeper significance than that he derived the wellspring of his fables from the ample ocean of the heroic epics, which, apart from Hesiod, were in his day still undissociated from the name of Homer; from the Cyclic poems, whose themes were the events of the Trojan war at large, the fate of the house of Oedipus, the fortunes of the suppliant daughters of Danaüs. All were legends that to the Greeks formed the repository of the history of their race and all were exclusively Greek in origin. The vast periphery of Hellenic myth and legend included nothing derived from a purely external source.

So far as the fable alone is concerned, Aeschylus set the type. To the end Greek tragedy remained ‘epic’ recast. But with this distinction: either an epic directly furnished the material for the story; or the poet had recourse to a legend already recast from the epic and charged with moral emotion by one of his lyric predecessors. Stesichorus “bore on his lyre the burden of epic song,” as Quintilian put it; and his handling of the tale of Clytaemestra and Orestes, influenced by Delphic tradition, had a profound influence on the Orestean trilogy of Aeschylus. In some cases, too, the dramatist may have drawn both on the epic and on the lyric setting of an heroic tale; and at times he could avail himself of the mythological researches and speculations of such special students as Pherecydes. Not a single play of any Greek poet is absolutely original in the sense that both the fable and the characters were purely creations of his own imagination.

Yet the myth, fixed in its essential outline, was also plastic. The myths of the ancient heroes were in a measure to Aeschylus what the stories in Plutarch, Holinshed, and the Italian romances were to Shakespeare—sources to be remodeled for the stage and its idealized transcript of life. Unlike the Elizabethans, however, Aeschylus was matched in a public contest in a religious festival, matched with his rivals, Choerilus, Pratinas, Phrynichus, Sophocles, all working on lines similar to his own, and each competing for the prize.

The material of myth, the instrument which set his mind in motion, was often crude, dimly outlined, rebellious to his purpose, because it was incoherent, inconsistent, or improbable. But whatever the improbability of the original story, its effect was nullified because, as Coleridge remarks about the first scene in King Lear, the improbability was already rooted in popular belief—“Märchen noch so wunderbar, Dichterkünste machen’s wahr.” In the selection of his basal mythical material, Aeschylus’ first care was to discover whether it might yield a theme capable of providing an action which, in its visible imitation, should induce the proper tragic effect—the ruin of a heroic personage through the antagonism of conflicting wills or obligations, and also a reconciliation that would eliminate blind forces and discover in their stead the compulsion of a moral law inherent in the very nature of man or of the universe itself. The myth must incarnate alike a moral problem and a moral solution. Professing no systematic theory of philosophy or theology, the poet must yet let the final issue restore our confidence in the security of a rational and equitable apportionment of things, a security that had been shattered by the spectacle of the discord between what is and what should be. The fable, too, must be such as to justify the presence of a choral group, the very center of the play; and it must yield a crisis or a series of crises. The story, so handled as to produce a dramatic action, came first. Second in rank to plot, came the drawing of character, involved in, or identified with, the action; ordinarily, at least, not independent of the action.

The social conditions and civilization of the heroic age must be fairly, if not accurately, reproduced. The heroes and heroines whose deeds and words were born of an age long overpast must be interfused with the spirit of the present, without disloyalty either to past or to present. The myth, reflecting the manners, the customs, and the religious sanctities of a ruder time, must subsist, its significance surrendered to the spirit of the poet’s own age because interpenetrated by conceptions alien in part to the heroic personages envisaged by a mimetic art.

But, apart from this field where the originality of the poet might find occasion for its display, the old story was stable on its base. It is the old stories, the old ballads, the old pictures, once heard or seen, that never stale in childhood; and age discovers in them a profounder significance than the knowledge bought by the growing years.

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A deeper import

Lurks in the legend told my infant years Than lies upon that truth we live to learn.

Foreknowledge of the plot is not a narcotic to curiosity. Foreknowledge is a challenge to the intelligence. Yet the ancients did not enjoy an equal opportunity with the moderns to put their intelligence to the test by a repeated hearing of a favorite play; and thus bring to its appreciation a keener power to judge the delineation of character, the reaction of altered circumstance on character, and to recognize those warnings of impending disaster which are uttered unconsciously or pass unheeded by the persons of the play whose fortunes are at stake. The delight of foreknowledge must, it would seem, have a limit; yet I have heard of a lady who is said to have listened with increased satisfaction to the hundredth performance of the Magic Flute. (Of course, the rehearing of a play is not identical with seeing reproduced on the stage a familiar story previously undramatized.) In the fifth century before Christ at least only new tragedies were given at the annual dramatic festival. To this rule a unique exception is authenticated. It was established by state decree that any person desiring to reproduce a play of Aeschylus should be “granted a chorus,” that is, have the right to revive the work of the master.

An ancient philosopher remarks that children love to simulate fear. For adults, older children that they are, the terrible has a fascination when its horrors can be assuaged through the mediation of art. The legends of early Greece formed an inexhaustible repository of tales of revolting crime and its retribution. Remote in time, their very antiquity cast a glamor over the annals of bloodshed, adultery, revenge, the ingratitude of sons, a father’s curse, and every defiance of the laws of God and man.

Roman history under the earlier Caesars, the chronicles of the Sforzas, the Borgias, and the Romanoffs, alone can rival the far-off tales of crime which tradition reported of the famous and infamous personages who figured as heroes on the Athenian stage. The house of Atreus has here preëminence. From Pelops to Orestes were accumulated horrors from which our poet might draw the material for his fables. The earliest atrocities he omits as impertinent to the ancestral guilt of Agamemnon. The wife of Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, was corrupted by his brother Thyestes; Atreus’ revenge was the banquet, served to Thyestes, of his own sons’ flesh; Agamemnon slaughtered his daughter for ambition’s sake; his wife was unfaithful to her absent husband with Thyestes’ son; she slew her husband on his return home and, together with her paramour, was killed by her own son. Of the earlier evils in the house of Oedipus, the lost plays Laïus and Oedipus told the tale; the extant play of the trilogy is mindful of the curse pronounced against his two sons, who divide. their father’s inheritance by the sword. The daughters of Danaüs, all save one, killed their husbands on their wedding night. In the Athamas, the title-hero, in his madness, hunted his son Learchus as a deer; his wife Ino threw his other son Melicertes into a boiling cauldron and leaped with the body into the sea. In the Ixion, the hero of that name, angry at his father-in-law for demanding a promised bridal gift, caused him to fall into a burning pit; and was purified of his crime by Zeus, yet he made an attempt on the Queen of Heaven, and thenceforth was chained hand and foot to a wheel on which he revolved perpetually in the lower world.