Gilbert Murray

“ Is it perhaps that one difference between Religion and Superstition lies exactly in this, that Superstition degrades its worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, on which it must needs act without question, without striving, without any respect for others or any desire for higher or fuller truth? It is only an accident—though perhaps an invariable accident—that all the supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious you may consider the truth you draw from it, you know that it is a truth seen dimly, and possibly seen by others better than by you. ”

“ And cried: 'South, South to Coptos! None shall stay
Our going.' But I turned from him away
And found that aged Priest and said: 'Thou Priest,
May Amun curse thee for thy words this day!
The Book of Thoth, the serpents and the sea!
Most bitter striving thou hast made for me,
And bitter watching till my lord's return;
False art thou, and thy South all cruelty.'
And much I prayed my brother not to sail
To Coptos, but my prayer might not avail,
For straight to Pharaoh's throne he went, and spake
To Pharaoh of the Priest and all his tale. ”

“ The best that a pious Athenian could do for such a god as that was to suppose that the official prophets were liars. Still Euripides attacks much more than Delphi. If his thoughts ever strike home, it is not merely Delphi that will fall, it is the whole structure of Greek ritual and mythology. It is against the gods and against Athens that his irony cuts sharpest.
Irony is the mood of one who has some strong emotion within but will not quite trust himself on the flood of it. And romance is largely the mood of one turning away from realities that disgust him. ”

“ The plain fact is that the men who are caught in the whirlpool of this War are too good for the life they now live. They are too good to be used for cannon-fodder, too good to be trained to drive bayonets into one another's intestines or stamp with nailed boots on one another's face. It is not only the pacifist and the eccentric who is craving in his heart for a gentler world. It is not only the thoughtful soldier, bent beneath a burden of intolerable suffering, who is torn by a long conflict between duties, in which he is forced to accept the most hateful as the most compelling. ”

“ Never was there a nation so generous, so ready in sympathy, so quick to respond to the call of suffering. They exceed England in these qualities almost as much as England exceeds the average of Europe. They will stand aloof from the savage old struggle, free, unpolluted, rejoicing in their own peace and exceeding prosperity, but always ready to send their missionaries and almoners to bind the wounds of more benighted lands. The wars of Europe are not their business. ”

“ Underneath, dim but indelible in the very fibres of the parchment, lie the characters of many ancient aspirations and raptures and battles which his conscious mind has rejected or utterly forgotten. And forgotten things, if there be real life in them, will sometimes return out of the dust, vivid to help still in the forward groping of humanity. A religious system like that of Eusebius or Marcus, or even Sallustius, was not built up without much noble life and strenuous thought and a steady passion for the knowledge of God. Things of that make do not, as a rule, die for ever. ”

“ It will only serve to foster prejudice, to make bad blood, to stir up that evil old spirit of slander between nations, which every decent Liberal and certainly every good internationalist would like to see buried for ever.
It is false to say that Great Britain has broken the Declaration of London, because the Declaration was never accepted as law. It is false to say that Great Britain is alone responsible for every unpopular act committed at sea by the Allied navies; she is acting in concert with nearly all the great maritime powers of the world. ”

“ Troy has already been set on fire by the Greeks in preparation for their departure, and the Queen rushes to throw herself into the flames. She is hurled back by the guards, and the women watch the flaming city till with a crash the great tower falls. The Greek trumpet sounds through the darkness. It is the sign for the women to start for their ships; and forth they go, cheated of every palliative, cheated even of death, to the new life of slavery. But they have seen in their very nakedness that there is something in life which neither slavery nor death can touch. ”

“ It could only be brought about by a strong and persistent lead from those who possessed the ear of the world and the confidence of their own people. Never in the whole course of modern history has there been a more magnificent opportunity than then lay before the British Prime Minister, never has there been a clearer call of plain duty. He was free, as men in public life are seldom free. Great Britain hung on his lips, and Europe was waiting for the lead of Great Britain. ”

“ The myths state clearly the one tremendous fact that the Gods are; that is what Julian cared about and the Christians denied: what they are the myths reveal only to those who have understanding. 'The world itself is a great myth, in which bodies and inanimate things are visible, souls and minds invisible.'
'But, admitting all this, how comes it that the myths are so often absurd and even immoral?' For the usual purpose of mystery and allegory; in order to make people think. The soul that wishes to know God must make its own effort; it cannot expect simply to lie still and be told. ”

“ We must either devote the whole of our national energies and resources, all our science, all our imagination, all our leisure, to preparation for a next war, not very distant, which must surpass in horror anything that the world has known and must leave European civilization poisoned if not dead: or we must by deliberate effort build up some permanent structure of international understanding which will make such a war impossible. To do the first we need only drift with the tide; to achieve the second we must rise up and conquer circumstances. ”

“ Europe is the place that people fly from; the place of tyrants and aristocracies, of wars and crooked diplomacy, the place where the poor are so miserable that they leave their homes and families and spend their last shilling in order to work at the lowest manual labour in the one land on earth which will really assure them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." No wonder it is easy for an American to reject all responsibility for the troubles of Europe! ”

“ For the Gods, to work much death and woe,
Devised this loveliness all dreams above,
That men in Greece and Troy for thirst thereof
Should strive and die, and so the old Earth win
Peace from mankind's great multitude and sin.
The superlative beauty may probably enough be found in company with heartlessness and treachery; but cannot these things be purged away, like the hates of Menelaus and Orestes, and the pure beauty remain a thing to pray to and be helped by, much as the old sagas pretend? There is here again the touch of mysticism. ”

“ In every nation there are numbers of criminals and numbers of fine men. In every nation's past there are black places and white. Only it so happens that just now, after a time of hideous suffering and wrong-doing, in the midst of a time of savage resentments and passions and great material difficulties, the nations of the world are from the depth of their hearts longing for some way of avoiding war and treating one another in future a little more openly and fairly than they have in the past. ”

“ Here, too, a raging world wakes to find itself at peace and its past hatreds unintelligible. And the first thought that comes to the surface is, in each case, the great guiding preoccupation of each man's life; with Menelaus it is Helen; with Orestes the oracle that made him sin. Nay more; when Orestes wakens, half-conscious, to find Hermione lying in his arms, his natural movement, as experiments on hypnotized persons have shown, is to accept the suggestion and draw her to him in love. Greek legend knew well that, as a matter of history, Hermione became Orestes' bride. ”

“ Every thinking person knows that if the states of Europe continue to practise war their doom is sealed. The precipice is visible, straight before us; are we men, with the power to think and check ourselves and turn aside, or are we as the Gadarene swine, incapable of turning? The situation is in some ways like that of the drunkard or the drug-taker who knows that, saved for once, he must from henceforth either abstain or perish. But in one way it is much more difficult. It is complicated by the constant suspicion that, if we abstain from war, other nations will not. ”

“ It is repeated in all the literature of these sects. 'Our human experience is so small: the things of the earth may be bad and more than bad, but, ah! if you only went beyond the Moon! That is where the true Kosmos begins.' And, of course, if we did ever go there, we all know they would say it began beyond the Sun. Idealism of a certain type will have its way; if hard life produces an ounce or a pound or a million tons of fact in the scale against it, it merely dreams of infinite millions in its own scale, and the enemy is outweighed and smothered. ”

“ Memory, according to Greek legend, was the mother of the Muses; and the "memory" of which Euripides is thinking is that of the race, the saga of history and tradition, more than his own. The Muses taught him long ago their mystic dance, and he will be theirs for ever; he will never from weariness or faint heart ask them to rest. He was thinking doubtless of the lines of the old poet Alcman to his dancing maidens, lines almost the most beautiful ever sung by Greek lips: "No more, ye maidens honey-throated, voices of longing; my limbs will bear me no more. ”

“ Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery; the ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but transcending, the love of man for woman. Or, if the way of Athena is too hard for us common men, it is not hard to find a true religious ideal in such a figure as Persephone. In Persephone there is more of pathos and of mystery. She has more recently entered the calm ranks of Olympus ”

“ The fact is unchanged that, under the present conditions of state organization and national sovereignty, the life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard oh No artisan, no peasant, no remote wood-cutter or shepherd in the whole of Europe, however law-abiding and God-fearing, can be sure henceforth that he will not suddenly by due process of law be haled away to a punishment more cruel than that normally reserved for the worst criminals. If not killed, he may be wounded, blinded, maimed for life, his business ruined, his family reduced to want and his home broken up. ”

“ God is unchangeable, always good, always doing good. If we are good, we are nearer to the gods, and we feel it; if we are evil, we are separated further from them. It is not they that are angry, it is our sins that hide them from us and prevent the goodness of God from shining into us. [188] If we repent, again, we do not make any change in God; we only, by the conversion of our soul towards the divine, heal our own badness and enjoy again the goodness of the gods. To say that the gods turn away from the wicked, would be like saying that the sun turns away from a blind man. ”

“ The Taurians are savages who kill all strangers, and if ever a Greek shall land in the wild place it will be her task to prepare him for sacrifice. She lives with this terror hanging over her, and the first Greek that comes is her unknown brother, Orestes. Their recognition of one another is, perhaps, the finest recognition-scene in all Tragedy; and with its sequels of stratagem and escape forms a thrilling play, haunted not, like a tragedy, by the shadow of death but rather by the shadow of homesickness. ”

“ Things have been done no doubt in this War which no man living who knows of them can forgive. But a generation soon passes. The burning lava quickly cools, and the grass and flowers grow over it. I wish one could be as confident of a recovery of wisdom and uprightness in the public affairs of Europe as we can be of a reaction towards peace and goodwill. For in the building up of a League of Nations, as in all great constructive work, neither correct principles nor good intentions suffice to ensure success. ”

“ Then, in the finale, come scenes of almost mystical tone, in which Hecuba appeals first to the gods, who care nothing; then to the human dead who did at least care and love; but the dead, too, are deaf like the gods and cannot help or heed. Out of the noise and shame of battle there has come Death the most Holy and taken them to his peace. No friend among the dead, no help in God, no illusion anywhere, Hecuba faces That Which Is and finds somewhere, in the very intensity of Troy's affliction, a splendour which cannot die. ”

“ Xenophon, an exile from his country, a brilliant soldier and adventurer as well as a man of letters, is perhaps the first Greek on record who openly lost interest in the city. He thought less about cities and constitutions than about great men and nations, or generals and armies. To him it was idle to spin cobweb formations of ideal laws and communities. Society is right enough if you have a really fine man to lead it. It may be that his ideal was formed in childhood by stories of Pericles and the great age when Athens was 'in name a democracy but in truth an empire of one leading man'. ”

“ Slavery had always been one of the subjects that haunted Euripides. We do not happen to find in our remains of his work any definite pronouncement that slavery is "contrary to nature," as was held by most Greek philosophers of the succeeding century. Probably no practical man of the time could imagine a large industrial city living without the institution of slavery. But it is clear that Euripides hates it. It corrupts a man; it makes the slave cowardly and untrustworthy. Yet "many slaves are better men than their masters"; "many so-called free men are slaves at heart." ”

“ Why should they do any honest work? They find it easier to live on the revenues and blast with thunderbolts the people who do not pay. They are conquering chieftains, royal buccaneers. They fight, and feast, and play, and make music; they drink deep, and roar with laughter at the lame smith who waits on them. They are never afraid, except of their own king. They never tell lies, except in love and war.
A few deductions may be from this statement, but they do not affect its main significance. One god, you may say, Hephaistos, is definitely a craftsman. ”

“ For sheer beauty of writing, for a kind of gorgeous dignity that at times reminds one of Aeschylus and yet is compatible with the subtlest clashes of mood and character, the Trojan Women stands perhaps first among all the works of Euripides. But that is not its most remarkable quality. The action works up first to a great empty scene where the child's body is brought back to his grandmother, Hecuba, for the funeral rites. A solitary old woman with a dead child in her arms; that, on the human side, is the result of these deeds of glory. ”

“ Books that are still read with delight after two thousand years are certainly, in some sense, models to imitate. But the great flaw in the classicist view, as regards the ancient literature itself, was that it concentrated attention on the external and accidental; on the mannerism, not the meaning; on the temporary fashion of a great age, not on the spirit which made that age great. A historical mind will always try, by active and critical use of the imagination, to see the Greek poet or philosopher in his real surroundings and against his proper background. ”

“ He lived on the island of Salamis in a cave which had two openings and a beautiful view—a good cave was probably more comfortable than many a Greek house, so this may not have been a great eccentricity—and there you could see him "all day long, thinking to himself and writing, for he simply despised anything that was not great and high." It is like the memories of a child, rather a puzzled child, watching the great man from a distance. ”

“ Clytemnestra, who has watched like a drowning woman to see which way the youth's fierce vanity would leap, throws herself at his feet in gratitude; "Shall her daughter, also, come and embrace his knees?" No; Achilles does not want any woman to kneel to him. Let the women try to change Agamemnon's mind; if they can do it, all is well. If not, Achilles will fight to the last to save the girl. ”

“ Now for every artist who is also a critic or rebel there is a difference of kind between these two sets of conventions. For the purposes of truth the tradition is absolutely indifferent. If, as a matter of fact, the earth goes round the sun, it does so not a whit the less because most ages have believed the opposite. The seeker for truth can, as far as truth is concerned, reject tradition without a qualm. But with art the case is different. Art has to give a message from one man to another. ”

“ And in a sense the greatest triumph that any tradition can accomplish is to rear noble and worthy rebels. The Greek tradition of the fifth century B.C., the great age of Athens, not only achieved extraordinary advances in most departments of human life, but it trained an extraordinary band of critical or rebellious children. Many a reader of Plato's most splendid satires against democratic Athens will feel within him the conclusive answer: "No place but Athens could ever have reared such a man as this, and taught him to see these faults or conceive these ideals." ”

“ The greatest change that has come over our study of Greek civilization and literature in the last two generations is this: that we now try to approach it historically, as a thing that moves and grows and has its place in the whole life-history of man. The old view, sometimes called classicist, was to regard the great classical books as eternal models; their style was simply the right style, and all the variations observable in modern literature were, in one degree or another, so many concessions to the weakness of human nature. ”

“ THE ART OF EURIPIDES CONTINUED: THE CHORUS: CONCLUSION
And lastly there is the Chorus, at once the strangest and the most beautiful of all these ancient and remote conventions. If we can understand the Chorus we have got to the very heart of Greek tragedy.
The objections to the Chorus are plain to any infant. These dozen homogeneous persons, old men or young women, eternally present and almost never doing anything, intruded on action that often demands the utmost privacy: their absurdity, on any plane of realism, is manifest. ”

“ There follows a first scene with Jason, in which man and woman empty their hearts on one another—at least they try to; but even yet some fragments of old habit and conventional courtesy prevent Jason from telling the full truth. Still it is a wonderful scene, Jason reasonable and cold, ready to recognize all her claims and provide her with everything she needs except his own heart's blood; Medea desolate and half mad, asking for nothing but the one thing he will not give. Love to her is the whole world, to him it is a stale memory. ”

“ They claim that in recent years they alone have met the Persians single-handed on behalf of all Greece; that in old times it was they who gave refuge to the children of Heracles when hunted through Greece by the tyrant Eurystheus; it was they who, at the cost of war, prevented the conquering Thebans from leaving their dead enemies to rot unburied and thus offending against the laws of Greece and humanity.
This is the light in which Athens conceived herself; the ideal up to which, amid much confused, hot-headed and self-deceiving patriotism, she strove to live. ”

“ Theseus has been his friend in many hard days and Heracles dares not face him nor speak to him. The touch of one so blood-guilty, the sound of his voice, the sight of his face, would bring pollution. He shrouds himself in his mantle and silently waves Theseus away. In a moment his friend's arms are round him, and the shrouding mantle is drawn off. There is no such thing as pollution; no deed of man can stain the immortal sunlight, and a friend's love does not fear the infection of blood. ”

“ To them, as the great mediævalist, Gaston Paris, puts it, "the universe was a vast stage, on which was played an eternal drama, full of tears and joy, its actors divided between heaven, earth and hell; a drama whose end is foreseen, whose changes of fortune are directed by the hand of God, yet whose every scene is rich and thrilling." ”

“ There is a brief wild attempt at bargaining; then hate in Menelaus overcomes fear. He rejects all terms. Orestes' party sets fire to the palace; and Menelaus at the head of his soldiers beats blindly at the barred gate. "The fire of Hell," to use Dr. Verrall's phrase, has been let loose; rage, hatred, revenge, all blazing to the point of madness; what more can befall?
What does befall is strange and daring. An entry of a god not in gentleness, not with any preparation or introduction, but sudden and terrific, striking all beholders into a trance from which they awaken changed men. ”

“ In devoting the present volume to the study of a single writer, remote from us in time and civilization and scarcely known by more than name to many readers of the Library, I am moved by the belief that, quite apart from his disputed greatness as a poet and thinker, apart from his amazing and perhaps unparalleled success as a practical playwright, Euripides is a figure of high significance in the history of humanity and of special interest to our own generation. ”

“ Probably the most high-minded man when engaged in a death-grapple fights in much the same way as the most low-minded. And there can be no doubt that as the toils of war closed tighter round Athens, and she began to feel herself fighting, gasp by gasp, for both her empire and her life, the ideals of the Saviour of Hellas fell away from her. She fought with every weapon that came.
Such times called forth naturally the men that suited them. The assembly cared less to listen to decent and thoughtful people, not to speak of philosophers. ”