Gilbert Murray

“ To us in our reflective moods comedy and tragedy seem only two sides of the same thing, the division between them scarcely tangible; and so thought the Athens of Menander. But historically they are of different pedigree. Tragedy springs from the artistic and professional choir-song; comedy, from the mumming of rustics at vintage and harvest feasts. "Tragedy arose from the dithyramb," says Aristotle; "comedy, from the phallic performances." ”

“ For this rebellious love of mankind he is nailed to a storm-riven rock of the Caucasus; but he is not conquered, for, in the first place, he is immortal, and besides he knows a secret on which the future of heaven and earth depends. Zeus tries by threats and tortures to break him, but Prometheus will not forsake mankind. And the daughters of Ocean, who have gathered to comfort him, will not forsake Prometheus. They face the same blasting fire, and sink with him into the abyss. There is action at the beginning and end of the play ”

“ Peithetairus is a splendid character, adapting himself to every situation and converting every opponent. He rouses the melancholy Têreus; convinces the startled and angry Birds; gets wings made; establishes a constitution, public buildings, and defences; receives and rejects multitudes of applicants for citizenship, admitting, for instance, a lyric-poet and a 'father-beater,' who seems to be the ancient equivalent for a wife-beater, but drawing the line at a prophet, an inspector, and a man of science. ”

“ Herodotus had not yet written, and we know what a land of wonder the farther parts of the world still were in his time. To the Athens of Æschylus the geographical interest was partly of this imaginative sort; in part it came from the impulse given by the rise of Athens to voyages of discovery and trade adventure. Of our extant plays, the Prometheus is full of mere declamations on saga-geography; the Persæ comes next, then the Suppliants; and even the Agamemnon has the account of the beacon stations. ”

“ And more than that, it is clear that our Iliad, Odyssey, Erga, and Theogony are not the first, "nor the second, nor yet the twelfth," of such embodiments. These ostensibly primitive poems show a length and complexity of composition which can only be the result of many generations of artistic effort. They speak a language out of all relation to common speech, full of forgotten meanings and echoes of past states of society; a poet's language, demonstrably built up and conditioned at every turn by the needs of the hexameter metre. ”

“ Antigone is discovered, refuses to make any kind of submission, and is condemned. Ismênê tries to share her suffering; her lover Hæmon, son of Creon, intercedes for her: both in vain. Hæmon forces his way into the tomb where she has been immured alive, finds her dead, and slays himself.
Apart from the beauty of detail, especially in the language, one of the marks of daring genius in this play is Antigone's vagueness about the motive or principle of her action: it is because her guilty brother's cause was just; because death is enough to wipe away all offences ”

“ Crime, however, is always more striking and palpable than virtue. Heroines like Medea, Phædra, Stheneboia, Aërope, Clytæmestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than those of the angelic or devoted type—Alcestis, who died to save her husband, Evadne and Laodamia, who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of virgin-martyrs. But the significant fact is that, like Ibsen, Euripides refuses to idealise any man, and does idealise women. ”

“ As a mere piece of technique, the Œdipus of Sophocles deserves the position given to it by Aristotle, as the typical example of the highest Greek tragedy. There is deep, if not very original, thought; there is wonderful power of language, though no great lift of imagination; and for pure dramatic strength and skill, there are few things in any drama so fine as the last exit of Iocasta, when she alone sees the truth that is coming.
The Ajax—called by the grammarians Ajax the Scourge-Bearer, in distinction to another Ajax the Locrian*—is a stiff and very early play. ”

“ The young girl, when she first finds that she has been trapped to her death, breaks down, and pleads helplessly, like a child, not to be hurt; then when the first blinding shock is past, when she has communed with herself, when she finds that Achilles is ready to fight and die for her, she rises to the height of glad martyrdom for Hellas' sake. ”

“ And if it was any of the finer 'Sons of Homer' who told of that last death-grapple where it was no longer Kebrionês nor Patroclus, but Acliilles himself, who lay "under the blind dust-storm, the mighty limbs flung miglitily, and the riding of war forgotten," the world must owe a grudge to those patriotic organisers who could not bear to leave the Trojan dogs with the best of it. ”

“ Even his exquisite diction, which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his predecessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist. Æschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in their great moments. But neither Prometheus nor Œdipus nor Electra, nor any one but an Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes them. ”

“ The wounded king of Mysia knows that nothing but the spear of Achilles, which wounded him, can cure him; the Greeks are all his enemies; he travels through Greece, lame from his wound, and disguised as a beggar; speaks in the gathering of hostile generals, is struck for his insolence, but carries his point; finally, he is admitted as a suppliant by Clytæmestra, snatches up the baby Orestes, reveals himself, threatens to dash out the baby's brains if any of the enemies who surround him move a step, makes his terms, and is healed. ”

“ The fresh virginity in nature, the spirit of wild meadows and waters and sunrise, is not to be disturbed because martyrs choose to die for it.
The Bacchæ is a play difficult to interpret. For excitement, for mere thrill, there is absolutely nothing like it in ancient literature. The plot is as simple as it is daring. The god Dionysus is disowned by his own kindred, and punishes them. There comes to Thebes a 'Bacchos'—an incarnation, it would seem, of the god himself—preaching the new worship. ”

“ His tragedies come, as perhaps all great tragedies do, from some 'Hubris,' some self-assertion of a strong will, in the way of intellect or emotion or passion, against stronger outside forces, circumstances or laws or gods. Æschylus was essentially the man to feel the impassable bars against which human nature battles; and the overthrow of the Great King was the one thought that was in every Greek mind at the time. Thus the peril of human 'Hubris' and the 'jealousy of God'—i.e. the fact that man's will aims further than his power can reach—is one rather conspicuous principle in Æschylus. ”

“ The Antigone is perhaps the most celebrated drama in Greek literature. The plot is built on the eternally-interesting idea of martyrdom, the devotion to a higher unseen law, resulting in revolt against and destruction by the lower visible law. Polyneikes has been slain fighting against his usurping brother Eteocles and against his country; and Creon—the name merely means 'ruler,' which accounts for its commonness for the official kings of the saga—commands that he be cast out to the dogs and birds as a traitor. Any one who attempts to bury him shall suffer instant death. ”

“ Only two gods are respectfully handled—Apollo, who, though an ally of Troy, is a figure genuinely divine; and Poseidon, who moves in a kind of rolling splendour. The reason is not far to seek: they are the real gods of the Ionian. The rest are, of course, gods; but they are 'other peoples' gods,' and our view of them depends a good deal on our view of their worshippers. Athena comes a good third to the two Ionians; in the Odyssey and K she outstrips them. Athens could manage so much, but not more: she could not make the Ionian poetry accept her stern goddess in her real grandeur ”

“ A poet who is uncompromisingly earnest in his realism, or unreserved in his imagination, is apt to jar upon his audience or to make them laugh. Sophocles avoids these dangers. He accepts throughout the traditional conception of heroes and saga-people. The various bits of criticism ascribed to him—"I draw men as they ought to be drawn; Euripides draws them as they are"; "Æschylus did the right thing, but without knowing it"—all imply the 'academic' standpoint. Sophocles is the one Greek writer who is 'classical' in the vulgar sense—almost in the same sense as Vergil and Milton. ”

“ In attempting to understand the scope and development of Greek literature, our greatest difficulty comes from the fragmentary and one-sided nature of our tradition. There has perhaps never been any society in history so near to the highest side of our own as the Athens of Euripides and Plato. ”

“ Of the literature produced by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C., we possess about a twentieth part; of that produced in the seventh, sixth, fourth, and third, not nearly so large a proportion. All that has reached us has passed a severe and far from discriminating ordeal. It has secured its life by never going out of fashion for long at a time; by appealing steadily to the book-trade throughout a number of successive epochs of taste—fourth-century Greece, pre-Christian Alexandria, Augustan Rome, the great Hellenic revival of the Antonines, the narrower Attic revival of the later sophists. ”

“ We must for the present refuse to listen to those who talk to us of masks and buskins and top-knots and sacerdotal dress, repeat to us the coarse half-knowledge of Pollux and Lucian, show us the grotesques of South Italy and the plasterer's work of Pompeian degradation, compile from them an incorrect account of the half-dead Hellenistic or Roman stage—the stage that competed with the amphitheatre—and bid us construct an idea of the drama of Euripides out of the ghastly farrago. ”

“ We have, unfortunately, lost Aristotle's philosophy of comedy. It was in the missing part of the Poetics. But when he explains the moral basis of tragedy as being "to purge our minds of their vague impulses of pity and terror" by a strong bout of these emotions; when he justifies 'tumultuous' music as affording a 'purgation' of the wild emotional element in our nature which might else break out in what he calls 'enthousiasmos'; it is easy to see that the licences in comedy might be supposed to effect a more obvious and necessary purgation. ”

“ The hero of the Electra is the Working Peasant, true-hearted, honourable, tactful, and of course as humbly conscious of his inferiority to all the savage chieftains about him as they are confident of their superiority to him. But, above all, Euripides retains his old belief in the infinite possibilities of the untried girl. To take only the complete plays, we have a virgin-martyr for heroine in the Heracleidæ, Hecuba, Iphigenîa in Aulis; we have echoes of her in the Trôiades and the Suppliants. She is always a real character and always different. ”

“ All three tragedians have treated the Electra-saga, and treated it in characteristically different ways. The realistic spirit of Euripides's Electra is obvious to every one—the wolfish Pelopidæ, the noble peasant, the harrowing scene of remorse and mutual reproach between the murderers. But the truth is that Æschylus has tried to realise his subject too. He takes the old bloody saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, though quite as grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Æschylus himself would. It is only Sophocles who takes the saga exactly as he finds it. ”

“ The life of one Achilles is worth that of a thousand mere women, such as she! That is her feeling at the moment when she has risen incomparably beyond every one in the play and made even her own vain young hero humble. Aristotle—such are the pitfalls in the way of human critics—takes her as a type of inconsistency!
An element of brightness comes also in the purely romantic plays of the last years, the Helena and Andromeda.* One is reminded of the Birds (p. 286) . Euripides can be happy if he turns entirely away from πράγματα, from affaires, from the things that weighed on all Athens. ”

“ Of the ninety plays Æschylus wrote, we possess seven. The earliest, on internal grounds, is the Suppliant-Women—a most quaint and beautiful work, like one of those archaic statues which stand with limbs stiff and countenance smiling and stony. The subject, too, is of the primitive type, more suited for a cantata than for a play. ”

“ There is a certain grandeur in the trial scene where Orestes is accused by the Curse-Spirits, defended by Apollo, and acquitted by the voice of Athena, The gods, however, are brought too close to us, and the foundation of the Areopagus has not for us the religious reality it had for Æschylus. But the thing that most disappoints us, the gradual slackening of the interest till the 'pity and terror' melt away in gentle artistic pleasure, was, as every choric ode and most tragedies testify, one of the essential principles of Greek art. ”

“ Two main processes were needed to make a complete performance: the 'chorêgus' ' provided a chorus,' the poet 'taught the chorus'—those were the difficult things. The mere composition was a matter of detail, which any good poet was ready to do for you. All the technical terms are formed with reference to the chorus. The 'prologue' is all that comes before their entrance; an 'episodion' is the 'entry to' the chorus of any fresh character; the close of the play is an 'exodus,' because they then depart. But the chorus was doomed to dwindle as tragedy grew. Dialogue is the essence of drama ”