Richard Claverhouse Jebb

“ This long life has an element of pathos not unlike that of Greek tragedy; a power above man was compelling events in a direction which Isocrates could not see; but his own agency was the ally of that power, though in a sense which he knew not; his vision was of Greece triumphant over Asia, while he was the unconscious prophet of an age in which Asia should be transformed by the diffusion of Hellenism. ”

“ Euripides made a splendid effort to maintain the place of tragedy in the spiritual life of Athens by modifying its interests in the sense which his own generation required. Could not the heroic persons still excite interest if they were made more real,—if, in them, the passions and sorrows of every-day life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness? And might not the less cultivated part of the audience at least enjoy a thrilling plot, especially if taken from the home-legends of Attica? Euripides became the virtual founder of the romantic drama. ”

“ The next hope was to find some one man equal to the task. Jason of Pherae, Dionysius I. of Syracuse, Archidamus III., son of Agesilaus—each in turn rose as a possible leader of Greece before the imagination of the old man who was still young in his enthusiastic hope, and one after another they failed him. But now a greater than any of these was appearing on the Hellenic horizon, and to this new luminary the eyes of Isocrates were turned with eager anticipation. ”

“ It is to be remembered that, as a selection, the nine chosen plays of Euripides correspond to those seven of Aeschylus and those seven of Sophocles which alone remain to us. If, then, these nine did not include the Iphigenia in Tauris, the Ion or the Bacchae, may we not fairly infer that the lost plays of the other two dramatists comprised works at least equal to any that have been preserved? May we not even reasonably doubt whether we have received those masterpieces by which their highest excellence should have been judged? ”

“ The fervid orator personifies that empire, that false mistress which has lured Athens, then Sparta, then Athens once more, to the verge of destruction. “Is she not worthy of detestation?” Leadership passes into empire; empire begets insolence; insolence brings ruin. The Areopagiticus breathes a kindred spirit in regard to home policy. Athenian life had lost its old tone. Apathy to public interests, dissolute frivolity, tawdry display and real poverty—these are the features on which Isocrates dwells. ”

“ Isocrates was the first Greek who worked out the idea of a prose rhythm. He saw clearly both its powers and its limits; poetry has its strict rhythms and precise metres; prose has its metres and rhythms, not bound by a rigid framework, yet capable of being brought under certain general laws which a good ear can recognize, and which a speaker or writer may apply in the most various combinations. This fundamental idea of prose rhythm, or number, is that which the style of Isocrates has imparted to the style of Cicero. ”

“ His early promise had won a glowing tribute from Plato, and the rhetoric of his maturity furnished matter to the analysis of Aristotle; he had composed his imaginary picture of that Hellenic host which should move through Asia in a pageant of sacred triumph, just as Xenophon was publishing his plain narrative of the retreat of the Ten Thousand; and, in the next generation, his literary eloquence was still demonstrating the weakness of Persia when Demosthenes was striving to make men feel the deadly peril of Greece. ”

“ Yet it would be very unjust to regard such clearness as merely a compensatory merit of lyric mediocrity, or to ignore its intimate connexion with the man’s native grace of mind, with the artist’s feeling for expression, with the poet’s delicate skill. How many readers, who could enjoy and appreciate Pindar if he were less difficult, are stopped on the threshold by the aspect of his style, and are fain to save their self-esteem by concluding that he is at once turgid and shallow! ”

“ The vision of the Greek race “brought under one polity” was not, indeed, fulfilled in the sense of Aristotle or of Isocrates. But the invasion of Asia by Alexander, as captain-general of Greece, became the event which actually opened new and larger destinies to the Greek race. The old political life of the Greek cities was worn out; in the new fields which were now opened, the empire of Greek civilization entered on a career of world-wide conquest, until Greece became to East and West more than all that Athens had been to Greece. ”

“ All those who denied the sublime to Euripides were either poor wretches incapable of comprehending such sublimity or shameless charlatans who, in their presumption, wished to make more of themselves than they were.” “A poet whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle lauded, whom Alexander admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of Athens put on mourning on hearing of his death, must certainly have been some one. If a modern man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees” (J. A. Symonds, Greek Poets, i. 230) . ”

“ Euripides had been warned that limits must be observed in the dramatic portrayal of a morally repulsive theme. In the later play, accordingly, the whole action is made to turn on the jealous feud between Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Artemis, the goddess of chastity. Phaedra not only shrinks from breathing her secret to Hippolytus, but destroys herself when she learns that she is rejected. But the natural agency of human passion is now replaced by a supernatural machinery; the slain son and the bereaved father are no longer the martyrs of sin, the tragic witnesses of an inexorable law ”

“ We may grant at once that the Medea of Euripides is not a faultless play; that the dialogue between the heroine and Aegeus is not happily conceived; that the murder of the children lacks an adequate dramatic motive; that there is something of a moral anti-climax in the arrangements of Medea, before the deed, for her personal safety. But the Medea remains a tragedy of first-rate power. ”

“ A pellucid style must always have been a source of wide, though modest, popularity for Bacchylides. If it be true that Hiero preferred him to Pindar, and that he was a favourite with Julian, those instances suggest the charm which he must always have had for cultivated readers to whom affairs did not leave much leisure for study, and who rejoiced in a poet with whom they could live on such easy terms. ”

“ An unerring instinct keeps both Aeschylus and Sophocles within the limits imposed by this law. Euripides was only fifteen years younger than Sophocles. But, when Euripides began to write, it must have been clear to any man of his genius and culture that, though an established prestige might be maintained, a new poet who sought to construct tragedy on the old basis would be building on sand. For, first, the popular religion itself—the very foundation of tragedy—had been undermined. Secondly, scepticism had begun to be busy with the legends which that religion consecrated. ”

“ The instruction which Isocrates undertook to impart was based on rhetorical composition, but it was by no means merely rhetorical. That “inborn philosophy,” of which Plato recognized the germ, still shows itself. In many of his works—notably in the Panegyricus—we see a really remarkable power of grasping a complex subject, of articulating it distinctly, of treating it, not merely with effect but luminously, at once in its widest bearings and in its most intricate details. Young men could learn more from Isocrates than the graces of style ”

“ Lastly, the boisterous, remorseful, and generous Heracles makes, not, indeed, a satyric drama, but a distinctly satyric scene—a scene which, in the frank original, hardly bears the subtle interpretation which in Balaustion is hinted by the genius of Browning, that Heracles got drunk in order to keep up other people’s spirits. When the happy ending is taken into account, it is not surprising that some should have called the Alcestis a tragi-comedy. ”

“ But now men gained a finer perception of those characteristics which belong to the Greek work of the great time, a fuller sense of the difference between the Greek and the Roman genius where each is at its best, and generally a clearer recognition of the qualities which distinguish ancient art in its highest purity from modern romantic types. Euripides now became the object of criticism from a new point of view. He was compared with Aeschylus and Sophocles as representatives of that ideal Greek tragedy which ranges with the purest type of sculpture. ”

“ The writings of Isocrates contain a few more or less distinct allusions to Plato’s doctrines or works, to the general effect that they are barren of practical result. [15] But Isocrates nowhere assails Plato’s philosophy as such. When he declares “knowledge” (ἐπιστήμη) to be unattainable, he means an exact “knowledge” of the contingencies which may arise in practical life. “Since it is impossible for human nature to acquire any science (ἐπιστήμην) by which we should know what to do or to say, in the next resort I deem those wise who, as a rule, can hit what is best by their opinions” (δόξας) . ”

“ Yet here we see how truly Euripides was the precursor of that near future which, at Athens, saw the more complete divergence of society from the state.
In an age which is not yet ripe for reflection or for the subtle analysis of character, people are content to express in general types those primary facts of human nature which strike every one. ”

“ Isocrates sought to enlarge the mental horizon of his disciples by accustoming them to deal with subjects which were not merely Athenian, but, in his own phrase, Hellenic. Secondly, though he did not claim to have found a philosophical basis for morals, it has been well said of him that “he reflects the human spirit always on its nobler side,” [17] and that, in an age of corrupt and impudent selfishness, he always strove to raise the minds of his hearers into a higher and purer air. ”

“ It cannot be too distinctly understood that, when Isocrates speaks of his φιλοσοφία, he means simply his theory or method of “culture”—to use the only modern term which is really equivalent in latitude to the Greek word as then current. [13]
The φιλοσοφία, or practical culture, of Isocrates was not in conflict, because it had nothing in common, with the Socratic or Platonic philosophy. The personal influence of Socrates may, indeed, be traced in his work. He constantly desires to make his teaching bear on the practical life. ”

“ Aristotle conceived the central power as political and permanent; Isocrates conceived it as, in the first place, military, having for its immediate aim the conduct of an expedition against Asia. The general views of Isocrates as to the largest good possible for the Greek race were thus in accord with the prevailing tendency of the best Greek thought in that age. ”

“ The method of Bacchylides in this department of the epinikion is best illustrated by the myth of Croesus in Ode iii., that of Heracles and Meleager in Ode v., and that of the Proetides in Ode x. Pindar’s habit is to select certain moments or scenes of a legend, which he depicts with great force and vividness. Bacchylides, on the other hand, has a gentle flow of simple epic narrative; he relies on the interest of the story as a whole, rather than on his power of presenting situations. Another element, always present in the longer odes of victory, is that which may be called the “gnomic.” ”

“ Achilles will stand well enough for the young chivalrous warrior, Odysseus for the man of resource and endurance. In the case of the Greeks, these types had not merely an artistic and a moral interest; they had, further, a religious interest, because the Greeks believed that the epic heroes, sprung from the gods, were their own ancestors. Greek tragedy arose when the choral worship of Dionysus, the god of physical rapture, had engrafted upon it a dialogue between actors who represented some persons of the legends consecrated by this faith. ”

“ The wealth of the country had ceased to grow; the gulf between rich and poor was becoming wider; party strife was constantly adding to the number of homeless paupers; and Greece was full of men who were ready to take service with any captain of mercenaries, or, failing that, with any leader of desperadoes. Isocrates draws a vivid and terrible picture of these evils. ”

“ But the later portion of the play, containing the intrigues for their rescue and the final achievement of their deliverance, is both too involved and too inconsequent for a really tragic effect. Just as in the Electra, the heroic persons of the drama are reduced to the level of commonplace. There is not a little which borders on the ludicrous, and it can be seen how easy would have been the passage from such tragedy as this to the restrained parody in which the Middle Comedy delighted. ”

“ The plot is taken mainly from the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus in the 9th book of the Odyssey. In order to be really successful in farce of this kind, a poet should have a fresh feeling for the nature of the art parodied. It is because Euripides was not in accord with the spirit of the heroic myths that he is not strong in mythic travesty. His own tragedies—such as the Helen, the Electra and the Orestes—had, in their several ways, contributed to destroy the meaning of satyric drama. They had done gravely very much what satyric drama aimed at doing grotesquely. ”