Ancient Greek tragedy

“ The two extremes of touching tenderness and violent passion, which no one ever combined more successfully in one character than did Euripides in his Medeia, come prominently to the foreground in these reliefs. I know of no monuments of ancient art that grasp the spirit of a Greek tragedy more effectually than the Medeia sarcophagi. The strange and secret power of the sorceress hovers over and pervades the whole. ”

“ On the Greek side, then, “the creatures of a day” are lost in the vision of eternal righteousness. But the poet has no such reason to obliterate the mighty names of Persia. Almost the whole effect of them is for us lost; but to an Athenian ear these barbaric polysyllables must have sounded with all the pomp of an ancient chivalry, the waves of the boundless and terrible Orient descending in deluge upon the tiny states of Hellas. ”

“ It is, however, true that tragedies which were known in ancient times as among the most celebrated, and which are to-day counted the masterpieces of Greek tragedy, were often particularly neglected by the artists. How meagre is the record of monuments based on the Prometheus, the Ion, or the Oedipus Rex! The reputation of a play cannot be taken as any guaranty, therefore, that the artist found in it the required motives. ”

“ The function of Greek tragedy was ever religious. It had its very origin in the worship of the gods; and the presence of the altar as the center of the strophic movements of the chorus was a constant reminder that the drama was dealing with the highest problems of human life. Added to the general religious atmosphere of tragedy were the direct moral teachings, the highest sentiments of ancient culture, which constantly sounded through the play. Greek comedy, especially of the old and middle type, also served a distinct moral purpose in society. ”

“ Indeed, an outstanding difference between ancient and modern tragedy, doubtless arising from the fact that the former dealt with traditional material whose outlines were fairly well known to at least some and could be modified only within certain limits, consists in this, that the Greek tragedians usually made little or no attempt to keep their audiences in the dark as to the outcome. It is true that there are occasional exceptions. ”

“ Finally, in the golden age of the Attic stage, the chorus dancers and singers were carefully trained, at great expense, and the dialogue became the masterpiece of some great poet,—and then the Greek drama, the most splendid creation of human genius, was complete.
The Three Great Tragic Poets.—There are three great names in Greek tragedy,—Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These dramatists all wrote during the splendid period which followed the victories of the Persian war, when the intellectual life of all Hellas, and especially that of Athens, was strung to the highest tension. ”

“ It is only that which can no longer be had for the asking that rouses men's anxiety lest it cease altogether. This is what happened among the Greeks in tragedy, in lyric poetry, in oratory, and in the first great movement of history. ”

“ From this short analysis it may be observed that Every Man is a grave, solemn piece, not without some rude attempts to excite terror and pity, and therefore may not improperly be referred to the class of tragedy. It is remarkable that in this old simple drama the fable is conducted upon the strictest model of the Greek tragedy. The action is simply one, the time of action is that of the performance, the scene is never changed, nor the stage ever empty. ”

“ We see here the justification of the high formalism and convention of Greek tragedy. It can touch without flinching any horror of tragic life, without failing in sincerity and without marring its normal atmosphere of beauty. ”

“ Soon an improvement was effected, and men were arrayed against men with deadly weapons, to amuse men and women, boys and girls, with their skill in murdering; and at last, as a further progressive development in taste, men were pitted against wild beasts. In the Greek tragedy, the ideal sufferings of humanity, struggling in an unequal combat with omnipotent and inexorable fate, were prominently set forth to purify men from their passions by showing the consequences of even unconscious guilt. The Greek tragedy was the national moral conscience brought into the most perfect poetical form. ”

“ The true national significance of Greek tragedy, however,—a chief cause of that vital reality in which it is pre-eminent—lies not in contemporary allusions, but in the broad fact that it is instinct with the beliefs, the memories, the aspirations, the moral convictions of the Athenian people, when in the full tide of their career ”

“ Nothing in Greek tragedy is more common than for a person after learning frightful news to rush within the doors in despair. But he does not return; a messenger tells the news of his fate. In this play news is indeed brought of the bloody deeds that have befallen. Then comes a sight almost too appalling for art: the doors open and the man of doom staggers into the light of day once more. Spiritually he is dead, but he may not destroy himself since he cannot go down to Hades where his father and mother dwell. He must live, surviving himself, as it were a corpse walking the upper earth. ”

“ But if he was to be saved from the ennui which ever attaches itself to realisation, even the realisation of perfection, it was necessary that a conflict should come, and some sharper note grieve the perfect harmony, to the end that the spirit chafed by it might beat out at last a larger and profounder music. In Greek tragedy this conflict has begun; man finds himself face to face with rival claims. Greek tragedy shows how such a conflict may be treated with serenity, how the evolution of it may be a spectacle of the dignity, not of the impotence, of the human spirit. ”

“ The history of the rise of Greek tragedy now tells us with luminous precision that the tragic art of the Greeks was really born of the spirit of music: with which conception we believe we have done justice for the first time to the original and most astonishing significance of the chorus. At the same time, however, we must admit that the import of tragic myth as set forth above never became transparent with sufficient lucidity to the Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers; their heroes speak, as it were, more superficially than they act ”

“ The tragic poet, Aeschylus, is a figure like that of Michael Angelo in Italian art, grand, sombre, and possessed by his ideas. The one which rules him and runs darkly through all his tragedies is the supreme power of Nemesis, the terrible destiny which is behind and above gods and men. The favorite theme of Greek tragedy is the conflict of fate and freedom, of the inflexible laws of nature with the passionate longings of man, of "the emergency of the case with the despotism of the rule." ”

“ To literary a-priorists this is of course horrible; to those who take the facts of literature, as they take the facts of life, it is a welcome and reconciling discovery. The conditions of the Greek stage were admittedly such as can never be naturally reproduced, and therefore, however great and perfect the Greek Tragedy may be in its own way, it cannot usurp the position of “best in all ways”; and can still less pretend to dictate to other kinds that they shall not be good at all in ways different from its own. ”

“ The Greeks believed in the gods and heroes whose agency and exploits constituted the machinery of tragedy, but the Romans did not, and we cannot sympathize with them, because we see that they are insincere.
An awful belief in destiny, and the hopeless yet patient struggle of a great and good man against this all-ruling power, are the mainspring of Greek tragedy. This belief the Romans did not transfer into their imitations, but they supplied its place with the stern fatalism of the Stoics. The principle of destiny entertained by the Greek poets is a mythological, even a religious one. ”

“ But no drama except Greek has that regular interweaving of tragedy with exquisite lyrics by which some of its most powerful effects are secured.
Effect is the wrong word to use, for we have here no literary trick, but a view of life, which is naturally complete and clearsighted, which is sensitive to the beauty that no evil can destroy, which sees the splendour in tragedy itself, and remembers that though the days of darkness are many it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun. This philosophy, implied throughout Greek literature, commends it to many people. ”

“ As each billow of grief descends upon her, leaving her still sentient, nay, filled with eager sympathy for others, the Greeks who oppress her become strangely puny and unreal like the legionaries in some mediæval picture of martyrdom. ”

“ The first type, which is represented by Greek tragedy, displays the individual in conflict with Fate, an inscrutable power dominating alike the actions of men and of gods. It is the God of the gods,—the destiny of which they are the instruments and ministers. Through irreverence, through vainglory, through disobedience, through weakness, the tragic hero becomes entangled in the meshes that Fate sets for the unwary; he struggles and struggles to get free, but his efforts are necessarily of no avail. ”

“ Tragedy was defined by Plato as an imitation of the noblest life. Its proper themes—the deeds and sufferings of heroes—were familiar to audiences intimately acquainted with the mythology of the national religion. To such Subjects of Greek tragedy. themes Greek tragedy almost wholly confined itself; and in later days there were numerous books which discussed these myths of the tragedians. ”

“ This is perhaps the chief reason why Greek tragedy was so calm and so processional in character, why all its vehement action took place off the stage, why some of its most impassioned expressions of emotion were cadenced in elaborate lyrics with a musical accompaniment. An actor, mounted on his buskins, and carrying the weight of the tragic mask, could never have encountered a similar gigantic being in personal combat without betraying some awkwardness of movement or exhibiting some unseemly gesture. ”

“ The basis for much of modern theorizing has been Aristotle's tentative yet searching analysis of Athenian tragedy. Many of the peculiarities of Athenian tragedy—its structure without acts but with a chorus, its limitation of three actors on the stage at once, its narrow range of mythological subjects—are evidently not essential to securing tragic effect. Even the unities, whether as observed in the Greek theatre or as defined by French and Italian critics, may, after generations of debate, be safely relegated as nonessential. ”

“ A custom, which consists in a deliberate and sacrilegious act of mutilation, more ghastly than murder itself, perpetrated upon the helpless dead, and which yet has continued unchanged throughout the changes and chances which the Greek people have undergone for more than a score of centuries, can only be based upon the most immutable of superstitious beliefs and dreads, and reveals more unerringly than even the whole literature of Greece the fundamental ideas of the Greek people concerning the avenging of blood. The murdered man in bodily shape avenges his own wrongs. ”

“ Accordingly, I presume, secondly, that this curiosity will take the following course:—these persons will naturally wish to know, at starting, what there is differentially interesting in a Grecian tragedy, as contrasted with one of Shakspeare's or of Schiller's: in what respect, and by what agencies, a Greek tragedy affects us, or is meant to affect us, otherwise than as they do; and how far the Antigone of Sophocles was judiciously chosen as the particular medium for conveying to British minds a first impression, and a representative impression, of Greek tragedy. ”

“ As long as the Greeks were left solely to their mythology, their views of a future state were melancholy and confused. Death was an evil, not a release. Even in their Elysium, their favourite heroes seem to enjoy but a frigid and unenviable immortality. ”

“ It was natural then, in an age of unscientific mentality, that plagues and pestilences, and diseases of all kinds, lunacy and sterility, the failure of harvests, misfortune in peace or war, adverse winds, volcanoes, inherited characteristics, the activities of genius, emotion and desire, birth, growth, death and decay—almost everything that crosses the threshold of human consciousness—should be ascribed to the ubiquitous and perpetual operation of supernatural agents. The literature of ancient Greece and Rome is permeated with such beliefs. ”

“ On hundreds of Etruscan monuments one sees the workings of Greek poetry, which found its way into Etruria before Livius Andronicus produced the first tragedy in Rome 240 B.C. That the Greek drama was introduced for the most part directly and not through the medium of the early Latin tragedians, is shown by the fact that the latter flourished in the second and first centuries B.C., while the urns exhibiting tragic subjects are, for the most part, from the third century B.C. Some may, indeed, date from the fourth century. ”

“ And I believe this, that this Greek tragedy, with its godlike men and manlike gods, and heroes who had become gods by the very vastness of their humanity, was a preparation, and it may be a necessary preparation, for the true Christian faith in a Son of Man, who is at once utterly human and utterly divine. That man is made in the likeness of God—is the root idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive, without which neither the Greek Tragedies nor the Homeric Poems, six hundred years before them, could have been composed. ”