Greek tragedy

“ 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 ”

“ Time in a Greek tragedy is 'ideal', or to speak more plainly, insignificant. Whether the scenes of the story are supposed to pass slowly or rapidly, or by how long an interval one incident is separated from another, are questions which the Greek dramatist never entertained, nor the Greek audience either. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Greek tragedy not only took shape and growth directly from the spirit of the time, but dealt with subjects of the most vital interest. For to the Athenians of the time of Cleisthenes or of Miltiades, and later still, the local or neighbouring hero was a living power, present in their midst, whose destinies were inseparably bound up with the national existence. Hence the imagination of the ancient spectator met the poet half-way and conspired with him in the production of an atmosphere of illusion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Would any modern audience be found, which would be prepared to sit for a whole summer day listening eagerly to the grand expression by such poets as Aeschylus and Sophocles of the power of Nemesis, the instability of all [383] prosperity, the misfortunes which hunt those who have the ill luck to displease the gods? Surely not. And not in Greek tragedy only, but in elegiac poetry and in epigram, we find perfect reflections of our most gloomy moods. But for such expressions of sorrow and despair the Greeks felt that sculpture, and even painting, were not suitable vehicles. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Undoubtedly, a Greek tragedy provided a beautiful spectacle, but this resulted from the costumes, poses, and grouping of actors and chorus.
Change of scene was rarely needed in tragedy; the peculiar arrangements of comedy do not concern us. Only two extant tragedies need it. In the Eumenides of Æschylus the change from the temple of Apollo at Delphi to Athena’s temple in Athens is vital to the plot but need not have caused much trouble; probably convention was satisfied by changing the statue. In Ajax the scene shifts from that hero’s tent to a deserted part of the sea-shore ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Also, a Greek tragedy is always highly concentrated; it consists generally of what would be the fifth act of a modern tragedy, and does not spend its time on explanatory and introductory acts. The Prologue saved time here. But why does it let out the secret of what is coming? Why does it spoil the excitement beforehand? Because, we must answer, there is no secret, and the poet does not aim at that sort of excitement. A certain amount of plot-interest there certainly is: we are never told exactly what thing will happen but only what sort of thing ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 same thing is asserted by literary critics to have been the cause of the repetition of subjects in Greek tragedy, and to have resulted in the infinite niceties of their forms, which are never the same and never radically new. ”

“ Athens. Such uncompromising hostility must have produced deep effects on so impressionable an assembly. For it is not merely a denunciation; it is a threat. The poet takes the whole picture of misery and stupid tyranny, and puts it into sinister perspective in his prologue. All the cruelties of the play are committed by the Greeks under shadow of the calamity denounced against them by the deities of the prologue, whereof [245] we are again and again reminded by the sentences casually dropped by Talthybius and others, that the host is eager to embark. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Academy, school, history, philosophy, logic, grammar, poetry, rhythm, harmony, melody, music, are all from Greek words which were in common use in Athens, and the lasting influence of her sublime dramatic tradition is indicated by the great words, chorus, comedy, drama, theatre, and tragedy, and the lesser catastrophe, episode, prologue, and protagonist, all of which draw their meanings from the originality and inspiration of the great Athenian dramatists. ”

“ This loss of their leaders threw the Greeks into despair. Ruin appeared inevitable. In the midst of a hostile country, more than a thousand miles from Grecian soil, surrounded by enemies, blocked up by deep rivers and almost impassable mountains, without guides, without provisions, without cavalry, without generals to give orders, what were they to do? A stupor of helplessness seized upon them. Few came to the evening muster; few lighted fires to cook their suppers; every man lay down to rest where he was; yet fear, anguish, and yearning for home drove sleep from every eye. ”

“ Our modern sympathies are apt to side with the giants and centaurs. An age of order likes romantic violence, as landsmen safe in their houses like [61] storms at sea. But to the Greek, this battle was full of symbolical meaning. It is the strife, the ultimate victory, of human intelligence, reason, and gentleness, against what seems at first the overwhelming power of passion and unguided strength. It is Hellas against the brute world. ”

“ Human scapegoats put to death at Athens. Human scapegoats annually stoned to death at Abdera. But in civilized Greece the custom of the scapegoat took darker forms than the innocent rite over which the amiable and pious Plutarch presided. Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. ”

“ But that depth of Grecian genius, which made it possible for Greece alone of all ancient nations to develop tragedy to anything like perfection, insured also even in the most impassioned life the most profound solemnity. ”

“ We have to bear in mind, here and elsewhere, that these Greek heroes, of whatever race we are to suppose them to be, are of an entirely different temperament to us cold and self-restrained northerns. They are highly sensitive to bodily pain, very much given to groans and tears, and very much afraid of death for themselves, however indifferent to human life in the case of others. Death, to these sensuous Greeks, was an object of dread and aversion, chiefly because it implied to their minds something like annihilation. ”

“ Looking back over the past seven years, a reflective mind is appalled by their futility and waste, and yet an analysis of this period as a whole reveals that quality of ruthless logic, of inevitable sequence, to be found in some Greek tragedies, in which the naked truth in all its horror is portrayed with supreme dramatic art. ”