In the fury of madness he sallies from his tent at night--slaughters
the flocks, in which his insanity sees the Greeks, whose award has
galled and humbled him--and supposes he has slain the Atridae and
captured Ulysses. It is in this play that Sophocles has, to a certain
extent, attempted that most effective of all combinations in the hands
of a master--the combination of the ludicrous and the terrible [371]:
as the chorus implies, "it is to laugh and to weep." But when the
scene, opening, discovers Ajax sitting amid the slaughtered victims--
when that haughty hero awakens from his delirium--when he is aware
that he has exposed himself to the mockery and derision of his foes--
the effect is almost too painful even for tragedy. In contrast to
Ajax is the soothing and tender Tecmessa. The women of Sophocles are,
indeed, gifted with an astonishing mixture of majesty and sweetness.
After a very pathetic farewell with his young son, Ajax affects to be
reconciled to his lot, disguises the resolution he has formed, and by
one of those artful transitions of emotion which at once vary and
heighten interest on the stage, the chorus, before lamenting, bursts
into a strain of congratulation and joy. The heavy affliction has
passed away--Ajax is restored. The Nuntius arrives from the camp.
Calchas, the soothsayer, has besought Teucer, the hero's brother, not
to permit Ajax to quit his tent that day, for on that day only Minerva
persecutes him; and if he survive it, he may yet be preserved and
prosper. But Ajax has already wandered away, none know whither.
Tecmessa hastens in search of him, and, by a very rare departure from
the customs of the Greek stage, the chorus follow.
Ajax appears again. His passions are now calm and concentrated, but
they lead him on to death. He has been shamed, dishonoured--he has
made himself a mockery to his foes. Nobly to live or nobly to die is
the sole choice of a brave man. It is characteristic of the Greek
temperament, that the personages of the Greek poetry ever bid a last
lingering and half-reluctant farewell to the sun. There is a
magnificent fulness of life in those children of the beautiful West;
the sun is to them as a familiar friend--the affliction or the terror
of Hades is in the thought that its fields are sunless. The orb which
animated their temperate heaven, which ripened their fertile earth, in
which they saw the type of eternal youth, of surpassing beauty, of
incarnate poetry--human in its associations, and yet divine in its
nature--is equally beloved and equally to be mourned by the maiden
tenderness of Antigone or the sullen majesty of Ajax. In a Chaldaean
poem the hero would have bid farewell to the stars!
It is thus that Ajax concludes his celebrated soliloquy.
"And thou that mak'st high heaven thy chariot-course,
Oh sun--when gazing on my father-land,
Draw back thy golden rein, and tell my woes
To the old man, my father--and to her
Who nursed me at her bosom--my poor mother!
There will be wailing through the echoing walls
When--but away with thoughts like these!--the hour
Brings on the ripening deed. Death, death, look on me!
Did I say death?--it was a waste of words;
We shall be friends hereafter.
'Tis the DAY,
Present and breathing round me, and the car
Of the sweet sun, that never shall again
Receive my greeting!--henceforth time is sunless,
And day a thing that is not! Beautiful light,
My Salamis--my country--and the floor
Of my dear household hearth--and thou, bright Athens,
Thou--for thy sons and I were boys together--
Fountains and rivers, and ye Trojan plains,
I loved ye as my fosterers--fare ye well!
Take in these words, the last earth hears from Ajax--
All else unspoken, in a spectre land
I'll whisper to the dead!"
Ajax perishes on his sword--but the interest of the play survives him.
For with the Greeks, burial rather than death made the great close of
life. Teucer is introduced to us; the protector of the hero's remains
and his character, at once fierce and tender, is a sketch of
extraordinary power. Agamemnon, on the contrary--also not presented
to us till after the death of Ajax--is but a boisterous tyrant [372].
Finally, by the generous intercession of Ulysses, who redeems his
character from the unfavourable conception we formed of him at the
commencement of the play, the funeral rites are accorded, and a
didactic and solemn moral from the chorus concludes the whole.
XI. The "Philoctetes" has always been ranked by critics among the
most elaborate and polished of the tragedies of Sophocles. In some
respects it deserves the eulogies bestowed on it. But one great fault
in the conception will, I think, be apparent on the simple statement
of the plot.
Philoctetes, the friend and armour-bearer of Hercules, and the heir of
that hero's unerring shafts and bow, had, while the Grecian fleet
anchored at Chryse (a small isle in the Aegaean), been bitten in the
foot by a serpent; the pain of the wound was insufferable--the shrieks
and groans of Philoctetes disturbed the libations and sacrifices of
the Greeks. And Ulysses and Diomed, when the fleet proceeded, left
him, while asleep, on the wild and rocky solitudes of Lemnos. There,
till the tenth year of the Trojan siege, he dragged out an agonizing
life. The soothsayer, Helenus, then declared that Troy could not fall
till Philoctetes appeared in the Grecian camp with the arrows and bow
of Hercules. Ulysses undertakes to effect this object, and, with
Neoptolemus (son of Achilles), departs for Lemnos. Here the play
opens. A wild and desolate shore--a cavern with two mouths (so that
in winter there might be a double place to catch the sunshine, and in
summer a twofold entrance for the breeze), and a little fountain of
pure water, designate the abode of Philoctetes.
Agreeably to his character, it is by deceit and stratagem that Ulysses
is to gain his object. Neoptolemus is to dupe him whom he has never
seen with professions of friendship and offers of services, and to
snare away the consecrated weapons. Neoptolemus--whose character is a
sketch which Shakspeare alone could have bodied out--has all the
generous ardour and honesty of youth, but he has also its timid
irresolution--its docile submission to the great--its fear of the
censure of the world. He recoils from the base task proposed to him;
he would prefer violence to fraud; yet he dreads lest, having
undertaken the enterprise, his refusal to act should be considered
treachery to his coadjutor. It is with a deep and melancholy wisdom
that Ulysses, who seems to comtemplate his struggles with
compassionate and not displeased superiority, thus attempts to
reconcile the young man:
"Son of a noble sire! I too, in youth,
Had thy plain speech and thine impatient arm:
But a stern test is time! I have lived to see
That among men the tools of power and empire
Are subtle words--not deeds."
Neoptolemus is overruled. Ulysses withdraws, Philoctetes appears.
The delight of the lonely wretch on hearing his native language; on
seeing the son of Achilles--his description of his feelings when he
first found himself abandoned in the desert--his relation of the
hardships he has since undergone, are highly pathetic. He implores
Neoptolemus to bear him away, and when the youth consents, he bursts
into an exclamation of joy, which, to the audience, in the secret of
the perfidy to be practised on him, must have excited the most lively
emotions. The characteristic excellence of Sophocles is, that in his
most majestic creations he always contrives to introduce the sweetest
touches of humanity.--Philoctetes will not even quit his miserable
desert until he has returned to his cave to bid it farewell--to kiss
the only shelter that did not deny a refuge to his woes. In the joy
of his heart he thinks, poor dupe, that he has found faith in man--in
youth. He trusts the arrows and the bow to the hand of Neoptolemus.
Then, as he attempts to crawl along, the sharp agony of his wound
completely overmasters him. He endeavours in vain to stifle his
groans; the body conquers the mind. This seems to me, as I shall
presently again observe, the blot of the play; it is a mere exhibition
of physical pain. The torture exhausts, till insensibility or sleep
comes over him. He lies down to rest, and the young man watches over
him. The picture is striking. Neoptolemus, at war with himself, does
not seize the occasion. Philoctetes wakes. He is ready to go on
board; he implores and urges instant departure. Neoptolemus recoils--
the suspicions of Philoctetes are awakened; he thinks that this
stranger, too, will abandon him. At length the young man, by a
violent effort, speaks abruptly out, "Thou must sail to Troy--to the
Greeks--the Atridae."
"The Greeks--the Atridae!" the betrayers of Philoctetes--those beyond
pardon--those whom for ten years he has pursued with the curses of a
wronged, and deserted, and solitary spirit. "Give me back," he cries,
"my bow and arrows." And when Neoptolemus refuses, he pours forth a
torrent of reproach. The son of the truth--telling Achilles can
withstand no longer. He is about to restore the weapons, when Ulysses
rushes on the stage and prevents him.
At length, the sufferer is to be left--left once more alone in the
desert. He cannot go with his betrayers--he cannot give glory and
conquest to his inhuman foes; in the wrath of his indignant heart even
the desert is sweeter than the Grecian camp. And how is he to sustain
himself without his shafts! Famine adds a new horror to his dreary
solitude, and the wild beasts may now pierce into his cavern: but
their cruelty would be mercy! His contradictory and tempestuous
emotions, as the sailors that compose the chorus are about to depart,
are thus told.
The chorus entreat him to accompany them.
Phil. Begone.
Chor. It is a friendly bidding--we obey--
Come, let us go. To ship, my comrades.
Phil. No--
No, do not go--by the great Jove, who hears
Men's curses--do not go.
Chor. Be calm.
Phil. Sweet strangers!
In mercy, leave me not.
* * * * * *
Chor. But now you bade us!
Phil. Ay--meet cause for chiding,
That a poor desperate wretch, maddened with pain,
Should talk as madmen do!
Chor. Come, then, with us.
Phil. Never! oh--never! Hear me--not if all
The lightnings of the thunder-god were made
Allies with you, to blast me! Perish Troy,
And all beleaguered round its walls--yea; all
Who had the heart to spurn a wounded wretch;
But, but--nay--yes--one prayer, one boon accord me.
Chor. What wouldst thou have?
Phil. A sword, an axe, a something;
So it can strike, no matter!
Chor. Nay--for what?
Phil. What! for this hand to hew me off this head--
These limbs! To death, to solemn death, at last
My spirit calls me.
Chor. Why?
Phil. To seek my father.
Chor. On earth?
Phil. In Hades.
Having thus worked us up to the utmost point of sympathy with the
abandoned Philoctetes, the poet now gradually sheds a gentler and
holier light over the intense gloom to which we had been led.
Neoptolemus, touched with generous remorse, steals back to give the
betrayed warrior his weapons--he is watched by the vigilant Ulysses--
an angry altercation takes place between them. Ulysses, finding he
cannot intimidate, prudently avoids personal encounter with the son of
Achilles, and departs to apprize the host of the backsliding of his
comrade.--A most beautiful scene, in which Neoptolemus restores the
weapons to Philoctetes--a scene which must have commanded the most
exquisite tears and the most rapturous applauses of the audience,
ensues; and, finally, the god so useful to the ancient poets brings
all things, contrary to the general rule of Aristotle [373], to a
happy close. Hercules appears and induces his former friend to
accompany Neoptolemus to the Grecian camp, where his wound shall be
healed.. The farewell of Philoctetes to his cavern--to the nymphs of
the meadows--to the roar of the ocean, whose spray the south wind
dashed through his rude abode--to the Lycian stream and the plain of
Lemnos--is left to linger on the ear like a solemn hymn, in which the
little that is mournful only heightens the majestic sweetness of all
that is musical. The dramatic art in the several scenes of this play
Sophocles has never excelled, and scarcely equalled. The contrast of
character in Ulysses and Neoptolemus has in it a reality, a human
strength and truth, that is more common to the modern than the ancient
drama. But still the fault of the story is partly that the plot rests
upon a base and ignoble fraud, and principally that our pity is
appealed to by the coarse sympathy with physical pain: the rags that
covered the sores, the tainted corruption of the ulcers, are brought
to bear, not so much on the mind as on the nerves; and when the hero
is represented as shrinking with corporeal agony--the blood oozing
from his foot, the livid sweat rolling down the brow--we sicken and
turn away from the spectacle; we have no longer that pleasure in our
own pain which ought to be the characteristic of true tragedy. It is
idle to vindicate this error by any dissimilarity between ancient and
modern dramatic art. As nature, so art, always has some universal and
permanent laws. Longinus rightly considers pathos a part of the
sublime, for pity ought to elevate us; but there is nothing to elevate
us in the noisome wounds, even of a mythical hero; our human nature is
too much forced back into itself--and a proof that in this the ancient
art did not differ from the modern, is in the exceeding rarity with
which bodily pain is made the instrument of compassion with the Greek
tragedians. The Philoctetes and the Hercules are among the exceptions
that prove the rule. [374]
XII. Another drawback to our admiration of the Philoctetes is in the
comparison it involuntarily courts with the Prometheus of Aeschylus.
Both are examples of fortitude under suffering--of the mind's conflict
with its fate. In either play a dreary waste, a savage solitude,
constitute the scene. But the towering sublimity of the Prometheus
dwarfs into littleness every image of hero or demigod with which we
contrast it. What are the chorus of mariners, and the astute Ulysses,
and the boyish generosity of Neoptolemus--what is the lonely cave on
the shores of Lemnos--what the high-hearted old warrior, with his
torturing wound and his sacred bow--what are all these to the vast
Titan, whom the fiends chain to the rock beneath which roll the rivers
of hell, for whom the daughters of Ocean are ministers, to whose
primeval birth the gods of Olympus are the upstarts of a day, whose
soul is the treasure-house of a secret which threatens the realm of
heaven, and for whose unimaginable doom earth reels to its base, all
the might of divinity is put forth, and Hades itself trembles as it
receives its indomitable and awful guest! Yet, as I have before
intimated, it is the very grandeur of Aeschylus that must have made
his poems less attractive on the stage than those of the humane and
flexible Sophocles. No visible representation can body forth his
thoughts--they overpower the imagination, but they do not come home to
our household and familiar feelings. In the contrast between the
"Philoctetes" and the "Prometheus" is condensed the contrast between
Aeschylus and Sophocles. They are both poets of the highest
conceivable order; but the one seems almost above appeal to our
affections--his tempestuous gloom appals the imagination, the vivid
glare of his thoughts pierces the innermost recesses of the intellect,
but it is only by accident that he strikes upon the heart. The other,
in his grandest flights, remembers that men make his audience, and
seems to feel as if art lost the breath of its life when aspiring
beyond the atmosphere of human intellect and human passions. The
difference between the creations of Aeschylus and Sophocles is like
the difference between the Satan of Milton and the Macbeth of
Shakspeare. Aeschylus is equally artful with Sophocles--it is the
criticism of ignorance that has said otherwise. But there is this
wide distinction--Aeschylus is artful as a dramatist to be read,
Sophocles as a dramatist to be acted. If we get rid of actors, and
stage, and audience, Aeschylus will thrill and move us no less than
Sophocles, through a more intellectual if less passionate medium. A
poem may be dramatic, yet not theatrical--may have all the effects of
the drama in perusal, but by not sufficiently enlisting the skill of
the actor--nay, by soaring beyond the highest reach of histrionic
capacities, may lose those effects in representation. The storm in
"Lear" is a highly dramatic agency when our imagination is left free
to conjure up the angry elements,
"Bid the winds blow the earth into the sea,
Or swell the curled waters."
But a storm on the stage, instead of exceeding, so poorly mimics the
reality, that it can never realize the effect which the poet designs,
and with which the reader is impressed. So is it with supernatural
and fanciful creations, especially of the more delicate and subtle
kind. The Ariel of the "Tempest," the fairies of the "Midsummer
Night's Dream," and the Oceanides of the "Prometheus," are not to be
represented by human shapes. We cannot say that they are not
dramatic, but they are not theatrical. We can sympathize with the
poet, but not with the actor. For the same reason, in a lesser
degree, all creations, even of human character, that very highly task
the imagination, that lift the reader wholly out of actual experience,
and above the common earth, are comparatively feeble when reduced to
visible forms. The most metaphysical plays of Shakspeare are the
least popular in representation. Thus the very genius of Aeschylus,
that kindles us in the closet, must often have militated against him
on the stage. But in Sophocles all--even the divinities themselves--
are touched with humanity; they are not too subtle or too lofty to be
submitted to mortal gaze. We feel at once that on the stage Sophocles
ought to have won the prize from Aeschylus; and, as a proof of this,
if we look at the plays of each, we see that scarcely any of the great
characters of Aeschylus could have called into sufficient exercise the
powers of an actor. Prometheus on his rock, never changing even his
position, never absent from the scene, is denied all the relief, the
play and mobility, that an actor needs. His earthly representative
could be but a grand reciter. In the "Persians," not only the
theatrical, but the dramatic effect is wanting--it is splendid poetry
put into various mouths, but there is no collision of passions, no
surprise, no incident, no plot, no rapid dialogue in which words are
but the types of emotions. In the "Suppliants" Garrick could have
made nothing of Pelasgus. In the "Seven before Thebes" there are not
above twenty or thirty lines in the part of Eteocles in which the art
of the actor could greatly assist the genius of the poet. In the'
trilogy of the "Agamemnon," the "Choephori," and the "Orestes,"
written in advanced years, we may trace the contagious innovation of
Sophocles; but still, even in these tragedies, there is no part so
effective in representation as those afforded by the great characters
of Sophocles. In the first play the hypocrisy and power of
Clytemnestra would, it is true, have partially required and elicited
the talents of the player; but Agamemnon himself is but a thing of
pageant, and the splendid bursts of Cassandra might have been
effectively uttered by a very inferior histrionic artist. In the
second play, in the scene between Orestes and his mother, and in the
gathering madness of Orestes, the art of the poet would unquestionably
task to the uttermost the skill of the performer. But in the last
play (the Furies), perhaps the sublimest poem of the three, which
opens so grandly with the parricide at the sanctuary, and the Furies
sleeping around him, there is not one scene from the beginning to the
end in which an eminent actor could exhibit his genius.
But when we come to the plays of Sophocles, we feel that a new era in
the drama is created; we feel that the artist poet has called into
full existence the artist actor. His theatrical effects [375] are
tangible, actual--could be represented to-morrow in Paris--in London--
everywhere. We find, therefore, that with Sophocles has passed down
to posterity the name of the great actor [376] in his principal plays.
And I think the English reader, even in the general analysis and
occasional translations with which I have ventured to fill so many
pages, will perceive that all the exertions of subtle, delicate, and
passionate power, even in a modern actor, would be absolutely
requisite to do justice to the characters of Oedipus at Coloneus,
Antigone, Electra, and Philoctetes.
This, then, was the distinction between Aeschylus and Sophocles--both
were artists, as genius always must be, but the art of the latter
adapts itself better to representation. And this distinction in art
was not caused merely by precedence in time. Had Aeschylus followed
Sophocles, it would equally have existed--it was the natural
consequence of the distinctions in their genius--the one more sublime,
the other more impassioned--the one exalting the imagination, the
other appealing to the heart. Aeschylus is the Michael Angelo of the
drama, Sophocles the Raffaele.
XIII. Thus have I presented to the general reader the outline of all
the tragedies of Sophocles. In the great length at which I have
entered in this, not the least difficult, part of my general task, I
have widely innovated on the plan pursued by the writers of Grecian
history. For this innovation I offer no excuse. It is her poetry at
the period we now examine, as her philosophy in a later time, that
makes the individuality of Athens. In Sophocles we behold the age of
Pericles. The wars of that brilliant day were as pastimes to the
mighty carnage of oriental or northern battle. The reduction of a
single town, which, in our time, that has no Sophocles and no
Pericles, a captain of artillery would demolish in a week, was the
proudest exploit of the Olympian of the Agora; a little while, and one
defeat wrests the diadem of the seas from the brows of "The Violet
Queen;" scanty indeed the ruins that attest the glories of "The
Propylaea, the Parthenon, the Porticoes, and the Docks," to which the
eloquent orator appealed as the "indestructible possessions" of
Athens; along the desolate site of the once tumultuous Agora the
peasant drives his oxen--the champion deity [377] of Phidias, whose
spectral apparition daunted the barbarian Alaric [378], and the gleam
of whose spear gladdened the mariner beneath the heights of Sunium,
has vanished from the Acropolis; but, happily, the age of Pericles has
its stamp and effigy in an art more imperishable than that of war--in
materials more durable than those of bronze and marble, of ivory and
gold. In the majestic harmony, the symmetrical grace of Sophocles, we
survey the true portraiture of the genius of the times, and the old
man of Coloneus still celebrates the name of Athens in a sweeter song
than that of the nightingale [379], and melodies that have survived
the muses of Cephisus [380]. Sophocles was allegorically the prophet
when he declared that in the grave of Oedipus was to be found the
sacred guardian and the everlasting defence of the city of Theseus.
FOOTNOTES.
[1] "Cum consuetudine ad imperii cupiditatem trahi videretur."--Nepos
in Vit. Milt., cap. 8.
[2] Corn. Nepos in Vit. Milt., cap. 7.
[3] Nepos. in Vit. Milt., cap. 7.
[4] Herod., lib. vi., cap. cxxxvi.
[5] Nepos says the fine was estimated at the cost of the navy he had
conducted to Paros; but Boeckh rightly observes, that it is an
ignorant assertion of that author that the fine was intended for a
compensation, being the usual mode of assessing the offence.
The case is simply this--Miltiades was accused--whether justly or
unjustly no matter--it was clearly as impossible not to receive the
accusation and to try the cause, as it would be for an English court
of justice to refuse to admit a criminal action against Lord Grey or
the Duke of Wellington. Was Miltiades guilty or not? This we cannot
tell. We know that he was tried according to the law, and that the
Athenians thought him guilty, for they condemned him. So far this is
not ingratitude--it is the course of law. A man is tried and found
guilty--if past services and renown were to save the great from
punishment when convicted of a state offence, society would perhaps be
disorganized, and certainly a free state would cease to exist. The
question therefore shrinks to this--was it or was it not ungrateful in
the people to relax the penalty of death, legally incurred, and
commute it to a heavy fine? I fear we shall find few instances of
greater clemency in monarchies, however mild. Miltiades unhappily
died. But nature slew him, not the Athenian people. And it cannot be
said with greater justice of the Athenians, than of a people no less
illustrious, and who are now their judges, that it was their custom
"de tuer en amiral pour encourager les autres."
[6] The taste of a people, which is to art what public opinion is to
legislation, is formed, like public opinion, by habitual social
intercourse and collision. The more men are brought together to
converse and discuss, the more the principles of a general national
taste will become both diffused and refined. Less to their climate,
to their scenery, to their own beauty of form, than to their social
habits and preference of the public to the domestic life, did the
Athenians, and the Grecian republics generally, owe that wonderful
susceptibility to the beautiful and harmonious, which distinguishes
them above all nations ancient or modern. Solitude may exalt the
genius of a man, but communion alone can refine the taste of a people.
[7] It seems probable that the principal Bacchic festival was
originally held at the time of the vintage--condita post frumenta.
But from the earliest known period in Attica, all the triple Dionysia
were celebrated during the winter and the spring.
[8] Egyptian, according to Herodotus, who asserts, that Melampus
first introduced the Phallic symbol among the Greeks, though he never
sufficiently explained its mysterious significations, which various
sages since his time had, however, satisfactorily interpreted. It is
just to the Greeks to add, that this importation, with the other rites
of Bacchus, was considered at utter variance with their usual habits
and manners.
[9] Herodotus asserts that Arion first named, invented, and taught
the dithyramb at Corinth; but, as Bentley triumphantly observes,
Athenaeus has preserved to us the very verses of Archilochus, his
predecessor by a century, in which the song of the dithyramb is named.
[10] In these remarks upon the origin of the drama, it would belong
less to history than to scholastic dissertation, to enter into all the
disputed and disputable points. I do not, therefore, pause with every
step to discuss the questions contested by antiquarians--such as,
whether the word "tragedy," in its primitive and homely sense,
together with the prize of the goat, was or was not known in Attica
prior to Thespis (it seems to me that the least successful part of
Bentley's immortal work is that which attempts to enforce the latter
proposition); still less do I think a grave answer due to those who,
in direct opposition to authorities headed by the grave and searching
Aristotle, contend that the exhibitions of Thespis were of a serious
and elevated character. The historian must himself weigh the
evidences on which he builds his conclusions; and come to those
conclusions, especially in disputes which bring to unimportant and
detached inquiries the most costly expenditure of learning, without
fatiguing the reader with a repetition of all the arguments which he
accepts or rejects. For those who incline to go more deeply into
subjects connected with the early Athenian drama, works by English and
German authors, too celebrated to enumerate, will be found in
abundance. But even the most careless general reader will do well to
delight himself with that dissertation of Bentley on Phalaris, so
familiar to students, and which, despite some few intemperate and bold
assumptions, will always remain one of the most colossal monuments of
argument and erudition.
[11] Aeschylus was a Pythagorean. "Veniat Aeschylus, sed etiam
Pythagoreus."--Cic. Tusc. Dis., b. ii., 9.
[12] Out of fifty plays, thirty-two were satyrical.--Suidas in Prat.
[13] The Tetralogy was the name given to the fourfold exhibition of
the three tragedies, or trilogy, and the Satyric Drama.
[14] Yet in Aeschylus there are sometimes more than two speaking
actors on the stage,--as at one time in the Choephori, Clytemnestra,
Orestes, Electra (to say nothing of Pylades, who is silent), and again
in the same play, Orestes, Pylades, and Clytemnestra, also in the
Eumenides, Apollo, Minerva, Orestes. It is truly observed, however,
that these plays were written after Sophocles had introduced the third
actor. [The Orestean tetralogy was exhibited B. C. 455, only two
years before the death of Aeschylus, and ten years after Sophocles had
gained his first prize.] Any number of mutes might be admitted, not
only as guards, etc., but even as more important personages. Thus, in
the Prometheus, the very opening of the play exhibits to us the demons
of Strength and Force, the god Vulcan, and Prometheus himself; but the
dialogue is confined to Strength and Vulcan.
[15] The celebrated temple of Bacchus; built after the wooden theatre
had given way beneath the multitude assembled to witness a contest
between Pratinas and Aeschylus.
[16] 1st. The rural Dionysia, held in the country districts
throughout Attica about the beginning of January. 2d. The Lenaean, or
Anthesterial, Dionysia, in the end of February and beginning of March,
in which principally occurred the comic contests; and the grand
Dionysis of the city, referred to in the text. Afterward dramatic
performances were exhibited also, in August, during the Panathenaea.
[17] That is, when three actors became admitted on the stage.
[18] For it is sufficiently clear that women were admitted to the
tragic performances, though the arguments against their presence in
comic plays preponderate. This admitted, the manners of the Greeks
may be sufficient to prove that, as in the arena of the Roman games,
they were divided from the men; as, indeed, is indirectly intimated in
a passage of the Gorgias of Plato.
[19] Schlegel says truly and eloquently of the chorus--"that it was
the idealized spectator"--"reverberating to the actual spectator a
musical and lyrical expression of his own emotions."
[20] In this speech he enumerates, among other benefits, that of
Numbers, "the prince of wise inventions"--one of the passages in which
Aeschylus is supposed to betray his Pythagorean doctrines.
[21] It is greatly disputed whether Io was represented on the stage
as transformed into the actual shape of a heifer, or merely accursed
with a visionary phrensy, in which she believes in the transformation.
It is with great reluctance that I own it seems to me not possible to
explain away certain expressions without supposing that Io appeared on
the stage at least partially transformed.
[22] Vit. Aesch.
[23] It is the orthodox custom of translators to render the dialogue
of the Greek plays in blank verse; but in this instance the whole
animation and rapidity of the original would be utterly lost in the
stiff construction and protracted rhythm of that metre.
[24] Viz., the meadows around Asopus.
[25] To make the sense of this detached passage more complete, and
conclude the intelligence which the queen means to convey, the
concluding line in the text is borrowed from the next speech of
Clytemnestra--following immediately after a brief and exclamatory
interruption of the chorus.
[26] i. e. Menelaus, made by grief like the ghost of his former self.
[27] The words in italics attempt to convey paraphrastically a new
construction of a sentence which has puzzled the commentators, and met
with many and contradictory interpretations. The original literally
is--"I pity the last the most." Now, at first it is difficult to
conjecture why those whose adversity is over, "blotted out with the
moistened sponge," should be the most deserving of compassion. But it
seems to me that Cassandra applies the sentiments to herself--she
pities those whose career of grief is over, because it is her own lot
which she commiserates, and by reference to which she individualizes a
general reflection.
[28] Perhaps his mere diction would find a less feeble resemblance in
passages of Shelley, especially in the Prometheus of that poet, than
in any other poetry existent. But his diction alone. His power is in
concentration--the quality of Shelley is diffuseness. The interest
excited by Aeschylus, even to those who can no longer sympathize with
the ancient associations, is startling, terrible, and intense--that
excited by Shelley is lukewarm and tedious. The intellectuality of
Shelley destroyed, that of Aeschylus only increased, his command over
the passions.
[29] In the comedy of "The Frogs," Aristophanes makes it the boast of
Aeschylus, that he never drew a single woman influenced by love.
Spanheim is surprised that Aristophanes should ascribe such a boast to
the author of the "Agamemnon." But the love of Clytemnestra for
Aegisthus is never drawn--never delineated. It is merely suggested
and hinted at--a sentiment lying dark and concealed behind the motives
to the murder of Agamemnon ostensibly brought forward, viz., revenge
for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and jealousy of Cassandra.
[30] In plays lost to us.
[31] I reject the traditions which make Aristides and Themistocles
rivals as boys, because chronology itself refutes them. Aristides
must have been of mature age at the battle of Marathon, if he was the
friend and follower of Clisthenes, one of the ten generals in the
action, and archon in the following year. But both Plutarch and
Justin assure us that Themistocles was very young at the battle of
Marathon, and this assurance is corroborated by other facts connected
with his biography. He died at the age of sixty-five, but he lived
to see the siege of Cyprus by Cimon. This happened B. C. 449. If,
then, we refer his death to that year, he was born 514 B. C., and
therefore was about twenty-four at the battle of Marathon.
[32] Plut. in Vit. Them. Heraclides et Idomeneus ap. Athen., lib. 12.
[33] See Dodwell's "Tour through Greece," Gell's "Itinerary."
[34] "Called by some Laurion Oros, or Mount Laurion." Gell's
Itinerary.
[35] Boeckh's Dissert. on the Silver Mines of Laurium.
[36] Boeckh's Dissert. on the Silver Mines of Laurium.
[37] On this point, see Boeckh. Dissert. on the Silver Mines of
Laurion, in reference to the account of Diodorus.
[38] If we except the death of his brother, in the Cambyses of
Ctesias, we find none of the crimes of the Cambyses of Herodotus--and
even that fratricide loses its harsher aspect in the account of
Ctesias, and Cambyses is represented as betrayed into the crime by a
sincere belief in his brother's treason.
[39] The account of this conspiracy in Ctesias seems more improbable
than that afforded to us by Herodotus. But in both the most
extraordinary features of the plot are the same, viz., the striking
likeness between the impostor and the dead prince, and the complete
success which, for a time, attended the fraud. In both narrations,
too, we can perceive, behind the main personages ostensibly brought
forward, the outline of a profound device of the magi to win back from
the Persian conquerors, and to secure to a Mede, the empire of the
East.
[40] Herodotus says it was resolved that the king could only marry
into the family of one of the conspirators; but Darius married two
daughters and one grand-daughter of Cyrus. It is more consonant with
eastern manners to suppose that it was arranged that the king should
give his own daughters in marriage to members of these six houses. It
would have been scarcely possible to claim the monopoly of the royal
seraglio, whether its tenants were wives or concubines, and in all
probability the king's choice was only limited (nor that very rigidly)
to the family of Cyrus, and the numerous and privileged race of the
Achaemenids.
