which is pure magic, such as you might find in the Kalevala, is transformed into a passage like
which is Romantic poetry at its best—or into
which is the Classical style very nearly at its best. But an essay must end after a reasonable time. Besides there is something else I want to say about the Classical and the Romantic.
II
Arnold expressed the difference between the Greek and the Celtic or Romantic spirit by the word Titanism. That is a very happy expression, happier even than Arnold knew, unless he knew what we said about the Titans. For Titanism is just Barbarism in heroic proportions. It is the spirit of the Old Kings—the “Strainers,” as Hesiod, etymologizing, calls them—who failed because they would not discipline their strength. With some of Arnold’s language about the Celtic character, and the “failure” in practical affairs of the Celtic race, it is unnecessary now for any one to concern himself, for no one now uses that kind of language. Even if it were justified it would scarcely be relevant, since success in literature depends (as of course Arnold saw) on qualities quite other than those which may be relied upon to give us success in life. It is the Titanism of the Celt, says Arnold, which makes him a failure in the world of affairs, but in compensation gives him the gift of style. We need not accept that way of putting the matter, but I do not think we can fairly deny either the style or the Titanism.
The Greeks had their measure of Titanism also, and very certainly their measure of style. Arnold quotes from Henri Martin a description of the Celt as always ready to react against the despotism of fact. Whereupon the Greek student instantly remembers that this is just what Cleon said about the Athenians. He will also remember that a Corinthian politician said that they seemed to him to be born neither to be quiet themselves nor to let other people be quiet. Any one who fails to notice the unappeasable restlessness of the Greek temperament will miss a great piece of its quality. It comes out in the Greek attitude to Hope, which set ancient hearts beating with a violence which frightened them and extremely surprises us. It comes out in the popular conception of Alexander the Great as one marching on and on in a dream of never-ending victories. It comes out in spite of Arnold. He quotes from Byron:
He thinks this characteristically Celtic. So perhaps it is. But it is characteristically Greek too. It is a commonplace of Greek poetry. Then he quotes:
This also he calls Celtic, although he knew his Prometheus Bound, and might have reflected that Milton knew it too. At last Arnold flings up his case, and describes a passage quoted to support his antithesis as, up to a certain point, “Greek in its clear beauty”; and when he wishes to find a name for the Celtic “intoxication of style” goes to a Greek poet for his word and comes back with Pindarism.
That shows how impossible it is to press these critical distinctions. Still one sees what Arnold is driving at, and one may go with him most of the way. It is quite true that Celtic literature is full of Titanism. But it is an error to say that Titanism is strange to Greek art. There is far more of it in Celtic, and in Romantic literature generally, than in classical literature, and this does produce a striking difference between them. But it is only a difference of method and emphasis. Titanism appeals to the Romantic, and he gives himself up to it. The Greek feels the attraction too, but he fights against it, and over Titanism he puts something which he thinks is better.
Thus it is part of the Romantic mood to love a strange and hyperbolical speech. We see the Romantic poet or his hero like a man increased to superhuman proportions and making enormous gestures in a mist. This effect is not beyond the reach of any true poet, and it has been achieved by Aeschylus better perhaps than by any one before or since. We must return to this point. Here we need only remark that the Greeks could manage the poetical hyperbole when they pleased. But it is only the Romantic, or if you like the Celtic poets, who never tire of it. Again, it is a mistake to believe that there is no symbolism in ancient literature. But what there is differs greatly from modern “Symbolism.” Our “Symbolism” employs certain accepted symbols, which allusively and discreetly recombining it sets the spirit dreaming. Ancient art kept its symbols—I do not know if the word be not misapplied—separate and definite. But it had them. The background of the Agamemnon, for instance, is crowded with symbols. It is all lit up by triumphal and ruinous fires with (passing unscathed through it all) the phantasmal beauty of Helen; while students of metre have observed that the heart of the verse beats faster and slower as she comes and goes. This symbolical use of fire, and Helen’s form, of dreams and tempest and purple and much else, is profoundly and intricately studied in the play. But it is not like modern Symbolism, which is often content to gaze ecstatically on the symbol itself, instead of using it dramatically to flood a situation with the light that is hidden in the heart of Time.
So all these differences resolve themselves into a change of attitude, which nevertheless is no small matter. Though not the foundations of life itself, yet man’s reading of life changes; and it is just the play of this inconstant factor upon the fixed bases of the soul which produces that creative ferment from which all art is born.
This may be seen in one matter of peculiar interest in the history of art—the passion of love. One constantly finds it said that Romantic love is a purely mediæval and modern thing. Those who make this statement might reflect that so profound and intimate an emotion is not likely to have been discovered so late in the human story. And it was not. Since there is perhaps a good deal of vagueness in our notions of what Romantic love is, let us take it here to mean the passion whose creed is, in Dryden’s (Note 172)phrase, All for Love and the World well Lost. Was such a passion unknown in antiquity? Was not that very phrase of All for Love used of the Greek Cleopatra, who is one of the world’s famous lovers? Did not Medea leave all for love’s sake, and Orpheus, and the shepherd Daphnis, whose legend is the more significant because it appears to be pure folk-story? Have not all poets of Romantic love turned instinctively to Greek mythology as the inexhaustible quarry of their lore? That they treat the myths in their own way is not to be denied. But they would not turn to them at all if they felt that those stories had been moulded by an alien spirit. Then, so far as one can judge from the haplessly scanty fragments of Greek lyrical poetry, the Romantic spirit was strong in that. Sappho and the fine poet Ibykos were wholly given over and enslaved to love; and the great and bitter heart of Archilochus hardly escaped from it with curses. In the Alexandrian era it flowers in poetry anew. One might take perhaps as typical of the extreme Romantic mood the considerable fragment left us of Hermesianax. It is little more than a numbering of famous lovers for pure delight in their names. There is a trifle of childishness in the piece, and a trifle of artificiality, yet it is not without a haunting loveliness like that which clings to the Catalogue of the Women in Homer. It is no accidental kinship. An underground river has burst up again. One finds it flowing unchecked in the Argonautika of Apollonios.
You may have noticed that none of my examples was taken from the greatest period of Greek literature, the Attic age. That also is no accident. For it is then that the hostile spirit most effectively comes in. The capacity for Romantic love was not at any time denied to the Greek nature. But what happened was this: the great age applied, as to the other passions, so to love, its doctrine of Sophrosyne. What was the result? Love became terrible and to be shunned in exact proportion to its power over the soul. And on the Greek soul love had great power; no one ought to be mistaken about that. Of old He has been called a tyrant, says Plato of Eros. It is a famous saying of Plato again that love is a form of madness. Sophocles, we remember, compared it to a wild beast. Such language is habitual with the Attic poets. (It is used, for example, by both Sophocles and Euripides in the famous odes invoking Eros, the one in Antigone, the other in Hippolytus.) It is not at all the language of Romance; it does not say All for Love. Indeed when we consider it more closely, we find that it means the exact opposite of what the extreme Romantic means. The Greek means that he has conquered, the Romantic that he has surrendered. There is, to be sure, in the Romantic theory, examined in cold blood, a certain amount of bravado. A great imaginative passion is rare enough to be more than a nine days’ wonder. Such an objection has no weight in the world of art, but it is extremely in point when we are contrasting the actual conditions of ancient and modern life. It will turn out in the long run that in ancient Greece men felt love as much as we, but felt about it differently. They were for self-mastery, we for ecstasy. They were Greeks, and we are Barbarians.
They were also, one may believe, in this the truer artists. There is nothing more characteristic of the artist than his capacity to bind his emotions to the service of his art.
is his thought. The man who said that said also The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. The two sentiments are in fact not incompatible, but it takes an artist to reconcile them. The poor plain modern man always divines something immoral in this attitude. As to that, it is easiest to reply that it all depends. But surely the Greek is the only sound artistic doctrine. No one will write very well who cannot control his inspiration. A platitude no doubt, but a platitude which in these days seems very easily forgotten. The mere emotion is not enough. Tannhäuser has suggested great poetry; he could not have written any, for that would have required moral energy.
It might be thought a subterfuge to leave this topic without a word on a matter which cannot be ignored. I believe a very few words will suffice. But it is as well to make clear a point which has not been observed by those who claim the Greek example as a confirmation of their view that all experiences are permissible to the artist. The point is this. It was not in the artistic portion of the Greek people that the kind of sexual perversity, so often indiscriminately attributed to the Hellenes in general, was most widely prevalent. It was chiefly a Dorian vice, fostered by the Dorian camp-life, though I dare say it was to some extent endemic in the Near East. The Ionians (including the Athenians), who (Note 175)inherited nine-tenths of the Hellenic genius, unhesitatingly condemned such practices, even if they themselves were somewhat infected by them. Athenian bourgeois morality was quite sound on that point, as you may see by merely reading Aristophanes. His attitude is really remarkable, and, so far as we can see, there is only one possible explanation: the Athenian people would not tolerate the Dorian sin upon the stage. Yet you know what they did tolerate, and what the comic tradition tolerated. It would take a lot to stop Aristophanes.
Another point may be put in the form of a question. How, on the assumption of Greek perversity, are we to account for the exceptional sanity of Greek thought and sentiment? It does not seem humanly possible that a pathological condition of the body should not result in a morbid state of the mind. Yet I never could hear of anybody who called the Greeks morbid. It is to be surmised that certain passages in Plato have been the chief source of the misconception, or exaggerated impression, which is still perhaps too prevalent. Now with regard to what is called Platonic Love, there are two things which ought not to be forgotten. One is this. The young men with whom Socrates used to talk—who were not, you know, in any proper sense, his disciples—were apt to be members of a tiny minority, among what we should call the upper classes at Athens, who professed what strikes us as a very unnecessary “philolaconism” or cult of things Spartan. Some of these young people certainly practised or trifled with the Dorian offence, and Socrates was willing to discuss the matter with them. He was the more willing to do this because he held a very definite view himself. He condemned the fleshly sin outright, though not perhaps uncompromisingly. But he attached the very highest value to the association of friends, an older and a younger, and he wished this comradeship to be intense enough to merit the name of love. This leads to the second point. You must judge ancient love—I mean this love of man and boy—by its ideal, as you insist on judging Romantic love. So judged, it often appears a fine and noble thing. That it sometimes sank in the mire is no more than can be said of modern love. Do not, at any rate, let us be hypocritical.
It is time to recover the thread of our original argument, which was to this effect, that the contrast of Hellenism and Barbarism appears in literature as the contrast of Classical and Romantic. Just as Hellene and Barbarian are correlative terms, so you cannot understand Classical art without reference to Romance, nor Romantic art in isolation from the Classics. But again, just as Greek and Barbarian are equally human, so Classical and Romantic art are alike art. The difference in the end is a difference of degree or (in another way of putting it) of tendencies. The great vice of the Barbarian is that he has no self-restraint. There cannot be art of any kind without restraint, and the Barbarian pur sang, if he exist, must be incapable of art. But it is not he we are discussing; it is the artistic expression of Barbarism which we call Romance. Now observe how clearly, within the limits imposed by art, Romance reveals the bias of the Barbarian temperament. In literature it comes out in the form of hyperbole or artistic exaggeration. It will not be denied that Romance indulges a good deal in that. The Greeks fought shy of it. To deal largely in it was likely to bring upon the writer the epithet of ψυχρός, “frigid”—a curious charge to us, who are inclined to look upon exaggeration as natural to a fiery spirit. They thought it the mere spluttering of a weak nature, which could not master and direct its inward flame.
Yet the Romantic exaggeration can be very fine. I agree with Arnold in liking a good deal a passage which he quotes in an abridged form from the Mabinogion. Search is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three nights old from between his mother and the wall. The seekers go first to the Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith’s anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon. “But there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will be your guide to them.” So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of Redynvre. The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon. “But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which was formed before I was”; and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd. “When first I came hither,” says the Owl, “the wide valley you see was a wooded glen. And a race of men came and rooted it up. And there grew a second wood; and this wood is the third. My wings, are they not withered stumps?” Yet the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never heard of Mabon, but he offered to be guide “to where is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abbey.” The Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not so much as a span high.
The popular belief in the great age of certain animals appears in many lands, and appeared in ancient Greece. It is expressed in an old poem, attributed to Hesiod, called The Precepts of Chiron. Nine lives of men grown old lives the cawing crow; four lives of a crow lives the stag; the raven sees the old age of three stags; but the phoenix lives as long as nine ravens, as long as ten phoenixes we, the Nymphs with beautiful hair, daughters of ægis-bearing Zeus. Compared with the Celtic passage, the quotation from “Hesiod” is poor and dry and like a multiplication sum. The Celtic imagination, with its fine frenzy, is at home in the region of popular fancy, and deals with it effectively; whereas the Greek method, if employed without art, spoils everything. You will observe that “Hesiod,” in spite of his vastly greater moderation (herein at least showing himself Greek), does not really succeed in being any more convincing to the imagination, while he does not impress it at all as the Celt impresses it. Employed with the art of Homer, or indeed of Hesiod at his best, the Greek method should at once impress the imagination and convince it. If it can do this, it clearly excels the method of impressing the imagination by a process akin to stunning it. One ought probably to prefer Hesiod at his dryest to mere senseless hyperbole even in a passage where a little hyperbole is in place. There is a future to Hesiod’s style in the hands of an imaginative artist, while there is no possible artistic future to mere shrieking. The Celtic method is always committing suicide.
Arnold quotes again from the Mabinogion: Drem, the son of Dremidyd (when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain). Here is what the ancient epic called the Cypria says: Climbing the topmost peak he sent his glance through all the Isle of Pelops son of Tantalos, and soon the glorious hero spied with his wondrous eyes horse-taming Castor and conquering Polydeukês inside the hollow oak. The superiority of the Classical style is now beginning to assert itself. The exaggeration in the Greek passage is immense, but it does suspend incredulity for a moment—and the moment in art is everything—while the Celtic passage pays no attention to verisimilitude at all, and therefore really misses its effect. (If you think we are here dealing with magic rather than simple hyperbole, the answer will be much the same.) What Euripides says about shame we may say about exaggeration; that there is a good kind and a bad. The good is, so to speak, intensive; the bad, merely extensive. The excellent method of hyperbole reflects some large hidden significance of it may be a little thing or a trifling action. The inartistic hyperbole is just overstatement—impressing nobody.
Any one who has read even a little of the old Celtic literature must have been struck by the presence in it of a very large element of enormous and almost frantic exaggeration. I speak very much under correction, as I have to work with translations, but no one can be wrong about so plain a matter. I have indeed heard a man who reads Irish say that in his opinion some of the exaggeration was merely humorous; but even this scholar did not deny that the exaggeration was there, and plenty of it. From the Táin Bó Cúalnge (the chief document of early Ireland) translated by Professor Joseph Dunn, I take part of the description of Cuchulain in one of his fits of rage. He next made a ruddy bowl of his face and his countenance. He gulped down one eye into his head so that it would be hard work if a wild crane succeeded in drawing it out on to the middle of his cheek from the rear of his skull. Its mate sprang forth till it came out on his cheek, so that it was the size of a five-fist kettle, and he made a red berry thereof out in front of his head. His mouth was distorted monstrously and twisted up to his ears. He drew the cheek from the jaw-bone so that the interior of his throat was to be seen. His lungs and his lights stood out so that they fluttered in his mouth and his gullet. He struck a mad lion’s blow with the upper jaw on its fellow so that as large as a wether’s fleece of a three year old was each red, fiery flake which his teeth forced into his mouth from his gullet. There was heard the loud clap of his heart against his breast like the yelp of a howling bloodhound or like a lion going among bears. There were seen the torches of the Badb, and the rain clouds of poison, and the sparks of glowing-red fire, blazing and flashing in hazes and mists over his head with the seething of the truly wild wrath that rose up above him. His hair bristled all over his head like branches of a redthorn thrust into a gap in a great hedge. Had a king’s apple-tree laden with royal fruit been shaken around, scarce an apple of them all would have passed over him to the ground, but rather would an apple have stayed stuck on each single hair there, for the twisting of the anger which met it as it rose from his hair above him. The Lon Laith (“Champion’s Light”) stood out of his forehead, so that it was as long and as thick as a warrior’s whetstone, so that it was as long as his nose, till he got furious handling the shields, thrusting out the charioteer, destroying the hosts. As high, as thick, as strong, as steady, as long as the sail-tree of some huge prime ship was the straight spout of dark blood which arose right on high from the very ridge-pole of his crown, so that a black fog of witchery was made thereof like to the smoke from a king’s hostel what time the king comes to be ministered to at nightfall of a winter’s day.
It would be mistaken and dull criticism to blame anything so characteristic as bad in itself. If such exaggerations are bad, it must be because the whole class of literature to which they belong is bad. But any one who should say that would be (not to put too fine a point upon it) an ass. Still, it would be paradoxical to maintain that the passage just quoted is in quite the best manner of writing. Cuchulain reminds one of Achilles, and it is instructive to compare the treatment of Cuchulain in the Táin Bó Cúalnge with the treatment of Achilles in the Iliad. In one sense the comparison is infinitely unfair. It is matching what some have thought the greatest poem in the world against something comparatively rude and primitive. But it is done merely to illustrate a point of art. In other respects no injustice happens. If one takes the combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain, which is the crowning episode of the Táin, with the combat between Hector and Achilles, which is perhaps the crowning episode of the Iliad, one cannot fail to see that the advantage in valour, and chivalry, and the essential pathos of the situation is all on the Irish side. But in the pure art of the narrative, (Note 182)what a difference! The Táin, not without skill, works through a climax of tremendous feats to an impression of deadly force and skill in its hero. But it is all considerably overdone, and at last you are so incredulous of Cuchulain’s intromissions with the “Gae Bulga” (that mysterious weapon) that you cease to be afraid of him. What does Homer do? He shows you two lonely figures on the Plain of Troy; Hector before the Skaian gate, and Achilles far off by the River Skamandros. And as Hector strengthens his heart for the duel which must be fatal to one, nearer and nearer, with savage haste, the sun playing on his armour, comes running Achilles. Nothing happens, only this silent, tireless running of a man. But it gets on your nerves just as it got on Hector’s.
Or take that singular description of the Champion’s Light. It so happens that Achilles also has something of the kind. But what is grotesque in the case of Cuchulain, in the case of Achilles has a startling effect of reality. The Trojans have defeated the Achaeans and come very near the ships in the absence of Achilles from the battle, when suddenly to the exulting foe the hero shows himself once more. Round his head the holy goddess twisted a golden cloud, and lit therefrom an all-shining flame. And as when a smoke rising from a town goes up to the sky in a distant isle besieged by fighting men, and all day the folk contend in hateful battle before their town, but with the setting of the sun thick flame the bale-fires, and the glare shoots up on high for the dwellers round to see, so haply they may come in their ships to ward off ruin—so from Achilles’ head the light went up to heaven. From the wall to the trench he went, he stood—not (Note 183)mingling with the Achaeans, for he regarded his mother’s wise behest. There standing he shouted—and, aloof, Athena called; but among the Trojans was aroused confusion infinite.... And the charioteers were astonisht when they saw burning above the head of the great-hearted son of Peleus the unwearied, awful fire, that the goddess, grey-eyed Athena, made to burn. The poet, you see, does not fairly describe the Champion’s Light, he describes its effect. In the same way the face of Helen is never described, only the effect she had on the old men of Troy. Such art is beyond our praising.
It may be complained that I am taking extreme examples—of Hellenic tact and moderation on the one hand, of Romantic extravagance on the other. This is admitted, but the process seems justifiable; you must let me illustrate my point. The argument is that the Romantic style tends to a more lavish employment of hyperbole than does the Greek. I cannot imagine any one denying it. Read of some nightmare feat of strength in a Celtic story, and then read something in Homer (am I giving too much of Homer?)—something like this: Aias the son of Telamon was first to slay a man, smiting him with a ragged stone, that was within the wall by the battlement, piled huge atop of all, nor might a man with ease upbear it in both his arms, even in full lustihead of youth—such as men are now ... but Aias swang and hurled it from on high. How moderation tells! How much more really formidable is this Aias than Aeneas when Virgil (with Roman or Celtic exaggeration) says that he cast “no small part of a mountain”!
A matter of this delicacy will mock at a rigid
handling. There is no rule to be laid down at all save
(Note 184)the
rule that is above rules, the instinct of the artist.
The limits of exaggeration—and there is a sense in
which all art is exaggeration—shift with the shifting
of what one may call the horizon of the soul. It is
clear, for instance, that the atmosphere of the
Domestic Drama or the Descriptive Poem is markedly
different from that of the Heroic Epic or the Choral
Ode. A gabe appropriate to Oliver or Kapaneus
would sound very strangely on the lips of Holy
Willie or Peter Bell; it could only be mock-heroic
or parody. One’s sensitiveness to these atmospheres,
then, the temperament of the reader, his
critical taste, the character of his education—all
that and more affect his response to what he reads.
We have had a different experience from the ancients
and live, as it were, in different emotional scenery.
Hyperbole counts for more in our art than it did in
theirs. To the device in itself there could be no
possible objection. When one thinks of the superb
and intoxicating hyperboles of Romantic literature
from the winding of Roland’s horn to the Playboy of
the Western World; when one thinks how largely
they serve to make the style of Shakespeare; the
Greeks appear a little timid in comparison. Perhaps
they were, although I cannot believe it was timidity
that ailed them. Only they guarded more strictly
against a danger they felt more keenly than we, into
which we have more frequently fallen.
Art of course must go where its own winds and currents carry it. To forbid it to be itself because it is not Greek is extreme, though happily impotent, nonsense. But it will be extraordinarily interesting to see how modern art is going to save itself from the two extremes of brutality and sentimentalism—the faults of the Barbarian—with which it is so manifestly and so painfully struggling. The Greeks solved that problem, and their solution stands. Meanwhile a student of Greek may help a little by explaining what the solution is. For it has been greatly misunderstood.
The secret was half recovered in the Renaissance. Thus in England Milton learned from the Greeks the value of form for the concentration of meaning, and that poetry should be not only “sensuous and passionate” but also “simple.” But the Renaissance had drunk too deep of the new wine to keep its head quite steady; and this, in turn, helped to provoke a Puritanic reaction which distrusted the arts, and therefore differed widely from Greek asceticism, which was itself a kind of art. The Restoration produced a new orientation of the English spirit, and a new interpretation of the Classical. Repelled by the extravagances and the frequently outrageous slovenliness of decadent Elizabethanism, the age of Dryden, communicating its impulse to the age of Pope, fell in love with the quietness and temperance of the ancients, and above all with their accomplishment of form. This admiration was an excellent and salutary thing for the times. But it seemed content to gaze on the surface. There arose a poetry which aimed above all at mere correctness. As if Greek poetry aimed at nothing but that!
The modern Romantic movement—I mean the new spirit in English literature which Lyrical Ballads is regarded as initiating—was largely a revolt against eighteenth-century Classicism. Yet it cannot fairly be said that the Romantics introduced a juster conception of Classical art. They started with a prejudice against it, which their discovery of the Middle Ages merely confirmed. Wordsworth indeed (who had much of the eighteenth century in him) felt the attraction of Classical art, but his best work is not in things like Laodamia. Landor is not Greek, any more than Leconte de Lisle is Greek. They have Greek perfection of form, but (except at his rare best Landor) they are glacial; they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which makes Sappho, for example, so different. It has been thought that no English poet has come nearer than Keats to recapturing the ancient secret. The Ode to a Grecian Urn nearly does recapture it. But not quite. Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty is very Greek; but it is not Greek to forget, as Keats and his followers have been apt to forget, the second half of their aphorism. So the Greek poets aimed less directly at beauty than at the truth of things, which they believed to be beautiful; and this realism—this effort to realize the world as it is—remains, in spite of the large element of convention in Greek poetry, the most characteristic thing about the Greek poetical genius.
In the very midst of the Romantic movement we find Matthew Arnold pleading for a return to Hellenic standards. The plea had curiously little effect. If you read Merope immediately after Atalanta in Calydon, you will scarcely wonder at that. Arnold in fact saw only half the truth. He cries for Greek sanity and absence of caprice; he does not cry for Greek intensity, Greek realism. He pleads for tact and moderation—in a word, for that good manners in style which had seemed so important to the eighteenth century. The doctrine was too negative for the age. It can hardly be said to inspire the best work of Arnold himself. Yes, that is just what is wrong with it, it does not inspire; and so, although based on a right instinct, it does not really lift him above his time. He did not care for Tennyson, whom he accused of affectation. But he would not have understood the twentieth century’s objection to Tennyson, that he lacked the courage of his genius. If he had understood it, he would no doubt have sided with Tennyson, for Arnold was, after all, mainly “Victorian.” But what do you suppose Aristophanes would have said about Tennyson? If the answer is not at once obvious, the reason must be the difficulty that would arise in getting a Greek of Aristophanes’ time to understand the Victorian timidities at all.
The present age is said to be extremely in revolt against Victorianism. Unfortunately one may be in full revolt and yet be only shaking one’s chains. There is a thing that is fairly clear. The paroxysmal art of the hour must bring its inevitable reaction. The cry will again be heard for a return to urbanity and a stricter form, and people will again call these things Classical, as if this were all the Classics have to offer. And then in due time will come once more the counter-swing of the pendulum. Well, perhaps art depends more than we think upon this ceaseless movement; for all art aims at giving the effect of life, and life is in movement.
III
Were it not for an original propriety in the distinction, it would be better not to speak at all of “Classical” and “Romantic.” This seems clearly to be the fault of modern criticism, which has hidden the path under so deep a fall of many-coloured leaves, that now one must spend a deal of time merely in sweeping them up. It is annoying how inapt are current terms of criticism to express the essence of ancient literature. I have hinted that it might almost be expressed in the word “realism,” and at once I am checked by the reflection that realism in modern speech appears to mean anything you like. How, then, is a man to avoid being misunderstood? But he has to take the risk; and on the whole it will be safer for him to grasp this runaway by the hair than to sow more definitions in a soil already exhausted.
Greek literature is realistic in the sense that it aims at producing the effect of reality, not by the accumulation of startling details—which perhaps is what is usually meant in these days by realism—but by a method of its own. Greek literature is marked by a unique sincerity, or veracity, or candour, equally foreign to violence and to sentimentality—a bitter man might say, equally foreign to what we now call (Note 189)realism and to what we now call idealism. So profound is this truthfulness that we (who cry out daily for a resolute fidelity to fact in our writers) have not yet sounded it. It needs a long plummet. So many of us have come to imagine that the truth of a situation is not apparent except in flashes of lightning—preferably red lightning—which the Greeks thought distorting. We think we are candid, and we are not so very candid. I could never be one of those fanatical champions of antiquity to whom the modern is merely the enemy. Their position is so pathetically untenable that one can only with a sigh busy oneself with something that really matters. But, however modern I may feel, I cannot get myself to believe that we attain so perfect a truthfulness as the Greeks. We have written volumes about the “Classical Ideal,” and we are apt to contrast “Hellenic Idealism” with our uncompromising modern “Realism” and “Naturalism.” And all the time the Greeks have had a truer realism than we.
For instance, we have of late almost made a speciality of wounds and death. You could not say this of any ancient writer. Curiously enough, you might say it with less impropriety of Homer than of any other. A warrior, he says, was pierced to the heart by a spear, and the throbbing of the heart made also the butt of the spear to quiver. That gives you a pretty satisfactory shiver. Menelaos smote Peisandros above the root of the nose; and the bones cracked, and his eyes dropped bloody in the dust of the ground at his feet. This is how Peneleos treated Ilioneus. He wounded him under the eyebrow where the eye is embedded and forced out the ball, and the spear went (Note 190)clean through the eye and through the muscle behind, and the wounded man crouched down, spreading out his hands; but Peneleos drawing his sharp sword smote his neck in the midst and dashed the head on the ground, helmet and all; and the heavy spear was still in the eye, and he raised up the head like a poppy. I suspect your modern realist of envying that image of the bloody head stuck “through the eye” on a spear and looking like a “poppy” or a “poppy-head” on its stalk. Another unfortunate fighter was hit down the mouth with a spear, which penetrated under the brain and broke the white bones; and the teeth were shaken out and both his eyes were filled with blood, and with a gape he sent the blood gushing up his mouth and down his nostrils. The youngest son of King Priam was wounded by Achilles beside the navel, and so dropped moaning on his knees and clutched his entrails to him with his hands—a passage remembered by Pater.
From it and the others it may be seen that Homer, when he likes, can be as grisly as Mr. Sassoon. But they are not typical of Homer, still less of the ancient Greek writers in general. It is not their way to obtrude details. Their aim is to give you the whole situation, and to give it truly. Their method is to select the significant, rather than the merely striking, details. Such a theory and method are best entitled, on reflection, to the name of realism. Kebriones, the charioteer in Homer, has his forehead crushed in by a stone, and a terrible battle is waged over his body. The poet in the heat of his battle thinks for a moment of the dead man. But he in the whirling dust-storm lay, with large limbs largely fallen, forgetful of his horsemanship. No insistence here on the ghastly wound. (Note 191)The reader for a breathing space is rapt from the blood and the horror into quiet spaces of oblivion. Is not this, just here, the right note to strike—and not the other? It gives the whole situation—the roaring tumult above, the unheeding body underneath—not merely one aspect. It is the more real because it is not simply painful.
Contrast, again, the Greek with the mediæval and the modern attitudes to death. See how many of the passages on death you can recall in writers not ancient are inspired by a grotesque or reflective horror, or ring with a hopeful or hopeless defiance. Think of Villon on death, and Raleigh, and Donne, and Shakespeare’s Claudio, and Hydriotaphia, and Browning, and Swinburne. There is nothing in the great age of Greek literature even remotely comparable to the gorgeous variety of these dreams and invocations. But if the question is of realism (as we are understanding it), if we resolve to see death as it is, neither transformed by hope nor blurred by tears, see if the ancients have not the advantage.
They will disappoint you at first. (But remember you are asking for realism.) Thus when Aristotle in his dry manner says, Death is the most fearful thing; for it is an end, and nothing after it seems to the dead man either good or bad, you may think it a poor attitude to strike. But Aristotle is not striking an attitude at all, he is simply facing a fact. He may be wrong, of course, but that is how death looks to Aristotle, and he is not going to gild the pill either for you or for himself. But if you miss in Aristotle the thrill of the greatest literature, you must feel it in the last words of Socrates to the judges who had condemned him. But now is come the hour of departure, (Note 192)for me that have to die, for you that have still to live; but which path leads to a better lot is hidden from all but God. And with that Socrates falls silent, leaving the reader silent too, and a little ashamed perhaps of our importunate hells and heavens.
Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles in Hades and speaks of the great honour in which the young hero is held here. Not of death, replies Achilles, speak thou in words of comfort, glorious Odysseus! Rather above ground would I be the hired servant of a man without a lot, whose livelihood is but small, than reign over all the perished dead. The truth as he sees it is what you get from the Greek every time. Odysseus hears it from Achilles, the greatest of the dead. He hears it from Elpênor, one of the least. (Elpênor got drunk in Circe’s house and, feeling hot, wandered on to the roof, where he fell asleep, and everybody forgot about him. In the morning he was aroused by the noise of people moving about and jumped up, forgetting where he was, and fell backwards from the roof and broke his neck.) Ah, go not and leave me behind unwept and unburied, turning thy back on me, lest I become a vessel of the wrath of gods upon thee; but bury me with all mine armour, and by the margin of the whitening sea heap me a high grave of a man that had no luck, that even after ages may know. This do for me, and on my grave plant the oar with which, alive, I rowed among my comrades. The natural pathos of this must touch everybody. But I wonder if everybody feels how much of its effect is due to an almost harsh avoidance of sentimentality, as in that hidden threat of the pleading ghost. And even that piercing last line about the oar—it may grieve certain readers to know that setting up an (Note 193)oar on the grave was merely part of a ritual usually observed in the burial of a dead mariner.
The corpus of Greek inscriptions naturally contains a great many epitaphs. There is not one, belonging to what we think of as the great age of Greece, that has the least grain of smugness or hypocrisy or sentimentality. It must be confessed that these “pagans” could die with a good grace. Here is an inscription, incerti loci, “of uncertain provenience,” but in the Greek of Attica. The tomb of Phrasikleia, “I shall be called a maid for evermore, having won from the gods this name instead of marriage.” I ought to add at once that the original is grave and beautiful poetry. I can only give the sense. One must read the Greek to feel entirely how good Phrasikleia is. At least she is not Little Nell. Some of the most famous epitaphs are by known authors; the most famous of all by Simonides. Over the Tegeans who fell in battle against the Barbarian he wrote: Here lie the men whose valour was the cause that smoke went not up to heaven from broad Tegea burning; who resolved to leave their city flourishing in freedom to their children, and themselves to die among the foremost fighters. All these little poems are beyond translation. The art of them lies in a deliberate bareness or baldness, which ought to be shockingly prosaic (and in English almost inevitably is so), but contrives to be thrilling poetry. The finest of all the epigrams is that on the Three Hundred who fell at Thermopylae. O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, following their instructions. Literally that is what it says. Yet I suppose that even a man who does not know Greek may feel in an instinctive way that it may be extraordinarily good in the original. It is. It is an instance of the famous Laconic brevity, whose virtue it was to cut at once to the heart of things. One other epigram I will add, partly because it also refers to the time of the Persian Wars, partly because the author was said (perhaps rightly) to be Plato. It is on the people of Eretria, a town in Euboea by the seashore, who were carried off into captivity and settled by Darius far away, hopelessly far, “at Arderikka in the Kissian land” beyond the Tigris. We who one day left the deep-voiced swell of the Aegean lie here midmost the Plain of Ecbatana. Good-bye Eretria, our city famous once; good-bye Athens, the neighbour of Eretria; good-bye dear sea. By the side of this mere “pathos” looks almost vulgar. If Plato wrote it, he was certainly a poet; but it is improbable that he did. I notice that Professor Burnet thinks Plato did not write any of the poems attributed to him in the manuscripts. In any case, when people say that Plato was “really a poet” they are thinking of his prose. I cannot help adding the irrelevancy that I wish they would not go on repeating this. He is an incomparably great master of imaginative prose. Is that not enough? He may have been no better at poetry than Ruskin or Carlyle. A poet is a man who writes poems.
Next to death the great test of sincerity is love. There used to be a general opinion that love, as we understand it, did not exist among the ancients at all. That point has been already discussed, but we may consider for a little the treatment of love in the Attic dramatists, who best represent the great period of Athenian development. There is plenty of love in them, only they don’t mention it. “Please (Note 195)do not be impatient,” as the Greek orators say, “until you hear what I mean.” Let us take Aeschylus, the earliest of the dramatists, first, and for a play let us take his Agamemnon. The great character is Clytaemnestra. She has allowed herself to become the paramour of a vile and cowardly relation of her husband called Aegisthus, who apparently seduced her out of mere idleness and hatred of King Agamemnon. When her husband returns she treacherously murders him.... What are you going to make of a subject like that? How are you going to make Clytaemnestra, I will not say “sympathetic,” but merely human and tolerable? It seems an insoluble problem. Yet Aeschylus solves it. For one thing, he represents Agamemnon, the nominal hero of the play, as rather wooden, weak and bombastic—not very unlike Julius Caesar, the nominal hero of Shakespeare’s play, where the dramatist had a similar but less difficult problem. The result is that the sympathies of the reader are not too deeply stirred in favour of the victim. Again, Clytaemnestra appears to be really in love with Aegisthus, while her feeling towards her husband is not merely the thirst for revenge or the hate a woman conceives of the man she has wronged; it is a physical abhorrence. She loathes him in her flesh. It is impossible to explain by what miracle of genius we are led to receive this impression, for she speaks nothing but flatteries and cajolery. Yet every speech of hers to him, as he dimly feels, shudders with a secret disgust. These long, glittering, coiling sentences are certainly not politic; they are the expression of a morbid loathing, which has ended by fascinating itself. When the blood of her lord (Note 196)bursts over her she rejoices no less than the sown ground in the heaven’s bright gift of rain. Now in the play Agamemnon is rather ineffective, but at any rate he is more a man than the immeasurably contemptible Aegisthus. Is it to be supposed that Clytaemnestra does not know that? Of course she knows, but she does not cease to love Aegisthus on that account. So the matter stands. Aeschylus does not make it any easier for you. A bad modern playwright would make Clytaemnestra a sadly misunderstood woman with a pitiful “case.” It so happens that the queen does have something of a case, really a good case, but she does not much insist on it. She knows quite well that it is not for her murdered daughter’s sake that she has killed the king. Neither is it from fear of detection; the woman does not know the meaning of fear. Aeschylus will not purchase your sympathy for her by any pretences. One of his unexpected, wonderful touches is to make her superbly intelligent. She feels herself so much superior intellectually to every one else that she hardly takes the trouble to deceive them. Nobody is asked to like Clytaemnestra, but surely she gives food for some reflection on the power and subtlety of Greek psychology, and the unswerving truthfulness of Greek realism, in a peculiarly complex affair of the heart.
There are in Sophocles at least two fine and tender studies of conjugal love of the conventional (but not silly conventional) type, namely Tekmessa in the Ajax and Dêianeira in the Trachinian Women; and one study not conventional in the very least, the Iokasta of Oedipus the King. She is the woman who slew herself because she had borne children to her own son, who had murdered his father, who begot him by her. The legend has made her a thing of night and horror. Sophocles has made her grand, proud, sceptical, lonely, pitiful, ravaged by thoughts not to be breathed, horribly pathetic. But these three are wives. Of love between man and maid Sophocles has hardly a word to say. People quote Haimon and Antigone. There is no doubt of the young man’s love for Antigone; he dies for her. But is she in love with Haimon? She is betrothed to him of course, but in ancient Greece these matters were arranged. She probably liked him a good deal; everybody likes him; but we are speaking of love. Those who have little doubts on the subject quote her cry, Dearest Haimon, how thy father slights thee! which she utters when Kreon has said, I hate bad wives for my sons. But they have no right to quote the cry as hers until they have proved she utters it; which they don’t, but merely assume the manuscripts be wrong. The manuscripts give the line to Ismênê, the sister of Antigone, and they appear to be clearly right. Any one who looks at the context will see that it is Ismênê who brings the mention of Haimon into the dispute with Kreon. Antigone stands apart in proud and indignant silence. She will die rather than let the man who has outraged her dead brother see how much her resistance is costing her. Besides, I think the manuscripts are right anyway. Imagine the case of an extremely high-minded young lady, who for the very best reasons has quarrelled with her prospective father-in-law. The young lady’s sister reminds the old man that after all Octavia is engaged to his son, which provokes the retort, “I object to bad wives for my boys.” Would Octavia then exclaim, “Dearest William, how your father insults you!”? Well, would she? But it looks delightfully like what Octavia’s sister would say. Therefore, I vote for the manuscripts and giving the line to Ismênê.
Antigone had two brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes. After their father had been driven from Thebes the brethren disputed the succession to his throne. Polyneikes lost, and took refuge in Argos, where he gathered assistance and marched against his native city. The attempt had no success, and Polyneikes and Eteokles fell in single combat. This mutual fratricide left Kreon, their uncle, king. He, in a flame of “patriotism,” had Eteokles interred with honour and commanded that the body of Polyneikes should be left unburied. Such an order might be compared to excommunication, for the effect of it was for ever to bar the spirit of the dead from peace. Antigone sprinkled dust on the naked corpse, which satisfied the gods of the underworld and eluded the penalty of the ban. When Kreon asks her if the spirit of Eteokles will not resent the saining of his fraternal enemy—which would be the orthodox opinion—she replies, beautifully but inconsequently, It is not my nature to join in hating, but in loving. She also speaks of a higher, unwritten law. But Polyneikes is the favourite brother. I hardly think any one can read carefully the Antigone and the Oedipus at Colonus without seeing that. All through the Antigone he is never out of her thoughts. “Natural enough,” you may be inclined to say. But is it? On the supposition that she is in love with Haimon? There is another play, the Electra, in which Sophocles portrays the love of a sister for a brother; and there are a good many points of resemblance between Electra and Antigone. Only there is in the love of Electra for Orestes (whom she brought up) a fierce, hungry, maternal quality, which would be out of place between the children of Oedipus.
When we pass to Euripides we seem by comparison to approach the modern. The impression is largely illusory, but not wholly false. It is the fact that he is troubled by many of the problems that trouble us, and it is the fact that he sometimes answers, or does not answer, them in a way we should regard as modern. This comes out in his treatment of love. It is best seen in the Medea and the Hippolytus. Medea has a special interest for us because she is a Barbarian (princess of Colchis in the eastern corner of the Black Sea). But her case is quite simple. She is a woman in love with a man who is tired of her. Necessarily he cuts a poor figure in the story. She had saved his life. On the other hand, she had thrown herself at his head, she had done her best to ruin his chances in life, and all she had now to offer him was a perfect readiness to murder anybody who stood in his way. She is one of those women who are never satisfied unless the man is making love to them all the time, so that one may have a sneaking sympathy for that embarrassed, if rather contemptible, Jason. Indeed, Euripides’ opinion of this kind of “Romantic” love is probably no higher than Mr. Shaw’s. It is the passion of the Barbarian woman. That does not prevent Euripides from sympathizing profoundly with Medea, the passionate, wronged, foreign woman. Why, indeed, should it? The case of Medea, as Euripides with the pregnant brevity of Greek art presents it, has seemed to many as true as death. It is an excellent example of realism.
More definitely than the Medea, the Hippolytus is a tragedy of love. Yet in the eloquence of the Romantic lover the one is as deficient as the other. Phaedra was dying for love of Hippolytus. Her secret is discovered and she dies of shame. What an opportunity for the sentimentalist! However, adds the relentless poet, that is not all the story. Before killing herself she forged a message to her husband making the charge of Potiphar’s wife against Hippolytus. She could not die without the pleasure of hurting him. Yet Euripides does not represent her as an odious woman; quite the contrary. The question for us is, does she, when we read the play, strike us as real or not? The poet has set himself a difficult task—to convince us that a soul overthrown by desire, cruel, lying, unjust was yet essentially modest, gentle and honourable. If she is almost too convincing, so that a sentimental part of you bleeds inside, you will perceive that realism was not invented in Norway. And there is this about the Greek sort: it never exaggerates.
It is hardly to be believed how startling an effect of truth this moderation of the Greek writers can produce. Sappho, in the most famous of her odes, says that love makes her “sweat” with agony and look “greener than grass.” Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as that, although (commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive complexion and had never seen British grass. But, even if it contain a trace of artistic exaggeration, the ode as a whole is perhaps the most convincing love-poem ever written. It breathes veracity. It has an intoxicating beauty of sound and suggestion, and it is as exact as a physiological treatise. The Greeks can do that kind of thing. Somehow we either overdo the “beauty” or we overdo the physiology. The weakness of the Barbarian, said they, is that he never hits the mean. But the Greek poet seems to do it every time. We may beat them at other things, but not at that. And they do it with so little effort; sometimes, it might appear, with none at all. Thus Aeschylus represents Prometheus as the proudest of living beings. The Prometheus Bound opens with a scene in which Hephaistos, urged on by two devils called Strength and Force, nails Prometheus to a frozen, desert rock. While the hero of the play endures this horrible torture, he has to listen to the clumsy sympathy of Hephaistos, who does not like his job, and the savage taunts of the two demons. To all this he replies—nothing at all. No eloquence could express the pride of that tremendous silence. Of course there is, or there used to be, a certain kind of commentator who hastens to point out that a convention of the early Attic stage forbade more than two persons of a tragedy to speak together at any time, so that in any event it was not permissible for Prometheus to speak. All you can do with a critic like that is (mentally, I fear) to hang a millstone round his neck and cast him into the deepest part of the sea.
Not but what the point about convention, if rightly taken, is extremely notable. It is an undying wonder how the kind of realism we have been discussing could be combined with, could even, as in that instance from the Prometheus Bound, make use of, the limitations imposed on the ancient poet. To a reader who has not looked into the case it is hard to give even an idea of it. If a man were to tell you that he had written a novel in which the hero was Sir Anthony Dearborn and the heroine Sophia Wilde, while other characters were Squire Crabtree, Parson Quackenboss, Lieutenant Dashwood and the old Duchess of Grimthorpe, you would think to yourself you knew exactly what to expect. Yet you must admit there is nothing to prevent the man leaving out (if he can) Gretna Green, and the duel, and the eighteenth-century oaths. But if a Greek tragic dramatist put on the stage a play dealing, say, with the House of Atreus, he positively could not leave out any part of the family history. It was not done. So the audience knew your story already, and knew, roughly, your characters. Nor, as historians say, was that all. There had to be a Chorus, which had to sing lyrical odes of a mythological sort at regular intervals between the episodes of your drama; while the episodes themselves had to be composed in the iambic metre and in a certain “tragic diction” about as remote from ordinary speech as Paradise Lost. How Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides contrive under such conditions to give a powerful impression of novelty and naturalness it is easier to feel than explain. About the feeling at least there is no doubt. Let us look again for a moment at that singular convention, the tragic Chorus. Very often it consists of old men who ... sing and dance. Consider the incredible difficulty of keeping a number of singing and dancing old men solemn and beautiful and even holy. Yet the great tragic poets have overcome that difficulty so completely that I suppose not one reader in a hundred notices that there is a difficulty at all. The famous Chorus of old men in the Agamemnon, whose debility is made a point in the play, never for a moment remind one of Grandfer Cantle. Rather they remind us of that “old man covered with a mantle,” whom Saul beheld rising from the grave to pronounce his doom. It is, in their own words, as if God inspired their limbs to the dance and filled their mouths with prophecy.
There is only one way of redeeming the conventional, and that is by sincerity. I am very far from maintaining that the moral virtue of sincerity was eminently characteristic of the ancient Greek; but intellectual sincerity was. None has ever looked upon gods and men with such clear, unswerving eyes; none has understood so well to communicate that vision. To see that essential beauty is truth and truth is beauty—that is the secret of Greek art, as it is the maxim of true realism. To keep measure in all things, that no drop of life may spill over—that is the secret of Greek happiness. To be a Greek and not a Barbarian.
NOTES
THE AWAKENING
The beginnings of Ionia, the earlier homes and the racial affinities of the Ionians, are still obscure, although the point is cardinal for Greek history. There is perhaps a growing tendency to find “Mediterranean” elements in the Ionian stock, and this would explain much, if the Ionians of history did not seem so very “Aryan” in speech and habits of thought. On the other hand the “Aryan” himself is daily coming to look more cloudy and ambiguous, and so is his exact contribution to western culture.
The chief ancient sources of our information concerning the Ionians are Herodotus, Pausanias and Strabo.
P. 14. Thuc. I. 2. Thuc. I. 6. Herod. I. 57.
P. 15. See especially D. G. Hogarth, Ionia and the East (1909).
J. Burnet, Who was Javan? in Proceedings of the Class. Assoc. of Scot. 1911-12. Herod. I. 142.
P. 16. Herod. I. 171 f.
P. 17. An authoritative little book dealing with (among other peoples) the Anatolian races is D. G. Hogarth’s The Ancient East (Home Univ. Ser.), 1914. Also H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East (1913).
P. 18. V. Bérard, Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée is full of instruction on the ways of the ancient mariner.
For the Colchians, see Hippocrates de aer. aq. loc. 15. Cf. Herod. II. 104 f.
P. 19. Chalybes. Il. II. 857. Herod. I. 203.
P. 20. Herod. IV. 93 f. Olbia. Herod. IV. 18. Scythian bow. Plato, Laws, 795-.
P. 21. Herod. IV. 18 f.
P. 22. Herod. IV. 172 f.
P. 25. Herod. II. 152. Abusimbel inscr. in Hicks and Hill’s Manual.
P. 26 f. Fragments of Archilochus in Bergk’s Poet. Lyr. Gr.
KEEPING THE PASS
The Battle of Thermopylae as related by Herodotus (practically our sole authority) is an epic. Therefore in telling it again I have frankly attempted an epical manner as being really less misleading than any application of the historical method. This is not to say that the narrative of Herodotus has not been greatly elucidated by the research of modern historians, especially by the exciting discovery of the path Anopaia by Mr. G. B. Grundy. I have followed his reconstruction of the battle (which may not be very far from the truth) in his book, The Great Persian War (1901). See also Mr. Macan’s commentary in his great edition of Herodotus.
P. 34. See Frazer’s note on Thermopylae in his edition of Pausanias.
P. 36. Cf. Xen. Anab. VII. 4, 4 (Thracians of Europe).
P. 39. Tiara. schol. Ar. Birds 487. The King’s tiara was also called kitaris.
P. 39. For Persian dress cf. with Herod. Strabo 734. Xen. Cyrop. VII. 1, 2. There are also representations in ancient art, e.g. a frieze at Susa.
THE ADVENTURERS
P. 45. Strabo IV.
P. 46. Herod. IV. 44.
P. 47. The Greek Tradition (1915), Allen and Unwin, p. 6f.
P. 48. Herod. IV. 151-153.
P. 50. For an account of the Oasis at Siwah, see A. B. Cook, Zeus, vol. I.
P. 51. Hymn ad Apoll. 391 f.
P. 52. Pind. Ol. 3 ad fin.
P. 53. Herod. VI. 11, 12, 17. Cf. Strabo on foundation of Marseille, IV (from Aristotle).
P. 54. Herod. III. 125, 129-137 (Demokêdês).
P. 55. Polycrates. Herod. II. 182 and III passim.
P. 61 f.61 f. Xen. Anab. I-IV.
P. 63. Pisidians. Cf. Xen. Memor. V. 2, 6.
P. 67. L’Anabase de Xenophon avec un commentaire historique et militaire, by Col. (General) Arthur Boucher, Paris, 1913.
P. 69. There is a fine imaginative picture of Nineveh in the Book of Jonah.
P. 71. The famous Moltke was nearly drowned from a “tellek.”
P. 77. The hot spring may be the sulphurous waters of Murad, which have wonderful iridescences.
The Armenian underground houses are still to be seen. These earth-houses are found elsewhere—in Scotland, for instance. See J. E. Harrison, in Essays and Studies presented to W. Ridgeway, p. 136 f.
ELEUTHERIA
P. 82. Aesch. Pers. 241 f. Herod. VII. 104.
P. 83. Pers. 402 f. Eur. Helen 276.
P. 84. Thuc. I. 3, 3 (“Hellenes” and “Barbarians” correlative terms).
Herod. I. 136.
P. 85. Aeschines 3, 132. Letter to Gadatas, Dittenb. Syllog.2 2.
Herod. III. 31. Cf. Daniel VI. 37, 38. Ezekiel xxvi. 7.
P. 86. Herod. IX. 108-113.
P. 88. Cf. vengeance of Persians on Ionians, Herod. VI. 32.
Herod. VII. 135.
P. 89. Herod. VIII. 140 f.
P. 90 f. “The ancients were attached to their country by three things—their temples, their tombs, and their forefathers. The two great bonds which united them to their government were the bonds of habit and antiquity. With the moderns, hope and the love of novelty have produced a total change. The ancients said our forefathers, we say posterity; we do not, like them, love our patria, that is to say, the country and the laws of our fathers, rather we love the laws and the country of our children; the charm we are most sensible to is the charm of the future, and not the charm of the past.” Joubert, transl. by M. Arnold.
P. 92. See J. E. Harrison on Anodos Vases in her Prolegomena, p. 276 f.
Herod. VIII. 109. Herod. VIII. 65.
P. 96. Herod. IX. 27. Supplices 314 f. But see the whole speech of Aithra, and indeed the whole play, which is full of the mission of Athens as the champion of Hellenism. Cf. also Eur. Heraclid. G. Murray, Introduction to trans. of Eur. Hippol. etc., on “Significance of Bacchae” (1902).
P. 97. Thuc. I. 70, 9. Herod. VII. 139. Dem. de Cor. 199 f.
P. 98. Arist. Pol. 13172 40, agreeing with Plato Resp. 562B.
P. 99. Plato Resp. 563c. Herod. III. 80.
Herod. V. 78. Cf. Hippocr. de aer. aq. loc. 23, 24. Both agree that a high spirit may be produced by suitable nomoi and that man’s spirits are “enslaved” under autocracy. This is a more liberal doctrine than that discussed in Aristotle, that Barbarians are slaves “by nature.”
P. 100. Supplices 403 f. Medea 536 f.
The association of Liberty and Law is exhibited both positively and negatively (as in the breach of both by the tyrant) in the tragic poets, etc. Thus the Suppliants of Aeschylus is concerned with a point of marriage-law, the Antigone of Sophocles with a point of burial-law, and so on.
Another “romantic” hero is Cadmus.
P. 104. Hom. Il. VI. 447 f.
SOPHROSYNE
P. 110. Plato Resp. 329B. ib. 439E.
P. 111. Plato Resp. 615c. Xen. Hellen. VI. 4, 37.
P. 112. Plut. Pelop. 29. Herod. III. 50; V. 92.
P. 120. Herod. VIII. 26.
P. 121. Purg. XXIV. 137-8.
GODS AND TITANS
P. 122. Od. III. 48.
P. 123 f. I may allow myself to refer, for more detailed evidence, to my article The Religious Background of the “Prometheus Vinctus” in Harvard Studies in Class. Philol. vol. XXXI, 1920. Cf. Prof. G. Murray in Anthropology and the Classics, ed. R. R. Marett.
P. 124. Theog. 126 f. Theog. 147 f. “ill to name,” οὐκ ὀνομαστοί. I think the meaning may be that to mention their names was dangerous—especially if you got them wrong. Cf. Aesch. Ag. 170. The Romans provided against this danger by the indigitamenta.
P. 126. Theog. 453 f.
P. 128. Theog. 617 f. Theog. 503 f.
P. 129. Solmsen, Indog. Forsch. 1912, XXX, 35 n. 1. Theog. 886 f. Theog. 929h f.
P. 130. Heracl. fr. 42 (Diels). Xenophan. fr. 11.
Pind. Ol. I. 53 f.
P. 136. On the “anarchic life,” see Plato Laws 693-699. Democritus (139) says, “Law aims at the amelioration of human life and is capable of this, when men are themselves disposed to accept it; for law reveals to every man who obeys it his special capacity for excellence.”
Zeus, acc. to Plato Crit. sub fin. is a constitutional ruler.
P. 137. Herod. I. 34 f.
CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC
I
P. 147. Plut. Alex. I.
P. 150. Il. II. 459 f. Il. IV. 452 f. Il. XIX. 375 f.
Od. XIX. 431 f. Od. XIX. 518 f.
P. 151. Il. VI. 418 f. Il. XIV. 16 f. Il. XXIV. 614 f.
P. 152. Il. XIV. 347 f. Od. XI. 238 f.
P. 153. Pind. Ol. I. 74 f. Ol. VI. 53.
P. 155. Il. XXIII. 597 f.
P. 161 f. See my Studies in the Odyssey, Oxford, 1914.
P. 163. Il. III. 243 f. Il. XVI. 453 f. Od. XIX. 36 f.
P. 164. Od. XX. 351 f. ad Cererem 5 f. ad Dion. 24 f.
II
P. 168. Thuc. III. 38. ζητοῦντές τε ἄλλο τι ὡς εἰπεῖν ἢ ἐν οἷς ζῶμεν.
On Elpis, see F. M. Cornford in Thucydides Mythistoricus, ch. IX, XII, XIII.
P. 172. Od. XI. 235 f. Plato Resp. 573B.
P. 175. See Prof. Burnet, Greek Philosophy (1914), Part I, p. 146 f.
P. 182. Il. XVIII. 205 f.
P. 183. Il. XII. 378 f.
P. 184. J. M. Synge said, “It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.” But this merely shows how much we are suffering from a reaction against sentimental romanticism.
III
P. 189. Il. XIII. 444. Il. XIII. 616 f. Il. XIV. 493 f. Il. XVI. 345 f. Il. XX. 416 f.
P. 190. Il. XVI. 751 f.
P. 191. Arist. Nic. Eth. III. 6, 6. Plato Apol. ad fin.
Od. XI. 488 f. Od.. XI. 72 f. Note the effect of the καί before ζωός. It is “simple pathos” if you like, hardly self-conscious enough to be called “wistful.” There are some wonderful touches of it in Dante’s Inferno.
P. 192. Phrasikleia. Kaibel, Epigr. Sepulchr. Attic. 6.
P. 193. The Eretrian epigram is preserved in the Palatine Anthology.
P. 195. Ag. 1391 f.
P. 196. Ant. 571 f.