Theology and Philosophy, each in its own way attempting to go beyond inadequate popular belief, could only very gradually transcend the limits of those narrow communities within which their influence was first felt and reach the circles in which that popular belief held sway. During the earliest successes of the theological and philosophical spirit hardly a voice was raised that might have suggested that the belief in the imperishability and divine nature of the human Soul, of the inherence of all things spiritual in one imperishable, fundamental substance, might become something more than a mystery known to the wise and illuminated, and enter into the convictions of the people and the unlearned. “After the death of the body, the Image of Life remains alive; for that alone is descended from the gods”—such is the announcement of Pindar. But for all the confidence with which, as though anticipating no contradiction, he here proclaims the view of the soul’s immortality and bases it upon its divine nature, such an opinion can at that time have been no more than the persuasion of isolated communities formed and instructed in that particular doctrine. It cannot be merely accidental,1 that in the fragments which have come down to us of the lyric and semi-lyric (elegiac and iambic) poetry—poetry intended for a wide and unspecialized public and expressing feelings and ideas in language that all could understand—hardly a trace appears of that enhanced conception of the worth and nature of the Soul. Reflexion does not linger over such dark subjects; whenever they are illuminated for a passing moment, we discern the outlines of those figures from the spirit world just as the Homeric imagination had given them shape.
Life and light are only to be found in this world;2 Death, to which we are all “owing”,3 leads the soul into a realm of nothingness.4 Inarticulate, voiceless, the dead man lies in the grave like a statue.5 Upon earth, and not in any shadowy hereafter, is completed that judgment6 which divine Justice passes upon the criminal himself, or upon his descendants in whom something of him still lives on. It is the lack of such descendants that forms the bitterest pang, as he goes down to Hades, of the man who passes childless out of this life.7 412
More distinctly and bitterly, in this age of advancing civilization and growing sensibility, sounds the wail over the pain and affliction of life, the obscurity of its ways, and the uncertainty of its outcome.8 Silenos, the prophetic wood-spirit, so went the ancient legend, when captured by King Midas in his rose-gardens at Bermios earned his release with the judgment of melancholy wisdom that the Greek was never tired of repeating in ever-varying forms—not to be born is the best thing for men, but having been born, let him pray that he may return as soon as possible to the kingdom of Night,9 and of Hades.10 The cheerful enjoyment of life is no longer so sure of itself as once it had been in the days of its naïve confidence: and yet there is no substitute attempted, no compensatory hereafter in a next world of justice and untroubled happiness. We rather hear the opinion expressed that rest is the greatest of all earthly blessings; and rest is brought by Death. Nevertheless there is little demand for consolation; a robust and virile sense of life that can put up with whatever may befall of evil or hardship in healthy indifference, is in the air, and speaks to us from many a page of this poetic legacy with unpretending veracity. No attempt is made to smooth over the hardship and cruelty of life. Man’s power is small, his efforts go unrewarded, one necessity after another besets his short life: over all alike hangs the shadow of inevitable death. All things come at last to the awful chasm—the bravest virtue and the highest authority in the world.11 Yet life is good and death an evil; else, why do the blessed gods not die? asks Sappho12 with feminine naiveté; though indeed, her life’s path had lain through the deepest valley of the shadow. Even the dead man, if he wishes to be preserved from utter nothingness, must depend upon the world of the living as the only place of reality; the fame of his virtues and his deeds is all that outlasts his death.13 Perhaps some dim perception of that fame reaches even to the dead.14 They themselves are for the living as though they had passed into nothingness; we should not, thinks a poet, give them another thought after we have buried them.15
Here even the time-honoured conventions associated with the cult of souls seem to be perversely cast aside. In general, the poet with his wide-ranging observation of mankind had small occasion to be reminded of the cult of the soul that the narrow circles of family or city offered to their dead, or of the conceptions thereby encouraged of the continued life enjoyed by the departed. The omission is supplied by the Orators of the fifth and fourth centuries and by what they say—and do 413 not say—of the state of things hereafter. The greatest period of lyric poetry was by that time already fading into the past, and yet whoever wished in speaking before a citizen assembly to meet with general agreement and understanding was still obliged to refrain from speaking of the blessed immortality, the eternity and divinity of the soul. The Orators16 never pass beyond the conceptions of the survival, power, and rights of the souls of the departed which were called forth and maintained in existence by the cult of the soul. The continued existence of the souls in the next world is not called in question; but the opinion that the souls still preserve their consciousness and have any knowledge of what happens on this earth is only expressed with the most cautious avoidance of definiteness.17 What—apart from the sacrificial offerings of their relatives—still binds the dead to the life upon earth, is little more than the fame accorded to them among the living.18 Even in the elevated language of solemn funeral orations the consolations offered to the survivors omit all mention of any enhanced state of being, any thought of immortal life in fully-conscious blessedness, that might belong now to the glorious departed.19 Such high visions and hopes for the future were still, it appears, as little necessary or demanded for the comfort of the people as they had been in the times of the great wars of liberty.20 The beloved dead who had given their lives for their country in those wars, as well as many others of the time whom death had overtaken, were the recipients of the epitaphs composed by Simonides the master of brilliant and condensed inscriptions. Nevertheless, not once does he vouchsafe a word that might point forward to a land of blessed immortality for the departed. There is a vestige of life still remaining for the dead—but it is in this world; the memory of the living and their own great name honoured by after generations is all that can prolong their existence.
It seems like an echo from another world when (about the middle of the fifth century) Melanippides the dithyrambic poet addresses a god in the words: “Hear me Father, marvel of all mortal men, Thou that rulest over the everliving Souls.” The words must be addressed to Dionysos;21 for such as entered into the magic circle of his nightly festival those visions of the imperishability of the human soul and its divine power acquired reality. Such wisdom received but partial assent from those who lived unaffected by the conceptions of isolated sects of the theologically or philosophically minded. 414
§ 2
A peculiar position is taken up by Pindar. Two contrasted views of the nature, origin, and destiny of the soul seem to be combined in his mind with equal claim to authority.
In the Victory Odes allusions predominate which imply an agreement with the popular view expressed in the sayings of poets and the presuppositions of the cult of souls and the worship of Heroes. After its separation from the body, the soul disappears into the underworld.22 The piety and affectionate memory of relatives and descendants remains as a link between the dead and the living;23 whether the soul itself is still conscious of any connexion with the world of the living seems uncertain.24 Its power is over and done with—it is certainly no condition of blessed happiness into which it has entered. Only the glorious name, the fame that is honoured in song, rewards the great deeds of the virtuous after death.25
An exalted state of being, after their departure from this earth, is attributed to the Heroes alone. The belief in the existence, importance, and power of these illuminated spirits holds complete sway;26 it emerges in lively reality from the words and narrations of the poet throughout all his work. Moreover, the ancient conception—in reality rendered untenable by the belief in Heroes—that only with the undivided union of body and soul is complete life imaginable, is discernible in many allusions and stories of Translation that imply that conception. Amphiaraos, the most illustrious of those who have been translated to everlasting life, is specially dear to the heart of the Theban poet, and is glorified more than once in the language of unaffected faith in such miracles.27 But, further, even when death has occurred in the meantime, elevation to a higher life remains possible—even beyond the heights of the “Hero”. Semele lives for ever, though she died under the crash of the thunder-bolt.28 The barrier between men and gods is not insuperable; we can distantly approach the immortals not only in greatness of mind, but in bodily vigour.29 One mother gave birth to both races, though the gulf between them is indeed a deep one; man is nought—a shadow’s dream-image; for the gods the brazen heavens remain for ever as an unconquerable stronghold.30 Only a miracle of divine interference with the lawful and normal course of nature, can raise the individual soul to the everlasting life of the gods and Heroes.
Such visions as these could be indulged in by one who still 415 kept his feet firmly fixed upon the ground of popular belief. And yet side by side with them in Pindar’s works are to be found descriptions of quite another order in which is expressed, with elaborate fullness and dogmatic exactitude, a complete doctrine of the nature, destiny, and fate of the soul; passages in which, in spite of some little poetic licence in detail, a well ordered and, in the main, consistent whole is pictured.
The Soul, the “Image of Life”, the other Self of the living and visible man, sleeps while the limbs of man are active; when the individual is asleep it shows him dream-visions of the future.31 This psyche32 which during the waking and conscious hours of the man is itself lying in the darkness of unconsciousness, is far from being the totality of mental powers gathered together in a single creature, or at any rate, in a single concept, such as the philosophers as well as the everyday use of the word at that period understood by the name “psyche”. Here, again, the name once more denotes the double of mankind dwelling within the living man such as it was known to primeval popular belief and to the Homeric poems. A theological meaning has, however, been added to it. This “Image” of man, we are told, “is alone descended from the gods,” and with this the reason also is discovered why the soul-image alone after the destruction of the body by death remains alive.33
Derived from the gods and therefore eternally exempt from destruction, everlasting and immortal, the soul is none the less condemned to finiteness; it dwells within the mortal body of man. This is the result of the “ancient guilt” of which, quite in the manner of theological poetry, Pindar also speaks.34 After the death of the body it is to await in Hades the stern sentence that “One” shall pronounce over its earthly deeds.35 For the condemned there is in store “affliction past beholding”36 in deep Tartaros, “where the slow rivers of murky night spit out endless darkness,” and forgetfulness encloses the victims.37 The just enter into the subterranean places of bliss where the sun gives them light when he has set upon earth.38 In flowery meadows they enjoy an existence of resplendent idleness, such as only the Greek imagination, nourished amid the artistic surroundings of Greek life, could describe without falling into emptiness and futility.
But the soul has not even so found its last resting place. It must again give life to a body and not until it has completed upon earth a third faultless life can it hope for an end of its earthly course of being.39 The conditions of each new life 416 upon earth depend upon the degree of purity that the soul has achieved in its previous lifetimes. When at last the Queen of the Underworld considers that its “ancient guilt” has been atoned for, she sends forth the souls after the ninth year40 of their last sojourn in Hades once more to live in the upper world, this time in happiness. Here they pass through one more lifetime as kings, mighty men of valour, and Wise Men.41 Then at last they escape from the necessity of earthly rebirth. As “Heroes” they are honoured among men;42 and they have therefore entered into a state of higher being which the popular belief of Pindar’s time ascribed not only to the souls of the great ancestral figures of the past, but also to many who had departed hence in more recent times after a life of valour and service.43 Now they are beyond the reach of Hades as much as of the world of men. Faith seeks them in “Islands of the Blest” far out in Okeanos; thither, to the “Citadel of Kronos” they travel on the “Way of Zeus”44 and enjoy, in company with the great ones of the past, under the protection of Kronos45 and his assessor Rhadamanthys, a life of bliss for ever undisturbed.
Such conceptions of the origin, fortunes, and ultimate destiny of the soul, the more they diverge from commonly held opinions, the more certainly must they be regarded as being part of the private and real persuasion of the poet himself. The poet, who on other occasions when he makes passing and casual reference to the things of the next world accommodates himself to the traditional view, gives himself up willingly to such hopes and aspirations where the circumstances of his song provided an opportunity of dealing at length with such matters—especially in hymns of mourning for the dead. He may have paid attention in such poems to the special opinions of those who were to be the first hearers of his song. Theron, the ruler of Akragas, to whom was dedicated the second Olympian Ode of Victory that deals so fully with the hope of bliss to come, was an old man whose thoughts might well be occupied with the life after death.46 In this case, therefore, we may presume perhaps the special interest of the person whose praises are sung in these reflections that lead so far away from the commonly accepted view of the Soul.47 But that Pindar, proud and self-willed, conscious of specific knowledge and proud of that consciousness, should have given expression to strange doctrine so foreign to popular ideas simply out of complaisance to another’s will, and in subservience to another man’s belief—that is quite unthinkable. It is rather the substance of what he believes himself 417 and has achieved by his own struggles that in a solemn hour he reveals for a moment to like-minded friends.
The different elements out of which Pindar has composed his special view are not hard to distinguish. He is following theological doctrine in what he tells of the divine origin of the soul, its wanderings through several bodies, the judgment in Hades, the special place assigned to the just, and that of the wicked. But it is layman’s theology that he is propounding; it does not bind itself to a single unalterable formula, and betrays throughout that its exponent is a poet. Pindar, throughout the whole of his poetic activity, combines the office of singer with that of professional teacher, more especially where he has to speak of the things of an invisible divine world. But for all his didactic professionalism he remains the poet, for whom as depository and trustee of the Myth it is out of the question to abandon the traditional, whether in legend or belief. His task is to keep pure what has been handed down to him, to make it more profound, perhaps to supplement and complete it, but with all this to justify it. Thus, poetic legend and popular belief enter even into his theologian’s doctrine of the Soul; the Islands of the Blest, the elevation of man to Hero—these were things he could not give up.
From what particular direction Pindar’s theological interests may have come to him we cannot say with precision or certainty. Orphic as well as Pythagorean doctrines may have come to his notice in Sicily whither he made repeated visits after 477 B.C.48 For both sects this country was the original nursery and breeding ground.
There, too, the poet may perhaps have (even at that date) met with certain varieties of the Orphic mystical doctrine which, like his own views, were intermingled with elements taken from conventional mythology. Examples of this type of Orphic mysticism allied with foreign elements are the verses which, inscribed upon gold tablets, were found not long ago in graves near the ancient Sybaris.49 Three of these poems begin with phrases that are common to them all, and imply the same underlying conceptions; after that they part company and represent two different views. The soul of the dead person50 thus addresses itself to the Queen of the lower world, and the other gods of the depths below: “I draw near to you purified and born of pure parents.”51 It belongs then to a mortal who, like his parents before him, has been “purified” in the sacred mysteries of a religious association.52 It claims also to be descended from the blessed race of the deities of the lower 418 world.53 “Lightning robbed me of life,” so one of the versions goes on,54 “and so I escaped from the Circle, the burdensome, the grievous”. In these words purely Orphic belief is expressed: the Soul has now at last escaped entirely from the “Circle of Births”,55 and it enters as it tells us “with speedy feet into the wished-for precinct”,56 and buries itself in the bosom of the Queen of the Underworld.57 It is the latter, probably, who at the end greets the liberated soul with the words: “Fortunate and to be called Blessed art thou; now shalt thou be, instead of a mortal—a god.”
Much less exalted are the hopes expressed in the other two versions of the mystic document—two versions that resemble each other in most essentials. Here the soul asserts that it has done penance for unrighteous deeds; now it appears before the revered Persephoneia to implore her graciously to send it to the dwelling places of the pure and the holy.58
How are we to explain the discrepancy? It would indeed be possible to explain the more restrained version as that of a sect whose members were less confident of their own divine origin and of the necessary return of the soul at last to its enfranchised divine state. It is much more probable, however—since in fact the presupposition of the divine nature of the soul and its kinship with the divine is really made in both cases and with the same words—that we here have to do with the beliefs of one and the same sect, and that the varying heights of felicity aspired to correspond to different stages of the process of redemption. He who through participation in the sacred mysteries has atoned for the ancient guilt, can be admitted by the goddess into the paradise of the blest in the midst of Hades. But he must still, in subsequent rebirths upon earth first complete the cycle before he can be fully released from rebirth and become once more what he was at the beginning, entirely a god. The dead man of the first tablet has reached the final goal of his pilgrimage; the other two have only reached an intermediate resting place.59 Another inscription, found in a grave of the same neighbourhood,60 by its use of a mystic formula61 appended also to the first version of the above-mentioned poems, reveals itself as an expression of faith deriving from the same sect. Among a variety of disconnected instructions and appeals to the dead,62 strung together with no particular arrangement, it contains the following statement: “a god hast thou become instead of a mortal”. This then always remained the crowning point of the salvation promised by the sect. 419
In the cult and beliefs of this sect which thus with divided voice speaks to us in these verses, the worship of the ancient Greek divinities of the Underworld (among whom Dionysos is not this time included) was fused with the boldest conception belonging to the Dionysiac mysteries: the confident assurance that the divine nature of the soul must in the end break through, purified and triumphant over the earthliness that obscured it. Pindar in another, but not very different, way has brought the same elements into conjunction. One would indeed like to be able to estimate the influence which his doctrine, which lay so close to his own heart, may have exercised on the hearers and readers of his poems. He was at once something more and something less than a theological teacher. Never again among the Greeks did the blessed life of the sanctified soul receive such majestic expression, clothed in such ample and resplendent diction, as that which poured so freely from the heart of this richly gifted poet. But though the poet may have touched the heart of his hearer and tempted his imagination to stray along the path laid out for him, yet it cannot have been easy (and perhaps the greatness of the poet’s triumph almost made it harder) permanently to mistake the magic gleam of poetry for the sunlight of reality. One may doubt whether the poems in which Pindar recounted his dreams of future blessedness can have found many hearers in whom they awakened not merely æsthetic satisfaction, but belief in the literal truth of the teaching, in the reality of those beautiful, dim, haloed figures.
§ 3
But perhaps by the expression of such doubts we do less than justice to the influence which a Greek poet might exercise upon the minds and dispositions of his hearers. Greek popular opinion was very much inclined to place the poet on a pedestal to which his modern representative would hardly care to aspire, and to which at any rate he could never attain. The purely artistic value and importance of a poem did not seem to be impaired by the demand that it should at the same time instruct and edify. The poet was to be the teacher of his people in an age when, in the conditions of Greek life, the people had no other instructor. He was to be a teacher in the highest sense of all when, speaking in the language of the most exalted poetry, he dealt with the doubts and certainties of religion and the relationship between religion and morality. In these matters he could supplement out of the wealth of 420 his own far-reaching reflection what was lacking in the public morality of the time through the absence of an official, authoritative religious Book. By giving them intelligible and memorable expression, together with greater cohesion and unity, he could strengthen the foundations of the common stock of moral ideas that had been evolved in the course of social and city life. He might also expand and give greater depth to the ideas of popular morality, tempering them in the fire of his own more rigorous thought and interpreting and refining them from the heights of a more elevated understanding of the divine. What he thus gave back to the people stamped with the impress of his own very personal temperament and outlook, no longer remained the casual opinion of a single individual, but took root in suitably constituted minds and became for many a valued possession, an enduring addition to their consciousness.
It was not until the rise in later times of a fully developed philosophy extending its range of interpretation to the whole of life that poetry was deprived of its special office of instructress to the aspiring minds among the people.63 Poetry had always been willing to exercise this function, but never so decidedly or with such fully conscious purpose as in the times of transition at the beginning of which Pindar lived—the transition from an unsophisticated faith in the traditional view of all things visible and invisible to a fresh stabilization of belief secured by, and resting upon, philosophic conviction. The need felt for the readjustment or verification of the ancestral or traditional forms of belief was vividly awakened, and it was still only poetry that could extend the light of its teaching to illuminate the minds of whole classes of the population. The influence of the poets must have increased in proportion as the numbers increased of those who were ready to receive the special bounty which they were able to offer. But if the influence wielded by Pindar, the Pan-Hellenic poet of the great Festivals, as the teacher of his people was, as we have seen, considerable, a very wide field indeed for the propagation of fruitful ideas lay open to the Attic tragedians in the huge concourse of the people which flocked together to hear their creations—a multitude which seemed all the greater for being confined within a narrower space. The poets themselves frequently allow it to be seen how seriously they regarded themselves as the teachers of their public, and the people admitted their claims. All men expected and demanded instruction from the word of the poet—the highest instruction from the highest poetry.64 We shall not be much mistaken 421 if we believe that the opinions and reflections to which Aeschylus, Sophokles, and not least Euripides, gave utterance in their tragic drama did not remain the sole property of those in whose minds they had first arisen.
§ 4
The Attic Tragedy of the fifth century must of its own accord, even if the conscious purpose of the dramatists had not tended in the same direction, have developed into an artistic product based on psychological interest. The real theatre of that drama must inevitably have become the interior of its hero’s mind.
The tragic poet attempted something hitherto unknown. The characters and events of ancient legend or history which had passed shadowlike before the minds of the hearers or readers of all earlier poetry, at the mercy of those hearers’ own private and variously limited imagination—these same events and characters were now to take form and body and appear visibly before the eyes of all beholders alike in equal clearness. What had hitherto seemed a dream-vision of the imagination now visibly presented itself to the eyes of the beholder, unchanging, precise, independent of the limitations of intellect among the audience, a concrete and self-moving object of waking perception. Thus reawakened to a palpable and fully realized life, the myth was seen in a new light. What in it was mere incident became subordinated to the personality of the man who plays his part in these events before our eyes, and whose importance and content is not exhausted in the single particular action. The old legend in becoming drama has undergone an extension both spatial and temporal, and even in externals the plot that unfolds itself in a series of momentary acts plays the least part in the story. The speeches and counter-speeches of the hero and the other actors who take part in the story were bound to take up the greater part of the time. Motives of action, expressed, debated and fought out in words, become more important than their eventual outcome in passionate deed or mortal woe. With the advance of artistic skill the intellect seeks to grasp the permanent outlines of the character that in the given circumstances can be moved by particular motives to particular acts. Thus, the complete materialization of the myth leads to its complete spiritualization. The eyes and mind of the beholder are directed less to the external events—these, being familiar from the ancient legend, could 422 awaken little curiosity—and more to the inward meaning and import of what the hero does and suffers.
And it was here that the dramatic poet was faced with his special and peculiar problem. What was to happen in his drama was settled out of hand by the course of the ancient legend (in a few cases by the course of historical events) and the lines along which his invention must move were planned out for him in advance. To give life to the personages of the drama, motivation and justification to the events of the drama—that was his particular business. But in this he was thrown entirely upon his own resources. Even if he could he was not permitted to derive the inner motive forces of the action from the real modes of feeling and thinking that had belonged to the distant past in which the myth had first been conceived. Such motives would have remained unintelligible to the audience, and his play would have been stillborn. But on the other hand, how was he to make plausible and intelligible to the vastly different mentality and changed feelings of the age in which he lived actions which really sprang from the habits and moral ideas of a long since vanished age? It is open to him (if he is not content to be a mere annalist simply stringing together bare events) to take the actual incident given him by the mythical legend and set over against it the actor in the story whose emotions are those of a modern man, and upon whose shoulders the burden of the event is laid; he may represent this opposition as beyond reconciliation, and so lead to the most simple and overwhelming of tragic conflicts. This simple opposition of character and destiny which places both the poet and his hero—another Hamlet—in a position of direct hostility to the mythological background can, however, never become the rule. It is the business of the poet as far as possible to assimilate and make his own the spirit that actually called forth the dark and cruel legend of the past, while yet remaining true to the mode of perception proper to his own time. He must manage to leave undisturbed the full primitive sense of the mythical story and bring it about that by its marriage with the spirit of a later age its meaning is not destroyed but deepened. He is committed to the search for an adjustment between the mental attitudes of an older and a newer age.
Such an adjustment came most easily to Aeschylus and satisfied the needs of his temperament. As one who had grown to manhood in the Athens of the period before the Persian wars his own character had its roots in ancient and traditional modes of thought. These he built up under the guiding 423 influence of his own special ways of thinking and feeling into a new and loftier whole: to corroborate this whole, which appeared to him as a law of the moral world, by reference to typical examples taken from mythology—examples chosen by him with deliberate care to serve as subjects of his dramatic poetry—this was one of the chief aims of his art. To the plot in its moral—nay, its religious—sense, all his thoughts are directed; the characters of the actors themselves are only illuminated from the standpoint of this special interest; their wider, independent existence outside the life of the drama which completely envelops them is not meant to draw attention to itself. He himself gives us the right, in studying his plays, to leave out of sight for a moment the representational aspect of the particular and the personal—all that in fact makes them essentially works of art—in order to observe more closely the under-current of generalized belief which we may reasonably call the ethic and theology of the poet.
Behind the living tissue of his artistic creation Aeschylus allows us to perceive pretty clearly the firm outlines of his own ethical and religious convictions. He fuses together elements prescribed to him from without with that which was dictated by his own spirit. What is prescribed to him by legend—which he allows to run its full course, in strictly dramatic form and by preference as a trilogy, a form in this case uniquely adapted to the subject—is a history that deals with the continued operation of the forces of evil and suffering upon several generations of a family, persisting from father to son and from son to son’s son. The belief also in such interconnexion of human destinies is prescribed to him from without. That the sins of the ancestors were visited upon their descendants here upon earth was an ancient article of faith especially strong in Attica.65 What Aeschylus contributes on his part is the unswerving conviction that the son and grandson of the sinner are punished for their own sin too. Suffering is punishment,66 and suffering would not have overtaken Oedipus, nor the sons of Oedipus, if Laïos had been the only guilty one—if their own sin had not deserved punishment.
And yet it does not lie within their power to choose whether the guilt shall be theirs or not: they cannot escape the deed of sin. How, we may ask, can a guilty deed be necessitated, imposed upon the guilty one by the decree of a higher power, and yet at the same time the fault of the doer of the deed, as though he had acted of his own free will? 424 The question is a perplexing and a formidable one, and it was by no means unnoticed by the poet. Behind the external apparatus of myth he finds himself faced by the problem of the freedom or determination of man’s will, which, as civilization and culture advance, feels itself morally responsible for every decision. He finds a way out of the difficulty in the view that it is not merely the deed of wickedness itself, but the conscious decision that leads up to the deed that arises out of the family inheritance of crime. The conscious choice and decision, though regarded as necessary, seemed to demonstrate fully the personal guilt and responsibility of the doer.67 The cloud of evil that proceeds from the deed of the ancestor casts a dark shadow also over the minds of his son and his son’s son. Not from his own mind or character does the will to do wrong take its origin. The noble, pure and resolute Eteokles, the model of intelligent manhood, the shield and protection of his people, falls in a moment, a victim to ominous destiny; his clear-sighted spirit is darkened, he gives himself up—his better self—for lost,68 and rushes upon his doom with awful resolve. The “sins derived from his ancestors”69 drive him on. Then, and not till then, is the full measure of penance at last paid for the crime done by the ancestor;70 his descendants are his representatives, and become guilty on his behalf and then, for their own guilt as well as his, they suffer retribution. Divinity, or a spirit of vengeance sent with a divine mission, drives the victims burdened with the inheritance of crime to the criminal deed. The divine guidance is actuated no longer, as in ancient and undying popular belief, by personal desire of vengeance, anger or malice,71 but by divine justice, acting with “just deceit”,72 that the measure of guilt may be fulfilled, and that the divine will to justice may have a means to complete satisfaction. The evil Spirit of the House assists Klytaimnestra to conceive the thought of murdering her husband;73 God himself guides and urges forward Orestes to the act of matricide which he plans and carries out with fully conscious purpose—a crime that is also a duty. To the poet the old ideas of the duty of avenging murder are a very living reality. The right to worship and cult possessed by the souls, their claim to vengeance when they have been violently done to death, their ghostly influence exerted upon the life and destinies of their immediate kinsfolk upon whom the duty of taking vengeance rests—all these things are for him not the obsolete fancies of an older generation but true and awful realities.74 Whole dramas, the Choephoroi and the Eumenides, for 425 instance, would appear as a meaningless beating of the air if they were not animated and made significant by unaltered faith in the right and the might of the souls, the reality and potency of the daimonic counsel, the Erinyes,75 who appear on behalf of the murdered mother. And now at last light breaks through the dark and clouded sky of awful imagination: where Duty and Crime have become inextricably confused, divine grace, though yielding nothing of its rights, finds at last a solution.
All these things, however—conflict and solution, crime and its expiation in ever-renewed crime and the suffering that arises thence—fulfil themselves in this world. Guilt is avenged always upon earth. The “other” world is by no means an indispensable link in this chain of conceptions and fancies; the poet’s view is rarely turned in that direction. Speculation upon the state of the soul after death, upon a blessed life in the kingdom of the spirits,76 does not interest him. Only such portions of the eschatological imaginings of the theologians as might serve the purposes of moral inspiration or support, found favour with the poet. There are occasional allusions to the judgment that, in Hades, “another Zeus” holds over the deeds of earthly life,77 but they remain dark and vague. It is not explained in what relation this judgment in Hades stands to the complete equivalence of guilt and destiny that, here upon earth, Zeus and Moira bring to completion in the person of the criminal himself and, after his death, of his descendants. Side by side with the allusions to the judgment in the underworld implying the complete consciousness of the dead, stand expressions that call up a picture of the senseless, twilight existence of the souls in Hades like that described in Homer.78 The poet, to whom every feature of the beliefs derived from the cult of the souls about the relations of the departed to the life of the dwellers on earth was intensely and vividly real, never cared to fix his attention for long upon the nature and condition of the dead in their separate other-world existence. In fact his chosen work of giving a moral significance and deeper meaning to popular and ancient faith was wholly derived from this faith itself; and so also was the lofty and consistent idea of divinity which fills the background of his picture of life. The generation which had fought at Marathon, in spite of a profounder and even more sombre meditation upon life and destiny, could still dispense almost entirely with the assistance of the theological doctrines of the sects who sought refuge from the dark and austere 426 realities of this unsatisfying world in thoughts of an imagined hereafter.
§ 5
Towards the great problems of dramatic philosophy—the problems of the freedom or compulsion of the will, the guilt and destiny of man—Sophokles took up a position that differed essentially from that of his great predecessor. A maturer and calmer self-abandonment to the observation of life and its difficulties made him less able to rest content with simple or sweeping solutions of the complexities; made him seek out other and more various modes of understanding. The individual man, stamped with the unique impression of his peculiar being, with him becomes more fully detached from the background of omnipotent might and universal law. The individual finds within himself the rules of his behaviour, the causes of his success, or his tragic failure. No petty, egotistical motive inspires the action of Antigone or Elektra: they are obedient to the old, unwritten laws of the gods. But the force that leads them to obey is derived solely from the special fashion and impulse of their own hearts. No one else could do what they do, suffer what they suffer. We realize the necessity and justification of what they do and suffer solely from the contemplation of the strength and weakness of their own characters as displayed for us in the action that takes place upon the stage. Indeed, the length to which Sophokles, in the “Elektra”, goes in the suppression of such universally recognized and binding motives as those derived from the duty of vengeance and the rights of injured souls, may well cause surprise. The special and individual case must for him carry its own justification within itself, and in fact it receives such justification so completely from the character and behaviour of the actors in the drama that, unlike the hero of Aeschylus’ tragedy, Orestes needs to have no qualm of doubt in the performance of his deed, and suffers no remorse after the murder of the wicked murderess. Once again as in the Homeric story, with Orestes’ “righteous deed of blood”,79 the circle of calamity is complete: no Erinys rises from the earth to demand his overthrow.80
So, too, when the suffering and calamity that befalls the mortal hero comes not from his own conscious decision and exercise of will, but from obscure decrees of fate it is still the special character of the hero which not only demands the greater part of our attention, but entirely conditions and sufficiently explains the course of events. The same 427 misfortune might overtake another man, but neither its inward nor its outward effects would be the same as they are for Oedipus or Aias. Only tragically extreme characters can have a tragic fate.
And yet, in these as in other tragedies, what gives the first impulse and direction to the course of the story does not arise from the will or character of their heroes. The mind of Aias is not free but subject when he performs the deed that sends him to his death. Oedipus, Deianeira take vengeance upon themselves for the deeds of horror that they have brought about without knowing what they did. Notwithstanding the fact that the interest of the “Philoktetes” centres so completely round the vividly contrasted characters of Philoktetes, Neoptolemos, and Odysseus, yet the situation which brings them into opposition is one which it was beyond the power or the purpose of man to bring about or to hinder. An obscure destiny plunges man into suffering, drives him to actions in the face of which easy and ready-made judgments about “guilt” and the relation between suffering and desert are silenced. It is not inherited family crime that here forces the son and the grandson to deeds that can hardly be called their own. The poet, it is true, knows of these conceptions81 that play so large a part in the poetry of Aeschylus, but they are mere historical tradition to him, not vital motives of his drama. Nor is it mere irrational chance, or impersonal fate working by necessity and without passion that directs the mind and guides the hand of the actor in his bondage. Clearly or obscurely moving about in the background of events the will of a divine power can be discerned that, inevitable as fate,82 guides the deeds and the fate of men in accordance with its own purpose.
The divine purpose brings to maturity a plan in which the individual man and his destiny are mere instruments. To make plain the premeditated character of this purposeful direction of human affairs is the object of the prophetic anticipations of the future, the divine oracles and prophecies of seers of which we hear so much in the plays. If this divine purpose should involve the fatal act, the undeserved suffering of the individual, then that purpose will be fulfilled though human happiness may be destroyed in the process, and though pain, crime, agony, and violent death may overwhelm the mortal individual. The well-being of the individual does not enter into the question where the intentions of a divinity that sees far beyond this puny existence are concerned. An honest, simple-minded, good-hearted man, without 428 deceit or fault, like Philoktetes, is abandoned for many long years to every kind of suffering in order that he may not interfere prematurely in the development of the war against Troy with the magic weapons that are in his possession.83 He is an involuntary martyr for the good of the whole community. In order that Herakles may be released from this life at the precise moment of time that has been fixed by divine foreknowledge,84 Deianeira, the most devoted and womanly character in the whole of the Attic drama, must out of the goodness of her heart and the love she bears to her husband send him to the most awful of deaths and then perish herself. Simply because such is the will of heaven85 must Oedipus, unknowing and blameless, slay his father, marry his mother, and plunge himself into the deepest depth of misery.
Thus, out of the darkness, the hand of divine superiority guides the destinies of humanity, the will and behaviour of men, according to its own purposes. The problematical in human life, the disparity between personal guilt and personal suffering, which daily experience brings before our eyes, seemed to the poet to be rendered more intelligible by this conception. He preaches dutiful submission to these dispensations of a higher power. He himself is one of the pious, in the specific sense of the word,86 for whom to perceive the will of the gods is sufficient to call forth adoration of the gods; who feel no need that this mighty will should justify itself to human ideas of morality and goodness.87 It may be right to call this will a holy will; but there is no need for it to prove itself such at the bar of human judgment. Nor does such piety find itself disturbed in its worship when, in order to assert the divine prerogative over humanity (whose first duty it is to recognize the limits of what is allowed and possible for it), divine inhumanity and cold lust of vengeance manifest themselves so clearly as in the Athene of the “Ajax”.88 It gives the measure of the peculiar and unique character of Sophoklean art and the Sophoklean attitude to life—a quite personal character not to be explained on abstract grounds—that this attitude of awed submissiveness in matters of religion could exist side by side with the strong appreciation and justification of the unfettered action of free individuality. Rarely—only once or twice in the plays—is a cry of pain wrested from the lips of one of these uncomplaining victims of a purpose not their own.89 As a rule, the eye shuns to behold, the judgment to criticize, the ultimate reasons of divine action. It is partly artistic restraint no doubt, but religious discretion, too, makes the poet leave 429 such things in semi-obscurity.90 The majesty of divine power remains for the most part in the background and does not mingle familiarly with men or too notoriously interfere with human destiny.91
But the individual who with his sufferings must serve a purpose that is not his own, Humanity that lives under such bitter laws—what elevating and consoling thoughts are awakened by the contemplation of their fate. The poet employs all the resources of his overwhelming art to secure the profoundest sympathies of his hearers for the undeserved sufferings of the victim, for the delusions of well-intentioned but limited vision that must always stray from the goal at which it aims. The moral of the play is not lost even on the sufferer’s foe as he beholds the error and guilt of the noble but misguided heart.92 What thus overwhelms the strong and the wise, the good and the well-meaning, through no fault of their own, may descend upon any member of the human family. Thus the destinies of men are allotted. The lament over the vanity and the sorrow of life, its brief happiness, and the uncertainty of its joy, is poured forth in memorable lines.93 They end on a note of resignation which gives the keynote of the poet’s own character; but there is a bitterness which remains behind.
It might have been supposed that one who thus abandoned all attempt to reconcile the worth and actions of men with their fate upon earth, would feel all the more need, for his own satisfaction and that of others, to prove the existence of a divine justice that should restore the balance in a future state of being. But the poet shows little sign of any such need. Thoughts of what may happen after death are never of very great moment to him. They never distinctly affect the behaviour of those whose deeds or suffering fill his plays.94
When, however, light is thrown for a passing moment on the unknown land beyond the grave the scene that imagination reveals hardly differs at all from the picture that had once been present to the minds of the Homeric singers. The place that is in store for the departed is Hades,95 the unlovely country of the dead,96 whither the Soul flits powerless, shadowlike, little more than a nothing,97 feeling no joy but no pain either;98 where it enters upon a state of insensibility that the grief-stricken sufferer on earth often longs for as a much-desired haven of rest.99 Plouton, Persephone, all the deities of the earth below,100 there rule over the departed. But it is not grace nor kindliness that prevails there—only Justice: Hades demands equal justice for all.101 430 Pious veneration of the gods continues also in the other world,102 and for the rest we hear nothing of either reward or punishment or of a final supplementing in the land of the Souls of the inadequacy of the justice that fulfils itself on earth.
But though departed into Hades the dead have still a claim upon the upper world and on those who still are living there. Together with the Homeric picture of the lower world is united the cult of the souls and the ideas, connected with that cult, of the continued life of the dead. The next of kin owe to the departed the ceremonious burial that is the first expression of their pious solicitude for his soul’s welfare.103 In two plays the “Ajax” and the “Antigone”, the love and loyalty of the survivors is obliged to fight for this right of the dead in desperate encounter with earthly authority and even with the sacrifice of their own devoted lives. Such instances serve to bring out clearly the fact that it is no empty convention or tradition that is thus defended and carried through to the end. Nor does the completion of the burial mark the end of the dead man’s relations with the upper world: even after that he may be benefited by offerings made at his grave.104 Information of what happens on earth may penetrate to the dead;105 and he himself, under the protection of the underworld spirits and of their assessor Dikê, who take cognizance of his claims,106 may interfere in the affairs of the living as a “Curse-spirit” upon those who disregard his wishes,107 by sending threatening dream-visions upon his foes,108 and as a very present help and unseen ally to his friends in their hour of need.109
As to an eternity of bliss awaiting the soul, the god in man, after its final release from the shackles of the body, the poet knows as little of such as he does of an eternity of damnation for the wicked. Only the quite special state of grace which is enjoyed by those who have been purified in the mysteries of the goddesses at Eleusis receives mention by him110: he is frequently disposed to think of this supreme expression of Attic worship with patriotic pride.111 But it is only a minority of the good who thus achieve by the grace of the goddesses a privileged “life” in the kingdom of shadows. One and only one is lifted by the divine grace clear of the human fate of annihilation, and in the Grove of the Erinyes the sorely-tried Oedipus is translated without seeing death out of this earthly life.112 So living a reality to this poet of ancient piety is the conviction that the divine miracle of translation113 is a literal truth, that he is even ready 431 to make this strange circumstance serve as the sole aim and purpose of a whole drama: a miracle which all the other scenes serve not so much to prepare as simply to postpone, and thus heighten the expectancy with which the event is awaited. It is not supreme virtue that secures an immortality for Oedipus which others also who showed an equal degree of goodness might possibly attain. He reveals himself to us as an innocent sufferer indeed,114 but also as obdurate in his rash and violent nature, vindictive, stubborn, and self-willed, not ennobled but rather brutalized by his sufferings.115 Nevertheless, divine power elevates him to the state of immortal Hero less almost for the sake of the satisfaction and bliss to himself as in order that he may be the saviour of the Attic land, the country of humanity and kindness that has taken into its protection116 the unfortunate one, and desires to preserve for ever his power of blessing.117 Just as once it had pleased divine power to overwhelm the innocent victim in a sea of crime and suffering, so now it pleases the same divine power to raise the sufferer, without any new or special merit on his side, to a fate of superhuman bliss.118 In his case a divine miracle occurs, into the ultimate reasons for which it is not profitable to inquire.
In his views, so far as he allows us to see them, of the things of the next world, Sophokles differs not at all from those who still saw life and worshipped the gods as their fathers had done before them. The great poet of human, tragic destiny, the profound student of the divine government of this mournful world, was unwilling to set by the side of it a brighter and more comforting picture of a spirit world of the imagination. In this, too, he is modest and will not say much—he knows no more of these matters, and in no other fashion, than “any other honest citizen of Athens”.119
§ 6
In the course of a long life Sophokles was able to make himself complete master of his art and grow up into strong and generous manhood without the guidance or support of either theological or philosophical learning. Theology he did not care to seek out in its hiding place, the obscurity of isolated sects. Philosophy, in the period of his impressionable youth, had not yet reached Athens, and when he had attained riper years his noble simplicity of temper had little to gain or to fear from the meditated wisdom or folly of the younger generation. In serene detachment he passed on his way through all the press and clamour of the market place. 432
The moving impulse which since the end of the sixth century had collected together at Athens all the intellectual forces of Greece for a final expansion of their capacity now began, in the middle of the fifth century, to take hold of philosophy as it had long since done literature and the fine arts. Athens saw the last representatives of Ionian physiology gathered together within her walls. Some, like Anaxagoras, took up their residence there for a long period, and left the impress of their teaching upon the foremost minds of the city. The others who paid briefer visits were those who in conscious opposition to the recent trend of thinking, stoutly upheld the older principles of philosophic Monism or Hylozoism, such as Diogenes of Apollonia or Hippon of Samos; or who sought like Archelaos to reconcile the old and the new Ionic doctrine. Besides these, Athens was a headquarters of the wandering exponents of the newest wisdom, the Sophists. Nowhere did unfettered discussion find such cultivated appreciation of its daring; nowhere was such an eager welcome given to the dialectical word-play that, seeming to be an end in itself, was destined to become the most fruitful nursery of native Athenian philosophy. All traditional beliefs and customs that had not their origin or their justification in reflexion were already doomed as soon as they, together with every conventional view of life and the world, were deprived of their natural protection of unchallenged self-evidence by the cold scrutiny of the sovereign tyrant Dialectic. The Sophists, those skirmishers of a new and as yet unrecognizable philosophy, scattered and put to flight the old guard of positive and doctrinal wisdom, but to the individual, who was bidden to depend upon his own resources, they offered stimulus to reflection in abundance but no permanent foothold in the shifting sands of opinion. It would be but a final assertion of the principle that there are no principles if by any chance the Sophists themselves should for a moment speak in the language of edification and, for example, lend the support of their eloquence to certain articles of doctrine that provided a positive teaching as to the nature and life of the soul.120
If Sophokles remained quite unaffected by this whole movement which reached its flood tide in Athens, Euripides was drawn completely into its current. He sought out philosophers and sophists personally and in their writings. His was a spirit that urgently desired to know the truth and he followed every available guide to knowledge and wisdom for a stage upon their journey. But he was never able to continue permanently in any one direction; in the restlessness 433 and bewilderment of search and experiment he is the true son of his age.
His philosophical and sophistical leanings were sufficiently marked to make it impossible for him to accept any part of the belief or tradition of his countrymen without trial. So far as it is possible within the limits of dramatic art, he instituted an unsparing and unhesitating criticism of all accepted things, and in the process felt himself immeasurably superior to the wit and wisdom of the past. And yet he never satisfied himself. He could never rest content with a merely negative position, for all onesidedness was foreign to his nature. The tremendous honesty of his nature made it impossible for him to admit that element of frivolity which made the sophistic movement and the dialectical negation of all certainty so simple and attractive, and at the same time took away half its sting. But he could take nothing easily; and so with all his sophistic enlightenment he was never happy. The pupil of the Sophists would hear every other side as well; there were even moments when he longed to take refuge in the restful narrowness of old and traditional piety. But it was not given to him to settle down in any fixed set of opinions; all his convictions were provisional, mere hypotheses adopted for the purposes of experiment. Afloat on a changeful sea, he let himself be driven hither and thither by every wind of intellectual excitement or artistic necessity.
When all convictions were involved together in a state of perpetual change and instability, the conception of the nature and being of the soul and its relation to the powers of life and death could not alone remain in fixed and dogmatic certainty.