Where the content and character of the fable chosen as the subject of his drama demand it, the poet frankly adopts the popular view of the nature and destiny of the departed soul, its power and claim upon the worship of the survivors upon earth. In the fairy-tale play of the “Alcestis” the whole apparatus of popular belief plays its part; the God of Death and his awful office, the dwelling of the dead in the underworld, are spoken of as facts and creatures of experience and reality.121 The elaborate funeral ceremonies owed to the dead are treated with the utmost seriousness and precision.122 A whole drama, the “Suppliant Women”, has as its real subject, or at least as its ostensible motive, the religious importance of a ritual burial,123 nor is there any lack of isolated passages in which the importance of burial and the honour paid to graves is stressed.124 The survivors on earth give pleasure to the dead by offerings at their graves,125 434 and in this way obtain their goodwill and can count upon their support.126 Power and honour belong not only to the great ones of antiquity translated to a higher state of being;127 not only “Heroes” can extend their influence beyond their graves and affect the course of earthly events:128 from the soul of his murdered father, the son expects assistance and succour in his time of need. The dread creatures of antique faith, the Erinyes, exact vengeance for the murdered mother.129

But at this point it becomes apparent that the poet only associates himself for his own purposes with this circle of ancient and sanctified popular fancy—so long in fact as it suits the tone that he wishes to give to the drama and its characters. The Erinyes are excellent material for the play—that in reality their horrid figures only exist in the imagination of the mentally diseased is clearly asserted in the “Orestes”.130 The whole series of beliefs and demands—murder ever calling forth fresh murder in accordance with the sacred duty of vengeance, the Erinyes, the bloodthirsty patrons of the murdered victim who leaves no proper avenger behind him—all these have ceased to have any validity for him. The “animal and bloodthirsty” part of these figures of ancient belief call forth the loathing of the poet living in the days of organized justice and humaner manners.131 He does not believe in the souls’ right to blood; the ancient legends which depend on this right are an abomination to him. In fact, he only seems to have written his plays about them in order, by the manner of his presentation, to have his revenge upon this material that was almost unavoidably thrust upon him by the tradition of the tragic stage. The duty of the living to offer a cult to the departed souls becomes doubtful in its turn. The seriousness with which that cult is sometimes handled in the plays is compromised by such reflections as these: it is certain that it matters little to the dead whether rich offering are placed in their graves or not; such things only satisfy the idle vanity of the living;132 honour and dishonour are of no further consequence to the dead.133 How should they be, if the departed no longer feel either pleasure or pain, are nothing at all, as is repeatedly declared even in the middle of the “Alcestis”?134

It is evident that only from an arbitrarily adopted point of view do the picturesque creations of popular belief in the soul and of the cult of souls seem real to the poet; apart from this they disappear from his mind like the creatures of a dream.135 The teachings of the theologians supplied him with no real substitute for popular faith; at the most they were a 435 momentary and passing stimulus. No doubt he did not shut his eyes completely to these manifestations of the spiritual life of his time. His plays contain allusions to Orphic poetry and he joins the asceticism of the Orphics to the cold virtue of his Hippolytos.136 The thought that the soul has fallen from a higher state of being and is enclosed within the body like the dead man in his coffin takes captive his imagination for a moment. “Who knows then whether life is not a kind of death,” so that in death the soul awakes to its real life?137 The gloomy view of human destiny upon this earth to which the poet so often gives expression, might seem to hint at a consolation to come in a more satisfactory hereafter; but the poet has no longing for the consolation offered by the theologians. Among the many and various reflections of the poet upon the reality that may reveal itself when the curtain is drawn aside by death, we never meet with the conception that lies at the bottom of the assurances made by the theologians—the conception that the spiritual individual is certain of its immortality because in its individuality it is of divine nature and is itself a god.138 True, he is the author of the bold saying so often quoted and varied in later times, that God is nothing else but the mind that dwells in men.139 But this makes no allusion to the theological doctrine of the multiplicity of individual gods or daimones banished into the life of men; it rather implies a semi-philosophic doctrine of the soul in which one may perceive for the first time the expression of a permanent conviction on the part of the poet.

In quite inapposite contexts Euripides sometimes introduces passing allusions to a philosophical view of the world and humanity, that is the more certainly to be regarded as the private conviction of the poet himself as the utterances fail to correspond fully with the character of the person in the play who makes them, and do not arise necessarily from the dramatic situation. Everything in the world has had its origin from Earth and “the Aether of Zeus”; the Earth is the maternal womb from which the Aether brings everything to birth.140 Both constituents combine to produce the multiplicity of appearance; they are not fused together nor are they to be derived from a single common original element;141 they remain in dualistic contrast side by side.142 It was probably the dualism of this cosmological fancy that reminded the ancients of Anaxagoras; but these statements cannot be regarded as simply a poetical version of the doctrine of Anaxagoras;143 for they derive the multiplicity of matter and things from the simple element of “Earth” from which 436 they arise only by a process of change and transformation, while in the “seedmixture” of Anaxagoras, the unchangeable seeds of all things only separate themselves out from the whole and give rise by mechanical reassemblings to all the perceived appearances of the world. The “Aether” of Euripides in its relations with the “Earth” is besides being the active partner also the intellectual and animated element. The isolation of such an element from the rest of matter does indeed remind us of the procedure of Anaxagoras. But the poet’s Aether is still an element though it may be penetrated by mind and animated by spirit; it is not a mental being standing over against all the other elements in essential distinctness like the Nous of Anaxagoras. The fact that it is the element of the Aether, i.e. the dry and hot air, in which intellectual capacity is said to inhere, may be regarded as having been borrowed from Diogenes of Apollonia, a philosopher who was held in considerable estimation at Athens at that time, and who was well known to Euripides.144 In his doctrine, the air (which indeed, in contrast to the view of Euripides, produces all other things simply out of itself) is expressly identified with the “Soul” and is itself described as “having understanding”.145

This view of the elementary forces and constitution of the universe, made up as it is from philosophical suggestions of a scarcely reconcilable character, in which the dualistic tendency is in fact finally predominant, suggests itself to the poet whenever in an exalted mood he speaks of the final destiny of the human soul. The soul on its separation from the body will depart to join the “Aether”. But in such conceptions it is not always the imagination of the philosopher-poet that finds expression. On this subject it is accompanied or replaced by a more popular view that only distantly resembles it, but which led to the same result. When we hear now and again of the Aether, the luminous atmosphere above the clouds, as being the dwelling place of the departed souls,146 the view—more theological than philosophic in its character—seems to be implied that after death the liberated soul will float upwards to the seat of the gods147 which has long ceased to be situated upon Olympos, but is in “heaven” or in this same Aether. This, too, was the meaning of a saying traditionally ascribed to Epicharmos the comic-poet of Sicily who was himself versed in philosophy. In this saying the pious man is assured that for him death will bring no evil for his “mind” will dwell permanently in “heaven”.148 This conception, which appears so frequently in later epitaphs, 437 must have been familiar to popular imagination at Athens at an early period; at least in the grave-epigram officially dedicated by the state to the memory of the Athenians who fell in the year 432 before Poteidaia, we find the belief expressed (as a commonly received opinion) that the souls of these brave men have been received by the “Aether” just as the earth has received their bodies.149 Such official use implies a commonly accepted opinion and the fundamental ideas of the popular cult of the souls might have led to similar results. From the beginning popular belief had regarded the psyche, which got its name from the air or breath, as closely akin to the winds, the mobile air and its spirits. It would not be difficult for the idea to arise that the soul, as soon as it was free to decide for itself what should become of it, should go to join the elemental spirits that are its kinsfolk. Perhaps this, too, is what Epicharmos means when on another occasion he says that in death when the united are parted asunder each returns whence it came, the body to earth, but the soul up to the heights—its name, in which allusion is made to its perpetual mobility, being now after the example of Xenophanes derived from the breath of the wind, the moving air (πνεῦμα), a usage which became very common in later times.150

But perhaps the use of such a name is an indication that this poet also regards the soul as standing in a close relation and kinship with the Aether that is destined to receive it after its release from the body; so that from this side, too151—in addition to the more popular conception just mentioned—Euripides may have received a hint for his peculiar version of the physiological theory of Diogenes. In his view the soul participates in the nature of the Aether. But it is more important to notice that the Aether participates in the nature and true reality of the soul; it possesses life, consciousness and power of thought. They both belong to one family. The Aether according to the poet—and here the speculations of Anaximenes as revived by Diogenes are unmistakable152—is a true vital atmosphere, an all-embracing psychic element, so that it becomes, not a mere vehicle of mind, but the All-Mind itself. The concept is even condensed and half-personified, it is called by the name of the highest divine power, Zeus,153 and the poet as though speaking of a personal god, calls it “immortal”.154 The human mind, too, as akin to the universal god and the All-Mind, appears, as it had been in the teaching of Diogenes,155 as a part of this God, this universal Mind. God is the mind, and the mind and understanding in us is God—so the poet clearly asserts.156 In death, when 438 the separation of the mind from its earthly elements takes place, the Pneuma of man will “not indeed live”, as it had done in the separate existence of the individual man, but it will “preserve an immortal consciousness”, entering into the immortal Aether and fusing itself with the All-living and the All-thinking.157 None of the physiologists who conceived the same idea of an immortality excluding the personal immortality of the individual, of the universal spirit of life in mankind, has expressed his meaning with such distinctness as this philosophic layman.

The poet may have wished to remain permanently upon the sublime heights of this Pantheistic vision; but he must, in his peculiar all-embracing spirit that never held fast to any one view with enduring persistence, have experienced too often the truth of the saying of Protagoras that every statement calls forth its equally legitimate opposite,158 to have become an unswerving adherent of any single opinion. Death, and whatever may reveal itself after death, is beyond the experience of any man.159 It may be that complete disappearance into nothingness follows death; that the dead man becomes simply nothing.160 It may be that in the permanence of the human race the great name and the renown of glorious deeds lives on undying.161 Whether there may remain besides a vestige of life in a spirit world, who can tell? Perhaps such a thing is hardly even to be wished.162 It is just what makes death such a comforting thing, that it puts an end to all feeling and therefore to all pain and every care. We should not lament over our fate if, like the harvests that follow each other in the course of the years, one generation of men after another flowers, fades, and is carried off. So it is ordered in the course of Nature, and we ought not to be dismayed by anything that is rendered inevitable by her laws.163

NOTES TO CHAPTER XII