EXTANT PLAYS OF SOPHOCLES.

• King Œdipus: this and the next two tragedies form a trilogy.
• Œdipus at Colonus: well adapted to flatter the local pride of the Athenians.
• Antigone: based on the story of “the Seven against Thebes.” Antigone was the daughter of Œdipus. Her uncle, King Creon, forbids the burial of her brother Polyni’ces, the instigator of the war and one of its victims. Sisterly affection proves stronger than fear of the royal decree; Antigone performs the last sad offices for her brother, and is entombed alive for her disobedience.
• The Trachinian Women: subject, the poisoning of Hercules by his wife Deïanira.
• Electra: called from the heroine, Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, who is overpowered by hatred for her unnatural mother and Ægisthus. The plot culminates with the slaughter of the guilty pair by Orestes the avenger. Finest passage, the meeting between Orestes and his sister.
• Ajax: founded upon the madness of Ajax in consequence of the bestowal of Achilles’ arms on Ulysses in preference to himself; his suicide and funeral.
• Philocte’tes: the hero was a Thessalian prince, whom the Greeks treacherously abandoned on the island of Lemnos. Afterward, when informed by the oracle that Troy would not fall until the arrows of Hercules, which Philoctetes had, were brought to bear on its defenders, they induced him to take part in the war.

Euripides.—In 480 B.C., on the island of Salamis, while the battle that was to decide the future of Greece raged in the neighboring waters, Euripides first saw the light. Æschylus, in his prime, was at the time bravely fighting on an Athenian galley; while Sophocles, but fifteen years of age, stood ready, should the gods grant his countrymen success, to celebrate the victory with the arts in which he excelled.

The third of the illustrious tragic trio was carefully trained; painting, rhetoric, and philosophy, besides the customary gymnastic exercises, engaged his attention; and he had not attained his eighteenth year when he finished his first drama. Not, however, until 441 B.C. did he, by winning the tragic prize, verify a prediction made before his birth that he would be crowned with sacred chaplets.

His reputation was now secure; and though he was exposed to bitter partisan attacks, his plays became widely popular. The philosopher Socrates always went to see them performed, and is even suspected of having had a hand in their composition. So great was the estimation in which they were held at Syracuse, that, after the surrender of the Athenian armies which had attempted the reduction of that city (413 B.C.), such of the soldiers as could teach their captors verses of Euripides were exempted from the cruelties inflicted on their fellows, and sent home to thank the author for their liberty. Athens itself is said to have been saved nine years later, when the Spartan general Lysander was minded to lay it in ashes, by the singing of a chorus of Euripides at the triumphal banquet; who could raise his hand against the city of one that had discoursed poetry so sweet?

Like his brother tragedians, Euripides drew his subjects from the mythical history of his country. His plays numbered seventy-five, some say ninety-two; and the best of them rank with the best pieces on the roll of dramatic literature. He composed slowly and with care. On one occasion, it is related, when he had completed only four verses in three days, Euripides was told by a poetaster that in the same time he had produced a hundred. “And yours,” replied the great man, “will live for three days; mine, forever.”

Euripides spent the last two years of his life at the Macedonian court, then the abode of many illustrious men. He went there in search of rest, but found that he had only exchanged persecution at home for jealousy abroad. The honors heaped upon him by the Macedonian prince, together with his own superior genius, raised him up enemies. In the king’s savage hounds, if we may credit the legend, they saw the means of removing an obnoxious rival; and while Euripides was walking in his patron’s garden, he was attacked and fatally mangled by the fierce brutes (406 B.C.).

Athens felt the loss, and went into mourning at news of his death; vainly she supplicated the Macedonian king for his ashes. They were magnificently interred at Pella; while his country was forced to remain content with a statue, and a cenotaph on which was inscribed, “All Greece is the monument of Euripides.” His verses, as he predicted, were immortal; admiration of them led an epigrammatist to write:

With Euripides, the glory of the Athenian stage descended into the tomb; and Tragedy found no one worthy to fill his place till Shakespeare’s day.

Style of Euripides.—Sophocles once remarked that he represented men as they ought to be, Euripides as they are. This holding of the mirror up to nature was what Athenian taste began to demand; Euripides had the tact to see what was wanted, and the genius to make the innovation successfully. His heroes and heroines talked and acted like men and women of the day; hence he has been accused of degrading his art by introducing the commonplace into his dramas, of lowering Greek tragedy to the level of every-day life.

A more serious charge also was laid at his door—that of impiety. Euripides rejected the faith of his fathers; we need not, therefore, look in his plays for the religious fervor of Æschylus, or even for the high moral tone of Sophocles. In one of his lines the doctrine of mental reservation appears,

a sentiment which led to his prosecution for justifying perjury.

While Euripides was inferior to Æschylus in majesty, to Sophocles in symmetry and finish, he surpassed both in delineating character, and particularly in representing the human passions. He was the most pathetic of the three, and in the portraiture of woman stands second to no poet, ancient or modern. His heroines are his master-figures. Traces of art are sometimes apparent in his writings, and occasionally he verges on the sensational.

The Mede’a is the chef d’œuvre of this author. Its plot is derived from the story of Medea, a Colchian princess proficient in sorcery. She won the love of the Greek prince Jason, who came to Colchis in the ship Argo to obtain possession of the Golden Fleece, helped him to secure the object of his search, and eloped with him to Greece. But when Jason beheld the fair Glaucè, daughter of the King of Corinth, he resolved to thrust aside Medea in favor of his new love, forgetful of the dark power of the enchantress.

The opening scene is laid at Corinth, after the nuptials of Jason and Glaucè. The infidelity of her husband has transformed Medea into a tigress, whose conflicting passions the poet touches with consummate skill—the anger of the dishonored wife, the love of the tender mother, the steeling of the woman’s heart against its deep affection, the all-absorbing thirst for vengeance.

The play ends with Medea’s terrible revenge. Banished by the king from Corinth, she begs for one day of preparation, in which she sends to the bride a costly robe and golden wreath poisoned by her fell arts. The unsuspecting Glaucè smilingly arrays herself in these presents; but her smiles give place to shrieks of agony as the enchanted garments burn into her flesh and the chaplet blazes in her hair. Her father tries to save her, and perishes in her flaming embrace. Medea completes her work by the murder of her two children—Jason’s sons—and after jeering at her husband’s grief disappears with the corpses in a chariot whirled through the air by dragons.

One of the most affecting passages in Euripides is found in

MEDEA’S LAST WORDS TO HER SONS.

EXTANT PLAYS OF EURIPIDES.

• Alcestis, first represented 438 B.C.
  Medea, ” 431 ”
  Hippol’ytus, ” 428 ”
  Hecuba, ” 423 ”
  Heracli’dæ, ” 421 ”
• The Suppliants.
• Ion.
• The Raging Hercules.
• Andromache.
• The Trojan Women, 415 B.C.: pathetic by reason of the plaints of the captive women.
• Electra, first represented 413 B.C.
• Helen,   first represented 412 ”
• Iphigeni’a at Tauris.
• Orestes, 408 B.C.: demoralizing in its portraiture of crime.
• The Phœnician Women.
• The Female Bacchanalians: produced at the Macedonian court.
• Iphigenia at Aulis: not acted till after the author’s death.
• Cyclops: a satyric drama (chorus of satyrs).

Lost Tragedies.—Dramatic literature has sustained an irreparable loss, not only in the missing plays of the three great masters, but also in those numberless works of their contemporaries and occasionally successful competitors now buried in oblivion. From the allusions of two or three Greek authors, a few meagre particulars may be gleaned, now of one, now of another—but they only serve to make us more painfully conscious of our loss.

Greek Comedy.—Comedy was older than tragedy in Greece. Thirty years before the time of Thespis, Susa’rion of Meg’ara, in his burlesque exhibitions, improved somewhat on the extempore jests and village-songs of the Bacchic revellers, and hence has been called the inventor of comedy. Susarion was no great lover of the fair sex, if we may judge by an ungallant sentiment of his which has been preserved: “Woman is a curse, but we cannot conduct our household affairs without this curse; therefore to marry is an evil, and not to marry is an evil.” Perhaps he had taken to wife a Xantippe.

The poet Epicharmus, also of Megara, but the Sicilian city of that name, first committed his effusions to writing; he was the author of thirty-five comedies, some of them on subjects not mythological.

The development of comedy, however, was interrupted. The Tragic Muse enforced her claims at the expense of her elder sister, and the latter was for a season neglected. But the flourishing era of republican Athens, when the poet was free to lash whom he chose, saw comedy restored to the favor of the satire-loving people. It may be said to have been perfected by Aristophanes. He not only ridiculed the follies and vices of the day, laid bare family secrets on the stage, and edified his audiences by caricaturing the rich and great with masks and costumes which reproduced their peculiarities, but fearlessly assailed the government. When all others shrunk from playing so dangerous a rôle, he himself performed the part of the insolent demagogue Cleon (originally a leather-dresser), whom he mercilessly “cut into sandal-strips” in his “Knights.”

Even the gods were not slighted by the comic poets. The gourmand Hercules devours as fast as the cook can prepare victuals; Prometheus is protected from the elements by an umbrella; Bacchus swaggers as a fop and coward. Comedy in the hands of Aristophanes and his contemporaries was to the Athenians what our press is to us, but went still further. Always personal and sometimes scurrilous in its attacks, too often coarse and licentious in its tone, it yet doubtless accomplished much good in restraining political ambition, checking public corruption, and modifying the prevailing faults of society.

Aristophanes.—The oldest comedies extant are those of Aristophanes, a citizen of Athens by birth or adoption, born about the middle of the fifth century B.C. If he was an adopted son, Athens had good reason to be proud of her protégé. His society was sought by the learned and great. He became the idol of the people, who fined such as brought libelsuits against him, and voted him an olive crown for exposing the misconduct of their rulers.

Nor was his fame confined to Athens. All Greece, and Sicily too, laughed at his humorous sallies. The Persian king enjoyed his pungent satires, and regarded him as such a power in Greece that when Spartan ambassadors sought an alliance with Persia against their Athenian rivals, the king asked on which side the comic poet was arrayed; for, said he, “the party whose cause Aristophanes espouses will certainly win.”

Aristophanes was loyal to the true interests of his country, and declined the flattering invitations of Dionysius to dwell in ease at Syracuse with the luminaries of his age. He longed for the glorious Athens of the past, and attacked whatever conflicted with his conservative ideas. None escaped his well-aimed shafts. He was specially severe on the Sophists, a new class of teachers at Athens, whose forte lay in chopping logic and splitting hairs, and who taught the tricks of rhetoric rather than practical morality. In his “Clouds” he derides their sharp practices and unsound system of education, striking them over the head of Socrates, the exponent of true philosophy, whose life was devoted to combating the false teachings of these very pretenders.

That Socrates was merely the scape-goat is plain, for he and Aristophanes were intimate friends. When the play was first exhibited, the philosopher, who was in the audience, took it all in good part, and even rose that the people might compare him with the caricature presented, which exaggerated his eccentricities of dress and figure—his pug-nose, thick lips, shabby garments, and absent-minded stare. The chorus of changing clouds symbolized the meretricious charms of sophistry.

“The Clouds” opens in the sleeping-apartment of Strepsi’ades, an Athenian citizen, his son Pheidippides occupying a pallet near him. The slaves of the household are abed in an adjoining room. Strepsiades, oppressed by debt incurred through the extravagance of his “precious son,” a fast young man addicted to fast horses, is disturbed by the recollection of numerous outstanding bills and notes about to mature. He wakes before daylight and calls a slave:—

Strepsiades finally bethinks him of a plan for paying his debts. He will have his son trained by the Sophists; and when the creditors bring the case into court, Pheidippides shall plead his cause, and defeat them with fallacious arguments even in the face of a thousand witnesses. Father and son at once arise, dress, and walk out in the direction of the Sophists’ school. Arrived in front of it, Strepsiades remarks:—

Failing to induce his son to enter the Thinking-school, Strepsiades resolves himself to master the fashionable Argument that “pays no bills;” he has an interview with Socrates, and is introduced to the Clouds, the new goddesses of this misty philosophy.

One of the most beautiful passages of the play—having the ring of the true metal—is the chorus of Clouds responding to the call of Socrates—first, behind the scenes, in the distance; then nearer; then rising from the lips of twenty-four gauze-clad nymphs, who descend upon the stage as personifications of the ethereal deities.

But though the Clouds assist Socrates in teaching Strepsiades, the pupil proves an utter dunce. Finally, in a moment of impatience, Socrates kicks him out of the school.

At last Pheidippides is prevailed upon to study with the Sophists. He proves an apt scholar, rapidly developing into an unprincipled scamp. When his education as a sharper is completed, he brings to bear his specious arguments against the creditors, and cheats them out of their dues. So far, so good; but his notions of filial duty have also been greatly modified by the instructions of Socrates. A quarrel arising in the family, he hesitates not to fall upon his father with a cudgel, and threatens to do the same by his mother if she provokes him.

With a curse upon Socrates, the outraged old gentleman calls his slaves, hurries to the Thinking-school, and sets fire to the building. Thus the play ends.

Beneath the pleasantry of Aristophanes is a substratum of solid sense; as is apparent in “the Birds,” an ingenious play in which the woodland songsters take characters. It was produced at a time when the Athenians, puffed up with vanity, confidently looked for the reduction of Sicily and the dominion of Greece. Aristophanes alone, at this critical period, ventured to raise the note of warning, and satirize their foolish ambition. The choruses in this drama ring with the sweet music of the wild woods; they were rendered by twenty-four performers plumed so as to represent as many different kinds of birds. The Hoopoe thus calls his fellows to a mass-meeting:—

Style of Aristophanes.—In weighing the merits of Aristophanes, it must be remembered that many of his peculiar beauties cannot be translated, and that we lose his local hits from our inability to see things from an Athenian standpoint. He is often indelicate in his allusions; he is as ready with town slang and the cant of the shop as with the most elegant phrase. But Attic salt seasons the whole, and none ever handled the versatile Greek tongue more deftly. In his command of language, he is equalled only by Plato, who felt the comic poet’s power when he said that in the soul of Aristophanes the Graces sought an imperishable shrine. Amid all his humor and buffoonery sparkles genius of the highest order. His aim seems to have been to elevate his art. Some of the improvements he claimed to have introduced, are thus set forth in an address which he puts into the mouth of the leader of the chorus in his “Peace:”—

Aristophanes outlived the license of the old comedy, which died with liberty. When in 404 B.C. the popular government was overthrown, and Thirty Tyrants, supported by Sparta, lorded it over Athens, a statute was passed making personal attacks on the stage capital offences; an actor who defied the law was actually starved to death. Thenceforth the comic poet dared not individualize the object of his satire; he tilted against vice and folly in general, or thrust at his intended victims indirectly under assumed names.

Aristophanes died about 380 B.C. No other comic poet could vie with him during his lifetime; none worthy to be his successor arose after his death, for “Nature broke the mould in which he was cast.” Of fifty-four comedies from his pen, eleven remain entire.

HISTORY.

During this halcyon age of Greek poetry, prose also was cultivated, and in the century following the Persian Wars it was brought to maturity. After the victories that secured her freedom, Greece felt the need of a national historian to record the story of her struggles and triumphs. The earliest narrators, as has been shown, confined themselves to mythology and tradition: the times now demanded an artist who could paint with faithful pencil on living canvas those scenes that were the glory of Hellas—and in Herodotus of Halicarnassus that artist appeared.

Herodotus (born 484 B.C.).—Halicarnassus was the capital of a Dorian confederacy of states in southern Asia Minor. Its queen Artemisia supported Xerxes in his quarrel with Greece; and although the Athenians, provoked that a woman should take the field against them, offered an immense reward for her capture, she escaped the perils of war, and carried her kingdom safely through the political troubles of the time.

The parents of Herodotus were persons of rank and property. His writings prove him to have been well read in the literature of his country. Though not an Ionian born, he adopted the Ionic dialect—the dress in which Greek prose first appeared.

Herodotus spent the best twenty years of his life in travelling over the greater part of the known world, studying the history, geography, and customs of the countries he visited. Thebes and Memphis, Tyre and Jerusalem, Babylon and Ecbat’ana—with all he made personal acquaintance, extending his tour as far west as the Greek settlements in Italy, and as far south as the first cataract of the Nile.

The marvellousness of the stories he collected brought down upon Herodotus the ridicule of his fellow-citizens; so quitting Halicarnassus when about thirty-seven years of age, he settled at Athens. Here, it is related, he read his history, still in the rough, to the admiring people, who voted him a handsome reward. Here also he seems to have become intimate with Sophocles and his great contemporaries; and here, perhaps, his ambition was kindled to add another star to the galaxy that made Athens the glory of the world.

Not long, however, did Herodotus remain at the capital. As one of a band of colonists sent out by Pericles in 443 B.C., he crossed to Italy, and aided in founding the town of Thurii, near the ruins of Syb’aris (see Map, p. 304). At Thurii he spent his last years in revising, enlarging, and polishing his history; yet we are not to believe that he ceased to indulge his passion for travelling when Sicily and southern Italy lay so invitingly before him. He died at the age of sixty, leaving the great work of his life unfinished.

The main subject of our author’s work is the Græco-Persian War and the triumph of his country. His narrative is from time to time relieved by delightful episodes. Indeed, we owe to him not a few of those romantic tales that invest ancient history with its peculiar charm; while modern research has verified many of the wonder-stories that provoked the derision of his countrymen. Nor do his digressions mar the unity of his history, which is planned and developed as skilfully as a drama of Sophocles.

The style of Herodotus is poetical, clear, familiar, fascinating, and marked by a pleasing variety. “His animation,” says Macaulay, “his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent for description and dialogue, and the pure sweet flow of his language, place him at the head of narrators.” His history is the first work of its kind that has descended to us entire. It is divided into nine books, said to have been read by the author at the Olympic Games, and there to have received the names of the Nine Muses, which they still bear.[34] Certainly no names could have been more appropriately connected with a work that has entitled its author to be called through all time “the Father of History.”—Extracts follow:—

XERXES AND THE PILOT.