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CHAPTER VIII
MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA
The epithet `dramatic' has often been applied to Thucydides' work; but
usually nothing more is meant than that be allows his persons to speak for
themselves, and presents their character with vividness. (note 1) The
dramatization which we have pointed out in the treatment of Cleon is a very
different thing; it is a principle of construction which, wherever it operates,
determines the selection of incidents to be recorded, and the proportions and
perspective assigned them. In this chapter we shall attempt to describe and
analyse the type of drama that we have to do with, and to trace the titerary
inEuence under which Thucydides worked.
We ought first, perhaps, to meet a possible objection. It may be urged
that Thucydides in his preface expressly excludes anything of the nature of
poetical construction from his literal record of what was said and what was
done. He criticizes the methods of poets and story-writers, and warns us that,
at the cost of making his story `somewhat unattractive', he intends to exclude
`the mythical' (tÚ muy<<dew). He cannot, therefore, it might be
inferred, have done what we have thought we found him doing. But we would ask
for a careful examination of the passage in question. What was in Thucydides'
thoughts when he wrote it, and above all, what precisely did he mean to exclude
when he banished `the mythical'?
The words occur towards the ena' of the intioduction, (note 2)
[1. This seems to be all that Plutarch means: i Youkud[[currency]]dhw
ée< t" lÒg[[florin]] prÚw taÊthn
èmillçtai tØn [[section]]nãrgeian,
o[[perthousand]]on yeatØn poi[[infinity]]sai tÚn
ékroatÆn, de Glor. Ath. 3. [2. i. 1-23.]
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which is designed to establish Thucydides' belief that the Peloponnesian
war was the most memorable of all that had ever been in Greece. The possible
rivals, he points out, are the Trojan war and the Persian invasion. For the
first of these events the only literary evidence we have is that of the epic
poets, and chiefly of Homer, whose record cannot be checked by direct
observation, while much of his theme through the lapse of time has passed, or
`won over', into the region of the mythical ad incredible. (note 1) The only
tests we have are ceiin indications in the existing condition of Greece which
seem inconsistent with the past state of things as represented by the literary
authorities. With these indications we must be content; and they suffice to
show that the epic poets embellished their tale by exaggeration. (note 2) The
story-writers, again, on whom we depend for the history of the Persian wars,
were not bent upon accurate statement of truth;--witness the carelessness of
Herodotus about points of detail. Their object was rather to make their
recitations attractive and amusing to their audience; and if we discount their
evidence accordingly, we shall find, going by ascertained facts alone, that the
Peloponnesian war was the greatest ever seen.Thucydides next
passes abruptly to the formulation of his own method; he intends to record what
was said and what was done as accurately and literally as possible. The result,
he then remarks, will probably be somewhat unattractive to an audience at a
recitation, because the facts recorded will have nothing `mythical' about them;
(note 3) he will be content, however, if they are judged useful by people who
wish to how the plain truth of what happened.
The phrase `winning over into the mythical' is illuminating. It suggests
the transformation which begins to steal over all events from the moment of
their occurrence, unless they are
[1.i. 21 tå pollå Ípo xrÒnou
aÈt<<n ép[[currency]]stvw [[section]]p< tÚ
muy<<dew [[section]]knenikhkÒta. [2. i. 21 ...w poihta<
ÍmnÆjasi per< [[section]]p< tÚ me>zon kosmoËtew. Cf.
i. 10. 3 t[[ordfeminine]] ÑOmÆrou poiÆsei, e[[daggerdbl]] ti
xrØ kéntaËya pisteÊein, un efikÚw [[section]]p<
tÚ me>zon mcentsn poihtØn ^nta kosm[[infinity]]sai.
[3. i.
22.4 ka< [[section]]w mcentsn ékrÒasin [[daggerdbl]]svw tÚ
mØ muy<<dew aÈt<<n éterpdeg.steron
fane>tai...]
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arrested and pinned down in writing by an alert and trained observer.
Even then some selection cannot be avoided--a selection, moreover, detrmm.ed by
irrelevant psychological factors, by the accidents of interest and attention.
Moment by moment the whole fabric of events dissolves in ruins and melts into
the past; and all that survives of the thing done passes into the custody of a
shifting, capricious, imperfect, human memory. Nor is the mutilated fragment
allowed to rest there, as on a shelf in a museum; imagination seizes on it and
builds it with other fragments into some ideal construction, which may have a
plan and outline laid out long before this fresh bit of material came to the
craftsman's hand to be worked into it, as the drums of fallen columns are built
into the rampart of an Acropolis. Add to this the cumulative effects of oral
tradition. One ideal edifice falls into ruin; pieces of it, conglomerates of
those ill-assorted and haphazard fragments, are carried to another site and
worked into a structure of, perhaps, a quite different model. Thus fact shifts
into legend, and legend into myth. The facts work loose; they are detached from
their roots in time and space and shaped into a story. The story is moulded and
remoulded by imagination, by passion and prejudice, by religious preconception
or aesthetic instinct, by the delight in the marvellous, by the itch for a
moral, by the love of a good story; and the thing becomes a legend. A few
irreducible facts will remain; no more, perhaps, than the names of persons and
places--Arthur, (note 1) Caerleon, Camelot; but even these may at last drop out
or be turned by a poet into symbols. `By Arthur,' said Tennyson, `I always
meant the soul, and by the Round Table the passions and capacities of man.' The
history has now all but wpn over into the mythical. Change the names, and every
trace of literal fact will have vanished; the story will have escaped from time
into eternity.When we study this process, we seem to make out
two phases of it, which, for the criticism of Thucydides, it is necessary to
distinguish. The moie important and pervasive
[1. We assume that Arthur was historic; but he may have been Arthur for
all we know.]
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of the two is the moulding of fact into types of myth contributed by
traditional habits of thought. This process of infiguration (if we may
coin the word) may be carried to any degree. Sometimes the facts happen to fit
the mould, and require hardly any modification; mere unconscious selection is
enough. In other cases they have to be stretched a little here, and patted down
there, and given a twist before they will fit. In extreme instances, where a
piece is missing, it is supplied by mythological inference from the interrupted
portions which call foi completion; and here we reach the other phase of the
process, namely invention. This is no longer a matter of imparting a
form to raw material; it is the creation of ffesh material when the supply of
fact is not sufficient to fill the mould. It leads further to the embroidery of
fabulous anecdote, which not only has no basis in fact, but is a superfluous
addition, related to fact as illustrations in a book are related to the
text.The process, in both its phases, can be illustrated from
the version preserved by Thucydides (note 1) of the legend of Harmodius and
Aristogeiton, the tyrant-slayers. Harmodius' sister, whom the tyrant insults,
makes her first appearance in this account. She is superfluous, since the
murderers had already a sufficient private motive arising out of the
love-quarrel. That is not in itself an argument against her historical
character, for superfluous people sometimes do exist; but other circumstances
make it not improbable that she owes her existence to the mythical type which
normally appears in legend when tyrants have to be slain. The two brothers, or
lovers, and the injured sister, or wife--the relationships vary--are the
standing dramatis personae on such occasions. Collatinus, Brutus, and
Lucretia aie another example from legend; while the purely mythical type which
shapes such legends is seen in the Dioscuri and Helen. (note 2) The suggestion
is that Harmodius and Aristogeiton
[1. vi. 54 ff. [2. Even aspirants to tyranny have to be killed on
this pattern. Thus one version of Alcibiades' death was that the brother of a
woman with whom he was spending the night set fire to the house and cut him
down as he leapt out through the flames. Plut. vit. Alcib.
fin.]
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were identified with the Heavenly Twins. If there is any truth in the
story of how Peisistratus was conducted back to Athens by a woman dressed as
Athena and accepted by the citizens as the goddess in person, (note 1) it is
not surprising that the next generation of Athenians should have recognized the
Dioscuri in Harmodius and his friend. Given that identification, the injured
sister is felt to be a desirable, if not indispensable, accessory; she is
filled in by inference, and she becomes a candidate for the place of
`basket-bearer' in the Panathenaic procession, at which the murder took place.
Thus, the legend of Ha,modius illustrates both the phases of the process we
described: first, it is moulded on the mythical type of the Heavenly Twins, and
then invention supplies the missing third figure. (note 2)Mythical types of this soil can be discovered and classified
only after a wide survey of comparative Mythistoria; for we all take our own
habits of thought for granted, and we cannot perceive their bias except by
contrast. The Greek who knew only Gieek legend could not possibly disengage the
substance fiom the form; all he could do was to prune away the fabulous and
supernatural overgrowths, and cut down poetry into prose. It is thus that
Thucydides treats myths like the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela (note 3); he rationalizes them, thinking that he has reduced them to history when he
has removed unattested and improbable accretions, such as the transformation of
Tereus into & hoopoe. But history can- not be made by this process (which
is still in use); all that we get is, not the original facts, but a mutilated
legend; and this may very well be so mutilated that it is no longer possible to
distinguish the informing element of fiction, which was discernible till we
effaced the clues.
The phenomenon that especially concerns us now is some
[1. Herod. i. 60. [2. On this subject see Mücke, Vom Euphrat
zum Tiber (1899), who points out other examples of the mythical type.
[3. ii 29.]
[[134]]
thing much wider than the mythical inflguration of a single incident
here or there, such as the legend of the Tyrant-slayers. It is the moulding of
a long series of events into a plan determined by an art form. When we
set the Persians of Aeschylus beside the history of Herodotus, we see at
once that the tragedian in dramatizing the events of Xerxes' invasion, some of
which he had personally witnessed, has also worked them into a theological
scheme, preconceived and contributed by his own mind. Further we remark that
Herodotus, although he is operating in a different medium and writing a saga
about the glory of Athens, uses the same theological train of thought as a
groundwork, and falls in with the dramatic conception of Aeschylus. This is a
case of the infiguration of a whole train of events by a form which is
mythical, in so far as it involves a theological theory of sinful pride
punished by jealous divinity, and is also an art form, by which the action is
shaped on dramatic principles of construction, involving such features as
climax, reversal, catastrophe. The theory and the form together provide the
setting of the whole story--the element which makes it a work of art. This
element is so structural that it cannot be removed without the whole fabric
falling to pieces, and at the same time so latent and pervasive, as not to be
perceptible until the entire work is reviewed in its large outline. Even then
it can be detected only by a critic who is on his guard and has not the same
scheme inwrought into the substance of his own mind; for if he is himself
disposed to see the events in conformity with the scheme, then the story wiil
answer his expectation and look to him perfecfly natural.When
Thucydides speaks of `the mythical', it seems probable from the context that he
is thinking chiefly of inventive `embellishment'. The accretions of
fabulous anecdote are comparatively easy to detect; they often bring in the
supernatural in the forms of vulgar superstition, and being for this reason
improbable, they require better evidence than is forthcoming. Also, poets tend
to magnify their theme for purposes of panegyric, flattering to their
audience;
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they will, for instance, represent Agamemnon'a expedition as much larger
than it probably was. It is on these grounds that Thucydides objects to the
evidence of Ionian Epos and Herodotean story-telling.'(note 1) He warns us
against the faults which struck his notice; and he was on his guard against
them, even more than against the popular superstition and dogmatic philosophy
of the day, which he tacitly repudiates. But there was one thing against which
he does not warn us, precisely because it was the framework of his own thought,
not one among the objects of reflection,--a scheme contributed, like the
Kantian categories of space and time, by the mind itself to whatever was
presented from outside. Thucydides, like Descartes, thought he had stripped
himself bare of every preconception; but, as happened also with Descartes, his
work shows that there was after all a residuum wrought into the substance of
his mind and ineradicable because unperceived. This residuum was his philosophy
of human nature, as it is set forth in the speech of Diodotus,--a theory of the
passions and of their working which carried with it a principle of dramatic
construction presently to be described. That he was not forearmed against this,
he himself shows when, in attacking Herodotus, he accuses him of trivial errors
of fact, and does not bring the one sweeping and valid indictment which is
perfectly relevant to his own point about the embellishment of the Persian War.
The dramatic construction of Herodotus' work, which stares a modern reader in
the face, apparently escaped the observation of his severest ancient
critic.
Another proof can be drawn from Thucydides' own account of a series of
events which he evidently believed to be historical, the closing incidents,
namely, of Pausanias' career. (note 2) He shows us the Spartan king intriguing
with the Persian,
[1. Cf. Plut. malig. Herod. 3 (855 D) afl ka< paratropa< t[[infinity]]w
flstor[[currency]]aw mãlista to>w mÊyoiw d[[currency]]dontai ka<
ta>w érxaiolog[[currency]]aiw, [[paragraph]]ti dcents prÚw
toÁw [[section]]pa[[currency]]nouw. This refers to digressions
(pareny[[infinity]]kai), which are reprded as legitimate, when used for the
purposes named. [2. i. 128ff.]
[[136]]
and `bent upon the empire of Hellas'. Pausanias commits certain
treacherous acts; boasts of his power to the Great King; intends, if the king
please, to marry his daughter'; is so `uplifted' by the king's answer that he
can no longer live like ordinary men; (note 1) behaves like an oriental; cannot
keep silence about his larger designs; makes himself difficult of access, and
displays a harsh temper. We know all these symptoms well enough, and we foresee
the end. Pausanias is recalled, but the evidence against him is insufficient.
He wiites a letter betraying his designs and ending with an order for the
execution of the bearer. The messenger, whose suspicions are aroused, opens the
letter and shows it to the authoiities at Sparta. The ephors arrange that they
shall be concealed behind a partition and overhear a conversation between the
king and his treacherous messenger, who contrives to draw from Pausanias a full
and damning avowal. The end follows in the Brazen House.This is
not the sort of thing that Thucydides objects to as `mythical'; it is not
`fabulous', not the embroidery of mere poetical invention; and so he reports it
all in perfect good faith. What does not strike him, and what does strike us,
is that the story is a drama, framed on familiar lines, and ready to be
transferred to the stage without the alteration of a detail. The earlier part
is a complete presentation of the `insolent' type of character. The climax is
reached by a perfect example of `Recoil' (peripdeg.teia), where the hero gives
the fatal letter to the messenger, and thus by his own action precipitates the
catastrophe. The last scene is staged by means of a theatrical property now so
cheapened by use as to be barely respectable--a screen! (note 2) The manner of
the hero's death involved sacrilege, and was believed to bring a curse upon his
executioners. Could we have better proof
[1. Thuc. i. 130 poll" tÒte mçllon [[Sigma]]rto ka<
oÈkdeg.ti [[section]]dÊnato [[section]]n t" kayest<<ti
prÒp[[florin]] bioteÊein. [2. It is possible that in this
scene we can just trace a dramatic motive, which is all but rationalized
away,--the idea, namely, that Pausanias cannot fall till he has committed
himself by his own act, to which act he must be tempted by the traitor.
This feature of Aeschylean drama will be fussed in the next
chapter.]
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that Thucydides was not on his guard against dramatic construction, and
was predisposed to see in the working of events a train of `causes' which
tragedy had made familiar?When we are alive to the dramatic
setting, we can infer with some certainty the stages through which the
Thucydidean story of Pausanias has passed. The original stratum of fact must
have been that Pausanias somehow misconducted himself, was recalled, and put to
death in circumstances which were capable of being used by superstition and
policy against the ephors. These facts worked loose into a legend, shaped by
imagination on the model of preconceived morality and views of human nature.
The mould is supplied by drama; and meanwhile fabulous invention is busy in
many minds, embroidering the tale with illustrative anecdotes. (note 1)
Thucydides brushes away these extravagant and unattested accretions, and
reduces the legend again to what seemed to him a natural series of events. It
is only we who can perceive that what he has left is the dramatized legend, not
the historical facts out of which it was worked up. It is not wildly
paradoxical to think that the historian who accepted the legend of Pausanias
might frame on the same pattern the legend of Cleon. Not that Thucydides
invented anything; all that was needed was to select, half unconsciously, those
parts of his life which of themselves composed the pattern. (note 2)
We must now come to closer quarters with the epithet `dramatic'. It is
worth noting, at the outset, that in the mere matter of external form, the
history seems to show the influence of tragedy,a fact which need not surprise
us, if we remember that Thucydides had no model for historical writing. The
brief abstract of the annalist was a scaffold, not a building; and Thucydides
was an architect, not a carpenter. Chroniclers and story-writers like Herodotus
had
[1. Some of these anecdotes, preserved by Herodotus, will come up for
discussion later. [2. Another instance is Thucydides' narrative of
Themistocles' latter days. This is rationalized Saga-history, influenced by
drama.]
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chosen the lax form of epic, congenial to ramblers; but whatever the
history was to be, it was not to be like Herodotus, and it was to draw no
inspiration from the tradition of Ionian Epos. So Thucydides turned to
drama--the only other developed form of literature then existing which could
furnish a hint for the new type to be created. The severe outline and
scrupulous limitations of this form satisfied his instinct for
self-suppression. The epic poet stands before his audience and tells his own
tale; but the dramatist never appears at all: the `thing done' (drçma)
works itself out before the spectators' eyes; the thing said comes straight
liom the lips of the actors.Best of all, to Thucydides'
thinking, if we, of after times, could ourselves have watched every battle as
it was won and lost, and ourselves have heard every speech of envoy and
statesman; we should then have known all, and much more than all, this history
was designed to telL But as this cannot be, we are to have the next thing to
it; we shall sit as in a theatre, where the historian will erect his mimic
stage and hold the mirror up to Nature. Himself will play the part of
`messenger' and narrate `what was actually done' with just so much of vividness
as the extent of his own information warrants. For the rest, the actors shall
tell their own tale, as near as may be, in the very words they used, `as I
heard them myself, or as others reported them.'
Speeches are much more prominent in Thucydides' history than they are in that
of Herodotus. The change seems partly due to the later historian's preference
for setting forth motives in the form of `pretexts', instead of giving his own
opinion; but it is also due to his being an Athenian. Plato similarly chose to
cast his speculations in the dramatic form of dialogue, allowing various points
of view to be expressed by typical representatives, without committing himself
to any of them. Even oratory at Athens was dramatically conceived; the
speech-writer did not appear as advocate in court; he wrote speeches in
character to be delivered by his clients. It has often been remarked that the
debates in Thucydides resemble in some points of technique the debates in a
Euripidean play.
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There is moreover in one respect an intellectual kinship between
Thucydides and the dramatist who was contemporaneously moulding the form of
tragedy to the strange uses of realism, and working away from Aeschylus as
Thucydides had to work away from Herodotus. The two men are of very different
temperaments; but in both we seem to find the same sombre spirit of
renunciation, the same conscious resolve nowhere to overstep the actual, but to
present the naked thoughts and actions of humanity, just as they saw them. No
matter how crude the light, how harsh the outline, so that the thing done and
the thing said shall stand out as they were, in isolated sharpness,
thoughMist is under and mist above,...
And we drift on legends for ever. (note 1)
These considerations, however, touch only the question of external form:
they show why so much that we should state directly is stated indirectly by
Thucydides, in speeches. The choice of this form is consistent with a complete
absence of plot or of dramatic construction: otherwise Thucydides could not
have chosen it at starting; for at that moment the plot lay in the unknown
future. We mention the point only because evidently it was somewhat easier for
an historian who consciously borrowed the outward form of tragedy, to take
unconsciously the further step, and fall in with its inward form and principle
of design. It is this which we now wish to define more closely. The type of
drama we have detected in the history is not the Euripidean type; it will be
found, on examination, to show an analogy with the older form existing in the
tragedies of Aeschylus.
The resemblances are reducible to two main points. The first is an analogy of
technical construction, seen in the use and correlation of different parts of
the work. The second is a community of psychological conceptions: a mode of
presenting character, and also a theory of the passions which has a place not
only in psychology, but in ethics. We shall begin by studying the structure;
but we may bear in mind
[1. Eurip. Hippol. 191 ff. Mr. Gilbert Murray's
translation.]
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that this structure is closely involved with the psychological
theory.An art form, such as the Aeschylean drama, shapes itself
as a sort of crust over certain beliefs which harden into that outline. When
this has happened, the beliefs themselves--the content of the mould--may
gradually be modified and transmuted in many ways. Finally, they may melt and
almost fade away, leaving the type, which is preserved as a traditional form of
art. This suivival of an element of technical construction may be illustiated
by the instance of `reversal' (peripdeg.teia). A `reversal of fortune' is the
cardinal point of primitive tragedy; and it originally means an overthrow
caused by an external supernatural agency--Fate or an angry god. When
the belief in such agencies fades, `reversal' remains as a feature in drama;
but the change of situation is now caused by the hero's own act. The notion of
`recoil' comes in: that is to say, the fatal action itself produces results
just the opposite of those intended--a perfectly natural occurrence. In this
way a piece of technique outlasts the belief which gave rise to it.
The Aeschylean drama appears to us to have gone through a process of this kind.
The structure, as we find it, seems to imply an original content of beliefs in
some respects more primitive than those explicitly held by Aeschylus himself,
but surviving in his mind with sufficient strength to influence his work.
Similarly, as we hope to show, in transmission from Aeschylus to Thucydides,
the dramatic type has a.gain outlasted much of the belief which informed it in
the Aeschylean stage. It is the artistic structure which is permanent; the
content changes with the advance of thought. Hence, if we point to Aeschylean
technique in Thucydides, we are not necessarily attributing to him the creed of
Aeschylus.
We must first attempt to describe the structure of Aeschylean tragedy.
(note 1) In order to understand it we must try to
[1. The description which follows is based on an analysis of the
impression made on the writer by an Aeschylean tragedy. It is of course not
susceptible of demonstration; the only test is the reader's own impression.
The description is not exhaustive, but is designed only to bring out a
neglected aspect.]
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imagine a yet more primitive stage in the development of the drama than
any represented in extant Greek literature, a stage which the earliest of
Aeschylus' plays has already left some way behind. A glance at tbe development
of modein drama may help us.Certain features which survived in
Greek tragedy suggest that we should look back to a type somewhat resembling
the mediaeval mystery and some of the earliest modern dramas, such as
Everyman, which are like the mystery in being religious performances and
in the element of allegorical abstraction. Their effect, due in part to each of
these features, may be described as symbolic. Everyman is a
sermon made visible. To watch it is like watching the pastime called `living
chess', in which the pieces are men and women, but the man who is dressed like
a bishop is nothing more than a chessman who happens to be automatic. He has
not the episcopal character; his dress is a disguise with nothing behind it;
his words, if he spoke, would be the speech of a parrot. And so it is with
Everyman. The persons are not persons at all, but personae,
masks, symbols, the vehicles of abstract ideas. They do not exist, and could
not be conceived as existing, in real space and time. They have no human
characters, no inward motives, no life of their oivn. Everyman, as his
name is meant to show, is in fact not a man, but Man, the universal.
The main development of modern drama shows, in one of its aspects, the process
by which this symbolic method gives way to the realistic. The process consists
in the gradual filling in of the human being behind the mask, till the humanity
is sufficiently concrete and vital to burst the shell and step forth in solid
flesh and blood. The symbol comes to contain a type of character; the type is
particularised into a unique individual. The creature now has an independent
status and behaviour of its own. Every gesture and every word must be such as
would be used by an
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ordinary human being with the given character in the given situation.
Once created, the personality is an original centre; it cannot be made to do
what we please or to utter our thoughts. In some such terms as these a modern
novelist or playwright will speak of his characters; and it is thus that they
appear to us.Now we can observe a certain intermediate stage in
which these two methods, the symbolic and the realistic, are balanced in
antagonism, so as to produce a curious effect of tension and incoherency. A
good instance is Marlowe's Faustus. Faustus himself occupies the central
plane; he is a living man, but still imprisoned in a symbolical type. The
intrusion of humanity has gone far enough to disturb the abstract effect, and
it ieacts on some of the persons in the play who ought to be purely symbolic.
Lucifer, it is true, is kept apart and remains non-human; but Mephistophilis
oscillates in our imagination between the ideal and reality, with a distressing
result. Again, on a lower level than Faustus there is yet another grade of
persons, in contrast with whom he shows up as heroic and ideal. These are the
vintner, the horse-courser, and other pieces of common clay picked out of a
London alley; they belong to a different world, and we feel that they could no
more communicate with the tragic characters than men can talk with angels.
(note 1) Thus there are in this one play four sets or orders of persons: (1)
the purely abstract and symbolic, such as Lucifer, who only appears on an upper
stage at certain moments, and takes no part in the action; (2) the
intermediate, for instance Mephistophilis, who ought to be symbolic, but treads
the lower stage, a cowled enigma, (note 2) horrible because at moments he
ceases to be symbolic without becoming human; (3) the
[1. We hope it is true that Marlowe did not write the comic scenes; but
we are only concerned with the effect of the play as it stands. [2. In the
Elizabethan Stage Society's representation Mephistophilis is cowled and his
face is never seen. The effect is indescribably horrible. At certain
moments in Greek Tragedy the mask must have produced a somewhat similar effect,
though the familiarity of the convention would make it much less in degree. The
longing to see the actor's face, when his words are enigmatic, is almost enough
to drive a modern spectator insane.]
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heroic or tragic: Faustus, who is an ideal half realized, hanging
together on its own plane; (4) the real: common moils who would attract
no attention in Fleet Street.
The Greek drama, although in the detail of historical development it started at
a different point from the modern, and followed another course, seems,
nevertheless, to pass through a phase analogous to that which we have just
described. The original substance of the drama was the choral lyric; the actors
(as they afterwards became) began as an excrescence. At a certain stage the
actors are assimilated to the chorus and move in the same atmosphere. Thus in
the earliest play of Aeschylus, the Suppliants, we find that the chorus
of Danaids are actually the heroines of the action, which centres round them,
so that they are not merely on the same plane with the actors, but themselves a
complex actor, and the effect is simple, coherent, and uniform. In the
Prometheus, again, the chorus belong to the same ideal world as the
Titan hero, a world in which abstract symbols like Mastery and Violence can
move without showing as unreal against the other persons. (note 1) The whole
drama is on the symbolic plane, the life in it being due to anthropomorphic
imagination, not to the intrusion of realism.
But in the latest plays of Aeschylus, the beginning of a change is clearly
marked: the actors are becoming human, while the lyric is rising above them, or
else remains suspended in a rarer atmosphere from which they are sinking. This
is a natural stage in the passage from pure symbolism to realism. The advance
shows itself externally in the dnjting apart of the lyrical element from the
dialogue,--a separation which, of course, widens in the later tragedians, till
the choral ode, though still an indispensable and very beautiful feature,
becomes in point of construction little more than an interlude, which relieves
the concentrated intensity of the action. This change is commonly taken as a
phenomenon which needs no explanation; but really it is caused
[1. Contrast the utter unreality of Iris and Lyssa in the Hercules
Furens. They are tolerable only when regarded as
dream-phantoms.]
[[144]]
inevitably by the coming to life of the persons in the drama. In
proportion as these become more real, the lyric becomes more ideal and further
removed from the action.In the stage observable in Aeschylus'
latest plays, the choral part is still dramatic, and of equal importance
with the dialogue. The two elements are evenly balanced; but at the same time
they have begun to occupy different worlds, so that we are sensible of the
transition from one to the other. The result is a curious duplication of the
drama which now has two aspects, the one universal and timeless, the other
particular and temporal.
The nature of this phenomenon will, we hope, become clear, if we take as an
illustration the Agamemnon. In this play, the visible presentation shows
how the conqueror of Troy came home and was murdered by the queen. The events
that go forward on the stage are particular' events, located at a point of
legendary time (note 1) and of real space. The characters are certain
individuals, legendary or historic--there is to Aeschylus no difference
here--who lived at that moment and trod that spot of earth. But in the choral
odes the action is lifted out of time and place on to the plane of the
universal. When the stage is clear and the visible presentation is for the time
suspended, then, above and beyond the transient spectacle of a few suffering
mortals caught, just there and then, in the net of crime, loom up in majestic
distance and awful outline the truths established, more unchangeably than the
mountains, in the eternal counsels of Zeus. The pulse of momentary passion dies
down; the clash and conffict of human wills, which just now had held us in
breathless concentration, sink and dwindle to the scale of a puppet-show; while
the enduring song of Destiny unrolls the theme of blood-haunted Insolence lured
by insistent Temptation into the toils of Doom. As
[1. By legendary time we mean the time occupied by events which have
worked so loose from real time that you can only date them within a century or
so, and do not think of dating them at all, till challenged. They are near the
stage in which the only date is `once-upon-a-time', the verge of mythical time
which has no dates at all.]
[[145]]
though on a higher stage, uncurtained in the choral part, another
company of actors concurrently plays out a more majestic and symbolic drama. On
this invisible scene walk the figures of Hybris and Peitho, of Nemesis and
Ate--not the bloodless abstractions of later allegory, but still clothed in the
glowing lineaments of supernatural reality. The curtain lifts for a timeless
moment on the spectacle of human life in an aspect known to the all-seeing eyes
of Zeus; and when it drops again, we turn back to the mortal tragedy of
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, enlightened, purified, uplifted, calm. (note 1)Thus we find in Aeschylus something analogous to the hierarchy
of persons we noted in Faustus; although, for various reasons, there is
not the same crude effect of incoherency and tension. The supernatural
characters--Zeus, supreme above all, and the demonic figures (note 2) of
Hybris, Nemesis, Ate, and the rest, are not seen, as Sucifer is seen on the
upper stage of the Elizabethan theatre, but remain in the spiritual world to
which lyrical emotion exalts the inward eye--the world where metaphor (as we
call it) is the very stuff of reality, where Cassandra quickens and breathes,
and whence she strays among mortal men like a fallen spirit, sweet-voiced, mad,
and broken-winged. Hence the effect is far more awful and solemn than the
actual appailtion of Lucifer; and when Apollo and Athene and the spirits of
vengeance take human shape in the Eumenides, a spell is broken, a veil
rent, an impression shattered, for which not the most splendid symphony of
poetical language can atone.
Here, however, we would code our attention to the Agamemnon. At the
lower end of the scale we find a further advance of realism in some minor
characters, the watchman and the herald; the nurse in the Choephori is
of the same order. These are allowed some wonderful touches of common humanity,
below the heroic level; for they are not directly
[1. The metaphor of the invisible upper stage which the writer has used
in describing his impression will be shown later to have justification in
ancient pictorial art. [2. This expression will be justified
later.]
[[146]]
concerned in the central action, and a little irrelevant naturalism does
no harm, if it is not carried far. But they are only just below the heroic
standard, and are certainly not the sort of people you would have met in a walk
to the Piraeus.Thus, the two planes in the Agamemnon are
divided by an interval less wide and less abrupt than the divisions in
Faustus. In psychological conception also the union is very close, since
the heroic characters are still so abstract and symbolic that they are barely
distinguishable from the pure abstractions of the lyrical world. Agamemnon, for
instance, is simply Hybris typified in a legendary person. He is a hero flown
with `insolence' (the pride and elation of victory), and that is all that can
be said of him. He is not, like a character in Ibsen, a complete human being
with a complex personality,--a centre from which relations radiate to
innumerable points of contact in a universe of indifferent fact. He has not a
continuous history: nothing has ever happened to him except the conquest of
Troy and the sacrifice of Iphigenia; nothing ever could happen to him except
Pride's fall and the stroke of the axe. As we see him, he is not a man, but a
single state of mind, which has never been preceded by other states of mind
(except one, at the sacrifice in Aulis), but is isolated, without context,
margin, or atmosphere. Every word he says, in so far as he speaks for himself
and not for the poet, comes straight out of that state of mind and expresses
some phase of it. He has a definite relation to Cassandra, a definite relation
to Clytemnestra; but no relation to anything else. If he can be said to have a
character at all, it consists solely of certain defects which make him
liable to Insolence; if he has any circumstances, they are only those
which prompt him to his besetting passion.
Now it is in some such way as this that Thucydides presents his
principal characters. Cleon is a good instance. He is allowed no individuality,
no past history, no atmosphere, no irrelevant relations. He enters the story
abruptly
[[147]]
from nowhere. A single phrase fixes his type, as though on a play-bill:
`Cleon, the most violent of the citizens and first in the people's confidence';
that is all we know of him. There follows a speech in which the type reveals
itself in a state of mind,--Violence in its several phases. Then he vanishes,
to reappear, before Sphacteria, as Violence with one of its aspects
(`covetousness') emphasized, and a sudden passion of ambitious self-confidence
([[section]]lp[[currency]]w) added thereto. Finally, we see him wrecked by this
passion at Amphipolis. Pericles is introduced in the same way, with a single
epithet: `Pericles, the son of Xanthippos, a man at that time first among the
Athenians, and most powerful (dunat~tatow) in action and in speech.'
(note 1) His charactenstic quality is wise foresight (gn~mh--the opening word
of his first speech (note 2)); and be stands also, in the Funeral Oration, for
the glory (timÆ) of Athens. Alcibiades we shall study later. In every
case the principal characters are nearly as far removed from realism, nearly as
abstract and impersonal as the heroic characters in Aeschylus. Thucydides, in
fact, learnt his psychology from the drama, just as we moderns (whether
historians or not) learn ours, not by direct observation, but from the drama
and the novel.
But we can carry the analogy further; it extends to minor points of
Aeschylean technical construction, which follow naturally upon the drifting
apart of lyric and dialogrne. In the Agamemnon we note that the
separation of the two planes has gone far enough to make it impossible for the
members of the chorus to interfere with the action at its crisis. The elders,
when they hear the death-cry, cannot enter the palace; not because the door is
locked, nor yet because they are feeble old men. Rather they are old men
because an impassable barrier of convention is forming between chorus and
actors, and their age gives colour to their powerlessness. The need of a
separate stage for the actors, though tradition may cling to the old orchestra,
is already felt. The poet is half aware of the imaginative
[1. Thuc. i. 139. [2. Thuc. i. 140.]
[[148]]
separation, and he bridges it by links of two kinds--formal links of
technical device, and internal connexions of a psychological sort, which will
occupy us in the next chapter.The formal links are provided by
what is called `tragic irony'. The dialogue is so contrived that, instructed by
the lyric, we can catch in it allusions to grander themes than any of which the
speakers are conscious, and follow the action with eyes opened to a universal
significance, hidden from the agents themselves. Tragic irony, however, is not
a deliberately invented artifice; it arises of itself in the advance from the
purely symbolic stage of drama. In that earliest stage the whole dialogue might
be called `ironical', in the sense that it is the poet's message to the
audience, not the expression of the persons' characters, for they have none.
But it becomes ironical in the strict sense only when the persons begin to have
elementary characters and minds, and so to be conscious of one meaning of their
words, which is not the whole meaning or the most important. The effect is now
no longer merely symbolic, but hypnotic; the speaker on the stage is
like a somnambulist--alive, but controlled and occupied by an external
personality, the playwright.
Tragic irony is used by Aeschylus with great freedom; because his persons are
still so near to the symbolic, they have so little character and psychology of
their own, that they do not mind serving as mouthpieces. Here and there we find
instances of perfect irony, where the speaker's words bear both constructions
equally well, and are at once the natural expression of the appropriate state
of mind and also a message from the poet to the spectator, applying one of the
lyrical themes. This is the only sort of irony admitted by Sophocles, whose
characters have become so human that they will not speak merely for another. In
Aeschylus, however, there are whole speeches which are hypnotic, and hardly in
character at all. The effect is so unfamiliar to readers schooled in realism
that it is often missed.
The first two speeches of Clytemnestra, for instance, seem to be of this kind;
notably, the beacon speech. If we try to interpret this as a realistic
revelation of Clytemnestra's
[[149]]
character and thoughts, we shall not find that it helps us to much
insight, because its main function has nothing to do with her character. The
poet is speaking through her, and the thoughts are his. The early part of the
play, down to the entrance of Agamemnon, is an overture, in which Aeschylus
musters and marshals the abstract themes which are to be the framework of the
trilogy. One of them is expressed in the beacon speech; and it is this. The
fire of Idaean Zeus has fallen upon Troy, `neither before its season nor
striking as an idle glancing shaft beyond the stars'; but that same
fire, the symbol of Justice, speeds now to `strike the roof of the Atreidae'.
From mountain top it leaps and hastens across the sea to mountain top; and like
the torch passed from hand to hand in the race, it is itself a runner and the
only one which `running first and last reaches the goal' (note 1) This
description of the symbolic fire conducted along the beacon chain is given to
Clytemnestra because it can be given to no one else, not because it is the best
means of illustrating her psychology. The speech, by the way, also exhibits
another artifice employed to link the two planes--the allusive verbal echo
between dialogue and lyric. The symbol of the fire, in a slightly varied form,
recurs at the beginning of the next chorus, and the keyword (skÆptein) is
reiterated to mark the correspondence.
Now the speeches in Thucydides can be roughly classed under four heads.
There are, first, a few realistic speeches by minor characters; for instance,
the short, sharp utterance of the Spartan ephor, (note 2) which has the trick
of the laconic
[1. The notion that it is the same fire which passes from beacon
to beacon is subtly conveyed throughout. Note especially the words: pdeg.mtein
and its derivatives, repeated many times (`conduct', `send on its way');
poreutoË lampãdow 299; f<<w molÒn 305; sydeg.nousa
lampåw ÍperyoroËsa 308, and so on. Towards the end comes
thrice the ominous word skÆptein: [[paragraph]]skhcen 314;
[[paragraph]]skhcen 320; kêpeitÉ ÉAtreid<<n
[[section]]w tÒde skÆptei stdeg.gow | fãow
tÒdÉ oÈk êpappon ÉIda[[currency]]ou
purÒw 322; echoed in the following chorus: ~pvw în | mÆte
prÚ kairoË mÆyÉ Ípcentsr êstrvn |
bdeg.low +/-l[[currency]]yion skÆceien, k.t.l. [2. Thuc. i. 86
(Sthenelaïdas).]
[[150]]
practical man. Next, there are idealistic speeches, designed as direct
expressions of character or of national ideals; the Funeral Oration will serve
as an example. These shade off, through a class in which sketches of national
character are introduced indirectly, with some strain upon dramatic
probability, (note 1) into a class where irony is openly employed in the tragic
manner. Cleon's Mytilenean speech, for instance, is nearly all ot the
character-revealing sort, but it contains a passage about the evil results of
exceptional prosperity which is without any true application to the position of
Lesbos or to the history of the revolt. It runs as follows (note 2):`Conceiving a reckless confidence in the future, and hopes
that outran their strength though they fell short of their desires, they went
to war; and they thought fit to prefer might to right, for wheie they thought
they saw a chance of success, they set upon us when we were doing them no
wrong. It is always so: when exceptional prosperity comes sudden and
unexpected to a city, it turns to insolence: and, in general, good fortune is
safer for mankind when it answers to calculation than when it surpasses
expectation, and one might almost say that men find it easier to drive away
adversity than to preserve prosperity. We were wrong from the first. We ought
never to have put the Mytileneans above the rest by exceptional treatment; then
their insolence would not have come to this height. It is a general rule that
human nature despises flattery, and respects unyielding strength.'
These words are patently inapplicable to the revolted island, whose exceptional
position was notoriously a survival of the status originally enjoyed by every
one of the allies, but now forfeited by all but a few; to speak of it as a
sudden access of prosperity is simply meaningless. We are driven to see in the
passage a use of tragic irony; Thucydides puts into Cleon's mouth the very
moral which his own career is to illustrate. The device is unskilfully
employed,
[1. e. g. the Corinthians' sketch of the Athenian character, i. 70.
[2. iii. 39. 3.]
[[151]]
since dramatic probability is too completely sacrificed. Sophocles would
not have passed these sentences, which on the speaker's lips have not even a
plausible meaning; but Aeschylus would have passed them, and after all
Thucydides was only an amateur tragedian.A fourth use of
speeches is illustrated by the Spartan envoys' homily before Sphacteria. This
is still further removed from realism, and resembles the beacon speech, which
is but one degree below the lyric plane. The historian, reluctant to break
silence in his own person, sets forth the theme and framework of his drama in
the form of a solemn warning. He has already described the Athenians at Pylos
as `wishing to follow up their present good fortune to the furthest point'.
(note 1) This is a dangerous frame of mind, against which Themistocles had
warned the Athenians after Salamis, when they wished to press forward and
destroy the Persians' bridges over the Hellespont. (note 2) `I have often,'
says Themistocles, `myself witnessed occasions, and I have heard of many from
others, where men who had been conquered by an enemy, having been driven quite
to desperation, have renewed the fight and retrieved their former disasters. We
have now had the great good luck (eÏrhma eÍrÆkamen) to save
both ourselves and all Greece by the repulse of this vast cloud of men; let us
then be content and not press them too hard, now that they have begun to fly.
Be sure that we have not done this by our own might. It is the work of gods and
heroes, who were jealous that one man should be king at once of Europe and
Asia.... At present all is well with us--let us then abide in Greece, and look
to ourselves and to our families.'
The warning of the Spartan envoys is conceived in the same spirit; but it is
unheeded and unanswered. No answer, indeed, was possible; the speech is not an
argument, but a prophecy. A reply from Cleon, a statement of the war party's
policy, such as modern critics desiderate, would be as inappropriate as a reply
from C!ytemnestra to the Second
[1. iv. 14.3 boulÒmenoi t[[ordfeminine]]
paroÊs[[dotaccent]] tÊx[[dotaccent]] ...w [[section]]p<
ple>ston [[section]]pejelye>n. [2. Herod. viii. 109 Rawlinson
trans.]
[[152]]
Chorus in the Agamemnon. The stage is clear while this prophecy,
addressed not to the actors but to the spectators, passes unheard by those who,
could they have heard it, might have been saved.One further
point of formal resemblance between Aeschylus and Thucydides is the allusive
echoing of significant phrases, which sustain the moral motive dominant in the
plot. We have seen an instance of this device in the repetition of the words
`coveting more' (pldeg.onow Ùrdeg.gesyai), which reappear at critical
moments after the use of them in the envoys' speech; and we shall note other
examples later. This completes the analogy with Aeschylean form, so far as
concerns external peculiarities.
Before returning to Thucydides' narrative, however, we have yet to
analyse a somewhat complex feature of Aeschylean psychology, which is connected
with the internal relations between the two phases of the drama--the
universal, or supernatural, and the particular, or human. We shall then be in a
position to consider whether some traces of this psychology are not to be seen
in Thucydides' treatment of certain characters. The topic will need a chapter
to itself.