Mosaics of Grecian History by Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

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"The personal temperament of the man," says DR. PLUMPTRE, [Footnote:
"The Tragedies of AEschylus," by E. H. Plumptre, D.D.] seems to
have been in harmony with the characteristics of his genius.
Vehement, passionate, irascible; writing his tragedies, as later
critics judged, as if half drunk; doing (as Sophocles said of
him) what was right in his art without knowing why; following
the impulses that led him to strange themes and dark problems,
rather than aiming at the perfection of a complete, all-sided
culture; frowning with shaggy brows, like a wild bull, glaring
fiercely, and bursting into a storm of wrath when annoyed by
critics or rival poets; a Marlowe rather than a Shakspeare: this
is the portrait sketched by one who must have painted a figure
still fresh in the minds of the Athenians. [Footnote: Aristophanes,
in The Frogs.] Such a man, both by birth and disposition, was
likely to attach himself to the aristocratic party, and to look
with scorn on the claims of the demos to a larger share of power;
and there is hardly a play in which some political bias in that
direction may not be traced."

AEschylus wrote his plays in trilogies, or three successive dramas
connected. Of the eighty tragedies that he wrote, only seven
have been preserved. From three of these, The Persians, Prome'theus,
and Agamemnon, we have given extracts descriptive of historical
and mythological events. The latter is the first of three plays
on the fortunes of the house of A'treus, of Myce'nae; and these
three, of which the Choeph'oroe and Eumenides are the other two,
are the only extant specimen of a trilogy. The Agamemnon is the
longest, and by some considered the grandest, play left us by
AEschylus. "In the Agamemnon," says VON SCHLEGEL, "it was the
intention of AEschylus to exhibit to us a sudden fall from the
highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the abyss of ruin.
The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of the
Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement
of the destruction of Troy, the fame of which is to be re-echoed
from the mouths of the greatest poets of all ages, in the very
act of crossing the threshold of his home, after which he had
so long sighed, and amidst the fearless security of preparations
for a festival, is butchered, according to the expression of
Homer, 'like an ox in the stall,' slain by his faithless wife,
his throne usurped by her worthless seducer, and his children
consigned to banishment or to hopeless servitude." [Footnote:
"Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," by Augustus William
on Schlegel. Black's translation.]

Among the fine passages of this play, the death of Agamemnon, at
the hand of Clytemnes'tra, is a scene that the poet paints with
terrible effect. Says MR. EUGENE LAWRENCE, [Footnote: "A Primer
of Greek Literature," by Eugene Lawrence, p.55.] "Mr. E. C.
Stedman's version of the death of Agamemnon is an excellent one.
A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenae; there is a scent of
blood, the exhalations of the tomb. The queen, Clytemnestra, enters
the inner room, terrible as Lady Macbeth. A cry is heard:

"'Agam. Woe's me! I'm stricken a deadly blow within!'
"'Chor. Hark! who is't cries "a blow?" Who meets his death?'
"'Agam. Woe's me! Again! again! a second time I'm stricken!'
"'Chor. The deed, methinks, from the king's cry, is done.'

At length the queen appears, standing at her full height, terrible,
holding her bloody weapon in her hand. She seeks no concealment.
She proclaims her guilt:

"'I smote him! nor deny that thus I did it;
So that he could not flee or ward off doom.
A seamless net, as round a fish, I cast
About him, yea, a deadly wealth of robe,
Then smote him twice; and with a double cry
He loosed his limbs; and to him fallen I gave
Yet a third thrust, a grace to Hades, lord
Of the under-world and guardian of the dead.'"

But the most finished of the tragedies of AEschylus is Choephoroe,
which is made the subject of the revenge of Ores'tes, son of
Agamemnon, who avenges the murder of his father by putting his
mother to death. For this crime the Eumenides represents him as
being driven insane by the Furies; but his reason was subsequently
restored. It is the chief object of the poet, in this tragedy, to
display the distress of Orestes at the necessity he feels of
avenging his father's death upon his mother. To this BYRON refers
in Childe Harold:

O thou! who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale--great Nem'esis!
Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss
For that unnatural retribution--just,
Had it but been from hands less near--in this,
Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!

At the close of an interesting characterization of AEschylus and
his works--much too long for a full quotation here--PROFESSOR
MAHAFFY observes as follows:

"We always feel that AEschylus thought more than he expressed,
that his desperate compounds are never affected or unnecessary.
Although, therefore, he violated the rules that bound weaker
men, it is false to say that be was less an artist than they.
His art was of a different kind, despising what they prized, and
attempting what they did not dare, but not the less a conscious
and thorough art. Though the drawing of character was not his
main object, his characters are truer and deeper than those of
poets who attempted nothing else. Though lyrical sweetness had
little place in the gloom and terror of his Titanic stage, yet
here too, when he chooses, he equals the masters of lyric song.
So long as a single Homer was deemed the author of the Iliad
and the Odyssey, we might well concede to him the first place,
and say that AEschylus was the second poet of the Greeks. But
by the light of nearer criticism, and with a closer insight into
the structure of the epic poems, we must retract this judgment,
and assert that no other poet among the Greeks, either in grandeur
of conception or splendor of execution, equals the untranslatable,
unapproachable, inimitable AEschylus." [Footnote: "Classical Greek
Literature," vol. i., p.275.]

SOPHOCLES.

AEschylus was succeeded, as master of the drama, by Sophocles--
the Raffaelle of the drama, as Bulwer calls him--who was also
one of the generals of the Athenian expedition against Samos
in the year 440 B.C. He brought the drama to the greatest
perfection of which it was susceptible. In him we find a greater
range of emotions than in AEschylus--figures more distinctly
seen, a more expanded dialogue, simplicity of speech mixed with
rhetorical declamation, and the highest degree of poetic beauty.
Says a late writer: "The artist and the man were one in Sophocles.
We cannot but think of him as specially created to represent
Greek art in its most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection.
It is impossible to imagine a more plastic nature, a genius more
adapted to its special function, more fittingly provided with
all things needful to its full development, born at a happier
moment in the history of the world, and more nobly endowed with
physical qualities suited to its intellectual capacity."

Sophocles composed one hundred and thirteen plays, but only seven
of them are extant. Of these the most familiar is the tragedy
of OEd'ipus Tyran'nus--"King OEdipus." It is not only considered
his masterpiece, but also, as regards the choice and disposition
of the fable on which it is founded, the finest tragedy of
antiquity. A new interest has been given to it in this country
by its recent representation in the original Greek. Of its many
translations, it is conceded that none have done, and none can
do it justice; they can do little more than give its plan and
general character. The following, in brief, is the story of this
famous tragedy:

OEdipus Tyrannus.

La'i-us, King of Thebes, was told by the Delphic oracle that if
a son should be born to him, by the hand of that son he should
surely die. When, therefore, his queen, Jocasta, bare him a son,
the parents gave the child to a shepherd, with orders to cast
it out, bound, on the hill Cithae'ron to perish. But the shepherd,
moved to compassion, deceived the parents, and intrusted the
babe to a herdsman of Pol'ybus, King of Corinth; and the wife
of Polybus, being childless, named the foundling OEdipus, and
reared it as her own.

Thirty years later, OEdipus, ignorant of his birth, and being
directed by the oracle to shun his native country, fled from
Corinth; and it happened at the same time that his father (Laius)
was on his way to consult the oracle at Delphi, for the purpose
of ascertaining whether the child that had been exposed had
perished or not. As father and son, strangers to each other, met
in a narrow path in the mountains, a dispute arose for the right
of way, and in the contest that ensued the father was slain.

Immediately after this event the goddess Juno, always hostile to
Thebes, sent a monster, called the sphinx, to propound a riddle
to the Thebans, and to ravage their territory until some one
should solve the riddle--the purport of which was, "What animal
is that which goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noon,
and on three at evening?" OEdipus, the supposed son of Polybus,
of Corinth, coming to Thebes, solved the riddle, by answering
the sphinx that it was man, who, when an infant, creeps on all
fours, in manhood goes on two feet, and when old uses a staff.
The sphinx then threw herself down to the earth and perished;
whereupon the Thebans, in their joy, chose OEdipus as king, and
he married the widowed queen Jocasta, by whom he had two sons
and two daughters. Although everything prospered with him--as
he loved the Theban people, and was beloved by them in turn for
his many virtues--soon the wrath of the gods fell upon the city,
which was visited by a sore pestilence. Creon, brother of the
queen, is now sent to consult the oracle for the cause of the
evil; and it is at the point of his return that the drama opens.
He brings back the response

"That guilt of blood is blasting all the state;"

that this guilt is connected with the death of Laius, and that

"Now the god clearly bids us, he being dead,
To take revenge on those who shed his blood,"

OEdipus engages earnestly in the business of unraveling the mystery
connected with the death of Laius, the cause of all the Theban
woes. Ignorant that he himself bears the load of guilt, he charges
the Thebans to be vigilant and unremitting in their efforts,--

"And for the man who did the guilty deed,
Whether alone he lurks, or leagued with more,
I pray that he may waste his life away,
For vile deeds vilely dying; and for me,
If in my house, I knowing it, he dwells,
May every curse I spake on my head fall."

A blind and aged priest and prophet, Tire'sias, is brought before
OEdipus, and, being implored to lend the aid of prophecy to "save
the city from the curse" that had fallen on it, he at first refuses to
exert his prophetic power.

Tiresias. Ah! Reason fails you an, but ne'er will I
Say what thou bidd'st, lest I thy troubles show.
I will not pain myself nor thee. Why, then,
All vainly question? Thou shalt never know.

But, urged and threatened by the king, he at length exclaims:

Tier. And has it come to this? I charge thee, hold
To thy late edict, and from this day forth
Speak not to me, nor yet to these, for thou--
Thou art the accursed plague-spot of the land!

OEdipus at first believes that the aged prophet is merely the
tool of others, who are engaged in a conspiracy to expel him
from the throne; but when Jocasta, in her innocence, informs
him of the death of Laius, names the mountain pass in which he
fell, slain, as was supposed, by a robber band, and describes
his dress and person, OEdipus is startled at the thought that
he himself was the slayer, and he exclaims,

"Great Zeus! what fate hast thou decreed for me?
Woe! woe! 'tis all too clear."

Yet there is one hope left. The man whom he slew in that same
mountain pass fell by no robber band, and, therefore, could not
have been Laius. Soon even this hope deserts him, when the story
is truly told. He learns, moreover, that he is not the son of
Polybus, the Corinthian king, but a foundling adopted by his
queen. Connecting this with the story now told him by Jocasta,
of her infant son, whom she supposed to have perished on the
mountain, the horrid truth begins to dawn upon all. Jocasta rushes
from the presence of OEdipus, exclaiming,

"Woe! woe! ill-fated one! my last word this,
This only, and no more for evermore."

When the old shepherd, forced to declare the truth, tells how
he saved the life of the infant, and gave it into the keeping
of the herdsman of Polybus, the evil-starred OEdipus exclaims,
in agony of spirit:

"Woe! woe! woe! all cometh clear at last.
O light! may this my last glance be on thee,
Who now am seen owing my birth to those
To whom I ought not, and with whom I ought not
In wedlock living, whom I ought not slaying."

Horrors still thicken in this terrible tragedy. Word is brought
to OEdipus that Jocasta is dead--dead by her own hand! He rushes in:

Then came a sight
Most fearful. Tearing from her robe the clasps,
All chased with gold, with which she decked herself,
He with them struck the pupils of his eyes,
With words like these--"Because they had not seen
What ills he suffered and what ills he did,
They in the dark should look, in time to come,
On those whom they ought never to have seen,
Nor know the dear ones whom he fain had known."
With such-like wails, not once or twice alone,
Raising his eyes, he smote them; and the balls,
All bleeding, stained his cheek, nor poured they forth
Gore drops slow trickling, but the purple shower
Fell fast and full, a pelting storm of blood.

The now blind and wretched OEdipus, bewailing his fate and the
evils he had so unwittingly brought upon Thebes, begs to be cast
forth with all speed from out the land.

OEdipus. Lead me away, my friends, with utmost speed
Lead me away; the foul, polluted one,
Of all men most accursed,
Most hateful to the gods.

Chorus. Ah, wretched one, alike in soul and doom,
I fain could wish that I had never known thee.

OEdipus. Ill fate be his who from the fetters freed
The child upon the hills,
And rescued me from death,
And saved me--thankless boon!
Ah! had I died but then,
Nor to my friends nor me had been such woe.

A touching picture is presented in the farewell of OEdipus, on
departing from Thebes to wander an outcast upon the earth. The
tragedy concludes with the following moral by the chorus:

Chorus. Ye men of Thebes, behold this OEdipus,
Who knew the famous riddle, and was noblest.
Whose fortune who saw not with envious glances?
And lo! in what a sea of direst trouble
He now is plunged! From hence the lesson learn ye,
To reckon no man happy till ye witness
The closing day; until he pass the border
Which Severs life from death unscathed by sorrow.
--Trans. by E. H. PLUMPTRE.

Character of the Works of Sophocles.

The character of the works of Sophocles is well described in the
following extract from an Essay on Greek Poetry, by THOMAS NOON
TALFOURD: "The great and distinguishing excellence of Sophocles
will be found in his excellent sense of the beautiful, and the
perfect harmony of all his powers. His conceptions are not on
so gigantic a scale as those of AEschylus; but in the circle which
he prescribes to himself to fill, not a place is left unadorned;
not a niche without its appropriate figure; not the smallest
ornament which is incomplete in the minutest graces. His judgment
seems absolutely perfect, for he never fails; he is always fully
master of himself and his subject; he knows the precise measure
of his own capacities; and while he never attempts a flight beyond
his reach, he never debases himself nor his art by anything beneath
him.

"Sophocles was undoubtedly the first philosophical poet of the
ancient world. With his pure taste for the graceful he perceived,
amidst the sensible forms around him, one universal spirit of
Jove pervading all things. Virtue and justice, to his mind, did
not appear the mere creatures of convenience, or the means of
gratifying the refined selfishness of man; he saw them, having
deep root in eternity, unchanging and imperishable as their divine
author. In a single stanza he has impressed this sentiment with
a plenitude of inspiration before which the philosophy of expediency
vanishes--a passage that has neither a parallel nor equal of its
kind, that we recollect, in the whole compass of heathen poetry,
and which may be rendered thus: 'Oh for a spotless purity of
action and of speech, according to those sublime laws of right
which have the heavens for their birthplace, and God alone for
their author--which the decays of mortal nature cannot vary,
nor time cover with oblivion, for the divinity is mighty within
them and waxes not old!'"

Sophocles died in extreme old age, "without disease and without
suffering, and was mourned with such a sincerity and depth of
grief as were exhibited at the death of no other citizen of Athens."

Thrice happy Sophocles! in good old age,
Blessed as a man, and as a craftsman blessed,
He died: his many tragedies were fair,
And fair his end, nor knew be any sorrow.
--PHRYN'ICHUS.

Wind, gentle evergreen, to form a shade
Around the tomb where Sophocles is laid;
Sweet ivy wind thy boughs, and intertwine
With blushing roses and the clustering vine.
Thus will thy lasting leaves, with beauties hung,
Prove grateful emblems of the lays he sung,
Whose soul, exalted by the god of wit,
Among the Muses and the Graces writ.
--SIM'MIAS, the Theban.

EURIP'IDES.

Contemporary with Sophocles was Euripides, born in 480 B.C., the
last of the three great masters of the drama--the three being
embraced within the limits of a single century. Under Sophocles
the principal changes effected in the outward form of the drama
were the introduction of a third actor, and a consequent limitation
of the functions of the chorus. Euripides, however, changed the
mode of handling tragedy. Unlike Sophocles, who only limited
the activity of the chorus, he disconnected it from the tragic
interest of the drama by giving but little attention to the
character of its songs. He also made some other changes; and,
as one writer expresses it, his innovations "disintegrated the
drama by destroying its artistic unity." But although perhaps
inferior, in all artistic point of view, to his predecessors,
the genius of Euripides supplied a want that they did not meet.
Although his plays are all connected with the history and mythology
of Greece, in them rhetoric is more prominent than in the plays
of either AEschylus or Sophocles; the legendary characters assume
more the garb of humanity; the tender sentiments--love, pity,
compassion--are invoked to a greater degree, and an air of exquisite
delicacy and refinement embellishes the whole. These were the
qualities in the plays of Euripides that endeared him to the
Greeks of succeeding ages, and that gave to his works such an
influence on the Roman and modern drama.

Of Euripides MR. SYMONDS remarks: "His lasting title to fame
consists in his having dealt with the deeper problems of life
in a spirit which became permanent among the Greeks, so that
his poems never lost their value as expressions of current
philosophy. Nothing strikes the student of later Greek literature
more strongly than this prolongation of the Euripidean tone of
thought and feeling. In the decline of tragic poetry the literary
sceptre was transferred to comedy; and the comic playwrights may
be described as the true successors of Euripides. The dialectic
method, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more
harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy
by Menan'der, when the Athenians, after passing through their
disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation
of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and
purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides.
Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said, and well
said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon important
matters; and his sensitive, susceptible temperament repeated
itself over and over again among his literary successors. The
exclamation of Phile'mon that, if he could believe in immortality,
he would hang himself to see Euripides, is characteristic not
only of Philemon, but also of the whole Macedonian period of
Greek literature." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." Second Series,
p. 300.]

Euripides wrote about seventy-five plays, of which eighteen have
come down to us. The Me-de'a, which is thought to be his best
piece, is occupied with the circumstances of the vengeance taken
by Medea on the ungrateful Jason, the hero of the Argonautic
expedition, for whom she had sacrificed all, and who, after his
return, abandoned her for a royal Corinthian bride. [Footnote:
See Argonautic Expedition, p. 81.] But the most touching of the
plays of Euripides is the Alces'tis, founded on the fable of
Alcestis dying for her husband, Adme'tus. MILTON thus alludes
to the story, in his sonnet on his deceased wife:

Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.

The substance of the story is as follows:

Admetus, King of Phe'rae, in Thessaly, married Alcestis, who became
noted for her conjugal virtues. Apollo, when banished from heaven,
received so kind treatment from Admetus that he induced the Fates
to prolong the latter's life beyond the ordinary limit, on
condition that one of his own family should die in his stead.
Alcestis at once consented to die for her husband, and when the
appointed time came she heroically and composedly gave herself
to death. Soon after her departure, however, the hero Hercules
visited Admetus, and, pained with the profound grief of the
household, he rescued Alcestis from the grim tyrant Death and
restored her to her family. The whole play abounds in touching
scenes and descriptions; and the best modern critics concede that
there is no female character in either AEschylus or Sophocles,
not even excepting Antig'one, that is so great and noble, and
at the same time so purely tender and womanly, as Alcestis.
"Where has either Greek or modern literature," says MAHAFFY,
"produced a nobler ideal than the Alcestis of Euripides? Devoted
to her husband and children, beloved and happy in her palace,
she sacrifices her life calmly and resignedly--a life which is
not encompassed with afflictions, but of all the worth that life
can be, and of all the usefulness which makes it precious to
noble natures." [Footnote: "Social Life in Greece, p. 189.] We
give the following short extract from the poet's account of the
preparations made by Alcestis for her approaching end:

Alcestis Preparing for Death.

When she knew
The destined day was come, in fountain water
She bathed her lily-tinctured limbs, then took
From her rich chests, of odorous cedar formed,
A splendid robe, and her most radiant dress.
Thus gorgeously arrayed, she stood before
The hallowed flames, and thus addressed her prayer:
"O queen, I go to the infernal shades;
Yet, ere I go, with reverence let me breathe
My last request: protect my orphan children;
Make my son happy with the wife he loves,
And wed my daughter to a noble husband;
Nor let them, like their mother, to the tomb
Untimely sink, but in their native land
Be blessed through lengthened life to honored age."

Then to each altar in the royal house
She went, and crowned it, and addressed her vows,
Plucking the myrtle bough: nor tear, nor sigh
Came from her; neither did the approaching ill
Change the fresh beauties of her vermeil cheek.
Her chamber then she visits, and her bed;
There her tears flowed, and thus she spoke: "O bed
To which my wedded lord, for whom I die,
Led me a virgin bride, farewell! to thee
No blame do I impute, for me alone
Hast thou destroyed: disdaining to betray
Thee, and my lord, I die: to thee shall come
Some other woman, not more chaste, perchance
More happy." As she lay she kissed the couch,
And bathed it with a flood of tears: that passed,
She left her chamber, then returned, and oft
She left it, oft returned, and on the couch
Fondly, each time she entered, cast herself.
Her children, as they hung upon her robes,
Weeping, she raised, and clasped them to her breast
Each after each, as now about to die.
--Trans. by POTTER.

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