Sophocles (Collins)/Chapter 1
SOPHOCLES.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
The materials for our poet's life are few and untrustworthy. The real biographies have perished; and all that we have in their place is a brief anonymous memoir, some notices in Suidas, and a few anecdotes retailed to us from different sources by Athenæus, the great collector of the scandal and gossip of his day—and these last probably belong to the mock pearls of history. The mere attempt, then, to compile a detailed life of Sophocles out of this "rubbish heap of tradition," is (to use Professor Plumptre's illustration) like "making bricks without straw." As in the case of Shakspeare, we know little of the man except what we can glean from his writings. Some few facts, however, rest on higher testimony; and these may be shortly noticed.
Colonus, a small village about a mile to the north of Athens, was the birthplace of Sophocles; and every feature of its scenery has been vividly described by him in a famous choral ode, to be hereafter noticed. The landscape must have been strikingly picturesque, with its white limestone cliffs, its dark grove sacred to "the gentle goddesses," and echoing with "all throats that gurgle sweet," with the pure clear stream of the Cephisus, never failing in the hottest summer, and watering this garden of Attica.
Whatever may have been his father's calling, Sophocles was himself a gentleman. "His natural gifts," says Lord Lytton, "were the rarest that nature bestows on man, genius and beauty." Body and mind were carefully trained under the best masters; and he received the complete liberal education of his age. We can imagine how the boy grew up to manhood, feeding his poetic fancy with those ancient founts of inspiration,—the adventures of the Argonauts or the "tale of Troy divine;" just as the genius of Spenser and Milton was nourished on the old romances of our country. We can imagine, too, how he must have been inspired with the eternal ideas of truth and beauty—wafted, as in Plato's State, "like gales of health blowing fresh from salubrious lands,"[1]—by the constant sight and presence of that noble city, robed in her "imperial mantle of architecture," adorned by the paintings of Panænus and by the sculpture of Phidias,—her streets crowded with strangers from all lands, and her harbours filled with the masts of a thousand triremes.
Sophocles made an early entrance on public life. At the age of sixteen his grace and beauty were such that he was selected from the youth of Attica to lead the choral dance around the altar which had been raised in honour of the victory of Salamis. Ten years later, we find him coming forward as the rival of Æschylus at the great festival of Bacchus, at which the prizes for tragedy were awarded. Cimon and his nine colleagues had just returned from Samos, bringing with them the bones of Theseus, which were to serve as a talisman against plague and pestilence. The generals entered the theatre just before the commencement of the performances, and the Archon, estimating rightly the greatness of the occasion, swore them in to judge the case between the rival dramatists. They unanimously awarded the first prize to Sophocles; and Æschylus, it is said, in deep resentment of their verdict, left Athens, and retired to the court of Hiero at Syracuse.
A first success is everything in literature; and Sophocles, like others, found himself famous in a day. For more than forty years he continued to exhibit plays—sometimes winning the first prize, sometimes defeated in his turn by some younger candidate for fame, but never once degraded to the third place. So prolific was his genius, that he is said to have composed upwards of a hundred tragedies. Of these but seven are extant.
He had inherited a moderate income, and it is said this independence was necessary to the poet, for custom and etiquette prevented him from making money by his plays. "The crown of wild olive" was the only stimulus to genius; for the "two obols" paid by each citizen for admission went to the lessees of the theatre, and served to defray the necessary expense of scenery and decorations, as well as to pay the actors. The Greek would have regarded with the same disfavour the tragedian who made a profit on his plays, as the Sophist who might (as many of them in fact did) take money for his lectures, or the statesman who should accept salary or pension for what should have been a labour of love.[2] All such sordid gains, they held, should be left to the base-born mechanic; no gentleman should degrade his profession to the level of a trade. In the case of the poet, who was supposed to receive his inspiration direct from heaven, it would have been simple profanation to sell, as it were, the very bread of life. It was sufficient glory and recompense for him if the State—or some rich citizen representing the State—should defray the expenses of a Chorus, that he might "see his poetry put into action—assisted with all the pomp of spectacle and music, hallowed by the solemnity of a religious festival, and breathed, by artists elaborately trained to heighten the eloquence of words, into the ear of assembled Greece."[3]
Like every other Athenian, Sophocles was a politician, and he took his part in the stirring scenes of public life, personally serving in more than one campaign. But public life palled upon him, as it palls on every ardent and enthusiastic character. His temper was too gentle and his principles too chivalrous for him to grapple with the unscrupulous party spirit of the times. Not even the charm of a friendship with Pericles, or the honour of a statesman's position, could console him for the loss of literary ease; and we can understand how gladly he must have left the restless and busy Athens for the peaceful and lovely scenery of Colonus. There, like Pope on his lawn at Twickenham, like Wordsworth in the solitude of Grasmere,—or, to use a more classical illustration, like Horace at his Sabine farm,—he was free to follow the bent of his genius, and to draw from nature his purest and most perfect picture of a Greek landscape.
Yet the scenes which he had left might well have attracted a more ambitious spirit
Athens was then teeming with all the exuberant life which marked the renaissance in modern times. Thought found its utterance in action, in the passion for war and in the restless spirit of enterprise, in all that many-sided energy which marked the Athenians—a people of whom their own historian speaks as "never quiet themselves, and never allowing others to be so."[4] Assuredly Sophocles was born under a lucky star; for his life was coeval with the greatness of his country, and he did not live to see the Long Walls—the symbol of that greatness—levelled in the dust to the sound of Spartan music. He lived in an age of heroes. All round him were the very men who had made his country what it was, and with most of these men he was on terms of the most familiar intercourse. Doors were not then, as now, "barred with gold;" and Athenian society opened its arms to the graceful and engaging poet, so genial in his temper, so lively in conversation, so true a friend, so pleasant a guest. We can imagine Sophocles in his old age recalling the memories of his youth; recounting to his children, with pardonable pride, the historic names and scenes with which he had been so familiar: he would tell them how he had listened to the thunder of "Olympian Pericles;" how he had been startled by the chorus of Furies in the play of Æschylus; how he had talked with the garrulous and open-hearted Herodotus; how he had followed Anaxagoras, the great Sceptic, in the cool of the day among a throng of his disciples; how he had walked with Phidias, and supped with Aspasia.
Sophocles enjoyed a rare popularity in Athens. Even that prince of satirists, Aristophanes, can find neither flaw nor blemish in his moral armour against which to launch an arrow. He directs unsparing raillery against the bombast of Æschylus and the sophistry of Euripides; but he has nothing to say against this "good easy man"—"as gentle below the earth as he was gentle in his lifetime."[5] The scandalous anecdotes of Athenæus may be taken for what they are worth; and it is difficult for any one who has read his plays, with all their purity of passion, their delicacy of feeling, their chivalrous principles of honour, to believe them, with Lord Lytton, to have been written by a "profligate" or a "renegade."[6]
He died full of years and honour, loved (as his biographer tells us) in every way by all men; and his fellow-citizens paid due reverence to the tomb of him who was truly "the prince of poets in his time." The god Bacchus, himself, the divine patron of the tragic drama, was said to have appeared to Lysander, whose armies were then beleaguering Athens, and to have demanded that a safe-conduct should be given to the poet's friends to bear his body beyond the city walls to Decelea, and there bury it in the sepulchre of his fathers.
Sacrifices were offered to his Manes, and a statue of bronze was erected to his memory; but "more enduring than brass or marble " has been the epitaph composed in his honour by Simmias of Thebes, thus gracefully translated by Professor Plumptre:—
"Creep gently, ivy, ever gently creep,
Where Sophocles sleeps on in calm repose;
Thy pale green tresses o'er the marble sweep,
While all around shall bloom the purpling rose.
There let the vine with rich full clusters hang,
Its fair young tendrils fling around the stone;
Due meed for that sweet wisdom which he sang,
By Muses and by Graces called their own."
We now pass to the inner life of Sophocles—to his character and work. It is but a step from Æschylus to him, yet the step involves an immensity of change, not only in the man, but in the age. Instead of the rough son of Mars—the hero of Marathon—who (as Sophocles himself said) "did what was right without knowing it," we have the graceful and artistic poet, skilled in weaving plots and in delineating characters. The change is like passing from storm to sunshine. The wild imagery, the unearthly conceptions, the heroes and the heroines, human indeed, but with the human image dilated to colossal proportions, like the spectre of the Brocken, and with the passions of the Titans who scaled Olympus—the "ox-horned Io," the blood-stained Furies, and the "wild Cassandra,"—all these have disappeared. In their stead the scene is occupied by creations of flesh and blood, with human sympathies and affections, true and real in character, because their types were taken from the gallery of life. The serenity which marked the poet seems to influence his readers and spectators. So true is he to nature, so gradual is his development of each legend, however wonderful or monstrous it may be, that we have no alternative but to believe and sympathise. It is with Sophocles as with Spenser. "Au plus fort de l'invention il reste serein. Sa bonne foi nous gagne; sa sérénité devient la nôtre. Nous devenons crédules et heureux par contagion. . . . 'C'est une fantasmagorie,' dira-t-on? Qu'importe? si nous la voyons, et nous la voyons, car 'Sophocle' la voit."[7]
The poet fell in with the change that had come over the spirit of his time. The generation of Æschylus—stout warriors who had fought at Marathon, and sturdy seamen who "knew nothing" (as Aristophanes said) "except to call for barley-cake, and shout 'yo-heave-ho'"—had been content to believe implicitly all that Homer and their poets had taught them; and seeing around them traces of some mysterious force whose agency and purpose they were powerless to explain, they made a god of this Necessity or Destiny, and called it Nemesis. She was, in truth, a jealous deity, causing the rich and prosperous to founder like a vessel on a sunken reef,[8] and in one short day changing their joy to sorrow,—striking them pitilessly down in the plenitude of their grandeur, as a child in mere wantonness strikes down the tallest poppies in the corn-field. It was in vain to attempt to coax or cajole this capricious power by tears or offerings. History had taught men the futility of such bribes. Polycrates had thrown his precious ring into the sea; Crœsus had filled the treasury of Delphi with his gold; but "no sacrifice or libation could save a man's soul from Death," and "on Death alone, of all divinities. Persuasion had no power."[9] And Herodotus, the most pious of historians, draws the obvious moral from the downfall of kings and the collapse of empires. "Envy," he says, "clings to all that mortal is. . . . Even a god cannot escape from Destiny."[10]
Such was the "tremendous creed" of which Æschylus was a fitting exponent; with him the Furies are the satellites of Fate, and it is their eternal duty to pursue the murderer till death and after death. The complaint which Corneille puts into the mouth of Theseus, in his 'Œdipe,' might have been more truly uttered by Eteocles in the 'Seven against Thebes,' as he feels the blast of his father's curse which is wafting him to Hades:—
"Quoi! la nécessité des vertus et des vices
D'un astre imperieux doit suivre les caprices,
Et Delphes malgrè nous conduit nos actions
Au plus bizarre effet de ses predictions?
E'âme est donc toute esclave; une loi souveraine
Vers le bien ou le mal incessament l'entraine;
Et nous ne recevons ni crainte, ni désir,
De cette liberté qui n'a rien à choisir;
Attachés sans relâche à cet ordre sublime,
Vertueux sans mérite, et vicieux sans crime."[11]
It is true that in the 'Prometheus' we have the spectacle of an indomitable will, proof against all suffering; yet it is in this very play that Æschylus most insists on the "invincible might of Necessity," to which wise men pay homage, and which is "a higher power than Jove." Prometheus defies the lightning, but he bows to Destiny, as the gladiators bowed to the autocrat in the imperial box, with their chant of morituri te salutant, knowing themselves to be doomed men, but dying with a good grace, and scorning to ask for quarter.
Gradually the Greek mind expanded. The seas were opened, commerce increased, men travelled far and saw much; and thus the same stimulus was given to national thought and feeling by maritime enterprise as to the Jews under Solomon, and to the English under Elizabeth.[12] And as the Athenians grew adventurous, so they grew self-reliant. They doubted and questioned where they had before been content to shudder and believe. They attributed more to themselves and less to the blind agency of Destiny; and thus, in this progress of rationalism, there ensued that momentous change in thought represented by the transition in history from Herodotus to Thucydides, and in poetry from Æschylus to Sophocles.
With this new generation, man is no longer bound hand and foot, powerless to move against his inevitable doom. He has liberty of choice in action, and by his knowledge or his ignorance, by his virtues or his vices, has made himself what he is. It is not so much a malignant power tormenting men in sheer envy at their wealth or happiness; but it is men themselves, who "play the fool with the times, while the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock them." A long train of disastrous consequences often follows from a single impious speech, or guilty deed—nay, even from a hot word or a hasty blow. Thus the idea of Destiny passes into that of retribution. Punishment surely follows sin, if not in a man's own day, yet descending, like an heirloom of misery, upon his children.
"In life there is a seesaw; if we shape
Our actions to our humours, other hands
May shape their consequences to our pain."[13]
In fact, Sophocles seems to have asked himself the question put by Nisus to Euryalus in the Æneid, and to have answered it in his treatment of men in their relations to God:—
"Dîne hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale? an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?"[14]
In each of his plays he shows how passion works out its own end—whether it be the pride of Œdipus, the stubbornness of Creon, the insane fury of Ajax, or the jealousy of Dejanira. All these passions are simple and natural; there are no eccentricities of genius, no abnormal mental states, such as furnish the material of the modern drama. The Greek would not have understood the melancholy of Hamlet or the madness of Lear; still less would he have entered into the spirit of Timon's declaration,—
"I am misanthropos, and hate mankind."
The Athenian audience, with the joyous instincts of children—ever ready to "make believe"—gave themselves up to all the illusions of the scene and story, delighting, and freely expressing their delight, in the picturesque and ever-shifting series of graceful tableaux, so different from the still life of a statue or a painting. They were "as gods," knowing all the good and evil in the future of the play—such knowledge only increasing the expectancy with which they looked forward to Œdipus blinding himself, or Ajax falling on his sword. The manner in which the poet treated each old familiar tale was the test of his art, just as a modern preacher might discuss and illustrate, after his own proper taste and fashion, some well-known text. If we want a modern example of the keen interest and sympathy which may be excited in a large and intelligent audience by the lifelike representation of a history familiar to them from their childhood, we have not to go far to seek. The Passion-Play now acted at Ober-Ammergau has many points of resemblance to the Greek drama. In both there is the same reality and majestic slowness in the acting, the same rhythmical dialogue, the same melodious choral songs, the same large stage, with architectural scenery half-open to the sky, and, above all, the same intensity of religious feeling, which thrills the actor, and passes from him, like an electric current, to an enthusiastic audience. And if this resemblance is apparent now, how much stronger must it have been in the middle ages, when the Bible was a sealed book to the poorer classes, while the Passion-Play embodied for them to the life the personages and scenes of Scripture—when, as a German critic describes it, "cloister and church were the first theatres, priests the first actors, the first dramatic matter was the Passion, and the first dramas the Mysteries."[15]
Sophocles developed this religious aspect of the drama; and no Athenian citizen could have seen his 'Ajax' or 'Antigone' without feeling their hearts burn within them, or without being touched and elevated by the mingled sweetness and purity and pathos which earned for the poet the title of the "Attic Bee." From his pages can be gleaned sentences which read like fragments from the inspired writings, and which might have furnished texts for a hundred sermons, With him the Deity is a personal and omnipresent being, far removed from that sombre and vindictive Nemesis which haunted Æschylus,—"neither sleeping nor waxing faint in the lapse of years, but reigning for ever in the splendour of Olympus,"—"speaking in riddles to the wise, but leaving the foolish in their own conceits.""Nothing is impossible with Him""His works may perish, but He lives for all eternity.""Happiness is a fruit that grows in His garden only.""To honour Him is the first and greatest of commandments."[16] Here are lines which might have been written by a Christian divine:—
"Speak thou no word of pride, nor raise
A swelling thought against the gods on high;
For Time uplifteth and Time layeth low
All human things; and the great gods above
Abhor the wicked as the good they love.
*********
Be blameless in all duties towards the gods;
For God the Father in compare with this
Lightly esteemeth all things else; and so
Thy righteousness shall with thee to the end,
Endure, and follow thee beyond the grave."[17]
These sentiments pervade every play. It is only when unmanned by despair that his heroes are tempted, like Job, in the anguish of their hearts, to "curse God and die." Even then such impiety meets with its own reward. Well, therefore, might his unknown biographer declare Sophocles to have been "dear to the gods as no other man was;" and with equal truth may Professor Plumptre hail him as one of those who were, in their degree, "schoolmasters unto Christ."
Mingled with this strong religious feeling in Sophocles was that melancholy supposed to be engendered only in the poets of the north. He is oppressed by his sense of the feebleness of human intellect and the impotence of human foresight, as compared with the omnipotent wisdom of an eternal being. Like some master-spirit, he views the actions and passions of the characters which he has created with a half-contemptuous pity. He heaps upon mankind every epithet of scorn—"phantoms," "shadows," "creatures of a day," "born to misery as the sparks fly upwards." Hence springs what has been called his "Irony," so admirably illustrated in Bishop Thirlwall's well-known essay. "Men promise much and perform little. They think they are marching onward to fame and greatness, when the ground is opening beneath their feet, and they are sinking to destruction. They boast of their strength when they are really displaying their weakness. Like Œdipus, they solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and are blind to the riddle of their own lives."[18] And there had been sufficient historical examples, even within his own experience, to point the moral of this Irony. Scarcely one of those great statesmen whom he had personally known, commanding the armies or guiding the councils of his country, had either lived long or had seen good days. Defeat, disaster, or dishonour, had been the lot of all. Themistocles had died in a strange land, a pensioner on the Great King's bounty; Pericles had fallen a victim to the plague which was decimating his besieged countrymen; his nephew, the gay and gallant Alcibiades, was a traitor in the Spartan camp; while Nicias had perished miserably, with, the flower of his army, after the fatal night-march from Syracuse.
Many improvements are said to have been introduced by Sophocles on the Athenian stage. We are told that he raised the number of actors present at once upon the scene from two to three; that he attired them in splendid dresses—robes of saffron and purple, falling in long and graceful folds,—jewelled chaplets, and broad embroidered girdles. But above all, he increased the number of the Chorus, and gave a new form and spirit to the music which accompanied their odes. We, in our cold climate, can hardly appreciate the effect which music produced on the enthusiastic Greek temperament. The French are more susceptible to such influence; and few who have ever heard it can forget the sublime effect of the Marseillaise thundered out by a vast revolutionary throng. To the Greek, music was a passion and a necessity. Even now, a modern traveller compares their life to an opera, where men sing from birth to death; and perhaps the case was even stronger in the days of Sophocles, when "song rose from an Hellenic village as naturally as from a brake in spring." Whether the peasant might be watching by the cradle, working in the vineyard, or toiling at the oar, the labour was in each case lightened by some appropriate song. Their bards told how Arion charmed the dolphin, how the walls of Troy rose to the sound of Apollo's flute, as those of Jericho fell before the trumpets of the priests, and how trees and rocks followed Orpheus as he sang. Even philosophers recognised this all-pervading influence. Aristotle has devoted a long and learned chapter of his Politics to the "moral influence of music;" and it was in music also (as most likely to be corrupted by innovation) that Plato, in his ideal State, places the watch-tower of his "guardians." The marriage hymn, the funeral dirge, the incantation of the witch, the chant of the physician, the solemn and melodious invocation of the priest, merely illustrate this universal passion. Ion, the rhapsodist, describes the strong emotion produced in himself and in his hearers by the recitation of Homer. "When that which I recite is pathetic," he says, "my eyes are filled with tears; when it is awful or terrible, my hair stands on end and my heart leaps. Moreover, I see the spectators also weeping in sympathy with my emotion, and looking aghast with terror."[19] If the mere recitation of hexameter verse could produce this effect, far more powerfully must the simple but passionate music of the Tragic Chorus, sung in unison by well-trained singers, have impressed the audience in the theatre, where the masks of perfect beauty, the graceful robes, and the majestic stature of the actors gave a solemn and almost unearthly character to the scene. Though Sophocles had a weak voice, he was himself a skilled musician; and in his choral odes (purposely shortened by him that they might not interrupt the current of the story) we can faintly trace the echo of that sweet and majestic melody which must once have entranced all hearers—we can almost hear the harmony
of voices, now rising loud and clear as they hail a
prince or victor, and then dying away with a solemn
Memnonian cadence as
"They mourn the bridegroom early torn
From his young bride, and set on high—
Strength, courage, virtue's golden morn,
Too good to die."[20]
- ↑ Republ. iii. 401.
- ↑ We may judge how mercenary, in a Greek point of view, would have seemed such an exhibition as that of the Royal Academy, from the analogous case of Zeuxis, the Millais of his day, who exhibited his picture of Helen, and took money at the doors. Crowds flocked to see the painting, and the painter cleared a large sum—but the name of 'Helen' was changed by a satirical public to 'The Courtesan.' (See St John, Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, i. 303.)
- ↑ Lord Lytton's Athens, ii. 516.
- ↑ Thucydides, i. 70.
- ↑ Aristoph. Ranæ, 82.
- ↑ Athens, ii. 520, note.
- ↑ Taine (Hist. de la Littérature Anglaise, i. 334), who thus speaks of Spenser.
- ↑ Æsch., Eumen. 565.
- ↑ Æsch., Fragm. of Niobe.
- ↑ Hist. i. 35, 91; vii. 46.
- ↑ Readers of Shakspeare may remember Edmund's description of the "excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves and thieves by spherical predominance, . . . and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on."—King Lear, act i. sc. 2.
- ↑ See Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church, ii. 185; Froude's History of England, viii. 426.
- ↑ So says Sophocles, Ajax, 1085 (translated in Mr D'Arcy Thompson's 'Sales Attici'), anticipating the well-known words of Shakspeare:—
"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to scourge us."
—King Lear, Act v. sc. 3. - ↑ Virgil, Æn. ix. 184. Professor Conington translates the passage thus:—
'Can it be Heaven,' said Nisus then,
'That lends such warmth to hearts of men?
'Or passion surging past control
'That plays the god to each man's soul?' - ↑ Gervinus, Comment. on Shakspeare, i. 66.
- ↑ Fragments of lost plays of Sophocles.
- ↑ Philoctetes, 1441. This and the preceding translations are mainly taken from 'Sales Attici.'
- ↑ Plumptre's Introd. to Sophocles, lxxxviii.
- ↑ Grote's Plato (Ion).
- ↑ Horace, Od. iv. 2 (Conington's Transl.)