Greek Tragedy

H.D.F. Kitto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136806896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

• Acclaimed study of Greek tragedy by a renowned Classical scholar
• Kitto is author of 'The Greeks', a legendary introduction to the Greek world and Penguin bestseller
• Examines three of the great Greek dramatists: Aeschylus, Sophocloes and Euripides and famous plays such as Agamemnon, Antigone and Medea
• New foreword by Edith Hall

I

___________________________

LYRICAL TRAGEDY

1. THE ‘SUPPLICES’

The first two editions of this book opened with the assertion that the Supplices is the earliest work of European drama. It now seems possible – some would say certain – that this is not true; that the trilogy was first produced not in or near 492 B.C. but much later, probably in 464, after the Persae and the Septem. The belief in the earlier dating never rested, of course, on any documentary evidence but chiefly on considerations of style, some of which (as I record with some complacency) I had rejected as evidence of date: namely, that in this play the real protagonist is not an actor but the chorus, and that the second actor is handled rather clumsily. Nevertheless, the general impression of archaism, combined with what Bowra well called ‘the loaded magnificence of the style’,¹ seemed reason enough, in the absence of direct evidence, to think it an early play.

This view was indeed challenged, notably by E. C. Yorke.² Yorke analysed a certain metrical phenomenon in the seven plays – resolution of a long syllable in the iambic trimeter – and showed that if the frequency of such resolution increased with the poet’s increasing years then the Persae (472 B.C.) is the earliest play, and that the Supplices would fall between it and the Septem (467). But the assumption is hazardous; closer inspection suggests that the dramatic quality of a scene had something to do with the incidence of these resolutions – as is certainly the case in Sophocles.

But in 1952 there was published a fragment of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus,¹ which to all appearance derives ultimately from the didascalia, the official record of the dramatic contests in Athens. The fragment says that in the archonship of somebody whose name begins Ar … (unless these two letters were the beginning of the word archon, which is not very likely) Aeschylus won the first prize with this trilogy, Sophocles the second prize, and Mesatos the third. If the reference is to the first production of the trilogy, which is the natural interpretation, but not indubitably the correct one, then the production certainly did not take place near 490, when Sophocles was a boy five or seven years old. He won his first victory, at what may have been his first attempt, in 468. The only year in the neighbourhood that provides a suitable archon is 464: Archedemides. The obscure Mesatos remains a difficulty. In Epistle V of Euripides he is mentioned alongside Euripides’ younger contemporary Agathon, which would put him firmly in the later part of the century. The epistle is indeed what we harshly call a ‘forgery’, written possibly as late as the fifth century A.D. Yet a forger has every reason to be careful over detail: this one may have known what he was talking about. There is indeed an inscription² which records names of dramatists apparently in the chronological order of their first successes, and places a certain … tos next to Sophocles. If this name was Mesatos, and not for example an unrecorded Stratos or the like, it would agree with the papyrus very well.

The fragment is so carelessly written that the Oxyrhynchus editor said of it ‘There are things about this text which make one sceptical of its authority’; and there is another fact which should be taken into account. F. R. Earp, in his Style of Aeschylus (1948), submitted the plays to an exhaustive stylistic analysis. In every one of his statistical tables the Supplices comes out on top, indicating – if such evidence has value – that it is the earliest of the seven. Nothing led Earp to suspect that it could be later than the Persae, and his results, in other respects, are self-consistent. It has been suggested, as a compromise, that the trilogy was kept in cold-storage for some twenty-five years, for political reasons.³ Not perhaps impossible, but unlikely, and the reasons adduced seem to me entirely to misjudge the ‘political’ significance of the play; as will be argued below, it is hard to see what more Aeschylus could have done to make it clear that his ‘Argos’ was not contemporary Argos.

The nature of the theme (if I have correctly interpreted it) and the power with which it is handled certainly do not suggest the immaturity of youth.Therefore, though without any burning conviction, I accept the evidence of the papyrus at its face value, and turn to more interesting matters.

Some of the older judgements of the play were based in part on the belief that it is a primitive work, partly on a sheer inability to understand a form of drama which is unfamiliar to us. It is natural, but wrong, to approach a work of art with a preconceived idea of what it ought to do, and how; such criticism may go very far astray. The critic tries to read into the play what he expects to find, and when he does not find it he is disappointed. Thus, Tucker found that the Supplices ‘fails in dramatic effect.… There is no thrilling action in the piece, and despite its admirable poetry it would have fallen flat’ but for the spectacular effect of the chorus. Bowra, many years ago now, wrote: ‘Such action as there is consists of their [the suppliants’] efforts to secure protection, and the arrival of a herald from Egypt announcing the presence of the rejected suitors’¹ – a summary which leaves out the situation which makes the play a tragedy. Or, starting with the doctrine that Aeschylus was a religious teacher and the educator of his people, Erzieher seines Volkes, we may say, with Pohlenz, that the play concerns the protectors more than the protected, which is true, and holds up to the Athenian democracy the inspiring picture of a whole people, the Argives, taking upon itself the greatest dangers because it puts religious duty before everything – which is not true, since Aeschylus takes some trouble to point out that the King and his people are in a cleft stick: if they will not protect the suppliants, they will have to brave the anger of the offended gods.

By all means let us think some passages in the play clumsy; nevertheless the greater part of it handles a profoundly tragic situation – and a familiar one – with immense power. Our first duty is to discover where Asechylus laid the emphasis; we may assume that he built the play as he felt it. Certainly, those who find it undramatic cannot tell us, except by accident, what it is about, for they will not have seen the drama.

It begins dramatically enough. The chorus enters, dressed in Egyptian fashion, and chanting to the processional anapaestic rhythm a great invocation of Zeus, the Zeus who protects the Suppliant and has brought these victims of violence safely across the sea from the Nile to Argos; and with Zeus are presently linked the other gods, those of the sky and those of the under-world. The particular situation is being placed in the widest possible context. The parodos gives us the necessary facts easily: Danus, the flight from the suitors, the suppliants’ own Argive descent. Why they are fleeing from the suitors is not yet made clear; the chorus mentions hybris, and θέμις εἴργει, Right forbids. We are given a clear impression of these young women – full of energy, passionate in their resistance, firm of faith in the gods.

The parodos is followed by a long ode. A slow and steady rhythm is started, and the chorus proceeds to dance and sing some 140 verses. There is no suggestion of immediate action, debate or intrigue; the ode, one-sixth of the whole play, would take something like fifteen minutes in performance, the time of an ordinary symphony-movement. This shows what wind is blowing in the theatre: the audience, clearly, is in no hurry to see the actors and action.

Since the rhythms of the poetry give us a slight and distant impression of the nature of the dances and their visual effect, we will give them a little attention. The ode opens, with Zeus and Epaphus, in the stately ‘Dorian’ rhythm. With the more personal tone of the second pair of stanzas the chorus turns to the impulsive choriambic:

(duple, not triple, time), but still closes quietly with a smooth iambic (or trochaic) verse. The third pair are well balanced: they open with a steady hexameter, work up to choriambic, and again end smoothly. In the fourth pair we return to Zeus and to a steadier rhythm; and this leads to the unmistakable outburst of

ἰάπτει δ᾽ ἐλπίδων

ἀφ’ ὑψιπύργων πανώλεις

βροτούς, βίαν δ᾽ οὔτιν᾽ ἐξοπλίζει

where the weight of the rhythm marks the climax of this part of the ode.¹ The next pair introduce something new: harsh, clumsy spondees and tribrachs, which seem appropriate to the passionate lamentation and foreign-sounding invocations in the two stanzas and their refrains. It would be a reasonable inference, perhaps even a necessary one, that the accompanying dance was of the same character. The audience was not simply listening to poetry; it was experiencing a combination of the three arts, poetry, dance, and music, all surely saying the same thing, each reinforcing the others.

In view of what was to happen to the tragic Chorus before the century was out, it is not superfluous to notice how closely the poet sticks to his dramatic theme. We are always told, with good reason, that Aeschylus was a great religious poet; what impresses one in this ode is that he is a great dramatic lyrist, never making philosophic or mythological or decorative diversions. So dynamic a combination of rhythms is essentially of the dramatic poet, composer, choreographer. To the chorus, Zeus is to be their protector; Io is their claim on Argos; they think naturally of Philomela; they do not stay to narrate her story, as a late Euripidean chorus might. Then comes the appeal to the Justice, the Dike, of the gods, followed by those two splendid stanzas in which, for their own assurance, they sing of the power of Zeus. Here we reach an almost Hebraic intensity, but it is the intensity of the dramatic poet, not of the philosopher or theologian. After this, the change described above: Greek by descent, they are Egyptian by upbringing. They began in Dorian rhythm and spoke in true Greek strain; they end with the rhythms of despair, with wild, uncouth language, and with threats of hanging themselves at the altars of the gods – threats which they are presently to apply to the King of Argos.

‘So, through the mouth of the chorus, does Aeschylus declare his faith in a Zeus who is the refuge of the oppressed.’ This kind of thing is easily said, and has been said. Unfortunately, either this is nonsense or the play itself is. It is a hypothesis which scholars have sometimes found convenient, that the dramatists would use the chorus as their ‘mouthpiece’; sometimes even that anything said in a play represents what the dramatist would have us believe. As this directly concerns our understanding of Greek drama, we may take the present opportunity of considering it.

An example of the extreme view comes to hand in Professor Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s article Zeus in Aeschylus,¹ in which it is said, about the Septem: ‘We are repeatedly told that Zeus and Dike are on the side of Eteocles and the defenders; this is implied at 443–6, 565–7, and 630, and is clearly stated at 662–71, where Eteocles calls Dike the maiden daughter of Zeus and affirms that Polyneices, from his earliest years, has had no part in her.’ It will be enough to consider the last of the four passages. If Aeschylus intended us to believe this about Zeus, Dike and Eteocles, he was a very inept dramatist and his audience were remarkable people. For what happens? With this declaration on his lips Eteocles goes out to meet his brother in single combat, and each of them is killed. Is not this sufficient comment on what Eteocles has said? Or did Aeschylus imagine that in a play words have meaning, but events none?

But there is also the audience to consider. Returning to the Supplices, we might picture two of Aeschylus’ fellow-citizens trudging home to their village after the trilogy, ruminating on what they had seen. They would recall (we will suppose) that in the parodos and again later (vv. 529 f.) the ill-used Suppliants appealed to Zeus to protect them and drown their oppressors at sea. How was Aeschylus to prevent them from remembering, too, that in fact the wicked Egyptians turned up in Argos, undrowned, perfectly dry? and from concluding either that there is no point in praying to Zeus, or that Zeus is something other than the Suppliants imagined?

In short, unless the mental processes both of Aeschylus and of his audiences were something beyond our comprehension, the poet had one mouthpiece and one only: the play in its entirety, not in bits and pieces. This chorus, certainly, is not Aeschylus’ ‘mouthpiece’ but his creation – and a very dramatic one.¹

During the ode, one figure has remained stationary, Danaus. Now he comes forward to speak, and what he has to say hardly makes our blood run faster. He tells his daughters that he is as prudent by land as he has been at sea; with unnecessary amplitude he tells them that a company of men is approaching. He is dull. Having said that, we should ask ourselves what is the substance of the short scene. To us it may be a bore, but the question is – if we can answer it – what response to it did Aeschylus expect from his audience? Two things happen: first, Danaus counsels his daughters to place themselves as suppliants at the altar of Zeus, and to be submissive, as becomes the suppliant; second, prayers are offered to Zeus, Apollo, Hermes. There is no difficulty in the prayers; we are once more to understand that the gods are going to preside over the action of the trilogy, that it will have no merely personal or local orbit. As for the other point, it seems reasonable to suggest that it is a preparation for what is to come and has been foreshadowed already: these Danaids can hardly be called submissive, ‘like doves’ (v. 223), towards the King; and this may prove to be not merely an interesting bit of decorative character-dra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Edith Hall
• Preface
• Note to the Third Edition
• 1. Lyrical Tragedy
• 2. Old Tragedy
• 3. The ‘Oresteia’
• 4. The Dramatic Art of Aeschylus
• 5. Middle Tragedy: Sophocles
• 6. The Philosophy of Sophocles
• 7. The Dramatic Art of Sophocles
• 8. The Euripidean Tragedy
• 9. The Technique of The Euripidean Tragedy
• 10. The ‘Trachiniae’ and the ‘Philoctetes’
• 11. New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies
• 12. New Tragedy: Euripides’ Melodramas
• 13. Two Last Plays
• Index