Greek Tragedy

H. D. F. Kitto

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317761440
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Ancient History

This classic work not only records developments in the form and style of Greek drama, it also analyses the reasons for these changes. It provides illuminating answers to questions that have confronted generations of students, such as:
* why did Aeschylus introduce the second actor?
* why did Sophocles develop character drawing?
* why are some of Euripides' plots so bad and others so good?
Greek Tragedy is neither a history nor a handbook, but a penetrating work of criticism which all students of literature will find suggestive and stimulating.

Chapter VIII

The Euripidean Tragedy

1. Introduction

If this book were being entirely rewritten, chapters VIII and X would probably change places. I had misunderstood the Trachiniae because I had not paid close enough attention to its form; therefore I ascribed it to a later period of Sophocles’ activity, one in which his dramatic thinking was less intense, in which he had begun to exploit the study of character and situation for their own sake. The Philoctetes, which I joined with the Trachiniae, does indeed exploit these more than any other of the extant plays, but even so I would not now draw the distinction which I did between Sophocles’ ‘middle’ and ‘new’ tragedy. However, it is perhaps no bad thing if we now consider some of Euripides’ plays; the young reader, at least, will be reminded that Sophocles and Euripides did not exist end to end but were contemporaries. It is probable that most of the plays to be discussed in this chapter were produced before the Electra of Sophocles.

During the period with which we are now concerned, the last three decades of the fifth century, all Greece was convulsed by the Peloponnesian War. No extant Sophoclean play shows the direct influence of this except the Philoctetes; Euripides reacted to it more violently. A more permanent influence on Greek poetry was exerted by another contemporary event which goes, rather awkwardly, under the name of ‘the Sophistic Movement’. It is as if the Greek mind, during this period, began to shift its weight from one leg to the other: from intuitive intelligence, based on a generalized reflection about human experience, and expressing itself through art and the traditional imagery of mythology, to a conscious analysis of experience which made use of new intellectual techniques and was expressed, inevitably, in prose. It is a change that has something in common with our own Enlightenment which set in during the seventeenth century: after that, in England, until the romantic movement brought revival, poetry was either witty or pitiful; in Greece, big-scale poetry of importance dies with Euripides and Sophocles. Exquisite poetry was still to come, but no longer did it even pretend to grapple with what matters most; that became the province of the philosophers.

What we will call New Tragedy shows the influence of the shift on serious drama. We shall find it in some of Euripides’ later plays, and it seems a safe inference that Agathon’s Antheus was of such a kind: Aristotle says that Agathon invented the whole plot: Agathon would not have done this unless he were writing drama of an essentially romantic kind, depending on surprise and novelty, not professing to say anything very important.

But before we can deal with this stage of Tragedy we must consider that development which took its origin not in a general change coming over the art, but in the individual outlook of Euripides. He, like Sophocles, had his great tragic period; it survives to us in the Medea, Hippolytus, Heracleidae, Heracles, Andromache, Hecuba, Suppliant Women and Troades. These plays are all tragic, all but the Hippolytus badly constructed, by Aristotelian standards; they have certain features in common, such as the prologue and ‘episodic’ plots, and in some respects, notably characterization and construction, they are as unlike the rest of Euripides’ work as the Tyrannus itself. Yet the I.T., even to Aristotle, was a model of construction, and the Ion, Electra, Orestes, Helen, are at the lowest estimate well-made. Why is it that in the tragic group there is hardly a single play which has not provoked the most serious complaints and the most desperate apologies ?

The thesis of the following pages will be that as we were able to trace the characteristic features of the Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy to the nature of the tragic idea that possessed these poets, so all the new features in these plays can be seen to be the logical result of Euripides’ tragic idea. We shall see him moving from a drama which he made as much like Middle Tragedy as possible to one which, however un-Aristotelian, was at least the powerful expression of what he wanted to say.

Our first task, once more, must be to try to catch the tragic idea, that tragic way of thinking about life which made these plays what they are; for we will not suppose, if we can help it, that a poet of Euripides’ calibre made loose plots like those of the Troades and Heracles by mere inadvertence, or committed the structural sins which Aristode censured in the Medea out of simple inability to do better. In fact we shall find, time after time, the Euripides does very much less than he might have done if Aristotelian perfection of form had been his aim, and intellectual loyalty to his idea of no importance to him. In the dramatic methods which we see developing from the Medea onwards there is a purposefulness, or at any rate a positiveness, which is not to be explained by mere absence of something, a mere lack of harmony between the poet and his form.

We have, to mislead us, important aspects of Euripides’ thought – his scepticism, his impatience with traditional religion (as if Pindar and Aeschylus had not been impatient and sceptical), the misogyny which ancient critics regretted in him, the feminism of which some moderns accuse him, his liberalism, his pacifism. These things are important. Politics and religion are more significant in drama than in painting, for instance, because the raw material of drama is drawn from the sphere of social and moral ideas; but to understand the art of a dramatist it is not enough to expiscate and record his religious and political beliefs – nor indeed shall we know what they are until we have understood his art. These doctrines of Euripides’ do not help us in the least; for they colour all his work, while we are faced with this cleavage between the tragedies and the other plays. The I. T. and Electra contain more religious scepticism, more realism, more satirical handling of traditional legend than the Hecuba or Troades, yet they are in the conventional sense infinitely better constructed and contain much more normal characterization. There is some force in the common statement that there was a deep disharmony between his thought and the traditional form of state tragedy, though Euripides did not handle this traditional form, whatever it was, much more freely than Aeschylus had done; yet the Suppliant Women, an ‘encomium of Athens’ as it is called by critics ancient and modern, shows litde sign that the dramatist for once felt comfortable in his civic bed.

Is there one general explanation of Euripides’ strange methods, or must we either resort to a kind of Secret Service like Verrall’s or take undignified refuge in phrases like ‘unevenness’, ‘lack of unity’, and ‘carelessness’?

Let us state the problem more fully. The Medea is twice censured by Aristotle: the Aegeus scene is illogical and is not even used properly, and the end is artificial and therefore wrong. Moreover, by implication he condemns the murder of the children as ‘revolting’ (μιαρόν), and the catastrophe, the escape of Medea and the death of the innocent, is hardly what he approved. Both the Hecuba and the Andromache have a sharply marked duplicity of action; the Heracles contains three actions (though with a more obvious connexion) and a character, Lycus, who seems to belong more to melodrama than to tragedy; the Suppliant Women offers one scene, Evadne-Iphis, about which a recent editor conjectures that it was put in to interest those spectators who were bored with the rest of the play; while the Troades is one episode after another, held together, we are told, by the passive figure of Hecuba – as if Euripides needed Aristotle to tell him that what befalls one person is not necessarily a unity.

In the later¹ series of plays none of these major faults are to be found. Euripides satirizes Apollo, he argues, he ridicules or condemns heroes of legend, he uses the realism and the modern music that Aristophanes disliked, he expresses ‘advanced’ views in religion, philosophy, and sociology, he commits all sorts of anachronisms, he does a dozen other things to which this critic or that may object, but at least he never commits again any of those elementary blunders in construction.² When we add that all of the plays in the first series are tragic and none of the second, or, if the Electra and the Orestes are to be called tragic, they are tragic in an entirely different spirit – then we are justified in asking if these peculiar features in the first series are not intimately connected with the nature of the tragic idea expressed in them.³

2. The ‘Medea’

There is no need to make phrases about the terrific power of the Medea. In important respects it diverges from what we think normal construction, at least normal construction as understood by Aristotle, and yet it is one of the greatest of Greek tragedies. So one writes, almost automatically, but most of the implications of that ‘and yet’ are wrong; for had Euripides managed to put the stuff of the play into a beautiful Sophoclean mould, making a ‘better’ play of it, it would not have been a better play but a ridiculous one. The Medea diverges from the Sophoclean pattern because Euripides’ way of thinking was different.

Aristotle expressly cites the appearance of Aegeus and the sending of the magic chariot as being ‘irrational’, not the necessary or probable result of what has gone before; but, lest we be tempted to think that these are only casual licences taken by the poet which can, with luck, be explained away, we ought to observe how fundamental is the divergence between the poet and the philosopher here. How, for example, does Medea fit Aristotle’s definition of a tragic hero? Not at all. Aristotle’s tragic hero is ‘like’ us, for we should not feel pity and fear for one unlike us. He must not be a saint, or his downfall would be revolting, nor a villain, whose downfall might be edifying but would not be tragic. He must therefore be intermediate, better rather than worse, and find his ruin through some ἁμαρτία. Medea is not like this; it would indeed be difficult to find a Euripidean hero who is, until we come to Pentheus. Medea is no character compounded of good and bad, in whom what is bad tragically brings down in ruin what is good, and we certainly cannot fear for her as for one of ourselves. In fact, treated as a genuinely tragic heroine she will not work; she causes at least one of her admirers to fall into a grave inconsistency. Professor Bates says (Euripides, p. 37), ‘In the character of Medea … the tragic genius of Euripides reaches its highest pinnacle. In none of the other plays is there a character which can approach Medea as a tragic figure.’ This is a possible view, but it is inconsistent with the judgement (p. 44), that all our sympathy is concentrated on the unfortunate children, ‘for we have little sympathy with the cruel, savage Medea.’ Then she is not tragic after all, only melodramatic? The poor children, the wicked mother, the heartless father – surely this will not do ?

A comparison with Macbeth is interesting. He can be made into a recognizably Aristotelian hero. He is presented at first in a favourable light: ‘For brave Macbeth – well he deserves the name.’ ‘O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!’ He is better rather than worse; but he ἁμαρτία of ambition, and circumstances, as is their way with tragic heroes, play upon it – first through his very virtues:

DUNCAN.	No more that thane of Cawdor shall deceive Our bosom interest. Go pronounce his present death, And with his former title greet Macbeth.
ROSS.	I’11 see it done.
DUNCAN.	What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.

It may be hazardous to claim Glamis Castle for a stronghold of Aristotelianism, but this ironic touch is very like Sophocles, and certainly it is an essential part of the tragedy of Macbeth that he has been noble, loyal, and gallant.

Medea on the other hand is certainly not all villainy; she loves her children, loved Jason (if that is a merit), and was popular in Corinth; but it is the essential part of this tragedy that she was never really different from what we see her to be. Euripides could easily have represented her as a good but passionate woman who plunges into horrors only when stung by deadly insult and injury. There was no need for him to rake up her past as he does – except that this is his whole point. She never was different; she has no contact with Aristotle.⁴

Neither has Jason. In him it is impossible to find anything that is not mean; not because Euripides is satirizing anyone through him, though he does use his Jason to mock the complacency of his countrymen, but for the same reason, whatever it is, that makes his Medea so extreme a character. We may notice here how little the other characters count – naturally, when the chief characters are drawn in such simple colours. The Nurse is this, the Paedagogus that, and Aegeus the other thing, but were they different nobody would be much the wiser. This is not characterization as Sophocles understood it; we have nearly returned to Eteocles’ Spy. Sophocles drew his minor characters vividly because he needed them, not because he was good at it; Euripides refrains because he does need it.

From characterization we may pass to the general tone of the play. Aristotle, in a dry little analysis, examines the ways in which τὸ øθαρτικόν, the deed of violence, can be brought about: the worst but one is for kinsman to slay kinsman knowing who it is that he is slaying. This is ‘revolting’, and the Medea is full of it. The unrelieved baseness of Jason is revolting; revolting in the highest degree is Medea’s great crime; and what of the Messenger-speech? The horrible death of Glauce and Creon is described exhaustively in the terrible style of which Euripides was such a master. It is sheer Grand Guignol. We have yet seen nothing like it in Greek Tragedy. We have had before scenes, described or suggested, of horror – the self-blinding of Oedipus, the murder of Clytemnestra-but always the horror has been enveloped in the greater emotion of tragic pity. It has brought with it its own catharsis. Where is the tragic pity here? In the destruction of an innocent girl and her father there is no possibility of tragic relief. We pity them, as later we pity the children, but as they have done nothing which in reason should have involved them in this suffering, as no flaw of character, no tragic miscalculation, no iron law of life has brought them to this pass, but simply the rage of Medea, our pity has no outlet; we are impotent and angry – or would be, if this assault on our nerves left room for such feelings. From these things we can turn to no grim but majestic universal principle, only back again to that terrifying murderess.

Supposing that Sophocles had given us a comparable description of Antigone’s death agonies? It is unthinkable; but is this only to say that Sophocles was Attic, Euripides already Hellenistic? And supposing that Aristotle had had his way, and that Medea, having committed these crimes, had made her way under her own steam to Athens? Or if the dramatic law of the necessary or probable had asserted itself, and Medea had been stoned by an outraged populace? The play would have been no tragedy at all, but the emptiest of melodrama; after this terrific preparation the story would suddenly have relapsed into insignificance, a mere exciting tale about Medea of Corinth. In the matter of the ending Euripides is un-Aristotelian by inspiration, not by mischance, as we shall see in a moment; but before considering this ful...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• I. Lyrical Tragedy
• II. Old Tragedy
• III. The ‘Oresteia’
• IV. The Dramatic Art of Aeschylus
• V. Middle Tragedy: Sophocles
• VI. The Philosophy of Sophocles
• VII. The Dramatic Art of Sophocles
• VIII. The Euripidean Tragedy
• IX. The Technique of the Euripidean Tragedy
• X. The ‘Trachiniae’ and ‘Philoctetes’
• XI. New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies
• XII. New Tragedy: Euripides’ Melodramas
• XIII. Two Last Plays
• Index