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ESSAYS ON GREEK LITERATURE
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ESSAYS
ON
GREEK LITERATURE
BY
ROBERT YELVERTON TYRRELL
LiTT.D. Dublin, Cambridge, Durham, and Queen's University ; D.C.L. Oxford; LL.D. Edinburgh and St. Andrews;
FELLOW OF BRITISH ACADEMY ;
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE AND FORMERLY REGIUS PROFESSOR
OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN
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1909
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PREFACE
It will be seen that none of the five Essays here brought together has been written within the last five years, while the earliest of them was published more than twenty years ago. For permission to republish the first four my thanks are due to the well-known courtesy of the proprietor of the * Quarterly Review.' The fifth is reprinted by the kind permission of the ' International Quarterly,' Messrs. Duffield & Co., Publishers, New York.
I harboured for many years the project of producing these five Essays on Greek together with others on Latin and English Literature ; but I have been advised on good authority that such a collection would be incongruous and unacceptable. I had thought of endeavouring to bring the studies more up-to-date ; but in some cases there seemed little to add, and in others such an attempt would have run counter to the original design.
In reference to the first Essay I venture to think that Professor Bury's arguments against the nomic basis of Pindar's ' Odes of Victory,' though brilliant like all the work of that most versatile and eminent scholar, are not convincing. The Essay has to a great extent dealt with them in anticipation ; while
vi PREFACE
the Editors who see in the Poems an elaborate system of * responsions ' have hardly succeeded in recommending their views to students of Pindar.
In the essay on Sophocles, pp. 60-63, the question is discussed whether Haemon did really spit in his father's face, and whether he was justified in so doing — whether irTvcrag irpoa-wircpQAnt! 1232) means ' spitting in his face ' or ' with loathing in his looks,' as the scholiast explains the words, followed by nearly all Editors, but not by Jebb. It is interesting to observe that Aristotle in referring to this very passage ('Poet' 1454a) has not a word to say about Haemon's 'splendida bills,' but condemns as inartistic the abortive lunge which Haemon made at his father before he plunged the cross-handled sword in his own body. Nowadays the abortive lunge would be accepted as a good piece of business, the spitting would be (as we have seen) condemned by nearly all modern critics. The passage in the * Poetics ' in Butcher's admirable translation runs thus : —
* Of all these ways, to be about to act, knowing the consequences, and then not to act, is the worst. It is shocking without being tragic, for no disaster follows. It is therefore never or very rarely found in poetry. One instance, however, is in the "Antigone," where Haemon intends to kill Creon.'
In impugning the Aristotelean authorship of the treatise on the ' Constitution of Athens ' I am aware that I am putting myself in opposition to the majority of English scholars, but I have not found in the champions of the Aristotelean origin, even in the exhaustive and most scholarly edition by Dr. Sandys, any answer to my arguments or any
PREFACE vii
solution of the difficulties which I have pointed out, founded on the style and diction of the tract as well as on the non-recognition of this specific treatise by Plutarch and subsequent writers. On the Continent the belief in the authenticity of the ' Constitution of Athens ' is by no means so general as in England. The following extract from the Preface of the brilliant edition of H. van Herwerden and J. van Leeuwen (1891), Englished from his very elegant Latin, expresses the views of some scholars in Great Britain and of many on the Continent : —
* The importance of the Treatise on the ' Consti- tution of Athens,' long lost but recently edited by Kenyon from Papyri in the British Museum, depends in a very large measure on the crucial question whether it is really the work of Aristotle, to whom it is ascribed by antiquity as far as we know, as well as by the majority (apparently) of modern critics since its recent discovery ; or whether, like so many other works ascribed to the great Stagirite, it falsely claims the sanction of his commanding name. The latter view was held by Valentine Rose, even when the work was known to us only in fragments ; and, now that we have it in its entirety (or nearly so, for it is defective at the beginning and at the end), the same judgment has been pronounced and fortified with strong arguments hy such critics as Fr. Cauer, J. van Leeuwen, H. Droysen, Fr. Ruehl, J. Schwarcz. But, even though by further research of the learned world it should be proved well nigh to demonstration that the recently discovered ' Constitution of Athens ' is wholly unworthy of the Arch-Philosopher, even though this should be established beyond all doubt.
viii PREFACE
no judicious reader will readily deny that the new Treatise is from many points of view a boon to students of the History and Antiquities of Athens and of Greek literature as a whole.'
The judgment of such scholars as Herwerden and those whom he cites must not be lightly set aside. But we cannot accept his statement as to the belief of the ancient world in the authenticity of the tract. We know that they recognised a Treatise on the Constitution of Athens by Aristotle ; but we submit that there is abundant evidence that it was not the Treatise now before us.
Allusion is made in the paper on Plutarch to the surviving traces of the hedge-schoolmaster among the Irish peasantry. The blurred fashion in which the heroes of Greek mythology are fused with vague memories of biblical personages is well indicated in the familiar Irish song which celebrates
' Homer, Plutarch, and Nebudchadnezzar, All standing naked in the open air.'
It is hoped that the volume may commend itself to such readers as may take an interest in critical questions and may desire to have before them in a concise form the most interesting portions of the more recent finds, ' The Constitution of Athens ' and the * Poems of Bacchylides.' All the translations from the latter were published before the appearance of Jebb's monumental edition.
CONTEiNTS
FINDAR V>^/^, iH~^' Z^*^
Estimate of Pindar in ancient times and in modern — Difficulty in *iu« ^Cv#^ placing him — Voltaire, Mr. J. A. Symonds — Points of contact g,,,^^ '
between English and ancient Greek mind — Greek public games O^^^JJ^,^] — Character of the Odes — Metzger's theory about their structure — Analogy of Terpandrian nome — Catchword serving as a kind of rubric — Structure suggested by the pediment in architecture — Relation to strophic constitution— Characteristics of Pindar's style — Recoil from the commonplace — Matthew Arnold, Villemain, Sir Francis Doyle, Froude, E. B. Browning, Rossetti, Keble - i
SOPHOCLES
Fortunate career of Sophocles — Aristophanes on Sophocles — Criticism of Sophocles on his two great rivals — Tragedy ancient and modern — Stateliness of Sophoclean diction — Jebb as editor — Jebb on German athetising — The German's knife — Jebb as a translator — i Compared with Paley — His aesthetic sense — Shown in various \ passages — Antigone's defence of her contumacy — Was Haemon ' justified in spitting in his father's face ? — Lord Lytton's version of the scene of Haemon's death — Minute felicities pointed out by Jebb — Dr. Benjamin Hall Kennedy — Sophocles as Strategus — Absence of the passion of Love from Greek tragedy — Character of Creon in the three Theban plays — Comic verses in the Watch- man in the * Antigone ' — Irony in ' Oedipus Rex '—Jebb as a textual critic — Use of conjecture — The MS. reading Kbvi'i in ' Antigone ' and the conjecture acott^s — Allusiveness of Greek lyric poetry and mixed metaphor — ^Jebb's contributions to the text of Sophocles 41
X CONTENTS ^ ^^^
THE RECENTLY-DISCOVERED PAPYRI '
Discoveries during the nineteenth century — Forgeries — The pursuit of the Unecht — Egyptian Papyri — Great antiquity claimed for them by Dr. Mahaffy questionable — The Athenian Constitution — Falls into two divisions — Discrepancies with Thucydides, Plutarch, Aristotle's * Politics ' — Can this have been the treatise used by those critics? — The Pisistratidae — New Athenian Worthies — Fresh light on the character of Themistocles — The Four Hundred, Five Thousand, and the Thirty— Rhino and Archinus new figures in the history of Athens — The twelve Athenian constitutions — Machinery of state— Minute urban legislation — Crepuertint fores — Female dancers and flute-players — Lucian vindicated — The Eleven— Curious blunder of a lexicographer — Lessons to be gathered from the study of the fortunes of a democracy — Dis- cussion of the Aristotelean authorship — Evidence against Arist. authorship from Style, Diction, Syntax — From quotations which are made by subsequent writers from a ' Constitution of Athens, ' but which are inconsistent with the present treatise - - 85
BACCHYLIDES
Work of Dr. Kenyon, and the late Professors Jebb and Palmer on
the editio princeps — ^Judgment of antiquity on Bacchylides borne
out by the finds — ^Judgment founded on fragments unused — Com-
^ parison of Bacchylides with Pindar — Ode III., Death of Croesus^ ili^
Lhy^^C^^^WJ^ —Ode v.. Story of Meleager— Ode XL, Daughters of Proetus—
fl^l^ Ode XIIL, Strange coincidence with a simile in 'Paradise Lost'
— Poems of a new genre — Theseus — Despotic lust, coincidence
between Bacchylides and Shakespeare — His religious creed — No
nomic structure — Emphatic phrases — Syntax — Critical obss. —
Diction — Accidence — Simplicity of metrical systems — No conflicting
imagery such as we find in Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles - 134
PLUTARCH
World-wide fame of * Plutarch's Lives ' — Meagre biographical details — Slight knowledge of Latin — Allusion to Horace— His relation to Christianity — Anecdote about Mestrius Florus — Symposiaca — Patriotism of Plutarch — Respects in which they fall short of
CONTENTS xi
perfection — Merivale on the ' Lives ' — Lack of political insight — His aim, as set forth in * Paullus Aemilius' — Popularity — Tribute by Amyot — Significant anecdotes — Impressive descriptions — Plutarch and Tacitus on the same theme — Plutarch and Thucy- dides — Plutarch and Shakespeare — Especially in death of Cleopatra — In * Antony and Cleopatra ' —In ' Coriolanus ' — Minor loans from North's ' Plutarch ' — Plutarch as a psychologist — Compared with Seneca — Most suggestive moral treatises — Unjust judgments on Plutarch — Method and style 171
PINDAR'S ODES OF VICTORY
It is perhaps hardly too much to say that no student has ever come to the first reading of Pindar without disappointment — without a more or less pronounced feeling that he does not realize what the quality was in Pindar which made him an inspired sage in the eyes of Hellas, a saint with a niche beside Homer ; which consecrated even his most casual utterances to Plato and to Cicero ; and which made Horace select his art as the very type of the inimitable.
Not only has the sober judgment of antiquity given to the Theban lyrist a place only second to Homer, but the airy tongue of legend has singled him out as the special favourite of the gods. It was on his lips, as he slept in childhood, that a bee lit and gathered honey. He it was who taught Pan his song, and to whom Persephone came in a dream, ten days before he died, and told him that he would soon be with her to make a song for her. And honours almost meet for a god were paid to him. His iron chair was preserved as a sacred relic at Delphi ; and every night as the priest closed the doors of Apollo's temple he cried aloud, * Let the poet Pindar come in to the supper of the God/
A
2 PINDAR
Such being the extraordinary reverence paid by antiquity to the poet, it seems strange that among us so many should fail to see his greatness, and that even his admirers should often feel constrained to mix apologies with his eulogies, burning incense with one hand, and snapping the fingers with the other. The fact is, the character of the ' Odes of Victory ' as a literary phenomenon has been very imperfectly apprehended. It is hard for us to figure to the imagination a form of art which partakes in nearly equal parts of the nature of a collect, a ballad, and an oratorio ; or to enter into the mind of a poet who is partly also a priest, a librettist, and a ballet master ; who, while celebrating the victory of (perhaps) a boy in a wrestling match, yet feels that he is not only doing an act of divine service and worship, but preaching the sacred truth of the unity of the Hellenes and their common descent from gods and heroes. The Odes of Pindar have their source in a religious feeling, almost as alien from ours as it IS from that which sent the children through the fire to Moloch, or strewed with corpses the path of Juggernaut's car. We find ourselves confronted with poems, which seem to us to deal with very incon- siderable events, but which are conceived in a strain almost burthened with a sense of the importance and dignity of the subject — poems of which the salient feature is their wild freedom and abandon, but which reveal to the closer gaze a strong sense of conscious art, and a singular conformity to technicality.
It is the utter absence of any modern analogue to the ' Odes of Victory,' which has on the one hand piqued and stimulated the interest, and on the other
ODES OF VICTORY 3
hand retarded and dwarfed the achievement, of successive generations of scholars from the revival of learning to the present day. And this is the reason why English writers have, to a great extent, refrained from characterizing the poetry of Pindar. Voltaire has spoken of him as 'this inflated Theban,' adding that his French translator had imparted to his poetry all the clearness and beauty which it could claim. We have not seen the version of M. de Chaumont, but we fancy it must be a strange piece of work if he, as well as Voltaire, looked on Pindar as being merely a ' chantre de combats a coups de poing,' or, at best, a First Violin in the court of Hiero. France may indeed be said to have, in her own phrase, 'the courage of her con- victions,' since through Voltaire she has condoled with England on having had her taste spoiled for two hundred years by Shakespeare ; and, by the mouth of La Harpe, has called the Divina Commedia ' une amplification stupidement barbare.' English writers about Pindar have not been so outspoken. But their enthusiasm is often qualified and half- hearted. Historians of Greek literature in England — even editors of Pindar — have shown a tendency to make large concessions to unbelief when they are called on to give an answer to the question. Was Pindar one of the poets of the world ? Even those whose panegyrics have been most eloquent — and among these Mr. Symonds naturally assumes a foremost place — have a habit of tempering their eulogies with excuses for ' turgidity ' and * bombast.' We shall afterwards endeavour to show that Pindar is not turgid nor bombastic. Here we would fain
4 PINDAR
offer some considerations to those who regard Pindar as ' the poet of the ring,' and who give his poems a place only among prize verses and installation odes.
Pindar's * Odes of Victory ' are sui generis^ and so were the occasions which called them into being. Local fetes^ in their events and prizes more or less resembling the four great national festivals of Hellas, are mentioned in large numbers by Pindar. But the four great national festivals will here furnish enough to engage our attention. How is it that they excited in Pindar as deep an interest, and kindled in him as vivid a flame of inspiration, as have been awakened in other poets by love, hate, war, destiny, patriotism, religion ?
The answer to this question is difficult. It is hard to reconstruct for our imagination the feelings with which the games were regarded by Hellas. Yet we may perhaps fairly say that it is easier for us than for other nations. First, the English love for athletics, the English glorification of physical prowess, has its good as well as its bad side, and in its best aspect has an Hellenic affinity. If we could take away from it all that savours in any way of gate-money and the betting ring ; and if it were possible (or indeed desirable) to add to the English sentiment in favour of athletics, that worship of the body which struck its root so deep in Hellas ; the feeling thus modified would be akin to that which inspired Pindar. Physical strength has not now that practical weight in battle which it had when the ancient Greek warriors * bare up the war against the
ODES OF VICTORY 5
hedge of spears.'^ Yet Wellington said that Water- loo was won in the playgrounds of Eton, and Kinglake seems disposed to think, that but for the hard riding practised in the English shires, our cavalry would never have been able to win the heights above the Alma.
But there is another, and a still closer, point of contact between the English and the ancient Greek mind. With both the desire to keep up the breed of horses assumed the proportions of a social — almost a religious — duty. In eulogizing Xenocrates of Acragas, Pindar writes —
' August was he in his converse with citizens, and upheld the breed of horses after the Hellenic wont.^ ^
Could such an eulogy have been uttered by any other save an English poet, or on any other save an English noble? To win a great race, to keep the hounds, to maintain the breed of horses, undoubtedly does give or add prestige to an English gentleman. But to a Greek LTTTrorpocpia was still more important as a road to distinction. There were no great land- holders in ancient Greece, nor could one become eminent by surrounding himself with rare works of art. At the time of Pindar, the works of art which existed were the property of states, not of private individuals.^ Much splendour, no doubt, embellished
* Nem. 8, 29, Myers' trans.
^Isthm. 2, 37. Myers' translation. In every place where we have used Mr. Myers' most tasteful and spirited version, we have acknowledged our debt in a note.
^This observation has been well developed by the Rev. F. D. Morice in his * Pindar for English Readers.' We have derived much pleasure from his book, which is plainly the work of a highly cultured
6 PINDAR
the courts of Hiero and Arcesilaus, but the chief opportunity for display, without any violation of good taste, was afforded by the games, and the festivities of which they were the occasion. Pindar declares constantly that the outward and visible sign of cultured opulence is the readiness to enter for the games — best of all the chariot race at Olympia ; that the next best thing to success in the games is failure in them ; that if a man be so blest as to achieve vic- tory, it is his glorious privilege to spend and spare not on the feast, and the triumphal ode which is its chief ornament ; but * if one at home store hidden wealth and laugh at them that spend, such an one recketh not that inglorious he giveth up his soul to death.' ^
The public games were to the Greeks something like what the great public schools and the Universities are to an Englishman. In both cases the imagination was touched by the antiquity — real or supposed — of the institution, and both institutions gradually came to be a social test. Pindar is often fain to tell how the victor's family had competed at the games — whether successfully or not — for many generations ; just as an Englishman might congratulate himself that his ancestors, generation after generation, had gone to Eton and Oxford, even though none of them might have attained any signal distinction at the school or the University.
To a Greek the public games were all that we have said, and more, for we must not forget that the
scholar, and is admirably fitted to meet the needs of the English student, while there are few classical scholars who will not derive much instruction from it. ^Isthrn. I, 67.
ODES OF VICTORY 7
right to compete was the test and proof of nationality. The Macedonian princes were obliged to afford satisfactory proof of Hellenism before they were allowed to enter the contests. It was no small thing which moved Hiero and Arcesilaus to transport their chariots and teams from Sicily or Cyrene to Olympia. The phrases in which Pindar dilates on the supreme blessedness of the Olympian victor surprise us, until we remember that Cylon is said to have owed his political prominence to a triumph at Olympia, and that Alcibiades was borne over a very ugly political quicksand by the tide of enthusiasm which rose when the ' Heralds of the Seasons ' declared the brilliant young Athenian, who had entered no less than seven chariots, to be winner of the first and second prizes on the Elean plain.
To gain some conception of an Olympic festival, we must not only figure to ourselves the great English festival of the Derby day, with both Houses of Parliament adjourning; but we must remember the sacred truce which the Heralds proclaimed throughout Greece for five days ; we must bear in mind that the games were a religious rite, which became even a starting-point for chronology ; we must impart to the mind of the Greek at the games the feeling with which a man listens to an anthem, as well as that with which he witnesses the victory or defeat of his old school at cricket ; we must think of the busy traffic which went on along the banks of the Alpheus by day — the Greek of Cyrene, for instance, who came with the horses of Arcesilaus, brought with him, no doubt, good store of the much-prized silphium from the * Garden of Aphrodite ' — and we
8 PINDAR
must think of the festal joy on which the midmonth moon looked down ; and to all this one must add a sort of Christmas feeling, a sentiment of peace on earth, goodwill towards men, which with us is called forth by the great festivals of the Church.^
Therefore, to Greeks at all events, he was not a mere ' glorifier of fisticuffs,' whose highest imaginings were kindled by the great Hellenic festivals. So infinitely important were these festivals to the Greeks that they were not remitted even when ' the Stone of Tantalus hung over their heads.' ^ When Xerxes was advancing on Boeotia, and the combined fleet was retiring from Artemisium, the Greeks were celebrating the Olympic games. How to us Pindar's 'Odes of Victory' — without the Hellenic associations, unglorified by their connection with the founders, Heracles or Adrastus — should appeal, will afterwards be more fully considered. We now pass to an examination of the poems themselves.
The poetry of Pindar now more than ever fascinates the scholars of Germany, England, and America. The main object of this paper is to set forth and discuss a theory concerning the structure of the odes, which has found much favour in Germany, but has hardly been noticed at all in England;^ and which
^The points on which Isocrates {Panegyr. 44) chiefly dwells are — the general truce, the sense of unity and common descent, the common prayer and sacrifice, the renewing of old friendships and the forming of new ones, and the general feeling of mutual good-will and charity.
^Isthm. 7, 10.
^Prof. Gildersleeve, of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, has made an important contribution to Pindaric literature in his edition of * The Olympian and Pythian Odes,' a work showing much
ODES OF VICTORY 9
puts in a new and very interesting light the poetry of Pindar as a literary phenomenon. To do this, we must take a short retrospect.
Before the epoch made by the labours of Bockh and his follower Dissen, Pindar was without form and void. His ' Odes of Victory ' seemed a strange medley of disjointed proverbial philosophy and dark mythic allusion, bursting now and then into a grand flash of semi-epical ballad. To Dissen mainly is due the view now held by all scholars, that Pindar's odes are by no means mere prize poems or installa- tion odes, but marvellous specimens of the highest constructive skill and the fullest lyrical inspiration — where every phrase, every allusion, fits as aptly into its own place as each bit in a piece of mosaic work, yet the whole poem rushes on with the impetuous volume of a lava stream.-^ Pindar's matchless mastery of construction is now duly appreciated, and a great poet of our own day has described him as thoroughly intoxicated with the spirit of style.^ But his precise relation to his age and his art is hardly yet sufficiently apprehended. Mr. Symonds compares the body of lost Greek lyric poetry to the mass of church music which exists in Germany and Italy, in MS. and print. Lyric poetry was as indis-
vigorous scholarship and brightness of style, together with a thorough mastery of the result of German industry on Pindar up to the present date. He has briefly noticed the theory referred to in the text, but he is not disposed to accept it.
^d-n-Xdrov irvpbs dyvdrarai irayal, Pyth. I, 21.
^ ' A sort of intoxication of style — a Pindarisvi, to use a word formed from the name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power of style seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect.' — Matthew Arnold, 'On the Study of Celtic Literature,' p. 144.
lo PINDAR
pensable to the life of the Greek as music to the churches of Europe. As every church in Europe now has its organist, so every town in Greece had its professional poet and chorus. But the poet was not merely the organist, he was also the celebrant of the rite, the conductor of the cantata^ and the preacher of the word, whose duty it was to set forth impressively the glory of the god who gave the victory, and the virtues whereby the victor won his favour. For this the poet received pay, just as our clergy receive pay in their capacity of professional conductors of public worship. When we remember that the professed lyric poet was bound not only to produce in his poem a work of art, but also to compose appropriate music, and to superintend the dancing as well as the singing of the chorus, we can understand how Pindar found full occupa- tion in his art through the troublous times of the Persian wars ; and we are not surprised to learn that he sometimes had to postpone, even for years, a commemorative ode which he had undertaken to execute.
Though Pindar's odes formed the chief part of a ceremony which was always more or less an act of worship, nothing could be a greater mistake than to look on them as religious poems. Their main characteristic is their exuberant buoyancy. The poet often speaks of his craft in terms which recal the * gay art ' of the Middle Ages.^ The Ode is a
^The very phrase for 'gaiety' is used in Isthm. 3, 57, Acara pa^8bp ^(ppacev deaTrealuv iiriiav Xoiirois dd {> peiv. Cp. KWfiov . . .*AwoWi!>viop &dvpfjt.a, Pyth. 5, 20.
ODES OF VICTORY ii
main ingredient in the revel, an appanage of luxury and the feast —
'Behold I send thee this honey mingled with white milk, and the foam of the mixing hangeth round about it, to be a drink of minstrelsy distilled in breathings of vEolian flutes.' *
The lay is more comforting to the victor than the warm bath to his limbs strained with the conflict.^ To Chromius he says,^
'Victory burgeons into fresh bloom by the lay that falls so soft on his ear ; with the bowl the singer's voice rises brave ; mix now the bowl, sweet inspirer of revel lays, and hand round in the goblets the vine's lusty son.'
Very often the poem is itself called a draught of wine, and once the ode's twofold character as a prayer and a work of art is exquisitely indicated in the words ' a suppliant I bear a Lydian crown wrought cunningly with sound of song.'*
Thus, it only requires a little reflection to recon- struct the feelings which inspired the poetry of Pindar, and the occasions which gave rise to it ; and to recognize broadly the fact, that Pindar was no improvisatore, but a careful and cunning artist. But as to the precise method of the poet's art, as to the material structure of his odes, a theory has been recently put forward which certainly has the merit of
^Nem. 3, 76, Myers' trans.
2 Nam. 4, 4. We shall afterwards have to quote a splendid com- parison of his verse to a crown of ivory, gold and coral. ^Nem. 9, 48. ^ l/c^raj . . . (^kpwv
Av8iav fxlrpav Kavaxv^^ TreiroiKiKfJLivav.
Nam. 8, 15, Myers' trans.
12 PINDAR
definiteness, and which in many ways must attract and fascinate students of Pindar.
The work of Professor Mezger has undoubtedly made an epoch in the study of Pindar. He is a willing follower of Dissen in the elaborate ingenuity with which he seeks to unearth the Grundgedanken of the odes. But he introduces entirely new principles in his theory about the structure of the poems. R. Westphal,^ by a very searching examina- tion of the choric odes of Aeschylus, was led to the conclusion, that each ode consists of four choric songs and one lament or connnos (the latter some- times replaced by a processional hymn). Of the choric songs Westphal held, that the real model was f$^the old Terpandrian nome^ which, starting from a , .' central point (ojuLcpaXo^)^ expanded itself into pairs of jf^ members on each side of the SfxipaXo^. This fact seems to be recognized by Aristophanes (Ran. 1281) when Euripides checks the threatened departure of Dionysus in the words,
fx-q' irptv y' aKovcrrjs ^drepav (TTdircv /xeAwi/
and follows up this description of the melic inspiration of Aeschylus with the celebrated travesty of the first choral ode in the ' Agamemnon ' to the accompaniment of TocpXaTToOparrocpiXaTToOpaT. The names of the various members of the Terpan- drian name are given by Pollux,^ and are thus enumerated by Mezger :
^ 'Prolegg. zu Aesch. Trag. 1869.'
*The irpoolfiiop was not mentioned by Pollux, because it was common to other artists with Terpander. By some the iirapxd is called jxeTapxd, and the i^65iov the 4iri\oyos.
ODES OF VICTORY 13
irpooifiLoVf eirapxa, APXA, C-/ /Jy KaraTpoTrd, 0 OM^AAOS,
^y /tj^ fieTaKaraTpoTTOL, ^ 2*PAri2,
Of these the cLp-^d, o/mcpaXog and crcppayig must be present in every ode. The others may be present or absent, just as the surface of a lake, broken by a stone thrown into it, may spread itself into more or fewer concentric circles of retreating water. Mezger maintains that Pindar, in his ' Odes of Victory,' in nearly every case ^ takes for his model the Terpan- drian nome. The kernel of the poem is the o/uLcpaXo^^ which very nearly always contains the myth. There are six exceptions. In Pyth. i and 9, Nem. i and 10, and Isthm. 2 and 6, the myth is not in the o/iKpaXo^ ; and sometimes there is no myth at all, as in 01. 5, II, 12, Isthm. 2. But in every other ode the myth is an elaborately executed vignette^ set in the o/uLcpaXog, with the other parts of the ode for its massive frame. From the ofxipakog expand the cip-)(a and cr(ppayig, one on each side. These deal with the glorification of the victor and his family. They are connected with the SjucpaXog by transition-pieces^ the KaTarpoTrd on one side, and the lULeTaKaraTpoird on' t 'io the other, in which the poet refers, under the guise of metaphor, to himself and his song. For instance, in Pyth. 4, 247, he compares the course of his ode to a
^The exceptions are six odes of very small compass, Ol. 4, ii, 12, 14; Pyth. 7 ; Nem. 2. Nem. 1 1 is not an Epinician Ode.
14 PINDAR
highway, and declares that he knows a short cut to his goal ; in Pyth. i o, 5 I the ode is figured as a bark on the sea; in Pyth. 11, 38, both metaphors are combined. When Lord Tennyson wrote a ' random arrow from the brain/ he used a figure under which o^ Pindar in the Kararpoird and the jULeraKaTarpoTra/^^ constantly refers to the products of his Muse. These two transition-pieces rarely lack a certain corre- spondence with each other, whether of sentiment or expression.^ For instance, in Nem. 7 the KaTarpoira (17-24) contains a splendid eulogy on the power of poesy —
* Rich and poor alike wend their way to ultimate death. But I hold, that the fame of Odysseus was greater than his suffer- ings by reason of the minstrelsy of Homer. For on his fiction and his soaring craft a kind of majesty is stamped, and his art beguiles us and carries us away.'
Closely connected with this is the /uLeraKaraTpowd (75-80), which describes in words of magic beauty the meed of poesy itself under the figure of a crown of gold, and ivory, and coral : —
' Let me be : if I soared too high when I shouted the victor's praise, no niggard am I in paying my due. To weave wreaths is a light matter. Strike the prelude ! For thee the Muse welds together gold and stainless ivory and the lily-flower that she hath filched from the ocean's foam.'
In Isthm. 6 the KaTarpoTrd (16— 19) says : —
'Sleeps the fair deed of olden time, clean gone from the minds of men, save what hath attained unto the perfect meed that poesy can give, being wedded to the tide of song.'
^The exceptions, curiously, are all in the Pythian odes. No corre- spondence between KaTarpoird and fieTaKaTaTpoird can be traced in Pyth. 2, 3> 4> 8, 9, 11; but it appears in all the others.
ODES OF VICTORY 15
To which the antiphonal response of the /meraKara- y f^ Tpoira (39-42) rings clear in the passage beginning
* I will twine my hair with wreaths and sing.'
In Isthm. 7 the poet in the Kararpoird (15—18) introduces the myth with a promise that he will 'give first to Aegina the fairest boon of the Charites;' while the /meTaKaraTpoTrd (59 ff.) leads us away from the myth by the reflection, 'So this thing found favour with the Gods ^00 — to give over a hero even dead to the hymning of the Heliconian maids.' The promise . of the poet in the KaTarpoird receives in the ineraKara- rpoTrd the sanction of the example of the Gods.
That this method of structure was not in any sense a caprice of the poet — neither a Uur de force of his youth, nor an affectation of his decline — may be seen by examining three odes, corresponding respectively to the beginning, the middle, and the close of his poetic activity. In Pyth. 10, the earliest of Pindar's odes, written about 502 B.C., at the age of twenty — verses 27—30 and 51—54, proclaim them- selves to be KaTarpoird and /uLeTaKararpoTra. Both have the metaphor taken from a voyage by sea, to which the poet so often turns ; and between the two the myth is set in the 6iui<pa\6^ as a precious stone within the bevil of a ring. After the /uLeTaKararpoTrd the cr<ppayL9 (55— 7 1) resumes the theme of the victor's praise which the cip)(d (4—26) had begun. Finally, while the Trpool/unop (1-3) had glorified the nobles of Thessaly, the e^oSiov (71 f) declares that * in the hands of good men lieth the good piloting of the cities wherein their fathers ruled.' ^
^ Myers' translation.
i6 PINDAR
The structure of the ode may be thus exhibited to the eye : —
3 (7r.) + 23 (a.) + 4 (k.) + 20 (d.) + 4 (mO + i^ (o-) + 2 (L).
V ^ " ' y
The fifth Isthmian ode coincides with about the middle of the poet's artistic h'fe (B.C. 482). It displays the very same structural phenomena, save that the irpoolfxiov and e^oSiov are absent, as is often the case. It will not be requisite again to enter into details. The reader, on referring to the ode, will see that its form is this : —
18 (a.) + 5 (k.) + 32 (o.) + 4 (/^.)+i6 (cr.).
The thirteenth Olympian ode belongs to the close of the lyrist's career, composed about 464 B.C. The Trpooljuiiov in this ode is a prelude in the strictest sense of the word. The ode proper begins with the €7rap-)(a (24-29) and its prayer to Zeus, which has its antiphone in the e^oSiov (114 f ). This is its structure : —
23 (tt.) + 6(€7r.) + I7(a.) + 6(/c.) + 40(0.) + Sih') + l6(o-.) + 2(6.)
V ^ ^ - — ^ y
In the cases which we have hitherto examined, the very substance and matter of the Kararpoira and /jLeraKaTarpoTrd show their transitional function. But, in many cases, there is no such clear note of their character. This would seem, at first sight, fatal to the theory of Westphal and Mezger. For how are we to disentangle the KararpoTra and fieTaKararpoTrd from the rest of the poem ? The hymn composed on the Terpandrian model has been compared, as a
ODES OF VICTORY 17
whole, to the pediment of a Greek temple. Take away from the sculptured pediment the groups on each side of the central figure, and all the symmetry is gone. The central sculpture must be flanked, on both sides, by corresponding pairs of designs, until the whole pediment is embellished. So the central S/uLipaXog of the hymn must shade off into a/>x« ^^^ a-(f)payi9 through the transitional KaTairpoira and /uLeraKaraTpoTrd. The hearer must feel the transition, else his ear, or his sense of symmetry, will be hurt, as his eye would be hurt by want of symmetry in the sculptured pediment.
Now these are the very cases in which Mezger sees the strongest proofs of the soundness of his theory. When the transitional pieces do not by their subject matter declare themselves to be such, it is the habit of the poet to mark the place of the transition by the repetition in the lULeTaKaraTpoTrd of some particular word in the KararpoTrd, and that in the same foot of the same verse in the strophe. Thus in Olymp. 7, of which the form is : —
19 (a.) + 7 (k.) + 5o (o.) + 4 (/^O+is (o-.). the myth is introduced (verse 20) by the words —
^vvov dyyeWoyv Siopdiocrai Xoyov.
There is nothing here to show the transitional character of the KaraTpoird, nothing to show that this is the Kararpoird. So the poet in the first line of the jLieraKaTaTpoTrd introduces in the same foot of the same strophic verse the word TXa7roXe/xw, to serve as a sort of cue or catchword. As the myth,
1 8 PINDAR
which forms as usual the ojuLcjyaXog of the ode, was introduced in verse 20 by the word TXaTroXe^ov, so by TXaTToXeVft) in the same foot of verse 77 is the myth dismissed,
toOl Xvrpov (TVfJL(f)opas oiKrpas yXvKV TAaTroXe/xo) MTTarat ^ipvvdioiv ap\aykT(}..
Thus this device of the poet would serve as a kind of rubric. The KaTarpoird would say ' here beginneth the oyu^aXoV and the fxeTaKararpoira would say * here endeth the o/uLCpaXog.' No doubt, moreover, the repetition of this was emphasized by traditional modifications of the music and the dance.
On first meeting these acute observations of Mezger, one is disposed to exclaim with Horatio, * 'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.' But we must again call to mind the circumstances under which Pindar's odes were composed. Such a device might seem childish to us, with our complete array of typographical expedients. The mere em- ployment of a different type, or the setting in or out of the same type, would call attention to a correspondence between two parts of a poem. But the poems of Pindar, if they were written at all, were certainly not written to be read but to be heard, and could not possibly have recourse to any structural device save such as would appeal to the ear.
Professor Mezger has pointed out many cases in which Pindar thus employs a recurrent word to guide the hearer to the proper apprehension of the nomic march in his poems ; and Mezger is himself so strongly convinced of the soundness of the prin- ciple, that he is guided by it in the arrangement,
ODES OF VICTORY 19
the explanation, and even the criticism of the odes. He shows, for instance, that Bergk is wrong in still protesting, now in his fourth edition, against the fusion of the third and fourth Isthmians into one ode — an arrangement which was long ago proposed by Heyne, and has been accepted by all subsequent editors, except Bergk. That the two odes are really one is clearly shown by verses 19-24, which, according to the pre-Heynian arrangement, were verses 1-6 of Isthm. 4. These verses are the KararpoTrd of the whole poem made up by com- bining Isthm. 3 and 4. They correspond to verses 60—63, which are the /uLeraKarar powd. This is made certain, in the opinion of Mezger, by the fact, that the name Melissus is introduced as a catchword in the same foot of the same strophical verse in the KaTarpoTrd and the juLeTaKararpoTrd.
In the eighth Olympian ode the narrative is sud- denly interrupted at verse 28 by the exclamation —
6 S' €7ravT€XXiov \p6vos TOVTO TTpdcrcrayv jxy Kapoi.
The explanation of this, Mezger ingeniously observes, is that the reOjuLo^ of the Epinician ode here demands the Kararpoira, which is ushered in by the words quoted. The catchword is irpda-a-wv^ which finds its echo in Trpd^aig (verse 73) in the same foot of the same strophical verse in the juLeTaKaTarpoTrd : —
'AtSa TOL XdOeraL ap/JLcva 7rpd^aL<s dvrjp.
These two places also correspond in their subject matter, dealing with the ways of fate, and leading on to a new topic.
20 PINDAR
In the ninth Nemean, verse 28 : —
TTCLpav fikv dydvopa ^oiViKOCTToXoiv cyvewi/ ravrav davaTOV inpl kol ^(ods dvaf^akkofxat tos iropa-LCTTa,
Mezger sees in ravrav a catchword corresponding to ravrav in 54 : —
eu^o/xat ravrav dperav KeXaSrjcraL (tvv Xaptrecrcriv,
and founds on this basis a quite new interpretation of this difficult passage. He regards (poivtKocrroXcov 'l,^ not as a proper name, but as a characteristic epithet of €y)(€wv, ' mit Roth d. h. mit Blut iiberzogen.' The poet having described the destruction of the Argive host at Thebes, and thinking of the recent Persian invasion, prays that far from him may be ' such high arbitrament by blood-boultered spears, where Hfe and death are the stake.'
Naturally enough Pindar is satisfied, according to the view of Mezger, with any catchword that will lead back his hearers to the desired point. He does not feel it necessary to employ in the /meraKararpoTra the very same expression as he had used in the Kararpoira. In the same way, some of the greatest of our modern poets content themselves with an assonance instead of a complete consonance. Mrs. Browning is satisfied with the degree o^ similarity in sound which subsists between turret and chariot^ when she writes —
' Crowned Cybele's great turret Rolls and quivers on her head ; Roar the lions of her chariot Toward the wilderness unfed.'
But the catchword must have sufficient resemblance
ODES OF VICTORY 21
to serve as a mnemonic for the hearer. For instance, in the tenth Nemean ode, the phrase inoipav ecrXwj/ (verse 20) in the KararpoTrd is recalled by /moipav aycovcov (verse 53) in the /uLeraKaTarpoTrd. In the fifth Nemean, ^(^pucreav l^ripijlScov (verse 7) finds its echo in y^pva-akaKdrwv l^tjpe'iScop (verse 36). In the twelfth Pythian, the discovery of the vojuLog iroXvKeipaXog is described in the Kararpoird ; then comes the myth of Medusa ; then in the jULeTaKaraTpoTrd we are led back to the Kararpoird by the word SovdKwv.
It would be tedious here to pursue Mezger's system any further in its application to each ode. That it is not merely fanciful we have said enough to show. The reader will, we think, find that to read Pindar from Mezger's point of view will certainly not detract from his interest in the poems, and will probably dispose him to look more favourably on the hypothesis itself.
On this fascinating theory, the first reflection which will occur to the reader is that it presents to us Pindar, not as a singer whose lawless imagination sweeps him on in unshackled numbers, but as the most painstaking of artists, bound by more rules than those of the sonnet, the ballade, or the chant royal \ yet supremely successful in giving to these laboured poems all the outward semblance of a strain of unpremeditated art, as profuse as the song of the skylark. Is then the theory a just one? Did Pindar really model his ode on the Terpandrian|-cU<^ /5^ nome, and use all the art which Mezger ascribes to him to emphasize his method ?
It has been already remarked, that a Pindaric ode
22 PINDAR
so constructed might be compared to the sculptured designs on the pediment of a Greek temple. Now Pindar frequently boasts that he has introduced some novelty into the melic art. The novelty introduced seems, from the way in which he refers to it, to have been some new method employed in the structure of his odes. For instance, in Olymp. 3, 4, he declares —
' Hereunto hath the Muse been with me, in the finding of a glossy-new device, to fit to the Dorian step the voice of the hymn.'i ' "^^tk^^
In Pyth. 4, 247, he exclaims —
' I show the way in the poet's craft.'
Some innovation of Pindar's was attacked by his rival, Simonides. This innovation seems to have been in the structure of his odes. It can hardly have been (as has been suggested) the employment of mythical narrative, though this is so leading a feature in his poetry. The one statement which tradition gives us on this question is, that it was his rival Corinna who recommended to him the use of the myth ; and she no doubt had employed it herself on the seven occasions on which she defeated him in trials of poetic skill. She even censured him for a misuse of her teaching, when she curbed his youthful exuberance by telling him * to sow with the hand, not with the whole sack.'
Now Pindar's poetry is informed with an en- thusiasm for Greek art. His * Odes of Victory ' are * an embodied joy ' in the great past and present of
^TAoiffa 5' oIjtu) toi irapiara fxoi veoalyaXov evpbvrt, Tpbirov
ODES OF VICTORY 23
Hellas, which now, after repelling the barbarian, was awaking to a buoyant sense of new life, national and artistic, * even as the earth after the murk of the changeful months burgeons anew with red roses,' ^ or as ' when the chamber of the crimson-clad hours is opened, and the harbinger gales usher in the incense- breathing spring.'^ Of this sense of a new and great existence, Pindar was full to overflowing. It is alien from the genius of the Greek poets to *give elaborate descriptions of nature and natural objects ; but chance-dropt expressions here and there show, that Pindar looked on nature with a painter's eye, and lead us to infer that he must have been deeply impressed by the painter's art. ' The midmonth moon in car of gold lit up right before him the eye of eve,'^ is what would now be called a word-picture ; and so is the phrase in which he describes the infant lamus as 'bathed in the yellow and purple glow'^ of the flowers which gave him his name. The description of the eagle of Zeus in the beginning of the first Pythian ode reads as if the poet had a picture before his mind's eye ; and we have in another place the simile of the eagle with his prey in his talons — a favourite device on the coins of his time.^
ilsthm. 3, 36. 2 Frag. 75. Bergk, ed. 4.
^Olymp. 3, 20. ^Olymp. 6, 55.
^Nem. 8, 80. This subject is magnificently treated by Sophocles in the first choral ode in the 'Antigone,' where the Argive invasion of Thebes is described as a fight between an eagle and a serpent. The skill with which the poet suggests the picture of the eagle and the serpent while telling of the actual invasion seems peculiar to the Greek poets and Swinburne, in whose ' Erechtheus ' the human warriors who invade Attica seem to loom larger than men, and the onset of the assailants merges itself into the onset of the elemental hosts which war
24 PINDAR
But while the poet's work was deeply coloured by the kindred arts of painting and sculpture (to which he so often refers) ; while we find him even alluding, in a noble passage already quoted, to the triumph of the goldsmith's craft ;^ there is only one art which he explicitly and in plain terms sets forth as the analogue of his own. This art is Architecture. A remarkable passage of this kind is the opening of the sixth Olympian ode, where he likens his poem to \:}ci^ facade of a noble building : —
' Golden pillars will we set up in the porch of the house of our song, as in a stately palace-hall ; for it beseemeth that in the forefront of the work the entablature shoot far its splendour.' ^
Again, he exclaims : —
' Lo, a basement of gold has been fashioned for our lays ; come, let us build a fair work of art with words wrought cunningly.' 3
He calls a promised ode now completed ' a god-built debt,'* in close connection, moreover, with his most explicit assertion of his claim to rank as a discoverer in the melic art. He speaks of a treasure-house of song being built, and of its fair fagadeJ" Even the expression ' poet-builders,'^ though it does not seem unnatural to us who are familiar with Milton's 'build the lofty rhyme/ must have been a significant expression when it was used by Pindar; since we
against the Attic coast. Pindar finely describes the elemental hosts as a 'fierce levy of storm battalions from the thunderous cloud-rack.'— Pyth. 6, 10.
^Nem. 7, 77. ^Qiymp. 6, i, Myers' trans.
3 Frag. 194, Bergk, ed. 4 ^Olymp. 3, 7.
«»Pyth. 6, 8-14. 6 Pyth. 3, 113.
ODES OF VICTORY 25
find it parodied by Aristophanes and Cratinus.^ But perhaps the most striking passage in which the poet speaks of a connection between Architecture and his own Art is the following (Olymp. 13, 17) : —
' To the inventor belongeth every work. Whence was revealed that enhancement of the rite of Dionysus that came with the Dithyramb? Who to the gear of steeds added that wherewith to curb their course ? Who placed on the shrines of the Gods the twin eagle ^ king of birds ? '
Surely this is a very remarkable coincidence, if it is nothing more. In close connection with an invention in the melic art, the poet places the first employment of the pediment in Greek Architecture ; for of course he refers to the two pediments of the temples them- selves, in referring to the eagles which were placed as finials on each gable, and from which the pediment itself was called aeT6<i^ aeTdifxa}
It seems then not an unwarranted inference, that it was some architectural device — most probably the treatment of the pediment — which suggested some striking feature in the structure of his odes. Now, Pindar must often have admired the sculptured pediments of the temple of Athene at Aegina. And it is very remarkable, that those very pediments furnish the themes of some of his most beautiful episodes. The following instructive passage from a paper on Pindar by the late Professor Jebb,^ though
^ Aristoph. Equites^ 530, and Schol.
2 There is, indeed, very considerable authority for the theory, that the field of the gable was itself called cteros from the resemblance of the whole pediment to an eagle with outstretched wings ; see Schol. on Aristoph. Aves mo, and Bekk. Anecd. p. 348. 3, y] yap ivl .rots irpoirvXaloLS KaraaKevrj deroO fic/jLeiTai (rxvf^'^ axoTeraKdros to, iTTepd.
^' Hellenic Journal/ iii. I, 177. _^
26 PINDAR
not written with any reference to the theories of Westphal and Mezger, seems to us greatly to strengthen their hypothesis : —
' But the school of Aegina is that of which we naturally think first in connection with Pindar. Of his extant epinicia, Sicily claims 15 ; the Epizephyrian Locrians 2 ; Cyrene 3 ; the main- land of Greece 13, of which 4 are for Thebes ; Aegina, 11 . . . The temple of Athene at Aegina had groups of sculpture on both pediments,— the east (which was the front), and the west. The Aeginetan marbles at Munich are statues which formed part of these groups. Their date falls within Pindar's lifetime. The subject of the east pediment (it is unnecessary to enter on controverted details of restoration) was that war against Lacedaemon, in which Heracles was helped by Telamon. The subject of the west pediment was one probably connected with the death of Patroclus, and the chief figure was Ajax, son of Telamon. All through Pindar's Odes for Aeginetan victors, the dominant mythical theme is fitly the glory of the Aeacidae, Telamon, Ajax, Peleus, Achilles. In the fifth Isthmian Ode, Pindar gives a most brilliant treatment to the initial episode of the very theme which occupied the east pediment of the temple at Aegina,— Heracles coming to seek the aid of Telamon against Troy, when Telamon gave his guest a wine-cup rough with gold, and Heracles prophesied the birth and the prowess of Ajax. Here then is a case in which we can conceive, that the poet's immediate theme may have occurred to his mind as he gazed on the sculptor's work in the splendid entablature of the temple ; and we recal Pindar's own comparison of an open- ing song to the front of a stately building, — dpxofievov 8' e/oyov Xpt) TrpoartoTTOV Oifxev Tr]\avy€sJ
What then could be more probable than that the poet, to beautify (SaiSdWeiv) his own poems, should seek to achieve in their structure some approximation to the kind of embellishment, which he must often have admired in the temple, which adorned the
ODES OF VICTORY 27
favoured home of Greek athletes ? Since he has treated with the highest efforts of his genius the themes which occupied its pediments, is it not natural that he should have tried to make each poem itself a kind of pediment of song? The same complete regularity of detail would not, of course, be attained in ordering the parts of a poem, but the principle at least might be employed. Before leaving this part of our subject, we will make another extract from the same brilliant essay of Professor Jebb (P- 179)) showing how much Pindar owed to Architecture with its handmaid Sculpture : —
'The Gigantomachia (Pindar, Nem. i, 67) adorned the pedi- ment of the Megarian 'Treasury' at Olympia ; next to Zeus, Poseidon, and Ares, the chief figure was Heracles, whom Pindar also makes prominent. The wedding of Heracles with Hebe (Pind. ib. and Isthtn. 3, 78) was the subject of a relief (of Pindar's age) on the low wall round the mouth of a well (TT^pLa-To/xLov) found at Corinth. Pindar may have lived to see the eastern pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, by Paeonius, though not the western, by Alcamenes ; the subject of the eastern was the chariot race of Pelops and (Enomaus (Pind. 01. I, 76) ; of the western the war of the Centaurs with the Lapithae. Pindar's mention of the ^'' fair-ihro7ted Hours " {Pyth. 9, 62), reminds us that the Heraion at Olympia possessed a chryselephantine group of the Horae seated on thrones by Smilis of Aegina, whose date has been referred to the earlier half of the sixth century.'
Whether Pindar really did borrow from the sister art of Architecture cannot be ascertained for certain. If he did, it is only in the last few years that scholarship has discovered the mechanism of the wonderful ' toy/ which is all the more beautiful since we have learned the secret.
28 PINDAR
If the attractive theory of Mezger be accepted, a ^ further question suggests itself The model of
WM^ /S^ Aeschylus and Pindar being a Terpandrian nome, why did they employ the division into strophe, antistrophe, and epode? Is not this a kind of cross division ? Is not each ode built on two frameworks ? * We cannot,' writes Prof Gilder- sleeve, 'admit a logical division which shall ruthlessly run across all the lines of the artistic structure. We must seek the symmetry of thought where the symmetry of the form is revealed in strophe, in triad.' In search of a solution for this problem we turn to the odes of Aeschylus and Pindar, and at ]/\{ • (ylov #^C^ lonce notice that the strophic framework has nothing whatever to correspond to it in the odes themselves. The strophic modification does not conform to any
^vLt-X/'i^ <ctMilP^^^^^^^^°'^ ^" ^^^ sense, the tone, or the construc-
^ . ' tion of the poem. A new train of thought, a new
bX»^v* /narrative, a new clause, will begin in the last verse of
^ylAJtAjt^ \r^ U strophic system and flow over into the next, which
^^^^;J*v/f<^ ( will then take quite a new turn. Conformity with
^y^jCCat^\^ i^L the strophic division seems even to be avoided by
a-i ^ 'J Pindar. No approach to it appears save in the
thirteenth Olympian ode, where the five strophical
systems do coincide curiously with the nomic
divisions, and where, moreover, the normal structure
of the ode on the basis of a Terpandrian nome is
very clearly marked thus : ^ —
23 (tt.) + 6(c7r.) + i7(a.) + 6{k.) + 40(0.) + 5(/A.) + 16(0-.) + 2 (I.)
V "^^ — ^ ' y J
^The 6th Olympian, written probably about 467 B.C., exhibits a greater conformity than is usual between the end of the clause and the end of the strophe ; and the individual strophes, antistrophes, epodes
ODES OF VICTORY 29
If, then, Aeschylus and Pindar did not take any account of the incidence of strophe and antistrophe as regards the subject matter, or construction of their poems, why did they write in strophe and antistrophe at all ? When they employed the strophic system, why did they not make the end of it a halting point for the thought and the clause, as well as for the feet of the dancers ? We cannot suggest any answer to this question, save that the Stesichorean recurrence of strophe and antistrophe had become de 7'iguetir. Aeschylus and Pindar, who did not frame their odes on this basis, were forced to employ it, and their r successors, finding that the strophic arrangement was I demanded by the public, wisely resolved to make it the^Jranaework of their choral odes. Lasus of Hermione, the teacher of Pindar, threw off the shackles of strophe and antistrophe : perhaps he found that his experiment was a failure.^ At all events it is significant that Timocreon the Rhodian, abandoning the simple stanza of Alcaeus and Sappho, clothed his satires and lampoons in the
correspond to some extent with the nomic structure ; the Trpooifxiov exactly coincides with the first strophe ; the dpxd includes the whole of the first antistrophe and epode ; the KararpoTrd coincides with the second strophe ; the 6/j,(pa\6s with the third and fourth strophes and the second and third antistrophes and epodes. At this point the coincidence fails. There is no real connection between the nomic divisions of this poem and the systems consisting each of strophe, antistrophe, epode ; save that the first system coincides with the irpoolfiiov and dpxd, and therefore with real factors of the ode. This phenomenon, as well as the circumstance, that the individual strophes, antistrophes, and epodes in this Ode often end with a clause, is no doubt due to chance.
^Mr. Fennell on Olymp. 13, 18, dirav 5' evpbvros ^pyov (a passage already referred to), suggests that some reaction against the recitative character of the Doric dithyramb is alluded to in Fra^. 79 (Bergk), irplv fi^v dpire (TXocpoTiveia t' doidd Sidvpdfi^ujv.
30 PINDAR
elaborate garb of choral strophe and antistrophe. I The Stesichorean discovery of the sequence of \ strophe, antistrophe, epode, was originally for the convenience of the dancers, and possibly the dancers were unwilling to dispense with its aid even when the poet's art had taken a higher flight. The innovation of Aeschylus and Pindar demanded qualities not to be found in the ordinary chorus. However this may be, it would certainly seem that in the odes of Aeschylus and Pindar the nomic division was the real division, the antistrophic structure being perhaps a concession to fashion.
We have already referred, in passing, to some characteristics of Pindar's style ; and we have adverted to the strange circumstance, that English writers — even the most enthusiastic — seem to find themselves obliged to apologize for his ' turgidity ' and ' bombast' It is not easy to reconcile the enthusiasm with the apology. If the poetry of Pindar does not satisfy the taste of the critic, either the poetry is at fault, or the taste is at fault, or the poetry is misapprehended.
George Eliot has observed, that there are very few who can glory in what is actually very great and beautiful, without putting forth cold reservations and incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. We began this paper by admitting, that Pindar is essentially a writer of whose study it may be said that Vappetit vient en mangeant. Those qualities in his style, which some describe as bombast and turgidity, are really splendid proofs of a keen instinct for style that enabled him always to maintain his
ODES OF VICTORY 31
poetic elevation, though dealing with events which, however glorified by associations, were in them- selves not considerable. Pindar does say, ' reft from the beardless ones,' ^ where he might have said, ' immediately on emerging from boyhood ; ' the ' vaulting ambition ' of Shakespeare is with him, the ' huntress craving ; ' ^ while the English poet writes, * the labour we delight in physicks pain,' the Theban more boldly calls a cloak * warm physick 'gainst the winds of heaven ; ' ^ ' Nemea never failed him ' is with Pindar, ' Nemea clave to him ; ' * com- pare the Biblical phrase, ' sticketh closer than a brother.' The savoury smoke of the sacrifice puffing up at irregular intervals is said to ' kick the air ; ' ^ the fruitful fields after lying fallow ' clutch back their strength ; ' ^ the glory of the family of Melissus which had ' fallen on sleep ' is said in Miltonic phrase to ' awake and trick its beams like the Daystar.' '^ We call to mind —
' Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,' when we meet such mixed metaphors as —
' Methinks a whetstone shrills at my lips ; it draws me on right fain with a current of sweet breath composed.' ^
Here the poet means, that the thought of the relation- ship between Thebes and Stymphalus (where a branch of the lamidae whom he is celebrating had
^ Olymp, 9, 89. 2 Olymp. 2, 60. ^ Olymp. 9, 97.
*d 'Ne/j.iafJL^v dpapev, Nem. 5, 44.
^XaKTi^oiaa, Isthm. 3, 84. ^^fiapxpav, Nem. 6, II.
"^ dveyeipofiipa xp^o. Xd/nrei, 'Aooatpopos darjrbs ojs darpoLS iu fiXXots, Isthm. 3, 41.
^01. 6, 82; compare Hamlet iii. i, 98, 'and with them words of such sweet breath composed.'
32 PINDAR
settled) makes * founts of inspiration well through all his fancy.' This thought takes the garb of three different figures in the exuberant fancy of the lyrist. It can better be felt than expressed. And this is true of many of the expressions which have been called turgid. To a question as to the meaning of the Miltonic
' Smoothing the raven down .
Of darkness till it smiled,' ( A fS '> ' ^ ^"^ ' ' * ' ' ' ^'^
ft^cUlAaJi^ ^^^ ^^^^ answer is sz non rogas intellego. We feel,
jlL ' rather than think, about such passages. If we plead
j|vil; / ' that night may be compared to a bird of black
. /La. ^ plumage, and that melody might be conceived to
y CT^t'*'^-*' soothe the night as stroking would soothe a bird ;
^/^vir*v^'v^ Ck tjig critic has only to urge, that neither a bird nor
HfyxjSXf^Y^'^-iki^ darkness can smile. We are silenced, but the
thought affects the imagination as powerfully as ever.
* That two-handed engine at the door ' is probably
the more impressive because we do not know what
it means.
A main source of the obscurity and apparent turgidity of Pindar's language is a recoil from the commonplace. He has to tell of a boy who won the prize for wrestling after vanquishing four com- petitors, and thus escaped the humiliation which attended on defeat. He thus expresses it — to render quite literally, for that is here the point of the quotation —
' He put off from himself on four lads' bodies the return home most painful, the tongue to dispraise turned, and the furtive path.' ^
1 Olymp. 8, 68.
ODES OF VICTORY 33
Pindar refuses to draw from many of those sources to which moderns go for their effect He never enters into the details of the combat ; never more than vaguely hints at a particular incident of the particular victory commemorated, sometimes, even by a single word, by using SvcrTraXeg for ' difficult ' in an ode which celebrates a victory in wrestling, or '^Gv^ai jueXog in commemoration of a chariot race.
On many sides his art offers contrasts to modern methods. He does not make use of descriptions of nature to beautify his themes, as a modern writer would certainly do. Yet who can have read the Olympian Odes without feeling the soft splendour of the scenes through which wended the comus- procession under the full moon ? Nay, so sensitive is the poet to the touch of nature that we miss the influence of the Altis and the smiling banks of the Alpheus, when we read the odes which celebrate victories won in Nemea, a wild glen surrounded by ' bleak barren hills worn by the winter torrents into a thousand furrows.' ^ He does not dwell even on the tender passion, save on ' love's sanctities ' ^ and the sweet alSwg and mutual adoration of lovers,
' The exalted portion of the pain And power of love,'
as in the exquisite tale of the love of Apollo and the nymph Cyrene, in the beginning of the ninth Pythian — surely the most beautiful of all his odes, not even the fourth Pythian or the sixth and seventh Olympian being excepted. It is indeed marvellous that Pindar,
^ Clark, ' Peloponnesus,' p. 65.
^ KpvirTal KXatSes ivrl (rotpas ireidous lepav (pikoTdTWV, Pyth. 9, 39, 'secret are wise Persuasion's keys unto love's sanctities.' — Myers' trans.
C
34 PINDAR
neglecting so many sources of poetic effect, could have produced such poetry.
Again, we must not forget that words or expres- sions in an ancient language, if they happen to coincide with some modern argot or vulgarism, take on a grotesque association which is not due at all to the phrase itself, but which makes the phrase seem much bolder than it really is. In telling why Ajax slew himself, Pindar says, 'it was envy that wrapt him round his brand,' ^ — that is, * made him sheathe his sword in his body.' To this phrase clings a remini- scence of the American 'humoristic' expression, accord- ing to which a man 'puts himself outside' that which he eats or drinks. This is the reason why slang is to be protested against. It does violence to language which ought to be sacrosanct. It is ' verbicide ' in a higher sense than that in which Oliver Wendell Holmes applied the term to punning. When Achilles * shows the door of Persephone ' ^ to the Trojan heroes, we are reminded of a vulgar synonyme for dismissing an intruder. Even within the limits of our own language and literature, we meet with cases where a word has in the lapse of time assumed grotesque associations. Who could now read the passage in which Chaucer speaks of
' That conceited clerk Homere,'
without a mental picture of the Foreign Office dandy, or the humbler velvet-coated cigar-smoking func- tionary of the Bank or Post Office? Yet the contemporaries of Chaucer knew that he meant * that learned poet so full of imagination.'
*0o<r7(li'V d/i0i/cvM(rats, Nem. 8, 23. ^ jsthm. 7, 55.
ODES OF VICTORY 35
We must remember too that Pindar aims at making his language * caviare to the general.' ^ Like Thomas Carlyle, he exults in phrases which seem to be the birth of a moment, the outcome of exuberant carelessness, but are really the product of careful invention.
We have already referred to Mr. Matthew Arnold's phrase about the style of Pindar. The same critic describes the true spirit of style as ' a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction '^ to it ' ; and again as ' an ever-surging yet bridled excitement in the poet giving a special intensity to his way of delivering himself No words could be devised more fit to depict the peculiar faculty of Pindar. Not Cowper, nor even Wordsworth, succeeded in maintaining elevation of style on com- paratively trivial themes. To be stilted is not to be dignified. ' Those who live in glass-houses should not throw stones,' is at least as elevated as
' Let those in vitreous tenements who dwell. Forbear the flinty missile to propel.'
M. Villemain, in a comparison between the genius of Pindar and of the great French orator Bossuet, dwells on their common possession of 'un instinct de la grandeur sous toutes les formes, un gout pour les choses eclatantes.' The sun, the splendour of kings and their palaces, the pomp and circumstance of war, set the imagination of both on fire ; and to both the eloquent words of Villemain are singularly applicable — 'ce qui semblerait parfois image vulgaire brille
1 Olymp. 2, 85.
36 PINDAR
toujours nouveau sous leurs paroles de feu.' Their common characteristic is * naivete dans la magni- ficence.' Their sometimes common-place themes are ' hid under flowers of fire,' to use the picturesque words of Sir Francis Doyle in a translation of the second Olympian ode, from which we give an extract (6 1-74), tempted by the extreme beauty of the passage, which, by its easeful flow mirrors for us, as in a shining river, a golden moment in the poet's inspiration : —
' These beneath a sun whose light Shines ever without setting day and night
Their happy years begin : By their worn hands the earth is vexed no more, Nor the sea smitten with the toiling oar,
A scanty meal to win : Zeus leads them on, crowning their brave endeavour.
To Time's far home of happy rest. Where the soft ocean breezes float for ever
Around the Islands of the Blest. There golden bloom to bloom succeeds.
Through Springs that never tire. They fill with light the ground below. Athwart the shining trees they glow ; Their growth the very water feeds,
Hid under flowers of fire.'
Froude justly characterises Pindar as the purest of the Greek poets. He is of the same order with Phidias and Praxiteles, as perfect an artist in words as they are in marble. ' Hard he is, as the quartz rock in which gold is embedded, but when you can force your way into his meaning it is like glowing fire.' Pindar is essentially (piXdyXao^. And his natural love of splendour was greatly fostered by the circumstances of his life. ' Bold, electric Pindar,' as
ODES OF VICTORY 37
he is called by Mrs. Browning, intoxicated with the glories of Hellenic life, felt that ' his soul possessed the sun and stars.' He was the public guest of many of the great cities of Hellas. The Rhodians engraved the seventh Olympian ode on the wall of the temple of Lindian Athene in letters of gold. He was the honoured guest of princes and potentates. Indeed, this ' First Violin of King Hiero,' as Voltaire called him, seems to have looked down on the mushroom kings of Sicily with some degree of contempt He never seeks to trace them back to the heroes of mythland. It is to be observed, that in the odes which commemorate their victories and those of their adherents, the myth takes its rise from the locality or other circumstances connected with the victory ; ^ or it is suggested by the character or personal surroundings of the victor ; ^ or else the myth is absent altogether.^ At Nemea, the Isthmus, and Pytho, the victors were chiefly of the great families of Aegina or the princely house of the Battiadae. Here it is to the victors themselves, and their descent from the Aeacidae and other kings of mythland, that the poet directs his hearers' attention. But at Olympia the parvenu chiefs of Sicily were often victorious, and there it is to be noticed, that the poet calls us away from the person of the victor to tales associated with the place of the contest, and to local Olympian legends.
In truth Pindar, proud in his descent from the Aegeidae, felt himself the peer of any king. He is bold enough to reproach the representative of the
iQlymp. I, 3 and 4; Pyth. 12 ; Nem. i.
2Pyth. I, 2, 3, 6; Nem. 9. ^Qlymp. 5, ii, 12; Isthm. 2.
38 PINDAR
Battiadae with harshness to a relative, and the despot of Syracuse with his accessibility to flattery and his avarice. Among the apophthegms attributed to Pindar is one to the effect, that he would not (like Simonides and Bacchylides) live at a tyrant's Court, * because he would rather live at his own behest than another's.' The Sicilian princes have been compared, as patrons of learning, literature and art, to the Medici at Florence. Pindar, when sojourning with Hiero, seems rather to have had the feelings of Dante at the Court of Can Grande della Scala. The Court poets filled him with scorn : —
' And the court poets (he, forsooth,
A whole world's poet come to court !) Had for his scorn their hate's retort. He'd meet them flushed with easy youth. Hot on their errand. Like noon-flies They vex'd him in the ears and eyes.' ^
There seems to have been an Oriental strain in the character of Hiero, which must have been very distasteful to Pindar. His love of flattery, though not his avarice, reminds us of the kings of Persia. His plot against his brother Polyzelus recals the story of David and Uriah the Hittite.^ Now Orientalism is hateful to Pindar, whose great poetic heart was Hellenic to the core. Pindar was a Theban, and Thebes Medized. But Pindar was not therefore un-Hellenic. It is impossible to be Hellenic or un-Hellenic until there is a Hellas, and
^ • Dante at Verona,' Gabriel Dante Rossetti.
2 Polyzelus had married Damareta, the widow of Gelo. Hiero, fearing the influence which this connection might give his brother, formed a scheme to send him in command of an expedition to a neigh- bouring town, where, by previous arrangement, he was to lose his life.
ODES OF VICTORY 39
there was no Hellas before the Persian invasion. When Hellas sprang from the blood of the Mapa- OoovofJiayaL, she had no more devoted lover than Pindar ; no son more keenly alive to the glories of Salamis, Plataea, and Himera;^ or more enthusiastic in his thanksgiving to the god who ' put away from us the stone of Tantalus that hung heavy over our heads — a curse greater than Hellas could endure.'^
These odes of Victory give us a unique picture of the 'sustained splendour'^ of Hellenic thought and life during and after the Persian invasion. It is a pity that they are so invariably read in the unnatural order in which they were placed by Aristophanes the grammarian, and which they have retained ever since.* Mezger has set an excellent example in dividing the odes into two great classes: (i) those in honour of princes, such as Hiero, Thero, Arcesilaus, the Aleuadse, and the followers of all these, such as Chromius, Xenocrates, Telesicrates, Hippocles ; (2) odes in honour of states, as Boeotia, Athens, Aegina. Subordinately to this classification, the odes are arranged by him as nearly as possible according to their chronological order, in so far as it can be ascertained.
But the odes, in whatever order read, cannot but present a stately picture. The poet of the 'Christian Year' has observed Pindar's tender sympathy with human life in all its stages, the appealing helplessness
iPyth. I, 7S-8o. 2isthm. 7, 10.
^The phrase in which Lord Beaconsfield, in * Lothair,' described the life of the English nobility.
*He arranged them on this principle: (i) chariot races; (2) boxing and wrestling ; (3) running, etc. The victories of men are given priority to the victories of boys.
40 PINDAR
of infancy, the sensuous grace of ayKa6yvLo<s rj^a, the sturdy vigour of manhood, and the serene restfulness of old age. Perhaps no words could be found more adequate to Pindar and his style, mind and life, than the noble lines in which the late Poet Laureate has glorified his own art. The magnificence of Pindar's spirit, the starry splendour of his diction, and the largeness of his human sympathies, might well have been present to the mind of Tennyson when he wrote : —
' The poet in a golden clime was born,
With golden stars above, Dower'd with a hate of hate, a scorn of scorn, A love of love.'
SOPHOCLES.
Whether there has ever been a greater poet than Sophocles would not be a very profitable question to ask, and the answer given to it would probably show considerable divergence of opinion. But that he was the most prosperous of poets, the most enviable both for the circumstances of his life and for the triumphs of his art, will be denied by none who are acquainted with his career. Such was his personal beauty and grace, that he was chosen, when sixteen years old, to lead the choir which celebrated the victory of Salamis with song and dance. The boy Sophocles walked naked in front of the choir, bearing an ivory lyre in hand. He afterwards held high office^ in the State, and died at a great age, the accepted poet of Greece, not least happy in his death, by which, as Phrynichus wrote in an epitaph on his brother poet, he was taken away from the evil to come.^ According to Aristophanes, the sweetness of disposition, which was naturally fostered by his fortunate lot, survived even the grave and attended him in the world below.
^He was one of the Strategic B.C. 440, and was among the Probuli elected after the failure of the Sicilian Expedition, B.C. 413. ^ KaKCii% ^reXei;TT/<r' ovhkv iiirofJt^Lvas kukSp. 41
42 SOPHOCLES
' Genial he was above and genial here,' says Dionysus of Sophocles in the * Frogs.' And the brightness of the gay and happy Athenian — who was the very bloom of the brilliant age of Pericles, Phidias, and Thucydides, and the mirror of its mind; who revelled in
'The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love,' and yet found a calm pleasure in advanced age in the sense of release^ from the passions which tore his youth — is reflected perfectly in the sparkle and glow of his lyrics. Where, even in Greek, can we find words that dance as they burn like those of the matchless ode in which the aged poet sung the praises of Colonus, and of that Queen of Cities which was his nursing mother, and set free his ever-young fancies to sing with the nightingales in the meadows aflame with crocus and narcissus, amid the olives and laurels which were the girdle of Athens, and the violets that crowned her brow? We wonder how many thousands of readers of Sophocles, fascinated by the magic charm of this immortal ode — which for any one who can read Greek for pleasure at once raises the standard of what is possible for human achievement in poetry — have essayed the feat of transplanting it into their own tongue, and have failed to catch completely the note of pure joy which it utters. Yet there was in this bright spirit a well of tears deeper than that which overflows in the tragedies of Euripides, and making a rainbow in the sunlight of his genius. It was not a passion-torn, broken-hearted Catullus, a sick and persecuted Keats, but the happy Sophocles,
^ dafievalraTa a.'tr^<t>vyov (Plat. Rep. 329 c).
SOPHOCLES 43
the idol of Greece, from whom was wrung that cry of agony :
* Not to be born is, past all prizing, best ; but, when a man hath seen the light, this is next best by far, that with all speed he should go thither whence he has come.'^
It is, perhaps, the great psychological range of this enthusiastic yet sober contemplator,
* Who saw life steadily and saw it whole,'
which has secured for him the unquestioning applause of every age. As regards formal estimates of his poetry, belonging neither to the Gigantesque nor to the Naturalistic schools, he has missed the praises which have been poured on Aeschylus and Euripides, and has sometimes been regarded as a kind of compromise between two rival ideals. We do not propose to enter on the oft-instituted comparison between the three great tragic poets of Greece. We may, however, form a surmise as to what Sophocles himself thought on this subject by calling to mind his own criticism on his two great rivals. He is reported to have told Aeschylus that * he did what he ought to do, but did it without knowing ' ; and of his younger rival, he said that * Euripides portrayed men as they are, he himself as they ought to be portrayed,'^ that is, as the laws of art demanded. Euripides produced photographs, Sophocles pictures. Thus he seems to have proposed to himself as the ideal temper of a dramatic poet a mind which on the one hand applies conscious principles of art to
^Oed. Col., 1225, Jebb's trans.
^Not 'as they ought to be': morally perfect characters would not afford materials for a drama.
44 SOPHOCLES
the treatment of human affairs, and on the other hand refuses to confine itself within the narrow limits of vulgar experience. Tragedy should have its scene in palaces, not boudoirs, and should present to the spectator not photographs, but pictures, or rather groups of statuary or tableaux vivants, for ancient Greek tragedy had closer affinities with the sculptor's art than the painter's.^
Aristotle has told us that 'Tragedy is a repre- sentation of an action that is weighty, complete, and of a due magnitude, effecting through pity and terror a purgation of the like passions in the mind of the spectators.' The precise meaning of the term ' purgation ' (KoiOapc-ig) has puzzled commentators ; but it broadly indicates that the feelings should be rightly excited about something which is their proper object ; and that those feelings ought ultimately to be allayed artistically. The best among modern tragedies, and even works of fiction — * Hamlet,' * Lear,' * Faust,' ' Romola ' — have succeeded in ex- citing the feelings rightly, and exercising them on worthy objects. Sometimes, however, it is easier to make the nature of a quality clear by pointing to a case in which it is absent than by adducing one in which it is present — by appealing to an instantia contradictoria, not an instantia exemplaris. Of one
^The magnificent kommoSy or amoebean dirge, in which Antigone and the Chorus (Ant. 808-881) antiphonally bewail the girl's approaching doom, is, from a dramatic point of view, certainly too long. Yet it fully satisfies another sense of beauty than the dramatic. It affects us as some stately frieze representing a slow, sad funeral procession. The action of the piece stops, to give us time to contemplate the girl's heroic self-sacrifice. It has not even the moving life of a picture, but the statuesque repose of a cunning piece of sculpture.
SOPHOCLES 45
who did not proceed in the right way to purge our emotions of pity, Thackeray^ gave a good instance in the late Mr. Warren when he told how Mrs. Aubrey shed tears as she reflected that it was the hour at which her (now impoverished) husband had been accustomed to go out to dine at the houses of the aristocracy. On the other hand, modern art neglects the due allaying of the passions aroused. ' Sin and suffering — the old, old story — men are in the hands of chance and fate — but God is good' — such is the broad lesson of Greek Tragedy. The most sublime of English dramas has no more definite conclusion than * the rest is silence.'^
It is not as the representative of this or that school of poetry that a great genius takes a firm hold on the mind of the successive generations. The chief quality in Sophocles which fascinates the modern world, is the sustained stateliness of his diction, which never shrinks into the colloquialism of Euri-
* 'In that noble romance called "Ten Thousand a Year," I remember a profoundly pathetic description of the Christian manner in which the hero, Mr. Aubrey, bore his misfortunes. After making a display of the most florid and grandiloquent resignation, and quitting his country mansion, the writer supposes Aubrey to come to town in a postchaise and pair, sitting bodkin probably between his wife and sister. It is about seven o'clock, carriages are rattling about, knockers are thun- dering, and tears bedim the fine eyes of Mrs. Aubrey and Kate as they think that in happier times at this hour their Aubrey used formerly to go out to dinner to the houses of the aristocracy, his friends. This is the gist of the passage — the elegant words I forget. But the noble, noble sentiment I shall always remember and cherish.' ('Book of Snobs.')
^ Some of the latest, however, of Shakspeare's plays, * The Winter's Tale,' 'The Tempest,' and 'Cymbeline,' show a feeling for the principle of Aristotle, and end with 'a resolution of the dissonance — a recon- ciliation,' as Prof. Dowden has pointed out.
46 SOPHOCLES
pides, nor swells into the inflated bulk of Aeschylean pomp. One is, indeed, astonished and dazzled by some of those Aeschylean
'jewels five words long, That on the stretch'd forefinger of all time Sparkle for ever.'
Yet the English taste at least will never relish such daring experiments in language as * thirsty Dust, near-dwelling brother of Mud,' or ' the maw of Salmydessus, stepmother of ships,' or 'dumb children of the undefiled one ' as a synonym for * fishes.' The language of Sophocles is never turgid, but it is always stately. Dignity is never dropped even in the least elevated passages : —
' Tall, and with newly sable-silver'd head,'
is the answer of Jocasta, when Oedipus asks her to describe her former husband Laius. And when the theme calls for the sublime in diction, none can soar on more ample pinion than Sophocles. When he contemplates cosmic order, or the high and eternal verities of natural law, his style is among the stars : one recalls : —
' Dread things and things most potent bcw to office ; Thus to lush Summer snow-clad Winter yields, Aye, and the dreary round of Dark makes way For blaze of Day on argent coursers horsed. And tempests let the groaning main alone ;'*
and the * wild and whirling words ' of Antigone,
' Nor deem'd I thy decrees had such avail That I, a mortal, could o'erleap the laws Unwrit, unfailing, of heav'n's chancery ; ^ Ajax, 672.
SOPHOCLES 47
Their life is not to-day's or yesterday's,
But of all Time the birth : and no man knows
When first they were revealed ; ' ^
and the lyrical glorification of
'those laws of range sublime, called into life throughout the high clear heaven, whose father is Olympus alone ; their parent was no race of mortal men, no, nor shall oblivion ever lay them to sleep.' ^
Such passages as these, especially when we remember that they were written considerably more than two thousand years ago, encourage us to indulge, not without hope, the thought that after all men may not be descended from apes ; and they find a ready welcome with a nation which shows so clear traces of a kindred spirit, for instance in Shakspeare's
'The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degrees, priority, and place ; ' ^
and Wordsworth's ' Ode to Duty ' :
' Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong. And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.'
But it is time to cease dwelling on the broad characteristics of the Sophoclean muse, a subject on which it is equally difficult to come to the end of what may be said, and to begin to suggest any reflections which have not been made often already. Our special purpose at present is to welcome an edition of Sophocles which bids fair to be one of the very brightest ornaments of English scholarship. Some forty years ago the late Prof. J ebb produced school editions of the * Electra ' and the ' Ajax.'
1 Ant. 453. 2 0ed. R, 865 (Jebb's trans.).
^ Troilus and Cressida, i. 3, 85.
48 SOPHOCLES
which were models of what commentaries for beginners should be, and which have without doubt permanently raised the standard of such books. His other splendid contributions to classical learning are too well known to call for mention here. His ' Characters of Theophrastus/ and his ' Attic Orators,' are recognized as showing all those qualities which go to make up the ideal of scholarship in England, and — what by no means follows of course — they have been received in Germany with unstinted welcome and praise. Jebb was known as the most per- fect master of the art of composing in Greek and Latin, before he showed himself to be the most sound and brilliant of editors. We think his career has done much to vindicate a most scholarly accomplishment from the charge of dilettantism, which it has become fashionable to launch against it ; and no observant reader of his commentaries and translation can fail to see in almost every line the rich fruit of that exquisite taste and feeling for beauty which have gained for him the first place among modern composers.^ His powers in this
* We will do ourselves the pleasure of quoting some excellent remarks on this subject by Jebb in his Introduction to the * Oed. Col.,' p. liii : — * Here it may be permissible to observe, since the practice of classical composition has been subject in late years to some ignorant and silly disparagement, that not a few of the conjectures which we sometimes see put forward are such as could not have been suggested, if their proposers had profited, even a little, by the discipline of Greek verse composition. It is earnestly to be hoped that the day will never come when that exercise — duly reserved for those to whom it is congenial — shall cease to have a place among the studies which belong to the English conception cf classical scholarship. When cultivated sympathetically and maturely — as a delight, not as a mechanical task — the accomplishment is one which necessarily contributes not a little towards the formation of a correct feeling for the idiom of classical
SOPHOCLES 49
direction have won for him a very signal distinction — the dedication to him by Lord Tennyson of his last poem, ' Demeter and Persephone,' with a curiously exquisite allusion to Jebb's Pindaric Ode in honour of Bologna and her University : —
' Fair things are slow to fade away, Bear witness you, that yesterday
From out the ghost of Pindar in you Roll'd an Olympian ; and they say That here the torpid mummy wheat Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet
As that which gilds the glebe of England, Sunn'd with a summer of milder heat. So may this legend for awhile, If greeted by your classic smile,
Tho' dead in its Trinacrian Enna, Blossom again on a colder isle.'
To one of this scholar's works we would direct special attention, not because it is superior to the others, but because it seems to us so thoroughly characteristic of the English school of classics at its best. One can hardly conceive the existence outside England of such a combination of ripe scholarship, sound judgment, and high literary skill, as is presented by his ' Introduction to Homer.' It is as learned as if it hailed from the Fatherland, and as brilliant as if it bore ' Hachette et Cie.' on its title-page ; and it is marked by a judiciousness, a moderateness, a delicacy of criticism, and a pure
poetry. In relation to the criticism of poetical texts, its positive merit is not so much that it sharpens a faculty of emendation as that it tends to keep verhal ingenuity under the restraints of good sense. But it has another influence, and one which (especially in our time) is perhaps not less useful. It helps to educate an instinct which will usually refrain from change where no change is required.'
P
50 SOPHOCLES
desire to attain the truth rather than surprise the reader, which we hold to be characteristic of the English school of criticism at its best.
It was not, however, until he took in hand the edition of Sophocles that he had an opportunity of showing fully his characteristic excellences as a scholar and a critic. Perhaps no classic — not even Virgil — demands in his exponent such minute faculty for observation, such delicate feeling for expression, and such refined aesthesis, as are required for the complete apprehension and appreciation of the subtle elements so kindly mixed in the genius of Sophocles. These are the very qualities which we have learned to expect from the present editor, and which we never look for in vain. The combination of these good gifts with great literary ability and the most complete mastery over the province of the grammarian is so rare as to give these editions a marked pre-eminence in an age which has been rich in valuable work on Sophocles — an age which has produced the complete edition of the plays and fragments by Prof. Campbell, the ' Studia Sophoclea ' of the late Prof. Kennedy, and the verse-translations of Prof. Camp- bell, Sir C. Young, Dean Plumptre, and Mr. Whitelaw.
We must not defer the payment of a debt of gratitude to the Editor for setting his face against the hacking and slashing of the Greek masterpieces which is now fashionable in Germany, and which seems to be there regarded as the whole duty of scholastic man. On this subject Jebb has written judiciously and pointedly in the Preface to the * Oedipus Coloneus ' : —
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* It is allowed on all hands that our traditional texts of the Attic dramatists have been interpolated here and there with some alien verses or parts of verses. But there has been a tendency in much of recent criticism to suspect, to bracket, or to expel verses as spurious, on grounds which are often wholly in- adequate, and are sometimes even absurd. In this play upwards of ninety verses have been thus suspected or con- demned by different critics, without counting that part of the last kommos (1689-1747) in which it is certain that the text has been disturbed.' [About eighty verses in the 'Antigone,' not counting the certainly corrupt 904-920, have been indicted on similar grounds. Jebb here gives a list of the supposed inter- polations in the ' Oed. Col.,' and then adds :] ' I know not whether it is too much to hope that some reader of these pages will take the trouble to go through the above list of rejections or suspicions, and to consider them in the light of such aid as this edition seeks to offer towards the interpretation of the play. If any one will do that, he will form a fair idea of the manner in which a certain school of criticism (chiefly German, but not without imitators elsewhere) is disposed to deal with the texts of the Greek dramatists. When an interpolation is surmised or assumed, it is usually for one (or more) of the following reasons : — (i) because something in the language appears strange ; (2) because the verse seems inconsistent with the immediate context, or with the character of the speaker; (3) because the verse seems inconsistent with something in another part of the play ; (4) because it seems weak or superfluous. In dealing with the first class of objections — those from language —the grammarian is on his own ground. But the second, third, and fourth classes of objections demand the exercise of other faculties — literary taste, poetic feeling, accurate perception of the author's meaning, insight into his style, sympathy with his spirit. Consider, for instance; why Nauck suspects two of the finest verses in a beautiful passage of this play (610 f.) : * " Earth's strength decays, the body's strength decays, Faith dies, distrust is born." He ascribes them to an interpolator because only the second is pertinent ; the decay of faith is in point ; but what have we to do
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with the decay of earth or of the body ? This is not a whit worse than very many of the examples in the above Hst. Could Sophocles come back and see his text after all these expurgators had wreaked their will, he might echo the phrase of the worthy Acharnian, as he held up his ragged garment to the light —
(5 ZiV StOTTTa.'
We have done as the Editor has suggested, we have gone through the list, and we share completely his confidence in the soundness of the passages impugned. When we consider the reckless way in which the critical knife is now being flourished in Germany, and reflect further on the loose hold which German savants seem to have of the metrical discoveries of Porson and his school, and think of the portentous things which they and their imitators put forward (and print in their text-books) as emendations, we are fain to protest against the obsequiousness with which many English (and nearly all American) editors bow their neck to the yoke of German authority. We are disposed to recommend jan adjunct to the Decalogue for the guidance of our 'ising scholars : Thou shalt not covet the German's :nife, nor his readings, nor his metres, nor his sense, lor his taste, nor anything that is his.
As a translator Jebb years ago set an example which has already brought about a complete change in the point of view from which translation is regarded. The scholars of the last generation, of whom we take the excellent Paley as a fair type, thought only of the letter that killeth, not of the spirit that giveth life. The Greek or Latin passage was never regarded as the expression of the thought of a great mind, but as a mere exercise in grammar.
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Let the bare construction of the sentence be indicated, and no matter how ludicrous the contrast between the spirit of the rendering and of the original. When, in a scene of an almost horrible intensity in the * Eumenides,' the Awful Goddesses sing the mingled pain and humiliation which they feel at their victim's escape, and say it is as the cruel doomsman's lash, we recognize that the thought is fine and impressive ; but what did the more intelli- gent schoolboy think of the art of Aeschylus, when the footnote presented to him this translation —
' There is present for us to feel (or perhaps " one may feel ") the severe, the very severe chill (smart), of a hostile public executioner ' ? ^
We do not doubt that Paley could have devised a far more worthy rendering of the fine words of Aeschylus. His great success in the kindred, but more difficult, art of turning English into Greek or Latin poetry precludes the theory of incompetence. No : he thought the attempt to preserve the spirit of the original neither necessary nor even desirable, a mere trifling with grammar. Like the young Hamlet, though not in quite the same sense, he held it ' a baseness to write fair.' The more intelligent schoolboy, we doubt not, secretly despised his Virgil and Sophocles, preferred the battle-pieces of Rider
^ irdpeari fiaarlKTopos, da'tov da/xiov, ^apd, t6 TTepipapv Kpios ^€i.v. (Eum. 154. ) 'Hostile' always struck us as a humorous touch, implying that the public executioner might sometimes be a pleasant friendly fellow whose society one might enjoy ; just as an invitation to dine 'quietly' with a friend seems to imply a possibility of dining turbulently, or ' eating with tumult,' like huge Earl Doorm and his lusty spearmen, ' feeding like horses when you hear them feed.'
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Haggard to those of the ' Aeneid ' and the * Ih'ad,' and thought Claude Melnotte less stilted than Haemon. When he listened to elaborate eulogies on these stiff and frigid writers in the class-room or the lecture- room, he thought, no doubt, that an affected admiration for them was one of the duties, not the most pleasant, of the lecturer, as to whom the pupil's real sentiments were probably those of the Northern Farmer towards the Parson, when he summed them up in the words : — 'I thowt a said whot a owt to 'a said, and I coomed awaay.' Jebb's school editions of the ' Electra ' (1867) and the ' Ajax ' (1869) showed that English scholar- ship had become awake to the considerations on which we have been dwelling. Since then we have had Conington's prose translation of Virgil, Myers' of Pindar, Butcher and Lang's of the Odyssey, Lang's of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, and other admirable prose renderings of ancient poetry, which are in themselves high works of art, which bring the English reader as near to the ancient masters as he can hope to come without learning the language in which they wrote, and which give the scholarly student as pleasing a sense of successful artistic effort as any which could be produced by a metrical version.^ Jebb's prose rendering of the most subtile of the Attic tragic poets seems to us the most poetical version of those plays which has yet appeared, and it is not likely to be surpassed unless some great poet, who is also completely
^ We can hardly conceive as possible the publication at the present time of such a translation of * Pindar ' as Paley's, of which the diction was really that of a provincial daily newspaper.
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equipped with scholarship, applies his genius to the task of giving Sophocles a poetical garb in English — a consummation not, perhaps, devoutly to be wished, and certainly not likely to be realized. Meanwhile Jebb's prose version is not more likely to be superseded by a metrical one than the Prayer Book version of the Psalms and Job, which has hitherto successfully resisted the attempt to hitch it into verse. It would be a mistake to suppose that the task of the prose translator is the easier. Rhythm is really a harder task-master than metre, and the presence of the latter often disguises the absence of the former. We are inclined to think that it would not be quite so hopeless an attempt to try to reproduce the effect of Hamlet's verse-soliloquies as of the prose one beginning, ' I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth.' Now we confidently point to Jebb's version as a triumph of rhythm throughout, and his freedom from metrical shackles has enabled him to express in it the nicest shades of meaning in the Greek, and to make his translation discharge to a great extent the function of a commentary as well. What we have said will be made good by our citations from his translation from time to time.-^ We would gladly add here, if space allowed, many examples of his dexterous dealing with single words and phrases, and of his power of sustaining the dignity of style in long and
^We have used throughout Jebb's renderings when our extracts have been from the three plays which his edition includes so far. In some cases we have modified the order of the words, so as to produce a metrical effect in line-to-line dialogue. Even in those cases we have moulded our version on his, but in the longer prose extracts we reproduce his translation word for word.
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impassioned speeches. We must, however, for further confirmation of our estimate of his skill in the execution of his task, refer our readers to the books themselves ; those v^ho have ears to hear will not say that we have expressed too high an opinion of the translation as a work of art, or as an exact equivalent for the Greek.
Minute grammatical accuracy and happy critical insight have been far more characteristic of English editions than a marked feeling for the artistic beauty of the ancient masterpieces. We would gladly invite attention to the scores of places in which the keen observation of Jebb has detected delicacies of expression and construction hitherto unnoticed ; but our readers will perhaps feel greater interest in those comments which illustrate in the Editor the rarer quality of aesthetic sense. We will therefore point to certain passages in these plays where the question involved is wholly or mainly an aesthetic one, and show how the Editor has dealt with the problem in each case.
In 'Antigone' (904-920) the heroine defends her defiance of Creon's edict, that the corse of Polynices should lie unburied a prey to carrion-birds and beasts, by a feeble and sophistical exaggeration of the nearness of the fraternal tie, an argument involv- ing a complete abandonment of the high ground which she has already taken, that she had given her brother burial rites in defiance of Creon, because no mortal decree could override the unwritten but unfailing statutes of heaven. The passage, which closely resembles that in which the wife of Inta- phernes in Herodotus (iii. 1 1 9) defends a similar
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preference of a brother before a husband or a child, runs thus in Jebb's translation : —
'And yet I honoured thee, as the wise will deem, rightly. Never, had I been a mother of children, or if a husband had been mouldering in death, would I have taken this task upon me in the city's despite. What law, ye ask, is my warrant for that word ? The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the first-born ; but, father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother's life could ever bloom for me again. Such was the law whereby I held thee first in honour ; but Creon deemed me guilty of error therein, and of outrage, ah, brother mine ! And now he leads me thus, a captive in his hands ; no bridal bed, no bridal song hath been mine, no joy of marriage, no portion in the nurture of children ; but thus, forlorn of friends, unhappy one, I go living to the vaults of death.'
Eckermann has preserved an utterance of Goethe on this scene which best describes the impression which the passage first produces —
' In the course of the piece the heroine has given the most admirable reasons for her conduct, and has shown the noble courage of a stainless soul ; but now at the end she puts forward a motive which is quite unworthy of her, and which almost borders on the comic. I should like a philologist to show us that the passage is spurious.'
If a husband, then, or child had lain unburied, Antigone would not have defied Creon's edict. And why ? Because she might have another husband and child, but her parents being dead, she could not hope j^^^h^S^- tt^A- for another brother. Could any respectable poet, \Lk^^eti not to speak of Sophocles, have put such a sentiment ^ ^J^ f ^ into the mouth of such a woman as Antigone ? Yet ^j^-mt^^^fii* Aristotle (Rhet. iii. i6) recognizes this passage as fvlfXJUiL^fj^ coming from the ' Antigone,' so that, if the verses/ /a- Q f f"
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are spurious, the interpolation must have found its way into the text not later than seventy years after the death of Sophocles. Hence vigorous efforts have been made to bring the sentiment into harmony with the principles of art and the character of Antigone. Bellermann's theory is that Antigone still occupies the high ground of religious obligation, but feels that that obligation has degrees. She merely says, ' I can imagine breaking that command in any case sooner than in that of a brother.' She knows the feelings of a sister, she had never known those of a wife or a mother. Boeckh thinks that Antigone has abandoned her lofty ground ; she has attained to a perception that she did wrong in breaking Creon's law, and when that noble illusion fails her, the poet permits her to catch at such support as sophistry can lend to despair. Seyffert also finds in the passage a note of despair ; her troubled thoughts fall back on the one thing of which she still feels sure, the deep human affection which bound her to her brother. Jebb's criticism on these theories must be given in his own words : —
' Bellermann's sliding scale of the religious duty here involves a fallacy from the Greek point of view. Greeks distinguished between the obligation in respect to dvpaXoi and in respect to oi'/cetot. A husband and child are on the same side of that line as a brother. Besides, Bellermann's subtlety invests the crude and blunt sophistry of the text with an imaginative charm which is not its own. If the psychological phase which he supposes in the heroine had been expressed by the poet, such an expres- sion must have preserved the essential harmony between her recent and her present attitude of mind.
' Of Seyffert's view we may say first what has been said ot Bellermann's — that it is an idealizing paraphrase of a crude text.
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But there is a further and yet graver objection— one which applies alike to Seyffert and to Boeckh. After this disputed passage, and at the very moment when she is being led away to death, she says, " If these things are pleasing to the gods, when I have suffered my doom I shall come to know my sin ; but if the sin is with my judges, I could wish them no fuller measure of evil than they on their part mete wrongfully to me." Here the poet identifies his heroine, in one of her latest utterances, with the principle on which the catastrophe turns. Creon is punished by the gods ; and his punishment is the token that they approve of Antigone's conduct. In the very last words which she speaks she describes herself as t7]v eme^lav ae^iaaa-a (943). Thus in two different places — both of them subsequent to the suspected passage — she stands forth distinctly as the representative of the great law which had inspired her act. Is it probable — would it be endurable — that at a slightly earlier moment (in vv. 905-912) she should speak in the tone of one to whom that divine law had proved a mockery and a delusion — who had come to feel that thence at least no adequate vindication of her conduct could be derived — and who was now looking around her for such excuse or such solace as could be found on a lower range of thought and feeling?'
We entirely agree with Jebb that the passage is spurious, and was probably introduced into the play, after the death of Sophocles, by his son lophon, who earned from his contemporaries the nickname of * the tasteless ' (o '^v)(p6g). Further, the diction seems to us to warrant a surmise that the interpolator had recently been reading the * Medea.' We would include in the spurious passage verses 920-924, which are weak in themselves, and contain another suspicious echo of the same play of Euripides.-^
^ The strange use of the genitive KaTdavbvros in v. 909 is exactly like that of irapefAiroXCjvTos in Med. 910 ; in both cases a genitive has to be evolved to agree with the participle, and in both cases from the same
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In another still more interesting scene in the ' Antigone,' again a question arises which must be decided mainly by considerations of taste. Antigone is condemned to die for her defiance of Creon's decree. Her sister Ismene seeks to share her fate, but Antigone disavows all complicity with her, and takes the sole responsibility for her act. Ismene then seeks to move Creon. She appeals to the betrothal of his son Haemon to Antigone. * Nay,' says Creon, 'there are other fields for him to plough.' ' But no such bond,' urges Ismene, ' as bound those two together.' ' Out on such rebel wives for sons of mine ! ' retorts the tyrant ; and this draws from Antigone the only tender cry that her proud lips suffer to escape from a woman's heart, ' O Haemon, O my love, thy father wrongs thee.' In no other part of the play does she unpack with words of love a heart set fast only on the stern thought of duty. Then Haemon enters with expressions of filial piety and sweet reasonableness. He urges his own deep concern for his father's fair name, the essential nobility of Antigone's moral attitude, the public sympathy with her pious contumacy, the beauty and dignity that would be in Creon's control of a cruel passion born of absolute power, the moral hideousness of tyranny. He receives for answer only flouts and gibes : * Am I, a signior, to be schooled by lads?' and *0 dastard, following a woman's lead,' and ' Wheedle me not with words, thou woman's slave.' Haemon, who at
word, or from some word signifying ' husband ' ; irdaews would fit both places, if there were any justification for the form.
The suspicious echo is to be found in iKT-rjadfjLrjv, 924, * I have earned ///<r name of ; iKT-fjaavro is found in exactly the same sense in Med. 218.
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first uses only the language of temperate argument and respect, is gradually stung into petulant expos- tulations, such as, ' A desert were the realm for thee to rule.' At last the pent-up fire flashes into flame, and the youth leaves the stage with a hint that he will not survive his bride. Haemon never sees his father again, till the latter, terrified by the prophecies of Teiresias, who announces to him that he shall atone for his sin with the life of his son, has resolved to pay the due rites to the corse of Polynices, and, this done, repairs to the tomb in which Antigone is immured, resolved to spare her, and thus save his son. He finds her dead, and Haemon is embracing her lifeless body. Then
'his father when he saw him cried aloud with a dread cry, and went in and called to him with a voice of wailing, " Unhappy, what a deed hast thou done ! What thought hath come to thee ? What manner of mischance hath marred thy reason ? Come forth, my child I I pray thee — I implore! " But the boy glared at him with fierce eyes, spat in his face, and, without a word of answer, drew his cross-hilted sword : as his father rushed forth in flight he missed his aim : then, hapless one, wroth with himself, he straightway leaned with all his weight against his sword, and drove it half its length into his side : and while sense lingered he clasped the maiden to his faint embrace, and as he gasped sent forth on her pale cheek the swift stream of the oozing blood. Corpse enfolding corpse he lies ; he hath won his nuptial rites, poor youth ! not here, yet in the halls of Death.' 1
Was not Haemon right in spitting in his father's face? We think he was. At all events he did so. And Jebb rightly refuses to force on Sophocles, in defiance of the Greek, a refinement of sentiment
^Ant. 1226-1241,
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alien from the ancient world everywhere, and from the Southern races even now, and to make Haemon merely * express loathing in his looks.' Yet the editors, with hardly an exception, reject with ridicule, or suppress all mention of, an interpretation in itself robust and natural, in favour of one which does violence not only to the language but to the dramatic effect.^ Jebb has the editors against him, but he has on his side a master of dramatic effect, and one who would be the first to reject a coarse touch in a fine passage. In ' Athens, its Rise and Fall,' Lord Lytton has translated this scene, and it does not seem to have occurred to the author of 'Richelieu' to reject the natural translation of Trrvaag irpoa-coTra) :
' Then glaring on his father with wild eyes, The son stood dumb and spat upon his face. And clutch'd the unnatural sword : the father fled ; And wroth as with the arm that miss'd a sire The wretched son drove home into his heart The abhorrent steel ; yet ever, while dim sense Struggled within the fast expiring soul. Feebler and feebler still his stiffening arms Clung to that virgin form ; and every gasp Of his last breath with bloody dews distain'd The cold white cheek that was his pillow. So Lies death embracing death.'
We cannot see any reason for the view which the editors have preferred except one that the Village Maiden in ' Ruddygore ' might have urged— spitting is nowhere justified in the ' Book of Etiquette.' A similar robustness of explanation, due to an abiding clearness in his conception of the ancient world as
* We cannot find that any modern editors except Mitchell and Bothe are willing even to consider the natural interpretation.
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distinguished from the modern, is to be found in a note on 'Oedipus Coloneus/ v. 1250, where Jebb rejects the rendering, ' weeping as no man weeps ' (but only women), on the ground that this view of the unmanliness of weeping is essentially modern. Aeneas and Achilles do not think it womanish to weep.
The same unerring feeling for artistic beauty, which leads Jebb into the right path missed by others, points out to him, and to those whom he guides, charms before unnoticed. It greatly enhances our enjoyment of a great work of art to have our attention called to minute felicities, which only a very close and appreciative study reveals, and which at once commend themselves to us as not imported into the play by the ingenuity of the commentator, but discovered there by his sympathy with the mind of the poet. How many, in reading the ' Oedipus Rex,' have ever thought of comparing v. 950 with v. 1447? In the first passage, Oedipus, still a happy man, and hopeful of future happiness, addresses her who was so horribly linked with him as ' Jocasta, dearest wife.' He does not refer to her again till he gives directions for her burial after the curse has fallen on them all, and she has died by her own hand ; and then he will not even utter the name which had become so horrible to him : * Give her that is within such burial as thou thyself wouldest give,' is his charge to Creon when about to go on his lonely pilgrimage.
In ' Antigone,' 465—468, the heroine says : —
'So for me to meet this doom is trifling grief; but if my mother's child in his death had been the imburied prey of dogs, that would have grieved me ; for this, I am not grieved.^
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This is one of the many passages impugned on frivolous grounds by German editors. Jebb has given a reason for believing the passage to be genuine, which seems to us as conclusive as it is acute. What interpolator would have thought of introducing the pathetic pleonasm in the words which we have italicised? The third clause touchingly iterates the sense of the first. This delicate piece of work comes from no common workshop, and commends itself to no common mind. It comes out of the air, in which great poets delicately walk, and is almost intangible. Interpolators are made of sterner stuff. A similar pathetic iteration meets us in the 'Oedipus Tyrannus ' (v. 1463), where the King bespeaks Creon's protection for his two little girls ' who never knew my table spread apart from theirs ; mine aloof from them!^
To dwell for a very little on minute points, we would draw attention to Prof. Jebb's observation that the same petulant exclamation, * Ha ! Say'st thou ? ' marks the climax of the anger of Teiresias in the * Oedipus Rex,' and of Creon in the ' Antigone ' ;^
^ The late Dr. Benjamin Hall Kennedy, to whom we owe many valuable comments on Sophocles, gives a strangely I'rigid meaning to this passage. He understands the final words to mean 'without my special orders ' : Oedipus would then say that his daughters always dined with him, * except when I gave special directions to the contrary.' This would certainly add to the accuracy of the statement of Oedipus, but Oedipus was not in a state of mind to aim at accuracy. A like difficulty besets Dr. Kennedy's view of the reading in 'Oed. R.' 1526. We must suppose the Chorus suddenly inspired by a desire to make a broadly true statement perfectly accurate by the insertion of a qualifying clause. (See Jebb, Appendix, on v. 1526.) But the tragic poet will generally find minute accuracy to be, like * the idiot laughter,' ' A passion hateful to his purposes.'
2*X9;^e5. (Oed. R. 350 ; Ant. 758.)
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and that a certain hardness of feeling appears in the phrase of Jocasta (' Oed. R.' 987), ' Howbeit thy father's death is a great sign to cheer us ' : she was softened by fear for Oedipus and the State ; now she is elated. Again in the same play (1037), when Oedipus cries, ' Oh, for the gods' love — was the deed my mother's or father's ? ' the Editor points out that the question is not the insignificant one whether it was his father or his mother who inflicted the mutilation which gave Oedipus his name, but the touching enquiry whether it was at the hands of his father or mother (or, on the contrary, at the hands of strangers) that he received this brand. In the 'Oedipus Coloneus,' v. 1680, Antigone, speaking of her father's death, which was sudden yet not violent, says that ' death met him not in war or on the deep.' But the comment of the scholiast seems to show that he had before him some word not meaning ' the deep ' (ttoVto?), but sickness. Wecklein, with that bluntness of perception which sometimes characterizes German criticism, suggests fever (Trvpero^). ' This,' writes Jebb, ' is too specific, as if one said. Neither the War-God nor typhoid! Even the splendid ode in praise of Colonus in this play takes on a new beauty, when we are reminded that the period of the year when the nightingale's song would first be heard in Attica coincides with the time, the end of March and beginning of April, when the great Dionysia were held at Athens ; so that the spectators could hear ' the nightingale, a constant guest, trill her clear note in the covert of green glades,' while their eyes wandered over the olive-groves, the hills, and the distant girdle of mountains, and could
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catch at one point even a broad stretch of blue sea.
We sometimes find in books on Greek literature a tendency to disparage Sophocles as one who showed a lack of military capacity. Aeschylus, we know, fought at Marathon and Salamis ; but, though Sophocles was one of the Strategi, we do not hear that he showed any of the qualities of a general : we only read that he was genial and popular with his colleagues and associates ; hence, it is inferred, he was ' no soldier.' This way of looking at the matter is akin to that which, according to ' Punch,' led the German to figure to his mind's eye the Right Honourable Mr. Smith, when he was Secretary of State for War, as a warrior bristling with offensive and defensive armour, and tugging fiercely at a huge martial moustache. In this matter let Jebb place us at the Athenian point of view : —
'Assuming, then, that the "Antigone" was brought out not long before Sophocles obtained the strategia, we have still to consider whether there is any likelihood in the story that his election was influenced by the success of the play. At first sight a modern reader is apt to be reminded of a man of letters who, in the opinion of his admirer, would have been competent at the shortest notice to assume the command of the Channel Fleet. It may appear grotesque that an important State should have rewarded poetical genius by a similar appointment. But here, as in other cases, we must endeavour to place ourselves at the old Athenian point of view. The word "general" by which we render "strategus," suggests functions purely military, requiring for their proper discharge an elaborate professional training. Such a conception of the Athenian strategia would not, however, be accurate. The ten strategi, chosen annually, formed a board of which the duties were primarily military, but also in part civil. And for the majority of the ten the military
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duties were usually restricted to the exercise of control and supervision at Athens. They resembled officials at the War Office, with some added functions from the province of the Home Office. The number of strategi sent out with an army or a fleet was at this period seldom more than three. It was only in grave emergencies that all the ten strategi went on active service together. In May 441 B.C. — the time, as it seems, when Sophocles was elected — no one could have foreseen the great crisis at Samos. In an ordinary year Sophocles, as one of the strategi, would not have been required to leave Athens. Among his nine colleagues there were doubtless, besides Pericles, one or two more possessed of military aptitudes, who would have sufficed to perform any ordinary service in the field. Demos- thenes— in whose day only one of the ten strategi was ordinarily commissioned for war — describes the other nine as occupied, among other things, with arranging the processions for the great religious festivals at Athens. He deplores, indeed, that they should be so employed ; but it is certain that it had long been one duty of these high officials to help in organizing the great ceremonies. We are reminded how suitable such a sphere of duty would have been for Sophocles, who in his boyhood is said to have led the chorus which celebrated the battle of Salamis — and we seem to win a new light on the meaning of his appoint- ment to the strategia. In so far as a strategus had to do with public ceremonies and festivals, a man with the personal gifts of Sophocles could hardly have strengthened his claim better than by a briUiant success at the Dionysia. The mode of election was favourable to such a man. It was by show of hands in the Ecclesia. If the "Antigone" was produced at the Great Dionysia late in March, it is perfectly intelligible that the poet's splendid dramatic triumph should have contributed to his election in the following May.'
To enter minutely into a discussion of all the characters introduced into these plays would, perhaps, become tiresome ; and in some of them, especially the character of Antigone, analysis has been pursued too far by some historians of literature, and has been
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founded on mistaken principles by others. They have been misled by not being able to place themselves at the ancient point of view. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how ancient tragedy, which is such an enduring monument of Attic genius, achieved such a position without drawing from the chief sources from which modern tragedy derives its interest. The plots were well known to the spectator at the Dionysia, and some of them — it must be owned — contained, like all folklore, some dross of triviality mingled with the gold of fancy. The whole story of the riddle of the Sphinx is redolent of the nursery, and there was a childish pendant to the Oedipodean myth, according to which Oedipus in his seclusion, after he had blinded himself, cursed his sons because, contrary to his interdict, they had served him with the silver table and golden cup belonging to his father ; and repeated the imprecation on another occasion when his sons sent him from the altar the buttock of the victim instead of the shoulder. Not only were the plots hackneyed and sometimes trifling, but the analysis of the passion of love, on which the modern drama almost wholly depends, was absent from Greek tragedy at its perfection. Aeschylus follows Homer; it no more occurs to him to dwell on the passion of Clytaemnestra for Aegisthus, than it occurred to Homer to analyse the feelings of Helen and Paris. It is only the consequences of the passion that have an interest, and lend themselves to epic or dramatic treatment. In Homer love is almost savage ; the woman is little more than a chattel ; Penelope's dot is more than Penelope ; and the pathos in the death of a young warrior, who was cut off in battle ere
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ever he possessed his bride, is found in the fact that he had incurred considerable expense in procuring her. In Aeschylus it is cosmical. In one of the fragments of his lost plays he puts into the mouth of Aphrodite herself a passage which describes love as a cosmic force, and reminds us of the Lucretian invocation of Aeneaduin genetrix. In Sophocles it comes into the sphere of humanity, but only as a cause of effects, as a factor in the evolution of destiny. In the hands of Euripides for the first time it is a passion worth studying, analysing, and dissecting for its own intrinsic interest. Hence, if the influence of passion on the female mind is widely different in Sophocles and Euripides, it is not because these poets take a different view of the female mind, but because they have a completely different theory as to how far the influence of love on it should be made the object of dramatic treatment. Aeschylus is made by Aristophanes to boast that he never depicted a woman in love. Sophocles does not analyse the passion of Antigone for Haemon. Love returned, love repelled, — on these themes Euripides dwelt with loving hand, and drew down on himself the denuncia- tions of Aristophanes in the ' Thesmophoriazusae ' and the ' Frogs.' In the former play, after appearing successively as Menelaus, Echo, and Perseus, Euripides finally transforms himself into an old procuress. This, according to the comic poet, is the last incarna- tion of Euripides. This is the penalty which he paid for bringing into a prominence, not before accorded to it, a passion which has ever since been a well-nigh essential ingredient in poetry, the drama, and the romance.
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We may now glance briefly at certain peculiarities which mark the ancient method of dealing with the portraiture of character, a^d point out how far in this and other matters the ancient poets recognized the obligation to keep within the bounds of probability and consistency. Ancient tragedy admits almost any conceivable violation of the laws of probability, provided that violation lies outside the limits of the play, outside the period embraced by the action of the piece. For instance, in the ' Agamemnon ' of Aeschylus, almost immediately after the beacon-signal has announced the fall of Troy, we hear of the arrival of Agamemnon himself, though we learn that the return of the Grecian army from Troy was impeded by a tremendous storm which destroyed nearly the whole of the fleet. So in the ' Oedipus Rex,' to which Aristotle gives the palm for construc- tion above all the tragedies known to him, the difficulties outside the play are very great, but they do not offend Aristotle because they do not beset anything within the limits of the drama itself When the action begins, Oedipus must have occupied the throne of Thebes for at least sixteen years ; for Antigone and Ismene, when they appear in the last scene, seem to be children of from ten to twelve years of age, and the two brothers were older. So the plague, which visited the city as a token of the divine wrath for the murder of Laius, was not sent until sixteen years after the crime was committed. And how did it happen that, during all those years, Jocasta had never questioned her husband about his past life, the story of which she hears from him for the first time during the progress of the play ? And
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why had not Oedipus asked even what was the personal appearance of his predecessor Laius, or what were the circumstances of his death ? To a Greek tragic poet such questions would give no concern ; they refer only to matters outside the scope of the action, — e^co rm TpaycpSiag, as Aristotle expresses it. In obedience to a similar view concerning the obligations of art, Greek tragedy demands from each character consistency with itself only within the limits of each play ; in different plays it may assume new, if not contrary, qualities. If we take the three Theban dramas in the order of their appearance, and consider the character in them which is common to them all, we shall find that in the first, the ' Antigone,' when Creon is an old man he is perversely rigorous. He bursts into invectives against the chorus, when they suggest that the mysterious funeral honours paid to Polynices may have come from the miraculous interference of the Gods : * Cease,' he cries, ' ere thou fill me to over- flowing with wrath.' He goads his son to madness with his taunts ; and at first he meets the warnings of Teiresias, by swearing that he will never suffer the burial of Polynices, ' not though the eagles of Zeus should bear the carrion morsels to their Master's throne.' Finally it is only through base fear of the consequences that he consents too late to remit the cruel doom of Antigone. In the second of the plays, ' Oedipus Rex,' Creon is the patient object of the unjust suspicions of Oedipus. When the tragedy had reached its height, when Jocasta has destroyed herself, and Oedipus has put out his eyes, the language of Creon is noble and magnanimous : * I
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have not come to mock thee, Oedipus, nor to reproach thee with a bygone fault ' : ^ though he is not so generous afterwards when he reminds Oedipus that he, above all men, has reason to be a believer in the fulfilment of prophecy;^ and again,^ that he must not count on good fortune as likely to abide with him, — he had already won it, and it had deserted him at his need. In the ' Oedipus Coloneus,' which appeared last of the three plays, and which deals with a period intermediate between the other two, Creon is a ruffian without a redeeming trait. There is not a trace of the reasonableness of the Creon of the ' Oedipus Rex ' ; and the narrow but not malevolent rigour which he shows in the ' Antigone/ certainly does not prepare us for the coarse truculence with which he receives the dignified refusal of Oedipus to accompany him to Thebes, nor for his subsequent sulky submission to Theseus. The tone of the refusal of Oedipus is curiously suggestive of Dr. Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield. Creon had sought to cloak under the guise of kind- ness his desire to secure for Thebes the blessings which, according to prophecy, should accrue to the land which should be the burial-place of Oedipus. The latter thus receives his overtures : —
* What joy is there here— in kindness shown to us against our will ? As if a man should give thee no gift, bring thee no aid, when thou wert fain of the boon ; but after thy soul's desire was sated should grant it them, when the grace could be gracious no more : wouldst thou not find that pleasure vain ?'
It has often been remarked that Euripides is prone to introduce into his plays persons of humble posi-
ly. 1422. ^y. 1445. ^y. 1523.
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tion, and to put into their mouths homely sentiments and expressions suited to their low estate. Aeschylus and Sophocles, though far more sparingly, have re- course sometimes to the same source of dramatic vraisemblance. The Nurse in the ' Choephoroe ' is nearly as garrulous as the Nurse in ' Romeo and Juliet,' and the reader will at once call to mind the homely diction of the Watchman in the ' Agamem- non,' when he says that the beacon-light which announced the fall of Troy was to him ' a throw of triple-sixes ' for luck. In the same way Sophocles makes his Watchman in the ' Antigone ' adopt a comic vein on his first entrance. Surely this (' Ant.' 223-236) is designedly comic : —
' My liege, I will not say that I come breathless from speed, or that I have plied a nimble foot ; for often did my thoughts make me pause and wheel round in my path, to return. My mind was holding large discourse with me : " Fool, why goest thou to thy certain doom ? " " Wretch, tarrying again ? And if Creon heard this from another, must not thou smart for it ? " So debating, I took my time about hurrying,^ and thus a short road was made long. At last, however, it carried the day that I should come thither — to thee ; and though my tale be nought, yet will I tell it ; for I come with a good grip on one hope, — that I can suffer nothing but what is my fate.'
Does not this pretentious prattle strongly remind one of the first appearance of Launcelot Gobbo (' Merchant of Venice/ ii. 2) in the scene beginning —
' Certainly my conscience will serve me to run away from this Jew my master. The fiend is at my elbow, and tempts me . . .
1 We read here ^vvtov cxoXt; Taxi>s with the margin of L, regarding this as a designedly comic expression, ' 'twas but a laggard haste I made,' * I took my time about hurrying. ' The rest of the version is Professor Jebb's.
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My conscience says, " Launcelot, budge not." " Budge," says the fiend. " Budge not," says my conscience.'
In 'Oedipus Rex,' 337 f., there is a marvellous specimen of the poet's art. Teiresias uses words which have one meaning for Oedipus and another for the audience : ' Thou blamest my temper, but what thou hast in thy bosom thou knowest not' By ' what thou hast in thy bosom ' Oedipus would under- derstand Teiresias to mean ' the wrath which thou hast in thy bosom,' that wrath which the Seer had upbraided in the King ; but the audience would see that the real allusion was to his incestuous union with his mother, 'thou knowest not what wife thou hast in thy bosom.' In Greek not only a wife but a wrathful mood may be said to ' be taken to one's bosom ' (ojuov valeLv). Locke, in a quaint passage,^ has a very similar play of fancy : —
' Nothing being so beautiful to the eye as truth is to the mind, nothing is so deformed and irreconcilable to the understanding as a lie. For though a man may with satisfaction enough own a no-very-handsome wife in his bosom, yet who is bold enough openly to avow that he has espoused a falsehood, and received into his breast so ugly a thing as a lie i*'
There is a certain construction recognized by grammarians as forming a feature in Attic usage, whereby between the object and its governing verb are inserted words which must be regarded as paren- thetic in the construction, and as not influencing (though they seem to influence) the object of the sentence. This * non-intervention ' construction (^m
^ 'Essay on Human Understanding,' Book iv., ch. 3, § 20.
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imecrou, grammarians call it) is very alien from English usage. Indeed we doubt if we could illustrate it at all except by citing the (probably mythical) advocate, who is reported to have said, ' Oh yes, indeed, your Lordship is quite right, (and I am quite wrong), as your Lordship generally is.' But in Greek it is common enough. Prof Jebb considers that in many cases the applicability of this principle breaks down on closer scrutiny, and, as regards the places to which he refers, his remark is fully justified. We would, however, invite him to consider whether the Sia juecrou theory ought not to be applied to three passages in these plays. In the first ^ it seems required by the construction, and in the two others ^ it would obviate a change in the manuscript reading.
In textual criticism Jebb may be pronounced to be conservative in the best — the only just — sense of the word. He will not revolutionize either the reading or the interpretation of a passage, unless he can make an unanswerable appeal either to the laws of grammar or to the canons of taste. In applying the latter, an Editor should be very cautious. He should approach the ancient masterpiece with the
^ * Oed. Rex,' 1093, where unless /cat x^P^^eo-^^^^ ''"pos -nfiQu is 8c6, ixiaov there is no construction for (pepovra.
^ * Oed. Col.' 161, Tuv ^he Trdfx/xop^ eS (pijXa^ai fieTaaradi. Prof. Jebb changes tQv to rb because (pvXda-aeadaL, 'to guard against,' takes the accusative, but twv may be governed by fxerdcrTadL, the intervening vv^ords being did fiiaov, * from vi^hich (beware, poor wanderer) avaunt !' The third is 'Ant.' II02, Kai raCr' eTraiveis Kal doKels TrapeiKadecv, where Jebb reads 5o/cet: but if /cat So/cels be regarded as 5ia /xeaov there is no need for change, 'and dost advise— and think'st I will — a yielding in this matter ? ' The validity of the construction is, of course, not denied, and it is applied to several places even in Attic prose, in Plato and the Orators especially.
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feelings of Marcellus in ' Hamlet ' towards the Ghost of ' buried Denmark ' : —
' We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the show of violence.'
For his own statement of his views on this subject we must refer our readers to his admirably judicious observations in his Introductions to 'Oedipus Rex' (pp. Ivii.-lix.) and to ' Oedipus Coloneus ' (pp. lii., liii.). We would gladly quote the passages, but that we trust that Jebb's monumental work is in the hands of all who have a real interest in the progress of classical learning. We must, however, lay before our readers a few of his excellent remarks in the Introduction to the ' Oedipus Rex ' (p. Ivii.), because we mean to appeal to them against his treatment of a passage in the ' Antigone,' the only place in which he seems to us not to have carried out thoroughly the principles which he has so clearly laid down : —
' The use of conjecture is a question on which an editor must be prepared to meet with large differences of opinion, and must be content if the credit is conceded to him of having steadily acted to the best of his judgment. All students of Sophocles would probably agree at least in this, that his text is one in which conjectural emendation should be admitted only with the utmost caution. His style is not seldom analogous to Virgil in this respect, that when his instinct felt a phrase to be truly and finely expressive he left the logical analysis of it to the discretion of grammarians then unborn. Such a style may easily provoke the heavy hand of prosaic correction ; and, if it requires sym- pathy to interpret and defend it, it also requires, when it has once been marred, a very tender and very temperate touch in any attempt to restore it. Then in the lyric parts of his plays Sophocles is characterized by tones of feeling and passion which change with the most rapid sensibility— by boldness and some-
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times confusion of metaphor — and by occasional indistinctness of imagery, as if the figurative notion was suddenly crossed in his mind by the Hteral'
These last words seem to us to describe with won- derful felicity the mind of Sophocles as it worked on the passage to which we refer, and in which we think the Editor has needlessly abandoned the tradition of the manuscripts, and has acquiesced in a time- honoured conjecture which seems to have occurred independently to several scholars, but which is, in our judgment, not only unnecessary, but positively objectionable.^ Sophocles, in a wildly impassioned lyric, makes the Chorus deplore ('Ant' 599-604) that the ray of hope (the survival of Antigone and Ismene) which was shed above the last root of the house of Oedipus, is now extinguished by the heroic contumacy of Antigone. But the spiritual excite- ment of the Chorus forces them into a hurly-burly of metaphor which would now be condemned, but which seemed to the ancient Greek (rightly, we think) to convey well a tumult of feeling. What the Chorus say is : ^ —
' Now that ray of hope, which was shed above the last root of the house of Oedipus, is mowed down in its turn by — a handful of bloody dust due to the gods below, wild whirling words, and a fury in the heart.' ^
The passage is aglow with all the hues of a heated
^ In his last ed. Jebb rejects the conjecture kottIs and restores k6vis of the MSS. ^ With the reading of the MSS. k6vi.s, not the conjecture kottLs. ^ Lord Tennyson has a similar expression in the ' Sailor Boy ' : — * A devil rises in my heart Far worse than any death to me.'
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fancy. The ray of hope is figured as a gleam of light above a plant. A word is applied to the ray of hope which is strictly suitable only to the plant. It is said to be ' cut down.' By what ? By the act of Antigone — the dust cast on her brother's blood- stained corse, her wild words of defiance to Creon, and the desperate resolve which upheld her. But, as the hope is said to be ' cut down,' the editors, with hardly an exception, demand something which cuts. They regard k6pl(}, ' dust,' as an error, and read instead of it /cott/?, ' a cleaver ' or ' chopper.' This change, in our mind, takes away a great deal of the sublimity of the passage, if indeed it does not rob it of dignity altogether, and still leaves behind a con- fusion of metaphor, for a light would naturally be said to be hidden, or extinguished, rather than ' mowed down.' We do not think that confusion of metaphor is alien from Greek lyric poetry, but, on the contrary, quite characteristic of it, conspicuously so in the hands of Pindar and Aeschylus, from whom it would be easy to cite metaphors as mixed as that which we are now considering. Of course the ques- tion how far such a licence in the use of language may fitly be carried, must be decided in each case by an appeal to the critic's taste and sense of fitness. Here the indistinctness of the imagery seems to us to be quite in keeping with the mood of the Chorus. But the conjecture, kottls, is in itself objectionable. There is nothing in the passages where the word occurs to show that it was not a homely weapon, such as ' a cleaver ' or ' a chopper,' or at best ' a bill,' and we do not know that this word would not have sounded to Attic ears almost ludicrous in a highly-
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wrought passage like this.^ The poetical aspirant in Lewis Carroll's poem was grieved when told that there was some hidden want in
' The wild man went his weary way To a sad and lonely pump.'
We are not satisfied that a Koiriq is not as alien from dignified poetry as a pump. If this were so, we could hardly over-estimate the havoc which such a word would work in a lyrical passage of a very elevated tone. Let us think what would be the effect of the substitution of chopper for axe in Andrew Marvell's fine description of the demeanour of Charles I. on the scaffold :
' He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, But with his keener eye The axe's edge did try.'
It is possible that the introduction of Koiziq into the wail of the Chorus might be even more fatal to the effect — as fatal as if Macbeth should cry,
' The beer of Life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of;'
or Swinburne should apostrophise ' Dolores ' as
* Young, but with fancies as hoary And grey as a badger?
Plainly, then, the admissibility of Koirlq as a con- jectural emendation turns on the question whether it can be proved to be a dignified expression — a word with the connotation of axe rather than chopper^ or even snickersnee. We cannot find any really trustworthy
^ A like objection maybe urged against ixbdwv, a conjecture which has ousted v6du}v of the MSS. in Eur. ' Bacch.' 1060.
8o SOPHOCLES
credentials for the word in any commentary on this passage. It is common as a kitchen utensil, and gave its name to the Helots' Festival at Sparta. In Euripides (' Electra/ 8 lo ff.) a sacrifice is described, in which Aegisthus slays the victim with a knife (orcpayLg)^ then Orestes asks for a cleaver or chopper (/cott/?) to cut open the brisket. Plutarch tells us that Demos- thenes used to call Phocion ^ roov cjulcov Xoycov kottIs. This is usually translated ' the pruner of my periods.' But such a rendering is quite erroneous. The word does not mean a * pruning-knife,' which is Speiravov (Plat. ' Rep.' i. 353) ; and, if it did, no word could be more inapplicable to the oratory of Demosthenes, who beyond all orators, past or present, is absolutely free from redundancy, and never admits of pruning. It is indeed the chasteness of the eloquence of Demosthenes which often conceals from the modern reader his greatness as an orator. What Demos- thenes meant when he called Phocion ' the /cott/? of his arguments,' was that the plain matter-of-fact common sense of Phocion often gave a * knock-down blow' to his own arguments and appeals, which would easily have withstood the assaults of the sophistry and vulgar rhetoric of his ether opponents. It is not so long since Lord Palmerston — straw in mouth, and thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat — used to direct a douche of common sense on the fires of Parliamentary rhetoric. Such a speaker was Phocion, and the cleaver of his home-spun mother- wit was more formidable than the flaming sword of eloquence or the nimble rapier of dialectics.
The ancients are far less prone than the moderns to beat out the gold of fancy into a thin leaf.
SOPHOCLES 8i
Shakspeare, it is true, will compress into an epithet the materials for a sonnet, as when Lear says, ' Down, thou climbing sorrow.' But his successors are not so lavish, and make their material go further. Moore diffuses into four lines what Sophocles packs into one word, TroXvTrXayKTog, ' flitting ' : —
' Has Hope, like the bird in the story,
That flitted from tree to tree With the talisman's glittering glory. Has Hope been that bird to thee ?'
Aeschylus is contented merely to allude in a word ^ to the ' sullen seclusion ' which seems to give per- sonality and volition to the lonely peak. Tennyson in the ' Talking Oak,' and Horace in one of his ' Odes,' devote a couple of verses to the expression of a thought which Sophocles conveys in one epithet, ' colt-like (diJiLiriro^) o'er the steep hill,' when he gives us ('Ant.' 985 ff.) that wonderful little vignette of the daughter of Boreas who was nursed in a cave remote amid the storms of her sire, and yet Fate found her out, and prevailed against her, and made her a hapless and scorned wife, and mother of a persecuted brood.
To put aside the scores of places in which Jebb has "xercised perfect judgment in embodying in his teX*- the suggestions of other scholars, and to choose among his own only those which are at the same time most striking and most certain, we would point especially to 'Oedipus Rex,' 1218, where his brilliant emendation ^ must, in our opinion, supersede all other attempts to restore the text ; and to ' Oed.
'^oib<pp<av. ('Supplices,' 795.)
^ iba-irep IdXe/xov x^^^ ^or u>s vepiaWa (or ireplaXa) iaxiuv.
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Col.' 541, where by a very slight modification of the reading of the manuscripts -^ he has set right a most perplexing passage, and restored beyond all reason- able doubt the very words of the poet. We would also express our conviction that he has completely solved the problem presented by ' Oed. R.' 622-627, by that very slight change of orav to w? aV, and by dividing the lines differently between Oedipus and Creon. This, indeed, involves the hypothesis that a line has fallen out in the passage, but it provides connexion for the thought and construction for the language. The ordinary view of the passage, we may say, dispenses with a construction ; for who will grant that words which mean ' what kind of thing envy is,' ^ can be rendered as if they meant ' what is the nature of your grudge against me ' ? We would suggest that the verse which fell out may have been very similar in form to the preceding verse, which would, of course, increase the chance of its being omitted by the copyists. It might have run
ov\ ix)(t6^ v7reLK€Lv /x' ovSe TTLO-TeveLV Aeyets. ('Thou lead'st me not to yield or to believe.)
The question of Creon which precedes the lost verse is
(OS ovx VTret^cov ovSe Trio-reucrwv Aeyets ; (' Speak'st thou as one who'll yield not nor believe.'^')
His other valuable contributions to the settling of
^ iir<jO(pe\'^aas for i-rrwcp^X-qaa. He shows that in wishes the Greek idiom does not demand a finite verb, or, in other words, that the wish may be expressed in the infinitive depending on some such word as &(pe\op, understood. Such an infinitive is e^eXiadai in this passage. The corruption arose from a misapprehension, natural in the copyists, of this nicety of Greek idiom.
* ql6v icrri t6 <})dovelp,
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the text of these plays would more appropriately find mention in a periodical devoted especially to recording the progress made in classical studies. Several of these seem certain to us, some even of those to which he has denied a place in the text, contenting himself with a modest mention of them in the notes.^
When these criticisms originally appeared as an article in the Quarterly Review (No. 340, April, 1890) only the three Theban plays had appeared. They are far richer than the other four plays in interesting problems for the student of psychology and of criticism. However, in the latter, we would recommend to our readers Jebb's analysis of the character of Deianira in the * Trachiniae,' especially as regards her scene with Lichas, where he completely rebuts the view of La Harpe and others that she is artfully concealing her jealousy ; his comparison of the ' Electra ' with the play of the same name by Euripides and the ' Choephori ' of Aeschylus; and his remarks on the introduction of Neoptolemus into the * Philostratus ' and the episode of the merchant in that play. It is curious to observe how the burial rite (which engrosses more than a third part of the ' Ajax ' and is the keynote of the ' Antigone ') takes the place of the marriage tie in modern romantic drama, as engaging the attention and interest of the spectators. The heroine's ' marriage-lines ' in the modern drama do not play a more important part
^ E.g. fiovdda for vofidda, (* Oed. Rex,' 1350), dyr)d-ns for citJ^t/s {*Trach.' 869), ttJs ^tt' dXXois for rets diraLbas {ib. 91 1). To the last he accorded a place in his edition of Text and critical notes (Cambridge, 1897).
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than the handful of earth cast on the corse of Polynices, and the question whether Ajax is to be buried or not.
We have, unquestionably, in this edition of Sophocles, a splendid example of the work which can be done by the English school of classics at its best. The combination in one person of such scholarship, literary excellence, and critical refine- ment must always be rare; but we hope that English scholars will keep Prof. Jebb's work before their eyes as an ideal to be aimed at, and as a model of what the editing of the classics in England ought to be.
THE NEW PAPYRI.
The nineteenth century has been rich in important additions to our store of classical knowledge. In 1 8 1 5 Niebuhr found a palimpsest in the Library of the Chapter at Verona containing a copy of the Epistles of St. Jerome ; under this writing he deciphered the text of the Institutes of Gaius, and thus immensely enhanced the value of what is per- haps Rome's greatest bequest to us, her system of jurisprudence and law. Shortly afterwards, the dis- covery of a great part of Cicero's treatise ' De Republica,' by Cardinal Mai, in a Vatican palimpsest, supplied a further proof of the matchless powers of the great Roman orator in every department of literary achievement, and contributed not a few choice blossoms to a future florilegium of the wit and wisdom of Cicero. Hardly had this precious piece of flotsam from the sea of time received the last polish from the hands of scholarship, before the four now famous orations of Hyperides, existing piecemeal in papyri, purchased by Mr. Harris Warden and Mr. Stobart at Thebes in Egypt about 1850, created for us a new figure in literature. Hyperides had hitherto been but a name in lists and lexicons like those of Harpocration and Pollux, ever
85
86 THE NEW PAPYRI
since the loss or destruction in the capture of Buda Pesth by the Turks of the codex of Hyperides, which had been the ornament of the library of the King of Hungary. Quite recently large additions to his remains have been made by the papyri of the Archduke Rainer. This acquisition was soon suc- ceeded by one which was in some respects even more interesting, the papyrus fragment of three pages containing a portion of Alcman's marvellous old hymn to the Dioscuri, with its strange laconisms, and its curious companion pictures of Agido and Hagesichora. It was found by M. Marietti in 1855 in a tomb near the second pyramid ; it is quite unique among Greek poems in its tone and style, and affords a new and amazing proof of the myriad- minded versatility of ancient Hellas.^
A century rich in real literary gains is naturally also fertile of forgeries, and some of these have had a temporary success. As Ireland's fictitious plays of Shakspeare imposed on Garrick, who actually put ' Shakspeare's Vortigern ' on the stage, so the sham- antique ballads of Surtees took in even the great master of ballad lore and maker of ballad poetry, the inimitable Sir Walter Scott himself — a fact which can only be put beside Scaliger's belief in the genuineness of two comic Latin fragments of great alleged antiquity, submitted to him by Muretus, who himself had written them. Ever since Onomacritus wrote the poems of Orpheus, the literary forger has been from time to time at work ; but in recent ages he has not been so successful as those artists whom
^ It is printed in the fourth edition of Bergk's ' Poetae Lyrici Graeci,' vol. iii. pp. 30-45.
THE NEW PAPYRI 87
some supposed to have fabricated the Homeric poems under Pericles. The Rowley MSS. of Chatterton and the Ossian of Macpherson, though they had many enthusiastic believers in their authenticity, had however only a temporary triumph ; and quite re- cently the Greek Simonides and the Jew Shapira have failed egregiously in their attempts to impose their sham antiques on the learned world. We shall again have occasion to refer briefly to the Shapira MSS., to point out the characteristic notes of dis- ingenuousness which marked the manner in which they were presented to the public, and to put before our readers, by way of contrast, the history, so far as we know it, of the leaves which contain the ' Constitution of Athens,' and which certainly are not a modern forgery. We may here remark that the tendency of modern literary criticism is towards undue scepticism about the monuments of antiquity which we possess, rather than too great readiness to accept fabricated imitations of them as genuine. The Germans are leaving no nook in Helicon un- rifled in their wild chase of the ' Unecht' The method of Wolfs Prolegomena has fascinated his countrymen. Kirchhoff has dissected the Odyssey^ as Wolf the Iliad, and Fick has rewritten it in its ' original Aeolic' It has been attempted to show that the * De Corona ' is an awkward fusion of two different speeches written on two different occasions, and on two incompatible plans. Thucydides, Plato, and Xenophon have been treated in the same way — unskilful patchwork all. Quite recently a book was written to show that the ' Annals ' of Tacitus had for their author Poggio Bracciolini, and indeed
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we are approaching the paradox of Hardouin, who maintained that all the classics except a very few^ were written by a committee of scholars under Severus Archontius in the thirteenth century.
The scholar's dream of literary treasure-trove used to carry him to the palaces of Turkey, the monas- teries of Macedonia, or the temples of Asia Minor ; but of late Africa has been asserting her claim to her old reputation of being the constant source of sur- prises. Egyptian papyri have been the vehicle of most of our recent acquisitions, and bid fair to yield a further and still more abundant harvest. Dr. Flinders Petrie has recently exhumed a great pile of mummy-cases at Gurob in the Fayoum. These contain quantities of waste paper stuffed into the interstices between the thin planks or strips of wood which form the walls of the cases, apparently for the purpose of giving to them a greater appearance of solidity, and of enabling the carpenter to economise his timber. Among these bundles of waste paper have been lying for centuries parts of old MSS. of Plato's ' Phaedo ' and of the ' Antiope ' of Euripides. Dr. Mahaffy has succeeded in eliciting from these papyri some new fragments of a play very celebrated in antiquity. He has published them in the Dublin ' Hermathena,' and in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. The preliminary labours of de- ciphering, involving, no doubt, frequent appeals to the art of emendation, have been skilfully performed by Dr. Mahaffy and Dr. Sayce, and have been
^ We believe the exceptions were Homer, Herodotus, Cicero, Pliny, Virgil (* Georgics'), Horace (* Satires' and ' Epistles ').
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supplemented by the critical sagacity of Mr. (now Professor) Bury, who has made many excellent corrections in the text. The fragment which probably came first in the play contains a speech in which one of the sons of Antiope encourages his mother, and bids her not to fear the approach of her uncle, the tyrant Lycus : ' Surely,' he urges, ' if Zeus is our father, as you say, he will deliver us in the hour of peril ; the time for escape is past, the fresh blood of Dirce (wife of Lycus, whom they had slain) will convict us of her murder ; we must do or die ; we must slay the tyrant' The leaf ends with the entrance of Lycus on the stage, but his speech is quite fragmentary. The only other portion of the MS. which is continuously legible presents to us Lycus a captive in the hands of his sons, and about to be slain by them, when Hermes appears as ' Deus ex machina,' and forbids the death of Lycus, whom he commands to hand over the sceptre to Amphion. This, as we know from the argument given by Hyginus, was the con- cluding scene of the play, and there is no doubt whatever that Dr. Flinders Petrie has become possessed of some new and genuine portions of a lost play of Euripides, which the affected phrase of Persius,
* Antiope aerumnis cor luctificabile fulta,'
would alone show to have been most pathetic, and to have been admired as such by the ancient world. But the newly-acquired portions of the play have very little interest except of an antiquarian kind, and contrast badly with the fragments of the * Antiope/
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already known and published. Naturally too : for nearly all the latter have owed their preservation either to the thought they conveyed, or the beauty of the language in which it was expressed, and have come down to us from Plato or Stobaeus ; whereas the recently found verses are indebted for their survival to the merest chance, and do not happen to contain any of the characteristic excellences of the poetry of Euripides, hardly indeed a thought or expression which deserved to survive. We would give all the speeches of a ' Deus ex machina ' in Euripides for that one so Euripidean half-line which the taste of Stobaeus has preserved for us from this very play,
KipSos iv KttKots ayi/ojcTia,
a pregnant anticipation of Gray's touching couplet, now one of our household words,
' Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.'
Dr. Mahaffy, perhaps feeling this, rests on its great antiquity the claim of the MS. on our attention : —
' The papers found along with these remains of Euripides' famous play are dated in the early years of Ptolemy III., viz. before 230 B.C. As we have found no dates later than this reign in any of the cases, it is extremely improbable that the present literary fragments can be more recent ; nay rather,, the natural inference that a play of Euripides would take longer than ephemeral documents would to turn into waste paper is strongly corroborated by the character of the writing. From a palaeo- graphical point of view the hand is very old, possibly generations older than the company in which it was found.'
But we cannot share the confidence with which Dr. Mahaffy claims such an enormous antiquity for the
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codex. At least we cannot admit the cogency of the reasoning by which he seeks to establish his opinion. The papers found in the mummy-cases along with the Euripidean fragments are very numer- ous, and are all of the same kind, — wills, agreements, receipts, leases, copies of statutes and decrees referring to rating and taxation ; in a word, documents dealing with property and business transactions. Mr. Sayce has given specimens of them in the same number of ' Hermathena.' Now it seems to us that nothing is more likely than that these documents once formed the contents of some Registry of Deeds, which at last got rid of the portions of its stock which had become useless, by selling them as waste paper, or perhaps by throwing them away. Such documents as these are precisely those which retain longest a right to be preserved. We are far from admitting that the natural inference is that a play of Euripides would take longer than these papers, which Dr. Mahaffy strangely calls ephemeral, to turn into waste paper. On the contrary, we think that many years, perhaps hundreds of years, might elapse before the officials of a public Registry of Deeds would hold the instruments deposited with them to be so worth- less as to justify them in throwing them away. They may have lain in the Registry for hundreds of years after they were deposited there, and then at last have become waste paper. Then it was that the old wills and deeds became mixed with the rubbish of a far later age, and helped a mutilated copy of the ' Antiope ' and of some dialogues of Plato to impart an appearance of solidity to a jerry- mandered coffin. These fragments must of course be
92
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very old, but they are not necessarily older than, for instance, the treatise on the * Constitution of Athens ' ; at least the arguments in support of the great antiquity which Dr. Mahaffy claims for them must be drawn from the character of the handwriting alone.
But even if the Petrie papyri had all the antiquity claimed for them, and a great deal more interesting contents, they would still have been completely eclipsed by the extraordinary ' find ' of the British Museum. Whether the treatise on the ' Athenian Constitution ' is by Aristotle or not, is perhaps to scholars the most important question connected with it, and will afterwards be considered carefully ; but even if we put the questions of age and authorship aside, the discovery is full of interest and importance. It is a singular, and even unique incident, that some un- known scholar living in Egypt in the time of Vespasian should have copied, or employed persons to copy, on the back of a farm bailiff's accounts, the remains of what he believed to be the treatise of Aristotle so often quoted and so widely celebrated, and that that MS. should have escaped all notice until towards the end of the nineteenth century it came into the hands of the authorities of the British Museum, and was by them deciphered, printed and published. These authorities have not thought it wise to give us any information as to the person or persons from whom the MS. has been obtained, or the place where it has been preserved. We believe, however, that their reticence is a good sign, and that it arises from a conviction on their part that the same source is likely to yield more treasures, and a
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desire not to attract rival bidders or encourage dis- honest manufacture. For all we know they have been obliged to be a little lax in their interpretation of certain Khedival laws, and have felt themselves constrained to give ear to the crafty counsel of Ulysses to Neoptolemus, and to lend themselves to frowardness for a brief space, with an intention of ultimately becoming the most upright of mortals. However this may be, we are certainly disposed to act on the old Leonine precept, ' Si quis det mannos, ne quaeras dentibus annos ' : we will not look a gift horse in the mouth, nor ask whence it came ; nor will we make much lament over certain errors in the editing hereinafter to be pointed out. We will at once express our hearty sense of gratitude to the authorities of the British Museum for their splendid gift to the world of learning, and our admiration for the patience and skill which enabled them to decipher a MS. of extraordinary difficulty. Com- mendation, moreover, is due to the insight of the editor, Dr. Kenyon, into historical questions, and to his lucid exposition of the evidence in each case. His weakness is that he ascribes some impossible forms to the Greek text of the papyrus, but he has shown himself capable of ably handling questions connected with history and archaeology.
That the treatise is not a modern forgery is, as we have said, certain. All the notes of modern forgery are absent. An artist who had the skill to execute such a MS. would have hawked his wares all over the Continent, to find out where he could get the highest price, and would have made the learned world ring with his name. Shaplra carried
94 THE NEW PAPYRI
his forged text of Deuteronomy to Beyrout, to Leipsic, all over the Continent, and finally to Berlin, before he approached the British Museum. He told in detail the way in which he became possessed of his MS., how a sheikh had informed him that some Arabs had little pieces of black writing which they believed to be amulets, and how he had by a lucky chance secured a small residue of them. Above all, he demanded for his invaluable MS. the sum of one million sterling. And with all his craft he did not impose on the sava^tts of the British Museum. It is true that their verdict was forestalled by the ingenious Frenchman, M. Clermont-Ganneau, who had proved the fictitious character of the codex before Dr. Ginsburg made his report. But there is no reason to doubt that they would have detected Shapira's forgery without the help of M. Clermont- Ganneau, though the French press at the time showed a disposition to crow over us as if we had only followed the lead of their countryman, and over the Germans for having spent some years before 18,000 thalers on the purchase from the same Shapira of some Moabite pottery which the same savant, M. Clermont-Ganneau, demonstrated to be spurious.
The text of the ' Constitution of Athens ' is written on the verso of the papyrus ; that is, on the reverse side, on which the fibres of the papyrus run per- pendicularly. On the recto are the accounts of a farm bailiff, of which a specimen is given in the facsimile, and they bear date of the eleventh year of Vespasian, that is, 78-79 A.D. As these are private accounts they would probably have perished
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within twenty years at most, but for the chance which made our unknown benefactor use their reverse side for the reception of what he believed to be the famous tract of Aristotle.
The writing on the verso has marked points of similarity to that on the recto^ and we may safely ascribe the MS. to the end of the first century A.D. or the beginning of the second. Almost every one of the existing fragments quoted by Greek writers of the early Christian centuries as coming from ' Aris- totle on the Constitution of Athens,' or presumably belonging to such a work, are either found in our MS., or are to be referred to the lost portions of it, for the beginning has not come down to us, and the end is much mutilated. The owner of the MS. was not in possession of the beginning of the tract, and left a blank space for it in his copy, in hopes that some lucky chance might supply it. Four scribes were employed. The first, third, and fourth hands are semi-cursive, and very difficult to decipher ; the second, which goes from the thirteenth column to the middle of the twentieth, is uncial, and is not quite so obscure.
The work falls into two divisions. In the first, which runs to the end of c. 41, our author gives a rapid survey of Athenian constitutional history from the mythical establishment of Ion down to the restoration of the democracy in the archonship of Euclides, after the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants. The second gives a list of the various magistrates of Athens and their duties. Much of the second section is lost ; but as the later grammarians, especially Pollux and Harpocration, used it very largely, our
96 THE NEW PAPYRI
knowledge of its contents is already considerable. The surviving portion of the work opens at the con- clusion of the narrative of the conspiracy of Cylon, and the purification of the city by Epimenides of Crete. It plunges us at once into a historical dis- cussion, by making the attempt of Cylon prior to the legislation of Draco, while Plutarch brings Cylon and Epimenides into the epoch of Solon. Mr. Kenyon, in an excellent note, gives reasons for preferring the new chronology, but fails to draw the natural conclusion (which we shall afterwards examine) that this was not the edition of the * Con- stitution of Athens ' which Plutarch read.
The development of the constitutional history is then pursued. According to our author, the people were in a state of slavery up to the time of Solon, and it was economic not political grievances that both Draco and he were called upon to redress. The pressure of debt had reduced the poorer classes to a state of serfdom. Before Draco the offices were elective, and were retained for life. The account of the origin of the Archons is quite new. The ofifice of Polemarch existed under the Kings ; the Archon came into existence under the Medontid dynasty, and was inferior in position both to the King and the Polemarch. The monarchy was, in fact, delegated to a board of three, and the name King was for a long time the title of one of them, probably until the decennial tenure of the ofifice was introduced. After that epoch the term was only retained for a sacrificial function, and the magistrate bearing it took rank below the Archon. Up to the time of Solon the Archons had only one court ; but
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when their number was raised to nine, the Archon, the King, and the Polemarch had each a separate court, while the six Thesmothetae together occupied another.^
The Areopagus is here said to have existed before Draco, though the account of the Solonian constitu- tion in the ' Politics ' of Aristotle (ii. 12) seems to imply that it was an institution of Solon, a view which Plutarch combats in his 'Solon' (c. 10), without, however, appealing to the ' Constitution of Athens ' in support of his opinion, as he certainly would have done, if he had had our treatise before him. It was very powerful, being recruited from ex- Archons, and exercising control over all the offices of the State. Draco was not merely a jurist, as has been hitherto supposed, but a political reformer — a state- ment strongly opposed to a passage in the ' Politics ' (ii. 12) which speaks of him as solely a codifier. He gave a share in the government to all who could afford to provide themselves with a military equip- ment, and required for each of the offices a different property qualification proportionate to its importance. Both the property qualification and the Council of 400, institutions usually ascribed to Solon, are here treated as belonging to the period of Draco ; the Draconian Council consisting of 401 members chosen by lot from the whole body of the citizens. From the Strategi and Hipparchi was required much the largest property qualification, 100 minae
^ The Court of the King was in the BovkoKlov. Hence Dr. Sandys has ingeniously proposed to emend a corrupt passage in Athenaeus, p. 235, where iK ttjs /3ou/coXias has been wrongly corrected to iKrbs povKoXLas, and absurdly translated absque dolo.
G
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against lo demanded from the Archons, and these military officers could only be chosen from such as had legitimate children over ten years of age. These children were, apparently, handed over to the Pry- tanes to be kept as hostages for their fathers' good conduct during office. On its expiry the same Pry- tanes took the officers themselves under their charge until their accounts should be passed, unless they could find bondsmen to take their place.^ No one was allowed to hold any office a second time until every qualified person had sat once, a rule which greatly modifies the apparent irrationality of election by lot, which, with this proviso, really only deter- mines the order in which the qualified persons shall hold office. Thus the people were admitted to a greatly increased share of power by Draco, but their condition was still miserable. Political reforms do not redress economic grievances. The comment with which the reforms of Draco are dismissed is significant, ' but their bodies were pledged for their debts, and the land was in the hands of a coterie.'
Hence a revolution, which ended in an appeal to Solon as arbitrator. He had already made himself eminent by his patriotic poems, in which he appealed to the classes to give up their oppression of the masses, and to the latter to refrain from violence. We find in Solon no tendency to encourage or palliate breach of the law by the masses, with a view to justify the invasion of the rights of the classes.
^According to the ingenious suggestion of Mr. W. R. Paton, we read: Toi>roi's 5^ diarr] peiy roi/s TrpvTaveii, Kal toi)s aTparriyoiis Kal Toi)s iirirdpxovs t oi>s ^p ovs fiexpl evdvvCov, fXT] iyyvrjTas 5 e/c tou aiirov TiXovs dexo/xivovi k.t.X.
wnanrnrsm
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Athens had already wrested back Salamis from the Megarians, stung by the trenchant elegiacs in which Solon wished he were a citizen of any state, however humble or insignificant, so that he might not hear the galling taunt that now dogged the name Athenian, —
' One of the Athenians this Who surrendered Salamis ! ' ^
He adopted the popular vehicle of elegiac, iambic, and trochaic verse to recommend his opinions to his countrymen at large, much as modern politicians publish signed articles in the monthly magazines, but apparently with greater success. The present treatise preserves for us some twenty new verses to be added to those collected in Bergk's ' Poetae Lyrici Graeci.' Solon at once addressed himself to the relief of the economic distress which prevailed, by legalising the repudiation of all debts, a measure which he (' euphemistically,' says Plutarch) called the ' Disburthenment' Some of his friends, catching some inkling of his intention, borrowed largely, and invested the borrowed money in land. ' This,' says the writer, ' gave rise to an attempt to blacken his character by representing that he had profited per- sonally by the Disburthenment ; but he was in other transactions so fair, that, though by tampering with the laws he could easily have made himself tyrant, he faced the animosity of both parties, and preferred the public good to his private aggrandizement ; so it is not likely that for a mere trifle he would soil his fair name.'
^ 'ATTtff6s oCros dvT]p tCjv lioKafiLvaipeTCiv.
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We have, however, no mention of Plutarch's alle- gation that he was a loser by his own measure to the extent of five talents. The ' Disburthenment ' was followed by the repeal of all Draco's laws except those relating to murder ; but among OecriuLol our author cannot include political institutions such as the Council and the property qualification, for these certainly existed under Solon, and indeed are com- monly supposed to have originated with him. Prob- ably Solon altered the relation of these institutions to the rest of the constitution. Perhaps now for the first time the division into classes resting on a property qualification was brought into direct con- nexion with the franchise and eligibility to office. On this matter not only Plutarch but Harpocration appears to have used a redaction of the ' Constitu- tion of Athens ' different from that before us, for they both distinctly ascribe the origin of these insti- tutions to Solon. Aristotle in the ' Politics' (ii. 12) tells us that Solon ' gave the people the irreducible minimum of political power, namely, the election of the magistrates and the right to call them to account on the expiry of their office.' It is proposed to elicit the same sentiment from the words of our treatise, ' he gave the lowest class, the Thetes, a share in the Dicasteries onlj^,' ^ but to us it seems impos- sible to ascribe such a sense to the words used. Again, the appointment of Archons under Solon is here described as a combined process of election and sortition, the four tribes electing ten persons each, and nine being chosen by lot from the forty thus
^ rois 5^ rb drjriKbv rcXovaiv iKK\r]<xlas Kai SiKaarTjpicov fier^SuKe fi&uop (c. 7).
■ UiiSiMWM. Jill, JUL
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elected ; now Aristotle says that Solon made no change in the election of magistrates. In primitive times, this tract tells us, the Archons were elected by the Areopagus. We have just referred to the pas- sage in which Aristotle speaks of the right of electing the magistrates and of calling them to account as the minimum of political influence, and says that these powers were conferred on the people by Solon : here the writer summarizes the democratic features in the Solon ian constitution as (i) the prohibition of lending money on the security of the person ; (2) the right of access to the law courts ; (3) the right of appeal to the Dicastery against the decisions of magistrates ; and Dr. Kenyon endeavours to recon- cile the doctrine of Aristotle and the writer of the treatise. But, though it be granted that the right of election is here omitted because as a matter of fact under Draco the election of magistrates was in the hands of all who could furnish a military equipment, yet it is impossible to believe with the editor that the calling of magistrates to account (to evOupeiv) is expressed or even implied in the words ^ €19 to ^LKaoTT-npiov ecpearig. In our opinion the two sum- maries are in no point coincident, and the Dicasteries are here distinctly regarded as a Court of Appeal in the time of Solon. Our treatise confirms the opinion of Boeckh against that of Grote, that Solon reformed the system of weights and measures ; the reform of the currency standard had the purely commercial aim of facilitating business transactions with the cities of Euboea and Ionia, which used the Euboeic standard.
Solon having so far succeeded in the furtherance
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of his political views, thought it prudent to retire from public life, and left Athens for ten years' foreign travel. Meantime, the feud between the factions of the Plain, the Shore, and the Mountain, burned or smouldered at Athens. These local distinctions corresponded to a difference of classes, and hence became a basis for political divisions. The rich landlords of the plain were the old aristocracy, the shore was occupied by the well-to-do commercial classes, and the rough uplands were the home of the poor farmers. An attempt made by Damasias to grasp the tyranny in the year 581 failed, and led to the appointment of a Directory of Ten, — five Eupa- tridae, three Geomori, and two Demiurgi, — which does not seem to have outlasted the year in which it was created. In Damasias (hitherto a mere name) we have a new notable added to Athenian history ; the same may be said of Cedo and Rhino, of whom we afterwards read, and the tract somewhat brightens our picture of the Athenian Archinus and the Spartan Callibius.
The next twenty years were marked by incessant party warfare. The immediate results of the Sol- onian legislation are justly estimated by Dr. Kenyon in a note on c. 13 : —
* The reforms of Solon were very far from producing a peace- ful settlement of affairs. Except for the four years immediately after his term of office, there was almost perpetual dissension until the establishment of the tyranny of Pisistratus ; and that in time led immediately to the reforms of Cleisthenes. In fact, the Solonian Constitution, though rightly regarded as the foundation of the democracy of Athens, was not itself in satis- factory operation for more than a very few years. In this respect it may be compared with the constitutional crisis of the
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Great Rebellion in England. The principles for which the Parliament fought the King were not brought into actual prac- tice until after a return to Stuart rule and a fresh revolution ; and yet the struggle of the earlier years of the Long Parliament, and the principles of EHot and Pym, are righly held to be the foundation of the modern British Constitution.'
The account of the establishment of Pisistratus in the Tyrannis is beset by serious difficulties. He is said to have owed his prominence to a campaign against Megara in which he took Nisaea. But if this was the war against Megara undertaken under the auspices of Solon, then the eminence of Pisis- tratus among Athenians was based on a victory achieved nearly forty years before, when he was a youth of eighteen, and he must have been fifty-eight years of age when he founded his dynasty. We must, therefore, assume that there must have been another campaign against Megara some thirty-five years later than the Solonian, though no account of it has survived elsewhere. But this is not the only diffi- culty. We read here (c. 1 4) that the periods, during which Pisistratus lived in exile, added together, make twenty-one years, which would leave only twelve for the actual enjoyment of power, for the two extreme dates 560 and 527 are certain, so that we know that thirty-three years intervened between his first accession to power and his death. Now we read in c. 17 that he ruled for nineteen years, and was in exile during the rest of the thirty-three, and in the ' Politics ' (v. i 2) that he was in actual possession of the Tyrannis for seventeen years. The account of his first restoration from exile adds nothing to that of Herodotus, except that Phya, whom he
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dressed up to represent Athena, was a flower-girl ; but we have fuller details of his second exile and of his sojourn in the neighbourhood of Mount Pangaeus, where he acquired wealth sufficient to raise an army, and to bring about his restoration. The story of the stratagem by which he deprived the people of their arms is amusing.^ Pisistratus summoned a meeting of the people under arms in the temple of the Dioscuri, and began to address them. He spoke low on purpose ; and when the people complained that they could not hear, he invited them to follow him to the porch of the Acropolis, where they could hear better. They did so, and while he harangued them, his emissaries carried off their arms, which they had left behind them, stacked according to custom. When he had intelligence that his orders had been carried out, he told the people what he had done, adding that they ought not to feel any surprise or annoyance : ' their business was to attend to their private affairs, and he would look after matters of state.' His policy was to keep the people busy, and not too well off. He imposed a tax of I o per cent, on the produce of the land, about which an entertaining anecdote is related. One day, when Pisistratus was on one of those tours of inspection
^ Polyaenus tells the same tale : but his narrative does not dispose us to think that he had read our tract. A somewhat similar tale is told of Hippias by Thucydides, vi. 58. Our author (c. 18) expressly denies the truth of the Thucydidean account of the assassination of Hipparchus, and especially of the stratagem by which Hippias is said to have dis- armed the people and discovered the conspirators. The whole narrative of Thucydides falls to the ground, if it is true that the practice of carrying arms at the Panathenaea belongs to a later age, as the treatise avers. It further states that the conspirators were numerous, Thucydides having expressly referred to the smallness of their number.
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which he used to make through the country, he saw an old man digging hard in a very rocky soil. He stopped, and asked the old man what did his farm produce. ' Nothing,' he replied, 'except every variety of worry and ache, and of these I owe a tenth to Pisistratus.' The tyrant was so pleased at the industry and the independence of the old farmer that he conferred on him a complete exemption from all taxes. It was this geniality of disposition, reminding us of Abraham Lincoln, which, in spite of the Athenian detestation of the very name of Tyrant, made Pisistratus popular, and gave to the period of his rule the name of the Golden Age, or the Good Old Time.^ We learn that, besides his sons by his first wife, Hippias and Hipparchus, he had two sons, lophon and Hegisistratus, surnamed Thessalus, by a second wife, Timonassa of Argos. Hegisistratus is mentioned by Herodotus, and Thessalus by Thucydides, but our author is the first authority for the fact that the two are one and the same individual. Further, he corrects the state- ment of Herodotus that Timonassa was the concubine of Pisistratus ; his alliance with her is said to have brought about the treaty with Argos, and cannot therefore have been an illicit connexion.
The history of the Pisistratidae presents some new features. Hippias is described as serious, while Hipparchus was devoted to pleasure and art, and filled his court with poets, Anacreon and Simonides among the rest. It was Thessalus, however, not Hipparchus, who by his folly and licentiousness brought about the exploit of Harmodius and Aris-
^ 6 iwl Kp6vov pios (c. i6).
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togiton. He it was (not Hipparchus, as Thucydides tells us) who insulted the sister of Harmodius, and drew on the Pisistratidae the furious hatred of the people ; such is the plain meaning of our text, unless we assume that there is a most unusual and un- accountable parenthesis. The conspirators succeeded only in killing Hipparchus, not Thessalus, which accounts for the phrase, ' they muddled the whole matter.'^ Harmodius was at once cut down by the bodyguards, but Aristogiton was subjected to pro- longed torture, under which he implicated in the plot, truly or falsely, many of the intimate friends of the tyrants. The description of his death is graphic : —
' He could not get them to put him out of his agony, so, promising to disclose many new names, he called on Hippias to give him his hand as a token of good faith. When he got hold of the tyrant's hand, he began to taunt him for his un- natural conduct in shaking hands with his brother's murderer, and finally lashed Hippias into such a fury that he could no longer contain himself, but drew his sword and slew him.'
The hatred in which the rule of Hippias was held found expression in a fine scolion^ beginning —
aiat AiXpvSpLOV TrpoSioa-eTatpov,
in which an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the Alcmaeonidae to establish a garrison against Hippias at Lipsydrium is glorified as an act of the highest heroism : —
' Woe worth Lipsydrium, the faithless hold
That saved not from defeat those champions true :
^ TTjp 8\r}v iXvfii^vauTO vpa^iv (c. l8).
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Bold sons of Athens, sprung from sires as bold, ^ They proved the aspiring blood from which their life they drew ! '
Before this there had been another brilliant failure to dislodge Hippias. It is associated with the name of the otherwise unknown Cedo, who must have won a high place in the estimation of Athens, as his fame too is embalmed in a scolion or drinking song —
' Here's Cedo's memory : may it never fade, As long as to the brave our festal dues are paid.' ^
When Hippias was finally expelled by the help of Sparta in 510, the democracy was re-established. The Alcmaeonidae had always held an intermediate policy, that of the Shore or the moderate oligarchs, between the extreme aristocracy of the Plain under Lycurgus, and the democracy of the Mountain with which Pisistratus had thrown in his lot. The Alcmae- onid Clisthenes now resolved to make a bid for the support of the democracy, and succeeded in securing a position from which the abortive emeute of Cleo- menes and Isagoras was able to dislodge him only for a very brief space. The legislation of Clisthenes is referred to the year 508, and is made subsequent to the attempt of Isagoras and Cleomenes. Clisthenes broke up the old tribal divisions, and raised the number of the tribes to ten (and consequently that of the Council to five hundred), purposely choosing a number which was not a multiple of four, so that the new tribes might not be based on subdivisions
^ We read, d7a^oi/s re ko.^ einraTpLdSiv for the metre. ei xpv TOL^ dyadofii dudpacriv olpoxoeiv.
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of the old. By his deme-system he abolished the local factions, but we learn nothing new about his constitution except that he did not create the office of Strategus, which was as old as the period of Draco, and that under him the Archons were directly elected by the people in the Ecclesia. He is not in any way connected with any modification of the dicasteries.
We find the name of Xanthippus among the Athenian statesmen who suffered ostracism ; and while this subject is under treatment, the name of Themistocles is suddenly introduced in connexion with his proposal to apply to the building of a fleet the money available from the newly discovered mines at Laurium, or Maroneia, as they are here called from the name of a town in the neighbourhood. We read here of a law that an ostracised person must not live between the promontories of Scyllaeum in Argolis and Geraestus in Euboea. The text gives ej/To? TepaicTTOu koI UKuWalov KaroiKeiv, but we must read ckto^ or /utj ej/roy, for Themistocles when under ostracism lived in Argos, which is west of Scyl- laeum, and Hyperbolus in Samos, which is east of Geraestus. This would have been contrary to the law as described by Dr. Kenyon's reading, which indeed would have permitted an ostracised person to live at Athens.
We read that at a critical moment just before Salamis the Areopagus had come forward with a donation of money, which procured crews to man the fleet which saved Greece. Thus Athens was raised to a commanding position in Greece, and the Areopagus in Athens. The leading statesmen there were Aristides and Themistocles, to the former of
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whom our author attributes the greater importance. Alcibiades is not mentioned at all, and Pericles receives merely a passing notice. But we read much of Themistocles, of whose tortuous character and policy instances are given which are, perhaps, more striking than any of those already familiar to us in Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plutarch. He is closely associated with Ephialtes in the movements which led to the downfall of the Areopagus, which accord- ing to the writer of the ' Constitution of Athens,' must be referred to some time in the year 462, and in which he assigns no part whatever to Pericles, though afterwards (c. 27) he speaks of him as having deprived that Court of some of its privileges. But the chronology of this part of the treatise, which would make the date of the Periclean pre-eminence later than has been hitherto supposed, cannot be reconciled with that of Thucydides. Themistocles' flight took place during the investment of Naxos, which was reduced before the victory of Cimon at the Eurymedon, and accordingly the attack on the Areopagus must have been at least three years earlier, unless we are to remodel the chronology of Thucydides completely. The story, however, which is quite new (though it was evidently known to the writer of the argument to the ' Areopagitica ' of Isocrates,^ who quotes ' Aristotle on the Constitu- tion of Athens'), runs thus : — Themistocles laboured under a charge of Medism which the Areopagus was
1 Yet some of his words appear to imply a slightly different version of the story ; for instance, the writer of the argument to the ' Areopagitica ' refers Themistocles' action to his pecuniary embarrassment, not to the charge of Medism.
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investigating. He saw that his only chance lay in the destruction of that Court, and he determined to force the hand of Ephialtes, whom he knew to be eager for a revolution. Accordingly he denounced Ephialtes before the Areopagus, of which he was himself a member, and then warned Ephialtes that he was about to be arrested. Failing to convince him of the truth of his warning, and knowing well that the Areopagus were not prepared for so decided a step as his arrest, Themistocles resorted to a ruse. He managed to engage some members of the Court in conversation in the vicinity of the house of Ephialtes, and assumed an earnestness of demeanour which quite convinced Ephialtes that he was indeed in imminent peril. Ephialtes fled for refuge to the altar, but, finding himself unmolested, he seems to have thought that his enemies were drawing back for a spring. Accordingly he concentrated all his efforts on the arraignment of the Areopagus before the Council of Five Hundred and the Ecclesia, and, aided by Themistocles, he finally succeeded. The characteristic craftiness, whereby Themistocles man- aged to keep up appearances with both sides until the moment came when he saw he could strike a decisive blow, is quite in accordance with his character as drawn by Plutarch, and we cannot believe that that most anecdotical of biographers would have omitted so apt a narrative if he had known it. Yet, as we have seen, there is good evidence that there was an edition of * Aristotle on the Athenian Constitution ' which related that anecdote, probably an edition different both from Plutarch's and from that which has recently come into our own hands.
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Cimon and Pericles are dealt with very hastily. The latter is said to have instituted paid dicasteries. His fortune did not permit him to rival the private munificence of Cimon, so he determined to be lavish at the public expense, and to expend the public money on the dicasteries — a most unsympathetic review of the policy of the statesman whom Thucy- dides has made so commanding a figure in Athenian history. From the death of Pericles dates the rise of low demagogy, and the description of Cleon bawling abuse from the rostrum is quite in accord- ance with the pictures drawn by Thucydides and Aristophanes. The only statesmen amongst the successors of Pericles whom our author commends are Nicias, Thucydides, and Theramenes. Of the two former he says, ' Nearly every one acknowledges them to have been not only high-minded gentlemen but statesmen and patriots ' ; the latter he takes a second occasion to praise highly, though his own account of his career shows him to have been no more than an opportunist with aristocratic leanings.
We have a very full account of a constitution pro- posed under the rule of the Four Hundred after the crisis of 411. Indeed the disproportionate ample- ness of this portion of the narrative would lead us to conjecture that the writer had strong oligarchical sympathies, and wished to exaggerate the importance of the Four Hundred, or else that he had some special source of information on this very dull sub- ject, and was anxious to make as much use of it as possible. As the proposed constitution never became an actuality, it is hard to see any other reason for the care with which he dwells on it. We do not
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find this false perspective in the genuine works of Aristotle.
The government of the Five Thousand, which rose under Theramenes and Aristocrates on the ruins of the oligarchy, elicits from the writer as from Thucy- dides terms of the warmest commendation. He tells us there was a subsequent restoration of the demo- cracy, which may have taken place after the victory of Cyzicus in 410; but he is certainly mistaken when he refers to the trial of ten generals after Arginusae : two were never put on their trial, two did not appear, and only six were tried. The state- ment made by a scholiast on Aristophanes (' Ran.' 1532), and disbelieved by Grote, that the Spartans made proposals of peace after Arginusae, is confirmed by the present treatise ; and the refusal of the Athenians to entertain these proposals is ascribed to the evil influence of Cleophon, who came drunk into the Ecclesia, and persuaded the people to insist on the surrender of her whole empire by Sparta, as the only condition of peace.
The history of the government of the Thirty set up by Lysander after Aegospotami throws some new light on its character. They repealed the law of Solon which annulled the will of a testator who could be shown to be of unsound mind or under undue influence. In this law there is nothing which calls for reprobation. These provisions against in- capacity and undue influence were reasonable in themselves, but they led to vexatious litigation, and did more harm than good, as may be gathered from some of the speeches of Isaeus. The way in which they compassed the destruction of Theramenes shows
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the Thirty Tyrants to have been rather adroit evaders of the laws, who sought to give a constitutional appearance to their most unconstitutional acts, than open violators of all law and custom, such as Xenophon describes. They induced the Council to sanction two laws, one giving the Thirty power of life and death over all persons not on the roll of the three thousand citizens which they were about to issue, a second declaring that no one could be placed on that roll who had helped in the demolition of the fort at Eetionea (of which we now hear for the first time in the treatise) or had taken any part against the Four Hundred ; ^ in both which Theramenes had a hand, so the result was that he was outside the constitution, and they had full warrant for putting him to death,' which they immediately did. It was then, not at an earlier stage in the career of the Thirty (as Xenophon says), that they admitted into the Acropolis a Spartan garrison under Callibius.
The overthrow of the Thirty by Thrasybulus was followed first by the appointment of a Board of Ten who failed to realize the seriousness of the situation, and sought only to establish their own power. A second Board of Ten subsequently constituted were more successful. The moderation of Rhino, another addition to the roll of Athenian worthies, and the tact of Archinus, worked wonders. All citizens who felt themselves unsafe at Athens were allowed to retire to Eleusis, and articles were drawn up between the secessionists and those who remained. The former were obliged, in order to secure their rights, to enter their names on a roll before a certain day. Archinus succeeded in curtailing without any notice
H
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the period within which the enrolment might be made, and thus kept in Athens perforce several citizens who intended to secede to Eleusis, but had put off their enrolment with that tendency to pro- crastination ' which is such a common trait in human nature.' This is a remark somewhat in the manner of Aristotle ; two other such reflections may be noticed, one when the writer speaks of the character- istic clemency of a democracy ' (p. 59), and the other when he observes (p. 79) that ' though a mob can be cajoled easily enough, yet it is apt to vent its hatred afterwards on those who have led it into wrong doing.' So children rarely love and never trust those who spoil them by undue indulgence.
Two years afterwards the secessionists at Eleusis were received back into the community of Athenians, and this was the last change in the constitution of Athens. Of these changes eleven are enumerated in the treatise, so that there existed on the whole twelve constitutions in Athens, namely: — (i) The original mythical establishment under Ion, (2) Theseus, (3) Draco, (4) Solon, (5) Pisistratus, (6) Clisthenes, (7) Areopagus, (8) Aristides and Ephialtes, (9) the Four Hundred, (10) the restoration of the Democracy after Cyzicus, (i i) the Thirty and the two Boards of Ten, (12) the final restoration of the Democracy. The name of Pericles has no place in the list of the suc- cessive statesmen who left their mark on the constitution.
The remainder of the 'Constitution of Athens' deals solely with the machinery of the State, and completely avoids all appeals to principles, never
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even approaching that tendency to generalization which is so marked a feature in the ' Politics ' of Aristotle. Yet it is by no means without interest for the modern reader. Individualists will be sur- prised to find how little favour their views found in the eyes of ancient Athens, and how the private life of ever}^ Athenian was fenced about with statutes restricting his liberty of action on every side. One cannot fail to be struck by the minuteness and com- pleteness of the legislation which provided for the relief of helpless and disabled paupers and the re- jection of disqualified applicants for charity, for the inspection of weights and measures and the preven- tion of adulteration, and for the supervision of horses by the establishment of a regular corps of veterinary surgeons, whose duty it was to affix certain marks to disqualified animals, the mark apparently being the figure of a circle stamped on the animal's jaw. Furthermore, the city traffic was under strict super- vision, and there were statutes compelling the removal of nuisances from public thoroughfares, and forbidding structures which would impede the free use of the streets. Such structures as the old Temple Bar, stretching across the street, are expressly prohibited, and it is clear that sky-signs would not have been tolerated. In connexion with this subject we learn that the Board which had charge of the street traffic were bound to see that no householder had a hall- door opening on the street, a provision which throws light on a question which presents itself to the readers of Menander, Plautus, and Terence. The Grammarians, as well as Plutarch, tell us that in Greek cities the doors opened outwards, and that
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persons about to leave the house were in the habit of rapping on the inside of the door, to warn passers- by that some one was coming out. Of late, this statement has been treated by Becker, Guhl and Koner, and others as a mere figment of the Gram- marians, and we are taught that such phrases as r} Qvpa y^oipel and crepuerunt fores refer only to the noise made by the door in opening. We do indeed read of water being poured on the hinge (or rather wooden pivot) on which the door moved, when the inmate of the house wished to conceal his egress, which would be in favour of the modern view. But on the other hand we have in this passage ^distinct evidence that the doors of private houses did at all events, at one time, open outwards. If, however, such a method of constructing doors was forbidden by law, it can hardly have been common in the time of Menander. We may perhaps infer that Menander introduced into his plays an archaic and disused practice, and was followed by his imitators. The passage in our tract, so far as it goes, discredits the modern interpretation,^ which indeed somewhat rashly set aside the distinct evidence of Plutarch and the Grammarians.
The same Board had the strange duty of seeing that female dancers and flute-players should not receive more than two drachmas as pay for their services at entertainments ; and if two or more entertainers were anxious to secure the same girl,
^ It is to be observed that dvpides generally means 'windows,' not * doors ; ' but the latter meaning is quite natural, and is found in Plato and Plutarch ; moreover it is incredible that it should have been against the law to open windows looking on the street.
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it was the duty of the Board to arrange for the decision of the question by lot. The forms, whereby the youthful Athenian on coming of age, when he was called Ephebus, was admitted to his place in the State, are given at great length, and show how completely the community dominated the individual, and how the interference with private liberty was carried to the verge of socialism. The functions of the Ecclesia, the Council, and the various magis- trates, are dwelt on with wearisome detail. It appears that in early times the Council had a sum- mary jurisdiction over the property, liberty, and life of the citizens, but that it lost this power on the occasion of the arrest of one Lysimachus, whose cause was taken up by one Eumelides. But as we know nothing more about either of these persons, the whole statement must await confirmation. It also had the selection of plans for public buildings, but was afterwards deprived of this privilege for a corrupt use of the power. So also they were accused of jobbery in the appointment of the girls chosen to weave the peplus to be carried in the great Pana- thenaic festival, under the supervision of two maidens of high family called apprjcpopoi. Both these privi- leges were in consequence transferred from the Council to a jury chosen by lot.
It is interesting to learn that, while the lot was used for the appointment of the other magistrates, Athens resorted to election in the case of the super- intendents of the commissariat for the army, of the theoric fund, and of the water supply. A piece of evidence bearing on a very curious statement about the Areopagus has been elicited from a corrupt
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passage in c. 57, where we have the half-obliterated reading SiKai[^o[vcri] . . . a£[o]o. We can testify our- selves that in the facsimile at least nothing more than this can be read ; indeed we cannot ourselves make out the i. Dr. Sandys, the public Orator of Cambridge, has made the certain emendation SiKaiC^ova-i (TKoraioi, quoting the passage in Lucian's
* Hermotimus ' (c. 64), which says that the Areo- pagus in some cases held their court at night, that they might not be able to see the speakers on either side, but only to hear their arguments. Thus the learning and ingenuity of a scholar of our own day have elicited from the newly-discovered document a strong proof of the literal truth of a statement which has hitherto been regarded as being merely one of Lucian's jokes.
An interesting passage (c. 52) saves the reputation of Athenian legislators. A fragment from an ancient lexicographer, apparently founded on a curious mis- translation of Pollux, tells us that it was the duty of
* the Eleven ' to keep watch and ward over persons apprehended on charges of murder, robbery, and the like, and that, further, they were empowered to execute at once such prisoners as confessed their guilt, but were bound to reserve for trial those who pleaded ' not guilty.' Such a law, the effect of which would be that no one would ever suffer death at the hands of the Eleven except perhaps some harmless lunatic, might prevail perhaps in the realm of a Queen of Wonderland or Mr. Gilbert's Mikado, but did not seem characteristic of the Attic mind at any period of its history. We now find that the condi- tion under which death could be summarily inflicted,
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was not that the prisoners should confess their guilt, but that the Eleven should agree in thinking the summary process requisite. The word used {ojxo- Xoyeip), meaning both ' to confess ' and ' to agree/ imported an ambiguity into a passage of Pollux, on which apparently the lexicographer based his note. It is easy to believe that there may have been occa- sions on which it was quite requisite to execute at once a murderer or robber whose guilt seemed clear to all the Eleven without exception, and whose rescue might perhaps have been successfully attempted by powerful partisans. The editor strangely seems to take the passage in our tract in the whimsical sense of the fragment from the lexicon. The mean- ing is quite clear : the Eleven are to put to death robbers, murderers, and such like, ' if they are unani- mous, but if there is any difference of opinion they are to bring them to trial.' ^ We cannot help re- flecting on the many dangers which beset the trans- mission of historical knowledge from the ancient world. The mere chance, that an ambiguous word was used in recording an actual fact, has given rise to an almost ludicrous error, which has had to wait about sixteen centuries for correction, if we reckon from the time of Pollux. And yet the blunder did not imply at all abnormal stupidity on the part of the lexicographer, merely the choice of the wrong one of two equally common meanings of a Greek verb.
^ Slv fxeu dfioXoyuKTt . . . hv d^ afKpKr^rirQffi. Pollux, viii. 102, has el fih ofioXoyoUu davanJoaovTes, el d^ /xtj elad^ovTei els rb diKacrirrjpiov. The words of the lexicographer are d/jLoXoyovvras fiev airoKTivvvovaLV, dvri- X^yovras 8^ (if they object !) eladyovaiv eh rb diKaaT-qpiov. — ' Lexica Segueriana,' p. 310, 14.
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The last chapter of the tract (c. 63) takes up the subject of the procedure in the law courts, and when he had written it the fourth scribe had evidently reached the end of his task, which is resumed by the third hand who had already written part of the foregoing MS. He took an earlier portion of the farm-bailiff's accounts as the vehicle of his MS., but the condition in which this portion of the papyrus has survived makes continuous decipherment hopeless.
Dr. Kenyon, in the end of his Introduction, points out that we had no right to look for a discussion of the spirit and principles of the Athenian Constitution in a work which professes only to be a collection of facts ; and moreover that the Greeks had not that genius for organization nor that tenderness for old formulas which have marked the Romans and the English. Consequently the influence of their example on the modern world has been very slight. Yet he thinks that for the English, especially, the concrete lessons which may be gathered from the study of the fortunes of a democracy ought to have an interest : —
' The Athenian Ecclesia was responsible to no other power or person, and it had no other interests to consider except its own ; and though no modern nation can have a sovereign assembly which includes every adult man in the community, yet a Parlia- ment whose members are delegates or mouthpieces of their con- stituencies, and not representatives with independent judgments, embodies a form of democracy which is sufficiently parallel with that of Athens to make it worth while to study the history of that State, and the observations thereupon of so acute a critic as Aristotle. This is not the place to discuss the conclusions which may be derived from it. Grote has drawn one series of judgments from it ; other critics have drawn others of a different character. The only point which concerns us here is that the
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evidence of Aristotle on such a matter is no unimportant addi- tion to our knowledge of the subject.'
This is very true : and it brings us face to face with an enquiry which, as we have said, is, for scholars at least, the most important and interesting of those which the treatise suggests, — the enquiry whether this is really likely to be the work of Aristotle, or even of his age.
The hypothesis of a modern forgery having been shown to be quite groundless, the next question concerning authorship is, whether the treatise before us is by Aristotle, or by a pupil or immediate successor, or by a later historian writing some time in the last two centuries before Christ, or even in the first century of the Christian era. The internal evidence, as will afterwards be seen, does not negative even the last hypothesis. Dr. Kenyon would naturally wish to believe the work to be the celebrated tract of Aristotle. It is a singular dis- tinction to be the editor of an editio princeps of a work of Aristotle. We are quite sure, however, that his expressed opinion in favour of Aristotelian authorship is the result of a careful estimate of the evidence as it presented itself to him, and we are ready to accord much weight to his opinion. Those portions of his task as editor, which called for insight into complicated questions in history and lucid review of evidence, have been adequately executed. Such faults as may be found in his editing are not connected with matters of history. However, we cannot share his opinion that the treatise before us is the work of Aristotle.
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The question as to the Aristotelian canon — as to what may be the undoubted works of Aristotle — is a very complicated one, and we should not think of forcing a discussion of it on readers of this Review. Those who wish to see how thorny it is may consult the great work of Grote on Aristotle. Even the far simpler enquiry, how far the authenticity of a work ascribed to Aristotle may be decided by considera- tions of style, is far more difficult than the same question concerning Plato or Cicero. For we know broadly the salient features of the style of Plato and Cicero, while as regards Aristotle we are puzzled by a curious discrepancy on the part of the best judges in referring to the way in which his writings have impressed them. Cicero, an undoubted authority, uses expressions about it which make us rub our eyes and ask ourselves, are we dreaming ? The words ' flumen orationis aureum ' ^ seem about the most inappropriate which could be chosen to represent to us the unadorned phrases in which the great Stagirite was wont to throw a flood of driest keenest light on the most profound questions in ethics, logics, and politics. Again we read of his 'orationis ornamenta,'^ of his ' dicendi incredibilis quaedam cum copia turn etiam suavitas,'^ and of ' Aristotelia pigmenta.'* Now these are by no means the qualities which we look for in his style. We expect the shrewd and con- cisely expressed suggestion of genius, unillumined by a ray of fancy, unspoiled by an attempt at brilliancy, but often disclosing a mind two thousand years ahead of its contemporaries, and striking us by
1 ' Acad.' ii. 38, § 1 19. ^ ' Fin.' i. 5, § 14.
^ 'Topica,' i. 3. * * Epp. ad Att.' ii. i, § i.
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unmistakable anticipations of views which began to be propounded some twenty centuries after the philosopher was dead. Hence it has been suggested that in some of his works lost to us, especially his dialogues, he set free a fancy which was curbed in his more formal essays. But is this view tenable ? Then, ' le style ce n'est pas I'homme.' Could Cousin write sometimes like Kant, and Butler occasionally like Bossuet ? We think not, and we are disposed to believe that we have in Aristotle a fountain of light which has come to us through many a distort- ing medium, sometimes making our eyes ache with its dry frosty clearness, and sometimes (in the lost works which Cicero read) displaying the rainbow hues of imagination. These last have certainly not shone on us, and it may be doubted (in view of what we do know about the successors of Aristotle) whether Cicero did not mistake tinsel for gold when he spoke of the ' flumen orationis aureum ' ; but this is certain, that Cicero read as the works of Aristotle pieces which he described in terms which we should not think of applying to our Aristotle.
These considerations fall in very aptly with a theory, which does not depend on them alone, that many of the great treatises of Aristotle have been preserved by means of notes taken at his lectures by his pupils, and have been rescued from the fate which would naturally attend such a vehicle of trans- mission, only by the amazing originality of the master's genius, and the generally high intellectual level of the pupils. If this theory could be accepted as tenable — and it has found many able and authori- tative supporters — we should not be surprised to find
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that the celebrated treatise on the Athenian Con- stitution had assumed even half-a-dozen dififerent forms within a hundred years after the death of the master. This would account for a great many things which puzzle us in the tract now under consideration. The first and most remarkable is that it seems certain that Plutarch had not read this particular edition of the ' Constitution of Athens.' In his ' Life of Solon,' Plutarch only once mentions Aristotle by name, and then it is to make him an authority for an incident in the career of Solon which he, Plutarch, does not believe, but for which he quotes the evidence of ' Aristotle the philosopher ' — the statement that Solon desired that after his death his ashes should be scattered round Salamis. There is no such state- ment in the * Constitution of Athens ' which has just been published. This, however, is not at all decisive, for ' Aristotle the philosopher ' might have recorded the anecdote elsewhere ; but what shall we say of the new and remarkable instances of the versatility (to use a euphemism) of Themistocles which the editio princeps affords us ? Is it credible that Plut- arch would have omitted all mention of a narrative so striking in itself, and so eminently suited to his vivid way of portraying character, if he had for it the authority of Aristotle the philosopher, whom he is glad to quote even when he differs from him ? The conclusion is irresistible that Plutarch had never read the work before us. But he had certainly read some treatise ascribed to Aristotle on the ' Athenian Constitution ' ; therefore there must have been other editions of the ' Athenian Constitution ' circulating under the name of Aristotle beside the one which
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has recently come into our hands. If so, there may have been many recensions, one issued perhaps in each succeeding generation, each introducing fresh knowledge required on the subjects treated in the tract, but each carefully avoiding the pursuit of the subject beyond the time of Aristotle, under whose name it was issued ; and some of these might have been even two hundred years posterior to Aristotle.
Such, we are strongly disposed to believe, is the present treatise. The style is neither that of Aris- totle as we know him, nor that of Aristotle as he seems to have been known to Cicero, whose Aristotle no doubt included many works really written by his pupils and successors. It is between both, and far removed from each. We have already pointed out a few reflections in the treatise which have caught something of the manner of the master, but they have not his originality nor his profundity. The style is easy and simple, far from striking, and some- times (as for instance in the description of the attack of Themistocles and Ephialtes on the Areopagus) very bald and feeble ; and the vocabulary of this short tract makes many additions, and quite need- less additions, to the already enormous vocabulary of Aristotle. The language is redolent of the epoch of Diodorus Siculus. Dr. Kenyon has en- deavoured to prove that the year 307 must be regarded as the latest limit of its composition, because the writer speaks of the Athens of his own time as having only ten tribes, whereas the number was raised to twelve in that year. Another ingenious critic would make the tract prior to 325, because in that year the Athenians began to build
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quinqueremes, while the tract only mentions triremes and quadriremes. But minute considerations of this kind are of little moment when weighed against the counter-evidence supplied by the whole character of the style and diction. Each successive redacteur would be careful to preserve in his edition the appearance of Aristotelian authorship, and would be on his guard, so far as his erudition served him, not to introduce anachronisms which would betray a post-Aristotelian origin. The editors of these suc- cessive recensions of a supposed tract of Aristotle did not trouble themselves to try to achieve any imitation of his style, or even to secure congruity with his opinions as expressed in his other works, but were satisfied if they could avoid the mention of institutions which would distinctly disprove the Aristotelian authorship. In the same way a literary man of our own time, in trying to pass off an essay of his own as the work of Hallam, might not have the ability to produce a good imitation of his style, or the learning to avoid some conflict with his opinions, but certainly he would be intelligent enough not to mention political phenomena which have appeared since Hallam's time, such as the Caucus, the ' one man one vote ' agitation, the cry for the taxation of ground-rents, or the demand for female suffrage.
An imposing array of positive proofs can be drawn from the language of the treatise that it was not written before the century preceding the Christian era. These can be disregarded only on the theory that the MS. is vitiated throughout by errors of scribes who introduced into it the literary
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mannerisms of their own time. Such a hypothesis has never been applied to the criticism of the remains of antiquity. If applied, it would render all literary criticism based on style irrelevant, and, if pushed far enough, it might prove the genuineness of the letters of Phalaris. We have only to alter the dialect throughout, and to regard as adscripts those passages which Bentley showed to refer to institutions ages posterior to Phalaris, and we have a set of letters which might have been written by the Sicilian tyrant. Nay, by a consistent remodelling of the spelling and phraseology, we might show that Queen Victoria's ' Tour in the Highlands ' was by James I. The changes required for these feats would certainly be more sweeping than those demanded to bring the present treatise into conformity with Aristotelian usage ; but the alterations requisite for the latter purpose would be so great to justify fully the state- ment, that it would require to be virtually rewritten. Of the proofs drawn from diction we will only give the most striking. A list of post-Aristotelian words and phrases, including many beside those which we had already noticed and which must have been observed by every student of Aristotle, is given by the Editor of the 'Classical Review' in the March number (1891) ; in it are most of the following : —
P. 14, 1. 2, eXeyeia, *a poem in elegiac verse'; the form eXeyela is found in Plutarch and Strabo, but not in early writers, who use only eXeyelov. In the same page (pvcrei (which Dr. Kenyon now recognises as the right reading) is employed in the non- Aristotelian sense of * birth ' (noble by birth), and is so used again in p. 48, 1. 10.
128 THE NEW PAPYRI
P. 1 6, 1. 4, irapacrTparrjyelv, 'to out-general'; Plutarch and Dionysius Halicarnasseus use it in the sense of ' to interfere with the general.'
P. 17, 1. 4, Karacpart'C^eLi/, 'to declare publicly' (Plutarch).
P. 20, 1. 8, l^euyiariop, ' rating of Zeugitae' (Pollux).
P. 32, 1. 6, nieiiiy^i/uLoipLa, ' fault-finding' (Lucian).
P. 36, 1. 7, irpocTKoa/uLeia-OaL, * to be ranged on the same side with.' Plutarch and Josephus have irpoa-- Koo-jiieiv, but in the sense of * to adorn further.'
P. 36, 1. 10, SiacprjiuLia-juLo^, *a proclamation,' formed from SiacprjiuLi'l^a), which is used by Dionysius Hal.
P. 65, 1. 7, e^airopeiv, 'to be in great want' (Polybius, Diodorus, Dionysius Hal.).
P. 90, 1. II, oruvapea-KecrOai, ' to be pleased with ' (Sextus Empiricus).
P. 95, 1. I, inaviav, 'to be mad ' (Josephus).
P. 1 1 1, 1. 7, yiiiiepa acpeon/uLo^, 'a holiday' (Aristides).
P. 117,1. I , evcrtjiuLLa, ' a favourable state of the auspices,' used by Hippocrates in the sense of ' a good prognostic'
P. 12 1,1. 3, eTTLrrrvXiov^ used in Plutarch and other late writers for ' architrave ' ; here either ' a column ' (of accounts), or a mistake for e-Tria-ToXiov, a late diminutive of cTria-ToXri.
P. 135, 1. ult, eKOu/uLa, 'a sin-offering,' used by Hippocrates in the sense of ' a pustule.'
Here are half-a-dozen phrases and constructions (for the most part Latinisms) which seem to point to a period long post-Aristotelian : —
P- 33» 1- 5) 0Lp-)(aiai/ eTToirja-av, possibly a translation of the Latin antiquare.
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P. 65, 1. 4, ovSevi Soy /man Xa^oucra rrjP ^yejULovlav, ' having obtained the supremacy without any decree.'
P. 76, 1. 9, rjTTOLTo SiSovai, * he was not equal to giving/
P. 100, 1. 4, eV) irepag V/yaye rrjv eipyjvtjv, * he con- cluded the peace.'
P. 103, 1. ult, ov-^ oLov . . . aWa Kai, not found before Polybius, and condemned by Phrynichus.
P. 109, 1. penult, irpay/JLacTL (tv/j. inly wad ai^ 'to be mixed up in affairs.'
To these may be added the use of eav for the conditional particle aV in pp. 84, ^y, 140, and the utterly post-classical apostrophising of the reader in SiayvwQi^ 'observe,' p. 29, 1. 12. Both these usages are certainly in the facsimile ; eav is quite clear, and ^Layvwdi certainly seems to be the reading ; Si- is certain, and -wOi nearly so ; at all events, Sij aXXoOi, Srj erepcoOi, the ingenious emendations proposed, are not in the facsimile. The reading seems to be SiayvwQi oTTov Xeyei Trepi, ' observe where he speaks about,' ^ and the usage is quite that of Siaa-Koirei in Plutarch (' Solon.' xix.), where he addresses the reader and says, ' However, turn over the question in your own mind.' The word opa, ' observe,' is constantly so used by late writers.
We have already given reasons for believing that Plutarch had not read the particular edition of the ' Constitution of Athens ' which is now in our hands. This conviction will be strengthened by a comparison of the places in which the same anecdote is told by
^ It maybe observed that even diayvwdi irov, for 'observe where,' may be paralleled in post-classical Greek ; cp. the title of a work of Lucian, ttws Set <Tvyypd<p€LP, quomodo historia conscribenda sit.
I30 THE NEW PAPYRI
the two writers. The shrewd comment of Solon on the request of Pisistratus for a body-guard, that he (Solon) was wiser than those who did not see the design of the tyrant and braver than those who seeing it held their peace, is given by both, but there is not a word in the narrative of Plutarch to suggest that he derived the anecdote from our treatise. On the other hand, Aelian (viii. i6) gives the same tale in very similar language, which would quite justify the theory that he had before him the very same text which has recently been published. In telling the story how Pisistratus inflicted wounds on himself, and persuaded the people that he had received them from his political opponents, our treatise has the same participle, KaTarpavjuaTLo-ag, which Diodorus Siculus uses in telling the same tale; there is no coincidence of expression in Plutarch, whose account seems to be derived from another source.
To these evidences for the existence of various recensions of a work used by many subsequent writers on politics, the following considerations should be added. There is no early authority for the existence of a work called IloXireiaL by Aristotle. The passage of Polybius referred to by Dr. Kenyon (Introd. p. xvii), as containing an allusion by Timaeus to Aristotle's HoXiTciai, does not really mention such a work ; it only tells us that Aristotle wrote a work about the Locrian constitution, and was criticised by Timaeus, but does not tell us what work of Aristotle was so criticised. Hence it is possible that there never was an Aristotelian archetype, but that the different editions of the tract were different efforts
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to produce something which Aristotle might have written. We are, however, disposed to believe that there was an original work by Aristotle himself. Some of the fragments which quote the 'Constitution of Athens by Aristotle ' give a statement distinctly different from the teaching of our text. Zenobius tell us that ' Aristotle in the Constitution of Athens ' related how Callicrates had increased inordinately the pay of the dicasts, and that hence arose a proverb i^Tre^o ra JLaXXiK parous, ' to out-Callicrates Callicrates,' which denoted unreasonable excess. The account of Callicrates in our treatise contains no such statement nor anything like it. The scholiast on Aristophanes (' Vesp.' 502) says that Aristotle ascribed to the dynasty of the fisistratidae a duration of forty -one years ; here ' Aristotle ' distinctly states that it lasted forty-nine. Heraclides Ponticus, a pupil of Aristotle, wrote a work called Trepl HoXitcimv, which is admitted to have been a compilation from the works of his master, and which in some cases pre- serves statements found elsewhere only in the tract before us, yet he did not profess to give us Aristotle's ' Constitution of Athens,' but only a work based on Aristotle. Probably it differed from many other similar essays only in the fact that it did not claim Aristotelian authorship.
While we have nothing but congratulations and praise for the skill and diligence with which an extremely difficult MS. has been deciphered, and while we recognise as really valuable the judgment which has been brought to bear on the historical materials presented, we cannot but express regret at a certain carelessness as regards Greek accidence
132 THE NEW PAPYRI
and syntax which disfigured the first edition, and even marred the second to some extent. But it would be a task both useless and ungrateful to point to these blemishes, which have been corrected in the subsequent editions of the treatise.
We are, however, under such deep obligations to the authorities of the British Museum, that we are unwilling to judge too harshly these defects. They have been the occasion of bringing out some fine scholarship, and showing that England can still hold the great position she has won in the art of brilliant and certain emendation. We have already men- tioned SiKal^ova-i cTKoraioi (p. 1 45), the admirable conjecture of Dr. Sandys. It would be a pleasure to record here, if space permitted, the many excellent suggestions which have been made by various scholars, by Wyse, Richards, the two Mayors, Bywater, Jackson, Rutherford, and many others, since the publication of the tract. We have, how- ever, already given reasons for the belief that the treatise is, in parts at least, of an age considerably later than the Aristotelian epoch, that post-classical usages are interwoven into the very warp and woof of it, and that to emend it into strict accordance with the Greek of Aristotle's age would be almost equivalent to rewriting the work. Further, we are disposed to think that even after all the violations of classical usage had been pruned away, not even then would the essay produce on a judicious reader with an ear for style the impression of being the work of Aristotle, or even of one of his immediate successors ; and that wholesale emendation might do more harm than good by disguising from us the
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real character of an essay which, though ancient and full of interest and instruction, does not seem to have emanated from Aristotle, nor from any of the pupils whom he taught in person.
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES.
Again the land of surprises, the proverbial home of plagues, pyramids, and now of papyri, justifies nobly her ancient reputation. It is just seven years since we^ congratulated the British Museum on its splendid gift to the world of letters, when it published from certain Egyptian papyH a very ancient and valuable treatise on the ' Constitution of Athens,' which many (indeed most) scholars believe to be the work of Aristotle. We now owe to the cultured enterprise and antiquarian insight of the same eminent institu- tion a very substantial portion of the work of a poet to whom the Alexandrian critics gave a place among the nine lyric bards of ancient Hellas, and of whom we have till now had but a few scanty fragments — due chiefly to chance, not selection — about a hundred lines, and these, as we can now see, by no means characteristic of the mind and art of their author. In the case of the present find, there is no room at all for the slightest doubt about the authenticity and genuineness of the recovered treasure ; and hardly anything could be more interesting than the various literary and archaeological aspects of these odes exhumed from a sepulture of nearly a millennium
^ * Quarterly Review,' No. 344, April 1891. 134
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 135
and a half. There is evidence that the poems of Bacchylides survived in some form till about 500 A.D., but * since that date,' writes Dr. Kenyon, * we have no certain warrant that any eye has seen a complete poem of Bacchylides for a space of fourteen hundred years.'
If we justly congratulated the British school of classics seven years ago on its achievement in de- ciphering and editing the ' Constitution of Athens,' still more hearty felicitations are due on the present performance. The editio prmceps is well worthy of the great traditions of English classical learning. Dr. Kenyon shows his former erudition, acuteness, and marvellous skill in deciphering ; but, beside these high qualities, he has brought to bear on his present task gifts of pure scholarship, of which we certainly saw but little evidence seven years ago ; and he has had by his side some of the most accomplished scholars of England and Ireland. Great as have been the services of Jebb to learning, we doubt if he has ever given more incontestable proofs of his kinship with the spirit of Greek poetry and his mastery of its instruments than in his labours on the editio pjHnceps. Indeed, in many places where the surviving record of the MS. is so slight as to afford but the scantiest clue, we are persuaded that that admirable scholar, ' from out the ghost of Pindar in him,' has drawn the very sentiment, and perhaps in many cases the very words, of which Time has spared only a letter here and there. When Tennyson, in dedicating to Jebb his ' Demeter and Persephone,' addressed to him the words just quoted, in happy allusion to his exquisite version of Browning's
136 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
* Abt Vogler ' in the measures of Pindar's fourth Pythian, he little thought that that very ghost of Pindar in him would soon be invoked to manifest itself in a work, which not even those ultra-modern utilitarians who sneer at modern Greek versification would venture to decry as useless — the work of fitting together with skilful and reverent hands the disiecti me^nbra poetae^ and giving to our age poems written about five-and-twenty centuries ago, and lost to the world for fully fourteen. Next to the editor and the Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge, among others who have shown much skill in brush- ing the dust of ages off the golden words of the last of the Greek lyrists, comes the late Professor Palmer of Trinity College, Dublin. The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin have thus been associated in a task which has been executed in a manner reflecting the highest lustre on all three. Dr. Kenyon was fortunate enough to secure the co- operation of Professor Palmer at a very early stage in the process of constituting the text. He entrusted to him the odes while yet in manuscript, and the result is that every page illustrates the taste, the insight, the genius of one whose death at a compara- tively early age the learned world with good reason deplores, of one whose many excellent gifts of intellect and temperament won him the universal admiration of scholars and the affectionate regard of all his associates.
Other scholars, notably Dr. Sandys, whose work in connexion with the former find was so eminent, have ably assisted the brilliant editor, and since the appearance of the editio princeps, such improvements
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 137
in the text and in its interpretation have been suggested that of the lines (more than a thousand) rescued from the sands of Egypt there is hardly one which is not already thoroughly understood and adequately illustrated. And no doubt we may con- fidently look for still more light from the same and other sources.
Now that we have quite sufficient materials for forming a judgment on the literary merits of Bacchy- lides, and assigning to him his place among the poets, it is very interesting to review the estimates of the ancients as well as those of modern critics, based as the latter have hitherto been on quite inadequate data.
The judgment of antiquity is absolutely borne out by the poems which Egypt has at last rendered up to the modern world. Sweetness, and an equable excellence of execution, which never rises very high or falls much below its natural level, are always present. Longinus denied to Bacchylides any claim to true greatness as a poet ; but, comparing him and Ion with such poets as Pindar and Sophocles, he observes that the former are * equable and have all the charm of elaborate workmanship,'^ while the latter sometimes ' fall miserably.'^ We may take leave to say that if Pindar and Sophocles have ever fallen miserably it must be in poems which have not come down to us ; but we recognize the justice of the criticism on Bacchylides, which is quite in har mony with that of the editor : ' his art is shown in
MStdirrarrot Acai iv t(^ ^\a(f>vpi^ irdvTrj KCKaWiypacfyqixivoi. (Longin. ' De Sublim.' xxxiii.)
' iriiTTOvffiv drvx^ffTara. (Ibid.)
138 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
graceful expression, in craftsmanship rather than in invention,'
The poet himself, though he ventures in one passage to arrogate the title of eagle,^ which so fitly belongs to his great Theban rival, calls himself else- where with more justice ' the Ceian nightingale/ and * the island bee of dulcet note ' ; and sweetness is the quality that epigrams in the Anthology ascribe to him in designating him as XaXo<i '^eiprfv and calling his songs Xapa. Dionysius, again, credits him with absolute correctness and uniform elegance ; and so true is this of the odes now before us that there is hardly a difficult expression or a tortuous construc- tion in them all. Indeed, in the few places where the editio princeps shows anything like a strained use of a word or a harsh phrase, we may ascribe it to an error in the MS. (though the MS. is quite unusually accurate) ; and we shall generally find that in those cases some natural misapprehension misled the copyist, and that a slight emendation restores the uniform correctness and elegant simplicity. We can well understand how Hiero and the Emperor Julian preferred the trim parterre of the Ceian to the Theban's ' flowers of fire.' There will always be those who will prefer Southey to Shelley, and who will not try to force their way into the quartz rock in quest of the gold which is imbedded in it ? Bacchylides seems to have proposed to himself as
^Some critics think that it is Hiero, not himself, whom the poet compares to an eagle in the fifth ode. But we are persuaded that they are mistaken. As applied to Hiero the whole passage 16-30 would be a piece of tasteless exaggeration. Besides, the word XiyOtpdoyyoi ap- plied to the lesser birds shows that the comparison is between himself and minor poets.
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 139
his model the art of his uncle Simonides rather than that of his great rival Pindar. Though he has never approached the beauty of the exquisite ode of Simonides on Danae and the infant Perseus, he has often succeeded (as we shall see) in telling a tale very simply, powerfully, and gracefully. It is chiefly in his apt comments on every-day life that he recalls the manner of Simonides rather than that of Pindar, who in this department — if it is a department — of poesy must be admitted to be
' Too bright and good For human nature's daily food.'
Where should we find in Pindar an aphorism at once so shrewd and so unconventional as that which Bacchylides puts into the mouth of Apollo address- ing Admetus ? ^
' It is meet that thou, as a man born of woman, should have two minds about life : one, that to-morrow's sun shall be thy last, and another, that thou shalt live in wealth full fifty years : be righteous, therefore, and make merry : in all thy getting this is best.'
Another passage reminds us of old Adam in ' As you like it,' with his praise of health and aspiration for some * settled low content,' while it also recalls a celebrated couplet of Pope. It is remarkably free from the conventionality which generally blunts the edge of proverbial philosophy : —
' Virtue giveth a man heart, and piety bringeth a nobler cheer- fulness and courage ; if a man hath health and substance whereby to live, then can he challenge the foremost among men. No delight is wanting to life, if distempers and desperate poverty hold aloof. The rich man hath his great cravings, as
1 in. 78-84.
140 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
the humble his humbler. Plenty in all things bringeth no delight to mortals ; they ever strive to overtake that which fleeth away.' ^
And here is another sample of mitis sapientia : — ^
* Man hath a thousand good gifts, but only one hath in it the promise of bliss, even for him whoso by uprightness ordereth his daily life. Not with cruel frays sorteth the voice of the harp and the loud lay of the choir, not with revels the ring of steel on steel. Each deed hath its own fit season. Him that doeth justice doth God too lift up.'
This simple belief in the sanctity of duty and the blessedness of contentment had no attractions for the splendour-loving ((piXdyXao^) Pindar, in whose veins ran the noble blood of the Aegidae, and whose creed was complicated by the ardent longings for future bliss and the bitter sorrow for present misery which the Mysteries inculcated on the initiated. This difference between the minds of Pindar and Bacchy- lides is well illustrated by the attitude of each to- wards the superior beings of Greek mythology. The third Olympian ode was sung at the feast of the Theoxenia given by Theron in the name of the Dioscuri to the other gods. We are struck by the respect, even awe, with which the Dioscuri are in- vested with the somewhat mundane character of hosts. A fragment of Bacchylides preserved by Athenaeus invites these same deities to a feast. They are regarded as ordinary mortals, and are warned that there awaits them ' no ox roasted whole,
* I. 25-39.
* XIV. 8-18. We read Ss rb trap X"P<5s, with Messrs. Headlam, Pearson, and Richards, in the ' Classical Review,' and Dr. von Wilamovitz-MoellendorfF, in the ' Gottingischen gelehrten Anzeigen.'
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 141
no gold nor cloths of purple ; only a merry heart, a tuneful song, and sweet wine in Boeotian flagons.'
The poems before us afford a signal proof how dangerous it is to attempt to characterize a writer known to us only in fragments. ' The genius and art of Bacchylides,' writes K. O. Miiller in his ' His- tory of Greek Literature,' ' were chiefly devoted to the pleasures of private life, love, and wine ; and, when compared with those of Simonides, appear marked by greater sensual grace and less moral elevation.' This judgment, we can now see, is quite unjustified, but it is easy to perceive its genesis. Among the few fragments of Bacchylides hitherto known to us almost the longest is a description of the influence of wine, under which a man is ' o'er all the ills of life victorious.' It is interesting to com- pare it with a fragment of Pindar ^ on the same theme. Bacchylides is easy and pleasant : —
' Straightway as he drinks he is a triumphant conqueror, soon to be king of all the world, his halls gleam with ivory, his argosies are laden with Egyptian bales : so soars his spirit as he quaffs the beaker.'
Pindar is less concrete, but the phrase ' shore of illusion ' (-\lrevSrj irpog aKrdv) is a monogram on the fragment, that ' note of distinction ' which Matthew ^ ^ Arnold bids us to look for, and which in Pindar we never seek in vain :
* The cares that oppress us leave the breast, and o'er a sea of golden store we sail all alike to a shore of illusion. The poor man is rich, and the rich are gladder at heart, javelled through by the arrows of the vine.'
218 Bergk.
142 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
Admirable as was the art of Simonides, graceful and refined as was that of Bacchylides, we do not meet in them that ' ever surging yet bridled excite- ment recasting and heightening what a man has to say,' in such a manner as to give special intensity, dignity, and distinction to it, that spirit of style, which Matthew Arnold finds in Pindar above all poets, and which distinguishes him from even the best of his contemporaries by the same qualities which make Shakespeare's work different from and conspicuous above that of the other poets of the Elizabethan age.
Before analysing more closely the style of the re-arisen lyrist, and considering what light is thrown by the poems on the personality and mind of their author, it will, perhaps, be interesting to examine the odes in detail, and to place before our readers some of their most characteristic features. An excellent analysis of the subject matter of each ode is given by Dr. Kenyon in the introduction (pp. xxvi xliii), and the dates of each and the structural arrangement are discussed in the notes prefixed to each. We will address ourselves rather to striking passages in the poems themselves.
In the third ode the poet celebrates a victory won by Hiero in the chariot-race at Olympia. In dwelling on the splendour of that prince's offerings to the god, he adduces the example of Croesus to show that such piety is not thrown away, and that the god is true to his faithful votaries. This ode, written less than eighty years after the fall of Sardis, and before the publication of the history of Herodotus, is the earliest version of the legend of
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 143
Croesus,^ and differs materially from the narrative of Herodotus, in omitting all mention of Solon, and making the self-immolation of Croesus with his wife and daughters the voluntary act of the defeated sovereign. It is to be observed that Croesus was not for the ancients the type of wealth, as with us, but of pious munificence and undeserved reverse of fortune. Midas and Cinyras were the typical millionaires for Pindar and Theognis. This is the way in which Bacchylides tells the tale : — ^
Lo, Croesus, when Sardis fell before the Grecian host, that the ordinance of Zeus might be fulfilled, Croesus, the Lord of knightly Lydia, found his tutelar in Apollo of the golden falchion. For, when he came to the day of his undoing that he looked not for, he would not brook bitter thraldom, but he builded him a pyre in the fenced close, and went up thereon with his faithful wife and his fair-tressed daughters weeping sore. " O, jealous God!" he cried, and lifted his hands to the high welkin, "where is the gratitude of Heaven ? Where is that great Lord, Leto's son ? . . . Our women are haled despitefully from the stately halls. What was once horrible now is welcome. Death is our best boon." So spake he and bade his henchman Habrobates fire the pile of wood. The girls screamed, and threw their arms round their mother ; for, most horrible is death when it cometh to us face to face. But, lo ! when the strong blaze began to course through the wood, Zeus brought up a black-stoled cloud and ^i quenched the yellow flame. Nothing is past belief that the fsi^ l|//5i^will of God bringeth about. So the Delian god carried the old J king and his lissome daughters to the land of the Hyperboreans, and there he stablished them, for the king's piety and for that beyond all mortal men he had sent goodly gifts to sacred Pytho.'
^ That is, the earliest in literary tradition. The red-figured Amphora, No. 194 in the Louvre, implies a pre-Herodotean version of the legend of Croesus, according to Mr. H. Stuart Jones in * Classical Review,' XII. i. p. 84.
2 III. 23-62.
144 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
The fourth ode commemorates the victory of Hiero with which Pindar dealt in the sublime first Pythian. It is preserved only in part, and does not seem to have been an ambitious effort, having been probably designed to be sung on the spot, while Pindar's triumphal chant was reserved for the cele- bration of the victory at the court of Hiero. It is in the next ode that the two poets are brought into a direct rivalry, of which both show a consciousness — Bacchylides in his elaborate comparison of himself to an eagle, Pindar when he boasts of his close associa- tion with kings and winners in the games, and hints that, as for Hiero in human fortune, so for him in his art, there is no higher height ; their prayer should only be that they may maintain their present state.
While Pindar chose for his theme the legend of Pelops, the founder of the Olympian games, Bacchy- lides strangely selected the story of Meleager, whom he expressly adduces as an illustration of the fact that no mortal man can expect to be completely happy. We can only suppose that the allusion is to the delicate health of Hiero, and we cannot regard the choice of the theme as felicitous, but the ease and grace with which this story is told are conspicuous even among Greek writers.^ When Heracles went to Hades in quest of Cerberus —
* There he marked the shades of poor mortals beside Cocytus' stream, thick as leaves which the wind scatters o'er the gleam- ing headlands of sheep-dotted Ida ; and among them towered the ghost of the dauntless champion of Porthaon's line. When Alcmena's wondrous son descried him gleaming in his harness, he hooked on the bow-tip the twanging string, and oped his
1 V. 63-175.
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 145
quiver's lid, and took therefrom a brazen-tipped shaft. But the shade of Meleager upspake to him face to face, for he knew him well, " Son of Great Zeus, be still, and, calming thy spirit, launch not thy fierce bolt at the sprites of the dead and gone. It hath no terrors for them." So spake he, and the son of Amphitryon was astonied and said, " What god or mortal reared up so fair a sapling, and in what clime ? Who took thy life ? Ah, such an one as thy slayer will girdled Hera send for my undoing. But nay, of a surety, golden-haired Pallas maketh my life her care." Then Meleager weeping, said, " Hard it is for mortals to turn aside the mind of the gods ; else would my sire the good knight Oeneus with prayer and sacrifice of many goats and russet kine have laid the wrath of Artemis divine, white-armed, flower- crowned. But the goddess nursed her wrath not to be van- quished, and set upon fair Calydon a merciless brute, a mighty boar, that in the plenitude of his strength hewed into the fruit trees with his tusk, and slaughtered the sheep and whatso mortal wight withstood him. We lords of the Greeks fought with him a hard fight amain six days continually ; and when God gave the battle to our hands we buried those whom the hoarse-grunting brute ^ had slain in his rushings, even Ancaeus and Agelaus, best of my brave brothers, whom Althaea bore in Oeneus' storied halls. Most of these ^ death took, for not yet did the angry huntress-queen stay her wrath ; and for the tawny fell with the staunch Curetes we fought amain. Then slew I, among others many, Iphiclus and Aphareus, my mother's stout brothers ; for cruel Ares distinguisheth not a friend in time of fighting ; sightless fly the arrows at the foemen's lives, and deal death to whom God listeth. Now my hapless mother, the wily
^ The epithet epi^pvxo-^ seems hardly suitable to the wild boar, the characteristic of which is its silence, and sullen dauntlessness : ' Over on his back the monster rolls, and dies without a groan — dies as only a wild hog can die, in silence.' — Major Shakspear's 'Wild Sports of India.' 'Pigsticking,' by that eminent shikari, Colonel Baden-Powell, also bears witness to the sullen silence of the hog in its combats Lfjth with man and with beast.
2 We read irK^vvw.
146 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
daughter of Thestius, not taking count of this, devised my destruction — a dame undaunted. The log that bare in it my untimely death she took from the figured chest wherein she had shut it/ and burned it in the fire. Fate had woven in her web at my birth that by it should be meted the measure of my life. I was spoiling Clymenus, brave son of Deipylus, for I had come on him, a goodly wight, before the ramparts, and the foemen were flying to the strong town of Pleuron, ancient hold. And my sweet life was minished^ in me, and I knew I was fainting away. Ah, as I drew my last breath I feel aweeping in my anguish, for that I was leaving my glorious prime." Men say that then, and never afore or after, did the son of Amphitryon, dauntless in the fray, let the tear down fall in ruth for the hap- ! less wight, and thus in answer he spake, " For men it is best i<^ I never to have been born, nor ever to have looked upon the light of the sun. But ah, it boots not to weep for these things ; rather is it meet to speak of that which the future hath in store. Hast thou in the halls of doughty Oeneus a virgin sister like unto thee in favour ? Her would I fain make my buxom bride." To him spoke the ghost of staunch Meleager. " I left behind me in those halls Deianeira of the dark-pale neck, and not yet hath she felt the spell of the golden goddess of love." '
Thus abruptly^ ends what may be called the
^ We read i-yKkq-aaaa for iyKXaiJcraaa of the MS. Jebb's dyKXatjaaaa would make Althaea weep while she did her son to death. This would be a pretty touch, and Ovid, Met. viii. 462-511, dwells on the con- flicting emotions of the mother and the sister. But the poet would have made more of the thought here if he had touched on it at all, and he would not have pointedly called her arctp/Sa/cros yvvd. Besides, Althaea was a terrible woman as depicted in II. ix. 566-572.
^ The form fjuvijvdd undoubtedly represents efiivivdr] from fXLvvvoi (cp. ^apijpio beside ^apudo)), a verb which should be restored again in ill. 90 for jMvvdeL, which could not by any means have the penult long. In that passage the verb is intransitive like 8r)d6vo}, while here it is transi- tive, like most verbs in -iJi'a;. For the termination -d cp. i^iKeaOav, Pind. N. 64, KTL<T(rdadav, O. ix. 45.
^ Such abruptness is characteristic of Greek lyric poetry. Pindar in the fourth Pythian, having devoted nearly two hundred and fifty lines
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 147
ballad of Heracles and Meleager in Hades, a clear flash of epic narrative in the great vein, not rising to the dizzy heights of splendour which Pindar's stories of myth-land sometimes achieve, but characteristi- cally maintaining an equable flow of tender senti- ment and pure and elevated diction. Many points of interest (none of them neglected in Dr. Kenyon's excellent footnotes) may be noticed in the passage which we have rendered. The comparison of the shades of the dead to perished leaves whirled about by the wind appears again in poets ancient and modern, the modern of course being quite ignorant ^^^ of the Bacchylidean source of the simile. As Homer's simile,^ like that of Apollonius Rhodius,^ relates to men, not disembodied spirits, it was probably the Bacchylidean ode which suggested to Virgil the graceful passage,^ which in its turn gave birth to Milton's ' Thick as leaves in Vallombrosa ' ; to Shelley's converse comparison in the ' Ode to the West Wind,' where the ' leaves dead ' are likened to—
' Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow and black, and pale and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes ' ;
to the story of the Argonauts up to the finding of the serpent that guarded the golden fleece, finishes the tale in eight verses, premising the words, ' Long were it for me to go hy the beaten track, for the time is nigh out, and I know a certain short path, and many others look to me for skill' (Myers' Tran.). It has, however, been suggested that the abruptness in the Bacchylidean ode would be justified by the hypo- thesis that there is some reference to some wedding then pending at Hiero's court ; and the theory gains plausibility from a comparison with Pind. 01. i. 69-89, written for the same occasion.
^ B. 468. '^Arg. iv. 216. ^Aen yi 309,, 310.
\
148 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
and finally perhaps to Rossetti's fine expression in one of his sonnets : —
'The ground- whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, The wind of Death's imperishable wing.'
Dr. Kenyon acutely notices that in his localiza- tion of the simile Milton has, unconsciously of course, approached nearest to the fountain passage, which speaks not merely of leaves, but of leaves on the wind-swept peaks of Ida. It is stated by a scholiast on Homer, $ 194, that Heracles met Meleager in Hades and was besought by Meleager to take his sister Deianeira to wife, and that the scene was in- troduced by Pindar into one of his poems. It would be interesting to read the poem of Pindar, on which we have perhaps in the ode before us a covert criticism, like that of Euripides on Aeschylus in the ' Electra.' The characteristic multiplication of epithets will strike the reader,^ as well as the fact Jhi> that the epithet' arajO^a/cTo? (1. 139) is rehabilitated, a word expelled by Hermann from Pind. Pyth. iv. 84 with such success that it does not even appear in the lexicon of Liddell and Scott, which, by the way, in these piping times of papyri must give up its claim to be ' definitive.' In Bacchylides some one hundred words are marked as new, and nearly all of them will hold their places as good words and , , true. The sad lines, 160-163, which at once recall the famous Sophoclean yu^ (pvvai top diravTa vikol^ \6yov again illustrate the danger of theorizing about j fragments. The lines were, ascribed by Bergk,
^ Artemis, who in 11. 98, 99 has three epithets, has no less than four i» XI. 37-39.
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 149
apparently on irrefutable grounds, to Silenus as their speaker.^
Ode VI., addressed to Lacon of Ceos, a fellow- countryman of the poet's, contains a play on the name of the Victor,^ which reminds us of a similar jeu d'esprit on the part of Simonides, when he told how one Crius (or Ram, Kpioi) was vanquished by an Athenian wrestler : ' rightly hath the Ram got himself shorn by venturing into the sanctuary of Jove's bower.' In a passage in Aristophanes^ Strep- siades bids his son sing this song, which the patriotism of Athenians had adopted as a popular ' Trink - Lied.' Apparently the highly - cultured Athenians, no more than the learned Cicero, could resist the baleful attraction of a play on a name.
The eleventh ode is interesting as supplying a reference to the poet's family history, if an acute conjecture by Palmer on line 120 is accepted, according to which the poet claims that his ances-
^ It was this famous passage in the * Oedipus Coloneus ' which sup- plied Macaulay with what, Sir G. Trevelyan writes, ' was acknowledged without dissent to be the best applied quotation that ever was made within five miles of the Fitzwilliam Museum.' Sir G. Trevelyan con- sidered it * too strictly classical ' to be reproduced in his pages. Perhaps, however, it is not * too strictly classical ' to be conveyed in a learned language. Let us fancy ourselves to be reading some unpublished letter of a latter-day Cicero : ' Ferunt poetam Wordsworthium apud nobilem quemdam commorantem, cum post ientaculum quotidie ^s airbirarov se recepisset, solitum esse ibi horas duas vel etiam tres inter- dum consumere. Quam rem cum Macaulaeo e familiaribus nescio quis narrasset et insuper dixisset morem esse poetae in sella familiarica versibus componendis operam dare, ferunt hominem, verbis Sophocleis in versus tam spurco in loco factos sceleste coUatis, salso risu clamasse, /S'^j'ttt Ktid^v bdevirep t^kci . Scis reliqua.'
^ Adxwi' Albs fieylaTov Xdx^ (p^prarov irSSeaaL Kvdos.
'•Nubes,' 1356.
ISO THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
tors returning from the siege of Troy consecrated to Artemis a grove by the river Casa, where afterwards Metapontum stood. It also contains an outspoken charge against the false decision of the judges at Olympia, which robbed the Metapontine Alexida- mus, a traveller from far Magna Graecia, of the prize which was his due — a charge at which Pindar would barely have allowed himself to hint. The myth is very characteristic of the sirnple and graceful note of the Ceian nightingale. The daughters of Proetus, who had offended Hera, were smitten with madness by that spiteful goddess, and wandered away from Tiryns to the hills : — ^
' Then grief gat hold of the heart of Proetus, and a pang that was strange to him smote him, and he doubted whether to drive his two-edged brand into his heart. But his squires with soft words, yea, and main force, constrained him. For a year and a month full told, through the bosky wildwood they fared far and wide, and kept their flight through the pasture lands of Arcady. But when he came to the fair-flowing Lusus, then did the father, after ablution due, call upon the full-eyed daughter of Leto crimson-crowned, stretching out his hands to the beams of the fleet-horsed sun : " Oh, bring my children out of the cruel deray of their frenzy, and I will sacrifice on thy altar a score of russet kine never yoked." Then the huntress-queen, daughter of a sire most excellent, heard his prayer, and she prevailed on Hera, and made them quit of their frantic fits, those flower-crowned damsels. And they ^ straightway builded for her a shrine and an altar therewith, and stained it with the blood of sheep, and round about they ordained dances and songs of women.'
In the thirteenth ode we have again a theme treated by both Pindar and Bacchylides, the victory at Nemea of Pytheas, son of Lampon of Aegina.
1 XI. 85-1 12. 2 We read rat.
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 151
The magic grace of the Pindaric ode, that ' sea- saturate ' song, which tells how Peleus won his sea- bride ; the note of gold that clangs through it ; the Sea-God coming in his car from Aegae, and the gladsome company that welcome him with song and sound of rebeck — all these touches, so true and so light, make the fifth Nemean almost unique among all the poems of the world. Prof. Bury in his admir- able edition has gone as near as any one could go to doing it justice, in an introduction which is a model of what comment on Pindar should be. But it is really an ' unexpressive ' song, beyond analysis, and above praise. In it, for once, Pindar has avoided the theme of unrequited merit in Ajax, which so often furnishes the material for his Aeginetan lays. Bacchylides has chosen the Ajax motif, but it is Ajax triumphant that he celebrates, not Ajax humili- ated and balked of the arms of Achilles by the guile of Odysseus and the ingratitude of the Greeks. The ode is in a very corrupt condition, but we can see that it did not take a very high flight, though it contains an elaborate simile ending with a pretty expression. The simile, admirably restored by Jebb (whose suggestions we accept, though he does not venture to put them in the text), runs thus : —
'As on the dark-burgeoning ^ main the north wind from Thrace rendeth a bark by the violence of the waves, coming on it in the night-watches when men take their rest, but with bright dawn the wind leaves to blow, and a fair breeze lays the main to rest, and with sail swelling 'neath the gentle South right fain they win to the haven that was beyond their hopes. So when the
^ xni. 91-107 : Kvavavd^'C, a new and strange epithet. As the earth blooms into flowers, so the sea heaves up into dark billows.
152 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
tl'^
vi9
Trojans heard that the doughty Achilles was abiding in his tent for the sake of the yellow-haired Briseis with limbs of young desire,^ then did they raise up to heaven their hands, when they descried a bright gleam of light 'neath the storm- rack.'
Prof. Piatt, in the 'Classical Review' (XII. i. p. 62), aptly compares for the simile Milton's ' Paradise Lost/ ii. 286:—
' As when hollow rocks retain The sound of blust'ring winds, which all night long Had roused the sea, now with hoarse cadence lull Seafaring men o'erwatch'd, whose bark by chance, Or pinnace, anchors in a craggy bay After the tempest.'
Prof. Piatt naturally observes, ' You would have sworn Milton was copying Bacchylides.' Yet that, we know, was absolutely impossible ; and hence, perhaps, we may be led to doubt whether many of the parallelisms observed between Milton and Pindar are not coincidences — whether some of the great Puritan poet's supposed borrowings from Paganism are not rather draughts on his own copious and splendid store.
But the papyrus has not only conferred on us poems belonging to a class already familiar to us. It offers examples of a quite new genre^ which we may call lyrical idylls or dramatic lyrics. Ancient critics ascribe to Pindar compositions which they call rpayiKo. Spd/uLara, none of which have come down to us. Hitherto the very designation has been a puzzle. We now have excellent specimens of com- positions which may well have been so styled, and
^ In l/aepoyviov we have another new and strange epithet.
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 153
which we might compare to the libretto of an opera or an oratorio, not, however, such as we are familiar with, but such as a real artist might have written. The first, in which Menelaus before the assembled Trojans demands the restoration of Helen, and the second, which touches on Deianira's fatal gift to Heracles, are fragmentary, as also are the two last. The poem about Heracles has one pretty expression which reminds us of a well-known phrase in Camp- bell's ' LochieL' Deianira could not foretell the consequences of her act in sending to Heracles her fatal gift : ' Her undoing was o'er-mastering jealousy, and the thick cloud of darkness that covers the things to come.' But the seventeenth and eigh- teenth are of the highest interest, the former for its contents, the latter for its form as well. We think we shall not do wrong in placing the two before our readers in their entirety. The story of the first is given by Pausanias and Hyginus. It was the subject of a painting by Micon on the walls of the Theseum ; and it has received copious illus- tration from the ceramic art, as it forms the subject of (amongst others) the cylix of Euphronius in the Louvre, and of the Francois vase at Florence, on which Dr. Kenyon (who describes these works of art in some detail) remarks that ' it is difficult not to trace a direct indebtedness of the poet to the artist.' The piece, which the final invocation of Apollo would seem to place among the Paeans, is entitled, ' The Youths and Theseus.' The ' youths ' are the captives (seven male and seven female) brought from Athens by Minos. Theseus went with them to slay the Minotaur, and so to save them.
154 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
' Cleaving the Cretan main sped the dark-prowed bark, bearing staunch Theseus and the youth of Ionia twice seven. Hard on her gleaming canvas, by the grace of Athena with her targe of war, blew the gale of the North. Now stings that come baleful from the love-crowned goddess smote the heart of Minos, and he withheld not his hand from the maiden Eriboea, but pinch'd wanton on her cheek.^ Then she screamed for Pandion's son, Theseus of the hauberk of brass. He saw, and his dark eye flashed 'neath his brows, and a pang rent his heart as he spake, " Son of Zeus most high, thou guidest not in right governance the motions of thy spirit. Chieftain though thou art, stay thou thy rude tyranny. What resistless fate hath approved, and the turn of the scale of justice, that weird will we dree in its appointed hour. Quell thou thy reprobate desire. If, indeed, to a great lordship thou wast born of the far-famed daughter of Phoenix, a damsel that came to the arms of Zeus on Ida's slope ; behold, I too have to my mother the daughter of Pittheus boon, that lay with Poseidon ; and the dark-tressed nymphs gave her her marriage veil. Wherefore, thou war-lord of the Cnossians, I charge thee to put down thy baleful lechery,^ for I would not look again on the sweet light of God's dawn if thou hadst out- raged by foul enforcement any one of this fair bevy of youth. Sooner shall we show how strong are our arms, and God will decide the issue." So spake the high-souled Lord, and the mariners were astonied at his proud defiance. And Minos, kinsman of the Sun,^ was wroth, and he wove for Theseus a snare quick- wrought, and said, " Zeus, father almighty, O hear. If the white-armed Phoenissa bore me to thee in good sooth,
^ A passage from ' Hamlet ' (iii. 4) is interesting as showing that two great impressionists hit on the same touch, as true as it is unconven- tional, in a picture of despotic lust : —
' Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed ; Pinch wanton on your cheek ; call you his mouse ; And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, Or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers, Make you to ravel all this matter out. ' '-' ii^piv is ' lust ' ; cp. ij^pip opdiav KvuiddXuv, Pind. P. x. 36. * His wife Pasiphae was daughter of Helios.
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 155
send thou now from heaven a flash of lightning in ringlets of flame, to be for a clear token. And do thou, Theseus, if in good sooth Aethra of Troezen bore thee to earthshaking Poseidon, do thou, casting thy body without fear^ into thy sire's abode, bring up from the deep sea this golden ring, my finger's splendid gawd. Thou shalt see whether the lord of the thunder, the God of Gods, heareth my orison." Great Zeus gave ear unto his inordinate prayer, and wrought for Minos a great boon, right fain to make manifest to all in what favour he held his beloved son. Flashed the lightning, and the doughty chief stretched forth his hands to the bright firmament, seeing the welcome sign, and said, " Now, Theseus, canst thou clearly see the boons that are of Zeus ; plunge thou into the roaring deep ; surely thy father, King Poseidon, son of Cronus, will make for thee a name which shall be highest throughout all the world's fair woodlands." So spake he, and the heart of the other quailed not, but, standing up, he plunged from the firm deck, and the yielding ocean-floor received him. Now Minos was glad at heart,^ and bade them let the good ship go with the breeze. Howbeit, fate ordained an issue far from his thoughts. So the swift bark sped on her way, and vehement was the North that blew upon her astern. Trembled the bevy of captives for fear when the hero leapt into the sea, and from their lily-soft eyes they let the tear down fall, as they thought of the heavy dule that must be. Now the dolphins, denizens of the deep, swiftly bare great Theseus to the abode of his sire, the God that made the steed, yea, he came to the dwelling of the Gods. And he was afeared when he descried the daughters debonair of Nereus blest ; for from their lovely limbs a light shined as of burning fire, and in their tresses were twined ribands of braided gold, and with frolic footfall they disported in the dance. Yea, he saw his sire's dear spouse, the blessed Amphitrite, in the delect- able halls. She flung round him a floating robe of purple,^ and
1 We read dpdaei aiiv.
^ We read yadev with Jebb. The ' issue far from his thoughts ' was the miraculous preservation of Theseus, whose destruction Minos sought in sailing away.
^ We read aWKav Tropcp^pav.
r
/fV
156 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
placed on his thick locks a chaplet very perfect, darkling with red roses, which arch Aphrodite gave her at her marriage. No^ /^j ^ deed of the Gods, whatsoever they list, is past belief to them '- that have understanding. By the ship's taper stern he appeared. Ah, what were the thoughts of the Cnossian lord that he brake upon as he came from the sea unwet, a very miracle. On his limbs gleamed the divine gifts ; the throned maidens shouted together in new-found joy. The sea roared, and the bevy of youth hard by sang the blithe song of triumph with dulcet voice. O God of Delos, be thy heart gladdened by the chorus of Ceians, and vouchsafe unto us thy blessing from on high.'
The next poem again has Theseus for its hero. It is strictly a rpayiKov Spajua, being lyrical in structure and dramatic in expression. It is a dialogue between Aegeus, King of Athens, and (probably) his Queen Medea, and was sung at some Athenian festival by two semi-choruses representing the two interlocutors.
' Medea. Lord of sacred Athens, King of the gay lonians, why but now hath the trump with note of brass brayed a tocsin of war? Doth some captain of foemen beset the bounds of our land ? Do crafty robbers drive off by force our flocks of sheep despite their shepherds ? Or what is tormenting thy soul ? Speak. For I ween that thou, if any man, hast valiant youth to come to thine aid, thou son of Pandion and Creiisa.
Aegeus. But now hath come a herald : far hath he fared along the road from Corinth, and passing strange are the deeds he tells of a mighty man of valour ; how that he hath slain the overweening Sinis, who was mightiest of mortal men, even the son of the Earthshaker, Cronides, the Lord of Lytae ; yea, and the ravening boar in the dells of Cremmyon, and the ogre Sciron hath he laid low, and made an end of the wrestling-place of Cercyon ; yea, and Procoptes hath let fall from his hand the huge mallet of Polypemon his sire, having met one that is mightier than himself I misdoubt me to what issue it will come.
Medea. Whom doth he report him to be, and whence, and
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 157
in what raiment clad about ? Cometh he with a great host and weapons of war, or unattended and unarmed, even as a way- faring merchant, to a foreign farland- — being so strong and brave and dauntless that he hath put under him the violence of these men ? Of a surety he is sent of God to do justice on froward men. For hard is it for a man in all his feats to meet no harm. In process of time all things have their issue.
Aegeus. But two squires, he saith, follow him, he hath a sword slung round his stout shoulders, and in his hand two bright steel darts ; a fair Spartan casque on his ruddy locks, and on his body a purple doublet and a woolly cloak of Thessaly. From his eyes is distilled the red flame of Lemnos. He is in the bloom of his early youth, and hath a mind for the playthings of Ares, even war and the brass-clanging melley ; and for Athens that doteth on things splendid he is bound.'
We have already quoted some passages illustrative of the simple philosophy of life which found favour with this refined young Ceian, who, if he was not in the very highest sense a born poet, was at all events brought up to be a poet by the example, and no doubt by the training, of his truly inspired uncle, and whose genius was fostered and fondled in courts of princes, where he does not seem to have felt the reluctance of his illustrious rival Pindar ' to live at the behest of another.' His religious creed was as simple as his theory of life. All good gifts come from God, whom it is meet to glorify with all our heart. ^ He is something of a fatalist, but a firm believer in the moral government of the world ^ and its benevolence : — ^
' Zeus on high who seeth all things bringeth not on men sore travail. It is open to all to find the straight road of righteous- ness. Righteousness is the servant of Order and wise Law ; blessed are they that take her to their breast.'
^iii. 22. 2 XIV. 1-18. 3 XV. 51-56.
158 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
Yet fate is above all : — ^
'Nor weal nor stern war nor red ruin and the breaking up of laws are for men to take or leave. F'ate hath all things in her hands, and now to this land now to that she bringeth disaster's flaw.'
No doubt in the passage just quoted he thought of his exile ; but the Ceian poet rarely brings before us his own personality. Pindar often does, chiefly in those strange little symphonies in his odes which im- mediately precede and follow the myth, the KaraTpOTra / \ /J>and /uLeraKaTarpOTrd of the Grammarians, which have been compared to a kind of rubric proclaiming 'here , I- beginneth the o/uLCpcikog ' and ' here endeth the ' "^ oiucpoXo^.' And we would here step a little out of our way to call attention to the fact that the newly-
k| discovered poems do not lend the slightest colouj;^tiii.
I what has. been called the nomic theory of structure.* //. Whether Pindar did or did not construct his odes on 2. i the model of a Terpandrian nome, and with a refer- ence to the design of a temple-pediment, is a question about which critics differ, and which has been fully
I discussed in the paper on Pindar. But certainly Bacchylides shows no sign of any acquaintance with any such method, nor yet with that system of catchwords and responsions by which some editors suppose that Pindar called attention to a certain correlation between the different structural elements of his odes. We have before pointed to a supposed reference of Bacchylides to an exploit of his ancestors on their return from Troy, and we have commented on his claim to the proud title of eagle, and on the greater appropriateness of his other self-bestowed
^Frag. 62.
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designations, the ' Ceian nightingale ' and ' the islanders' singing bee/ the latter of which probably suggested to Horace a well-known simile. When he does put forward his own opinion he is apt to use an emphatic phrase, such as (paiul kui ^acro)/ and ya S' eTricFKrfTrrcDV TTLcpavcrKco. In praising Pherenicus, Hiero's victorious steed, he exclaims : — ^
' Lo ! I lay my hand on earth and utter my voice. Never, as he galloped to the goal, was he defiled by the dust of steeds that were before him.^ For, like a rushing mighty wind, marking well the pilot of his course, he sped, winning for gracious Hiero victory with rattling din of cars.'^
And again in VIII. 3-9 : —
' Laying on earth my hand I will make a high vaunt — where truth is, everything shows clear — no mortal man ere now, being of such an age as he, e'er won more triumphs both as man and boy.'
The syntax of Bacchylides is, as we have already observed, extremely simple and normal. Perhaps eOrjKav . . . Kvprjaai (ill. 9), ' brought about that he should obtain,' and TiKrei . . , eipyva . . . irXovrop . . . KOI . . . aiOecrOai /Socov . . . lutjpa (Frag. 46, I -3), * Peace begets wealth and the burnt sacrifice of beeves,' might puzzle a beginner. And the order of words is sometimes a little anomalous, as, for instance, in XVII. 62, where a parenthesis is inter- posed between an adjective and its substantive. In places where strange constructions are met, we shall generally find that either the interpretation of the text or its reading is in fault. In IX. 36 there is
^1.21. 2^42-48.
^Cp. Juv. viii. 61, 'clara fuga ante alios et primus in aequore pulvis.' ^ We read i'er' dcpvedKporov with Professor Housman in the ' Athenaeum.'
i6o THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
no reason why ajULapuy/ma TraXa? should not be the direct object of wrpwe instead of a very anomalous accusative of respect. The editor's explanation of X. 43, involving a very strange construction, must certainly be rejected for that of Jebb given in the note. The extraordinary position of yap in III. 2 2 plainly points to another reading, which is indeed as near to the MS.: —
deov OeXovTcs dyXat^d\ w Trap' apLcrros 6X/3(i)V.
Nor could Si' oara-a in VI. 4 mean ' on account of which.' We should probably read Afo? ^e irapoiQev^ ' before the face of Zeus.' That victory was cele- brated at Olympia ' before the face ' of Olympian Jove. With it is contrasted a new Olympian victory, which is now being celebrated, not, however, at Olympia, but at the victor's house in Ceos. Again, in XI. 32 Te-^vaig irekacra-ev is explained 'made him acquainted with his skill.' Now this is by no means justified by Homer's /ca/c^? oSvvhctl ireXoXeiv^ ' to bring into sore pains.' The whole passage runs : —
TraiS' iv x^ovl KaXkixopio iroLKL\.aL<s T€XvaL<s TTcXaa-crev.
The meaning is that the young wrestler ' brought to the ground by his cunning ' the boy opposed to him. The figure Unesis, by which the preposition is separated from the verb in eyUTreXa^o), is common in Pindar and very common in the epic style with which Bacchylides is so strongly tinged.
In two places a very strange use of the dative is postulated. In xvii. 62 Opdarei is taken adverbially,
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES i6i
as meaning ' bravely,' and in the same ode, 1. 90, a-Oevei is interpreted ' strongly.' In the first passage [a-vu] may be restored instead of [to], which is not required, in the lacuna. In the second the reading is very doubtful, and such a construction ought not to be introduced into a conjectural emendation.
The same may be said as regards diction. The only really difficult use of a word which can fairly be ascribed to the poet is that of TreraXov in V. 186. It seems to mean ' a vote,' as in Pind. ' Isthm.' viii. (vii.) 46 ; and it is a strange use of language whereby a winning horse is said to ' give his vote ' for his master's prosperity, because this is the horse's ' contribution ' to the sum of his master's good things. Yet iriraXov could no more mean a wreath or crown of victory than folium could stand for corona, so that we cannot understand evSaijuovia^ ireraXov as ' the coveted wreath.' It is idle to compare o\j3ov avOea in III. 92. It is the use of the singular which makes ireToKov impossible as Greek for ' a crown.' The strange word veoKporov in V. 48 must, as we have seen, disappear from the list of new words, though only to make room for another newcomer in cKpveoKpoTov. The word crrecpamg could not mean (still less (TTecpavoi) corona in the sense of a band or troop, as a note on II. 10 would seem to imply. The meaning is, * He has brought to our minds all the brave deeds at the Isthmus which we, the chorus of seventy voices, held up to view together with his crowns of victory.'
In IX. 10 we meet a new and strangely-formed word, viKaa-in^efi. But, standing as it does after a lacuna, it doubtless represents a much more natural
L
1 62 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
word, (poiviKda-TTiSeg. Bacchylides affects words com- pounded with (poivi^, and Pindar has (poiviKoo-roXcov XO ey)(e(t)v, N. ix. 28. It is true that the tragic poets call the Argives Xef/cao-Trtfe, but Professor Housman, to whom the correction is due, points to alOag eir' aa-TriSog (Pind. P. viii. 46), ' a fiery shield.' We do not believe that Trora/uLol "Apt]09 (ix. 45) could mean
* rivers of blood.' The passage has not yet been explained. Professor Housman's ingenious notes in the ' Classical Review ' (for February and March) are on the right track. The river in 1. 39 is certainly the Asopus. We should probably read (tmv . . . eyyovwv, the reference being to Achilles and Ajax, whose prowess the Amazons felt before Ilium. As ancestor of these very eminent champions Asopus might be called * King of rivers.'
In XI. 65 the learning of the editor has supplied a passage from Apollodorus which certainly gives the key to the meaning. Proetus and Acrisius were at feud ' from their very infancy.' But could this be expressed by the phrase /SXrj-^pag air' apyaf;} We think not. Surely these words could only mean
* from a trivial origin,' which is plainly not the sense required. We would propose to read ^Xrj-^ag air cLKpag * from their first baby-cry, a primo vagitu, from the time before they were airaWayevrefi a(Ty]fXDov KwXvifxaTwvl as Herodotus has it. For aKpav = ' first,' cp. Pind. P. V. 8, alwvog aKpav airo /BaO/uLlScov, and id. xi. 10, aKpa avv ea-n-ipa. The editor cannot consistently refuse to admit emendation. He has himself made a palmary emendation in this very ode, line 54, where by reading votj/ma for o/mjuLa he has perfectly restored sense, metre, and poetry ;
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 163
TraXlvrpoTTov potjima, ' wits warped ' or ' turned awry/ is an excellent expression for madness.
In V. 190 ff. the poet quotes from Hesiod, as Pindar does twice.^ But while it is easy to localize the quotation in the case of Pindar,^ no passage is to be found in the extant works of Hesiod which gives the sentiment here required, namely, that they whom the gods delight to honour have also fair fame with men.^ The editor, in filling up the lacuna, gives to e7r\i]orau a sense which it could not bear. The passage is thus ingeniously restored by Professor Housman in the ' Athenaeum,' December 25, 1897:—
ov av addvaroi Tt[/^wa-t, tovt(j^ KoX fSpoTMV cfiTf'jfiav €7r[€o-^at].
As regards accidence, his chief peculiarity is the employment of infinitive forms in -ev, like epvKcv, (pvXda-crev, '1(t')(€v^ and perhaps rlev (XIX. 15). It is remarkable that the papyrus nowhere shows those forms in -rjimi for o) or w of the pres. indie, which
IN. vii. 88, 'Isthm.' v. 67.
^ Trrjfia KUKbs yelrojv Saaov r' dyadbs fiiy' 6veiap, ^fifjiopi Toi Tifiijs 6tXT' ^fx/xope yelrovos iadXou, — 0/>. 346. /xeX^TT] 8i Toi ipyov ocpiWei. — Op. 412.
^Professor Blass in the ' Literarisches Centralblatt ' for December 25 quotes a close parallel from Theognis, 169 (Bergk) : — ov 5e deol Tifida', ov Kal fiio/xe^fievos alvei. It would seem as if Bacchylides had, by a lapse of memory, ascribed to Hesiod a sentiment of Theognis, which, by the way, should rather run : — 6v bk deol tlixCxtiv 6 kuI fiu/j-eOfxevos aivei, ' whom God delights to honour even the most captious critic commends.' Dr. von Wilamovitz-Moellendorff has proposed in the ' Gottingischen gelehrten Anzeigen ' the emendation of Prof. Housman, with Kebcj} for roijTip. He and Prof. Blass have more than once arrived independently at restorations suggested by English scholars in the • Athenaeum ' and the * Classical Review.'
i64 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
Bacchylides, Frag. 56 (27 Bgk.), presents in 6aX7rf](Ti, Pindar (Frag. 155 Bgk.) in alrrjiuLi, Simonides in eiralvriiJLi, and Ibycus in e-^^rja-L and iyelprjcri. The diction is even more penetrated with epic phraseology than that of Pindar, though we do not meet those synonymes for epic tags, those Homeric jewels reset, which are so characteristic of the style of the Theban lyrist. Perhaps ayXaav 7J/3ai/ irpoXelirwv in V. 154 is a reminiscence of Xnrova aSporrjTix koi i'/^rjp^ and aa-ia-ToiraTpa (XI. 1 06) and /uLeyicTTOTraTcop (v. 199) may have been suggested by Homer's SucrapiG-TOTOKeia, but we do not find that delicate remodelling of epicisms which in Pindar has the same charming aesthetic effect as Milton's classicisms and Swinburne's hebraisms. Bacchylides is fond of compounds with apicTTo-, and to the list of these must be added apicrTa\Ke<}, which must certainly be read instead of epiaraXKeg in VII. 7. He has introduced some words in which two substantives are anomalously compounded together, instead of an adjective or verb and substantive. Such are TroXe- fjLaiyig, IjULepa/uLirv^, i/uLepoyvio^y aperai^iULOs, ao-TvOefiig, TTvpieOeipa, v/uLvodvacrcra. His extreme proneness to new and strangely formed epithets would almost seem to show a consciousness of a certain humble- ness in his diction, which he thus seeks to elevate.
It is very remarkable that in addition to the hundred or so of new words which Bacchylides gives us, there are a good many (perhaps about a score) which we have been accustomed to regard as post-classical words (and even constructions, such as ?joa prepositional, * on account of) which have hitherto had the authority only of Quintus Smyr-
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 165
naeus, Oppian, Nonnus, Tzetzes, or the ancient lexicographers, the Anthology, and inscriptions. It is a fair inference from this that the post-classical writers were not at all so ready as we have hitherto believed to coin new words, but oftener drew on ancient authors not now extant. It is further ob- servable that the irregular compounds to which we have already referred were avoided by the late writers. Not one of them appears except in Bacchy- lides, though many of them are metrically most convenient, especially for writers in hexameters.
Even more pronounced than the prevailing sim- plicity of the style of Bacchylides is the singular simplicity of his metrical systems. The wild anti- , spastic movements and constant resolution of long \ syllables, which make the metres so complicated in i Pindar's odes, especially those in the Aeolian mood, of which the second Olympian is a good example, were never dreamed of in the Bacchylidean theory of structure. There is hardly a poem in which the metre does not catch the ear at once, and the very \ close antisjtrophic_jcorrespQndence greatly simplifies \ /6G the problem of constituting the text. It is true that here and there we meet the case of a deficient or superfluous syllable in violation of antistrophic correspondence, but this generally points to the easily corrected error of the copyist. In the fifth ode, 11. 14, 29 contain a syllable more than they ought to have, but the changes which bring them into conformity are quite easy. LI. 1 1 and 26 exhibit the same phenomenon ; but here the omission of a syllable does not at all commend itself How- ever, when we come to examine the corresponding
i66 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
antistrophic verses, eight in number, we find that there is in every case some evidence that a syllable has dropped out, and that therefore they originally
(agreed perfectly with 11. 1 1 and 26. Conformity between the strophes and antistrophes ought certainly to be demanded, especially in a poet who resorts so little even to resolution of long syllables, a licence which he rarely allows himself, except in the long ode XVII., where we find also other slight laxities, such as the correspondence of a long and a short syllable elsewhere than at the end of a verse. For the last syllable of every line is common. To call attention to this fact, whenever the line ends with an elided syllable the letter before the elision is brought over to the beginning of the next verse, to show that there is no synapheia, as there is in tragic anapaestic systems, and as there would seem to be in these odes if elision were allowed at the end of a verse. Thus we have KoXuSm/v (v. 106), viJLvoava(rj(T (xil. i), (pSyjO' (XVI. 15), 6e\oi/iuL' (xvil. 41). This, be it observed, is in no way due to exigencies of space. There would always be room for the letter brought over, sometimes for many more. Moreover, ex- amples of hiatus after a long syllable at the end of a line are frequent, and we have it even after short syllables in v. 172, 177, ix. 40, XL 12, XIII. 82, 120. We have said that the metres used are simple, » the lines short, the strophic correspondence well/^J^ j maintained, the resolution of long syllables rare, and still rarer any variation in the quantity of corresponding syllables, except at the end of each line. There no quantitative uniformity is required, inasmuch as the last syllable of each verse is treated
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 167
as common. There is not a single ode which does not illustrate this truth (many of them again and again) save one, the second, a very short ode contain- ing only one strophe (with its antistrophe) of but five lines. The seventh and twelfth odes have only one metrical system, and so are not antistrophic at all. The fourth is too corrupt to afford any evidence. Therefore the whole theory denying the syllaba - anceps at the end of the line is borne out only by one strophe and antistrophe five lines long. It is invalidated by all the other poems. Surely it is mere chance which has here produced the conformity in one ode. And is this fortuitous conformity, maintained for but five lines, to be set up as the standard, while the practice illustrated by all the other odes is to be set down to error and altered by arbitrary correction ? Surely not. What would be said of a scientific observer who, professing to found a law of nature on induction, should then reject or garble every datum of observation or experi- ment which conflicted with his own preconceived hypothesis? Yet this is what some critics have attempted in applying wholesale correction in order to bring about a conformity against which the MS. — our only evidence — everywhere protests. These arbitrary changes are sometimes slight enough, some- times considerable and highly improbable, sometimes impossible. And be it noted that if in one place a short syllable at the end of a line corresponds strophi- cally to a long one, then the principle is established that the last syllable is common, and correction ignoring the principle is shown to be quite un- scientific. We will take only one case. In XI. 119
i68 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
a short syllable at the end of the line corresponds to a long syllable in the two other epodes. The reading is undoubtedly sound. The attempt to restore irpo yovjvoV for irpoyo/voi can have hardly commended itself even to its author, who essays no explanation or defence of it except a quite irrelevant reference to III. 19, apparently to prove that irpo means 'in front of,' which we readily concede. Other attempts, such as TTpoa/yov, carry with them their own refutation. The true state of the case is that irpoyovoi here is right and indispensable, and that a short syllable at the end of a line corresponds strophically to a long one here as in some fifty other places in the poems. To make the poems before us conform to the rules laid down in some treatises on metre, we must either rewrite the poems or rewrite the treatises. The latter, we submit, is the more reasonable proceeding. Sut when the MS., with a very slight correction, presents a reading against which nothing can be urged except that it records an incident not else- where mentioned (so far as we know), could anything be more absurd than to reject it, and give instead a statement that ' they ' (who ? the 'A;(afo/ mentioned in 1. 114?) 'instituted a precinct to be in front of (or in preference to) a knoll (slope) ' ; for no other- wise can we render if we read irpo yovvoV "ia-arav ejuev ? There are in Bacchylides none of those impressive complications of conflicting, or at least exuberant, imagery — those maelstroms of metaphor — which flash from Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, at those moments —
* When a great thought strikes along the brain And flushes all the cheek.'
THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES 169
There is no hurly-burly of feeling, like that in which Pindar cries^ — ' Methinks a whetstone shrilleth on my lips ; right fain it draws me on with a current of sweet breath ' ; or in which Sophocles ^ makes , the chorus say that ' the ray of hope which was shed , ]over the last root of the house of Oedipus is mowed \ ^down by a handful of bloodstained dust ' cast on the corse of Polynices ; or in which Cassandra in the * Agamemnon '^ exclaims, ' Lo, the oracle will no more peer from behind a veil like a bride new- wedded ; nay, it is like to come and clear the welkin with a blast that will roll up against the bright horizon, like a surging billow, a horror far worse than this.' We should look in vain in Bacchylides for such spiritual excitement or its outward and visible sign in the style. He must suffer from that comparison with Pindar which Dr. Kenyon depre- cates, but which is really forced upon us. We hope, however, that the specimens of his work which we have put before our readers will have shown, even to those who do not propose to study the poems in the original, that our newly-found lyrist is a shrewd observer of life, and a masterly artist in verse, with remarkable command of limpid and graceful narrative. In the closing words of the third ode, which commemorates the victory of Hiero in the chariot race in 468 B.C., words which may have been his latest utterance, and which are certainly the latest utterance to which a date has been assigned, the poet exclaims : —
' Hiero, thou hast held up to the view of men all that most gloriously adorns an high estate. On such triumphs as thine
1 0. vi. 82. 2 c Ant.' 600 ff. 3 1 180 ff.
170 THE POEMS OF BACCHYLIDES
silence bringeth no honour. In telling them therewithal will men, launching the shafts of truth,i glorify too the meed of praise which the honeyed nightingale of Ceos could bestow.'
We gladly join our voice to the chorus which hails the resurrection of the Ceian lyrist, and add the heartiest expression of our sense of gratitude to the trustees of the British Museum, to the editor, and to the scholars who have given him their aid, for bestowing on us a gift which is a precious addition to the literature of the world.
^ We read fiaXivv for koXQp
PLUTARCH.
' And would they take the poor boy's life for the like o' that ? ' ' Bedad they would, if he had as many lives as Plutarch.' This little dialogue was overheard not long ago in an Irish county. It may, perhaps, fitly introduce the present paper, as show- ing what a world-wide fame has been won by ' Plutarch's Lives.' It will be observed that the phrase ' Plutarch's Lives,' coming down to the peasantry from a distant and obscure tradition of the Hedge-Schoolmaster, had lost its meaning for them, and Plutarch had become not the author but the possessor of many lives. Mr. Strachan Davidson in his ' Cicero ' couples the ' Lives ' with the philo- sophical works of Cicero, as having exercised the greatest and most constant influence on subsequent literature ; and when we remember Shakespeare's large indebtedness to North's * Plutarch,' we must admit that the Dean of Balliol has not accorded to the ' Lives ' an unduly high place among epoch- making works.
But though Plutarch has exercised so great an influence on literature, we know very little about his life, and that little chiefly gleaned from his own writings. The chief of biographers has had no
171
172 PLUTARCH
biographer. The legends which have gathered round him, such as the tradition that he was made consul by Trajan, have no historical basis. He was born a Boeotian, in that crass atmosphere of which Juvenal speaks as the very home and centre of dulness, though it produced Pindar, perhaps the most truly ' inspired ' of all poets ancient or modern. His native place was Chaeronea, the town which com- manded the Boeotian plain, and which so often pro- vided a field for contending hosts to meet and put the destinies of Hellas to ' battle's brute arbitrament. As Belgium in modern history has earned the name of * the cockpit ' of Europe, so Chaeronea (as Plutarch tells us) was called more pleasantly by Epaminondas ' Mars' ballroom,' so often did it invite the states of Greece to the carnival of war. His birth may be placed about 50 A.D. He studied at Athens, visited Alexandria, and must have spent some time in Asia Minor. Rome, ' beautiful Rome/ as he calls it, was visited by him at least twice, probably oftener. He delivered lectures there in the Greek tongue, and many of his treatises, as they have come down to us, seem to have been little more than expanded notes of these lectures. He could not have lectured in Latin, — a language of which he had very little knowledge, only enabling him to take in the general meaning of a sentence which he could not have construed word by word. His knowledge of Latin literature is very small, extending only to histories and memoirs essential for his ' Lives.' To Virgil he never refers, nor to Ovid, whose * Fasti ' would have been so useful to him for his * Roman Questions.' His only reference to Latin poetry is one to Horace.
PLUTARCH 173
It is in his life of Lucullus, where he tells the story to which Horace refers in his ' Epistles.' ^ Accord- ing to Horace, Lucullus, being asked if he could supply a hundred purple cloaks for a certain scenic representation, said that he thought he had some, and would see. After a while he sent back a mes- sage that he found he had some five thousand, of which the ' entrepreneur ' might have as many as he wanted. Horace adds the reflection, 'it is a poor establishment in which there is not much gear of which the owner knows nothing and in which the thief finds his account' Plutarch seems to have read the passage. The way in which he tells the anecdote is this : * When the " entrepreneur " said he wanted a hundred, Lucullus told him to take twice as many ; on which the poet Flaccus made the com- ment that a man is not really rich unless he has more property that is overlooked and unsuspected than that which is seen and recognized.' The com- ment, however, is more like that of a man who had been told that Horace had used the incident to point a moral than of one who had read the actual words of the poet. However, the passage is interesting as showing that the great Gibbon nodded when he said that between Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Libanius, — between the century before Christ and the fourth century after, — there is not in the whole of Greek literature a single allusion to Horace or Virgil. Plutarch was equally ignorant of the prose literature of Rome, including the philosophical works of Cicero which, as we have seen, contest with the * Lives ' the dominion of the intellect of posterity.
1 i. 6, 40-46.
174 PLUTARCH
The two passages in Plutarch's life of Cicero which seem to show some knowledge of Cicero's philoso- phical works, are more likely to have come from Tiro's * Life of Cicero/ When asked which of the speeches of Demosthenes he admired the most, Cicero replied, the longest.^ Again, Plutarch quotes the remark of Cicero when Caesar ordered the restoration of the statues of Pompey which had been thrown down, * he is erecting the statues of Pompey, but he is planting his own.'
It is an interesting observation of the late Dr. Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, in his admirable lectures on Plutarch,^ delivered in Dublin thirty-six years ago, that Plutarch never broke a lance against the truth which was higher than any which he had ever heard, the truth which in two cen- turies was to dominate the world. He knew nothing of Christianity. Even such passing notices as we have in Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, and Epictetus are sought in vain in Plutarch. If we are right, and we cannot be far wrong, in placing his birth about 50 A.D., long before he began to write, St. Peter and St. Paul had fulfilled their mission. All around him there were flourishing Christian churches, but he knew nothing of them. If he had ever heard of the perverse superstition, as Pliny calls it, he confounded it with Judaism, of which he knew little and only the least attractive side. * He can tell us how the Jewish high priest was clothed,' writes Dr. Mahaffy in his excellent study of Plutarch in * The Greek World under Roman Sway' (p. 321), * but as to Jewish dogmas he manifests the grossest ignorance.'
* Cic. xxiv. 2 « Plutarch,' four lectures, 1873.
PLUTARCH 175
When, however, he warns the wife not to allow religious cults foreign to her husband to creep into the house, he is, in the opinion of Dr. Mahaffy, pointing ' at Christianity, as well as at those Oriental cults which we know to have done domestic mischief in those days.'^
The later years of a tranquil and happy life he spent in his native town of Chaeronea, a small and insignificant place of which he says in his life of Demosthenes, — in one of those few and precious * asides ' which throw a rare and fitful ray of light on his private life, — that it was so small that he did not like to make it smaller by leaving it. Have we here a passage read and remembered by Juvenal ^ when he speaks of a man repairing to Cumae as about to present the Sibyl with one additional citizen, an appreciable addition to a population so limited ? But while he made Chaeronea his head- quarters he took excursions into various parts of Greece, and felt a pride in making himself acquainted with her historical and antiquarian monuments. It is in his ' Symposiaca ' or ' Table Talk ' that we see most of the man himself and the society of his time. One of his chief friends was Mestrius Florus, a man of consular rank and an ardent antiquarian. With him Plutarch visited the battlefield of Bebria- cum where the army of Otho was overthrown. He records an occasion on which the Emperor VespaiMan 'scored off' the man of learning in a manner char- acteristic in all ages of the personage when brought to book by a scholar. Mestrius Florus had corrected the emperor for his mispronunciation of the word for a
^ lb. 328. "^ Juv. iii. 3, Unum civem donare Sibyllae.
1/6 PLUTARCH
wagon. He had called it plostra not plaustra. The emperor accepted the correction, but next day- greeted the scholar as Flaurus not Florus. Now Flaurus in Greek means * worthless ' (cjyXavpo^). Human nature is ever the same. The boor in high place loves to have a jest at the expense of the poor scholar, and the world laughs at the triumph of material success over mental endowments. The questions raised at these symposiaca were often small and trivial, as, for instance, why is A the first letter of the alphabet, whether the hen or the ^g% came first, which hand of Venus Diomede wounded. Here, again, is it not possible that we have evidence of some knowledge of Plutarch on the part of Juvenal ? One recalls the passage ^ where Juvenal laughs at the minute and trivial inquiries which engaged the cognoscenti of his day : who was the nurse of Aeneas, the step-mother of Anchemolus, what age did Acestes attain and how many flasks of Sicilian wine he gave to his Phrygian guests. The symposiaca are a wonderful source of information about the social life of the first century of the Christian era, and they have not been drawn upon as much as they deserve. Further, they show the character of Plutarch in a very amiable light, which will be further illustrated when we come to consider his nature and gifts from other points of view.
We have seen, — and shall see even more clearly when we come to estimate Shakespeare's debt to Pluturch, — that the * Parallel Lives ' have on them the seal of immortality. Before dwelling on their greatness it may be well to dispose of what is much
1 vii. 234-236.
PLUTARCH 177
the most trifling part of the inquiry, namely, the respects in which they fall short of perfection. First of all, Plutarch was a Greek. He was enamoured of Hellas, as Pericles said that every Athenian ought to be of Athens ; and he loved his birthplace. He hated those who belittled, — even those who did not love and worship, — Greece, nay even Chaeronea. In a strange passage in the ' De sera Numinis Vindicta ' (' The Deferred Retribution of Heaven '), perhaps the most interesting of his moral essays, he depicts Nero as suffering the tortures of Hell, his soul being studded with red-hot nails. But he adds that this torment is presently to be remitted, and that Nero (in recognition of his musical tastes) is to be transformed into a marsh frog to make, we suppose, ' the punishment fit the crime.' This miti- gation of sentence is represented as being due to his treatment of Greece : 'Some recognition from Heaven was due to the fact that he emancipated Greece, the best and most pious of the peoples subject to Rome.' His extraordinary treatise, ' On the Malignity of Herodotus ' (if really authentic), probably had its rise from the fact that Herodotus has recorded some ignoble facts in Theban history. Yet what single writer has done more than Herodotus to paint in unfading colours the grand tableau of the struggle of the West against the East? Marathon, Ther- mopylae, and Salamis live in his pages ; but so does the Theban Medism, and Plutarch cannot bear to be reminded of the blot on the Boeotian escutcheon. Yet surely it was erased by Epaminondas, and Pindar could contemplate it without a blush. But Plutarch lived in a time when Greece was politically
M
178 PLUTARCH
a nullity, though she was still able to give laws in literature, rhetoric, and art. We have seen that he despised, or at least neglected, the great literature which Rome had borrowed from her vassal ; he also was somewhat blind to the solid qualities of Roman worthies, their steadfastness, their devotion to their country, their abnegation of self, — qualities con- spicuously absent in the far more brilliant Greek men of affairs, such as Themistocles, Alcibiades, and (as some would say) Demosthenes. It is interesting to observe that when he has to seek a Roman parallel for a person so characteristically Greek as Alcibiades, he is obliged to have recourse to the semi-mythical Coriolanus, and the parallel hardly extends beyond the fact that each bore arms against his country. It is said that he is disposed to favour the Greek against the Latin hero. On this subject we would ask leave to quote an eloquent passage (abridged) from Dean Meri vale's ' History of the Romans under the Empire ' : —
' Plutarch's " Parallel Lives " are eminently philo- sophy teaching by example. There is no work, perhaps, of antiquity that Christian parents can put so securely into the hands of their children. The author's object was to draw a fair and friendly com- parison between the Greeks and the Romans, be- tween the conquered and the conquerors, the spoiled and the spoilers, the slaves and the masters, between men whom other censors would have delighted to contrast as the spiritual Hellene and the brutal Italian, or, again, as the cringing Graeculus and the lofty Romulides. Yet throughout this long series of lives, this glittering array of virtues and vices, there
PLUTARCH 179
is no word, I think, of subservience or flattery, of humiliation or triumph, to mark the position of the writer in the face of his Roman rulers. Whether we consider the book as addressed to the Greeks or the Romans, the absence of any such indications of feeling is undoubtedly remarkable. To me it seems most honourable both to the one people and to the other.' ^
The question is certainly one on which there is no room for a charge of undue bias. But, be it observed, even if the charge of favouring the Greeks were true it would reflect great credit on Plutarch that in an age of assentation and servility he chose the nobler part and refused to avail himself of an obvious means of recommending himself to the emperors and the great families of Rome. It is true, indeed, that Plutarch was a born biographer, and as such he was no historian. His lives, for instance, of the Gracchi present them to us as living beings, but the times in which they lived must be reconstructed by us from other sources. The revolution which marked that epoch had for him no existence. A crucial instance of his lack of political insight is to be found in the rapture with which he records the proclama- tion of the liberty of Greece at the Isthmian games by Flamininus. He seems to believe that ' liberty,' given as that was, is really liberty and not the most degrading form of servitude, chains the more humilia- ting because they are gilded, and because they bind their wearers under the semblance of ornaments. But though the political outlook of the ' Lives ' is but limited, their ethical aspect is invaluable. His
1 Ch. Ixvi.
i8o PLUTARCH
own account of his aim may well be quoted from his ' Paulus Aemilius,' in the words of Sir Thomas North's translation, which must ever have such a deep interest for every English-speaking race, as being the material out of which Shakespeare wrought his magnificent panorama of the Roman republic : —
' When I first began to write these " Lives " my intent was to profit others ; but since continuing and going on I have much profited myself by looking into these histories as if I looked into a glass to frame and fashion my life to the mould and pattern of these virtuous noblemen. For, running over their manners in this sort and seeking also to describe their lives, methinks I am still conversant and familiar with them, and do, as it were, lodge them with me, one after another. I do teach and prepare myself to shake off and banish from me all lewd and dishonest conditions, if by chance the company and conversation of them whose company I keep, — and must of necessity haunt, — do acquaint me with some unhappy or ungracious touch.'
What is the great secret of the popularity of the ' Lives,' which has made them, in the words of Madame Roland, ' the pasture of great souls,' which has led Montaigne to call them a breviary, and which has recommended the sage of Chaeronea to minds so diverse as those of Jeremy Taylor, Bayle, Dryden, Bossuet, Moliere, and Montaigne ? A very noble tribute, too, is paid to them by Amyot, the author of the sixteenth century French translation of the ' Lives/ whose version North Englished, and who, therefore, at second hand has fed the lamp of our great poet's inspiration : —
PLUTARCH i8i
' The dullest man in the world on reading or hearing read such a master must bend his head in humility and do obeisance to Truth herself, who can make herself so well heard in the mouth of a poor pagan.' ^ It is his clear appreciation of the differ- ence between history and biography, his vivid psychological portraiture, which gives to every anec- dote, however apparently trivial, a deep significance. Every anecdote illustrates some characteristic trait, or puts in a strong light some striking fact. Wit- ness the anecdote of the girl who, during a gladiator's show, plucked off a thread from the toga of Sulla that she might get a bit of his luck ; the mother who, learning from her husband that he had betrothed their daughter, said angrily, ' you have been very hasty unless, of course, it is to Tiberius Gracchus ' ; the refusal of Cato, aged five, to acknowledge the right of the Italians to the franchise, though in the grasp of a big Marsian who held him out of the window by the neck and threatened to drop him if he did not give in. Beside many pithy sentences which have made their way into all the histories, there is still a rich harvest to be gleaned. What could be better than the reply of Sulla to the appli- cation for a military command made by Crassus whose family had suffered in the Marian massacre, ' I will give the command, but I can give you as support only the ghosts of your father and your brother ' ; or than Caesar's summing up of his mili- tary position at a critical moment in the words,
^ * Le plus sourd du monde lisant ou oyant un tel maistre est con- straint de baisser le front et donner gloire a la Verite se faisant si bien ouyr en la bouche d'un pauvre payen. '
1 82 PLUTARCH
* first I must deal with the army that has no general, then with the general who has no army.' Plutarch is keenly conscious of the psychological value of the anecdote and sometimes expressly claims it. In his life of Alexander he tells us that he omits many things of the greatest importance because ' the noblest deeds do not always show virtues and vices ; but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, make men's natural dispositions and manners appear more plain than famous battles won, wherein are slain ten thousand men.' Plutarch's object is ' to decipher the man and his nature,' as he says in the beginning of his ' Nicias,' when he confesses that he has lightly passed over many things that Thucydides has told. He certainly neglects the background, giving the life without the times, even to the detriment of the decipherment of nature (as sometimes we cannot help feeling) ; but when he has succeeded so wonderfully, who shall dare to speak of a flaw in his method ? Who will lift up his voice against a plan which has given us such a number of delightful anecdotes, some of which are often attri- buted to authors much posterior to Plutarch? It is to him we owe the phrase ' to call a spade a spade ' ; he it is who has told us that when the Olynthian politicians complained to Philip that they were called traitors in Macedon because they had betrayed their city, the king replied, ' We Macedonians are a rude folk ; we call a spade a spade.' The same king on another occasion was silenced by a retort also recorded by Plutarch. He was arguing without any special knowledge with a musician on a question touching the musical art, when the latter closed the
PLUTARCH 183
discussion with the words, ' God forbid your Majesty- should know as much about these things as a mere artist Hke myself.' An answer recojded by him as given by Alexander the Great is interesting because Seneca^ calls it utterly foolish though he admits that it sounds spirited and princely. Spirited and princely it certainly sounds to us. A humble friend asked him for some help towards a dowry for his daughter. Alexander gave him fifty talents. This seemed to the applicant to be far too much, and he desired that the gift should be greatly reduced. ' But,' said the king ' though such a sum might be enough for you to receive, it would not be enough for me to give.' One is reminded of the indignation of another kingly-minded man, Julius Caesar, when the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom. ' Make it fifty,' said Caesar, ' you do not know my value, such a small ransom would be an insult' This story, illustrating so well the soaring spirit of the great Roman, we owe to Plutarch, as well as Alexander's neat remark about his vicegerent, Anti- pater. A friend called attention to the plain apparel of Antipater, and commended his modesty and humility. ' Yes,' said Alexander, * his outer man is plain, but his spirit is always " en grande tenue." ' ^ Very subtle, too, is the * mot ' ascribed by him to the wise man, Chilon, who, when some one boasted to him that he had not an enemy, put to him the significant question, ' Have you a friend ? ' Some of his happy anecdotes, happy as apt illustrations of
^ Animosa vox videtur et regia cum sit stultissima^ *De Beneficiis,' ii. 16.
^ Toi, 5^ ivhov 6\oTr6p<f>vpos.
1 84 PLUTARCH
character, have already been quoted. Others would be well worthy of record if space permitted. So would some of his grand tableaux, such as those in which he depicts the defeat and death of Crassus, who went deliberately to meet his doom because ' it will be better to have it said that a Roman general was deceived by the enemy than abandoned by his own men.' Very impressive and picturesque is his description of the last hours of Cato in Utica, that great soul to whom Mommsen refers as the fool who spoke the epilogue in the drama of the fall of the Roman republic. If Cato was a fool in any sense, it was not in the vein of Touchstone and Parolles, caustic but genial critics of life. It was in the way of Don Quixote — a noble way, which Mommsen was unable to understand. Yet he was no Don Quixote either. It was not against windmills that he tilted, though it was against objects equally impervious to his lance. The death of Pompey was called by Chateaubriand ' le plus beau morceau du Plutarque,' and has been reproduced by every historian of Rome.
We would here put before our readers a scene or two in which Plutarch's treatment of the theme may be compared with that of a brother artist, and it will be seen that Plutarch does not suffer by the com- parison. The suicide of Otho is described both by Tacitus-^ and by Plutarch,^ and the two have evi- dently used the same authorities. Here is the Taci- tean account taken from Church and Brodribb : —
' Towards evening he quenched his thirst with a draught. Two daggers were brought to him. He tried the edge of both, and then put one under his
^ ' Hist.' ii. 49. 2 <otho,'xvii.
PLUTARCH 185
head. After satisfying himself that his friends had set out, he passed a tranquil night, and it is even said that he slept. At dawn he fell with his breast upon the steel. Hearing a groan from the dying man his freedmen and slaves came in. They found but one wound. His funeral was hastily performed. He had made this the subject of earnest entreaties, anxious that his head might not be cut off and sub- jected to indignities. The Boeotian cohorts carried his body with praises and tears, covering his wound and his hands with kisses. Some of the soldiers killed themselves near the funeral pile, not moved by remorse or fear, but by the desire to emulate his glory and by affection for their prince.'
Plutarch's account of the same scene has all the dignity of Tacitus, and has preserved besides, in the dying emperor's concern for his friends and his freedmen, some pathetic touches which the Tacitean narrative lacks : —
* Towards evening he was athirst and drank a little water. Then he carefully examined the edge of two daggers which were beside him, and laid aside one, placing the other under his arm. ... He spent the rest of the night in repose so unbroken that his chamberlains were astonished at the sound- ness of his sleep. In the morning he summoned a freedman who had assisted him in the division of his property among his friends, and, learning from him that each of them had received what he desired, said, " go, then, and show yourself to the troops, if you do not want to meet a violent death at their hands as having helped to cause my death." When the man left, he held the dagger, point upwards, in both
1 86 PLUTARCH
hands and threw himself down on it. The pain wrung from him only one groan, which was the first notice the household had of his tragic end. When the slaves lifted up the dead body and exposed it to the public view, the whole camp and city were filled with lamentations. The soldiers burst noisily into the house, and in the excess of their grief cursed their negligence in not keeping a close watch on their emperor and thus baffling his noble self- immolation in their behalf Though the enemy were hard by, not one of the soldiers would leave the corse. Without even removing their armour, they made a pyre, and carried the dead emperor out. Those who succeeded in outstripping the others in the race for the honour of bearing the bier were proud men. The less fortunate contented themselves with throwing themselves on the corse and kissing the wound. Others clasped the dead hands, and others, who could not get near, prostrated themselves in adoration. Some, after applying the torch to the pyre, slew themselves, not, so far as is known, through gratitude for benefits received, or through fear of the vengeance of the conqueror. No, never was king or tyrant animated by a love of power so prodigious or so passionate as was their craving to be servants to Otho and to do his bidding. Even after his death regret for his loss never left them, but endured in undying hatred of Vitellius.'
It is hard to account for this extraordinary en- thusiasm for the effeminate Otho, who, according to Juvenal, plastered his face with bread poultices and carried his mirror with him to the battlefield.^ He
^ speculum civilis sarcina belli ^ * Sat.' ii. 103.
PLUTARCH 187
must have had some trait which appealed strongly to the soldiery. One recalls a somewhat similar case during the Boer war.
It is no small triumph to come with advantage out of a comparison with Tacitus. We have not space here to set beside each other the Plutarchean and Thucydidean narratives of the last days of Nicias, but a reader of Thucydides ^ and of Plutarch ^ will find, we think, in the former, fine as it is, noth- ing so touching as the last words of Plutarch's twenty-sixth chapter : —
' While all were weeping and wailing in their terror and agony of mind, Nicias, sick though he was, seldom broke down. When he did, it was plain that he was not thinking of himself, but of the ignominious issue of the expedition and the collapse of the soaring ambition of Athens. What struck people most was the injustice of his fate, — a feeling that was aggravated when they remembered how he had argued and pleaded against the disastrous inva- sion of Sicily. Indeed, in some their trust in Pro- vidence experienced a severe shock, when they saw a man of such eminence, of such unimpeachable life and exemplary piety, involved in the same ruin with the most degraded and abandoned of the rank and file.'
But let us no more compare Plutarch with the artists of the ancient world. Let us hasten to his crowning triumph, to the fact that the Master Mind of all time, the Artist of Artists, not only drew from him the materials for his amazing pictures of the ancient world, but sometimes transferred to his plays
^ vii. 86. ^ * Nicias,' xxvi.-xxviii.
1 88 PLUTARCH
whole scenes from the ' Lives ' with scarcely a phrase or a word altered or modified. Had Plutarch never written his ' Lives/ or had they not been translated by some sympathetic mind like Sir Thomas North's, it is very unlikely that the world would ever have had ' Coriolanus,' ' Julius Caesar,' or ' Antony and Cleopatra.' The whole play of * Julius Caesar ' is to be found in Plutarch, and often the very wording of North's version is adopted un- altered ; oftener, however, a happy touch is dwelt on and developed, — the lines deepened or the colour heightened. A good example of the latter mode of dealing with the materials is afforded by Antony's speech in * Julius Caesar,' perhaps the finest speci- men in literature of the orator's art and its influence on an urban multitude. Here is the fine passage ^ in Plutarch which Shakespeare's art has immor- talized : —
' To conclude his oration he unfolded before the whole assembly the bloody garments of the dead, thrust through in many places with their swords, and called the malefactors cruel and cursed mur- therers.'
We all know the grand passage in * Julius Caesar ' : —
' If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. You all do know this mantle : I remember The first time Caesar ever put it on ; 'T was on a summer's evening in his tent : That day he overcame the Nervii. Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through : See what a rent the envious Casca made :
1 'Ant.' 14.
PLUTARCH 189
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd,
And, as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it,
As rushing out of doors to be resolved
If Brutus so unkindly knock'd or no.
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel.' ^
The final words in the passage of Plutarch about ' calling them murtherers ' find their poetic conse- cration in
' O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers.'
Here we have the original Greek passage treated with great freedom and, perhaps, in one place a little spoiled by one of those conceits which were so dear to the Elizabethan age, and which even Shakespeare could not resist. Throughout the play of * Antony and Cleopatra' the correspondence with Plutarch is modified by the fact that Antony, as he was and as Plutarch portrayed him, would not have made a hero of tragedy. The coarse rufifian and debauchee is refined by Shakespeare into the victim of the spells of an eastern enchantress, a Ulysses in the toils of Circe or Calypso, but one who is sober and wise enough to recognize that he has lost the world for a woman, even though he count it well lost, one who is able to sum up his ruined career in the pathetic words, ' I have lost my way in the world.'
But in this play there is one perfect example of the confidence with which the ' myriad-minded ' Englishman was content to put himself into the hands of the simple Boeotian, borrowing from him every artistic touch, and adding only the dramatic
1 iii. 2, 174-185.
190 PLUTARCH
framework. Greece took captive her proud Roman conqueror, but never had she a greater triumph over posterity than when a Greek wrote a scene on which not even a Shakespeare could make an improve- ment.
The final scene of Cleopatra's life is thus told by- Plutarch (North's version) : —
' Her death was very sudden, for those whom Caesar sent to her ran hither in all haste possible, and found the soldiers standing at the gate, mis- trusting nothing, nor understanding of her death. But when they had opened the doors, they found Cleopatra stark dead, laid upon a bed of gold, attired and arrayed in her royal robes, and one of her two women which was called Iras dead at her feet, and her other woman (called Charmian) half dead and trembling, trimming the diadem which Cleopatra wore upon her head. One of the soldiers, seeing her, angrily said unto her "Is that well done, Charmian?" "Very well," said she again, "and meet for a princess descended from the race of so many noble Kings." She said no more, but fell down dead hard by the bed.'
Here is Shakespeare's version accepting every artistic touch and adding practically nothing except the dramatic form and metrical garb.
' Enter the Guard rushing in. First Guard. Where is the Queen ?
Char. Speak softly, wake her not.
First Guard. Caesar hath sent —
Char. Too slow a messenger.
[Applies an asp.] O, come apace, despatch ! I partly feel thee. First Guard. Approach, ho ! All's not well : Caesar's beguil'd.
PLUTARCH 191
Sec. Guard. There's Dolabella sent from Caesar : call him. First Guard. What work is here? Charmian, is this well
done? Char. It is well done, and fitting for a princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
Ah, soldier. \^Dies^
Reenter Dolabella. DoL How goes it here ? Sec. Guard. All dead.
Dol. Caesar, thy thoughts
Touch their effects in this : thyself art coming
To see perform'd the dreaded act which thou
So sought'st to hinder.
[ Within?[ A way there, a way for Caesar ! Reenter Caesar and all his train marching. Dol. O, Sir, you are too sure an augurer.
That you did fear is done. Caes. Bravest at the last,
She levell'd at our purposes, and, being royal.
Took her own way. The manner of their deaths ?
I do not see them bleed. Dol. Who was last with them ?
First Guard. A simple countryman that brought her figs :
This was his basket. Caes. Poison'd, then.
First Guard. O, Caesar,
This Charmian lived but now ; she stood and spake :
I found her trimming up the diadem
On her dead mistress ; tremblingly she stood
And on the sudden dropp'd.' ^
Such is the tale as told by Plutarch, and such is the scene as dramatized by Shakespeare. Even the soldier's indignant question, — probably resting upon some basis of tradition, for who would have imagined such words from a soldier ? — and Charmian's splendid
^ 'Ant. and Cleop.' v. 2, 323-347.
192 PLUTARCH
reply are hardly modified. Shakespeare takes here and there words, phrases, even speeches, as by royal right from various writers. But we do not elsewhere find so large and beautiful a picture transferred with every detail to his enduring canvas. In this proud boast Plutarch has no rivals.
Shakespeare is seen at his worst when he puts Holinshed into blank verse, but he rises to his noblest heights in some of his adaptations of Plut- arch. It was in his power of realizing a character or scene already sketched in outline, that his consum- mate genius lay.
The ' Coriolanus ' not only adopts whole speeches from North's ' Plutarch,' but is penetrated through- out with the diction and thought of that work. The first sentence of the * Life ' is reproduced almost verbally in 'Coriolanus,' ii. 3, 244 f. 'Coriolanus,' iii. I, 69 f.,
' In soothing them we nourish 'gainst our senate The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition'
has its origin in North's * They nourished against themselves the naughty seed and cockle of insolence and sedition.' Sometimes Shakespeare apologizes for an extravagance of fancy or diction in North, as, for instance, where North has ' And so the belly, all this notwithstanding, laughed at their folly and said.' Shakespeare makes Menenius justify the figure : —
* With a kind of smile Which ne'er came from the lungs, but even thus — For, look you, I may make the belly smile As well as speak — it tauntingly replied.'
We add two passages showing how closely Shake-
PLUTARCH 193
speare adhered to the text of North. Here is the passage on which he built the speech of Coriolanus at the house of Tullus Aufidius, the general of the Volscians : —
* I am Caius Marcius, who hath done to thyself particularly and to all the Volsces generally great hurt and mischief, which I cannot deny for my sur- name of Coriolanus that I bear. For I never had any other benefit or recompense of the true and painful service I have done and the extreme dangers I have been in but this only surname ; a good memory and witness of the malice and displeasure thou shouldest bear me. Indeed, the name only remaineth with me ; for the rest the envy and cruelty of the people of Rome have taken from me by the sufferance of the dastardly nobility and magistrates who have forsaken me and let me be banished by the people. This extremity hath now driven me to come as a poor suitor, to take thy chimney-hearth, not of any hope I have to save my life thereby : for if I had feared death I would not have come hither to put myself in hazard : but pricked forward with desire to be revenged of them that have thus ban- ished me ; which now I do begin in putting my person into the hands of their enemies. Wherefore, if thou hast any heart to be wreaked of the injuries thy enemies have done thee, speed thee now, and let my misery serve thy turn, and so use it as my services may be a benefit to the Volsces : promising thee that I will fight with better good will for all you than I did when I was against you, knowing that they fight more valiantly who know the force of the enemy than such as have never proved it. And if it be so
N
194 PLUTARCH
that thou dare not, and that thou art weary to prove fortune any more, then am I also weary to live any longer. And it were no wisdom in thee to save the life of him who hath been heretofore thy mortal enemy, and whose service now can nothing help nor pleasure thee.' ^
Compare the following passage from North's * Plutarch ' with Shakespeare's * Coriolanus,' v. 3,
94 f.
' If we held our peace, my son, and determined not to speak, the state of our poor bodies and present sight of our raiment would easily bewray to thee what life we have led at home since thy exile and abode abroad ; but think now with thyself how much more unfortunate than all the women living we are come hither, considering that the sight which should be most pleasant to all other to behold, spiteful fortune had made most fearful to us, making myself to see my son, and my daughter here her husband, besieging the walls of his native country : so as that which is the only comfort to all other in their adver- sity and misery, to pray unto the gods and to call to them for aid, is the only thing which plungeth us into most deep perplexity. For we cannot, alas ! both together pray for victory to our country and for safety of thy life also ; but a world of grievous curses, yea more than any mortal enemy can heap upon us, are forcibly wrapt up in our prayers. . . . Moreover, my son, thou hast sorely taken of thy country, exacting grievous payments upon them in revenge of the injuries offered thee ; besides, thou hast not hitherto showed thy poor mother any
1 'Cor.'iv. 5, 65 f.
PLUTARCH 195
courtesy. And, therefore, it is not only honest, but due unto me, that without compulsion I should obtain my so just and reasonable request of thee.'
The scene in ' Corlolanus,' v. 3, where Volumnia employs the child Marcius to work upon his father has a pathetic touch not in Plutarch : —
' Speak thou, boy, Perhaps thy childishness will move him more Than can our reasons.'
Minor loans from North's ' Plutarch ' will be recognized in ' Timon of Athens ' compared with Plutarch's ' Antonius,' 38, and ' Alcibiades/ 4; and in 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' ii. i, 75-80, where Shakespeare takes the name Perigenia from Plut- arch's 'Theseus,' i, Ariadne from ib. 3, Aegle from ib. 4, and Antiopa and Hippolyta from ib. 8. Indeed, almost all the foreign names in Shakespeare come from Plutarch. The strange name Caphis in ' Timon' is found in Plutarch's ' Sulla.' Hannibal, in ' Mea- sure for Measure,' ii. i, no doubt comes from Plut- arch, and so does the story of Alexander and Clitus, alluded to in 'Henry V.' iv. 7, 41. In 'Julius Caesar,' iv. 3, 178, 'Cicero being one,' looks very like a reminiscence of Plutarch, ' Brutus,' 20, ' and among that number Cicero was one.' ' Et tu Brute' appears in 'Julius Caesar,' iii. i, "jj^ but not in Plutarch.
As a psychologist Plutarch might be compared advantageously with Seneca, but the latter is theo- retical while the former is practical. Plutarch thor- oughly understands human character, observes it with great intelligence, and describes it luminously ; but he observes as a man, not as a metaphysician, to
N 2
196 PLUTARCH
borrow a shrewd observation from Emerson. He sounds the depths and scales the heights of the great problems of existence, but, like Tennyson's shepherd, he loves not the heights,
* Nor cares to walk With Death and morning on the silver horns.'
Like Love, Plutarch is 'of the valley ' and ' by the happy threshold.' ' He has a taste,' writes Emer- son, ' for common life. He knows the farm, the forge, the kitchen, and every kitchen utensil.' He revels in 'the little murmur of the burg' of Chaeronea, but he is far from mistaking it for ' the great wave that rolls around the world.' It would be pleasant to follow Plutarch into his private life, to sketch the Greek village of the first century after Christ, to examine his views on love, and on mar- riage, which he makes a very prosaic relation, en- livened only by the excursions and alarums of the mother-in-law, who even at that early period of the world's history had begun to make herself felt. But all this would afford material enough for another essay. We will now make a few observations on a couple of the best and most suggestive of his moral treatises, that on Superstition, called by Wyttenback ' liber vere Plutarcheusl and that on the ' Delays in Divine Justice,' concluding with some general remarks on Plutarch's method and style.
The moralists of the ancient world, Seneca, Per- sius, Juvenal, Lucian, have been bitter satirists. Even Persius, when he describes himself (far from accur- ately) as a laugher {cachinnd) adds ' with an angry spleen.' But Plutarch is never bitter, never applies
PLUTARCH 197
even the light lash of Horace, under which Persius says his victims smiled. He pities the sufferers from the plague of superstition, and tries to alleviate their miseries and excuse their weakness. Superstition is not so great an error as atheism, but it entails more suffering. He compares the atheist to the man who is colour blind. The atheist lacks a great source of hap- piness, but he never had it and does not know what it is. The man who is stone deaf does not suffer like him whose want of ear turns harmonies into discords. The superstitious man sees in every little ' contre- temps ' of every-day life a clear sign of the anger of Heaven and its determination to punish him. Even sleep is turned into a source of terror. ' Reversing the pleasing remark of Pythagoras that we are made better by coming into the presence of the gods, he feels as if the temples which he enters were full of serpents.' He puts God in a worse light than the atheist. ' For my part,' says Plutarch, ' I would rather have a man say of me "there is no such person as Plutarch" than ''Plutarch is unreasonable, passion- ate, vindictive, a man who, if you left him out of a supper party through inadvertence, or had not time to pay him a visit, would slander you and even ruin you." ' In fine, while the atheist says ' there is no God,' the superstitious man says ' I would there were not.' The wise man he describes as standing ' on sound solid ground between the bogs of super- stition and the quagmires of atheism.'
The treatise on the ' Delays of Divine Justice ' is full of profound remarks, among which one finds a complete recognition of heredity, and the devolution on the children of the sins of the father. The remark
198 PLUTARCH
of Cotton is anticipated, which we cannot accurately quote in English, but of which we happen to recollect the late Benjamin Hall Kennedy's happy rendering in an elegiac couplet : —
' Justitia gaudere Deum sic collige : poenas Qui meruere timent, qui timuere luunt.'
The treatise is an attempt to lead an age, prone to deny God, or disfigure Him, back to the god of Plato. Plutarch has no doubt of the immortality of the soul. ' Miserable man,' he exclaims, * is he who shuts the gates of another life. He is like a man who, over- taken by a storm at sea, would say to his fellow voyagers " we have no pilot to steer or star to guide us. But what matter? We shall soon be dashed against the rocks or engulfed in the abyss." ' But a complete treatment of this delightful treatise would lead us into a discussion about the religion of the first century of the Christian era.
Niebuhr, to the great injury of his reputation for literary or psychological insight, called the ' Lives ' a collection of silly anecdotes, and others have accused Plutarch of not duly weighing his authori- ties. But the charge cannot be sustained. For instance, he warns his readers of the chronologi- cal difficulties which beset the story of the interview between Solon and Croesus ; but that does not seem to him a sufficient reason for suppressing a tale so instructive and so natural. Besides, we find him expressly weighing rival authorities, as in the forty- sixth chapter of his ' Alexander,' where he recites the evidence for and against Alexander's relations with the Amazonian queen, and decides against the
PLUTARCH 199
story. In a similar spirit, in ' Lysander,' he rejects the tale of a characteristic correspondence between Lysander and the Ephors, who, receiving from him the despatch, ' Athens is taken,' said, ' taken would have been quite sufficient' Plutarch's comment is, in effect, that the anecdote is ben trovato, but that there is no positive evidence for its truth. It is sus- piciously like other tales illustrating the Spartan love of laconic speech. In like manner in ' Themistocles,' 25, he rejects a statement of Stesimbrotus, quoting against him Theophrastus and Thucydides ; and in many other places we find him exercising the same caution.
The style of Plutarch has been almost universally admired, but there have been dissentients. Johnson found it cramped, and Boissonade described it as a mosaic, apparently because he makes his style fit his theme, and according to its requirements employs the language of the historian, the poet, the naturalist, "and the metaphysician. Chateaubriand said he was * un agreable imposteur en tours naifs,' and another French critic has said that he owes to his French translator, Amyot, any charm that he possesses. But M. Greard, in his excellent work on Plutarch's ' Morals,' puts the case in its true light. Plutarch had a real candour and geniality of spirit. His cultivation of rhetoric modified these qualities, but was very far from eradicating them. ' How is it,' remarked a French statesman, * that French boys of ten are so charmingly clever, and French youths of twenty-four so intolerably stupid ? It is the effect of education, I suppose.' But education did not debauch the style of Plutarch. It left it as simple
200 PLUTARCH
as his life. Of course we do not find in him the nafvete of primitive literature, but still less are we met by the artificial simplicity of periods of literary decadence. The ' tours naifs ' of Plutarch are leaps of a mind which lets itself out, not the taught somer- saults of the gymnasium. He does not seek for his effects, they drop from him, as the jewels dropped from the lips of the good princess in the fairy tale. Plutarch was an enormously wide reader, but it can- not be said of him, as it can be said of many learned men, that he put out the fire by heaping on the coals. He obeys the Horatian precept : —
' Si vis me flere, dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi,'
and when he is warmed by his theme he never allows his readers to be cold.
INDEX.
The Index is intended to supplement the Table of Contents. Subjects to be found readily there are not mentioned in the Index, which records chiefly references to persons.
A. Aelian, 130. Ajax, 34, 151. Alcibiades, 7. Althea, 146. Amyot, 180. Anecdotes, 181 ff. Apollo, 33.
Apollonius Rhodius, 147. Arcesilaus, 6. Archinus, 113. Aristotle, vi. 44, 69, 92 ff. Arnold, M., 9, 35, 142. Atheism, 197, Athene, Temple at Aegina, 25.
B. Blass, 163.
Browning, E. B., 20, 37. Burial rite and marriage tie,
83- Bury, V. 151.
Caesar, 183. Callibius, 113. Cedo, 107. Chaucer, 34. Chaumont, 3. Cicero, i, 122. Conjecture, 76. Cylon, 7. Cyrene, 7, 33.
D. Davidson (Strachan), 171. Delphi, I. De Rep., 85. Dissen, 9. Doyle, 36.
E. Eliot, Geo., 30. Eton, 5.
F. Flamininus, 179.
G. Gilbert, 118. Gildersleeve, 28. Goethe, 57.
H. Haemon, 60 f.
Hedge Schoolmaster, vii. 171. Herwerden, vii. Hiero, 6, 138. Homer, i, 68. Horace, i. Housman, 162. Hyperides, 85.
J- Jebb, 25, 48 ff., 135. Juvenal, 172, 175.
202
INDEX
K. Kenyon, 93, loi, 120, 135.
L. La Harpe, 3. Latinisms, 128. Lucullus, 173. Lucian, 118. Lytton, 62.
M. Mahaffy, 88, 90, 175. Merivale, 178. Mezger, 12.
Milton, 32, 147, 148, 152. Morice, 5. Myers, 5.
N. Niebuhr, 198. Nomic structure, 13 ff. ' Non-intervention ' construc- tion, 74. North, 180, 192, 193, 195.
Otho, 184, 186.
P.
Paley, 53. Palmer, 136. Paton, 98. Petrie, 87. Phocion, 80. Pisistratidae, 107. Plato, I.
Plutarch, 96, 100, 129. Pollux, 118. Polyaenus, 104. Proetus, 150. Punch, 66.
'^^4/fp^^^^
Rhino, 113. Rossetti, 88, 148.
S. Sandys, 132, 136. Shakespeare, 31, 45, T2>^ I39,
154. Shapira, 94. Shelley, 147. Simonides, 139, 149.^ Solon, 98, 102, 103. Swinburne, 23. ^-^^ P^^'^''^^ ^^ Symonds, 3, 9. {ni ^ jl,^-^
T.
Tacitus, 184, 185. Tennyson, 14. Terpander, 13. Thackeray, 45. Theramenes, 112. Thrasybulus, 113. Thucydides, 107, 187 ff. Timocreon, 29, 40, 54. Trevelyan, 49.
V.
Villemain, 35. Voltaire, 3, 'i'].
W.
Warren, 45. Westphal, 12. Wordsworth, 47. Wyttenback, 196.
X.
Xenocrates, 5. Xerxes, 8.
Z.
Zenobius, 131.
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