The Male Characters of Euripides by
E M Blaiklock
Continued from P. 70
In the neuroses of war, the baser passions too readily gain sway. Says the messenger:
Well might men choose such battle-chief as this, Who is in peril's midst a tower of strength,
But hates the scorners who, in fortune's hour Seeking to mount the ladder's topmast round,
• Let slip the bliss that lay within their hand
(Supp. 726-730. Way)
The lines are bold criticism. No such leaders were left in Athens. Even Adrastus is impressed. If only he himself had acted thus, and so led Argos against Thebes!
O foolish men
Who strain the bow beyond the mark, and suffer
Much harm at justice’. hand, and yield at last
Not to friend’s mediation, but stern facts!
(Supp. 744-747. Way)
What, asks Adrastus, of the bodies for which Athens had gone to war? Slaves, surely, turned their hand to such a loathly task?
No, the messenger replies, friends' hands, free hands, gathered the rotting corpses. Theseus himself in ministry of love washed the bodies, and veiled them on the biers. ‘Patriotic plays,’writes Gilbert Murray, ‘are generally too shallow and boastful to make good literature. But it is interesting to see what qualities the patriot boasts about. Euripides idealises Athens as the the helper of the oppressed, the champion of Hellenism and true piety, but also as the city of enlightenment. For when the putrefying bodies are recovered from the field, the old practice would have been first to treat them as polluted and let only slaves tend them, and next to lay them before their mothers so as to increase the weeping. Theseus tends them and
"shows them love" himself and keeps the mothers away from the hideous sight. It is the Hellenism or humanity of Athens that Euripides loved, and her failure in that is the cause of his quarrel with her. In a manner exactly similar Theseus incarnates this ideal again in the Hercules Furens. The stricken hero in that play has murdered his children in a fit of madness, for which, as we shall see, he had no moral responsibility.
Theseus appears, refuses to recognise pollution in a deed for which there is no just blood-guiltiness, and leads his mind-sick friend to Athens. Such sons of Erechtheus were found in the best men's dreams. The moral excellence from which they sprang found the atmosphere of that decade a bleak climate.
After a simple, poignant choric song-bitter words for men and women who found echoes of every note and phrase in memories of dead kin—Theseus marches in with his troops in solemn procession, bearing the covered bodies of the slain Argives. It was a spectacle bold in its suggestiveness. The subtle protest against war which infuses this play is reaching its climax.
There is wild keening for the dead. Moderns have
been impatient over the catalogue of slain heroes which follows, and it is to be admitted that the enumeration of the dead heroes and their virtues is as foreign to modern taste as the Homeric account of their battle which appears in the Phoenissae. Euripides was not, however, writing for a modern audience, and it is perhaps of some significance that Adrastus recites the catalogue at Theseus' request. It is probable that the ancient world liked such recitation. Polynesians find inspiration in the mere declamation of genealogies, and the reason is that the names are suggestive of folklore and history. It was for such a reason, as Warde Fowler in The Gathering of the Clans, points out, that the Seventh Book of the Aeneid would appeal to Romans much more strongly than it does to us. Neither did the oft-telling of a tale tatigue the ancient listener. Ion told Socrates in the vivid little dialogue which bears his name, how his audience wept at the words he declaimed. It made no difference that they had wept since childhood over Andromache's farewell, and old Priam kissing the hands that had destroyed so many of his sons. It is clear therefore that no artistic blemish would have been censured by ancient Athens in Euripides enumeration of the Argive heroes. This, of course, suggests no comparison between the supreme poetry of the Homeric passages and the rather dull sequence in Euripides. The catalogue of heroes would bear little repetition. As part of an impressive scene it was probably most etlective none the less.
It is part of the pageantry of the play. aGathering of the Clans,