The Male Characters Of Euripides

The Male Characters Of Euripides by Professor E M Blaiklock MA

Continues from Page 62

THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES
Euripides, close to events, still hoped. The breathless repeat of Athens, downfall, rights page in his very eloquent
introduction to he Medea, Is indeed a constant source of wonder. in toughest outline, discovery, enjoyment, and discontent should have been the natural stages of the city's evolution. Men build their empire out of poverty and hardship; then rest awhile to enjoy their comfort and security; later, since peace and plenty breed satiety, a generation which has not toiled demands repose no longer, convention and comfort recreate the restless and the critical, decline or change comes quickly. The tragic difference of Athens was that she omitted the intermediate phase. She climbed to the peak of her mountain, and rushed straight down without stopping to enjoy the prospect. Athens had no Victorian age'
At any rate, when he made Demophon, he was building into a synthetic character the sentiments of his day. In Thucydides, who austerely traces the main movement of history over a wider plane, the existence of such ideals is not noted. Euripides, to that extent, corrects the historian. There was still faith in the darkness.
Such is the measure of the realism in this drama. In form the play is unreal, even fantastic. It is nevertheless a document of solid historical interest. One man at least remembered in that day what Athens stood for, and sought to set such truth before his countrymen. The play does not, therefore, stand with the Iphigenia in lauris as an exception to the general rule that Euripides chief interest was in character, and not in plot.
For all the care with which a truly Aristotelian TrEpITÉTELa (Translation needed here please) is worked out, it is clear that Demophon and lolaus were Euripides' reason for the play.
And Iolaus? Yes, if lolaus was a whimsical satire! When Euripides wrote the Heracleidae he was fifty-three years of age-or fifty-eight if the birthdate of the Parian Marble is accepted. He was on the threshold of old age, one of life's periods of manifold adjustment. The human likelihood that he would himself carry a spear in the conflict which he watched with such fascinated interest, was remote. He watched the young men embark at the Peiraeus, and saw the sweep of their long oars as the galleys nosed down the gulf. He saw the young ride out to harry the Spartan raiders among the burned barns of Attica. Boys he knew had gone ashore in the grey of dawn round the shores of Peloponnese. The old men sat at home and won the war by argument. None are so bellicose as non combatants.

SONS OF ERECHTHEUS
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combatants. Euripides, ever observant, ever self-critical, watched the old men, watched himself. He had written into verse his love of fatherland. He had glorified like Pericles the city of his love. He felt, as age will, the stirrings of old desire, and the call to service. And yet, in the nature of flesh, how to serve? If young men see visions, old men, according to the Hebrew prophet, dream dreams. One of those dreams was Iolaus, the old warrior who won back his youth for the space of a forenoon and carried off the spolia opima. (Latin for "rich spoils")
Shameful it is-this loitering at home,
That some should fight, some, craven souls, hold back.
It was Euripides speaking, speaking to himself and to the garrulous members of the fraternity of age whose tellowship he was about to enter. He took Iolaus to battle, spread the mist of two divine presences about his chariot, set a heavenly star a-gleaming over the horses' yoke, and clothed him like a hero of Homer with glowing youth. The elaborate fantasy is deliberate. The poet in it tells himself that these dreams have no reality. They can never come true, for on no modern field of strife will the mists of epic deities clothe the cars of warriors.
The silver and the gold of rejuvenating gods and goddesses are found only in lands like Scheria, and in the world of myth and drama. Iolaus is a satire, whimsical, pathetic, full of the sweetest of all humour, that which laughs at itself. 'Aged friends,' said the poet, 'so might we destroy Lacedaemon. We cannot march off with the boys. A legion of impossibilities stand between us and Brasidas. Only a god could sweep them away-like this.' Remembering the defiant chorus they had sung with such gusto, the old men of Athens might feel duly chilled.

Continuing from p. 64 THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES

Viewed thus, the Chorus of the Heracleidae "imitates' life with a touch of pathos.
If Wilamowitz is correct in fixing on 427 B.C. as the latest date for the Heracleidae, the Supplices must be separated from its companion play by six or seven years. The play must have appeared when the Peace of Nicias and the prospect of alliance with Argos were common topics in the àyopá and the barbers' shops. Cleon and Brasidas were both dead the year before.
A sore and bleeding state might well pause, hope a little, tend its wounds, and look back with exasperation on the pain and hysteria of an incredible decade. Hence the critical tone of the Supplices-and its post-war pessimism, which as Kitto! says,
'in eulogies... is best omitted.' It is difficult to say in a word what the theme of the play is meant to be-a difficulty with which Euripides not infrequently presents us. We have already quoted with some disapproval the verdict of the Argument that it purports to be eyecov Anuûv. Is it, as Kitto suggests, a development of the theme ‘quidquid delirant reges plectuntur Argivi? (Meaning: Whatever folly the kings commit, the Greeks [or subjects] pay the penalty") The suppliant women themselves are dramatic and passionate enough characters in all conscience.
Their hideous suffering dominates the very magnificent pageant which this play at least succeeds in presenting, while Evadne's suttee must have left the audience in Athens as horrified and aghast as a similar scene in a setting of maharajahs and Brahmin wives might have left a modern audience, before the devices of Hollywood came to steal the thunder of all such coups de théâtre. We shall see in the Phoenissae a deliberate attempt to reflect in human personalities and fortunes the horrors of a war.
Evadne and Iphis play such a role. Hellas, indeed, Sopularns ảmóNurai (Interpration please) It is a far cry from this to the more heroic and hopeful atmosphere of the Heraceidae. There are, nevertheless, recognisable similarities. Theseus is set forth like Demophon, and like Aneas too in Virgil’s plan and purpose, as the embodiment of a civilized ideal. Adrastus , like Iolaus, and like
Turnus, for all his nobility and worth, is visibly inferior, without the sovereign qualities, without the cultured chivalry, without, in short, the owppooún
(2°Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, Eng. ed., vol. II, PP. 300, 301, defines the word neatly.
•Discretion, moderation, temperance,
modesty, self-control-each of these words
contain a part, but none the whole of it. "Health of soul" is the etymological meaning of the Greek word.... But such a literal translation readily opens the door to mis-understandings. When we speak of healthy or wholesome natures, and the like, that which is dimly present to our minds by way of contrast is artificiality, weakness, or perversion of the primitive instincts and impulses of human nature. Not so with the Hellene. For him the great foe was excess; and health of soul meant for him principally the subjugation of exuberant force to the normal measure, to a standard determined mainly by the interests of society as a whole)
of Athens.
Self-control, a due sense of the wickedness and folly of war, bravery, nevertheless, in facing its inevitability, respect for constitutional and democratic government, freedom of spirit from the bondage and blight of cruel superstitions—these and the like are the characteristics of the true-hearted Athenian. It is Pericles over again, this time through Theseus. To that extent the poet of the drama is interested in actuality. Mahaffy in his History of Greek Literature, wrote of the two plays reviewed in this chapter that, 'If it be true that these plays were brought to the stage within three or four years of one another, during the shifting interests of the Peloponnesian War, it will prove how completely Euripides regarded them as temporary political devices, varying with the situation.... We may perceive a growing tendency in tragedy to become a written record, and to appeal to the reading public instead of the listening crowd in the theatre.' The remark is just as true if the plays were produced within six or seven years of each other. To bear in mind that Euripides was probably quite conscious of this dual division of his public is a useful aid to the understanding of his work. For the listening public the poet had his ration of romance, of pageantry, of rhetoric; for his reading public, his more appreciative minority, he had the stronger meat of realism with its seasoning of satire. The latter diet was mingled with the greater portion of his own sincerity.
The Supplices is typical of the plays which show him in this divided rôle. For the mass there was a series of dramatic tableaux, for the discerning something more than a pageant of Athens' greatness. There was criticism, and the revelation in human personalities of the ideas which filled men's minds at that point of time and space. The characters may be again like those of the Heracleidae, synthetic. Character is painted, however, in the line and color of word and deed, and in the men of the Supplices Euripides shows utterance and action, the roots and origin of which the thoughtful found in the familiar movements of their own hearts and minds. The poet of such drama is fundamentally a realist. Actuality is still the raw material.
The play opens with Aethra seated at the altar surrounded by Argive suppliants. The women who hold the olive boughs the mothers of the Seven who lie unburied before Thebes, their attendants. Aside Adrastus lies, shorn of his pride, the sons of the dead with him,
his eyes with tears
Drowned, mourning for the battle-shivered spear,
And that ill starred array led forth of him.
(Supp. 21-23. Way)