Mosaics of Grecian History Part 34

The reputation of Pindar early became so great that he was employed, by various states and princes, to compose choral songs for special occasions. Like Simonides, he "loved to bask in the sunshine of courts;" but he was frank, sincere, and manly, a.s.suming a lofty and dignified position toward princes and others in authority with whom he came in contact. He was especially courted by Hiero, despot of Syracuse, but remained with him only a few years, his manly disposition creating a love for an independent life that the courtly arts of his patron could not furnish. As his poems show, he was a reserved man, learned in the myths and ceremonies of the times, and specially devoted to the worship of the G.o.ds.

"The old myths," says a Greek biographer, "were for the most part realities to him, and he accepted them with implicit credence, except when they exhibited the G.o.ds in a point of view which was repugnant to his moral feelings; and he accordingly rejects some tales, and changes others, because they are inconsistent with his moral conceptions." As a poet correctly describes him, using one of the names commonly applied to him,

Pindar, that eagle, mounts the skies, While virtue leads the n.o.ble way.

--PRIOR.

The poems of Pindar were numerous, and comprised triumphal odes, hymns to the G.o.ds, paeans, dirges, and songs of various kinds.

His triumphal odes alone have come down to us entire; but of some of his other compositions there are a few sublime and beautiful fragments. The poet and his writings cannot be better described than in the following general characterization by SYMONDS:

"By the force of his originality Pindar gave lyrical poetry a wholly new direction, and, coming last of the great Dorian lyrists, taught posterity what sort of thing an ode should be. His grand pre-eminence as an artist was due, in great measure, to his personality. Frigid, austere, and splendid; not genial like that of Simonides, not pa.s.sionate like that of Sappho, not acrid like that of Archil'ochus; hard as adamant, rigid in moral firmness, glittering with the strong, keen light of snow; haughty, aristocratic, magnificent--the unique personality of the man Pindar, so irresistible in its influence, so hard to characterize, is felt in every strophe of his odes. In his isolation and elevation Pindar stands like some fabled heaven-aspiring peak, conspicuous from afar, girdled at the base with ice and snow, beaten by winds, wreathed round with steam and vapor, jutting a sharp and dazzling outline into cold blue ether. Few things that have life dare to visit him at his grand alt.i.tude. Glorious with sunlight and with stars, touched by rise and set of day with splendor, he shines when other lesser lights are dulled. Pindar among his peers is solitary. He had no communion with the poets of his day. He is the eagle; Simonides and Bacchyl'ides are jackdaws.

He soars to the empyrean; they haunt the valley mists. Noticing this rocky, barren, severe, glittering solitude of Pindar's soul, critics have not infrequently complained that his poems are devoid of individual interest. Possibly they have failed to comprehend and appreciate the nature of this sublime and distant genius, whose character, in truth, is just as marked as that of Dante or of Michael Angelo."

After giving some ill.u.s.trations of the impression produced upon the imagination by a study of Pindar's odes, the writer proceeds with his characterization, in the following language: "He who has watched a sunset attended by the pa.s.sing of a thunder-storm in the outskirts of the Alps--who has seen the distant ranges of the mountains alternately obscured by cloud and blazing with the concentrated brightness of the sinking sun, while drifting scuds of hail and rain, tawny with sunlight, glistening with broken rainbows, clothe peak and precipice and forest in the golden veil of flame-irradiated vapor--he who has heard the thunder bellow in the thwarting folds of hills, and watched the lightning, like a snakes tongue, flicker at intervals amid gloom and glory --knows, in Nature's language, what Pindar teaches with the voice of Art. It is only by a metaphor like this that any attempt to realize the Sturm and Drang of Pindar's style can be communicated.

As an artist he combines the strong flight of the eagle, the irresistible force of the torrent, the richness of Greek wine, and the majestic pageantry of Nature in one of her sublimer moods." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." First Series, pp. 171, 174.]

Pindar, as we have seen, was compared to an eagle, because of the daring flights and lofty character of his poetry--a simile which has been beautifully expressed in the following lines by GRAY:

The pride and ample pinion That the Theban eagle bare, Sailing with supreme dominion, Through the azure deeps of air.

Another image, also, has been employed to show these features of his poetry. The poet POPE represents him riding in a gorgeous chariot sustained by four swans:

Four swans sustain a car of silver bright, With heads advanced and pinions stretched for flight; Here, like some furious prophet, Pindar rode, And seemed to labor with th' inspiring G.o.d.

A third image, given to us by HORACE, represents another characteristic of Pindar, which may be called "the stormy violence of his song:"

As when a river, swollen by sudden showers, O'er its known banks from some steep mountain pours; So, in profound, unmeasurable song, The deep-mouthed Pindar, foaming, pours along.

--Trans. by FRANCIS.

As a sample of the religious sentiment of Pindar we give the following fragment of a threnos translated by MR. SYMONDS, which, he says, "sounds like a trumpet blast for immortality, and, trampling underfoot the glories of this world, reveals the gladness of the souls that have attained Elysium:"

For them, the night all through, In that broad realm below, The splendor of the sun spreads endless light; 'Mid rosy meadows bright, Their city of the tombs, with incense-trees And golden chalices Of flowers, and fruitage fair, Scenting the breezy air, Is laden. There, with horses and with play, With games and lyres, they while the hours away.

On every side around Pure happiness is found, With all the blooming beauty of the world; There fragrant smoke, upcurled From altars where the blazing fire is dense With perfumed frankincense, Burned unto G.o.ds in heaven, Through all the land is driven, Making its pleasant place odorous With scented gales, and sweet airs amorous.

II. THE DRAMA.

One of the most striking proofs that we possess of the rapid growth and expansion of the Greek mind, is found in the rise of the Drama, a new kind of poetical composition, which united the leading features of every species before cultivated, in a new whole "breathing a rhetorical, dialectical, and ethical spirit"

--a branch of literature that peculiarly characterized the era of Athenian greatness. Its elements were found in the religious festivals celebrated in Greece from the earliest ages, and especially in the feast of Bacchus, where sacred odes of a grave and serious character, intermixed with episodes of mythological story recited by an actor, were sung by a chorus that danced around the altar. A goat was either the princ.i.p.al sacrifice on these occasions, or the partic.i.p.ants, disguised as Satyrs, had a goat-like appearance; and from the two Greek words representing "goat" and "song" we get our word tragedy, [Footnote: From the Greek tragos, "a goat," and o'de, "a song."] or goat-song. At some of the more rustic festivals in honor of the same G.o.d the performance was of a more jocose or satirical character; and hence arose the term comedy, [Footnote: From the Greek ko'me, "a village," and o'de, "a song."] from the two Greek words signifying "village" and "song"--village-song. In the teller of mythological legends we find the first germ of dialogue, as the chorus soon came to a.s.sist him by occasional question and remark.

This feature was introduced by Thespis, a native of Ica'ria, in 535 B.C., under whose direction, and that of Phryn'icus, his pupil, the first feeble rudiments of the drama were established.

In this condition it was found by aeschylus, in 500 B.C., who brought a second actor upon the scene; whence arose the increased prominence of the dialogue, and the limitation and subsidiary character of the chorus. aeschylus also added more expressive masks, and various machinery and scenes calculated to improve and enlarge dramatic representation. Of the effect of this new creation upon all kinds of poetical genius we have the following fine ill.u.s.tration from the pen of BULWER:

"It was in the very nature of the Athenian drama that, when once established, it should concentrate and absorb almost every variety of poetical genius. The old lyrical poetry, never much cultivated in Athens, ceased in a great measure when tragedy arose; or, rather, tragedy was the complete development, the new and perfected consummation, of the dithyrambic ode. Lyrical poetry transmigrated into the choral song as the epic merged into the dialogue and plot of the drama. Thus, when we speak of Athenian poetry we speak of dramatic poetry--they were one and the same. In Athens, where audiences were numerous and readers few, every man who felt within himself the inspiration of the poet would necessarily desire to see his poetry put into action--a.s.sisted with all the pomp of spectacle and music, hallowed by the solemnity of a religious festival, and breathed by artists elaborately trained to heighten the eloquence of words into the reverent ear of a.s.sembled Greece. Hence the mult.i.tude of dramatic poets; hence the mighty fertility of each; hence the life and activity of this--the comparative torpor and barrenness of every other-- species of poetry."

1. TRAGEDY.

MELPOM'ENE, one of the nine Muses, whose name signifies "To represent in song," is said to have been the inventress of tragedy, over which she presided, always veiled, bearing in one hand the lyre, as the emblem of her vocation, and in the other a tragic mask. As queen of the lyre, every poet was supposed to proclaim the marvels of her song, and to invoke her aid.

Queen of the lyre, in thy retreat The fairest flowers of Pindus glow, The vine aspires to crown thy seat, And myrtles round thy laurel grow: Thy strings adapt their varied strain To every pleasure, every pain, Which mortal tribes were born to prove; And straight our pa.s.sions rise or fall, As, at the wind's imperious call, The ocean swells, the billows move.

When midnight listens o'er the slumbering earth, Let me, O Muse, thy solemn whispers hear: When morning sends her fragrant breezes forth, With airy murmurs touch my opening ear, --AKENSIDE.

aeSCHYLUS.

aeschylus, the first poet who rendered the drama ill.u.s.trious, and into whose character and writings the severe and ascetic doctrines of Pythagoras entered largely, was born at Eleu'sis, in Attica, in 525 B.C. He fought, as will be remembered, in the combats of Marathon and Salamis, and also in the battle of Plataea.

He therefore flourished at the time when the freedom of Greece, rescued from foreign enemies, was exulting in its first strength; and his writings are characteristic of the boldness and vigor of the age. In his works we find the fundamental idea of the Greek drama--retributive justice. The sterner pa.s.sions alone are appealed to, and the language is replete with bold metaphor and gigantic hyperbole. Venus and her inspirations are excluded; the charms of love are unknown: but the G.o.ds--vast, majestic, in shadowy outline, and in the awful sublimity of power-pa.s.s before and awe the beholder. [Footnote: see Grote's "History of Greece," Chap. lxvii.] Says a prominent reviewer: "The conceptions of the imagination of aeschylus are remarkable for a sort of colossal sublimity and power, resembling the poetry of the Book of Job; and those poems of his which embody a connected story may be said to resemble the stupendous avenues of the Temple of Elora, [See Index.] with the vast scenes and vistas; its strange, daring, though rude sculptures; its awful, shadowy, impending horrors. Like the architecture, the poems, too, seem hewn out of some ma.s.sy region of mountain rock. aeschylus appears as an austere poet-soul, brooding among the grand, awful, and terrible myths which have floated from a primeval world, in which traditions of the Deluge, of the early, rudimental struggle between barbaric power and nascent civilization, were still vital."

"The personal temperament of the man," says DR. PLUMPTRE, [Footnote: "The Tragedies of aeschylus," by E. H. Plumptre, D.D.] seems to have been in harmony with the characteristics of his genius.

Vehement, pa.s.sionate, irascible; writing his tragedies, as later critics judged, as if half drunk; doing (as Sophocles said of him) what was right in his art without knowing why; following the impulses that led him to strange themes and dark problems, rather than aiming at the perfection of a complete, all-sided culture; frowning with s.h.a.ggy brows, like a wild bull, glaring fiercely, and bursting into a storm of wrath when annoyed by critics or rival poets; a Marlowe rather than a Shakspeare: this is the portrait sketched by one who must have painted a figure still fresh in the minds of the Athenians. [Footnote: Aristophanes, in The Frogs.] Such a man, both by birth and disposition, was likely to attach himself to the aristocratic party, and to look with scorn on the claims of the demos to a larger share of power; and there is hardly a play in which some political bias in that direction may not be traced."

aeschylus wrote his plays in trilogies, or three successive dramas connected. Of the eighty tragedies that he wrote, only seven have been preserved. From three of these, The Persians, Prome'theus, and Agamemnon, we have given extracts descriptive of historical and mythological events. The latter is the first of three plays on the fortunes of the house of A'treus, of Myce'nae; and these three, of which the Choeph'oroe and Eumenides are the other two, are the only extant specimen of a trilogy. The Agamemnon is the longest, and by some considered the grandest, play left us by aeschylus. "In the Agamemnon," says VON SCHLEGEL, "it was the intention of aeschylus to exhibit to us a sudden fall from the highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the abyss of ruin.

The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of the Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement of the destruction of Troy, the fame of which is to be re-echoed from the mouths of the greatest poets of all ages, in the very act of crossing the threshold of his home, after which he had so long sighed, and amidst the fearless security of preparations for a festival, is butchered, according to the expression of Homer, 'like an ox in the stall,' slain by his faithless wife, his throne usurped by her worthless seducer, and his children consigned to banishment or to hopeless servitude." [Footnote: "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," by Augustus William on Schlegel. Black's translation.]

Among the fine pa.s.sages of this play, the death of Agamemnon, at the hand of Clytemnes'tra, is a scene that the poet paints with terrible effect. Says MR. EUGENE LAWRENCE, [Footnote: "A Primer of Greek Literature," by Eugene Lawrence, p.55.] "Mr. E. C.

Stedman's version of the death of Agamemnon is an excellent one.

A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenae; there is a scent of blood, the exhalations of the tomb. The queen, Clytemnestra, enters the inner room, terrible as Lady Macbeth. A cry is heard:

"'Agam. Woe's me! I'm stricken a deadly blow within!'

"'Chor. Hark! who is't cries "a blow?" Who meets his death?'

"'Agam. Woe's me! Again! again! a second time I'm stricken!'

"'Chor. The deed, methinks, from the king's cry, is done.'

At length the queen appears, standing at her full height, terrible, holding her b.l.o.o.d.y weapon in her hand. She seeks no concealment.

She proclaims her guilt:

"'I smote him! nor deny that thus I did it; So that he could not flee or ward off doom.

A seamless net, as round a fish, I cast About him, yea, a deadly wealth of robe, Then smote him twice; and with a double cry He loosed his limbs; and to him fallen I gave Yet a third thrust, a grace to Hades, lord Of the under-world and guardian of the dead.'"

But the most finished of the tragedies of aeschylus is Choephoroe, which is made the subject of the revenge of Ores'tes, son of Agamemnon, who avenges the murder of his father by putting his mother to death. For this crime the Eumenides represents him as being driven insane by the Furies; but his reason was subsequently restored. It is the chief object of the poet, in this tragedy, to display the distress of Orestes at the necessity he feels of avenging his father's death upon his mother. To this BYRON refers in Childe Harold:

O thou! who never yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale--great Nem'esis!

Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss For that unnatural retribution--just, Had it but been from hands less near--in this, Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!

At the close of an interesting characterization of aeschylus and his works--much too long for a full quotation here--PROFESSOR MAHAFFY observes as follows:

"We always feel that aeschylus thought more than he expressed, that his desperate compounds are never affected or unnecessary.

Although, therefore, he violated the rules that bound weaker men, it is false to say that be was less an artist than they.

His art was of a different kind, despising what they prized, and attempting what they did not dare, but not the less a conscious and thorough art. Though the drawing of character was not his main object, his characters are truer and deeper than those of poets who attempted nothing else. Though lyrical sweetness had little place in the gloom and terror of his t.i.tanic stage, yet here too, when he chooses, he equals the masters of lyric song.

So long as a single Homer was deemed the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, we might well concede to him the first place, and say that aeschylus was the second poet of the Greeks. But by the light of nearer criticism, and with a closer insight into the structure of the epic poems, we must retract this judgment, and a.s.sert that no other poet among the Greeks, either in grandeur of conception or splendor of execution, equals the untranslatable, unapproachable, inimitable aeschylus." [Footnote: "Cla.s.sical Greek Literature," vol. i., p.275.]

SOPHOCLES.

aeschylus was succeeded, as master of the drama, by Sophocles-- the Raffaelle of the drama, as Bulwer calls him--who was also one of the generals of the Athenian expedition against Samos in the year 440 B.C. He brought the drama to the greatest perfection of which it was susceptible. In him we find a greater range of emotions than in aeschylus--figures more distinctly seen, a more expanded dialogue, simplicity of speech mixed with rhetorical declamation, and the highest degree of poetic beauty.

Says a late writer: "The artist and the man were one in Sophocles.

We cannot but think of him as specially created to represent Greek art in its most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection.

It is impossible to imagine a more plastic nature, a genius more adapted to its special function, more fittingly provided with all things needful to its full development, born at a happier moment in the history of the world, and more n.o.bly endowed with physical qualities suited to its intellectual capacity."