The History of Rome. Book III

Greek tragedy as well as Greek comedy came in the course of this epoch to Rome. It was a more valuable, and in a certain respect also an easier, acquisition than comedy. The Greek and particularly the Homeric epos, which was the basis of tragedy, was not unfamiliar to the Romans, and was already interwoven with their own national legends; and the susceptible foreigner found himself far more at home in the ideal world of the heroic myths than in the fish-market of Athens. Nevertheless tragedy also promoted, only with less abruptness and less vulgarity, the anti-national and Hellenizing spirit; and in this point of view it was a circumstance of the most decisive importance, that the Greek tragic stage of this period was chiefly under the sway of Euripides (274-348). This is not the place for a thorough delineation of that remarkable man and of his still more remarkable influence on his contemporaries and posterity; but the intellectual movements of the later Greek and the Graeco-Roman epoch were to so great an extent affected by him, that it is indispensable to sketch at least the leading outlines of his character. Euripides was one of those poets who raise poetry doubtless to a higher level, but in this advance manifest far more the true sense of what ought to be than the power of poetically creating it. The profound saying which morally as well as poetically sums up all tragic art - that action is passion - holds true no doubt also of ancient tragedy; it exhibits man in action, but it makes no real attempt to individualize him. The unsurpassed grandeur with which the struggle between man and destiny fulfils its course in Aeschylus depends substantially on the circumstance, that each of the contending powers is only conceived broadly and generally; the essential humanity in Prometheus and Agamemnon is but slightly tinged by poetic individualizing. Sophocles seizes human nature under its general conditions, the king, the old man, the sister; but not one of his figures displays the microcosm of man in all his aspects - the features of individual character. A high stage was here reached, but not the highest; the delineation of man in his entireness and the entwining of these individual - in themselves finished - figures into a higher poetical whole form a greater achievement, and therefore, as compared with Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Sophocles represent imperfect stages of development. But, when Euripides undertook to present man as he is, the advance was logical and in a certain sense historical rather than poetical. He was able to destroy the ancient tragedy, but not to create the modern. Everywhere he halted half-way. Masks, through which the expression of the life of the soul is, as it were, translated from the particular into the general, were as necessary for the typical tragedy of antiquity as they are incompatible with the tragedy of character; but Euripides retained them. With remarkably delicate tact the older tragedy had never presented the dramatic element, to which it was unable to allow free scope, unmixed, but had constantly fettered it in some measure by epic subjects from the superhuman world of gods and heroes and by the lyrical choruses. One feels that Euripides was impatient under these fetters: with his subjects he came down at least to semi-historic times, and his choral chants were of so subordinate importance, that they were frequently omitted in subsequent performance and hardly to the injury of the pieces; but yet he has neither placed his figures wholly on the ground of reality, nor entirely thrown aside the chorus. Throughout and on all sides he is the full exponent of an age in which, on the one hand, the grandest historical and philosophical movement was going forward, but in which, on the other hand, the primitive fountain of all poetry - a pure and homely national life - had become turbid. While the reverential piety of the older tragedians sheds over their pieces as it were a reflected radiance of heaven; while the limitation of the narrow horizon of the older Hellenes exercises its satisfying power even over the hearer; the world of Euripides appears in the pale glimmer of speculation as much denuded of gods as it is spiritualised, and gloomy passions shoot like lightnings athwart the gray clouds. The old deeply-rooted faith in destiny has disappeared; fate governs as an outwardly despotic power, and the slaves gnash their teeth as they wear its fetters. That unbelief, which is despairing faith, speaks in this poet with superhuman power. Of necessity therefore the poet never attains a plastic conception overpowering himself, and never reaches a truly poetic effect on the whole; for which reason he was in some measure careless as to the construction of his tragedies, and indeed not unfrequently altogether spoiled them in this respect by providing no central interest either of plot or person - the slovenly fashion of weaving the plot in the prologue, and of unravelling it by a Deus ex machina or a similar platitude, was in reality brought into vogue by Euripides. All the effect in his case lies in the details; and with great art certainly every effort has in this respect been made to conceal the irreparable want of poetic wholeness. Euripides is a master in what are called effects; these, as a rule, have a sensuously-sentimental colouring, and often moreover stimulate the sensuous impression by a special high seasoning, such as the interweaving of subjects relating to love with murder or incest. The delineations of Polyxena willing to die and of Phaedra pining away under the grief of secret love, above all the splendid picture of the mystic ecstasies of the Bacchae, are of the greatest beauty in their kind; but they are neither artistically nor morally pure, and the reproach of Aristophanes, that the poet was unable to paint a Penelope, was thoroughly well founded. Of a kindred character is the introduction of common compassion into the tragedy of Euripides. While his stunted heroes or heroines, such as Menelaus in the Helena, Andromache, Electra as a poor peasant's wife, the sick and ruined merchant Telephus, are repulsive or ridiculous and ordinarily both, the pieces, on the other hand, which keep more to the atmosphere of common reality and exchange the character of tragedy for that of the touching family-piece or that almost of sentimental comedy, such as the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Ion, the Alcestis, produce perhaps the most pleasing effect of all his numerous works. With equal frequency, but with less success, the poet attempts to bring into play an intellectual interest. Hence springs the complicated plot, which is calculated not like the older tragedy to move the feelings, but rather to keep curiosity on the rack; hence the dialectically pointed dialogue, to us non-Athenians often absolutely intolerable; hence the apophthegms, which are scattered throughout the pieces of Euripides like flowers in a pleasure-garden; hence above all the psychology of Euripides, which rests by no means on direct reproduction of human experience, but on rational reflection. His Medea is certainly in so far painted from life, that she is before departure properly provided with money for her voyage; but of the struggle in the soul between maternal love and jealousy the unbiassed reader will not find much in Euripides. But, above all, poetic effect is replaced in the tragedies of Euripides by moral or political purpose. Without strictly or directly entering on the questions of the day, and having in view throughout social rather than political questions, Euripides in the legitimate issues of his principles coincided with the contemporary political and philosophical radicalism, and was the first and chief apostle of that new cosmopolitan humanity which broke up the old Attic national life. This was the ground at once of that opposition which the ungodly and un-Attic poet encountered among his contemporaries, and of that marvellous enthusiasm, with which the younger generation and foreigners devoted themselves to the poet of emotion and of love, of apophthegm and of tendency, of philosophy and of humanity. Greek tragedy in the hands of Euripides stepped beyond its proper sphere and consequently broke down; but the success of the cosmopolitan poet was only promoted by this, since at the same time the nation also stepped beyond its sphere and broke down likewise. The criticism of Aristophanes probably hit the truth exactly both in a moral and in a poetical point of view; but poetry influences the course of history not in proportion to its absolute value, but in proportion as it is able to forecast the spirit of the age, and in this respect Euripides was unsurpassed. And thus it happened, that Alexander read him diligently; that Aristotle developed the idea of the tragic poet with special reference to him; that the latest poetic and plastic art in Attica as it were originated from him (for the new Attic comedy did nothing but transfer Euripides into a comic form, and the school of painters which we meet with in the designs of the later vases derived its subjects no longer from the old epics, but from the Euripidean tragedy); and lastly that, the more the old Hellas gave place to the new Hellenism, the more the fame and influence of the poet increased, and Greek life abroad, in Egypt as well as in Rome, was directly or indirectly moulded in the main by Euripides.

Roman Tragedy

The Hellenism of Euripides flowed to Rome through very various channels, and probably produced a speedier and deeper effect there by indirect means than in the form of direct translation. The tragic drama in Rome was not exactly later in its rise than the comic[39]; but the far greater expense of putting a tragedy on the stage - which was undoubtedly felt as a consideration of moment, at least during the Hannibalic war - as well as the nature of the audience[40] retarded the development of tragedy. In the comedies of Plautus the allusions to tragedies are not very frequent, and most references of this kind may have been taken from the originals. The first and only influential tragedian of this epoch was the younger contemporary of Naevius and Plautus, Quintus Ennius (515-585), whose pieces were already travestied by contemporary comic writers, and were exhibited and declaimed by posterity down to the days of the empire.