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_ Of Euripides it cannot be said, as of his two great predecessors, that woman plays an insignificant role in his dramas. Most of the nineteen plays which have come down to us of the ninety-two he wrote are named after women; and Bulwer-Lytton was quite right when he declared that "he is the first of the Hellenic poets who interests us _intellectually_ in the antagonism and affinity between the sexes." But I cannot agree with him when he says that with Euripides commences "the distinction between love as a passion and love as a sentiment." There is true sentiment in Euripides, as there is in Sophocles, in the relations between parents and children, friends, brothers and sisters; but in the attitude of lovers, or of husband and wife, there is only sensuality or at most sentimentality; and this sentimentality, or sham sentiment, does not begin with Euripides, for we have found instances of it in the fond words of Clytaemnestra regarding the husband she intended to murder, and did murder, and even in the Homeric Achilles, whose fine words regarding conjugal love contrast so ludicrously with his unloving actions. These, however, are mere episodes, while Euripides has written a whole play which from beginning to end is an exposition of sentimentality.
The Fates had granted that when the Thessalian King Admetus approached the ordained end of his life it should be prolonged if another person voluntarily consented to die in his place. His aged parents had no heart to "plunge into the darkness of the tomb" for his sake. "It is not the custom in Greece for fathers to die for children," his father informs him; while Adinetus indulges in coarse abuse: "By heaven, thou art the very pattern of cowards, who at thy age, on the borderland of life, would'st not, nay, could'st not find the heart to die for thy own son; but ye, my parents, left to this stranger, whom henceforth I shall justly hold e'en as mother and as father too, and none but her." This "stranger" is his wife Alcestis, who has volunteered to die for him, exclaiming:
"Thee I set before myself, and instead of living have ensured thy life, and so I die, though I need not have died for thee, but might have taken for my husband whom I would of the Thessalians, and have had a home blest with royal power; reft of thee, with my children orphans, I cared not to live."
The world has naively accepted this speech and the sacrifice of Alcestis as belonging to the region of sentiment; but in reality it is nothing more than one of those stories shrewdly invented by selfish men to teach women that the object of their existence is to sacrifice themselves for their husbands. The king's father tells us this in so many words: "By the generous deed she dared, hath she made her life _a noble example for all her sex_;" adding that "such marriages I declare are gain to man, else to wed is not worth while." If these stories, like those manufactured by the Hindoos, were an indication of existing conjugal sentiment, would it be possible that the self-sacrifice was invariably on the woman's side? Adinetus would have never dreamt of sacrificing _his_ life for his wife. He is not even ashamed to have her die for him. It is true that he has one moment when he fancies his foe deriding him thus:
"Behold him living in his shame, a wretch who quailed at death himself, but of his coward heart gave up his wedded wife instead, and escaped from Hades; doth he deem himself a man after that?"
It is true also that his father taunts him contemptuously,
"Dost thou then speak of cowardice in me, thou craven heart!... A clever scheme hast thou devised to stave off death forever, if thou canst persuade each new wife to die instead of thee."
Yet Admetus is constantly assuring everyone of his undying attachment to his wife. He holds her in his arms, imploring her not to leave him. "If thou die," he exclaims,
"I can no longer live; my life, my death, are in thy hands; thy love is what I worship.... Not a year only, but all my life will I mourn for thee.... In my bed thy figure shall be laid full length, by cunning artists fashioned; thereon will I throw myself and, folding my arms about thee, call upon thy name, and think I hold my dear wife in my embrace.... Take me, O take me, I beseech, with thee 'neath the earth;"
and so on, _ad nauseam_--a sickening display of sentimentality, _i.e._, fond words belied by cowardly, selfish actions.
The father-in-law of Alcestis, in his indignation at his son's impertinence and lack of filial pity, exclaims that what made Alcestis sacrifice herself was "want of sense;" which is quite true. But in painting such a character, Euripides's chief motive appears to have been to please his audience by enforcing a maxim which the Greeks shared with the Hindoos and barbarians that "a woman, though bestowed upon a worthless husband, must be content with him." These words are actually put by him into the mouth of Andromache in the play of that name. Andromache, once the wife of the Trojan Hector, now the concubine of Achilles's son, is made to declare to the Chorus that "it is not beauty but virtuous acts that win a husband's heart;" whereupon she proceeds to spoil this fine maxim by explaining what the Greeks understood by "virtuous acts" in a wife--namely, subordinating herself even to a "worthless husband." "Suppose," she continues, "thou hadst wedded a prince of Thrace... where one lord shares his affections with a host of wives, would'st thou have slain them? If so, thou would'st have set a stigma of insatiate lust on all our sex." And she proceeds to relate how she herself paid no heed in Troy to Hector's amours with other women: "Oft in days gone by I held thy bastard babes to my own breast, to spare thee any cause for grief. By this course I bound my husband to me by virtue's chains." To spare _him_ annoyance, no matter how much his conduct might grieve _her_--that was the Greek idea of conjugal devotion--all on one side. And how like the Hindoos, and Orientals, and barbarians in general, is the Greek seen to be in the remarks made by Hermione, the legitimate wife, to Andromache, the concubine--accusing the latter of having by means of witchcraft made her barren and thus caused her husband to hate her.
With the subtle ingenuity of masculine selfishness the Greek dramatist doubles the force of all his fine talk about the "virtuous acts" of wives by representing the women themselves as uttering these maxims and admitting that their function is self-denial--that woman is altogether an inferior and contemptible being. "How strange it is," exclaims Andromache,
"that, though some god has devised cures for mortals against the venom of reptiles, no man ever yet hath discovered aught to cure a woman's venom, which is far worse than viper's sting or scorching flame; so terrible a curse are we to mankind."
Hermione declares:
"Oh! never, never--this truth will I repeat--should men of sense, who have wives, allow women-folks to visit them in their homes, for they teach them mischief; one, to gain some private end, helps to corrupt their honor; another having made a slip herself, wants a companion in misfortune, while many are wantons; and hence it is men's houses are tainted. Wherefore keep strict guard upon the portals of your houses with bolts and bars."
Bolts and bars were what the gallant Greek men kept their wives under, hence this custom too is here slyly justified out of a woman's mouth. And thus it goes on throughout the pages of Euripides. Iphigenia, in one of the two plays devoted to her, declares: "Not that I shrink from death, if die I must,--when I have saved thee; no, indeed! for a man's loss from his family is felt, while a woman's is of little moment." In the other she declares that one man is worth a myriad of Women--[Greek: heis g' anaer kreisson gunaikon murion]--wherefore, as soon as she realizes the situation at Aulis, she expresses her willingness to be immolated on the altar in order that the war against Troy may no longer be delayed by adverse minds. She had, however, come for a very different purpose, having been, with her queen mother, inveigled from home under the pretext that Achilles was to make her his wife. Achilles, however, knew as little of the plot as she did, and he is much surprised when the queen refers to his impending marriage. A modern poet would have seen here a splendid, seemingly inevitable, opportunity for a story of romantic love. He would have made Achilles fall in love at sight of Iphigenia and resolve to save her life, if need be at the cost of his own. What use does Euripides make of this opportunity? In his play Achilles does not see the girl till toward the close of the tragedy. He promises her unhappy mother that "never shall thy daughter, after being once called my bride, die by her father's hand;" But his reason for this is not love for a girl or a chivalrous attitude toward women in distress, but offended vanity. "It is not to secure a bride that I have spoken thus," he exclaims; "there be maids unnumbered, eager to have my love--no! but King Agamemnon has put an insult on me; he should have asked my leave to use my name as a means to catch the child." In that case he "would never have refused" to further his fellow-soldiers' common interest by allowing the maiden to be sacrificed.
It is true that after Iphigenia has made her brave speech declaring that a woman's life was of no account anyway, and that she had resolved to die voluntarily for the army's sake, Achilles assumes a different attitude, declaring,
"Some god was bent on blessing me, could I but have won thee for my wife.... But now that I have looked into thy noble nature, I feel still more a fond desire to win thee for my bride,"
and promising to protect her against the whole army. But what was it in Iphigenia that thus aroused his admiration? A feminine trait, such as would impress a modern romantic lover? Not in the least. He admired her because, like a man, she offered to lay down her life in behalf of the manly virtue of patriotism. Greek men admired women only in so far as they resembled men; a truth to which I shall recur on another page.
It would be foolish to chide Euripides for not making of this tragedy a story of romantic love; he was a Greek and could not lift himself above his times by a miracle. To him, as to all his contemporaries, love was not a sentiment, "an illumination of the senses by the soul," an impulse to noble actions, but a common appetite, apt to become a species of madness, a disease. His _Hippolytus_ is a study of this disease, unpleasant but striking; it has for its subject the lawless pathologic love of Phaedra for her step-son. She is "seized with wild desire;" she "pines away in silence, moaning beneath love's cruel scourge;" she "wastes away on a bed of sickness;" denies herself all food, eager to reach death's cheerless bourn; a canker wastes her fading charms; she is "stricken by some demon's curse;" from her eyes the tear-drops stream, and for very shame she turns them away; on her soul "there rests a stain;" she knows that to yield to her "sickly passion" would be "infamous;" yet she cannot suppress her wanton thoughts. Following the topsy-turvy, unchivalrous custom of the Greek poets, Euripides makes a woman--"a thing the world detests"--the victim of this mad passion, opposing to it the coy resistance of a man, a devotee of the chaste Diana. And at the end he makes Phaedra, before committing suicide, write an infamous letter which, to save her reputation, dooms to a cruel death the innocent victim of her infatuation.
To us, this last touch alone would demonstrate the worldwide difference between lust and love. But Euripides knows no such difference. To him there is only one kind of love, and it varies only in being moderate in some cases, excessive in others. Love is "at once the sweetest and the bitterest thing," according as it is one or the other of the two. Phaedra's nurse deplores her passion, chiefly because of its violence. The chorus in _Medea_ (627 _seqq_.) sings:
"When in excess and past all limits Love doth come, he brings not glory or repute to man; but if the Cyprian queen in moderate might approach, no goddess is so full of charm as she."
And in _Iphigenia at Aulis_ the chorus declares:
"Happy they who find the goddess come in moderate might, sharing with self-restraint in Aphrodite's gift of marriage and enjoying calm and rest from frenzied passions.... Be mine delight in moderate and hallowed [Greek: hosioi] desires, and may I have a share in love, but shun excess therein."
To Euripides, as to all the Greeks, there is no difference in the loves of gods and goddesses or kings and queens on the one hand, and the lowest animals on the other. As the chorus sings in _Hippolytus_:
"O'er the land and booming deep, on golden pinion borne, flits the god of love, maddening the heart and beguiling the senses of all whom he attacks, savage whelps on mountains bred, ocean's monsters, creatures of this sun-warmed earth, and man; thine, O Cypris, thine alone, the sovereign power to rule them all."[304]
[FOOTNOTE 304: The unduly extolled [Greek: Epos] chorus in the _Antigone_ expresses nothing more than the universal power of love in the Greek conception of the term.] _
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