PA RSH CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library PA 3135.R54 The or* 4.anajttJBM& 3 1924 022 692 853 DATE DUE N0\M^rrii JfflT'T 3 TO at^^^yiz mui »fl»7g u SEl«#TW92 PRINTED IN U.S A. Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022692853 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE GREEK TRAGEDIANS By the same Author THE OEIGIN OF METALLIC CURRENCY AND WEIGHT STANDARDS New Edition in preparation. "Die epochemachende Untersuchungen von William Eidgeway 'The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards.' " — Deutsches Rundschau, June 5, 1897. "It is the induction which is the real strength of the present work. The collection of sure facts is so large, and the facts themselves hang so well together, that we cannot help accepting what they point to — at least until we see whether an adversary can make an equally good collection on the other side. But we do not expect to find this done." — Economic Journal, vol. n, p. 704. THE EARLY AGE OF GREECE, Vol. i (Vol. II nearly ready.) " No more lucid piece of argument has been produced for many years. Mr Eidgeway takes no step which is not sure. He trusts neither to prejudice nor to speculation. He admits nothing save facts, and being an eminent anthro- pologist he does not reason as though Greece were a province set in a vacuum far apart from the civilization of the world." — Spectator. "Der vorliegende erste Band des auf zwei Bande berechneten Werkes verdient wegen des Inhaltes und wegen der Art der Stoffbehandlung auf- merksame Beachtung An dieser Stelle muss das Hervorgehobene geniigen und wird wenigstens das erne gezeigt haben, dass der vorliegende Band der interessauten Schrift, auch schon wegen des reichen Materials in arehaologischer und prahistorischer Beziehung, ein sorgfaltiges und eingehendes Studium verdient." — Neue Philologische Rundschau, 1902, pp. 132 — 5. THE ORIGIN AND INFLUENCE OF THE THOROUGHBRED HORSE (Cambridge Biological Series.) "It is the simple truth that no such addition has been made in biology to the study of a domesticated animal since Darwin wrote.... Pregnant as these pages are with living human interest, they are charged also with facts and suggestions of the greatest biological value."— Athenceum. "In thus dividing domesticated horses into two main types Prof. Eidgeway will, we think, command the consent of most naturalists.. ..As regards the main thesis the reviewer is in perfect accord with the author of the work."— Nature. "The prodigal wealth of argument and illustration in this book makes a most fascinating olla podrida for the general reader."— Times. "We may at once congratulate Prof. Eidgeway upon the thoroughness of hie research upon the marshalling of his facts and the soundness of the l?rZ%! 7- ICh ^£ M F U * f0rth in Sup P° rt of the idea tha * «« Libyan horse ttr g ;tea^^ th ^r anCeSt ° r ° f the Arab «* ^ * ^English which^:^j:^err^!^&^ roversy the tw ^ ts ■*» THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE GREEK TRAGEDIANS BY WILLIAM RIDGEWAY, Sc.D., F.B.A., HON. LL.D. (ABERDEEN), HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN AND MANCHESTER) DISNEY PROFESSOR OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND BRERETON READER IN CLASSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE GIFFORD LECTURER ON NATURAL RELIGION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN QUBEN*S COLLEGE, CORK LATE PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND HONORARY MEMBER OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF PARIS HONORARY MEMBER OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF ATHENS, ETC. (SapVTlfXOl X$6vioi 0-f}Ka$ kot^xovtss. Aesch. Suppl. 24 — 5. Cambridge : at the University Press 1910 °f L A slST\1: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS ftoirtron: FETTER LANE, E.C. C. F. CLAY, Manager fflBin&urBfj: 100, PRINCES STREET Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO. iel»ffl: F. A. BROCKHAUS jjleto Jgoift: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS aSomfas an* Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. All rights reserved ROBERTO YELVERTON TYRRELL TPOEIA PEEFACE AS I had long been dissatisfied with the theory of the -L\~- Origin of Tragedy universally accepted, I have tried to obtain the true solution of the problem by approaching it from the anthropological standpoint. The general theory here advanced — that Tragedy originated in the worship of the dead — was first put forward in a lecture before the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies in 1904, summaries of which were printed in the Proceedings of that Society and in the Athenceum (1904, p. 660). It also appeared in a fuller form in the Quarterly Review (Oct. 1908). The first section of Chapter I. in the present work is an expansion of that article, and for permission to use this I have to thank Mr John Murray and Mr G. W. Prothero. The section on the Eumenides in Chapter IV. was published in the Classical Review (1907, pp. 163-8), whilst that on the Supplices of Aeschylus was printed in the Cambridge Greek Praelections (1906), but each of these has been altered in various details. The subject-matter of the whole work formed the material for a course of lectures which I delivered in my capacity as Brereton Reader in Classics in the Lent Term, 1908. It only remains for me to offer my best thanks to those who have aided me in various ways. I am indebted to my friends Dr and Mrs Seligmann for permission to print their account of a Vedda dramatic performance and for the photograph reproduced in Fig. 12 (p. 103); to Mr A. J. B. Wace, M.A., Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, for his account of the Carnival Play in Northern Greece; to Mr W. Aldis Wright, Vlll PREFACE D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D., Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cam- bridge, to Mr John Harrower, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Greek in the University of Aberdeen, to Mr Harold Littledale, M.A., Litt.D., Professor of English Literature in University College, Cardiff, and to Mr H. M. Chadwick, M.A., Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, for useful references; to Mr A. B. Cook, M.A., Reader in Classical Archaeology, and Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, for the photograph from which Fig. 9 is reproduced ; to the Council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies and to Mr R. M. Dawkins, M.A., Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Director of the British School at Athens, for permission to use the illustrations shown in my Figs. 7 and 8; to Mr J. E. Sandys, Litt.D., F.B.A., Public Orator in the University of Cambridge, for sanctioning the use of two blocks from his Bacchae for my Figs. 10 and 13, and to Miss J. E. Harrison for a similar sanction of the use of a block from her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion for my Fig. 5. WILLIAM RIDGEWAY. Flendyshe, Fen Ditton, August 6tk, 1910. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I The Origin of Tragedy PAGE The old theory — the claim of the Dorians — the dialect of the Chorus — the Dithyramb — Lasus of Hermione — the worship of Dionysus — the modern Carnival Play in Thrace — the Epiphany Carnival in Thessaly — Dionysus in Greece — Mimetic Dances in Greece — the cult of Adrastus at Sicyou and the worship of the Dead — the Thymele — the introduction of the cult of Dionysus into Greece — the Satyric Drama .... 1 CHAPTER II The Rise op Attic Tragedy Introductory, Epigenes of Sicyon — Thespis — his grand step — Mysteries and Miracles — the immediate Precursors of Aeschy- lus — Pratinas — Choerilus — Phrynichus — the origin of the terms Tragoedia and Tragic — 'Goat-singers' — the Satyrs not Goatmen — Dr Farnell's hypothesis — the Bull — the Goat — Goatskins — ancient dress — Aegis of Zeus and Athena — Conclusion . . 56 CHAPTER III Primitive Dramas among Asiatic Peoples Hindu drama — the Ramayana — Lama plays in Tibet and Mongolia — Malay dramas — the dramatic performances of the Veddas of Ceylon , . 94 CHAPTER IV Survivals of the Primitive Type in extant Greek Tragedies Aeschylus— Tombs in Greek Tragedies— Persae— Choephori— Supplices— Sophocles— Ajax— Antigone— Oedipus Coloneus— Euripides— Helena — Hecuba— the Threnos and the Kommos— Tragedies especially suited for the festivals of Heroes— Hippo- lytus and Rhesus— Ghosts— Darius— Clytemnestra— Polydorus TABLE OF CONTENTS — Achilles — The Appeasing of the Ghost — Libations and Sacri- fices — Human Victims — Iphigenia in Tauris — Heracleidae — Ipkigenia at Aulis — the Hecuba — Human sacrifices contem- porary in Greece — in Arcadia — Messenia — and at Athens herself — Thermistocles sacrifices Persian youths — the dream of Pelopidas — Zeus worship and its influence in stopping human sacrifice — Graves as Sanctuaries — the Helena — the Suppliants of Aeschylus — the Eumenides, etc. — Courts for trial of Blood- shed at Athens CHAPTER V The Expansion of Tkagedy Introduction. Aeschylus uses Tragedy for discussion of great social and religious problems — the Suppliants and the Eumenides — Descent through Women— Exogamy— transition to Male suc- cession and Endogamy — Prometheus Vinctus — the relation of Man to God ... Index LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. PAGE 1. Thraoian coin showing Ox-cart 10 2. Silenus with a Woman 11 3. Silenus carrying off a Woman 11 4. Sileni or Centauri carrying off Women 11 5. Dionysus and his Satyrs (from the Wurzburg cylix) ... 12 6. Dionysus and Ariadne between a, Satyr and a Bacchant . . 13 7. Modern Thraoian Dionysiac Play 21 8. Skyros Masquerader 23 9. Theban Scyphos showing a Bema or Thymele .... 45 10. Masks of Dionysus, Satyr and Silenus 89 11. Archaic Greek Scarab 99 12. A Vedda Drama : ' How Kande Yaka killed the Deer ' . . . 103 13. Masks of Tragedy and Comedy . . ' 113 14. Orestes and Electra at the tomb of Agamemnon .... 121 15. Prometheus tortured by the Eagle 215 CHAPTER I THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 01 8 «r« elirdyayov k\vto Swpara, top pev eweira TprjTols iv \exeeariri Bitrav, irapa 8' elirav doiSois 6pr)va>v i^apxpvs, o? re v ^ueis tS/iev, irot7)u6eh (pptvas. 2 s.v. Arion : "Saripovs elffeveyxeiv lp.fi.erpa \4yovras. 3 TpayiKov rpbirov eiperijs. 4 01. xiii, 18-9: Tal kuaviaov iroBev Qifyavev abv {iorjkaTq x<£/"T« SiBupdnflip ; 6 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. in Pindar's own time, and probably from its first rude beginnings, the dithyramb was used in commemoration of heroes. Thue his own contemporary and great rival, Simonides 1 of Ceoe (B.C. 556 — 467), a composer of many dithyrambs, wrote one called M emnon, in praise of that ill-fated hero. The epithet "ox-driving" used by Pindar differentiates from others the peculiar character of the dithyramb sung in honour of Dionysus. As it has been commonly held that Tragedy got its name from the he-goat (Tpdyos), said to have been the prize in such competitions, so the epithet "ox-driving" has been supposed to mean that in the case of dithyrambic contests the prize was an ox. In later times, at Athens at least, though we have no evidence that Attic practice means general use in Greece, in musical contests an ox was the first prize, an amphoreus the second, and a he-goat the third 2 . These contests, like others in the great festivals of Greece, may have undergone modifications in later times. But the true explanation may rather be found in a passage of Pausanias 3 . Speaking of the Cynaetheans, an Arcadian community, he says: "What is most worthy of note is that there is a sanctuary of Dionysus here, and that they hold a festival in winter, at which men, their bodies greased with oil, pick out a bull from a herd (whichever bull the god puts it into their head to take), lift it up, and carry it to the sanctuary. Such is their mode of sacrifice." It would thus seem not unlikely that in Dionysiac ritual the bull to be sacrificed was driven or dragged along by the chorus of celebrants. But although the dithyramb may have thus been used in the worship of Dionysus, it does not at all follow that it was confined to his ritual. From the statement of Aristotle that it was not till late that the grotesque diction of the earlier Satyric was discarded for the stately manner of Tragedy it might at first sight be maintained that Tragedy had arisen solely out of 1 Strabo, 619, 43 (Didot) : Ttufrijvcu. Si \tyerai M^xwx wepl m\rov rrjs Zvplas irapa BaSax iroTa/* 6 * Nat. An. vm, 47 : h yew t iieracrr-fiaas robs fniff/wbs Kal tj} tSiv abX&v iroXvipiafla KaraKoXovB^cas irXelotrl re tpBoyyois Kal Siepptpntvois XpyG&P-evos els fieraBeatv rty irpobTapxovcrav riyaye jiovcnK^v. 4 Vesp. 1410. 10 the origin of tragedy [ch. The Worship of Dionysus. Let us next examine the belief that Tragedy arose solely from the worship of Dionysus. Aristotle himself has shown once for all that the Drama like every other form of Art springs from that love of imitation, which man possesses in a far higher degree than any other animal, and from the love of rhythm likewise implanted in him. But he assumed, on insufficient grounds as we have just seen, that " the stately manner of Tragedy" arose out of "the grotesque diction of the earlier Satyric." If it can be shown that in districts of Greece, where mimetic dances were performed long before the Dorian invasion or the introduction of the worship of Dionysus into that country, there were dramatic performances and solemn festivals held not in honour of the Thracian wine-god but of very different personages, we shall Fig.1. Thracian coin showing De forced to the conclusion that Ox-cart. Greek Tragedy did not arise from the cult of Dionysus and his Satyrs. Let us first trace briefly the origin of that worship and its spread in Greece. Homer indeed knows of Dionysus, but only as a Thracian deity. Lycurgus, an ancient Thracian chief, scourged Dionysus and his attendant women so severely with his ox- whip that the god of wine had to take to water and seek an asylum with Thetis in the depths of the sea 1 . The Birth-story of Dionysus at Thebes is also alluded to in the Iliad*, whilst we are told in the Odyssey* that Artemis slew Ariadne in Naxos "on the witness of Dionysus." Herodotus states that the three chief Thracian divinities were Ares, Dionysus, and Artemis (i.e. Bendis). The oldest and most famous seat of the cult of Dionysus was not amongst the red-haired Thracians of the Danubian region, such as the Getae, who did not even worship him, but had separate divinities of their own 1 - His home was amongst 1 II. vi, 132 sqq. = xiv, 325. > Od. xi, 325. ' Herod, iv, 94-6. I] THE OKIGIN OF TRAGEDY 11 the aboriginal dark-haired Thracians of the Pangaean range. On one of the loftiest of its peaks lay his great ancient oracle. The tribe of the Satrae dwelt around and the oracle was in charge of the Satrian clan of the Bessi 1 . The Thracians of this region were closely akin to the ig. 2. Silenus with a woman: Lete 2 . Fig. 3. Silenus carrying off a woman : Lete. indigenous population of Greece. They were no rude savages, as generally believed, for they were skilled in metal-work, striking coins of singular beauty and originality of types (Fig. 1) from the early part of the sixth century B.C. No less skilful were they in music and literature than in the material arts. From them had come Thamyris, and Orpheus and Linus, the B^^^^aaai&i jf*—*^ 1 m^^ tMm.' . - M "v^5^ ^m*r Fig. 4. Sileni or Centaurs carrying off women : Okkescii. master of Orpheus : from thence too had sprung Eumolpus who established the Mysteries at Eleusis. Almost all the aboriginal Thracian tribes had been conquered by the fair-haired race from the Danube and beyond, or else they had had to seek new homes in Asia, as was the case with the Dardanians, Phrygians and Mysians. But Herodotus 3 tells us that the mountaineers of Pangaeum, who in his own day defied the 1 Herod, vn, 111. 2 Figs. 2 and 3 are from coins in the Leake Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 3 Herod, vn, 111. 12 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. arms of Xerxes, had at no time been conquered but had pre- served their liberty secure in their snow-clad mountain fastnesses. There can therefore be no reasonable doubt that in the oracle of Dionysus served by the Bessi we have an original cult of these indigenous Thracians. These tribes differed in many respects from the so-called Thracians, such as the Getae, who were really Celts. The former invariably tattooed themselves and traced descent through women, differing in these particulars as well as in others from their Celtic neighbours and oppressors, whilst in their morals they were exceedingly lax, the girls up to marriage being allowed complete licence. This circumstance probably gave rise to a general belief amongst the neighbours of the Satrae that they were addicted to all sorts of wild Fig. 5. Dionysus and his Satyrs (from the Wiirzburg eylix). orgiastic rites, as is evidenced by the coins of that region on which Satyrs or Sileni are seen carrying off women (Figs. 2, 3 and 4). Colonel Leake long ago suggested that from the name of the great tribe of the Satrae, amongst whom was the chief sanctuary of Dionysus, arose the name of the Satyri, the constant attendants of Dionysus in his wild rout (Fig. 5). This explanation seems highly probable. Aristotle 1 has told us that just as we make our gods in our own likeness, so do we also represent their lives as like our own. Dionysus accordingly reflected the life of his own worshippers. The Satyrs are simply his own Satrian tribesmen, and the Bacchants (Fig. 6) are merely the young women of the tribe allowed to range at will. 1 Pol. 1, 7 : Jiairep Si xaX ra elSri iavrois dipofioiovatv of dvBpwiroi, of)™ Kai tous (3Lovs twv detov. I] THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 13 s^ffi^F « a a T3 a a 14 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. It will be convenient at this point to treat at greater length of the Sileni and their relations to the Satyrs. It is difficult to find any explanation of their name or to discover the region in which it originated, but it is not improbable that it, like that of the Satyrs, was once the name of some tribe or clan. On several points however we can be quite certain. They cannot be separ- ated from the Satyrs, since not only is Silenus regarded as the chief of the Satyrs, but Pausanias 1 gives us explicit information on this point. When speaking of a stone at Athens " of no great size but big enough for a little man to sit on, and on which, so said the folk, Silenus had rested when he came into the country along with Dionysus," he mentions "that elderly Satyrs are called Sileni." In another passage he states 2 that there was at Elis a temple dedicated to Silenus alone and not to him jointly with Dionysus. Me the ("Drunkenness") was represented handing to him a wine-cup, and the traveller remarks that the Sileni are a mortal race, as may be inferred especially from their graves. This identification of the Sileni with the Satyrs is thoroughly corroborated by two very impor- tant glosses in Hesychius 3 . In one of these we are told that according to Amerias the Sileni were called Sauadae by the Macedonians, whilst from the other we learn that amongst the Ulyrians the Satyri were called Beuadae. Now there can be no doubt that in Beuadae and Sauadae we have only dialectic forms of the same name, as in the case of a well-known Illyrian or Macedonian tribe, which was termed both Dasaretii and Sesarethii 4 . In another gloss Hesychius 5 identifies the Sileni with the Satyri, whilst in yet another he calls them Hermeni. From these various passages it is fairly certain that there was no essential difference between Sileni and Satyri, and also that neither Ulyrians nor Macedonians used the name Sileni, but had a different term of their own for the creatures whom we see on the Thracian coins 6 either as naked men (Figs. 2 and 3) 1 i, 23, 5. 2 vi, 24, 8. 8 B.v. SaudSai • SaOSoi • 'A/ieplas rous 2ei\i;i/oi>s oiira KaXetaSal tfriaiv iwo MaKeSdvuiv. s.v. Acvd&u • ol Sdrupoi Trapa 'IWvplois. " Bidgeway, " Who were the Dorians?" Anthropological Essays in honour of Tylor, p. 308. 5 s.vv. SeiXi/xoI and 'Mp/irptel. 6 Head, Historia Numorum, pp. 174, 176-7. J ] THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 15 with horse's feet, ears, and tail (as at Lete), or as fully developed into Centaurs (Fig. 4), as on those of the Orrescii, who, as I have elsewhere pointed out, are probably no other than the Orestae, reckoned as a Macedonian tribe by Strabo. In another place 1 I have shown that the Centaurs of Thessaly were simply a mountain tribe, living on Pelion, and that it was only at a late period that their neighbours imputed to them every brutal passion and represented them as semi-equine in order to typify their bestial lust. In the men with the tails, ears, and feet of horses on the Thracian coins we have the first step towards the Centaurs on those of the Orrescii. In the names Sileni, Deuadae or Sauadae, and Hermenoi, we have probably old tribal or clan names, as in the case ot the Centauri of Thessaly. In literature the name Sileni first occurs in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 2 , in which the Sileni and Hermes are represented as consorting with the nymphs in the recesses of the pleasant grots of Mount Ida. A passage of Pindar cited by Pausanias* represents Silenus as born at Malea and as having come from thence to Pyrrhichus, an inland town of Laconia. The name Silenus seems not to be old in Greece, and therefore may be regarded as imported either from northern Greece and Thrace, or possibly from north-west Asia Minor, whither of course it may well have passed with Thracian immigrants or with the cult of Dionysus. One fact of considerable importance comes out clearly, — Sileni or Satyrs are not represented in goat form on the archaic Thracian coins, but with equine attributes. There can be no doubt that the semi-equine representations of the Satyrs or Sileni in the act of carrying off women or nymphs refer to a wild and gross cult. It must be borne in mind that orgiastic and licentious rites have at all times and in many places been considered of great importance for fertilising the earth in seed-time, and accord- ingly Dionysus and his ribald company may be but part and parcel of a cult intimately connected with the fertilisation of the earth. Since the present writer first put forward this view, confirmatory evidence of a very important kind has come to hand not only from Thrace itself but also from Northern 1 Eidgeway, The Early Age of Greece, vol. i, 173-5. 2 261. 3 in, 25, 2. 16 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. Greece. There seems to be no doubt that a ceremony still used in Thrace with a view to securing an abundant harvest, is a distinct survival of Dionysiac rites. The Modern Carnival in Thrace. My friend Mr H. M. Dawkins, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Director of the British School at Athens, has described 1 what seems to be an undoubted survival of such ceremonies. It is the Carnival festival held in the district about Viza (ancient Bc^vtj) in Thrace, which was witnessed by Mr Dawkins in 1906. The ceremony had been previously described by G. M. Vizyenos, a native of Viza. His statements, based on personal knowledge dating back for forty years, Mr Dawkins was able to confirm from his own observations. Viza lies some eight hours by road north of the station of Tcherkesskeui on the railway between Constantinople and Adrianople, and nine hours from Midheia (Salmydessus) on the Black Sea. " In all the knot of Christian villages, of which Viza is the centre, the festival in question is celebrated annually on Cheese Monday (Tvpivrj AevTepa). This day begins the last week of Carnival, which culminates on the following Sunday (KvpiaKrj tov Tvpocpdyov). Lent then begins with Pure Monday (Kadapd A.evTepa), when not only meat, as during Carnival, but also all kinds of animal food except bloodless molluscs are forbidden. The masquerade of this day was, even when Vizyenos saw it, no longer kept up in its fullness at Viza itself, but only in the neighbouring villages, of which he takes Haghios Gheorghios (Turkish, Evrenlu) as an example." Mr Dawkins spent " Cheese Monday " at this village and during his stay of a week in the district was able to supplement his notes by inquiries about the observances in other places. The list of masqueraders is as follows: I. " Two KaXoyepoi (Fig. 7), who play the principal parts. Their disguise consists of a headdress formed of an entire goatskin without the horns, stuffed out with hay so as to rise like a great shako at least a foot or eighteen inches above the head, and adorned at the top with a piece of red ribbon. The skin falls over the face and neck, forming thus a mask, with holes cut » Jour. Hell. Stud., 1906, pp. 191—206, Figs. 1—8, "The Modern Carnival in Thrace and the Cult of Dionysus." l] THE ORIGIN OP TRAGEDY 17 out for the eyes and mouth. Round' the waist three or four sheep-bells are tied, and, their hands are blackened. Their shoulders are monstrously padded with hay to protect them from blows, which, from Vizyenos' account, they used to receive more freely than at present. He adds that the head-dress may be made of the skin of a fox or wolf and that fawnskins were worn on the shoulders, and upon the leg goatskins. The essential and indispensable elements, he says, are the mask and bells. It would seem from this ' that the resemblance of the actor to an animal was formerly a good deal more marked than at present. A little boy whom I saw on the Tuesday at Viza acting as kalogheros, the only part there surviving, wore a tall conical fur cap, and bells at his waist. He had no mask, but his face as well as his hands were blackened. In one of the villages the kalogheroi do not wear skins at all on their heads; but beehives. One of the kalogheroi at Haghios Gheorghios carries a wooden phallus and the other a mock bow. t This bow (Sogdpt) is in general appearance rather like a crossbow, but is made only to scatter ashes or powder." Vizyenos adds that the carrier, of the bow is the leader of the two, and the other his servant and follower, a view endorsed by Mr Dawkins himself. In the drama with which the play closes it is the carrier of the bow who shoots the other, and in this point Vizyenos agrees with Mr Dawkins' observations. II. "Two boys dressed as girls (YLopiTtna), called also in some other villages, according to Vizyenos, vvfyes, brides. These wear a white skirt and apron, a peasant woman's bodice Qpen in front, and kerchiefs binding the chin and the brow. A third kerchief hangs down behind, and from beneath it escapes a corded black fringe like finely plaited hair. They check any liberties with knotted handkerchiefs weighted with a few bullets. It is to be noted that the kalogheroi at Haghios Gheorghios must be married men, and the koritsia unmarried. Vizyenos tells us also that these four actors are chosen for periods of four years and that during this time a koritsi may be betrothed, but must remain unmarried, a father being able to refuse to allow his son to take this part on the ground that he is thinking of getting married.../' e. t. 2 18 The origin of tragedy [ch. III. Next comes a third female character, the Babo, a word in general use meaning an old woman. This personage was not represented in the play seen by Mr Dawkins, but her place was taken by the katsivela. The Babo herself still appears at other villages, and until quite recently was seen at Viza, where she has now been forbidden by the authorities. She is described by Vizyenos as a man dressed as an old woman carrying on her arm a basket containing "some absurd object or piece of wood swaddled in rags," which she treats as a baby. Of this child she is the kapsomana, and the child (liknites) is a seven- months child born out of lawful wedlock of a father whose name she does not know. Mr Dawkins was told at Viza that the Babo's child was always regarded as a bastard. Kapsomana, he was given to understand, meant nurse or foster-mother, but Vizyenos says that the Babo regards the child as her own, and kindred words make it almost certain that the real meaning is unmarried mother, mother of an illegitimate child. The word likni survives in the district meaning a cradle, made as usual of wood and shaped like a trough, and liknites is the local word for a baby in the cradle. " Nowhere else in Greece," writes Mr Dawkins, "have I found any evidence for these words used of baskets or cradles." IV. The katsiveloi, or Gipsies, dressed like the Babo in miserable rags. Vizyenos says that there were three or four, apparently all male, though elsewhere he incidentally mentions a female katsivela. Mr Dawkins saw two only, a man and his wife. They carried a sapling some ten or twelve feet long, and their faces and hands were blackened. The man had no other disguise, but his wife wore a woman's coat and on the head a kerchief and a little false hair. V. The Policemen. These are two or three young men carrying swords and whips, with embroidered kerchiefs tied round their fezzes. One of them carried also a length of chain for making captures. Lastly there is a man playing a bagpipe. " The masqueraders spend the day in visiting each house in the village, receiving everywhere bread, eggs or money. The two kalogheroi lead the crowd, knocking loudly at the doors with the bow and phallus, and with the koritsia generally dance I] THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 19 a little hand-in-hand, before, the housewife brings out her contribution. They are followed by the katsivelos and katsivela, who are especially privileged to scare fowls and rob nests. In general anything lying about may be seized as a pledge to be redeemed, and the koritsia especially carry off babies with this object, and occasionally capture a man with their handkerchiefs. A recurring feature is an obscene pantomime between the katsivelos and his wife on the straw-heaps in front of the houses." "By the afternoon no house was left unvisited, and everybody, . men and women, gathered round the open space in front of the church. Here the drama proper is enacted. It began with a hand in hand dance of all the characters, the Policemen brandishing their drawn swords. The kalogheroi then withdrew, leaving the field to the Gipsy smiths, the katsivelos and his wife. These sat on the ground facing each other, and the katsivelos pounded on the ground with a stone, whilst the katsivela lifted her skirts up and down. This is understood to be a pantomimic representation of the forging of a plough-share, the man hammering like a blacksmith, whilst the fanning with the skirts represents the action of a pair of bellows. At this point, the Babo's child begins to get too big for the cradle, and, together with a huge appetite for meat and drink, he begins to demand a wife. This according to Vizyenos was followed by the chief kalogheros pursuing one of the koritsia and the celebration between them of a mock marriage, parodying the Greek rite of the bride and bridegroom. The first kalo- gheros is then seen sauntering about or standing the phallus upright on the ground and sitting upon it. Meanwhile his comrade stalks him from behind, and shoots him, with the bow, whereupon the other falls down dead. After making sure that he is dead the slayer pretends to flay him. Whilst the kalogheros is thus lying dead his wife laments for him with loud cries, throw- . ing herself across his prostrate body (Fig. 7). In this, lament according to Vizyenos the slayer and the rest of the actors join, making a regular parody of a Christian funeral, burning dung as incense and pretending to sing the service, finally lifting up the corpse to carry it away." The slain man then suddenly comes to life. Next follows 2—2 20 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. the serious part of the ceremony. There is another forging of the ploughshare, and this time it is a real share. At about this point all the implements used were thrown into the air with cries, ical tov xP°"° v ("Next year also !"). The share being supposed to be finished, a real plough was brought and the mockery seemed to cease. Instead of oxen, the koritsia were yoked and dragged it round the village square twice contrary, to the way of the sun. One of the kalogheroi was at the tail of the plough and the other guided it in front, whilst a man walked behind scattering seeds from a basket. Whilst the plough is being drawn, they cry, "May wheat be ten piastres the bushel! Rye five piastres the bushel! Barley three piastres the bushel! Amen, God, that the poor may eat! Yea, God, that poor folk be filled." Mr Dawkins has kindly presented to the Cambridge Anthropological Museum the implements used in the play that he witnessed. There can be little doubt that we have in this local festival a survival of a coarse and orgiastic rite performed by the ancient Thracians in order to ensure fertility. It will be observed that the fox-skin, and the fawn-skin which are so prominent in the ancient Dionysiac rites here also survived, though now the goat-skin, probably because of its greater cheapness, seems to have replaced the skins of the wild animals used in the ancient cult. As the fox-skin and the fawn-skin both formed part of the ancient Thracian dress, and as the goat-skin was the most common form of dress in ancient Greece, we need not indulge in any speculations as to whether, in the modern Thracian play, we have evidence of the worship of a goat-god or a fox-god or a fawn-god. Epiphany Carnival in Thessaly. But such rude dramas are not confined to modern Thrace, for there is now evidence of their survival in Northern Greece. My friend Mr A. J. B. Wace, M.A, Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, has given me the following account of such a performance, which has lately come within his own cognizance, when engaged in making his important excavations in the prehistoric mounds of Thessaly. He first heard of it at Almyro in Phthiotis. On the eve of the Epiphany a kind of Satyric festival I] THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 21 takes place. Men dressed in goat-skins dance and sing round the bonfires, and a kind .of play is acted. "This carnival 5 o ft a J5 dance, which takes' place on Epiphany eve and in many cases on -Epiphany "day itself, occurs in Phthiotis, the Thessalian 22 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. plains, on Ossa, and in southern Macedonia, where Christians of other nationality than Greek (i.e. Albanian and Bulgarian) also celebrate it. The young men form bands about twelve strong, four of these act and the rest dance and sing in two semi- choruses. The four actors are the bridegroom (yafifipos) clad in a sheep- or goat-skin cloak with a mask of the same material wearing bells and carrying a rusty sword, the bride (vvs fiev r

' t)V wpb Qio~iri8os eh ns di'a/3as- tois x°P €VTa G dweicpLvaTO. 4 i) tov Be&rpou p^xP L "8" <"rd rijs Tpairifts ibt>6puurrai. Tap* to iw' avTys t& (Mil p.eplteo-8at, TovriffTi, to. Bvbfueva lepeio.. Tpatrefa Si tJv, i' rjs iv rots dypols jjSov, wfiiru] rd^iv \a(3oi!i(n)s TpaytpStas. l] THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 41 meat, etc.), of an old-fashioned type, was used as an extemporised stage on which someone, the poet or leader, mounted and held a dialogue with the other members of the Chorus. This shows that Thespis was not the first to introduce dialogue between some kind of actor and the chorus. The table on which the actor stood had nothing sacred about it. This statement of Pollux is amply confirmed by the second passage which declares that in old days in the country parts before Tragedy had taken its full shape, the singers stood and sang upon a table (trapeza). We must therefore be careful not to confuse the sacred table (theoris), on which offerings were laid in front of the homos, with the ordinary table extemporised into a stage. The derivation of ihymele given above is virtually that still generally accepted, i.e. from Oveiv, " to sacrifice," lit. " to raise a smoke," that is, to offer burnt sacrifice. It is the term regularly used of sacrificing to gods, whilst the term evayi^eiv is used of the "fireless offerings " made to the dead. Thus the offerings cut up on the ihymele (according to the Etymologicum Magnum) were those to be offered with fire and therefore to a god, but at the same time it is quite possible that the term thyos, thysia, came to be used generally of all sorts of sacrifice. Pollux plainly had doubts whether the ihymele was a bema (step or platform), or a bomos (altar or tomb), but it is very probable that the two coincided. A raised altar or tomb with or without a step or steps was nothing else than a bema (cf. Fig. 9, p. 45). By the time when Pollux was writing, the term ihymele had come to be generally used of a raised platform. This too is certainly the sense in which it is employed by Plutarch where it is contrasted with the skene. Plutarch 1 uses it in several passages as a platform from which people spoke or sang, though at the same time he speaks of it as something distinct from the stage (skene). The scholiast on Aristophanes, Equites 516, uses it apparently in a like sense, for he repre- sents the comic poet as coming forward to the ihymele to recite 1 in, 119, 2 (Reiske) : Sulla, in celebration of his victory at Thebes, caused a thymele to be erected near the fountain of Oedipus ; i, 447, 11 : Alexander borne along with his companions on a lofty thymele drawn by eight horses ; viii, 456, 7 : tr/ciji'V nal $v/i4\tiv. 42 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. the Parabasis. On the strength of the latter passage and of one of those from Plutarch, to which I have just referred, Liddell and Scott (s.v.) explain the thymele as " an altar-shaped platform in the middle of the orchestra, on the steps of which stood the leader of the Chorus (anciently the poet himself) to direct its movements." Mr Haigh 1 , adopting the view set forth by my friend Mr A. B. Cook 2 , Reader in Classical Archaeology in the University of Cambridge, says that " the first innovation was the introduction of a dialogue between the coryphaeus and the choreutae in the intervals of the choral ode. For the purpose of carrying on this dialogue the coryphaeus used to mount upon the sacrificial table, which stood beside the altar in the centre of the orchestra. Such sacrificial tables are often found in ancient vase paintings by the side of the regular altar, and were used for cutting up the victims or for receiving various bloodless offerings, such as cakes and vegetables. Both the table and the altar were called by the same name, thymele. This table on which the coryphaeus took his stand, surrounded by the choristers, was the prototype of the stage in the later Greek theatre." But the reader will notice (1) that there is not a single word in the ancient sources (on which Mr Cook and Mr Haigh relied) to show that a table was ever called a thymele, and (2) to show that the sacred table which stood, not in the orchestra beside the thymele, but on the stage (skene), bearing on it sacred cakes, was identical with the ordinary common table used by rustics as a temporary platform on which they stood and sang. Let us turn to the material evidence. Various ancient theatres have been excavated in Greece in modern times, but only in one of them, that at Priene, have the remains of an altar been discovered. In this theatre some fifteen years ago the altar was found standing in its original position. It is placed just in front of the first row of seats, exactly opposite the centre of the stage 3 . Mr Haigh doubts whether this was 1 The Attic Theatre (2nd ed., 1898), p. 106. 2 "On the Thymele in Greek Theatres," Class. Review (1895), vol. ix, pp. 370-8. 3 Haigh, The Attic Theatre (2nd ed.), p. 137. l] THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 43 the usual position of the altar in a Greek theatre. " In the earliest period (writes he), when the drama was still a purely lyrical performance, the altar stood in the centre of the orchestra and the chorus danced round about it. The evidence supplied by the remains at Athens and Epidaurus rather favours the view that in these theatres it still occupied the same position." " In the middle of the theatre at Epidaurus there is a round stone, 28 inches in diameter, let into the ground, so as to be on the same level with the surrounding surface. In the middle of the stone is a circular hole. A similar hole is found in the later Athenian orchestra." The purpose of this stone cannot be determined with certainty. It has been sug- gested that these holes were meant for the reception of small stone altars. At Athens the surface of the fifth and fourth century orchestra has not been preserved, but the Roman pavement has survived, which may retain vestiges of the original design. There is no trace of an altar, but in the centre is a large rhombus-shaped figure bounded by two strips of marble. The interior of the figure is paved with small slabs of marble also rhombus-shaped and of different colours. In the middle of the figure is a block of Pentelic marble 41 inches long and 17£ inches broad. The centre of the block has a shallow circular depression, which may have been intended to receive an altar of Dionysus. At the Piraeus the centre of the orchestra was marked by a small pit. The excavations at Megalopolis failed to find any remains of the thymele or altar, which doubtless stood in the centre of the orchestra 1 . It may be that in the depressions in the centre of the stone found in the middle of the orchestra at Athens we have really a hollow to receive offerings, and that the circular hole in the stone in the middle of the orchestra at Epidaurus, as also the pit found in the centre of the orchestra at Piraeus, may both have served a like purpose. These hollows may well represent the bothros into which offerings to dead heroes were placed. It was quite easy to place over these stones a temporary platform, such. as the thymele had certainly become in Hellenistic and Roman times. 1 Haigh and Cook, loc. cit. 44 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. Mr Cook in his paper already cited has shown that the statements of Pollux and the Etymologicum Magnum are amply corroborated by the evidence of extant monuments. He points out that the table {trapeza or eleos) was a usual concomitant of a homos (altar or tomb), and that it was employed to hold the objects to be offered on the homos. But he seems wrong (a) in assuming that the trapeza or eleos on which the singers stood, was identical with the sacred table (theoris), which stood beside the homos on the stage (and not in the orchestra), and (b) in deducing from thence one form of thymele. In support of this he cites a Pan-Athenaic vase in the British Museum (B. 141), showing a musical contest between two persons confronted on a kind of platform. The platform is a horizontal table-top supported on legs, one showing at each end, the lower part of which is roughly carved to represent animal paws. In this he rightly recognizes the trapeza referred to by Pollux and the Etymologicum Magnum. Its shape, he thinks, accords precisely with that of a trapeza placed before the cultus statues of Dionysus Dendrites. But it does not follow that because a table used for holding offerings is in the same archaic form as the tables used for ordinary domestic purposes any singer would have ventured to stand upon and use as a platform the table dedicated to a god or hero. Another vase in the same collection (B. 188) shows an apparently solid bema, the motif being repeated twice with a slight variation : (a) a musical contest with a bema of three steps, on which stand two youths confronted, and (6) a bema of one step on which stand two youths side by side. There is thus archaeological evidence for the statement of Pollux and the Etymologicum Magnum that tables were used as extem- porary platforms by the rustics, though there is none to show that such tables were in any sense thymelae, whilst there is also proof that the thymele was a hema or platform of one or more steps. But such is the form of the tomb of Agamemnon (Fig. 14, p. 121). Moreover the tomb of Agamemnon in the Ghoephorae (p. 119) and that of Proteus in the Helena (p. 139) are compared to a bomos. Such bema can be seen in the illus- tration (Fig. 9), which I am enabled to show by the kindness of Ij THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 45 s J? a .0 46 THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY [CH. Mr Cook 1 . It is from a Theban black-figured scyphos in the British Museum (B. 78). It is thus described by Mr H. B. Walters: "Flute-player to left, with puffed out cheeks, wearing a beaded fillet and himation ; in front of him, two grotesque nude figures to left, the first slightly bearded, holding up a tympanon (?) ; the other beardless, with a wreath in his hand and another on his head, standing on a ihymele{V). On the left a branch.'' A very interesting discovery made in Athens in an ancient Dionysiac precinct near the Areopagus does not prove that the table was the thymele itself, for it may have been meant to bear offerings for the object of adoration. In the middle of the precinct " are the remains of an altar in the form of a table resting on four legs and beside this in the basis of the altar is a sinking for a stela." 2 It may be that we must not recognize, as has been done, a thymele in this table. Possibly it was a table for offerings presented to the stele or the object of veneration represented by that stele, whether Dionysus, or some ancient hero upon whose cult that of Dionysus may have been placed. Not only, as already said, were trapezai the regular accessories of altars, as on the Lycaean Mount in Arcadia, but even of much smaller objects of adoration. Thus at Chaeronea the supposed spear or sceptre of Aga- memnon was held in great sanctity, and a table stood beside it s . "The god whom the Chaeroneans honour most is the sceptre which Homer says Hephaestus made for Zeus. This sceptre they worship naming it a spear, and that there is something divine about it is proved by the distinction that it confers on its owners. There is no public temple built for it, but the man who acts as priest keeps the sceptre in his own house for a year and sacrifices are offered to it daily and a table is set beside it covered with all sorts of flesh and cakes." Here we have the sacred table of offerings corresponding with its cakes to the sacred table with cakes called theoru or thyoris, which stood on the ancient skene (stage) beside the bomos. The facts here set forth show that there were two forms of worship in the Greek theatre : 1 op. cit., p. 374, with figure. a Cook, op. cit., p. 370. s Paus. ix, 4. 11-12. i] THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 47 I. The bomos on the stage with its table of offerings. This bomos was like the conical pillars which stood in the streets before house doors, and called in later times Apollo Agyieus, but which were more probably the grave-stones of ancient worthies. The offerings to this bomos were cakes, such as those commonly offered to the dead. II. In the orchestra stood the thymele, a true altar for offering burnt sacrifices to the gods. This may also have had its table and have stood over a bothros. Here sacrifice was offered to Dionysus before the performance began. To this thymele came forward (irapafids) the comic poet, or in his name the coryphaeus, to deliver the Parabasis, a term which derived its name from this circumstance. But as Comedy borrowed largely the practices established by Tragedy, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the leader of the solemn hymns or dithyrambs from which Tragedy arose also took his stand on the steps of the thymele or on some object near it, in later times a temporary platform. The Skene. But quite distinct from the table for offerings near the bomos on the stage, and possibly from the other one beside the thymele in the orchestra, there was the ordinary table used as a temporary stage in early times before Tragedy had taken its proper shape. It was out of such table-stages that the skene eventually grew and not from a sacred table for offerings. The Introduction of the Cult of Dionysus. As there were two altars in the theatre, there were undoubtedly survivals of two distinct cults. Can we explain this hitherto neglected point ? The super-imposition of the cults of Dionysus upon that of an old hero gives us exactly the explanation needed for the facts. At Sicyon the tomb of Adrastus stood right in the market- place and round it the tragic chorus that represented his sorrows danced their solemn measure and sang their solemn hymn. When Cleisthenes handed over to Dionysus the tragic choruses of Adrastus, the dance would still be held in the same place and the tomb of Adrastus would either become the fire- 48 THE ORIGIN OP TRAGEDY [CH. altar of Dionysus {thymele) or else a separate altar of Dionysus would be set up beside it or close by. Thus in the embryo of the Tragic theatre there were two centres of adoration, the tomb of the hero and the fire-altar of Dionysus, and at the sacred spot where before only the ritual of a hero was performed, there were now two cults; the one in honour of the old dead heroj the other with burnt sacrifice in honour of the god Dionysus. The shrine henceforth played a double part like that of Heracles close by (p. 38). But the religious principles that led to this double cult at Sicyon were at work all over Greece. In very many places the tomb of the old hero or heroine, in whose honour mimetic dances had been, held from of old, was incorporated into the worship of some more potent divinity. If the new cult was that of Dionysus, the tomb either became the thymele of that god, or a fire altar was erected beside the tomb of the hero. But it does not follow that in every case where such super- imposition took place, Dionysus was the god who overshadowed the worship of the local hero. Thus we have seen that at Tegea in Arcadia the dramatic performance in honour of Scephrus did not form a part of the cult of the Thracian god, but was associated with that of Apollo. In a later section it will be shown at length that in the extant Greek tragedies the tombs of heroes play a very prominent part. At this stage it will suffice to cite one of the most striking instances. In the Ghoephori the tomb of Agamemnon forms the centre of the opening scene. To it approach from the palace the chorus of handmaids in attendance on Electra, their purpose being to offer at the command of Clytemnestra propitiatory offerings to the murdered king and husband. The connection of the worship of Dionysus with festivals in which the cult of the dead bore a very im- portant part, has recently been placed beyond doubt in the case of the chief Attic festivals with which the name of that god is associated. These were (1) the Country Dionysia (to. tear dypov';) held in the country villages in the month of December, (2) the Lenaea, held at Athens in the second half of January (in the month anciently termed Lenaion from this very festival, but \ later Gamelion), (3) the Anthesteria held in Athens in March, x ] THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY 49 (4) the Great or City Dionysia (rd. iv aa-rei) held in the first part of April. It is obvious that all four festivals fall at seasons of the year when there is no vintage. Now as each Attic month bore a name 1 derived from the chief festival held at that season, we might naturally expect to find a month named after Dionysus, if the City Dionysia had been of great antiquity, or if the festival held at that time of year had had that god's name associated with it from a distant past. But the fact that such is not the case is exactly in accordance with its history. Plays were practically only to be seen at that festival and at the Lenaea, but there were also certain acting contests at the Anthesteria, whilst there were dramatic exhibitions in the various country town- ships during the Rural Dionysia, though in Athens itself there were apparently no performances at this season. Yet the dramatic performances at the Great Dionysia were only of a comparatively recent date. It was the principal time for the exhibition of tragedies, and it was at this festival that the earliest public competitions in Tragedy were established. The first contest was held in B.C. 535, when Thespis, now an old man, took part in the performances and won the crown of victory. It was but a short time before that date that Pisistratus had returned once more from exile and had begun his third and final tyranny. The regulations of the tragic contests must therefore have been carried out under his auspices. As the festival, at least in its more splendid form, is known to have been of a comparatively late date, critics have been led to con- jecture that the entire festival was first instituted by that despot. But it seems more probable that like the other three 1 I have shown (Proc. Cambridge Philological Society (1907)), pp. 2, 3, that the termination -av of the names of the Attic months (e.g. Ho, -ficos, TioTidpoiuiiv, YaiiifKiibv, etc.) is simply the genitive plural of the name of the festival held in the particular month, HoT(fi xal iv apuaaiv Zttttoi Sia redr, w W&tois h aidWauri 6av/iaSla,y. As we have said above, it has been generally supposed to have grown out of rude licentious dithyrambs of the Dorians. But there is no evidence for the existence of such licentious dithyrambs, and as neither the dithyramb nor Tragedy itself can be held to be Dorian in origin, we must look for some other explanation of the Satyric drama. Now when the Chorus, which 1 169-72 : tx' &m rovrt t 6pdbv ^axiordcai IukftoQ re dpay/tds Kal Tape IIovtikov iroieiv Kal 04ffridos iinypktptiv. 4 Rhet. in, 1: inreKplvovro yap airol ras rpayifSlas o! toitjtoI t6 Tpfirop. 60 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [OH. of tragedy the poets themselves acted in their own dramas," but we know from Plutarch 1 that Thespis himself took the leading part in his own pieces. Tragedy must have become a definite form of art and literature before Pisistratus gave it so honourable a place in his new or expanded Athenian festival of Dionysus. By universal consent Thespis made the grand step in the evolution of the Tragic art. In what did this consist? According to Diogenes Laertius 2 " in ancient times the chorus alone carried on the action, but Thespis invented a single actor." But this cannot mean, as is commonly held, that Thespis first separated in some degree the coryphaeus from the chorus and made him interrupt the dithyramb with epic recitations, for as we have seen above (p. 40) before his time the poet or coryphaeus used to mount a table and hold a dialogue with the chorus. There seems no reason to doubt that Thespis in some way defined more exactly the position of the actor, especially by the introduction of a simple form of mask. We are told by Suidas 3 that at first he smeared his face with white lead, next he covered it with purslane in his exhibitions, and finally he intro- duced the use of masks made of linen only. But it is likely that another and still more important step was made by him, as is asserted in the tradition embodied by Horace 4 . Prof. Mahaffy 5 says that " we must cast aside the nonsense talked by Horace of his (Thespis) being a strolling player, going about in a cart to fairs and markets," and he holds that "an acquaintance with the mysteries and deeper theology of the day suggested to Thespis the representation of human sorrow for a moral purpose," and that "with Thespis may have arisen the great conception, which we see full-blown in Aeschylus — the in- tention of the drama to purify human sympathy by exercising it on great and apparently disproportioned afflictions of heroic 1 Solon 29. 2 in, 56. 3 s.v. Thespis : Kal trpurov fiev xp^as rb irpbffwirov iptmxvdlip iTpayipdrfffeif, elra AvSpax"V iffKiiraaev iv t<£ iwibelKwadai, Kal /jlcto. ravra elvfyeyice Ktti tt]V t&i irpoainveltiiv xpfyiv iv p.bvji ddbvg Karaaiievdiras ; Horace, A. P., 277, makes him use lees (perunoti faeoibus ora). 4 Ars Poet., 275-6. « Hist, of Greek Literature, vol. i, pp. 234-5. Il] THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 61 men, when the iron hand of a stern and unforgiving Providence chastises old transgressions, or represses the revolt of private judgement against established ordinance." Others 1 also reject the Horatian tradition on the grounds that it arose from confusing the first beginnings of Tragedy with those of Comedy. In the latter beyond question "jests from a waggon " played a very important part, but there is no reason why a waggon should not likewise have taken a due share in the first efforts of the tragic actor, though for a purpose very different from that to which it was put by the scurrilous jesters who were the forerunners of Comedy proper. After all Horace is probably right. In early days the tragic choruses and dithyrambs were closely attached to the tombs of heroes and were only performed on festival occasions at these sacred spots. Thespis detached his chorus and dithyramb from some particular shrine, probably at Icaria his native place, and taking his company with him on waggons gave his performances on his extemporised stage when and where he could find an audience, not for religious purposes but for a pastime. Thus not merely by defining more accurately the rdle of the actor but also by lifting Tragedy from being a mere piece of religious ritual tied to a particular spot into a great form of literature, he was the true founder of the Tragic art. This view offers a reasonable explanation of Solon's anger on first seeing Thespis act. A performance which he would have regarded as fit and proper when enacted in some shrine of the gods or at a hero's tomb, not unnaturally roused his indignation when the exhibition was merely "for sport," as Thespis himself said (and doubtless also for profit), and not at some hallowed spot, but in any profane place where an audience might conveniently be collected. It may of course be said that the offence of Thespis in Solon's eyes consisted in the im- personation of heroes or of gods. But it is very likely that long before this time sacred dramas with impersonations of the gods were regularly performed in temple precincts, as for instance the Mystery Plays at Eleusis, as part of the regular ritual of the deity. 1 W. Christ, Geschichte der Griechischen Literatur, p. 175. 62 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. It can hardly be maintained that it was simply the intro- duction of an actor who held a dialogue with the chorus that angered the great statesman and reformer, for as we have seen above (p. 40) long before the time of Thespis some sort of dialogue had been held between the chorus and a person mounted on a table. On the other hand, the representation of gods, not in or near their shrines, and of dead heroes far away from the graves in which their bones were at rest in the lap of their native land, must indeed have been not merely a great " novelty," as we are told it was, but a great shock, to the Greeks of the sixth century B.C. If this explanation of the grand step made by Thespis is correct, it can be exactly paralleled in the history of the mediaeval Drama. Mysteries and Miracles. The Mysteries and Miracles were essentially part of a religious ritual performed in honour of Christ or of some saint, as for instance the play of St Catharine, which the Norman Geoffrey, afterwards abbot of St Albans, caused to be represented at Dunstable some time prior to A.D. 1110, the earliest play of any kind known by name to have been acted in England. In process of time actors who had given successful performances of such Mystery and Miracle plays at some church in honour of some holy personage and for the edification of the faithful, began to wander about as strolling players ready to perform their piece wherever they could secure an audience, be it sacred edifice or inn-yard. In so doing they were transforming such plays from being merely a piece of religious ritual attached to some particular shrine into a true form of dramatic literature. Nor is it only in these respects that the mediaeval Christian drama may be compared with that of early Greece. Not only was the process of development similar, and not only did each rouse the same prejudices on the part of the more religious and staid part of the community, but each sprang from the same deep-rooted principle — the honouring and pro- pitiation of the sacred dead, the hero and the saint — and as a corollary even of the gods themselves. As the men of Sicyon thought that they pleased Adrastus by rehearsing and repre- lr J THE BISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 63 senting his sorrows, so the Christian Church honoured its Divine Founder by continually keeping his Passion in remembrance, as he himself had ordained at the Last Supper. The Roman Church still further carries out this same principle of honouring Christ by exhibiting the manger-cradle and holy child at Christmas and his sepulchre at Easter. To this day when every ten years the peasants of Ober-Ammergau perform their Passion Play, they believe that by this solemn representation of the sufferings of Christ, they are doing what is pleasing in his sight. But if the leader of that company of peasant actors were to take it to some town or city and there perform the sacred drama in a theatre " for pastime " and for lucre, the feelings of their fellow-villagers and, I doubt not, of a far wider community, would not unnaturally be much the same as those roused in Solon's breast by the performance of Thespis. But before discussing other forms of primitive drama, let us briefly review the successors of Thespis and the im- mediate forerunners of Aeschylus in the development of the Tragic art. The Immediate Precursors of Aeschylus. Pratinas. First of these comes Pratinas, a native of Phlius in Argolis. His father's name is variously given as Pyrrhonides or Encomius. According to Suidas 1 he is said to have been the first to compose a Satyric drama, and the lexicographer ascribes to him fifty plays of which thirty-two were Satyric. In B.C. 499 when Aeschylus made his first appearance before the Athenian audience, Pratinas and Choerilus were his competitors, but, nothing is known of the plays produced on that occasion. It was the collapse, during the performance of one of his pieces, of the temporary platforms (licpia,) on which the spectators were standing that led to the erection of the first regular theatre at I Athens z - His son Arisl^as followed in his father's footsteps, and the name of one of his Satyric dramas — Cyclops — has come down 1 s.v. Pratinas. 2 Suidas, loc. cit. 64 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. to us. This is of special interest since, as we have seen above, the only extant Satyric drama bears the same title and doubt- less was composed on the same theme. But in B.C. 467 when Aeschylus competed with Laius, Oedipus, Seven against Thebes, and the Satyric play Sphinx, Arises was second with the Perseus, Tantalus, and the Satyric play Palaestae, composed by his father Pratinas 1 . Polyphradmon, son of Phrynichus, was third with the tetralogy of the Lycurgeia. The Palaestae is the only play of Pratinas of which the name has survived. A fragment of a hyporchema probably belonging to one of his Satyric dramas is extant. In a lyrical fragment still pre- served Pratinas 2 complains that the flute is now overpowering the voice : "The Muse made Song the qiieen. Let the flute keep its place in the chorus. It is but the servant of Song." This was probably due to the great changes made by Lasus of Hermione, a contemporary of Pratinas, who, as we have seen above (p. 9), deeply influenced the music of the day, amongst his innovations being a greater use of the flute. Choerilus. If Pratinas was the first to introduce the Satyric drama into Athens, his contemporary and rival Choerilus seems to have surpassed him in public estimation as a com- poser of this class of play. So great was his distinction in this branch of dramatic art that it gave rise to the proverb : " When Choerilus was king amongst the Satyrs 3 ." Choerilus first began to exhibit in B.C. 523, and according to Suidas* he wrote no less than one hundred and sixty plays and was victorious thirteen times. From the same source we learn that he made some improvements in masks, but what these were is uncertain; perhaps they were Satyric. He, like Pratinas, was a competitor of Aeschylus when the latter made his first appearance in B.C. 499. Phrynichus. Pratinas and Choerilus are chiefly remem- bered for the part they took in the introduction and development 1 Arg. to Aesch. Sept. c. Theb. 2 Athen. 617 B : jkv aoiHav Kar^crraae HiepU fiaaLXeiav 6 5' av\bs CorepoK Xopev^TO). koX yap tad' ijTnjp^Tas. 3 Hxka /ih (3acri\e!>s T)V Xoipl\os if SaTtSpowi. * S.V. XoipCkos. Il] THE RISE OE ATTIC TRAGEDY 65 of the Satyric drama at Athens. But on the other hand their contemporary Phrynichus, son of Polyphradmon, is memorable for his share in the evolution of that true Tragedy which in the hands of Aeschylus was moulded into the greatest form of literature. Phrynichus made improvements on various sides of the tragic art — metre, dances, structure of plot, and mise en seine. Thus he was the first to use trochaic tetrameters in Tragedy, and indeed he is called the inventor of that metre 1 — traditions really not in conflict with the vague statement of Aristotle already cited (p. 57), that the tetrameter was discarded along with the short plot and that the iambic came into use along with that of greater compass. He was the first to introduce female characters and to employ female masks, and he invented a great number of new dances. In an epigram composed by himself 2 he boasts that he had devised " more figures in dancing than there are waves in the sea on a stormy night." All the early dramatists — Thespis, Pratinas, Choerilus and Phrynichus — were called "dancers 3 ," not only because of the pro- minent part which the chorus and the dancing filled in their plays, but also because they gave instruction in choric dancing. Aeschylus himself is said to have personally trained his choruses and to have invented many new dances and movements for them. Partly from Suidas, partly from other sources, we know the names of some half-score of the plays of Phrynichus : Aiyvimoi, 'A.KTalo>v, "A\k7] °* IT ' M ™ r V "i/iara 7T04HTCU X e fa aTl *"? dXotf. 3 Athen. 22 a. 4 Them. 5. Themistocles commemorated his victory on a pinax, Qe/uo-TOK\ijs $pe&ppios tx°lrirt el "i */"fr"X os iSlbaaxev, 'ASelp-avTos ijpx 6 "- R. T. & 66 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. held to be right. This play has a special importance as there seems little doubt that Aeschylus modelled his Persae upon it. But still more famous from its historical associations is the Sack of Miletus, which the poet exhibited in B.C. 494. In it he was again the forerunner of Aeschylus in the widening of the scope of Tragedy, but he was unfortunate in this experiment in using current political events for dramatic purposes. The play dealt with the capture of Miletus by the Persians in B.C. 495 (01. 71). But the horrors of the calamity suffered by their kinsfolk of Ionia were still too fresh in the minds of the Athenians. Herodotus 1 narrates how the whole theatre buret into tears, how his fellow-citizens fined the poet a thousand drachmae for having reminded them of their sorrows,and directed that no one for the future should dramatise this story. We have few remains of Phrynichus, but from the references to him in the plays of Aristophanes 2 , his compositions, especially his lyrics, were noted for their sweetness, and in the last quarter of the fifth century were still great favourites with the older generation. From one of his fragments quoted by Pausanias* we learn " how the brand was given by the Fates to Althea and how Meleager was not to die till the brand was consumed by fire, and how Althea in her rage burned it." " This legend," says Pausanias, " was first dramatised by Phrynichus, son of Poly- phradmon, in his play of The Pleuronian Women " : "For chilly doom He did not escape, for a swift flame consumed him While the brand was being destroyed by his grim mischief-working mother." " Phrynichus, as we see, has not worked out the story in detail as an author would do with a creation of his own : he has merely touched it as a story already famous all over Greece." Polyphradmon, son of Phrynichus, followed his father's art and with his Lycurgeia was third in the contest in B.C. 467, when Aeschylus won the first prize with his tetralogy, one play of which was the Seven against Thebes*. 1 vi, 21. 2 Avel 750 . Vespae 219. 3 *, 31. 4. * Arg. ad Aesch. Sept. c. Theb. n ] THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 67 Let us now sum up the results of our survey of the rise of Tragedy in Greece. There had been, rude laments and dirges for the dead, cer- tainly from Homeric days, and we know not how long before — unfeigned outpourings of the anguished heart for the loved one, later to be supplemented by the wail of the hireling. Such were those led by Achilles over Patrocles 1 , and by white-armed Andro- mache over the body of her brave lord 2 , when they had brought him to his famous house and " laid him on a carven bed and set beside him minstrels, leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay, while the women made moan with them." In the words of Achilles " Lamentation is the due of the dead." But the honouring of the dead did not end with the burning on the pyre or the consignment to the grave. Periodically solemn dances of a mimetic character, athletic contests and feats of arms, in honour of those long departed, had been the custom of the aboriginal population of Greece, long before the coming of either Achean or Dorian. This is amply proved by the celebra- tions in honour of Adrastus at Sicyon, of Iolaus at Thebes, and by the traces of similar cults of the dead in the Shaft-graves of Mycenae, which date from the Bronze Age. At what precise date the gross rites of Dionysus were introduced into Athens we cannot say, though it was certainly early (pp. 51-2). On the other hand we can infer with high probability from the statements of Pindar and Herodotus re- specting the first performance of the dithyramb at Corinth in the reign of Periander (B.C. 625 — 585), that it was within that period that the worship of the god was introduced, publicly at least, into Corinth. It may also have been about the same time that the cult of Dionysus Melanaegis of Eleutherae was set up in Hermione, the birthplace of Lasus. Now as it was in the reign of Cleisthenes (circa B.C. 595—560) that the worship of Dionysus was introduced into Sicyon, it is not unlikely that when Cleisthenes was casting about for some way of ridding himself and Sicyon from the danger which he apprehended from the hero Adrastus (p. 27), the newly established cult of Dionysus at Corinth, with its famous dithy- 1 II. xxin, 10. 2 II- xxiv, 720 sqq. 5—2 68 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. ramb and chorus, came under his notice. He accordingly may have brought in not merely the hero Melanippus, but also the powerful new god from Thrace to aid him against his ghostly enemy. Whether this be so or not, the introduction of the cult of Dionysus into Sicyon cannot be set earlier than B.C. 600, and may have been some twenty years or more later. Now as Thespis was an old man in B.C. 535, and as Solon died in B.C. 558, Thespis must have been engaged in his pro- fession at least before the latter date and probably many years earlier, unless he had only taken to the dramatic calling rather late in life. We may not be far wrong if we place his public performances as early as B.C. 570. But as we are told that there were at least fifteen writers of Tragedy before him, the first of whom, according to Suidas, was Epigenes of Sicyon, the latter must have been living and working at the very time when the cult of Dionysus had not yet been set up in that city, and when Adrastus was still the chief object of worship and was still honoured with " tragic dances which referred to his sorrows." Now the orthodox writers on the history of Greek Tragedy infer from the scanty data respecting Epigenes that he had already overstepped the narrow ring of Dionysiac themes and had celebrated ancient heroes without any reference to Dionysus. In other words, those who hold that Tragedy was originally confined to Dionysus and his vicissitudes, admit that in Sicyon at the very time when tragic dances in honour of Adrastus were still or had lately been a chief feature of that town, and when the cult of Dionysus had either not yet or but recently been introduced, Epigenes was writing dramas which had no reference to that god. But as he was writing dramas on subjects not Dionysiac either before or very shortly after the cult of that deity had been brought in by Cleisthenes, we must regard him as not breaking away from a tradition which strictly confined tragedies to Dionysiac themes, but rather as continuing the ancient practice of" celebrating heroes in such compositions. Thus the unsubstantial fabric erected on the assumption that Tragedy in its first stage dealt with nothing else but Dionysiac subjects falls to the ground. When we come to the rise of Attic Tragedy the evidence, n ] THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 69 as far as it goes, points clearly in the same direction. The names of several of the plays of Thespis have been preserved, but these have been regarded as of doubtful authenticity, because, according to Aristoxenus, Heraclides Ponticus wrote plays to which he prefixed the name of Thespis. But as we are not told that these plays bore the same titles as those ascribed to Thespis by Suidas, it does not by any means follow that the latter are spurious. But even if the titles were the same, it is not unlikely that Heraclides would have chosen as titles for his spurious compositions names declared by tradition to be those of genuine works of the Father of Attic Tragedy. The titles as they have reached us indicate that the ancients most certainly did not believe that Thespis confined himself to Dionysiac subjects. Neither the Bachelors, nor the Priests, nor Phorbas imply any such connection, though the name Pentheus clearly indicates that the play was on the same subject as the Bacchae of Euripides, and was therefore in some sense on a Dionysiac theme. Thus the Attic tradition seems to be against any such limitation of plays to Dionysiac subjects even in the infancy of Tragedy. We may therefore not unreasonably con- clude that Thespis, like Epigenes, dramatised from the first the sorrows of heroes and heroines. This is confirmed by the fact that his younger contemporary, the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, wrote a dithyramb called Memnon, whilst it is possible that Lasus also sang the sorrows of them of old time. The foregoing arguments gain further support from the fact that Thespis does not appear to have written Satyric dramas, for, as we have seen above, Pratinas of Phlius first introduced them into Athens, whilst his contemporary Choerilus developed this style. But as it is admitted that the Satyric dramas specially dealt with the adventures of Dionysus, it follows that Dionysiac themes did not form any considerable element in the plays of Thespis. When we pass to Phrynichus our arguments are again strengthened, for not one of the nine or ten titles of his plays which have come down to us betrays the slightest indication that the plot has any reference to Dionysus. On the contrary, we have good reason for believing in the case of most of them 70 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. that they dealt purely with heroes, and not with the Thracian deity. We may therefore conclude with high probability that there was never a period, either at Corinth, Sicyon or Athens, or anywhere else in Greece, when dithyrambs and tragedies were restricted to the celebration of the exploits and sufferings of Dionysus, but that on the contrary from the first inception of anything like formal dithyrambs and tragedies, these were employed like the ruder forms out of which they sprang, to honour the illustrious dead, whose tombs, as in the case of Adrastus and Iolaus, had been centres of worship for untold generations. This is quite in keeping with Aristotle's view that the tragedians were the lineal successors of the Epic poets, for the latter sang of the exploits and deaths of mighty men and the sorrows of heroines. At Sicyon itself the rhapsodists were reciting the poems of Homer, when the " tragic chorus " celebrated year by year in mimetic fashion the sorrows of Adrastus. In the Greek tragedies, as we have seen, the epic element has long been recognised in the speeches of the messengers (p. 7). Thus Tragedy is really a combination of the lyrical outburst of spontaneous grief for the dead and the heroic lay in which the deeds and trials of hero or heroine were recited in narrative form. In the fully developed Tragedy the lyrics sung by the chorus represent the immemorial laments for the dead, whilst the messengers' recitals and the dialogues of the dramatis personae correspond to the narrations and speeches of the Epic. The Origin of the terms Tragoedia and Tragic. Whilst in the preceding pages we have reviewed the origin and development of Tragedy in Peloponnesus and Attica we have restricted ourselves to the thing and have not attempted to discover the true origin of the name or to build any argu- ment upon it. As facts are always more important than mere terms, such an order of treatment seemed distinctly the most scientific. Now that we have completed our survey of the more material evidence, we are in a better position to attack Il] THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 71 the problems presented by the nomenclature of this branch of the Dramatic art and Literature. Tpo786<;, KcofiwSo?, Kw/j-mSia point rather to a subjective meaning, though it has to be confessed that rpvymSof, the oldest term for a comic actor, may be explained in either way. II. The next explanation is that of Bentley, who held that tragoedia meant the song of the goats or goatmen, that is, the satyrs, whom he and many others assumed to have been always in caprine shape. However it is now established that in Thracian representations they were never regarded as goats, for they have always the ears, tails, and even the feet of horses (Figs. 2 — 5). The reason for this is not far to seek. When Man desires to attribute inordinate sensuality to his fellow- men, he assigns to them the moral qualities of the horse, the bull, or the goat. But Aristotle knew that this was a libel on these animals and did not hesitate to say so. "Next after man," he wrote 1 , "the horse is the most lustful of all animals." In later times Satyrs were certainly pourtrayed in caprine form, as for instance on the Pandora vase 2 . This exhibits a group of masked Satyrlike beings pourtrayed as half-men, half-goats, dancing round a flute-player ; they have goat's horns on then- heads and goat's hoofs instead of equine or human feet, their tails also being those of goats. But there is no evidence that this scene depicts a Satyric chorus. On a Naples vase 8 dated some fifty years later, Satyrlike beings are seen, but without goat's hoofs or horns, and with horse-like tails, the only part resembling a goat being a shaggy skin round the loins. This type with horsetails and goatskin loin cloths is likewise found 1 Hist. An. vi, 2. 22. 2 Jmr HM Stud yol XJ> pl _ xj 3 Haigh, The Attic Tlieatre, p. 328, fig. 29. Il] THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 73 in the later representations 1 of Satyric choruses. If the Greeks conceived the Satyrs as goat-men and goat-footed, it is very strange that throughout the whole of Greek literature the epithet " goat-footed " is never found applied to them, an omission all the more significant since by the Roman writers they are regularly termed capripedes 2 . The Satyrs therefore cannot be themselves regarded as the origin of the term, more especially as their name gives its title to the Satyric drama, which, as we have seen, stood clearly apart from Tragedy. It seems unlikely that both the terms tragoedia and Satyric Drama would have been adopted from the Satyrs, more especially as it is clear that the very essence of Tragedy — the rude dithy- ramb and the mimetic dance — was already in use long before the introduction of the cult of Dionysus and his Satyrs. III. In May 1909, Dr L. E. Farnell read a paper before the Hellenic Society entitled "The Megala Dionysia and the Origin of Tragedy 3 ." In this he put forward a modification of Bentley's view, on which he based a criticism directed against the main theory of the present work. His paper has as yet only appeared in a summary, which I quote in full: " The origin of tragedy partly turned on the question about the date of the introduction of the cult of Dionysos 'E\ev- Oepew from Eleutherai. Vollgraff's view was that this was only introduced shortly before the peace of Nikias ; if so the legend and cult of Eleutherai would not necessarily throw light on the origin of tragedy. But there were strong reasons against Vollgraffs view, and for supposing that the cult and cult-legends of Eleutherai reached Athens as early as the middle of the sixth century B.C. and that a new ' cathartic ' festival in spring was instituted to provide for the god of this new cult. Scholars had long felt the difficulty in the Aristotelian dogma that ' Tragedy ' arose somehow from the Dithyramb and was primarily 'Satyric': a new theory had been put forward that Tragedy arose not from Dionysiac ritual but from a mimetic service performed at the graves of heroes. 1 Baumeister, Denkmaler, fig. 424. 2 Luor. iv, 582; Hor. C. n, 19. 4. 3 Jour. Hell. Stud. vol. xxix (1909), p. xlvii. 74 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. But whatever advantages attached to this theory, it did not account, any more than the older theory accounted for, the name rpayq>Bia. No explanation of this word of any proba- bility had ever been put forth other than the obvious one, that it meant ' goat-song ' ; that is, according to the most likely analogies, the song of men dressed in goat-skins. The mistake hitherto made was to suppose that men so dressed were satyrs. The original performers in the rpaywBia were worshippers of Dionysos MekdvaiyK, a god of the black goat-skin ; and their mimetic dance was solemn, sad, always tragic, probably originally a winter rite. The true meaning of the primitive service was indicated partly by the legend concerning Dionysos MeXdvaiyit;, and the duel between Melanthos and Xanthos, in which Black- man killed Fair-man, partly by the story of the Minyan i|ro\oew of Orchomenos, who had to do with a ritual in which the young god was killed, partly by the discovery by Mr E. M. Dawkins of a Dionysiac Mummers' play in modern Thrace, in which goat-men appeared and a goat-man was slain and lamented. They must look for the origin of Attic tragedy in an ancient European Mummery, which was a winter-drama of the seasons, in which the Black personage Dionysos Me\avaiyt<; or Mekavdos, or ol y]ro\6ei<; killed Xanthos the Fair One. The actors wore the black goat-skin of their god. Such a peasant mummery-play spreading through the North-Greek villages would often attract the local dramatic legend of some priest like Ikaros, who was slain in the service of the god : this would bring in the 'heroic' element, the death of the Dionysiac ' hero ' : the heroic element triumphed, all heroes were admitted, and the black goat-skin was discarded. Finally the religious intention of the festival explained the Aristotelian theory of ' Katharsis.' " Let us now examine the various points in this statement seriatim. (1) The first to be noticed is that Dr Farnell admits that the Dionysiac Mummers' play, spreading to the North-Greek villages, found there local dramatic legends, and that "this would bring in the heroic element." In other words, after denying that Tragedy arose in the worship of heroes, he admits Il] THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 75 for it the dual origin, which I have put forward — a native Greek and a Thracian — since he holds that a " local dramatic legend " was often already in full operation, such as was the case at Sicyon, where there had already been mimetic choruses long before the worship of Dionysus Melanaegis (according to Dr Farnell) had been introduced into Athens and long before any cult of Dionysus had been brought into Sicyon. (2) Dr Farnell speaks as if Dionysus had come into Greece as Melanaegis, and was universally worshipped there under that title. But what are the facts ? It was only at Eleutherae, Athens, and Hermione in Argolis that he was worshipped under this cult-name. There is not a tittle of evidence to show that Dionysus was celebrated at Corinth under that name in the famous dithyramb of Arion, or that the god was brought into Sicyon in that form : indeed the two ancient statements re- specting the origin of the name Melanaegis distinctly indicate that it was a very special phase of the god and by no means the ordinary form under which he was venerated. The account given by Suidas 1 is as follows : " They set up the worship of Dionysus Melanaegis for the following reason: the daughters of Eleuther beheld an apparition of Dionysus clad in a black goatskin, and found fault with it. Thereat the god was enraged and drove them mad. After that Eleuther was instructed by an oracle to cure their madness by honouring Dionysus of the Black Goatskin." The other account is given by the Scholiast on Aristophanes 2 . " War broke out between the Athenians and the Boeotians for the possession of Celaenae, a place on their borders. Xanthus, the Boeotian, challenged the Athenian king Thymoetes. When the latter declined the challenge, Melanthus a Messenian (of the race of Periclymenus, the son of Neleus), then living at Athens, took up the challenge with an eye to obtaining the kingdom. When they met in single combat Melanthus saw someone behind Xanthus clad in the skin of a he-goat (rpayij), that is, a black goatskin (04715), and he cried out that it was not fair for him to bring a second. The other looked behind, and Melanthus at once struck him and slew him. In consequence of this the festival 1 s.v. fU\av. 2 4cfc. 146 - 76 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. of the Apaturia and of Dionysus Melanaegis was established." It is quite plain from these two passages that the form under which Dionysus was supposed to have appeared at Eleutherae, whether it was to the daughters of Eleuther, the eponymous hero of that village, or to Melanthus, the Messenian, was in a guise hitherto unknown to Greece. Otherwise there would have been no reason for setting up a brand new cult of him under this particular title. Exact parallels occur in modern times. At some particular place, be it Lourdes or Knock or Loretto, someone sees a vision of the Madonna, and in conse- quence of this a new cult of a particular phase of the Virgin is set up. But it does not follow that this particular phase becomes universal. Just as the cult of a special aspect of Dionysus was brought into Athens and Hermione, so too that of Our Lady of Loretto is set up in various places. Again though Dr Farnell assumes that the cult of Dionysus Melanaegis only got into Athens about the middle of the sixth century B.C., shortly before the Great Dionysia with their tragic contests were established by Pisistratus in B.C. 535, yet the ancients thought that it had been introduced circa B.C. 1100 in the regal period, and associated it with the very ancient festival of the Apaturia. But the latter was already of great importance when the Ionians 1 settled in Asia after the Doric invasion (b.c. 1104). Now if Attic Tragedy and the name Tragoedia arose at Athens from the worship of Dionysus Melanaegis, we ought to find Tragedies, which are supposed by Dr Farnell to be an essential element of that cult, forming an integral part of the Apaturia. Yet it was only at the Lenaea and the Great Dionysia that such plays were acted, whilst no dramatic performance of any kind was included in the ceremonies of the Apaturia. Nor is there any evidence that the acting of tragedies formed a part of the ritual at Eleutherae or Hermione, although we know that in the latter place his festival was annually celebrated with musical contests and a regatta and swimming races 8 . Nor was Dionysus the only or the chief deity venerated at the Apaturia, that great festival of the Phratriae. On the first day, called Dorpeia, every citizen 1 Herod, i, 47. ' Paus. n, 35. 1. n ] THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 77 went in the evening to the phratrium, or to the house of some wealthy member of his own phratria, and there feasted. The second day was termed Anarrhusis, from the sacrifice offered on that day to Zeus Phratrius, and to Athena and sometimes to Dionysus Melanaegis. But according to Harpocration the Athenians on that occasion dressed in their finest apparel, kindled torches on the altar of Hephaestus, and sacrificed to, and sang in honour of, that deity. On the third day, called Koureotis, the children born that year in the families of the phratria, or such as had not yet been entered on the roll of the phratria, were presented by their fathers or guardians to the phratores. For each child a probaton 1 was sacrificed. It is therefore quite clear that Dionysus Melanaegis formed but a mere adjunct of a very ancient festival, that his worship had been brought from Eleutherae to Athens long before the sixth century B.C., that there was at no period any dramatic performance, tragic or otherwise, at the festival of the Apaturia, that the sacrifices offered on the third day were not confined to a he-goat, as it is termed a probaton, a word which in Attic Greek is almost always confined to a sheep and is not used of goats. To Dr Farnell's fanciful explanation of the names Xanthus and Melanthus, and to his comparison with the Psoloeis, we shall return later. (3) Dr Farnell, in confining his thesis to the origin of Attic Tragedy, shuts his eyes to the historical facts which pre- clude us from treating the origin of Attic Tragedy and the name tragoedia apart from the rise of that art in other parts of Greece, and he ignores the statements of the ancient authorities that Thespis was already acting dramas, known to them as tragedies, long before the death of Solon in B.C. 558 and the institution of the Great Dionysia in B.C. 535. Thespis was not the first composer of such tragedies, for already Epigenes of Sicyon had written tragedies, and there is reason for believing that some of these at least had no reference to Dionysus (p. 68). Furthermore, there are said to have been many other dramatic writers in the interval between Epigenes and Thespis. (4) Dr Farnell told us that we " must look for the origin 1 Schol. Ar. Ran. 810. 78 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. of Attic tragedy in an ancient European Mummery, which was a winter-drama of the seasons, in which the Black personage Dionysos MeXdvaiyis or M.e\av0os, or oi tyokoeis killed Xanthos the Fair One. The actors wore the black goat-skin of their god." Dr Farnell does not in his summary expressly term Dionysus a goat-god, though it is distinctly implied in his words just cited. He bases his view principally on the modern play seen in Thrace by Mr Dawkins "in which goat-men appeared and a goat-man was slain and lamented." Thus there can be little doubt that he means that Dionysus was a goat-god. What is the proof of this ? If he were really worshipped under an animal form when he was brought into Greece, evidence of this ought easily to be found in the shapes which he takes in literature and art, and in the victims sacrificed to him. A brief investigation will demonstrate that there is little evidence for his connection with the goat, but an overwhelming mass of proof for his intimate relation with the bull 1 - The Bull. Dionysus is specially conceived of as in taurine form. Thus he is called " Cow-born," " Bull-shaped," "Bull-faced," "Bull-browed," "Bull-horned," "Horn-bearing," "Two-horned," and " Horned." The last three epithets of course might apply equally well to him, if there were other evidence for his repre- sentation in goat-form. Again.he was believed to manifest himself at least occasionally as a bull ; his images, as at Cyzicus, were often made in the form of a bull, or with bull's horns, and he was similarly represented with horns in paintings. In one statuette he is shown clad in a bull's hide, the head, horns and hoofs hanging down behind. The women of Elis, as we are told by Plutarch 2 , hailed him with this invocation : " Come hither, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea ; come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with thy bull's foot, O goodly bull, goodly bull ! " According to the myth he was in the shape of a bull when he was torn to pieces by the Titans, and when the Cretans acted his sufferings and death, they rent a live bull in pieces with their teeth. "Indeed," writes Prof. Frazer, "the 1 Prof. J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. n, p. 164 (2nd ed.) has collected all the evidence for the bull, goat and fawn. 2 Quaest. Graec. 36 ; Isis and Osiris, 35. n] THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 79 rending and devouring of live bulls and calves appears to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites." This last practice needs no better illustration than the famous passage in the Bacchae of Euripides 1 . Again he is represented as a child with clusters of grapes round his brow, and with a calf s head with sprouting horns attached to the back of his head. On a red- figured vase the god is portrayed as a calf-headed child seated in a woman's lap. When treating of the Dithyramb (p. 6) we have had occasion to notice the practice of the Cynaethians who, at their feast in honour of the god, went forth and seized from a herd the bull which the god himself directed them to take and to bear away to sacrifice. What is still more important for our present inquiry is that on the first day of the Great Dionysia at Athens, the Ephebi provided as the victim for the god, not a goat but a bull. Yet Dr Farnell holds that the Great Dionysia and its tragic contests were especially associated with the cult of Dionysus Melanaegis, the goat-god. We have already seen that to the first fully matured Dionysiac dithyramb, that of Arion at Corinth, the name ox- driving was given by Pindar, which may well mean, as explained by the scholiast, that the victim was a bull, as was the case with the Cynaethians and the Athenians. Thus then in classical times, Dionysus was regularly worshipped as tauriform, and as appearing in this guise to his votaries, whilst the victims torn to pieces or offered with less frantic rites, as at Athens, were normally bulls or calves and not goats. The Goat. Now let us turn to the evidence for the connection of the goat with Dionysus. That god is never termed tragos, though, according to a legend preserved by Apollodorus 2 , he is said to have been changed into a kid (eriphos) to save him from the wrath of Hera ; again, according to Ovid 3 , when the gods were led to Egypt to escape Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat; finally Arnobius 4 says that the worshippers of the god tore goats asunder. 1 735 sqq. 2 in, 4. 3. 3 Met. v, 329. * Adv. nationes, v, 19. 80 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. But it must be pointed out that these allusions to his having a goat form are all from late writers. At Eleutherae and at Hermione he was worshipped as Melanaegis, " the Wearer of the black goat-skin," but with this point we shall deal fully later on. In the market-place at Phlius, the birthplace of Pratinas the satyric playwright, stood a bronze statue of a she-goat gilded almost all over. " The image," says Dr Frazer, " probably repre- sented the vine-god himself." But apart from the difficulty occasioned by the sex of the statue, the explanation given by Pausanias 1 is probably the more correct : " It was honoured by the Phliasians for the following reason. The constellation named the Goat always blights the vines at its rising and to avert its baleful influence they worship the bronze goat in the market-place and adorn it with gold." This is plainly a simple case of sympathetic magic. This view is corroborated by the occurrence in Greece of similar dedications of goats to gods other than Dionysus. Thus " the people of Cleonae 2 , like the Athenians, had suffered from the pestilence, and in obedience to an oracle from Delphi sacrificed a he-goat to the rising sun. So finding that the plague was stayed, they sent a bronze he-goat to Apollo." Pausanias 3 also relates how the people of Elyrus in Crete sent a bronze goat to Delphi : " The goat is suckling the infants Phylacides and Philander, who according to the Elyrians were the children of Apollo by a nymph Acacallis, whom Apollo visited in the city of Tarrha." Other divinities are likewise closely associated with the he-goat. Thus Aphrodite Pandemus at Olympia was represented in a statue seated upon a bronze he-goat 4 and the same goddess was worshipped as Epitragia ("Seated on a He-goat") in one shrine at Athens. There is one clear case of the sacrifice of a he-goat to Dionysus, but on investigation this turns out not to have been the original form of offering, but a substitution for a human victim. At Potniae in Boeotia there was a temple of Dionysus Tragobolos ("Goat- shooter"). "Once when sacrificing to the god, flushed with wine, they grew so outrageous that they killed the priest of Dionysus. Pestilence fell upon them and from 1 ii, 13. 6. * Paus. x, 11. 5. 3 2L, 16. 5. " Paus. vi, 25. 1. Il] THE RISE OE ATTIC TRAGEDY 81 Delphi word came to sacrifice a youth to Dionysus. But they say that not many years afterwards the god substituted a goat as a victim instead of the boy 1 ." Thus then the he-goat at Potniae was not his original victim. But it is easy to show that he had no monopoly of goat sacrifices. Such victims were certainly offered to other deities and heroes, not as substitutes for human victims, but as the offerings of a primitive time. The Lacedaemonians, accord- ing to Pausanias 2 , surnamed Hera "Goat-eating' - (Aigophagos) and sacrificed goats to the goddess. " They say that Heracles founded the sanctuary and was the first to sacrifice goats. The reason why he sacrificed goats was because he had no other victims to offer." The worship of the hero-god Aesculapius, had been intro- duced from his great sanctuary at Epidaurus into the Cyrenaica and set up at Balagrae. There he was worshipped under the title of Physician. From this Cyrenian sanctuary was founded the one at Lebene in Crete. " The Cyrenians 3 differ from the Epidaurians in this, that whereas the Cyrenians sacrifice goats, it is against the Epidaurian custom to do so." Conversely, at Tithorea in Phocis, there was a shrine of Aesculapius 4 where they sacrificed to him all animals except goats. There was also a legend that Aesculapius, like the Cretan Zeus, had been suckled by a goat in the land of Epidauria 5 . The legend that Heracles offered goats to Hera, because he had nothing better, explains why we do not more frequently hear of such victims being offered to heroes or gods. Although goats were almost certainly constantly sacrificed, yet we naturally do not hear of them in connection with the more important festivals of gods and heroes, for more costly victims were offered on those occasions. The goat victim offered to Dionysus at Potniae was a sub- stitute for a youth, just as the she-goat sacrificed in later times to Artemis at Munychia in Attica was instead of a bear, which in its turn had almost certainly replaced a maiden, for the priest when sacrificing the she-goat uttered the significant 1 Paus. ix. 8. 1. 2 ni. 15. 9. 3 ib. n. 26. 9. • ib. x. 32. 12. 6 ib. n. 26. 4. 82 THE RISE OE ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. formula " This is my daughter." Therefore it cannot in face of these facts be maintained that when the cult of Dionysus came into Greece from Thrace the proper victim for the god was a goat. We have already seen that bulls and calves were the normal offerings, but there are a series of grim facts which point distinctly to human victims as in the case at Potniae. Though one phase of Dionysus had been introduced into Athens under the particular local title borne by him at Eleutherae, and had been attached in its new home to the festival of the Apaturia, the normal offering to the god was not a goat either at that festival or at the Great Dionysia. What was the true nature of the offerings made to the god in his primal and more universal cult ? It is in times of stress and anxiety that the true primitive character of a ritual comes boldly to the light. In B.C. 476 Themistocles, the greatest of Athenian statesmen, furnished the expenses of the chorus which performed the tragedy of Phrynichus at the great festival of Dionysus. Four years earlier on that awful night before Salamis, when men and women prayed as they had never prayed before to the gods for deliverance from slavery and death, Themistocles sacrificed to Dionysus not three he-goats, or three bulls, but three Persian youths. In doing this he was certainly reverting to what tradition taught was by far the most acceptable offering to that god. This beyond question was the practice in Thrace itself, the true home of the god. For the rending in pieces not merely of animals, but of human beings, in the worship of Dionysus in that region is manifest in the legend of the death of Orpheus. The frantic Thracian women as they were cele- brating the Bacchic orgies rent him limb from limb and his head was borne "Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore." The title " Cannibal " ('fl/iT/o-Ti;?) under which Themistocles propitiated him on the eve of Salamis and the like one (D,fmSios pir avdpas airwv dmeifiaToiiv- T{j>v...\jiok6eis, rat Alokdas OlwvoXoas. I have followed Beiske's reading Svveifw.- TovvTas...aiThs 5k AidXetas dtov 'OXoas. 86 THE RISE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY [CH. men appeared and a goat-man was slain and lamented." But it will be noticed that the name Psoloeis (" Sooty ") was not given either to the child Hippasus, who was slain by his mother Leucippe and her sisters, nor yet to the women of that family.* Plutarch only states that the name Aeoleiae was still applied to the women of the house of Minyas, but makes no such assertion about the application of the term Psoloeis to the males of that race. Now Dr Farnell's argument based on Melanaegis and Melanthus depends upon the assumption that in each case we have a personage "Black-man " killing " Fair-man." But the Psoloeis, the " Sooty " ones, did not kill either the boy Hippasus, nor did they kill the Aeoleiae in historical times, nor were they them- selves killed. Accordingly they cannot be compared with either Melanaegis or Melanthus or the goat-men who kill a goat-man in the Thracian Mummery. Nor is there the slightest trace of any connection between the Psoloeis and the goat. Further- more Dr Farnell ignores the sex of the victims at the Agrionia in later times. The women of the house of Minyas cannot be paralleled offhand with a boy representing the young god. The story undoubtedly points to human sacrifices as part of the rites of Dionysus at Orchomenus, the boy corresponding probably to the youth once sacrificed to Dionysus Tragobolus at Potniae, another Boeotian town. But the Aeoleiae represent a different type of sacrifice, possibly the provision of a wife for the god. (5) Dr Farnell holds that "the actors wore the black goat- skin of their god," and that " their mimetic dance was solemn, sad, always tragic, probably originally a winter rite." But there is no more evidence for his description of the early Dionysiac dance than there is for his European goat-god. Half a century before the date at which Dr Farnell supposes that the worship of Dionysus Melanaegis had been introduced into Athens, Arion, who had given its full shape to the dithyramb performed by his chorus at Corinth in honour of Dionysus, had introduced in his songs " Satyrs speaking in metre " (p. 5). But we have not the slightest reason for supposing that their utterances and dances were uniformly sad and grave any more than are those of the JI ] THE ETSE OF ATTIC TRAGEDY 87 actors in the modern Thracian Mummery. Though the latter contains the slaying of a man, it is far from being all grave, as it has a very large element of indecent buffoonery. But the ancients themselves did not consider the Satyric drama at all grave or sad, but gave it the name of "Sportive Tragedy " (p. 52), because it was regarded by them as partly tragic, partly ludicrous, like the modern mummeries in Thrace and Northern Greece. Dr Farnell holds that the Satyrs were " goat-men " and that they wore the goat-skin in honour of their god. That the Satyrs wore goat-skins there can be no doubt, for we have the evidence of Euripides in the Cyclops 1 itself, his own Satyric drama. This passage will show whether Dr Farnell is right in his assumption that the goat-skins are the sacred vestments worn in a solemn sad ritual of a "god of the black goat-skin." The chorus of Satyrs sings: "O dear one, dear Bacchic god, whither roaming alone art thou tossing thy fair locks ? But I, thy servant, am the serf of the one-eyed Cyclops wandering as a slave with this miserable garment of a he-goat's skin, bereft of thy loving care." But far from these lines indicating that the goat-skin was a peculiarly sacred vestment and an important part of the ritual, they clearly prove that it was simply regarded as the meanest form of apparel that could be worn by a slave. In fact it is nothing more than the goat-skin or sheep-skin cloak (baite, sisura), worn by country people and shepherds in Greece, not only in classical times but down to the present day. This gives us the true explanation of a line from a Satyric play of Aeschylus 2 , in which one of the chorus is addressed as a he-goat. The speaker simply makes a jesting allusion to the skin of that animal which the other wears as his dress, like the Satyrs in the Cyclops. This too gives both a true and simple explanation of the goat-skins seen on the loins of Satyrs in 1 74 — 81: J l\e Bo/c^eie, troi oloirdK&v %av6b.v x a ^ Tav relets ; ^yt!> 5' 6 Kii/cXwiri ry fiovoStpKTq., doQXos 6,\aivwv city T$de rp&yov xXalvq. /AeXtq. eras %w/>is (ptXlas. 2 Fr. 207 (Nauck) : rpdyos yheiov apa TrevB^ffeis e veuri.T

i airrUa itreKiaro oi fidpfSapoi. oi iiiv 8-f) SXXoi "BXX^pes eirl ■npbp.vrjv aveKpoiovro koX wkcKKov rds rtas, 'Aftetrhis Se naXXijKOis dvrip 'ASyvaios i^avax^fU vr\X i/i^dWei kt\. To this incident Aeschylus himself alludes (Persae 411) : rjp%e S' £/iflo\rjs 'EXXtjvikj; caOs, K&iroOpa&et 7rdira $otvltrL(i\ It is probable that Aristophanes refers to this same Ameinias and his exploit IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 111 the western world. Critics of course have denied that this Ameinias was the brother of Aeschylus, chiefly on the ground that he belonged to the deme of Pallene, whilst Aeschylus belonged to Eleusis. But, as often happens in such cases, they have ignored a simple and probable solution of this difficulty. Adoption was a very common practice at Athens, and by Attic law, if a boy were adopted he passed from his own family and deme into those of his adoptive father. The fact that Ameinias was the youngest of the three brothers harmonises admirably with the view that he had been adopted into another family. No father would have given an elder son to another family, but rather his youngest. The other objection is that Herodotus would certainly have mentioned that Ameinias was a brother of Aeschylus, had such been the case. But he does not tell us that Cynegirus was a brother of the poet, simply stating that he was the son of Euphorion 1 . Any biographical notes upon the relations of Ameinias would have been utterly out of place and have marred the grandeur of the account of the opening and decisive incident of the great struggle. But even if Aeschylus was not on the ship of Ameinias of Pallene, either as a combatant or as a spectator, he must have looked upon that grand scene of which he has left an immortal picture in the Persae. The famous lines in which he describes the dead Persians flung helpless and inert by the pitiless waves against the unyielding shore of " dove-nursing " Salamis are as little likely to have been drawn from fancy as is that magnificent passage in which another soldier-dramatist, Cyril Tourneur, has pictured the dead soldier lying in the surf: in Eq. 569-70, where I ventured to amend many years ago 'A/xwlas to 'AjiieiWas (Camb. Phil. Trans., vol. i, p. 210). The poet is speaking of the brave men who fought at Marathon in contrast to the poltroons of his own day : oi5 yhp ofideh irCiTOT 7 ai/T&p rovs ipapriovs Idwv ^piSfiriaev, d\V b Svubs eiBvs fy i/ivvlas. The name of Amunias occurs several times in the Nubes and the Vespae either as that of an usurer or of an infamous archon. Aristophanes therefore was not likely to use a name with such evil associations in such a passage, hut rather that of one of the worthies who had fought at Marathon or Salamis. Cf. R. A. Neil's ed. of the Equites, ad loc. 1 Herod, vi, 114. 112 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. " He lay in his armour as if that had been His coffin ; and the weeping sea (like one Whose milder temper doth lament the death Of him whom in his rage he slew) runs up The shore, embraces him, kisses his cheek ; Goes back again and forces up the sand To bury him 1 ." But the two poets approach their theme from opposite standpoints ; the note of the Athenian is that of triumph and exultation over his slain enemies ; that of the Englishman sorrow and sympathy for a dead friend, who lay "Among the slaughtered bodies of their men, Which the full-stomach'd sea had cast upon the sand." Each reads his own feelings into the like action of the ceaseless element. Thus the chief part of the poet's life was over before the wonderful development in political and artistic activity, which characterised the new Athens of Ephialtes and Pericles. Though Thespis had made his grand step, the Tragic art was still but in its cradle when Aeschylus had reached man's estate, for Phrynichus made no material innovation, and it was left for Aeschylus himself to make the next great stride by introducing the second actor and by diminishing the importance of the chorus, as well as the minor improvements of the painted masks (Fig. 13) and the buskin 2 . As Tragedy could hardly be termed an art before it had been made an organic whole by these far-reaching innovations, it is not surprising that Aristotle, as we have seen, ignored Thespis and the other pioneers, and began his historical account of the Attic stage with Aeschylus. Indeed the fact that he it was who bridged over the gulf between the old Athens and the new, as Marlowe was the link between the Moralities and the Histories and the full-blown Elizabethan drama, is the true explanation of his use of strange and monstrous forms, such as 1 The Atkeist's Tragedy. 2 Hor. Ars Poet. 278-80 : "post nunc personae pallaeque repertor honestae Aesohylus et modicis instrauit pulpita tignia et doouit magnumque loqui nitique cothurno." IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 113 " Horse-Cocks " and " Goat-Stags." These were not the experi- ments of a dramatist striving after novelties, but were rather the survivals of those uncouth mimetic dances, of which strange and composite forms of quadrupeds, birds and men 1 were an essential characteristic, and which, as is proved by the material monuments, had come down from the Bronze Age of Greece. The last survival of the awful conceptions of a dark and dreadful past meets us in his representation of the Erinyes, whose terrible and monstrous aspect made pregnant women bring forth in the theatre. We may therefore rest assured that in his early days, as we shall presently see, and probably for long Fiq. 13. The Masks of Tragedy and Comedy. after, the old notions respecting the purpose of Tragic choruses were still fresh and unblurred by time in the minds of the Athenians. If therefore it shall turn out that the tombs of heroes, and offerings at these tombs, and laments for the dead, figure prominently in almost all his extant plays, we may conclude that these are no new inventions of the poet's fertile brain, but merely a continuation of the traditional subjects, purposes and performances of Cyclic or Tragic Choruses. The Persae. Although the Persae belongs to the poet's middle period and was performed in B.C. 472, seven years after the flight of the Persians from Greece never more to return, and 1 Cf. Pollux, IV, 103, 6 di /lop/paa/ubs iravToSairwv fwau' t\v /ilfirins kt\. R. T. 8 114 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. though, as will shortly be seen, a tomb plays a prominent part in his earliest surviving drama, yet as the Persae furnishes not only an admirable example of a tomb on the stage, but also of the worship of dead heroes, we shall take it first in order. The Persae is no true drama ; it is rather a glorious epinician poem infinitely superior to those in which Pindar celebrated, albeit with marvellous art, the victories of chariots, of horses, and of heavy-armed men or naked athletes at Olympia or Pytho. For the Persae recounts no mere mimicry of battle or contest. Aeschylus sang of the victory of the Greek spear over the Asiatic bow in the grim moil of war, — the triumph of free states over the despot of Asia. It stands to the Attic Drama much as does Shakespeare's Henry Fto the Elizabethan. Just as the latter was adapted by Shakespeare from the older play of The Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth, so it is held that Aeschylus in writing the Persae drew somewhat upon the Phoenissae of Phrynichus. But there is this important difference between the Greek and the English play. The latter is a dramatic representation without any plot of a series of victories over the French before an English audience who are exulting in the spectacular representation of the overthrow of their hereditary enemies at Harfleur and Agincourt. No note save that of triumph is heard throughout, only one slight glimpse of the French stand- point is given in the scene between Henry and Katherine of France. The Persae might indeed be well termed " The Famous Victories of the Athenians," but instead of the pictures of the victories being presented to the audience by Athenian dramatis personae, the grim joy of the Athenians at their great deliver- ance is enhanced by the spectacle wherein the dramatis personae axe the heads of the Persian empire, who recite their own over- throw and the triumphs of the Greeks. But it was not merely to give a keener zest to the exultation of the Athenians over their foes that Aeschylus constructed his great poem from this peculiar standpoint. If it was to be a tragedy at all and to conform to the conventional type, sorrow of some sort must form a chief feature. Yet this must not be a sorrow that would cause anguish or even a sense of discomfort to any Athenian heart. Phrynichus had composed a tragedy like that of Aeschylus, in so far as it was IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 115 on a recent historical event. His Capture of Miletus was as tragic in all its circumstances as could be desired, but the Athenians fined him for placing the miseries of their kindred before them and thus reminding them of their misfortunes. By his treatment of the Persae Aeschylus both avoided the fate of Phrynichus and at the same time placed on the stage a truly tragic situation, and besides he was able to introduce on the scene the immemorial centre-piece of Tragic choruses, a hero's tomb, lamentations for and propitiatory offerings to the dead. The scene opens before the palace at Persepolis. In the centre lies the tomb of Darius. Around it slowly march the chorus composed of twelve of the greatest Persian nobles left behind to administer the Empire during the absence of Xerxes. They are full of apprehension, for no tidings have come, not even a single horseman with news of the great host that had passed into Europe. The tomb of Darius almost certainly forms the thymele, as scholars have long held. This in itself is a startling confirmation of the doctrine of the origin of the thymele given above (p. 39). Presently the elders propose to enter the hall of the palace to hold council. Next enters Atossa, daughter of Cyrus, the widow of Darius and mother of Xerxes. The elders salute her as wife of the god of the Persians and as mother of a god. The queen then tells them why she has come forth from the marriage chamber of herself and Darius. First, ascribing the prosperity of her consort to the care of some god, she declares that the eye of the house is the presence of its master. Ever since Xerxes marched away she has been haunted by visions in the night season, but on the night just passed she had had a far more manifest vision than any heretofore. She beheld two women of surpassing beauty, sisters in origin, the one in Persian, the other in Dorian garments; the one had been allotted Hellas, the other Asia. Then they began to quarrel, and Xerxes sought to quell their strife by placing collar-straps on their necks and yoking them to a car. One was docile and took the bit freely ; the other proved restive and finally broke the pole. Darius standing by beheld his son's disaster. Then Xerxes perceiving his father present and viewing his catastrophe, rent his raiment. When morning came, the queen, to rid her of 116 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. the evil presage of her vision, washed her hands in running water, and taking incense prayed to the averting gods. But to her dismay an eagle pursued by a kite took refuge at the altar of Phoebus. Finally she reminds the elders that if Xerxes be victorious, he will be a hero ; but should he meet defeat, he is not accountable to the State, and it will make no difference provided he himself returns home safe. The chorus of elders urge her to pray first to the averting gods, then to pour out libations to Earth, and to the spirits of them that be departed, and lastly to supplicate her husband Darius, whom she had seen in her dreams the previous night, to send blessings on herself and on her son from the world below, and to keep all evil in darkness beneath the earth, shrouded in infernal gloom. In reply Atossa declares that as soon as she goes back to the palace she will carry out their requests. After some further parley between the queen and the chorus, the former says that she will first pray to the gods, next she will take drink-offerings from her house to present to Earth and to the spirits of them which be dead ; and these accomplished, she will return to them. Soon comes the messenger with the dread tidings of all that had happened at Salamis. The chorus then makes lament for those whose corpses are tossing in the tide and are being devoured by "the dumb children of the Un- defiled," and they predict the anarchy that will fill the Empire. Just then Atossa returns from the palace bringing to Darius such libations and offerings as may have power to appease the dead. She bids them to ingeminate their appeals to Darius, now a spirit of power in Hades. " I myself," says she, " will head the procession and carry these earth-poured offerings in honour of the gods below." They then pray to the gods of the nether world to be propitious and to send up the soul of Darius to the light. " Their dear departed king," they declare, " is equal in power to the daemones," and they beseech the Chthonian spirits to convey to him through Earth their request " even though it be in a barbarous tongue." " Does he hear me down below ? But do thou, O Earth, and ye mighty rulers of the dead, allow to pass out from your abodes a mighty prince of the ghosts, the IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 117 Susa-born lord, the king of the Persians, and send up to us such a one as the Persian land hath never before covered with its sod. Dear was the man, dear is his tomb." " Aidoneus, Guide of the dead to the world above, send up to us the spirit of Darius. Oh, what a king was he ! Divine truly was he, for he ruled his people prosperously. ancient king, come visit us ! Come to the surface of thy grave-howe, uplifting to our view thy saffron-dyed shoes, and revealing the crest of the royal tiara. Darius, come forth." Then from the tomb arises Darius in spectral form (d us Ti\x$ov Tarpos. 120 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. in the case of the ihymele (p. 39). Electra then pours the libation into the ground, for she speaks of it as " earth-drunk." While doing so, she notices a lock of hair upon the grave, which she sees to be like her own, that is, blonde 1 . She also observes footprints, which resemble in their contour, not in their size, her own feet. Some years ago I explained 2 the difficulty so long felt by scholars. The recognition (avapiavn fytoios 6 xe/wiri;! KaXoi/ievos iv rj iruAp x^M"" 0i)ko( eW airoS Kal tu>v avyyev&v Kai oifcetwi/ (Strabo, 197-9, ed. Didot). IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 129 Apollo, Poseidon, and Hermes 1 are directly named. On the mound are xoana or wooden images of these gods. But it is important to note that Dionysus is not mentioned either here or elsewhere in the play, although an altar, which serves as the thymele, stands at the foot of the mound. This fact, like the tombs in the Persae and Choephqri, certainly favours the views advanced in the first part of this work — that Dionysus had originally nothing to do with the first beginnings of tragic choruses. The chorus of the fifty daughters of Danaus in Oriental attire with finely-wrought robes, forehead bands and veils, enter bearing in their hands fresh-plucked olive branches, wreathed with wool, the mark of suppliants. They recite their woes and the cause of their flight and invoke the aid of Argos, Earth and Water, the gods above, and the spirits of the dead, heavy in exacting vengeance, that are in their graves within the barrow, and finally they pray Zeus to receive the Suppliants and side with them against vice and violence. Then Danaus, who meantime has mounted the tumulus, cries to his daughters to be on their guard, as he sees the dust of a host approaching and he urges them to take sanctuary on the mound. The maidens immediately ascend the barrow invoking the chief gods whose images they behold. When the king of Argos comes, he asks why they have sought asylum on the mound. The king on hearing their tale sends Danaus to plead their cause in the city and bids the maidens descend from their sanctuary, but to leave on it their suppliant boughs and to descend into the alsos. Danaus comes back with the good news of his favourable reception. He once more mounts the barrow and gazing sea- wards espies the Egyptians approaching. Soon arrive the herald and the mariners from the Nile and once more the maidens take refuge on the mound and cling to the statues. The Egyptians have no respect for the inviolability of the place and lay hands on the girls to drag them away. But at this juncture the king of Argos once more arrives and the Egyptians depart uttering threats of future vengeance, and the maidens proceed to the city where hospitable homes await them. It is thus clear that this reverend mound, with its ancient dead each in his narrow i 11. 193-6. e. t. 9 130 SURVIVALS OP THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. cell within and with images of the gods superadded, plays an important part thoughout the whole action of the play. It thus proves that the great importance of the tomb of Darius in the Persae was no mere chance invention of the poet in his mature years, but rather a clinging to the great primitive principle out of which Tragedy had sprung. This sepulchre of the mighty dead on which were placed images of the heavenly deities affords an admirable parallel for what we suppose to have taken place at the heroum of Adrastus in Sicyon, when the worship of Dionysus was superimposed upon the tomb of the hero. Further- more it is important to note that though Dionysus is not men- tioned amongst the gods whose images stand upon the barrow, nevertheless the altar at the foot of this mound, which almost certainly must belong to the gods enumerated, serves as the thymele around which the chorus solemnly move. Plainly Aeschylus did not consider it imperative in a tragedy that the' altar round which his chorus circled should be dedicated to Dionysus. In the Persae and the Ckoephori the chorus move simply round a dead chieftain's grave, but here in the Supplices is the next step, when cults of gods are superimposed on those of the dead and an altar or table of offerings (p. 42) is added to the ancient barrow. Now why should the gods whose images stand upon this barrow be termed Presidents of Contests (dywvtoi) ? We saw above that one of the regular ways in which the mighty dead were honoured was by contests (aytoves), whether of athletes or of horses. Such contests took place round or alongside of the barrows which covered the remains of the great departed (p. 36). When the worship of gods was added to that of the heroes, as was the case at Sicyon and at Tegea, that of Dionysus in the one case, that of Apollo in the other, it was but natural to regard these gods as presiding over the contests which took place close by the barrow, and thus they obtained the epithet " presiding at contests." In a later section I shall deal with the question of Sanctuaries, under which this particular mound in the Supplices distinctly falls, and the arguments there adduced will confirm the conclusion at which we have already arrived, that this great mound in the Supplices was certainly sepulchral. IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 131 Yet it may be said that although the graves and worship of heroes play a very important rdle in the dramas of Aeschylus because he was a conservative and clung to the ancient beliefs of his race, it does not follow that this doctrine had any intimate connection with the origin and evolution of the tragic art, but was quite independent of it. To this there is a ready answer. It can be shown that his two younger contemporaries, Sophocles and Euripides, continued to the last to give great prominence to the doctrine of ancestor worship and the potent influence exercised on human affairs by the spirits of the dead, though with the former the purely artistic side of Tragedy reached its zenith, while the latter was deeply saturated by the new doctrines of Anaxagoras and the Sophists. Let us first turn to Sophocles. This man, the greatest dramatic artist of the ancient world, if not of all time, Avas the son of Sophilus, probably a middle-class Athenian. About B.C. 496-5 he was born not far from Athens, at that " white Colonus " which he loved so well, and which, with its golden crocus, its purple ivy, its green olive-tree and its nightingales, he has glorified for ever in the famous chorus of his Oedipus at Colonus. He was only a stripling and incapable of bearing arms at the time of the Persian invasion, but he was chosen for his personal beauty, and probably also from his charm of disposition, to lead the solemn chorus that formed part of the public thanksgiving for the great deliverance of Salamis. Thus his young imagination must have been fired and ennobled by the great events through which he had lived. He studied music under Lamprus, the rival of Pindar and Pratinas. In B.C. 468, when not yet twenty-eight years of age, he competed against Aeschylus and defeated the great master. Hence- forward, his life was one of unceasing literary activity' until he died, full of years, beloved and honoured of all, shortly before B.c. 405. He composed at least seventy tragedies and eighteen Satyric dramas, though, according to Suidas 1 , his dramatic works numbered no less than one hundred and twenty-three whilst besides these he wrote elegies and paeans and is also said to have written a prose treatise on the Chorus. 1 s.v. 2otpoK\rjs. 9—2 132 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. The actual dates of only two of his plays are known. The Antigone, produced shortly before the Athenian expedition to Samos in B.C. 440, secured his election by the democracy as one of the Ten Generals, but he does not seem to have had any military qualifications, since Pericles remarked of him that he was a good poet, but a poor commander. As the Antigone is said to have been his thirty-second play, it must be regarded as a work of his mature genius. The Philoctetes, produced in B.C. 409, is considered to be the last of his works by those critics who hold that the Oedipus Coloneus, though not pro- duced till after his death, was nevertheless written many years before. Both the Antigone and the Philoctetes won the first prize ; their author not unfrequently was second, but he was never third. His contributions to the evolution of the Tragic Art were the introduction of the Third Actor or Tritagonist (sometimes even a Fourth), and the use of painted scenery ; whilst according to Suidas he was the first to compete with single dramas instead of with tetralogies after the fashion of Aeschylus. In this, however, he probably only reverted to the practice of Phrynichus and the other early playwrights. Sophocles stands to Aeschylus in much the same relation as Shakespeare does to Marlowe. The young Cambridge scholar before he was twenty-nine had not only shaken off the crudities of the Moralities and the Histories, hut had forged that "mighty line " which became the grand instrument of dramatic expression for Shakespeare and the rest. In like fashion Aeschylus had not only freed himself from the narrow trammels and uncouth imagery of the elder age, but he had also discovered once for all the true metre and diction for Tragic expression. Sophocles had only to perfect the instrument which Aeschylus had placed in his hands, and when in B.C. 468 he defeated his master, the eagle was smitten with an arrow feathered from his own wing. We cannot indeed point to any one of his extant plays in which a tomb actually appears on the stage, yet the burial rites of the dead and the extraordinary value attached to the possession of the bones of heroes form a leading feature in at least three of them. IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 133 Ajax. It is a commonplace with scholars that the whole interest of the Ajax flags after the self-slaughter of that hero, for the rest of the play is taken up with wranglings as to whether the body of the hero shall receive due sepulture or not. It is only when we moderns place ourselves at the standpoint of the ancients and comprehend, dimly though it may be at best, the extraordinary importance attached by them to the due perform- ance of burial rites, that we can even faintly conceive how that tragedy could move an Athenian audience. Antigone. The same holds true in a large degree of the Antigone. The play centres round the question — Is Polynices, who has led an army against Thebes his native city, and who has fallen in mortal combat with Eteocles, each brother having slain the other, to be allowed the rites of sepulture or shall he be left to birds and beasts of prey? This theme would not excite much emotion in a modern audience, were it not supple- mented by elements that never fail to rouse the sympathy and pity of every human heart, — the devotion of Antigone to her dead brother, her courage in withstanding Creon, the romantic love of Haemon for the heroine, her immurement in a living tomb by the merciless behest of Creon, Haemon's suicide when he finds that he is too late to rescue his betrothed from self- inflicted death, and finally Creon's belated repentance and agony, when he learns of his son's suicide. It is important to notice that the tomb, in which Antigone was buried alive and in which she strangled herself to escape the lingering misery devised for her by Creon, plays a very prominent part in the drama, although it does not actually appear on the scene. Oedipus Coloneus. But when we turn to the Oedipus at Colonus we find a tomb playing a still more important part, although it likewise does not appear on the stage. Oedipus the King ends with a terrible storm of anguish, shame and despair, when the proud monarch at last realises that he himself and no other is the source of the pollution which is destroying Thebes and the Cadmeans, that he has been the murderer of his father, and the consort of his own mother, and that his sons and daughters are his own brothers and sisters. In the Oedipus 134 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. Coloneus the old storm-battered craft has at last reached the harbour's mouth, and is coming into its last haven, Colonus in the land of Attica. Here the blind world-worn hero is granted an asylum by Theseus and the men of Colonus, and he promises to them a guerdon for their hospitality. When the divine token comes to Oedipus that the closing scene is now at hand, he sends to the city for Theseus, and when the king arrives tells him that his end is near. Blind as he is, he will now lead the way to the sacred spot where he is to lie in death, that no one save Theseus himself shall know the exact place. When death approaches that hero, he is to reveal the site of the grave to the best of his sons, and he in turn to his successor. Thus secured from all risk of being carried off by the Thebans or any other enemies of Athens, the bones of Oedipus, with his spirit in close attendance on them, will be for Athens an ally through all time " worth many shielded hoplites and mercenary spearmen 1 ." Then the blind old man steps forth unguided by any hand, Theseus alone attending him. Soon the thunder of Zeus is heard by those who stayed behind, and presently Theseus returns and informs them that all is over. The old hulk so long tossed by the storms of calamity has found a safe mooring for ever. In return Oedipus will be to Attica an invincible guardian for all time. Thus then in the closing years of the fifth century B.C., when Socrates had been teaching for more than twenty years, when the Hylacists of Ionia, and the clever rhetoricians of Sicily had been long disintegrating old beliefs, when the stress from plague and war had shaken men's faith in the gods, the worship of the dead and reliance on the beneficial results therefrom were as strong as ever in the Athenian mind. Moreover it is not the more advanced doctrine, such as that held by Aeschylus respecting the detachability of the soul from the body, and the harmlessness of fire to the soul that is preached by Sophocles, but the crude ancient doctrine that every care must be taken to preserve the body or bones of the hero from destruc- tion and to guard them from the depredations of those who would work Athens ill. 1 O.C. 1524-5. IV ] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 135 If Tragedy arose from the worship of the dead and was in the Greek mind closely bound up with it, we can now fully understand why such a consummate artist as Sophocles gave such prominence to the proper veneration and security of the tombs of the mighty ones departed, why he makes the due sepulture of the dead the pivot on which hangs the dramatic movement of the Antic/one, and why he actually devotes to the same theme a great part of the Ajacc. It may be said that as the grave of Oedipus was concealed with almost as much care as that of Moses, there could be no dramatic celebrations around that hero's resting-place, and that accordingly it may be inferred that there was really no connec- tion between the worship of the dead and dramatic performances. But to this the answer is not far to seek. The case of Oedipus is exactly parallel to that of Orestes 1 . Each is buried in a land of strangers, far from his own city and his own kindred, and the safe-keeping of the bones of both is essential for the weal of the alien land in which each lies. But it was not merely of dramatic performances that these heroes were deprived. No offerings of any kind were made at their graves. Yet it would be absurd to argue that because in their cases no offerings were made at stated seasons, therefore there was no real connection between the dead and the offerings ordinarily made at graves. The cases of such differ essentially from those of indigenous heroes, who lie in the Agora or Prytaneum of their own city, secure from all danger of being carried off by the enemies' of their land and race. These heroes, their families, clansmen, and citizens honour with rich offerings, solemn songs, and dramatic performances, as the years revolve. But to the friendless alien dead who lie in that same land and whose spirits are, as it were, in servitude, bound to render aid to the people who have the control of their remains, no one makes the offerings customary for the dead. They have no kindred, no clansmen. There is no one impelled by love or duty or family ties to make oblation to them, or to organise in their honour sacred dances and dramatic contests. Euripides. Although Sophocles might have clung to ancient i Herod, i, 67-8. 136 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [cH. beliefs or at least reverted to them in his extreme old age, it might naturally have been anticipated that Euripides, who was so greatly influenced by the new ideas from Ionia, would have paid but little heed to such mouldering beliefs and would have disdained to use them for dramatic purposes. The son of Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides and Clito, the poet was born in Salamis in the year — some said even on the very day — of the great battle in B.C. 480. His parents appear to have been in good circumstances. Of his father's calling nothing certain is known, though by some he is called a retail merchant. The Comic poets never tired of jesting at his mother Clito as a " greengrocer " (XaxavoTrcoXis), though a good ancient authority denies the truth of this allegation. He is said to have been trained as an athlete, but seems to have had little fancy for such pursuits. He became a painter, and in later times pictures ascribed to him were shown at Megara. But the most im- portant part of his education was the study of rhetoric under the famous sophist Prodicus of Ceos, and to this circumstance we may attribute in part at least the love of dialectic in his plays. Later on he was greatly influenced by Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and also by Socrates. If Sophocles was called the " bee " on account of the sweet- ness of his character, Euripides on the other hand had the reputation of being morose and unsociable, and doubtless his temper was not improved by the unhappiness of both his marriages. His first competition, which was also his first victory, was with the Peliades in B.C. 455, the year after the death of Aeschylus. He is said to have written some seventy- five dramas, according to others ninety-two. His earliest extant play is the Alcestis (p. 54). In his later life he left Athens and went to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, who treated him with great distinction. The poet composed there plays on local topics, such as the Archelaus and the Bacchae. The king's favour, however, cost him his life in B.C. 406. Two rival poets, Arrhidaeus, a Macedonian, and Crateuas, a Thessa- lian, jealous of his success, by a bribe of ten minae -induced Lysimachus, the master of the royal kennel, to set the hounds at him and he was torn to pieces. Archelaus had his bones JV"] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 137 placed in a costly tomb at Pella, whilst a cenotaph for him was erected at Athens 1 . His chief innovations in Tragedy on the formal side were the introduction of the melodrama in which " nobody is killed by anybody" and the use of set prologue-speakers. If then it should turn out that in some dozen of this poet's extant plays either a tomb is the centre of dramatic action, whether represented on the stage or not, or the worship of the dead or a funeral procession plays a leading part, we shall be forced to the conclusion that there must have been some principle of primary importance to bind tragedy so closely to the worship of the dead, that even the sceptic and innovator could not shake himself free from its bonds. This inference will be confirmed if we find that not merely in the forepart of his career before he might have been supposed to have shaken off the trammels of his early training, but even in his latest period, he places on the stage a tomb and makes it the centre round which pivots all the chief action of the play. Helena. In B.C. 412 he produced his Helena. Though the famous heroine had so often been reviled by the misogynous poet in his earlier plays, as a worthless woman who had run away from her husband, we find him in his later years adopting the view of Helen's conduct first put forward by Stesichorus. In one of his earlier poems — probably The Destruction of Troy — that poet had treated Helen in the conventional way as the guilty wife. When at a later time blindness befell him, convinced that the deified heroine had sent this affliction upon him as a punishment, he composed his famous Recantation, in which he declared that the Helen who had been seen in Troy and for whom Acheans and Trojans fought so hard and long, was a mere wraith (Qdcrfia, e'&coXov), whilst the true Helen had never fled from Greece with Alexander overseas. Although Euripides borrowed the main idea of Stesichorus, and represented Helen in the play named after her as the model wife, he departed from the Stesichorean prototype in one very important particular. The plot is as follows: The true Helen was not carried off to Troy, but Hermes, by the direction 1 Suidas, s.v. Evpnrldrjs. 138 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [cH. of Hera, transported her to Egypt and handed her over to the safe-keeping of king Proteus, who dwelt in Pharos. When the play opens, the old monarch is dead, and his son Theoclymenus wants to marry Helen. She rejects his offer and to avoid the violent prosecution of his suit takes refuge at the tomh of Proteus, which stands in front of the palace. There can be no doubt that the tomb of Proteus was represented on the stage. When Menelaus on his way home from Troy lands in Egypt arrives at the palace and asks who lives there, the old porteress at the door replies " Proteus lives here, and the land is Egypt 1 ." A, few lines later on Menelaus asks the name of the lord of the palace, and she answers : " Yon is his tomb ; his son now rules the land." It is at this tomb that Menelaus first finds Helen seated as a suppliant and accosts her : " thou who hast by a desperate struggle reached the curbstone and fire-wrought railings of this tomb 2 ." In another passage Helen says to Menelaus: "Thou 1 Hel. 466 sqq. ' 2 Hel. 546 sqq. : &e ttjv opeypa Seivbv iifjuWij/tivTiv t6u(3ov Vi Kfyrjirld' ip,Tr6povs t dpdotTT&Tas, fieivov. Paley (ad loc.) infers that because the tomb of Proteus has a Tcrepis, it was not a mere barrow or tumulus but had architectural features. But there is ample evidence that a stone curb or retaining wall was a regular feature round ancient Greek barrows, as I have shown {Early Age of Greece, vol. i, p. 119). Thus the famous tomb of Aepytus mentioned by Homer (II. 603-4) is described by Pausanias (vm, 16, 3) (o<;). Here I implore escape from marriage 1 ." Menelaus asks : " Is it through lack of an altar or in conformity with foreign usage ? " To this she answers : " This doth protect me as well as would the temples of the gods." It is again at this tomb that the Recognition takes place between husband and wife, when Helen has returned thither after learning from Theonoe happy. In the first place Pollux in the passage to which they refer, does not mention the word at all, but is only referring to iri\avoi, the usual offerings of the dead, whilst it is most unscientific to explain the meaning of ipBoardras in this passage from a word of different form in Hesychius, when there is every possibility of explaining it from the use of the word in other passages of the poet's plays. Thus the posts of a great tent erected at Delphi (Ion 1134, 6p0oommavLa$ or Xre6po'i because the hero offers garlands to Artemis 1 - These plays seem simply to have been first and second editions of the same piece, and not separate plays in a Trilogy. The scene is laid at Troezen. Hippolytus, son of Theseus by the Amazon Hippolyte, has been brought up by his great- grandfather Pittheus at Troezen. A model of chastity he scorns Aphrodite and devotes himself to the worship of the virgin huntress Artemis, by whom he is honoured with intimate, though invisible communion. Determined to punish Hippolytus for boasting superiority to the ordinary emotions of love, Aphrodite makes his stepmother Phaedra, daughter of Minos, fall in love with him. Theseus had retired from Athens to Troezen for a year's span in consequence of the slaying of Pallas and his sons, and his queen accompanied him. She had previously seen Hippolytus at Athens as he was going to Eleusis. At Troezen she now gives way to secret passion for him. Her nurse at last extracts from her the cause of her pining, and as a last hope of restoring her mistress to health and happiness she reveals to the young hero under an oath of secrecy his stepmother's love. Horrified at the disclosure Hippolytus withdraws from Troezen. Phaedra, on finding that her love has been revealed, hangs herself, but leaves behind a letter in which she charges Hippolytus with having made dishonourable overtures to her. Theseus on his return reads the letter and is infuriated at his son's supposed baseness and hypocrisy. He expends on his son one of the three curses 1 673. e. x. 10 146 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. which his father Poseidon has declared should be fulfilled, and banishes him for life. In deep sorrow Hippolytus turns his back for ever on Troezen, his dear home, and drives in his chariot along by the sea-shore. Suddenly Poseidon sends from out a great tidal wave a tauriform monster to affright the horses. They upset the chariot on the rocks and leave the young hero dying. Theseus on hearing the fatal news is filled with mixed feelings of sorrow and satisfaction, until Artemis appears and reveals the truth. Then follows the reconciliation between the dying youth and his penitent and distracted sire. Hippolytus expires, but Artemis confers on him a festival at Troezen for all time. At this town in classical and post-classical days many memorials of Hippolytus and Phaedra were shown. There was a stadium called after him. His tomb, says Pausanias 1 , " is a mound of earth not far from the myrtle tree," which was popularly believed to date from the time of Phaedra. Close to it was the grave of that unhappy queen. But far more important was the precinct of great renown consecrated to Hippolytus, son of Theseus. " It contains a temple and an ancient image. They say that these were made by Diomede, and that he was also the first to sacrifice to Hippolytus. There is a priest of Hippolytus at Troezen, who holds office for life, and there are annual sacrifices. Further, they observe the following custom : — every maiden before marriage shears a lock of her hair for Hippolytus and takes the shorn lock and dedicates it in the temple 2 ." According to Pausanias the Athenians likewise had honoured the hero, since in front of the temple of Themis was "a barrow erected in memory of Hippolytus 3 ." Although we are not told by Pausanias that any ceremonies were performed in his time at the cenotaph of Hippolytus in Athens, it is probable that in earlier days sacrifices were annually offered, and although in a later age there may have been no dramatic performance or " tragic chorus " at the festival of the hero at Troezen, such probably formed part of the great 1 n, 32, 4. " Id. ii, 32, 1-4. 3 Id. i, 22, 1. IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 147 ceremonials at his shrine in the classical period. Euripides 1 him- self is pur witness, since in the closing lines of the play he makes Artemis declare that she will establish for Hippolytus in the city of Troezen the "highest honours." ''Unyoked maidens on the eve of their marriage shall shear their locks for him, and his sad story shall ever be a theme for poets." As the rite of shearing the hair was still observed by the Troezenian virgins in the days of Pausanias, Euripides beyond all doubt referred to an actual contemporary practice when he alludes to this ceremony. When therefore he speaks of poetical com- positions on the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra, he is almost certainly referring also to some form of dramatic representations or threnoi at the festival of the hero. The poet knew well that the highest honours at Troezen, as at Sicyon in the case of Adrastus, included dramatic representations which kept in continual remembrance the young hero's noble life and tragic fate. Nay, we may even go further and believe that Euripides wrote his play from the standpoint of one who was composing a drama to honour and propitiate the illustrious dead. Rhesus. Nor does the Hippolytus stand alone in this respect amongst the plays ascribed to Euripides. If the Rhesus be a genuine composition of that poet, as was held by all the Alexandrian critics, its conclusion offers a striking parallel to that of the Hippolytus. We know from tradition that Euripides did write a play called the Rhesus, but the majority of modern critics whilst admitting this historical fact, hold that the true play was lost, and that the drama which has come down to us is only a spurious imitation composed in a later age. The arguments urged by the critics are practically all subjective, each condemning the play for faults, which it is assumed that Euripides could not have committed, even in his earliest period — that to which the ancient critics and the moderns who believe in its gemiineness, assign the play. We need not too hastily reject the extant play as spurious. Euripides has been singularly fortunate in having had so many 1 Hipp. 1424-6 : n/ids p-eyiaras iv irtikei Tpoijjivlt} dt&trw nbpaL yap d^vyes ydfiwv irapos Kdfias Kepovvrai trot kt\. 10—2 148 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [cH. of his plays handed down to posterity, a fact in no small degree due, as has long been recognised, to his popularity in Graeco- Roman and Roman times. His sententious utterances and his keen dialectic delighted philosophers and rhetoricians, and thus his plays were regularly used as texts in the schools. As his genuine writings thus continued to be so popular and well known, it is difficult to see how his real Rhesus could have been replaced in the many manuscripts of his works by an inferior and spurious play on the same subject. Bacon 1 in a famous passage argues that only the less valuable creations of the ancient world have come down to us : " For the truth is," says he, " that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream which carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that which is weighty and solid." But this argument has been refuted by the discoveries of the works of authors hitherto unknown or lost writings of others whose masterpieces had come down to us from antiquity. No matter how meritorious are the results of the labours of archaeologists and papyrographers, it must be confessed that neither the Polity of the Athenians nor the recently discovered work of an historian of the fourth century B.C., although valuable as historical documents, has much claim to literary merit. Bacchylides has proved very disappointing, and the recently discovered remains of Menander still more so, while the new fragments of Pindar have only furnished us with examples of his work far inferior to those great Epinician Odes that have made the Theban eagle famous through the ages. Of Herodas it may be said that if his writings were again lost, Greek literature would not be much the poorer. The verdict of men of culture, arrived at in the long lapse of time, has been pro- foundly just. Not only is it the truly great writers — HomerT Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Herodotus, Thucy- dides — that have come down to us, but the best productions of these authors, as is clearly seen in the case of the recently discovered fragments of Pindar. In view of these facts it is hardly credible that in the manuscripts of Euripides, which preserved the best of the poet's writings down to our own day, 1 The Advancement of Learning, i, 5, 3. IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 149 the true Rhesus could have been supplanted by a spurious and inferior work of a later age. The subject of the play is Rhesus, the Thracian king, son of Eioneus and a Muse, or according to others, son of the river Strymon and the Muse. The plot follows the story told in the Iliad, Book x, of the coming of the Thracian hero. The Trojans have long looked for the arrival of Rhesus, as an oracle had declared that if he came the Greeks would be vanquished. After various incidents, — the capture of Dolon, the entry of Odysseus and Diomede into the Thracian camp, the slaying of Rhesus, and the escape of the two Achean chiefs by giving the true watchword obtained from Dolon, — the play ends with the lamentation of the Muse, the mother of Rhesus. She upbraids Athena, whose city of Athens the Muses had ever honoured, for ingratitude in instigating the deed. Finally she confers on her son Rhesus for all time the divine honours of a hero amongst the Thracians. It seems highly probable that there was some cult of Rhesus amongst the Edonians or other Thracians of the Strymonian region to which the poet is referring. As in the Hippolytus he makes Artemis allude to a festival and ritual in honour of the hero of that play which most certainly did exist at Troezen, we are justified in thinking that when in the Rhesus he puts in the mouth of the Muse the statement that she will set up a cult of her son amongst the Thracians, the poet is referring to some well-known worship of such a hero amongst the Thracians of his own day. Nor would there be any difficulty in his having knowledge of such a shrine. The subject of the play brings it into the same category as the Archelaus and the Bacchae. But even if it were written before he took up his residence at Pella, and of this we have no certainty, those who maintain the genuine- ness of the play have long pointed out that its subject may have been suggested to the poet by the great developments of Athenian commerce and colonisation in Thrace, which were taking place in, the poet's early days, and in consequence of this they have dated the play about 440 B.C. But it must be confessed that this argument, combined with the supposed youthful style of the play, for placing it early rather than late 150 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. is not sufficient to countervail that for assigning it to his last period when he was certainly devoting himself to native Macedonian themes to be acted on the spot. It seems more probable that Euripides was influenced by this in the choice of a subject, although he might well have heard of some hero.um in honour of Rhesus from one or other of the many Athenians who had commercial relations with Thrace, and who had lived there. Finally, the parallel between the conclusion of this play and that of Hippolytus is in favour of the genuineness of the Rhesus. If our theory of the origin of tragedy is true, we can understand the introduction of the reference to the establish- ment of a cult of a hero which has seemed so out of place to the critics. But if the play is the work of a far later age, it is not at all so likely that the playwright would have introduced such a conclusion, rather than one more in accordance with the con- ventional ideas of a later period. As it stands the play is admirably adapted for an age when it was still generally felt that the true object of such works was the propitiation of heroes at their shrines. No more fitting piece than the Rhesus could be found for the glorification and propitiation of the spirit of Rhesus at his shrine in Thrace. Ghosts. Since the tomb played so prominent a part in many of the tragedies of the three great dramatists, it would be indeed strange if the ghosts of departed heroes and of others did not form an element in dramatic representations, especially as the Greeks had no hesitation in representing in any form of art the shadowy forms of the departed, provided this was done with due limitations, to which we shall presently refer. Three extant tragedies present us with examples of ghosts introduced as part of the dramatic machinery, though the r61es played by them in the several plays differ widely in importance. The three plays are the Persae and the Eumenides of Aeschylus and the Hecuba of Euripides. How Sophocles treated ghosts dramatically we have no means of judging, for no spectral personage appears in any of his extant works. IVJ IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 151 The Persae. As we have already seen (pp. 113-9), the whole action of this play, as far as it can be said to have any, centres round the tomb of Darius. But the grave does not form a mere pivot for the dramatic movement, it has a far greater importance. From it rises up the ghostly presence of the great monarch who had organised the Persian empire. His queen and the Persian elders in their perplexity and sorrow have invoked his aid, and it is his soul, revivified for the time by the drink-offerings poured into his tomb, which plays the leading r61e in the concluding part of the drama by its recital of the building of the empire, by its prediction of the disaster that the Persians are to sustain at Plataea, and finally by its directing the queen and the magnificoes to follow a policy by which Persia may avoid similar catastrophes in the future. The Eumenides. In the Persae the poet employs the ghost to aid the dramatic action, but the ghost is in no wise detached from the grave where the remains of its carnal tabernacle are entombed. In the Eumenides he introduces the ghost of Clytemnestra with awful effect, as the spectral shape of the murdered mother, herself a murderess, appears from above the scene to hound on the Erinyes and to upbraid them for their slackness in the pursuit of Orestes. Though Clytemnestra's body lies far away in Argolis, the poet does not hesitate to detach her ghost from close attendance on her mortal remains and to represent it as coming to Athens to see that vengeance is wreaked upon her son. The Hecuba. In the Eumenides the treatment of the ghost is very different from that of the spectral form of Darius in the Persae. Euripides goes still further in dealing with the ghost of Polydorus in the Hecuba, for the spectre of the ill- fated prince plays neither a leading role, as does that of Darius, nor is it introduced to heighten dramatic effect, as is that of Clytemnestra. The phantom of the murdered youth is only one of the puppet-speakers of the Euripidean prologues, so bitterly satirised by Aristophanes in the Frogs through the mouth of Aeschylus. The Acheans on their departure from Troy had put into the Thracian Chersonese carrying with them Hecuba and the 152 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. other captive Trojan women. The ghost of Polydorus appears hovering over the tent of Agamemnon, in which is his mother ; he details how he, the youngest son of Priam and Hecuba, too young to take part in the defence of Troy, had been sent by his father across to his guest-friend Polymnestor, the chief of the Thracian Chersonese, and that with him was secretly despatched a great store of gold, in order that if things went ill with Troy, Priam's surviving children might not want. The boy was kindly treated so long as Troy held out, but as soon as Hector fell and all was lost, the guest-friend changed. Thirsting for the Trojan gold he scrupled not to murder his young ward and to cast his body without funeral rites into the sea. For a long time it has now been tossing to and fro in the currents of the Hellespont. For the last three days the Acheans have been encamped on the Thracian shore, stayed in their homeward course by the phantom of Achilles, which had appeared from his tomb and demanded, as his share of the spoil, that Polyxena, Hecuba's youngest daughter, should be sacrificed on his grave. Polydorus has been hovering over the tent of Agamemnon, but he will now show himself to his mother that his body may at last receive due burial rites. It might be held by a superficial student that in these three plays we can trace the gradual extension of the use for artistic purposes of such unearthly adjuncts. It might be urged that whilst in the Persae the poet, in conformity to the ancient belief, employs the ghost to aid the dramatic movement without detaching it from the grave, wherein rest its material relics, in the latter part of his life he had advanced far beyond the limits of the crude old doctrine that the ghost keeps close to the spot where the body lies, and that this is clearly shown by the Eumenides. In that play the ghost of Clytemnestra appears far away from her grave in Argolis, revivified by no libations or prayers of invocation, like that of Darius, but fired into living force by a fierce wrath against her son. Finally it might be said that Euripides, under the disintegrating causes which were destroying ancient beliefs, had abandoned all the old conventional notions respecting disembodied spirits, and that he had therefore no hesitation in using the ghost of IV] TN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 153 Polydorus as a mere piece of mechanism to supply the audience with what corresponded to a modern programme of the play. But the use made of the ghost in each play is not purely arbitrary, for in each case the dramatist has not overstepped the strict limits imposed by the popular beliefs respecting the spirits of the dead. In the case of Darius it would have been impossible for Aeschylus to represent his spirit as coming to Athens far away from the last resting-place of his body, or hovering, like the ghost of Polydorus over the tent of Aga- memnon in the Hecuba. The great and good king has been gathered to his fathers full of years and honour in the due course of nature. The last rites had been paid to his re- mains, and the full meed of ceremonial pomp had been offered at the closing scene. Thus his soul had been enabled without let or hindrance to find entrance into the Spirit-land beyond the tomb, there to be honoured amongst the dead. His parting words indeed, as his spirit returns to the abode of disembodied souls, are pitched in the same sad note as those addressed by the shade of Achilles to Odysseus, when the latter had fared in his black ship to the asphodel mead away in the shadowy West beside the Ocean stream. " Speak not comfortably to me of death, glorious Odysseus ! Thrice rather would I be a hireling and toil for a lackland, hard-pinched wight than be king of all the dead ! * " Though Darius refers to his existence in the other world in the same joyless tone as Achilles, yet when all is said and done, the Persian king enjoys the best that can fall to human souls beneath the earth, for he himself declares that he is held in honour and treated as a prince. To have represented the soul of such a hero as capable of being detached from its mortal relics and as wandering at will through space, would have been blasphemous in the eyes of the Greeks, for this was the fate of those who had lived evil lives and died in their sins. Plato in the Phaedo gives us what was probably in the main the ordinary theory of ghosts, although at the same time he engrafts on it the Theory of Ideas. Philosophy, says he, partially liberates the soul even in a man's lifetime, purifying 1 Od. XI, 488 sqq. 154 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. his mind. This is evidently no new idea of Plato himself, for he compares the action of Philosophy to that of the Orphic mysteries, which purged the mind from the contagion of body and sense. If such purification has been fully achieved, the mind of the philosopher is at the moment of death thoroughly severed from the body, and passes clean away by itself into commerce with the ideas. On the contrary the soul of the ordinary man, which has undergone no purification and remains in close implication with the body, cannot get completely separated even at the moment of death, but remains encrusted and weighed down by bodily accompaniments, so as to be unfit for those regions to which mind itself naturally belongs. Such impure souls are the ghosts or shades which wallow round tombs and graves, and which are visible because they have not departed in a state of purity, but are rather charged full of the material and corporeal. They are thus not fit for separate existence, and return into fresh bodies of different species of men or animals. The Hindus of to-day practically have the same belief, for they hold that the souls, of those who die in a state of impurity or by violent deaths become bhuts, or malevolent demons. Such a soul reaches an additional grade of malignity, if it has been denied proper funeral ceremonies after death. Identical with this is the mediaeval and modern European belief that ghosts are the spirits of those who have been murdered or otherwise cut off suddenly in their sins. The agonised complaint of Hamlet's father testifies to this: "Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, UnhousePd, disappointed, unaueal'd ; No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head ; O, horrible! 0, horrible! most horrible! 1 " In the Clytemnestra of the Eumenides Aeschylus has given us what is in some respects a parallel to the ghost in Hamlet. The murderess, who up to the moment of her death had con- tinued to live with her blood-stained paramour, had certainly 1 Hamlet, Act i, So. 5. IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 155 been cut off in the blossoms of her sin, with all her imper- fections on her head. Moreover, criminal as she was, she herself had met the bitter doom of death from the son that she had borne and carried at her breast. According to the belief of the Tegeatans the spirit of Scephrus, when slain by his brother Limon, could not rest but became a malignant demon bringing blight and barrenness on the land, until vengeance was taken on his brother and peculiar honours recalling his own murder and the punishment of the murderer were annually paid. Thus every Athenian present in the theatre believed that there was good reason why the spirit of Clytemnestra could not rest, but wandered far from the last abode of her body as a malignant spirit thirsting for vengeance on her son. Accordingly when Aeschylus thus detached the ghost of Clytemnestra from her place of sepulture and introduced it with splendid effect in his drama, he was not merely following the bent of his genius and working a great artistic idea, but at the same time he was also keeping within the strict bounds of the orthodox doctrine respecting the spirits of those who had wrought great crimes and had been cut off in their sins. We have now had examples of two types of ghosts — that of the great man, who had died in the odour of sanctity, full of years and honour : and that of a great sinner, who had met in a violent death at the hands of her own son the due reward of her crimes. In the remaining example we have a third type — that of the ghost of an innocent victim of a base crime, whose body has been denied due rites of sepulture, flung out to the winds and waves " without lament, without a grave," — in Shakespearean language, "unhousel'd, disappointed, un- aneal'd." It is thus debarred from sinking to rest once for all in the abode of spirits, never to reappear except in response to the prayers of those it loved, as in the case of Darius. Until due rites of burial shall have been given, his ghost will keep wandering as it lists to and fro detached from the festering corpse that still lies in the surge of the Thracian sea. Thus Euripides when he introduces the ghost of Polydorus as a prologue- 156 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. speaker, makes the ghost only do what, according to popular belief, was quite within the bounds of possibility. In the cases of Clytemnestra and Polydorus the ghosts are represented as appearing over the top of the scene. But if the spectre of Darius had appeared in the same quarter, as is held by some and thought possible by all writers on the Greek tragedy, and not as rising out of his tomb in answer to the libations and evocative prayers of his wife and the Persian lords, it would have been an outrage on the most sacred beliefs of the time respecting the condition of the noble army of the holy dead. In the extant Greek tragedies there is a fourth ghost — that of Achilles in the Hecuba of Euripides— which appears like that of Darius from the top of the tomb. But though it plays a leading part in the development of the plot, it does not appear on the stage, and therefore it will be more appropriately treated in the section on Human Sacrifice (p. 160). The Appeasing of the Ghost. Libations. We have seen incidentally that the ordinary fashion in which the living sought to honour and please the dead, more especially the mighty dead, was by pouring drink offerings (ire'X.avo';, (teiKiyfiara, X oa ^) i n *° a hole beside or actually communicating with the interior of the tomb. Of references by the tragedians to this practice we have already had good examples in the Ghoephori and the Persae, whilst Sophocles 1 and Euripides 2 frequently allude to such offerings made to the dead. For example, Eurystheus in the Heracleidae is made to say : " Suffer them not to let libations of blood trickle into my grave." Perhaps the most familiar form of such propitiatory drink offerings is the Athenian practice of pouring oil upon the grave-stones of their relations and others. Another method of honouring more especially the illustrious dead was by contests of naked athletes and horses near to or around the 1 Antig. 431, 902 ; El. 440 etc. 2 Heracl. 1040 sqq. ; of. Troad. 381 sqq. ; EL 90 ; Or. 96, 113 etc. ; Ph. 940 ; Iph. T. 61, 160 ; Ale. 854 etc IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 157 tomb, as in the case of Iolaus at Thebes. To this practice there seems to be a reference in at least one extant tragedy. In the Troades 1 of Euripides, Astyanax, Hector's son, has by a common resolve of the Greeks before they fired Troy been flung from the battlements of that city over which, under happier fates, he might have ruled. His mother, Andromache, has already been carried off to Thessaly by Neoptolemus. But the innocent's mangled body is handed over to his grand- mother and the other Trojan women to receive the last rites. As he lies in his father's shield Hecuba utters over him a touching speech: "'Grandam,' thou used to say, 'In sooth I shall cut off in your honour a great lock from my curls, and I shall bring a band of my comrades to visit your grave.'" But in four of the extant dramas of Euripides, goddesses and heroes cannot be appeased with ordinary offerings, but demand the living blood of a human victim. The Iphigenia in Tauris. In the Tauric Chersonese it was the custom to sacrifice all strangers at the shrine of a heroine or goddess, whom the Greeks identified with their own Artemis. Orestes and Pylades went to that land in search of Iphigenia. They were captured and doomed to be sacrificed and that too by the very hand of Iphigenia herself, who as priestess of the goddess has to carry out her hideous rites. Brother and sister are made known to each other, and instead of sacrificing Orestes and his faithful friend, she aids them to escape and herself accompanies them. There is thus nothing to harass the mind of the spectator, but the other three dramas in which human sacrifice is a principal feature are not mere melodramas, for in two of them at least the horrible sacrifice is offered to the dark being that cries out for human blood, whilst in all three cases the victim is a helpless, hapless maiden. The Heracleidae. In this play, the date of which is unknown but placed by some as late as 418 B.C., though regarded by others as amongst Euripides' earlier productions, the sacrifice of Macaria, daughter of Heracles, to Demeter is the turning-point in the play. On the death of Heracles, Eurystheus had not only banished 1 1182-3. 158 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. the hero's children from Argolis, but by threats and superior power had brought about their exclusion from all the various petty states of Greece in which they had sought refuge. Iolaus, the nephew and comrade of Heracles, brings the persecuted family to Athens, imploring the aid of Demophon, the son of Theseus, who then reigned there. The herald of Eurystheus arrives to claim the refugees, but the Athenian king refuses to surrender them, in spite of the threats of war. The Argive host soon appears on the borders of Attica, and Demophon prepares to meet it. But he finds it laid down by an oracle as a condition of success that he must sacrifice to Demeter the best-born maiden. Thereupon Macaria, daughter of Heracles, offers herself as a willing victim. The armies meet, and the Argives are defeated. Eurystheus is captured and brought before Alcmena, Heracles' mother, to receive his doom. The horror of this sacrifice is in some degree mitigated by the spontaneous self-devotion of Macaria. But this element is lacking in the two remaining cases. Iphigenia at Aulis. This play was brought out after the author's death. It opens with the detention by contrary winds of the Greek fleet at Aulis. The seer, Chalcas, has declared that Iphigenia must be sacrificed to Artemis in fulfilment of Agamemnon's vow, that he would offer to that goddess the most beautiful thing which the year of Iphigenia's birth had produced. Menelaus persuades the reluctant father, and Aga- memnon sends a letter to Clytemnestra bidding her come with Iphigenia in order that the latter may be married to Achilles. But the father soon repents and sends another letter revoking the former, but this second letter is intercepted by Menelaus, who upbraids his brother with his weakness. The brothers part in anger. At this juncture Clytemnestra and her daughter suddenly arrive. At the sight of the maid Menelaus is softened, but Agamemnon points out to him that the host cannot be so easily put off, since with Chalcas and Odysseus at their head they are clamouring for the sacrifice, and he himself may fall a victim to the unreasoning fury of the commonalty. Agamemnon then has a meeting with Clytemnestra and IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 159 Iphigenia, and urges his wife to return to Argos, but she refuses. At this moment Achilles, all unconscious of the pretended marriage, enters to inform Agamemnon of the dis- content of the army at the long delay ; his own Myrmidons are getting out of hand. To his astonishment Clytemnestra accosts him as her son-in-law, and thereupon explanations ensue. The old servant from whom Menelaus had taken the second letter now reveals the truth, and Achilles promises to do his best to save the maiden. At this juncture Agamemnon comes in and Clytemnestra tells him that she herself is aware of his real object. Iphigenia now knows all and implores her father to spare her, carrying in her arms her infant brother Orestes. But Agamemnon relents not. Necessity knows no law. Achilles arrives flying from his enraged followers who are resolved to have the maiden's blood. Iphigenia now resolves to devote herself, and avows her resolution to die, in order that it may be said, " This woman saved Hellas." A procession is formed to the altar of Artemis. The epilogue as it now stands describes the miraculous substitution of a deer by Artemis as a victim and the translation of Iphigenia to the Tauric Chersonese. In this play there is a partial mitigation of the horror by the final self-devotion of Iphigenia, though not to such an extent as in the Heracleidae. There can be little doubt that the play was composed at the close of the poet's life. But as it was not brought out till after his death, the epilogue may have been the work of some later hand, who wished to give the play a happy ending, a fate which befell King Lear at the hands of Nahum Tate. But even if it be granted that the epilogue as it stands was written at a later date, it may very well embody the poet's idea. To have given the play a happy ending would have been quite in keeping with his love of melodrama, as evidenced by the Alcestis and the Helena. As in the later period of his life he abandoned the time-honoured form of the story of Helen and adopted that of Stesichorus, so in the same period he may have wished to retain the chief part of the story, but to strip it of its cruel traditional ending, as it was known to Aeschylus and the rest of antiquity. We shall soon see that although 160 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. in the first part of the fourth century B.C. there were not wanting those in Greece, even amongst her noblest, who were ready to resort in times of stress to human sacrifice, there were nevertheless others openly ready to withstand such attempts and to denounce them as hateful to the All-Father. The Hecuba. In this play, which was certainly composed before 423 B.C. (in which year it was ridiculed in the Clouds), the tomb of Achilles though not actually seen on the stage is the central point of the tragic interest. But this grave was no mere figment of Euripides or any other poet. The Greeks of all periods believed that a great barrow which stood close by the sea near Sigeum was the veritable tomb of the Achean hero 1 . This great sepulchre by the sea is celebrated in a picturesque little poem in the Greek Anthology 2 : " 'Tis brave A.ohilles' barrow ; th' Acheana reared it high. For Trojans yet unborn a terror ever nigh ; It looketh toward the shingle that still the moaning surge For sea-sprung Thetis' scion shall sing a glorious dirge.'' Whether Achilles lay within or not, tradition had long identified it with that hero. At the time when Alexander marched to the conquest of the East it was the practice to honour the great Achean by foot-races and offerings also. The visit of the great Emathian conqueror to the spot is not the least picturesque incident in his wonderful career. When the army, destined to subdue all Asia as far as the Indus, had been assembled at Pella and made its way to Sestos, leaving Parmenio to superintend the embarkation, Alexander himself went down to Elaeus at the southern end of the Thracian Chersonese. Here stood the chapel and sacred precinct of the hero Protesilaus, who according to legend was the first of the Greeks to leap on Trojan soil, where he straightway met his fate at the hands of Hector. Alexander made offerings to the hero, praying that his own disembarkation might have a happier issue. He then sailed across in the admiral's trireme, steering with his own hand, to the landing-place near Ilium, called the Harbour of the Acheans. In mid-channel he sacrificed a bull 1 It was explored by Sohliemann in 1879 (Troja), pp. 244 sqq. 1 vii, 142. IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 161 with libations out of a golden goblet to Poseidon and the Nereids. Himself too in full armour was the first, like Protesilaus, to leap on the strand of Asia, but no Hector was there. Thence he mounted " wind-swept Ilium," and sacrificed to Athena, dedicating in her shrine his own panoply and taking in exchange some of the arms said to have been worn by the heroes of the Trojan War. These he caused to be carried along with him by his guards in his subsequent battles. He visited the supposed palace of Priam and the altar of Zeus Herceius, at which that unhappy old king was slain by Neoptolemus. As the latter was his own ancestor, Alexander felt himself to be the object of Priam's unappeased wrath, and accordingly made offering to his spirit at the same altar for the purpose of ex- piation and reconciliation. But what is much more important for our immediate purpose, the pupil of Aristotle next proceeded to the great barrow of Achilles and anointed with oil the pillar upon it, and with his companions all naked, as was the custom, he raced up to it and crowned it with a chaplet, exclaiming how blest was Achilles, who in life had a most faithful friend and in death had his exploits sung by a mighty bard 1 . The Acheans after the fall of Troy on their homeward voyage put into the Chersonese with their captives, Hecuba and the other Trojan women. The afflicted queen and mother had not yet drunk the cup of woe to the dregs, some bitter drops still remained. The Hecuba opens with the announcement of a new sorrow. The ghost of Achilles had appeared from his barrow at Sigeum and stayed the home-bound host of the Acheans, demanding as his share of the spoil of Troy Polyxena, the virgin daughter of Priam and Hecuba. After debate it has been resolved by the Achean host that the demand of the wraith must be gratified, and Polyxena slaughtered at the "high barrow" of the hero by his son Neoptolemus. Odysseus comes to announce the decision to the distracted mother, and Polyxena is torn from her arms. The ghastly offering to the dead must be made, and the damsel is led away to be slaughtered on the grave. Of course the dreadful scene was not represented on 1 Plut. Alex. 15; Arrian, Andb. I, 11; Justin, xi, 5. K. T. 11 162 SURVIVALS OP THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. the stage, any more than the actual murder of her children by Medea. But nevertheless the chief pathos of the play centres round the tomb. The herald Talthybius, when all the horror is over, comes to bid her mother give burial rites to her daughter, whose warm pure blood has been poured upon Achilles' tomb. The herald details the terrible scene. In front of the barrow stood the Achean host. Neoptolemus took the noble maiden by the hand and led her to the summit of the howe, and with him went none but the chieftains, the herald himself and some chosen youths, whose horrid task was to restrain the struggles of the victim. The herald proclaimed silence to the host, and then Neoptolemus raised on high a golden cup and prayed to his father that he would receive the propitiatory libation and " come to drink the dark fresh blood of the maiden " ; that his wrath may thus be assuaged, and that he will permit the Acheans to loose from their moorings and fare homeward. As he prayed, the whole of that great host repeated the response. Then he drew from its scabbard a gold- mounted sword, and made a sign to the chosen youths to seize the maid. She saw the sign and said: "O ye Argives, that have destroyed my native land, willingly I die. Let no one touch me, for with good courage I will lay bare my neck. In heaven's name leave me free that thus in freedom I may die, for a king's daughter I am. It shames me to be called a slave amongst the dead." The hosts murmured in assent and king Agamemnon bade the young men loose her. As soon as she heard the order, she rent her vest and laid bare her neck and breast, beautiful as though wrought in marble, and invited Neoptolemus to deal the fatal blow. He, though faltering for pity of the maid, dealt her the death stroke. It may be possible to see in the treatment of human sacrifice in these three plays a gradual movement in the poet's mind, which perhaps was the reflection of the general tendency of the day. In the Hecuba, which may very well be the earliest of the three, there is little or no mitigation of the horror. Polyxena indeed is not slaughtered before the audience, but Talthybius gives a minute and graphic picture of the dreadful spectacle. As has been well remarked, it is only in the willing IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 163 resignation and noble resolution with which Polyxena meets her fate that we have any alleviation of the pain which we feel in common with Hecuba. In the Heracleidae, which may very possibly be some years later than the Hecuba, the pity and horror excited in the audience is mitigated by the spontaneous self-devotion of Macaria, who in order to save her brothers and sisters offers herself, all unprompted, as a willing victim. In the Iphigenia, which is beyond all doubt the latest of the three, if the epilogue was either composed by Euripides himself, or, though written at a later date, embodied his own ending, we have not merely a substantial mitigation of the horror, but in the happy ending find a tragedy turned into a melodrama. The feelings of the audience have indeed been harried by the vain pleading of the maiden for pity, and they have seen her depart in the procession to be the victim on the altar of Artemis. But there is no description of the closing scene. On the contrary, instead of a messenger coming and describing her sacrifice, the epilogue gives instant relief to the high-wrought feelings of the spectators by announcing that the goddess has at the last moment found a deer as a substitute, as Jehovah supplied a ram in the story of Abraham and Isaac. It may be urged that although human sacrifices had been commonly offered in all parts of Greece by them of old time to angry deities and to the spirits of the savage dead, yet at the date when Euripides introduced such themes into his plays, he was only reviving for dramatic purposes the shadowy traditions of a long vanished past. But was this really so ? It is easy to show that humansacrifices.such as those dramatised by Euripides, were actually performed within historic times in Greece. Thus in the First Messenian War, Aristodemus, the Messenian hero, offered his daughter in sacrifice, as did Agamemnon in the Iphigenia. Again Aristomenes, the bulwark of Messenia in her second struggle against Sparta, is said to have sacrificed five hundred prisoners to the deity of Mount Ithome, whom the Greeks of a later age designated as Zeus. But it may be said that these occurred at a period which can hardly be called classical. Yet down to the second century after Christ the 11—2 164 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. Lycaean Mount in Arcadia was year by year the scene of a horrid rite, the foundation of which was ascribed to the ancient king Lycaon. To propitiate the dark spirit of the spot he sacri- ficed to it a human babe on the altar, which in later times was termed that of Lycaean Zeus. "And they say that immediately after the sacrifice Lycaon was turned into a wolf 1 ." " On the topmost peak of the mountain," says Pausanias 2 , " is the altar of Lycaean Zeus in the shape of a mound of earth. On this they offer secret sacrifices to Lycaean Zeus, but I did not care to pry into the details of the sacrifice. Be it as it is and as it has been from the beginning." But it may be urged that although in wild and savage Arcadia and in Messenia human sacrifice might be practised, yet in the more advanced communities of Hellas — Athens, Thebes or Sparta — such awful rites had ceased from a remote age. Yet we must sorrowfully confess that the facts of history are against this idea. Of all the great names connected with the story of the glorious rise of Athens, that of Themistocles stands first. It was he who fore- saw the possibility of a naval dominion for Athens, and that the time was not far distant when she might have to depend for safety on her " wooden walls," and it was his wisdom and eloquence that persuaded the Athenians to expend on the building of a navy the silver of the mines of Laurium, hitherto squandered in popular doles. When the stress and panic of Xerxes' invasion fell upon the Greeks, it was he who counselled them to meet the Persian fleet at Artemisium, and it was his energy and surpassing ability that induced the allied squadrons to make that stand in the narrow strait of Salamis that wrought the salvation of Greece. Yet on the very eve of that great day this man, the foremost of his age, brave in battle as wise in council, offered three Persian captives to Dionysus the Cannibal 3 . But it was not merely the highest minds of the first part of the fifth century B.C. that were ready to resort to human sacrifice in seasons of danger and anxiety. On the eve of the battle of Leuctra in B.C. 371 the Spartan and 1 Paus. viii, 2, 3. s vm, 38, 7. 3 Plut. Pelop. 20 sq. : roils iirb OwtTOKXiovs a, 'Attik6s \edis, irpibras dUas Kplvovres atparos x VT0 ''- Itrrai Se Kal t& \onrbv Afyews arpaTtp del hiKaardv tovto pov\ewqpiov. 2 I, 28, 8-12. 176 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [OH. when he had slain the rebel Pallas and his sons. But the custom was in former days, before the acquittal of Theseus, that every manslayer either fled the country, or, if he stayed, was slain even as he slew." Yet it will soon be seen that the court probably owed its name to an older legend. (4) At Phreattys, on a tongue of land projecting into the sea at Zea, was held a court to try any manslayer who, during his period of exile, might have committed another crime of the same character. The judges sat on the shore, whilst the accused was literally docked in a boat moored off the beach, that he might not pollute with the miasma of his guilt the land of Attica. (5) In the Prytaneum, as already stated, were tried weapons, especially the axe -with which was slain the ox at the Buphonia, If it be said that Pausanias does not refer to the trial of Orestes as having taken place at the Palladion, and con- sequently that this shrine cannot be its true scene, I may at once point out that there is the same objection to the Areopagus, for Pausanias 1 says that that court was first established to try Ares for the murder of Halirrhothius, and makes no mention of the trial of Orestes at all. Aeschylus gives us a totally different account of the establishment of the first tribunal for manslayers, but as he wrote some six centuries and a half before Pausanias, we are justified in assuming that his statement represents a far older legend than that of the later writer, and accordingly we may leave on one side the latter's account of the first cases supposed to have been tried at the Palladion, the Delphinion, and the Areopagus. Originally the judges in all these five courts for bloodshed were the ancient body called the Ephetae. The King Archon presided and probably with the fifty Ephetae made up the Fifty and One, a term by which the body was likewise known. According to Pollux* the Ephetae were constituted by Draco. Up to that time the Basileus had investigated and tried all cases of bloodshed, but Draco referred 1 I, 28, 5. 2 vm, 120: for an excellent summary of the evidence relating to the Ephetae see Dr Sandys' note on Arist. Ath. Pol. c. 57. IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 177 such to the Fifty and One, and to this system of reference Pollux ascribes the origin of their name Ephetae. But like so many other provisions in Draco's enactments the body had only been reconstituted, having really existed from time im- memorial. The fact that they were selected on the ground of high birth (dpiffnvBrjv alpeOevras) of itself indicates that they were a survival from oligarchic and monarchical times. It is highly probable that in the Ephetae presided over by the Archon Basileus (himself the shadow of the ancient king), we have the survival of the ancient Gerousia or Boule. This view will be found to be quite in accord with certain statements of Aeschylus. By Solon's reforms the Ephetae were replaced on the Areopagus by a body consisting of ex-archons, though juris- diction in the minor courts was still left to them. Aristotle 1 speaks as if they still continued to sit in these tribunals down to his day, but there is evidence that by the end of the fifth century B.C. ordinary dicasts sat in the Delphinion and Palladion, for we hear of seven hundred dicasts, a number inconsistent with the Fifty and One. Pollux 2 tells us that gradually the tribunal of the Ephetae was laughed to death. It is clear that with the courts of Phreattys and of the Prytaneum we have nothing to do in our present inquiry. The Areopagus, the Palladion, and the Delphinion therefore remain as the three possible scenes for the asylum and trial of Orestes, unless we make the wild assumption that the dramatist laid the scene of the trial at some spot never associated either in fact or tradition with trials for homicide. It is useless to urge that the dramatists are not at all particular as to the spot in which a scene is laid. For though this may be so when an Attic dramatist is composing a play the scene of which is laid at Troy, at Argos, or at Thebes, he certainly would not expose himself to ridicule and criticism from his Attic audience when dramatising a legend which was indissolubly bound up with ■ one of the courts established for homicide, the very origin of which was ascribed to the trial of Orestes. Let us consider what are the conditions required for the 1 Ath. Pol. c. 57. 2 wn. 125 - B. T. 12 178 SURVIVALS OP THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. spot where Orestes was tried. First of all there must be a most ancient image of the goddess. Secondly, it must be an image to which manslayers actually fled as suppliants when they could plead that the act was involuntary, as urged by Orestes in his own defence, or that it was justifiable, as was pleaded on his behalf by Apollo. Thirdly, this image ought to bear the name of Pallas and not that of Athena, for Apollo at Delphi orders Orestes to " go to the city of Pallas and take your suppliant seat there embracing in your arms her ancient image. And there having judges to decide on these matters, and arguments in mitigation of your crime, we will find means to relieve you from your troubles, for it was even in obedience to me that you slew that body which gave you birth." Then Apollo tells the Eumenides that Pallas will see justice done at the trial of Orestes. Fourthly, on that spot ought to sit the most ancient tribunal for trying homicide that was known at Athens, for Athena declares that the case of Orestes is too serious for one to decide, and therefore she will institute a thesmos to deal with such cases, who are to be the noblest of her citizens 1 These last words seem especially to apply to the Ephetae, who, as we have just seen, were chosen dpccrrivhrjv. Moreover, when Athena says that the case of Orestes is too great for one to decide, we seem to have a direct allusion to the tradition preserved in Pollux that "in old days the king heard cases of bloodshed, but that Draco established the court of Ephetae." Furthermore, this oldest court for homicide cannot be one for deliberate murder, but only for the trials of those who could plead extenuating circumstances. Let us examine the respective claims of all the three com- petitors beginning with the Delphinion. As this was the shrine of the Apollo of Delphi, it is inconceivable that there would be in it a most ancient image of Pallas, such as that at which Orestes took sanctuary and which he clasped in his arms. For assuredly the object of adoration in the Delphinion would have been a statue of Apollo and not that of the goddess. Moreover, this shrine of Apollo was not an im- memorial place of veneration, as is fully shown by its name, 1 Eum. 465 : KpLva 8re KOfilfoiTo rb i-bavov eirl tt]v 8a\aaaav. 12—2 180 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. statue down to the sea was to wash it from all impurity is rendered clear by the passage in the Iphigenia in Tauris 1 , where Iphigenia effects the escape of Orestes, Pylades and herself by telling Thoas the Tauric king that it was necessary to purify the image of Artemis from the miasma of Orestes and Pylades not by fresh water, but by sea- water, " for the sea washes away all human pollution." We need therefore have no doubt that the Palladion was used from time immemorial as a sanctuary in which those whose hands were red with human blood took refuge. (3) In it sat the Ephetae, who had once sat even on the Areopagus until Solon had replaced them by a body of ex-archons. (4) There is not the slightest evidence that trials for deliberate murder ever took place here, for they would seem from their first institution to have been held on the Areo- pagus. Of course it may be said, if the trials for wilful murder were held from the first on that famous spot, then that must have been the oldest court for homicide, since deliberate murder was the most serious offence, and for it a tribunal would be first erected. But this is a complete misconception of the evolution of the law of trial for murder at Athens and in many other places. We are told by Aeschylus 2 , and Pau- sanias (supra) repeats the same tradition, that in old days at Athens prevailed the stern rule, that whoso had shed man's blood, whether accidentally, justifiably, or wilfully, should be slain even as he slew. This was exactly the same doctrine as that held by the Semites od the other side of the Mediterranean. Amongst the latter we have the clearest proof that the first step in any modification of the custom by which the avenger of blood was permitted to kill the manslayer, no matter whether the latter had slain his victim by accident or design, was the establish- ment of sanctuaries. Such were the six cities of Refuge enjoined by Jehovah through the mouth of Moses. "That 1 Eur. Iph. Taur. 1193 : /cXtifei BdXavaa lravTa Tav6p&wuv kokc£. Cf. Farnell Cults of Greek States, vol. i, p. 304. 2 Choeph. 305 : Sp&cavn iraBciv Tptyipuv nv$os riSe fwrti. IV] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 181 the manslayer may flee thither, which killeth any person at unawares (a/couo-t'w?). They shall be unto you cities of refuge from the avenger ; that the manslayer die not, until he stand before the congregation in judgment V If he could show that he had shed blood unwittingly, he was spared and there he dwelt until the death of the High Priest at Jerusalem. It will be observed that the manslayer was tried at the asylum where he had taken refuge, not brought somewhere else to be tried. This was but natural, seeing that if he once quitted his sanctuary he was liable to be slain by the avenger at any moment. The Semitic practice gives us the clue to the various steps in the evolution of the law of homicide at Athens. Here as in Palestine the ancient custom was that the slayer should he slain. As the first relaxation of this merciless rule was the establishment of an asylum for those who had unwittingly shed blood, so we are justified in assuming that when at Athens we find distinct tribunals for different kinds of homicide, in- voluntary, justifiable, and deliberate, the first named (i.e. the Palladion) must have been the oldest, that for deliberate murder (the Areopagus) the last, that for justifiable (the Delphinion), the second; but this is exactly what Aeschylus assumes, for he represents that the first tribunal for homicide was established for cases where extenuating circumstances were alleged — Orestes himself pleading that he had committed the crime under the compulsion of Apollo, and the god urging that Orestes was justified in killing his mother to avenge his father. In other words Aeschylus represents the first tribunal as instituted for both the classes of homicide which in historical times were divided between the court of the Palladion and that of the Delphinion. But this is only what might have been expected, for the first step in the amelioration of the law of vengeance would be in the case of those who had killed unawares, the second would be the feeling that a man, even though he slew deliberately, might be justified in so doing. Naturally those who first urged the latter plea took refuge at the ancient sanctuary whither resorted those who had slain a man unawares; and it would be only later that a separate 1 Numbers, xxxv. 11-13: iras 6 warifas ^/vxw iicovatm (LXX). 182 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [OH. court would be established for the second class of extenuating circumstances. But this is completely in accordance with the statement of Aeschylus, for the court first established to try homicide was held at a sanctuary which contained a most ancient image of Pallas. But as it was at the court of the Palladion that trials for involuntary homicide were held, there can be little doubt that the court of the Palladion was older than that of the Delphinion. Moreover, as the name Delphinion shows, that shrine was of comparatively recent origin, and as its con- nection with justifiable homicide apparently arose from the belief that Apollo had first broached that doctrine at Athens in the case of Orestes, we must conclude that it was of more recent date than the Palladion. Let us now turn to the remaining claimant, the Areopagus. How does it fit the conditions of the case ? (1) There was there no ancient image called by the name of either Athena or Pallas, for Pausanias only mentions a statue of Athena Promachos on the Hill of Ares. (2) There is not the slightest evidence that any other form of homicide except deliberate murder was ever tried there. (3) It is only as the last step in the evolution of the law of homicide that the community steps in between the next of kin and the deliberate manslayer, and insists that a solemn inquiry into the facts of the case shall be carried out before the accused shall be put to death. Accordingly the court of the Areopagus comes latest in the process of legal evolution. That court therefore fails as com- pletely as the Delphinion to fulfil the required conditions, whereas the Palladion, as has just been shown, is in strict accord with all the requirements of the play. For it had an immemorial ccoanon, used as a place of sanctuary by man- slayers, and this was never called by any other name than that of Pallas or Palladion, whilst in its precincts was held the court for the trial of involuntary homicide which we have just seen was the first stage in the mitigation of the pitiless rule of a life for a life. In the first attempt to mitigate the severity of the antique law the king and his council of elders would naturally be the IV ] IN EXTANT GREEK TRAGEDIES 183 body who would decide whether a particular manslayer had shed blood involuntarily or justifiably. I have already pointed out that the Fifty aDd One consisting of the Basileus Archon and fifty others chosen for their high birth look like the survival of the ancient king and Gerontes or Boule. The Basileus laid the case before the court (eladyei) as Athena does in the play. Aeschylus evidently believed that the first trial for homicide took place before the ancient Boule, for otherwise he would not have represented it as taking place in a Council chamber (PovXevTrjpiov) 1 . Whilst it is very likely that in ancient times the king decided all ordinary cases himself, as did the Egyptian kings, and as is perhaps implied in the tradition preserved in Pollux, yet in cases of bloodshed the king would have felt like Athena in the play, and held that such cases were too serious to be tried by any one individual, whether mortal or immortal, and accordingly he laid (elcrijyaye) the matter before the Boule. If it be urged that although Orestes took sanctuary at the Palladion, nevertheless he was tried on the Areopagus, and in support of this contention it be said that the words Trdyov 8' "Apeiov rovS" ^Afia^ovcov eSpav refer to the spot where the trial is proceeding, it may be at once pointed out that rovSe is simply used SeucTiicax;, as is so often the case ("yon Hill of Ares "), for the reference to the Areopagus is only secondary, having been introduced by Aeschylus, as is commonly held, in order to support the Areopagites against the democratic legislation of Pericles and Ephialtes. But there are several grave objections to this view. In the first place, it has already been pointed out (supra) that it was in the very essence of an asylum that the manslayer should remain there until it had been decided whether he could plead extenuating circumstances or not. Orestes would have been exposed to the vengeance of the Furies if he had been removed from the Palladion to be tried on the Hill, as is now supposed by my friend Dr Verrall 2 , who, whilst adopting my view of the place of asylum, still clings, though not very strongly, to the 1 Eum. 540 : Tr\rjpovpJvov yap rovSe @ov\evTriplov. 2 The Eumenides of Aeschylus (1908), pp. 183-8. 184 SURVIVALS OF THE PRIMITIVE TYPE [CH. Areopagus as the scene of the trial. Again, if the trial took place on the Areopagus, it is strange there should be no reference to the two famous unhewn stones of Anaideia and Hybris, on which stood the accuser and the accused respectively. Furthermore, at the close of the play Athena declares that she will send the Erinyes by torchlight to the cavernous recesses beneath the earth, under the conduct of her attendants who guard her bretas, whilst the best-born of all the land of Theseus shall come, a goodly company of maidens, married women and aged matrons. It seems very unlikely that Athenian women would be represented as present on the Areopagus during the trial, more especially as such trials took place by night, and ready to form a procession. Moreover, there is no reason why the attendants of Athena who had charge of her ancient image should be present at a spot where there was no shrine of the goddess, and no ancient image known either as Pallas or Athena. On the other hand, if the procession started from the Palladion, moving from south-east to the Areopagus, the attendants of Athena will naturally be ready to escort the Furies, now clad in scarlet like Metics (as my lamented friend, the late Dr Headlam, has cleverly shown 1 ), to their future abode in the side of the Areo- pagus. Moreover, the words ev^aneire Be, -)(a>P>- Tai (989) and evp 8tp.is etpyei vQerepit-dfievov iraTpadeXfalav rfyS' dtKdvTGiv iirt^rjvai. 3 75. - 220. s 326. V] THE EXPANSION OF TRAGEDY 191 grandfather were dead, he would succeed to the inheritance of which his mother was the heiress. Not only could the next of kin claim the heiress, if she was still unmarried, but even if a woman was already married, and she, by the death of her brother, became an heiress to the family property, her next of kin could claim her and could compel her husband to give her up. Again, if a man after his marriage became next of kin to an heiress, he might put away his wife and marry the heiress. Accordingly then the plea of the Danaids that the marriage with their cousins was incestuous would have excited nothing but contempt in an Attic audience of the time of Demosthenes. But had this law of the marriage of heiresses always been the custom at Athens or was it but of comparatively recent date ? The fact that even in classical times when succession was through males, the claim of a woman who had no brothers to the family land remained paramount, points distinctly to a time when all property descended through women. There were distinct traditions that in old days wedlock was unknown at Athens and that children were named after their mothers. According to Justin 1 it was Cecrops who first established the marriage bond, whilst according to Varro 2 , it was under this same king that the women lost their votes in the assembly, and that the children no longer received the mother's name. Up to that time the women sat in the assembly along with the men. A double wonder sprang out of the earth at the same time, in one place the olive tree, and in another water. The king in terror sent to Delphi to ask what he should do. The god answered that the olive tree signified Athena, and the water Poseidon, and that the citizens must choose after which of the two they would name their town. Cecrops called the assembly; the men voted for Poseidon, the women for Athena, and as there was one woman more, Athena prevailed. Thereupon Poseidon in wrath sent the sea over all the lands of Attica. To appease the god, the citizens imposed a threefold punishment on their women : they were to lose their votes, 1 ii, 6. 2 ap. Augustine, De civitate Dei, xvm, 9. 192 THE EXPANSION OF TRAGEDY [CH. the children were no longer to receive the mother's name, and they were no longer to be called Athenians after the goddess. As McLennan points out, this story is a tradition of a genuinely archaic state, and cannot have been the invention of a later time, for Athena in it represents Mother-right. If it be contended that Varro and Justin are but late writers, it must be remembered that both of them contain much valuable information garnered from earlier sources, and that their statements are amply corroborated by the Athenian law respecting the marriage of half-brothers and half-sisters, provided that they were not sprung from the same mother. Whilst legal conservatism would retain an ancient custom once of peculiar importance, it is most unlikely that the Athenians in later times would have introduced any such law, more especially at a time when the whole tendency was to magnify the importance of the male parent. It is clear now that Athens once had the system of descent through women which prevails still over wide areas of the earth, and which once was the rule in a great part of Europe, for instance, with the ancient Spaniards, and amongst the ancient peoples on the south and east of the Mediterranean, of whom the Lycians are the most typical example. The latter were allied to the Greeks in blood, and with them down to very late times kinship was reckoned through women, the children being called after their mothers, and the property descending through the female line 1 . If a woman cohabited with her slave, the offspring were full citizens, but if a free man lived with a foreign woman or a concubine, even though he was the first in the state, the children had no rights of citizenship, whilst according to Nicolaus Damascenus they left their inheritances to their daughters and not to their sons. It is then certain that at Athens there had once been a time when descent was traced and property passed through females, a fact proved by the circumstance that brothers and sisters by the same father might marry freely, whilst the union of half-brothers and half-sisters sprung from the same mother was considered incestuous. In such a condition of society, 1 Herod, i, 173. V] THE EXPANSION OF TRAGEDY 193 marriage outside the kin is the normal rule, that is what is called Exogamy. Clearly then, when the Danaids complain that their cousins are forcing on them an unnatural union, they take their stand on the doctrine of exogamy, whereas at Athens, from the end of the fifth century and after, marriage within the kin is peculiarly favoured, or as McLennan would say, Endogamy was the rule. But as we have just seen that descent through women was once the rule at Athens, there must have been a period of transition from the one system to the other, and there is evidence to show that the older system was still fresh in memory in the time of Aeschylus. The Eumenides 1 furnishes us not only with evidence of descent through women, but also shows that in the Athens of the fifth century B.C., there was a clear recollection of a time when the marriage tie can hardly be said to have existed at all. When the Erinyes declare that their office is to drive matricides from their homes, Apollo asks, "What if he be the slayer of a wife who has murdered her husband ? " To this the Erinyes replies, "That would not be kindred blood shed by the hands of kindred." " Truly," says Apollo, " ye make of none effect the solemn pledges of Hera Teleia, and Zeus. The Cyprian goddess too is flung aside and is dishonoured by this argument, source as she is of the joys dearest to mortals. For the marriage bed, ordained by Fate for husband and wife, is a bond stronger bhan a mere oath, guarded as it is by Justice." Again, when Orestes demands of the Erinyes why they persecute him, though they did not pursue his mother Clytemnestra in her lifetime for the murder of her husband, they reply that " She was not of the same blood as the man whom she slew." As Athens once had the older system to which the Danaids cling, there must have been a time when the archaic form gradually gave way to that which we find fully established in the days of the Attic orators. When did this take place ? The question of the transition to succession through males instead of females plays a central part in the Eumenides. In that play the dread goddesses, who are maintaining the 1 201 sqq. R. T. 13 194 THE EXPANSION OF TRAGEDY [OH. immemorial customs of the land when indicting Orestes for the slaying of his mother, lay down that the tie between mother and child is especially sacred, in other words the doctrine embodied in the Attic law which forbade intermarriage between half-brothers and half-sisters by the same mother. On the other hand Apollo is chargedby them with overthrowing primaeval ordinances and introducing strange practices, when in defence of Orestes he declares on the authority of Zeus that the tie between the father and the child is much closer. Now unless the Athenian audience in the year 458 B.C. was fully aware that succession through females had been the ancient practice at Athens, the main point on which the triumphal acquittal of Orestes depends would not have appealed to them in the slightest degree. We are therefore justified in the inference that down to the fifth century B.C. there were many survivals of a time when succession passed through the female line and when the law of exogamy was still a matter of common knowledge to the mass of Athenians. Now if this was so in 458 B.C. when the Oresteia was exhibited, it must have been still more the case when the Supplices, supposing that we are right in considering it the earliest extant play of the poet, was composed. Accordingly the plea of the suppliants to be saved from an endogamous marriage with their cousins would probably appeal to many in the audience who first heard it. The breaking down of ancient customs cannot be effected in a few years even by a Napoleon, and in an ancient state such as Attica, with its numerous small communities rigidly conservative, the process of change must indeed have been slow and great opposition must have been roused in many quarters by the proposals to alter the time-honoured methods of tracing forms of kinship and succession. I have already given the plea urged by the chorus against their marriage with their cousins on the ground that such was immoral. In their conversation with the king of Argos we find another objection equally strong, one not moral but material. The king asks them why they have become suppliants of the gods whose images are worshipped at the mound where they V] THE EXPANSION OF TRAGEDY 195 have taken sanctuary, bearing their wool- wreathed olive boughs. The leader replies, "In order that I may not become the bondswoman of the sons of Aegyptus." The king asks, "Is this merely because there is a family quarrel, or because it is unlawful ? " She avoids a direct answer by asking " Who would purchase relations as owners?" The king, who is not at all a sentimental statesman, replies, "It is in this way that men's power becomes aggrandised." The Coryphaeus declares that she does not want to become a bondswoman to her cousins and furthermore she has a great aversion to purchasing with her property relations who will in reality be her owners. In this she is simply expressing the feelings of the Athenian heiresses, who by the new legislation were to be treated merely as appendages to the family estate, who could not marry whom they pleased, and who, even if already married to some other man, might, under certain circumstances, be torn from their husbands to gratify the cupidity of the next of kin. That the poet is alluding to the Attic law relating to women is rendered all the more probable by the words of the Argive king: "Suppose the sons of Aegyptus have authority over you by the law of your city, alleging that they are your nearest of kin, who would seek to withstand their right ? Needs be that you must plead according to your own country's laws, that they have no authority over you 1 ." Now as every Athenian woman in the later classical period must have a /cvpios, a man who had control over her and managed her estate, whether father, brother, or next of kin, the use of the term icvpo? by the king of Argos is of great significance ; it confirms the view that the chorus are really voicing the objections made by the party at Athens, especially women entitled to property, not only against the innovations by which they were deprived of 1 362 sgq.: et Tot Kparovat Taides Alydwrov akQev v6/j.tp Tr6\eas, tj>affKovres iyytirara ytvovs ctvai, ris &v toutS' d,VTuadrjva.i 8£Kot; Sec rol 6po<;) was the first, and the Release of Prometheus (Avo/ievos) was the third. The Satyric drama is unknown. It cannot have been the Prometheus Pyrcaeus, for that was the last of the tetralogy which included the Persae. The scene is laid on a bleak cliff in the Caucasus, which Aeschylus regarded as being in the Scythian desert. The play opens with Prometheus in custody of Kratos and Bia. The first lines give us the keynote. Kratos orders Hephaestus, the divine smith, to rivet the fetters on Prometheus because such is the command of Zeus, and at the same time Hephaestus is re- minded that Prometheus had stolen his fire and had bestowed it upon mankind. Prometheus is to be punished in order that he may abandon his desire to befriend the human race and that mortals may learn to bear with patience the sovereign will of Zeus. Hephaestus reluctantly obeys and only through fear of the Olympian is he willing to shackle a brother god, and justifies this reluctance by declaring that kinship and comradeship are strong bonds. Kratos answers that one may do anything except become king of the gods. The fetters of adamant are now fast fixed, and Prometheus utters his famous appeal to all Nature 2 — he calls 1 in, 116. * 88 sqq. 208 THE EXPANSION OF TRAGEDY [OH. upon the divine aether, the swift winged winds, the river founts, the multitudinous laughter of the rippling waves, on Earth the All-Mother, and on the All-seeing Sun to behold the torments which this new ruler of the gods has inflicted upon him. Prometheus has prescience of what his fate will be, but not a full foreknowledge, as we shall presently see. He knows that he is doomed to bondage for ten thousand years, and he must bow to 'AviiyKT/, " for the might of Necessity is irresistible 1 ." He declares that all these torments have come upon him because of the gifts that he had bestowed upon men, more especially the boon of the stolen fire concealed in a stalk of fennel, which had enabled them to develop the arts of life. At this moment he hears a rustling through the air, and bodes some coming woe. His fear is quickly dispelled, for the Chorus of the Daughters of Ocean and Tethys now enter. Far away in their sea-caves they had heard the replication of the hammer-strokes as Hephaestus riveted the gyves on Prometheus. Prometheus adjures them to behold his misery. They sing how a new steersman now grasps the helm of Olympus, how Zeus is supreme ruling with new laws, and how he is bringing to nought the mighty ones of yore. They assure Prometheus that he has the pity of all the gods except Zeus, who will not relent until either his wrath has been glutted or he has been overthrown by craft. Prometheus replies that the day shall come when Zeus will sorely need his aid, but never will he give him the counsel that may save him until he is released from his bonds and Zeus has made requital. The nymphs answer that the ways of Zeus are past finding out. "Zeus," answers Prometheus, "will yet be brought low and then and not till then will Prometheus be ready for reconciliation." The Chorus now ask why so grievous a punishment has been meted out to him. Prometheus tells his story. Wrath had broken out amongst the Titanic gods and strife ensued, some wishing to expel Cronus and make Zeus king, others taking the part of Cronus and urging that Zeus should never reign 2 . Prometheus, warned by his mother Gaia, advised the Titans to rely on craft and not on mere brute force, but they 1 105- 2 205 sqq. V J THE EXPANSION OF TRAGEDY 209 set his counsel at nought. Then acting on his mother's advice, he took the side of Zeus and by his counsels that god consigned to Tartarus Cronus, the Ancient of Days, and all who took his side. Though Prometheus had done so much for Zeus, the latter requited him ill, for like all despots he distrusted his friends. Zeus assigned their duties to the various gods, but took no account of hapless mortals. It was his design to annihilate mankind and to create a new race. Prometheus interposed and saved men from the thunderbolts of Zeus and planted golden hope in the breasts of mortals. Prometheus tells the nymphs that he knew what was before him, when he helped mortals, but he did not realise that his punishment would be so grievous. It is thus clear that his prescience was limited. At this point Oceanus himself comes on the scene, not merely as a kinsman, but as a friend. He counsels Prometheus to bow to the will of the new ruler of the world, for Zeus even though his seat be very far away, may hear his words. Ocean himself had hated the whole revolution in heaven, but he had yielded to Zeus and he advises Prometheus to do the same. Prometheus commends the wisdom of Ocean's ad- monitions, but yet he is unmoved. He relates the sufferings of two brother Titans, Atlas who far in the West bears upon his shoulders the pillar of the sky, and Typhon who by the strait of the sea lies crushed beneath the roots of Aetna, whence in time to come shall burst forth streams of lava. When his advice has been rejected by Prometheus, Oceanus departs riding on his griffin. The Chorus then point out to Prometheus that Zeus is ruling by laws of his own and manifesting arrogance to the gods of the older empire. Already all the earth groans aloud and sheds tears sighing for the departed glories of the grand old sway of Prometheus and his brother Titans. The races of men settled in fair Asia are moved with pity, as are the Amazons in the land of Colchis, the Scythians that dwell by Lake Maeotis and the martial host of Arabia 1 . 1 In Trans. Cambridge Philological Soc, vol. n (1881-2), pp. 179-180, I defended the reading 'Apafilas of Med. against the various conjectures of Hermann (Zap/uvrav), of Burges ('A/3<£/k