Mosaics of Grecian History Part 35

Sophocles composed one hundred and thirteen plays, but only seven of them are extant. Of these the most familiar is the tragedy of OEd'ipus Tyran'nus--"King OEdipus." It is not only considered his masterpiece, but also, as regards the choice and disposition of the fable on which it is founded, the finest tragedy of antiquity. A new interest has been given to it in this country by its recent representation in the original Greek. Of its many translations, it is conceded that none have done, and none can do it justice; they can do little more than give its plan and general character. The following, in brief, is the story of this famous tragedy:

OEdipus Tyrannus.

La'i-us, King of Thebes, was told by the Delphic oracle that if a son should be born to him, by the hand of that son he should surely die. When, therefore, his queen, Jocasta, bare him a son, the parents gave the child to a shepherd, with orders to cast it out, bound, on the hill Cithae'ron to perish. But the shepherd, moved to compa.s.sion, deceived the parents, and intrusted the babe to a herdsman of Pol'ybus, King of Corinth; and the wife of Polybus, being childless, named the foundling OEdipus, and reared it as her own.

Thirty years later, OEdipus, ignorant of his birth, and being directed by the oracle to shun his native country, fled from Corinth; and it happened at the same time that his father (Laius) was on his way to consult the oracle at Delphi, for the purpose of ascertaining whether the child that had been exposed had perished or not. As father and son, strangers to each other, met in a narrow path in the mountains, a dispute arose for the right of way, and in the contest that ensued the father was slain.

Immediately after this event the G.o.ddess Juno, always hostile to Thebes, sent a monster, called the sphinx, to propound a riddle to the Thebans, and to ravage their territory until some one should solve the riddle--the purport of which was, "What animal is that which goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noon, and on three at evening?" OEdipus, the supposed son of Polybus, of Corinth, coming to Thebes, solved the riddle, by answering the sphinx that it was man, who, when an infant, creeps on all fours, in manhood goes on two feet, and when old uses a staff.

The sphinx then threw herself down to the earth and perished; whereupon the Thebans, in their joy, chose OEdipus as king, and he married the widowed queen Jocasta, by whom he had two sons and two daughters. Although everything prospered with him--as he loved the Theban people, and was beloved by them in turn for his many virtues--soon the wrath of the G.o.ds fell upon the city, which was visited by a sore pestilence. Creon, brother of the queen, is now sent to consult the oracle for the cause of the evil; and it is at the point of his return that the drama opens.

He brings back the response

"That guilt of blood is blasting all the state;"

that this guilt is connected with the death of Laius, and that

"Now the G.o.d clearly bids us, he being dead, To take revenge on those who shed his blood,"

OEdipus engages earnestly in the business of unraveling the mystery connected with the death of Laius, the cause of all the Theban woes. Ignorant that he himself bears the load of guilt, he charges the Thebans to be vigilant and unremitting in their efforts,--

"And for the man who did the guilty deed, Whether alone he lurks, or leagued with more, I pray that he may waste his life away, For vile deeds vilely dying; and for me, If in my house, I knowing it, he dwells, May every curse I spake on my head fall."

A blind and aged priest and prophet, Tire'sias, is brought before OEdipus, and, being implored to lend the aid of prophecy to "save the city from the curse" that had fallen on it, he at first refuses to exert his prophetic power.

Tiresias. Ah! Reason fails you an, but ne'er will I Say what thou bidd'st, lest I thy troubles show.

I will not pain myself nor thee. Why, then, All vainly question? Thou shalt never know.

But, urged and threatened by the king, he at length exclaims:

Tier. And has it come to this? I charge thee, hold To thy late edict, and from this day forth Speak not to me, nor yet to these, for thou-- Thou art the accursed plague-spot of the land!

OEdipus at first believes that the aged prophet is merely the tool of others, who are engaged in a conspiracy to expel him from the throne; but when Jocasta, in her innocence, informs him of the death of Laius, names the mountain pa.s.s in which he fell, slain, as was supposed, by a robber band, and describes his dress and person, OEdipus is startled at the thought that he himself was the slayer, and he exclaims,

"Great Zeus! what fate hast thou decreed for me?

Woe! woe! 'tis all too clear."

Yet there is one hope left. The man whom he slew in that same mountain pa.s.s fell by no robber band, and, therefore, could not have been Laius. Soon even this hope deserts him, when the story is truly told. He learns, moreover, that he is not the son of Polybus, the Corinthian king, but a foundling adopted by his queen. Connecting this with the story now told him by Jocasta, of her infant son, whom she supposed to have perished on the mountain, the horrid truth begins to dawn upon all. Jocasta rushes from the presence of OEdipus, exclaiming,

"Woe! woe! ill-fated one! my last word this, This only, and no more for evermore."

When the old shepherd, forced to declare the truth, tells how he saved the life of the infant, and gave it into the keeping of the herdsman of Polybus, the evil-starred OEdipus exclaims, in agony of spirit:

"Woe! woe! woe! all cometh clear at last.

O light! may this my last glance be on thee, Who now am seen owing my birth to those To whom I ought not, and with whom I ought not In wedlock living, whom I ought not slaying."

Horrors still thicken in this terrible tragedy. Word is brought to OEdipus that Jocasta is dead--dead by her own hand! He rushes in:

Then came a sight Most fearful. Tearing from her robe the clasps, All chased with gold, with which she decked herself, He with them struck the pupils of his eyes, With words like these--"Because they had not seen What ills he suffered and what ills he did, They in the dark should look, in time to come, On those whom they ought never to have seen, Nor know the dear ones whom he fain had known."

With such-like wails, not once or twice alone, Raising his eyes, he smote them; and the b.a.l.l.s, All bleeding, stained his cheek, nor poured they forth Gore drops slow trickling, but the purple shower Fell fast and full, a pelting storm of blood.

The now blind and wretched OEdipus, bewailing his fate and the evils he had so unwittingly brought upon Thebes, begs to be cast forth with all speed from out the land.

OEdipus. Lead me away, my friends, with utmost speed Lead me away; the foul, polluted one, Of all men most accursed, Most hateful to the G.o.ds.

Chorus. Ah, wretched one, alike in soul and doom, I fain could wish that I had never known thee.

OEdipus. Ill fate be his who from the fetters freed The child upon the hills, And rescued me from death, And saved me--thankless boon!

Ah! had I died but then, Nor to my friends nor me had been such woe.

A touching picture is presented in the farewell of OEdipus, on departing from Thebes to wander an outcast upon the earth. The tragedy concludes with the following moral by the chorus:

Chorus. Ye men of Thebes, behold this OEdipus, Who knew the famous riddle, and was n.o.blest.

Whose fortune who saw not with envious glances?

And lo! in what a sea of direst trouble He now is plunged! From hence the lesson learn ye, To reckon no man happy till ye witness The closing day; until he pa.s.s the border Which Severs life from death unscathed by sorrow.

--Trans. by E. H. PLUMPTRE.

Character of the Works of Sophocles.

The character of the works of Sophocles is well described in the following extract from an Essay on Greek Poetry, by THOMAS NOON TALFOURD: "The great and distinguis.h.i.+ng excellence of Sophocles will be found in his excellent sense of the beautiful, and the perfect harmony of all his powers. His conceptions are not on so gigantic a scale as those of aeschylus; but in the circle which he prescribes to himself to fill, not a place is left unadorned; not a niche without its appropriate figure; not the smallest ornament which is incomplete in the minutest graces. His judgment seems absolutely perfect, for he never fails; he is always fully master of himself and his subject; he knows the precise measure of his own capacities; and while he never attempts a flight beyond his reach, he never debases himself nor his art by anything beneath him.

"Sophocles was undoubtedly the first philosophical poet of the ancient world. With his pure taste for the graceful he perceived, amidst the sensible forms around him, one universal spirit of Jove pervading all things. Virtue and justice, to his mind, did not appear the mere creatures of convenience, or the means of gratifying the refined selfishness of man; he saw them, having deep root in eternity, unchanging and imperishable as their divine author. In a single stanza he has impressed this sentiment with a plenitude of inspiration before which the philosophy of expediency vanishes--a pa.s.sage that has neither a parallel nor equal of its kind, that we recollect, in the whole compa.s.s of heathen poetry, and which may be rendered thus: 'Oh for a spotless purity of action and of speech, according to those sublime laws of right which have the heavens for their birthplace, and G.o.d alone for their author--which the decays of mortal nature cannot vary, nor time cover with oblivion, for the divinity is mighty within them and waxes not old!'"

Sophocles died in extreme old age, "without disease and without suffering, and was mourned with such a sincerity and depth of grief as were exhibited at the death of no other citizen of Athens."

Thrice happy Sophocles! in good old age, Blessed as a man, and as a craftsman blessed, He died: his many tragedies were fair, And fair his end, nor knew be any sorrow.

--PHRYN'ICHUS.

Wind, gentle evergreen, to form a shade Around the tomb where Sophocles is laid; Sweet ivy wind thy boughs, and intertwine With blus.h.i.+ng roses and the cl.u.s.tering vine.

Thus will thy lasting leaves, with beauties hung, Prove grateful emblems of the lays he sung, Whose soul, exalted by the G.o.d of wit, Among the Muses and the Graces writ.

--SIM'MIAS, the Theban.

EURIP'IDES.

Contemporary with Sophocles was Euripides, born in 480 B.C., the last of the three great masters of the drama--the three being embraced within the limits of a single century. Under Sophocles the princ.i.p.al changes effected in the outward form of the drama were the introduction of a third actor, and a consequent limitation of the functions of the chorus. Euripides, however, changed the mode of handling tragedy. Unlike Sophocles, who only limited the activity of the chorus, he disconnected it from the tragic interest of the drama by giving but little attention to the character of its songs. He also made some other changes; and, as one writer expresses it, his innovations "disintegrated the drama by destroying its artistic unity." But although perhaps inferior, in all artistic point of view, to his predecessors, the genius of Euripides supplied a want that they did not meet.

Although his plays are all connected with the history and mythology of Greece, in them rhetoric is more prominent than in the plays of either aeschylus or Sophocles; the legendary characters a.s.sume more the garb of humanity; the tender sentiments--love, pity, compa.s.sion--are invoked to a greater degree, and an air of exquisite delicacy and refinement embellishes the whole. These were the qualities in the plays of Euripides that endeared him to the Greeks of succeeding ages, and that gave to his works such an influence on the Roman and modern drama.

Of Euripides MR. SYMONDS remarks: "His lasting t.i.tle to fame consists in his having dealt with the deeper problems of life in a spirit which became permanent among the Greeks, so that his poems never lost their value as expressions of current philosophy. Nothing strikes the student of later Greek literature more strongly than this prolongation of the Euripidean tone of thought and feeling. In the decline of tragic poetry the literary sceptre was transferred to comedy; and the comic playwrights may be described as the true successors of Euripides. The dialectic method, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy by Menan'der, when the Athenians, after pa.s.sing through their disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides.

Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said, and well said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon important matters; and his sensitive, susceptible temperament repeated itself over and over again among his literary successors. The exclamation of Phile'mon that, if he could believe in immortality, he would hang himself to see Euripides, is characteristic not only of Philemon, but also of the whole Macedonian period of Greek literature." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." Second Series, p. 300.]

Euripides wrote about seventy-five plays, of which eighteen have come down to us. The Me-de'a, which is thought to be his best piece, is occupied with the circ.u.mstances of the vengeance taken by Medea on the ungrateful Jason, the hero of the Argonautic expedition, for whom she had sacrificed all, and who, after his return, abandoned her for a royal Corinthian bride. [Footnote: See Argonautic Expedition, p. 81.] But the most touching of the plays of Euripides is the Alces'tis, founded on the fable of Alcestis dying for her husband, Adme'tus. MILTON thus alludes to the story, in his sonnet on his deceased wife:

Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave, Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.

The substance of the story is as follows:

Admetus, King of Phe'rae, in Thessaly, married Alcestis, who became noted for her conjugal virtues. Apollo, when banished from heaven, received so kind treatment from Admetus that he induced the Fates to prolong the latter's life beyond the ordinary limit, on condition that one of his own family should die in his stead.