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The Masks of Tragedy
Essays on Six Greek Dramas
Thomas G. Rosenmeyer
Illustrated by Donald L. Weismann
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THE MASKS
OF TRAGEDY
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Zhe Masfaof Zragedy
ESSAYS ON SIX GREEK DRAMAS
THOMAS G. ROSENMEYER
decorations by Donald L. Weismann
U N I V E R S I T Y OF T E X A S PRESS • A U S T I N

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Copyright © 1963 by Thomas G. Rosenmeyer

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FOREWORD
IT MAY BE ASKED whether there is room for yet another study of

Greek drama. If it is true that the ancient dramas have to be interpreted
anew for each succeeding generation and for each cultural group, has
this not been done with eminent success? A continuing stream of
books and articles dealing with one phase or another of the sub-
ject testifies to its lasting popularity. Many of them are works of
scholarship, designed for the benefit of the specialist; of these there
can never be too many. The present volume does not claim to be
one of them. As for the more popular publications, they fall roughly
into two classes. The majority are devoted to the study of an author
or a period. That is to say, the plays are analyzed under the auspices
of a literary biography. This is important; if through an examina-
tion of the plays we can gain a greater insight into the personality
or the purposes of a Sophocles, we are the beneficiaries. The same
is true of the type of study in which a number of dramas are discussed
for the sake of arriving at an understanding of the specific "laws" or
the "idea" of tragedy. Even for the iconoclastic playwright there is,
one suspects, such a thing as the model play or the norm against which
he fashions the product of the moment. The principal disadvantage
of this approach, however, has been that sometimes it does not do full
justice to a particular play. If the study of the playwright or of the
dramatic form is to be exhaustive, the evidence must be complete. That

vi FOREWORD
means, a large number of plays have to be taken into consideration.

This emphasis on wealth of evidence, along with the demands of
the major thesis argued by the critic, makes it impossible to devote
as much scope to each play as it deserves. Significantly, no more than
eight or ten pages are often thought sufficient for saying what has to
be said about a play to make its evidence felt.
But a play is not only evidence. Hence a dissatisfaction with this
kind of analysis has recently increased the output of studies, both in
the form of articles and latterly also in the form of full-length books,
which are devoted to the analysis of a single play. Where these unifocal
studies have permitted a fuller savoring of a single work of art, with-
out sidetracking us into comparison, statistics, biography, or anthro-
pology, they have been welcome. But even so it is natural that a critic
who channels his interpretive acumen into the explication of one play
may come to regard this play as the realization of a generic ideal.
Though this was not his original intention, he may eventually adopt
the same perspective which prevails in the other camp, and see his
play as the approximation to a norm, as representative rather than
autonomous. It is, of course, humanly impossible to do anything else.
Criticism, like other cognitive activities, operates with models and
paradigms. But I dare say that what matters about a play is not the
extent to which it is like any other play, but the way in which it is
itself and different. This is, I suggest, how the ancient audiences re-
ceived the performances. The jokes of Aristophanes justify the pre-
sumption that each play was felt to have it own ethos and its own ob-
jective.
My purpose, then, in writing these essays is twofold. First, I wish
to devote enough space to the discussion of each play to allow its
special tone and texture to emerge without hindrance and at leisure.
And, second, I want to include in one collection analyses of plays
so different from one another that the accent will come to rest on the
variety of the tragic experience rather than on any one narrowly de-
fined norm. The purpose is not without its perils. What seems to me
necessary by way of an unhurried inquiry may appear to some slow
and fullsome; the stress on variety and difference may be regarded

FOREWORD vii
as a willful disregard of systematic connections. In actual fact I have
not been able to proceed without occasionally reminding myself that
this is a play by Aeschylus or Euripides rather than just a play. And
the combined analysis of two plays attempted in the third essay should
prove that I have not discarded the comparative method entirely.
But I should like to insist that the comparison was undertaken to
underscore a contrast. The fact that both the Ion and the Bacchae are
concerned with cult divinities is made the occasion for separating the
plays as widely as the common concern allows.
Given this approach, the choice of the plays to be discussed, and
the order in which they were to be taken up, were matters of some
initial uncertainty. Eventually I decided to include among the titles
some that are bound to be well known to the readers—Aeschylus'
Prometheus, Euripides' Bacchae and Alcestis—and some that may be
less familiar—Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles' Ajax,
and Euripides' Ion. As for the order, I arbitrarily decided to start
with an extreme example of what may be called hieratic lyricism, the
Seven; to finish with a tragicomedy, the Alcestis; to put the compara-
tive essay on the Bacchae and the Ion in the middle; and to put the
two heroic plays, the Prometheus and the Ajax, in second and fourth
place. The order is not chronological, nor does it follow any other
prescribed canons. But it does seem to me best suited to convey the
impression of diversity andflexibilitywhich I am concerned to argue.
The diversity of tragic experiences invites a diversity of critical
approaches. The critic who wants to emphasize the wealth of what
is possible within the dramatic genre must expose himself to the
charges of eclecticism and impressionism. The only tool which I have
firmly excluded is that of the biographical interpretation. For the pur-
poses of this book I am not interested in finding out—though it is
an eminently legitimate interest—how the young Sophocles differed
from the old, how his techniques shifted along with his sympathies
or his ideologies, and how this may account for the handling of a cer-
tain scene or character. For the present I want to regard the plays as
going somewhere rather than as evolving from somewhere. I suspect
that an ancient audience, too, is more likely to have been impressed

viii FOREWORD
with what the play had to say to them, not with the conditions of its
manufacture.
There is a further score on which I propose to be abstemious. Mod-
ern criticism often begins by trying to discover what is explicit or
implicit in the smaller units of a work of art, in the images and tropes
and turns of speech, before it permits itself the luxury of conceiving a
more general response. But it may well be that ancient drama becomes
meaningful in its fashion only if the larger response precedes the anal-
ysis of the subunits, both in the perception of it and in the critical
formulation. A meticulous scrutiny of details and key-words is im-
portant, but it must be obedient to a larger parti pris. By itself it will
fail to generate a plausible facsimile of the intended reaction. Close
reading has its use chiefly for purposes of verification rather than inter-
pretation. This is particularly true of the intensive study of imagery.
A criticism which starts out by collecting and classifying images and
then proceeds to develop an interpretation based on the results of the
collection, defies the essential simplicity—one might almost say naivete
—of the projected impression. Tragic diction and tragic thought were
destined for the theater; they were meant to provoke certain large and
immediate feelings of which an immense audience, taken as a group,
should be capable.
The end of tragedy, it may therefore be said with some trepidation,
abhors subtlety. In a criticism of Greek drama it is impossible to avoid
using the simple obvious words—man, nature, gods, good, bad, no-
bility, suffering—which are the hallmark of that writing. The temp-
tation is to go far beyond these essentials, and to ferret out meanings
and references and effects which may not be there. I have not myself
completely resisted this temptation; I would not have enjoyed my work
if I had not made myself here and there liable to the charge of
overinterpretation or inconsistency. One is, for example, tempted to
plot the progress of a play—take the Prometheus, or a play by Seneca
—in terms of pure dynamics, the movement from turmoil to rela-
tive calm and back. But though this touches upon an important ele-
ment in the experience released by the performance, the gain is com-
paratively small. For the significant thing about most of the plays is

FOREWORD ix
their appeal to the conscious verbal imagination, to the communal in-

tellect, if I may use this phrase. Kinetic and structural aspects are help-
ful, but they do not determine the effect of a play as significantly as
elements which lie closer to the rational understanding.
Above all, however, there must be no undue belaboring of single
words. On the whole, I think, the ancient dramatists would have
approved of Maimonides when he said: "Let not the meaning of your
words be far removed from their literal sense; say not: If a person
probe deeply, he will see that what I said is right/ Let not your words
require farfetched interpretation and extraordinary perception before
they can be understood."1 An interpretation of Greek dramas for an
English-speaking audience makes poor enough reading; either the
Greek must be translated into literal English or it should perhaps not
be cited at all. In any case, the thrill which comes from being exposed
to great poetry in bits and snatches is missing. But a Greekless reader
ought to be assured that in the vast majority of cases the sense of the
words is tolerably clear and not nearly so complicated as some nine-
teenth-century translations may have led him to believe.
Obviously, then, I do not consider a predominantly formalist or a
structuralist treatment adequate to the task of examining the nature
of Greek dramatic writing. Greek criticism did not consider textual
patterns, sound combinations, structures of rhythm, or syntax the
principal objectives of the craft. The audience was expected to re-
spond less to the way things are said than to what they conceive the
poet is talking about. Hence if the criticism attempted in these pages
appears somewhat old-fashioned, my excuse must be that the Greeks
themselves seem to have looked at their literature with a conventional
eye. In fact, if we wish to put ourselves in the place of a fifth-century
audience, we should pretend to think that the play is an illusion of
reality, to be appreciated as a self-contained slice of life and not as
the contrived product of an artistic plan. No self-respecting critic
would now admit that this is a perspective which promises new results.
And it may, quite properly, be asked whether there is any real hope
ijudah Goldin (ed.), The Living Talmud (New York, The New American
Library, 1957), p. 89.

X FOREWORD
of transcending our present critical position, or whether there is any

profit in adopting what is perhaps an inferior position, and one about
which we know so little. But now and then it will be useful to pass
up some of the more intriguing modern perspectives and to look at
a play as if it were an action meant to be observed with no more
sophistication and no less sympathy than those which we encounter in
"real life."
As we all know, there is in the Greek literary experience a greater
attention to audience reaction than, say, in the writings of the late
eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Greek tragedy is a species of
oratory aimed at generating in a jury of peers the passions appropri-
ate to a life fully lived. Hence criticism should not shy away from
the words "we" and "us" and "I." Our direct responses are indeed
worth talking about, because the play needs us in order to have its own
life, precisely as the ancient epics needed their princely listeners. But
the playwright, unlike the bard, is not in evidence. We are face to
face with the characters and the issues of the play; it is, therefore,
legitimate now and then to talk about the characters as if they were
saying and doing things on their own instead of being manipulated
by the author. More than that, it is proper to talk about the charac-
ters as if they had a future and a past beyond the immediate scope
of the play. The question: "How many children had Lady Mac-
beth?" is not perhaps so very silly after all. Will Ion be happy in
Athens? What is going to happen to Cadmus? Greek drama, com-
pressed and narrowly focused as it is, raises a great many questions
which the play itself, outside of prologue or epilogue, has no time or
no business to answer. The emergence of the questions into the con-
sciousness of the audience is part of the effect of the drama. Some-
times the writer does not want a particular question to be asked; he
then tries by dramatic means to block its formation. But there is no
reason why criticism should not explore some of the vistas opened up.
For the greatness of a play can be measured in part by the questions,
profound or superficial, which it provokes in the minds of those who
love it.
In sum, then, what I have attempted to do in these essays is to jot

FOREWORD XI
down some of the questions—and one or two tentative answers—

which occurred to me in reading the plays and in reflecting upon my
initial responses. The essays were first given in the form of addresses
to groups of laymen under the auspices of the extension program
of the University of Washington, and I am grateful to the administra-
tion of that program for giving me that opportunity of first trying
out some of my remarks on a live and inordinately patient audience.
I am grateful also to those friends, teachers, and students who over
the years have helped me to assemble and organize my thoughts on the
subject. My friends Arnold Stein and Paul Pascal have each read a
chapter of the manuscript and assisted me with a compelling mixture
of critique and charity. My debt to the great scholars and critics who
have worked in the field of ancient drama is enormous. Those who
know about these matters will have no difficulty in identifying my
various obligations. I thought it better, however, not to burden the
writing with the scholarly apparatus of learned footnotes, except on
the few occasions where textual problems made this necessary. Finally,
I owe a great debt of gratitude to two fund-dispensing bodies, the
American Council of Learned Societies and the Graduate School of
the University of Washington, which honored me with stipends that
allowed me to take off two summers and finish the book.
T. G. R.
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington

CONTENTS
Foreword . . . . . . v
A Note on the Translations 3
Seven Against Thebes: The Tragedy of War 5
Prometheus Bound: Tragedy or Treatise? . 49
Bacchae and Ion: Tragedy and Religion 103
Ajax: Tragedy and Time 153
Alcestis: Character and Death . 199
xiii

THE MASKS
OF TRAGEDY

A Note on the Translations
Line references in the text are to the first

line of the passage cited. The translations,
unless marked otherwise, are my own. My
objective has been to be literal; they are as close to the Greek as I
dared to keep them without lapsing into downright ugliness or un-
intelligibility. Only in the translations from the Alcestis have I oc-
casionally ventured to push the humor at the expense of literalness.
Acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for per-
mission to use quoted material: University of Chicago Press, six lines
from Aeschylus I: Oresteia, and seventeen lines from The Iliad of
Homer, both translated by Richmond Lattimore; Penguin Books
(Harmondsworth, England), fourteen lines from Euripides: The
Bacchae and Other Plays, translated by Phillip Vellacott, and thirteen
lines from Sophocles: Electra and Other Plays, translated by E. F.
Watling; Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., sixteen lines from T. S.
Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950.
3

Seven Against Znebes:
THE TRAGEDY OF WAR

THIS IS A PLAY ABOUT WAR, a play "full of
Ares," as an ancient critic put it. Perhaps
we should say: a play about a war, for the
attack of the Argive champions on Thebes, the struggle of Greek
against Greek, brother against brother, is a particular chapter in his-
tory. Aeschylus does all he can to remind us of the uniqueness of the
event. But the nature of war is such that the chroniclers of particular
wars always transcend their immediate focus and touch upon the arche-
type. War, "the father of all," is a more intrusive reality than other
universals operating behind and through the events.
7

8 Seven Against Thebes
How, then, does one go about writing a play about war? One way
is that of Shakespeare, in whose Histories war is presented as an ex-
tension of diplomacy, the busyness and chicanery of royal intercourse
brought to a boil. Political intrigue, council sessions, duels, flourishes,
and soldiers groping in darkness: the panoramic range of the Eliza-
bethan stage delights us with the sheer beauty of effort, of vital force
clashing with vital force. What tragedy there is, is almost forgotten
over the bluster and the strainings on the field of battle. Homer pro-
vides us with the closest Greek analogue. Yet there is this difference
that in the Iliad fighting is not only a thing of beauty, but carries its
own tragic moral. For Shakespeare, war is an extension, a pinpointing,
and also a catharsis of the tragedy of human relations; for Homer, war
is the proof and authorization of life itself.
Another way is that of some recent playwrights who portray the
fears and the miseries and the desperate gentleness of the common
soldier. E. M. Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues, conceived as a
novel, but experienced as drama, set the tone. The mood is unheroic,
candid, lyrical, an Archilochian mixture of grossness and sensibility.
In the film version of Remarque's book the hero dies while watching
a butterfly. In this kind of play, life stands still and death takes con-
trol. That is to say, war shows itself as a protracted and endless numb-
ing of life, an eraser of ambition and desire and privilege, an embalm-
er of Everyman. There are no heroes in this war, only sufferers; their
pleasures are such as can be eked out from death, the small inglorious
pleasures of men condemned to die. Of this perspective brief flashes
are to be caught here and there in Greek drama. Take, for example,
the herald's speech in the Agamemnon (555 ff., tr. Richmond Latti-
more):
Were I to tell you of the hard work done, the nights
exposed, the cramped sea-quarters, the foul beds . . .
We lay
against the ramparts of our enemies, and from
the sky, and from the ground, the meadow dews came out
to soak our clothes and fill our hair with lice.

THE TRAGEDY OF WAR 9
The herald goes on to recall the dying of the birds, the sea paralyzed
into wavelessness, the dead men fixed in their graves. Hopelessness,
revulsion, and death are the keynotes of this formulation of war.
Then there is the war lampooned by Aristophanes. His thoughtful
clowns are brothers in the flesh to the Achaean soldiers encamped be-
low Troy and fighting against dew and vermin. But in comedy it be-
comes possible for the sufferers to change into scoffers, to turn back
Death with a flick of the wrist and laugh him off the scene. Aristoph-
anes achieves this by domesticating war; in the place of swords and
helmets and breastplates, the paraphernalia of a heroic delusion, the
comic heroes use cooking utensils to make battle. Thus war becomes
both manageable and funny. Yet its horror continues to be felti for
the domestication remains a device, open for all to see. The device
produces a moral, by posing a question: why not use the pots and
pans for making porridge or soup? Why not use iron for plough-
shares, atomic power for cancer research? It is the triumph of comedy
that now and then, using the kind of material which informs tragedy,
it can, by means of comic distortions and inversions, prompt the asking
of specific questions and generate a directed response.
In most plays about war, it appears, the treatment is unified. War
is visualized in a certain way, and the actions and responses of the
characters are brought into line with that particular emphasis. It is
not to be expected that Coriolanus feels about fighting as Virgilia
does. For Agamemnon the Trojan War means one thing, to Clytem-
nestra it means something quite different. But within the imagination
of the audience each play that deals with a war establishes a recogniz-
able pattern, a unique impression of the specific quality and mean-
ing of that war. This is as true of Shakespeare's Histories as it is of
Goethe's Gotz and of the political plays of Euripides. The status and
the appeal of the war are clearly defined, for a very good reason.
For war, in these plays, is to serve as a matrix for the action or in-
action of the tragic hero. The brighter, the better defined the foil, the
more mysterious and affecting is the individual heroism pictured
against it.

The Seven Against Thebes of Aeschylus deviates from this norm,
as it deviates from the attitudes toward war lightly sketched above. In
this drama war and the hero are not related to each other as the field
of action and the agent. There is between them a reciprocal rela-
tion, a mutually quickening involvement, which reduces the tradi-
tional schemes of free will, fate, and responsibility to irrelevance. The
war shapes Eteocles, and Eteocles in turn shapes the war. What is
more, the war itself is developed in terms of a daring counterpoint.
Toward the beginning of the drama it is an impersonal mechanism,
an irresistible brutal assault on the weakness of man, a senseless grind-
ing pressure from abroad. Under its aegis beauty takes refuge in de-
spair and heroism is cast out. Toward the end of the play, on the
other hand, the machine aspect of war is long forgotten, beauty has
re-entered with the engagement of the leader, and heroism saves the
day. Between the beginning and the end there is much subtle manipu-
lation of the contrapuntal themes of tanks versus bayonets, of logistics
versus courage, of Ares versus the Curse. As against Shakespeare's
panorama of blood and fuss and thunder, against Remarque's por-
trayal of human frailty sustaining senseless bombardment, Aeschylus'
image of war in the Seven is more complex and more comprehensive.
It is also more real because it partakes of the ambivalence and the
mystery which attach to the heroic achievement.
It will be useful to recall the ancient legend, or, more specifically,
the version of the legend which Aeschylus chose to adopt. Laius, king
of Thebes, was told that Thebes would flourish only if he had no sons.
He flouts the oracle, begets Oedipus, exposes him after his birth, and
is ultimately killed by him. The flouting of the oracle in combination
with the parricide produces a curse which settles heavily on the royal
house. Oedipus himself, crushed by the curse, revitalizes the Fury by
cursing his own sons before he dies. Against this compounded curse
the brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, attempt the feeble protection of
a political settlement. Eteocles, the older, is to remain and rule in
Thebes; Polynices is to go south and seek a kingdom of his own. Poly-
nices is lucky; on the strength of a dynastic marriage in Argos he gains
influence and persuades Adrastus, king of Argos, to march against

Thebes and challenge his brother. As the play opens, the siege has
begun. Eteocles selects seven leaders from the Theban army to en-
gage seven champions of the Argive forces at the seven gates of
Thebes, arranging for himself to take up the position opposite Poly-
nices. The brothers kill each other, the city is saved, and the play ends
with the sons of Oedipus being laid alongside their father in a holy
grave.1
It is often said that Aeschylus delights in spectacle, in violent action
on the stage, in vivid colors and extravagant gestures. The present
play forms an exception to this rule also. The setting is simple. At
the back of the stage stands a large stepped altar adorned with seven
divine statues, each of them representing the divinity that presides
over one of the seven gates of Thebes. It is these seven images, clearly
characterized as belonging to Athena, Ares, Poseidon, and so forth,
which determine the stage action. Both the chorus and the actors
focus their attention, as the progress of the play requires, now on this
divinity and now on that, or on all of them jointly. The choreography
and the movements of the actors may be plotted as a continuous rite
of worship, as a series of supplications, protests, and challenges di-
rected to the Theban pantheon enshrined on the stage. In other words,
there is no allowance for the acting out of personal relationships. The
constant reference to the gods clothes the proceedings in severity. The
public character and the grandeur of the issues, at least so we are led
to believe from the beginning, rule out intimacy and sentiment. Ap-
parently they also rule out flamboyance and baroqueness. The stage
is simple, the movements on it deliberate and repetitious, masks and
costumes purposely subdued in color and design. The reason for this
intentional lack of variety and sprightliness will become clear later.
For the present it is sufficient to note the fact.
1
In spite of some recent objections, most scholars are today agreed that the play
originally ended with line 1004. What follows in the traditional text is subsequent
additions inspired by Sophocles' Antigone.

ii
As the play opens, we face a public situation.
Thebes is under attack, and the question is whether and how the sal-
vation of the city can be worked out. Eteocles, the king, is charged
with finding a solution to the problem. In this task he is disturbed by
the presence of the chorus of Theban women. They break in on his
calm and reasoned dispositions with an almost prophetic fervor, born
from fear. In their excitement they visualize the enemy spilling over
the city walls although the battle has not yet begun. Eteocles, the con-
fident organizer, manages to break the hysteria of the women. Actual-
ly, as we shall see in a moment, he strikes a compromise with them.
He suggests that they go home, a time-honored suggestion wherever
a tragic character comes upon an excited chorus. But of course they
cannot take his advice, for a chorus must remain on the scene. As
women imperiled by war they symbolize the endangered city as a
whole; and in this capacity they must be present to frame the com-
posure of the King, and to justify his decisions.
Eteocles, it appears, simultaneously faces two different fronts. On
the one hand there are the attackers, beyond the stage, outside the city.
They are the enemy, and his position as leader requires that he devote
his undivided attention to counteracting that threat. At the same time,
however, his mind is distracted, and his function complicated, by the
women who are on the stage, within the city, visible to the audience.
Standing between the two blocks he forms a connecting link between
them; he finds out that he may have as much to fear from the one as
from the other. In the end, in spite of some brave maneuvring to pro-
tect his rear, he is crushed between them. But this will not happen until
the play has run its course. For the present we do not see the disaster,
but take our visual cues from the King. By alternately focusing on the
aggressors outside the city and on the sufferers within, Eteocles per-
mits us to recognize the gulf which separates the two. In this we are
helped along by the poetic elaboration of a network of crucial antino-
mies. On the stage we witness a segment of Greek culture, with its
altars, its gods, and its demonstrations of freedom; beyond, there are
barbaric rites, Titans invoked, and the threat of slavery. Here we

see reasoned organization and responsible administration, only tem-
porarily unbalanced by the cries of the women; out there we sense
disordered, brutal impetus. On the stage we review solid fighters, re-
lying on courage and modesty and little else; beyond, the instruments
of action are beasts and emblems and idle boasts. Here, soft women
conveying the suffering that comes with war; there, shields and chariots
and brazen bells, the glossy impenetrable impersonal equipment of
battle. In Thebes, a reliance on Earth, the great mother, the giver
of food and the shaper of feelings; outside, blood and fire and root-
less, barren monstrosity.
Let us look at some of the details of this antiphonal system of ref-
erences. The conception that the Thebans are Greeks while their
enemies are barbarians has of course no foundation in history or rea-
son. What is more, for an Athenian playwright in the fifth century
to intimate that an Argive army was less Greek than the Thebans is a
diplomatic faux pas of the first order. And yet Aeschylus dares to fly
in the face of familiar history, by unmistakably contrasting Thebes
(71),
a city which pours forth the speech of Greece
with (170)
an army of another tongue.
For Aeschylus is a dramatist, not a historian. To point up the vicious-
ness of war, and to deepen the gulf between the city and the forces
beyond, he does not scruple to practice a patent deception and to paint
his Argives with the colors of the Persians of recent historical memory.
The result, at least to begin with, is a clearer drawing of the lines, a
more crystalline hardening of opposites.
One reason why the enemies have to be barbarian in speech and
character is their lack of a home. To be Greek, within the world of
this play, means to be tied to the soil which your fathers have culti-
vated. In his speech from the throne at the beginning of the drama,
Eteocles contemplates the beneficence of Earth ( 1 6 ) ,
the mother, our own nurse.
She reared the young crawling on her kindly lap,
entertaining the full burden of your nurture . . .

The word for "nurture" is paideia, the sum total of everything physical
and spiritual that makes a man a mature Greek. This culture is root-
ed in the soil; no immigrant or vagabond can have it. The loss of
Thebes would mean, beyond all else, the loss of a living hoard of
Greek tradition. The opponents do not share in this earth-bound cul-
ture; uprooted, uncommitted as they are, they are shown to practice
a vain and vicious self-reliance, an autarky such as is exhibited by fools,
villains, and barbarians.
When the messenger first tells us about the seven enemy cham-
pions we find them engaged in a bloody and uncivilized rite ( 4 3 ) :
. . . who cut a bull's throat into a black-rimmed shield,

and dipped their hands into the gore of the bull,
and swore their oaths to Ares, Enyo, and bloodthirsty
Terror . . .
There is a reference here to the magic ordeal of tasting bull's blood,

to put to the proof the validity of one's purpose. Pausanias tells of a
priestess who is forced to prove her virginity by drinking bull's blood;
the presumption is that if she does not speak the truth, the blood will
kill her. Such magic is not part of the paideia espoused by Eteocles.
By itself, however, this would not be enough. What finally stamps
the enemies as barbarians is that they do not swear by the gods of
their city. They have no city in which to anchor themselves, they live
in a vacuum, unsupported by the values of an experienced past. Their
lack of a mooring reduces them to the folly of taking their oaths by a
god who happens to be a protector of Thebes. True, they call on Ares
in his capacity as a war god. But this invocation of a glorified Augen-
blicksgott cannot be expected to hold its own against an invocation in
which Ares figures as a beneficial deity of continuous force. Not only
are the barbarians foot-loose and unorganized, their very tactics are
self-defeating.
The Thebans have freedom, the opponents offer slavery. This con-
stant theme, struck whenever the issue between Greeks and barbarians
is raised, forms one of the major motifs developed in the choral songs.
The women fear enslavement, ending in concubinage. With vivid and

pathetic colors they paint scene after scene of subjugation and humilia-
tion. But at this point Aeschylus introduces a jarring note. Eteocles, at
pains to calm their fears, suggests to the women that it is they who, by
their own behavior, are liable to bring about their enslavement ( 2 5 4 ) :
It is you yourselves who enslave me and all the city!
Perhaps he means to say only that their lack of control is interfering

with an effective defense of Thebes. But I believe there is more in
this than the forecast of a dreaded outcome. The present tense of the
verb and the steady progression from "you" to "me" to "the city"
hint at a contagion spreading outward from the women. Their be-
havior shows that they are unfree, they are jettisoning the dignity and
the spiritual strength, the sopbrosyne, which they should have ab-
sorbed with their paideia. Eteocles reminds them of their birthright
and their obligations as free citizens. For the members of the chorus
are citizens, whatever the status of women in Greek politics.
In this fashion Aeschylus averts what might have been a fatal flaw
in his design. There is nothing more dangerous to the successful
planning of a tragedy than a moral situation which is all black and all
white. The treatment by antinomies which pervades the play brings
it very close indeed to the line beyond which tragedy resolves into
melodrama and audiences may hiss in comfort. The names of the
brothers, Eteocles—the man of true fame—and Polynices—the man
of much strife—underscore the tendency toward moral naivete.
Aeschylus is daring enough to exploit this onomastic antithesis when
it suits his purpose, as if it involved no element of risk at all (577).
But this is, after all, a tragedy, and it can be that only because the
antinomies are not allowed to stand without some subtle adjustment.
Hence the characterization of the women, who are not entirely free.
The absence of Polynices from the stage is a further touch to blunt
the edge of melodrama. It is true, of course, that he could have come
on the scene only under the protection of a truce; and that would
have meant proliferating the action in a way which Aeschylus, un-
like Euripides, avoids. Polynices, at any rate, does not appear; and a
villain off stage can never be quite so effective in drawing upon him-

self the hatred of the audience as an adversary who faces the hero
visibly and concretely.
But these are rather superficial measures. There are other, more
incisive, means whereby Aeschylus arranges to prevent the set con-
trarieties from degenerating into a moral paradigm. They are, princi-
pally, the dynamics of the selection scene, and the gradual self-revela-
tion, completely unexpected, of Eteocles, who in the end turns out to
be, and to have been, quite different from what we had a right to
expect. For, and this is part of the irony which restores to the action
its tragic dimension, Eteocles winds up as one who "would seem
rather than be."
The initial role of Eteocles is highlighted by one of those nautical
metaphors which recur in many parts of the play ( 1 ) :
He must speak to the point
who watches the course from the city's deck,
his hand on the tiller and his eyes unsoothed by sleep.
Eteocles is the pilot of the State. There is no reason to doubt, during
the first part of the play, that his chief business is to guide his crew.
His speeches bear down significantly on his status as a public function-
ary, as a guarantor of order and safety. It is as an administrator that
he clashes with the chorus. About his soul, his private feelings, his
hopes and fears as a human being, we learn nothing at all. The public
crisis requires a public official to cope with it according to the lights
of his profession. He is the sort of professional whom the Sophists
were soon to advocate as the promoter and chief instrument of human
perfectibility. Eteocles calls to his fellow citizens ( 1 4 ) :
Help the city, help the altars of our native
gods . . .
and the children, and Earth, the mother, our nurse!
The premise of his command is that men are responsible and effective
agents, that they are masters in their own houses. They have the power
to protect the city and the altars—the two cannot be separated; they
may even protect the gods, for is not Earth a goddess? The good
city, the end of human ambition, is within the reach of man if only

he puts himself out and knows how to achieve it. Thus the adminis-
trator proudly appeals to the reasoned, orderly human achievement
which the optimism of the age proclaims to be both feasible and
necessary.
The language of political authority has a ring all its own. It makes
statements, it shouts commands, it never hedges or wavers or falters.
Above all, it works through speech. Eteocles has no lyrics. His iambic
trimeters consistently reflect the rational calm of his public commit-
ment. The King, as king, has no music. Contrast the women; their
utterance exhausts itself in exclamations and interjections and rhetori-
cal questions. Theirs is the language of despair, of terror, of the
imagination. Except for a short passage (245 ff.) when Eteocles seem-
ingly succeeds in abating their frenzy and the chorus respond to his
advice through the mouth of their leader, the choral communica-
tion is lyrical. They sing and dance out their experiences, and the
varying curve of their passions finds audible expression in the intri-
cate texture of their musical rhythms. It is almost as if we could read
the precise quality of each momentary feeling from the "beat"—
dochmiac or some variety of Aeolic—to which it is sung. It is only
toward the end, when Eteocles reverses himself, that the shock causes
the chorus to interrupt the continuity of this musical pattern and to
lapse into speech. But this is a deviation which proves the rule. The
antithetical positions of the leader and his flock are acted out through
the antithesis between music and the spoken word. Particularly when
they turn toward each other, to persuade or beseech, the "epirrhematic"
alternation of song and speech (203 ff.) carries an obvious moral.
W e have noted that the mind of Eteocles works on the level of
reason, while the women give themselves over to their emotions and
their violent fancies. This is only another way of saying that it is
Eteocles' role to think of others and for others, whereas the members
of the chorus are wrapped up in their own fears and specters. At any
rate this is true of the Eteocles and the chorus who are presented to
us in the first half of the play. That the women should be so con-
cerned about their own fate and their own sufferings, instead of help-
ing to support high strategy, is only to be expected. It is not for noth-

ing that this chorus consists of women. This is a play about war, and
war's destructive power is felt most sharply by women. Men brave
war, they enter into a partnership with it, the terms of the partner-
ship being that if they win, they have the glory, and if they are killed,
they have neither shame nor suffering. But women are the losers
whatever the outcome. Driven by restless fancies the chorus con-
template only the worst, and some of Aeschylus' formulations have
the keen edge of collective memories of pain ( 3 2 6 ) :
. . . and that the women be corralled and herded,
young and old,
dragged by the hair as horses by the mane,
with their dresses torn on their bodies . . .
Or ( 3 3 3 ) :
Weep upon girls freshly plucked who, even before
the cruel harvest of marriage rites, leave
their home on an odious path.
Nay, I say that the dead
have a fate better than this.
Or again ( 3 6 3 ) :
Slaves now, young, untrained in suffering,
enduring a captive bed
of a man in luck, an
enemy superior.
The only hope that the night runs its course,
a steady surf
of cries and pains.
The picture is one of women wasted, violently and at random.
Aeschylus merges this with another picture, a vision of foodstuffs
recklessly spilled ( 3 5 7 ) :
A wealth of fruits strewn on the ground
where they fell
vex the spirit and stab
the housewife's eye.
Again and again the gift of the earth
in senseless confusion pours itself out
in waves of nothingness.

This passage comes just before the description of the women enter-
ing the captor's bed. The housewifely concern for food wasted, for
larders raided and provisions spilled, is mingled with sorrow for
the shame and the hurt of the women's fate. As a portrayer of women's
thoughts and feelings Aeschylus has few equals among the great
writers of tragedy. He does not set out to create lifelike characters,
to copy the bundle of significances and irrelevancies which constitute
a specific personality. But he understands the important differences
between the world of men and the world of women. This prevents
him from ever designing his women as mere negations or parodies of
masculinity, such as are occasionally found in the plays of Sophocles
and Euripides. The dramatic situation is often contrived or abstract,
but the variety of human responses which Aeschylus builds into
his situations is drawn from a fountain of sympathy and discrimina-
tion.
The women suffer most in war. Their suffering is augmented by the
acuteness with which each sense reacts to its stimuli. As a description
of the fall of a city, the choral ode in which the women envisage the
enemy bursting into their midst is very nearly perfect ( 3 3 8 ) :
When a city is conquered she
suffers many ills.
Man drives man, now this, now another,
kills, or puts to the torch. The whole
bastion is filmed with smoke.
Raging Ares, man-destroyer? blows
his breath, polluting sanctity.
Rumblings throughout the city, the network of turrets
inclines,
man is killed
by man with the spear.
Bloodied wailings ring,
just born, of
babes at the breast.
Pillage, kindred of random running.
Plunderer settles with plunderer,
calls him empty-handed, himself empty-handed,

wishes to have him for partner,
craving neither less nor an equal portion.
What sense could
be conjectured from this?
The impressionistic, not to say pointillistic, arrangement of wailing
babes—not experienced as babes but as wailings, as units made up
of blood and cries and fondling and death—of roaming plunderers,
fire and smoke, leaning battlements and calculating eagerness, is un-
translatable. This is the quintessence of war, its terror and its incalcula-
bility, and also its inhuman nonchalance. For war, seen whole, de-
taches itself from the feelings and motives of individual souls and
turns into a distant machine, dealing out wounds and shocks on so
vast a scale that the net effect, even in Aeschylus' powerful verse, is
one of remoteness and ease, and almost of beauty.
When the chorus, in their characteristic hallucinations, see the
enemy vaulting the wall, the objects on which their inner eye dwells
are many: horses, chariots, helmets, plumes, spears, bridles, shields
small and large, and disembodied crashes and thunderings (100):
Listen to the clang of the shields—
do you hear it? . . .
My eyes are on it—the crash of many spears.
Behind this imposing front of armor and equipment the men them-
selves are barely noticed.2 The concentration on the war machine, on
the gear and the artillery, is deliberate. For it communicates the hard
impersonality of war which Aeschylus wishes us to accept as the initial
thesis of the play. Above all, there is the accent on the shields. The
symbolic function of the shields in the selection sequence will be dis-
cussed directly. But long before that phase of the play, beginning with
the pouring of bull's blood into a "black-rimmed shield," the shield as-
serts itself as the principal image of the vision of war we have been
discussing: war as a meaningless mechanism, as crude physical neces-
sity and violence, as the impact of mass on mass. We need not rely
on our own sense of metaphor to see how fitting the image is; archaic
2
In line 92 Buecheler's poda must, for this reason, be rejected.

vase painting furnishes us with independent evidence. When the

artist paints a duel, the contortions of the limbs, the tautness of the
facial muscles, are sharply individualized. Each fighter has his own
posture and his own momentum; the contest is one in which two
souls meet and clash. The arms, though an important part of the
artistic design, are largely decorative, or at any rate subordinate to the
contours of the heroic physique. But then there are the vases with
serried ranks of fighters moving into battle or engaging an enemy
host. In such scenes of mass fighting the soldiers are, as a rule, barely
differentiated as men; their movements and their facial expressions
form a repetitive design. Only their shields, reaching from chin to
knee and allowing only the smallest margin to heads and extremities,
are grandly distinguished, by their blazons. These blazons—snakes
and eagles and bulls' heads and Gorgons and boars—form the real
personalities, the true entities engaged in the battle. It is a battle of
shields, not of men.
This is the formulation which Aeschylus uses in the first half of
his play. The conception is essentially visual, invented by painters for
their panels of mass war. Because it appeals to the eye, its use by
Aeschylus is particularly effective. For it is important that a play-
wright should, at the beginning of a tragic action, supply his audience
with a firm visual anchoring. The image of the shield permits us to
follow the development of the theme with a full perception of the dis-
tance we are travelling. More particularly we shall be able to appre-
ciate the achievement of Eteocles, who, in spite of the seemingly
impervious harshness of war symbolized by the shield, succeeds in
imposing his organic, unmechanical, purposeful will upon it. But
I must not anticipate. For the present let us merely acknowledge the
objective of the design: a picture of war as a destructive machine,
crushing anonymous human existences, blotting men from sight. Even
the soldiers seen plundering and burning and entering into mock
partnerships are tentacles of the mechanized monster. Their roaming
is a compulsive thing, spasmodic jerks of the complex, but in its
way perfectly coordinated, robot.
Eteocles begins his career as a strategist. That is to say, he in-

tends to accept the machine at its face value and to meet it with counter-
measures channeled through the line of command. His position vis-a-
vis the chorus is typical of his policy. There are, as I have said, two
areas of activity, the field of action outside the city walls, and the
community within. The two are, from the point of view of naive
realism, separate, and the King, with his rational, organizational
approach to the task, would like to keep them separate. But the women
confuse the two worlds; they have their vision of the machine rolling
over the walls. It is this visionary muddling of realities, this sacrifice
of the tidy distinctions set up by the rational mind, which provided
Plato with one of his chief objections to the psychological effect of
tragedy. The women fail to distinguish between the present and the
future, sense experience and hallucinations, the here and the there.
Eteocles is a Platonist; he wants to keep the two worlds distinct and
to assign the appropriate value to each.
The same proto-Platonism also characterizes the religious stand of
Eteocles. Over against the self-surrendering enthusiasm of the chorus
he puts the emphasis in worship on discipline and decorum. In his
view service to the gods takes its cue from reasons of State. There
is no conflict between Church and State; rather, the city is all, and
the gods are a part of its political life ( 2 3 6 ) :
I do not mind your honoring the race of gods.
But lest you turn your citizens' hearts to baseness,
be calm, do not indulge your fears!
In their exchange—the chorus singing and dancing and Eteocles
countering with speech—the women insist on imploring and em-
bracing their gods, whereas the King feels that ritual must not inter-
fere with preparations for defense. His attack on orgiastic cult prac-
tices borders on downright secularity ( 2 1 7 ) :
It is said
that when a city falls the gods desert.
The Aeschylean hero stands alone, unaided by the gods, sometimes
obstructed by their wills. In the present circumstances the unnatural
fervor of the gods' worshippers blocks his administrative progress. As

a general and tactician, he cannot allow religious commitment to en-

danger his planning. He seems to believe that good generalship is
all that is needed. The efforts of the citizens must be directed toward
one goal only: to turn back and perhaps destroy, by means of a rea-
soned campaign and with only nominal help from the gods, the
machine rumbling beyond the walls.
iii
At the end of the stretta which concludes the
exchange between the King and his people (245 if.) there is a mo-
mentary reconciliation. It marks the end of the exposition, of the set-
ting of the stage for the tragic action that is to follow. The women
are impressed with the warnings of Eteocles; they promise to control
themselves, to subject their anxieties to the military-political-philo-
sophical discipline recommended by him (263):
I hold my tongue; and bear the general fortune.
From here on, the women are launched on their slow road to political
and personal salvation. There will be lapses into their old nervous-
ness and trepidation, notably in the ode which follows immediately
upon their apparent adjustment to the policy of Eteocles, after the
King quits the stage and leaves them to themselves. The metrical pat-
terns of the ode, and of the brief choral interludes which follow,
testify to a continuing undercurrent of fear and self-concern. But the
first flash of a new spirit has been glimpsed, a token of the strength
and the freedom which the women are to achieve before the play
comes to an end.
More important, Eteocles, at precisely the same moment, begins to
travel in the opposite direction. The reconciliation is no one-sided af-
fair. To pacify the chorus and give them the confidence they need
for their conversion, the King promises to relinquish his generalship
and to become a fighting soldier. This decision to fight—though
Adrastus, the leader of the opposition, does not—is a concession won
from Eteocles in his contest with the women. Ostensibly the move is
not out of keeping with the military preparedness for which he

stands. In reality it is in the nature of an abdication. Earlier, before the

force of the choral frenzy exacted its toll, he had asked ( 2 0 8 ) :
How now, does the skipper, when his ship
wearies against the sea swell, find a means
of safety by leaving the stern for the bow?
With his announcement that he will share in the fighting ( 2 8 2 ) :
I shall range six men, and I shall be the seventh,
to ply our oars against the enemy . . .
he himself turns into a skipper who leaves the stern, who gives up his
post of command and joins the sailors in their undirected efforts
throughout the length of the ship. The detached leader, the organizer,
begins to be personally involved. At first the involvement is only on
the surface; his fighting is to be primarily for show, to convince the
women that there is nothing to fear. Even in the thick of the battle
he intends to remain clear-sighted, to keep the reins of the strategy
in his hands. He continues to regard himself as the pilot of the city,
as if such doubling in brass were possible in the world of the city-
state. But administrative discipline is not the stuff from which
heroes are made.
The chorus calmed, Eteocles leaves. Now we expect the battle.
But Greek drama shows no battles on the stage, just as it is reluctant
to show deaths. Perhaps the writers feel that an enactment of dying,
particularly of blood and wounds, would strain the nice tension be-
tween truth and illusion which is demanded in the theater. An imi-
tation of feelings or of certain actions causes the audience to feel
sympathy or joy or horror as the occasion warrants. An imitation of
death is likely to provoke disbelief or, worse, laughter. There may be
other reasons, beyond good taste and a sense of what is proper and
effective, to account for the reluctance to dramatize death, especially
violent death. Some suggest that the religious setting of the per-
formance, the Dionysiac background, must be held partly responsible.
Whatever the reason, the battle cannot be staged. It must be reshaped
to fit the bounds of the tragedy.
Now what is a heroic battle? It is the measuring up of two men

against each other. What counts is the comparative standing of the

two contenders, the reserves and intentions they bring into the fight,
the robustness or lack of robustness with which they impress their
opponents. Significantly in Homer the great duels are fought through
the medium of oratory before they are decided by means of arms.
Often we are made to feel that the fight is won when one of the heroes
has managed to deflate the ego of his opponent through his superior
art of boasting. The wounds inflicted afterward are merely the natural
consequence of the power arrangement which the speeches of the men
have rehearsed before our eyes. Thus, if we could look into the hearts
of the people as they confront each other, instead of having our eyes
distracted by the haphazard noise and smoke and physical pain of
the battle, we might perhaps be able to catch the quintessence of the
duel. We should perceive the form or idea rather than the phenome-
non, which is stunted and disfigured by accidental detail. The con-
frontation of vital components is to be found already in the antiphonal
symbolism discussed earlier. But now we need more than a thematic
counterpoint. W e need a concrete clash, the full shock value of the
sight of solid bodies meeting head on. To furnish this is the purpose
of the selection sequence. We cannot have the paltry reality of a
genuine battle; so the formal organization of speeches and counter-
speeches, stately and deliberate and richly colored, gives us what we
need to know about each of the fighters, to judge or to applaud. The
sequence permits us not only to see the duels, as we might in a proper
war, but to assess their worth and to reflect on the rights and wrongs
of the fighters. Above all, it saves the duels from appearing either
ludicrous or obscure.
It is easy to be put off by the severe symmetry of the selection se-
quence. Its length also might give us pause, for, if we include the
choral odes which frame it at beginning and end, the sequence consti-
tutes more than half of the play. But the formal severity is a basic
feature of the plan. We are reminded of analogous structural de-
signs on archaic vases and temple friezes. The visual arts of Aeschylus'
time are committed to the principles of symmetry and repetitive pat-
terns. In the present case, however, the formalism of the art has
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more than tradition to commend it. It serves to dramatize a sort of
ritual, a consecration of the spirit of war, in which each initiative,
each thrust and counterthrust, is granted equal time and a matching
benediction. There is no haste about this ceremony; a sacred service
is expected to be deliberate, exhaustive, canonical. Above all else it
must satisfy the participants' sense of continuity, their feeling that
what is taking place has happened before and will happen again.
Recurrence and repetition are of the essence of the ritual event.
The sequence consists of seven double panels, each separated from
its neighbor by a brief choral interlude in which the enduring fears
of the women continue to be voiced. Each of the seven panels con-
sists of two speeches; in the first the messenger describes the prepara-
tions of an attacker; in the second Eteocles arranges for a defendant
to repel the enemy. At the end of Eteocles' final rejoinder the chorus
do not add their usual sung comment but adopt the blank verse of the
speakers. For once they respond with a remonstrance rather than a
sentiment or apprehension. This suggests that the last panel is dif-
ferent from the others, and that perhaps the others are meant to pre-
pare for this one. Indeed, just before the choral ode which concludes
the sequence there is an exchange between Eteocles and the chorus,
parallel to the exchange which prompted the earlier reconciliation
and obviously conceived as a complement to it. By purely formal
means, therefore, we are given to understand that at the end of the
selection sequence the King and the chorus once more find them-
selves at opposite poles, but in reverse, and that a new solution of
their difference must be worked out. The reason for the new constel-
lation of attitudes is supplied by the sequence itself. It turns out to
be the dramatist's chief instrument for refashioning our vista of
war, for guiding us from the impersonal horror of the machine and
its extensions to the moral and spiritual substance of the heroic en-
counter.
If we compare the attackers named by the messenger with the de-
fenders sent against them by Eteocles, the Thebans are, for the most
part, a colorless lot. They have to be, for color in this play is linked
with wrong. The colorfulness of the enemies is part of their barbarism,

their Orientalism; it is the visual confirmation of their boastful preen-

ing. Color is, as it were, the accompaniment of emptiness. Solidity
and substance are persuasive enough without the surface thrill of an
optic illusion. This also explains why, as mentioned earlier, there is a
notable lack of color in the Theban setting. The throne of modesty
worshipped by several of the defenders is no glossy fagade. The fiery
spirit of Polyphontes, though superior in power to the flaming fire-
brand in the hands of his adversary Capaneus, cannot compare with
it for visual magnificence.3
The aggressors are all the more interesting. First there is Tydeus.
Aeschylus' audience knew that he killed the Theban champion and
drank his brain, for which deed he was himself struck down by the
gods. Aeschylus does not refer explicitly to this extraordinary tale,
but the characterization of Tydeus keeps close to the tradition. He is
a beast; more particularly he is the proverbially roaring beast. He
roars like a serpent—the context suggests that the bellow of a dragon
rather than the hiss of a snake is intended; a little later (392)
. . . he neighs
like a horse that pants against the bridle's might,
the blare of the trumpet driving him ahead.
He is all animal sound, and bells attached to his shield furnish a
continuous obligato to the "mad noonday brayings" of his voice. The
beast imagery and the impression of vocal compulsiveness carry us
beyond the limits of good and evil. Tydeus lacks the moral dimension
which makes of a man a responsible human agent. He is part of the
animated machine; through the turbulence of Aeschylus' verse we
experience some of the terror spread by the inhuman howl of the
monster.
Capaneus, the next man from Argos, though differently conceived,
is of the same stuff. Like Tydeus and all the other attackers but one
he is a blasphemer ( 4 2 7 ) :
3
The underplaying of color, the emphasis on the unspectacular, may explain
Eteocles' curious remark early in the play (24) that the Theban prophet has found
his knowledge from the birds, through an effort of ears and mind, "rather than from
the flame." Physical fire is to be associated with the enemy camp.

He says he will destroy the city whether the god
grant it or not . . .
But with him blasphemy is not merely an attitude, a partial symptom

of his villainy; it is his very nature. His * gigantic'' frame brooks
no commerce with the gods; the lightning bolts of Zeus are to him
only a mild discomfort to be shrugged off along with the midday
heat. He is, or fancies himself, an irresistible and unfeeling bulk,
an engine destined to hurl firebolts of its own and burn the city. Like
Tydeus, then, Capaneus perpetuates the vision of war as a compul-
sive mechanical threat, which is the play's point of departure.
Roughly the same is true also of the portrait of the third Argive
warrior, Eteoclus, except that in his case the emphasis is less on the
unfeeling mechanism than on the irrational nature of the monster
(461):
He wheels his mares snorting in their muzzle
straps, eager to dash against the gate.
The muzzles whistle with a barbaric ring,
filled with a nostril-sniffing insolence.
This is all we learn about the person of Eteoclus (the embarrassing

closeness of the name to that of Eteocles must mean that the myth
on which Aeschylus draws is based on historical memories, however
dim). A picture of savagely gyrating horses kicking against the re-
pressive control of muzzles and reins with unearthly and—more im-
portant—un-Greek neighing, may not be adequate as the sketch of a
man. But if the lines are meant to delineate the untamed and un-
tamable fury of mass war, they are appropriate. The personality of
Eteoclus disappears behind the vicious energy of his horses. Once
more we find ourselves stationed in a moral desert, in a fierce devilish
stamping ground where good and evil have no meaning.
The horses of Eteoclus duplicate, with an increase in the brutality
of it, the neighing of Tydeus. Similarly Hippomedon, the next ag-
gressor to be described, may be called a doublet of Capaneus. But now
the governing idea of automatic bulk is fully realized; the descrip-
tion comes to be completely divorced from the anatomy of the human

body. To be sure, the first few lines seem to say that he too is a giant
( 4 8 8 ) . But from the sequel we gather that the eyes of the messenger
are not fixed on the person of the man, or even on his "frame and
huge design" (488), but on the shield. The shield, the symbol of
mechanical war, has come to cover and hide the lineaments of the
fighter behind it. It usurps the space theoretically saved for the soldier,
and grows to unmanageable size. This enlargement and self-assertion
of what should be an instrument in human hands contains an ele-
ment of humor. Bergson reminds us that human beings who are shown
behaving like machines are funny. Aeschylus, with characteristic
courage and with a minimum of subterfuge, exploits the humor where
it presents itself ( 4 8 9 ) :
I shuddered as he wheeled his vast threshing-floor—

I mean, the round of his shield.
It is this type of humor about sartorial idiosyncrasy to which we owe

the expression "ten-gallon hat." Aeschylus follows this up with a
phrase which is tantamount to "pardon the expression." The robot-
like nature of mass war is here fixed in a pattern so simple, so naive,
that the messenger himself, the selfless reporter, shrinks from the
truth and seeks refuge from the obvious in a joke. The fact remains
that the shield has now become an autonomous substance. As an
image it is no longer merely basic, but also terminal. N o further de-
velopment of the initial conception of war is possible, unless the
drama is to bog down in the species of humor which feeds on in-
sistence and hyperbole. A continuation of the present argument and
the present imagery would carry us farther and farther away from the
complexities of the tragic perception. The joke of the messenger,
therefore, heralds a turn.
The first thing to be noted about the messenger's description of
Parthenopaeus is its anonymity. He withholds the name till almost the
end of his speech, which is a little longer than the earlier descriptions.
True, near the beginning of the passage there are certain pointers—
"mountain-dwelling mother," "man-boy," and others—which an au-
dience learned in mythology will interpret correctly. But it is a mat-

ter of interpretation, and for most of us, as for the majority of the
ancient audience, the speech is a protracted riddle, whose solution, in
this case the name, is held off until the personality has been cast in full
relief. For now, and for the first time, the messenger gives us a man, a
complex human being, rather than a monster or a machine. Like the
others he is a blasphemer ( 5 2 9 ) :
He swears by the spear he holds, prizing it more
than a god, nay, higher than his eyes . . .
The terms of the comparison are revealing. The enemy worships his
spear; in that he resembles the others. But in his vanity he makes
reference to his eyes, and it so happens that these eyes belong to an
unusually pretty face. The warrior has, we are told, an adolescent,
girlish look—and in fact that is the meaning of the name as yet un-
announced. But his spirit is by no means girlish, and his eye, set in a
lovely, ephebic face, is a true mirror of his spirit: a grim Gorgon eye.
In short, Parthenopaeus is an angelic miscreant; charming without
and rotten within, he exhibits a gross disparity between character and
looks.
His thoughts about the war are equally remarkable ( 5 4 5 ) :
Nor is he likely to dole out the fight,
to dishonor the funds provided for the journey,
the Arcadian Parthenopaeus. An Argive immigrant,
he means to pay them back for his welcome there.
It is clear that with the appearance of this man we have entered a new
arena. He is not a beast, or a colossus, or a shield, or one of the other
unnatural concretions which take us beyond the pale of pity and fear.
He interests us as a person, for we know his type. But he is more than
that. A type, even if familiar, would not mark the break with the
preceding characters quite so radically as this mercenary, this non-
Argive who has enjoyed the fruits of Argos and who has decided to
pay back his keep by not acting as a thrifty businessman would, but
by confusing the accounts of battle and giving war away gratis. The
notion itself is striking enough. We are reminded of

War, the money-changer of dead bodies,

that illustrious and significant image in the Agamemnon (437).
Parthenopaeus is less calculating than Ares, for he has recognized that
war offers no accounts ( 3 5 7 ) . He has intuited the nature of war, and
he models his own actions to conform with the setting in which they
are performed. But what matters most is that Parthenopaeus is a
man, a difficult, riddling figure of a man who reflects on his function
and acts accordingly. His reflection may not be profound; his decision
not to pinch the pennies of battle may be prompted by the chain reac-
tion of killing as much as it is a conscious resolve. Still, we have left
the machines and the beasts behind us; from now on we shall be
looking at men.
With the next messenger-report, which is even longer than the
preceding and complicated further by the introduction of direct
speech, the leap is complete. The sixth aggressor is Amphiaraus, a
prophet. W e have briefly met him in the first messenger-speech as
the seer who tries to prevent Tydeus from crossing the Ismenus River
and becomes the butt of Tydeus* abuse (378). As a prophet Am-
phiaraus stands above factional and tribal differences. But the tradition
suggested an even greater incentive for him to turn against his com-
rades-in-arms ( 5 8 7 ) :
Look at me; I shall enrich this country's soil,
a prophet bedded in an enemy land.
He knows that the expedition will fail and that he himself will, by
his death, enhance the power of Thebes. In the great heroic tales of
the Greeks it has always been the function of the prophet to serve as
a warner, to channel the energies of the kings into divinely acceptable
patterns, to obstruct the chances of hubris. Amphiaraus, however, is
more than a warner. He opposes the whole war and along with it
the men who have carried it to the gates of Thebes. This is what we
would expect from a hero who resembles Eteocles in being temperate
and controlled (568), who holds his shield quietly instead of whirling
it (590), and who carries no design on the shield. For (592)

He means not to seem best, but to be,
and gathers fruit from the deep furrow ploughed
in his mind where noble counsels grow and thrive.
His opposition to the other Argives and the cast of his mind mark him
as a second Eteocles, a doublet of the protagonist built into the army
of the attackers. He is a good man, substantial and colorless. His
judgment of his companions permits us to see them as they are, from
close up, in the perspective of one who is not a partisan but an insider.
Amphiaraus is not easy to understand. The unorthodoxy of his
position answers to the tension in his mind. His name-calling of
Polynices, drawn out into a veritable catalogue of denunciations, points
to a harsh sense of frustration. We should remember also that he
is a prophet, a "man of curses," as his name says. His abuse has the
force of crushing souls. After he has finished with Polynices we can
no longer believe that Polynices has any justice on his side, or that
he will be victorious. A good man who curses the aggressors; an enemy
who helps to secure the salvation of Thebes: no wonder Eteocles
bursts out in sorrow and perplexity at the spectacle of Amphiaraus
conjured up by the messenger. For the anomalousness of the position
of Amphiaraus closely resembles his own: he also has found himself
at odds with his friends; he also is in danger of being (614)
pulled down and smashed along with the rest, God willing.
Amphiaraus does not deserve to die; he is (610)
a temperate man, just, good, and reverent.
The catalogue of the ancient virtues gives us the background against
which to judge the deeds of Polynices. It is dramatically significant
that Amphiaraus, at this point, levels his criticism against Polynices
rather than anyone else. With the nature of Amphiaraus clearly de-
fined, the position of Polynices becomes more untenable than ever
before. But the curses also show us that the wickedness of Polynices
differs from the monstrosity of a Tydeus or a Hippomedon. It is a
matter of morals rather than of brute dynamics. The moral upright-

ness of Amphiaraus doubly ensures the ethical tenor of the scene

which follows.
The goodness of Amphiaraus does something else. Earlier I com-
mented on the artistic precariousness of a dramatic situation which is
morally all white and all black. The presence of the prophet among the
villains is yet another means of mitigating the risk. It appears that
the attackers are wicked but not unexceptionally so. Eteocles, under
another name, has been inserted into the ranks of the aggressors, to
redistribute the light and the shade, and to save the tragedy from be-
coming an open book. At the same time the device cannot fail to sug-
gest that the comparison works also the other way round. Because
Eteocles is like Amphiaraus we must be prepared for the possibility
of the King's defeat. For the doom of the prophet shows that the good
are not necessarily victorious.
But, to turn now to the last panel, Polynices is a moral agent, a
man, not part of the machine. He prays to Justice, and carries her
image on his shield. To be sure, she is his justice, a fragmentary por-
tion of justice of which Heraclitus would say that it is illusory like
a dream. It is worse than illusory; being a relativist distortion of true
justice it is more evil than moral indifference. There is a similarity
between the power invoked by Polynices and the barbarous, vengeful
spirit of retribution exorcized in the Eumenides. But the Furies prior
to their conversion have a real complaint, for they have suffered an
injury. Polynices, on the other hand, has no case. The author means us
to understand that his departure from Thebes was voluntary and
sanctioned by usage. Polynices is in the wrong; but instead of simply
drawing him as a villain Aeschylus has him indulge in a flight of
ethical fancy which prompts us to reflect on the justice or injustice of
his enterprise. Through his person, as through that of the prophet,
we are enabled to view the war as a contest of right and wrong, as
an agon, that is, a collision of energies between men, rather than as a
ruthless force unleashing itself over men. And finally, the moral com-
plexion of his character, itself prefigured by the virtues of Amphiaraus,
helps to prepare for the eventual shift of Eteocles. Thus the selection

sequence turns out to have an important function in shifting our focus
from mass war to personal engagement and the question of right and
wrong, and in setting the stage for Eteocles' liberation from his role
as detached manipulator.
iv
Through most of the selection sequence,
Eteocles remains the master strategist. Each of the attackers, we are
told, carries a shield with a telling blazon, all except Amphiaraus, who
prefers being to seeming. That is to say, the shields are conceived
as outgrowths and manifestations of the hollowness of the aggressors.
They need shields, and colorful and articulate shields at that, to con-
ceal their own lack of substance and to frighten their opponents. Such
shield magic, like the boasting speeches that precede a duel, serve the
purpose of psychological warfare. It is up to Eteocles, in his capacity
of general, to oppose the magic and to devise countercharms. The
answers of Eteocles to the messenger's descriptions, therefore, con-
stitute a display of magic at work. But this particular magic, unlike
that exercised by the shields, is a magic of words, a protective wall
of remedial oratory raised up in the face of monstrous shapes and
blasphemous images. Modern civilized rhetoric here overcomes the
ancient power of grimacing. In the drama, to be sure, the visual magic
is itself cast in the form of speech. There are, in this play, no violent
spectacles such as crimson carpets or rocks hurled underground. But
the speech conjures up vistas of massive bucklers and garish blazons
calculated to deflate the will and paralyze the mind. Eteocles' rejoin-
ders, on the other hand, are in the nature of arguments, of philosophi-
cal rebuttals.
The shield of Tydeus carries a flaming sky with stars and a bright
full moon. Eteocles* answer ( 4 0 3 ) :
If he should die, and night descend on his eyes,
this arrogant device would rightly prove
its nature and its name for him who bears it.
Note the high-toned emphasis on "nature" and "name," the pivots

of a rational dialectic. If the intention were to meet force with force,
this sort of procedure would be awkward and ineffectual. In the per-
son of the Theban general, traditionalism and abstract reflection are
joined in a competent mixture which defeats the cruder ventures of
the enemies at every turn. Capaneus displays a naked man with a
lighted torch in his hands and the legend: "I shall burn the city."
Eteocles contrasts this torch with its divine counterpart (444):
I believe he will be struck, inescapably,
by the burning thunderbolt.
The answer is particularly appropriate as Capaneus had likened
thunder and lightning to the petty discomfort of the midday sun.
Eteoclus' shield shows a fully armed man ascending the rungs of a
ladder toward an enemy battlement, with the legend: "Not even Ares
will cast me from the ramparts." Eteocles' answer has the ring of a
Socratic whimsy (478): the device will enable the defender Megareus
to capture two men and a citadel. Hippomedon, the fourth attacker,
has on his shield a picture of Typhon spewing black smoke from a
fiery mouth. On this occasion Eteocles' rebuttal is ready-made: Father
Zeus, flaming weapon in hand, will fight on the side of Hyperbius and
win his ancient victory all over again. The refutation is so obvious
that for once, and perhaps also for the sake of variety, rhetoric de-
scends to the level of iconography, and Zeus is shown enthroned on
the defender's shield (512). But the next adversary, Parthenopaeus,
is once more neutralized with the proper refinement and wit. His de-
vice, ever more baroque than those of the others, is the voracious
Sphinx holding in her talons a single Theban man (544),
for most of the missiles hurled to hit this man.
The notion is that the Theban soldiers, faced with the prospect of in-
juring one of their own, would be reluctant to fight. Eteocles deftly
exposes the ambivalence of the implied argument (560): it is the
Sphinx herself, the archenemy of Thebes, who will have cause to
complain, for she will be much buffeted when she gets close to the
citadel.

And so the battle is dramatized as a series of magic pretensions on
one side and counterarguments on the other. Both the magic and the
dialectic are used toward an artistic objective, to let us see the power
and the limits of the personalities posted for battle, to create and in
turn unmake the characters participating in the attack. The sequence
may be termed an experiment in character construction. H. D. F. Kitto
has recently reminded us that the characters in a Greek tragedy are
constructive; that is to say, the Greek dramatic writers, instead of aim-
ing at the flexible naturalism usually found on the modern stage, con-
ceived of their characters as aggregates of significant features and be-
havior patterns required by the action of the play. The selection se-
quence grants us a glimpse into a workshop in which such characters
are manufactured. Because the characters of the attackers are secondary,
geared to this one scene only, the process of construction is even more
radical than usual. The characters are built up only to be removed
again immediately, and all this is done by means of words, for though
we are made to see their clothing and the rest of their external trap-
pings, they do not appear on the stage. They do not confuse us with
their gestures, their mannerisms, the solid but opaque appeals of souls
revealed in the flesh. We see their essences, without the accidents.
Thus the selection sequence realizes a tendency inherent in all tragic
art; for tragic costume, mask and buskin serve the same goal of mini-
mizing accident. The impact of such raw constructiveness as is at-
tempted here is very powerful indeed.
Amphiaraus carries no shield design, hence no rebuttal is needed,
only an expression of sorrow which comes from the reflection that
good men perish indiscriminately with the bad (597):
Alas, the luck which does associate
the just man with the impious.
Here, just before the curse begins to move him, in the very teeth of
war, Eteocles injects a last and most emphatic note of human sym-
pathy. He cuts short his dialectic, his tactical argumentation, and falls
back on an elegiac mood, on pathos, self-inquiry, and reproach. As
suggested earlier, he senses in the fate of Amphiaraus a parallel to

his own. The elegiac mood, and especially the initial apostrophe to
luck-—or, literally, to "omen"—is not the kind of thing we should
have expected from the confident leader of the earlier part of the play.
We should sooner have looked to the chorus to supply this strain of
mournful resignation. In fact the whole speech of Eteocles, with its
somber contemplation on the fate of man and with its formal division
into general examples and specific application, has a decidedly choral
quality. Eteocles has undergone a change. By itself the present scene
is not sufficient to reveal the precise nature of the change. This much
is clear, however, that the public function of the general has become
overshadowed by the private ponderings of the man, and that his
former sanguine assurance has given way to a new humor, to worry
and despair. From a leader manipulating war he is turning into a man
experiencing the war in himself. The progression which we have noted
in the catalogue of the aggressors, the change-over from tanks to
bayonets, the transition from the machine war to the personal com-
bat, is beginning to tell also in the figure of Eteocles.
But there is one more shield-carrying enemy: Polynices. His device
is not symbolic in the same way as those of his associates. Rather it
conforms more closely to the reality with which we are already fa-
miliar. The image shows a woman decently leading a man in full
armor ( 6 4 4 ) ; the legend says that she is Justice conducting her
champion back to regain his native city and to enjoy the freedom of
his home. This is not magic; the image is too "realistic" to have a
share in sorcery. By putting himself into the picture Polynices shows
it for what it is, a pictorial design which directly communicates the
spoken announcement which it is meant to convey. Let us call it a
campaign poster, informing all and sundry: "I shall return." Far
from intending to frighten the defenders into insensibility, the motto
is designed to appeal to their moral intelligence, to convert them. In
the eyes of Eteocles this type of blazon must be the most dangerous
of all. He has no countermagic, no deflecting whimsy, no refutation.
All he can do is deny the claim. Simple negation is the only instrument
left to him when an ethical claim takes the place of brute force. As it
will turn out, negation is not enough.

In the case of Amphiaraus no magic was necessary because the
prophet already knew his destruction; he had no need to have it
invoked against him. In the case of Polynices magic is equally out of
place, if only because the relationship between the brothers would
render any such extravagancy petty and irrelevant. For now, at the
end of the sequence, the contest is between two moral agents locked
in meaningful combat. The stress is no longer on the device but on
the men themselves and on their intentions. The men are seen as
products of a development, as characters with a past; each has his
upbringing and his achievements, almost in the Sophoclean manner.
We note the biographical dimension of Eteocles' answer (622):
If Justice, the maiden child of Zeus, had stood
by him, in his deeds and thoughts, this might well be.
But no, not when he escaped from his mother's darkness
nor in his childhood nor in later youth
nor even when his chin collected down
did Justice glance on him or judge him just.
We cannot miss the undertone of regret and disappointment at a life
of promise steered in the wrong path. Eteocles is not only a general
or a soldier; he is also an older brother who still, as it were, considers
himself his brother's keeper. With the other aggressors, from Tydeus
to Parthenopaeus, he has nothing in common. With Amphiaraus he
is connected only by the tenuous link of a moral understanding. With
Polynices he shares a life, and a curse.
v
Alas, the god-crazed towering hatred of heaven;
alas, my clan, the tear-drenched clan of Oedipus;
alas, my father's curses now fulfilled!
This is Eteocles' reformulation of the curse, of the divine hatred
under which his family has labored for generations (653). A curse
is something constant, a stain which cannot be expunged except under
the most unusual circumstances. And yet, so that it may retain its full
force in the hearts of men, it has to be re-evoked periodically from gen-

eration to generation. This, at any rate, is what we find in Aeschylean
and Sophoclean tragedy. A curse once pronounced goes into effect
unto the third and fourth generation; the men affected by it turn into
spontaneous victims, reasserting at crucial junctures their commitment
to the curse. That is the reason Oedipus cursed his sons, though
various other more or less frivolous motives were later substituted by
an uncomprehending posterity. Similarly now, with Eteocles' out-
burst, we are thrust back into the living domain of the curse. No long-
er does the city occupy his thoughts; the war machine has vanished
from the scene. Eteocles has ceased to be a general, sovereign and
efficient, and has turned into a hero, involved, committed, obsessed.
To be a hero, whether on the Homeric battlefield or in Attic tragedy,
means to be unreasoning, self-centered, surrendering oneself head-
long to the needs and demands of an engrossing mission. The hero
listens to a call from within himself; he does not weigh alternatives,
he does not regulate, he obeys. For such a man a curse presents a chal-
lenge and a scope.
The chorus recognizes the shift (677):
Do not, child of Oedipus, break our hearts
by raving like an evil-spoken zealot.
Here we have an extraordinary development. The mention of Oedipus
shows that the chorus perceive the workings of the curse. Moreover,
in their judgment the brothers are now as one, for there can be
little doubt that Polynices is precisely such an "evil-spoken zealot.,,
Eteocles' evocation of the curse has eliminated the tenuous boundary
which previously separated him from his brother. Finally, as Eteocles
rejects his public status and concentrates on his own person, on his
needs and his fate, the chorus give up their own self-centeredness and
begin to take thought of the hero. By a radical crossing of lines the
chorus assume the earlier role of Eteocles, the role of the unselfish
warner. Formally also they authenticate their new position, for these
lines are spoken rather than sung. Each of the preceding six tableaux
of the selection sequence is terminated by a choral lyric; now, at the
end of the final tableau and (not counting stage directions) for the

first time in the play, the leader of the chorus takes over with a small
speech of her own.
Let not madness, filling the heart,
spear-crazed, carry you away!
So sing the chorus, resuming their traditional lyric medium ( 6 8 6 ) .
And Eteocles answers ( 6 8 9 ) :
Since it is the god who activates the event,
let it sail before the wind, straight to Cocytus,
the whole Apollo-hated clan of Laius.
Such subservience to the gods, such willingness to be carried in what-
ever direction pleases the divine powers, had once been the preserve
of the chorus. Now Eteocles has adopted the perspective for his
own. There is more yet. A few moments before he rushes into the
battle he states ( 7 1 0 ) :
Too true the visions of nightmarish dreams . . .
W e had hardly dared to suspect that Eteocles, like the chorus, might
have his own hallucinations. His Platonizing homage to the intellect,
his strictures on the women's turmoil, have proven a sham. Given the
proper setting, in this case the catalyzing effect of war, man, whatever
his position, will betray himself as the simple, raw, vulnerable organ-
ism that he is, without the spurious protection of public status or
a body of philosophical beliefs. And vulnerability is the first con-
dition of heroism. The administrator cannot be heroic, only an un-
disguised and unsheltered human being can, a man reduced to his
essential condition by the curse.
The liveliness of the action has perhaps caused us to forget that
there is a curse. A commander in chief issuing orders is not likely
to remind us of the Furies hovering over the clan. And yet Aeschylus,
in his own careful manner, does not mean us to forget. In Eteocles'
second speech, near the beginning of the play, when the King calls
on his divinities to protect the land and the city—he does not refer
to himself as requiring protection—he prays to Zeus, Earth, the city's
gods, and the (70)

Omnipotent Curse, the Fury of my father.

This first appeal to the curse is contemplative, almost gentle, quietly
edged in. From then on, each mention of Oedipus, each mention of
the family of which Eteocles is a member, should prepare the audience
with cumulative explicitness for the final explosion. Nothing else is
to be expected in this third play of the Theban trilogy. A king is tied
to his community; it glories and suffers with him. Laius had failed
to do his duty and thereby brought ruin on city and house. The city
remains in danger; she cannot be saved except by deflecting the curse
so that it will come to rest entirely on the house. Only by meeting the
curse head on, by identifying his fate with it, and incidentally thereby
affirming the power and dignity of his manhood, can Eteocles hope to
eliminate it. This is not to say that Eteocles recognizes the need for
saving the city as he prepares to meet his brother. With the cessation
of his role as administrator, all forethought, all planning and reason-
ing, are sacrificed. But by allowing the curse to operate at full strength,
by challenging its potency into the limited area of the fratricide, he
makes possible the survival of the city. The achievement remains his,
no matter that his original perspective, his concern for the com-
munity, has been cut off.
Sophocles, a generation or so later, was to show in his Oedipus
Tyrannus that the evasion of a curse makes for an intensification of
the doom. Conversely he demonstrated, yet another generation later,
in his Oedipus Coloneus, that a man could, by submitting to the
curse and uniting it to himself and his career, bring about an eventual
release. Just so Eteocles, by rekindling and embracing the curse,
brings about the great cleansing and liberation with which the tril-
ogy ends. Even with the fragmentary evidence available to us it
is quite apparent that the proper ending of a trilogy is one in which
conflicts are resolved and passion stories terminated. It does not mat-
ter whether the resolution is profound or superficial, whether it is
achieved by reconciliation or adjudication or, as in our case, sacrifice.
Sometimes, as in the Oresteia, the ending is happy; sometimes it
hinges on a death. The important thing is that by the end of the third
play the tensions and conflicts which are set up and manipulated in
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the trilogy have ceased to operate. That is not to say that all ques-
tions, philosophical or otherwise, that may have been stimulated
by the action will have been answered. On the contrary, the cancella-
tion of the immediate conflict often raises as many questions as it
purports to answer, and more. Perhaps a tragedy, like a Socratic
dialogue, should do precisely this. But looking at the play as a self-
contained unit, as a unitary aesthetic experience, the abolition of the
governing conflict is the principal business of the ending. This reso-
lution is usually climactic; it coincides with an act of heroism or a
similarly impressive event underscoring the power or the littleness
of man. In the present play the curse has produced a war, and both
curse and war are terminated when Eteocles allows the Fury to seize
him up and deliver him to certain death.
The curse is the theme of the choral song which follows the exit
of Eteocles. The ode begins and ends with the picture of hardened
steel in the hands of the brothers (727):
A stranger-friend allots the shares,
newly arrived from Scythia,
a sharp divider of property rights,
raw-spirited steel.
And again (788):
And they with steel-wielding
hand will yet divide their
property.
The iron is the special tool and substance of the curse, now fully ma-
terialized after more than a lifetime of hints and threats. More par-
ticularly the iron succeeds to the shield. Before personal involvement
and private impulse undermined the relentless workings of the ma-
chine, the shield had served as the chief image of the war and of the
attitudes taken toward the war. As such, characteristically, the shield
was visualized as an autonomous entity, not suspended from the
shoulder or held on the lower arm, but, as it were, dwarfing the
bearer and obeying an action or motion of its own. By way of con-
trast the steel rests in the brothers' hands. We can watch the physical

effort, the specific turn of the body which gives to the weapon its
aim and success. Thus once more the imagery helps us to follow the
shift from the machine to the soul.
It is strange that a curse, ostensibly a pollution coming in from the
outside, should enable or force men to reflect on their selves, to recog-
nize in their fate a challenge to their minds and hearts. But this is a
thoroughly Greek concept for which modern ideas concerning freedom
of will and the like make no allowance. Perhaps it is because the
Aeschylean and the Sophoclean hero is often primarily a political
man, a person who takes his administrative obligations seriously,
that he needs the shattering blow of a curse to train his eyes on him-
self and see himself as he is. Once the curse has struck, the hero finds
himself less powerful and less happy but more purposefully alive
than ever. In real life a curse, such as that pronounced over the Alc-
maeonids, is likely to paralyze the individual and cripple his in-
itiative; on the stage the effect is the opposite.
The king is killed, but the city is saved. The two outcomes are re-
ported and accepted side by side, in the order of their importance to
the reporter and his audience. Both the messenger who enters to an-
nounce the events and the chorus who respond to the news first em-
phasize the salvation of the city ( 7 9 2 ) :
Take courage, nurslings of your mothers' care;
our city has fled the yoke of slavery!
And ( 8 2 2 ) :
Great Zeus, and gods of the city,
you who stand ready to protect
the ramparts of Cadmus;
shall I rejoice, shall I cry out
in triumph at the city's day of grace?
Only after this first spontaneous cry of happiness over the deliver-
ance of the city do messenger and chorus turn to consider the death
of the brothers, and to allow grief a place beside their joy. This grief,
an unintricate, noble, calming grief is not for Eteocles alone but jointly
for the brothers. With their death the curse has fulfilled itself and

the community is restored to health. Hence their death emerges as

a beneficent thing, and the question of justice or injustice pales be-
fore the simple act of self-sacrifice in which both brothers share to an
equal degree, no matter what the intentions that lay behind it. The
curse had set the brothers at each other's throats; the curse had drawn
forth Eteocles from his isolation and made him come to grips with
the war on terms of intimacy and wrath. Now the curse has bound
the brothers together in a new union and wiped out the scores of
guilt and resentment.
In their great hymn to the curse, the women predict ( 7 3 4 ) :
When they die killing their own,
their own victims,
and the Earth's dust drinks
black-clotted murder-blood . . .
Earth, the giver of life and freedom and culture, is to be the arena of
the final torture, the recipient of the sacrifice. But Earth is to be
something more than that. By an old magical Greek tradition the
burial of a sinner, of a polluted man, makes for a hallowed spot.
Oedipus and others like him had broken the basic laws of decent
society; in their lifetime they represented a serious threat to the
communities with which they were associated. But once they were
dead it was thought that the same vitality which previously endangered
the public peace would now, from the sepulcher underground, work
for the benefit of the people. Just so the fratricide, in itself a mon-
strous act, is now absorbed by Earth and metamorphosed into an
asset ( 9 4 7 ) :
They have their share, unhappy beneficiaries,
of god-given lots;
and below, in the body of the Earth,
there will be fathomless wealth.
In this manner Earth, "the demon having ceased" (960), contributes
her own time-honored magic to help along with the "happy ending,"
the restoration of balance and the cleansing which we expect at the
end of the play and the trilogy.

The exorcizing of the curse is above all the result of Eteocles' con-
version. This is a fact; but the fact needs to be confirmed, ritually
and aesthetically. Hence the dirge. The curse is rescinded once and
for all by the lament of the chorus which follows upon the first shout
of triumph for the delivery of the city, and which stretches over more
than 150 lines to the end of the play. Its inordinate length and its
lack of poetic interest have caused much dismay. It will help to
remember, however, that the dirge was sung and danced, that the
ritual exigencies of a funeral song rule out poetic venturesomeness,
that the lament is designed to conclude the whole trilogy rather than
merely one play, and, finally, that it serves a special function: it is a
kind of binding song, analogous to the sorcerers' chant with which
the Furies in the Eumenides try to overcome the resistance of Orestes.
The burying of the brothers, vicariously enacted in the dirge, also
becomes a burial of the curse, and thereby a storing up of pregnant
treasure. To ensure all this the dirge must allow liberally for the
repetitive formulas native to prayer. One might even say that the
dirge imitates, on a grander scale, the patterns of the curse it is laying
to rest. Without an appreciation of the religious cast of the lament
we cannot hope to understand the emphatic terminalism of the last
scene.
Still, we cannot be entirely persuaded that the curse has been neu-
tralized. In the course of the play we have seen the terror and grue-
someness and unintelligibility of war subjected to a process of re-
finement and subversion until only heroism and tragedy and finally
sacred blessings remain. Aeschylus asks us to pay tribute to war and
to carry away the illusion—for that is all a dramatic solution can give
us—that war is manageable, that even at its worst it allows a man
to exercise his most personal aspirations, to struggle for heroism
and glory. But the terror, the brutal shock of the barbaric shield, the
desolation of the sacked city, are not completely muted. In spite of
the resolution and of the allaying of the family curse, the antiphonal
arrangement of the theme of war continues to echo in our ears and
to release its ration of fear and disgust. The satyr play which fol-
lowed—it is no longer extant but we know that it dealt with the

Sphinx—would of course erase this echo, or cushion it with a sooth-
ing dose of harmless laughter. But the palliative is short-lived. When
the whole tetralogy has been played through, the sanguine finale is
soon forgotten, and the tragic mood of the earlier plays is recalled in
full. That this mood is not all terror and futility, that the dramatiza-
tion of war which the play gives us leaves room for glory and dig-
nity as well as horror: this is the special achievement of Aeschylus,
an achievement equaled only perhaps by Homer's Iliad.
It is tempting to suggest that in mood, style, and objective the
Seven Against Thebes is cast in the epic mold. Homer made it the
business of the epic to formulate the manifold nature of war, to
point up its beauty and its ugliness, its significance and its pettiness,
its grandeur and its bestiality. But in the Iliad the complexity of the
experience emerges from the successive highlighting of various iso-
lated perspectives. Now we see the war through the eyes of Priam,
now through the eyes of Achilles, now of Hector. Each one of the
key figures catches the meaning and the spirit of the war from a
specific angle which, despite minor variations depending on the
situation in which the witness finds himself, is on the whole constant.
For Hector the war is a defensive operation, to be organized along
lines of tactical responsibility. Occasionally he forgets the neces-
sity of tactical considerations; then he lives to regret the blunders.
For Achilles the war starts out as the legitimate occupation of the
class of which he is a member, and takes on special meaning after
the death of his closest friend. He is turned from a businesslike
knight into an avenging fury. But even this change indicates not so
much a shifting of his perspective as rather an intensification of his
energies. About the nature and the justice of the war to be fought and
about his own particular role in it Achilles has few doubts, his spe-
cious rebuttals in Book 9 notwithstanding. Everyone in the Iliad takes
the war for granted and accepts the part in it which destiny has allotted
him.
In the Seven the relation between men and war is not similarly
fixed. For one thing, war is not seen as a necessary or normal thing,

to be dealt with as best one can. It is an enormity, an aberration from

the settled ideals of peace and culture and domesticity. More im-
portant, however, the view of war is not, as in the epic, a totality of
singular views each of which admits of some sort of definition by
itself. Instead of the perspective of the father and the perspective of
the defender and the perspective of the knight and so forth, our play
develops a portrait of war which is not a composite of perspectives at
all, but an organic experience, growing under our very eyes. From the
moment when Eteocles begins his address to the citizenry, with his
cool appraisal of the military contingencies, to the point when the
chorus lyrically re-enact the fratricidal duel, the picture of war
undergoes a constant shifting. Its outlines never grow sufficiently firm
to allow the picture to harden into a set of perspectives. E. Staiger
has said about the lyric that in contrast to the drama and the epic it
does not deal with "objects" and therefore does not operate with
perspective. The poet and his world are not sufficiently distinct to
require the help of a perspective. Aeschylus' tragedy verges upon
the lyric mood; the picture of war which it distills into us, to use a term
of Staiger's, is a feeling rather than an image, an experience rather
than the fruit of an illumination.
Neither Eteocles nor the chorus can be said to offer us a single
identifiable formulation of what war means to them. Above all,
the gradual incubus-like growth of war in the soul of Eteocles, the
transformation of the planner into the enthusiast, permits us to focus
on war in its full extent through the lens of a single life and a single
commitment. This is an act of compression which cannot but enhance
the power of the communication. In the epic, the understanding of
war is fragmented; the audience is asked to bring the fragments to-
gether and weld them into a response of its own. In the Seven the
representation of war is whole, evolving, natural. Driven by the vigor
of Aeschylus' verse the audience must surrender itself to the com-
prehensive truth generated on the stage. To this extent, then, the play
goes far beyond the epic, in spite of the epic touches of its language,
and in spite of its echoes of the Homeric world of heroes. Unlike the

Iliad it does not describe a succession of battles, it creates a war. It
plants its disharmonies into our very hearts, with an urgency and a
pathos which only tragedy can accomplish, and which are the special
hallmark of the art of Aeschylus.

Prometheus ftoundt
TRAGEDY OR TREATISE?

FIRST LET US NOTE some peculiarities of the
Prometheus, some features which distinguish
it from the other Aeschylean dramas that
have come down to us. The differences are striking, and some scholars
have, not without cause, concluded regretfully that the play as we have
it could not possibly have been written by the author of the Oresteia
and the Suppliants. The question of authorship will not concern us
here. But the singularity of the play merits detailed comment.
The most apparent characteristic of the Prometheus when compared
with almost any other Greek drama is the prominence of iambic
51

52 Prometheus Bound
speech. Spoken orations seem to have encroached on the territory
usually held by the lyric element and to have relegated the music to
a position of entr'acte decorativeness. To be sure, Prometheus and
Hermes do some chanting, and Io has an aria whose musical texture
resembles that of choral songs in other Aeschylean plays. But the
choral odes themselves are infrequent, brief, and seemingly undis-
tinguished, as if the composer felt that the iambic medium ought not
to be interrupted beyond the minimum claims of the tradition. In the
spoken passages the language and the versification have little of the
gnarled compactness or of the sheer joy of muscle which marks
Aeschylus' iambics elsewhere. Mostly the verse is restrained, dry,
subtle, sometimes prosaic. If a comparison is in order, the simplicity of
the Prometheus contrasts with the exuberance of the Persians as the
brittleness of the Tempest does with the turbulence of Lear. The
Prometheus shows the same containment, the same deliberate rejec-
tion of baroque expansiveness and bulky metaphor, the same deli-
cate control of the rhythmic patterns. Whether all this means that
the Prometheus is written in the style of old age, must be left to fu-
ture epigraphic discoveries to determine. We do not know the date
of the performance, and in fact we do not know whether it was ever
performed.
The play is not without its share of full-throated passages. The
description of the monster Typhon (355),
who hisses panic from terrifying jaws
and strikes a Gorgon lightning from his eyes,
is a forceful reminder of the Aeschylean flair for color and bigness.
On the whole, however, there is an obvious avoidance of purple
patches and full orchestration. The speech tends to be simple, direct,
almost colloquial; some of the lines read like quotations from comic
dialogue or anticipations of Hellenistic genre writing. The imagery
also, though of considerable interest as we shall see later, is much
reduced in tension and scope, as if the Aristophanic Euripides had,
after all, won his case. Sometimes, indeed, the imagery seems trite
or pale and even thoughtless, but such first impressions can be de-

TRAGEDY OR TREATISE? 53
ceptive. In any case, it is apparent that on the several levels of style and
diction the play lives up to its special character of moderation, of re-
coiling from poetry and pomp.
So much for matters of style. When we turn to the action our at-
tention is pre-empted by the figure of Prometheus himself. He is
more than a hero or a central figure; of all known characters in Greek
tragedy he alone is on stage all the time. The play is about him
and no one else; he is the play. Moreover, once he has been placed in
position against the rock in the center of the stage he remains mo-
tionless. This rigid fixity, as unique as it must have been uncomfort-
able to the actor, reads like a protest against excessive motions on the
tragic stage, against the Ajaxes and the Lycurguses, who express the
violence of their feelings through extravagant gesturing and savage
stridings. Like Nero Wolfe, Prometheus achieves a special effect by
the contrast between his own stillness and the unimpeded comings
and goings that surround him. And like that celebrated investigator he
seems to supervise and perhaps originate much of that motion. It
will, I suspect, be of some importance to keep track of the purely
kinetic relationships, of the interplay between various kinds of mo-
tion and rest which structures the play, from its halting, almost slug-
gish beginning to its cyclonic end.
The constant presence of the chief character on the stage should,
it may be expected, furnish a modicum of unity. The assumption is
that the longer a man is with us and the longer we know him, the
more we are likely to find out about him, and this progressive familiar-
ity will make us see more and more clearly the end toward which the
drama aims. This expectation, of an experience both unified and
rising in intensity, is plausible enough. Unfortunately the Prometheus
does not fulfill it. There is in it no unity, no consistency, no interlock-
ing of event with event toward the steady building up to a climax such
as we have in the Oedipus Tyrannus. In spite of the staggering of the
interlocutors there seems to be no perceptible growth in intensity.
Contrary to the Aristotelian axiom, the play is no living unit with be-
ginning, middle, and end conditioning one another. Rather it may be
called a series of scenes or tableaux, more or less artfully joined to-

54 Prometheus Bound
gether but ostensibly independent of one another. The connecting
statements are often bald, not to say ungainly. After Io's great intro-
ductory aria, for instance, the author wishes to supply an explana-
tion, again by lo, of her sufferings. The transition from song to speech
may be summarized as follows (604): lo, singing: Tell me my fu-
ture. Prometheus, speaking: I shall tell you whatever you wish to
know. Io, speaking: Why are you suffering? Prometheus: I shall not
repeat what I have just finished telling. Io: How long will I continue
my wanderings? Prometheus: I had better not tell you. Io: Please do.
Prometheus: All right, I will. Chorus-leader: No; first we want her
to tell us more about her troubles. Prometheus: Yes, that is a better
idea. And then follows Io's speech. It should be added that this sum-
mary reproduces a conversation which extends over thirty-six lines
of text.
In a radio studio this laborious plotting of who is to speak next
and about what, is called "traffic." The present passage is by no
means the only traffic sheet in the play, though it may well be the
most explicit. Other examples of a meticulous conferring regarding
spots on the program are to be found in lines 696 ff., 778 ff., and
816 ff. Once the assigning is organized as a children's game (778):
PROMETHEUS: Of two orations I shall give you one.
Io: What kind? Hold out your hands and let me choose.
Each of the traffic sheets has the function of separating two major
speeches, or at any rate of introducing a new speech. They are me-
chanical introductions which mark the speeches as lectures or per-
formances rather than spontaneous outflowings of organically con-
ceived characters. On this score also, therefore, it is clear that we
are not dealing with a drama of character, featuring a probable or a
significant life, and presenting a combination of causes and results
which make for a meaningful continuity. That there are characters on
the stage will, of course, not be denied. Even a superficial reading
of the play produces a strong feeling of the basic differences in thought
and temperament and tone between Prometheus and Io and Ocean
and Hermes. But the presence of distinguishable characters does

not necessarily give us a play whose plot and meaning derive princi-
pally from the purposeful interaction of its agents. It is symptomatic
of the sort of drama Prometheus Bound is that it contains compara-
tively little dialogue, and that what dialogue there is turns out in
most cases to be the trafficking which connects the speeches. In sub-
stance, the play consists of revelations and self-revelations, the para-
tactic unfolding of issues and feelings and historical fact, instead of -
the interlacing and merging of lines of thought and the pooling of
sensations which a true drama of character would seem to demand.
At the end of the play the advance of the action over what is found
at the beginning is nil. There has been no enlargement of themes, no
energetic expansion to sustain our imagination toward climax and
resolution. It may well be asked whether this leaves us with a static
mass, a symposium of speeches organized without regard for what
Kenneth Burke has termed the sense of crescendo. The answer to this
question is No. There are some elements of movement and articula-
tion and even of tension. But they are artificial, or at least imposed
from outside; they do not correspond to any intrinsic direction or
purpose. One such adventitious device calculated to infuse a sense of
mystery and anticipation into the proceedings is the motif of the
secret. Prometheus knows the identity of the lady destined to bear
a son whose status will exceed that of his father; Zeus, who is about
to choose a bride from a large group of candidates, does not, and is
in fact close to selecting the very girl whose ominous gifts Prometheus
alone divines. Between Prometheus' first and second speeches to Io
there is a reference to this secret, and also to another enigma concern-
ing a future deliverer of Prometheus. On the surface these dark hints
have the purpose of breaking up into two separate speeches what other-
wise might have been a single interminable oration. In other words,
the remarks about the secret are analogous to the regulatory passages
preceding the speeches, and indeed the two are often combined. But
there is something else. As the secret is touched upon again and again
the references become less and less veiled until in the end it is felt
that Prometheus is ready to divulge the full contents of the secret to
the enemy. He does not do so; but this frustration of our legitimate

56 Prometheus Bound
hopes—or fears—becomes the crowning touch of Aeschylus' use of
the riddle as a creator of suspense and crescendo. A minor mythologi-
cal detail generates a tension which the subject matter as such does not
rightfully carry, and produces the illusion that in the end Prometheus
might barter a piece of knowledge for his liberation. For an illusion
it is, at any rate within the limits of the play we have. Thus the secret
of Zeus' marriage is a device, we might almost call it a gimmick,
to extend pace and momentum to an otherwise static mass. Later we
shall see that it is much more than that.
Mythology once more provides yet another extrinsic means of in-
troducing suspense. From Hesiod and from vase paintings we know
that the audience associated the impaled Prometheus with his eagle.
In the present play, when Prometheus is dragged in and nailed against
the rock, the eagle is absent. Prometheus chants his great apostrophe
to Nature, at the end of which he announces (124):
Alas, what is it I hear? The fluttering
of birds near by? The air hums
with the volatile strokes of wings.
It is not the expected eagle that enters, but the members of the
chorus. We cannot here discuss the vexed question of the means of
transportation by which the girls make their entry. I for one consider
it most likely that they come in on a ship-cart. They do, after all, come
from the ocean, and the analogy between oars and wings is familiar
from the Homeric epic down. What matters is that their appearance
is heralded by an announcement designed to mislead the audience
into expecting the eagle. Some time later, after the chorus have es-
tablished themselves on the stage, there is another rustle of wings.
This time there is no announcement; the winged creature advances
too rapidly. The mermaids scatter and hide behind the rock. But
again it is not the eagle, only a parody of that royal bird, a fanciful
hobby monster supporting the withered physique of Father Ocean.
Only toward the end of the play, when we have ceased to look for
the eagle, does Hermes schedule its arrival. On second thought it is
obvious that it would have been bad taste, a confusion of the genres,

to present the eagle on the stage. The tone of the play is perhaps not
so far removed from the tone of comedy as one might wish. But the
outlandishness of the animal figure could only have compromised the
Titanic dignity of the hero. Hence we are shown only the domesticated
variety, a whimsical plaything for an Ocean who has long lost his
standing as a Titan.
Thus, though there is some suspense, it depends largely on ex-
ternals, on spectacle and mythology and similar instruments of surface
appeal. It would of course be wrong to suppose that there is no in-
crease whatever in the emotional tempo of the play. Prometheus'
anger, for one thing, is steadily intensified by the successive interviews
with the gracious and timid mermaids, the sober and ineffectual Ocean,
the tormented Io, and finally the malicious and crude Hermes. Each
person elicits a different response from Prometheus, and, if nothing
else, sheer momentum carries him to greater and greater heights of
expostulation and wrath. The rising curve is intentional. This is
proved by the way in which the writer arranges the beginning of
the play. The initial absence of the chorus is nothing more than a debt
owed to the tradition. But the silence of Prometheus as he is being
hammered against his rock, his continued silence after the workmen
have left the stage, and the feeling of isolation which speaks from
the address to inanimate Nature into which he then launches, all
indicate that the author knows the value of a slow start. But our first
judgment remains unchanged all the same. If there is a development,
it is not effected by converging lines of plot or revelation of charac-
ter or the merciless unfolding of an embodied truth. The reason for
this is very simple; the Prometheus Bound is not a tragedy of plot
and character—the life and sufferings of Mr. X—but an entirely
different species of dramatic composition. E. A. Havelock has, very
properly, called it a masque. Like a Renaissance masque, it dramatizes
issues and abstractions rather than the joys and sorrows of living men.
A masque cannot be read as a tragedy proper is read, it must be trans-
lated and decoded before it can be understood. In the case of a
Renaissance masque a tracing of classical models and conventions
will often furnish the clue. But the Prometheus has no precedent, at

58 Prometheus Bound
least not in the drama of the Greeks. Hence we must try to under-
stand what the play has to say from within itself, with only occa-
sional help from our knowledge of the intellectual climate of fifth-
century Athens. Because the play is an innovation, not firmly rooted
in a soil of conventions arid rules, no solution of the enigma of its
meaning can be anything more than tentative. But some attempt at
giving an answer has to be made; that is what a masque is for. The
particular question before us is: Who is being punished, and for what?
»•
11
By rights the question should be answered
for us in the Prologue of the play. And in fact the Prologue is un-
usually informative, without appearing to lecture us. As we watch
Hephaestus and Might going about their lamentable business we
become acquainted with the ostensible issue, the punishment by Zeus
of a rebellious god; with the identity of the chief contestants, Zeus and
Prometheus; with the setting of the passion story, a mountainous
region at the very edge of the world; and, most important, with the
varied composition of the camp against which Prometheus is fighting.
For in the persons of Hephaestus, Might, and Violence we find the
enemy camp split into segments of contradictory intentions. Violence,
a mute, is but a Hesiodic doublet of Might. But between Might and
Hephaestus there is little sympathy. Might is the loyal, unthinking
executive, carrying out the wishes of a Zeus grown cruel in his wars.
Hephaestus does not similarly represent Zeus; he serves him but his
heart is not in the task, and he strains against the duty.
In his Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead1 speaks of the struggle be-
tween "formulated aspirations" and "senseless agencies." His chief
examples of the former are Christianity and democracy; the latter are
conveniently represented by barbarians and steam. It is Whitehead's
contention that the career of human civilization has always been
marked by the interaction of solid hopes for happiness and peace with
1
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Harmondsworth, England,
Penguin Books, 1942), p. 13.

an equally solid estate of frustration and ruin. As for the latter, the
senseless agencies, the Greek writers "are apt to speak of compul-
sion (ananke) when these agencies appear with a general coordina-
tion among themselves, and of violence (bia) when they appear as a
welter of sporadic outbursts." The distinction between two aspects
of necessity—compulsion and violence—is of some importance to
us, for they are both fully dramatized in our play. More generally
Prometheus himself recognizes that his struggle is against the sense-
less agencies, and that it must be hopeless ( 5 1 4 ) :
Skill is far weaker than necessity.
But to say that a struggle is hopeless is not the same as saying that it
is wasted. Necessity, the grim exclusiveness of the world enveloping
cultured man, cannot be gainsaid, but it can be confronted and judged,
and by way of dramatic illusion it can be made to render up its ex-
clusiveness, almost. And in the struggle man will perhaps find the
reward of his dignity.
Whitehead shows that as culture and civilization become conscious
achievements, as beauty and obligation and all the other civilized
values are worked out, necessity is felt more and more keenly. As life
turns gentler, it creates its own harshnesses and points up the cruelty
of its environs. Every increase in knowledge carries with it an ex-
pansion of the territory which is unknown and felt to be hostile. Every
comfort gained is doubly compensated by the infliction of new cruel-
ties. As we learn in the play, the civilizer is immobilized by the fruits
of harshness reaped from the softness he has sown. Shelley is mis-
taken when he has his hero speak of the
swift shapes and sounds which grow

more fair and soft as man grows wise and kind
and, veil by veil, evil and error fall.
Aeschylus understands the perils of progress; he knows that the
sensitizing and refining of men can only serve to widen the gulf be-
tween them and a cosmos whose vastness and incomprehensibility grow
in the same ratio as aspirations are fulfilled.
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60 Prometheus Bound
But in the play necessity is not all force and darkness. There is also
Hephaestus, the reluctant executive, friend of Prometheus and bene-
factor of men but indentured to Zeus and under orders to do his
hammering. The violence of the cosmos is thus prismatically split.
If the senseless agencies were one in their direction man might more
easily cope with them. If they were hostile and nothing else, his role
as adversary and protester would be relatively easy to sustain.
But a violence tinged with hesitation and regret blurs the picture and
makes it harder for the civilizer to keep up the fight and hold off
despair. At the same time such mingling of feelings heightens the
poignancy of the tragedy. In a world all gentle, heroism would cease
to exist; in a world of untempered harshness there would be no room
for sympathy; the result would be catastrophe rather than tragedy. It
is imperative that the hero entertain some relations with the opposition.
Hephaestus is the poet's first instrument for the establishing of such
bonds. From the very beginning the hidden feelings and secret loyal-
ties of members of the opposition are used to complicate and deepen
the area of conflict.
It is a pity that we are not given Prometheus' response to the spe-
cial pleading of Hephaestus. But a reply at this early stage in the play
would have been premature. There will be enough time later to devel-
op the various attitudes of the hero toward the enemy. The beginning
is to be slow. When we first hear from Prometheus he is to be a man
with a message, a demonstrator, perhaps a boaster or a complainer,
but not an answerer. His failure to respond to the pitiful advances
of Hephaestus reinforces our awareness of his isolation, both imposed
and self-chosen. Thanks to the skill of Aeschylus—I assume that had
he wanted to he could have employed a third actor and let Prometheus
speak—we comprehend the two camps separately, through the in-
transigence of Might and the silence of Prometheus, and the ineffec-
tualness of Hephaestus' overtures, before there is a suggestion of con-
tact and negotiation. Later, in a sense, Prometheus does answer
Hephaestus, that is, Hephaestus revisiting: Ocean. Hephaestus is the
agent who would prefer to be inactive but cannot (45):
O hated and accursed handicraft!

Ocean is the bystander who would rather be active but whose action
will be useless and self-defeating (383),
a foolish and redundant exercise.
Both gods, the enslaved smith and the side-lined river god, symbolize
the same ineffectuality caught from two separate angles. Effective ac-
tion is, for the time being, a prerogative of Zeus. There is no room
for intermediaries, especially for those whose sympathies are more
on the side of Prometheus than of Zeus. In terms of action and re-
sults Prometheus stands for frustration and failure, and this frustra-
tion cannot but affect also the purposes of those willing to work on
his behalf.
The near-identity of the roles of Hephaestus and Ocean, with
their kindliness and their abortive generosity, would be puzzling if
this were a conventional play of character, where we should ex-
pect a certain economy and differentiation in character development.
As it is, the doublet serves notice that the duality of harshness and
gentleness will be continued through the play. The mood set by the
juxtaposition of Hephaestus and Might will be extended, in a dif-
ferent manner of composition, by the succession of Ocean and Hermes.
As Might opened the drama, so Hermes will close it, on a shriller
and less assured note, which is in itself an indication of some sort
of surface progression. As we shall see directly, the combination of
harshness and gentleness is characteristic also of the physical world
which Prometheus set out to remake for the betterment of man and
which now holds him captive. Together, harshness and gentleness
form a setting within which the hero must act and suffer, and with
which he has to come to terms to remain a man and not merely be a
hero. A comparison of Sophocles' Ajax with his Philoctetes shows
how unresponsive Ajax is to the gentleness around him; in this re-
spect, as in others, Philoctetes is more human, the more rounded
character. Whether Prometheus manages to transcend his heroic
status is a question to be answered later.
Wherein lies Prometheus' principal activity on the stage? Apart
from his complaining, his chief business seems to be that of instruct-

62 Prometheus Bound
ing. He is offering to instruct the chorus in the events of the future
when he is interrupted by the entry of Ocean, and there are other
offers of the same kind, some of them fulfilled. One might be tempted
to think of him as a prophet; his mother, Themis, is nothing if not
prophetic, and his knowledge of the secret stamps him as an expert in
divination. But the form and the content of his pronouncements point
in a different direction. Unlike most prophets he does not express
himself in riddles, in dark, compressed conundrums. He is not con-
cerned with the fate of an individual or a house or a single city; he
does not warn or bully or mislead. His is the full explanation, the
extended listing, the explicit argument. The whole of humanity, so-
ciety as such, is his concern. He is a teacher, an intellectual, or, as the
Greeks would call him, a sophzstes. The fifth-century Sophists—and
that includes Socrates, if we follow the lead of the comedians—claimed
that the correct exercise of man's reason will make for a happier and
more harmonious society. All Greek tragedy contains a measure of
protest against this Sophistic naivete. But the Prometheus occupies
a special position in the series, stressing not only the falsity of the mes-
sage but also the beauty and dignity of it, and the pity of its untruth.
The dream of man setting himself above the senseless agencies,
above cosmic regularity and barbarians and steam, is encouraged by
an old myth found in many parts of the world, the myth of the cul-
ture hero who separated heaven and earth and suffered in order that
mortals could live their own life apart from the gods. "Suffering for
our sins," as it was put by a later tradition which had its eyes fixed
on Adam's fall. Prometheus, in myth, is a precursor of the last of the
culture heroes, with his dual nature, human and divine. Like Jesus
he sees his mission as that of a mediator; but unlike Jesus he is an
encourager of man's equality. We may speculate that the culture hero
himself is responsible for the tension existing between god and man.
But in our first account of his activities, in Hesiod, the tension al-
ready exists, and Prometheus attempts to eliminate it by raising men
to the level of the gods. Aeschylus went far beyond the version of
the myth given by Hesiod. What had been a trickster, a secretive pol-

tergeist, became in his formulation a Titan, a hero of majesty and
wisdom, and of a directness which leaves no room for deception. This
aggrandizing of Prometheus, and the cutting out of features of the
folk tale which had come to be regarded as unsavory, set the pattern
for all later versions. In modern parlance, "Promethean" equals "Ti-
tanic"; and this we owe to Aeschylus.
In the folk tale, Prometheus deceives the gods; in Aeschylus, he
helps man, and in fact makes man what he is. Prometheus is a sec-
ond creator, perhaps the only true creator. The change of emphasis is
significant. The folk tale piously though with some obvious grati-
fication stresses the misdemeanor; Aeschylus puts the accent on the ac-
complishments. The list is indeed an impressive one. Even a bare cata-
logue, and that is precisely what the play gives us, manages to con-
vey the proud satisfaction with which homo sapiens regards the di-
versity of his triumphs. Among the benefits listed we find the build-
ing of houses, carpentry, astronomy, arithmetic, the art of writing,
the taming of horses, navigation, medicine, and the interpretation of
dreams and omens. The arrangement of the items in the catalogue
does not obey any manifest system, in spite of the bundling together
of certain related activities. The lack of system is not necessarily a
disadvantage; better than a pedant's orderliness it communicates the
richness of civilized experience. Above everything else we learn that
all the crafts mentioned are derived from one fundamental art, the
kindling of fire (109):
. . . the stealthy spring of fire,

bound in a hollow stalk, the first instructor
and great resource of human industry.
Characteristically, however, the motif of the civilizing fire is under-
played. Fire is the visible embodiment, the always freshly experienced
reminder of man's wisdom and man's perfectibility. But fire is also
the pledge of a continued association between man and god. The cul-
ture hero separated the two, but at the same time he assured man of
a permanent connection with the gods, of god-likeness, through his
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64 Prometheus Bound
gift of the divine fire. If we scan the play we discover that, apart
from the passage cited above and a fleeting reference in the dialogue
between Prometheus and the chorus (252), there is no poetic de-
velopment of the theme of Promethean fire. Where fire is mentioned
it is ranged on the side of Zeus, in the form of a smoldering thunder-
bolt or a searing storm. It is as if the author shrank from enlarging
on the one element of the human achievement which more than any
other reflects its celestial origins. In spite of the entirely new con-
ception of the ancient tale the Hesiodic theft remains embarrassing.
The "stealthy spring of fire" is ambiguous, but the ambiguity is no
mere oversight.
But more important than what the author does not say is his affir-
mation of what is singular in the human accomplishment. At the end
of an elaborate speech for the defense which Prometheus addresses to
the chorus, the god explains a further and more profound contribu-
tion to the new order. To save man he deprived him of the fore-
knowledge of death and gave him hope (248). The meaning of this
is apparent; the life of society is based on ambition and industry,
which an awareness of the finality of death would destroy. Men can
be like gods only if they refuse to know death, that it comes and
when, and if they hope for immortality, either in person or in the
song of posterity. They can hope to equal the gods only through a
delusion, granted by Prometheus as a boon. Civilized life is founded
on an act of blindness. But it is some comfort to consider that this
is the only delusion which a man needs for a rational existence. Hence
Prometheus prides himself on having roused man from the dream-
like stupor which was his fate before he became blinded to the fact
of death. In these speeches in which Prometheus details his benefac-
tions we sense the full-blooded optimism rampant among the en-
lightened of the time. Man must be wide awake; only the examined
life is worth living; had not Heraclitus said that only the waking
know the true order of the world? And Prometheus, upright against
the rock, never sleeps.
Now it will perhaps be possible to understand the function of Io
in the play. She is a creature who lives most acutely in dreams and

hallucinations. When she comes on stage she thinks the dead Argus
is still with her ( 5 6 7 ) :
. . . Away, away! I am afraid
at the sight of the herdsman's thousand eyes.
He marches along, radiating deceit;
he is dead, but the earth refuses to keep him.
She knows that Argus has died, and yet she cannot shake off the
vision of his sly-eyed form. With her, reason and unreason are
mingled in an indeterminate and sterile mixture. Later when she
ceases her dancing and adopts iambic speech, the whole tale of Zeus
wooing and hurting her is cast in the mold of a dream (645):
Again and again night visions straying into
my maiden chambersflatteredme with smooth
and slippery speeches . . .
The simplicity of Io's account has led many critics to assume without
further ado that Aeschylus' account of Io is taken straight from
the traditional story. The truth is that the playwright, contemporary
of Hecataeus and other critics of myth, completely refashions the
material handed to him. Like Herodotus he ostensibly accepts the an-
cient tale only to rework it until an entirely new production emerges.
In Herodotus the mechanics of the transformation often derive from
the historian's interest in clinical psychology. So here, what in the
myth had been the amorous advances of Zeus toward a passive and
ingenuous woman, is portrayed as the hallucinatory experience of an
introverted adolescent. Io's speech contains no reference to an actual
encounter with Zeus, or to the jealousy of Hera,2 only to Zeus as the
instigator of her exile and peregrinations. The emphasis is on the
life of the mind, on dreams and fears and visionary horrors, rather
than on the flesh-and-blood escapades of a divine libertine. Aeschylus
took a wronged princess and made of her a mask for the soul of pre-
2
1 cannot accept Gottfried Hermann's restoration of Herds in Io's initial aria,
line 600. The only two references to Hera, once by Prometheus (704) and once by
the chorus (900) come long after Io has conditioned us to view her suffering as in-
ward rather than divinely imposed. Prometheus and the Oceanids give us the myth;
Io communicates an experience.
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66 Prometheus Bound
Promethean man, for the terrors of human life prior to the advent
of cultural progress and enlightenment. Her words, her gestures, her
dance motions on the stage betoken man in his primeval wildness,
rootless, uncontrolled, tossed by constant apprehensions of his weak-
ness and dependence. Unlike Prometheus she cannot plan or predict,
she can only suffer; and even in her prayers to the gods she can only
beg for more sufferings of the kind which befit wild beasts ( 5 7 7 ) :
O son of Cronus . . .
scorch me with fire, or hide me in the earth,
or throw me as food to the monsters of the sea!
It is hard to see how Goethe in 1799, in a note on staging the tale of
Prometheus, could have written: "Jo's dreams, pleasant and light/'
If a dream is acted out on the stage, as it must be in the ballet which
Goethe had in mind, the performance is of course likely to achieve an
air of lightness and buoyancy in spite of the material which has gone
into it. In Greek tragedy dreams are as a rule not dramatized, they
are reported. Only thus can the raw realities of the world of sleep
be rendered intact. In our play the report helps to produce the confron-
tation of the waker and the dreamer, of homo sapiens and the
human animal (complete with hoof and horns), of steadfast doer
and frantic sufferer, of intellectual masculinity and vegetative Eve.
There is considerable fascination in thus fixing the lines of con-
trast between the immobile hero and the girl-heifer whirling below
him. But is the contrast quite so simple as our allegory would seem
to demand? There are some few straws in the wind to suggest that
the relationship between Prometheus and lo, and the constellation of
forces for which they serve as masks, is rather more complex. The
question will be taken up when we begin to ask whether an allegory
pure and simple can ever be a tragedy. At this point it will be suf-
ficient to mention one such indication. Io, as she tells us herself (663),
was exiled as the result of an oracle from the Delphic god. Her physi-
cal ordeal is thus directly due to the skill of men in searching out the
will of the gods. This happens to be a skill which Prometheus counts
among his major contributions to civilized life (484) :

I staked out numerous ways of divination . . .

Here, through the puzzle of an almost frivolous incongruity, we
catch a glimpse of a greater discordance within which Prometheus and
Io are joined closely together. In this particular instance the mean-
ing seems fairly simple. Man, through the institution of oracles and
the art of soothsaying, aspires to gain some measure of control over
the gods and necessity. But the oracles rebound and show him up
for the puny slave he is. Further, they constantly remind him of
the inborn savagery which he hopes he has left far behind him, and
in the overcoming of which the founding of the oracles was de-
signed to be an effective step. The concept of the means of civiliza-
tion aborting their own objective is not explicitly stated, but it is a
natural heirloom of all Greek tragedy, whether tragedy was Dionysiac
in origin or not. More will be said about this in our discussion of
the Bacchae of Euripides.
In the Prometheus, the idea of man's estate controlled and broken
is conveyed by one of the principal images of the play, the image of
the bridle. To be sure, the special quality of the diction which we
noted above is borne out also in the use of metaphors. There are
fewer of them than in any other Aeschylean dramas, and they are em-
ployed in the interest of discursive argument rather than poetic im-
pact. They operate in the manner of slogans or newspaper cartoons,
to clarify and summarize; only rarely do they appeal to the lyrical
imagination. Such metaphors as there are will be found to derive
from the program of disciplines instituted by Prometheus and pro-
moting civilized intercourse: medicine, horse training, gymnastics,
navigation, hunting. In various contexts in the play Prometheus is,
respectively, a healer, a trainer, an athlete, a helmsman, or a hunter.
But things are not left quite so simple. On the evidence of his crucifix-
ion these competences refer rather to the past, perhaps to the future,
at any rate to what Aristotle calls the events "outside the drama/'
On stage his achievement is not equally unambiguous: he is a pa-
tient as well as a healer, a broken horse as well as a trainer; the
athlete is immobilized, the helmsman turns into a drowning sailor,

68 Prometheus Bound
the hunter into the prey of the hunt. Mostly he is the wild colt reined
in and tamed. Both Io, through her father (671) —
. . . the bridle of Zeus

compelled him . . .
and Prometheus has suffered the bit of the god.

Thus even the images, in spite of their seeming barrenness, help
to underscore the paradoxical position of the hero. A Prometheus
who is both powerful and impotent mirrors the dual reign of harsh-
ness and gentleness which the intellectual must uncover. For, to re-
peat, it is the predicament of science that in serving to make the
world more convenient it makes it more complex and rarely gentler.
The greater the progress and the more acute the understanding, the
more threatening is the harshness released. That science, as the Greeks
regard it, man's use of waking reason for the betterment of the city,
is a dominant theme in the Prometheus has always been recognized.
The fact is clear from the language used and from the procedure fol-
lowed. Take the Prologue. As we watch the piecemeal fastening of the
body to the rock (55 ff.)—now the hands, now the arm, now the
chest, now the sides, finally the legs—we are put in mind of analogous
cataloguings of parts of the body, in the Hippocratic corpus or in
Thucydides' analysis of the plague in Athens. The Prologue is sympto-
matic of the whole, for the slow consecutive listing of observable
data, the painstaking effort to achieve completeness, are among the
most marked features of the play. In science, stock-taking and ex-
haustiveness are the norm, not suggestion and allusion. The scheme
of the catalogue derives from epic literature, but when science takes
it over it is adapted to an entirely un-Homeric purpose. To put it
briefly, the epic catalogue fixes a rhythm, it underscores the stability
and the regularity of the world order. Through the near-monotony of
the Homeric catalogue the sensory world proves itself as a source of
delight and strength and as a solid springboard for heroic action. In
science the effect is more neutral; the scientific catalogue does not
savor and acclaim, it records. The items listed are not registered for
their own sake, but as preliminary entries which are needed for other

more abstract calculations. The spirit in which the details are collected
is one of detached curiosity. The intention is not to attune oneself to a
natural rhythm, but to defy time and isolate pieces of evidence for
the sake of a timeless truth. This is the spirit which we find in the
Prometheus. Its catalogues, along with the comparative dearth of meta-
phor, the restraint of the diction, and the emphasis on lecturing tech-
niques, are scientific in nature and intent.
The scientific cast is particularly obvious in the geographical
speeches, the symmetrically balanced orations in which Prometheus
details the future and past wanderings of lo among Scythians, Chalyb-
ians, Caucasians, Amazons, Cimmerians, Maeotians, Graeae, Gor-
gons, Arimaspians, Aethiopians, Aegyptians, Dodonians. Perhaps
we had better speak of mock science, for this travelogue is a hor-
rendous mixture of fact, myth, and free association. The division into
Asia and Europe which allegedly gives the account its proper coordina-
tion is downright unintelligible. No one could hope to duplicate the
journey here outlined without running into a maze of impossibilities.
But the manner of presentation is scientific. Instead of the marvelous
visions of a Marlowe, instead of the pregnant adjectives of epic folk-
lore, Prometheus asks us to consider a sober collection of names,
unexcited, devoid of pomp, without a climax to thrill to or a periphras-
is to crack. The effect is that of a geographical dictionary, of a world
map in words, rather than of an escapist mirage.
What is the purpose of these barren rehearsals? We cannot learn
the answer to this question from lo, for she does not register a re-
sponse. After the termination of the lectures lo merely relapses into
her unhappy dervishism. It is evident, however, that one effect of
the catalogues—and their deliberate mystifications may stem from this
—is to call attention to the vastness and unfamiliarity of the world
around us. The approach is not that of the lyricist or the prophet, but
of the scientist who is compelled by his own sanity and tidiness to
recognize the limits of his capacity. Man-scientist finds himself
in a world which he tries to analyze and describe, but there comes
a point at which analysis turns into wonder or, at best, guesswork.
Then the catalogue, despite its ostensible function, which is to

70 Prometheus Bound
organize and make more manageable, by the stateliness and mo-
notony peculiar to it underscores the stubborn and prodigious
power of what it sets out to catch. Thus the geographical * 'di-
gressions" point up our old ambiguity. Prometheus seems to have,
or thinks he has, some control over his environment: he catalogues.
But the strangeness of the material, the swirl of the unknown be-
yond the visible horizon, re-establishes the natural proportions, how-
ever sober and deceptively factual the speech in which it is put. The
untrodden and ungentle wastes of the world rise to swallow up the
civilizers and the knowers. Prometheus is surrounded by them; the
travels of Io provide the rude impetus and the vertigo with which
the vastness beyond checks the proud motionlessness of Prometheus.
But that is only one side of the picture. Prometheus needs Io; Io
the itinerant completes Prometheus the thinker. Her movement sym-
bolically brings into the scope of the action the world outside, the
waste land as well as the paradises, but especially the waste land.
Through her the deserts and mountains and armed savages and "the
jagged jaws of the sea" (726) come to life in stiff and disciplined
and speciously masterful speech. By the end of the play Prometheus
is no longer alone; we see him encircled by all the specters conjured
up by Io's fate. And these specters, harsh and militant as they are,
aggrandize the stature of the hero whose keenness has brought
them to life; their existence is a measure of his achievement. Without
the Scythians, Gorgons, and Arimaspians, Prometheus could not be
himself.
What is the status of the thinker vis-i-vis the nature he wants to
control? In the first choral ode the mermaids applaud Prometheus'
undertaking to transform nature into more than nature, and regret its
partial failure. As they put it, Asia—i.e., as commonly in this play,
uncultured land—and the watery elements had put their hopes in
Prometheus and now mourn his frustration (434):
The springs of sacred streams lament
and pity the grievous pain.
The Colchians, Scythians, Arabians, along with Earth, springs, and,

above all, the Oceanids themselves, the waves personified, sympathize

and sorrow with Prometheus. For nature is not only hard but also
pliant, otherwise man would never have been able to shape it. Man's
work upon nature is in one sense nothing but an eliciting of nature's
destiny. Ocean, the embracer of land, wishes to be embraced and con-
fined and covered with keels in turn. Asia wishes to be made into
Europe; hence the sorrow of the Arabians. There is a readiness in
nature, a potential in barbarism, for what the thinker has in mind for
it, for progress and humanization. It is the mission of Prometheus
to put gardens in the mountains, to bend the iron into spears and
pruning hooks. This mission coincides, to an extent, with a tendency
rooted in nature itself. So when the hammer blows are stilled, nature
sends out its delegates, the chorus, to offer its condolences.
But it is impossible to overlook the undercurrent in the opening
section of the play of that other side of nature which resists man's
encroachment, of the wave not lapping in harmony but crashing dis-
cordantly, of the waste land persisting in its fruitless isolation. Na-
ture delights in the tortures of the fallen intellectual who must for-
ever, by a Dantesque dispensation, stand cruelly exposed to the ele-
ments which he attempted to soften, ever upright, sleepless, unbend-
ing: a fiendish perpetuation of his role as civilizer and creator. He
whose role had been to transmute the raw and inhuman into a struc-
ture of sensibility and meaning, is now himself incarcerated in a
landscape without meaning, sterile and raw. Nature rendering its
benefits to man and nature attempting to preserve and enlarge its
identity against man; the Chalybians desiring to be civilized and re-
jecting civilization: a notorious ambivalence, shipwrecking mission-
aries and engineers, which constitutes the testing ground for the hero
of the play and is tested in its turn. Nature's dual status and man's
dual identity are linked to one another by a network of mutual har-
monies and antagonisms. Prometheus is cousin to the Oceanids and
uncle to Zeus. Shelley's
This bleak ravine, these unrepentant plains
draws too simple a picture, as if nature were only an adversary of the
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72 Prometheus Bound
human soul. They are indeed antagonists, and yet they inform and
quicken one another because they are part of a larger cosmic division.
The dyarchy of harshness and gentleness does not respect the bound-
aries which human isolation has tried to establish around itself. The
formulated aspirations of which Whitehead speaks may well be found
embodied in the natural world, just as the senseless agencies are
not unknown in human shape.
ili
In the eternal struggle of kinship between
man and his world, what is the role of Zeus? We learn something
about the manner of his rule in the second choral song, just before
Io runs on stage. The Oceanids, irresolute and retiring in the tradition-
al choral style, pray that (526)
omnipotent Zeus may never
strike back at any position we hold . . .
They are more than willing to extend to the god the recognition
which is the path of least resistance. In contrast, they suggest (543),
Prometheus overindulges in his unconventional position of honoring
mortals too much. They deprecate (548)
the weak-willed, dream-like
impotence of the human race . . .
By a twist of irony, man facing Zeus permits himself the same broad
alternative as nature in its relation to civilizing man. He may sub-
mit to the authority of the god, as the Oceanids, representative of
the plastic potential of nature, appear to recommend. Or he may rebel
and try to achieve his proper destiny by blocking the tyranny of
heaven and annexing some of its prerogatives. But the situation is re-
versed, for the struggle is against harshness rather than gentleness.
Zeus' dictatorial desires are to be taken as a symbol of raw necessity.
He is ' 'pitiless/' as we learn in the first choral song and again and
again in the course of the play. His pitilessness is the unfeeling stub-
bornness of the senseless agencies. Zeus is cruel and he is irresponsible;
compulsion and violence are the natural modes of his operation.

This conception of the father of the gods has on occasion proved
a disagreeable morsel to swallow. Usually, however, the difficulty is
caused by a misconception, according to which the author decided to
write a play in which Zeus would take a prominent role, and then pro-
ceeded to furnish Zeus with a character strangely unlike the character
known to the earlier writers on mythology. This is getting hold of
the wrong end of the stick. Nor again is Aeschylus at pains to con-
struct a new theology, or to transform the traditional mythology.
There is in this picture of Zeus no element of confession or com-
mitment or moral philosophy. Rather, Zeus is in the play because
Aeschylus needed a supreme and comprehensive focus for cruelty
and irresponsibility, a focus so vast and incontrovertible that the ra-
tional imagination would boggle at it and refuse to question the ex-
istence of the force described. For this purpose, only Zeus would do.
In Athens his majesty was as great as his popular standing was negli-
gible. One told stories about him, and worshipped him in unre-
flected civic rites; but no one would have thought of making the
Homeric divinity his personal god, a deity to ply with fervent sup-
plication and private queries. Thus, though all respected Zeus, no-
body called him his own. By a happy coincidence it was this eminently
useful divinity who was featured as the opponent of Prometheus in
the traditional story. The dramatist took over the person though not
the character of Hesiod's Zeus; but the meaning of the masque, the
intellectual programme of the drama, was settled without reference
to the god. It would of course be nonsense to say that the significant
outlines of the action were fixed long before Aeschylus decided to turn
to the figure of Zeus for the appropriate divine symbol. The act of
literary creation presumably is not quite so mechanical as this. But it
is fair to assume that it was the power of Zeus rather than any of
his more domestic or ethical characteristics which the writer kept
within his sights while designing his plan. Thus the image of the en-
throned father came to stand for an entirely new complex of ideas,
generated by the new conception of the role and personality of
Prometheus. It may be asked whether an Athenian audience would
have been willing to go along with this daring step, with the super-

74 Prometheus Bound
imposition of a celebrated if little-felt name on a conception shaped
largely independently of that name. The question is tied up with one
to which I had occasion to refer earlier, namely, whether the play is
likely to have been performed in the theater at all. Neither question
can be answered definitively. It remains only to acknowledge that a
masque must operate with known symbols, even if the content that
is poured into the symbols is so new as to make likely misunder-
standing and doubt.
Once all harshness, all compulsion and violence outside man, has
been centered in the image of Zeus, the writer has a freer hand in
portraying more concretely the sympathetic component in nature.
Near the end of the play Hermes pictures for us, and Prometheus
prophesies and then describes, the turmoils of nature which are
to accompany his downfall. Because Zeus and, to a lesser degree,
Hermes have attracted to their persons the obstructive and merciless
aspects of the universe, the convulsions of Earth and winds and
waters turn into expressions of grief rather than triumph. Even in
his greatest suffering Prometheus has the comfort of knowing that
brute nature, barring sheer necessity, is tormented as he goes down.
The Oceanids underscore this compact, through their last-minute re-
jection of the appeal of Hermes and through their resolution to join
the hero in his throes. In the end civilizer and nature move in unison,
against the retarding force of cosmic lethargy: an auspicious message,
in the spirit of the enlightenment which posed the problems of the
play.
Can we go further in our attempt to read a precise meaning into
the balanced symbols of the work? It might be suggested that Zeus
is, in a manner of speaking, the creature of Prometheus. After all
only a thinker is capable of recognizing and formulating the laws
or the special quality of lawlessness which marks the obduracy of
the cosmic automatism. Perhaps that is the notion which underlies
the report, to which Prometheus reverts again and again, that he
helped Zeus to power, for this is a feature of the myth of which there
is hardly a trace in the tradition on which Aeschylus drew. Now the
kingmaker has been discarded, and he dreams of seeing the downfall

of the power he helped to create; an idle dream, but typical of the in-
tellectual's malaise at recognizing and resenting the forces he has un-
covered. The bonds and wedges fixing Prometheus to his rock are
ultimately self-imposed; the anvil on which they were forged is of his
own ambitious devising.
Man, civilized man, is impotent. But in his weakness he has one
consolation which restores meaning to his life and sets him above the
gods: he has his choice, his accountability, his moral freedom. The
exercise of intelligence is, to be sure, ineffectual in its collision with
the will of Zeus. But it is necessary and dignifying; it is founded on
insights and liberties unknown to the god. When Prometheus says
to Ocean, who at that moment acts as a spokesman for Zeus (330):
I envy you your chaste immunity,
he is being heavily ironical. The agent incurs a responsibility, and
therein lies part of his satisfaction. Action is the end of life-—at least
this is what the Greeks seem to have felt prior to the advent of the
Hellenistic philosophies—but action entails accountability. Mechanical
nature, the irresponsible gods, those "who have no accounts to render,"
as the writer puts it with strong political emphasis, are victorious, but
there is no substance in their victory. As in the Homeric epic, a god's
triumph can only be frivolous or petty. It is won without a conscious-
ness of effort, without the risk of defeat and death, and the god has
no cause beyond the mere fact of his existence to give the triumph
its meaning. Ocean has his griffin, Prometheus will have his eagle.
The difference between the amusing, unessential plaything and the
hurtful companion, deliberately elected, repeats in the visual realm
what we learn from the speeches of the opponents.
It may be asked why Aeschylus does not put Zeus himself on the
stage. A play about two antagonists in which one does not appear
in his own person but is rather unenthusiastically represented by
emissaries is an oddity on the Greek stage or any other stage. Analogies
could perhaps be cited from the modern theater, plays in which a
character struggles in vain against a code or a combination of forces
which eludes his control. But the comparison is not quite proper, for

76 Prometheus Bound
in these modern tragedies—the works of Ibsen, Hauptmann, Arthur
Miller come to mind—the unconquerable element is not seen as a
personal adversary. Hence it is not expected to emerge into open
view. In those plays—Goethe's Faust is an instance—in which the op-
posing force is visually caught in a specific mask, usually one taken
from mythology, the mask is, as a rule, manifest on the stage. The
Devil is a member of the cast. Why did Aeschylus avoid a similar
commitment? There are two answers, closely related to one another,
to account for the latency of Zeus. We must remember that the Zeus
of this play bears little resemblance to the Zeus whom the Athenians
knew from their epics and their civic rites. To bring him out into
the orchestra would have meant evoking a conventional response which
could only corrupt the meaning carried by the hidden tyrant. Again,
the impact of his descent to earth would no doubt have blunted the
effect of Prometheus' own tortured epiphany. The playwright wishes
to exalt the hero; for the benefit of Prometheus' standing we must
be satisfied with a lesser representative of necessity. Only thus can
man's achievement in the face of an unfeeling, unpotential world
blocking progress and creativeness be put in the proper focus. In Faust
the hero is continually on the verge of losing his stage appeal because
of the lurid attractiveness of his opponent. In the Prometheus the cold-
blooded executioner, the abortive compromiser, the snarling op-
portunist cannot touch the greatness of Prometheus; by the scheme of
the plot they are puppets rather than agents, and lack the credentials
for a solid challenge.
But Prometheus is not entirely insensible to the provocations of
an Ocean or a Hermes. Particularly the latter, with his shrill petulance
and his brisk politicking, manages to rouse Prometheus to a pitch of
resentment and bluster which threatens to cost him the chorus'—and
that means the listener's—sympathies. Is the stridency of the mes-
senger god, coming as it does near the end of the play, dramatically
acceptable? That is to say, does it not tend to reduce the force op-
posing Prometheus to unduly minor proportions, and does it not pro-
mote in Prometheus himself a reliance on boasts and counterthreats
unworthy of the hero? In any event, is vituperation climactic?

Again, the answers will have to be deferred. Meanwhile there is

a further mystery connected with the status of Zeus. On several oc-
casions Prometheus remarks on the fact that Zeus is a newcomer to
the scene, a callow upstart, and compares the lateness of his ascendancy
unfavorably with his own old age and experience. Does this mean
only, as suggested above, that the scientist, in his struggle for the
control of nature, experiences necessity and harshness as the price of a
new dispensation? From the point of view of technological planning,
it is the "new" which cannot be absorbed into the area of control;
when the score of progress is cast and tallied, new difficulties, new
pockets of necessity move into view and endanger the planning. Is
that what is meant by the "youth" of Zeus? The answer is, Yes, if we
read the Prometheus Bound as a neat allegory of philosophical issues.
But the interpretation needs only to be mentioned to be rejected as
patently forced and awkward and improbable. What, then, is the
significance of the repeated stress on the youthful inexperience of
Zeus? If it were merely a mythological vestige, a touch of Hesiodic
color and nothing else, the emphasis would clearly be redundant and
misleading.
Before going on with this problem, one final question. If the
play, as has been agreed, is about the achievement and the suffering
of thinking man, why are all the characters, with one apparent ex-
ception, gods? A glance at Aeschylus* trilogy, the Oresteia, is in order
here. In the first two plays the action is carried out entirely by human
characters; in the third, men are almost driven from the stage by the
drama of the gods. The understanding is that in the Eumenides the
fate of individual men has become less crucial, and the social crisis
as such has moved into the limelight. The more a plot is conceived in
terms of general human behavior, the more openly the gods become
the dramatis personae. Where the action is presented as a struggle
between individuals the gods fade into the background. In our play
the issues stated or hinted at are so general that particular men, even
men of myth, could not have satisfied the requirements of the plot.
And yet, ironically, because the gods chosen are allegorical or used
allegorically, there is a danger of greater preciseness than might have
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78 Prometheus Bound
been the case if the writer had elected men to carry the burden of the
message. Oedipus, though a particular man with a clearly defined
history of his own, is in many ways more Everyman than Prometheus.
In Oedipus, in his ambitious search and his crushing truth, we can
see ourselves more readily than in the undaunted intellectual ardor of
Prometheus. But then, this is not a play about Everyman, but about
a narrowly defined species of man, the fifth-century intellectual, pro-
claiming the cause of progress and the ameliorability of man's estate.
Still, the story is that of a class, of a movement, not of an individual;
and so the players are gods, not men.
It should be added that this sharpness of outline, the allegorical
perspicuity of the mask of Prometheus, contains an element of danger.
The clarity of a character or a situation might detract, in the imagina-
tion of the audience, from its reality. Life is not clear, it does not easily
resolve itself into philosophy. Hence, to maintain the illusion of
reality, the original allegory has to be softened and even obscured, in
various ways. As we shall see, Aeschylus, fully conscious of this de-
mand, does indeed erase the fixed outlines of the intellectual image he
has created. He performs this erasure with such vehemence that he
manages to transform the divine characters, certainly Prometheus,
into full-blooded complex human organisms. At the same time, the
advantage of having gods, with their greater universality and their
acknowledged impressiveness, remains effective. Their presence indi-
cates that the play is concerned with more than one incident in the
lives of heroic men, and that the action transcends the works and the
failures of any one individual.
Why, then, is Io mortal? Why does the writer disrupt the divine
homogeneity of his drama with the interpolation of a human being?
Actually Io is not mortal in the sense in which Antigone or Jocasta
or Helen or St. Joan are mortal. Her hybrid nature lifts her above
the concretely experienced, empirical run of women. She is the female
counterpart to a horned river god, and in fact daughter of a river
god, and bride of Zeus. By comparison with the great ladies of the
Homeric pantheon, with Hera and Athena and even Aphrodite, she
is of course a humble mortal. Still, considering the allegorical ob-

jective he had in mind the poet was wise to choose her, with her
ephemeral trappings, rather than a canonical Homeric deity. What
true goddess available to a Greek author could have suitably embod-
ied the qualities of unreason and insecurity which needed to be for-
mulated? Whatever might be said about the virtues and vices of the
female inhabitants of Olympus, they are supremely intelligent. A
mere girl, therefore, it had to be. But her connections and the miracle
of her peregrinations make her into something that is more than a
mere girl. Visually she resembles the daughters of Ocean, to whom she
is tied through her youthful maidenly innocence and her want of
stability. The only thing which sets her apart from them and from
all divine creatures is her capacity for suffering, and in this she is
linked with Prometheus. Thus Io is as much more than human as
Prometheus is less than divine. They meet, and in their seemingly
accidental meeting, a meeting neither well motivated nor organically
developed, they embody the sufferings of humanity in its full exten-
sion from savagery to civilization, from pastoral nomadism to city
refinement, from eidetic involvement to the rule of the intellect.
iv
I began this essay by trying to analyze the
Prometheus Bound as a sort of manifesto, a philosophical tract, alle-
gorically sketching the position of man in the modern universe, ac-
claiming his heroism and lamenting his weakness, through the broad-
ening and concretizing mechanism of a masque. It is important for a
treatise to carry a discoverable meaning, to present a pattern sufficiently
transparent to allow reason to reflect on it and to find her special
laws properly observed. This is, to a certain extent, true of the play.
We can, and should, read it as a document recording certain trends in
fifth-century Athenian thought, simultaneously corroborating the val-
ues of the enlightenment and combating its claims. The form is ap-
propriate; heraldically set speeches alternate with shorter stretches of
a dialogue without adornment, even prosy and garrulous. The dra-
matic machinery often creaks; the writing shows a romance-like un-
concern for the motivation of dramatic climaxes. Generally speaking,
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80 Prometheus Bound
the tragic vehicle seems, at first glance, to be little more than an editori-
al cloak for material of an entirely different order. In a treatise the
units of meaning are plotted so carefully and so perspicuously that
the imagination requires no additional impetus to organize them for
itself in a balanced arrangement. The main purpose of a treatise is to
achieve a sense of order, and to bring about a situation in which few
major questions remain unanswered and no significant ends are left
undisposed. It is difficult to say how a genuine tragedy could be fash-
ioned from matter which affords so little scope for mystery and dis-
quietude. What, then, saves the Prometheus Bound from being just a
treatise, in spite of its frequent baldness and its lack of native mo-
mentum?
We have already noted several occasions on which the interpreta-
tion of the play as a tract failed to solve certain puzzles, or where it
made for new puzzles in its turn. The age of Zeus, the status of the
oracular art, and the closeness of Prometheus and Io are some of the
motifs which an allegorical explication failed to illumine. It is hints
like these which assure us, if we were not already convinced by the
emotional impact of the drama on generations of audiences and prac-
ticing poets, that the Prometheus is indeed much more than a dis-
cursive broadsheet dressed up in the garb of a chamber masque. The
difficulty arises when we ask ourselves precisely how the play tran-
scends its function as a treatise. That is to say, by what means does
the poet succeed in creating a tragedy while at the same time preserv-
ing the allegory of scientific man? For the message evidently retains
its validity, whatever additional elements we may discover. I should
like to suggest that there are two main directions in which the play
goes beyond the semantic confines of the argument I have sketched
above. In the first place, there are several levels of meaning. The only
reason for not noting this earlier is that it seemed better to formulate
the allegory of science in isolation and thereby enhance its impor-
tance. And it does seem to me that this particular significance of the
drama is by far the most important, and one that the audience could
be expected to absorb more immediately than some of the collateral
meanings. But more than any other play in the Greek repertory the

Prometheus Bound dazzles with a multiplicity of significances, all of

which interlock and reinforce each other in a way that does not per-
mit paraphrase and that in the end defeats the allegorical intention.
Each reference by itself is tolerably apparent. There is a political
plane. Scene after scene we discover acute insights into the asym-
metrical relations of power, wisdom, organized institutions, and liber-
ating action. It has often been observed that many of the adjectives
employed in the running controversy between Prometheus and the
emissaries of Zeus are primarily political in color, and that Zeus is
throughout pictured as a conventional tyrant, at least as the fifth cen-
tury understood the nature of tyranny.
Then there is a cultural plane. In many ways the struggle between
Prometheus and the complex of forces which opposes him reminds
us of the historical struggle between Greeks and barbarians. Not only
is Zeus the tyrant another Xerxes—one fifth-century thinker is said to
have referred to Xerxes as "the Zeus of the Persians"—but the tribal
and regional names which the poet chooses as symbols of uncivilized
nature are generally taken from the contemporary Persian orbit. By
the time of Aeschylus the Greek fiction that to be a non-Greek is to be
not quite human, or human only in a superficial sense, had fully es-
tablished itself. Equating uncivilized nature with barbarian mores
had become a staple of public poetry, in spite of the occasional re-
minders by more historically oriented writers that Persia and Egypt
could look down on Greece as a newcomer in the ranks of civilized
nations. Prometheus is a Greek; Zeus, as the writer uses him, and
Ocean and his daughters are not. The girls may perhaps sympathize
with the hero's position; but they cannot really understand his mis-
sion. A cultural gulf separates them from him.
Finally it is possible to single out the sexual references at which
I have only hinted. The juxtaposition of rational active man with non-
rational passive woman carries our imagination beyond the scientific al-
legory and lends comfort to the masculine conservatism of the Atheni-
an audience and, I dare say, of most modern audiences also. On this
score the Prometheus has a remarkably old-fashioned ring, for one of
the surprising things about Attic tragedy is the scope given in many of

82 Prometheus Bound
the plays to female enterprise and female independence. Our play does
not feature an Antigone or a Clytemnestra; the male element stands
unchallenged in its place of power and strength. Themis is little more
than a shadow on the horizon, an abstraction without notable effect on
the dramatic action. The war is a war between males.
It is the critic's privilege to uncover these various nuclei of reference
and to study them in isolation from one another. In the play, of course,
they are not separate; cultural, political, and other symbolisms nudge
each other and overlap, to the advantage of one or the other of them.
But mostly the full response generated by the action is not narrowly
geared to this or that reference alone. The multiplicity of levels of
meaning and the mixed quality of the responses help to mitigate the
meticulousness of the logic, and to preserve the impression of a sig-
nificant opacity which might endanger the success of a treatise, but
which a tragedy needs.
So much for planes of reference. The other factor helping to free
the play from the shackles of a too ostensible meaning is no less
obvious. Beyond the various analyzable themes there are nonprogram-
matic factors; they do not share in a straightforward symbolic inten-
tion yet are powerfully operative in shaping the effect of the drama.
To cite one example: the interplay between stillness and motion, the
purely visual impact of the motionless hero standing as one crucified,
engulfed by the billowing blue gauze of the ancient Rhine Maidens,
generates an impulse of its own far in excess of any demonstrable
moral which it might be thought to enhance. Another instance of the
nonprogrammatic ingredient in the total texture is the residue of the
mythological tradition. We have already noticed that certain features
of the plot seem to be due to an acceptance of ancient tales even
where the terms of the tales threaten to conflict with the ends of the
allegory. We shall come back to this directly. Then there is the fact of
Prometheus' wrath. Like the wrath of Achilles or Lear or Kleist's
Michael Kohlhaas it is not the type of anger which interests social
scientists, a natural and predictable reflex stimulated by and commen-
surate to an injury received. In its monumental and shocking violence,
and in its incongruity rising as it does from the heart of the ' 'thinker"

Prometheus, the anger belies any easy moral that might be drawn, and
brings back into the play that more significant obscurity which assists
us in getting past the barriers of a discursive meaning. "Brings back"
is, of course, said from the point of view of the critic whose limitations
have compelled him to approach the drama from only one side. In
reality this enriching obscurity is part of the essence of the play
from the beginning. Unfortunately it is more difficult to discuss the
principles and the modes of this aspect of the tragedy than it is to
reduce the action to the units of a debate.
The final scene of the Prometheus Bound may serve as a convenient
sample of the interaction between meaning and nonmeaning, of the
disturbing and exalting influence of alien factors on the terms of
the allegory. In that last scene we learn, from the words of the hero
which echo his introductory recitative, that untamed nature is in an
uproar of indignation ( 1 0 8 1 ) :
The ground is shaken;
the low crash of thunder bellows
close by, the fiery scrolls of lightning
blaze aflame, whirlwinds wheel
their dust . . .
Such are the turmoils of nature as it watches the hero disappear into
the depth. That these are indeed tokens of compassion and fellow
feeling is put beyond question by the declaration of solidarity issued
by the Oceanids just before the elements are stirred up. At the same
time the upheaval may also be understood as punishment, as the back-
lash of the crude elements against the man who wanted to tame and
control them. That is the interpretation which Hermes puts on the
scene when he prophesies it some time earlier ( 1 0 1 4 ) :
Consider, if you do not trust my words,
the irresistible attack of storms
and waves upon waves of ills which will beset you.
Hermes' perspective cannot be dismissed. The unleashing of the
natural forces symbolizes both sympathy for the hero and resistance to
his purpose. Two planes of significance clash and merge in an irration-

84 Prometheus Bound
al mixture. Furthermore the unrestricted fury of the physical powers

is not only the setting within which the hero stands and against which
he braces himself. It is also an external realization of the torment
within his soul, of the anger and confusion which mark the limits of
his allegorical personality. The sheer theatricality of the final burst
and collapse—whether engineered on the stage or simulated in the
rhetoric of the verse—goes, in its effect upon the imagination, far be-
yond any demonstrable programme. What starts out as a description
of the suffering of knowing man in and with and against nature, ends
up as an autonomous act of total strife and destruction. The world
goes under; the triple statement, once by Hermes and twice by Pro-
metheus himself, secures the feeling of inevitability.
Zeus also is a richer symbol, a less transparent personality than I
have made out. To be sure, Zeus is the world as seen in a certain way,
he stands for the senseless agencies which, in response to man's
search for beauty and truth and loving comfort, concede an inch only
to repossess a mile. But Zeus not only "stands for" one thing or an-
other, he is, in a personal and immeasurable sense. However fully
we explain the role of Zeus in this masque of thinking man, there
is always something left over, and that remainder, difficult to analyze
and tally, helps to lift the play above the level of a treatise or mani-
festo* Perhaps the most striking instance of the philosophical awkward-
ness of the figure of Zeus is his relation to the dark maternal powers
of a bygone age ( 5 1 5 ) :
CHORUS: Who is the helmsman of necessity?
PROMETHEUS: The Destinies' trio and the mindful Furies.
CHORUS: Then would you say that Zeus is not as strong?
PROMETHEUS: He is committed to his destiny.
Not even Zeus can escape the necessity embodied in these dark ab-
stractions. Nothing is said elsewhere in the play to suggest that this
is a private opinion or wishful thinking on the part of the hero rather
than a truth which the author wants to convey to the audience. Now
if we apply the standards appropriate to an allegory, this would have
to mean that Zeus, besides being necessity, is controlled by necessity.
Thus we pass beyond unambiguous conceptualization and enter into

the world of literature and art where paradox is at home, and con-
sistency, pace Aristotle, need not be a virtue.
The somber deities who are said to be stronger than Zeus are taken
from the mythological tradition, specifically from the panoramic
scheme of Hesiod, from that portion of his Theogony in which he
reflects on the vast interlocking variety of social and historical forces
rather than on the moral splendor of the rule of Zeus. They are part
of his catalogue of generations; they are not involved in the cosmic
trend toward Justice over which Zeus presides. The Furies are those
released by the deposition of Cronus and the Titans; the Fates are a
more general personification of dynastic transitoriness. Hesiod makes
an effort to remove his Zeus from the entanglement denoted by these
symbols; Aeschylus has no such concern, in spite of the ostensible uni-
versality of the god's might. Probably Aeschylus thereby reaffirms an
older connection whose partial obliteration in Hesiod remained un-
successful. In this reference to the authority of the Fates and the Furies,
therefore, we witness an almost automatic carry-over of myth, a
reassertion of the simple, naive, and vital beliefs of popular divine
lore, undigested and unreconstructed and, so long as we cling to the
code of the treatise, contradictory. But without these bedeviling
memories, without the disruption of meaning they introduce into the
work of art, what would we have?
We know what we might have. In 1773 Goethe wrote a play
entitled Prometheus, in two acts. First act: son rebels against father,
refuses to be his servant; a domestic drama. Second act: men and their
social problems; the first impact of death. Goethe dramatizes two
major issues, the issue of freedom against servitude, and the issue
of death versus immortality. In spite of its fragmentary nature and
the early date of its composition there is considerable merit in the
piece. The issues are clear, the language is unwaveringly true to the
issues, and the revolutionary zeal which then inspired Goethe cannot
but stir the heart of the most sluggish reader. But the clarity of the
issues, the unambiguousness of the meaning, in the end prevents the
sketch from being effective as drama, much less as tragedy. That
the history of the writing of Faust might also be called a history of

86 Prometheus Bound
the progressive obscuration of the issues and conceptions with which
Goethe started out, is fully recognized by all critics of that masterpiece.
Once we admit that denotative complexity and irrationality are of
the very substance of a successful philosophical tragedy, two items
which had earlier perplexed us gain fresh significance. It will be
recalled that Aeschylus more than once insists on the point that Zeus
is young and that his rule is new. At the time, we found that this
newness could not be stretched into a symbolic scheme without lapsing
into artificiality. Only the most ingenious interpreter could discover
an allegorical significance in the comparative ages of the thinker and
his enemy. But the fight of Prometheus will enlist our sympathies more
readily if the enemy is not ancient and legitimate but young and of
dubious authority. That is to say, the comparative ages of the two
characters are not part of the mathos, of the veiled meaning of the ac-
tion, but part of the pathos, the emotional persuasion produced by
the quality of the personal relations in the drama as drama. It is
important that the characters, however mythical or figurative, should
deal with one another as men. They should have their foibles and
encumberments as well as their specific and official purposes. We are
not only to understand their significance, but to glory and suffer with
them as ends within themselves. As human beings involved in a pain-
ful nexus they must not be referable beyond themselves. Even Zeus is
not exempt from this demand; if he were not for the sake of the
tragedy fitted into a system of subjective, nonallegorical relationships,
the struggle of Prometheus would perhaps touch our intelligence but
not our hearts. All this does not make our play a drama of character
in the sense in which Oedipus the King or Medea is a drama of charac-
ter. The tragedy does not flow organically from the interrelation of
the various personalities. Such characters as there are do not originate
the tragedy; they are designed to support a tragic mood in the face of
an abstract allegory. The masks have taken on some of the features
of the tangled skein of life; their hard outlines are here and there
broken and distorted as if they were on the point of transforming
themselves into living flesh and blood. The transformation does not

proceed very far, except perhaps in the case of Prometheus himself;

but the gain is sufficient to guarantee the desired success.
From this, further light is shed on the motif of the secret, the item
of knowledge hidden from Zeus. To begin with, it appeared as if its
fitful introduction into the argument was intended to infuse a sem-
blance of progress and suspense into a static situation. Now it may
be added that the secret is more than just a gadget to promote an
artificial suspense. Like the youth of Zeus, the secret is taken from
myth. We cannot be sure how well-known and important this motif
was in the tradition familiar to Aeschylus' contemporaries. It is
enough to note that Aeschylus recognized its usefulness and made
it a cornerstone of his edifice of human relations. If the play were
an allegory and nothing else, Zeus would have to be omnipotent. The
myth of the secret limits his power, it reduces his authority to a level
very near that of Prometheus, and by thus humanizing their relation
opens the scope for a tragedy. No mere abstraction of overriding
strength, the Zeus of the"PrometheusBound excites our interest and
even a modicum of sympathy for this one crack in his armor of om-
niscience, without at the same time giving up one iota of the cosmic
symbolism demanded by the allegory. Conversely, through his monop-
oly of the secret Prometheus ascends to the position of a minor Zeus,
jealous, highhanded, unphilanthropic—if we may extend the term
beyond the accident of mortality. And so his war against Zeus, that
unlikely victim of a conspiracy of silence, becomes sufficiently am-
biguous to accommodate itself to the needs of drama.
That the references to the Furies and the Fates are due to the same
cause should now be evident. No more forcible reminder of the person-
al limitations of the god could have been devised. It is characteristic of
the technique of the playwright that once again the humanizing touch
is taken from popular myth. Why is it that mythology is made to sup-
ply those elements which help the author to counterbalance the
theological or philosophical or moral burden of a drama? Perhaps,
of all the pieces of common knowledge available to him, only the
glittering escapades and the somber regulations of the divine tales

88 Prometheus Bound
were so familiar to the people that they could be digested whole and
unreflectedly, without jarring or compromising the meaning of the
material which they are drawn in to assist. That Zeus is subject to
Fate is a thought to which people had become accustomed through
countless pointed remarks in the Homeric epics and other classic
tales. To have this truth once more enunciated in the present play is
an effective instrument toward describing the "human" status of
Prometheus' opponent. At the same time, the reminder does not
arouse the curiosity or doubt to a degree which might imperil the
impact of the heroic message of the masque.
It may be useful, in this connection, to discuss the portrait of Typhon
(315-372) which most manuscripts put in the mouth of Ocean,
though the majority of editors follow our oldest manuscript in as-
signing the speech to Prometheus. It is difficult to say which ascrip-
tion is right. The answer depends on the answer to another question:
whether Aeschylus means to emphasize the lonely pride of Prometheus
or the conciliatory enterprise of Ocean, in this attempt of one of them
to talk the other out of a proposed venture of "rashness/' Fortunately
the dramatic ascription of the speech is less important than the fact
that it is where it is, particularly in this play in which statements are
not as closely attached to characters as they would be in a more con-
ventional drama. As it stands, the picture of Typhon battling and
overthrown merges in our imagination with that of Prometheus. Ty-
phon, the opponent of Zeus par excellence, the celebrated devil of
Hesiod's poem, here becomes a fellow sufferer. He dared to stand up
against the Olympians, he was defeated and hurled underground,
and now spends an eternity plotting revenge against his torturers.
The parallel with Prometheus is too close to be overlooked. Further,
there is a vision of Typhon eventually breaking out from his under-
ground chambers and once more hurling his weapons upward into the
sky (367):
. . . and then there will erupt
rivers of fire tearing withfiercejaws
the expansive plains of fruitful Sicily.
Such seething bile will Typhon belch up high

with red-hot bolts of hideous turbulence,
though burnt to ashes once by the bolt of Zeus.
The language of this vision prefigures another rout, the mysterious
emergence of the "wrestler" (920) who will toward the end of time
outcrash and outfight Zeus and thus prepare the liberation of Pro-
metheus. Within the imagery of the play as a whole, therefore, the
portrayal of the opening up of Aetna serves as a pictorial omen for the
humiliation of Zeus and the restoration of Prometheus.
But the choice of the sufferer also casts some light on the nature
of Prometheus himself. Despite the purity of his purpose and the no-
bility of his message Prometheus is in some ways another Typhon,
and Aeschylus manages, by his use of the myth, to enlarge the per-
ceptions of the audience. The theomachy of Prometheus has about it
something brutal, even monstrous. The intellect also, the light of
pure reason directed against the stubbornly natural, may, when em-
bodied in a human career, acquire feral dimensions. In the Tempest
the beastly is made comfortable, or at any rate endurable, through the
domestication of Caliban and the eventual self-mastery of Prospero.
In the Prometheus Bound there is no similar exorcism. The canons of
Aeschylean art stipulate progressive self-revelation rather than change
and evolution. The fierce streak which is part of Prometheus' being
remains with him to the very end, its terror tempered only by the
beauty of the rhetoric in which it is expressed. And because of this we
feel more closely attached to him than if he were a paragon of rea-
soned perfection. The brutality of Prometheus—we shall come back
to it—obeys the same purpose as do Zeus' blindness and subservience
to Fate. It ranges the enemies together in a concrete and familiar bond
which defies the allegory and authenticates their war.
We have already seen that the figure of Io is one of the richest
symbols in the play. Dimly we perceive that in spite of the obscurities
and the apparent irrelevancies of her part, her travels and her excess
of feeling signify a fulcrum for important aspects of the underlying
allegory. Nevertheless if she were nothing but a somnambulist of the
present, without memories and without beginnings, we would not
be satisfied. But she tells us that she was once a pretty girl, that she

90 Prometheus Bound
has not always borne her present monstrous shape. Hence we are
informed of more than a fact, a fixed pattern of behavior; we come
to know a history, a singular shifting course of human events. This
individual career, including the circumstances of her transformation
into animal shape, is useless and a little awkward from the point of
view of the meaning. In fact we note that Aeschylus decided to elim-
inate some features of the tale which might have obscured the mean-
ing altogether. There is, for instance, no mention of Hermes' role in
the killing of Argus, no doubt because it would have been embarrass-
ing in this context to feature Hermes as a protector of the oppressed.
But on the whole it is remarkable how much of the ancient story
Aeschylus retains. Moreover he endows the events pertaining to Io's
metamorphosis with an emphasis and a pathos which turn a tale of mir-
acle into a tale of wonder. The account of her sufferings shapes our
feelings; our pity proves that it is part of the tragedy, in spite of our in-
ability always to clarify its bearing on the significance of her role.
Thus pity and fear on the one hand, and insight and analysis on the
other, come to be mixed in an unlikely synthesis to permit the full
effect of meaningful drama.
Let me hasten to admit that the separability of the personal or
biographical elements, their lack of necessary connection with the al-
legory, imposes a special obligation on the poet. Obviously not just
any mixing of human relations and meaning will do. No technical
rules can, however, be laid down to facilitate the successful combina-
tion of the two, to show what kind of persons must be put on the stage
in order to create a drama with this or that message or moral. Success
in this amalgam comes with the spark of genius; it can be tested only
in the court of experience. Before the uniqueness of the achievement,
approved by generations of theater-goers and readers, literary criticism
can only demonstrate the fact. A theoretical distinction between an
amalgam that is properly incongruous and a mixture that is merely con-
fusing exceeds the limits of what is possible in criticism. All that
criticism can do is show that a drama in which characters and meaning
are completely harmonized must fail because it lacks the elements of
friction without which drama cannot be fully alive.

v
The time has now come to look more closely
at the conduct of Prometheus, particularly at those facets of his be-
havior which are not closely linked with the symbolism of the play and
which may in fact be expected to have little to do with it. More es-
pecially I should like to comment on a number of qualities which this
particular hero exhibits but which, it appears, are found again and
again in the more famous examples of European high tragedy. It is
a remarkable fact that many of the tragic heroes of Western literature
bear a striking resemblance to Prometheus. The resemblance may per-
haps be explained by the reminder that even today tragic heroes are
often conceived in the image of a theomachy, of man trying to assert
his individual and generic powers in the face of senseless and un-
predictable agencies. At the same time, when we think of the Aeschy-
lean Titan who braved Zeus, we are put in mind of a certain attitude,
a certain combination of gestures and feelings. More than any special
significance or intelligence, we recall the immediate impact of weight,
of truculence, and martyrdom. For most of us Prometheus is not a
symbol but a man, not an allegory but an experience visual, kinetic,
and emotional. It is this experience which, with countless variations,
has been duplicated time after time, until it has achieved an almost
archetypal status in the expectations of educated men and women.
It is, therefore, not amiss to attempt to define the ingredients which
have gone into the Aeschylean mixture of * 'Promethean'' man.
The last three lines of the play are in the form of an incantation
(1091):
O Mother, ever revered; O Heaven,
revolving the light that is common to all:
you see the wrong of my suffering!
With these words the play comes to an end, on a composite note of suf-
fering, loneliness, a sense of outrage, and a feeling which under more
ordinary circumstances might be termed "arrogance/' The critics
have preferred to call it "hubris," but the term raises too many ques-
tions to be useful here. These words of Prometheus echo his very
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92 Prometheus Bound
first utterance in the play ( 8 8 - 9 2 ) , but with an important change in

the grammatical structure. In the first episode Prometheus had called
on the natural elements around him to look on his sufferings:
O sacred heaven, and winged puffs of wind,
streams and their sources . . .:
see how I suffer, a god struck by gods!
Now, at the end of the action, he discards the imperative for the in-
dicative mood. He takes it for granted that his sufferings are being
witnessed; the stress is not on his desire for communication but on
his concern with himself and his tortures. But though there is this
change, though Prometheus is now apparently satisfied that he is
not alone but surrounded by compassionate beings, the similarity in
the wording of the two passages effectively neutralizes the advance.
In spite of the repeated attestations of solidarity on the part of the
Oceanids, both for their own persons and for the powers of nature
which they represent, we feel that the hero remains isolated. Prome-
theus the fire-bringer, the founder of social organization, the champion
of philanthropic intercourse, does not, in his own dramatic person,
know the pleasures of friendship or sociability. His mode of existence
is loneliness.
The stage setting of the Prometheus is the concrete realization of
an image which is found several times in the Iliad, but which is per-
haps most conveniently quoted from Sophocles* Antigone ( 5 8 6 ) :
Like a swelling of the sea when
submarine darkness bestrides it with foul Thracian winds;
it rolls black sands from the depth, and the cliffs
struck by ill winds roar in response.
In Sophocles' play the promontory braving the winds and resound-
ing to the breakers symbolizes the house of Laius buffeted by fate and
Ate. In Homer the image usually underscores the unique heroic
strength and stubbornness of the fighter hemmed in by his inconstant
attackers. It may be assumed that this personal application in Homer
was familiar enough to Sophocles' audience that it would refer the
simile to Antigone as well as to her family. In the staging of the
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Prometheus Bound the metaphor has become autonomous and en-
tered the world of action. Or rather, reality and trope are set side
by side in a novel arrangement. There is the cliff, the image of soli-
tary strength and pride, lapped by the waves of Ocean and resounding
to the hammer blows of an impersonal and unheroic hostility. But
then there is also Prometheus, surrounded by the Oceanids and re-
sponding to the voices of his tempters with a roar of his own. The
breakers are not all hostile; the daughters of Ocean certainly are not.
But Prometheus treats them as if they were; his special nature does
not acknowledge friends. Both visually and spiritually he merges with
the rock. Visually he towers high above the rest of the characters, par-
ticularly above the chorus. They cannot reach him, nor can he reach
them or reach out to them. Spiritually he is the rock. Brother of Atlas,
he raises up the sky and is punished for his benevolence. In the older
tradition both Atlas and Prometheus were associated with pillars
rather than mountains; archaic vase paintings show Prometheus
chained against a pillar. But pillars are ciphers of a settled world, of
urban sociability. Aeschylus prefers to place him against a rock; the
epic connotations of the embattled crag are exploited for a new con-
ception of the fire-god, a conception in which loneliness, merited
and self-imposed, is the dominant note.
This loneliness is not the ordinary sort, conditioned by time or
circumstance. Shelley's Prometheus is a Platonizing Stoic, sufficient
unto himself, hence not lonely. The hero of Aeschylus' play is the ideal
man of the fifth-century enlightenment, of Socrates and Critias and
the rest of the rationalists. Like Socrates he is unaware of the in-
completeness of his nature; unlike Socrates he suffers the pangs of
isolation. In the end the isolation forces him to surrender his brittle
intellectuality. At first the loneliness of Prometheus presents itself
as self-confidence; it springs from the intolerance of the thinker
who works for the good of his brothers but does not love them. The
thinker works alone and shuns assistance. But loneliness does not stand
still; it feeds upon itself until it becomes that "modern" thing, the ma-
laise of the intellectual cut off from the emotional springs of his being.
The more keenly the malaise is felt, the more stubbornly the hero

94 Prometheus Bound
fortifies himself in his solitary stand, rejecting mediation and rebuffing
old friends. And yet the anger into which he argues himself, the
passion with which he defends his privilege, are hints of an essential
compromise, of a range of experience first excluded and combated but
now readmitted. For Prometheus is, after all, more than a rock. The
edge of his resistance is not universally sharp; there is some crumbling
in the hard granite of his purpose.
In the end Prometheus addresses himself to his mother, Themis.
Social ties and family relations are important in Sophoclean drama
where the hero stands and falls with his house, where the whole life
of the character, including his acts and obligations as father or brother
or son, is implicated in his tragedy. In Aeschylean drama, too, the
hero is usually seen against the background of the house, and often
the fate of the house carries the fate of the hero along with it. But
intimate relationships between the various members of a family are
not fully dramatized. This is particularly true, of course, if the hero
is a god. That Prometheus should call upon his mother is not de-
manded by anything in the plot or by the character requirements of
the allegory. Nor does the tradition offer a precedent, unless we are
to regard the relationship between Achilles and Thetis in the Iliad as
a source of the filial appeal. Furthermore, the identification of Prome-
theus' mother, Themis, with Gaia, the earth goddess (209), intro-
duces an element of uncertainty into the scheme of the allegory. For
do we not think of earth as one of the elements which alternately ad-
mit and repel the progress of man? The most that can be said, once
more, is that Prometheus' call to his mother is not part of the treatise
but a commentary on the special quality of the hero's sense of isola-
tion. The family tie is etched in because it is felt to be one of the es-
sentials in a cultured man to have such associations of kinship, friend-
ship, and family. The conditions of Prometheus' achievement have
brought him close to losing even the most fundamental of these ties.
His appeal to his mother suggests that he has travelled a long distance
from the sheltered life where she would be with him spontaneously.
There is also an intimation that he has begun to feel his loneliness as
a burden which, in spite of his pride, he would like to reduce.

His passion, his cry to his mother, are important clues revealing
a Prometheus who is, notwithstanding his primary function, suscep-
tible of warmth and understandable as a man. But, granted these
humanizing touches, for the rest Aeschylus endeavors to formulate
the loneliness of the hero as an overwhelming and all-informing con-
dition of his role. At one point Prometheus says (197):
It pains me greatly to have to say all this,
but silence too is painful . . .
This is the dilemma of the lonely man who knows he will not be
understood but must talk about his deed and his reward to make them
live on and to assure himself of their worth. Technically there is no
necessity for Prometheus' being his own messenger; psychologically
there is. True, the type of the strong silent man, though not unknown
in the epic, is foreign to the Greek stage where even Ajax, traditionally
no mincer of words, practices the sustained rhetoric of the genre.
But the oratory of Prometheus is more than a consequence of the dra-
matic form. Dramaturgic convention and psychological portraiture
combine to produce a rhetoric which is not simply sustained but os-
tentatious and demonstrative. Deprived as the hero is of other forms
of expression, he is all speech, all lecture and remonstrance. But
speech is painful to him. His sentences and his descriptions are forced
from an unwilling heart; the philanthropist despises men too much
to consider them equal participants in discourse. His heroism, his
superiority, carries with it the necessary adjunct of contempt. He is
torn between silence and speech, with the result that the words which
he utters seem to be addressed to himself rather than to anyone about
him. Monologue and harangue rather than conversation: the pattern
is pervasive in the career of Western high drama. More important,
each utterance, conceived in a spirit of recoil and with the prospect
of an unattainable silence before it, betrays its status as a surrogate
by a special hint or inflection. Irony, bitterness, resignation, bombast;
these are some of the moods supporting Prometheus' speech, and
suggesting a fundamental disenchantment with speech as a natural
social commodity.
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96 Prometheus Bound
The hero refuses to be an Aristotelian man, with the citizen's
commitment to reasoned speech and to intercourse with other reasoned
speakers. Nor is this the only item which he would wish to withhold
from his fellows. He is jealous even of his sufferings. Whatever the
meaning of his role, the hero divines that suffering is a necessary
part of it, and that it is a suffering which transcends the treatise and
enters into the core of his dramatic personality. Hence he must not
share it with anyone else, and so Prometheus repulses Ocean when
that worthy dignitary offers to suffer with him (345). He raises a
wall between himself and others, always surprised at any initiative
they show, always convinced that they live in comfort and sloth and
flinch from exposing themselves. Here are his words to Ocean (299):
How did you have the courage to leave

the stream named after you and the rock-roofed
self-established caverns, to come to the land
where iron is born?
Unless the hero believes that the lives of other men are sheltered,
automatic and soft, he cannot persist in the self-imposed isolation
which gives him his strength to endure the "land where iron is born."
He must despise in order to act and suffer. It is this heroic mode, not
any calculable merit or status, which authorizes him to show himself
impatient and brusque to his associates, at least toward the men. To-
ward the ladies he is more polite, to the extent of addressing them by
name when they enter. They deserve consideration because nothing
is expected of them. The chivalry of the tragic hero, like the brutal
familiarity of the comic, takes for granted that in his scheme of
things women are insignificant. Men are potential rivals, heroes-in-
the-making, and need to be insulted and rebuked so that the unique-
ness of the hero remains untarnished. It is not an argument against
this rule that in many classical tragedies the women turn out not to fit
the part which the men have naively assigned to them.
Thus the heroic tradition, inspired and embodied by Prometheus,
makes for a self-conscious and recalcitrant principal, hard-pressed
by what he conceives to be his unworthy friends as well as by his

proper enemies. The artificiality of the self-dramatizing emerges most
succinctly through an element in the writing which is particularly pro-
nounced in the Prometheus, but which is not entirely lacking in any
example of high tragedy. This is the self-righteous apostrophe, the
charged epigram, not fully convincing in its succinctness but arrest-
ing and strangely satisfying, hurled in the face of disinterested or
uninterested bystanders. Emil Staiger has demonstrated the similarity
between the purposive drift of drama and the tension roused by the
expectation of the final line of an epigram. The history of tragedy is
full of such epigrams—"who loved not wisely but too well"—epi-
grams which are pregnant in sense, excessive in tone, and only rarely
adequate to the meaning and the force of the play in which they occur.
In them the peculiar blindness of the hero is interposed between
drama and audience. His self-revelation is at best a partial thing, and
usually misleading, for it focuses our eyes on the tortured pride of the
man, on the dramatic dimensions of his soul, while distracting our at-
tention from the total meaning of the play or even from the meaning
of his role within the play. But that is as it should be, for if an epi-
gram really had the power to tell us what the play was about or to
inform us about the function of the hero in the plot, the play would
fail to challenge our intelligence and our feelings.
The more revelatory such an epigram seems to be, the more we
have to be on our guard. Usually we can learn from it what particular
adjustment the hero has made to the tragic situation at the moment
when he utters the phrase, but little else. Prometheus picks up the re-
proach of the chorus and replies in the terms of the criticism (266):
Transgression ? Yes! But willed and unrecanted!
His mood of defiance prompts him to adopt the perspective of the
enemy camp and to stamp his act a transgression. To have it so
stamped supports him in his truculence. He would rather be wrong
than not be an agent at all. Perhaps, in his dogged desire for independ-
ence, he would rather be wrong than right. His noble wish for no-
toriety has nothing whatever to do with the meaning of the action
but is a special illustration of the heroic mood as such. The hero of

98 Prometheus Bound
high tragedy, in his loneliness and his thinly veiled contempt for
others, becomes a law unto himself. The moral order loses its stringen-
cy when applied to him, and in his pronouncements he may toy with
moral perspectives in a manner which appears to thwart the moral di-
rection of the plot. The struggle of civilized man against brute nature
is perhaps ambivalent, but it is no sin, especially within the framework
of fifth-century thought. Yet within the play the hero may find it
convenient, for the greater glory of his position, to don the garb of
the sinner, in the knowledge that men are inclined to bestow greater
admiration on a weighty transgression than on ordinary good conduct.
The moral orientation of the plot is not the only thing to be dis-
turbed by the hero's self-dramatizing. Before the entry of Hermes,
Prometheus predicts the dethronement of Zeus ( 9 3 9 ) :
What if he acts and rules for this brief time
as he wishes ? Soon his reign in heaven will stop.
Earlier (907) there is a more extended prediction of Zeus' downfall.
Some of the lines of the prophecy are difficult to fit into the scheme of
the plot. But it is important that they are all big and full-throated and
exultant. Prometheus is preparing himself for the scene with Hermes
in which he will need all his assurance to keep the lackey at bay. To
gather the needed strength he pictures to himself the fall of Zeus,
the humiliation and dishonor of the enemy with whom elsewhere in
the play he appears willing to strike some sort of compromise ( 1 9 0 ) :
He will dissipate his rugged wrath
and hasten to me in friendly union
as I shall hasten to him.
The question of whether Zeus will fall or not is irrelevant and even a
little ridiculous when one contemplates the meaning of the play.
That this question could have been asked merely proves to what degree
the utterances of Prometheus may, upon surface inspection, appear
to conflict with the symbolism of the drama and to undermine the
moral impact of the play. Only by imagining the fall of Zeus can
Prometheus muster sufficient strength for his interview with the emis-
sary of the god. We should not conclude either that the fall is im-

minent or even that it is effective as a hope. The epigram, which in

this case happens to extend itself to the length of an oration, defines
for us the momentary mood of the hero, and that is all. In any case
we would be mistaken to read into it a reference to a projected salva-
tion of the hero. Our play is complete within itself. If it was part of
a trilogy, and another play followed, we have at present no means of
discovering how the tragic complication was resolved. There are in-
dications that the resolution may have been in terms of mythology;
the figures of Hercules and Chiron are mentioned in the tradition as
helping in the liberation of Prometheus. If so, the resolution may
have been more apparent than real; given the deceitful stratagems
of living drama there was no need for Aeschylus to go back on the
message of the present play, which is that the struggle between Prome-
theus and Zeus is irreconcilable and eternal. Obviously Zeus cannot
change, for though, in the interest of tragedy, he has some human
characteristics, he is largely a symbol, and the reality which he sym-
bolizes is immutable.
So much for the epigrammatic formulation of Prometheus' stand
against Zeus. Similarly the mixture of ostentatiousness and agony in
the final speech addressed to the elements is typical of high tragedy.
The speech is proud because of, not in spite of, his defeat. He ends
as he had begun, drawing attention to the treatment he, a god, has
received from the gods. Prometheus would be lost if he did not have
his audience, and if he does not have one naturally, he manufactures
one, by hypostasizing the natural elements. There is nothing subtle
or spiritual about his extrovert exclamatoriness. His suffering is im-
portant to him inasmuch as he can thrust his tortures before the eyes
of others. Near the beginning of the action Prometheus cries ( 1 5 2 ) :
Why did he not cast me under the earth,

into Tartarus, limitless house of Death,
receiver of corpses . . .
that neither god nor anyone else
gloat over this sight?
Aeschylus is playing with us. He has Prometheus delude the audience

100 Prometheus Bound
and perhaps himself also with a seemly show of modesty and fastidi-
ousness. But nothing could be further from the hero's wishes than
solitary confinement. Only by being seen can he be tragic. His repeated
request "Look at me" is answered by the chorus: "We see you, Prome-
theus." Sight is important throughout the play; it is the spectator's
wonder built into the drama, converting personal relations into a net-
work of beholdings. This adds to the directness of what might easily
have been a rather abstract composition. The treatment of the story is
of the kind which has a special appeal to the senses. By fixing our eyes
on the towering figure of the hero we lull ourselves into forgetting that
the motives of his action may be less apparent. The hero insists on
being looked at rather than read about or talked with. Only by making
his role, his life and his sufferings, an object of sight for those whose
lives are less grandiose, can he be sure that he will gain the unreserved
and uncritical attention which the art of tragedy demands. No charac-
ter in a novel, except in one which deliberately emphasizes the visual
in imitation of drama, exercises the massive and unrefracted impact
which distinguishes the tragic hero.
This peremptory claim on the senses verges on exhibitionism. The
simple bravado that we find in Othello or Prometheus is not the same
as the bravado mixed with contemplativeness which Shelley's Prome-
theus, for one, entertains. If such a generalization be permitted, a
Greek hero exhibits a minimum of doubt and self-analysis and a max-
imum of vitality, manifested through the vehicle of uninhibited rhet-
oric. Othello conforms to the Greek standard, Hamlet does not. But
the pagan simplicity carries its own safeguard, which prevents the
bravado from degenerating into bluster. By way of contrast, and to
indicate the dangers of a superficial classicism, one last reference to
Goethe will be in order. In a poem written in 1774 and entitled
"Prometheus," he sees the hero as an arrogant youthful protester
against Jehovah, hurling forth rhetorical questions and punctuating
his message with exclamation marks: We do not need a god! Any
gods that may exist are to be pitied! The speech is bouncy rather than
confident, filled with a sort of frantic hilarity. The mood is that of the
young Goethe; in his later years the poet would no longer acknowledge

the iconoclasm and the spirit of self-indulgence which light up these

lines. There is nothing self-indulgent or destructive about the mood
of Aeschylus' Prometheus. He does not rejoice in his pains; he merely
advertises them. In spite of the anger and the truculence there is no
reveling in torture, but an almost disinterested yea-saying, and a manly
desire to hear himself echoed.
It is this special combination of Titanic incompleteness, of stub-
born longing, of pride proud of its fall without malice or pettiness,
which ensured the success of the Prometheus Bound in its own day and
which delimited the course of high tragedy for centuries to come, par-
ticularly in Roman drama and the Renaissance drama directly indebted
to it. These are for the most part nonallegorical elements, which have
little enough to do with the meaning or message of the play. We ex-
pect the tragic hero to exhibit a sense of outrage; we can open our
hearts to his protestations if the writer has done his job well. But if
we ask ourselves precisely what prompts his expostulations, what it
is that has hurt the hero, and whether he is fully justified in his com-
plaints, there are no easy answers, perhaps because the questions are
not meant to be asked in exactly that form. We begin to understand
why Aristotle, who counted the Prometheus Bound among the plays
worth citing, chose to discuss how the hero is likely to behave, and
what sort of person he is likely to be, rather than telling us what a
tragedy is about and what kind of issues are dealt with in it. We begin
to understand why he is content to analyze the formal elements, the
devices and manners and conventions of tragedy, rather than its na-
ture. In a tragedy the characters and their behavior are bound to be
bigger than the plot; and the conventions and machinery are likely
to clash with a proposed significance. We must expect some incon-
gruity between action and behavior, between meaning and manner.
Without this disharmony we should have an open book, a treatise, not
a tragedy. Precisely what this particular mixture of sense and nonsense,
to use the positivist jargon, must be, is the real and probably insoluble
task of criticism to discover. All that has been possible here is to point
out that in the Prometheus sense and nonsense collide in an especially
intriguing fashion. Tragedy does not communicate knowledge, as

102 Prometheus Bound
Plato recognized; it stultifies knowledge and makes our knees tremble.
At the end of the play, the audience along with Prometheus and the
Oceanids are hurled into the abyss of darkness and despair. But it is a
more substantial darkness, a richer despair, than we had known before;
the special mixture of the play, whatever it is, is vindicated, by its
effects.

ftacckae and JOM*
TRAGEDY AND RELIGION
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Appear, in the shape of a bull or a many-headed
serpent, or lion breathing fire!
Come, Bacchus, and with laughing face
coil the deadly rope around the huntsman
of the Bacchae, to be trodden under by the
women's stampede!
THUS THE CHORUS, immediately before the

messenger enters to describe the death of
Pentheus (1017). The invocation is signifi-
cant on many counts; for the moment we are concerned with the god's
laugh. "With laughing face" or "with laughing mask," the Greek
may mean either. The expectation is geared pictorially rather than au-
105

106 Bacchae and Ion
ditorily; the epiphany will be centered in the cast of the holy counte-
nance. But how are we to imagine it—that is to say, how did the Athe-
nian craftsman shape the mask of Dionysus? Did he mold it into an
archaic smile, gentle, refined, charmingly supercilious, the smile of
the handsome marble youths who died in the Persian Wars? Or are
we to visualize a Gorgon grin, a grimace of malformed jaw and lolling
tongue? Is Dionysus' laugh bestial or Olympian, subhuman or super-
human? The latter, no doubt, at least so far as the maskmaker is con-
cerned. The stranger is a handsome man, a pretty fellow, as Pentheus
readily admits (453), and an archaic smile would be just the thing to
create the visual effect of effeminacy. But if we can forget the mask-
maker and the stage and the awkward requirements of a physical pro-
duction, and listen to the poetry itself, the laugh turns out to be both
a smile and a grimace, a token of blessing and the sealing of a curse.
For such is the will of Dionysus.
In any case, the laughter is expressive of the gulf between god and
man. It is remarkable how few references there are in Greek litera-
ture, particularly in the epic and in tragedy, to men smiling or softly
laughing. We find much about derision and ridicule and triumphant
scoffing, the exultant shout which comes from the fear of defeat tem-
porarily diverted. Ancient man, in most of the tragedies, is too busy
seeking the means of safety or of greatness to achieve by his own
strength the equilibrium and the wisdom without which happiness
and gentle laughter do not occur. The sea laughs; a meadow smiles;
so will the god, on occasion. But man cannot unbend and relax, for
he lacks the unselfconsciousness, the simple assurance of the natural
being. Except in the escapist genre of the romance—and that includes
the Odyssey—men are characterized by toil (620):
Breathing hard he was, and sweat was trickling down his frame,
his teeth were clamped on his lips, while I, close by,
sat quietly and looked on.
This is how Dionysus describes the difference between the man of

action and himself, the breach separating human struggling from di-
vine unconcern.

TRAGEDY AND RELIGION 107
Divine laughter has nothing to do with sympathy or fellow feeling.
The god does not love his children, though the Stoics in a later genera-
tion talked as if he did. In classical Greek thought the love of God is
a matter of social distinction; God loves only those who are manifestly
successful in the temporal affairs of this world. Divine love is not an
axiom of theology but an explanatory concept ready to be cited where-
ever prosperity appears to be undeserved. Nor is the laughter of the
god a chuckle of amusement. In the Odyssey, it is true, Odysseus man-
ages to amuse Athena, but that is a sign of his uniqueness. Generally
the gods of the epic amuse one another but they are not amused by
the antics of men, and that is doubly true of the gods of tragedy. We
may contrast the post-Romantic conception of Zorba, in Kazantsakis'
recent Zorba the Greek, that Zeus smiles pityingly at the touching
weakness of women, and that in fact he turns philanderer out of a
mixture of sympathy and amusement. God is also a man, capable of
suffering and sensing the sufferings of others. But this is not what we
find on the Attic stage. Dionysus always stands apart from men; when
he smiles—and he smiles throughout the play—it is the smile of the
Sphinx, the icy mask of unconcern and abstraction.
Zorba tries to bridge the gulf between the divine tradition and so-
cial exigency. To find a fulcrum for his world of sentiment and
temptation he remakes Zeus into a figure mixed in equal portions of
Jesus and Don Juan. The Greeks of the classical period also were
faced with the same difficulty, how to make sense of their accounts
of the gods in the light of new social experiences, of the laws of the
city, of marital ethics, of the values of a progressive civilization. But
unlike Zorba, the Athenian of the fifth century B.C. is too enlightened
to allow his god the benefit of human affections, particularly of human
sympathy. Or, to put it differently, classical Greek tragedy does not
permit sympathy or fellow feeling to provide solutions for the tragic
dilemma. The gods do not willingly lower themselves to help men.
But, if we are to believe the old stories told about them, the gods
often behave as if they were the worst of men.
Apollo's fatherhood of Ion is a direct intrusion of the divine into
human life. As for the Bacchae, the myth has it that Pentheus and

108 Bacchae and Ion
Dionysus are grandsons of Cadmus. The presence of Cadmus on
the stage continually reminds us that the man and the god are blood
cousins. This is not exceptional; both Greek myth and Greek religion
range god and man in the closest proximity. Of Heracles and Niobe
we are given to understand that they were both human and divine. Of
Helen we know that she was a goddess before she came to be featured
as a mortal heroine. Amphiaraus and Brasidas and Alexander were
worshipped as gods though they had once, as everybody would admit,
been men. Man is potentially a god; and yet the gods are infinitely
apart. This is a paradox with which every Greek thinker worth his salt
came to grips sooner or later. Plato and Aristotle wrestle with it in
their discussions of the soul; the soul, they find, is both divine and
human, both immortal and subject to change. Here we have the basic
crux of the pagan creed, perhaps of all religion, but most pressing
in a society that worships heroes and recognizes deification.
All Greek drama to some extent touches on this ambivalence. But
usually the religious predicament is marginal, an element used for the
dramatization of other, nonreligious issues. Only occasionally, as in the
two plays under consideration, the question about the gods comes to
inform the very heart of the drama. In one thing, however, all plays
are agreed: the god must not be made to mingle with the mortals on
the stage. The stage is reserved for sufferers and potential sufferers,
and this disqualifies the gods, for, in spite of some thumping frolic
in the Iliad and the extravaganzas of Orphic myth, the gods cannot
suffer pain or grief, much less death. Hence when a deity appears in a
tragedy he is set apart from the other actors and the chorus, often tow-
ering above them on a raised platform. If the god were to be one of the
crowd, the effect would be comical, as is convincingly shown in Greek
comedy. Generally, also, tragedy features him only in the Prologue
and the Epilogue, outside of the dramatic action proper. Thus by vir-
tue of the conventions of tragedy the god is kept free of the pollution
of human involvement. The only extant play in which Euripides de-
parts from the tradition and puts the god on the floor of the orchestra
is the Bacchae. But even there he makes a distinction between the god

who speaks the Prologue and the Epilogue—the true and undisguised
divinity who has his epiphany on the roof of the palace—and the un-
earthly stranger who mixes and yet does not mix with the other charac-
ters. In spite of the disguise the audience knows that the stranger is
Dionysus. Actually, can we speak of a disguise? It is unlikely that
the Dionysus of the Prologue wears a costume and mask different
from those of the Dionysus in the play. The pretty face and the deli-
cate bearing were becoming recognized as important facets of the
Bacchic personality; in art, too, the majesty of the black-figure Diony-
sus was being replaced by the languorous elegance of the fourth-
century portraits of the god. If there is a disguise, then, it is one of
conduct rather than clothes. The god in the play seems to be human.
This is a daring attempt to picture the intrusion of the divine into the
human scene in the form of living drama. Whether it is unique we can-
not say; there were other plays about Dionysus, notably by Aeschylus,
in which a similar technique may have been used. But those other
plays are lost; for us the Bacchae remains an unparalleled experiment,
an example of what can be done with the traditional material and the
traditional forms by way of almost destroying tragedy as it is usually
understood. For in writing this play Euripides seems to come close
to creating the medieval mystery play. There is a critical widening of
the tragic frame; human heroism and human suffering appear to be
pushed into the background, and the miracle of divine being occupies
the center of the stage. It is perhaps significant that the Bacchae was
written at the end of the fifth century B.C., when classical tragedy had
run its course. But this is not to say that the play is anomalous. As we
have seen, Greek tragedy is a vehicle for many different ideas and
many different intentions. The religious focus of the Bacchae is merely
another realization of the rich potential of classical drama.
The stranger has no name. Even if he had one it would not be
understood. "Does anyone understand the name of something when
he does not know what the something is?" (Plato, Theaetetus, 147B).
He is a walking mystery, an unintelligible mask. He refers to himself
as a follower of Dionysus. But in the salient passages Euripides exer-

110 Bacchae and Ion
cises a great virtuosity to avoid a clear-cut statement of duality. Those

who know, the audience attuned to the ambiguities of the genre,
will understand that when the stranger talks about Dionysus he is
really talking about himself. Pentheus asks him (469) whether the
god "forced" him—that is his term for "possessed" or "converted";
the verb he uses also means "to rape"—whether the god forced him
at night or with his eyes open. The answer of the stranger, freely
translated "face to face," is in fact untranslatable. Suffice it to say that
he uses two participles of the verb "to see," one in the nominative
and one in the accusative case, but without the assistance of a personal
pronoun to apportion the activities distinctly and objectively. This is
verbal conjuring. There are more tricks of the same sort ( 4 7 7 ) :
PENTHEUS: YOU say you saw the god; what is his shape?
DIONYSUS: Whichever he chooses; it is not my decision.
Or again ( 4 9 5 ) :
PENTHEUS: Come, then, release the thyrsus; hand it to me!
DIONYSUS: You'll have to force me; the staff belongs to Bacchus.
Compare also: "My locks are those of Dionysus" ( 4 9 4 ) ; "The god
will free me whenever I wish" ( 4 9 8 ) ; "In injuring me you are im-
prisoning -hint' ( 5 1 8 ) . The effect of all this is that in the minds of
those who are alert to the divine charade, the stranger and Dionysus
merge into one, as indeed they are one. In the unseeing eyes of Pen-
theus, the stranger produces the worst kind of mystification. But with-
out some mystification a god cannot show himself on earth. Like an
oracle, an embodied god must hedge his divinity with darkness and
punning and formal proliferation. At any event, in spite of the tricks,
the stranger does not become sufficiently part of the human scene to
appear just cunning or deceitful. With his fixed smile he preserves
his separateness and a kind of sublimity which even Pentheus can
sense.
In the Ion Apollo does not show his face at all, neither within the
drama nor in the Prologue or Epilogue. And no wonder, for a sover-
eign god in a tragedy ought to be shown as an august species of ma-

chine, colossal, imperious, automatic. But this will not do for Apollo
the cosmic rake, the morganatic spouse of Creusa. So Euripides keeps
him off the stage and has him represented by counsel, Hermes, a poor
cousin, and Athena, a cheerful suffragette. Both of them are at best
halfhearted advocates. Behind the expressions of solidarity and the
diplomatic explanations one perceives a note of detachment, as if
Hermes and Athena were not in their hearts convinced that Apollo
has a case. Of course he doesn't; that is the burden of the play. And
not having a case he forfeits bail and stays away from the courthouse
on the day of the trial. In the Bacchae much of the power of the play
derives from the presence of the god; in the Ion the important thing
is the absence of the god. Here, then, are two plays, both working
with a religious subject, with the intrusion into the lives of men of the
world of the gods, both dealing with the gods' cruelty to man. And
yet, how different in conception, in mood and form!
But are these religious plays, and if so, in what sense? We are in-
clined to think that the ancient repertory must include some religious
drama, for we suspect that religious tragedy is possible only in a pagan
world. Jewish monotheism has no room for it. True tragedy presup-
poses the unresolved coexistence of two opposed poles, of man and
god, or of god and god, or god and devil. No such coexistence is pos-
sible in the terms of serious Jewish thought. In the realm of Christian-
ity, too, tragedy can live only where pagan lingerings are strong,
where being can be pitted against being and where the outcome is not
foreordained by the omnipotence of the good. One may go further
and say that tragedy cannot flourish except where paganism asserts it-
self over Christianity. Some of Shakespeare's tragedies are obvious
cases in point. Goethe's Faust ceases to be a tragedy, if it ever is one,
the moment the Queen of Heaven begins to exercise her grace. But
if it is true that tragedy is uniquely a function of pagan thought, of
the belief in many gods and in the godliness of some men, then it is
only fair to expect that there is some ancient tragedy which is so
closely tied to the religious experience as to merit the designation "re-
ligious drama." Both the Ion and the Bacchae are about the gods and

112 Bacchae and Ion
their dealings with men. But are they religious tragedies in the proper
sense of the word, that is, tragedies arising out of, and only out of,
the problematic nature of religious faith or religious action, and grap-
pling with the problems in a manner somehow parallel to that of the
theologians or the philosophers?
The answer is that they are not, or at any rate that to call them re-
ligious tragedies pure and simple would do violence to the special in-
tentions of each. In the Ion the divinity of Apollo is the demonstrand
or refutand of a debate. With the telling of the myths Apollo's divine
nature has become questionable, and with it the whole tradition of
religious tales. A god is weighed in the scale of human standards and
found seemingly wanting, a god with a hamartia, &flawwhich causes
a disturbance in the lives of men. Euripides has managed to write an
inverted Oedipus, with the flaw located in Olympus rather than in a
now unheroic humanity. Apollo is the real object of the play's search,
he is not a symbol. But we should not forget that the Apollo whose
sordid biography we are invited to contemplate is an Apollo of myths,
a god of nursery tales and family trees, not the god whom Socrates
saw fit to follow and whom Plato adopted as the inspirer of moral
philosophy.
In the Bacchae Dionysus, in spite of his presence on stage, or per-
haps because of it, is largely a symbol; the entity weighed in the scale
is not a god, but men, as in all great tragedy. The precariousness of
human greatness is here shown from a special angle: the god-likeness
of man. For Pentheus, as a fighter against the god, places himself on
the same level as his adversary. It turns out that this god-likeness is a
trap and a deception, and that man is not so close to God as he may
suppose. But this shows us that the concern of the poet is with man.
As we shall see directly, even the religious experience described, the
ecstasy and the hallucinations and the holy rolling, are not there as
ends in themselves but mean to tell us something about the nature of
man, man as a whole being rather than man as a worshipper. Thus,
strange as it may seem, the Bacchae is less of a religious drama than the
Ion is, and even the Ion is a very unusual specimen of the class.
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ii
In the Bacchae the action of the god is direct
and immediate; he touches the people and they respond. In the Ion
it is not the god himself who affects the characters but what is told
about him. As in the history of Herodotus we have here a distinction
between what the Greeks call ta onta and ta legomena, between things
which are and things which exist in reports, between reality experi-
enced at first hand and reality mediated by word of mouth and pon-
dered and analyzed. Both can be shattering in their effect. Some critics
have said that the Ion deals with a rape, but that the plot is not sordid
or squalid because the rape is committed by a god. One wonders
what Xenophanes or Plato or Voltaire might have said to this. The
truth is that the reality which sets the plot going is not a rape but
the memory of a rape. The characters are affected, more or less di-
rectly, by a memory; their revulsion—and such it surely is—is not
aesthetic, but intellectual and moral. It is of course true of all Greek
tragedy, in contradistinction to that of Seneca, that it bypasses the
bodily senses and makes its appeal to the imagination. Like death, a
rape must not be communicated directly. To preserve the intended ef-
fect it must be stripped of its accidents and be entrusted to a mes-
senger, who will unfold its essential magnitude. In the messenger's
telling, or in the evocation of the memory, the rape attains an ideal
status, and acquires the special purity which comes with isolation. At
the same time this ideal concentration is brought about at the cost of
material force. The rape does not shock, it merely worries and per-
plexes, and in the end generates questions as the viewing of the gross
event could not have done.
Likewise the disappointment within the play is not so much for
what Apollo has done or not done, but largely for what he has said or
not said. He is a cad, but more important, he appears to be a liar.
Again it is the intellectual phase of the problem which interests the
poet. Apollo's failure to speak the truth is particularly disconcerting
because he is supposed to be the exponent of oracular truth. Above all,
this must be disturbing to Ion, the unspoiled youth, simple and good

114 Bacchae and Ion
and credulous like Daphnis or Candide or any other adolescent hero

of romance, with this distinction that he grows up to be a man. Ion
thirsts for the truth, and in this he is more Apollinian than Apollo.
He expects his god to behave like a god. As a matter of fact his ex-
pectation is unwarranted. If you have been raised on the kind of tales
which Ion is bound to have heard from earliest youth, it is unrealistic
to suppose that the gods do not lie and commit adultery. As it turns
out, even this faithful servant of the god does not require much evi-
dence to turn against his idol. The tales had conditioned him, and the
present intelligence comes as a final confirmation. True, Euripides
makes out that he is an unsuspecting youth and that Creusa's tale shocks
him to the marrow of his bones. But Greek tragedy with its large-scale
compression does not leave much room for a precise recording of the
slow process of attrition which is involved in the overcoming of piety
by doubt. Hence Ion begins to doubt as soon as the tale is out, and this
makes psychological sense only because the speed with which his
conservatism succumbs has its analogue in the hearts of the audience.
Ion, like Creusa (1017), likes to think that the good and the bad do
not mix. But he is an intelligent boy, and so he is quick to notice it
when he finds Apollo offending against the canons of his strait-laced
morality ( 4 3 6 ) :
What is happening to Phoebus?
I must admonish him. To ravish young girls
And then betray them? To beget sons in secret
and callously let them die ? No! As our lord,
you ought to set an example . . .
Outwardly the Ion shows the same development as the Oedipus Rex:
progressive self-recognition accompanied by an increasing insight into
divine irresponsibility. But the analogy is trivial. For Oedipus the ex-
perience is deadly; it destroys his very being as a king and a man. In
the Ion the knowledge gained is not ruinous but merely frustrating.
Frustration is one of the keynotes of the play; at one time or another
all the main characters are made to fret over the obstacles in their way.
Even Hermes, ostensibly an uncommitted bystander, is subjected to

frustration, for the play does not come off as he had predicted in the
Prologue (69):
When Xuthus enters this oracular shrine
Apollo will hand him his own son, and say
that Xuthus fathered him, so the boy will go
to Athens and Creusa accept him, and
Apollo's wenching will not come to light.
Everything said about the gods tends to associate them with meanness
but even more with ineffectualness. Apollo is a bounder, and with
him the gods in general are reduced to a low level of force and au-
thority. With little respect for human feelings, they try to arrange
things as smoothly as they can, and fumble their operations. The ac-
cent is on the fumbling rather than on the intention. Eventually Ion
and Creusa and Xuthus turn out to be luckier than the gods, for their
mistakes are righted and their blindness is cured, while Apollo, in spite
of Athena's busy glossing, could not possibly forget all the botching
he has done. One may feel, though Ion does not, that a god has the
right to offend against human moral standards. But clearly a god
should be able to follow through with his actions and not have his
plans aborted. His rape of Creusa still leaves him a god; but this can-
not be said of his various ill-fated attempts to cover up the affair.
Ion's discovery of his parentage is also a process of maturation.
Within the confines of the play the boy grows up to be a man. But
the mature Ion is no more understanding than the boy, only less at
ease with himself and less at ease with others. The simple, slightly
domineering familiarity which characterized his relations with the
chorus (221 ff.) is replaced by suspicion and resentment. In the
Oedipus the acquisition of knowledge touches the hero's relation with
himself; in the Ion it affects his relation to society. This is true also
of other plays by Euripides. The poet is interested in the group, in the
interaction between purposes and wills and destinies, rather than in
the fate or the feelings of an isolated individual. Often we are given
to understand that there is no reason why society should not function
happily, that the intentions of men if left to themselves are quite

116 Bacchae and Ion
compatible, and that friction sets in only when the gods decide to in-
terfere and use men for their own amusement. That this is the case
in the Ion requires no demonstration; the idea that human beings
misbehave toward one another only at the instigation of the gods is
basic to the dramatic plan.
The idea is powerfully supported by the use of specific elements of
language and dramaturgy, such as the business of the Gorgon's blood
(987 ff., 1054). When Creusa finds her position threatened by Ion,
the availability of the Gorgon's blood suggests to her a way of elim-
inating him. That this is the heavy hand of the gods steering the
human agent is made apparent by the form of the scene. Creusa does
not simply say: "Here I have a vial with a deadly poison; let's use it."
Nothing so straightforward as this, for it would saddle Creusa with the
guilt. Instead she lectures the old man on a chapter of mythology. Pe-
dantically, laboriously, she conducts him through the labyrinthine
turns of the ancient story: the gods fought the giants at Phlegra, Earth
bore the Gorgon to help the giants, Athena killed the Gorgon and
used her dead form for manufacturing the aegis; later when Erich-
thonius, the founding father of Attica, was born, Athena gave him
two drops of the blood of the Gorgon, stored in two golden capsules
now attached to Creusa's wrist. One of the drops heals, the other kills,
and this Creusa now proposes to use against Ion. Our brief summary
does not convey the true feeling of the passage. Extending over thirty
lines of text it proceeds with a slow, circumstantial monotony, as if
every single step in the chain of causation leading back to the holy
wars of the gods had to be fully cited to provide the plot with the
proper authority. There is something of the rhythm and the mood of
a ritual service about this rehearsal of the divine beginnings. Before
she can kill her man, Creusa has to communicate with the gods through
a sort of mock litany and assure herself of their participation.
Mythology furnishes many examples of the iniquities of the gods.
The Ion bursts at the seams with mythological detail, especially as af-
fecting the Athenian royal house. In the light of the stories about the
gods' dealings with Creusa's ancestors, Apollo's failure to live up to
his responsibilities becomes only the latest in a long series of divine
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mischief. The chorus begins by describing scenes from the fights be-
tween gods and giants and monsters engraved on the metopes of the
temple (206 ff.). Then Ion asks Creusa to tell him about Athens, and
she obliges with detailed information about earth-born Erichthonius,
Cecrops and his daughters, and Erechtheus. The Bacchae has nothing
like this mythological fullness, not even in the speech of Cadmus,
where we might have expected to find it. In the Ion the mythological
decor is pervasive, it is a significant aspect of the style of the play.
That style is perhaps best described as baroque. The writing and the
structure are not pared down to bare essentials, as they are in some
other plays by Euripides. In contrast to the unpretentiousness of the
action and the obviousness of the emotions released by the action, the
language is lush and gilded. Take the description of the woven
tapestries in the tent where Ion almost meets his death ( 1 1 4 6 ) :
And traced into the scheme there was a pattern,

the Sky marshaling stars in his bright vault;
the Sun driving his chariot near the glow
of dusk, with glittering Hesperus in his wake.
Black-mantled Night escorted by her stars
careened along in a two-horse equipage.
The Pleiades and Orion with his sword
coursed through the midway of the sky; high up
the Bear twisting his golden back around the pole.
The orb of the Moon, divider of the month,
pierced high into heaven; and the Hyades,
the sailors' clearest sign, and, scattering
the stars, light-wielding Dawn . . .
The description of the design on the tapestry continues. The transla-

tion tries to give a sense of the irregularities of syntax; the catalogue
seems to stumble along in a breathless and ill-organized fashion. The
significant thing about it is that all this is part of a messenger speech
which starts out as a call to the girls of the chorus to flee for their
lives. The terrible danger seems to be forgotten temporarily as the
girls absorb the colorful spectacle of the tent. There is no doubting the
lavishness of the decoration; expense is no object as Ion celebrates
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118 Bacchae and Ion
his new-found importance. But what do the sun and the moon and
the stars have to do with this phase of the action?
Again, take the design on the cloth in the cradle (1421 ff.);
Athena's aegis and the Gorgon seem to grin down upon the action
throughout. In this case the choice of the decor is meaningfully tied
to the plot. But the particular choice is less significant than the em-
phasis on the pictorial as such. This insistence on externals and, on oc-
casion, irrelevancies is a hallmark of the play. I suggest that the ba-
roque quality and the concentration on the gods are strands of the
same cord. For once, the life on Olympus forms the sum and sub-
stance of the drama. Homer is at his most colorful when he describes
the comings and goings of the gods. When dealing with men a
Greek writer must probe into their souls, into those intangibles of
choice and action which call for compression and abstraction rather
than for richness of color and expansiveness. The gods have no
souls, particularly the species of gods with whom Euripides is here
concerned. The life of the god is all on the surface; its meaning ex-
hausts itself in splendid appearance and tangible fagade. And when
the god under consideration is a busybody or a rake, when the life
placed under the lens is a night life, the tendency toward color and
flourish is given full rein.
But the analogy with the Iliad is not complete. Homer shows us that
the life of the gods among themselves has no real substance. They can-
not die, they cannot suffer for long, and so their actions and inter-
actions unfold themselves in an air of unreality, of weightlessness.
It is impossible to take seriously the threats of an Ares or the boasts
of a Zeus, for they are not supported by peril or doubt. As is well
known, Homer often uses his gods for something very much like
comic relief. When the human battle has reached its most critical stage,
when mortal suffering has risen to its peak of intensity and pain,
Homer changes the scene to the palaces of the gods and gives our
sensibilities a chance to relax as we watch the escapades of those
who can do all and risk nothing. In their affairs with men, on the
other hand, the Homeric gods ask to be taken very seriously. When

Athena counsels Achilles or when Poseidon rallies the Greeks to

resist, they become part of the human scene. Their personalities are
affected by the weightiness of the situation which prompts their inter-
vention. Not so in the Ion; here divine insubstantiality remains un-
touched even as Apollo descends to earth and performs his human
business. A god who is concerned with preserving his reputation in the
face of men, who tries to squirm his way out of the consequences of
an ill-considered act, is a god who makes us laugh so long as he does
not make us angry. The temple background suggests an aura of solem-
nity, but that is an illusion. The god of the drama is a funny god; and
that means that the drama, in addition to being unusually colorful and
extravagant in form, is unorthodox in spirit. In fact, it is not a tragedy
in the modern sense at all.
The touches of humor are, some of them, broad; others are more
subtle. Ion is perfectly satisfied with his lot as Apollo's spiritual son; in
his piety he refers to him as "the father who begot me" (136); the se-
quel indicates that he is using a liturgical metaphor. But as soon as he
finds out that the metaphor may not be a metaphor at all, his satisfac-
tion changes into displeasure. Every blue-blooded Greek counted it an
honor and a social necessity to be descended from a god, but it never
occurred to them to understand this fiction literally. Ion's scruples
coincide with the values of Plato's Symposium, in which we read that
a spiritual progeny is more valuable than a physical child. But put
in the mouth of this long-lost prince, such sentiments are bound to
amuse rather than convince. The old servant also contributes to the
fun. Creusa is not an Antigone, she needs an agent who will do the
plotting for her. But the old man is not one of those wise and trusted
counselors who direct the steps of heroes and heroines in other plays.
He is drawn as a caricature of old age and of doting zeal. He is so
ancient, so decrepit, that he can barely move his legs and has to be
pulled along the Sacred Way as if it were a perpendicular ascent
(738 ff.). And when he proposes to burn down the temple of Apollo
(974) he is a comic and therefore pardonable Herostratus. Compare
the Clouds, in which a somewhat different temple is actually burned,

120 Bacchae and Ion
in response to a heartfelt desire on the part of the audience. The old
man is a fool, but he is the sort of fool whom the people will suffer
gladly, for his recklessness is a comic variety of their own.
One of the prominent features of Greek comedy is the parabasis,
an address to the audience in which the members of the chorus disrupt
the dramatic illusion by divesting themselves of their role in the play
and talking about some topical issue which as a rule is unrelated to
the subject of the drama. The Ion, too, has its "parabasis." This is the
famous defense of women against the slander of unfaithfulness
(1090 ff.), part of a choral ode sung immediately after Creusa and
the old man have botched their plot. It is generally acknowledged that
the thought of this passage has no discoverable connection with the
theme and the plot, though Euripides takes some pains to pretend
that it has. True, Euripides uses such choral thought pieces also in
plays which contain no element of comedy. But here the lack of
relevance is more than usually startling. The stanza reads as if
Euripides needed to get this criticism of masculine prejudice off his
chest and decided that this was as appropriate an occasion for it as any
other. Similarly Ion's speech against the discomforts of being a prince
in Athens (585 ff.) is a forensic argument which moves off on a
tangent from the line of the play. Such ventures are possible only be-
cause the movement of the plot is not so compellingly aimed at an im-
mediate target as to spurn embellishment and digression. The baroque
brilliance of the drama leaves room for many things whose relevance
is questionable but which in their turn contribute to the total effect of
glitter and flourish and tumultuous fullness, of a kaleidoscopic world
which teases the understanding.
This, then, is a play which is not high tragedy, which does not con-
cern the inner man but god and society, which deals not with suffering
but with adjustment. Its characters fight not for issues or causes but
for survival and status. And the central character, who does not appear
in his own person, is shown up as an irresponsible weakling, causing
the human group dependent on him to forsake their decent ways for
plotting and trickery and, almost, murder. Let us call the work a
theological romance. As in the late Greek romances, decency is on

trial, and men are herded through a baptism of pillage and rape and
attempted slaughter before the hero and the heroine can once more
settle down in domestic comfort. But in the novels the gods are not
involved except to prophesy, to protect, or to punish. In the Ion the
god is cast in the role usually reserved for the villain, the pirate, or the
landlord who assails the virtue of the lady and sets off the chain reac-
tion of pains and revenges. In some romances, as in the Aethiopica of
Heliodorus, villains reform and turn into friends. In the pulp litera-
ture of antiquity this kind of conversion can be effected without much
ado; characters count for less than the extraordinary events by which
they are buffeted about, and the moral dividing-line between heroes
and villains is remarkably thin. In fifth-century drama an analogous
conversion must leave a residue of uncertainty and embarrassment.
Apollo, through his representatives, attempts to see to the happiness
of Creusa and Ion and Xuthus, but he comes up against the hard fact
that human beings are not as easily manipulated as the romances would
seem to suggest, and as the gods would like to believe. Men want
their dignity and their rights; they think back and forward and con-
nect the past with the future, and they worry if the accounts show a
discrepancy. So the conversion from ravisher to protector runs into
heavy opposition, and by the time the issues are settled the honor of
the god is smudged beyond repair.
But in spite of the absence of smoothness and cliches, the story is a
true romance. There is no tragic hero, and some measure of happiness
comes to all. Men have something to which the gods are largely in-
sensitive: kindness and sympathy. Oiktos, pity, is one of the key-words
of the play (47, 312, 361, 618); even the temporary renunciation of
pity, explicit as it is (970, 1276), testifies to the same emotion. In
spite of the murder plot, and though Ion very nearly commits sacri-
lege and matricide, there is more downright humaneness in this
play than in most other Euripidean dramas. The characters are civ-
ilized, generous people, easily injured, easily pleased, kind to slaves,
ready to worship. Their warmth and their charity shame the gods. In
the end Athena recognizes the strength of human benevolence. Ex
machina she recommends a deception, from humane motives: to have

122 Bacchae and Ion
Xuthus go on believing that Ion is his son (1601 f.). The whole play
may serve as a lesson that deception is often kinder than the truth. This
is also the strength of the myths. Intelligent people know that the
stories are lies or based on lies; at the same time they admit that the
myths have a civilizing force of their own. The gods whose bungling
and whose erratic ways are analyzed in this play are the gods of the
myths. Euripides has his fun with them, by mixing the divine with
the human, the mythical with the religious, thefictitiouswith the real.
It is hardly likely that a romance such as this would seriously affect the
faith of the worshipper. After all, the myths are myths, and worship
is worship, and though there may be a tie between them, to relate
them to each other as Euripides does is entertaining rather than disil-
lusioning, much less heretical. A play about the deeds of the gods and
their effects on men must, in the nature of things, border on the whim-
sical. It cannot be a tragedy.
iii
But does not the Bacchae show that this con-
clusion is wrong? Is it not about a god, and is it not a true tragedy?
Above I made a passing reference to the great contrast between the
two plays. The list of differences could be extended indefinitely. Ion
deals with a dreamy youth foiled in his endeavor to lead a contempla-
tive life: the Bacchae pictures a powerful man foiled in the conduct of
an active public life. In the Ion the contemplative life is frustrated by
scruple and doubt; in the Bacchae the active life is undone by raw ex-
perience. Both plays are full of irony. But that of the Ion is almost
genial; it produces the pleasantries that we associate with a comedy of
errors, signaling the fallibility of men and gods. When the incredu-
lous Creusa replies to Ion's command that she leave the altar (1307):
Go, dictate to your mother wherever she is!
irony reaches and perhaps overreaches the limits of good taste, but it
remains within the bounds of reason. In the Bacchae the irony is dia-
bolical; it reflects not questions of personal identity but the identity of
meaning and the problem of identity itself. The stage of the Ion—I am

speaking figuratively, for the real stages are of course indistinguish-

able—is filled with the clear bright light in which the metopes are
admired by the tourists from Athens (184 ff.). In this merciless light
the truth will out. It is the type of truth with which scholars and de-
tectives deal; as Ion says at one point (1547),
I'll go indoors to scrutinize Apollo,
using the verb which a historian applies to his research. We are confi-
dent that the truth can be discovered, and we expect its formulation to
be simple and straightforward; for the vision of Apollo is plastic
and limited.
The illuminatiofi of the stage of the Bacchae is that of the womb; it
is the darkness of birth and passion and death. Within this darkness
the fire of Semele, the flame on the house, flare up with a foreboding
sheen. Only the remoter vistas opening up with the messenger speeches
are filled with the brightness of day: a contrast which marks the inner
contradictions of the Dionysiac. In the Ion we hear the boy-grown-man
say (1517):
The incandescent ambience of the Sun
opens our eyes to all that this day holds.
It is the same Sun whom Ion greets when he first enters the stage
(82 ff.), and whom Creusa invokes at the moment of her greatest
happiness (1445, 1467). But the Sun had shone also on the scene
of her first suffering ( 8 8 7 ) :
You came to me, Apollo, your hair
shining with gold, as I was gathering
into the fold of my dress yellow flowers,
gleaming with a gold of their own bloom.
The golden radiance of the Sun is pervasive; only the catastrophe is
set in the chiaroscuro of the tent, with its artificial mirroring of Sun
and Moon and Stars on dark canvas. In the Bacchae, Pentheus asks the
stranger ( 4 8 5 ) :
When do you worship, at night or during the day?
The answer:

124 Bacchae and Ion
Mostly by night; there is prestige in darkness.

Finally, the plays are far apart in structure and movement. The Ion
is a lively play, spirited and intricate, full of heated discussions, songs
and arias, spoken exchanges of unparalleled length, extended mes-
senger speeches. Now and then an oration is interrupted by song or
chant, with chorus and actors performing responsively. Every formal
means of creating a complex and varied structure has been utilized for
the sake of the romance. There are surprises, reversals, true and false
recognitions, plottings and resolutions: all the baroque elements which
Aristotle desired in a tragedy and which to spite him are so much more
frequent in plays which are not tragedies. Here is one example among
many. Xuthus bids the chorus not to reveal what has happened (666);
a little later the chorus does just that (760). Fewer than a hundred
lines pass between the request and the expose. Meanwhile the audience
wonders whether the chorus will tell all, and when. This sort of sus-
pense and this sort of technical brilliance are completely absent from
the Bacchae. There the statement is terse, the pace regular, without
the rallentandos and the accelerandos of the Ion, without elaborations
or tricks, almost relaxed, if relaxation and compulsiveness can be said
to go together. The fixed smile of the god suggests they do.
In the Ion the early scenes of temple worship, of rites performed
happily and unaffectedly, are presented with great charm. As Ion ad-
dresses the broom on a note of homely camaraderie (112), the old-
fashioned identification of simplicity and excellence, of beauty and
virtue, seems securely established. We assume that the god is cherished
and respectable and pure—for the Prologue, though disturbing, can-
not by itself inaugurate a mood or a perspective—and repeated refer-
ences to pure speech and pure thought (98 ff., 134 ff.) lull our senses
into a false confidence. It is only with a violent effort, with a forcible
reorganization of our feelings that we can face the scramble which fol-
lows. The Bacchae offers no similar misguiding; the disaster hangs
over Pentheus from the moment he enters the stage. There is no rising
curve, no choral acceleration, no emotional ups and downs, only an
insistent heading toward the inevitable, formulated with economy
and restraint. Here, in the case of a true tragedy, Euripides chooses to

dispense with the frills, with dynamic and emotive refinement, and
come straight to the point. It is like a return to the hieratic stiffness
of the Seven Against Thebes. But Euripides goes even further than
Aeschylus in removing the action from the undisciplined ferment of
daily life. Both in the Prologue and in the entrances information is
given out mechanically and abruptly. Whenever a character enters—
Tiresias, Cadmus, Pentheus—he explains his status and his motiva-
tion, as circumstantially and undramatically as any clown in a Roman
comedy. This makes for a full spectral illumination from the start;
there is time enough later for dramatic confrontation. But it is not
the random rhythm of the life of the streets, or of a work of art cre-
ated in the image of that life.
iv
The Bacchae, like the Ion, is a tale about a
god, but that is all they have in common. The Ion I called, perhaps for
want of a better term, a theological romance. What, then, can we say
about the Bacchae? Earlier I suggested that it is not intrinsically a
religious drama. This flies in the face of certain critical assumptions
which have recently gained currency. It has been suggested that
Euripides' chief object in writing the drama was to give a clinical
portrayal of what Dionysiac religion, hence Dionysus, does to men.
According to this view, the Bacchae is a more or less realistic docu-
ment, perhaps an anthropological account of an outburst of manic
behavior, of a psychosis analogous to certain phenomena reported
from the Middle Ages and not unknown in our own troubled times.
The play has even been compared with a modern imaginative treat-
ment of mass psychosis, Van Wyck Brooks' Oxbow Incident. I feel
that this is mistaken, and for a very simple and obvious reason. What-
ever one may say about the ancient tragedians, about the extravagant
character of many of the plots, about the implausibility of much that
is said and done, the fact remains that the writers are interested in
what is typical, in the generic, or, as Aristotle has it, in the universal.
To attribute to Euripides a study in abnormality is to indulge in an
anachronism. Euripides is not the kind of dramatist, like Sartre, whose

126 Bacchae and Ion
poetic urge is stimulated by small grievances rather than catholic in-

sight. Nor is Euripides a scientific observer of sickness; he does not
record, he creates. His material is ritual and mythical, and some of it
clinical; but the product is something entirely different.
Pindar once uses the tale of Perseus cutting off the head of the
Medusa as an image symbolizing the act of poetic creation: living
ugliness is violently refashioned into sculptured beauty. The ferocity of
the Bacchae is to be seen in the same light. By an act of literary ex-
orcism the cruelty and the ugliness of a living experience are trans-
muted into the beauty of a large vision, a vision which is not without
its own horror, but a horror entirely unlike that felt at the approach
of the god. It is the kind of horror which Plato touches on in the Sym-
posium and the Theaetetus, the sudden weakness and awe which get
hold of the philosophic soul at the moment when she comes face to
face with a like-minded soul and jointly ventures to explore the ulti-
mate. Dionysus is only a means to an end; Euripides exploits the
Dionysiac revels to produce a dramatic action which helps the spec-
tators to consider the mystery and the precariousness of their own
existence.
Aeschylus, notably in his Agamemnon but also in some of his other
extant plays, appeals to the audience with an interplay of sounds and
sights. With Aeschylus, language is not an instrument but an entity,
a vibrant self-sufficient thing, working in close harmony with the
brilliant objects filling the stage of the Oresteia. The word textures
pronounced by the chorus, like the sentence patterns of the actors'
speeches, stir the audience as violently as the sight of a crimson tapestry
or the vision of evil Furies on the roof. Behind this sumptuous drapery
of color and sound, personality takes second place. The characters
are largely the carriers of images and speech. Sophocles introduces the
personal life, the bios, into drama. Now a man is no longer largely
the pronouncer of words, the proposer of ideas and emotions, but
an independent structure involving a past and a future, a point of in-
tersection for ominous antecedents and awful prospects. This emer-
gence of the organic character, of the heroic life as the nucleus of
drama, was a fateful step in the history of literature. Aeschylus also,

in some of his later plays, adopted the new structuring for his own
purposes.
Euripides goes further. He rejects the autonomy of speech as he
rejects the autonomy of the personal life; instead he attempts to com-
bine the two in an organic mixture of his own. In the Ion he gives us a
parody of the pure bios form; mythology is squeezed into a biograph-
ical mold, with unexpectedly humiliating consequences for the great
hero. In the Bacchae, on the other hand, it is in the end not the per-
sons who count, nor the words or sound patterns though the play may
well be the most lyrical of all Euripidean works, but the ideas. The
Bacchae, in spite of its contrived brutality and its lyricism, is a fore-
runner of the Platonic dialogues. The smiling god is another Socrates,
bullying his listeners into a painful reconsideration of their thinking
and their values. That is not to say that we have here an intellectual
argument, an academic inquiry into logical relations. That would fit
the Ion better than the Bacchae, Rather, the Bacchae constitutes a poet's
attempt to give shape to a question, to a complex of uncertainties and
puzzles which do not lend themselves to discursive treatment. There
is no clear separation of thesis and antithesis, of initial delusion and
liberating doubt, nor is there anything like a final statement or a solu-
tion. Nevertheless the poem is cast in the philosophical mode. Soph-
ocles, in the Oedipus Rex or the Ajax, takes a heroic life and fashions
its tragic nexus to the world around it or to itself. Euripides, in the
Bacchae, takes an abstract issue and constructs a system of personal re-
lations and responses to activate the issue. He builds his lives into the
issue, instead of letting the life speak for itself as Sophocles does.
The issue derives from a question which is simple and raw: What
is man? As Dionysus remarks to Pentheus (506),
Your life, your deeds, your Being are unknown
to you.
For Plato, the human soul is a compound of the divine and the perish-
able, a meeting place of the eternal beyond and the passionate here.
In the Phaedrus he puts the question more concretely. Socrates sug-
gests that it is idle to criticize or allegorize mythology if one has not

128 Bacchae and Ion
yet, as he himself has not, come to a satisfactory conclusion about his

own nature and being ( 2 3 0 A ) :
I try to analyze myself, wondering whether I am some kind

of beast more heterogeneous and protean and furious than
Typhon, or whether I am a gentler and simpler sort of crea-
ture, blessed with a heavenly unfurious nature.
The word that I have translated as "creature" is the same that appears
in Aristotle's famous definition of man as a "political creature," or
rather, as "a creature that lives in a polis." "Political animal," the
usual translation, is unfortunate, for in his definition Aristotle clearly
throws the weight of his authority behind the second alternative of
Plato's question. Man is not a ravaging beast, but a gentler being. But
perhaps Aristotle is not as fully sensitive as Plato to the difficulty posed
by the alternative. Is man closer to the gods or to the beasts?
Another question which is linked to the uncertainty about the
status of the human soul is: What is knowledge? Or, to put it differ-
ently: How much in this world is subject to man's insight and con-
trol? Greek philosophical realism, beginning with the Eleatics and
reaching its greatest height with Plato, taught that reality is unchang-
ing, static, difficult of access, and that in general men come to experi-
ence it only through the veil of ever-changing patterns of sensory im-
pulses. There is an inexorable friction between total Being and par-
tial Appearance. Man is constrained to deal with the appearances,
but at his best he comes to sense—or, according to Plato, to know—
the reality behind the phenomena. The break-through to the reality
is a painful process; it can be achieved only at the cost of injuring and
mutilating the ordinary cognitive faculties. The perfectionists, in-
cluding Plato in the Phaedo, submit that the break-through becomes
complete only with the complete surrender of the senses whose ac-
tivity stands in the way of the vision of reality. That is to say, the
perceptual blindness and the phenomenal friction cannot be resolved
except by disembodiment and death.
Now if this, or something like it, is the philosophical issue which
Euripides is trying to dramatize, he is at once faced with a grave artistic

difficulty. How is he, as a dramatist, to convey the universal scope of
reality and the beguiling contradietoriness of Appearance, without
rendering the formulation banal or bloodless or both? The statement
"Dionysus is all" would be worse than meaningless. It should be em-
phasized again that Euripides is not trying to say poetically what could
also, and better, be said discursively. What does a poet-metaphysician
do to clothe the range of abstract issues in the living and self-authenti-
cating flesh of poetry? Is it possible for a dramatist to convey ideas
without having his characters preach them ex cathedra, which is by
and large the situation we find in the Prometheus Bound? Can a philo-
sophical idea which is refracted by a process of poetic mutation con-
tinue to score as a factor in a metaphysical argument?
To begin with, the Greek writer has an advantage over his modern
colleagues. The ancient conventions of tragedy stipulate that the dra-
matic nucleus be essayed from a spectrum of approaches. From Pro-
logue to chorus to characters to Epilogue, each constitutive part of
the drama contributes its specific orientation. In the end the various
perspectives coalesce into one and invite a unified though never simple
audience response. This is the desired effect; sometimes the merging
of the lines of coordination is not complete, and the spectators are left
without a certain key to gauge their participation. Goethe's Faust is,
perhaps, once again a fair example of such a case on the modern stage.
The author is saying something profound about man and reality, but
for various reasons the play leaves us with the impression of partial
statements instead of a total imaging, because of the vast scope of the
action, because Goethe has inserted certain curious elements of dif-
fusion and fragmentation, and because he tries to play off one culture
against another in an attempt to universalize the compass of the theme.
Any Greek play is likely to be more successful on this score. The tra-
ditional spectrum of perspectives is offset by an extreme succinctness of
speech and thought, by a narrow conformity to Greek ways, by an
economy of character, and, last but not least, by the condensatory ef-
fect of hereditary myth. Myth is itself a condensation of many experi-
ences of different degrees of concreteness. Greek drama simply car-
ries forward the business begun by myth.

130 Bacchae and Ion
Dionysus, who is Euripides' embodiment of universal vitality, is
described variously by chorus, herdsman, commoners, and princes.
The descriptions do not tally, for the god cannot be defined. He can
perhaps be totaled but the sum is never definitive; further inspection
adds new features to the old. If a definition is at all possible it is a
definition by negation or cancellation. For one thing, Dionysus ap-
pears to be neither woman nor man; or better, he presents himself as
woman-in-man, or man-in-woman, the unlimited personality (235):
With perfumes wafted from hisflaxenlocks
and Aphrodite's wine-flushed graces in
his eyes . . .
No wonder Pentheus calls him (353) "the woman-shaped stranger,"
and scoffs at the unmanly whiteness of his complexion (457). In the
person of the god strength mingles with softness, majestic terror with
coquettish glances. To follow him or to comprehend him we must
ourselves give up our precariously controlled, socially desirable sexual
limitations. The being of the god transcends the protective fixtures of
decency and sexual pride.
Again, Dionysus is both a citizen, born of Semele, and a Greek
from another state, for he was raised in Crete, like the Zeus of the
mysteries—surely this is the implication of lines 120 ff.—and z. bar-
barian from Phrygia or Lydia or Syria or India, at any rate from be-
yond the pale of Greek society. It is not as if the conflicting pieces of
information had to be gathered laboriously from various widely sep-
arated passages in the play. All of them are to be found in the entrance
song of the chorus. After the introductory epiphany of the god himself,
the women of the chorus begin to assemble their picture of Dionysus,
and it is indicative of what Euripides means him to be that even these
first few pointers should cancel out one another. It happens to be true
historically that Dionysus is both Greek and non-Greek; recently dis-
covered Mycenean texts have shown that the god's name was known
to the Greeks of the Mycenean period. It now appears that the foreign
extraction of Dionysus may have been a pious fiction of Apollinian
partisans. Dionysus the popular god, the god of mysteries, the emblem

of surging life in its crudest form, of regeneration and animal passion
and sex, was endangering the vested interests of Apollo, grown re-
fined and squeamish in the hands of the gentry and the intellectual
elite. One of the defense measures, and there were many, was to de-
clare Dionysus a foreigner, a divinity whose ways, so the propaganda
went, offended the true instincts of the Greek. There was some ap-
parent justification for this. The genuinely foreign deities who were
being imported into Greece often were kindred in spirit to Dionysus.
At any rate the propaganda took hold. At the end of the fifth century
all Greeks tended to believe that Dionysus came from abroad; and yet
they considered him one of their own, a powerful member of the
Olympian pantheon. Euripides exploits the discrepancy to the ad-
vantage of his purpose; he uses it to emphasize the unbounded, the
unfragmented nature of the ultimate substance. But the arrival from
foreign lands signifies a special truth; it highlights the violently in-
trusive character of the Dionysiac life, of the unlimited thrusting itself
into the limited and exploding its stale equilibrium, which is a favorite
theme of Pythagorean and Greek popular thought.
But all this would be bloodless metaphysics, dry-as-dust allegory,
were it not for Euripides' grasp of the essential irony enunciated in
the passage of the Phaedrus and skirted in Aristotle's aphorism. Man
is both beast and god, both savage and civilized, and ultimate knowl-
edge may come to him on either plane, depending on the manner in
which the totality communicates itself. It is as an animal, as a beast
close to the soil and free of the restrictions of culture and city life,
that man must know Dionysus. But that means that in embracing
Dionysus man surrenders that other half of himself, the spark of the
gentle and celestial nature which, the philosophers hope, constitutes the
salvageable part of man's equipment. The incongruity of the two
planes, the political and the animal, becomes the engrossing puzzle
and the energizing thesis of the play. The double nature of man is
what the play is really about; the ambivalence of Dionysus is pressed
into service largely in order to illumine the ambivalence of human cog-
nition reaching out for its object, for the elusive pageant of truth.
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132 Bacchae and Ion
v
How does Euripides use the animal in his art?
In the Ion the relation between men and animals is simple and
candid, though not devoid of some humor. At the beginning Ion
wages a mock battle against the birds because they interfere with his
daily cleaning operations. The kindly gruffness with which he re-
bukes them deceives no one. Once he threatens death to a swan that
approaches too closely to the altar (161 ff.), but he does not take the
threat seriously himself (179):
To think I would murder you,
messengers of the words of gods
to men!
Ion is not so cynical as to remember that the swan is said to sing his
truest song when he is about to die. Later Ion's life is saved when a
dove consumes the poison meant for him (1202 ff.); he accepts the
sacrifice gratefully but without comment. Near the beginning of the
exodus Ion calls Creusa (1261) a "serpent... or a dragon"
with murderous fire blazing from his eyes,
but this is a metaphor induced by rage, and in any case Ion is mistaken
about her, as he acknowledges in the next scene. The history of Athens
may have been crowded with serpents and half-serpents; the decora-
tion of the tent features many beings half-man half-beast, including
Cecrops himself with his serpent's coils. But the somber tent, as sug-
gested earlier, is the exception. Through most of the action, and cer-
tainly at the end of the play when the causes of ignorance have been
removed, men know their distance from the animals. Their humane-
ness entails this; the gentleness which characterizes the true inclina-
tions of lo and Creusa and Xuthus takes us far away from the murky
borderland where human nature and animal nature merge and where
satyrs and centaurs ply their brutal trade.
In the Bacchae this borderland is always present. Men are identi-
fied with animals, not as in Aesop where the beasts aspire to be men
and become moral agents, but as in a Gothic tale where intelligence

and social grace and responsibility are renounced and the irrational,
the instinct of blood and steaming compulsion, take their place. Charac-
teristically this way of looking at life paralyzes value judgment. The
gulf between men and animals is erased, but whether this is a good
thing or not is by no means clear. When the women of the chorus, for
example, call Pentheus a beast they do not mean to flatter him. He is
the son of Echion, who was sprung from dragon's teeth, and there
is dragon blood in his veins (1155). He is said to be a fierce monster
(542) whose acts make one suspect that he was born of a lioness or
a Libyan Gorgon. His mother also in her moment of visionary bliss
sees him as a lion rather than as a man. For her, however, this is not a
matter of disparagement; if anything, embracing a lion seems to her
to offer a glimpse of perfection. Not so the chorus; in the passages
cited they show an incongruous pride in human shape and human
achievement. But in the fourth choral ode, as they reach their high-
est pitch of passion and frenzied insight, they issue the call which
is quoted at the beginning of our chapter (1017) :
Appear, in the shape of a bull or a many-headed
serpent, or a lion breathing fire!
In their first ode also they refer to Dionysus as the bull-horned god
wreathed in snakes (100 f.). The god Dionysus, the stranger-citizen,
the hermaphrodite, at once superman and subman, is a beast, for
which the chorus praise him. This is the sacred dogma. Even Pentheus,
once he has fallen under the spell of the god, acknowledges him as a
bull ( 9 2 0 ) :
And now, leading me on, I see you as
a bull, with horns impacted in your head.
Were you a beast before? I should not wonder.
And Dionysus answers:
Yes, now you see what is for you to see.
But what of Pentheus' own beast-likeness? Are the women suggest-
ing that human beastliness is a mere parody of divine beastliness, and
therefore to be condemned? Or have the ladies of the chorus not yet
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134 Bacchae and Ion
travelled the full length of the Dionysiac conversion, and retain a

vestige of civilized values? Their abuse of Pentheus is couched in
terms which expose them as imperfect Maenads. Contrast that other
chorus, the band of Bacchantes hidden from our sight, whose myster-
ious acts of strength are reported to us in the messenger speeches.
From them rather than from their more civilized sisters on the stage
we expect the pure lesson of the new faith. And in fact they pre-
serve no trace of a false pride in human separateness. They carry the
tokens of animal life on their backs and entertain the beasts as equal
partners ( 6 9 5 ) :
And first they shook their hair free to their shoulders
and tucked up their fawnskins . . .
. . . their spotted pelts
they girt with serpents licking at their cheeks.
And some clasped in their arms a doe or wild
wolf cubs and gave them milk . . .
Under the aegis of Dionysus, men and animals are as one, with no
questions asked. The philosophical message is tolerably clear. But the
vestigial bias of the pseudo-Maenads on stage is more than a temporary
deviation from the orthodox Bacchic faith. In the interest of the mes-
sage it would have been wiser to abuse Pentheus as a man, incapable
of going beyond the limitations of his anthropomorphism. The beast
imagery in the choral condemnation of Pentheus is cumulative and em-
phatic. The praise of Dionysus does not blot it from our memory. It
is, in fact, intended to serve as a counterpoint. The animal shape rules
supreme; but when all parties have been heard it is not at all clear
whether one ought to approve or not. The judgment is suspended, and
values are held in abeyance.
It is a mistake to consider the Dionysiac ecstasy a perversion of so-
cial life, an impasse, a negative situation. The Bacchae does not tell a
story of maladjustment or aberration. It is a portrayal of life explod-
ing beyond its narrow everyday confines, of reality bursting into the
artificiality of social conventions and genteel restrictions. Waking and
sleeping are deprived of their ordinary cognitive connotations; who
is to say that sleeping, the drunken stupor which succeeds the rite, does

not expand one's vision beyond its commonplace scope? In the Ion
the premium is on wakefulness; in the Bacchae we are invited to rest
in a gray no man's land which is halfway between waking and sleep,
where man shelves the tools of reason and social compact and aban-
dons himself to instinct and natural law (862 ff., tr. Phillip Vellacott):
O for long nights of worship, gay
With the pale gleam of dancing feet,
With head tossed high to the dewy air—
Pleasure mysterious and sweet!
O for the joy of a fawn at play
In the fragrant meadow's green delight,
Who has leapt out free from the woven snare,
Away from the terror of chase and flight,
And the huntsman's shout, and the straining pack,
And skims the sand by the river's brim
With the speed of wind in each aching limb,
To the blessed lonely forest where
The soil's unmarked by a human track,
And leaves hang thick and the shades are dim.
This is the strophe of a choral ode; in the antistrophe the chorus in-
voke the divine order of things—physis, nature—which will assert it-
self eventually in spite of men (884)
who honor ignorance and refuse
to enthrone divinity . . .
The verses cited picture the pleasure and the awe of identification with
nonhuman nature, with the life of the fawn bounding free of the snare
but never quite eluding the hunter, a life of liberty which is yet not
free. The animal senses the sway of natural law even more strongly
than the man. Strophe and antistrophe, the vision of animal escape
and the address to natural compulsion, are part of the same complex.
But in the text they do not follow one upon the other; they are sep-
arated by that rare thing in Greek poetry, a refrain which is repeated
once more identically, at the end of the antistrophe. Refrains in Greek
tragedy always have a solemn ring; they are felt to be echoes of ritual
hymns. The fixed severity of the repetition is something foreign within
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136 Bacchae and Ion
the headlong flow of the dramatic current. The mind accustomed to
pressing on after the determined advance of ideas and plot is abruptly
stopped in its tracks; time ceases for a while and the cold chill of
monotony reveals a glimpse of Being beyond the Becoming of the
human scene.
Here is an attempt to translate the refrain as literally as the sense
allows (877, 897):
What is wisdom? Or what is more beautiful,
afinergift from the gods among men,
than to extend a hand victorious
over the enemy's crown? But beauty
is every man's personal claim.
Wisdom equals tyranny, beauty equals vengeance. The hunted and the
hunter have their own jealous notions of wisdom and beauty, but
their pretensions are drowned in the vast offering of the gods, the dis-
pensation of natural law and the survival of the strongest. This is
what the refrain seems to say; the message agrees well with the proposi-
tions of strophe and antistrophe. But note the didactic quality of the
speech, the question and answer, and particularly the academic formu-
lation of the last line which in the Greek consists of only four words:
"Whatever beautiful, always personal." It is a line which might have
come straight from the pages of Aristotle; better yet, it reminds us of
a similarly scholastic passage in a poem by Sappho in which she con-
templates various standards of beauty and preference and concludes:
M
I [think that the most beautiful thing is] that with which a person
is in love." The poetess speaks of a "thing," using the neuter gender,
and of "a person," any person, desiring the thing. Like a good teacher
she starts her discussion with a universal premise. Then, as the poem
draws to its conclusion, she discards the generality and focuses on the
living girl and on the I, the specific poles of her love whose reality
constitutes the authority for the writing of the poem. But the philo-
sophic mode of the earlier formulation remains important; it re-
minds us that the specific poles of her present love are at the same
time representatives of a universal rhythm. In Euripides' ode, also, it is

this universal rhythm which comes into view through the hieratic
stillness of the refrain and particularly through its last line. The words
are almost the same as those of Sappho; the difference is that between
a vision intent upon the small joys and sufferings of love, and a vision
which comprehends man in the sum total of his powers and feeble-
ness. The refrain may well be the closest approach to poetry shedding
its disguise and showing itself as metaphysics pure and simple.
But the glimpse is short-lived, and the clarity immediately obscured.
Again it is the chorus itself which is the chief agent of confounding
the analysis. It does so by combining in the Dionysiac prospects of its
songs the two sides, the real and the ideal, which are inevitably con-
nected in the experience. Both ritual and hope, slaughter and bliss,
dance and dream, the cruelty of the present and the calm of the re-
lease, are joined together as one. The paradise of milk and honey
and the orgy of bloody dismemberment merge in a poetic synthesis
which defies rational classification. Of this creative insight into the
contradictoriness of things I have already spoken. To complicate the
picture even further, Bacchic sentiments are superimposed on tradi-
tional choric maxims. In an earlier ode which begins with a con-
demnation of Pentheus' words and an appeal to the goddess Piety, the
women sing (386, 3 9 7 ) :
Of unbridled mouths
and of lawless extravagance
the end is disaster . . .
Life is brief; if a man,

not heeding this, pursues vast things
his gain slips from his hands.
These are the ways, I believe,
of madmen, or of
injudicious fools.
W e recognize the familiar adage of "nothing in excess," the motto of
bourgeois timidity and sane moderation, at opposite poles from the
Dionysiac moral of vengeance and expansiveness and the bestializa-
tion of man. The injunctions of moderation and knowing one's limits

138 Bacchae and Ion
run counter to the hopes of those who worship Dionysus. The two
people who live up to the injunctions, Tiresias and Cadmus, come
very close to being comic characters, as we shall see directly. Why,
then, does Euripides put the pious precept into the mouth of a chorus
whose primary artistic function is to communicate precisely what it
is condemning, the spirit of unbridled mouths and lawless extrava-
gance? It may be noted that such injunctions in Greek tragedy are
often illusory. Setting off as they do a heroic imbalance or a cosmic dis-
turbance, they underscore the poignancy of the action. But in this par-
ticular instance the use of the Delphic motto is even more startling
than usual. The direction of the metaphysical impact is rudely de-
flected and the opacity of the poem enhanced by this conventional re-
minder of irrelevant quietist values.
While the Theban women are away celebrating, the foreign votaries
are in Thebes. This is a mechanical displacement necessitated by what
Greek tragedy permits; for the Dionysiac revels must be reported
rather than seen, and so the true Maenads are off stage. But that puts
the chorus in an anomalous position. They are worshippers of Diony-
sus, but they must not behave like worshippers. Few Euripidean cho-
ruses are less intimately engaged in the action and in fact less necessary
to the action. It is the chorus off stage that counts. Hence the curious
mixture of halfhearted participation and distant moralizing, as if the
poet were not entirely comfortable with the choral requirements. This
may account for the perplexing admixture of ApoUinian preaching
which I have just mentioned. It may account also for the remarkable
poetic color of many of the choral utterances. The poet, making a
virtue of the necessity, calls attention to the detachment of the chorus
from the heart of the plot—though not from the heart of the philo-
sophical issue—by giving it some of the finest lyrics ever sounded in
the Attic theater. This is not the place for a close appreciation of the
poetry; that can be done only in the original. The analysis of ancient
poetry is a difficult thing; there are few men who combine the necessary
scholarly equipment with an understanding of what poetry is about.
Further, some of the clues to such an understanding which in modern

poetry are furnished by the experience of living speech are missing for
the Greek. Nevertheless few readers can expose themselves to the
choral odes of the Bacchae without realizing that this is poetry of the
highest order. Imagery has little to do with it; in this as in most
Euripidean plays the choral poetry is even less dependent on metaphor
and simile than the dialogue. There is some pondering of myth, to be
sure. But perhaps the most important thing about the odes is the
wonderful mixture of simplicity and excitement. The women do not
beat around the bush; their interest in life is single-minded, and they
declare themselves with all the fervor of a unitary vision. This does
not, of course, say anything about the poetry as poetry, but it may ex-
plain why the lyrics of the Bacchae touch us so powerfully.
There is one image, however, or rather a class of images, which
ought to be mentioned: the container filled to the bursting point. In
their first ode the chorus use the trope three times. They sing of
Dionysus stuffed into the thigh of Zeus, golden clasps blocking the
exit until such time as the young man may be born (94 ff.). They
call on Thebes, nurse of Semele, to (107)
teem, teem with verdant
bryony, bright-berried;
the city is to be filled to the rooftops with vegetation, as a sign of the
presence of the god. For illustration we should compare the famous
vase painting of Exekias in which Dionysus reveals himself in his
ship to the accompaniment of a burst of vegetation. Finally the women
caution each other to be careful in their handling of the thyrsus, the
staff of the god (113):
Handle the staffs respectfully;
there is hubris in them.
In all three instances it is the fullness of the container which is
stressed, not the spilling over. But as the play advances, containment
proves inadequate. At the precise moment when the stranger is ap-
prehended by Pentheus' men, the Maenads who had been imprisoned
earlier are set free (447):

140 Bacchae and Ion
All by themselves the bonds dropped off their feet;
keys unlocked doors, without a man's hand to turn them.
Their liberation is as real as the binding of the stranger is false.
The most striking mise en scene of the inadequacy of the container
is the so-called palace miracle. Like that of the other passages, its func-
tion is symbolic rather than dramaturgical; after it has happened it is
never mentioned again. It is not necessary to the progress of the plot,
only to the effect and the meaning of the poem. We need not worry
much whether the stage director engineered the collapse of a column or
a pediment, or whether the spectators were challenged to use their
own creative imagination, though I am inclined to assume the latter. At
any rate, the vision of the palace shaking and tumbling is the most
explicit and the most extended of a series of images pointing to the
explosion of a force idly and wrongfully compressed. Eventually this
concept converges on what I have called the friction between total
Being and fragmentary Appearance, the friction which is worked out
also through a series of antinomies: the brute wildness of the thyrsus
versus the spindles abandoned in the hall, the fawnskins versus the
royal armor, the civic proclamation versus the bleating shout, the beat-
ing of tambourines versus the steady clicking of the loom. Dionysus
disrupts the settled life, he cracks the shell of civic contentment and
isolation. Probably the most important word in the play, as a recent
critic has well pointed out, is "hubris." It occurs throughout, and al-
ways in a key position. But it is not the hubris of which the tragic poets
usually speak, the hubris whichfiguresalso in the legal documents, the
thoughtless insolence which comes from too much social or political
power. In the Bacchae, hubris is quite literally the "going beyond," the
explosion of the unlimited across the barricades which a blind civili-
zation has erected in the vain hope of keeping shut out what it does
not wish to understand. That is not to say that the word is not used
also in its more conventional sense, especially with reference to the
campaign of Pentheus. As a result, the efforts of Pentheus take on the
aspect of a parody of Dionysiac impulsiveness.
Similarly the hunt is a principal symbol because it catches the fu-
tility of organized, circumscribed life. From the vantage point of the

larger reality, all worldly activity appears both hunt and escape. Hunt-
ing and being hunted are the physical and psychological manifesta-
tions of Appearance, the monotonous jolts of the process of genera-
tion and decay. Agave cries when approached by the herdsman (731):
Run to it, my hounds!
Behold the men who hunt us! Follow me,
brandish your thyrsus and pursue them!
The Maenads are resting; they are communing with the god and
sloughing off the sense of separateness when they are violently pulled
back into the world of Appearance and resume their game of hunting
and being hunted. In this case it is Appearance which causes the dis-
ruption; Being and Appearance are so related that one as well as the
other may be the cause of disturbance and dislocation. There is a per-
petual pull between them which never allows either to win a lasting
victory. Without the constant friction there would be no tragedy;
without the violent disruption of one by the other there would be no
dismemberment. Sparagmos, the sacred dismemberment of the Diony-
siac rites, is both a means to an end and an autonomous fact. As a
means to an end it supplies the frenzied exercise which terminates in
the drugged sleep. The explosion of energy, the tearing and mutila-
tion of a once living body, leaves the worshipper exhausted and
readies the soul, through a numb tranquility, for the mystic union with
the god. But the dismemberment operates also as a self-validating
event. Through it, symbolically, the world of Appearance with its
contradictions and insufficiencies is made to show itself as it really is.
The destruction of Pentheus, then, is not simply a sardonic twist of
an unspeakable bloody rite, but a fitting summation of the lesson of
the play. The limited vessel is made to burst asunder, refuting the
pretensions of those who oppose Dionysus, of the partisans of un-
reality.
vi
Who is Pentheus, and why is it he who dies
rather than one of the other Thebans? When the stranger raises the
question whether the King knows who he really is, he answers (507):

142 Bacchae and Ion
Pentheus, the son of Agave and of Echion.

Thus Pentheus identifies himself as a member of the ruling house, as
an officer of the State. He bears a name which establishes his position
within the hereditary political structure of his city. Even at the moment
of death he throws off the leveling disguise of the ministrant and cries
(1118):
Mother, it is I, your son
Pentheus, the child you bore in Echion's house.
In the judgment of Dionysus this pride in the house, the emphasis
on the limited life, is ignorance. But is it commensurate with the pun-
ishment which Pentheus receives? Is there not something about him
as a person which is more likely to justify the violence of his undoing?
To ask the obvious question: Does Pentheus not exhibit an arrogance
which cries out for retribution?
Here we must step gingerly. It is to be remembered that the action
of the Bacchae is not primarily borne or promoted by the characters.
Euripides does not in this play operate with idiosyncrasies but with
lives. Suffering is constructed as the measurable content of a life, not
as the unique unquantifiable experience of a specific irrational soul.
And the lives, also, are largely catalysts for the release of social com-
plications. These complications have nothing to do with the arbitrary
contours of individual dispositions, but answer directly to the needs
of the author's metaphysical purpose. The personal relations brought
into play are devised chiefly as one of the means for the author to
invoke his philosophical riddle. In the Alcestts, as we shall see in the
essay on that play, character is all; in the Bacchae it counts for very lit-
tle. It is sometimes said that the tragedy of Pentheus is not that he
tried to do what was wrong but that he was the wrong man to do it
—that he was, in fact, not a political strongman but precisely the un-
balanced, excitable type of person who most easily falls a victim to the
allurements of the Dionysiac indulgence. In other words, the charac-
ter of Pentheus is too Dionysiac to allow him to oppose Dionysus
successfully. But this argument will not stand up. Pentheus is no more
and no less excitable or unstable than most of the heroes of Greek

tragedy. An Odysseus, or a Socrates, is no more fit to stand at the center

of a high tragedy than a Pecksniff or a Tanner. Odysseus is not a whole
man, as Helen is not a whole woman; they are exponents of a partial
aspect of the human range: intelligence in the case of Odysseus, love
in the case of Helen. But Pentheus is a whole man, precisely as Oedipus
is, or as Antigone is a whole woman. And because he is whole he is
vulnerable, more vulnerable than the men and women who are weight-
ed in one direction or another.
Of course he is not a moderate. His order to smash the workshop
of Tiresias (346 ft.) is not well considered. He happens to be right;
Tiresias appears to have turned disloyal to Apollo, and so will no
longer need his oracle seat. Under the democratic spell of Dionysus,
everybody will do his own prophesying. But even if Pentheus were
unjustified in his harshness toward Tiresias, his lack of moderation,
or, to put it more fairly, his capacity for anger, does not necessarily
discredit him. Stability, self-control, discretion smack too much of as-
ceticism and puritan artifice to provide a solid basis for tragic action.
Pentheus is a whole man, with none of his vitality curtailed or held
in check. But he is also a king, a perfect representative of the human-
istic Greek ideal of the ordered life, a political being rather than a
lawless beast Being Aristotle's ' 'creature living in a polis," he is
destined to ask the wrong sort of question, a political question, when
faced with the reality of religion. His query (473),
What profit do the celebrants draw from it?
shows the political or educational frame of his thinking. The twentieth

century, unlike the eighteenth, is once more inclined to the view that
the question of usefulness when applied to religion misses the point,
that religion cannot be adjusted to a system of utilitarian relations.
But where did Euripides and his contemporaries stand on this issue?
In all probability Pentheus' question did not strike the audience as
irrelevant; it may, in fact, have impressed them as noble and re-
sponsible. At the end of the fifth century, as we can see in the History
of Thucydides, the preservation of social and political institutions and
traditions had become the overriding topic of discussion to which all

144 Bacchae and Ion
other values tended to be subordinated. The Bacchae demonstrates that
this sort of nobility, the exaltation of the political and educational
thesis, is as nothing before the primary currents of life. But a nobility
which goes under is not the less noble for its defeat. Pentheus dies,
and the nature of his death, particularly of the preparations which lead
to his death, is deplorable. But the fact remains that his stand, and
only his, can be measured in positive moral terms. Clearly the force
which kills him eludes ethical analysis.
Because Pentheus is a king he offers a larger area to be affected by
the deity. His responses differ from those of other men less in their
specific quality than in their intensity. As a king he suffers for the
group; his name, as Dionysus reminds him (508), means "man of
sorrow/* But there is nothing Christ-like about him. He proposes to
live as a rational man, to leave everything nonrational, everything
that might remind us of man's original condition, behind him. Love
and faith, the Christian antidotes of the dispassionate intellect, have
not yet been formulated. In Plato, characteristically, it is love and
reason together, or love-in-reason, which refines man and weakens the
animal in him. Nonreason, in the fifth century B.C., is neither love nor
hatred but religious ecstasy. This Pentheus means to fight, for he
knows it is wrong. Pentheus is not a romantic hero, he does not search
for a hidden truth. The same thing is true of the others; both the
characters and the chorus are, each of them, convinced that they know
best and that their way of life is best. For Pentheus the best is Form,
the tested and stable limits of responsibility, law, and control. Against
the chorus, which espouses the cause of excitement, of formlessness
and instability, Pentheus is the champion of permanence and stability.
Neither his anger nor his defeat are valid arguments against the merits
of this championship. Like A] ax, as we shall see in the following es-
say, Pentheus is identified with armor (781, 809); like Ajax, the
armed Pentheus, confined in the panoply of embattled civic life, turns
against the forces which are wrecking his fragile cause. As a function-
ary he represents order and limit; as a man he is whole and robust and
fully alive.
This cannot be said about Cadmus and Tiresias. For one thing,
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they are old men, their life force is diminished and stunted. This
means that they cannot suffer as Pentheus can. It also means that they
have come to terms with the world; there are no issues left for them
to battle out, no difficulties over which to fret. Cadmus is a fine speci-
men of the arriviste, proud of the achievements of his grandson, but
even prouder of the inclusion of a genuine god in the family. The god
must at all costs be kept in the family, even if it becomes necessary
to mince the truth a little. Here is Cadmus' humble plea to Pentheus
(333):
And if, as you say, the god does not exist,
keep this to yourself, and share in thefinefiction
that he does; so we may say that Semele bore
a god, for the greater glory of our clan.
The distinction between truth and falsity, between order and disorder,
is of no importance to him. At his time of life, a good reputation is a
finer prize than a noble life, no matter whether the reputation is de-
served or not. Tiresias likewise is not concerned with essentials. This
Tiresias is not the Sophoclean man of truth, the terrible mouthpiece
of mystery and damnation, but, of all things, a clever sophist, a pseudo-
philosopher who strips away the mystery and the strangeness of the
superhuman world and is content to worship a denatured, an ungodded
god. A squeamish deist, he does not hold with the miracles and the
barbarisms of popular faith. In his lecture to Pentheus he pares down
the stature of Dionysus to render him manageable and unoffending
(272 ff.). Point one: he is the god of wine (280)
which liberates suffering mortals from
their pain.
That is to say, he is wine (284), precisely as Demeter is grain. By al-
legorizing the old stories and identifying the gods with palpable sub-
stances, we can dispense with whatever is not concrete and intelligible
in the traditions about Dionysus. Point two: he is a perfectly natural
god. The distasteful tale about Zeus sewing him up in his thigh pro-
duces a quite satisfactory meaning once it is understood that the grating
feature is due to a pun. Like Max Mueller in a subsequent era of fa-
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146 Bacchae and Ion
cile enlightenment, Tiresias believes that the mystery of myth is caused
by a linguistic aberration; with the discovery of the cause, the mystery
disappears.
Finally, in the third part of his lecture, Tiresias does pay some at-
tention to the irrational virtues of the god, to his mantic powers and
his ability to inspire panic in strong men. But this part of the assess-
ment is underplayed; it is briefer than the other two, and one feels that
Tiresias adds it only in order to have a weapon with which to frighten
Pentheus. The reference to soldiers strangely routed and to Dionysiac
torches at home in the sanctuary of Delphi is not a confession but a
threat, calculated to appeal to Pentheus in the only language he under-
stands: the language of military and political authority. Tiresias'
heart is not in the threat; what interests him is the theological and
philological sterilization of the god. Neither he nor Cadmus really
understands or even wants to understand what the god has to offer.
But they know that his triumph is inevitable, and so they try to ac-
cept him within their lights. They are fellow travellers, with a good
nose for changes of fashion and faith. To take them seriously would
be absurd; a Tartuffe has no claim on our sympathy.
They do not understand; hence nothing happens to them.1 Pentheus,
on the other hand, is fully engaged, and he is a big enough man to
perceive the truth beyond his own self-interest. He is capable of ap-
preciating the real meaning of Dionysus; though he does not approve,
he understands. But understanding, in a man of his power of commit-
ment, is tantamount to weakening, and in the end, to destruction.
This is what Euripides dramatizes with the sudden break-up of Pen-
theus' royal substance. Abruptly the officer of the State turns into a
Peeping Tom. One shout of the god (810) and the manly general
becomes a slavish, prurient, reptilian thing, intent on watching from
a safe distance what he hopes will be a spectacle to titillate his voyeur's
1
T h e metamorphosis which Dionysus inflicts upon Cadmus in the Epilogue is
a datum from mythology. Because of the bad state of preservation of the final portion
of the play we do not know how Euripides motivated the metamorphosis, and what
the punishment—for such it is said to be (1340 ff.)—is for.

itch. The civilized man of reason is gone, and in his place we find an
animal, living only for the satisfaction of his instinctual drives.
Is the rapid change psychologically plausible? Once more, the
question is not pertinent. There is no character in the first place, only
a comprehensive life-image to symbolize one side of a conflict which
transcends the terms of a uniquely experienced situation. Whether it
is possible for such a man as Pentheus is shown to be in the first half
of the play, to turn into the creature he becomes after his conversion
by Dionysus, is a question on which psychoanalysts may have an
opinion but which does not arise in considering Euripides , purpose.
The truth is that the change is not a transition from one phase of life
to another, much less a lapse into sickness or perversion, but quite
simply death. When a tragic hero in the great tradition is made to
reverse his former confident choice, especially if this happens at the
instigation of the archenemy, the role of the hero has come to an end.
W e remember Agamemnon stepping on the crimson carpet, after
Clytemnestra has broken down his reluctance. The blood-colored
tapestry is a visual anticipation of the murder. Instead of the corporeal
death which will be set off stage, the audience watch the death of the
soul. With Agamemnon slowly moving through the sea of red the
contours are blurred and the king of all the Greeks is annihilated be-
fore our eyes. Aeschylus uses a splash; Euripides, less concretely but
no less effectively, uses a change of personality.
That the hero has died in his scene with Dionysus becomes even
clearer when the god, with a Thucydidean terseness, announces the
physical death ( 8 5 7 ) :
Now I shall go and dress him in the robes

he'll wear to Hades once his mother's hands
have slaughtered him . . .
His death, then, is an agreed fact both while the chorus sing their ode
to Natural Necessity and also during the terrible scene which follows
in which Pentheus arranges his woman's clothes about him. The King
joins the Maenads, but he goes further than they, for he adopts the
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148 Bacchae and Ion
bisexuality of the god. All this is meaningful as a picture of the com-
plete and devastating victory of reality over unreality, of the natural
over the institutional life. But it is not without its psychological as-
pect, and here, curiously, we may see an ironic parallel to one of Plato's
most troublesome concerns. In his discussions of dramatic poetry, Plato
takes it for granted that the spectacle affects the soul of the spectator,
even to the extent of transforming it in its own likeness. This is what
drama demands; the audience must allow what they see to shape their
souls, without struggling against the impact. Plato recognizes the legiti-
macy of the demand, and decides that therefore drama is too dangerous
to have around in a healthy body politic, except the kind of drama
whose effect is beneficial. Pentheus also is about to see a spectacle, a
Dionysiac drama of the type which as a responsible man of the city
he had condemned. Euripides knows that Plato's act of censorship is
in a hopeless cause. A life which does not reach out to embrace the
sight of a greater reality which tragedy affords is incomplete. Watch-
ing a play may mean a partial sacrifice of the soul, a surrender to the
unlimited and the irrational, but we cannot do without it. Pentheus
holds out against it for some time, but in the end he throws down his
arms, with such finality that his soul comes to be transformed and en-
riched even before he goes off to spy on the mysteries.
Pentheus is drunk, without the physical satisfaction of strong drink
(918):
Ho, what is this ? I think I see two suns,
two cities of Thebes each with its seven gates!
This is one way of formulating his conquest at the hand of Dionysus.
Drunk he sees more keenly, or at any rate more completely:
And now, leading me on, I see you as
a bull. . .
And Dionysus replies:
Yes, now you see what is for you to see.
For the first time Pentheus* eyes are suflSiciently opened to see the god
in his animal shape. His vision is broadened; but his role as Pentheus
is finished. The disintegration of the king js made particularly pain-

fill by the emphasis on the feminine clothing. With Dionysus assist-

ing as his valet (928) the one-time upholder of the vita activa be-
comes fussy and vain about the details of his toilette. Does the cloak
hang properly? Is he to carry the thyrsus in his right or in his left
hand? The energies which had once been directed toward the muster-
ing of armies and the implementation of public decisions are now be-
stowed on the arrangement of his Bacchic vestments. Along with this
attention to the correct fashion—behold, another Tiresias—to the ex-
ternal signs of his new-found anonymity, there goes an internal change
which is equally preposterous. The blocked doer turns into an un-
inhibited dreamer ( 9 4 5 ) :
I wonder if my shoulders would support
Cithaeron and its glens, complete with Maenads ?
His speech, formerly royal and violent and ringing, has become pretty
and lyrical; he pictures the women (957)
like birds in the thickets,
contained in the fond coils of love's embrace.
Compare this with his earlier comment (222) that the women
slink off by devious ways into
the wild and cater to the lusts of males.
His imagination has been fired, his surly prejudices are gone. The
vision which neither Cadmus nor Tiresias was able to entertain has
come to Pentheus and is inspiring him. The Bacchianized Pentheus is
a visionary and poet. But it is a poetry which lacks the saving grace
of choice. He contemplates the prospect of his mother carrying him
home from the mountains, and the prospect pleases him. The political
man has become woman and child. Having rid himself of the social
restrictions and classifications, he savors infancy, a sentient creature
for whom the mother's cradled arms offer escape and bliss. He is wom-
an and child and beast, an amorphous organism susceptible to all in-
fluences and realizing itself in a life of instinct and unthinking sense.
The victory of Dionysus is complete; the king is dead, and the man
has been found out, in the god's image.
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150 Bacchae and Ion
vii
This, roughly, is what the Bacchae is about.
The vast recesses of mystery and abomination which it explores make
it difficult to talk about the play without some measure of doubt and
uneasiness. Not so with the Ion. The Ion deals with a portion of
Greek mythology. Selecting an ordinary incident from the traditions
about the gods, the poet turns it this way and that to highlight its ab-
surdity in the light of modern culture, and incidentally also to re-em-
phasize the worth of the human achievement. The spirit in which this
is done is, on the whole, playful. But the plot which Euripides sets
up features enough scheming and resentment and disillusionment to
make us wonder whether the author's purpose is not quite serious. It
is indeed, but the seriousness is that of a dramatist who takes no human
suffering lightly, who regards the feelings of men as more precious
and essential than the events which befall them. He finds that even the
silly nonsense about gods fathering human sons can, if taken at face
value, produce momentary effects which threaten to cripple generosity
and fellowship. Eventually kindness triumphs; human culture is too
tough and too secure an institution to be disrupted for long even when
one of its chief supports, the veneration of the gods, is jarred.
The Bacchae questions what the Ion extols, by asking: Precisely
what is human culture, and what is man? Plato chose to believe that,
at his best, man can divest himself of his animal trappings and rise to
a station in which the divine in him remains in sole control. Euripides
shows that the divine equals the bestial, and that man's special achieve-
ment, the social graces and comforts fondly sketched in the Ion, are at
the furthest remove from the reign of the god. Pentheus is a "politi-
cal animal*' whose veneer is stripped off, who is forced to return to his
origins as a creature of instinct and sense, without the protective color-
ing of social conventions, without the benefit of activist illusions. In
this original state before the fall into grace he will be a simple beast,
with the pleasures and the dangers of an animal existence. To save his
dignity, the king must die; the death images the ephemeral nature of

the civilized veneer. A few seconds of consciousness are given to him

to double the pathos and to ratify the horror (1118):
Mother, it is I, your son
Pentheus, the child you bore in Echion's house.
Have pity, Mother, do not kill your son,
though my transgressions furnish cause enough!
This brief abortive glimpse of what has held him up in the past and
what is now becoming the instrument of his defeat, the social compact,
is like a trope of all cultured life. Between the realm of the beasts
from which man is born, and the realm of the gods presided over by
the great beast of heaven, civilized existence and human fellowship
are a minute enclave, hard-pressed and short-lived and utterly without
hope. Social conventions are fictitious, they offend against nature and
the natural law. However noble and glorious the human achievement
may appear to the enlightened, it makes barely a dent upon the true
structure, the real being of the animate world which defies reason and
order and progress and engulfs man in its eternal rhythm of animal
necessity.
Everyone will agree that this is a most depressing moral. But it is the
moral pronounced by the play, and we cannot doubt that it is a view
held by the author. Fortunately we know that it was not Euripides'
only view, for we have the Ion, in which men are very substantial in-
deed, far removed from the realm of the wild beasts, and where the
god is so civilized himself—and, we should add, so ineffectual—that
the vista of a greater reality which is neither rational nor cultured does
not even suggest itself. I said earlier that the Ion is about the gods and
the Bacchae about man. But that is only a matter of emphasis. In truth
both plays are about God, both are about man. But they have to be
read together so that we may understand the full range of Euripides'
thoughts on the subject of religion. As dramas they are autonomous;
each exercises its own special effect and wants to be taken on its own
grounds. But once we begin to think about the issues developed in
them, we must in all fairness admit that what for want of a better term

152 Bacchae and Ion
may be called Euripides' philosophy is not fully presented in either
play. Even together they do not give us a complete picture. But they
help us to realize that a good drama, especially a good Greek drama,
must bear down significantly on a narrow front. If it tries to say too
much and to cover too many stations it dissipates its strength. A Greek
drama is, ideologically or philosophically, an unbalanced thing, es-
pecially if, as in the Bacchae, its objective is to dramatize a philosophi-
cal truth. But the imbalance is our gain; the force generated by the
concentration is unmatched in the history of dramatic literature.

AM& TRAGEDY
AND TIME

IT IS SOMETIMES SAID that the Ajax is not a
well-constructed play. Now structure, in a
Greek drama, is an elusive commodity. In
its heyday Greek tragedy was seen and heard, not studied. To what ex-
tent is the aesthetic appeal of a religious service, or of a political rally,
determined by structural factors, and what are the structural criteria of
such a communication? I do not intend to enter into this inquiry, which
is one to which classical scholars have only recently become alive. But
at the least, structure is more than a symmetrical arrangement of sung
and spoken lines; it has something to do with the distribution of stim-
155

156 Ajax
uli of emotional response. In the light of this it should be noted that

at the exact center of the play, thrown into relief by the horror which
precedes and the mortification which follows, the chorus has an ode
of joy ( 6 9 3 ) :
I throb with passion, joy lifts me up high!
All pain and fear and resentment are forgotten, and in a paroxysm
of relief the sailors shout to Pan and Apollo to lead them in their dance
of happiness. Alas, their happiness is out of place, the result of a char-
acteristically Sophoclean device which is often found near the middle
of a play: false hope. On this occasion it is the hero himself who mis-
guides their affections, with a speech which begins as follows (646,
tr. E. F. Watling):
The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything.
There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light,
Nothing once known that may not become unknown.
Nothing is impossible. The most sacred oath
Is fallible; a will of iron may bend.
And later (670):
The snowy feet of Winter walk away
Before riper Summer; and patrolling Night
Breaks off her rounds to let the Dawn ride in
On silver horses lighting up the sky.
The winds abate and leave the groaning sea
To sleep awhile. Even omnipotent Sleep
Locks and unlocks his doors and cannot hold
His prisoners bound for ever.
This stately homage to Time is by no means unique in Greek litera-
ture, though it may well be the most successful of its kind. "The mov-
ing likeness of eternity,'' as Plato calls it in the Timaeus, held a great
fascination for all thinking Greeks. Reflecting upon its various opera-
tions they made the discussion of time a Greek specialty, with a rich
vocabulary to mirror the variety they discerned. Every reader of Greek
finds in his earliest lessons a number of words for "time" to tax his in-
genuity as a translator: time as motion (chronos), time as status

TRAGEDY AND TIME 157
(aion), time as juncture (kairos), and so forth. Time, in all its mani-
festations, was felt to be a particular mark of the human life. It was
sensed to be part of the complex of a meaningful existence on earth, of
human weakness and achievement and self-consciousness. God knows
no time; beasts live in time but cannot be said to recognize its laws or to
suffer from its restrictions. Only man, who, as the tragedies remind us
again and again, hovers precariously between divinity and beastliness,
becomes aware of the power of time.
The lyric writers were the first to develop the theme of man as a
time-bound being. But the poetic possibilities of the insight are not
fully exploited until the dramatists adopt it for their own. The
Oresteia, the Oedipus plays, the Prometheus Bound, the Ion, all build
their dramatization of the contingency of men's works around the focus
of time. Usually it is time as motion, or flux, which serves the poets as
their guide. For, as the lyric poets had recognized, the defenselessness
of man emerges most clearly when time is visualized in its most cruel
guise, as an enemy of stability and solid anchorage, as a stream.
But time as flux may itself be considered under various perspectives.
Let me mention four. First, time may register itself as moving past
the subject into the future. This is the historian's line of vision, or the
scientist's. Of all the perspectives it is the least disturbing, for on this
view the beholder is scarcely involved in the flux. Such time is cal-
culable; the beholder knows the past, and on the basis of his
knowledge he may freely predict the future. But calculability does not
fill it with meaning. Because I myself am not engaged in the processes
of time, the direction and the character of the advance toward the fu-
ture remain irrelevant to me as a moral being.
Contrariwise, time may be experienced as a function of one's own
development. As Lucretius1 puts it:
Time by itself does not exist; but from things themselves

there results a sense of what has already taken place, what
is now going on and what is to ensue. It must not be claimed
1
R . E. Latham (trans.), Lucretius: The Nature of the Universe (Harmondsworth,
England, Penguin Books, 1951), pp. 40-41.
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158 Ajax
that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement
of things or their restful immobility.
This is the philosopher's time; it stems from introspection, from the
discovery that man himself is a part of the moving world around him.
On this view, also, time is calculable. But unlike the historian's time,
the philosopher's time has meaning; it is nothing if not read from the
significant phases of my own growth and successes and failures. Yet
in a sense, as Lucretius suggests, to speak of time in this way is a tautol-
ogy. The flux contemplated has meaning and is relevant, but there is
no allowance for a meaningful relation, much less tension, between
the flux and the self. A time which does not exist outside the moving
self rouses neither hopes nor fears, it does not oppress nor does it in-
spire. Hence poets have no interest in this perspective.
Third, time presents itself as a stream which sweeps men along as
mountain torrents carry along stones, or as rivers carry flotsam and
wreckage. On this view time is both meaningless and incalculable; the
stones and the wreckage have little control over the direction and the
rate of speed of the current which pulls them along. If there is an ele-
ment of calculability, it is merely this: that the operation of the stream
upon the man enveloped is not likely to be beneficent.
And finally, time may be thought of as moving, not past the agent,
or with him or around him, but straight through him. In such a case
time reveals itself not only as incalculable but as a shatterer of the
substance of man.
Like the philosopher's time, the historian's also fails to fit into the
scheme of dramatic poetry. Negatively, of course, it may be put to some
use. When Hamlet says, "The time is out of joint," he thinks of him-
self as an onlooker, an outsider, a scientist who judges and manipu-
lates at will. He assumes that a man may penetrate the vagaries of
time without being touched in his own person. As he finds out even-
tually, his own life becomes affected when for him, temporarily,
time stands still; he discovers himself in a "dead vast and middle of the
night" which paralyzes and ultimately transforms him. His feeling
that he was born to set time right is a delusion, as we are made to
recognize in the course of the play. In the world of the poet, time is

an active power. Hence only the last two perspectives of the four I
have mentioned are to be found in the plays. Time affects man, either
as a container or as an aggressor. If as a container, time functions as
the life of the cosmos, the structure of fate or chance, the superhuman
rhythm which molds the human existence to its will, numbing or
healing or perfecting but always determining the character of its
charge, while never granting a glimpse of its intentions. If as an ag-
gressor, on the other hand, the intention is obvious, and the outcome
clear: such time kills.
In the drama to which we shall now return, Ajax is the undisputed
hero. Even though Sophocles has him die halfway through the play,
the whole action is centered on his person. And he stands alone. The
other characters have their disagreements between themselves, but their
quarrels are as nothing if compared with the great gulf which sep-
arates Ajax both from his enemies and from his retainers. This stark
cleavage between the hero and the rest of the characters is of course
quite usual in Sophocles. But in the Ajax the incompatibility between
hero and nonheroes is rendered with extraordinary pathos. And one
of the means whereby the writer manages to make the contrast so im-
pressive is his handling of the concepts of time. Menelaus and Odys-
seus, but also Tecmessa and Teucer, might say with Shelley's Urania:
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart.
Time is the movement of the cosmic stream, and the cosmos is prior
to its parts. Hence living men are hollow specters or empty shadows,
as Odysseus puts it early in the play (125). The insubstantiality of
man is the greater because the rationale of time is not apparent. The
philosopher who said "Everything is in motion/' also said "Time is
a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a
child/' In the eyes of the nonheroic characters of tragedy, then, man
is not the master of his fate, nor even of his personality, because he
is molded and refashioned continually as a stone is polished in the
stream which carries it.
But the container need not be inimical, or at least so men's opti-
mism prompts them to suppose. In a friendly guise time pretends
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160 Ajax
the role of a companion or a protector. The delusion can go further,

as in this quotation from Plato's Laws (4.721C3):
Mankind are coeval with the whole of time, and are ever
following, and will ever follow, the course of time; and
so they are immortal, because they leave children's children
behind them, and partake of immortality in the unity of
generation.
The delusory concept of time as a fellow traveller and sanctifier of man
is an index of the recuperatory power of the human soul, but also of
its need to be supported and comforted. Man welcomes the bearing
which he himself, hopefully, reads into time; he clings to time be-
cause it appears to incorporate a sequence, a structure, which may give
meaning and direction to his own existence.
So long as there is felt to be a direction, it is not really important
whether the direction perceived is forward or backward. When Ajax
has died the chorus sings ( 9 2 5 ) :
You were destined, alas, hard-hearted one,
you were destined to drain an evil share
of numberless infinite toils.
Here the movement is toward a predestined goal. The suffering, and
in the end the death, are interpreted as the final causes of Ajax's ad-
ventures from the start. But then, less than ten lines later ( 9 3 3 ) :
A great inceptor of sufferings was
that time when the contest for the arms
engaged the hands of the best.
For the chorus, time is either a movement coming to a head or a
movement from a source. Hindsight creates the illusion that we know
which of the two it is that rules our affairs. But in actual fact, as the
two conflicting formulations show, there is no way of ascertaining
the flow of the stream. It implicates the witness in its suprapersonal
sweep, but that is all we can know about it until whatever additional
knowledge we may gain no longer matters.
Time the companion is a popular misconception. And so is time

the softener of pain. After Tecmessa has given her rousing report of
the killing of the cattle, she remarks on the beginning of Aj ax's re-
covery (306):
. . . and at long odds, with the help of time, regains his -senses.
Tecmessa believes that time, even injurious time, provides its own
healing. Once the disease has run its full course, the very length of
the aberration will function as a palliative. Compare the chorus, in
their ode of joy (714):
Great time assuages all!
The phrase is an echo of Ajax's famous lines cited at the beginning of
this essay, but there is a difference. Ajax, in his apostrophe to cosmic
and social instability, had said that time reveals and hides beyond
reckoning, as if it were an immense receptacle consuming and regurgi-
tating by turns. The chorus cannot for themselves entertain so philo-
sophic a picture. Its purely dynamic quality does not furnish them
with the solace they need. So they see time as quenching or softening
all. The greatest fury or passion or suffering, and that means: what-
ever is hard and brittle, is mellowed and abated with time. This is the
worship of time as the great inurer, the dispenser of balm, which—
or at least so they think—always operates predictably. The sentiment
is common and indeed plebeian. What saves it from triteness is the par-
ticular verb used by the chorus which I have translated: "assuages/'
Its original meaning is "to put out a fire," and we may well regard
as a burning flame the madness whose subsidence the chorus is an-
ticipating. But by the time of Sophocles the verb had generally come
to mean "destroy," "make wither." So even the built-in healing power
of great time is not respectful of substance. It cancels out the evil;
but it cannot be expected to put anything in its place. Softening is not
transformation, but deprivation.
ii
The notion of time as a stream or a contain-
er, or, more mercurially, as a companion or a healer, is the notion held
by the men and women ranged opposite Ajax. It is the popular, the
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162 Ajax
non-heroic perspective, for lesser men, or rather for all men, except
the hero. Men must either cower before time, or nestle in its lap, or
measure their achievements against an imagined direction and speed
of time, to preserve their sense of purpose and substance. The per-
spective may be mistaken, or even immoral, as the hero might sug-
gest. But without the feeling that man is dependent upon time and
subservient to it an important prop would be missing from the basis
of social life and social cooperation.
Now in spite of the vulgar optimism which claims to be able to read
a sense of progress or alleviation from our involvement in the cur-
rent of time, there are moments when even the most optimistic see
neither direction nor speed. It is then that men speak of tyche, fortune.
The Latin fortuna, based on the verbal stem fer~, which means "to
carry," plainly points to the image of the stream which I have been de-
veloping. The Greek tyche has a slightly different orientation. Literally
it means "structure" or "tissue." When Tecmessa or the chorus refer
to their situation or their prospect as tyche—and they do this repeat-
edly—they acknowledge their awareness of a structure, of some larger
fabric of which they declare themselves to be captive members. Along
with the presence of the structure they also acknowledge their own
blindness vis-a-vis any meaning or purpose the structure may embody.
By the time Sophocles wrote his plays the emphasis in tyche had come
to rest on the unintelligibility of the tissue, or on the oppressive tight-
ness of it. When a person speaks of tyche, the current of time is felt
to be so densely poured about the victim that all sense of motion is
lost. The only thing left is hope, the hope that the chance is after all
flowing properly and toward an auspicious end.
Tecmessa has learned of the announcement by Calchas that Ajax
will come to grief unless he is kept within the camp on this one day of
his life. Terrified, she implores the chorus to protect her against what
she calls (803) "coercive fortune." Exactly the same words had been
used by her earlier when speaking to Ajax about the unkindness of her
fate which reduced her from princess to concubine (485). The ap-
peal to fortune, or rather the mixture of protest and surrender to it, is
once more representative of ordinary unheroic humanity. "Coercive

fortune'' may be experienced as a single incident or accident, as when,
in Euripides' Electra, Orestes is said to have died of it: he fell from
his chariot in a race. But more properly, and more profoundly, it desig-
nates the whole tight web of untracked circumstance. Plato's principle
of Necessity, for instance, is of this order. Tragedy prepared this con-
cept of a structure without meaning, of a fabric whose function it is to
oppress without revealing its nature or identity. Tyche may be broken
up into many points, each of them blind, unrelated, gratuitous. But
most significantly tyche is not event but circumstance, the whole web
rather than its strands.
When Ajax is at the height of his madness, Athena asks him what
he has done with Odysseus. Literally the question runs (102): "At
what point of fortune do you have him stand?" Odysseus, like all
other ordinary mortals who mind their manners and worship the gods,
has his fortune which determines his successes and failures. The sig-
nificant thing here is that Athena tricks the raging Ajax into believing
that he, Ajax, can plot Odysseus' fortune for him. That is indeed
madness, for fortune cannot be plotted or engineered. But it is a mad-
ness which is characteristic of the heroic intelligence. For, as we shall
see later, Ajax's handling of time bears a close resemblance to such
tampering with fortune.
Fortune as an object of popular reflection and hope and despair is
one of the pervasive themes of Greek tragedy. In the plays of Aeschy-
lus references to fortune are especially prominent in the choral pas-
sages, particularly in the Persians, and in the speeches of heralds and
servants, and in the warnings issued by the heroes. For their own per-
sons, the heroes do not rely on fortune. The only one who seems to
do so, King Pelasgus in the Suppliants (380), does so at a juncture
when he has declared himself subject to popular vote, and that means:
when he has ceased to be a hero. Thus from the very beginning of
the writing of tragedy, heroes are treated differently from other men;
they do not feel themselves embraced and controlled by a tyche. Much
later, in Euripides, the rule comes to be relaxed. As is to be expected
in a playwright whose heroes are "people like ourselves," enmeshed
in atrocious circumstance, Euripides does feature the concept of for-

164 Ajax
tune in the self-appraisals of his heroes. In Sophocles, however, the
older tradition was fully kept up, in all plays, that is, except the
Oedipus Coloneus and the Philoctetes, where the chief characters,
bowed down by old age or sickness, do not enjoy the sense of freedom
and animal vigor which characterizes the more typical Sophoclean
hero. In the Oedipus Rex the rule of fortune is emphasized by the
chorus, by Jocasta, and especially by Tiresias, the riddling prophet,
mouthpiece of the people, chastiser of kings and heroes. Oedipus
steadfastly refuses to acknowledge so irrational a structure as fortune.
Only toward the end, just before his eyes are fully opened to the ter-
ror of his situation, does he, in a frenzied speech, ostentatiously call
himself the son of Fortune. And by doing so, by accepting the vision
of Jocasta and Tiresias and the messenger and all the others who lack
in heroism, he temporarily betrays his mission as a hero (1080).
In the Oedipus it is Tiresias who spearheads the attack of those who
flock to the standards of fortune. In the Ajax the same function is
performed by Calchas, his colleague in the skill of prophecy. There
is, however, a difference in formulation, and this introduces us to yet
another conception of time, allied to that of fortune. When the web
of fortune becomes, as it often will, too oppressive to be endured, the
hard-pressed victim attempts, not to tear and break the fabric, but to
find a natural opening, a chink in the structure, to crawl through into
what he hopes will be freedom. Then men are like mice trying to es-
cape from a maze, busily seeking the one hole which leads into the
open. This chink, or as we may call it, this nick in the strands of time,
rarely discovered but always hoped for, is the object of many sighs
and prayers in Sophoclean tragedy, and especially in the Ajax. Its dis-
covery would furnish the answer to the feeling "So long already . . .,"
which expresses not a sense of progress, or even duration, but merely
weariness and exhaustion. The Greek word for the nick in time is
kairos. Before the classical age it denoted the vacuum between two
strands of the warp. By the time of Sophocles, and actually long before,
the meaning of kairos had been narrowed down to refer to one fabric
only, the fabric of time.
When Teucer and Agamemnon almost came to blows over the

question of the burial, Odysseus, as the chorus acknowledge (1316),

comes in the nick of time to prevent bloodshed. When Teucer recapitu-
lates the past deeds of Ajax, reminding the Greeks to be grateful to a
man who has done so much for them, he stresses that Ajax once saved
all of them in the nick of time ( 1 2 7 4 ) :
When you were penned within your own defenses,
your very lives poised on the turn of a spear,
he came and rescued all of you, unaided,
asflameswere licking round the edges of
the towering ship-decks, and while Hector pressed
across the ditch to leap into the hull.
Circumstance is here pictured as a dense envelope of barriers and fire
and smoke and attacking foes, until Ajax shows a way out of the im-
passe. The actual word kairos is not used on this occasion, but the
language points to the same basic conception.
The nick of time, with its overtones of last-minute salvation and
miracle and happy ending, is an eminently popular concept. This is
obvious not only from the tragedies but more significantly from an-
other genre to which I have already made reference to verify popular
attitudes, namely, the late romances, the pulp literature of the ancient
world. The heroes and heroines of the romances are constitutionally
incapable of seeing anything but coercive fortune. They are thoroughly
immobilized by this vision, for, by the conventions of the genre, their
superior status renders them more sensitive to the tyrannic rule of for-
tune than other men. In the end they require the assistance of friends
or trusted slaves, less intelligent and less sensitive but cleverer and
more inventive, to find the hole in the net which imprisons them.
Similarly, though less obviously, kairos plays an important role in the
ancient arts of medicine and rhetoric. The instinct for the best mo-
ment, for the singular occasion when the practitioner could cut through
the limiting conditions and achieve the results which ultimately lead to
conversion or salvation: this attention to kairos looms as large in the
writings of the Hippocratics as in the handbooks of the rhetoricians.
Neither the orator nor the medical man is foolish enough to think that
he can subvert the massive processes of organic or spiritual life. But

166 Ajax
his skill tells him that the processes are not completely closed, that
there are gaps and openings in the structure which he may ascertain
and through which he may hope to effect his ends.
In the tragedies the nick of time, or the main chance, is of course
the central concern in the plays of intrigue, such as the Philoctetes or
the Electra. For the rest kairos is in the popular domain. Aeschylus
indeed does not make much use of the notion; in Euripides the nick
of time, like fortune, has come to be associated with the hopes of the
heroes as well as with those of the commoners. But in Sophocles, kairos
is an object of popular expectations and of popular despair. In our
play, kairos is, toward the middle of the plot, used as a pivot of the ac-
tion. From Calchas, via the messenger, we learn that Athena's wrath
is destined to strike Ajax only during this one day, and only under
certain conditions. If he can be kept in his tent, safely out of reach of
the divine punishment, in careful and sorry seclusion, he will be saved
(753, 756, 801 f.). To cite the colloquial comment of the chorus
(786):
It's a close shave; somebody won't be happy!
This is the people's perspective, romantic, bustling, subservient to
chance. Ajax will have nothing to do with it. It is beyond good and
evil; the fact that on this particular day Ajax could be saved is not
related in due proportion to anything he has done or not done. For
any crimes he may have committed he has been punished already,
through the madness and through his loss of prestige. If the possibil-
ity of salvation is to be understood as a reward for his earlier con-
duct it is surely unworthy of his great merits. The salvation which
would accrue to him in the nick of time is self-generating, meaningless
and sordid, an application of plebeian hopes, enacting the survival
of the unfittest. And so Ajax deceives his retainers and escapes to die.
Finally, perhaps the most useful fiction as regards time is the dogma
that time is not an unstructured mass but that it is articulated, and that
clock time is a realistic apprehension of time as such. This is a view
which comes close to the philosopher's interpretation of time as a
function of our own development. As a matter of fact the most sue-

cinct formulation of the view is found in Aristotle: time is the count-
ing ©ff of motion; its nature is numerical. Characteristically, through-
out Aristotle's discussion of the subject in the fourth book of his
Physics, we are conscious of a certain mercantile flavor, as if Aristotle
meant to say that time made us into shopkeepers who handle weights
and measures and reduce the business of life into distinct quantities.
In spite of the stirring picture of the high-minded man in Aristotle's
Ethics, the general tenor of his moral philosophy is practical and busi-
nesslike. Even the best man, the philosopher, is a reckoner, a de-
cipherer of mysteries and a calculator of astronomical relations.
In tragedy, business, or engineering, the meticulous tracking and
analyzing of numerical relations is usually a mark of the nonheroic.
At the very beginning of the Ajax, Odysseus comes forward as a
tracker following the footprints of Ajax. Significantly the language is
not so much from hunting as from business ( 5 ) :
. . . measuring
his freshly minted tracks . . .
The use of the countinghouse image stamps Odysseus as an ordinary
man. Others are similarly characterized. Tecmessa, for one, though
an honorable lady, counts like a fishmonger. On one occasion (265)
she establishes, by a bastard syllogism, that because two pains are
worse than one, the present condition, after Ajax has awakened to
his crime, is worse than that before.
But not until it is applied to time does the counting theme find its
most natural validation. Again and again the chorus literally count
the days, as though the counting could convince them that time was
advancing toward fulfillment rather than merely grinding them down.
In their last ode, not a particularly distinguished song but typical for
the use of the counting theme, they ask: (1185, tr. Jebb):
When, ah when will the number of the restless years be
full, at what term will they cease, that bring on me the
unending woe of a warrior's toils?2
2
R. C. Jebb (ed. and trans.), Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, Pt. vii: The
Ajax (Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1896), p. 179.

168 Ajax
On that occasion their counting does not give them joy; on others it
is their only sustenance. And of course the hope that on this one d a y —
in this nick of time . . . matters will be righted, is itself a convergence
of the counting urge upon one critical date in the calendar. Without
the fiction of the calendar and of red-letter days most men would be
lost. Not so Ajax; he disdains such reckoning and despises the reckon-
ers. When he places his sword in position to receive the thrust of his
body, he says ( 8 1 5 ) :
The slayer stands where he should do his work
of cutting best, supposing anyone has
leisure and interest for such calculations.
His contempt for numbering is shown most acutely at the point when
he first decides to commit suicide and ponders the business approach
to life ( 4 7 3 ) :
Only a coward hahkers after the
full tally of his life . . .
What joy is there in the totaling of days,
each crediting or debiting death by turns ?
I would not buy a man of no account
who heats his heart with empty expectations.
The hero does not count, he lives, and when life becomes a sordid
business of ticking off days, he sacrifices life.
Once, it is true, Ajax himself turns enumerator. He has come out
of the tent to show himself to the chorus and Tecmessa. As he begins
to recover his calm and change from singing to spoken verse he ex-
claims (432) "Aiai!"; and then, after suggesting a punning connec-
tion of this cry of pain with his own name, he continues:
Once, twice, three times I must cry out "Aiai!"
to match the torment of my present pains.
Is Ajax here indulging in a harsh parody of the common pose, or has
his torment temporarily reduced him to the sensations of an ordinary
man? The four words which make up the last line of our translation

might be thought to reinforce this interpretation; more literally Ajax
says: "Such are the troubles in which I am fortuned." But an uncer-
tainty remains. The passage clearly forms an exception to the ideologi-
cal pattern I have traced. It seems to me rather unlikely that Sophocles
would use such key-notions as "fortune" and the counting theme for
the purpose of psychological realism, to mark the ups and downs
of an unstable personality. Unless, with some classical scholars, we
are willing to believe that in Sophocles fixed characters count for noth-
ing and that each scene or action creates its own imagery and precipi-
tates its own mood, the language of Ajax as he begins to address the
chorus remains puzzling. It will, perhaps, be best to remind ourselves
that symbolism in Greek tragedy is not a hard-and-fast technique, dis-
tributing terms in accordance with a rigorous plan. It is too often as-
sumed that the images in a Greek drama respond to a sort of mathe-
matical analysis. There are occasions when the imagery defies a com-
plete reduction. This is one of those occasions, and it is probably the
wisest course to leave the puzzle as it is, a suitable reminder that the
critic's machinery is never perfect.
iii
Aj ax's general position, at any rate, is un-
mistakable, and we must now try to assess it. Aristotle tells a tale about
certain men in Sardinia who slept with the gods, and upon awakening
did not feel that time had passed. Similarly in the first book of the
Iliad, while Achilles converses with Athena time stands still; nobody
else notices that Achilles is taking time out, and when the conversa-
tion is over he and Agamemnon continue their quarrel where they
had left it, as if no interruption had occurred. By virtue of sleeping
with the gods or conferring with them, a man may hope not merely to
crawl through a chink in the texture of time but to leave time behind
grandly and without effort. Dionysus and his mysteries hold out the
same hope, offering the comatose sleep of the wine-soaked as a special
instrument for the conquest of time and the achievement of timeless-
ness. But this is the plebeian way; sleeping with the gods is incom-
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170 Ajax
parably easier than talking or, as the Bible has it, walking with a god.
The achievement of timelessness is difficult enough; the conscious en-
joyment of it is an exceptional privilege.
Yet the hope persists, above all in the breast of the man who feels
himself to be different from the common run, and who wishes to pre-
serve his being as a definable identity. Any change, according to the
Greek view, is in its nature a disturbance, the dislocation of an identity.
A man who is somebody, who has achieved a standing of his own and
wants to retain it, must begin to regard time as aimless and destructive,
as an effacer of achievement and status. As a result he conceives the
wish to place himself beyond the effects of time, and to oppose its
functioning. But this can be done only at the peril of his life; by in-
sisting on his identity and braving the advances of time, the hero cuts
himself off from his surroundings. In the end he may find that he
has preserved a shell rather than a living soul. Archilochus drew the
picture of a man rolling himself up like a hedgehog and presenting
nothing but bristles to the hostile influences from abroad. But does a
hedgehog permanently rolled up continue to live as a hedgehog? Does
he not rather become a generic specter of the race?
The Sophoclean hero, and in fact many tragic heroes, are in precisely
this position. He is not as other men are, he has a distinct being, more
real than that of others, which cries to be preserved from contamina-
tion and change. Exactly what this being is, he may not know himself
in every instance; we ourselves are hard put to it to define the heroic
nature. But whatever it is, we do know how it behaves. It seeks to
perpetuate itself against mutation, and to stabilize the world which it
dominates. And to do this, it must oppose the agent of change, time.
Lucretius, it will be recalled, claims that time does not exist apart
from things. That is the philosophical view, the view from the study,
across the top of the desk. For the hero times exists because in his in-
sistence on his rights he challenges it to a duel and thereby provokes its
operation. He summons time, and time, rising to the challenge, at-
tacks and destroys. There are only two things time can do when its cur-
rent is blocked and it is bidden to turn against a man. It can either strip
off the presumptuous veneer and lay open the common weakling under

the heroic mask. We then speak of Time the Revealer, time which
brings out into the open the hidden truth, the heart of the man. Or, if
the challenger is a true hero, time must cut straight through him and
kill. Time breasted either reveals or annihilates.
It is part of the subtlety of Sophoclean drama that we are tempted
halfway through the play to think that we have witnessed the work of
Time the Revealer. When Oedipus calls himself a son of Fortune, or
when Ajax makes his gentle speech about the irresistible mastery of
time, the disguise seems to have dropped off, and the hero seems to
have joined the ranks of the commoners after all. Antigone's "break-
down," when she is about to be led off to burial (806 ff.), is of a
similar nature, and equally illusory. For these are heroes through and
through, and time cannot cease until it has entirely demolished their
mortal status.
In the present play the lever of time's attack, or better, the cause
of hostilities between Ajax and time, is a part of the antecedents of
the plot: the award of the arms of Achilles. From Teucer we learn
(1135) that Menelaus and some of the other leaders had exercised
an improper influence on the voting. In the eyes of Ajax and his party
the contest for the arms was decided by a rigged election. The con-
sciousness of this maneuver helps to feed the glow of their resentment,
for the corruption of the others is thought to be sufficient proof that
Ajax is in the right. But even if the election had been perfectly fair
and proper, nothing would have been different. The use of the ballot
expresses the views of the people, and the hero must not be subject to
their whims.
The manner in which the decision was reached pales to insignifi-
cance beside the outcome of the decision itself. The result of the con-
test shows that, given the old-fashioned warrior, Ajax, and the mod-
ern man of reason, Odysseus, the leadership now goes to the latter.
Historically speaking, Ajax is getting to be out of date. He finds him-
self at odds with the advance of time, in the sense of social and po-
litical progress. In the simple, unselfconscious terms of Greek political
thought: time changes the good man into the bad. The man who has
been looked up to and imitated in one era will be laughed at or dis-

172 Ajax
regarded in the next. The Homeric soldier has become worse than use-
less in the age of democracy and committee work and elegant compro-
mise. Reason and reasonableness are the new ideals; fixity of character,
the proud unbudging manliness of the old order, is felt to be coarse
and dangerous. Galchas, the representative of the people, gives voice
to the new creed of flexibility and circumspection. As reported by the
messenger he says ( 7 5 8 ) :
Excessive and unthinking bodies are
struck down by massive hardships from the gods,
. . . when a mortal man
thinks thoughts outranking his mortality.
Athena also at the end of her epiphany, before the entrance of the
chorus, announces the creed of humility, though in terms at once more
traditional and also less relevant to the situation at hand ( 1 2 7 ) : Do
not talk back to the gods, do not pride yourself on strength or wealth;
a single day may elevate or abase
all mortal things; the gods love and protect
all men of reason, and the bad they hate.
Where it stands, Athena's little speech has an air of unreality, if not
cynicism, about it. Ajax has not prided himself on his wealth, nor has
he, yet, spoken unbecomingly to the gods. But beyond all doubt he is
not a reasonable man. Thus it would seem that in the opinion of
Athena his lack of sophistication puts him in the same class as the
nouveaux riches and the blasphemers. This is disconcerting; but Sopho-
cles complicates the puzzle even further. To emphasize the monu-
mental stubbornness of the hero on the stage he has Athena pretend to
the audience that in the past, in the pages of the Iliad, Ajax had
been an excellent man at thinking ahead and meeting emergencies
with forethought and intelligence ( 1 1 9 ) :
Could you have found a man more provident,
more gifted to effect what chance required ?
Athena wants us to believe that before Ajax was overwhelmed by the
storm he had worked in harmony with time. This epitaph on his al-

leged former self, proffered at a moment when Ajax is suffering the
worst pangs of his hallucinations, is a bare-faced mockery of the truth.
Even in the old epic Ajax was in no sense a pliable or thoughtful man.
His present truculence and rigidity are simply the continuation of a
personal pattern set from the earliest beginnings of the tradition.
Athena pretends the opposite only because, from the vantage point
of the gods, Ajax's resistance to time is a betrayal of the human por-
tion, hence Ajax must have changed. Or, conversely, Athena cannot
admit to herself what happens to be the truth, namely, that the gods
have changed along with the society which they symbolize. The gods
are eternally true to themselves, hence Ajax is not the same as before.
This is what Athena says; but the drama refutes her judgment.
Ajax offers himself to be crushed by insisting on a role that is no
longer viable, and by opposing time with the same unerring vigor
that had laid low so many opponents in the past. Time attacks, and
in a mighty explosion the magnificent unrepenting self is disinte-
grated and the remains handed over to Ate, the ruinous demon that
infests all fallen angels. This ate, this damnation, has a grandeur of its
own, the grandeur which attends a catastrophe of major proportions.
Odysseus, too lightly moved to fellow feeling, pities Ajax for his new
companion (123), but the chorus, in one of their passages of poetic
insight, thrill at the vision of their lord (195)
burning with a heavenly ate.
They sing this when calling on Ajax to come out of his seclusion in
the tent and fight for his soiled name. Literally the line may be trans-
lated in two ways: either "fanning the flame of an ate that reaches
the sky," or "burning with an ate sent from the sky." I suspect that the
chorus mean the former; they think of Ajax deliberately kindling the
flame of his madness. The implication that he could, if he wished,
quench the fire is flattering, and indicative of the esteem in which they
hold him. But alas, the second interpretation is the correct one; the
curse is heaven-sent because it is the tragic concomitant of the victory
of time.
When eventually Ajax recovers his senses, there are many symptoms

174 Ajax
to show that he is a broken man. Witness the terrible cries (308, 317)
such as he had never uttered before; the man of the terrifying battle
shout becomes a person of shrill wailing and piercing lament. In a
rapid succession of unheroic moods he begs the bystanders to kill
him, he rails at them for not leaving him alone in his misery, and he
complains that the villains whom he meant to slaughter got away..
This mixture of moods makes it apparent even to the chorus, blind and
forgiving as they are in their regard for their master, that the old au-
thority is gone. In a bitter, undignified outbreak against Odysseus,
the modern man, Ajax stoops to using slang, the sort of mobsters'
cant known to us from Aristophanic comedy, as if the destruction of
his old manhood had made him over into a glib member of the hated
crowd (381, 389). In the end, exhausted by this exhibition of mean-
ness and vulgarity, Ajax has an apostrophe to
Darkness, my light,
most brilliant gloom!
and prays to be admitted to the nether world. It is at this point (401),
when the full measure of his undoing begins to dawn on him, that
Ajax recognizes the role of Athena in his destruction.
We may well ask about the function of Athena in this tale of the
hero unstrung. Generally the tragedians use the gods for any one of
the following purposes. One: the presence of a god may herald an im-
mutable truth or symbolize some reality or trend which is greater than
individual men. Of this there is very little in the play. The Athena
who gloats over the sickness of Ajax is not comparable to the Zeus
who stands for Justice, or the Aphrodite who stands for the cosmic
power of Love. Two: the gods may be employed as stage hands, to
assemble an enormous and superhuman event, which must be shown
to flow from a higher source if it is to be properly impressive. This
we do find in the play, for Athena is the ostensible creator of the sick-
ness which overpowers Ajax at the moment of his defeat. Homer had
taught his followers that even the most revolting disease will appear
petty in the scheme of things unless it can be shown to have been sent
by a god. We cannot like or admire the Athena of the Prologue, but

her divinity is unquestionable, and through the fiction of her responsi-
bility the madness of the hero takes on an aspect of majesty and awe-
someness which it would otherwise lack.
Three: the gods are given the task of humbling men, either to
humanize or to barbarize them. If tragedy is, as is widely held, a dra-
matic treatment of the fall of the proud, this function of the gods as
levelers and agents of punishment is a necessary component in all
tragedy, not only ancient drama. The proud cannot fall unless they
are pushed, and somebody has to do the pushing. This is not just a
matter of texture or technique, for the moral situation demands that
the punisher be more powerful than the proud. That humiliation at
the hands of the gods is an important element in our play is obvious.
But if that were all we should have to ask why Sophocles chose to
present Athena only at the beginning, and why he drew her charac-
ter as he did. For the Athena of the Prologue is less a punisher or dis-
cipliner from the heavens than a churlish and rebellious friend, a
former associate turned disloyal and resentful. Indeed, the personality
of the goddess as pictured by Sophocles goes far to rule out the prob-
ability that her appearance in the tragedy was designed primarily for
the purposes mentioned under Two and Three. She does not have the
necessary majesty to be entirely successful in turning the sickness into
a splendid horror, and she is too vindictive to satisfy the require-
ments of divine justice and retribution.
Athena's principal role in the Ajax is to dramatize the collapse of
the hero. This explains why her appearance is restricted to the Pro-
logue. We come to be acquainted with Ajax through her, and when
we feel we know him she leaves the stage, never to return. Her de-
parture and her absence are felt keenly not only by Ajax but through
him by the audience. For, as Athena herself recalls to our memory
( 9 0 ) , she is his ally and chief assistant. Historically that is correct;
she had been his champion in the past, both in his own past and in the
past of the audience, in the tales learned at school. But—and this is
where the difficulty began—she had also been the champion of Odys-
seus. In Homer both Ajax and Odysseus are the chosen warriors; the
dual character of the goddess, mingled of fierce militancy and cool

176 Ajax
calculation, had found something in each of them to respond to. Now a

new day has arisen and Athena must declare herself for the one or the
other. The decision is never in doubt; as the protecting divinity of
democratic Athens, as the people's guardian, she must espouse Odys-
seus. This means, as Tecmessa perceives (953), that she must hurt
Ajax.
But this is mythological superstructure. It is not that Athena turns
against Ajax, but he destroys himself in his heroic stand against time,
and Sophocles uses the violent swagger and then the abrupt departure
of the goddess to highlight the self-destruction in a way which is not
accessible to a more direct portraiture. With Athena gone from his
side Ajax is a doubly broken man. He is obsessed with his loss; again
and again he ponders the disappearance of his ancient ally. Significant-
ly he never mentions her by name; his sense of injury and the memory
of his former greatness permit nothing more than hints and circum-
locutions. The catastrophe is, after all, of his own making. The brief
materialization of the goddess at the beginning, when he is mad, helps
to underscore his desolation when he recovers and finds her gone. But
he is too honest to deflect outward upon her what he knows in his
heart to be the fruit of his own commitment.
iv
Now our fierce, magnificent leader,
Ajax, is brought low,
sickened with a turbulent winter.
Thus Tecmessa (205), at her first appearance. That Ajax's behavior

when the play opens is due to a sickness, a malignant demon attack-
ing the soul of man and perverting his actions, cannot be doubted by
anyone. There are many clues which underline the strangeness of his
conduct. We learn, for instance, that in moving out against the Greek
chieftains he proceeded stealthily, under cover of night ( 4 7 ) . This
method of warfare may have been effective enough in the bloody
guerrilla actions of Sophocles' own time, but it is contrary to what
we would have expected of the historical Ajax, or of the Ajax of the

tragedy as he sees himself. Unlike Odysseus and Diomedes he is not

likely to go on night patrols, pouncing on men in their sleep and mas-
sacring them without the sanction of challenge and counterchallenge.
The truth of the matter is that the sickness has begun long before he
starts cutting down the cattle. It must be thought as originating with
his loss in the contest for the arms. The sickness, then, is not so much
a consequence of his defeat by time as a symbol of it. The killing of
the cattle is only the final spasm of the ordeal, coincident with the
final demolition of the heroic soul. Further than this the sickness can-
not go; Ajax must wake up, to find himself destroyed.
The butchering of the cattle is one of those conceptions which make
the spectator wince both at the enormity of the thing and at its ap-
propriateness. All the characters in the play refer to it, and several
describe it in detail, as if each wanted to outbid the others with the
picturesqueness of his report. Tecmessa even describes the scene twice.
But only the second version is a report in the proper sense of the word.
The first is part of an excited exchange with the chorus, chanted
rather than spoken, and conveying the awful truth through the media-
tion of an image, the image of the wintry storm. The chorus of sailors
conjure up the spectacle of a tempest, with the raging Ajax at its
center and the swell of ridicule tossing the waves. "Pull for safety!"
the chorus shout to one another, and try to make their escape. Thus this
account of the madness is garbed in a vision more immediately relevant
to the professional interests of the choristers, and appealing strongly
to our love of metaphor. For the time being, the imagery cushions our
perceptions. But then Tecmessa declares the storm ended ( 2 5 7 ) :
But wait! The lightning is gone; like the wind

from the south, though at first violent and sharp,
he is calming down.
She invites the chorus to join Ajax in waking up to the truth and sur-
veying the terrible results. And now, finally, we are in a position to
listen to her detailed communication, without taking refuge in meta-
phorical extensions and extenuations.
As she tells the story, the savagery of Ajax's treatment of the ani-
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178 Ajax
mals is thrown into cruel relief, and so is the senseless confusion of

the deed. The cutting, the dismembering, the severing of tongues,
the torturing, and the grim jubilation, all are sharply etched in our
memories. But there is some uncertainty concerning the identity of
the animals killed. Tecmessa speaks of bulls, and the image is almost
flattering to the sons of Atreus intended by it. But elsewhere the talk
is of rams, or even he-goats (cf. 237, 297, 309, 374, 1061). It does
not matter; it is enough that Ajax sees his enemies as less than hu-
man, and that the reporters capture the violence of his mood. A too
nice distinction between the several species might have done an in-
justice to the quality of his delusion. It is the treatment of the vic-
tims which counts, not the specific nature of their animal disguise.
Two of them are killed outright; they stand for the sons of Atreus.
One is flogged and flayed before he is put to death; that is Odysseus,
suffering the fate which in the eyes of Ajax he deserves, the fate of
an impious runaway slave.
What kind of a madness is it that makes a man mistake innocent cat-
tle and sheep for his enemies? Or rather, is * 'madness" the right word
for it? For the similes in Homer suggest that Ajax is acting out a fanta-
sy which, in its way, is as truthful as the reality he wakes up to, and,
who knows, perhaps even truer. Later in the play Sophocles gives us
a number of hints that, seen in a certain perspective, men and cattle
are ranged more closely together than our waking experience would
allow. Tecmessa in describing the shrill wailing of the broken Ajax
comments ( 3 1 9 ) :
He used to think that to indulge in such
laments was good enough for dreary cowards.
Himself, instead of high-pitched strident wails,
would give a husky groan, like a bull lowing.
His enemies employ the same comparison. Witness Agamemnon, who
contrasts the old-fashioned warrior with the new ( 1 2 5 3 ) :
A little whip causes the big-flanked ox
to trot obediently along the path.
Agamemnon is wrong, of course; more than a little whip is needed,

even in the case of Teucer, to whom this statement ostensibly applies.
But the comparison is in order; like Ajax himself all the characters
tend to put the traditional hero in the same class as the lead-animal
of the herd. A Homeric warrior is like a bull, or a ram. But for reason-
able people that is all; a comparison is only a manner of speaking and
no more.
Ajax goes further. He reverts to a mentality which preceded the
advent of reason and culture and kindliness. In a throwback to primi-
tiveness he chooses to live in a world where man and animal are not
distinct, where the leader is not like, but is, a bull or a ram, and mutual
preying and killing are the norm. What more suitable condition for
a man who has set himself against time? If this interpretation seems
fanciful a piece of etymological evidence may help to remove our scru-
ples. Presbys, the Greek word for *'elder/' literally means "chief bull."
I am not suggesting that the Greeks had once known a totemistic social
organization, or that the contemporaries of Sophocles were completely
aware of the etymological components of the word. But the existence
of the word and its derivation suggest that dignity and leadership
among the group were at one time seen as analogous to the standing
of the lead-animal in the herd. Mythology with its hybrid shapes, the
simile, and the theriomorphic objects of popular religion kept alive
in the Greeks an understanding of the aboriginal identity of man
and beast. By a punishment worthy of an Orphic hell Ajax is forced
to live the life which in his resistance to time he has put himself on
record as wanting to live. The killing of the beasts becomes not so
much a madness as the full realization of his appetites.
The man-beast identity is not the only synthesis, to use the Freudian
term relevant to the experience through which Ajax goes. Another
unity of the same order is that which exists between Ajax and his
armor. The self-induced hardening of the man is symbolized by the
constant reference to the weapons he wields or to his military dress.
Unlike the beast synthesis, which is largely compressed into one fren-
zied experience, the focus on the arms is used more subtly to give di-
rection to a variety of scenes. Whether Ajax is on the stage or is being
talked about while absent, whether he is mad or sane, he cannot be

180 Ajax
conceived apart from his arms. The nearest parallel is the biblical
picture of Saul leaning on his spear or brandishing his spear or hurling
it. Like Saul vis-a-vis David, Ajax persists in his attachment to his
weapons at a time when diplomacy and flexibility have put the arms
of the strong man out of the running. In the case of Ajax there is
the added irony that the arms with which he is identified are not
the arms of Achilles, hence are second best in addition to being out of
date. But as he clings to the trappings of his glorious past he does not
seem to realize that he is cherishing what at one time he was ready to
reject.
In his so-called madness, his instrument is his sword. The first time
Odysseus refers to him he calls him (19) * 'shield-bearing Ajax/' This
remains true throughout; references to the man always draw particu-
lar attention to his arms, as if they alone constituted his authority and
accounted for much of his personality. By contrast the stress on Teu-
cer's bow is minimal, and the others are associated with no weapons
whatever. Ajax cannot act without at the same time activating his arma-
ment. Tecmessa is (211) "captured by the sword"; we are not al-
lowed to forget that his past achievements, and that includes his mar-
riage, are owed to the sword. As Ajax prepares himself for death he
prays that Teucer will be one of the first to find him (828)
fallen upon this sword still freshly moist.
The sword is placed in position, and Ajax becomes truly one with
it, and Tecmessa finds him "folded around the sword," as the business-
like Greek has it ( 8 9 9 ) .
By the repeated emphasis on the tools of war, the suggestion of un-
wieldy size and hardness and isolation, Sophocles reduces the hero to
a shell of his former flesh-and-blood self. His resistance to time has
left him a hedgehog permanently rolled up and showing only his
barbed armor. Ajax continues to treat Tecmessa as if he were the old
Ajax of the proud days gone by. He demands obedience, refuses to
think of her as an equal partner—never calls her by name—and barely
regards her as a human being. He has none of the social graces, none

of the fellow feeling toward social inferiors which the new age has
made the fashion. When his son does not answer his summons im-
mediately he breaks out in a fury; when the boy comes he forces him
to look on the carnage of the cattle as if the scene of slaughter were
a source of pride. In literary imitation of Hector's speech to Astyanax
in the Iliad, he too addresses his son who is characteristically called
"He of the Broad Shield/' But the venture is only a surly replica of
the old model. He praises the father of the boy, and expresses the hope
that the boy will some day become like himself. He continues in his
refusal to face the fact of time and development, even for his son. In-
stead there is much talk of his own father (434, 462, 4 7 1 ) ; he pre-
fers to measure himself against the familiar dead past.
All this means that the attractive Ajax of the Homeric wars has
been stopped in his tracks and has turned into a mockery of his former
self. Instead of manhood he shows cruelty; instead of self-reliance,
self-centeredness; instead of bravery, desperation; instead of pride,
vanity and arrogance; instead of fighting strength, slaughter and mu-
tilation. In an hour when he comes as close to kindness as he can he
says to Tecmessa ( 5 9 4 ) :
You are, I think, a fool
to suppose that you can educate my nature.
Time has killed off the man and then passed him by. On a stage as
lively and hectic as that of any play in the Greek repertory, includ-
ing even a shift of scenery and an exit and fresh entrance of the
chorus—which is the sort of liveliness on which Aristotle frowned—
Ajax rests at the center, outwardly joining in the busy play but in-
wardly hostile to involvement and setting his face against the com-
motion. It is instructive to contrast him with that other great figure of
heroism, Prometheus, outwardly fixed in his chains but in his heart
seething with social instincts, with programs of action, with a will
toward progress. Prometheus, the crucified, is eternally young; Ajax
has cut off his ties with life long before he goes into his death.

182 Ajax
v
Both the plot and Ajax's belated insight into
his situation demand that he die. But when the time for his death
arrives, Sophocles has made things difficult for himself once more.
By introducing the mechanism of the nick of time, with the suggestion
that the hero might be saved on this one day, Sophocles has opened
up the possibility that death will not be necessary after all. Yet the
prospect of continued life for Ajax is intolerable and, worse than
that, dramatically useless. A heroic death appears tragic only to the
degree that it seems to be enacted by necessity. And so the playwright
devises a means of neutralizing the intimations of kairos: the two blas-
phemies. In the Prologue, when Athena points self-righteously to the
ravings of the hero and states that it is a deserved sickness, she says
nothing about specific misdemeanors which might have brought on
the punishment. There is nothing in the whole first half of the play
which might temper our impression that Ajax suffers because of what
he is, not because of what he may have done or failed to do.
But when Ajax has removed himself from the stage to die, though
none of his followers suspects that this is the object of his excursion,
the messenger who comes with news from Calchas upsets our as-
sumptions. For the first time, and utterly without warning, we are
told about two earlier occasions when Ajax showed himself less than
discreet toward the gods ( 7 6 4 ) :
"Son," said his father, "bend your mind to win
by the sword, and let the gods help you to win."
But he, his pride blotting his sense, replied:
"Even a nobody, father, could gain power
if gods assist him; I propose to attract
my glory by myself, without assistance."
Such was his boasting. And later, again,
when great Athena spurred him on and called
on him to bathe his hands in enemy blood,
he answered with a word of blasphemy:
"Mistress, go and assist the other Greeks!
Here where I stand the battle will be easy."

To speak thus about the gods, or to address them as Ajax is said to

have done, is indeed blasphemous. If these tales are true we must
revise our views concerning the background of his punishment. But
there is something disconcerting about the reports, and particularly
about their timing. If the audience was not familiar with these inci-
dents—and I suspect that it was not, notwithstanding the ancient
scribe's notice that there was a story in which Ajax threw Athena
bodily from her chariot—then it would appear that Sophocles cites
them remarkably late in the proceedings, and with a minimum of
emphasis. Perhaps the moralizers needed an aetiology for Ajax's suf-
fering, at a point just before the suffering culminates in death. The
unthinking are happily reconciled to the death once they feel that it
is a deserved penalty for specific crimes. But the two acts of blasphemy
are mentioned only, as it were, in passing, and forgotten immediately
thereafter. We must, I should think, conclude that Sophocles did not
want to have the incidents understood as touching on the heart of
the tragedy. The timing, the scope, and, not the least, the source of
the information conspire to play down the importance of the crimes,
for Calchas is not, in this play at any rate, an entirely reputable in-
formant. The drama is saved from being just another morality tale
about a proud mortal being punished for not sufficiently honoring the
gods. The simple-minded in the audience, with whom an Athenian
playwright always had to reckon, may have found satisfaction in such
an interpretation, but those to whom structure and imagery and themat-
ic development meant something would want to shrug it off.
And yet, the reports cannot be shrugged off entirely. Though the
intelligence is late and inconspicuous, Ajax had dishonored the gods.
His punishment, if it is a punishment, may not be related precisely to
the blasphemies; but they are symptoms of a tendency inherent in all
heroism, the tendency toward isolation and self-sufficiency and the
cutting off of social ties. The new man, with his reason and his small-
ish sympathies, does not present an impressive front when compared
with the true hero, but he is sure to adapt himself more easily to the
whims of the gods. Let us say that Calchas' revelations illumine the
character of Ajax from an angle which is more readily appreciated by
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184 Ajax
the people than some other manifestations of his personality. The blas-
phemies are not the cause of his punishment; but they do give tangible
evidence of the sort of man he is, on a level of action and behavior
which can be judged more concretely than some of the subtler strokes
of the artist's brush. The blasphemies help to round out the portrait
of the man who is out of touch, and who attempts to regain his lost
prestige by a factitious outbreak against authority.
Ajax first begins to think of suicide when the sickness is wearing
off, immediately after the great storm has ended. He knows he is
broken, and when he sings (412)
Foaming courses of the sea,
caves by the ocean, headland groves,
too long, too long you have kept me here
a prisoner in the Trojan land!
he temporarily adopts the outlook of the commoners. From an at-
tacker, time has turned into an oppressor breaking his back. A little
later he delivers his great speech on time, nonheroic time, that is. A
speech not so much of dissembling, though there is some of that also,
as of euphemism and apparent surrender. He now admits, or sup-
poses, that he pities the woman—still no names—and the child, and
that he regrets having to leave them among his enemies (652). He
declares that he was wrong to rebel against the sons of Atreus; for
without a hierarchy, without a chain of command, the world would
collapse. And now the application: I must give in, for even the great-
est powers give in in their time. The seasons give way to each other,
night gives in to day, sleep to waking. Nor do values achieve stability;
friendship lapses into enmity, enmity into friendship.
All this is of course foreign to the old Ajax. But it is no lie, for
the old Ajax no longer exists, except fitfully and uncertain of him-
self. The attack of time first made him into a parody of the ancient
warrior. Now it has made him over, for a short spell, into the new
man; it has refashioned him so that now he travels with it instead of
against it. But tragic heroes are not changed; they are undone. In
this scene, with his magnificent baroque showpiece of a speech, Ajax

has his hero's death. The corporeal suicide must follow. N o explicit
announcement is required, though there are enough double mean-
ings embedded in his oration to give warning to those who know what
a hero can do and what he cannot do. Later, in his monologue at the
scene of death, when he is by himself on the beach, he conjures up
his old personality once more, calling down curses upon the sons of
Atreus and Odysseus, and unburdening himself of the vulgar per-
spective which gained him a free exit from the tent. But then it is too
late.
How could Ajax be expected to live in a world in which muta-
tion rules supreme? It is the tragedy of Ajax that the stable moorings
of the heroic age as envisaged by Hesiod have been replaced by the
relativism of the iron age, in which parents will quarrel with the
children, host with guest, friend with friend. What Ajax does not
realize is this, that the iron age is not entirely devoid of the better
sentiments, of reverence and justice and the other social goods which
Hesiod portrays as leaving men to their own foul and indeterminate
devices. In truth, the new fluidity has its own attractions and its own
positive values which Ajax cannot see, for his temporary admission
of the universality of flux is a weakening, or a ruse, but not a con-
version. Even in his unstrung, moribund state, he cannot see that
change has either value or charm.
As he gets ready to die, Ajax prays, not to Athena, for obvious
reasons, but to Zeus, the ancestor of his house; to Hermes, the guide
from life to death; to the Furies, spirits of vengeance who can brake
the flow of time and punish the sons of Atreus long after Ajax is
gone; and to Helios, the bridger of space who is to inform Aj ax's
father of his death. The invocation of the Furies (835) is particu-
larly interesting. It shows us an unreconstructed Ajax, one whose lapse
into mildness and subservience now appears to have been only a brief
episode—this will be important directly; interesting also because
under the aegis of the Furies time relations are canceled out, the son
suffers for the deeds of the father, so does the grandson, to revalidate
the primitive pretemporal concept that the house is one and unanalyz-
able, and that the son and grandson live again, or better: live, the life
I!

186 Ajax
of the father and grandfather. Similarly, in his prayer to the Sun

(845) Ajax calls upon Helios to halt his course and stop his chariot,
to interrupt the rotation of the day, when he comes to the place in
the sky which looks down upon Salamis, in order to give the mes-
sage to his father. On the threshold of his death, then, Ajax once
more strains his whole being to interfere with the stream of time, and
to re-establish the sacred fixity without which he cannot live. And
this brings us to the turning point in the drama.
vi
The oracle had suggested that Ajax could be
saved if he stayed safely home instead of venturing out into the open
country. This is taken quite seriously by Tecmessa and the chorus. They
are interested in saving life (812), no matter what sort of life. Now
if Ajax had stayed home, physically and figuratively, he could have
gone on living perhaps, but his life would have been a shadow ex-
istence, not unlike the kind of life which the Homeric heroes are
compelled to live in Hades, a spectral existence without feeling or
body or purpose. Even the beautiful poetry of the speech on time
cannot deceive us into believing that the new Ajax is alive or real.
For the hero, salvation must have a nobler meaning, not the com-
monplace romantic excitement associated with the nick of time, but
a salvation which puts its stamp on the eternity of values, which pre-
serves the true being of the man rather than the embers of his soul.
This is what the second part of the play gives us. It shows us an Ajax
who is saved more than if he had stayed alive, in disgrace, mocked
and shunned. W e know from Plato's portrait of Socrates in the
Apology and the Phaedo that death can be regarded as a more ef-
fective means of preserving a man's special function and his individ-
uality than a timid avoidance of death. Ajax dies and is saved, as a
hero and a saint, a demon henceforth insolubly and perennially linked
to the soil and fate of Athens and her citizens.
Here we have come to a point in the drama which was more mean-
ingful to a Greek audience than to us. But we, too, by an act of the
historical imagination, can learn to appreciate the propriety of what

Sophocles does with the material at hand. As suggested toward the

end of the essay on the Seven Against Thebes, the demon, the life-
giving and protective spirit whose dead body, resting in the soil of
the land, ensures its fertility and its happiness, is a common Greek
institution. If we look around among the various heroes chosen to be
demons by the Greeks we find that all of them had in their lifetime
committed some terrible crime. We need think only of Oedipus, of
Heracles, and of the sons of Oedipus, all of them men whose acts fell
far beyond the pale of civilized behavior, but who had nevertheless, or
perhaps because of the immensity of their crimes, been transformed
into protecting demons. The assumption seems to have been that the
excess of vitality which made these men so dangerous in their mortal
phase could now be counted on to benefit those whose powers are
more circumscribed. Ajax, in Athens, was such a demon. One of the
ten Athenian tribes was named after him, and the citizens relied on
his beneficent presence to help Athens through many of her political
and economic difficulties.
Hence, when ate makes Ajax commit slaughter and treason and
sacrilege, he is already well on his way toward canonization. His
sickness, ironically, becomes the instrument of his salvation. And
when, on the verge of death, he invokes the Furies against the sons
of Atreus, he is already practicing the arts of the competent demon
cursing the enemies of his land. The suicide itself, though not per-
haps regarded as sacrilegious as it is in modern religious thought, con-
tributes its share to the making of the saint, by arousing the horror
which always attends any forcible snuffing out of life. It appears,
therefore, that in this special case time is not only destructive of the
proud heroic self, but also creative of something new. The act of cre-
ation and its result are as unpredictable as the force destroying the man
is mysterious. In Ajax it leads to demonship, and so the creation of
time must also be recognized, in a sense, as a victory of Ajax. He is
shattered as a hero, but reborn as a demon—in Greek, the word for
"hero" and "demon" is the same—achieving the permanence for
which he had longed, and justifying the harsh grandeur of his former
self.

188 Ajax
Now because Ajax is destined to be a demon, because, in fact, he
is a demon the moment he has thrown himself on his sword, the ques-
tion of burial comes to be of the greatest importance. Sophocles was
fascinated with the theme of interment; in two of his extant plays he
dramatizes the difficulties which block the burial of a demon in the
making. In the Antigone the tragedy enacted is in part that of the
burier. In the present play it is exclusively that of the buried. In both
plays the author forces us to look upon the body of the dead, if not in
the flesh, then through the reporting of messengers and mourners.
In both plays the action revolves about a body and its disposition.
At first the body is shrouded from sight by trees (892). The act
of death itself, I assume, was not witnessed by the audience. For the
purpose Ajax steppped behind some stage obstruction where Tecmessa
ultimately finds him. When the choristers ask to see the corpse (913)
it is pulled into the open, but not before Tecmessa has thrown a cover-
let over it. Only after Teucer has entered the stage, and on his orders,
is the body fully revealed. This intercalation of a period when the
body is not visible cushions the break between Ajax the crashed hero
and Ajax the hero reborn. There should be no slow transition, no
organic development between the two phases. For, as I have tried to
suggest, they are really one, though human eyes may see them as ir-
reconcilables. By withdrawing the body from open view for a short
while, the author evades the ticklish question whether to dramatize
the demonic status of Ajax as a corroboration of the old or as a radi-
cal departure from the old. Like the exit and re-entry of the chorus,
the temporary concealment of the body serves as an interruption to
make the audience forget everything that was pitiable or repugnant
in the hero's behavior. At the least, it serves to obviate the wrong kind
of question.
For a while, supposedly, Ajax's new status is no more assured than
his old heroism had been toward the eve of his age. By a clever twist
of dramatic irony Teucer comes only in the nick of time, as prayed for
by Tecmessa (921), to preserve the body against the machinations of
the detractors. But even if Teucer had not come in good time to fore-
stall the enemies, the damage would have affected only the Athenians

themselves, not Ajax, who is now beyond the reach of temporal af-
flictions. In spite of the abuse heaped upon him, he is secure in his
demonship. When Teucer, Tecmessa, and Eurysaces in a touchingly
intimate ceremony cut their hair in sacrifice over the corpse, we are
assured that, whatever further wrangling may be in store, Ajax is now
at rest, even before he is put in the grave. His survival underground
has been authenticated by those nearest to him.
The acrimonious exchanges which follow are not likely to make us
miss the fact that with the death of Ajax the progress of the play has
come to a dead stop. While Ajax was alive, though only the broken
tally of a man, things moved swiftly and with deadly purpose. All
action, including Ajax's speech of resignation and dissembling, had
been directed toward a cogent end. Now that he has died there is no
further development. What follows is merely a protracted illustra-
tion of the congenital inability of most men to recognize a saint when
he is in their midst. While Menelaus and Agamemnon on one side, and
Teucer on the other, hurl their insults, nothing happens, time is
empty, and though this is not at all the kind of standstill which the
living Ajax had desired, the simple fact that time does interrupt its
course while the fate of the body is being decided carries its own
sardonic justice.
vii
As intimated at the beginning of the essay,
it has been asked why Sophocles chose to write a play in which the
hero dies before the plot is half done, and whose second half is
curiously flat and unheroic in mood and style by comparison with the
first. That a play with a hero who dies halfway through need not be
inartistic, Shakespeare has shown. But more than that, given Sophocles'
purpose of dramatizing the hero's struggle against time, or better,
the assault of time upon the hero, the structure of the Ajax is well
suited to the purpose. If I may apply a biblical motto in a sense not
originally intended: By their fruits ye shall know them. With
the hero dead, the world is the loser. What follows is the pettiness of
the unheroic, flexing their wizened muscles and wagging their tongues

190 Ajax
in a total void, unsustained by the vital currents and the solid am-
bience which made every act of Ajax a Titanic effort rather than an
empty gesture. The flatness, the lack of tension and weight in the
second half of the play are symptomatic of the advent of the common
man. Even a broken hero is a more substantial thing than the Agamem-
nons and the Menelauses, who do not know what it is to fight against
a foe greater than other men and who, though beneficiaries of time,
have no insight even into their own ephemeral estate.
The contrast between the two halves of the play is not only one of
mood and substance. In form also Sophocles marks a decided change.
Before the death of Ajax the quality of the drama is largely musical.
The chorus chants or sings lengthy passages of sustained grief or joy,
and both Ajax and Tecmessa join with the chorus to produce those
musical exchanges which on the Greek stage achieve the most brilliant
emotional effect. After he is dead and the exaltation of tragedy proper
is exhausted, music is restricted to one ode by the chorus, and to one
exchange between Tecmessa and the chorus accompanying the search
for the body and its discovery. The dominant characteristic of the
second half is speech—we might almost say prose, the prose of thrust
and parry, the pro and con argumentation of the law court—rather
than the music of madness, or the music of reflection, or of mourn-
ing, or of hate. There are speeches in the first half also. But because
they give voice to the character of Ajax, and his isolation, the speech-
es are monologues, not orations designed to convince or convict. After
the death the orators take over and attack and counterattack. The rhet-
oric of the soul gives way to the rhetoric of the forum. But the body in
the center of the stage cannot possibly be touched by the brittle logic
chopped at its feet.
The men against whom the loyal Teucer tries to defend the corpse
are a singularly undistinguished lot. Menelaus' presence in the war
councils seems to be due to an oversight in the nepotism regulations.
He stresses the respect which is due to temporal authority, in a tone
rather like that used by the luckless Creon in the Antigone. He feels
that if only respect—or, as the outspoken Greek has it, fear—were
fully implemented, social organization would be successful and per-

feet. But the comparison with Creon is too flattering. In the mind of
Creon the appeal to fear is backed up by an avowed faith in law, and
law is a matter to which Menelaus pays only the most cursory atten-
tion. It will be useful to quote from his speech at some length, to un-
derscore the contrast between Ajax and this specimen of the new man
(1077):
Even a mountain of a man must know
that one small blemish will produce his fall.
But one attached to fear and reverence,
you may be sure, salvation is his gain.
Where wilfulness and hubris rule supreme,
behold the city after running well
before the wind, shipwrecked and plunged below.
Let there be fear, I say, in its right season;
let us not think that we can act at will
without paying the price in grief and pain.
Salvation, running before the wind, the proper season, reckoning the
price: we have come to know the mentality well enough. But perhaps
the most revealing touch in this creed of the new age is the sudden
mention of the city. Menelaus starts out by talking about an individ-
ual agent, a doer, a potential hero. Now he substitutes the city, the
safe, comfortable group, as if he were afraid even in thought to ven-
ture out alone into the uncertain sea of life. The change from the
singular to the plural is unannounced, probably unnoticed by most. It
is the herd perspective asserting its proper categories.
Agamemnon, who appears next, is more subtle. At first sight it
appears to be a poor example of dramatic economy to have both
Menelaus and Agamemnon oppose Teucer's aims. They are brothers,
their objectives are the same, and the plot does not seem to be ad-
vanced further by this twofold version of intervention. But "dramatic
economy'' is always a dangerous phrase. The notion that the short-
est route between two points is the most effective is not easily ap-
plicable to drama. In the present case it would not have done to
bring on stage only one specimen of postheroic manhood. One of the
significant things about Ajax was that he was alone, one man at odds

192 Ajax
with the rest of men. His opponents, then, must be presented as

many, acting with a fair unity of purpose but seeking safety in num-
bers. Greek tragedy does not favor crowds. Not that it would have
been technically impossible to arrange for a milling mob in the vast
orchestra of the theater in Athens. In fact some choral dances, as
those of the Aeschylean Suppliants, must have come rather close to
producing the effect of a mob stirred into action. But for its speak-
ing roles tragedy relied on selective samples, on representative in-
dividuals to carry the burden of popular interests. In Attic drama,
with its severely restricted number of actors and characters, two is a
crowd. To enhance the pathos of the uniqueness of Ajax, Agamemnon
must succeed Menelaus and share the limelight with him. Their near-
identity betrays their lack of quality; because they are made from the
same mold, neither has the distinctive powers which heroism de-
mands.
But once the dramatic need for a representation of plurality has
been satisfied, the author may wish to make the second actor a varia-
tion rather than an exact replica of the first. Agamemnon is more
subtle than Menelaus, and his greater subtlety in the end prepares us
for the appearance of Odysseus, whose refinement is destined to give
an entirely new complexion to the conflict. Agamemnon's appeal is
less to fear than to the law which sanctions fear, and less to political
law than to social regulation (1246). Also he sets out, in the best
traditions of the intellectual revolution, to discredit brute strength
and to elevate the power of intelligence (1250). With this evocation
of the teachings of Xenophanes and Heraclitus, Agamemnon de-
clares his membership in the vanguard of the enlightenment. But
underneath the gospel of liberating reason there is a political mo-
tivation. In a revealing line, close to the end of the play, he says
(1350):
To reverence tyrants is no easy matter.
Agamemnon too is a delegate of the people, of the little men who

curse the hero because he is not like them. His utterances are not

downright vulgar, but his sentiments are little different from those
of his brother.
And what of the chorus? Ostensibly, of course, they are on the side
of Ajax. They followed him to Troy, and their fate continued to be
linked to his. But their loyalty aside, they think and feel like the sons
of Atreus. They are simple men who have learned the lesson of
fear and prize nothing above safety and anonymity. Their sailors7
talk, on the Attic stage, immediately stamps them as democratic and
unpretentious folk. Timidity, constraint, cowardice are their avowed
companions. The thing they abhor most is ridicule. This, at first
sight, somewhat resembles Ajax's own insistence on being admired,
and his anticipation of jeering when the prestige is lost. In truth,
however, Ajax did not fear laughter. He fully expected it, and
loathed the prospect, but when it came he took it as his due from the
blind rabble. His retainers, on the other hand, cringe at the thought of
the slightest taunt. For them mockery is more than an insult, it is the
collapse of the precarious role which they have constructed for them-
selves out of the leavings of their master's pride.
For a full understanding of the tragedy, this is perhaps the most
painful note, that at first blush the people's response to the death of
the hero should resemble the hero's own disposition. In this play,
as in most Greek tragedy, and for that matter in comedy, each per-
son considers his own welfare and his own advantage before he gives
himself an opportunity to consider others. Altruism and self-ef-
facement are not the stuff of dramatic poetry. But there is an obvious
difference between the proud isolation of Ajax harshly rejecting all
encroachment on his terrain; and the chorus anxiously pondering
the question of what will become of them now that their protector
is gone; or Tecmessa pressing the claims of wife and family; or Teucer
ever oppressed with the consciousness of his bastard birth (1006),
clinging to Ajax because he knows that the hero alone is big enough
to disregard social convention and accept him at his own worth. Com-
pared with Ajax, even the best of them, like Teucer, are men whose
horizon is bounded by their needs and their resentments. They do not

194 Ajax
know the glory of the kind of struggle which Ajax undertakes, for
they have tried to adapt themselves to the position which the advance
of time has found for them. They travel along with the stream, their
association with Ajax notwithstanding.
viii
Finally a word or two about the most ex-
plicit champion of accommodation and stream-time, Odysseus. He too
is self-centered and desires his own advantage, but he knows that he
does, and he builds a philosophy of enlightened utilitarianism on his
appetites. Menelaus and Agamemnon refuse to acknowledge that they
cannot match Ajax on his level. The members of the chorus are too
ready to admit their inferiority. Odysseus is the only man who recog-
nizes that he is different from Ajax and yet puts a positive interpreta-
tion on the difference. Of the adversaries of the hero he is the one
most likely to elicit our understanding and sympathy. It is significant
that Odysseus is the only character in the play who seems to undergo
a development. At the beginning, when compelled by Athena to wit-
ness the madness of Ajax, he tries to block out the sight (80):
It would content me if he stayed within.
Not that he is afraid of Ajax, as some commentators have suggested.
Rather he is afraid of the contaminating air of the madness which is
bigger than either himself or Ajax. He is not sufficiently humane to
endure the sight, much less the touch. For a dramatic character who
no longer fears the contagion of madness or divine sickness we shall
have to wait till we come to the Theseus of the Oedipus Coloneus or
the Theseus of Euripides' Hercules, both written after the Athenian
plague had revolutionized the attitude toward disease. The Odysseus
of the Ajax may think of himself as emancipated, but he is old-
fashioned enough to avoid contact with an obvious victim of the gods'
displeasure.
But more than that, his desire not to be contaminated is chiefly a
desire not to be involved. His brand of isolationism, though far dif-
ferent from that of Ajax, is a legitimate brand nonetheless. But at

the end of the play he is changed, he is willing to be involved, and
he risks misunderstanding and opprobrium to bring about the measure
of peace and reconciliation on which the drama ends. Part of the ex-
planation is that his isolationism never extended to his feelings, but
only to his actions. Indeed, his initial revulsion may be said to spring
from an excess of sensibility and fellow feeling stabbed into inac-
tion. The key-word of his opening scene is oiktos, pity, and remark-
ably enough he includes himself among the members of the pitiable
breed (124). In the end his pity rouses him to overcome his reluc-
tance to act. Hence the statement made above has to be emended:
Odysseus does not undergo a development, he simply recovers his
ability to act. This happens once the initial shock of seeing Ajax in
his fury has worn off, as soon, that is, as the new Ajax has taken the
place of the victim of ate. Nevertheless it remains true that in Odys-
seus the author presents us with a character whose actions do not flow
substantially and predictably from a public pose. He is a varied man,
capable of fine gradations in thought and conduct, a worthy anti-
thesis to the monolithic stiffness of the hero.
In his conversation with Agamemnon (1359 ff.) Odysseus re-
voices the Heraclitean sentiments of Ajax's speech of surrender, the
paean to the instability of things and values. Odysseus even uses some
of the same examples: friends are potential foes, foes are possible
friends. But this revoking of the relativist position is no duplication.
When Ajax makes his speech, the weight of his remembered per-
sonality shows the perspective to be pusillanimous. So long as the
living example of the hero's greatness was, despite sickness and
despair, concretely before our eyes, the apostrophe to time could charm
and impress but not convince. But now that Odysseus confesses to
the same perspective, his pleading on behalf of his former enemy
makes us question our ready condemnation of the philosophy of flux.
From the premise: "A friend today may be a foe tomorrow" and
its converse Odysseus concludes (1361) :
A rigid spirit has not my support.
"Live and let live and bury the dead" falls short of expressing a
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196 Ajax
heroic sentiment, but as a rule of action it is neither immoral nor
trivial. At the very least it is an insight which accepts the inevitability
of change and man's bondage to it, and still allows for some freedom
of choice and conduct. Through the agency of Odysseus the merits of
the popular morality, of liberalism in the modern sense if one so
wishes, are restored to their rightful station from which the dulling
force of Ajax's contempt had briefly removed them.
Teucer concedes the respectability of Odysseus' persuasion. When
he thanks him for his mediation (1393) he refers to him as the son
of Laertes, a far cry from the earlier scolding by the chorus, who had
talked of Odysseus as the son of Sisyphus (189). The change of
filiation is an index of Odysseus' changed moral standing in the eyes
of his former adversaries. As in the Odyssey, Sisyphus, the archknave,
is replaced by Laertes, the pious grower of fruit; and as in the Odyssey
the shifting of the focus to Laertes inaugurates the final settlement.
It is difficult to say to whom the settlement applies, and what its terms
are, except that the burial is now made possible because for the sup-
porters of Ajax the Heraclitean maxim has become a reality: a former
foe has turned into a friend. In point of fact the burial signifies a
truce rather than a settlement. Agamemnon and Menelaus will con-
tinue to carry their grudge, though they will abstain from acting upon
it. What matters is not the terms of the truce itself but the moral au-
thority with which Odysseus invests it. His plea for forgiveness
(1322) is formulated as a recommendation to grant even to your en-
emies the right to preserve their own particular values and their own
special prerogatives. Each man has his natural excellence, his own
claims against prestige, and these we must, Odysseus feels, respect in
our neighbors even when they conflict with ours (1339, 1356).
Like Pericles in Thucydides' funeral oration, Odysseus attempts to
bring together two disparate worlds, the world of Agamemnon with
his affirmation of respect and law, and the world of Ajax, the world
of excellence and status and rugged individualism. The moral enun-
ciated by Odysseus on the whole favors the camp of the people, the
social group that looks for progress through compromise. The words
he chooses are taken from the sphere of heroic action and aristocratic
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pride. The terms arete, excellence, and time, prestige, had long been
catchwords of a philosophy which derived its inspiration from the
past and spurned the egalitarian tendencies of the present. But now
the prestige to be acknowledged is not the exclusive, jealously guarded
status of the great lord but a prestige which is only one of many, and
which allows the privileges of others to coexist. In spite of the over-
tures to heroic terminology, the great truce turns into an instrument
for leveling. When men "conceive in harmony/' their conceptions
possess little grandeur. Peace is restored at the expense of greatness
and of artlessness. The mutual attunement, the humaneness of the new
creed as formulated by Odysseus, is built on two interlocking premises.
One demands that "whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,
do ye even so to them"; according to the other (1365),
I too shall one day be in need of burial.
The ethics of the businessman is combined with the ethics of the
graveyard. W e do not aspire to be gods, the river of time is good
enough for us; let us try to swim rather than float so that our bodies
will not hit one another. But above all, no building of dams to stem
the tide.
Lest it be thought that this is a moral which Sophocles means to
support, that he throws the weight of the drama's lesson on the side
of Heraclitus and the Sophists, let us recall that Odysseus is, dramat-
ically speaking, not entirely successful. Though he is now willing
to touch the body of Ajax and help carry it to the sepulcher, Teucer po-
litely vetoes this ( 1 3 9 3 ) :
I hesitate, son of ancient Laertes,
to let you minister in this burial,
lest my permission irritate the dead.
The people have relented, but Ajax preserves his exclusiveness to the
end. He is carried to his tomb in full panoply (1407), as if this re-
newed emphasis on the armor made it plain that he is not included
in the general truce. The tragedy had come to an end with the death
of the man. What we have witnessed in the second part of the play
is the plebeian backwash of the heroic act, the humble societal ar-
.,.,,
198 Ajax
rangements prompted by the act. The treatment is necessary to indi-
cate the gulf which separates the hero from ordinary men. But the
detail and, in the case of Odysseus, the loving care with which the
common man is studied should not trick us into believing that the age
of the hero is dead, that reconciliation is resolution, or that kindliness
or utilitarianism is more substantial than heroism with its cruelty and
its ponderous unbalanced strength. Ajax stood with the gods, and
fought against time. He perished as a man, but his heroism survives,
beyond good or evil, beyond the reach of time, in the pure air of
everlasting life which even in tragedy is the reward and proof of an
earthly existence purposefully spent.

tAlastiS: CHARACTER
AND DEATH

I N HOMER'S Iliad the uneasy truce which ac-
companies the duel between Menelaus and
Paris is, after the disgraceful withdrawal of
Paris, broken by Athena, who persuades a lesser Trojan, Pandarus,
to shoot Menelaus (4.104, tr. Richmond Lattimore) :
Straightway he unwrapped his bow, of the polished horn from
a running wild goat he himself had shot in the chest once,
lying in wait for the goat in a covert as it stepped down
from the rock, and hit it in the chest so it sprawled on the boulders.
The horns that grew from the goat's head were sixteen palms'
length.
201

202 Alcestis
A bowyer working on the horn then bound them together,

smoothing them to a fair surface, and put on a golden string hook.
Pandaros strung his bow and put it in position, bracing it
against the ground . . .
. . . and took out an arrow
feathered, and never shot before, transmitter of dark pain.
Swiftly he arranged the bitter arrow along the bowstring . . .
He drew, holding at once the grooves and the ox-hide bowstring
and brought the string against his nipple, iron to the bowstave.
But when he had pulled the great weapon till it made a circle,
the bow groaned, and the string sang high, and the arrow, sharp-
pointed,
leapt away, furious, to fly through the throng before it.
Everything conspires to make the shot firm and true. That Athena,
the instigator of the disturbance, then turns around and deflects the
arrow from Menelaus is another matter. It merely proves that divine
power transcends divine partisanship. If the goddess had not interfered
with the direction of the missile, it would surely have found its intend-
ed mark. That is the impression created by the build-up of the shoot-
ing, and particularly by the prehistory of the bow itself. By tracing
the various steps which went into the making of the bow, by dwelling
on the size and strength of the animal and on the effort whereby it
was made to render up its horns, Homer manages to convey to us
that this is a superbow, an unerring instrument in the hands of any
warrior, but particularly so in the hands of the man who had killed
the goat and thus made the bow his own. A bought weapon, or a
stolen one, is not likely to give the same kind of service. The quality
of a thing, then, particularly of a thing used by a man, is regarded as a
function of its history. How it came to be, what happened to it in its
inception and afterward, is decisive in fixing its nature and its ef-
fectiveness.
The principle that in the area of physical things, status or efficacy is
determined by origins, is well known to Greek writers. The many
aetiological tales in Greek mythology, providing imaginary origins
and histories for numerous segments of our experience, argue the same

CHARACTER AND DEATH 203
understanding. These stories show that the principle is not restricted

to inanimate things, but operates also in the area of organic life. In-
deed most of the tales are about animals or plants, answering such
questions as: Why does the swallow not sing like other birds? or
Why is the weasel more ingenious than other creatures? or Why does
the heliotrope always turn its face to the sun? The character of an
organism is, according to this method, explained by pointing to a past
event. Men also are subject to aetiology. In Homer, as in most of the
writers of his tradition, the prowess or cowardice of a fighter is pre-
sumed to be conditioned by his family background. If a man comes
from good parentage he can be expected to prove himself a stalwart
warrior; if his parents are undistinguished, the chances that the son
will make a mark for himself are slim. This is, of course, a wide-
spread assumption; in Greece it prevailed until the rebels of the
classical period began to question it, but even then the natural prefer-
ences of the writers continued to favor the belief in inherited charac-
teristics. Deviations from the rule were regarded with some uneasi-
ness or, occasionally, with the excitement of a strange discovery, as
in Pindar's Sixth Nemean, written for a family in which athletic skill
was found to be handed from grandfather to grandson rather than
from father to son. The poet is intrigued by the enormity of what
the facts seem to indicate. But it is noteworthy that even here the
athlete's talent is not thought of as a personal matter, but as a gift
granted long ago in the family's past.
Now if it is true that the aetiological question—how did the thing
come to be?—was a powerful guide in the Greek approach to the puz-
zles of individual life, to the riddles of physique, status, and achieve-
ment, one might plausibly expect to find the same outlook also in
Greek analyses of human character and social behavior. If Helen is
under the compulsion of Aphrodite, if Homer's Agamemnon be-
trays signs of what today might be diagnosed as a feeling of insecurity,
or if Theophrastus' Grumbler is never satisfied with anything that
happens to him, we wonder whether the reasons for their behavior
might not be traced to their historical antecedents. Did something
happen, either to them or to their parents or their parents' parents,

204 Alcestis
which laid the foundation for the development of an excessive tend-
ency to love, or doubt, or grumble?
Here and there in the Greek writings it may seem as if this ap-
proach was indeed taken, as if, that is, the principle of aetiology was
explicitly applied to the analysis of conduct or character. In Aeschylus'
Agamemnon, for instance, Clytemnestra furnishes her own interpre-
tation of why she is different from other wives. It all started, she
tells us, when her husband sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. But
it is significant that the argument is that of Clytemnestra herself, and
not of the chorus, who alone qualify as a conveyer of the poet's critical
comment. The chorus, in fact, make no allowance for characters.
Their understanding of the world is lyrical; for them everything is a
texture of events, of colorful units of life attracting and repelling one
another and in the process creating complex patterns of meaningful
association. The lyrical perspective is essentially descriptive; because
of its extreme vulnerability to sensory stimuli it is incapable of analysis
or explanation. But even Clytemnestra's argument is not so much
an explanation as a rationalization. She recognizes the monstrousness
of her deed, and looks for an excuse in the past. The wrath released
by the killing of Iphigenia may explain an act, but it cannot be de-
signed to explain the whole complex tissue of traits and tendencies
which Aeschylus has embodied in Clytemnestra. In any case her retro-
spective explanation is the exception rather than the rule. In gen-
eral those Greek authors who are interested in matters of the soul, in
•psyche and ethos, do not give us history. Instead of uncovering ante-
cedents they draw a picture; instead of analyzing motivation they nar-
rate; instead of providing an aetiology they list the symptoms.
The Greek writers were not familiar with psychoanalysis. More par-
ticularly, they had to do without the tidy terminology and the clinical
orderliness of the Freudian school. But as we have seen, the aetiological
principle was not foreign to them. It would be a mistake to suppose
that they were not yet capable of analyzing men's actions in terms of
events and influences in their earlier lives. The poet who tried to ex-
plain the deadly aim of Pandarus' bow by investigating the history
of the bow could, if he wished, have explained the tormented career

of Helen by pointing to an incident or a series of incidents dating back

to her childhood in Sparta. That he did not do so has nothing to do
with intellectual progress or the lack of it. It is simply that he was not
interested in this kind of explanation, or in any other kind, when
dealing with exceptional human characters. Great writers have an in-
sight into the complexity of the psyche which allows them to create
convincing characters and to set forth human relations of great in-
tricacy. But they need not regard it as their concern to supply rea-
sons for their creatures being the way they are.
Homer's characters are remarkably subtle, as everybody would agree.
He is a connoisseur of individual modes of behavior, a shrewd prac-
titioner of the art of psychology. So is Euripides, especially in the
plays which do not end unhappily. Aristotle, in spite of his essay on
the soul and his treatment of the emotions in the Rhetoric, does not
have the sharp insight of the poets, perhaps because his science and
his system get in the way of his very considerable sensitivity. Nor do
all great poets necessarily have this insight. A writer like Faulkner
often does not have it, or does not wish to communicate it, because
his tragic figures are conceived as either automata or monsters. Restora-
tion comedy does not have it because it deliberately puts on the stage
men and women who are monomaniacs, hence false to the legacy of
the complete man. Proust does not have it because his preoccupa-
tion with the Dast and with the sources of the present mortifies the
instinct for the vitality of the present.
It is a commonplace of literary criticism that the meticulous regis-
tering of channels of motivation may run counter to the interests of
psychological realism, if not of art. The great and most enduring por-
traits are often the least overtly analytic. Their creators leave it to the
readers to take their cues from faint hints, or from the actions them-
selves, to establish the possible causes and motives to their own satis-
faction, if they so wish. What made Hamlet the man he is in the
drama may be an interesting speculation, but the question does not
enter into the aesthetic response except peripherally. Especially on
the stage an explicit plotting of motivation is likely to be disastrous in
its effect. If a playwright were to give us the exact causes of an action

206 Alcestis
in terms of the soul's evolution, he would risk reducing that action
to the level of a standard mechanism. On the stage a character should
be both singular and interesting; hence motivation must be either
obscured or left entirely to our imagination. By concentrating on the
evident patterns of behavior and response the playwright makes his
characters more immediately and more generally appealing.
Modern interpreters usually frown on any attempt to emphasize
psychological variety and finesse in a Greek play. In a recent ad-
mirable edition of the Alcestis we read: "So far from considering the
Alcestis 2L full-length study of naivete, weakness, hysteria, egotism,
character-development, and so forth, I do not believe that apart from
the hosiotes [piety] Euripides had any particular interest in the sort
of person Admetus was/' 2 It is true that there are Greek dramas in
which issues or lyric perceptions are more important than character
delineation, and in which the personalities of the agents are so
shaped and distorted as to answer to themes and objectives beyond
themselves. I have already discussed some of them. But the existence
of such dramas should not blind us to the fact that there are in the
Greek repertory other plays which are nothing if not portrayals of
interesting characters in action and interaction. If critics have lately
been unwilling to concede this, their reluctance is perhaps due to a
commendable reaction against the fashion of reading the plays as
studies of case histories. Freudian interpretations of Shakespeare or of
Aeschylus may have their use, but they start from so irrelevant a
premise that they defy the basic intentions of the writers. Greek drama
is not concerned with motivation; the question of why a particular
character may be acting as he is carries us far away from the nucleus of
the tragic business. But some Greek drama is very much concerned
with character elaboration. It would be wrong to impair the tough
fiber of Euripides' plan by translating his terms into professional jar-
gon, or by filling in what he has chosen to leave uncharted. But to
explore the richness of the vision, and the subtlety of the psychological
2
A. M. Dale (ed. and comm.), Euripides: Alcestis (Oxford, England, The Claren-
don Press, 1954), p. xxvii.

perceptions, is very much to the advantage of an understanding of

the play. It is no longer feasible to assume that a classical work of art
is necessarily a monolithic sort of thing, unselfconscious, natural, in
a state of paradise. We must acknowledge complexity and refrac-
tion where we find them, even in so simple a tale as that about Ad-
metus and Alcestis.
ii
The catalyst which Euripides employs for
the isolation of character is death. In our play death is the principal
theme. This immediately raises two questions which are, in some in-
direct way, connected with each other. First, should a play about death
be a tragedy? Second, should the treatment of death in a drama in-
volve the use of symbolic devices or not? As for the latter, it is to be
noted that the Greeks did not have a word for "symbol," and though
Greek literary criticism does discuss such things as metaphor and
simile, it generally regards them as stylistic techniques or manner-
isms, as substitutions for the real thing, and not as self-validating
formulations of a poetic reality. At the same time it is obvious that
the poets knew the value of symbols. Medea's chariot, Pentheus' pine
tree, the "Chalybian stranger" in the hands of Oedipus' sons are
the kind of meaningful substances which the ancient critics do not
take under advisement, but which nevertheless contribute, and must
always have contributed, significantly to the aesthetic effect of the
drama. The crimson tapestry in the Agamemnon is not merely an em-
bellishment of royal proportions, but helps to shape the mood and
the meaning of the action as only a visual symbol can. It is, therefore,
legitimate to say that the poets did use symbols to put across their
literary intentions.
In modern discussions of symbols, ritual is usually not very far
behind. The obvious parallelism of myth and ritual has led some
writers to regard all symbols as mental correlates of ritual patterns
of behavior. In the play before us, Hercules goes off to fight Death
at roughly the same time Alcestis is being put in the grave. The

208 Alcestis
simultaneity of contest and sacrifice is too tempting to resist; it smacks

of the rites of spring, of mortification and invigoration and in the
end, jubilation. In the words of T. S. Eliot's Family Reunion:
Spring is an issue of blood

A season of sacrifice
And the wail of the new full tide
Returning the ghosts of the dead,
Those whom the winter drowned
Do not the ghosts of the drowned
Return to land in the spring ?
To read the Alcestis as a symbolic representation of the death and re-

birth of Nature is especially tempting because this type of interpre-
tation has been proposed for much of Greek drama by an influential
school of critics.
Yet, in the case of this play at any rate, the ritual interpretation
is to be completely rejected. The characters of the Alcestis are not the
dependent parts of a larger organism, they do not feel themselves
to be members of a cosmos with which they must keep in tune and
which in turn determines their fears and hopes. On the contrary, in
spite of the myth of fate and death which informs the play, the chief
characters are autonomous, undetermined, self-reliant men and wom-
en, in no way tied to the vegetative life around them. They are human,
they are bourgeois; and the bourgeois life is insensitive to the work-
ings of ritual patterns. It does not function as a knowing or unknow-
ing participant in the periodic cosmic processes of expansion and con-
traction, of seasonal life and death. If Admetus and Alcestis and Pheres
were participants in a drama of cosmic crisis, they could perhaps take
some dubious comfort from their role. Even if they were not, as
agents in the play, themselves aware of their ritual standing, the
reader would remedy the lack and regard their actions as positive min-
isterings in a natural cause. But as Euripides conceives the King and
his Queen, no such facile comfort is appropriate. They stand alone,
without hope and without purpose, stripped of a sense of belong-

ing, having surrendered their chance of ritual reconciliation. They
are, in fact, modern men.
To come back to the second of our two questions, what means are
available to literature of talking about death, Sappho says in one of her
poems:
A great desire grips me to die and see
the dewy banks of lotus-covered Acheron.
Her formulation is twofold, first, colloquial speech, and then meta-

phor, specifically a metaphor taken from two different mythological
sources, the story of the lotus-eaters, and the concept of the river sepa-
rating the world of the living from the world of the dead. Sappho uses
the two formulations side by side, but they are of course alternatives;
either would have been adequate, and both are equally natural, at
least in the terms of Sappho's poetics. Why Sappho in this case chooses
to reinforce the colloquial with the mythological or vice versa we
cannot tell; the rest of the poem has not come down to us. The pos-
sibilities of the colloquial are severely limited, even in the supple
Greek, whereas the range of mythology is, notably in this matter of
death, almost unlimited. Death may be visualized as a person, as a
winged messenger who along with his brother Sleep returns the
Homeric hero Sarpedon to his grave in Lycia. Vase paintings have
taught us that in this role Death is a handsome young man, a gentle
guarantor of elegance and peace. Or again, Death may appear in
the person of the fearsome Charon, him of the burning eye and the
matted beard, whose unlovely visage stares at us from a number of
Etruscan paintings. Or he may be experienced as Hades, the majestic
inmovable ruler of the dead. Ancient writers greatly benefited from the
variety of mythological formulations. Depending on the special objec-
tives of the work at hand, they could pick this or that formula, or they
could combine several for a particular effect. And they were always in a
position to choose between the colloquial and the symbolic in the
first place. In this respect the Greek authors may be said to have had
an advantage over their modern colleagues. Homer even manages to

210 Alcestis
present the maturing of Achilles by his use and nonuse of mythology;
in the first book of the Iliad, when Achilles needs to control his pas-
sion, he is assisted by Athena, while in the last book of the work he
is able to master a similar outbreak of anger without outside help.
But personification has its disadvantages. The concentration of an
experience into the contours of a person, however august and bril-
liant, will usually be false to the abstractness or the mystery or the
power of the experience. Personification works by subtraction, and a
great deal that is important in the intangible that is personified, comes
to be sacrificed on the altar of clarity and visual charm. Hence mytholo-
gy offers complementary symbols of death, nonanthropomorphic sym-
bols which may be adopted by themselves or used in combination with
others. There are the images of the Odyssey, such as the vicious beasts
Cerberus, Scylla, and Charybdis; or the lotus-eaters, or the clashing
rocks. Death can be represented as aflockof vultures or Furies on the
roof, door posts sweating blood, a palace tumbling to the ground, a
curtain rent. Aeschylus' plays, as is well known, are full of such
nonpersonal symbols of death.
One rule of writing which was well understood by the ancient
authors is this: when symbols of death predominate in a work of
literature, the physical happening of death must be kept in the back-
ground. That means that in drama, generally, heroes do not die on
the stage. And this is true in the great majority of the plays that have
come down to us. But it is not true of the Alcestis; the heroine's death
takes place right on the stage. What is more, the physical death is so
conspicuous that it becomes the pivot of the dramatic action. Conse-
quently the scope for symbolic utterance is greatly minimized. To be
sure, Euripides does make some use of the metaphorical material
which I have mentioned, and the personification of Death becomes one
of the subsidiary agents of the plot. Nevertheless, as I hope to show,
the stress in the play is on realism, on the everyday formulation, on
Sappho's "I wish to die" rather than on symbolic transformation. And
there is a good reason for that. Death as an object of fear, as an omi-
nous prospect, registers its most telling impression via symbols. So will
death as a hoped-for release from suffering. But the question of the

meaning of death, and especially the group of questions taken up

in the Alcestis—how, and why, and with what results does a man
face or not face death, and what does death mean to the living?—
these questions must be asked in a setting that is immediate and col-
loquial. To dramatize the meaning of death, symbols are useless; it
is behavior that counts.
The overcoming of death is a universal theme of folk literature.
Of the Greek heroes, Hercules, Theseus, Pirithous, and Orpheus,
among others, attempted to descend into the nether world and outwit
Death. Each of them, with the exception of Hercules, either failed
in his purpose or proved himself a rascal rather than a hero. The
most rascally of them was Sisyphus, who tried to evade death by
bidding his wife not to bury him after he had departed for the under-
world. The result was that the powers of death could not claim him
fully as their own. So he struck an agreement with the king of the
dead to let him go back to the living for a day, in order to see to his
proper burial. He reascended, tried to go back on the agreement by
staying on among the living, and was finally fetched down again
and punished.
The folk tale about Admetus and Alcestis on which Euripides mod-
eled his play was very similar to this story about Sisyphus. Our play,
like the folk tale, is concerned with death not as a dire prospect, but as
a fact already experienced and known. As a prospect, death creates
confusion and uncertainty, and induces us to turn our eyes away from
human concerns to the mysteries of the universe. As a fact, it allows
us to concentrate our attention on what it does to men. For both the
protagonists, death is a fact. They are committed, even dedicated, to
the fact. One has decided to run away from it, the other to clutch it to
her heart. Both know the how and the that; the decision has been
made, and all mystery has been stripped off. With the mystery gone,
every thought and every act is bathed in the merciless light of simple
acquaintance. Alcestis and Admetus are familiar with death; and that
is why Euripides has introduced the personification, the Demon Death
with his well-known traditional gestures and his brutal directness. It
is true that, just before she dies, Alcestis shrinks from the irreversible
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2:05:22 PM
212 Alcestis
step. Her horror at the vision of death introduces a note of strange-
ness and wonder, suggesting that perhaps things have been taken
too much for granted. But this sense of uncertainty is short-lived. The
mood of familiarity and colloquial simplicity which marks the other
scenes is extraordinary even for Euripides, who, as we know from
Aristophanes, prided himself on having freed tragedy from its
shackles of symbolic ambiguity and rhetorical pomp. It would be fruit-
less in this play to look for elevated thematic images or significant
vocabulary clusters. Even the choral songs, all except the Ode to Neces-
sity (962) for whose Aeschylean color there is a special reason, have
a minimum of pathos and lyric texture. The chorus is drawn straight
into the middle of an action which is realistic, humane, unmysteri-
ous; from the very beginning, the choristers share in the conversa-
tional and unwondering mood of the drama.
But can there be a tragedy without wonder? The truth is, to
answer the first of the two questions raised above, that the Alcestis is
not a tragedy. Tragedy dramatizes men's emotions, their victories
and defeats in the struggle for values and principles. Tragedy does
not deal with the natural necessities such as eating and drinking or
sleeping or dying. Because this is a play about death as a natural fact,
its tone is light and its machinery derives from the happy optimism
of the folk tale on which it draws. Dante's Commedia shows us that
the natural order of the world requires a nontragic exposition. We
may also remember the words of David when Bathsheba's child had
died:
While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept; for I said,
Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the
child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I
fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he
shall not return to me.
We know that Euripides did not conceive of his play as a tragedy

even in the more neutral Greek sense of the word. This is clear from
the fact that the Alcestis was performed as the last part of a tetralogy.
We do not have thefirstthree plays but we have the titles and we know

what the plays were about. In all three of them Euripides seems to have
emphasized the monstrosity of human instincts, the shabbiness of
personal relations, and the impenetrability of the moral order. The
subjects were depressing and even revolting, and one of the plays,
the Telephus, came to be a by-word for the type of naturalism from
which the Greeks on the whole shied away. There were, then, three
statements of negation, or at best of painful disillusionment. At the
end, in the position where ordinarily we should expect a satyr play,
Euripides on this occasion put yet another drama dealing with men,
and inglorious men at that. But the fourth play eventually turns out
to voice a ringing "Yea," a vote of confidence calculated to compen-
sate for the horrors which precede it. For in some peculiar way which
we shall have to study, the sorry men and women of the Alcestis are
also noble and perhaps even admirable. Apparently Euripides felt
that a traditional satyr play, with the accent on amoral vitality and
animal vigor, would have been less effective in counterbalancing the
human futility of the first three plays than this lighthearted confronta-
tion of natural necessity with the common feelings of fear and jealousy
and love.
iii
The lightheartedness of much of the action,
as of the antecedents, is unmistakable. It all started with Apollo, who
served the Furies strong drink, "tricking and tripping them, like a
professional" (33), to get Admetus off. This is part of the familiar
tale; nevertheless the emphasis on drink at this early stage is signifi-
cant. Drink is part of the structure of human necessities and tempta-
tions which lend themselves to comic treatment. Drink is predictable,
it raises few questions, and it can be funny. Of all this Hercules will
be the living proof, later in the play. In the Prologue on the stage, the
language of the conversation between Apollo and Death shows that
though they are gods they have nothing godly about them. They argue
like business competitors. Fortunately for the conception of the play
the word for "death" in Greek is masculine, hence the personification
of death is male. If Death were female as she is in Latin and the Ro-

214 Alcestis
mance languages, no such robust negotiating at the conference table

would have been possible. For an audience of men, the femininity
of Death would endow her with mystic dimensions which the hope-
lessly masculine Death of the Alcestis does not possess. In his greet-
ing to Death, Apollo gives us a taste of what is to be expected ( 2 6 ) :
He's come on the dot of the hour!
The bourgeois quality of the remark, both complimentary and a
little resentful at the fact that trains are running on time, sets the tone
for what follows. This is a well-regulated world in which men know
all the answers; occasionally they wish there were a few they did not
know.
Death is surprised and suspicious at seeing Apollo. Apollo tries to
allay his suspicions ( 3 8 ) :
APOLLO: Fairness and persuasion are my tools.
DEATH: If so, what is the purpose of that bow?
(points)
APOLLO: What bow? Oh, that! It's just a habit of mine to
carry it.
DEATH: Ah! Just as you patronize the rich?
The joke about the bow is characteristic. The god carries the bow by
the same unreflected necessity by which we eat and drink and sleep.
W e go through the motions without contemplating their meaning.
When they are brought to our attention we are embarrassed, for we
like to think of ourselves as living fully conscious and purposeful lives.
The negotiating starts in earnest ( 5 4 ) :
APOLLO: A death is a death; why not accept another?
DEATH: No deal; I like to bag them young and green.
In the sequel, Death voices the suspicion that Apollo has been bribed,
and condemns bribery with all the sham dignity of a public orator. A
good democrat, he despises Apollo for being on the side of the rich.
He lives by the letter of the law; Apollo, he suggests, tries to set him-
self above it. Apollo's position is indeed peculiar. He had arranged for
the death of Alcestis; now he tries to rescind the arrangement. In the
eyes of Death, Apollo is an incurably unrealistic humanitarian who

fights the windmills of natural necessity, the despair of the practical
law-abiding bureaucrats who have their feet on the ground and loathe
sentimentality. Death does not pretend to be a free agent; he has his
work cut out for him, for he is a servant of the nether gods. He does
not control or understand, nor does he wish to; his job is to act. At
first blush this would seem to put him on the same level as Hercules,
that other slave who acts rather than reflects. But Hercules' servitude
is that of a Stoic king; he is a man so attuned to the natural world that
the choice of action and the exercise of what little freedom he has be-
come as congenial to him as the ties which bind him to necessity. Death
is a real slave, a clockwork machine which has renounced all free-
dom. He is a tool of necessity.
Is the humor of the scene between Apollo and Death appropriate
to the plot of the Alcestis? A woman courts death, virtually commits
suicide, because she feels she can help her husband by sacrificing her-
self. Her husband knows about her intention and does nothing to stop
her because, through a deficiency in his imaginative powers, he thinks
life to be the highest good. In the end, faced with the fact of her
death, he comes to his senses. This is the plot of the Alcestis. It is by
no means funny, nor is it outlandish or contrived. Stalinism and Hit-
lerism provided many occasions for its re-enactment, and some years
back films about lifeboats with too many occupants in them were
very popular. In the political experience of fifth-century Athens, also,
the institution of the scapegoat was well enough known. Why, then,
does Euripides present us with, for the most part, a genial fairy tale,
rather than a bitter drama of conflict and betrayal? Because, for one
thing, the fairy tale consolidates the impression of necessity. All
great drama, as everyone would agree, needs to generate the feeling
that the plot is exactly as it had to be, and could not have been other-
wise. For the building of this assurance the fairy-tale formulation
does exceedingly well. Furthermore, the fairy tale allows beauty to co-
exist along with violence and necessity. And third, the fairy tale makes
it possible for Euripides to write his commedia. The theme itself is not
funny; but the fable frame allows the modicum of humor and play-
fulness which the author wants for his major design, which is the ex-
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216 Alcestis
ploration of human character and ordinary behavior in the face of
the fact of death. Character, as we know from the end of the Sym-
posium and from the Characters of Theophrastus, can be studied best
in an atmosphere of pleasantry and gentle detachment. High serious-
ness and a preoccupation with unnerving issues do not favor the
development of those minor but trenchant insights whereby character
is anatomized and revealed.
The action is designed not to engage our fear or pity. The Pro-
logue, through the mouth of Apollo, tells us what is going to hap-
pen. We know, and the gods know; only the actors do not realize that
everything is going to come out all right, that Hercules will be the
deus ex machina. Thus the plot comes to be insulated against our
emotions; it turns into an object for amusement, and perhaps for
reflection, but not for empathy. We admire what we see on the stage
very much in the way we admire and applaud a clever orator. We
recognize his subtlety, his ability to make things come alive in our
imagination, the verisimilitude of his fictions. But we cannot possibly
feel anxiety, much less horror, at the visions he conjures up. And just
as the orator knows that we know, and allows this knowledge to color
his speech, so also the speeches of the Alcestis have about them an air,
however faint, of posing. It is as if the characters were at one and the
same time trying to rouse our emotions and apologizing for doing
just that. And yet this touch of mockery is so slight that most of the
time we are not even conscious of it; certainly it never endangers the
simplicity of the action, or the credibility of the main characters.
The Alcestis presents us with a rhetoric of death. But rhetoric does
not exclude realism. Knowing as we do the conventions of the Greek
theater we do not expect a photographic type of realism. The speech
consists of polished trimeters, and the action proceeds with a swift-
ness which defies the snail's pace of life. But in a larger sense the play
comes as close to a successful realism as a Greek drama can be. There
is no villain, but there is no hero either. Everybody is decent and well-
meaning within his lights even if motivated by his special interests
and grudges. Even Pheres is kind enough to play the mourner for Al-
cestis, and while he does so he is not necessarily insincere. What the

play does tell us is this, that people often make each other intensely
unhappy by their virtues. According to Plato, each action releases
one or more effects, and each of these effects becomes itself a cause
which releases new effects, which are no longer controlled or cal-
culated so far as the original cause is concerned. This errant cause,
as Plato calls it, is chiefly responsible for the various dislocations in
the life of the world, and ultimately for the existence of evil. Life
is a nexus of ill-connected events.
Euripides likewise teaches that by their very virtues men may
contribute to the wrong in this world. The only figures on the stage
not caught up in the concatenation of human causes are Apollo, Death,
and the unerrant Hercules. But though they are not enmeshed in the
tissue of failure and error as the others are, they are themselves suf-
ficiently naturalized not to disturb the effect of realism. The gruff,
puritan, class-conscious Death, the guzzling but tempestuously gen-
erous Hercules, the ineffectual and bow-ridden but well-intentioned
Apollo fit well into the scheme of things. The mythological apparatus
is gauged to further the ends of psychological realism. At the same
time the presence of the gods, and the fairy-tale base, prevent the
realism from turning sour and becoming a naturalism of indignity
and ugliness. And in the figure of Hercules, Euripides shows us a man
who, whatever his shortcomings—and the servant thinks he is more
beast than man—has the power to act without causing unhappiness,
except to Death. If there is a hero it is Hercules; in spite of—or be-
cause of?—his patent lack of discretion and intellect, he is the only one
who can cope with necessity without hurting either himself or others.
Decency, necessity, and death: these are the elements out of which
Euripides composes this gentle anatomy of the unheroic soul.
iv
How does an ordinary human being protect
himself against too keen an awareness of the weight of necessity?
How does he manage to save his self-respect in the face of predictabil-
ity? By embracing the conventions, if we are to believe the Alcestis.
Conventions are man-made, they give an illusion of human mastery,

218 Alcestis
they afford a fixed point, a dignified rest in the toss of the errant
cause. The instrument which Euripides employs to dramatize man's
reliance on the conventions is, naturally, the chorus. Throughout the
repertory of Greek drama the chorus has the role of affirming conven-
tional morality and conventional perspectives in the face of heroic
deviations from the norm. Often its conventionality appears to us
more like triteness or stupidity. But its traditional stand provides an
ever-present internal rectification of the heroic imbalance, a constant
therapy of the heroic madness. In the Alcestis there are no heroes who
deviate from the norm, there is no inkling of the grand madness or
intransigence which we associate with the character of a Medea or an
Ajax. Still, the chorus delivers its sermons. But now these pledges
to convention do not have their usual counteractive force. Rather, they
give us the essence of the chorus, and through them the essence of all
men.
As soon as the choristers enter, they ask, in effect (79): "Are we
to grieve or not? Somebody please tell us whether Alcestis has died
or not!" For the people, it requires a ceremonial to cope with neces-
sity. Their reaction to the fact of death is a matter of timing and
ritual observance. Their mourning need not be any less heartfelt for
being mechanized; but they guard well against its being spontaneous.
The question of the chorus: What shall we do? is a nontragic dis-
tortion of the tragic dilemma expressed in the words: What am I to
do? In the Alcestis, the question really means: What does etiquette
require us to do? Or better: How soon may we fall back on the regu-
lations of etiquette? This is how the comedy of manners reformu-
lates the question of how one behaves in the presence of death. The
men of the chorus make no bones about it—they would be more com-
fortable if the Queen were already dead. They would rather prac-
tice the ceremonial than wait for it. At the moment they are waiting
for the conventional signs of mourning, for the groaning and la-
menting and beating of hands on breasts (86). In their mind's eye
they contemplate the vision of a beautifully appointed funeral, com-
plete with bowl of water and curl of hair (96). They want Alcestis
dead so they can go through the apotropaic motions of the ritual. But,

being decent and generous, they are ashamed of their secret expecta-
tions; they catch themselves and sing ( 9 0 ) :
Healer God, appear and soothe
the wave of disaster!
as if Apollo had anything to say in the matter. But then again, later,
they turn to the servant girl and ask with an unhealthy but quite
natural eagerness (146),
You're sure there is no hope she will be saved ?
And again (150),
Her death will make her famous!
In the eyes of the chorus, at any rate, Alcestis' death is a fact, and they
are impatient to get on with it.
Eventually, when the Queen has deigned to give up the ghost, they
remark, quite literally ( 4 1 6 ) :
You must, Admetus, try to bear this sorrow.
You're not the first, nor will you be the last,
to lose a worthy wife. After all, we must
all of us go at one time or another.
This reminds us of nothing so much as of the Marx Brothers in Room
Service exclaiming pious inanities at a fictitious deathbed. Would the
effect in Greek be similarly funny? Perhaps not; it is the traditional
function of the chorus to express collective wisdom. What seems silly
to us, appears in many instances to have been intended as a serious
contribution to the soothing of distress. Yet I for one cannot see
Euripides writing these lines without tongue in cheek. For the chorus
to say to Admetus "We've all got to go!" is comical in any language.
The chorus relies on its stable conventions to see them through the
present unhappiness, and they wish to let others share in this protec-
tion. They do not seem to realize that their age-old comfort cannot
possibly be a comfort to their king.
A second characteristic of the chorus spotlighted by Euripides is
their strong sense of masculine prerogative. Apart from an initial ref-

220 Alcestis
erence (82) to "Alcestis, child of Fellas," the chorus refuses to con-
sider the Queen in her own right, preferring to think of her as the
wife of Admetus. At one point (220) they pray to Apollo to save
Admetus from being hurt through her death. What matters is not her
sacrifice but her husband's suffering (cf. 144, 199, 226, 241). Al-
cestis must die, that is her obligation and her fate; any feeling that
may be provoked by this fate is to be poured into sympathy with the
lonely survivor. It is his loss, not hers, which feeds the compassion of
the chorus. In the eyes of the servant girl, on the other hand, it is
Alcestis who merits the greater share of the grief; as for Admetus, he
could have prevented the unhappiness (197):
If he had died, that would be all. But since
he ran from death, he'll have his torture with him
always.
The chorus, manly and middle-aged, cannot appreciate the great-
ness of the Queen's decision or, later, the violence of her suffering;
they can speak and feel only with other men. They are too old-
fashioned to put themselves in the place of a woman, too simple to
look at the situation from two points of view. As in the original folk
tale, Alcestis is for them little more than a means to an end, a will-
ing instrument to ensure the survival of the King. For the slave girl,
Alcestis is a heroine, and Admetus a coward.
Euripides is playing fast and loose with traditional morality. Tyr-
taeus, the spokesman of masculine virtue, had said: "The man who
deserts his post will lead an outcast's life, and in the end he is going
to die anyway; hence, face death, for so you will live gloriously, or
earn glory in death." In our play this creed is, with but one significant
change—eternal pain instead of eternal shame—enunciated by the
slave girl, while the brave men of the chorus, loyal supporters and
spiritual companions of the King, throw the dictates of heroism to
the winds. They seem to think that the privileges of their sex and
the continued survival of masculine power should cancel out the claims
of manly courage and arete.
What kind of a person is this man who is willing to sacrifice his

wife? First of all let us look at the tradition. An ancient drinking song
advises as follows:
Friend, learn the rule of Admetus and keep distinguished com-

pany.
Keep away from the mob; there is no grace in them.
In the old songs, apparently, Admetus was the ideal aristocrat, gra-
cious, class-conscious, cultured to his finger tips, the kind of prince
whose self-righteousness is unshaken by irrelevant notions of charity
or brotherly love. In the folk tale on which the play is based, his
superior standing guaranteed him a hero's rank, and he achieved
the hero's supreme authentication by, for a time, overcoming death.
That his wife got lost in the shufHe was unfortunate and regrettable
but justified by the results. He was invincible, and she was one of
his means of defense. In retrospect the victor has a right to expend
fortifications. The brilliance of his position induces us to regard the
death of Alcestis a mere incident and to forget it.
In Euripides' play Admetus is still the gracious and refined gentle-
man, but though his royal power is great ( 588), his personal distance
from his subjects is much reduced. Like most of Euripides' kings, he
is actually a man of the people, more sensitive perhaps than the rest,
but a little confused and not entirely happy in the elevated position in
which fortune has placed him. More important, Euripides shifts the
emphasis of the ancient tale; he concentrates less on the deed itself than
on the implications and consequences of the deed. He asks the ques-
tion: What happened to the wife, and could the King really stand
by and see his wife die for him without a stir of embarrassment? It
is as if a dramatist were to take up the story of Hansel and Gretel and
ask: What precisely was the position of the witch? Did she suffer?
Could the children who caused her death sleep the sleep of the inno-
cent thereafter?
Because of the new light thrown on Alcestis, we are now made to
see Admetus from a radically different angle. It is the servant girl
who supplies us with the fresh perspective: Admetus is a fugitive
from justice, with Apollo, the god of blue-blooded honor and re-

222 Alcestis
finement, aiding and abetting him to turn tail. Worse yet, Admetus im-
plores his wife not to "betray" him. He uses the word on more than
one occasion (e.g., 250, 275). The servant girl copies the usage in
her report ( 2 0 1 ) :
He weeps and clasps his lady in his arms

and begs her: "Don't betray me," . . .
Admetus falls back on the same word to characterize his parents' un-
willingness to die for him (659). It is a military term, taken straight
from the spiritual arsenal of Tyrtaeus and other writers of patriotic
poetry. Strictly speaking, it is applicable only to Admetus himself and
no one else. W e wince to hear it used of one who is a very much bet-
ter soldier than he. But as a piece of psychological portraiture it is
perfect. Admetus has transferred his fate to the shoulders of Alcestis;
she is about to die, there is nothing now he can do to head off the
event, and he is beginning to resent this infraction of his freedom to
will and act. At the peak of his frustration he persuades himself that
she is dying of her own free choice, and that she rather than he is the
one who could yet rectify the mistake. There is some justice in this.
The whole dramatic treatment does conspire to make Alcestis appear
a freer agent than her husband. Admetus expressed a wish, and the
gods acted; Alcestis had no gods assisting her to facilitate or direct
her choice. Hence Admetus blames Alcestis for not revoking her
decision.
The absurdity and the violence of his entreaties suggest that he
is not without his share of tenderness. A coarser man might have
commiserated with the woman, and yet taken the situation in his
stride. He is vulnerable, hence he suffers. Again and again he assures
Alcestis of his love and his concern. When he says to her ( 2 7 7 ) : "If
you die, we [he includes the children} shall die too," he means what
he says, however preposterous the sentiment. He treats his wife as an
equal, as a cherished partner in life. He wished to escape death, and he
allowed Alcestis to substitute for him. But all that, Euripides wisely
saw to it, is part of the antecedents, part of the folk tale rather than
the drama. The facts are fixed, the drama cannot change them, it can

only study the consequences of the facts. Seen from this vantage point,
the sorrow of Admetus is not an ignoble thing. When the chorus,
prior to the actual death of Alcestis, pity Admetus and voice their
fear (328) that his suffering might drive him to suicide, we are at
first inclined to feel that their compassion is misdirected. But they
are right; his suffering is intense, and he knows that death might well
have been better than the prospect that is now before him.
His personal embarrassment is that he cannot translate wish or
thought into action. His life is a prime example of the ordinary man's
incapacity to live the life which Aristotle recommends, the life of
choice and commitment, the heroic life. He recognizes the sordidness
of his existence, but he cannot lift himself above it. W e are tempted
to look down on him, but we should know that the figure of Admetus
is a mirror in which we may recognize ourselves. The image is not re-
pulsive, but it leaves little scope for pride or moral satisfaction, in spite
of the honesty with which Admetus comes in the end to admit his
inadequacies. The Alcestis inspires little pity, and less fear, but, in
spite of the humor, a humiliating sense of solidarity.
v
Admetus is the unheroic hero of the people,
warm, passionate, quick to trust and love and hate. Alcestis, his wife
and adversary, is an entirely different character. W e learn that she is
well beloved by her servants. Both the slave girl and the steward who
waits on Hercules clearly prefer her to her husband, from whose
tempers she has often protected them (770). Toward her inferiors, in
public, she has always been kind and considerate. But what about her
private personality? Of her innermost nature we learn next to noth-
ing. By stipulating that the decision to die lies in the past, by making
her death a fact rather than a matter for doubt and choice, Euripides
has deprived himself of the opportunity, fully exploited in other plays,
of exposing the psychological piquancy of a moment of resolution.
W e are not permitted a glimpse into her soul at a time when she is
not yet sure of herself. There is some partial compensation for this
lack in the scene when she beholds the angel of death and flinches

224 Alcestis
from the vision. But the experience is clinical rather than some-
thing that touches the spirit, a momentary weakening of resolve rather
than a grappling with the dilemma of life and death. On the whole,
her mind is made up, and she exhibits the serene, not to say the chilly,
composure of a woman sure and proud of her purpose.
Obviously Euripides is interested in setting up a significant con-
trast between a struggling, ineffectual Admetus and a stoically proud
Alcestis. The servant describes how the Queen went through all the
ritual procedures preliminary to death (173)
without a tear shed or a sigh, nor did
she blanch in contemplation of her fate.
Unlike her husband, Alcestis sets a remarkable example of the heroic
posture of endurance. But while Admetus is a whole person, and has
a consistent attitude of weakness toward death, Alcestis faces death on
two planes, in public and privately. After she has gone through the
premortuary rites with the gravity of a marble statue, she goes home
to uncoil her stored-up passion. Through the eyes of the servant girl
we gain admission to the spectacle of her domestic extravagancies.
We watch as sheflingsherself on her bed, only to hurl herself from the
bed to the floor, all the time sobbing out her story of bitterness and
frustration. The story required that she offer herself in sacrifice, not
that she do so with pleasure. She is a queen; true to her standing she
inspires her public subjects with an image of tranquility and resolu-
tion. But in the quiet of her bedchamber she abandons the role her
people expect her to play, and gives full vent to a benefactor's pique.
Alcestis has naturally come to despise the man who caused her to
commit herself. She must also repent the rashness which prompted her
to give her promise, and to wish her promise undone. The strength
which drove her to offer herself in the first place now asserts itself
as an urge to live, a tenacity which curses the unreasonableness of
what is demanded of her. Euripides has caught the mixture of com-
peting passions in the heart of Alcestis wonderfully well. But the
subtlest stroke is this, that her grief is witnessed only by the children
and the domestics. To her husband she presents her stoical front.

There is no doubt that her soul is breaking in two, as it is put in the
Prologue (20, 143). But she is not going to give Admetus the satis-
faction of meeting him on the common ground of human weakness
and love of life.
I have referred to the play as embodying a rhetoric of death. Al-
cestis is death's chief rhetorician. To begin with, immediately upon
her entrance, she intones an address to the Sun, the Clouds, and the
Earth (244). As in the first utterance of Prometheus, the apostrophe to
the cosmic powers marks her loneliness and her elevation. She is half-
abstracted, and the presence of her husband means nothing to her.
Then there follows a succession of two scenes whose order is to be
explained as a Greek dramatic convention; first the exposition of her
passions, in the form of an aria (252), then a set speech voicing her
concurrent thoughts (280; cf. the same arrangement later for Adme-
tus, 861, 935). First we behold Alcestis beside herself with the ago-
nies of the vision of death; then abruptly she launches into a rea-
soned discourse on the meaning and implications of her action. A
modern reader will perhaps find this sudden break neither realistic
nor aesthetically satisfying. In fact, however, the two scenes are not
to be understood as following one another in empirical sequence.
They present two sides of one and the same experience which, be-
cause of the exigencies of literary formulation, have to be developed
independently. Alcestis' response to the fact of death is at least two-
fold: the prospect engages her passions and her anxiety, but also her
reasoning powers. In life, the two modes of reaction are bound to-
gether and simultaneous; in writing, they have to be separated unless
the author tries to recapture the unity by some surrealistic measures
such as those used occasionally by Eugene O'Neill. The Greek method,
sanctioned and appreciated, it appears, by the Greek audiences, was
to savor each mode by itself, to feature the response of the pas-
sions first and the commentary of the intellect second. This is a dis-
tortion of what happens in "real life." But to the extent that it catches
the total experience more fully than would an emphasis on one or
the other of the two modes, the convention may be said to make for
a higher kind of realism. Certainly this solution of the difficulty seems

226 Alcestis
to adapt itself more easily to an essentially realistic design than do
other devices that have been tried for catching the fullness of the
soul's life on the stage. Further, there is the old belief that a person
on the threshold of death has a clearer understanding of the truth
than other men, and that a deathbed speech is likely to carry the
marks of a pure intelligence. There are thus sufficient reasons why the
very last utterance of the hero or heroine should be a specimen of
rational speech.
At any rate, first Alcestis has her tug of war with Charon. I like to
think that Charon actually appears on the stage. Both the folk tale as-
sociations of the play, and its position in lieu of a satyr play, would
encourage the utilization of the grotesque. One may assume that the
mask of Death in the Prologue was designed to clash extravagantly
with the mask and costume of the virtuous Apollo. The vision of
Charon should indeed be hair-raising. As he grabs the Queen, she
fails to maintain her public pose of calm resolution; her protests
against forcible abduction spring straight from a desperate heart. Her
position is not enviable, but it is not without a touch of the ridiculous.
Her frantic shouts "Let me go!" alternating between the singular
and the plural imperative, make it appear that she is being pulled
in opposite directions, with Charon at one end and her family and at-
tendants at the other. For the moment, the family wins out and
Charon retires. In reality, of course, it is not the family that prevails
but the dramatic convention that requires her to follow up her mo-
ment of passion with a speech. Charon withdraws so that Alcestis
can give her husband a piece of her mind.
It is a most unpleasant speech (280). She begins by asserting that
she might have been a merry widow, that her youth and attractiveness
had promised to realize her every claim to happiness, but that she
had decided otherwise. She reminds him that his parents had failed
to do their duty by him; insists that her children remain motherless
after she is gone; and finally, asks Admetus to concede that he may
well be proud of calling such a wife his own. These are the four main
points of her speech. For Admetus they become the theses of a
creed which promises to rule and almost ruin his life henceforth. With

these points, developed with the deadening authority of a master

lawyer, Alcestis attempts to make sure that Admetus will never be
a happy man again. She wants him to forswear all enjoyment of life,
she asks him to deny his parents, she desires the children to remain
orphans and remember her always and damn their father always; she
expects him to be overcome with a continual awareness of his loss
and with a never-ceasing contrition. Her language is in character
(300):
Permit me to ask a favor; not, of course,
one matching mine, what I have done for you,
for nothing is more precious than a life;
but still, you will admit, you owe a favor.
This is the speech of a regal, a self-possessed, a purposeful woman,

a heroine, if you wish. Yet imagine a play in which Alcestis* last speech
was noble, self-effacing, warm, happy in the consciousness of her
sacrifice. Such things are not unknown, especially in the classicistic
tradition. But neither Euripides nor anyone else in fifth-century
Athens was interested in this sort of romantic sweetening. He did
not intend to portray a noble woman finding fulfillment in the act
of self-immolation. Christian charity, the bliss of martyrdom, the
happiness of a woman dying for a cause, are not the kind of sub-
jects which appealed to his analytic mind. This is an essay in charac-
ter, not a flight of Utopian spirits. Alcestis speaks as a woman cheated
out of her rightful legacy as mother, wife, and queen. At the moment
of her death she despises her husband and twists the knife in his
wound. We find her speech cruel and vindictive, but we also sense
that her cause is just.
Admetus* speech in answer to Alcestis' harsh testament is a plaus-
ible mixture of self-pity, bravado, resentment, and daydreaming
(328). Briefly the points of his reply are as follows. He promises
never to marry another woman (330); to hate his parents (338); to
organize a public mourning and to maintain private grieving in per-
petuity (343); to have a statue of Alcestis made, to honor and em-
brace (348); to have his children bury him beside her when he dies

228 Alcestis
(365). What is more, he wishes he could descend into Hades and
sing for her release (357). This catalogue of promises and wishes
is an extraordinary thing, especially in the light of what is to follow.
He says he will never remarry; the final scene of the play, when Her-
cules tries to force the veiled woman upon his attentions, is de-
signed to demonstrate that Admetus had meant what he said. But
the audience knows that his resolve is unnecessary and abortive, and
the fervor with which he stresses the point may well arouse the sus-
picion that he protests too much. He promises to hate his parents; and
yet, as we shall see later, the consummation of this hatred leads in-
directly to the salvation of Admetus as a moral being. There will be
perpetual public mourning; how can a king presume to mortgage the
joys and affections of his subjects in payment for a personal debt? He
would descend into the underworld and appeal to the king of the
dead—with music, like Orpheus, not by force of muscle or character,
in the way of Hercules! The children will put him beside her when
he dies; when, or if? What is this mention of his own death in the
hour when ostensibly he is surrendering his mortality? Is this his way
of turning his back upon the agreement, or at least of making his
own share in it easier to bear?
The crowning touch in this tissue of dreams and self-delusions is
the provision for the statue (348):
A likeness of your shape, made by the hand
of skillful artists, will be stretched on our
great bed, for me to kneel before and fondle.
*'Stretched": Admetus chooses a word which in its specific corporeality
denotes either the stiffness of death or the posture of sex. He cannot
live without her; even in death her concrete body must continue to
support him. His love and his feeling of guilt conspire to realize a
fantasy which borders on the abnormal, not to raise the issue of good
taste. But first, pedantically, let us ask whether the artists whom
Admetus has in mind are stone masons or carvers in wood? The term
used normally means "carpenter," but I suspect that he is thinking
of a statue in marble, a cold substitute for a chillier reality. Admetus

loves his wife. He senses, as he must, that there is little loyalty and less
affection in the giving of the gift, but he is awed by the enormity of
the offering, and the warmth of his love is not diminished in the
hubbub of his conflicting responses. Hence the wish for the statue.
Frigid as the conceit may appear to us, it should be read as an at-
tempt to express his love in the most forceful terms available. The
nature of the material is irrelevant—divine images may be made of
stone or of wood—as are the exact qualifications of the artists. All
that matters is Admetus' desire that Alcestis survive in some fashion or
other. This use of a statue, as a memento and by way of deification,
is found elsewhere in Greek mythology; Laodamia seems to have
consoled herself with an image of her husband, Protesilaus, who died
at Troy. Xenophon of Ephesus tells of an old fisherman who kept
his mummified wife at his side, a scene intended to touch us, not to dis-
gust. Likewise the notion of Admetus is designed to testify to his
ardor, not to indicate a sickness. But it helps to round out the por-
trait of a desperate man.
After Alcestis and Admetus have both spoken, Alcestis appoints the
children to be witnesses of her husband's promises (371) :
Children, your ears are witnesses to this

pledge of your father's; not to wed again
and give you a second mother, but to honor me.
A social worker, Athenian or otherwise, would demur at this; we

are free to assume that Eumelus grew up to be a juvenile delinquent.
But by making the children watchdogs of their father, by implicating
them in the sorry existence which she has mapped out for him, Al-
cestis gives us the full measure of her hardness. She has made the
expected gesture; now she hits back at the person who is to benefit
from it, and she does so by establishing a relation between father
and children which is bound to lead to friction and disaster. If
Euripides felt that he was faced with the danger that Alcestis might
turn out to be the heroine who receives the sympathy of the audience,
he has avoided that danger expertly. Admetus, the passive, contempla-
tive man, plays the traditional role of women or choruses. Alcestis
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230 Alcestis
is active, or at any rate she is earning the fruits of her past action. Her
singleness of purpose might easily distract our attention from the
figure of Admetus; but it is he who chiefly interests Euripides, and
around whom the play is principally written. So the author moves to
prevent Alcestis from usurping the part of the central character. What
he gives us is a sort of goddess, a woman who, publicly at least, is
superior to the ordinary human emotions. Even so, he manages to
make this goddess interesting and believable, because he endows her
with the coldness of contained fury rather than the torpor of insensi-
bility. Hers is the kind of impassioned frigidity which, though not
so moving as the irresolution of Admetus, helps us to understand
better the suffering through which he passes.
The final exchange is the climax of this interplay of energies. On
the part of Alcestis, assurance, asperity, malice, contempt; on the
part of Admetus, contrition, self-justification, regrets. Then Alcestis
dies, and with the song of the child there is heard, for the first time,
the voice of unadulterated grief. It is not a lifelike sorrow; musical
sorrow never is, and in this case the terms of the grief are not childish.
Father, your marriage has turned out
stale and wasted!
is not the sort of thing a preadolescent would think up, no matter
what the provocation (411). Prior to the fourth century, as we know
especially from vase paintings, Greek art did not represent children
as different in kind from adults. In drama, too, children speak the
language of grown men in miniature. At the death of Alcestis, pure
grief is voiced not so much by the child as through the child. The
scholars who have studied Greek stage technique tell us that in all
likelihood an aria such as this was sung by one of the adult actors, per-
haps by the actor who played the part of Alcestis, now lying motionless
on her bier behind the gesticulating child. The distress is mature;
it is the quintessence of mourning felt or meant to be felt at the final
sealing of the Queen's fate. But Euripides has it issue from the mouth
of the child because all other characters on the stage are too rigidly

caught up in their own interests and complexities to respond with the

proper candor and simplicity.
This is especially true of Admetus. In spite of the depth and genu-
ineness of his anguish he does not permit it to interfere with his duties
as ex-husband and king. As he organizes the funeral cortege and an-
nounces the regulations for the official mourning (422), he takes
refuge in the social conventions which make his sorrow bearable.
Surprisingly it is the chorus that comes closest to echoing the unre-
fracted grief intoned by the child. But perhaps that is not so sur-
prising after all. Now that Alcestis is dead the men can relax and
play the role for which they had been preparing themselves, without
thinking primarily, as they had hitherto, of the King's affliction or of
the prerogatives of men. In a stately, ringing processional they turn,
for the first time, to address Alcestis in her own right, in the second
person, wishing her a happy sojourn among the dead, and promising
her renown for many generations and in many cities of Greece. Even
their blunt and naive (473)
I wish I had a wife like that!
is to be taken as an expression of unreserved appreciation. There is

no longer any need for the note of urgency which characterized their
earlier utterances. Alcestis is dead, and they have nothing to lose by
paying her the traditional honor of retrospective acclaim, or even by
interpreting her death as a loss. Their feelings on this score are al-
most disinterested; but they are not, for all that, contrary to their best
interests. For their massive eulogy helps to fix the event, and to es-
tablish Alcestis firmly in her grave. If it were up to them, the song
seems to say, no Hercules would come and restore her to life and
bring back the old uncertainty.
The funeral ode, then, is in the nature of a confirmation. In this
capacity it also serves to terminate the first part of the play. What fol-
lows is the beginning of the reversal which in the end will undo
everything that had seemed safe and irrevocable. Appropriately, there-
fore, in the final section of the ode, the chorus put aside their role as

232 Alcestis
participants and turn, impersonally, to sum up some of the themes

which dominate the first movement; the specious hope that Alcestis
might be brought back from Hades, the gallant query of why the
parents did not die instead, the regret at the prospect of the King's
pledged celibacy. The emphasis on family tension, on deprivation
and death, is compressed within a very few lines to epitomize once
and for all the sense of inadequacy, of spiritual poverty which can
now be recognized as the hallmark of the first movement. Alcestis
has died; but her death has not produced the relief or the contentment
which comes from mutual understanding and trust. The chorus may
be moderately satisfied with the outcome; Admetus is not.
vi
In T. S. Eliot's Cocktail Party the Stranger
says to Edward:
Most of the time we take ourselves for granted,
As we have to, and live on a little knowledge
About ourselves as we were. Who are you now ?
You don't know any more than I do,
But rather less. You are nothing but a set
Of obsolete responses. The one thing to do
Is to do nothing. Wait.
Admetus has waited because he took himself for granted. But this
cannot go on in the light of the new fact, the emptiness where
formerly he could count on a life beside him. We expect the recoil.
But before we come to the awakening of Admetus, Euripides trans-
forms the whole mood of the action by the introduction of a new
character. Again let me quote from the Cocktail Party:
Just when she'd arranged a cocktail party.
She'd gone when I came in, this afternoon.
Whereupon the unidentified guest says:
This is an occasion.
May I take another drink?

Before very long we shall see Hercules take that drink. Now he ar-
rives, and his fast-paced interview with the chorus completely cuts
off our preoccupation with death and frustration. This is the start
of something new, a breath of fresh air admitted into the dank prison
house of blindness and inaction and, above all, of pretended purpose-
fulness.
Hercules happens to pass by on his way to perform his eighth labor,
the taming of the fierce horses of Diomedes. He has recently com-
pleted the seventh, the overcoming of the Cretan bull. He has no
exalted view of his duty; unlike Admetus he does not regard his
position in life as a basis for speculation and bargaining. As the
slave of Eurystheus he has a certain job to do, and that is that. Though
a servant, he faces death repeatedly, as Admetus, the master of
Apollo, cannot. Hercules is content to risk death even in a matter
which is of no concern to him. From the manner of his talk about the
horses of Diomedes it is quite apparent that he has no interest in them
either as adversaries or as commercial value. What is more, he has
not been briefed about them. Admetus, homo contemplativus, has
all the insight and acumen he needs to appraise his situation properly,
but he tries to shut the knowledge out until it can no longer be
blinked. Hercules, homo activus, is truly uninformed; he undertakes
each labor as if it were a business requiring nothing more than me-
chanical action. His matter-of-factness leaves no room for insights or
fears or beliefs. The greatest hero of Greek fairy tales—and here
Euripides once more has his fun with us—is not imaginative enough
to believe in fairy tales. The man who is going to take the personal
existence of Death seriously enough to wrestle with him and choke
his windpipe, refuses to credit the existence of supernatural things.
When the chorus suggest that it will not be easy to tame the horses of
Diomedes, he replies tolerantly (493):
Surely they don't breathefirefrom their nostrils ?
Of course every child in the audience knew that that was precisely
what the wild Thracian horses did do. Hercules just has a good laugh

234 Alcesth
at the notion and goes about his business, pretending not to like it
(499),
Just my tough luck! I always get the worst breaks!
but eager enough to carry out the mission all the same. Hercules is
not involved in the tragedy of inaction which plagues Admetus and
his people. Nor is his role in life dependent on the support and com-
forts extended by fellow men. Admetus, even at the moment of his
self-discovery and conversion, could not cope with his lot unless he
knew himself to be a member of the group, sharing with them his
anxieties and his dreams. Hercules stands alone; his simple strength
and uncomplicated outlook operate best without the softening influ-
ence of human bonds. Nor again is he weighed down by conventions;
being a successful man of action he has no need for them. He is in
every way uninvolved. And the absence of involvement is dramatized
visually through a break with the traditions of the Greek theater: his
scene with the steward is played on an empty stage, with the chorus
gone to attend the funeral.
Hercules is not entangled in the meshes of the errant cause; his
cause is freedom, the freedom of spirit and freedom of action. Free-
dom is the theme of a drinking song which he bawls out, much to the
pious horror of the steward. As corroborated in the speech which
follows, the theme is pedestrian and untragic: Drink and be merry,
for tomorrow you will die (782). With the Herculean labors freshly
engraved in our minds, there is considerable humor in the spectacle
of the Stoic saint preaching the philosophy of Omar Khayyam. Surely
he is the one man in the world who does not pursue a hedonistic ca-
reer. And yet, the man of action easily turns into the clown; Hercules'
freedom from involvement also places him beyond the restrictions of
a meaningful commitment. He does not need to be sensitive or tact-
ful or morally obligated; he stands by himself, above the claims of
society. It is perhaps worth noting that Euripides is here engineering
a clever scheme of deflection. In the literary tradition it is Admetus
who was associated with the philosophy now offered by Hercules.

A poem by Bacchylides, who lived a generation or so before Euripides,

contains these lines:
The lord Apollo
. . . spoke to the son of Pheres:
"You are mortal; hence you shall foster
two thoughts, that you will see no more
than the light of tomorrow's sun,
or that you will draw out and complete
a deep-treasured life of fifty years to come.
Then, do what is right and enjoy yourself;
that is the greatest of all profits/'
In Euripides' version Admetus cannot take life so lightly; his friend
Hercules can, and he can exemplify the finer qualities of Admetus to
boot: warmth, generosity, tolerance.
Unlike the chorus, Hercules sees only kindness, not extravagance,
in the fact that Admetus entertained him without informing him
of the true conditions. In spite of his servile status he can admire a
good act without envy or resentment ( 8 5 5 ) :
He took me into his house, he did not drive
me away, despite the fierce weight of his sorrow;
he hid it, in his kindliness and with
his usual tact. Is there in Thessaly,
or Greece, a man more liberal than he ?
Hercules is a man without bitterness, without aggressions; he has no
privileges to safeguard, no fancied status to maintain. His eye is free
and unclouded, his heart ready to be moved by the actions of his
friends. He may be somewhat lacking in imagination, but his capacity
to love and admire is unlimited.
Why does Admetus deceive Hercules? For one thing, to admit that
Alcestis had died would have meant provoking awkward questions.
Hercules knows of Alcestis' promise, but the accomplished fact would
force him to regard Admetus in a different light. Hercules does not
believe that she will die—he does not believe in fairy tales—and so
Admetus feels himself safe from his contempt. To this extent Ad-

236 Alcestis
metus* silence is selfish, a further token of his lack of fiber. The chorus
are appalled at his silence, but for another reason. In their eyes, ad-
mitting Hercules into the house is a breach of the conventions, or
rather the breach of one convention in the interest of another, and
they doubt that the duty of hospitality could ever take precedence over
the duty of mourning. But that is exactly what Admetus seems to
feel; a true Thessalian, raised in the traditions of the frontier and
the wide-open spaces, he regards the duty of entertaining a guest as
canceling all other obligations.
But that is not all; in effect, Admetus is trying to take the easy
way out. Upon Hercules' question whether his wife has died (518),
he answers: she has, and she has not. The whole passage which fol-
lows is riddling, and Hercules has a point when he remarks: "You
are talking mysteries!" Riddling is a kind of ritual; by reducing the
status of Alcestis and his own lamentable part in the affair to the
terms of a conundrum, Admetus hopes to be able to live with his
guilt more easily. Hercules is less subtle, he has no taste for puzzles,
and asks to be excused (544): "Let me go!" he says, using the words
which Alcestis had used at the moment of her vision of Charon. Ad-
metus allowed Alcestis to leave him; he cannot now allow Hercules
to do likewise. Hospitality is easier to exercise than marital obligation.
It is a beneficent convention, ordered to measure to help you forget the
sting of personal defeat. Admetus craves to salvage what is left of
his pride, by clinging to the embarrassed guest. The tenacity with
which he presses him is an index of his desperation. It leads him to
renounce even the last shred of his moral integrity (541):
The dead are dead; come, go into the house!
Coming from the delicate Admetus, this is indeed a callous pronounce-
ment. He is attempting to escape, both from his own remorse and
from the painful memory of his wife's last actions. But the escape
into the role of host, even if momentarily effective, cannot last. The
time must come when Admetus will recognize his delusion and strug-
gle to rid himself of it.

At this point the chorus, apparently forgetful of their earlier criti-

cism of Admetus' conduct, sing their second great choral ode, a hymn
to hospitality (569), in rhythms usually reserved for the extolling of
victorious kings or athletes. The ode, with its praise of Apollo—-an
earlier guest who should never have come in the first place, and who
stayed too long when he did—is designed to create an impression of
security and contentment. The language is pastoral; the emphasis is on
peace, stability, simple pleasure, the happy life. The song starts with
an address to the house, then turns to call upon Apollo, who is pic-
tured, like Orpheus, attracting the animals with his lyre (thus adding
to the number of the house guests), and settles down to describe the
wealth and liberality of Admetus. These three—the house, Apollo,
and Admetus—form a compound image in which the meaning of
hospitality takes concrete shape. True hospitality is the willed expres-
sion of a life that is full, happy, relaxed. At least it should be that.
But often it becomes a gadget employed to make it appear as if the
life which occasions it were unimpaired. In our play, hospitality is
the most impressive manifestation of the code which is the ordinary
man's support in the stream of life, and which marks its practitioner
as a civilized person. But there is no doubt that it is mainly for the
weak. They are the hosts; the strong are guests.
Hospitality, Admetus briefly hopes, will allow him to find his
moorings. But the record of the convention as it pertains to this tale
does not leave much room for confidence. The hospitality tendered
by Admetus to Apollo initiated the loss of Alcestis. Admetus enter-
tains Hercules, wrongly in most people's eyes, but the faux pas starts
her recovery. Finally Admetus tries to shake off his weakness and pro-
poses to deny hospitality to the mystery woman, and almost loses
his wife once more. Thus the code, in its conflict with genuine sorrow
and genuine involvement, makes for some difficult situations. But
nothing better can be expected from the slipshod tactics of the civilized
man who lives by rules rather than by instinct. Once the manipu-
lation of the code has been substituted for the life of courage and con-
viction, the control must slip from the hands of the agent.

238 Alcestis
vii
There is a man in the play whose instincts,
it seems, are as simple and straightforward, though not so generous, as
those of Hercules: Pheres. It is true that when he comes on the stage
he has a perfectly respectable little speech, full of pious and accept-
able sentiments. One might almost believe that he is not an interested
party, and that the reports about him put out by Alcestis were not en-
tirely accurate. But this impression is at once wiped out when we come
to the last two lines of his opening remarks, where he reveals his real
feelings with singular coarseness ( 6 2 7 ) :
This is the sort of marriage that turns to profit;

otherwise marriage is not worth a straw.
The method is characteristically Euripidean; neither Aeschylus nor

the pre-Euripidean Sophocles has it (though Homer does): a man
betraying his secret thoughts in an unexpected final disclosure, an
epigrammatic revelation of the self, as if the pretended sentiments got
to be too burdensome for the speaker to maintain. His remark im-
mediately puts us out of sympathy with him, and makes us accept the
position of Admetus in the scene which follows with less revulsion
than might otherwise have been the case. And yet we cannot help
but admire the old man; unlike his son he has not talked himself into
believing his own fictions. He can take or leave the code as it fits his
purposes, his true instincts always being on hand to run their con-
sistently unsentimental course.
Admetus, to be sure, behaves like a cad. He calls his father a coward
(642, 717), apparently forgetting his own inglorious role. Taking a
leaf from his father's book he addresses him in terms of law rather
than affection, as if the relationship between father and son were
little more than a legal contract which might be revoked at the signer's
discretion. The effect of his inaction has been to destroy his judgment
and to atrophy his humaneness; for a brief interval he dispenses with
his gentlemanly ideals of kindness and good will. His father repays
him in kind. From legalistic charges and countercharges—I disown

you, I have a new father and mother! . . . What crime have I commit-
ted? Have I stolen from you?—the quarrel degenerates into a battle
of insults, into the most vitriolic enactment of the war of generations
in Greek drama. N o punches are pulled as the young calls the old
superannuated, and the old, with equal justification, sneers at the
softness and the dishonesty of the young.
Pheres says that he has no understanding of the nature of Alcestis'
sacrifice ( 7 2 8 ) :
She's pure and blameless, yes; but does she have sense?
While Admetus decries his parents for the purpose of magnifying

Alcestis, Pheres cannot see any point to her deed. He prides himself
on being levelheaded, unromantic, unconfused; he does not mind
being coarse in the bargain so long as the truth as he sees it comes out
into the open. His coarseness is painful but it has a function. For it
exercises on Admetus a peculiar spell which helps us to understand
him further, and which eventually helps him to understand himself.
Goaded by the memory of his wife's not-so-silent reproaches, angered
by his father's brutal cynicism, the gentle Admetus turns savage and
fanatical. The explosion is as terrible as it is unexpected. It must lead
either to destruction or to catharsis. And this gives us a clue concern-
ing the role of Pheres in the plot. His own character is drawn vividly
enough; but his appearance in the play is due chiefly to the fact that
Euripides is interested in the soul of Admetus, in the experience which
a good man undergoes when faced with the fact of a loved one's
death.
One barb which Pheres uses in his scolding is particularly sharp; he
calls Admetus sophos—clever, or ingenious ( 6 9 9 ) . Admetus is that.
To say that you expect your parents to die for you is immorally clever;
to consider such a statement natural, as Admetus in his violence does, is
downright sophistical. But * 'cleverness" does not quite meet the situa-
tion, for Admetus is, at this stage, too confused to merit the tag. In
reality his sophia is fantasy, self-delusion. A good son is made bad, his
filial responses are distorted, by a good deed which put him to shame.
The explosion helps to untwist the responses and to transmute the

240 Alcestis
fantasy into a sophia proper, into an insight into his true self. Pheres
functions as a kind of psychotherapist to assist Admetus in his re-
covery from the wound which Alcestis has dealt. That is not to say
that Pheres thinks of himself as a healer; he is too old and too crude
to think of anyone's welfare but his own. But he operates as one none-
theless. His refusal to participate in the fiction which his son has
elaborated for himself shocks Admetus into first compounding and
then surrendering his fantasy, into turning from delusion to knowl-
edge. Pheres is little more than an instrument, a tool of conversion.
After the scene between father and son, there is no further mention of
Pheres; he has done the job he was designed to do. And when Ad-
metus comes back from the funeral he is a different person.
Not so the chorus; they have changed very little, continuing to
rely on their double props of convention and masculinity ( 8 9 2 ) : it
happens all the time, you are not the first one to lose a wife, and so
forth. They do not understand the new single-mindedness of Adme-
tus* grief, and on one occasion they offer a veiled criticism ( 9 0 3 ) :
I had a kinsman
who lost a son, an only son;
his death was bitter
cause for tears. Nevertheless,
he bore the loss well, though childless now,
and graying of hair,
and closing in on the eve of life.
In other words: too much fuss over a dead wife. But Admetus can no
longer, after the set-to with Pheres, take shelter in externalizing or
ritualizing his guilt. H e begins by addressing the house, once the sym-
bol of fullness and contentment. Now he is reluctant to enter it because
it reminds him of the emptiness in his life and the draining away of
his own self ( 8 6 1 ) :
Hated entrance way, hated sight

of an empty home! Where am I
to walk, where to stand ? . . .
I have been ill-starred from birth.

Apollo has enriched the house, now he has impoverished it; and Ad-
metus has begun to realize that he is not separate from the house; as
the house goes, so goes he. He had been blind to believe that life,
domestic and political—as the second choral ode shows, the house
symbolizes both—could go on much as before; that, with Alcestis gone
from his side, he could continue to exercise his function as father and
king. The delusion is gone, and Admetus recognizes his guilt.
In his speech after the musical exchange which marks the second
entry of the chorus, Admetus openly confesses himself at fault. He
does so by using the only formulation then readily available to a man
and citizen. He imagines outsiders and personal enemies pointing
their fingers at him and whispering (955):
There goes the man who lives in shame, who did
not dare to die, who bought a coward's life
with his own wife's death . . .
who hates his parents for his own panic!
And the capping humiliation:
Is he a man?
The formulation is in terms of what anthropologists call shame rather
than guilt; the language of guilt was not yet easily handled by Euri-
pides or his audience. But the self-questioning of Admetus clearly
is a pregnant dramatization of the dawning of guilt upon a soul in
the process of conversion. "He has turned tail before Hades; is he
a man?" Greek tragedy of the grand genre, the tragedy of Oedipus
or Medea or Prometheus, does not allow for a learning from ex-
perience or a wisdom through suffering. But Greek melodrama, or
tragicomedy, or the sort of drama we have here, occasionally does
show us a hero who recognizes his faults and suffers for them and
learns from them. Conversion is not a tragic business, it does not rouse
the emotions of which Aristotle speaks. But for an author who is in-
terested in character and character development, conversion is an
eminently desirable theme. In the story of Admetus, Euripides gently
guides us through the career of a man who, though initially self-
deceived, proves his worth by permitting himself to be shocked into

242 Alcestis
an admission of his cowardice. He now sees himself with the eyes of
Pheres; and that is the beginning of his restoration to favor with
the audience.
viii
Immediately after Admetus' condemnation of
himself, the chorus sings a great ode to Fate or Necessity (962). It
is a stately hymn, majestic and serious, with touches of Aeschylean
grandeur unusual in the choral passages of Euripides. One may wonder
how this announced submission to Necessity tallies with the obvious
cancellation of necessity in the scene which is about to follow.
It would obviously be a mistake to interpret the devout utterance of
the chorus as documenting a philosophy which Euripides himself held
and wished to broadcast. That is not the way in which the ancient
dramatists proceed; in any case, being a dramatist Euripides would
never accept a trust in the power of necessity as a pertinent philo-
sophical creed. In his plays, even more than in those of Aeschylus and
Sophocles, man is what he makes of himself, in spite of the unseen
powers which rule beyond the scene of action. Hence the poignancy
of Admetus, suffering; it would be uninteresting if Fate or Necessity
was responsible for what happened to his soul.
Does the ode, then, tell us something of the beliefs of the chorus?
Perhaps, for they are ordinary people, with ordinary and rather limited
ideas, quick to grasp the simplest, most traditional formulation and
to turn their backs on the prospect of personal responsibility. But if
this were all, it would be awkward, to say the least. The play is almost
over, and this is not the proper time to introduce new information
about the inclinations of the chorus. As a matter of fact, the ode is
not meant to add to our knowledge of character at all. The study of
character has come to an end. The conversion has happened, the anat-
omy of the soul is complete, and Euripides must tackle the difficult
task of bringing the play to a satisfactory ending. This is where the
Hymn to Necessity comes in. With it the author accomplishes the re-
validation of Admetus. The stress on Fate seems, but only seems, to
diminish his culpability in retrospect. The scene which Euripides has

just put on the stage, the conversion of Admetus, holds a danger. The
danger is that the audience, who had to a certain extent shared in the
delusion of the hero and the chorus, will now see him with his eyes,
see him as a coward only. Psychological realism disenchants; the anat-
omy of an unheroic soul shows up a dynamic vacuum which may
become intolerable. This will not do, either morally or aesthetically.
Aesthetically the play can be concluded satisfactorily only if at the con-
clusion Admetus can once more be regarded with a modicum of re-
spect and appreciation. Morally, our initial feelings about him were
not so far wrong after all. He is a good man, a worthy man caught in
circumstance, and his admission of guilt should, with the enlightened
in the audience, enhance his ethical standing. That is why, by an act
of artistic legerdemain, the audience is induced to focus on the gov-
ernment of Fate, thus to take Admetus back more willingly into the
fold of their sympathy. As so often in Greek drama, the chorus is
used to shape the feelings of the audience; under the guidance of the
ode the spectators dispense with cold logic and submit themselves to
the irrational demands of the play.
Toward the end of the Hymn to Necessity the chorus re-emphasize
the deadness of Alcestis; they vow to extend to her almost divine
honors. As before, there is in the song of the chorus a characteristic
insistence on the fact of her admission to Hades. While Admetus asks
(897), "Why could not I have died?" the chorus sings about the in-
escapable bonds of death which will keep Alcestis safely and bene-
ficially underground (985, 992, 1002):
She died for her husband; now

she lives as a blessed goddess.
Hail, mistress, and give us your blessings!
The song of worship is also a binding charm.

Enter Hercules, with a veiled lady. The audience knows who she is,
the actors do not; a masquerade. Hercules starts out with emphatic
reproaches ( 1 0 1 2 ) : "You never told me!" This is surprising, for
when he first found out, in his conversation with the steward, that
Admetus had not been completely frank with him, his impulse was

244 Alcestis
to admire Admetus for his thoughtfulness (855). Only now does
he take stock of what was due him as a friend and guest. But now he
is about to make Admetus happy again. Are his reproaches playful?
Are they the result of his recent bout with Death, a working off of the
strain on the nearest bystander? The latter would not be without
precedent. In the Iliad heroes snarl at their closest friends and rela-
tives for no other reason than that they are under pressure and must
vent their strain where it will do the least harm. But whatever the psy-
chological motivation—and perhaps none is needed now—Hercules*
criticism is artistically useful. His air of discontent keeps Admetus
off balance until it is time to show his hand in earnest. To secure
the fullest effect of the happy ending which is to come, the long as-
cent from apparent displeasure to ultimate benefaction is the most
satisfying.
Hercules proposes to leave the lady with Admetus; Admetus ob-
jects. Do his remonstrances give us the picture of a man who is tempted
to break faith with his promises but shrinks back because he does not
wish to be censured? True, this is the fear he voices, but again it is
a matter of terminology rather than substance. He states in terms
of shame what we would expect to see stated in terms of guilt. His
question (1057), "What will the people say?" really means the same
as, "How can I square such an act with my self-respect?" The man
who says he fears the censure of the people and of the dead Alcestis
is not an inhibited libertine or a prurient ascetic, but one who is no
longer interested in women, and for whom even the duty of hospitality
has lost its meaning. The author wants no further dissection of Ad-
metus' character/The last scene is pure fairy tale, to finish the play
satisfactorily. Realistic portraiture and clinical psychology are left far
behind. Euripides has said what he wanted to say by the time the
closing scene opens. The scene is not without its subtleties, of course
—witness the silence of Alcestis—but its purpose is resolution rather
than further exploration. True, Admetus shows signs of a reawakening
capacity for enjoyment; he says to the woman (1062):
You have the same measurements as Alcestis.

True, Hercules and Admetus between them strike just the right note
of courteous hesitation and gentle urgency. There is humor and there
is irony. But there is no further interest in the consequences of the
fact of death.
Why does Alcestis not move or speak? Hercules' explanation, per-
haps not entirely satisfactory to all of us, has a substantial kernel of
wisdom and truth. It is an explanation on the level of ritual, appealing
to the instincts operative during a religious festival such as the Diony-
sian festival at which the play was performed. Alcestis is to be puri-
fied before she may speak; she must readjust herself to the ways of life
before she can be trusted to participate in life once more. But for
once the ritual reinforces the dramaturgy. Earlier in the play Alcestis
had stood under the shadow of death. Now she returns, alive, and
that is awkward in itself. For the plot she was needed to die, not to
come back. She must come back so that Admetus will be happy, or at
least so that we shall not worry about the future of the hero. But
that is all; for the rest her dramatic appearance must be pruned to zero.
A single word from her and we should be put in mind of the whole
complex of frustration and inadequacy which the final scene is de-
signed to make us forget.
The last scene, then, is as clear an indication as one may wish of
Euripides' pervasive conviction that the stage is not to offer solu-
tions to moral or psychological problems. It is the author's task, after
presenting the conflicts and the suffering which constitute the plot
proper, to terminate the drama with a close which is not philosophical-
ly meaningful but artistically and psychologically satisfying. Mostly
he does this by creating a compelling illusion of having cut the knot,
by employing a deus ex machina. Hercules is no such august divinity
lowered from the skies, but his role as the restorer of Alcestis is anal-
ogous to the intervention of a god. But there is a difference between
this kind of conclusion and the ending of a true tragedy. In the Medea
or the Hippolytus or the Bacchae the coming of the god serves as a pub-
lic avowal that the situation witnessed on the stage is insoluble by
purely human standards. The deus ex machina underscores the hope-

246 Alcestis
lessness of the human predicament. In the Alcestis, on the other hand,
the action had come to a proper end before Hercules returns. With the
conversion of Admetus the air has been cleared, and human dignity
and intelligence have been, if not vindicated, certainly salvaged from
utter loss. Hercules does not come back to solve a difficulty or to sup-
ply a spurious answer; he returns to bring back Alcestis. After all,
the Queen had been sent off to Hades only so that we could see what
happened to her husband under the peculiar circumstances of her
death. We have seen what happened; now that Admetus has shown
the signs of a moral recovery, why not liberate both of them from the
forced conditions required by the experiment? It would be wasteful
to leave Alcestis in Hades now that Admetus will be a much bet-
ter husband to her. The masquerade is long-drawn-out; Euripides
wants the audience to enjoy the fun. The emphasis is on relaxation,
on happiness and sport. The spirit of the exordium augurs well for
the future of the reunited couple.
When Admetus is first told who the veiled lady is, he thinks he
is dreaming (1127). But the restoration of Alcestis suggests that it
is not the present but the past which was the dream. In retrospect
the events of the play have a chimerical quality about them, not only
because they derive from a fairy tale, but because matters which are
usually covered up have been exposed with a nightmarish precision.
Now Admetus is emerging from the dream; his slowness in realizing
who the veiled stranger is, shows the difficulty he has in putting it all
behind him. It takes some time for the head to be cleared. The dream
had helped to rid him of an immoral fantasy; now, for the sake of the
audience, the dream itself must be exorcised. But what does the dream
mean? Here Artemidorus, a writer of the second century A.D., may be
of some help, for he knew more about the dream images of the Greeks
and their feelings about them than we shall ever know. Here are a few
scattered passages from his book. "A wedding and a death have the
same meaning, for the things that go with them are the same/* "For
the unmarried man to dream of death means that he will marry; for
death equals a wedding. Both have the same events linked with them,
namely, a procession of men and women and garlands and incense and

myrrh and a plate collection/' 'To dream that one descends into
Hades and sees the things which are supposed to be in Hades, this
has one meaning for those in good circumstances and another for the
depressed. For the former, for those who live as they have chosen [and
that disqualifies Admetus] the dream indicates bad circumstances and
harm. For the others, those who are overcareful and worried and de-
jected, the dream foretells a release from these worries and cares; for
the people in Hades are without cares and beyond all worrying.''
Thus Artemidorus. To be sure, it is Alcestis who has descended
into Hades, not Admetus. But the vision, the purifying fright, are
his, and ours. The ending of the play suggests that henceforth he will
be a better man, a more appreciative husband, a married man rather
than an island to himself. And we share in the broadening of the
perspective. The plot which Euripides has sketched for us, and the
character of Admetus as he suffers and squirms and finally breaks
free, have the sharply incised quality of a dream. It is, however, a
benevolent dream which stops short of turning into unrelieved night-
mare. There is nothing obsessive about the limpid naturalness of the
action and the relations between Admetus and his household. The
men and women in the play are not machines, nor are they monsters
which are simply machines gone wild. They are the likely and, on
the whole, likable characters of everyday life, forced to grapple with
the natural necessities and trying hard to preserve their small portion
of culture and dignity as they do so. In his entanglement with the
fact of death Admetus takes on the outlines of Everyman. But not an
Everyman stripped of all that does not bear on his entanglement.
Rather an Everyman of flesh and blood, with the gestures and the
foibles and the luxury of good will which makes him into one of
Euripides' most successful characters, vastly more successful than the
heroes and heroines of true tragedy, the outrageous Medeas and the
tortured Pentheuses, who were of course never meant to be charac-
ters in quite the same sense. For a tragedy deals with issues or causes
beyond the reach of ordinary men, issues that can be realized effectively
only in the test-tube environment of extraordinary souls. Only a non-
tragic drama such as the Alcestis may venture to undertake the study

248 Alcestis
of character for its own sake. This does not mean supplying reasons,
or tracing origins; behavior is not studied as a fruit of the past, but
as a pattern interesting and authentic in itself. Admetus appeals to
us not for what made him act as he acts, nor for what he hopes to ac-
complish—that would be the tragic dimension—but simply for the way
he acts when confronted with a situation which, in spite of its fairy-
tale base, is perfectly natural. A play of this type requires very little
interpretation; all that the audience is asked to do is to listen to what
the characters have to say, and recognize themselves in them. We can
do no more, and no less.

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The Masks of Tragedy

Essays on Six Greek Dramas

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Copyright © 1963 by Thomas G. Rosenmeyer

All rights reserved

Requests for permission to reproduce material from

Library of Congress Catalog Number 63-7436

isbn 978-0-292-74161-4, paperback

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IT MAY BE ASKED whether there is room for yet another study of

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means, a large number of plays have to be taken into consideration.

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their appeal to the conscious verbal imagination, to the communal in-

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of transcending our present critical position, or whether there is any

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down some of the questions—and one or two tentative answers—

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Line references in the text are to the first

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. . . who cut a bull's throat into a black-rimmed shield,

There is a reference here to the magic ordeal of tasting bull's blood,

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It is you yourselves who enslave me and all the city!

Perhaps he means to say only that their lack of control is interfering

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vase painting furnishes us with independent evidence. When the

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a general and tactician, he cannot allow religious commitment to en-

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stands. In reality it is in the nature of an abdication. Earlier, before the

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against each other. What counts is the comparative standing of the

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their Orientalism; it is the visual confirmation of their boastful preen-

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But with him blasphemy is not merely an attitude, a partial symptom

This is all we learn about the person of Eteoclus (the embarrassing

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