VIII.—Euripides. The Four Feminist Plays
The three main interests of Euripides’ mind, realist, pacificist and feminist—to use our ugly jargon—are to be found in all his theatre; but there are four plays which are especially concerned with the relations between women and men, the Alcestis, Medea, Ion and Andromache. They are not pleasant plays: indeed, to a lover of sentimental idealism they would be conspicuously unpleasant if they were fully understood. Nor are they to be recommended to women readers. The relations between the sexes are a delicate thing; and human nature, male humanity at any rate, is generally none the worse for discreet reticence and tender handling. But in these plays Euripides uses the surgeon’s knife. They were meant for an audience of men, grown callous by time and custom; and the treatment is ruthless. They should be regarded as the painful but necessary operation, needed to rid a patient of some long-festering ulcer, and the dramatist deserves the thanks that we give to the skillful surgeon.
The particular flaws in the male character with which Euripides deals in the four plays are these—meanness, cowardice, selfishness, and treachery. They are not the faults, it will be noticed, that are especially appropriate to a ruling class. Man is not indicted on the score of haughtiness, pride or cruelty: his weaknesses are of a less ‘manly’ sort. It is his position as the natural lord of creation that is questioned and put to the test of dramatic action.
If Jason, Admetus, Apollo and Menelaus are impossible characters, then Euripides fails altogether in his lesson: if their actions, though possible, are improbable, then again he fails in an artistic sense. Some may think that no one could be quite so mean as Jason, quite so cowardly and selfish as Apollo and Admetus, quite so treacherous as Menelaus; but if we apply the test of experience, the cruel facts of life will justify the poet. None of the four are ‘tragedies,’ in the sense in which we use the word. They are as good examples as we are ever likely to see of ‘la haute comédie’; the Ion and Andromache, perhaps, a little melodramatic, the Alcestis and the Medea in places almost farcical; but all depending eventually on a subtle study of psychology and social relationships.
It is probable that they were not originally composed for public representation in the great theatre of Dionysus. They are intimate studies of humanity and can quite easily be divested of the official chorus, prologue and epilogue, which are independent of the dramatic action of the play. What is left is Euripides’ own teaching, put as plainly as the ironical spirit will allow. The frequency of translation must not blind us to the fact that in essentials Euripides is untranslatable. He is one of the greatest masters of irony and there is nothing that is so apt to vanish in translation, or create confusion in the English mind.
All four plays are concerned with problems of motherhood and children, especially male children. In three, child-actors are required and play an important part in the action: the fourth play, the Ion, has for its hero a lad, just emerging from the ‘awkward age’ of boyhood.
Between the Ion and the Andromache there is a curious resemblance of plot. The case was probably not uncommon in the circumstances of race-degeneration that prevailed at Athens during the fifth century. In both plays a husband has a childless wife, but a son by an irregular union. There are two women to one man, and in each case there is another man in the background, Apollo who has seduced Creüsa, and Orestes who has been the affianced lover to Hermionë. The husbands, Xuthus and Pyrrhus, are the least important figures in the action; indeed, Pyrrhus does not appear in person at all. They are represented as colourless characters; men of position and personal courage, dangerous, perhaps, when roused, but generally negligible. Their young wives, Hermionë and Creüsa, regard them with a mixture of contemptuous fear and jealous affection.
The interest is concentrated on the women, and the plays are studies of wifely jealousy—‘Why should my husband have a child, while I am childless?’—and maternal love.
Euripides knows well that motherhood is a woman’s natural sphere: a childless woman is for him an abnormal woman, and behaves in an abnormal and anti-social fashion. Both wives attribute their barrenness, probably the natural result of their past history, to supernatural causes. Hermionë believes that the foreign concubine Andromache has bewitched her: Creüsa, that she has incurred the anger of a god. Hermionë accordingly proposes to break the spell by killing the witch; Creüsa goes to Delphi to propitiate the divinity and seek his aid.
Both women, also, in their jealous hate are anxious to kill their husband’s bastard. Hermionë uses her father’s help and nearly succeeds in murdering the boy Molossus. Creüsa employs her father’s old slave as her agent, and all but poisons the boy Ion. In neither case is the crime accomplished, for the plays are not ‘tragedies’; but the criminal purpose is there. The women have been injured in the past and they are childless. They are embittered against life and ready to requite evil for evil. On the other hand, the unwedded mothers in both plays are ready to sacrifice themselves for their children. Andromache offers her life to save her son—‘What pleasure have I in life?’ she cries, ‘In him all my hopes centre: it would be a disgrace for me not to die on behalf of the child I bore. Children, indeed, are life: those who in ignorance disparage them, may feel less pain than we do, but they are miserable in their happiness.’
In the Ion Pythia consents to an even harder sacrifice: she hands over her child to another woman, saves him thereby from the guilt of murder and makes him prince of Athens. Andromache and the Priestess have been injured in the past, but they are saved by their children: the maternal, not the marital, is the holy state.
But in both plays the feminist interest is complicated by other motives, political and religious. In the Andromache a bitter attack is made upon the Spartan system in the person of Menelaus. ‘You a man?’ old Peleus cries, ‘You dastard son of dastard parents. What claim have you to be counted among men? A fine man it was, a Phrygian, that robbed you of your wife. You left your hearth and home without a lock, without a servant to guard, as though, forsooth, you had a virtuous wife within doors, she who was the worst of all women. Why, even if she wished, none of your Spartan girls could be virtuous. They leave the shelter of home and go about with young men; their legs bare, their dresses open; and run and wrestle like men. It all seems to be abominable. We need not be surprised that your system of education does not produce virtuous women.’
In the Ion the system of Delphi and the oracle is assailed, and a vein of bitter irony runs through the play. So ironical is the poet’s method that, if we take the prologue seriously and confine ourselves to the statements there made, we are apt to get a somewhat misleading idea of the play’s purpose. Dr. Way, for example, who gives the traditional interpretation with the greatest clearness, supplies the following summary of the action.
‘In the days when Erechtheus ruled over Athens, Apollo wrought violence to the king’s young daughter Creüsa. And she, having borne a son, left him, by reason of her fear and shame, in the cave wherein the God had humbled her. But Apollo cared for him, and caused the babe to be brought to Delphi, even to his temple. Therein was the child nurtured, and ministered in the courts of the God’s house. And in process of time Erechtheus died, and left no son nor daughter save Creüsa, and evil days came upon Athens, that she was hard bestead in war. Then Xuthus, a chief of the Achæan folk, fought for her and prevailed against her Eubœan enemies, and for guerdon of victory received the princess Creüsa to wife, and so became king-consort in Athens. But to these twain was no child born; so, after many years, they journeyed to Delphi to inquire of the oracle of Apollo touching issue. And there the God ordered all things so that the lost was found, and an heir was given to the royal house of Athens. Yet, through the blind haste of mortals, and their little faith, was the son well-nigh slain by the mother, and the mother by the son.’
This summary quite faithfully represents the statements of the divine Hermes; but Euripides knows as well as we do that gods do not walk the earth and that children are not miraculously wafted through the air. The prologue satisfies convention: the play itself is realistic and one of the chief characters is a woman of whom the prologue tells us nothing. The real plot, as opposed to the idealistic version, is as follows:—the facts are put down crudely instead of being conveyed by subtle hints and innuendo as they are in the Greek.
A young Athenian girl, Creüsa, wandering one day alone in the fields is attacked by a brutal satyr. He drags her into a cave, violates her and then makes his escape. She faints, and on awakening imagines that her assailant, who has disappeared as suddenly as he came, was a being from another world: she had seen him in the full sunlight; he is the sun-god Apollo. She tells no one of her adventure, conceals her condition and when her time comes, makes her way alone to the same cave. The child is born, wrapped by the girl mother in a piece of cloth, and placed, together with a golden bracelet as token, in a wicker basket. Then he is abandoned, and of his fate we hear no more.
About the same time at Delphi, in one of those periods of promiscuous sexual intercourse allowed and encouraged by temple ritual, one of the Delphian women becomes a mother, by a roving soldier of fortune named Xuthus. The latter leaves Delphi, ignorant of his paternity, and the woman is soon after appointed priestess of the temple. Her child, Ion, ostensibly a foundling, is reared within the temple precinct and regards the priestess as his foster mother. Meanwhile, the soldier Xuthus makes his way to Athens and marries Creüsa. They have no children, and come to Delphi to ask advice of the oracle. The priestess recognises Xuthus as the father of her son, and so arranges matters—remaining herself unseen—that after a conversation with the boy he acknowledges him as his child, the result of the former hasty connexion.
But though Xuthus has now got a son, Creüsa is still a childless wife. In passionate anger she reveals her long hidden secret, denounces the god as the author of her ruin, and with the help of a slave, attempts to poison Ion. The plot fails, she is pursued as a murderess by Ion and is on the point of being put to death. Then the priestess once more intervenes. She has heard Creüsa’s story—in some details not unlike though more lamentable than her own—and she determines to help a fellow sufferer. She has already given up her son to his father, and she now arranges a second trick whereby Creüsa shall believe Ion to be her child. She has in her possession a baby’s wicker cradle, a piece of cloth similar to that in which the dead baby was wrapped, and Creüsa’s own bracelet which has been used in the poisoning plot. By an ingenious subterfuge she makes all three appear to be the recognition tokens of Creüsa’s child. Creüsa with joy, Ion with some painful doubts, accept the new relationship; and so the play ends.
The Ion and the Andromache both abound in incident: the Medea and the Alcestis depend more on a psychological interest. They are ‘one-part’ plays—the strong woman Medea and the weak man Admetus—and they have many points of resemblance. In the Medea a mother kills her children to save her own pride: in the Alcestis a mother consents to death to save her children’s position. Alcestis is a saint: Medea—to some people—a devil.
Medea is certainly not meant to be a pleasant character. She has laboured too long under a sense of injustice to be pleasant either in her thoughts or behaviour. ‘You are always abusing the government;’ Jason says to her, ‘and so you will have to be ejected.’ She expresses the revolt of women in its bitterest form. ‘Of all things that draw breath,’ she cries, ‘and have understanding, we women are the most miserable; we are merely a thing that exists. To begin with, we must outbid each other to buy ourselves a lord and take a master of our body. ’Tis a risky business—we may get a knave or an honest man. To leave her husband brings a woman no honour, and we may not refuse our lords. When a woman comes to fresh ways and pastures new, she needs must be a prophet, for she has never been taught at home how best to use the man who now shares her bed. If we work our task aright, and our lord keeps house with us, and does not kick against the yoke, then our life is enviable. If not—better to be dead. A man, if he is vexed with the company of his household, goes out and purges away his heart’s annoyance; but we women are compelled to look ever at one soul.’
This isolation was the worst feature in a Greek woman’s life: to a clever woman it was soul-destroying, and Medea is incomparably cleverer than any man in the play. The scenes where she forces the two old men, ‘King’ Creon and ‘King’ Ægeus to do, not what they want, but what she wants, are masterpieces of satirical humour. With her husband her cleverness fails her: she is too angry to reason: she hisses her scorn and foams her disgust. Jason keeps cool and so far has the best of the argument.
‘You certainly are a clever woman,’ he says, ‘but you are only a woman. I am a very fine figure of a man: you fell in love with me; and it was only natural.’
Jason is in many ways like Admetus. Both are lovers of outward show and have a great regard for men’s opinion. Both say with some emphasis that a family of two children is quite large enough. Both have the same opinion of women; and this is how Jason concludes—‘Men ought to be able to get their children from some other source: the female sex should not exist: and then there would be no trouble for mankind.’
Such sentiments naturally fail to please either the chorus or Medea. The comment of the chorus is, ‘You have made the best of your case, but still, surprising though it may seem to you, I think you are acting unfairly in betraying the woman who has shared your bed.’ Medea gives full vent to her anger: she contemptuously refuses the help in money which Jason says he is ‘ready to give with an ungrudging hand,’ and at last scornfully dismisses him—‘Be off with you. You are yearning for the new girl you have broken in, all the time that you linger outside her house. Go and play the bridegroom with her.’
But in the next scene Medea has mastered her temper and pretends to submit. ‘We are but what we are,’ she says, ‘just women. You must not take pattern by the evil nor answer folly with foolishness. I give way: I acknowledge that I was wrong.’ Jason is patronising and friendly in his answer: ‘I approve your present attitude, and, indeed, I do not blame your past behaviour: it is only to be expected: woman is a thing of moods.’ He consents to ask his new wife for a remission of the children’s exile. ‘Certainly I will, and I fancy that I shall persuade her.’ ‘Yes, indeed, you will,’ Medea says, ‘if she is one of us: all women are alike. But I will help you once again in this enterprise, too.’ And as in the past she had given him an antidote against the fire-breathing bulls, so now she gives him the fiery robe which is to destroy the young bride.
Then comes the crucial scene of the play: Medea kills her children and we are faced by the problem—when is killing murder?
A mother who kills her child is to us a dreadful figure, and the death penalty is invoked against the deserted girl-mother: no punishment is inflicted upon the father, perhaps because no punishment can be adequate. Greek law and custom went further and in a different direction. The father was allowed to decide whether the child whom his wife had brought forth should be reared. Child killing in this fashion, when done by the father, was not a crime, and the exposure of children after birth was a common, and by no means held to be a reprehensible act. Plato, indeed, thinks it a fit subject for a jest in the Theætetus (p. 161). ‘Do you think,’ says Socrates, ‘that it is right in all cases to rear your own child? Will you be very angry if we take it—the argument—from you, as we might take a baby from a young mother with her first child?’ ‘Oh, no,’ answers the other. ‘Theætetus will not mind: he is not at all hard to get on with.’
The mother who did mind was regarded as a difficult person, but whether she minded or not, decision lay with the father—as we see in Terence’s play, The Self Tormentor. There the wife says to her husband, ‘You remember, don’t you, when I was pregnant, you told me emphatically that if the child should be a girl you would refuse to rear it.’ The child proved to be a girl, and so without further question it was got rid of. Male children were more valuable, and unless the circumstances of their birth were exceptional, as in the case of Paris and Œdipus, they were not often exposed.
There is this further point: what differentiates killing from murder is the question of risk. You kill, you do not murder, when you risk your own life. A soldier is not a murderer, and in sport a fox-hunter is a man of different type from a pigeon shooter. Now the Athenian women were not Amazons, but they fought a battle no less dangerous. ‘They say of us,’ cries Medea, ‘that we live a life free from danger within doors, while men are fighting like heroes with the spear. But men are fools. Rather would I stand three times in the battle line of shields than bear one child.’ A mother had already risked her life in bringing a child to birth; is she not far more justified than the father in ending that child’s life, if such be her will? Moreover, children are the pledges of marriage, the securities given for a business arrangement. Is it right that the party who wilfully breaks the compact should retain possession of the securities?
Such I believe are some of the questions that Euripides meant to suggest. It is no answer to them to say that it is an unnatural crime for a mother to kill her children, for it is equally unnatural and criminal for a father, and yet ancient fathers killed their children without compunction and without blame.
The Medea then is realistic and little else: the Alcestis, the first in time of Euripides’ plays, is a blend of style, and demands a fuller treatment.
There are no villains in the Alcestis, and there are no heroes. There is one heroic character, but her heroism is of so common a type that it usually passes unnoticed. The three men, Admetus, Pheres and Heracles, in varying degrees are animated by the strongest of all male motives, self-preservation. Alcestis lacks their sound common-sense; she is guided by passion, by the strongest of all female passions and that which comes nearest to the divine, the maternal passion of self-sacrifice. She has given life once, she is prepared to give it again.
It is commonly assumed—and even Verrall tacitly allows this to go unchallenged—that Alcestis ‘is in love with’ Admetus, and Admetus ‘is in love with’ Alcestis. The affection which, happily for us, may usually be expected to exist between husband and wife, is taken for granted in the very different conditions of Euripides’ time.
Now, as we have seen, this is a cardinal error. Mutual affection and esteem did not reign in an ordinary Athenian household. Husband and wife were usually indifferent one to another, and even this indifference was an improvement upon the Ionian relationship when husband and wife were often natural enemies.
That a wife should give up her life out of love for her husband is a state of things so agreeable to the natural man that it is, perhaps, not surprising if the language of the play has never been too closely examined.
Alcestis’ motive is not love for her husband, but love for her children. Euripides, following Æschylus, knew that maternal love is a far stronger force than conjugal affection, even when the latter exists. The mother and the children—on them he spends all the resources of his unrivalled pathos—the husband is a mark for his bitterest irony. It is because Alcestis does not wish her children to be left fatherless that she consents to death.
The position of the widow—as indeed, is implied in our language by the form of the word—is definitely worse than that of the widower. The orphan in ancient times was the fatherless child, and the position of the chief’s son whose father died in his childhood was particularly unenviable. It is described in two of the most pathetic passages in Greek literature, by Andromache in the twenty-second book of the Iliad and by Tecmessa, in the most Euripidean of all the plays of Sophocles, the Ajax. Under the old tribal system, a chief’s power depended very largely on personal ascendency, so that old men like Laertes and Pheres found it expedient to retire in favour of their grown-up son. A small boy like Eumelus could not have maintained his father’s position, and his father’s death would probably have meant considerable danger to his life. All this in Euripides’ time was a commonplace and needed no emphasis. He prefers, indeed, to deal with the reverse picture—the sorrows of the motherless children and especially of the motherless girl; for the pathos of the sacrifice is partly this. It is for the sake of the boy and his future position in life, and not so much for the girl, that the mother dies.
Let us now examine the play itself. Admetus, chief of Pheræ, has been told by his medicine man that he is a very bad life: that, indeed, he cannot hope to live much longer—three months, perhaps; six months, say, at the most. But he has been a generous benefactor to the profession, and in particular has rendered some quite exceptional services to the arch-physician, Apollo himself. Accordingly a special provision is made in his case. If he can get some one of his own family to transfer to him their vitality, the operation may be feasible. The problem is, to find the man—or woman—for his family is very small. Admetus goes to his father and his mother, but both, even his mother, refuse; for, as we shall see, Admetus is not a very sympathetic character, or likely to arouse the spirit of self-sacrifice even in a mother’s heart. Finally he asks his young wife, the mother of his two little children, and she consents.
At this point the play opens. Admetus believes what he is told; Alcestis believes what she is told: the sixth month is ending and she is marked out for death. So Death appears, and the burlesque dialogue between Death and the Doctor, Thanatos and Apollo, forms the prologue, where the arch-physician, who can cure all diseases but one, is confronted by that One himself. But the prologue and the entrance of the chorus need not detain us. The first intimate details about Alcestis are given by the servant woman in her long speech to the chorus, and it will be noticed that in the picture of the household which she draws for them the central point is the marriage bed. Twice already has Alcestis risked her life upon that bed, and now another sacrifice has to be made. A childless woman might refuse. Her husband demands her life, and she must give it for the sake of the children whom on that bed she has borne. It is of her children that Alcestis thinks: for them she prays: she has no petition to make on her husband’s behalf. In all the narrative, indeed, the husband scarcely appears. The chorus—of men—notice the omission and enquire of him, and this is the answer they get:
‘Oh, yes he is weeping as he holds the woman he loves, his bed-fellow, in both arms. He is begging her not to abandon him: he wants what he cannot have.’
The chorus then burst into a lament which is interrupted by the appearance of Alcestis and her husband outside the house. The following scene is an extreme example of that combination of pathos and irony from which Euripides never shrinks. The lamentation of Alcestis, expressed in lyrics of the purest quality, is answered at regular intervals by Admetus in iambic couplets where style and thought alike are cruelly commonplace.
Then Alcestis who has been standing, supported by her women, sinks to the ground and with one last cry to her children thrice repeated seems to faint away. Admetus in the name of the children begs her not to forsake him ‘this is worse for me than any death: on you we all depend—to live or die.’ Alcestis makes her final effort, and for the first time addresses her husband by name, but in the pathetic speech that follows, her last words are for her children, and it is plain that she is terribly afraid that Admetus will marry again and inflict a stepmother upon them. Admetus himself hesitates to give the promise, and it is one of the chorus who answers the dying wife.
With Alcestis disappears the pathos of the play. The rest is ironical, a realistic criticism of the resurrection story and hardly concerns us. But the scene between Pheres and Admetus where the old father—the mother is prudently omitted from the action,—comes to convey his sympathy, is a beautiful illustration of Euripides’ insight into the weakness of the male character.
‘Such are the pair, father and son: behold your ordinary sensual man,’ he seems to say. Dr. Verrall spends some time and pains in showing that Admetus is not a hero, and, doubtless, he is not heroic either to us or to Euripides. But it does not follow that an Athenian audience would share our or the master’s private views. We are unconsciously influenced by centuries of romantic literature in which the relations of the sexes have been idealised. The Athenians treated women much as the baser sort still treat animals. To us Admetus seems almost inconceivably selfish and callous: probably many an Athenian never realised that his conduct was reprehensible.
Even so to-day a vegetarian has considerable difficulty in proving to the ordinary man that it is unjustifiable selfishness to take life for the gratification of appetite. ‘I always have eaten meat,’ such an one will say; ‘I always shall: and so did my father. Animals were created for use.’ The Athenian might have used the same language about his wife.
But in the play itself no one is under any sort of delusion as to Admetus. The servant woman, the attendant, the chorus, Alcestis herself: all know him for what he is, a selfish coward. Very religious certainly he is and very hospitable: in other words, very full of absurd superstitions and very fond of having strangers in the house to divert him from himself. Heracles the ravisher, and Apollo the seducer, appreciate him as an excellent boon companion: his own household do not share their views. They know too well—and there is constant reference to this in the play—that he is ‘foolish’ in the Euripidean sense of the word, the slave of passions which he is unable to control. And so we may leave him: in his character Euripides explodes the fallacy that in all cases and in all circumstances man is the superior animal.
But the wonder of the Alcestis is this: in spite of the irony and cruel satire, in spite of the bitter criticism of the two doctrines, the existence of the supernatural and the superiority of man, there remain so many other threads of interest—realism and romance, pathos and humour—that a well-disposed reader can shut his eyes to the unpleasant, and usually does. What is wanted to bring out the full meaning of Euripides’ plays is a double translation; one version written in prose by a realist with a taste for irony, the other composed by a lyric poet. Neither version will be satisfactory apart, for the spirit of Euripides is a compound of the two: neither will be final, for translations quickly age and Euripides is ever young.
