Part 81 (2/2)
”that, though some G.o.d has devised cures for mortals against the venom of reptiles, no man ever yet hath discovered aught to cure a woman's venom, which is far worse than viper's sting or scorching flame; so terrible a curse are we to mankind.”
Hermione declares:
”Oh! never, never--this truth will I repeat--should men of sense, who have wives, allow women-folks to visit them in their homes, for they teach them mischief; one, to gain some private end, helps to corrupt their honor; another having made a slip herself, wants a companion in misfortune, while many are wantons; and hence it is men's houses are tainted. Wherefore keep strict guard upon the portals of your houses with bolts and bars.”
Bolts and bars were what the gallant Greek men kept their wives under, hence this custom too is here slyly justified out of a woman's mouth.
And thus it goes on throughout the pages of Euripides. Iphigenia, in one of the two plays devoted to her, declares: ”Not that I shrink from death, if die I must,--when I have saved thee; no, indeed! for a man's loss from his family is felt, while a woman's is of little moment.” In the other she declares that one man is worth a myriad of Women--[Greek: heis g' anaer kreisson gunaikon murion]--wherefore, as soon as she realizes the situation at Aulis, she expresses her willingness to be immolated on the altar in order that the war against Troy may no longer be delayed by adverse minds. She had, however, come for a very different purpose, having been, with her queen mother, inveigled from home under the pretext that Achilles was to make her his wife. Achilles, however, knew as little of the plot as she did, and he is much surprised when the queen refers to his impending marriage. A modern poet would have seen here a splendid, seemingly inevitable, opportunity for a story of romantic love. He would have made Achilles fall in love at sight of Iphigenia and resolve to save her life, if need be at the cost of his own. What use does Euripides make of this opportunity? In his play Achilles does not see the girl till toward the close of the tragedy. He promises her unhappy mother that ”never shall thy daughter, after being once called my bride, die by her father's hand;” But his reason for this is not love for a girl or a chivalrous att.i.tude toward women in distress, but offended vanity. ”It is not to secure a bride that I have spoken thus,” he exclaims; ”there be maids unnumbered, eager to have my love--no! but King Agamemnon has put an insult on me; he should have asked my leave to use my name as a means to catch the child.” In that case he ”would never have refused” to further his fellow-soldiers' common interest by allowing the maiden to be sacrificed.
It is true that after Iphigenia has made her brave speech declaring that a woman's life was of no account anyway, and that she had resolved to die voluntarily for the army's sake, Achilles a.s.sumes a different att.i.tude, declaring,
”Some G.o.d was bent on blessing me, could I but have won thee for my wife.... But now that I have looked into thy n.o.ble nature, I feel still more a fond desire to win thee for my bride,”
and promising to protect her against the whole army. But what was it in Iphigenia that thus aroused his admiration? A feminine trait, such as would impress a modern romantic lover? Not in the least. He admired her because, like a man, she offered to lay down her life in behalf of the manly virtue of patriotism. Greek men admired women only in so far as they resembled men; a truth to which I shall recur on another page.
It would be foolish to chide Euripides for not making of this tragedy a story of romantic love; he was a Greek and could not lift himself above his times by a miracle. To him, as to all his contemporaries, love was not a sentiment, ”an illumination of the senses by the soul,”
an impulse to n.o.ble actions, but a common appet.i.te, apt to become a species of madness, a disease. His _Hippolytus_ is a study of this disease, unpleasant but striking; it has for its subject the lawless pathologic love of Phaedra for her step-son. She is ”seized with wild desire;” she ”pines away in silence, moaning beneath love's cruel scourge;” she ”wastes away on a bed of sickness;” denies herself all food, eager to reach death's cheerless bourn; a canker wastes her fading charms; she is ”stricken by some demon's curse;” from her eyes the tear-drops stream, and for very shame she turns them away; on her soul ”there rests a stain;” she knows that to yield to her ”sickly pa.s.sion” would be ”infamous;” yet she cannot suppress her wanton thoughts. Following the topsy-turvy, unchivalrous custom of the Greek poets, Euripides makes a woman--”a thing the world detests”--the victim of this mad pa.s.sion, opposing to it the coy resistance of a man, a devotee of the chaste Diana. And at the end he makes Phaedra, before committing suicide, write an infamous letter which, to save her reputation, dooms to a cruel death the innocent victim of her infatuation.
To us, this last touch alone would demonstrate the worldwide difference between l.u.s.t and love. But Euripides knows no such difference. To him there is only one kind of love, and it varies only in being moderate in some cases, excessive in others. Love is ”at once the sweetest and the bitterest thing,” according as it is one or the other of the two. Phaedra's nurse deplores her pa.s.sion, chiefly because of its violence. The chorus in _Medea_ (627 _seqq_.) sings:
”When in excess and past all limits Love doth come, he brings not glory or repute to man; but if the Cyprian queen in moderate might approach, no G.o.ddess is so full of charm as she.”
And in _Iphigenia at Aulis_ the chorus declares:
”Happy they who find the G.o.ddess come in moderate might, sharing with self-restraint in Aphrodite's gift of marriage and enjoying calm and rest from frenzied pa.s.sions.... Be mine delight in moderate and hallowed [Greek: hosioi]
desires, and may I have a share in love, but shun excess therein.”
To Euripides, as to all the Greeks, there is no difference in the loves of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses or kings and queens on the one hand, and the lowest animals on the other. As the chorus sings in _Hippolytus_:
”O'er the land and booming deep, on golden pinion borne, flits the G.o.d of love, maddening the heart and beguiling the senses of all whom he attacks, savage whelps on mountains bred, ocean's monsters, creatures of this sun-warmed earth, and man; thine, O Cypris, thine alone, the sovereign power to rule them all.”[304]
ROMANTIC LOVE, GREEK STYLE
The Greeks, instead of confuting my theory that romantic love is the last product of civilization, afford the most striking confirmation of it. While considering the love-affairs of Africans, Australians, and other uncivilized peoples, we were dealing with races whose lack of intelligence and delicacy in general made it natural to expect that their love, too, must be wanting in psychic qualities and refinement.
But the Greeks were of a different calibre. Not only their men of affairs--generals and statesmen--but their men of thought and feeling--philosophers and poets--were among the greatest the world has ever seen; yet these philosophers and poets--who, as everywhere, _must have been far above the emotional level of their countrymen in general_--knew nothing of romantic love. What makes this the more remarkable is that, so far as their minds were concerned, they were quite capable of experiencing such a feeling. Indeed, they were actually familiar with the psychic and altruistic ingredients of love; sympathy, devotion, self-sacrifice, affection, are sometimes manifested in their dramas and stories when dealing with the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, or pairs of friends like Orestes and Pylades. And strangest of all, they actually had a kind of romantic love, which, except for one circ.u.mstance, is much like modern romantic love.
Euripides knew this kind of romantic love. Among the fragments that remain to us of his lost tragedies is one from _Dictys_, in which occurs this sentiment:
”He was my friend, and never did love lead me to folly or to Cypris. Yes, there is another kind of love, love for the soul, honorable, continent, and good. Surely men should have pa.s.sed a law that only the chaste and self-contained should love, and Cypris [Venus] should have been banished.”
Now it is very interesting to note that Euripides was a friend of Socrates, who often declared that his philosophy was the science of love, and whose two pupils, Xenophon and Plato, elucidated this science in several of their works. In Xenophon's _Symposium_ Critobulus declares that he would rather be blind to everything else in the world than not to see his beloved; that he would rather _give_ all he had to the beloved than _receive_ twice the amount from another; rather be the beloved's slave than free alone; rather work and dare for the beloved than live alone in ease and security. For, he continues, the enthusiasm which beauty inspires in lovers
”makes them more generous, more eager to exert themselves, and more ambitious to overcome dangers, nay, it makes them purer and more continent, causing them to avoid even that to which the strongest appet.i.te urges them.”
Several of Plato's dialogues, especially the _Symposium_ and _Phaedrus_, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic conception of love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and its altruistic impulses. Especially notable in this respect are the speeches of Phaedrus and Pausanius in the _Symposium_ (175-78), in which love is declared to be the source of the greatest benefits to us. There can be no greater blessing to a young person, we read, than a virtuous lover. Such a lover would rather die a thousand deaths than do a cowardly or dishonorable deed; and love would make an inspired hero out of the veriest coward. ”Love will make men dare to die for the beloved--love alone.” ”The actions of a lover have a grace which enn.o.bles them.” ”From this point of view a man fairly argues that in Athens to love and be loved is a very honorable thing.” ”There is a dishonor in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or of political power.” ”For when the lover and beloved come together ...
the lover thinks that he is right in doing any service which he can to his gracious loving one.” And in the _Republic_ (VI., 485): ”He whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections.”[305]
All this, as I have said, suggests romantic love, except for one circ.u.mstance--a fatal one, however. Modern romantic love is an ecstatic adoration of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman, whereas the romantic love described by Xenophon and Plato--so-called ”Platonic love”--has nothing whatever to do with women. It is a pa.s.sionate, romantic friends.h.i.+p between men and boys, which (whether it really existed or not) the pupils of Socrates dilate upon as the only n.o.ble, exalted form of the pa.s.sion that is presided over by Eros. On this point they are absolutely explicit. Of course it would not do for a Greek philosopher to deny that a woman may perform the n.o.ble act of sacrificing her life for her husband--_that_ is her ideal function, as we have seen--so Alcestis is praised and rewarded for giving up her life; yet Plato tells us distinctly (_Symp_., 180) that this phase of feminine love is, after all, inferior to that which led Achilles to give his life for the purpose of avenging the death of his friend Patroclus.[306] What chiefly distinguishes the higher love from the lower is, in the opinion of the pupils of Socrates, purity; and this kind of love does not exist, in their opinion, between men and women.
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