Part 7

When we come to Pindar’s view of the life after death, we find that he has a more exalted vision than the poets of an earlier day. The ideas of immortality, of future rewards and punishments, of rebirth, and of a possible final bliss, which were current from the early sixth century at least, had not failed to have their effect on our poet. In a remarkable fragment he sets forth a doctrine as to the relation of body and soul which is very similar to that held by the Orphics, under whose influence he had evidently come: “The bodies of all men follow all-conquering death; but life’s image still liveth on, for that only is from the gods. It sleeps when the limbs are active, but ofttimes in dreams it shows to the sleeper coming judgment, a judgment of peace and pain.”[127] That is, when the body is awake it hampers the soul so that the soul is numbed in sleep; but when the soul is free from the domination of the imprisoning flesh, it then enjoys its proper powers. There is a famous passage in the second Olympian which sets forth Pindar’s views of future reward and punishment. According to this passage, sins committed on the earth are punished beneath the earth, and those done beneath the earth are punished in the soul’s next reincarnation. So heaven and hell are always present to man’s soul, whether here in the light of the sun, or in the darkness of Hades. Those from whom atonement is accepted in the lower world are allowed to return to the earth in high positions; when they have accomplished this rebirth thrice, if they have been just, they may enter into their final happiness. These are Pindar’s words: “The guilty souls of the dead straightway pay the penalty here on earth; and the sins done in this kingdom of Zeus are judged by one beneath the ground, who delivereth his judgment to hateful necessity. But ever in the night and in the day alike the good receive as their lot a life free from toil, enjoying the light of the sun. They vex neither the ground nor the water of the sea for food that does not satisfy, but among the honored gods, those who have found their pleasure in keeping their oaths, enjoy a life free from tears; but the others bear suffering too great to look upon. Yet all those who have tarried thrice on either side (of death) and have persevered in keeping their souls wholly free from unjust deeds, travel the road of Zeus to the tower of Cronos. There the ocean breezes blow around the islands of the blest, golden flowers bloom, some from glorious trees on the land, others water feeds. With garlands the blest entwine their hands and crown their temples.”[128]

We need not pause here to point out in detail the great contrast between Pindar’s ideas of religion and those expressed in the Homeric and Hesiodic poetry. He presented a higher doctrine of future rewards and punishments, which was binding upon men in all the relations of this life; and he expressed a higher conception of morality and of justice, to whose obligations the gods as well as men were subject. The baser elements of mythology he refined away and elevated thereby men’s ideas of the divine; and by making righteousness and truth the prime attributes of the gods, in accordance with which they punished the wicked and blessed the good, he lifted morality and religion to a nobler plane.

When we turn to the two older tragic poets, Aeschylus and Sophocles, we find that they teach doctrines very like those of Pindar, although naturally they dwell on those elements in religion and morality that are adapted to their tragic themes; and they differ between themselves in the points which they emphasize. Aeschylus makes prominent the punitive aspect of divine justice; he dwells upon the punishment which must inevitably follow sin, and which pursues a guilty line from generation to generation. The poet displays a moral earnestness and intensity like that of a Hebrew prophet, and he shows an extraordinary profundity in his handling of moral and religious themes; furthermore he is consciously a religious teacher. Sophocles keeps religion more in the background, using it as one of the materials which he as a literary artist can employ in his dramas; yet he is important as a religious poet for he lays especial stress on the necessity of purity of heart, which for him is the substance of piety toward the gods.

The elder tragedian, Aeschylus, was born at Eleusis about the year 525 B.C. Tradition told that he fought in the Persian wars and was wounded at Marathon. He began to present tragedies about the year 500, and continued to produce them until about three years before his death in 456. Aeschylus was a man of mighty concepts and massive thought, to which his condensed and pregnant style corresponds; a man of a profound and religious nature, strongly influenced by the Mysteries, he thought deeply upon the problems of men and of gods. He faced with honesty the contradictions involved in the current notions with regard to the moral nature of the gods, and in the ethical standards of men. Like Pindar he elevated and refined the traditional myths and made them a medium for the teaching of great moral truths.

Aeschylus regards the order of the universe as moral throughout. This view appears even in the Prometheus Bound, that unique drama of revolt. When we now read this tragedy alone, it seems as if Zeus were represented as a lawless tyrant, using his power and might in most unjust ways. But it is evident that if we had the other two plays of the trilogy, the sympathy which we feel with the Titan Prometheus would be lessened, that we should realize that the extant play represents the transition from violence to law, and that in reality the rule of Zeus is not one of might but one subject ultimately to the law of justice.

Although Aeschylus, like all of his day, was a polytheist, he exalts Zeus far above all other divinities. He regards him as preëminent, the possessor of all majesty and power, whose will always prevails, so that, when he speaks, the thing he wishes comes to pass. The poet uses the highest and most comprehensive epithets of him throughout his plays; in the Supplices the chorus appeal to Zeus as “King of kings, most blessed of the blessed, most perfect power of perfect powers; blessed Zeus”; and again they address him as “the one who rules through infinite time.”[129] In other passages the poet seems to feel as if language were unequal to the task of describing adequately the majesty and power of this supreme god. In his mind Zeus surpasses the other gods so much that his will represents the whole of the divine laws; to him man inevitably turns in doubt and perplexity. As the chorus say in the Agamemnon:

Zeus—whate’er ’Zeus’ expresseth of His essence— If the name please him on the lips of prayer, With his name on my lips I seek his presence, Knowing none else I may with him compare.

Yea, though I ponder, in the balance laying All else, no help save Zeus alone I find, If I would cast aside the burden weighing, All to no profit, ever on my mind.[130]

It is not impossible that Aeschylus cherished ideas of divinity which approached the pantheism or the henotheism of a later age. Clement of Alexandria has preserved two of his verses which are so extraordinary that we are glad to have them attested also by Philodemus.[131] When in these the poet says: “Zeus is the ether, Zeus the earth also; also the sky. Zeus is all things, and that which is above all things as well,” this syncretistic expression may well be due to the influence of Orphism or of the philosopher Heraclitus; but whatever the source of the idea it stands at diameter with popular tradition. Of course it does not exclude the gods of the popular belief, who could be included in the divine unity, as later thought usually conceived them. That Aeschylus uses the gods of the people in his plays is not surprising, for the dramatic poet, whatever his personal belief, must always use material familiar to his audience and suited to his dramatic and poetic purpose.

In the Prometheus Bound the Titan threatens Zeus with Fate and declares that even he cannot escape Necessity. But we must remember that the Prometheus, as I have said before, is a drama which represents transition from the old order to the new, and that at the end of the trilogy there was no conflict between Zeus and Fate; and in general Aeschylus, though not always clear, most often represents Fate either as the will of Zeus himself or as his assistant. The former idea is again and again expressed in the Supplices, where the will of the supreme god is shown as something mighty and absolute which none may transgress.

But if Zeus is exalted to this supreme position, it is as a god of supreme justice. With the poet the ideas of justice and piety, injustice and impiety are equivalent. Like Hesiod he makes Justice the daughter of Zeus, whom Zeus always supports and avenges, “allotting duly ill to the wicked, blessing to the righteous.” To the poet it is inconceivable that a god of perfect justice could desire anything in the world except what is right and just; and therefore he conceives that man’s obligation is to strive after that which is just and righteous, and so to put himself into harmony with the divine will. A failure to do this is sin. Indeed the poet says that when men disregard justice they injure the gods, and more than once sin is spoken of as a disease of the mind. The sinner is a vain creature, laboring under a delusion which oftentimes springs from o’erweening pride and is doomed to bear tears for its fruit. The envy of the gods, which seems in Homer a childish thing, is in Aeschylus only the resentment which they feel toward a sinner who has been led away by success into insolent pride and so is doomed to punishment. In the Persians Xerxes is represented as having been swept away by his haughty insolence so that he lacked discretion (σωφροσύνη) and came to his doom. The shade of Darius says to the chorus:

Zeus sits above, a chastener of thoughts Exceeding proud, a stern inquisitor. Wherefore, since Heaven’s warning bids be prudent, Admonish him with counsel of wise speech To cease from flouting Gods with reckless pride.[132]

And Xerxes’ armies were likewise doomed to pay the price of insolence and of their godless thoughts.

Furthermore Aeschylus teaches that good men must avoid the wicked, and illustrates the truth by the fact that it was evil companions who urged Xerxes to his folly. There is a striking passage in the Septem in which Eteocles, when informed that the seer Amphiaraus is among the heroes who are besieging Thebes, says:

Woe for the omen that with impious men Joineth a righteous man in fellowship! Than evil converse, in all enterprise Nothing is worse; its harvest let none reap. Infatuation’s field hath death for fruit. If the godfearing man for shipmates hath A crew hot-hearted in iniquity, With that god-hated tribe he perisheth: The righteous man who dwells with citizens Traitrous to guests and reckless of the Gods, Is justly taken in the selfsame net, Lashed by the same impartial scourge of God.[133]

We have just seen that Pindar shows a tendency to make man responsible for his sin, quite in contrast to the popular belief which still kept the Homeric view that the gods were responsible for all things. With this popular idea Aeschylus seems at times in accord. But if we consider his plays in their entirety, he makes man responsible for the first step. In the Eumenides, for example, the Furies declare that no just man has ever put his hands justly to any deed and met their wrath. The lesson is that when men have taken the initial downward step themselves an evil divinity or daemon drives them on, but that the first step no man is forced to take. When, however, he has taken it, then the poet represents the sinner as through god’s will infatuated with his sin. No other extant poet shows so impressively how sin relentlessly persists through generation after generation.

The most familiar illustration is found in Aeschylus’ treatment of the story of the bloody line of Atreus, who sinned by slaying his brother’s sons and offering their flesh, an unholy banquet, to their father; then Agamemnon’s queen, with her paramour Aegisthus, slew her lord on his return from Troy; and finally Agamemnon’s son Orestes murdered his mother and Aegisthus to avenge his sire. Thus through three generations the curse ran, each generation adding its own crime until only the divine intervention of Apollo and Athena could stay the course of sin and its doom. When in the Choephoroe Orestes has exacted his vengeance and stained himself with his mother’s blood, the chorus finally sings:

Lo, how upon the palace royal hath burst The third storm that fulfils the house’s fate! First, wretch Thyestes at a feast accurst Of his own children ate:

Then shrieked the second storm the agony Of that king in that laver hacked to death, When the Achaians’ chief to treachery There yielded up his breath:

Now on the third storm’s wild wings down doth sweep A Saviour—or a Doom shall he be named? Where shall the Curse end?—how be lulled to sleep Its fury?—how be tamed?[134]

A similar theme was handled by him in his tragedies which dealt with the history of the royal house of Thebes. Against the warning of the oracle Laius married Jocasta; their son Oedipus slew his father and wed his own mother who bore him children. Under the burden of Oedipus’ curse their two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, fell in fratricidal strife. These are dark bloody tales, but in the tragedies of Aeschylus they were given a fearful moral import. It is true that the same stories were handled by other tragedians, but by none with such moral impressiveness.

The mind of the poet was too searching and earnest to avoid the difficult problems which appear in real life when there is a conflict of duties. Such a conflict arises when Agamemnon has to choose between slaying his daughter and failing to do his duty by his country; again when Antigone at the close of the Seven against Thebes has to decide whether she will disobey the higher law which requires that the dead shall be buried, or resist the edict of the state which forbids her the service to her dead. Throughout the Choephoroe and Eumenides Orestes has to face the duty of avenging his father’s death laid upon him by Apollo, and the pious reverence which he should show his mother. The poet offers no satisfactory solution to such problems as these—indeed, his purpose in bringing them out clearly was probably dramatic rather than moral. Yet whatever his purpose, it is important for us to note that he realized the moral conflict clearly as a part of man’s common experience.

I have already said that Aeschylus dwells chiefly upon the retributory nature of punishment, teaching that the sinner must suffer for his own deeds. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was no less binding in Greek than Hebrew justice:

Destinies, Mighty Ones, grant that from Zeus may the issue betide Even as Justice requireth, who now is arrayed on our side. ‘Ever the tongue of hate shall the tongue of hate requite: Aye for the stroke of murder the stroke of murder shall smite’ Justice exacting her dues cries ringing-voiced this law. ‘Doers must suffer’—so sayeth the immemorial saw.

* * * * *

A law saith, ‘Murder-drops of blood-libation On earth spilt, cry for blood in expiation.’ The Avenging Sprite shrieks, hastening Havoc on Which brings from graves of men dead long agone Ruin to crown the work of ruin done.[135]

This principle runs through the entire trilogy of the Oresteia. Agamemnon lost his life as recompense for the life of his daughter Iphigenia whom he slew with his own hand, and the murder of Agamemnon was avenged by the slaughter of Clytemnestra and her paramour. Throughout the three plays doom follows the criminal relentlessly and only divine interference in the end clears the account. And yet at times Aeschylus teaches a gentler belief, that wisdom comes through suffering and constraint, and that it is through the discipline of pain that we travel the road to understanding.

Although Aeschylus lays overwhelming emphasis on the truth that punishment for sin falls upon the sinner in this life, he also teaches that there is punishment for the wicked in the world below. In his description of the dead there are many reminiscences of Homer. But his Hades is not Homeric; there is reality in punishment there no less than upon earth. In the Eumenides the Furies threaten Orestes thus:

Nay, I shall suck—thou canst not choose but pay the penalty— The red gore from thy living limbs, and win me out of thee The banquet of a draught that shall with awful anguish flow. Yea, I will waste thy living frame, then drag thee far below, There to pay all thy penalty, the mother-murder’s woe. So shall all else that have transgressed, Have sinned against a God, a guest, Or parents, mark how each receives The dues of sin that Justice gives. For Hades ’neath the earth waits every soul, A mighty judge who watcheth to enscroll All sins on his eternal memory’s roll.[136]

Of the rewards of the righteous in the next life Aeschylus has no word to say. There is no Elysium or Islands of the Blest.

Aeschylus represents the Athens of the Persian Wars; Sophocles belongs to the Periclean age. He was born fifteen years before the battle of Salamis and led the chorus which sang a paean to celebrate the Greek victory. To his contemporaries his life seemed happy, as if he were beloved by the gods above all other men. In 468 B.C. he was successful in contending for the tragic prize with Aeschylus, and he continued to write until his death in 406. Instead of the rugged strength and passion that we find in Aeschylus, Sophocles displays a sunny and gentle nature that naturally sought out the kindly and mediating elements in life. A conservative, he was not an innovator, critic, or teacher, as both Aeschylus and Euripides were; he does not make his characters reason much on the deeper things of life or criticize the traditional order.

Yet in one sense he is the most religious of the Greek poets, showing a faith in divine government and a wide outlook on the universe which the two other tragedians did not display. He does not break with the traditional belief as to the nature of the gods; indeed at most points he follows closely the Homeric conception; they are still to his mind the givers of evil as well as of good to men, and in fact his chorus in the Antigone quotes with approval the ancient saying that evil seems good soon or late to him whose mind the god draws to mischief.[137] Although he does not follow Pindar and Aeschylus in ascribing to divine beings a pure morality, yet he is inclined to believe with the elder poets that “Justice revealed from of old sits with Zeus in the might of the eternal laws.”[138] There are only two passages in which his characters may be said to criticize the gods. In the first Philoctetes, smarting under his suffering and neglect, exclaims:

No evil yet was crushed. The Heavens will ever shield it. ’Tis their sport To turn back all things rancorous and malign From going down to the grave, and send instead The good and true. Oh, how shall we commend Such acts, how construe them? When I extol Things god-like, I find evil in the Gods.[139]

But it must be observed that any other sentiment would have been out of character for Philoctetes at this point. The second is a fragment from his lost play, Aleites, in which some speaker, contemplating the prosperity of the wicked and the misfortunes of the good, declares that the gods ought not to order things thus for mortals, but that on the contrary the pious should have some evident profit from their piety and the unjust should pay the penalty for their wrongs that all might see.[140] But this fragment is so at variance in sentiment with Sophocles’ general attitude that it has been conjectured, not without probability, that it came from Euripides. Even if we reject this conjecture, as I think we must, we need not suppose that the sentiments which the poet puts into the mouths of his characters always represent his real view. A dramatist, as we must remind ourselves, should make the speakers in his play express sentiments in harmony with their characters and for the most part will have them utter moral ideas with which most of his audience is in sympathy, unless indeed he would play the part of innovator or prophet. As a matter of fact Sophocles’ own attitude seems to be expressed in another fragment: “No man is wise save him whom god honors; but if one look unto the gods, even if the god bid him depart from justice, there he must go. For nothing to which the gods lead men is base.”[141] This seems the key to Sophocles’ religious attitude. He is confident that however things may seem to us in our short-sightedness, if we could only see the purposes of the gods in their totality, we should know that they are good.

The bases of man’s life and action, his highest duty, Sophocles teaches is piety and discretion, σωφροσύνη. When in the Philoctetes Heracles appears, he urges upon the heroes that when they return to Troy they be mindful, in laying waste the land, to show reverence towards the gods:

But, take good heed, Midst all your spoil to hold the gods in awe. For our great Father counteth piety Far above all. This follows men in death, And fails them not when they resign their breath.[142]

And the chorus sings at the end of the Antigone:

Wise thought hath the first place in happiness Before all else, and piety to Heaven Must be preserved. High boastings of the proud Bring sorrows to the height to punish pride:— A lesson men shall learn when they are old.[143]

In the Ajax Athena says:

Then, warned by what thou seest, be thou not rash To vaunt high words toward Heaven, nor swell thy port Too proudly, if in puissance of thy hand Thou passest others, or in mines of wealth. Since Time abases and uplifts again All that is human, and the modest heart Is loved by Heaven, who hates the intemperate will.[144]

There is an extraordinary passage in the Oedipus Coloneus where Oedipus is made to say, when his strength fails him and he cannot go to the altar to sacrifice, but must send one of his daughters: “For I think that one soul suffices to pay this debt for ten thousand, if it come with good will (purity) to the shrine.”[145] Piety, reverence, and purity, these to Sophocles are the highest qualities of man.

For the poet the moral order was unchanging, dependent not upon caprice but having a divine source and a divine sanction; the laws of heaven are therefore superior to those of man, and man’s obedience to the higher law is made his duty and the means of his consecration. In an ode in Oedipus the King, which is called forth by the king’s harshness and by the suspicion that he is not wholly guiltless, as well as by the queen’s bold contempt for Apollo’s oracle, the chorus sings:

O may I live Sinless and pure in every word and deed Ordained by those firm laws, that hold their realm on high! Begotten of Heaven, of brightest Ether born, Created not of man’s ephemeral mould, They ne’er shall sink to slumber in oblivion. A Power of God is there, untouched by Time.[146]