Part 11

So he continues to narrate all that he had achieved for the welfare of man: how he had taught him Medicine, Prophecy and Augury; and had brought to light the treasure of precious metals that lay hidden within the earth. Indeed, as the long recital falls from his lips, we know that the poet has symbolized in him all the great civilizing influences on mankind.

But the sea-nymphs, though they sympathize with his sorrow, cannot rise to the height of his thought. To them mankind is a “fleeting, dream-like race,” unworthy of the sacrifice that he has made. They chide him gently. Why has he dared the wrath of Zeus, and why will he bear the weary ages of torture for such a people? The beauty of the lyric casts a spell upon us. The thought of the long-drawn agony, endured from century to century, makes us waver. Might he not have been misguided? Was Zeus right, perhaps? And would not the titan be wise to make peace with so powerful a ruler?

Thus the softer mood of the sea-maidens wins upon us. Viewed through it, the resistance of Prometheus begins to look like stubborn self-will; and the decree of Zeus a righteous chastisement. But just as the feeling is gathering strength an episode occurs which reverses the current of emotion. For there rushes suddenly on the desolate scene a strange wild creature, half woman and half beast. Under the curling heifer’s horns there is a fair white brow; and below the brow sweet human eyes, distraught with fear and pain. This is Io, the maid beloved by Zeus. Cast out of her home by the god’s command, she has been chased from the society of her kind, and her fair woman form has been partly changed to bestial shape. For many a weary league she has been goaded onward by the gadfly of Hera; and even now she is haunted by the wraith of Argus, the huntsman of the hundred eyes whom the angry goddess had set to watch her. Good and beautiful she had been, her serene life gladly given to the service of Hera in an Argive temple. Yet now she is doomed to wander restlessly over sea and land, through sun and storm, and by many an unknown lonely path, without apparent aim and for no apparent cause. As her feet stumble up the mountain side and she stands before Prometheus, innocent and mercilessly persecuted, we feel that the moment is crowded with all the elements of tragedy. If we had wavered before, standing on that ridge of neutral ground where the cool airs of reason calm the passions; if the poet meant that we should waver for a moment, giving us in his unifying purpose some perception of the higher power as it would ultimately justify itself; he plunges us now into the arena again, with every emotion clamant to defend these victims of tyranny.

As they confront each other, Io speaks, forgetting her own griefs for the moment in contemplation of the suffering titan.

“_What land, what people is here? Whom shall I say that I see, Rock-pinioned yonder, Storm-buffeted? To penance of a living death What crime hath doomed thee? Tell me, thou luckless one, Where have I wandered?_

“_Ah me, alas, unhappy! Frenzied again as by the gadfly’s sting, The fatal herdsman with the myriad eyes, The giant Argus, I behold ... Me he pursues, the unhappy, Over sandy leagues of the waste seashore.... Whither alas, ah woe is me When shall my wandering end?_

“_What, O what was the sin in me, O son of Cronos, that thou didst find? Why hast thou doomed me thus to suffer By the gadfly’s goad still onward driven, Weary of fleeing, distraught with dread?... Enough I have wandered— Wandered afar till my strength is spent; And still from my doom escape is none. Dost thou mark my speech? The hornèd maiden hearest thou?_“[20]

Prometheus does indeed hear and know her, he says, the poor frenzied daughter of Inachus, whom Zeus loves. As he speaks her father’s name, Io catches at it eagerly. Perhaps this may be a friend.

IO. _Who told thee of my sire? Tell me, the sufferer—who art thou, That thou hast named aright One wretched as thyself?..._

PROM. _This is Prometheus, who gave fire to men._

IO. _Of all our human kind, proved helper thou, Ill-starred Prometheus—what hath earned thee this?_[20]

In rapid interchange of question and answer, the cause of the quarrel, and its consequence, are related to Io; and then, because she knows that Prometheus can foresee the future, she begs him to tell her what is in store for herself. The titan warns her that the knowledge can only bring fresh pain; and for awhile the prophecy is delayed, as Io, at the petition of the nymphs, tells her own strange story.

IO. _Your will is law to me; I must obey. ... Albeit I blush to tell. Haunting my virgin chamber, night by night, Came visions to beguile me while I slept With fair smooth words: “O maiden highly blest, Be maiden now no more; to whom ‘tis given To mate thee with the Highest; thy beauty’s shaft Glows in the heart of Zeus, and for his bride He claims thee.”_[20]

Her father Inachus sent anxious messages to the oracles at Delphi and Dodona to inquire what this persistent vision might mean. At first ambiguous answers came.

_But at the last to Inachus there came A peremptory word, with mandate clear, To cast me from my country and my home, At the world’s end a wanderer far from men; And, if he would not, swift from Zeus should come A fiery bolt that should consume his race._[20]

With sorrowful heart, Inachus obeyed the oracular command, constrained thereto by Zeus. Io was driven out to the pastures of her father’s herds.

_Then was my feature changed, my reason fled: Wearing these horns ye see, with frenzied hounds, Pricked and tormented by the gadfly’s sting, To fair Kerchneia’s stream and Lerna’s shore I hasted. And upon my traces still, Of rage unslaked, with myriad eyes agaze, The earth-born huntsman Argus followed hard. Him unawares a sudden death o’ertook, And reft him of his life. From land to land, Heaven’s scourge, the unsleeping gadfly, drives me still. My tale is told. What time has yet in store For me to suffer, tell me if thou canst: Not pitying think with lies to comfort me: False words I count of maladies the worst._[20]

Io is asking more than she knows, and the prophecy that Prometheus will make to her is more wonderful than she could ever dream. In careful detail, and so impressively that she must remember every word, he indicates the first part of her wanderings. She must turn her face eastward, and faring through Scythia, pass along the sea-coast, avoiding the fierce Chalybes. Then on wearily to the range of the Caucasus, which she must ascend to the very summit; and following afterward a southward road, she will come to the land of the Amazons and down to the sea which separates the continents. Here she must boldly ford the strait, which in later times will be called Bosphorus because she, the cow-maiden, crossed it; and leaving Europe behind, she will tread on Asian soil.

PROM. _... Deem ye not That this proud lord of heaven on great and small Tramples alike? For this poor mortal maid, Enamoured of her love, his godhead dooms To wander thus. Thy most imperious wooer, Maiden, thou well mayst rue. What I have told, Deem that the prelude hardly hast thou heard._

IO. _Woe’s me, alas, alas!... What boots it then to live? Were it not better From this hard rock to fling myself outright, That dashed to earth I might of all my toil Have riddance? Better surely once to die. Than all my days to be afflicted thus._[20]

But Prometheus, looking further still into the future, sees some hope for her, as he contrasts her fate with his. However great her affliction, it must end some day; he can even foretell just what the issue will be, and when. But for him, suffering must continue until Zeus is hurled from his throne.

IO. _Shall Zeus indeed be downcast from his throne?_

PROM. _To see that day methinks thou wouldst rejoice._

IO. _How could I but rejoice, whom he has wronged?_[20]

She begs for a revelation of the fate of Zeus; and the titan tells briefly of a certain marriage that the god is contemplating, which must bring him ruin if Prometheus will not interpose.

IO. _Who then shall loose thee in despite of Zeus?_

PROM. _One of thine own descendants he shall be._

IO. _How? shall a child of mine deliver thee?_

PROM. _Ten generations hence, and three beside._

IO. _Now hard to read the prophecy becomes._[20]

Io’s mind cannot take so great a leap forward; and Prometheus, resuming the course of her wanderings in Asia, gradually leads up to the climax of her story. Having crossed the strait, she is again to bend her steps eastward. Through the land of the Gorgons she must go, and of the Griffins, and of Phorcy’s daughters, the three hags with one eye and one tooth between them. On the golden shores of Pluto she will see an army of one-eyed horsemen, whom she must carefully avoid; and toiling onward still, she must follow the course of the river Ethiopia far up to its very source. Then, at Canopus, a town upon the shores of distant Nile, she will find rest.

So is completed the tale of Io’s wanderings. And now, before Prometheus reveals the strangest thing of all, he would convince her that he is speaking truth indeed. So he recalls to her mind a marvel that had happened on her way thither, but which she had not spoken when she related her story.

PROM. _To the Molossian plains when thou hadst come,... And to Dodona’s rock-ridge, to the seat And sacred oracle of Thesprotian Zeus, Famed for its marvel of the talking oaks, That with clear voice and nowise doubtfully Hailed thee (sounds this familiar to thine ears?) The glorious bride of Zeus in days to come._[20]

The weird music of the oaks came back to her as the titan spoke, phrased intelligibly now. It had haunted all her journey, but confusedly, hinting at something she could not clearly understand, and dared not name. But in the words of Prometheus its meaning pealed. Becoming in that far Eastern country the bride of the ruler of Olympus, she would found a splendid race. From her the Danaans would spring, one root of that Hellenic people which should civilize the Western world. She would give a line of kings to the Argive throne. But greater and more blessed than all, from her should come the supreme Greek hero Heracles, destined to release this suffering titan from his misery.

As she muses on the wonder of it, Prometheus takes up again the thread of his prophecy. In that rich land which borders on the Nile she may at last stay her weary feet.

“_There shall the hand of Zeus, with soft caress Upon thee laid, restore thee to thy mind: And thou shalt bear, named of his fruitful touch, A son, swart Epaphus, whom all that land, By the broad Nile-stream watered, shall enrich...._“[20]

From Io’s son Epaphus should descend, generations afterward, a princess.

“_’The royal line of Argos springs from her. Time fails to tell the story to its close: But of her strain one valiant shall be born, And famous with the bow; he from these ills Shall loose me.’ Thus the titaness, my mother, Primeval Themis, prophesied to me, But of the ways and means too long it were To tell thee, and it profits not to know._“[20]

To immortal eyes, seeing the end in the beginning, it was a glorious destiny; one to compensate perhaps, if not to justify, all that she had endured. But Io is only a mortal maid. The vision of the future opens before her in one radiant moment, and then all is dark again, and nothing remains but her inexplicable pain. Even before Prometheus has finished speaking the cloud had fallen upon her mind again.

“_Alas! Woe worth the day! Again a thrill, a spasm of frenzy Shoots through me, soul-distracting: The unforged goad of the gadfly Stings me afresh; and my seated heart Knocks at my ribs for fear, My sight swims, and my senses reel; And a frantic gust of madness sweeps me Wide of the course...._”[20]

Tormented and distracted, she rushes from the scene as wildly as she had come; but as the titan and the sea-nymphs sadly watch her go, they see that her face is set now toward the East.

Footnote 20:

From Mr Robert Whitelaw’s translation of the _Prometheus_ (Clarendon Press, 1s. net).

_Sophocles: Jocasta_

Jocasta, in _Œdipus the King_ of Sophocles, is a very real woman. Moreover, though she is a splendidly dramatic figure, she is not heroic in anything save her death. True, she is a queen, deriving royalty through several generations from Cadmus himself; and possessing the throne of Thebes so surely that when the king her husband died she had perforce to marry with his successor in order to establish him in the kingship. But despite her special royalty, which makes her, as Professor Murray has pointed out, like one of the consecrated queens of early times: despite the extreme deference which is paid to her, the weight that attaches to her counsel, and the sense of brooding fate that clings about her, she is before all an appealing and convincing human creature.

This vivid reality is a new fact in our study of Greek heroines, and the reason for it is that we have come now to the Drama of Sophocles. We have seen, so far, the women of Homer and those of Æschylus; and we have observed one or two characteristics which distinguish them.

The Homeric women are gracious and beautiful, glowing as it were with romantic charm. With one notable exception, Penelope, they appear rarely in the movement of the epic; and then only to form the central figure in a picturesque group. Reality has never touched them. Generous as their emotions are, the extremes of passion have not for an instant distorted their loveliness. When they are called upon to act, they seem always to move with grace and gentleness; and even in their sorrow they are serene. If they share in the great stern things of life, its aspiration and its struggle, they give no sign of the penalty exacted. They are always young, fresh and fair; except again Penelope, and she has only gained from age, not lost. A wise maturity has been added to her early charms. And thus these Homeric women, with their delicate infrangible bloom, seem to belong to a region just over the boundary-line of our common humanity.

The women of Æschylus are much greater figures. Clytemnestra is colossal: Cassandra, Electra and Io are all conceived majestically. Unlike the Epic women, they are capable of strenuous action: strong passions sway them, and they are much concerned with the great issues of life. We know little or nothing about their appearance, and it does not seem to matter. They do not live in our mental vision pictorially, in soft, warm tints; but remotely grand, they appeal to a more austere sense of wonder, awe and reverence. Surrounded by an atmosphere of myth, and sharing in the elevation of the poet’s spirit, they seem to be creatures of an older and a bigger world.

There is indeed one woman in the Æschylean Drama, Orestes’ nurse, who is of ordinary stature and might belong to any age. But she is of minor importance in the story, and does not move on the heroic plane. She is therefore beyond the range of that sublimating power of the poetic spirit which magnified the heroes and heroines to immense proportions. And as she stands in the clear daylight outside the enchanted circle she is just an old grey woman taken straight out of common life. But for that very reason there is a hearty, homely breath about her which is very refreshing. She is but a nurse: she is quaint and querulous in her talk, inept, wordy and reminiscent; and peevishly loyal. Yet in her very weakness and foolishness she is precious, for is she not a flash from the eyes of the Comic Spirit, naïvely unconscious of its august surroundings? We feel that we can actually see and hear her, as she gabbles about Orestes’ babyhood and how she tended him; being nurse, cook, foster-mother and washerwoman all combined. But she is unique among Æschylean women, and when we turn to look again on the figures of his heroines, a thought is suggested by the extreme contrast. Here is creative genius so strong that it has evoked on the one hand the grandeur of a Clytemnestra; and on the other, the biting reality of this old slave. But there does not seem to have been an equivalent artistic power which, controlling the fervid idealism and combining it with his keen insight, would have produced types more fully and completely human.

Such types we find first when we come to the Drama of Sophocles. With Æschylus the ruling passion had been spiritual fervour. In Sophocles the artist reigned paramount. All the advance which his drama made, in plot, incident and character-building, was in the direction of a more perfect art. And although there was some inevitable loss—as for instance the curtailment of the lyrics by modifying the part of the Chorus; and their lower poetic flight—on the whole the gain is very great. In the matter of characterization, with which we are chiefly concerned, the change is one which brings us out of the region of demi-gods into the world of men and women.

When we say that the persons of Sophocles’s drama are real people, that is not to say that they are ‘realistic’ in the narrow sense of the word which conveys only what is average and actual. But it does mean that with all their splendour and dignity and fine achievement they are subject to our common humanity. They are not immune from the defects of their virtues. The passions which have led them to great deeds are potent agents of their downfall. It is the flaw within which helps to betray them.

For this reason, and also because the poet shows his characters moving in intimate human relationships, the women of Sophocles are intensely living creatures. Electra in her conflict with Chrysothomis, and Antigone with Ismene, are of the stuff of life; and the situations thus created are pure drama. Here two great natures clash. Closely bound by the ties of blood and affection, but at the opposite poles of temperament, the struggle between them is all the more bitter from the intimacy of their relationship. Both claim our esteem and both are sincerely confident in the purity of their intentions. But each mistrusts the other, believing her to be fatally misguided or wilfully blind. It is by this faculty of seeing all sides of an issue, or, as Matthew Arnold expressed it, “to see life steadily and see it whole,” that Sophocles has heightened and deepened the dramatic values of a story. Out of that, too, he has made Jocasta, with all her state and despite the unnatural horror with which she is touched, a pitiable figure.

Here again two noble natures, near and very dear to each other, are brought into conflict. In this case, however, there is an added element of tragic irony which increases the dramatic power threefold. For we know, as we watch the tender comradeship of Œdipus and Jocasta, that there is this sinister thing in the background, ready to flame out at any instant and make them loathsome in each other’s eyes. And the moment when the shameful truth is revealed, literally dragged to light by Œdipus to his own undoing, is perhaps the most awful in Greek tragedy.

The story belongs to the Theban cycle, of which we have already heard. It is older than Homer, who calls Jocasta _Epicasta_; and it had many variants. In the Eleventh Book of the _Odyssey_ there is the quaint epitome of it which the hero gives when he is describing his visit to the World of the Dead. Among the shades which throng there he sees Jocasta.

“_And then beheld I Epicasta fair, Oedipus’ mother, her who unaware Did a strange deed through ignorance of mind, To intermarry with the son she bare._

“_And he his mother wedded, having slain His father: and these things the Gods made plain To all men suddenly; then he among The folk Cadmean held a troublous reign,_

“_In lovely Thebes, according to the fate By purpose of the Gods predestinate For evil: but she went her way alone To the strong Warder of the darkling gate._“[21]

This version agrees in the main with that of Sophocles, and points to the antiquity of the story. Even in those early times the fate of Jocasta and Œdipus was part of an ancient myth. Like the story of Io, remote ancestress of the founder of their city, it is a tale of wrong wrought upon mortals by a god. Perhaps it is not so primitive as the Io legend. There is nothing in it quite so naïve as the idea of the heifer-maiden loved by the supreme god and mercilessly hunted by his jealous queen. The Olympian hierarchy is now established, with its system of greater and lesser gods, and Zeus at their head has grown, in accordance with the theory of Æschylus, wiser with age. Apollo is now the persecutor. And with the development in the divine order goes a corresponding complexity in the human elements of the story. The actors in it are the instruments of their own suffering. The inimical power is not now frank tyranny. Its victims even believe it to be friendly, or at least placable; and it is by their own deeds that the decree against them is brought to pass. Yet this apparent advance still leaves the story in a dark past, far behind the poets. And there are some aspects of it—the curse fulfilled by Œdipus of parricide and incest; and the stark unreason with which it was regarded—which make us feel that the primitive age has only just given place to one of gross superstition.

The essence of the tragedy lies in the double fact of Apollo’s hostility to Œdipus and Jocasta and their ignorance of it. When Laius and Jocasta were young upon the throne of Thebes they prayed to Apollo to give them a son. The oracle at Delphi replied to Laius, “I will give thee a son, but it is doomed that thou leave the sunlight by the hands of thy child.” Thus the decree was launched.

Laius and Jocasta trembled at the doom, and considered how it might be averted. When their son was born, they took a cruel and desperate means to save its father’s life. Three days after his birth they handed over the babe to a herdsman, to be exposed on Mt. Kithairon. And first they pierced his heels, to ensure his death. So Jocasta, out of love for her husband and fear of the oracle, brought herself to a deed which poisoned all her life. Yet it was of no avail against fate. For the man who took her babe had pity on it; and meeting a friendly herdsman who was in the service of Polybus, king of Corinth, he gave the child to him. Polybus and his queen Merope were childless; and the herdsman believed that they would welcome the little foundling. He was not mistaken: calling him Œdipus from his swelled feet, they brought him up as their son.