But it is worthy of note that these are the words of a man who of his own volition has come with foreign aid against his native city; and Oedipus on his part heaps the bitterest reproaches upon him for his cruel lack of filial feeling: "Tis thou that hast brought my days to this anguish, 'tis thou that hast thrust me out; to thee I owe it that I wander, begging my daily bread from strangers. And, had these daughters not been born to be my comfort, verily I had been dead, for aught of help from thee. '18 With this compare his earlier reference to the two brothers: 'But now, moved by some god, and by a sinful mind, an evil rivalry hath seized them. '19

Of the futility of warning, and even of sure prophecy, Hawthorne has given a good illustration in The Prophetic Pictures. An artist of marvelous insight paints the portraits of two young people who have just been wedded, and, discerning a taint of madness in the young man, gives it subtle expression in the portrait. The bride detects it, and is filled with horror. Years pass, and the artist comes back after a long absence, and goes to this house to see his pictures. Just as he reaches the room, a tragedy is impending. The curtain over the portraits has been drawn aside, and before them stand the hapless pair, the man in his frenzy grasping his victim's hair with one hand, while in the other he holds an uplifted knife to slay her. The artist interposes, and saves her life; then with a stern look he cries: 'Wretched lady! Did I not warn you?' 'You did,' answers Elinor calmly. 'But-I loved him!' 'Is there not a deep moral in the tale?' continues Hawthorne. 'Could the result of one, or all our deeds, be shadowed forth and set before us-some would call it Fate and hurry onward-others be swept along by their passionate desires-and none be turned aside by the Prophetic Pictures.' The portentous knowledge of the oracle does not save the man; as with Oedipus, the impulsive nature flashing out in wrath brings upon him the very doom he sought to escape. Does not the Greek drama, in its treatment of oracles, express something similar to the profound truth here uttered by the American novelist?

Take the Antigone of Sophocles. Tiresias earnestly and solemnly warns Creon, but to no purpose. Stubbornly entrenched in his purpose, the king will not heed, but insults the prophet with base suspicion, and brings down upon himself the full weight of woe. Too late he sees himself in the true light-his own self-will, and not Heaven, the agent of his doom-and over his dead son he cries out from a broken heart:

18 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1362 ff. Jebb's translation.

19 Ibid. 371.

'Woe for the sins of a darkened soul, stubborn sins, fraught with death! Ah, ye behold us, the sire who hath slain, the son who hath perished! Woe is me, for the wretched blindness of my counsels! Alas, my son, thou hast died in thy youth, by a timeless doom, woe is me!-thy spirit hath fled-not by thy folly, but by mine own! '20

And the commonly neutral chorus, which had found its voice to condemn Creon with the words,

'Lo, yonder the King himself draws near, bearing that which tells too clear a tale-the work of no stranger's madness, if we may say it, but of his own misdeeds, '21

now rejoins:

'Ah me, how all too late thou seemest to see the right!'22

Finally, at the woeful news of his queen's death, with heartrending cry the hapless king exclaims:

'Ah me, this guilt can never be fixed on any other of mortal kind, for my acquittal! I, even I, was thy slayer, wretched that I am I own the truth. Lead me away, O my servants, lead me hence with all speed, whose life is but as death!'23

But what of the great ethical teaching of the Greek drama? Is not such a function inconceivable if a Greek play is merely the spectacle of men and women moving like automata to a destined end? In the Poetics, Aristotle says: "The right thing, however, is, in the characters, just as in the incidents of the play, to endeavor always after the necessary or the probable; so that whenever such and such a personage says or does such and such a thing, it shall be the probable or necessary outcome of his character; and whenever this incident follows on that, it shall be either the necessary or the probable consequence of it. '24 Conversely, what a personage says or does, reveals a certain moral purpose. Thus, it is because of the nobility of her nature that Antigone cannot leave her dearly 20 Sophocles, Antigone 1261-1269. Jebb's translation.

21 Ibid. 1257-1260.

22 Ibid. 1270.

23 Ibid. 1317-1325.

24 Poetics 1454 a 33-36, Bywater's edition, p. 43.

loved brother to be a wretched outcast in the world below; unhesitatingly she gives him burial, well knowing though she does that the price of her act will be her own young life. There is no fatalism in her unwavering choice; she feels in her heart the binding constraint of those unwritten laws 'that are not of to-day or yesterday, but live on for ever';25 and so she will obey the decree of no man, even an all-powerful king, if it conflicts with them, choosing instead to fulfil the sacred obligations prescribed by her own loving heart. Character interpreted by action and in action-this is the Greek drama; and out of the far-reaching consequences of acts that are the logical outcome of character, its structure is formed. So in a single house we see crime followed by crime and punishment by punishment, as in that of the ill-fated Atridae, until at last comes one pure and undefiled to do the god's behest and so stay the curse; but always the beginning of the evil is in the sin of one man. Laius sins through his passion for Chrysippus, and receives as his punishment the sentence of childlessless.20 But though warned of his doom if he beget a child, he forgets the oracle when inflamed by passion and flushed with wine. He then tries to prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy by exposing the hapless Oedipus; but such an attempt is now folly, and Oedipus fulfils the oracle by slaying his father where the three roads meet, on the way to Delphi. This is not fatalism, however. Laius was forewarned, but disobeyed the warning. Is this not one of the great truths of life? Do we not know-know to a certainty-the outcome of such and such an act, and yet perform that act, hoping in some vague way to contrive an escape from the consequences? And so, 'the fate that overtakes the hero is no alien thing, but his own self recoiling upon him for good or evil. '27 That 'A man's character is his destiny' (00s ȧvoρúτų daiμwv), as Heraclitus says, is a principle clearly recognized indeed by the Greek drama; but nowhere do we find this principle better illustrated than in the English tragedy of King Lear, who pays for his folly as inexorably as any character in any Greek play.

Among those who maintain that the Greek drama was a drama of destiny is De Quincey. 'Man,' he says, 'no longer the representative of an august will-man, the passion-puppet of fate-could not with any effect display what we call a character. . . . The will is the central pivot of character; and this was obliterated, thwarted, canceled, by the dark fatalism which brooded over the 25 Antigone 456-457.

26 Cf. Euripides, Phoenissae 16-25.

27 S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1907), p. 355.

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would

Grecian stage. . . . Powerful and elaborate character have interrupted the blind agencies of fate. Butcher replies: 'It is strange that the Greeks of all people, and Aeschylus of all poets, should have been accused of depriving man of free agency and making him the victim of a blind fate. The central lesson of the Aeschylean drama is that man is the master of his own destiny: nowhere is his spiritual freedom more vigorously asserted. The retribution which overtakes him is not inflicted at the hands of cruel or jealous powers. It is the justice of the gods, who punish him for rebellion against their laws. '29

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Pindar has the same moral code. Prosperity engenders pride, pride lifts up a man's heart within him to commit sin, and sin brings punishment. The genealogy is ὄλβος, κόρος, ὕβρις, ἄτη: prosperity, satiety, insolence, vengeance. 'The prosperity that produces pride and fullness of bread culminates in overweening insolence and outrage, and brings on itself mischief sent from heaven,' as Professor Gildersleeve phrases it in his edition of Pindar.30 'If ever the watchers of Olympus honored any man,' says Pindar, 'that man was Tantalus. But the high honor of friendly intercourse with the gods proved too much for Tantalus. He grasped after more than mortal might, and so brought down upon himself unmeasured woe. In similar strain Bacchylides denounces ißpis: 'Insolence... who swiftly gives a man his neighbor's wealth and power, but anon plunges him into a gulf of ruin, she it was who destroyed the giants, overweening sons of earth. '32 Excess the Greeks condemned and deplored. Their cardinal virtue was σwopoσvn ('measure,' 'moderation'), and they rang the changes on undèv ayav ('nothing too much,' 'the golden mean'). Consciously or unconsciously, they made this the canon of their art and literature, and so they wrought the perfect work. In line with owopovin is the oft-repeated injunction to remember that we are mortals and cannot venture too far. 'Seek not to become Zeus'; 'mortal things befit mortals'; 'the brazen heavens are not to be mounted. '** True, Aristotle reaches a loftier note: 'Let us not listen therefore to

28 De Quincey, Shakespeare. The Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Masson (1897), 4. 74-75.

29 Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, pp. 356-357. Compare Aeschylus, Agamemnon 750-781.

30 Gildersleeve, Pindar: the Olympian and Pythian Odes. Introductory Essay, p. xxxi.

31 Pindar, O. 1. 54-57.

32 Bacchylides 14 [15]. 59 ff. Jebb's translation.

33 Pindar, I. 5. 14; I. 5. 16; P. 10. 27.

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those who tell us that, as men and mortals, we should mind only the things of man and mortality; but, so far as we may, we should bear ourselves as immortals, and do all that in us lies to live in accord with that element within us, that sovereign principle of reason, which is our true self, and which in capacity and dignity stands supreme. Yet Aristotle defines virtue as the mean between the two extremes of excess and deficiency, and condemns alike the too much and the too little. Courage is a virtue; it is the mean between the extremes of rashness and cowardice, which are both vices. 'Pride goeth before a fall,' is the teaching of Herodotus. 'He believes in the existence of a law governing events. . . . Every sin draws upon man a punishment, but, above all, pride, which is the unpardonable sin. The defeats of Xerxes have no other cause but this. '35 Bury says that the Persian overthrow according to Herodotus is 'a divine punishment of the insolence and rashness that are often born of prosperity. '36 The Greek dramatists, too, show presumptuous pride (ßpis) punished, and heavily punished, by the gods. Ajax, the bravest of the Greeks after Achilles, overconfident in his strength and bravery, dares to set the gods at naught; and this presumption Sophocles makes the central thought in his play of that name:

""Yea," said the seer, "lives that have waxed too proud, and avail for good no more, are struck down by heavy misfortunes from the gods, as often as one born to man's estate forgets it in thoughts too high for man. But Ajax, even at his first going forth from home, was found foolish, when his sire spake well. His father said unto him: 'My son, seek victory in arms, but seek it ever with the help of heaven.' Then haughtily and foolishly he answered: 'Father, with the help of gods e'en a man of naught might win the mastery; but I, even without their aid, trust to bring that glory within my grasp.' So proud was his vaunt. Then once again, in answer to divine Athena,-when she was urging him onward and bidding him turn a deadly hand upon his foes-in that hour he uttered a speech too dread for mortal lips: 'Queen, stand thou beside the other Greeks; where Ajax stands, battle will never break our line.' By such words it was that he brought upon him the appalling anger of the goddess, since his thoughts were too great for man.'' '37 34 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10. 7.

35 Croiset, Manuel d'Histoire de la Littérature Grecque, p. 393 (cf. the same authors' Abridged History of Greek Literature, tr. Heffelbower, p. 270). 36 Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians, p. 68.

87 Sophocles, Ajax 758-777. Jebb's translation.