KXCHANGE
JUL .14 13lS
THE
ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
BY
RHYS CARPENTER
Submitted in Partial Fulfilment op the Requirements
FOR the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the
Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University
ARCHIVES OF PHILOSOPHY
edited by
FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE
No. 7, May, 1916
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
1916
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
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THE
ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
BY
RHYS CARPENTER
Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
FOR the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the
Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University
ARCHIVES OF PHILOSOPHY
edited by
FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE
No. 7, May, 1916
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
1916
Copyright, 1916
By Columbia University Press
Printed from type, May, 1916
C367
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
CHAPTER I
TO 8e (pva KpaTLffTov aiTav. "Nature's way is ever the strongest and
best," wrote Pindar in his ninth Olympian ode.^ Like much of his
teaching, the aphorism has more earnestness than originaHty. Indeed,
it is as a commonplace of Greek conviction that I have chosen it as my
starting-point and text. If it were possible to comprise in one short
sentence the essential differences of the Greek genius from that of other
nations and of modern times, Pindar might claim to have come near to
that achievement. For there is an entire world — an entire Greek
world — of meaning in ^uS. It implies that the Greek standard, the
ethical and physical sanction, is not drawn from a supra-mundane or
transcendental source, but from the physical world as it is or as it tends
to be.
TO 5e 4)va KpcLTLCTTov awav. Hence, in logic, the Platonic theory of ideas,
inasmuch as the idea can be defined as that form of any infima species
which is wholly and perfectly 0i;a. The logical concept to the Greeks
had always a curious concreteness. It was not an abstraction so much
as a formal visualisation of the object in its complete and perfect state.
Hence that curious dualism in Plato, — a world of objects, and a world
of ideas which always threatened to be objects also, to be 4>va KpaTtarov
a-rrav : the ideas were the objects (j)ua, and as such they liad a particular
KpoLTos or dvvajjLis, a driving power directing these material counterparts
toward the perfection which should be theirs by nature.
In sculpture, that strange early development through a very limited
number of fixed types is common to most early art, inasmuch as differ-
entiation is a late acquirement. But note that the types did not stag-
nate into conventions, as seems to have happened occasionally in Egypt
and many Oriental countries. The sculptor was never satisfied with his
heritage, because he felt very vividly, " to 0i;a KpaTiaTov airav." Fifth-
century athletic art is an amazing blend of geometric formalism and
reaUstic observation: the former (inherited from the archaic schema)
1 01. ix. 107.
336663
2 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
gives it the so-called classic regularity and "suppression" of unessen-
tials; the realism saves it from conventionalisation. Greek art is a
spiritual interpretation of the physical. But what that phrase means,
only those will understand who realise that the generations of sculptors
were studying the nude athlete in order to find that schema toward
which Nature is striving without ever a perfect attainment. They
worked toward the human form (})vq., the bodily eUos, and not toward
a mere counterpart of this Olympic athlete here and now. It is the
bare truth to call Greek sculpture Platonic, m spite of all Plato's
strictures on art. The canonic statue of an athlete is the visible
presentation of the Platonic Idea of the athlete. Both are imagi-
nary, yet deduced from reality, from the multitudinous members of
the species, each of which is more or less completely 0i;a. Greek sculp-
ture was thus for long confined by the demands of a strict develop-
ment toward a logical concept. For that reason, in comparison with
modern art, it impresses the unspecialized as strangely limited in imagi-
nativeness, or, better, in that particular quality of imaginative suggest-
iveness which may be termed phantasy, whose stimulus is through strong
emotional vagueness. Maxfield Parrish's scenes from Greek mythology,
for instance, or Gilbert Murray's reimbodiments of Euripidean tragedy,
are full of this modern appeal, of which Hellenic art knows so little.
Compare these two versions (both of them in my judgment good
poetry) :
. . . Ifxe 8e TTOVTiov aKa(f)OS
alaaov ivTepoLdi Tropevaei
l-Kirb^OTOV " kpyos, Iva reix^a
Xd'tVa Kii/cXcoTTt' ovpavia veixovraL.
(Tro. 1085-8)
"... and me the ships
Shall bear o'er the bitter brine,
Storm-birds upon angry pinions.
Where the towers of the Giants shine
O'er Argos cloudily.
And the riders ride by the sea."
In the Greek, every picture is single and concise, and refers to places
and conditions actually known to the hearers. In the English, the whole
effect counts upon vague pictures, indefinite plurals, unfamiliar places,
and unknown men.
It has been suggested to me that I am wrong in entirely denying to
the Greek this sense of imaginative appeal and that, for example, we
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 3
derive a very modern emotional stimulus from the vase-painting of
the morning-stars who dive through the clouds at the approach of
the sun.^
I might, of course, plead that an instance so unique is eloquent of
the prevalence of the opposite condition. But I am inclined rather to
question the validity of the example; for, were the mythology as much
a commonplace to us as to the Greeks, the illustration of the stars as
youths would have no more imaginative stimulus than a statue of Apollo
as a young man. I mean that there are no vague suggestions, no half-
lights nor lowering shadows, such as the Romanticists and the Celt-
icists have made familiar. For, all these effects are obtained by a play
on Nature, a suppression, a distortion, an exaggeration, an innuendo
of the unusual and mysterious, a trick of the half-seen, the imperfect.
But if to the Greek to <t)va KpanaTov dirav, then art is at its best when it
is at its most precise. And thus, in its most serious and noble work,
instead of imaginative surprises with their unbalanced emphasis, there
is the strictest subordination of every element in its just and logical
position. I do not believe that the specialist in Greek art will dispute
the real tyranny of this almost logical formulation; yet, for additional
support, a reference may be permitted to the Pythagorean-like formalism
in such strangely arithmetical creatures as the "canons." Greek archi-
tecture and apparently certain periods of Greek sculpture placed an
almost fanatical trust in the efficacy of pure numerical ratio, and when
Diogenes Laertius says of the sculptor Pythagoras of Rhegium that he
was the first to use (xvufxerpia, I hold it obvious that the word cannot
be translated " symmetry," but refers to the observance of arith-
metical ratios between the various physical members. Derived, as this
procedure seems to have been, from mathematico-physical and musical
speculations on Nature's supposed inherent preference for simple nu-
merical ratios,^ it reveals the Greek artist in an effort to catch Nature's
own ideal and to show in stone that which is perfectly 0i;a.
Again, in Greek ethical thought, Pindar's gnome finds a wide appli-
cation. Since conclusions here are especially open to challenge as hasty
or superficial impressions, I make a more exhaustive appeal to particu-
lars, in order to show that Pindar's gnome is the key-note to Euripides'
morality and that the logical concept is quite as dominant there as in
Greek sculpture. To be sure, one can scarcely demand a rigorous proof
2 Furtwangler-Reichhold-Hauser, Griechische Vasenmalerci, III, pi. 126.
' Cf. Arist. de Caelo. F. 1. 300a 16. evLoi yap ttjv 4>v<nv kS, apid/xCju awiaracnv,
axTTrep rdv HvdayoptUwv TLvks. Cf. also Arist. Met. A. ch. 5.
4 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
extracted from a dramatist, who by profession holds up his mirror to
a changeful and inconsistent world. And yet, as I hope to show, his
ethic has in realitj^ just this rigor, if one but apprehend the awirbdeTo^
apxv, the self-sufficient and self-evident principle from which all his
specific rules of conduct are dcduciblc.
If one reads Euripides with this in view, the plays seem to conspire
to emphasise a certain single ethical principle. This they exemplify in
its different applications to the stuff of tragedy and human life. In fact
this principle is so insistent, so explanatory of the meaning of the plays,
that it runs like a forma injormans through Euripides' dramas, as
effective in his moral thought as-sj'mmetr}^ was in the work of the
sculptor of pediments or isocephalism for the early designer of relief.
The principle of which I am speaking is a tacit assumption at the
back of Greek ethic generally and is its source of moral sanction. Pre-
cisely because it is basic it is seldom found expressed in Greek writers.
But though the fundamental postulates of a nation's way of thought
are not expressed, because they are never seen against a contrasting
background, yet everj^ honest utterance betrays them.
For the ethical principle in question, one may assume some variant
of Pindar's gnome, such as, to ^fjp Kara (fihaiv earlv ev ^rjv.'^ An English
equivalent for the phrase can scarcely be said to exist. For that reason,
and because clarity in terms is vital for my thesis, a more detailed
analysis of the wording is essential.
<f)V(ns is the world in which we are; not, however, the world as a
haphazard congeries of matter, but as a great ordered sj^stem of organic
things in growth, attained development, and decay. The world must
be realised to be under law, before ^uo-ts can be understood. The various
kinds of plants differ from one another: they have different (jiixns. The
laws of growth keep them relentlessly to their own development, their
own nature. A rose differs from a violet because of ^i'o-ts. But one rose
differs also from another rose. No two members of an ultima species
are precisely alike. What is it that makes them different? Scarcely
their (j)vaLs, for the 4)h<ns of a rose is always the same. There are other
forces at work, and these operate against the ^wcrts, they are -wapa ^uo-tv.
If everything in this world were strictly /card <^vaLv, every rose would be
like every other one and all alike would be -perfect roses. Unhampered
4>haLs would develop every nascent organism into a perfect exemplifica-
tion of its type, its eiSoj. The type or tUos is a static conception; ^ucrts
* Cf. Diog. Laert. viii. 87. 5i6irep rkXos yiperai to aKoXoWus rfj (j>v(7ei ^rjv.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 5
is dynamic, it is the complex of laws by which everything tends to attain
its eldos.^
A good rose must have, let us say, its full quota of petals. The
literal moth and the figurative rust must not have worked it harm. It
must have had sun and rain. (f)V(ns must have had full play, that from
the seed it might develop stalk and leaf and bud and perfect flow^er.
Only so can it attain its full type, its d8os. A good rose is a perfect
rose. It is wholly /card (f)veLv.
Man is in a like position. Only, with him, development is not
mere physical growth. The whole complex of mental and spiritual
powers must expand and increase to their perfect form. Yet we can say
of him what we said of the rose. As a good rose is a perfect rose, so a
good man is a perfect man. He must be wholly Kara (f)vaLv. He must,
under the unobstructed action of 0uc7ts, attain his eUos as material or-
ganism, as sentient animal, and as thinking man. In so far as he exerts
his powers to further this action of (f)vaLs, he is acting rightly; in so far
as he thwarts (f)vais, he is acting wrongly.
Back of such an attitude of the Greek mind there must have been
an extraordinary sense for the community between man and the rest
of the material world. The modern mind opposes itself to Nature.
With our artificialities of living and thinking, our exotic scientific diver-
sion of natural forces, we feel that we dominate her. The supremacy
of Mind marks us out from our surroundings: we feel like powerful
strangers from another planet who have seized upon this earth, thanks
to our unterrestrial sagacity. The Greek could not have felt so. He
was part of the natural world, as plants and animals were part of it,
though with a more intimate insight because of his part in its intel-
lectual aspect.^ To such a people it is not a great imaginative and
poetic flight to feel that man is like the flowers of the field. It is
merely a simple statement of an obvious truth.
Secondly, the Greek must have had a keen eye for formal perfection
and have realized that every organism under favourable conditions
develops a product which has a formal, as well as a purely material^
^ But it is also the matter upon which that d6os is formed. Burnet in his recent
book, Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato, justly emphasises this aspect of the
meaning of the word in the vocabulary of a slightly earlier period. (Cf. o. c. p. 27.)
^ I do not mean that he was the care-free child of nature, the pastoral fiction of
an 18th century imagination. Minds like that of Aeschylus, who was thoroughly
Greek, are a sufficient contradiction to such generalities. But there is an ultimate
Versohnung, not an ultimate opposition, between man and the high mysteries of
Nature, drrj acts wapd 4>v(ji.v and its catastrophe is so best explained.
6 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
significance. Nature, we might say, has a love of pure form. (Not
that she displays a conscious aesthetic interest: there may be very
simple reasons why Nature tends toward a formal articulation. For
one thing, it is probabh' mechanically easier: at least, symmetry is
mathematically simpler than asymmetrJ^) Rather, I wish to empha-
sise the mere empirical fact that Nature constantly strives toward a
formal expression. The botanist, the zoologist, the biologist knows
this. The Greek seems to have been peculiarly sensitive to it.
There results a certain optimistic confidence in Nature. Unthwarted
<j>v(n$ produces, as far as form goes, superior and more perfect products.
Thwart Nature, and consider the undergrown or crippled or uneven
results. Formally, they are far inferior. But give the rose its proper
soil and dew and sunlight, and the perfect form appears; and give to
men the soil of individual freedom, the dew of material self-sufficiency,
and the sunlight of good fortune, and they likewise will attain their
formal and natural perfection.
A gardener working in a sandy and barren soil would not be prone to
emphasise this striving toward form. His flowers would all be im-
perfect, with stunted stem, uneven leaf, and ill-developed blossom. So
amid the misery of the ghetto, the rabble of the dusty streets of Alex-
andria, or the ill-fed slave-hordes of imperial Rome, in certain more
unfavorable periods, the Greek doctrine would have little meaning and
make little appeal. But the Greeks of the Euripidean age were an indi-
vidualistic aristocracy. From their slave-tilled soil thej^ sprang up
independent and self-sufficient. Inside their city-fatherland, they had
leisure and immunity enough to develop themselves physically and spir-
itually. To such a people the doctrine had application, and for them its
significance was self-evident. Only under such conditions can a purely
individualistic code of ethics succeed. Only there can there be the be-
lief — which was the Greek belief — that the best life is the life of
self-development into the perfect natural norm, the life Kara 4)vaLP.
It is important to realise how completely such an ethical principle
would be misinterpreted by the people of to-day. Self-development is
not self-aggrandisement. But many modern nations have lost the
sense for form and substituted a sense for size. They have been rightly
taunted with treating everythmg quantitatively, and many men to-day
hold an individualistic creed which prompts them to believe that the
more they have of the good things of the world, the better it is for them.
Metaphorically, we have ceased to know that, though rain is good
for the rose, the water-floods of Noah cannot benefit it. Nature, to
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 7
attain her end, must have her necessities in right quantities. Too much
is often as disastrous as too little. To develop ourselves to the perfect
norm, we need, not as much of everything as possible, but just so much
as is consonant with the particular demands of our particular nature.
It is easy to see that this is true of the simpler organisms such as
plants and animals. Overfeeding and underfeeding are both bad be-
cause both are contrary to natural requirements, — they are xapa
(t>vaLv. Both produce in the affected organism a departure from the
true norm, a formal distortion, and a consequent imperfect state. It
is not hard to see that, in man likewise, the physical part is in a similar
condition, that under-exercise or over-eating ' are detrimental. Yet
we now-a-days feel our impaired state of health to be a sin against
good judgment rather than against morality. But the best Greeks of
the Polykleitan age, with their peculiar attitude toward athletics, would
have felt it to be an offence against that formal perfection of the human
body which is for man the only physical state worthy of his aspiration.
Compare the Polykleitan Doryphoros with the Herakles Farnese of
a later and other age. The one is physical perfection, the other is physi-
cal exaggeration. The history of early Peloponnesian sculpture is little
else than the gradual evolution of the completely and harmoniously
developed type of the male human body. The slow-yielding stone
bears record to that incessant striving of the Greek to allow Nature her
formally wonderful self-expression, which prompted him to Olympian
festivals wherein the victory was not merely a glorification of muscle
and sinew, but also the visible triumph of human ^uais that had realized
her eUosJ
Because he was so sensitive to this formal perfection which is
Nature's successful self-expression, it was apparently an inevitable con-
sequence that the Greek applied to everything the standard of mate-
rial form. He saw spiritual problems as it were from a physical point of
view. Man's spiritual growth was somehow similar to that material
growth whose athletic perfection the Greek so greatly loved. To one and
the other, the same general laws applied. The athletic training-school
reappeared as a spiritual paedeutic. Man's thinking and vohtional
nature must be formed by exercise into a natural state of health and
strength. The sophists and rhetors were but athletic trainers in the
palaestra of thought. The Greek youth learned to wrestle intellec-
tually not primarily for display or gain, but because only so was the
^ Euripides' polemic against athletes is in itself a protest against the professional
vulgarisation of this high athletic ideal (and not against the ideal itself). (Fr. 284).
8 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
intellectual body, with all its sinews of reason and knowledge, brought
into its proper state of health. So only could the intellectual ^uo-ts
realise its tUos fully.
Compare again the Polykleitan Doryphoros and the Herakles Far-
nese. Think of them, however, as an allegory of man's intellectual and
spiritual self. The Doryphoros gives us the classic Greek ideal : through
self-denial if necessary, through constant energy, and unfailing self-
attention, all the spiritual powers are developed in harmony with each
other until they give the fullest expression to that balanced and per-
fect type toward which Nature always strives, but which she can attain
only if the individual himself will aid her. All the right conditions must
be there, before the rose at last unfolds its petals and displays the per-
fect flower, — a wholly natural product, this flawless plant, and yet
in nature how rare !
It is a creed which is absolutely individualistic and self-centred;
but it involves both devotion and painful energy. Selfishness and self-
aggrandisement produce a spiritual Herakles Farnese. It needs an
intense training, a deep feeling for spiritual 4)v<ns, a sense of moderation
and restraint in mental diet and immaterial exercise, before the per-
fected form, the spiritual Dorj-phoros, can emerge. It is not a doctrine
of self-indulgence. But far less is it a doctrine of self-suppression. It
is the precise opposite: it is self-expression by unwearymg attention
to the ways of that universal nature which guides plants and animals
through their wonderful growth toward that completed individual
form which they all attain in some measure, but which only those attain
fully and perfectly for whom all the conditions are right. Ethics is the
study of these conditions in the case of the human organism. The pur-
suit of these conditions is at once right conduct and the highest individual
good. "To live in the norm of nature is to live rightly and well":
TO ^TJv Kara <pv(7iv kcrlv eS ^riv.
This general attitude toward existence was so deep-rooted in the
Greek mind that it became a unifying principle for all his ethical thought.
From it, deliberately or instinctively, he drew his moral sanction. Like
" revealed word of God," or " innate consciousness of right and wrong,"
it gave a starting-point outside of the individual and independent of
his subjective vagaries.
How thoroughly it interpenetrated Greek moral thought I intend
to show by an examination of Euripides.^ By constant appeal to his
* I have thus far given no references in support of my view, because so general
an attitude must be based not merely on the whole of Greek literature, but on
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 9
dramas I hope to emphasise the fact that some of the striking differ-
ences between the Greek and Christian attitude toward moral ques-
tions are largely due to this initial divergence in the source of Moral
Sanction. I wish to show how far the Euripidean ethic proves itself
consistent, when once its fundamental proposition is adopted. I mean, v
further, to suggest that the Aristotelian ethic is largely a prose statement,
helped out by a certain quantity of logical fermentation, of what the
tragic stage inculcated into Athenian audiences; and that the service
of Aristotle in his famous Nicomachean Ethics was not so much that of
creating a system of ethics as of supplying a logical and psychological
framework for an otherwise highly developed and intelligently thought-
out morality. Indeed, we should expect this to be true, on the general
ground that the moral philosophers are largely engaged in rationalising
the convictions of their fellow-men; so that it would be strange indeed
if so intellectual and so ethical a product as the Greek drama had not
already uttered all the fundamental tenets of the Nicomachean Ethics.
But it is one thing to suspect a truth and another thing to prove it in
its specific exemplification. In the following chapters, accordingly, I
have gone into the logical detail of the Euripidean ethic, championed
its simplicity and its rationality, and tried to show both how highly it
is developed and how little change is necessary to cast it in obvious
Aristotelian form.
Greek art and life as well. Euripides himself uses the actual word ^iicns sparingly,
perhaps in no case in order to give expression to a definite ethical teaching. I believe
that the quotations from Euripides, which follow, will give ample corroboration for
this introductory chapter; but from the nature of the subject, the evidence must
be cumulative rather than specific.
I might, however, refer to the extraordinary frequency with which moral evil
is spoken of as disease or sickness, to show how intimately the Greek mind connected
the physical and the ethical. v6<tos is a violation of <^iiens in its physical aspect: moral
evil is a similar malady in conduct. I add a few instances of this usage. It would
be easy to treble the list: Fr. 227; 294; 431; 609; Hipp. 730.
CHAPTER II
We may ask ourselves how the individual is to know this norm of
nature wliich Greek morality bids him follow. He will know it, in out-
line at least, from his earlj^ training. Presupposing that his teachers
already understand this norm, its principles can be firmly imbedded in
his childhood mind at an age when he could otherwise have no grasp
of it. Right training is thus of the greatest ethical importance, and it
is not surprising to see Euripides frequently emphasising its value.
Thus Fragment 926:
Trats uv 4>v\aaaov TrpayixaTWV alaxp^v airo'
ojs ^i' Tpa(t>fj TLS fxi] KaKcJos, aiax^veraL
avi]p yepoixevos ai(rxpoi bpav v'eos 5' orav
TToXX' e^afxaprri, ttjp afxapriav exft
els jTJpas avTOv tols TponoLaLV eix4>vT0v.^
In the Suppliants," Adrastus lauds the great warriors who fell in battle
before the gates of Thebes. After recounting their individual worth and
valour, he praises the good training which set such courage in their souls :
TO "yap Tpa^yivai /jltj KaKcJos aldu) 0epet"
aiffx^verai 5e rayad' aanrjaas avrjp
KaKos yeveaQai xas tls. 17 5' evavbpia
bihaKTOs, eiirep Kal j8p€0os bibacFKtTaL
Xkyeiv CLKOveLV 6' wv fj.a.dr](TLv ovk ex€t.
a 5' av /xadri tls, TavTa acc^eadai 0tXet
irpos yrjpas. ovtcx} Traibas ev iraibeveTe.
(Hik. 911-17)
Hekabe, in the play of that name, remarks that the good are ever good
and the bad are ever bad, and wonders to what cause this may be due :
ap' ol TeKovTes bLa(j)€pov(np r) Tpo4>a'i.;
'ix^i 76 jjikvTOL Kal TO dpe(l)9f]vaL koXus
blba^LV ecrdXov' tovto b' r]v tls ev f-iadrj,
olbev TO 7' alcrxpov, KavovL tov koKov fxaduv.
(Hek. 599-602)
1 The extant plays are quoted from Gilbert Murray's edition, in the Oxford
Classical Texts, and the Fragments from the latest Teubner text (ed. Nauck).
2 Hik. 857-917.
10
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 11
A further instance occurs in the Iphigeneia in AuUs:
Klytaimestra: Who trained Achilles, Thetis or his father?
Agamemnon: 'Twas Cheiron lest he learn bad tricks of mortals.
Klytaimestra: Ah, wise the trainer; but the father, wiser.
(I. A. 708-10) '
But though for the individual this training in the norm of nature may be
practicable and to a certain extent sufficient, it of course does not solve
the ethical problem raised at the beginning of this chapter. How is
man to learn the norm of Nature which it is his duty and highest
good to follow ?
The physical norm can be learned by experience and trial. The rules
of the athletic training-school are empiric in their origin. The right
amount of exercise, of food, of sleep, can be ascertained by experiment.
The same is true of man's spiritual activities. We may violate the norm
by excess or by defect; but if we are attentive to the results, we shall
learn at last the due amount. The "golden mean" is thus an empiric
rule. Our reason gives us merely the rule in all its generality, telling
us that, since we are natural organisms, we must fit ourselves as com-
pletely as possible to Nature's requirements, and that, since we may
err either by too much or by too little, our aim must be to discover the
norm between excess and defect. Such advice is excellent, but not
specific. In every part of conduct, in every act, we must pause and ask
ourselves, " What does ^uo-is here require? Where is that balance be-
tween too much and too little, which is the perfect requirement and
condition of Nature? "
This is the difficulty of Greek ethics. The fundamental principle
must be elaborated in every part of life, in all the emotions and intel-
lectual conditions, in every portion of the system of human conduct.
Only if it can be shown to be true without exception, to be as infallible
in practice as it is plausible in theory, only then can it be proclamied
a great and necessary principle of living. It is only then that we are
justified in considering it as it were the ethical spine which makes a
coherent and organic articulation out of what would otherwise be merely
an invertebrate mass of precepts.
In the Hippolytos, Phaidra's nurse — a prosaic soul full of middle-
class wisdom — appeals to the seven sages : ^
' Cf. the chorus in the same play, 11. 561-2.
* If this inference to the Wise Men may be made from the collocation of the
familiar n-qbkv 0,701' and the suggestive aocjioi.
12
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
ol'tco to \iav rjaaou €7raivw
Tov ^r]5ev ayaV
Kai ^vy^4>ri(TovaL aocjiOi fiOL.
(Hipp. 264-6)
Nihil nimium (or, in Terence's phrase, ut ne quid nimis) ,^ is a corner-
stone for conduct because:
^poTols TO. ixei^o) T(hv n'taoiv tIktcl voctovs.
(Fragment 80)
The plays, in fact, are full q/ warnings against excess.^ But it is the
specific application of the general rule which Euripides never wearies
of emphasising and exemplifying. And, as we saw, an empiric rule
must offer precisely this proof in detail. I give, under various headings,
passages in Euripides to show the poet's thoroughgoing crusade for
moderation in conduct.
1 . In courage and fear, the evil of excess :
ixrj TO. KLvSvvevfxaTa
alveiT ' 6703 7dp ovre vavriKov 0iXco
ToKfxCJVTa \lau ovre TpocrTCLTrjv x^ovos.
TCLS rCiV dewv yap oaris eKfxoxdf:^ tvxo.s,
Trpodvfios kcTiv, ■q Tpodvp.ia 8' a4>p(j)v.
The evil of defect :
5etXot yap av8pes ovk exovcFiv kv /jlclxv
apidnov, dXX' ciTretcn kolv Trapwc' ofxcos.
. . . Tovs irovovs yap ayadol
ToXjJLCocL, deiXol 8' elalv ov8ev ov8atxov.
6 8 ri8vs aiojv if /ca/cij r' avav8pia
ovT^ OLKOv ovre toKlv avopdcoaecev av.
Praise of the right amount of courage:
veaviav yap av8pa XPV roXpav aei'
ov8els yap o)v padv/jLos evKXeris avrjp,
dXX' ol TTOVOL rlKTOvaL Tr]v tvav8piav.
(Fragment 194)
(H. M. 309-10)
(Fragment 523)
(I. T. 114-15)
(Fragment 241)
(Fragment 239)
* Andria, 61.
« E.g. Med. 127-8; Phoin. 539-42; 554; 584; Fr. 80; 628, 1. 4; 964.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 13
<f)evyeiv nev ovv XPV i^oKtixov octtls ev (^povtl'
el 5' €s r65' ekdoL, arecfiavos ovk alaxpos ttoKh
/caXcos oXeadat, jUi) KaXws 8e SvaKKees.'
(Kasandra in Tro. 400-3)
Praise of the right amount of fear :
. . . OVK alvCi (f)b^ov,
(Tro. 1165-6)
implying that reason should determine the due extent to which fear is
justified.
2. So, in general mental and physical activity, those who are over-
energetic and those who love the life of inglorious ease are both at fault.
Somewhere between the two extremes runs the course of right conduct :
6 TrXetcrra ■wpaaawv TXelad' anapravei ^pordv.
(Fragment 580)
In the lost play Philoktetes, Odysseus speaks of his own folly in striving
for cunning and wisdom beyond due measure:
TTWS 5' av ct)povoir]v, c3 Taprjv aTpayfiOVOJs
kv ToicTL TToXXois r]pidnr]ij.hw (XTparov
icrov fieraax^^v t(2 (ro<^a;rdrcJ tvxv^'j
(Fragment 785)
Similarly, the other extreme is wrong :
. . . Tis 5' afxoxdos evKXer]s;
tIs tS)p jjLeyiaTwv SeiXos ccv wpe^aro',
(From Fragment 242)
. . . et 5' arep ir6vo)v
5oms tcreadaL, fxojpos el, dvrjTos yey<j:s.^
(Fragment 396)
The right amount in energy and activity is alone right, and this is
either energy as opposed to laziness:
eK T(hv TTOPWP TOL TOLyad' av^erai jSporoLS,
(From Fragment 366)
fioxdetv avayKT] tovs deXovras evTvxelv,
(Fragment 719)
or else self-restraint as opposed to over-activity:
6 5' riavxos 4>IXol(jl t a(X(l>aXr]s (f>iXos
TToXeL t' apLCTTOS. . . .^
(From Fragment 194)
' Cf. also Fr. 304; 420; 437; 745; 1038.
8 Cf. also Fr. 241 and the almost identical lines in 366.
3 Cf. also Fr. 235; 238; 464; 477; 745; mainly praising energy.
14 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
The apparent inconsistency in these three fragments vanishes only if
we recognise that the first two praise the mean as opposed to the defect,
while the third praises the mean as opposed to the excess.
3. The doctrine of the mean has perhaps its greatest value in man's
emotional pursuits, where pleasure and dislike are such powerful factors,
apd where man is, as nowhere else, prone to rush into extremes. It is
consequent Ij^ the excess rather than the defect against which man needs
warning and such passages are more numerous in Euripides than those
which emphasise the opposite extreme. And yet there is one entire play
which has this latter function to perform. I judge that with the Hip-
polytos Euripides is preaching as usual (but by an unusual example) his
fundamental ethical doctrine that conduct contrary to nature must end
in disaster. Hippolytos is insensible to the attraction of love, and be-
cause he thereby behaves xapd <j)V(nv, the (t>vaLs which he has violated, that
same power and instinct of love, reacts against him in the person of
Phaidra and brings about his ruin and his violent death. In confirma-
tion, there is a fragment from that other and earlier play of the Veiled
Hippolytos, of which we should so gladly know more. There we read:
ol yap Is-Virpiv (t)ev'yovTes avOpuiro^v ayav
voaova' opLoiccs rots iiyav 6r]pcoij.evoLS.
(Fragment 431)
The Hippoh'tos is such a brilliant and careful exposition of
Euripides' fundamental moral thesis that it is essential for me to ex-
amine it at greater length. The play has been very generallj^ misappre-
hended, because the author's intentions toward Hippolytos have not
been understood. To a careful reader, who bears our moral thesis in
mind, it must be abundantly clear that Euripides is not in sympathy
with Hippolytos, but is strongly censuring an attitude which was prob-
ably prevalent in his own town of Athens and which strongly recalls
the aesthetic and other "literary" movements of the closing years of
the nineteenth century in England. From his first appearance on the
stage, a certain preciosity is noticeable in the words of Hippolytos.
He talks of flowers ^^ and jewelry ^^ and maintains an attitude of odi
profanum vulgus (from whom he is toto caelo distinct). ^^ He belongs to
a set" oaoLs diSaKTov fi-qSev dXX' h rrj 4>vaeL. (1. 79). To the last he is
exclusive, and despises the bourgeois gift of demagogic oratory :
kyo) 8' aKOfx\J/os els ox^ov SovvaL \6yov,
ks rfKiKas 8e K(h}\.iyovs aocpccrepos.
(ib. 986-7)
1" Hipp. 73-8. " lb. 82-3. '^ 75 79-8!; 84.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 15
He is of the jeunesse doree who spend time on horses and hunting. These
very horses cause his undoing. In ancient tragedy the agents of disaster
are chosen with grim appropriateness. aKriparos, " unsuUied," is a favour-
ite word of his.^^ It has a self-righteous ring, a note of moral arrogance,
v^pLs. It turns to injured innocence in 11. 654-6 where he spurns the
suggestions of the old nurse, and shows a complete lack of sympathy.
He is inhuman in his avaLadrjaia. Just this quality in him spurs Phaidra
to her fatal actions. Bitterly she says, "that he may learn not to be
high and mighty about my misfortune" (iV el8fj nii Vt rots e/jLols KaKots
v\J/r]\6s eii/at).^**
From his father Theseus we have further light on Hippolytos, who
is taunted with a bitter reference to his reputation as a superman of
refinement (irepLaa-ds avrip)}^ aKr]paros, "unsullied," his favourite word,
is hurled in his face.^^ Apparently Theseus has found his son's affec-
tations (/cojUTToi) hard to endure. He has had to put up with his vege-
tarianism, religious mysticism, and literary dilettanteism.^^ His whole
speech is the reaction of the normal man against the abnormal. Theseus
is healthy in mind and body; Hippolytos seems to be neither. It is
the clash of rd Kara (j^vaiv with to. irapa (j)V(nv, and the latter must go
under. Lest the spectator think that the approaching catastrophe is
accidental or individual, due to casual misunderstanding or spite or
sudden rage, Euripides makes Theseus declare the universality of his
attitude. It is not Theseus against Hippolytos, it is the natural
against the abnormal:
Tovs be TOLOVTOVS e7w
4)€V'y€LV Tpocpwvoj TrScf
(955-6)
TOLOVTOVS and Trao-t are no longer specific or personal terms.
Hippolytos defends himself against his father's charges in a speech
betraying affectation and self -righteousness.^^ He is (xdocppccv,^^ without
sexual interest, ^'^ a virgin.-^
OLfjLOL, TO ae/xpov COS fx' airoKTepeX to adv.
Oh, how thy holy cant will murder me!
cries Theseus. 22 The same to ae/jLvdv is one cause of Hippolytos' undo-
ing. He was warned against it at the opening of the play by his hunts-
man. ^^ But it is h Tfj (t)va€L. Even when near death, he clings to his
" Hipp. 73, 76; cf. 949. ^^ 75. 945. n 75 952-4. i^ lb. 995.
" lb. 729-30. 16 75. 949_ is 75. 933 ff. 20 75, 10O6.
21 adiKTos, 1002. But it must be granted that his ideal in 1016-8 is both a healthy
and a good one. ^ lb. 1064. " lb. 91-5.
16 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
aefjivos eyo:.-* But the last scene is one of reconciliation. Sympathy with
his father breaks his aefxvoTrjs.-'" In his last words, he becomes at last
natural and human. He turns against his old life as personified in
I Artemis. (In 1441-3 does he not even seem to suggest that he finds
^'] her a trifle verbose and tedious ?) ^iicts has reclaimed him, and Theseus,
\ the normal man, weeps for his dying son.
Of all Hippolytos' abnormalities, however, the most fatal was his
complete aversion to love. Aphrodite, speaking the prologue and
explaining the argument, announced the unvengeful and almost imper-
sonal retribution of this slighted instinct,^^ and Phaidra is declared
the unwitting \dctim of the reaction.^^ The huntsman warns Hippolytos
of this force which he spurns;-* but without effect. Straightway
thereafter, love asserts itself in Phaidra's unhappy struggle.
With the appearance of Theseus, we realize that slighted love has
fulfilled its terrible reaction. And now the other charges of abnormality
are developed against Hippolytos, as explained above. But observe
that after the death of Hippolytos, when Theseus and Poseidon are alone
vivid in the spectator's thoughts, the chorus without a word of transi-
tion harks back to Aphrodite to whom all this tragedy is ascribed. ^^
The mangled Hippolytos is brought upon the stage. He is still unre-
pentant. When disaster overtook him, amid the turmoil of broken
wheel and dragging rem, he called himself still "a perfect man" (avdp'
apidTov, 1242). And now he ascribes his misfortune to inherited guilt. ^°
But Artemis tells him the true cause, ^^ and Theseus, who closes the
play, attributes all to Kypris, the power of love.^^
It is a grim spectacle, because all the characters are merely puppets
playing the great but unequal game of 06(ns against to irapa (jyvaLv. But
just because it is so universal, it is true tragedy and true morality.
That morality is Greek to the core.
The Medeia illustrates the opposite extreme. Princess of the royal
blood of Kolchis, she deserted her land and slew her brother, for love of
a foreign adventurer. Bitterly she exclaims to Jason, ''To my friends
at home I made myself a foe, and those whom ne'er I should have
wronged, for the sake of you I made my enemies!"^' Endowed with
strange knowledge, a creature with the sun-god's passion in her veins
and sister to the enchantress Kirke, she sacrificed everything for love.
2* Hipp. 1364. 28 75, 88-120. ^i /;,_ 1400 and 1402.
25 76. 1405-15. 29 7^, l268-8a ^2 75, 14(31
26 lb. 20-22. 30 lb. 1379 ff. 33 Med. 506-S.
2^ lb. 27-28; cf. 47-50.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 17
Outraging Nature, she falls a victim to Nature's recoil. Her wild love
turns into barbaric hate. She slaughters her own children, and van-
ishes. The chariot of dragons, on which she disappears, is not more
strange than she to Nature's normal ways.'**
4, Passages against excess in pleasure are numerous in Euripides:
... 17 cf)V(7LS yap otx^TaL
orav 7Xu«:€tas rjbovr]^ rjaaojv tls fj.
(From Fragment 187)
TO, XP^ot' kiriaTaneada Kal yLyv(jjaKOfjL€v,
ovK eKTrovodiJ.ev 8', ol nev apyias vto,
ol 5' r]8ovr]u TvpoQtVTfi o.vtI tov koKov
o.Wr\v TLV'.
(Hipp. 380-3)
orav KttKOt irpa^ciXTLV, Si ^kvoL, /caXcos,
ayoiv KpaTOvvres kov poni^ovres 8lKr]v
dcoaetv edpaaav tclvt e^eires 7)8ovfj.^^
(Fragment 568)
But though pleasure with its irrational power is in general a danger,
it is not in itself an evil if man can only enjoy within due bounds. In
this the Greek differs from much mediaeval Christian doctrine and dis-
plays an attitude more akin to the modern. With our thought coloured
by evolutional and biological theory, we judge pleasure as a natural
appearance, valuable and necessary for man's maintenance. In just
the same way the Greek saw pleasure to be "according to nature,"
a normal and admirable product. The ideal was not to avoid pleasure,
but to learn how to use it. There is a remark made by Pylades in the
Iphigeneia in Tauris which may be elevated to a general gnome of this
Greek attitude toward pleasure :
(TO<i>(hv yap avbpCiv ravra, /xi] 'K^avras tvxv^j
Kaipov XajSovras, rjdovas dXXas XajSeti'.^^
(I. T. 907-8)
^^ Perhaps also (as Prof. H. N. Sanders has pointed out to me) the play is a veiled
protest against the legitimation and naturalisation of the children which Perikles
had by Aspasia. In that case the appeal is similarly to the plea of Trapd cjiva-if, under
whose ban legalised international marriage is easily made to fall.
35 Cf. also Fragments 197; 364 (11. 22-23); 849.
3^ iiWas in the Greek idiom is attracted to rjdovds. It does not mean "other
pleasures," but "other things, which are pleasures." So in Hipp. 383, just above.
18 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
Similarly :
TO 8' kpdv irpoKkyoi Totai vkoiaiv
IxijivoTt (f)evyeLV,
XP^c^ai 5' opdQis orav 'i\Oii,
(From Fragment 889)
which, as we have seen, is very much the moral of the entire Hippolytos.
The self-control which never runs into excess of pleasure is known in
Greek as sophrosyne. It does not mean abstinence or asceticism, but
the ability to maintain the mean amid temptations to excess. Conse-
quently it most frequently has reference to pleasure. But sophrosyne
is not mere negative restraint. To understand it, we must read the
Bacchae, a play of first importance for our thesis. I can see no sign that
the drama is the palinode of an atheist or the apologia of a rationalist,^^
an old man in exile trying to reconcile himself with popular religion.
The " orthodox " view seems obviously correct; for Euripides' own words
are insistent in its favour. It is nearly the same subject as in the Hip-
polj'tos: the Bacchic pleasures and prerogatives — dancing, laughter,
freedom from care, wine-feasting ^^ — are natural and salutary. To
treat them with austerity and suppression is therefore not virtue, but
a violation of nature, and quite strictly Trapa (f)V(nv. Hence the fateful
recoil of these Bacchic elements of life on Pentheus, even as love re-
coiled to work the death of Hippolytos. More than this, man's 0iVts
includes more than a mere life of reason. All that fine intoxication of
the spirit, with which poet and votary are so familiar, is not outside of
Nature's intent. Euripides would have been turning a weapon against
himself, were he to admit that poetic enthusiasm is Trapa (f)v<xLv. Rather,
its suppression and denial are wapa (f)vaiv, and baleful. Let us be poets
and Bacchants, since we have it in us! Enjoyed in right amount,
Dionysos is /card 4>v(tlv and a moral necessity, very different from excess
or licentiousness as the chorus is careful to point out.^^ Nor is it true
that his rites lead necessarily to dissipation:
ovx o Aiopvaos ao:(f>pove'LV avayKaaei
yvvoLKas es ttjv IvvTrpiv, dXX' kv ttj (j)vaei
[to (jiccppopeLP eviCFTLV ds TO. ttolvt' aei] ^
" As, among others, Sir John Sandys would have us believe in his edition of the
play (Cambridge, 1900, Introd. Ixxv).
^* All these enumerated o. c. 379-85.
39 lb. 386-8.
^» lb. 314-6.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 19
The chorus states the whole matter admirably :
TLfXicv re BpdfjLiov aoicjypovtis.
"Give Dionysos his due, and you will be o-a)<^pwv."^^
Sophrosyne is not abstinence, but proper acquiescence in Nature's
ways. The Hippolytos takes pains to illustrate the true meaning of
the word. Hippolytos is fond of calling himself ac^4>po:p ^~ and Artemis
agrees with his definition.'*^ But Phaidra has a different conception of
sophrosyne :
drdp KaKov ye x^t'^P'^ yevr]aofxaL
davova , Lv eidrj ixr] ttl toTs knots KaKols
v'^'rjKos tlvai. ttjs voaov 8e rijaSe jjlol
KOLVTJ neraaxo^v acocppoveiv jiad-qaeTai.
(Hipp. 728-31)
Which definition of sophrosyne has the poet's own approval, we may
read writ large through all the play.
We should rememl^er that because the Greeks, like most southern
races, were inclined to excess, restraint was to them an inherent part
of conduct. Where northern peoples are apt to phrase the ethical
alternative as " to do or not to do," and make a sheer choice between
extreme poles, the southern shift the problem to the intermediary zones
and make the choice one of degree. The Corcyra massacres in Thu-
cydides are an instance of the excess into which the Greek was not
infrequently betrayed. Alexandrianism and Byzantinism show the
ultimate assertion of these fervid tendencies which, in the preceding
classical age, were controlled only by the most constant application.
Indeed, one may suspect that Greek art and literature show essentially
the curbs and checks of a conscious formalism trying to hold in restraint
the dithyrambic excess of the national temperament. By having, in
general, only the formal product preserved to us, we miss the ever-
present contrast with the unrestrained world with which they strug-
gled.^"* Only on such a supposition can we understand why the
doctrine of the Mean forms such an apparently disproportionate
part of Aristotle's Ethics and why Euripides could write whole plays
« 76. 329. ^2 E.g. SO, 13G5. « 76. 1402.
^ The terra cotta figurines often echo the popular temperament unrestrained by
artistic formalisation. Cf. the well-known caricatures mostly found in Asia Minor,
and monstrosities such as were discovered in the Demeter sanctuary at Priene, illus-
trated in Wiegand-Schrader's Priene.
20 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
primarily to exemplify the value and necessity of harmonious and
balanced conduct.
The references have emphasized that in love, even more than else-
where, the need of moderation obtains. The following passages are
equally illustrative of this teaching: *'^
epooTes VTvtp p-tv ayav
tkdbvTts oi'K evdo^iav
ov6' aperav Tapt8(j}Kav
av8pa.(nv el 8' aXts eXdot
KvirpLS, ovK dXXa deos eDxapts ovtoos.
(Chorus, Med. 627-31)
fjiaKapes di /xerptas 6eov
/xerct re coi^poavva'i fiere-
cxov \k;KTpoiv 'A0po5tras,
yOiKavda. xpi70'aM€»'ot
p.avLb.8u:v oiarpuiv, 66l 8ri
8i8vp.' "Epcos 6 xP^coKonas
t6^' kPTelverat xaptTCOJ',
TO iJLev €7r' ei'aluvL ttot/xw,
TO 5' eirl crvyxvc^ei (SLords.
elf] 8e iJLOL iieTpla fxev
Xo.pLS, TTodOL 8 oaiOL,
Kal niT€XOLiJ.L rds ' A(f)po8i-
ras, TToWav 8' airoddiiav.
(Chorus, I. A. 543-51; 554-7)
fj.€Tpioiv "KeKTpcov, perplccv 8e ydfxuv
fjiera a(j:cl)poavv7]S
Kvpaai 6vr]T0L(nv apLdTov.
(Fragment 505)
Finally there is the praise of love in a fragment of eleven lines ascribed
to Euripides:
TTatSeu/xa 5' "Epcos aocfyias aperrjs
ir'Ke'lcrTOV VTapx^h
Kal TpocroixiXeiv ovtos 6 8aLixoiv
TvavTOiv rjStOTOs e^i; dvriTols.
^^ Cf. similarly, Hipp. 358; 431-2; also Fragment 449 from the earher Hippol-
ytos; Fr. 507; 951; Med. 635-6.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 21
Kal yap iiKvirov rkpypiv tlv' exo}v
eis eXirid' aycL. toIs 5' dreXecrrots
TU}V Tovde TTOvoiv iJLTjTe avveirjv
Xcopts T aypiojv valoip.!. Tpoiruv.
TO 5' kpap irpoKkyoi rdtai vkoiaiv
prjTTOTe 4>evyeLV,
XPW^o-t- 5' dpdojs, orav 'ekdrj.
(Fragment 889)
5. Similarly, the rest of man's emotions are not to be frowned upon
nor treated with the unrecognising stare of a merciless self-suppression.
The emotions are natural products. To deny them their due place in
man's life is to attain, not a higher ethical plane, but an unhuman one.
The problem of the individual is not to avoid emotion, but to avoid,
now excessive emotionality, now emotional insensibility. For example,
although indulgence in anger is generally injurious to men, there are
instances where a lack of resentment proclaims a spiritless creature,
a thing somewhat less than a man, like that Phrygian slave in the latter
part of the Orestes (11. 1369 ff.) whose barbaric panic and cringing sub-
mission fill us with contempt. Not to harbour just anger and desire
for revenge is, in fact, characteristic of the serf; and, in Greek thought,
the barbarian slave who behaves as a slave, is of a lower and different
order than real man.^^ The free-born Greek had a duty toward his own
self-respect. 'EXeu^epoTTjs, the conduct of individual independence, was
part of his 4>^(ti.s. Not to maintain it was -Kapa (f)V(TLv and ethically
wrong. With just this plea Orestes announces his vengeance against
Menelaos :
bpaaas rt xpfl^^ tovs eiJLOvs exdpovs davelv,
'Iv' avTavaXwaw fxev di pe Trpovboaav,
CTtvoiaL 5' oiTrep Kciyu' WrjKau adXiov.
' k.yap.ep.vovbs tol ttols Trk(j)vx • • •
6v ov KaraLaxwoj
8ov\ov Trapacrxojt' davarov, dXX' eXevdepoos
^l^vxw a4>7](T(jo, Mevk\ewv 8e Telaopai.
(Or. 1164-7; 1169-71)
Though the evil of excessive anger is often emphasised in Euripides, —
as for example in the following,
TToWous 8' 6 dvpos 6 peyas uiXeaev ^pordv
(Fragment 259)
« Cf. Fr. 215.
22 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
bpyfi yap oans cu^ecos x^P^f^T-at
KaKO)s TeXevrg.. . J'
(Fragment 31)
none the less, there is such a thing as justifiable anger, —
ykpovTes, aivu}' tojp iplKoov yap ovveKa
opyas dLKaias tovs <^tXous ex^i-v XP^<^^!
(H. M. 275-6)
and in the Herakleidai, when Alkmene at last holds her implacable enemy
Eurystheus in her power and claims that her right of vengeance is greater
than the laws of Marathon, the chorus calls her rage avyyvudTov, "com-
prehensible," and so " pardonable." ^^ In another play, where Hekabe
takes a hideous revenge on Poljanestor for the violation of the sanctity
of hospitality and the murder of her son, Agamemnon, in true Eurip-
idean fashion, holds an ethical inquest and justifies Hekabe for blind-
ing Pol}anestor. The decision gains weight, because awarded by a
Greek against an ally and in favour of a hereditary foe.*^
In fact, where resentment is justified, it is mere weakness to indulge
the opposite emotional extreme. Forgiveness and compassion may be
as wrong and disastrous as wrathful implacability. Though a Frag-
ment bids:
. . . fxr] aKvOpooiros tcrd^ ayav
irpos TOVS KaKoJs irpaaaovTas, a.pdpo)iros yeydos,
(Fragment 410)
yet, in the Medeia, Kreon by yielding to his pity for the woman whose
viperous hate and cunning he secretly dreads and understands, exposes
himself to vengeance at her hands. He acknowledges his error even
while he commits it :
alSovfjLevos 5e iroXXa 5?) bL(.4>dopa'
Kol vvv opco fxkv e^afxaprdvoiv, yvvaL,
6/icos 5e rev^r} rovde'
(Med. 349-51)
Scarcely has Kreon left the stage when Medeia speaks contemptuously
of his unwise generosity toward her as "senseless folly. "^^ It is true
Greek ethic (and good logic) to despise in a foe the weakness by which
one profits.
Right conduct, here as elsewhere, lies between the two extremes.
« Cf. also Fr. 760 and 796. « Hek. 1129-1251.
«« Herakl. 981. so Med. 371 ff.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 23
Anger must be justified by reason, for reason alone can divine the proper
norm. Medeia, in yielding wholly to her passion and rage, realises that
anger in her has exceeded its proper function and that she is morally
at fault:
/cat jxavdavw /jtev ola bpav ixkWw KaKa,
dv/xos 8e Kpeiaaccv rdv enaiu (SovXev/jLarcop,
ocFTrep fxeyiarcov atrtos KaKOJV (SpoTots.
Two fragments present the same doctrine :
upa ae dvp,ov Kpeiaaova yvwiJLrjv 'ex^i-v.
(Med. 1078-80)
(Fragment 715)
xoXX kcTTLU opyrjs e^ airatdevTov KaKa.
(Stob. Flor. 20, 12. Presumably from Euripides)
" Not too much, yet not too little." It is this that makes right con-
duct so rare and so difficult. For the doctrine of the mean applies to
all conduct, and it is our moral duty to observe the limits between
excess and defect in all that we do.
6. Even love of life, it would seem, can be carried to excess. As in
all other phases of human conduct, there is a mean which alone is the
right and adequate action. The defect is a form of cowardice. Herakles,
when about to commit suicide from despair, checks himself with the
reflection that the coward thinks death easier than misfortune: the
brave man holds more fast to life.^^ Yet the other extreme is no less
cowardly. Iphigeneia, before she makes her resolve to die for Greece,
has gone to such excess. It is possible Xta^ <pL\o\J/vxe'Lv, to love one's own
life overmuch, as she herself realises.^^ old men, says Iphis in the
Hiketides,^^ cling to their useless shred of life beyond its worth. And
Pheres in the Alkestis is taunted by his own son for hoarding with
selfish greed the few years that yet remain before death. ^*
It is a Greek tenet that death is better than disgrace :
... 17 yap aicFX^^V vrdpos
Tov ^fju Trap' eadXols avdpaaiv vonl^erai.
(Herakl. 200-1)
Brave men reckon honour before life; in the choice of evils between
disgrace and death it is preferable to die.^^
" H. M. 1347 ff. " Hik. 1108-13.
" I. A. 1385. M Alk. 642-50 et al.
55 Cf. H. M. 284-92; Hipp. 400-2; 426-7; Fr. 599.
24 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
7. In pleasure and pain/^ then, in joy and grief," in praise and
envj^^** in courage and fear,^^ in anger and humility,^"^ in pity and com-
passion,*^ in friendship,*'- — in short, in all our emotional relations,
Euripides exhibits to us how excess will do harm and lead man astray,
while deficient sentiment will leave him too colourless and inactive, a
creature below the level of that true moral agent which it is man's proper
function to be.
8. But there is a large class of material and spiritual possessions,
which mankind calls "the good things of this earth," against which
the Few have ever preached without ever signally persuading the Many.
Wealth and honour and power are good to have; and, thinks the world,
the more of them one has, the better. It has always been difficult to
expose the fallacy' in this seemingly self-evident equation and to show
that More Good does not necessarily spell Better. Greed of wealth and
greed of power have been combated in many ways, — though for only
one reason: because they threaten the moral equipoise of society.
Moralists have cudgelled their brains to discover plausible arguments
against them ; obviously, as they are not at all good for others, the indi-
vidual must be convinced that they are really not good for hi7n. To
produce this conviction is the aim of Plato's Republic. Of the host of
other attempts, utilitarianism is perhaps the most hypocritical, as Chris-
tianity is the most sincere. What attempt at proof is there in Euripides ?
Several passages praise wealth without reserve.*^ As they are all frag-
ments and tell us neither character nor context, they are not evidence
with direct bearing.*^ Had the following verses, for example, survived
to us without further information than that they were from Euripides :
6 ttXovtos, avdpo)iriaKe, to2s ao(f)o7s deos,
TO. 5' dXXa KOfxiroL Kai \6yo^v eviJLop(f)lai.,
IMannikia! wealth the wise man's god is,
Everythmg else a wordy fraud is!*^
^^ Above, pp. 14-19.
" Fr. 364, 11. 32-34; Herakl. 619-20; Fr. 422.
S8 Or. 1161; Fr. 297. ^^ Above, pp. 12-13. «« lb., pp. 21-3. «i lb., p. 22.
«2 Hipp. 253-60. 63 Fr. 96; 143; 326; 327; 328; 379; 584.
** And here I take the opportunity to acknowledge freely the fallacy of taking
every stray word as a reflection of Euripides' own convictions. There is a very real
difficulty in distinguishing, in the work of a dramatic poet, what is said out of dra-
matic fitness from what is meant as the poet's own opinion; but in every case I have
tried to base important steps in my argument on only such statements as seem to
reflect Euripides in propria persona. Cf. the remarks of Decharme, Euripide et
VEsprit de son Theatre, pp. 27-8; and also supra, pp. 3-4.. ^^ Kykl. 316-17.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 25
we might be puzzled what conclusions to draw. How differently we
treat the passage when we learn that it is an utterance of that mighty
hedonist, the Kyklops, whose high god is his belly,^^ and for whom food
and warmth and sleep and animal-like irresponsibility complete the
pantheon ! ^^
Of the fragments which praise wealth, three of the most laudatory
appear to come from the lost play, Danae. A story, told by Seneca in
reference to one of these three, warns us how we ought to interpret
other fragments inconsonant with the attitude of Euripides in his
preserved plays. In Epist. 115, Seneca gives a Latin version of Frag-
ment 326 with its exorbitant praise of gold :
CO xpv(^^> de^ioina KaXXLairov ^poTols,
(Jos ovre iJ-rjTrip ridovas TOtaad' ex^t,
ov TTOLdes avOpoiiroLffLV, ov (piXos iraTrjp ...
el 5' 17 Ki'Trpts TOLOVTOV 6(f)da\fxo7s 6pd{v) ®^
oil dav/j.' epcoras fivpiovs avr-qv €X^(-V,
(Fragment 326)
and continues, " When these verses were spoken for the first time in
Euripides' tragedy, the entire audience sprang up as by a single im-
pulse to eject both actor and play, until Euripides himself stood up in
their midst and begged them to wait and see what happened to this
person who thought so much of gold." We may believe the anecdote
or not. Yet, with more of the context preserved, we well might see
a similar fate overtake the characters in the five other fragments which
praise the power and glory of wealth. At any rate, it is fairly obvious
what Euripides thought on the subject. A fragment from the Alex-
andros^^ sounds like a taunt against Paris himself: "Wealth and lux-
ury are an unmanly training. Poverty, though a harsh teacher, is a
good one." In other Fragments, we hear that wealth dulls the sensibili-
ties,™ that the rich are dull in body and in mind,^^ and that wealth with-
out intelligence is useless. '^^ Riches wrongly acquired are even worse
than useless,^^ for the prosperity which they bring is transient.''^ Worst
of all, wealth breeds a certain i)/3pts,^^ and therein lurks the beginning
of ruin.''^
66 Kykl. 335. " lb. 323-41.
6^ Conjecturing 6pav to be Seneca's reading.
69 Fr. 55. ra ]f)_ 163; 237; 1054. '^ /^. 441.
'<> lb. 773. 73 If, 822. "6 lb. 1027.
71 76. 773; 642. ^4 75 3^4^ n u-is; 421.
26 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
The preserved plays are better evidence for Euripides' own feeling.
The Hekabe is devoted to the punishment of avarice. ^ engeance comes
at the hands of the helpless woman who has most been wronged. We
call such a denouement "poetic" justice, implying that it scarcely
could occur in the real world of prose. Euripides, I hope to show, felt
otherwise about the matter. Again, in the play of the Supphant Women,
Theseus characterises the march of the seven warriors against Thebes
as an example of ruin brought on by greed of honour, of power, and of
gain.^ Later in the play, Adrastos delivers a long eulogy on the slain
seven. Concerning Tydeus he says :
({)L\6TLjjiov rjOos irXovaLov, (i>p6vr]ixa be
ev Tolaiv epyoLS, ovx'l toIs \6yoLS, laov.
His praise of Kapaneus is still more significant :
KaTaveiis 65' karlv <!} /3tos fxev fjv toXvs,
r/Ktcrra 5' 6X/3cfj yavpos rjv. (f)p6vr]ixa 8e
ovdev TL jiei^ov dx(^v fj irevrjs aurjp.
(Hik. 907-8)
(Hik. 861-3)
Adrastos and Theseus, then, disagree in their judgment on these men.
But in one thing they seem to agree thoroughly, and that is in their
belief that too much wealth or honour bring disaster, and that only
by humility, by acting as if one had neither honours nor wealth, is it
possible to avoid destruction. The clearest expression of this belief is
in a Fragment:
orav 5' iSt/s xpos v^os ripp.'evov tlvol
\aiJLirpQ re ttKovtw kol ykvet yavpovp-tvov
b4>pvv re fxei^oo tjjs Tvxr]S eiryjpKOTa,
TOVTOV Tax^^CLV v'ejxecnv eWvs irpoaboKa.
(Fragment 1027)
These verses sound a key-note of the histories of Herodotus and the
tetralogies of the Aeschylean drama. Euripides was an innovator: he
brought tragedy down from its ancient exalted severity, its aenvoTrjs,
' and filled it with clever wrangle of disputes caught from law-trials and
the sophists' corner. But he never tried to rid the Attic stage of its
faith in that poetic justice which overtakes the rich and the powerful
when they presume on their high fortune. On the contrary, he keeps
^ displaying the power of this invisible requital; for it is a foundation-
" Hik. 232-7.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 27
stone of his ethic. For him it is the one proof that in the "good things
of this earth," in gold, in honour, and in power, there is a mean of right
conduct, and an ever-present possibihty of excess.
In the Herakleidai, lolaos, an old and feeble man, suddenly displays
an inexplicable folly by demanding to be armed and led into battle.
Judging him for what he seems, the audience may admire, but cannot
commend, his mad ambition. But later we hear, through a messenger,
of wonderful feats of arms. lolaos, the decrepit and helpless, regains
his youth and strength on the field of battle ^^ and takes captive Eurys-
theus, who, with implacable persecution of Heracles and all his race, has
so long hounded that hero's ancient comrade. The play is entirely
devoted to the fall of presumptuous evil-doing and the ultimate happi-
ness of the innocent, through the liberation of the Herakleidai from the
persecution of Eurystheus and their restoration to the kingship which
is theirs by right. lolaos is the sudden and miraculous embodiment of
this divine retribution. As if to emphasise its unearthly origin, it in-
carnates itself in an outworn warrior who is unable to carry his own
armour.
This is perhaps the extreme case of justitia ex machina. In other
plays it takes a less miraculous course; but everywhere we are made
to realise that something more than human agency is at work. So,
in the Hekabe, the gauntlet is thrown down in challenge to heaven.
Talthybios, the Greek herald, on seeing the former queen of Troy now
a slave in the Greek camp, overwhelmed with misfortune, prostrate on
the ground with grief, exclaims over her :
w Zed, Tt Xe^co; irdrepa a avd pi/iirovs bpaV,
rj ho^av aWccs rrivde KeKTrjadaL fxaTr]v,
Tvxw ^^ TraPTa rav jSpoTols eTLaKorelv,
(Hek. 488-91)
Still more explicitly, Hekabe herself states the challenge:
■fi/jLets fxev ovv bovKoi re Kacr^ems iccos"
dXX' ol deol crdevovaL x<^ Kelvoiv Kparwv
NofjLOs' vbp.(jo yap tovs deovs riyov/jLeda
Kal ^cc/jLev aSiKa Kal 5t/cat' upLanevoc
OS es a' av€\9(hi> el bLa4>dapy]aeTaL,
Kal fjLTi 8lKr]v ddoaovaLv olrLves ^'evov^
KTeifovaLV fj deoop lepa ToKucbaLV (pepeiv,
oi'K edTLV ovbev toop ev audpuiroLS 'iaov.
(Hek. 798-805)
^8 Herakl. 843-63.
28 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
In the end, divine justice fulfils itself. The fatal avarice of Polymestor
leads him into Hekabe's power. She herself accomplishes her revenge.
In the Suppliants, Theseus punishes Thebes for insolently refusing
to allow burial to the slain Argive Seven. The chorus considers this
intimation of justice to be a proof of the existence of a divine ordinance
in the world. "^
The plays of the Euripidean "Oresteia" are the best example of
this faith in the certainty of ultimate justice. In the Aulic Iphigeneia,
Agamemnon through cowardice agrees to sacrifice his daughter. Ten
years later, on his return from Troy, he pays the penalty at the hands
of his wife Klytaimestra. She however acted, not so much to avenge
her daughter, as to cover her adultery. She has done evil, therefore,
and must pay the penalty at the hands of Orestes.^° Aigisthos, too,
must suffer for his adultery and his participation in Agamemnon's
death. Over his dead body, Elektra speaks the splendid lines which
are a summary of all that Euripides is trying to establish :
fit] not TO irpcoTOV ^rjjjL^ eav Spdiirj /caXcos,
VLKciv Sojcetrco ttjv AUrjv, irplv av ireXas
y pafJL/Jirjs iKrjrat Kai reXos Ka.p,\l/r} fiiov.
(El. 954-6)
In no instance can wickedness go for ever unpunished. ^^ Appearances
often point another way; but, in the end, justice through unknown
ways fulfils herself on man. Euripides is never tired of emphasising
this essential part of his faith. Thus we read that no unjust man ever
prospered ^^ and that in vain the wicked hope to escape. ^^ The last
lines of the Ion are the seal of his doctrine: ^^
es reXos yap oi fxev ead\ol rvyxo-vovaiv a^lwv,
ol KaKoi 6', cbairep Tre(()VKaa\ ovttot' ev Tvpa^uav av.
(Ion 1621-2)
" Hik. 731-3.
^° Orestes, acting purely through vengeance, seeks to fulfil justice. The death
of Klytaimestra is just, but agent and means are wrong (cf. Or. 492-506). Hence
Orestes too must suffer; but, because he has intended justice, he will find ultimate
acquittal.
^^ In the Andromache, Menelaos ruthlessly breaks his faith, and the helpless
Andromache has no weapon save her belief that the gods punish evil and maintain
justice. Curiously enough, the efficacy of divine justice is never put to the test, since
Peleus intervenes. This play, however, seems to be largely a loose series of events
calculated to discredit Spartan character to the Athenian audience.
S2 Hel. 1030-1; cf. Fr. 646. 84 Similarly, Fr. 224 and 559.
»3 Fr. 257; 832; cf. Hek. 1192-4.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 29
Time will tell; ^^ for it holds up a mirror to mankind, as to a
young maiden's beauty,^^ and men's characters stand revealed. Time
measures with a just rule,^^ and by it we know the good man from the
wicked. ^^
Toward the close of the Ion, Athena says :
det yap ovu
XpovLa ixkv TO. Toov Qtwv xws, h reXos 5' ou/c aadevrj.
(Ion 1614-5)
And this we might almost translate with the truly Greek lines:
"Though the mills of the gods grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small."
With this belief that there is an unseen divine vengeance on all evil-
doing, the last doubt vanishes and we understand how it is that, even
when excess seems profitable to the individual, it cannot prove to be
so for very long. The norm of human living is a demand of ^uo-ts, of uni-
versal nature. If <t)V(ns does not immediately and openly punish its
violation, then slowly and invisibly she prepares the downfall of the
offending individual.
Thus, Nemesis completes the proof of the doctrine of the Mean.
The unseen ordinance of the world is such that it will not tolerate excess
in any form. For, all excess is synonymous with a violation of 4>v(ns;
and (l)vais, in one form or another, punishes rd xapd <t)V(XLv.
The evidence which has been given is now sufficiently complete for
the construction of a logical outline which will be at once a summary
of the previous pages and a conclusion drawn from them. Since it is
intended as a condensed exposition of the metaphysical basis of Eurip-
idean ethics, I give it, for the sake of clarity, in schematic form :
Thesis. Right action is /card ^ucriv. Every action Trapd (f)V(nv is
detrimental to the agent, and therefore wrong.
Definition. (j)v(ns, or the order of nature, includes :
(o) The material and physical laws of the universe.
(b) The material growth, maintenance, and decay of organisms, i.e.,
life in all its forms.
(c) The cause of those sudden unintelligible (because unprognos-
ticable) events which the ordinary man calls chance or fate.
85 Fr. 444; 509. 87 Yt. 305.
86 Hipp. 428-30. 88 Fr. qi.
30 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
Evidence. Under each of these three aspects of <t)V(ns, our thesis must
be shown to be true and operative :
(a) Experience amply shows that man must conform himself to
the universal material laws and not seek to divert them from
their normal function.
(6) The thesis is manifestly valid for plants and for animals. In
the case of man, however, it needs proof :
Every violation of a norm can be measured quantitatively,
i.e., it is due either to excess or to deficiency. The norm
itself (which our thesis identifies with right conduct) is there-
fore a mean between two extremes.
We must show that:
(1) Observance of the mean is good for the agent.
The proof is derived from the evident formal and material
superiority of all organisms under their complete natural
conditions.
(2) Violation of the mean is bad for the agent.
For it throws the organism into an abnormal state in
which it is less fitted to perform its function. In man,
this is obviously true for his more violent emotional states.
There are, however, cases where excess seems to benefit
the individual at the expense of his surroundings, particu-
larly at the expense of his fellow-men. Such conduct is
manifestly harmful to the latter; but it must be shown to
be ultimately harmful to the agent also. No evidence of
this is immediately forthcoming, and the proof must be
postponed for the moment,
(c) Empirical observation of the unprognosticable events of " chance "
and "fate" reveals certain clearly regulated tendencies and
proves these very events to be a great and invisible legislation
for maintaining the validity of our thesis, and furnishes the
proof which we were unable to give at the end of the previous
section. We call these events the working of divine justice:
the force behind them we identify with the gods.
Thus, our thesis has been shown valid in each of the three aspects of
<t>vat,s, and may fairly be considered established.
CHAPTER III
The connection between ethics and theology was not as manifest
in Greek as it is in Christian ethics; yet to thinking minds the moral
and the religious could not long remain unrelated. Socratic teaching
put moral life into Ionian materialistic speculation. The atheist"
helped to rehabilitate the gods. For Euripides the gods are the unseen
legislators of the world, who so order the apparent caprices of events
that they form a moral system of punishment and reward. Yet Euripides
apparently casts discredit on the Olympians. Thus, the Ion shows
Apollo taking precariously elaborate measures in order to emerge with
even superficial credit from a rather disgraceful scrape. In another
play, Herakles complains bitterly against Hera's persecution: Zeus
was unfaithful, Hera was jealous, and unoffending Herakles must
suffer. "Who would pray to such a goddess?" he exclaims.^ In the
Bacchae, Dionysos takes a hideous revenge, such as mortals scarce
approve.-
Of all the gods, Apollo suffers most from Euripides. He is vindic-
tive and unforgiving in the Andromache,^ immoral and underhanded
in the lon,^ an instigator of mischief in the Suppliants.^ It may be
that there was an Athenian quarrel against the Delphic oracle. It may
be that Euripides disbelieved in oracles and divination. His charac-
ters exclaim not infrequently against such practices.^ In the Elektra
and the Orestes, the Delphic oracle prompted the murder of Klytai-
mestra, and Orestes blames all his consequent misfortunes on the god,^
and Elektra joins in his censure.^ But here in the end Apollo proves
himself just, as Orestes gladly acknowledges.^ The divine will was
slow in accomplishment, — a signal characteristic, as Orestes himself
declared. ^° In fact, it is tolovtov (f)vaei.
I cannot enter in detail into the question of Euripides* religion;
1 H. M. 1307-10; cf. 1316-20 and 339-47.
2 Bacch. 1348. ^ Andr. 1161-5.
^ Ion, passim; cf. esp. Ion's own criticisms of Apollo in 436-51; 355; 367.
6 Hik. 138 and 219-22.
6 E.g. Hel. 744-8; 756-60. But cf. Hipp. 1320-4.
■' Or. 285-7; 414-20; 591-9; El. 971-3; 981; cf. 1245-6.
8 Or. 162-4. 3 Or. 1666-7. i" Or. 420.
31
32 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
but must be content with the assertion that all the evidence seems to
me to indicate quite clearly that Euripides is so severe with the gods
because he beheves in them so thoroughly. From the often quoted
fragment :
€t Qeol TL dpuiCTLV alcxpov, ova elalp Qeoi,
"If the gods do evil, then they are not gods,"
(From Fragment 294)
we must not conclude that there are no gods, but that the gods do no
evil. The quarrel with Apollo is the only serious instance to the con-
trary, and this seems to be directed against the Delphic oracle for other
than ethical reasons.
For, if there is to be any higher ethical sanction for mankind, the
forces of the universal ordinance cannot be evil or do evil. For this
reason, the gods must be purged of all their traditional immoralities.
The gods can do no evil, and therefore Euripides is merciless with them.
But he fights for them not against them:
oi'dkva yap olfiai baL}ibv(j)v elvai KaKov.
(I. T. 391)
Euripides openly declares that the gods must be purged of their
evil reputations and estabUshed as that higher justice from which
human morality derives its sanction. Therefore, the gods should be
above revenge" and more wisely forgiving than mankind.^^ In a word,
they can do no evil;^^ for otherwise w^e, who imitate them, would not
be to blame for the evil which we perform,^^ since our actions take their
sanction from the gods.^^ Thus the gods must be moral and just, for
otherwise where should we turn for justice? ^^ If there are gods at all,
the just man will gain a good reward^' and the wicked be destroyed,^^
but if there are no gods, all justice vanishes, and why should we strive
to be moral ? ^^ Or, reversing the argument, if injustice prevails on
earth, we cannot believe in the gods;-** but "when I see the wicked
fallen, I say. The race of gods exists!" (Fr. 581). In one form or
another, so say most of the heroes and heroines of Euripides' plays;
and, presumably, so said also the Athenian audience which beheld the
" Bacch. 1348. ^^ Hipp. 120.
" Fr. 294 quoted above. Yet Aphrodite often works evil; hence she is not a
god, but something else, something more powerful (Hipp. 358-61), who overcomes
even the gods (Fr. 434). See below p. 41. " Ion 449-51.
15 Hipp. 98. 1^ I. A. 1034-5. ^^ I. A. 1035.
" Ion 253. 18 Hik. 505. ^o e1. 583.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 33
ultimate triumph of the good and punishment of the overbearing, of
the wicked who exceeded the due measure of the norm of Hfe.
In conclusion, I give the important passage from the Troiades, which
openly points a finger to the place of the gods in Euripides' ethical
system : ^^
oaTLS ttot' el av, dvaTOTaaros eldevaL,
Zeus, €tr' avayKT] (f>vaeos elre vovs ^porojv,
Trpoarjv^a^rjv ae' iravTa yap 8l' a\l/6(f)ov
^alvwv KeKeWov Kara 8iKr]v to. Ovtjt' d7€ts.
(Tro. 885-8)
For Euripides the gods are ceasing to be persons. They are becoming
the more or less abstract forces in Nature which work for universal
justice.
Of human justice I can find in Euripides no clear account. He fre-
quently gives it a partial definition. It involves religious observance
and veneration; ~^ it is punctiliousness (drpketa) ; "^ it is respect for prop-
erty;-^ it is altruistic, since it is directed toward the good of fellow-
men.^^ But though naturally we find no analysis and systematic
treatment such as Aristotle gives in the fifth book of the Nico-
machean Ethics, there are a couple of passages in Euripides which are
definite.
The first is lokaste's speech to her two warring sons in the Phoinis-
sai.^^ She is pleading for a divided kingship in Thebes; but appeals
to more general principles: "The tyrant's rule is merely successful
injustice and doomed to anxiety and misfortune. Be not over-ambi-
tious; but rather, be just, and grant everyone his share. Justice is
equality."
The second passage -'^ is in similar vein. Theseus is disputing
political theory with the Theban herald for the glorification of Athens
21 A convenient indication of the philosophic echoes in this passage may be found
in J. Adam's Religioxis Teachers of Greece, p. 299 ff., where it may be of interest to
note that the important phrase avayKT} (pvaeos draws a blank, so to speak: — " It is
not so clear that Euripides had any definite philosophic theory in view when he sug-
gested that this Zeus or Aether is perhaps to be regarded as avayK-ij <j)vaeos — Nature's
Necessity or Law. He may be thinking, perhaps, of the Atomists, etc. . . ."
Mr. Adam justly suggests that the fire clauses " are not really intended to exclude
one another."
22 Herakl. 901-3; cf. Fr. 1063. 25 Herakl. 1-5.
23 Fr. 92. 26 phoin. 528-67.
2" Fr. 356. 27 Hik. 429-55; v. also Fr. 429.
34 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
and the delectation of the audience. He condemns tyranny and com-
mends written law, wherebj' rich and poor, and strong and weak, have
equal hearing and equal redress. Such equality is justice.
But though there is neither adequate definition nor analytic discus-
sion of justice in Euripides such as Plato gives in his Republic or Aris-
totle in the fifth book of the Ethics, indirectly there is evidence of ideals
as thoughtful and as far-reaching.
As we have seen, he believes that justice is the gods' care and obtains
a deep and universal self -fulfilment. Though occasional characters
cry out that rapacious and ruthless power is so successful and
complain:
TToXets re fXLKpas ol8a rt/xcocras deovs,
at fxeL^ovoiv kKvovcti dvaae^earkpc^v
X67X'7S apLdfxu) TrXeloPOS Kparovnevai,
, (From Fragment 288)
3^et the conviction is strong that
OL'Seis arparevaas aSi/ca aQis rjXdev irdXiv,
(Fragment 355)
and " foolish are they who gather virtue with the point of the spear;
if battle is to decide, never will strife depart from cities of mankind.""^
In fact, it is entirely due to evil of man that there is injustice abroad;
for "the gods' deeds are just, but among wicked men they sicken and
fall into confusion." -^
The hidden world works for justice, for equality among men, and for
requital of good and evil. Kingship and tyranny must vanish and a
perfect equality arise among men. With such an ideal, what of women
and of slaves ?
Euripides had a profound belief in women.^° He did not look on
them as Plato in the interest of formal theorising once seems to have
done,^^ as men with child-bearing functions, able to do all that men
could, though hampered by a lack of strength. Euripides looked on
23 Chorus in Hel. 1151-7.
23 Fr. 609. The reading is more uncertain than the general trend.
5° The long speech against women by Hippolytos (615-68) accords with an
anti-erotic or sexually perverted nature.' It throws no light on Euripides' own views.
Rather, it shows much understanding of a tj'pe which has probably always been
exceptional, but which has alwaj-s existed. Of the other misogynistic outbursts in
Euripides, I find five are mere short fragments without a background (Fr. 500; 532;
805; 1045; 1046). There remains the taunt of Jason in Med. 573-5, which is
scarcely a rooted conviction of either author or character. For a good survey of the
material, v. Decharme, ch. IV, § 1. '^ Rep. Book V.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 35
women quite frankly as women. He saw many faults in them, that
they were scheming and unscrupulous,^- inordinately jealous,^^ defect-
ive in a sense of honour and fair play,^* gossiping and meddlesome. ^^
Yet he declares a good wife to be the bulwark of a house ^^ and a bless-
ing to the fortunate man who wedded her.^" But women are not men
disguised under another sex. Their virtues are womanly, their natural
functions are essentially domestic.^^ But justice and equality apply as
much to them as to men. They have been unfairly criticised, good
women and bad have fallen under a common censure ;^^ it is men who
have talked, while women have had no hearing ;''° had they but equal
opportunity, they could recount as many evils about men."*^ They
should have equality of speech, therefore. More than that, divorce
should be a mutual right ^^ and unchastity as much an offence in the
husband as in the wife."*^
It is part, therefore, of Euripides' belief in that equality which he
identifies with justice, that women should have equal rights with men,
provided always that they fulfil their place as women.^^ It is of course
consonant with this that polj^gamy, being unequal, is unjust and un-
natural. In the Andromache, the chorus compares a household with
two wives to a city with two rulers, a play by two authors, and a ship
with two pilots.'*^
In the case of slaves, Euripides feels none of the injustice of their
position. It is not that they are morally worthless. Though he some-
times calls them so,''^ more often he shows a great appreciation of their
self-respect, their honour, and their faithfulness. The old nurses in
the Medeia and the Hippolytos are among his most human and attract-
32 Med. 407-9; I. T. 1032; Hik. 294; Andr. 262-8; 380-4; 425-32, where
Hermione seems to be the instigator; but much of the Andromache must be
discounted as a ruthless attack on Spartan behaviour.
33 Andr. 155-80. 35 phoin. 198-201.
34 Fr. 673; Andr. 516-22. 36 Yv. 1041.
37 Fr. 164; 1042; 1043; cf. I. A. 749-50.
38 Praise of good wives: Fr. 819; 820; Tro. 645-56; and csp. Fr. 901.
33 Ion 398-400; Hek. 1183-6; Fr. 496; 658; cf. Fr. 497.
" Ion 1090-8.
^^ Med. 421-30. Cf. on the unequal and difficult position of men, Medeia's
speech in 230-51. ^^ Andr. 672-4.
^3 El. 1036-41. Cf. however the opposite attitude of Andromache in the play
of that name, 215-26.
*^ They should remain indoors, Herakl. 476-7; Fr. 525; and not strive to rule
in their home, Andr. 213-4; El. 1052-3.
^5 Andr. 464-85. Cf. the equally strong opinion of Hermione in the same play,
173-80.
« Cf. Fr. 49; 50; 215; and the Phrygian in the latter part of the Orestes.
36 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
ive characters. In fact, in three instances he declares them at least
the equals of their masters.''^ Yet he never cries out against the injus-
tice of their position. I imagine that he, like Aristotle, must have looked
on slavery as a natural and necessary institution. He never expresses
the possibility of doing without it. Its evils and injustice never touch
his logic or brain; but that they could touch his heart, and call forth his
deepest emotions of pity and sorrow, is patent to any who read even
casually the great lamentations in the Hekabe and Troiades.
Slavery is a misfortune, the greatest of all misfortunes, so hopeless
that death is preferable to it.^^ Yet there is nothing to be done. It is
the order of nature and the will of the unseen ordinance. This seems
to be Euripides' position; but under its reasoning we seem to hear
his soul crying out with the distress of Hekabe, yet comforting itself
with the thought that under good masters the lot of the slaves was not
evil, and that in the household of Alkestis they were rather children
than serfs.^^ It is rather the horrors of war, such as we see them in the
Hekabe, that lend their gloom}^ colours to the spectacle of man become
the chattel and the property of his fellow-beings. It is a strange posi-
tion, humanity strugghng for expression almost against the dictate
of reason.
At the beginning of this thesis I spoke of an apxri, a universal prin-
ciple, running through Greek ethical thought. This apxv I identified
with life in the norm of Nature. To Euripides, a careful interrogation
of Nature supplies the empiric rules of conduct, and so furnishes an
objective standard, external to the agent. What behaviour is right in
this or that crisis ? what are the gods ? what is the proper position of
women or of slaves ? To answer these and other questions of conduct,
we must in every case turn to Nature. What is the (pvacs of women and
of slaves? we must ask.^° If that can be determined, w^e shall have
*' Hel. 728-31; Ion 854-6; Fr. 515.
« Hek. 357-78; 211-15. Fr. 247. « Alk. 193-5, 769-71.
5" It will be noticed that this question implies a classification by type, as if woman
qua woman had a distinctive <t>vais. This process of thinking by type or class is
natm-al to a people among whom the caste-system prevails. But it is also in general
a necessary stage in a process of differentiation. One is reminded of the develop-
ment of artistic types in sculpture, from the undifferentiated nude male to the various
distinct athletic types (the boxer, the wrestler, the runner, etc.), at which still unin-
dividualised stage the process seems almost arrested untO the fourth century. In
much the same way, the Greek thinkers differentiated the moral agent into types or
classes, whose functions and natural capacities {epyov and ^i-o-ts) they treated as
limited and distinctive. So the slave, 8ov\os (Soph. O. C. 763-4), the vonevs (ib.
1118; cf. Od. 17, 322).
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 37
discovered their proper position and conduct. The appeal to (t>vais
is the great source of moral sanction. Whatever is Kara (l)V(nv is morally-
right; whatever is Trapa (jivatp is morally wrong.
To the Greek mind, therefore, morality is not a matter of subjective
impulse or conscience or self-interrogation. Man identifies himself in
the world by a realization that he is an ordered part of it with a deter-
mined place and function. It is his duty to fulfil that function, to play
his part as Nature intended.
This is the avvTroderos apxv of which I spoke. It has proved itself
under all of Euripides' ethical feeling as the forma informans which alone
explains and unifies his teaching. His religion, his morality, the mean-
ing of his plays, all become clearer in the light of this single and simple
principle. Thus understood, the Greek tragedian is as logical and as
consistent as his fellow Greeks in philosophy and art.
The thesis is therefore concluded, — or rather, it would be, were it
not that there is another and counter principle in Euripides which
conflicts with this one and in certain cases supersedes it. To this other
principle the remainder of the thesis must be devoted.
/
CHAPTER IV
Under a system of ethics such as we have sketched, the individual
is self-centred. His actions are not for others, but for himself. In
identifying his OAvn complete and harmonious development with his
highest good, he excludes that long range of so-called Christian virtues
which stretches from self-denial to self-obliteration. For how can it
help the individual, if he die to save another than himself ?
Yet human instincts and human nature have always been much the
same, and the Greek could die for his city or lay down his life for a
friend, whether or not strict logic of his ethical theories justified his
behaviour. Nor could he withhold his admiration and applause if he
beheld another man perform similar unselfish acts.
In the Nicomachean Ethics we read nothing about self-sacrifice.
For such an unwearied student as Aristotle, devoted to increasing his
knowledge and extending his logic till it should cover every phase of
human thought and action, what possible attraction or what possible
meaning could there be in a creed of self-abnegation whose commands
must run counter to his whole life's activity ? With the instincts of the
scholar, however, Aristotle combined those of a teacher, and here he
experienced the desire of labouring for another's benefit. There creeps
into the Aristotelian ethics, therefore, the famous chapter on friend-
ship, with its characteristic analysis of friends into three kinds, friends
for delectation, friends for utility, and friends for love of the good which
is in them. The last class contains the only true friends. This meant,
in the fourth century before Christ, to Aristotle, tutor of Alexander
and sage of the Lyceum, three kinds of associates, — men to dine with
and to jest with; influential men with power in their hands; and, last,
the true intimates, pupils and followers, who could discuss philosophy.
Now, philosophy among the Greeks was not a lone man's plaything, a
solitary invention of secluded minds. Truth rose only out of discus-
sion; like a child, it needed two parents. The outcome of the Nicoma-
chean Ethics is a glorification of the life of philosophic speculation and
an admission of the need of like-minded friends for successful pursuit
of this philosophic ideal. To the last, therefore, Aristotle clung to the
self-centred creed of the scholar, admitting friends not for friends'
38
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 39
sake, but because they were indispensable to that highest scholarly and
philosophical self-development which was for him the consummate
human type on earth, the. realization of all the latent possibilities of the
thinking animal, man.^
It is interesting to see how every distinction in Aristotle's discussion
of friendship can be found already made in Euripides. Thus, there are
the same classes of false friends, those for advantage,^ and those through
pleasure (iidovfi,^ wpos xo-pi-v^), and such friendships may exist among
evil men through the attraction of like for like,^ while true friendship
occurs only between the good, for it is a " love for a just and restrained
and virtuous soul" (epcos ^vxv'^ hiKalas auxppovos re KayaOrjs).^ Misfor-
tune is the great test of friendship, for it reveals the motive, and only
that friendship which is based, not on advantage or an idle interest, but
on a deep-rooted affection will endure amid adversity.^ Such friends
are a gift beyond all value.^ Though they are admittedly rare,^ there
are eloquent and unforgettable examples in the pages of Euripides.
Such is the friendship of Theseus and Herakles in the Herakles Mai-
nomenos. Insanity and murder with all its pollution do not shake the
loyalty of Theseus, who proclaims for friendship a higher sanctity:
oi'dels dXaoTcop rols 0tXots e/c tCjv (piXuu.
(H. M. 1234) 10
The last lines of the play ^^ mark still more the sanctity and solemnity
of this high friendship which no crime can shatter or alter. More fa-
mous, though not more touching, is the indissoluble comradeship of
Orestes and Pylades throughout the Tauric Iphigeneia, the Elektra,
and the Orestes. Of such a friendship must have been written the Frag-
ment from which a line has already been quoted. Though it is not
1 The erepos avTos is a logical quibble to keep the ethical centre within the indi-
vidual. An unselfish act for a friend now ceases to be unselfish, for the action is
performed to benefit that more comprehensive Self (I plus friend, or Self plus Second
Self). The strict logic of individualistic ethics is pi'eserved, but the barriers are really
already down. Why limit the extension of self to a friend or two ? But if the exten-
sion is unlimited, there is no longer any individualistic ethic.
2 H. M. 1224-5; Fr. 465; Hek. 1227.
3 Fr. 298, 1. 2. » jf, 298; 809.
4 lb. 364, II. 19-20. « lb. 342.
' Euripides calls such friends (t>i\oi aaifxls (Or. 1155; H. M. 55; Fr. 928), aXridtls
(Hik. 867; Hipp. 927), 6p0ws (Andr. 377; H. M. 56).
8 Or. 727-8; 804-6; 11.55-7; H. M. 1425-6; Fr. 7; 928.
9 El. 605-7; Hik. 867-8; Fr. 736.
'" In Or. 793-4 Pylades holds the same belief toward the frenzy of Orestes.
" H. M. 1394 ff.
40 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
particularly good poetry, it has enough ethical import to justify its
quotation in full :
(f>VKos yap -qv fxoL, /cat fi' epcos eXot Trore ^^
ovK eis TO fiCipop, ov5e fx' els KvirpLV rpkiruv.
dXX' etrrt bi] tis dXXos ev ^poTots epcos
^'VXV^ biKalas cru^cjjpovds re Kayadijs.
Kai XPV^ ^^ T-oTs ^poTolcnv rovd' elvai vo/xov,
TOiv ev<7ej3ovvT0i)v OLTives ye a6:(f)poves
epav, Ki'TpLV 8e ttjv Alos xcitpetj' eav.
(Fragment 342)
The Aristotelian friend is part of the self-centred ethical system; but
in this Euripidean fragment, and in the lover-like comradeship of Orestes
and Pylades, of Theseus and Herakles, a new element has crept in, too
strong for "system," an element which threatens the clarity of the
Euripidean logic with the colouring of a fatal emotion.
It will be noted that in such a form of individualism there is no room
for the rather self-destructive enlargement which classes altruism as
a higher form of selfishness. Euripides could not logically claim that
self-sacrifice was also /card 4>vaLv and therefore commendable, any more
than, for example, a gardener could claim that the extermination of the
tare to give soil to the corn was /or the tare Kara (f)vaLv. As long as immor-
tality and a higher, external moral sanction are not involved, the in-
dividual is to be considered entirely as a material manifestation, here
and now, closely analogous to any other living product of nature, whose
end, and therefore, in a thinking being, whose "dut}^," is realization
of form (in the sense of complete attainment of eldos). Self-sacrifice
is in consequence eminently xapd (l)vaLv.
We must constantly remember this distinction between ancient
naturalistic individualism and certain modern rehabilitations which
can conveniently merge the individual into a "higher self" bj^ a pleas-
antly indefinite transition. If we insist on our rather humble analogies
and argue as if man were merely an intelligent political animal, akin
to other natural forms, these rather insidious sophistications lose their
force, while we ourselves shall be closer to the attitude of mind of
Sokrates, with his constant adjudication of ethical problems by con-
crete analogies in the lowly trades and crafts, and of Aristotle, whose
pregnant use of such concepts as epyov, reXos, dvvap.Ls, and eldos, I have
throughout tried to copy.
12 The reading is corrupt.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 41
In friendships of this extreme and beautiful sort, then, the ethical
postulate is in danger. Curiously enough in that other, and to our
thought more intense, emotional relation, the love of man and woman,
this is seldom true. Making all allowance for ethopoiia, for the diffi-
culty of distinguishing the dramatis personae from Euripides' own
utterance, such is the consistency of sentiment that it seems hard to re-
sist the conclusion that Euripides looked on sexual love as a violent and
irrational thing,^^ an intruder into an otherwise ordered world. It is
mere folly:
TO. iJLccpa yap ttcivt' earlu ' Acjipodirr] ^pOTols,
Kol Toiivo/j.' opdoos dcf)po(Tvvr]s apx^t 0eas.
(Tro. 989-90)
Running counter to that great system of morality and justice which
Euripides calls "the gods," Aphrodite cannot be herself a god. She is
something even more powerful. ^^ She is quietly excluded from the
ethical system as an irrational and uncontrollable factor.
But this other love, that bound Pylades and Orestes, caught the
Greek imagination where the more ordinary love of man and woman
failed. Too sane and wise to be irrational, too abiding to be fortuitous
or merely fleeting and uncontrollable, it demanded with full right a
place in the Greek ethical system, and such a place the self-centred creed,
with which we have been dealing, was unable to give.
Love in still another form impressed Euripides with its strength and
its beauty. "To all men, children are their very soul," says Androm-
ache.^^ It is not a question of the pleasure which they give us. Al-
though to some they are more to be desired than wealth or kingly
power, ^^ others may judge themselves happier without children, for
they may sicken and die or grow into evil ways and, all in all, cause
only care and grief.^^ But virtuous and wicked men alike love their
children; ^^ and there is nothing more intimate than the bond between
parents and their children,^^ nor any sweeter love than that of mother
and child. "° And out of the strength of such love comes self-sacrifice,
the obliteration of the individual for the sake of another.
In the Herakleidai, Makaria dies of her own will, in order to save her
brothers. She justifies her act by a long speech, claiming that, first,
justice demands her sacrifice; Marathon has received her and her
13 Fr. 139. 15 Andr. 418.
" Hipp. 359-60. i« Ion 485-91.
17 Chorus in Med. 1090-1115; Admetos in Alk. 879-88; Fr. 575.
18 H. M. 634-6. " Fr. 333. -» Fr. 360.
42 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
brothers as suppliants at the risk of its prosperity and its freedom,
hence she must take equal dangers on herself to save Marathon ;^^
secondlj^, not to die would show lack of courage and bring shame upon
her;^^ thirdly, the alternative, life, is not preferable, since she would
not attain happiness;-^ and therefore, in fuial conclusion, it is better
for her to die with honour, since to live is shameful.-^ In all this in-
human reasoning, how the ethical logician is trying to find a place for
self-sacrifice in his " sj'stem! " Makaria may make this forensic speech;
yet she acts through impulse and for love of her brothers, not through
logic or for reason. Euripides admits as much. He makes Makaria
realise that the deed, to be good, must come from love and not through
any restraint. When lolaos suggests that she should draw lots with her
sisters to determine the victim, she refuses, and even intimates that
should she be commanded by the fall of the lot, she would resist such
a death ; for it would resemble an execution more than a deed of virtue."^
And thereby she shows that her harangue was a judicial gloss, hiding
her true motive of voluntary self-devotion to save those whom she
loves. In that admission, the individualistic creed of ethics breaks down.
It is not shame and honour that are the motives. The individual is no
longer consulting the interests of his own harmonious and complete
self -development. But to do so was the fundamental demand of the
system which we have been developing.
There are numerous other cases in Euripides, for the situation makes
a great appeal to the dramatic instinct and that human sympathy
which a great tragic poet possesses. Andromache is unhesitatingly
prepared to die in order to save her son Molossos.^^ Hekabe wishes to
take the place of her daughter whom the Greeks have voted for sacri-
fice to the shade of Achilles."' Alkestis, dying that her husband may
live, is a familiar figure in all men's minds.^^ So, too, Iphigeneia's sacri-
fice is voluntary. When the plot becomes involved, so that apparently
bloodshed and intestine strife must break out in the Greek camp at
Aulis, Iphigeneia suddenly claims her right to die in behalf of the
Greek cause against Troy. She has been weeping and lamenting in
childish fashion: all at once, she understands her duty and her privilege,
— "To all Greece didst thou bear me! ""^
21 Her. 503-10. ^4 /ft, 525-8. 27 Hek. 385-7.
22 Ih. 515-19. 25 7ft. 547-51.
23 76. 520-4. 26 Andr. 406-18.
28 Cf . also the more difficult situation in the long fragment from the Erechtheus
quoted by Lycurgus (Kata Leokr. 100), where the mother gives her son to die to
save her country. 29 j. a. 1386.
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 43
So far does the power of affection reach, that even where nothing is
gained, the sacrifice is offered. In the Helena, husband and wife,
precariously reunited, vow to die together if both may not live:
EX. \}/avcjo, BavovTOS aov rod' eKKeixl/eLV 0dos.
Me. Kayo: aTeprjdels aov reXevTrjaeLV ^lov.
(Hel. 839-40)
In the Orestes, Pylades insists on dying if his friend Orestes must, how-
ever needless the sacrifice seems.^° His, also, are the stirring lines:
jUTj^' al//d jJLOv bk^aiTO KapTnfxov irkbov,
fxi] Xa/JLTTpos aidrjp, et a' eyco wpodovs irore
eXevdepu^aas tovjjlov d,7roXt7rot/xt ae.
(Or. 1086-8)
I have tried to show that the Greek individualistic ethic is incom-
patible with certain emotions which we class among the higher Chris-
tian virtues, and that precisely these emotions occur in Euripides.
When, as in the cases just cited, life is freely and gladly given for another's
.sake, not out of selfish interest or a weighing of For and Against, but
out of love, whether of country or of wife or of friend, the fundamental
ethical thesis has been violated. The individual proceeds to efface his
entire existence, and, with it, all possibility of further realising his
spiritual and bodily powers. It seems to me a significant comment
on all individualistic ethics that even in so logical and successful an
exemplification as that of fourth-century Greek morality, though the
philosopher could be self-consistent, the more human tragedian — for
all his sense for logic — was driven into violating the cardinal principle
of his ethical system.
This observation has its bearing on modern conditions of thought
and feeling, as I intend to show. But before sketching the change of
attitude in ethics since Aristotle, I wish to add at least a brief note of
comparison between that philosopher and Euripides. It is almost a
commonplace of Aristotelian criticism to scent an odour of the comic
stage in the ethical characters so drastically and dramatically portrayed
in the central books of the Nicomachean Ethics. I offer the general
tenor of this essay as an indication that Aristotle's total indebtedness
to the stage is still more thoroughgoing. A system such as Euripides
held needs only to be subjected to the rigorous formalising of the Ar-
istoteUan logic — and the Nicomachean Ethics, as Burnet has shown,^^
30 Or. 1069-72. ^i Jq jjig edition of the Ethics.
V
s
44 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
is full of logical formalism — and to be interpreted in the light of
the Aristotelian psychologj^ of conduct, to produce almost the entire
fabric of the Nicomachean Ethics.^- There is the same fundamental
assumption — a monstrous 7io7i sequitur of optimism — that, because the
fulfilment of function is the aim of every organism considered as part
of Nature, therefore it is also the aim or end of man as a self-con-
scious self-directed individual, and thus the best thing for him to do;
and being best, it is thus equivalent to the Highest Good. The evdatiiovia
of Book I is Aeschylean-Herodotean preaching on the transiency of
prosperity, the unrehability of to. e^co ajada reconciled as far as possible
with the equation of right action to action in the norm of Nature.^^
The immediately following books contain the explanation of the mechan-
ism of such action — the psychological mediation between the intellec-
tual act of apprehending the general ethical law and the practical act
of conduct in the concrete. This psychological mediation effected by
the doctrine of irpoaipeaLs, and the divisions of the sentient activities,
could not, I admit, have been found ready-made in the Attic drama.
But it is not part of the moral theory, so much as of the scientific analy-
sis of the mechanism of behaviour. The more properly speculative dis-
tinction between e^ts and hepyeta, however, is already in Euripides;
at least, the equivalent doctrine that there is no well-being without
well-doing seems clear in the following fragment from the Antiope :
el 6' evTVX^i' tls Kal fiiov KtKTr}p.'evos
ixr}hh 86ixoL(TL TOiV KoKihv TreLpaaeraL,
€7« jjLev ovttot' avrov oK^lov /caXw,
(f>v\aKa 5e fiaXKov XPVI^^^'^^ evdai/jLOva.
Is not this precisely the point of Aristotle's definition of Eudaimonia
in Book I ? Following this psychological treatise, come the practical
^2 On the other hand, the examination in this thesis has afforded hardly any
Platonic doctrine. Is not this merely another indication that Plato was a highly
original (or, at any rate, a highly specialised) thinker, whereas Aristotle was a school-
logician and analytic encyclopaedist working from the normal viewpoint of the
ordinary educated Athenian ?
3^ Cf. with Aristotle's account, the following Euripidean treatment of Eudai-
monia: It is transient and uncertain (Herakl. 609-18, Hipp. 981-2), and we can call
no man happy before death (Andr. 100-2, Herakl. 865-6). No man is completely
happy (Med. 1224-30; Fr. 46; 196). None are happy without aid of the gods
(Fr. 149; Her. 609), and none are happy unless they are prosperous. For this pros-
perity {to. e^o! ayaOd), children are necessary (Andr. 418-20) and wealth is necessary
(Erech. 16-17). Without opportunity it is impossible to perfect and develop one-
self (Fr. 738). Finally, happiness is essentially an activity, for there is no well-being
without well-doing (Fr. 198).
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 45
rules for right conduct, centred and contained in the doctrine of the
Mean, — the very rule-of-hfe which has been brought out so vividly
by our study of Euripides. Then follow the " pre-Theophrastean "
characters, vivid attempts at ethopoiia, and redolent of practical play-
writing. The exhaustive treatment of justice in Book V echoes mathe-
matical theorists and is not exemplified in Euripides; but just because
it is so largely a mere practical calculus for the juryman, its purely
ethical content is slight. The discussion of wisdom, pleasure, and
incontinence is a more purely speculative heritage from the Sophists
and the Academy. The nature of friendship is already in Euripides in
strikingly Aristotelian form.
I conclude, therefore, that we estimate Aristotle's Ethics wrongly
if we treat it as moral speculation. The morality came to his hand
from the Sophists and the stage. Out of it, he made a practical exposi-
tion of human behaviour. The Nicomachean Ethics is not a treatise
on Duty or Obligation or Moral Sanction, but a text-book of psychology
with practical hints on conduct.
POSTSCRIPT ON INDIVIDUALISTIC SYSTEMS
The Greek civilisation perfected itself within rather narrow geo-
graphical bounds. In the fourth century before Christ it began to affect
non-Greek people. Alexander the Great gave a whirlwind impulse to
a movement already begun. By the third century it was widely dis-
seminated through the Mediterranean lands. In extending its appli-
cation it naturally was modified to meet non-Greek conditions. Its
art and literature and material code of life met with severe change,
but endured the test triumphantly; but its ethic failed. At least, it
failed in that form which the Athenian drama had taught and Aristotle
had systematised. City-life grew enormously in these Hellenistic days.
The great towns, like magnets, drew people from the farm and its empty
routine to the energetic idleness of the splendid city-streets. The ex-
tremes of society worked ever further apart. The idle rich and the mob-
swelling poor now first appear as outstanding social factors. With the
increased disparity of level, luxury and want, enjoyment and misery
are more emphatic and more prominent. The poor and wretched cry
out that life is a succession of insupportable evils. The rich revel in
goldsmith's ware and marble-coated houses, in feasting and fine apparel.
What meaning for either of them has the old fifth-century advice to
develop the Self harmoniously and evenly in order to realize all the
inherent potentialities of the organic life which Nature gave us? Es-
pecially to the ill-clothed and ill-fed rabble, this would seem a high-
flown and senseless creed. Something else was needed; Stoicism and
Epicureanism swept the Hellenistic world. The one thought life full
of evil and counselled a high fortitude as man's best armour. The other
saw that enjoyment was still possible and counselled gathering the
roses while we may. Whatever the original philosophy of these creeds,
this seems to have been their practical application. In this form they
fitted their world and gained their votaries. But both talk much of
(l)V(ns, especially Stoicism (though neither can gladly and completely
acquiesce in it); and both must be studied genetically as divergent
growths out of the ethical system which Euripides exemplifies.
This earlier ethic hinged on self-assertion. It was applicable to a
prosperous community, an aristocracy whose material needs were guar-
anteed by slavery. The doctrine had no application to this slave-class
46
THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES 47
itself and was in fact never extended to them even in the broadest
theorising. When an ethic was needed which would apply to both
classes — and for that matter to all mankind — the Greek system
failed. The necessity of that failure is foreshadowed in Euripides.
Constant preoccupation with tragic situations developed in him a sym-
pathy for the unfortunate and an understanding of their suffering which
is completely lacking in the theorising self-absorption of Aristotle.
From the poet we learn what we should never have guessed from the
philosopher, that the Greek ethic, though logically consistent for or-
dinary Greek conditions, in extreme human crises breaks down. An
ethical study of Euripides is consequently of considerable interest
because it defines the range of conditions within which an indi-
vidualistic ethic can be self-consistent and satisfactory. Now, many
of these conditions, after being lost in Hellenistic, Roman, and
Christian times, have reappeared in the very recent world of to-day.
For the first time in centuries, we can apply the lesson of Greek ethics
to ourselves.
As I understand the matter, a fundamental difference between Greek
and Christian ethics derives from the source of moral sanction. Chris-
tian dogma, I presume, reflects the legal tone of Roman civil adminis-
tration and Hebraic religious law : it is essentially imposed, like a corpus
juridicum, by an authority external to the individual. Christ and
Caesar are parallel manifestations, to each of whom must be rendered
what is his due and whatever is demanded by the laws whose adminis-
tration ultimately pinnacles in them. In Christian law the emphasis
shifts from this world to the world hereafter. There is thus a marked
difference from Greek ethical thought.
In general, I should formulate the matter thus: Where there is
the belief in a personal creative Deity and in individual immortalit}^,
there must arise an external non-earthly sanction; without these be-
liefs, the interest must centre in the individual, in the living intelligent
Being, here and now. In the latter case, in a complex community,
Hedonism or Stoicism arises as a personal guide to life, with Utilitarian-
ism, perhaps, as a more impersonal theoretical system; while in a closed
aristocracy or a sociahstic community, the Euripidean and Aristotelian
Individualism will make their appeal.
Now that modern wide-spread prosperity has removed much of the
need for self-suppression, a material condition reappears wherein each
may to some extent live for himself and develop his own faculties to the
utmost. Harmonious and complete development of the various physical
48 THE ETHICS OF EURIPIDES
and intellectual faculties once more becomes the aim in education.
Hence also there is an ever more marked wane of sympathy with some
of the fundamental teachings of Christian dogma, just because self-
development implies self-assertion and an individualistic rather than
altruistic attitude. In political as well as pedagogical theory the same
trend is apparent. Socialism, in its general tenets, makes unbroken
progress. It aims at an increased efficiency in the community, and, for
its ideal, would give every individual the opportunity to realise his
highest possibilities in the social fabric. What is this but the great
doctrine of Greek ethics applied to a more complex community ? Under
a completely triumphant socialism — if the realisation be practicable —
our attitude would approximate that of the Greeks; provided that we
had sufficient sense for form and balance to keep us from the degenera-
tion of excesses. To keep this sense alert and operative was, as we have
seen, the main occupation and value of Greek ethical teaching.
Obviously, self-development can be easily confused with self-inter-
estedness. A self-centred attitude may degenerate into greed and
callow selfishness. Its true character as a high moral system can only
be maintained by a people who realise intuitively that perfection does
not mean the quantitatively greatest, but a difficult and rather subtle
balance between the Too Much and the Too Little. Surely Euripides
realised that for the Greeks this dangerous mistake was possible. Else
why, with all his bold innovations, did he cling so strongly to the old
dramatic theme and show, as rigorously as Aeschylus himself, that
every man however wealthy or well-born, if he confuse self -development
with self-aggrandisement at the expense of others, is punished by the
great law of universal justice with which the gods are merged and into
which they disappear.
VITA
I was born in Cotuit, Massachusetts, August 5, 1889.
I was educated at Trinity School, New York City; Columbia Col-
lege, from which I received the degree of A.B., in 1909; University of
Oxford, England, from which I received the degree of B.A., in 1911,
and of M.A., in 1914, having been appointed Rhodes Scholar from the
State of New York for the years 1908-1911, and having resided at
Oxford during those years as a member of Balliol College. I was ap-
pointed Drisler Fellow in Classical Philology at Columbia University
for the years 1911-12 and 1912-13, spending the second year abroad
as resident member of the American School of Classical Studies at
Athens.
D
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