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All the poetry and romance of the story have disappeared: realism has triumphed. Io is a woman; on the best interpretation of her conduct she is vain and imprudent; she shows herself to strange men, and is carried off by them, although, as the story is at pains, though not very logically, to add, it must have been with her own consent. On the worst interpretation she is a mere wanton. She allows a sea-captain to seduce her, and then deserts her home, her parents, and her native land.
Listen now to schylus---in the beautiful version by Mr. E. R. Bevan:
The story is the same, but the treatment is different, and the two passages illustrate the difference between romantic idealism and realistic depreciation.
But Io, in the Prometheus, is only one of the gallery of schylus' heroines, for in his art women take the foremost place. The dramatist is at variance with his age, and his fervent patriotism is almost the sole bond of union between him and his fellows. schylus is a mystic; he believed in the Delphic inspiration, and took an interest in religious speculation. His contemporaries were materialists, suspected the politics of Delphi, and regarded religion simply as a ceremony. schylus was a conservative in politics, although a liberal in thought; Athens was already becoming an extreme democracy. Finally, schylus bases his theatre on women, and makes them the chief agents[68] of the drama, while the ordinary woman of his time was shut out altogether from the active business of life.
But he is an unconscious feminist, and the definite purpose which we find in Euripides is quite absent from his plays. It shows, however, a strange lack of appreciation to reproach him, as some critics have done, with neglecting the feminine interest. Of the seven tragedies that the Byzantine tradition has preserved for us, four, if their subject was handled by a modern dramatist, would be called feminist problem plays, and in the other three the female characters supply most of the dramatic interest, even though the first idea of the plot might seem to put them in the second plan of action.
Of the lost plays, many, as far as we may judge by their titles and meagre fragments, have the same characteristic. The most famous, the Niobe, had for its central figure the sorrowing mother, such another as Euripides' Hecuba in the first scene of the Trojan Women, and represented perhaps in much the same fashion, for schylus, like most Athenian women, knew full well the dramatic value of silence, and the pathos of Niobe's situation needs no long speeches. So, if we possessed the Callisto, the legend of the maiden changed into a bear, the Penelope, the Iphigenia, or the Oreithyia, that favourite Athenian story of the young girl roaming[69] on the sea-shore and carried off by the fierce god to his northern fastness, we should appreciate even more vividly than we can now the romantic side of the tragedian's art. It is a significant fact in this connection that of the sixty odd titles of lost plays which have come down to us, nearly half are names of women. Moreover, in seventeen of these plays, the title is taken from the chorus, and in the schylean Theatre the chorus is generally the central figure in the dramatic action. Such titles as the 'Daughters of the Sun,' the 'Nurses of Dionysus,' the 'Daughters of Nereus,' and the 'Bacchanal Women,' suggest at any rate romantic plays with a strong feminine interest; such others as the 'Women of the Bedchamber,' the 'Water-carriers,' and the 'Women of Etna,' might well be examples of that realistic treatment of women's life of which we have an example in the Nurse of the 'Libation-bearers.' Arguments drawn merely from the names of lost plays are obviously of little value, except in so far as they strengthen the definite evidence which the existing tragedies supply, but an examination of the remaining seven plays will show that the first and greatest of Athenian dramatists was deeply impressed with the potentialities for good and evil of the female mind.
Of the seven plays of schylus that remain, three---the Seven against Thebes, the Persians, and the Prometheus---are concerned with battles, and with strife among men and among gods. It might be expected that women here would play but a small part, but, as a matter of fact, in two of the three the chorus, the intermediary between poet and audience, is composed of women, and in the third a woman is the chief character.
The Seven against Thebes is a patriotic drama, 'crammed full of the spirit of war,' as the poet himself describes it, and also full of speeches. The male characters talk; what little action there is in the play falls to the women of the chorus. Their first song, for example, when they call on the gods to save them from the ravages of war, was probably accompanied by more vigorous movements than anything in the rest of the tragedy. The unsympathetic male, Eteocles, addresses them, it is true, as 'unbearable creatures' and 'detestable animals,' and says, 'For my own part, I never want to share my house with any womankind, nor take them to[71] my troubles and my joys;' but his remarks are strictly in keeping with his unpleasant character, and the poet instinctively relies on the female characters for his chief dramatic interest. So in the Persians, a chronicle play composed mainly of choral odes and messengers' speeches, the queen-mother, Atossa, takes the first place in the action, and the psychological contrast lies between her womanly strength and Xerxes' manly weakness. In the Prometheus, certainly, most of the characters---gods and demi-gods---are males, but they have little dramatic significance. As far as they are concerned, the play is a good example of what Maeterlinck calls the 'static drama.' The characters stand still, and talk. The action is in the hands of the female characters, the pathetic figure of the wandering cow-maiden, Io, and the contrasted group of the mermaid chorus, the daughters of the sea. These latter are perhaps the most charming of all the poet's creations, and the fragrance that heralds their approach, when, casting away modesty, they venture to appear before a man, spreads through the whole play. Sympathising, but not quite without merriment; inquisitive, but staunch in the hour of danger; they are just such characters as Nausicaa herself.
