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A band of women are pursuing a man over the earth; pursuing relentlessly until he shall die of fatigue. Whenever the pursuit slackens, another woman---or rather her spirit---urges on the chase. The man appeals in vain for help from men, and at last a third woman by skilful diplomacy persuades the avengers---or at least some of them---to agree to a reconciliation.
Such is the schylean theatre; but, as we have said, schylus is a lonely spirit in Athens. The general view of women is represented by the next generation, Pericles, Sophocles, and Thucydides, the greatest statesman, dramatist, and historian of their time. The last of the three is particularly[78] significant. You may read through his History from beginning to end---and if you are a student of affairs you will not find any other book in the world quite so valuable---but, concerning one-half of the human race, you will get scarcely a word. Even in the hortatory speeches, when soldiers are being encouraged to fight for their possessions, women only come in the second place after the children. In the rest of the History they are practically never mentioned.
To Thucydides, women, even such a woman as Aspasia, hardly existed. Politics were to him the serious business, war the great game of life, and in neither of these did women take part. He probably would have agreed with his hero Pericles, 'a woman's highest glory is not to fall below the standard of such natural powers as she possesses: that woman is best of whom there is the least talk among men, whether in the way of praise or blame.'
In his indifference the historian faithfully follows the example of the statesman. Pericles, of whose mistress, Aspasia, we hear so much, and of whose wife, the mother of his sons, we hear so little, appears never to have considered the part that nature has assigned to women in the creation and management of a state. In his day Athens was faced by a war that in one year robbed her of many of the bravest of her sons. A state funeral was given them at which, as Thucydides tells us: 'Any one who[79] wished, stranger or citizen, could be present: even women were there to mourn for their relatives at the grave.' At the end of the ceremony Pericles made that Funeral Oration in praise of Athens of which echoes are to be found in all contemporary Greek literature. Most of the speech dwells resolutely on the glory of these heroic deaths and the grandeur of the sacrifices made, but at the last the orator condescends to human feeling and addresses some noble words of comfort to the men before him, taking them in succession as fathers, sons, and brothers of the dead. Then comes the one final cold sentence addressed not to the mothers, but to the widows in his audience: 'a few words of advice,' Pericles calls it, and it is the language of reproof rather than that of sympathy.
Their ignorance of women made even the greatest minds in Athens insensible to women's true position, and in the case of Thucydides there is a further reason. When the historian came to compose his work he was too bitterly disillusioned to concern himself with anything but his main subject, the failure of Athens to maintain the Periclean system. In a world where blind chance seemed to rule and the highest political ideals went unrealised, the social position of women may well have seemed to him a trifle.
But Thucydides' testimony is chiefly negative:[80] we get clearer evidence from Sophocles. Sophocles is the typical Athenian, versatile and ingratiating, 'eutrapelos, eukolos.' Actor, poet, priest, and general, he was one of the most popular men of his time---with men. Of his family life we have not quite such a brilliant picture. His wife is one of the many anonymous women, the wives of great men. His children did not apparently regard their father with as much affection as did the outside world, and in his old age tried to deprive him of the control of his property. As to women, and the softer affections of life, outside his own writing we have the anecdote in Plato's Republic. The poet in his old age was asked how he felt in regard to love: 'Hush, hush,' he replied; 'I have escaped and right gladly. I feel like a slave who has escaped from a mad master.'
That was the feeling which the conditions of life at Athens engendered. Woman and woman's love was a necessary weakness: happy the man who could break free, and if we believe the stories in Athenus, Sophocles also in escaping from women fell into the Ionian snare. In his plays women are generally a negligible quantity; at least the only women whom he succeeds in making lifelike are the slave women, the ministering angels like Deianira and Tecmessa who meekly respect their master's words, 'oft dinned into their ears'---'Woman, for women silence is the finest robe.'
Tecmessa, beautiful character though she is, and far superior to Ajax in moral strength, has no independent existence apart from her lord and master. Deianira, deserted by her errant husband, has no thought of resentment: she only wants to get her master back, and is prepared to stoop to any means if she may regain his company. And it is obvious that these two ladies, who would make a modern woman despair, are Sophocles' ideals of feminine excellence.
Of the other plays, the dipus Tyrannus contains only one woman character---Jocasta; the mother married to her own son, a dreadful figure, and one almost impossible to dramatise successfully. In the play she takes only a minor part, and her silent exit is the most effective touch; but it is interesting here to compare Sophocles with Euripides, who in the Phnician Women does succeed in making Jocasta a real and most pathetic figure. The dipus at Colonus has the two girls, Antigone and Ismene, but they are sexless and dramatically only important as types of girlish devotion. The Philoctetes, like the two dipus plays, has a male chorus and alone among Greek tragedies, if we except the Rhesus, has no female characters. It is also, whatever the reason, the dullest play we possess.
There remain the Electra and the Antigone, and the first of these is a signal example of the importance[82] for a dramatist of choice of subject. schylus and Euripides have both left us plays dealing with the same story, and a comparison with the three tragedies will reveal the essential differences between the three poets. A dramatist must share---imaginatively at least---in his characters' thoughts; and women like Clytemnestra and Electra were so beyond the range of Sophocles' experience and sympathy that he is quite unable to make them live. Like everything that Sophocles wrote, the Electra is full of literary accomplishment. The epic method, for example, is most ingeniously adapted to the theatre, and a vivid narrative of the chariot race in which Orestes is supposed to meet his death forms the centre of the play, but there is no real grip on the dramatic situation: it is literature, not life.
In the Antigone, on the other hand, the poet is dealing with a subject thoroughly congenial to his temperament, the conflict between law and the individual, and one independent of sex, and the play is a magnificent example of his art.
Here certainly the central figure is a woman, or, at least, a girl; but the interest does not depend upon her sex, for little dramatic use is made of the Hmon episode. It is not her sex but her social position that affects the problem of the play, a problem vital enough in itself without any sex interest---'How far is an individual justified in[83] setting his or her conscience against the law of the State?'
