nature and the world of man in greek literature

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Nature and the World of Man in Greek LiteratureAuthor(s): Charles Paul SegalSource: Arion, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1963), pp. 19-53Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162818 .

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NATURE AND THE WORLD OF MAN IN GREEK LITERATURE

Charles Paul Segal

IfflS IS AN ATTEMPT TO SKETCH THE

changing conception of the relations between man and nature in

the Archaic period, in fifth-century tragedy, and in the fourth

century and the beginnings of pastoral as a literary form. It is obvious that any division of a culture into periods' will inevitably neglect certain

overlappings from one 'age'

to another and per

haps overemphasize differences when much is unchanged

vice versa. It is far from my intention to insist on any all

determining Zeitgeist; I hope only that the general framework,

oversimplified as it here must be, may illuminate some

aspect of

particular works or genres and clarify some of the constants in

the Greek view of man's position in the world. I shall not attempt to develop any strikingly new theories, but simply to present, in

synthetic fashion, certain continuities and contrasts that need

constant reemphasis.

'Nature' is taken here in its broadest sense, as the forces and

elements of the non-human world which form man's environment

20 NATURE AND THE WORLD OF MAN IN GREEK LITERATURE

and Ue beyond his control. Hence this essay will be concerned also with the problem of human control as felt and stated in the three

periods under consideration. As a 'problem,' this topic arises

properly only in the Classical period, with man's heightened awareness of his central position in the world and his confidence in his power. Here, however, I wish to stress the continuing effect

of certain aspects of the Archaic attitude, the sense of amechania,

helplessness, lack of 'device,' which provide a formative basis for Greek tragedy in so far as tragedy reasserts the limitations of man and his enclosure within a framework or an order which trans

cends his humanity and cannot be comprehended by it. There can be seen a

general movement from the acceptance of human

helplessness in the Archaic period to a more optimistic attitude of control in the Classical period, which is corrected, or balanced

by survivals of the Archaic attitude as they are expressed and modified in tragedy. In the fourth century man's confidence in his human powers and their creations is supreme, but in the more complex and highly urbanized civiUzation of the early Hellenistic period there arises a desire to reestablish some of the

simpler ties with nature that were felt in the past, and this desire

helps create the new literary form of pastoral poetry.

I ARCHAIC

It is difficult to speak with certainty and precision of the re lation of the human and natural, or non-human, worlds in the

Archaic period. Many of the attitudes labelled 'Archaic' are doubt less survivals from the darker past that followed the break-up of

Mycenaean civiUzation and first find Uterary expression here.

Some are basic Hellenic or even Mediterranean attitudes which

continue throughout the whole history of Greek culture. Still, the

predominant emphasis which certain ideas receive and the fre

quency and intensity with which they are expressed are of some

significance, especially when they seem to reflect an essential

unity of outlook. In the Archaic period this outlook is marked by a

strong sense of the mystery of the non-human world and the

feebleness of man; but, as will appear, it is not altogether nega tive or

gloomy. The pecuUar character of the Archaic attitudes, as

expressed in the literature, is defined, in part, by contrast with what pre cedes it. Consider the following two passages from Homer. At the end of the seventh book of the Iliad the gods look with uneasiness and amazement at the wall of the Greeks, 'the great

work of the bronze-corseted Achaeans,' and Poseidon addresses

Father Zeus, is there any mortal left on the wide earth who will still declare to the immortals his mind and his pur

pose? Do you not see how now these flowing-haired Achaians

Charles Paul Segal 21

have built a wall landward of their ships, and driven about it a ditch, and not given to the gods any grand sacrifice? Now the fame of this will last as long as dawnlight is

scattered, and men will forget that wall which I and Phoibos Apollo built with our hard work for the hero Laomedon's city.

( 7.446-53)1 Zeus reassures him and gives him leave to level the wall 'when the Achaeans depart with their ships to their dear homeland.'

Then at the beginning of Book 12, Homer describes the actual destruction of the wall, 'built against the will of the gods,' after the sack of Troy:

. . . Then at last Poseidon and Apollo took counsel to wreck the wall, letting loose the strength of rivers upon it, all the rivers that run to the sea from the mountains of Ida,

Rhesos and Heptaporos,

Karesos and Rhodios, Grenikos and Aisepos,

and immortal Skamandros,

and Simoeis, where much ox-hide armour and helmets were

tumbled in the river mud, and many of the race of the half-god

mortals.

Phoibos Apollo turned the mouths of these waters together and nine days long threw the flood against the wall, and Zeus

rained

incessantly, to break the wall faster and wash it seaward. . . .

Thus, afterwards, Poseidon and Apollo were minded to put things in place, but at this time battle and clamour

were blazing about the strong-founded wall. . . .

(12.17-26, 34-36) The first passage emphasizes the force and achievement of the

heroes, able to threaten, indeed almost defy the gods. In this

epic view, everything is concentrated upon the individual hero in the man-enobling war: he stands out by the force of his will and the violence of his passions. The second passage begins to involve a somewhat different, perhaps

more reflective attitude, one which sees the great heroic deeds as part of a remote past, the visible traces of which have been destroyed. Here the gods join with the forces of nature, the rivers of the Troad, so beauti

fully enumerated and powerfully marshalled, to obliterate the work of man. The temporal view here is larger, and the possi biUties of lasting human creation seem weak and small against the sheer brute force of the natural world:

'Poseidon turned the rivers again to make their way down

the same channel where before they had run the bright stream of their water'

' ( 12.32-33).

Nature is not necessarily wilfully or cruelly destructive; it simply claims back its own with an irresistible inevitabiUty.

The first passage depicts the epic world in its full power; the second begins to foreshadow man's vision of himself against the

non-human powers in the Archaic age. In the world of the Iliad

both views exist simultaneously and are indispensable for the fullness of its tragedy and the truth of its humanity. In the Archaic

period the second view dominates.

The change can already be seen in the Odyssey. The non

human, supernatural world is more powerful and autonomous.

The hero has still his human intelligence and courage; but though they save him from total destruction, they cannot mitigate the losses he and his men suffer at the hands of monsters like the

Cyclops, Scylla, the Laestrygonians. And often he is saved only by the intervention of powers beyond his ken: Leucothea in Book 5, Hermes in Book 10. The hero who is poly m?chanos,

'of many devices,' comes to know also the state of amechania,

'helplessness.' The word first occurs in this sense in Greek to describe Odysseus in the Cyclops' cave (9.295). Odysseus comes into his own, his powers have full play, only on his return to the human world. But the powers of the supernatural world are

overwhelming, and against them the epic hero shrinks back to human size.

This reduction to human size, however, leaves Archaic man

free for a more intensely personal experience of his world and his human situation.2 He is no

longer under any obUgation to

'lieroic" standards; and thus Archilochus can speak

in a jocular

vein of throwing away his shield: 'Let the shield go; I shall buy another no worse' (frag. 6 Diehl). Instead, the Archaic poet

present his relationship to the world as he experiences it himself, in terms of his passions,

as in Archilochus, Sappho, or Alcaeus;

or his poignantly felt sense of age, change, and death, often mixed

with a sense of futiUty and disappointment, as in Mimnermus,

Theognis, or Simonides; or his experienced wisdom fused with the traditional sayings about justice and injustice, the ways of

men and gods, as in Hesiod, Solon, or Pindar.

While the Homeric world is populated by a large, but not

overwhelming number of divine figures who are for the most part well defined, with definite, easily grasped and specific person aUties and functions, the Archaic world is full of countless, less defined presences whose interrelations are often vague and mys terious. Hesiod speaks of the 'thirty thousand immortal spirits,

who keep watch for Zeus and all that men do' (Op. 252ff.).3 These presences were felt, doubtless, in Homer's age as well, but

have no place

in the epic presentation of the world. Hesiod,

however, feels them penetrating even the most minute matters of

daily Ufe, and they lurk behind the long list of taboos at the end of the Works and Days:

Never stand upright and make water

facing the sun,

but only, remember, when he has set, or before his rising.

Do not, when in your house, ever show yourself near the hearthside when you are

physically unclean, but keep away from it. Do not, when you have come back

from an ill-omened burial,

beget children, but when you come from a feast of the immortals. Never wade through the pretty ripples of perpetually flowing rivers, until you have looked at their lovely waters, and prayed to them, and washed your hands in the pale enchanting water. For if one wades a river unwashed of hands

and unwashed of wickedness the gods are outraged at him, and give him pains for the future . . .

Never, when you are building

a house, leave rough edges on it, for fear a raucous crow may perch there, and croak at you.

(Op. 727-47, with omissions) Such feelings of uncertainty and caution toward all aspects of the nonhuman world probably persist in some stratum of the

population or in the popular religion throughout the Hellenic

civiUzation; here, however, they are important enough and

strongly enough felt to emerge in Uterary form, indeed in the

meter and language of the Homeric epics. There is a strong

of the totally incomprehensible, met and formulated in a pre rational way.

This setting of human existence in a world of undefinable and uncontrollable forces stamps much of Archaic Uterature with a

general pessimism. Hesiod projects all happiness into the past, the remote Golden Age, and wishes he had not been born into the present age, an age of iron (Op. 175-78). The gods have themselves malevolently devised evils for men in Pandora, and 'Zeus the deviser' (parlera Zeu?) has taken away the voice of the

diseases which steal upon men in the night and 'there is no way to avoid what, 'Zeus intended' (Op. 102-5). 'Full is the earth of

woes, full the sea,' says Hesiod in a Une heavy with spondaic rhythms (irX?r? pkv yap y ala Kcwctw, irke?rj 8? 6?\a&aa, Op. 101). The beginnings of this attitude can again be found in the

Odyssey. In an unusually reflective moment,4 Odysseus declares,

'Earth bears nothing more frail than a man, of all things that breathe or creep upon the earth' (18.130). Archaic poetry deep ens this pessimistic evaluation of the human situation:

Of all things not to be born is best for mortals, and not to see the rays of the

sharp-burning sun,

but, if born, to pass as quickly as possible the gates of Hades and to lie with much earth heaped up above.

(Theognis 425-28) The echoing of this passage at the very end of the fifth century, in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus ( 1224ff. ), exempUfies the con

tinuity of such 'Archaic' sentiments into Greek tragedy. The essence of human Ufe is flux and uncertainty: 'Since you

are a man, never say what will happen tomorrow, for not even

of a long-winged fly is the change so swift,' says Simonides (frag. 6D). Men are fearful of any attempt to control the unpredict abiUty of their world. Thus Hesiod, after a careful Ust of pre cautions about saiUng, adds that he who follows them will be

saved, 'unless Poseidon, the shaker of the earth, of his own voU

tion, or Zeus king of the immortals, wishes to destroy him; for with them rests fulfilment (telos) of good and bad equally' (Op. 665-69). The telos, the end, as well as the fulfilment, lies with the gods. Man does not know how an action will end. Hence Solon's advice to Croesus: 'In every matter look to the end' (Hdt. 1.32), and the oft repeated maxims: 'Look to the end always,' 'Count no man happy until the final day.'

It is better to wait for the gifts of the gods than to pursue success too

eagerly and thus run the risk of hybris, man's over

stepping of his human limits (see Hesiod, Op. 320; Solon 1.9ff.). It is wiser to conform to the structure of the world than to try to

control the world. Thus the human act never emerges totally free and independent of the enclosing supra-human forces, as the

Archaic kouros never completely emerges from the frontal,

squared block, constrained, as it were, by the pressures of the

world around it, though beginning to step out with wonder and

curiosity to discover just what these forces are.

The Archaic world, though mysterious, has nevertheless a

strong coherence in all its parts. This coherence is perhaps most

strongly felt in the connection between moral action and the proc esses of the physical world. The gods who are the upholders of

moral laws are also the governors of the processes of nature: rain,

fertiUty of crops and flocks, sudden, violent disturbances Uke storms or floods. In one sense the gods almost are the natural

world; they are felt in the sea, the sun, mountains, woods, trees.

Yet they have a moral as well as a physical existence. Thus the

Horae, the daughters of Zeus, are traditionally connected with the seasons, but in Hesiod they are also personifications of moral

qualities: their names are Lawfulness (Eunomia), Justice (Dike), and Peace (Eirene). The beginnings of this interrelation between the moral and "natural" functions of the gods can be seen in the

Iliad, in the violent storm which Zeus sends when he is angry at men for their crooked judgments (16.384-92). By the time of

Solon, the interrelation is more explicit and morally pointed: he

gives this incidental thought in Homer's simile a new emphasis and moral significance in using it to describe the suddenness of the punishment that comes from Zeus ( 1.18ff.).

Because of this coherence of the moral and physical spheres, morality itself is seen not so much in terms of abstract, internal

principles as concrete, external acts. All action is thus in a sense

moral action, for every human act bears somehow upon man's re

lation with the innumerable nonhuman powers around him. It is

again the feeUng expressed in the taboos at the end of the Works and Days. The natural world itself, if not felt as actually a Uving body, is full of living presences which respond in one area to im balances or disturbances in another. The human act, therefore, can bring inevitable physical repercussions in the natural world.

An act which violates some aspect of the order of the world is, therefore, doubly dangerous, for one does not know where the

repercussions will come. Guilt is an external thing, a violation of

the balance of nature; the balance must be restored, and no man

knows how or when:

One man pays at once, another later; but as for those who

themselves escape, those not responsible (anaitioi) pay for the deeds, either their children or their race hereafter.

(Solon 1.29ff.) Again the unpredictable: individual moral action can be over whelmed by forces beyond a man's control or comprehension, beyond the limits of his own life.

The deed of sin is something concrete, and engenders concrete results: a

pollution or uncleanliness, a miasma or agos. Unless

cleansed (and the means of cleansing become gradually moral

rather than physical or ritual), the pollution breaks out in de structive, virulent manifestations that can affect the whole society,

usually through some interference with the natural cycles of Ufe in barrenness, plague, blight, earthquake, etc.5 The situation is

even more terrible and less controllable because one can harbor a miasma without knowing it?at least until its effects begin to

appear. Here again the continuity with tragedy is significant, for

the concepts of inherited guilt and pollution from a past crime, whatever force they continue to have in the actual reUgious thought and practice of the fifth century, play a large part in

shaping the material of its tragedies. Tragedy gives a deepened aesthetic significance to the essentially reUgious basis of these ideas in their Archaic form: the sense of the unknown and the terrible, which is beyond man and which impinges upon and sometimes destroys

This relation of Archaic man to his world has bequeathed a

perhaps equally important, if less tangible, heritage to fifth-cen

tury tragedy. The sense of the physical repercussions of the hu man act and the uncertainty of the results, save that there will be

results, surround human action, as already seen, with an aura of

danger. Yet in the ability to maintain this sense of danger and

uncertainty lies a characteristic Hellenic courage. The Archaic

period develops no clearly formulated or dogmatic moral theory, and in refusing to do so, it leaves the way open for the deeper

moral probings of the tragedians. The moral issues have to be faced with their full intensity in each case as it arises; everything

must be examined anew with all the questions still sharp and

unanswered, all the pain and jaggedness still in them. There are no abstract formulas, no

reassuring faith to smooth off the edges. Archaic man lives in a state of unresolved moral tension which demands continual alertness and willingness to look at the uni verse as unstructured. The embodiment and deepening of this attitude in Greek tragedy are one of the sources of its power and should warn us of the danger of finding in it neat and easy moral lessons.

What must be stressed is that the moral and physical, the re

Ugious and secular aspects of human Ufe were not yet separated.6 Their connections are

especially clear and powerful

in an agricul

tural society, almost totally dependent on the rhythms of the natural world and hence especially careful of action that would violate those rhythms. Here family, individual, and state are all linked by a common dependence on these uncontrollable proc

esses and protected by the same moral sanctions. Men's physical

well-being is closely connected with the moral soundness of their

society as embodied in the righteous judgments and good govern ment of their ruler or king. It is not simply the physical perfection of the king that expresses and insures the flourishing of the so

ciety, as at a less developed ethical stage, but his moral excellence. The moral significance of the relation between king, people, and the bounty of the natural world is already asserted in the Odyssey.

Odysseus (in disguise) compares Penelope's fame to that of some blameless king who godlike in his rule among men

many and strong maintains good judgments (eudikias), and the black earth bears wheat and barley and the trees are

heavily laden with fruit, and the flocks bear young without fail and the sea furnishes fish from his good government, and the people fare well under him. (19.109-14)

Hesiod develops a similar connection, widening the range of those

responsible (Op. 225-37); and, immediately following (238 47), with a more expUcit moral point he develops the negative side, the results of unjust action, famine, plague, barrenness.

The evil act has a physical reaUty, then, which disrupts the

closely compacted order of the natural and human worlds, the

'topocosm,' the total environment with which man and his city must stand in

Ufe-giving relation.7 This interp?n?tration of man's

moral life and the vital processes of his world is expressed even in the language of Archaic poetry

as one of its recurrent meta

phors. It has already been seen in the storm passage of Iliad 16; but it first becomes explicit as an element of the language itself, a basic condition reflected in diction and imagery, in the highly

moralistic context of the Hesiod passage just cited. Here the

righteous city 'blooms' (r?OrjXe) and its people 'flower' (?vOevcrw, Op. 227). The metaphor receives still deeper moral significance when Solon (3.35) applies it not to men and cities, but to the moral

principles themselves: 'Lawfulness (Eunomia) withers the grow ing flowers of infatuation (ate).' In so unified a conception of the

world, the metaphor is almost a reality and testifies to the realms with which human action and morality are indissolubly con nected. Even at a more advanced stage (toward which Solon

points), when the moral principles themselves and not the physi cal results are the central concern, the areas invoked by this half

literal, half-metaphorical language serve to indicate the immen

sity of the violation, the horror of the natural forces being checked

by the unnatural. Evil action, when stated in these ethical and

linguistic formulations, becomes seen as a check to the processes of life itself.

Even in the more rationaUstic systems of early natural philoso

phy the sense of the coherence and vitality of the world persists. Here the world is a kosmos, an ordered structure operating by certain explicable physical principles; yet a sense of the mystery and a reverence for the vitality of the processes of the universe are not lost. The early Presocratic thinkers still use hymnic lan

guage to describe their new physical principles, thus transferring to them the terms traditionally appUed to the gods.8

Here too there is a close coherence between the physical proc esses of nature and the moral demands of human life. Physical and moral laws are

essentially the same; the two realms are still

inseparable. Thus Anaximander's sole surviving sentence reads, 'But from whatever is the genesis of the things that are, into these

they must pass away according to

necessity; for they must pay the penalty (dike) and make atonement (tisis) to one another for their injustice (adikia) according to Time's decree (taxis)' (B 1 Diels-Kranz). And so Heraclitus (B 94) 'Helios will not

overstep (his) measures (metra); otherwise the Erinyes, allies of Zeus, will find him out.'

These thinkers too can still conceive of the world in mythical, semipersonal terms, as full of divine beings. Parmenides began his poem 'On Nature' (?) with a mythical account of the journey to 'the gate of the paths of Night and Day,' with reminiscences from Homer and Hesiod.9 Empedocles still gives his four elements

mythical names, and the motivating forces in the cyclical revolu tions of his universe are the half-personified Strife and Love, the latter of whom he even calls Aphrodite (B 17, 24). Despite

enormous differences, there is still a certain continuity here with

the world of Hesiod, where the cosmic powers lie with one an

other and beget all the substances of the world, where Earth, like a fruitful woman, bears a numerous progeny (see e.g., Theogony

126ff). The whole of the universe is pervaded by life and per sonaUty, in Hesiod sexual life, in the Presocratics moral Ufe. The

world is not approached in simply materiaUstic, purely physical terms. It is not physical' in the sense in which Democritean phys ics, or modern physics, understands the term. Everything is still 'full of gods,' as Tha?es says, and their Ufe pervades the world, is immanent in its structure. It is only with the philosophers of the

Classical period, with Diogenes of Apollonia, with Anaxagoras, with the nameless and sexless atoms of Democritus that the nat

ural world loses its divine, and hence Ufe-filled, character.10

Man is an organic part of this organic world. As a part he stands in the relation not of the controller to the controlled, but of the receiver to that which gives. As a part too he is helpless against the whole and must move with it; yet even his relation of

helplessness has a personal aspect. Thus well over a

century after

Tha?es predicted an eclipse and a generation before Anaxagoras was to ?describe the sun as a molten stone, Pindar can still invoke

as living and terrible the powers behind a solar ec?pse: O Beam of the sun, you who search out all things, mother of sight in men, with what intention did you devise the

brightest star to be robbed of light in day time? Why have

you reduced to nought and helplessness (amechanon) the

force of men and the road of wisdom, speeding along a dark ened track? Are you driving upon us some

strange fate, un

known of time before? I entreat you, in the name of Zeus,

you swift driver of the steeds of the sun, turn to some happi

ness without pain for Thebes, Lady Goddess, this image of terror for all mankind.

(Paean 9.1-10, dated to 463 b.c.)11 Human life, moreover, is not only subject

to the forces and

rhythms of the natural world, but can even be described in terms of them. The sense of this connection between man's Ufe and the broader vitaUty of his world is as old as Homer's comparison of men to 'the generation of leaves' (II. 6.146-49). Pindar carries this feeUng further and draws upon an even broader and more

pervasive aspect of nature's Ufe and death in comparing the alter

nation of excellence in successive generations with the rhythms of the fruitfulness of the earth:

The old excellences are borne up again, changing their

strength with the generations of men; and not even do the black fields give their fruit in succession, nor do the fruit trees wish to bear their fragrant flowers with equal yield of

wealth in all the turnings of the year, but in alternating measure. So too does fate (moira) lead on the human race.

(Nem. 11.37-43; see alsoNem. 6.8-11) Man's subjection to the natural forces and movements of his

world has, then, its positive side too. It makes possible a more

acceptant attitude toward its potential richness. Hesiod accepts the possibility of receiving from the gods the vision of their beauty and the power to sing of it (see Theogony 30ff.), and Pindar

hopes to gain a sense of the fruitful powers behind beautiful

things through 'Lady Hora, messenger of Aphrodite's ambrosial

loves, you who sit on the eyelids of girls and young men' (Nem. 8.1-2). This Hora is one of the mythical figures connected with the bloom and vitaUty of the natural world and their communica tion to men; and this communication is felt in terms of the proc esses of growth and life, as Pindar expresses it later in this ode

(40-42) in his comparison of the growth of human excellence

(areta) to the dew-freshened vine reaching up into the liquid air. The feeUng of participation in a coherent whole finds positive

expression too in much of the sensuous vividness of archaic po

etry and art: the richness of detail in the Homeric Hymns, Sappho, Alem?n, Ibycus, in sculpture like the Siphnian frieze, in the lov

ingly carved hair decoration or volutes of ear and ornament in the Ionion kouroi or, indeed, the Ionic capital. Details of this Uving

world are held in the immediacy of their sensuous presence. With the more rationaUstic order of the Classical period, however, this

pleasure in the naive fullness of detail is superseded by a demand for clarity of organization in the total structure. The concreteness of the myth yields to the greater abstraction of the logos; the additive richness of the 'strung style' and parataxis gives way to the more rigorous logic afforded by antithesis and subordination.

Still, in the very late archaic period, and especially in the later odes of Pindar, there comes a balanced sense of human poten

tiality and the powers of the natural world. Man becomes fully aware of his position and limitations amid the rhythmic move

ments of his surroundings and accepts them, not so much with

resignation as with tranquiUty and

understanding. He envisions

the possibiUty of maintaining this balance within himself and thus becoming beautiful through his limitation and his humanity. Pindar expresses this feeling in a late poem, the seventh Isthmian. He speaks first of a young man 'breathing out his well-flowering time of life' in the field of battle, and then of himself:

I suffered grief not to be told; but now the Earth-shaker granted to me calm weather

out of storm. I shall sing, fitting my hair with crowns. But let not the envy of the immortals disturb

whatever ephemeral joy I pursue proceeding calmly into old age and the fated time of Ufe. For all alike we die; only the daemon (of our luck) is un

equal. (37-43) The Archaic attitude finds its fruition in this sense of reconciU ation between man and his world. Man is aware of his position

both as man and as a part of a

larger whole, with the movements

of which he must suffer. This attitude seems almost to anticipate the humanism of the

high Classical period, but it is more humble and more resigned. Order comes from outside man, and man

accepts it. For the

Classical period, 'man is the measure,' and order comes from

within man himself. Man determines the structure of reality, as

on the Parthenon frieze the rhythms of the human participants form and define the totaUty of their world, give it its texture and

scale; they seem to lend their radiance to the gods, with whom they are almost united in dignity and beauty.

II ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL

Man becomes the measure of all things in the Classical period in part by dismissing or reducing in significance the non-human, semi-animate and animistic powers of the Archaic world. He be

gins to describe and confront the world in terms of processes that bear firmly the stamp of human ratiocinative power. Thus Thucyd ides rejects the mythical in favor of rational inference and gen eric laws based upon human nature (see Thuc. 1.22). Man's

past is seen in terms of man himself, 'the human element' (to

anthropinon) ; and hence it will be useful for men to come to know their past, for they

can hope also to understand their pres

ent. There is no place here for the intervention of gods, for divine

'envy' or wrath; man is a free and autonomous agent, able to con

sider his past and his future, for both are bound together by this human element.

Similar differences between Archaic and Classical appear in the art of the two periods. The Archaic kouros steps out with wonder into a world full of divine powers from which its own life derives; the Classical figure has its Ufe entirely within its human form and

with it animates rather than draws upon its environment. The

kouros is full of energies that are striving to burst forth, but the structure of its body does not indicate exactly how or in what

measure they will be released. The Classical figure, on the other

hand, gives a fuller sense of its expUcabiUty in human terms; it is an integrated human organism which reveals unambiguously the

paths of its energies along its Umbs and muscles and the origins of these energies in human bone and sinew. Lacking this degree of human expUcabiUty, the kouros stands itself as one of the divine

presences of which the world is full. The thinkers of the Classical period no longer see divine or

moral forces in action behind the processes of the natural world,

but find it comprehensible, and hence controllable, in terms of

physical and rational laws and properties. The medical thought of the period well represents the new spirit. In the work On the Sacred Disease sickness is not

regarded as a moral or divine

punishment, the manifestation of dike or tisis, but as the result of a natural disturbance or a physiological imbalance: no disease is

more 'divine' than any other; 'they are all divine and all human; each has its nature (physis) and its effective property (dynamis) in itself' (21).12

As in the natural and biological world men begin to extend their area of control, so too in the poUtical and social world. The

Sophists begin to question the foundations of human society in the old, god-sanctioned traditions and begin

to introduce new

rationalistic criteria. Whereas Aeschylus still has his SuppUants rely

as much on the altar and the reverence of the gods (Saip?v^v

ae?as) as on the political strength and order of the state (see

Suppl. 83ff, 184ff), the Sophists shift the focus to the state as a human creation, to man's active and rational capacities, his abiUty to create his own poUtical and social order. In the thought of

Hippodamus of Miletus, for example, one of the first to speculate on new constitutional forms, is well reflected this idea of man's

creating his own social environment and reforming his institutions in accordance with rationally discovered principles and concepts of human nature.13 And this same

Hippodamus speculated on and

executed ideas of reforming man's physical environment also in

the grid-form city plans which he is said to have carried out in the Piraeus and perhaps at Thurii. During his activity in Athens and its colony at Thurii, he is, of course, in contact with Pericles, himself the embodiment of the new movement, the sponsor of its monument to itself, the redesigned Acropolis and the Parthenon. For what it is worth, one scholar has noted that in his first three

great speeches in the first two books of Thucydides, he never

once uses the word 'god'; instead, man reveres his own creation, the city.14

This clearer definition of the external world leads also to a clearer and more

emphatic definition of the internal. Man be

comes aware of his uniqueness as a

thinking being, of the psy

chological dimensions of his existence, with a self-consciousness

previously absent. Thus Democritus finds internal, human moti

vations behind man's sense of the supra-human, and speculates on

the psychological bases of religious feeUngs.15 It is, above all, in Classical tragedy that the new psychological

interest expresses itself. Yet at the same time tragedy balances the new humanistic focus with the continuing Archaic sense of the

powers of the non-human. Such continuities in the ancient world are strong, especially in a society which remains essentially de

pendent on the soil and the rhythms of nature, a society in which there occurred no industrial revolution to Umit significantly man's

helplessness before the uncontrollable. In the great ode on human

progress and control in the Antigone Sophocles has still a strong sense of the final unconquerable: 'From Hades alone he will not

bring in means of escape' (361); and, as will appear later, the

subsequent course of the play is a long and painful quaUfication of the apparent or ironic optimism of this ode.

As the tragedians never tire of pointing out, the rational move

ment could not answer the questions of human existence or re

solve the imponderables of human Ufe. The mysterious and ani mistic powers of the Archaic world are absorbed, only to break forth again in new, violent forms, often in terms of the self- de structiveness of man. 'The demonic world has withdrawn,' as

Dodds put it, leaving man alone with his

passions.'16 This re

crudescence of the demonic, however, can be seen in part as re

emergence of the Archaic heritage, the sense of the terrible and the uncontrolled, now internaUzed in man himself and given tragic focus in his own emotions and will. The tragic view is thus the fullest and most poignant expression of the confrontation of the Archaic with the Classical; it is the reward gained and the

price paid for man's splitting apart his traditional world, for sup planting the divine with the human. It is no accident, therefore, that hybris, man's presumptuous self-assertion over what he

should not or cannot control, is perhaps the single chief theme of Greek tragedy.

m tragedy

It is natural that tragedy should express these connections with

the non-human and supra-human worlds, for the tragic perform ance remains essentially

a ritual situation, part of the festival of

Dionysus, which contained such primitive and unsophisticated fertility symboUsm as the carrying of great phalloi, and, Uke all ancient rituals, affirmed the fruitful connection of the human

world, the community, and the powers of nature. The setting also in which the plays

were performed often affirms this connec

tion: the Greek theater is not the Roman deep half-cyUnder en closed upon itself,17 but includes the hillside into which it is cut, the circle of the heavens above, and the often dramatic land

scapes beyond. In dealing with the natural world in Greek tragedy, I shaU focus

in part (but not exclusively) upon a single element, the sea, as it

appears in a few plays of the three tragedians. The sea is, of

course, one aspect of the natural world with which Greek Ufe had

always to reckon. Vast, impenetrable, powerful, it could well em

body all the forces of the elemental. Its multiple significance is

present from earUest times; it is the sea by which Achilles sits alone in the Iliad, with which his mother Thetis (and even he

himself, see 16.34) are associated; and the sea which Odysseus must cross and recross to reach home. Its destructive force has

already been seen in Hesiod (Op. 665ff); its Ufe-giving poten tials in the Odyssey (19.113). It is the sea which heads the list of

man's conquests in the Antigone (334ff). In its strangeness and

familiarity, its destructive force and life-giving richness, it can well exemplify all the power of the natural world.

In the Archaic period, the terror and force of the sea are

grasped in their immediate and direct impact, as in this fragment of Archilochus:

T\avx> opa' ?aOvs y?p r?hr) Kvpxvjiv rapacrcrcTat

ttovtos, ap(?>\ h OLKpa Tvp?wv opObv toTarat ve(f>o$,

(TTJfia ̂ ctjLt?Jvo?' Kixdvet 8 e? ?cAti-ti^s cfro?os.

Glaucus, look, for now the sea is disturbed deep in its waves, and around the heights of Gyrae a cloud rises up straight, the sign of storm. And from the suddenness fear lays hold

of us. (frag. 56D) The direct address, 'Glaucus, look!' and the breath-stop it necessi tates emphasize the suddenness, the fearful immediacy of the

presence of the angry sea.18 In Aeschylus' Oresteia, however, the

sea has a further significance. Aeschylus is often taken, with justi fication, as a

bridge between Archaic and Classical. He is con

cerned with human will and passion, but as they appear against the decrees of the gods and the requirements of divine justice.

He wishes to discover the harmonious place of man amid the

Olympian and chthonic powers that govern the world. Writing the Oresteia at a time when the constitutional reforms carried by Ephialtes and the young Pericles were about to launch Athens into the new period known as the Classical, he hopes to reconcile the older sense of the 'terrible,' the reverence for what is beyond

man (see Eumen. 517ff, 696ff), with the coming rationalism, the confident exaltation of man. The sea in the Oresteia

figures in this

reconciliation. It reflects man's relation with the powers of the

non-human. Its significance centers not about matters of fertiUty

or survival, but the problems of divine justice. It is perhaps more 'real' and more

important for its symbolical associations with the

cosmic order than for its physical power, although this power is

inseparable from its symboUcal significance. The sea as part of the natural world in the trilogy is invoked,

then, not only for what it is in itself, but as a part of the cosmic scale against which the meaning of the human act can be read.

Thus the sea reflects Agamemnon's moral violations, the hybris which leads to his destruction. He must sacrifice his daughter to cross the sea. He sends the news of victory

over the sea by

of the beacons (Ag. 281ff), using the element antithetical to sea, fire, to conquer it and transmit the prideful news of his achieve

ment. Fire suggests another sinister aspect of his success in the

bodies brought back as ashes, cremated by fire (438ff), the cost that others pay for the general's glory. Sea and fire have been

made to serve human pride, and they reply with the destructive

potential of which they are capable. They join together to destroy the returning conquerors:

For they, of old the deepest enemies, sea and fire,

made a conspiracy and gave the oath of hand

to blast in ruin our unhappy Argive army (650-52).19 And this destructive reversal of the powers of nature is marked in the grim metaphor of the sea 'flowering with corpses' (659).

The famiUar Archaic metaphor (see above) reflects now the im

mensity of the fertile powers of nature that are turning destruc

tively against the men who have violated it. It is in terms of the destructive sea too that the final hybris of Agamemnon is an swered: the carpet he treads is 'of sea-wrought' purple (946), and Clytaemnestra cries out to the vastness and fertile richness of

the sea as her victim walks to his doom: The sea is there, and who shall drain its yield? It breeds (rpi^ovaa) precious as silver, ever of itself re

newed, the purple ooze wherein our garments shall be dipped

(958-60).20 The sea now becomes a sea of blood, and its destructive aspect becomes embodied in the avenging Clytaemnestra, the alastor, called a sea-monster, a Scylla, by Cassandra (1233), and the horrible truth of Cassandra's prophecy breaks like the sea-surge

(kvploltos SiK-qv/ kXv?civ, 1181-82). Clytaemnestra still hopes to

turn her back on the violation of the natural order she has com

mitted, and she does so in terms of fire: . . . The

hope that walks my chambers is not traced with fear

while yet Aegisthus makes the fire shine on my hearth

(1434-35). She clings to the sheltering fire of the hearth, the fire enclosed

within the secure framework of human life, shutting out from her mind the destructive sea which will break over her and her lover and "quench" (see 958) their fire.

In the second play of the trilogy revenge on Clytaemnestra too comes in terms of the sea, in the "storm" of Electra's hatred

(Cho. 183ff: /cAuSwiw, Svo^?piov TrXrjpvpf?os). In a later choral

ode (585ff) not only sea, but all nature?earth, sea, and sky?is joined in its destructive aspect to answer man's violation of its

order. Sea and earth are no longer kindly, fertile mothers, but the begetters of monsters, as Clytaemnestra herself is the mother of a deadly snake (527) which she, Uke the sea, will 'bring to harbor' (529). Yet Aeschylus' ultimate concern is reconciliation, not discord, and the theme of reconciliation is adumbrated now

in fire, Apollo's fire at Delphi (1037), the fire of purification and the 'bright god' (Phoibos). Fire here no longer joins for destruc

tion, as earlier (Ag. 650-52); the antithesis now helps check, rather than reinforce, the destructive significance of violated sea.

But the time for reconciUation is not yet, and this play too ends with the image of storm.

Earth rather than sea sets the tone for the Eumenides in the Priestess' tracing of the oracle back to Gaia (Iff), but it is the sea which is used to describe the destruction of the evil man,

destroyed as in shipwreck 'on the reef of Justice' (550-65). Yet the reconciliation will be complete only when the dread god desses of the earth will consent to the judgment of the bright Olympians and change their curses into benisons of fruitfulness

(see 778ff, 916ff). Sea, earth, and sky now join to bless human life:

Let it [the Eumenides' blessing] come out of the ground, out of the sea's water,

and from the high air make the waft of gentle gales wash over the country in full sunlight, and the seed and stream of the soil's yield and of the grazing beasts be strong and never fail our people as time goes, and make the human seed be kept alive. (903ff)

The final seal of reconciUation, however, is fire, the fire of the ritual procession, the prototype of the Panathenaea, which ends the play (see esp. 1022, 1029, 1041f, 1044).21 The torchlight fires that in the Agamemnon marked man's hybristic self-asser

tion, and the fire that joined with sea to punish it, are now, at the end of the trilogy, a sign of man's acceptance of his place in the cosmic order, his dependence

on the powers of the supra human world, and the fruitfulness of his harmonious relation with them.22 Reverence and ritual replace pride and violence. The

element of destruction forebodes peace and accord. Nor is this fire the falsely enclosed, sinfully sheltered hearth-fire of Cly taemnestra that sought

to shut out the violated powers; it is now

the covenant of a fuller inclusion of the life-giving, but also

potentially death-deaUng, forces of the earth.

Aeschylus thus returns to the Archaic sense of the coherence

of the physical and moral realms, but at a deeper level. Human action has immediate repercussions

on the cosmic order, and reso

lution and atonement can come only when man is

brought back

fully into harmony with that order and, still more significantly, only when this order is brought back into harmony with itself

through the mediation of the goddess of the city. No one could be further than Aeschylus from the agnostic humanism of Pro

tagoras. For Aeschylus, man still needs the protective, but am

bivalent powers of earth and nature. Yet the role of Athena and Athens in the final resolution of the trilogy is significant for the new

emphasis on man and his creative power.

Sophocles and Euripides write, of course, in the full flower of

fifth-century humanism. Living in a

rationally conscious, man

centered age, they raise the question of how man as controller

stands in relation to what he does not or cannot control, how

much he dares to control, and finally whether he can control him

In Sophocles the natural world is still the necessary comple ment to man's reason and power, that which gives scale and the

broader reference-points to human action. Yet unlike Aeschylus,

it is no longer

a moral agent in itself, a quasi-animate force

wherein the wills and conflicts of the divine powers are made manifest. Its significance for Sophocles lies rather in its total otherness from man: it is that against which man defines himself. The moral questions

are raised now in terms of man's relation to

himself, with all the mysteries and paradoxes of his existence. Man is the 'measure,' but he must measure himself against the non

human to discover his true humanity. The Oedipus Rex begins with an essentially 'Archaic' situa

tion: a preceding moral violation has had its repercussions, finally, in plague and barrenness. Yet Sophocles'

concern is not so much

with the restoration of the harmony in the natural world as with

Oedipus' search and discovery. The plague is important primarily as a motive force for this search, for what it leads the man to, not

for what it signifies in itself. And Oedipus finds the curse, the

agos that he would drive out (cf ay-qXaruv, 402) in himself. He is the 'curse' (1426-27), and in him, man, lies the secret of the

balance, the right relation to the natural world. The balance is

fine and complex, and in its Ues the essence of the Classical view: man is aware of his uniqueness and greatness, but does not deny the powers which Ue beyond him. From the conflict of these inexorable powers and the greatness of man is born suffering,

from the suffering the tragic hero.

Sophocles' position seems

attractively simple, easily reduced

to formulas of thesis and antithesis, conflict and resolution. Yet as

commentators who have come to grips with the moral problems of the plays have discovered, there is much more to it than this. The

higher valuation of man only

creates a more complex

tionship between him and the world. As the sense of man's power increases, so does the possibiUty of his overstepping his Umits and violating the powers beyond him. Human and supra-human oscillate in a

dangerous rhythm, or, in a more Hellenic image, behave as the two pans of a balance. The structure of the Oedipus well exempUfies this relation: Jocasta rushes inside with the awful

knowledge while Oedipus and the chorus, at the height of their

optimism, vaunt the hero's kinship with the powers of the external

world, the cycles of the months, the gods of mountains and plains (see 1076-85, 1086-1109). When Oedipus calls himself the kins

man of the months who 'defined me great and small' (1082-83), the complexity of man's assimilation of himself to the powers of nature is apparent. Self-discovery of greatness and smallness

amid the movement of the months is the essence of his tragic

position. Similarly, the chorus' hope that he will be a child of a

god of the mountains proves true in a devious and horrible way: he becomes, in a sense, the true child of the mountains when he

learns of his abandonment on Mt. Cithaeron by Jocasta. The sea here also is one of the areas of human control, and the

sea controlled, Oedipus as

pilot, is, as Knox has recently re

emphasized, one of the images of his intellectual achievement, the

intellect by which he is raised up and is destroyed. But towards the end of the play the sea reflects his loss of control: he is the

ship brought to harbor, the same dreadful harbor for both child and bridegroom (see 1207ff).23 Here again the imagery of the natural world focuses on the inner condition of man, the am

biguities of the human situation when man is (or thinks he is) the controller.

In the famous Antigone ode too, cited earlier, the sea is one of man's conquests. There, however, another aspect of the natural

world reflects man's violation. The birds which man hunts and

traps (342-43) return to indicate that something is wrong. They bear the carrion of the polluted corpse, taint the altars, and will not give the proper omens (1015-22). But again the powers of the natural world are of significance in indicating the failure in the human situation: Creon's stepping beyond the bounds of his

humanity, pushing his authoritarian definition of the state beyond the limits which god or man can bear.

In the Electra also the reversals in the natural world conse

quent upon the past murder are important not only

as symptoms

of the evil situation in Mycenae, but also as part of the destruc tive influences upon the heroine. The imagery of the play pre sents a

complex pattern of reversals in the fertility of nature.24

The nubile daughter, whose name means 'wedless,' is kept from

marriage and children by the over-fulfilled mother who hopes thus to continue to enjoy her own sexual licence (see 27Iff, 585ff, 652ff). Orestes enters in the beauty of the dawn ('Already the

bright flash of the sun stirs the clear dawn voices of the birds, and the dark night of stars is spent,' 17-19) ; but Electra appears soon after invoking 'the pure (?yvov) Ught and the air coextensive with the earth' (86ff) when in fact everything has been defiled by hate and guilt; and the play ends with darkness (see 1494). The evils of the past, in the now familiar metaphor, are 'blooming rather than wasting away' (260), as the scepter of Agamemnon, in Clytaemnestra's dream, borne now by his murderer, blooms

with a sinister richness and darkens all Mycenae (419ff). And

finally 'the dead below the earth live' and 'drain in retribution the blood flowing from their murderers' (1417-20). Yet all these inversions in the 'Ufe' of nature help define the tragic situation of

Electra, the physical deprivation and moral death in which she is forced to live and their final effect in fixing her entirely on hatred and death.

In the Philoctetes man's relation with nature plays perhaps

larger explicit part than in any other Sophoclean tragedy. As

before, the natural world reflects upon the human situation.

Philoctetes has been inhumanly abandoned on a desert island, and the natural world points up the cruelty of this abandonment. The opening Unes create the essential setting:

Akttj pkv rjhe r^? irepLppvrov \6ovbs

ArjpVOV, ?pOT?ls aOTlTTTO? ovS o?KovpL?vrj ....

This is the shore of the sea-girt Lemnian land, untrodden of men and uninhabited. (1-2)

The sea that girds Lemnos is the guff that separates Philoctetes from the rest of humanity. Yet the human relationships which will

develop here are to deepen the significance of this desolate set

ting. The very isolation and barrenness of the surroundings be

come a foil for the human values and trust estabUshed between Philoctetes and Neoptolemus.

This natural world has nothing fostering or gentle about it. It has little of the animate quaUty of the Archaic view of nature. It is indifferent, unfeeUng, the hard stuff of existence from which

man must carve out his life; and the creations that bear witness

to his life are feeble and miserable: his wood-carved cup, bed of leaves, means of kindling: these are his 'treasury' (th?saurisma,

33-37). Philoctetes later describes to Neoptolemus the difficulties of his struggle to keep aUve, his hunting and foraging for wood

(285ff), and re-emphasizes the desolation of the island:

Boy, let me tell you of this island. No sailor by his choice comes near it.

There is no anchorage,

nor anywhere

that one can land, sell goods, be entertained.

Sensible men make no voyages here. (300-304)25

Sophocles makes the island, as much as possible, the negation of human civilization and human society. Its wildness serves as a

test of the ability of man, unsheltered by society, to suffer and

endure, to retain his humanity while taking the full measure of nature's rawness:

There is wonder, indeed, in my heart

how, how, in his loneUness,

listening to the waves beating on the shore, how he kept hold at all on a Ufe so full of tears. (686-90)

Man, in his suffering, has entered into a kind of communica tion with the hardness of the world in which he suffers. The con ditions of existence are not made easier, the necessity to kill or

be killed is not lessened (see 455ff), but there arises a kind of

respect and understanding between man and nature; and when

Philoctetes learns that he has been betrayed in his human rela

tions, he turns back to the natural world in the famous invocation at the climax of the play:

Caverns and headlands, dens of wild creatures You jutting broken crags, to you I raise my cry There is no one else that I can

speak to?

and you have always been there, have always heard me ....

(936-39) The pathos of his looking back to this wild setting for consolation is underlined by the use of the word synousiai (936) for the 'dens' of the wild creatures: it is the usual word to describe

human 'relations' or 'associations.' Philoctetes' disappointment in

these human relations is deep; and despite Neoptolemus' reas

sertion of friendship he refuses to leave this isolation for the world of the men who have caused his suffering, not even when they can now cure it (see 1392-93, 1395-97). But man is not allowed to live out his life in total isolation from the human. The in

transigent Philoctetes yields before the divine command brought by Heracles. Yet his final words are not a welcoming of the hu man world, but a last farewell to the wildness in which he has suffered. It is no gentler at the end, but there is a tie between it and the man:

Lemnos, I call upon you: Farewell, cave that shared my watches,

nymphs of the meadow and the stream,

the deep male growl of the sea-lashed headland . . .

where many a time in answer to my crying

in the storm of sorrow the Hermes mountain sent its echo!

Now springs and Lycian well, I am leaving you,

leaving you. I had never hoped for this.

Farewell Lemnos, sea encircled, blame me not, but send me on my way with a fair voyage to where a great destiny carries me . . .

(1452ff) The gentleness and beauty of the play Ue in the hero's abiUty

not to conquer or transform nature, but to accept it with its

cruelty and hardness, with the pain-filled, minimal existence it

imposes upon him. In his ability to suffer and endure, and his awareness of his

suffering, he transcends nature; and yet he Uves

with it on its own terms and has come to understand and love it as it is. But he can live in its desolation and solitude only until he is of necessity claimed back by the human world. In returning to man Philoctetes gives up the sea-girt wildness which has, in a

sense, become a part of himself, a

part that he must lose on reac

cepting the human world, but without denying his understanding and kinship with the non-human.

Thus in Sophocles the Archaic sense of the coherence of the world recurs with a deepened significance and a more complex focus upon the human situation. Euripides,

on the other hand, is

considerably further from this Archaic view. He looks upon a world in part devitaUzed by the rationaUstic physics of Anaxag oras and Democritus. It is one of the paradoxes of Euripides'

thought, however, that while he reacts against this rationalistic

view, he does so in terms created by the rational movement itself.

His gods seem often to be impersonal, not humanly intelUgible powers, and his universe a perverse reflection of the Democritean

or Leucippean cosmos where atoms move

by their own weight

and momentum, set in motion by necessity with no clear sign of a guiding intelUgence.

The natural world, no longer reUgiously understood or felt as a

Uving entity permeated by divine forces, becomes something re mote and unapproachable, fascinating man by its power and

savage beauty, yet fearful in its elementaUty and incomprehensi bility. This double relationship of fascination and fear is well

exempUfied in the Bacchae: the hills, the vines, the wild and domestic animals, and the Maenads' ecstatic union with all these confront man as something totally beyond the scope of human

Ufe, something intensely moving, but frightening in its power. This world, unlike Sophocles', cannot be approached in human terms without man's partial sacrifice of his humanity, or his de

struction. There is no question even of the kind of grudging, but

ultimately tender respect for and understanding of nature

achieved by Philoctetes. This natural world no longer reflects the whole man acting with the full force of his humanity against the non-human in his existence: it comes to signify,

in a kind of fear

ful metaphor, the potentially destructive, as well as creative,

forces in man himself, at a level at which man does not neces

sarily know himself. The kinship man finds with nature is thus

deeper, more internal, but also more dangerous: it is the kinship between the elemental in the natural world and the elemental in

himself, a kinship with which man is fascinated, to which he is

drawn, but at which he fears to look too closely. If these forces are blocked or artificially constrained, they rise up out of the

depths of his nature with the momentum of his repressed energies to overwhelm him and his civiUzation.

Though the Bacchae presents the fullest development of these

ideas, elsewhere too Euripides shows his interest in the elemental in nature. He looks upon nature in terms less of its vital rhythms, as did the prerationafistic, pre-Democritean Archaic poet, than of its static being, its fixed elemental aspects?mountains and wild

creatures, rock and sea. The rational physics of the fifth century expand the whole framework of the universe, and in the process the natural world becomes devitaUzed and less intelligible than

Charles Paid Segal 41

the living movements felt in all their ambiguity by Hesiod or Pindar.

In the Iphigenia in Tauris the constant reminders of the pres ence of the sea and its dangerous clashing rocks, the Sym plegades, emphasize the remoteness and cruelty of the Taurians and their goddess (see 6ff, 123ff, 391ff). It is the savagery of the sea which the protagonists, having discovered their kinship in a distant land, must risk (see e.g. 889ff), the sea which separates them, and the sea which finally joins them, smoothed by Athena, goddess of civilization, when savagery is replaced by affection,

when reunion and respite from suffering are assured (see 1442ff). In the Hippolytus, sea and the natural forces it symbolizes are

even more savage. The sea itself is the center of conflict and de

structive passions. The play begins with a conflict between divine

powers, Aphrodite and Artemis, which is re-echoed in a conflict between natural elements, the fresh, pure water of springs

rivers associated with the chaste Artemis, and the violence of the sea. This violence is connected with both love and hatred, with

Aphrodite, the goddess born from the foam (aphros) of the sea, and with Poseidon, the sea-god who fulfils Theseus' mascuUne

anger and his curse. This conflict between aspects of the natural

world is quite unlike the conflict between cosmic powers in the Oresteia: it is framed, rather, in terms of conflicting modes of human life, opposing forces within man himself. Thus the con flicts on the three levels, in the divine world, the natural world, and the human world all come to the same thing, the violence, the uncontrollable and destructive forces within the framework of human life.

Hippolytus is at once associated with the clear, calm water of

his chaste goddess. The garland

he presents to her comes from an

untouched meadow watered by 'modesty (aidos) and the mois ture of rivers' (78). This clear water, however, grows turbulent

in the parodos, where the chorus sing of the clear springs by the

'water of Ocean,' where they first learned of Phaedra's illness

(123ff). The calm water of the springs and the sea still coexist

peacefully in this scene of quiet, womanly domestic tasks. But

another aspect of woman, and water, comes in the conversation

of the nurse and Phaedra. The nurse urges her to be 'more bold than the sea' (305). Phaedra herself is caught by the violence of the sea and describes herself as 'in a storm' (yeip?^opai, 315). The nurse later speaks of Kypris 'who haunts the air and is in the

sea-surge" (447ff). Then in the following chorus on the power of Eros (525ff), even the 'sacred walls of Thebes and the springs of Dirce' confess the power of Aphrodite (555ff). The sea begins to enter the calm, sheltered life of human civiUzation, with the

peaceful associations of springs recalled from the parodos and familiar, perhaps, from the springs of the Iliad, where the women

washed before the war (22.147-56). Hippolytus' response is in terms of flight from the sea: he will wash out his ears with the

running waters of pure rivers (653-54) ; and the theme of flight is taken up by the chorus, who would fly over the sea (732ff).

Yet the same sea over which they would flee has brought Phaedra from Crete, as they sing in the next strophe (752ff). She has crossed the sea to her ruin and is destroyed by its tremendous

force, also the force of her own passion. The sea, once loosed,

destroys Hippolytus too, rushing out beyond its bounds and over

whelming the land, sending out finally the fearful bull (1198 1217). The play ends with a pathetic reflection of man's feeble ness

against the sea and the elemental forces it symbolizes: the

lament over Hippolytus' torn body is described as a pitylos ( 1464 ), Uterally, the measured beating of oars, here transferred

to the falling of tears and, perhaps, the beating of breasts: an

image of control over the sea when the sea has been uncontrol

lable, and of measure and human rhythm when the measureless

and reasonless has shown its full force. Human measure is de

stroyed; it is left only as a dirge. In summary, four general points of contrast with earner views

can be made. 1) The forces of nature appear, and remain, in

disharmony rather than accord, and the disharmony produces violence and destruction for men. 2) The natural world is pre sented not as a whole, but in terms of its parts, with one

part op

posing or resisting another. 3) These oppositions in the natural world are

significant less on the cosmic or external level than for

the internal Ufe, the conflicting drives and needs of man himself. The elemental is not only outside man, but within him and can overwhelm him in despite of himself. 4) As a fearful metaphor for the internal aspects of human life and as an elemental force in

itself, the natural world loses some of the ambiguous associations

with the rhythms of Ufe and death that it had in the Archaic

period. It is seen less as an animate whole, potentially life-giving, though potentially destructive, and more as a demanding, dan

gerous power, primarily destructive. There is Uttle possibiUty here of the vaguely personal attitude towards it possible in the Archaic age, or even of man's measured acceptance of its wildness

in the dignity of his humanity affirmed in the Philoctetes. What results is instead the mixture of terror and fascination presented in the Bacchae.

IV THE FOURTH CENTURY AND THE BEGINNINGS OF PASTORAL

The disillusion and moral disintegration in the Peloponnesian war bring the final blow to the Archaic view of the coherence of the physical and moral worlds; and the Euripidean sense of the violence and elementality of nature can

already be regarded as

one of the results. Yet the fourth century seeks to reestablish a

new, more consistent and more rational basis for human Ufe. It

does so by turning its back, even more decisively than fifth cen

tury rationalism, upon the violent, destructive powers of the ex

ternal world; and it seeks to enclose human Ufe still more firmly and more securely within the civilized framework of the polis.

It is an age of 'civilization' par excellence, an age of social re

finement, of intense poUtical interest and

speculation, an

age concerned with man in his social environment. The city is already so much the center of human life and culture that its opposite, the country, becomes a term of reproch: aypou?a, 'rusticity,'

'boorishness,' is a section in Theophrastus' Characters, a work

typical of the fourth-century concern for society and manners; and Menander uses the corresponding adjective (agroikos) to describe the unsocial Knemon, the dyskolos, of the like-named

play (see 202, 956), introduced, significantly, in the country (agros, 5) by Pan.

The fourth century, therefore, defines man not against the otherness of the natural world, but in terms of the framework he has created for his Ufe, the polis. He is, in Aristotle's words, a

'political animal,' a creature of the polis; and the definition is an indication of the new spirit. The citizen's poUtical activity, in

Athens at least, reaches a new peak of importance, and the ma

chinery of this activity, as in the running of courts and assembUes or the fair choosing of jurors, receives a new

degree of elabora

tion.26 The citizen is to be free for the cultivation of those quaU ties which make him most uniquely man; and these consist in his life in the polis.

The major forms of creative activity are now seen in the closest

relation with the polis. While fifth-century tragedy is also incon

ceivable apart from the social and religious unity of the city, stiU it faces the non-human world and strongly presents man's con

trasting limitations. What lies beyond the polis in the fourth-cen

tury view, however, is not the elemental wildness of nature, but

the ideal of a broader humanity which transcends the bounds of the individual polis and rests upon the awareness of the greatness of Greek culture.27 The great minds of the period

are concerned

not so much with man's helplessness and suffering as with the

nobility and lastingness of his intellectual attainments; and these are seen not in terms of the practical conquest of nature, as in the

fifth century, but on a more idealistic plane: man's true greatness lies in the beauty of his soul and in his spiritual achievements, in the very fact that he is human and feels a new dignity in his hu

manity. The very term anthr?pismos, 'humanity,' is a fourth-cen

tury creation; and the idea of philanthr?pia, 'kindness and respect toward one's fellow human beings because they

are human,' re

ceives a new emphasis. Menander well typifies the new attitude:

'How graceful is a human being when indeed he is human.'28 Hence

tragedy ceases to be a creative form in the fourth cen

tury, and those forms which reach their highest development,

oratory and philosophy, look toward the life of man within the

polis. Oratory, of course, is totally involved in its civic context,

and philosophy, under Plato and Aristotle, is largely concerned with man's end and function within the community.

There is perhaps something significant too in the development of prose as an artistic medium. The fourth century is an

age of

prose, a

prose which can persuade and reason with clarity and ele

gance when a certain rational purposefulness in human Ufe is

assumed, when the excellence of the good man is seen as being a

good citizen in a state founded upon reason. Here there would be no place for the creation of dramatic poetry or lyrical choruses like

Euripides', or even

Sophocles', to express with the tremen

dous emotional power they command the elemental violence of

irrational, incomprehensible forces.

In such an atmosphere the natural world is clearly subordinate to the human and is seen as an

accepted, rather passive adjunct of human needs. When the question of the natural environment

of a city comes up in the theories of the ideal state, the ho?ness of the site, the relations with the forces of nature do not enter,

only the strictly human requirements demanded by the philo sophical system in question (see Aristot, Polit. 1326b 26ff). It is not necessarily that divine forces are no longer felt in the earth and the landscape, but rather that such considerations are sec

ondary to man's fulfilment of the potential of his humanity within the most

characteristically human of his creations, the polis. The

religiously-minded Plato of the Laws does, it is true, begin his discussion of the situation of the new

colony with some considera

tion of divine powers in the natural world. The 'Athenian Stranger'

begins the fourth book thus: And now, what will this city be? I do not mean to ask what is or will hereafter be the name of the place; that may be determined by the accident of locaUty or of the original set

tlement,?a river or fountain, or some local deity may give the sanction of a name to the newly-founded city

(Laws 704a)29 Yet even here this matter is of incidental significance, and Plato turns at once to the purely human needs. The problem of the

proximity of the city to the sea is discussed, and the sea here is far from being an elemental force; it is simply a channel of human

communication, with good and bad results: 'The sea is pleasant enough as a daily companion, but has indeed also a bitter and brackish quality; fining the streets with merchants and shop keepers, and begetting

in the souls of men uncertain and unfaith

ful ways .. .' (705a).

The natural world is admitted into human Ufe as an adornment or enhancement of what is pecuUarly human, and so it can serve

in the Phaedrus as the calm, deUghtful background for a philo sophical discussion about the soul's response to love and beauty:

Socrates: But let me ask you, friend: have we not reached the plane-tree

to which you were conducting us? Phaedrus:

Yes, this is the tree. Soc: By Hera, a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream

which flows beneath the plane-tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and the images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delight ful is the breeze:?so very sweet; and there is a sound in the

air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus

of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide. (230b-d)

There is indeed something pastoral about the description: the cool stream, the Nymphs, the singing of the cicadae, the soft

grass; and parallels can easily be found in Theocritus.30 The pas toral element, however, lies perhaps deeper: as man is defined as a

'city-state' animal and prizes chiefly the urban and the urbane, he is a degree removed from the natural world and must bring it

artificially into his Ufe. Plato has not yet arrived at a stage of sharp removal, but even so there is a heightened consciousness of the natural world as 'beautiful,' an

explicitness about man's enjoy ment of its beauty that would be difficult to find in earlier Greek

literature. The earUer Greeks found spreading plane-trees and

cool streams beautiful too, but accepted them, with the powers they contained, as an integral part of their world. They had not

yet the self-conscious pleasure in nature which even a small de

gree of removal from it makes possible.

There is perhaps another proto-pastoral element here too in the

lightly ironical suggestion of a contrast between city and coun

try.31 Socrates, immediately after the passage cited above, repUes to Phaedrus' observation that he never leaves the city with the

explanation, T am a lover of knowledge and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country'

(230d). Yet it was Socrates who dwelt on the beauty of the set

ting in the first place; he will return to it later (259a-e) in his

hope that the grasshoppers chirping about them will impart to them their gifts, their connection with the Muses 'who are chiefly concerned with heaven and thought, divine as well as human'

(259d) ; and he concludes the dialogue with a prayer to Pan for inward and outward beauty (279b-c). The beauty of nature at the beginning of the dialogue thus takes on a deeper significance: it reflects the possibiUty of man's connection with something

purer and closer to the gods. In thus gaining a purer, gentler, more consciously enjoyable

beauty nature loses its savagery. It is felt no longer

as an ambig

uously fertile or destructive power, but as a welcome complement

to human life, something that allows man to escape from the sheltered confines of his civilization into a fresher and simpler

world. And this need for simplicity arises, naturally, in the most

sophisticated and complex ages, when man is most removed from

the elemental forces of the non-human, when he is most enclosed

within the constructions of the human. Hence pastoral burgeons as a full-blown Uterary form at the height of the complex civiUza tions of Alexandria and the early Roman Empire and in close con

nection with the capitals. Here nature exists as a

deUghtful extension of human Ufe rather

than in its own right or in terms of its own rhythms. Man of the Alexandrian age is no longer Unked to it or sensitive to its move ments as Hesiod or Pindar, Aeschylus

or Euripides

are. He ap

proaches it as something removed from the reaUty of his Ufe. To reenter it he must transform it, in one sense emasculate it, and he

enjoys the process of transformation. In Theocritus the poetic shepherds, the nymphs, the artificial dialect all contribute to the effect.

The artificiality of the pastoral framework Ues partly in the one

sidedness, the peacefulness and tameness of the natural world that it pictures. It is a world constructed for men of the city, a

world wherein man leaves the limits of his urban environment, not

to be exposed to the elemental and uncontrollable, but to receive a measured dose of pleasurable rusticity made agreeable by the

grace and refinement of the poetic form. Ultimately then he is

merely receiving another product of his own urbane civiUzation

in altered dress.

Here, for the first time in Greek Uterature, man estabUshes a 'false' relation with nature, one that does not include the full truth

of its power, the range of its manifestations. He enters into a

more sentimental correspondence with it: it can reflect his own

grief and offer a gentle consolation which enables him to enjoy his suffering and dwell on it with a certain reUsh, as in Theocritus' Lament for Daphnis:

Now, O brambles, may you bear violets, violets too may

you bear, O thorns; and let the lovely narcissus flower in the

juniper, and let everything be contrary, and let the pine tree bear pears since Daphnis dies; and let the stag pull down the

hound, and from the mountains let owls sing to

nightingales.

Cease, Muses, come cease the pastoral song. So much he said and ceased; and him Aphrodite wished to raise up again, but all his thread from the Fates had been

spent, and Daphnis went to the stream. The swirl washed

over him, a man dear to the Muses, a man not unUked of the

Nymphs. Cease, Muses, come cease the pastoral song.

(1.131-42) One is not far here from Ruskin's 'pathetic fallacy.'32 Nature is

beautiful, in part, because of its calm, undisturbed contrast with human suffering; and both the suffering and nature are made

unreal, ethereally beautiful through the contrast. Nature stands in contrast to human suffering,

not as a possible

source of it, reflect

ing man's moral violations back upon himself. Its beauty here, however, lies not only in its removal, but in its sympathy for human suffering (which is all the more beautiful precisely be cause the sympathizer is removed and not human), in its capacity to feel for men as if it were itself a living, sentient being. Vergil, in a later development of pastoral, will carry this idea further still:

ilium etiam lauri, etiam flevere myricae,

pinifer ilium etiam sola sub rupe iacentem

Maenalus, et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycaei. (Eel. 10.13-15)

Him even the laurel trees lamented, even the tamarisks, even pine-bearing Maenalus as he lay under its lonely rock, and the cUffs of cold Lycaeon.

Archaic poetry too feels the natural world as pervaded by Ufe, but it is a Ufe of a different sort, an elemental vitaUty which keeps the clarity and hardness of its distinction from man, although human Ufe is ultimately

a part of it. Man is too close to nature,

too much a part of its movements and rhythms, and too directly dependent on them for his own Ufe, physical and moral, to feel that nature sympathizes with his sufferings or his inward sorrows.

Thus the movements of the distant moon and stars and the pas

sage of time in the lovely fragment formerly attributed to Sappho,

ScSukc ph> ? aeX?vva

Kai nA^taSe?* pecrai 8?

vvktc?, 7rap? 8 epxeT &Pa

eya> 8? pava KarevSoi)

The moon has set and the Pleiades. It is the middle of the

night; time passes by; but I sleep alone.

intensify rather than console the lonely mortal. The same distinc

tions exist in the beautiful Alem?n fragment, 'The tops of the mountains sleep and the gullies, and the headlands and the tor

rent-beds . . .' (frag. 58 Diehl) where there is no mention (in the

extant Unes) of man at all; and in Simonides' Danae fragment (frag. 13 Diehl). Here the contrast of the sea and the sleeping

child is indeed full of pathos (see esp. vv. 21-22, 'Sleep, I bid

you, my child, and let the sea sleep, sleep measureless woe'), but

the pathos Ues precisely in the elemental violence of the sea, its lack of pity, in contrast to the heightened awareness and tender

ness of the mother and the bUssful unawareness of the sleeping child. The whole passage is about as far as

possible from the

identification of the sea with the emotions of the love-torn Si

maetha of Theocritus' second Idyll ( 38-39 ), with which several

nineteenth-century critics have compared

This difference perhaps helps clarify the paradox that in pas toral, when nature itself is so much more

approachable, kindly, and gentle, such a wide guff is felt between the natural and hu

man worlds. Yet the guff exists, and it is intentional. It derives

partly from the fact that nature has lost the wholeness and am

biguity which it had in the Archaic or tragic views and something of the truth to experience which those views express. It is more

pleasant to contemplate, but what is contemplated is partial and unreal. It is no longer to be immediately recognized as an element basic to the human condition, all that which Ues beyond human

power and control, but is intended to be felt as something quite removed from ordinary human experience, something itself con

trolled and selectively perceived in a very artful way. The natural world of pastoral, therefore, is not the embodiment

of elemental wildness or primal sacred powers; its divinities are

friendly and playful: Pan, the Nymphs, the Muses. Playfulness might be said to characterize this new relation to nature. 'Pas

toral' elements are often said to exist in the Odyssey; yet the natural world there, though remote and unreal, is far from the

gentle levity of Theocritus' Idylls. It is unreal in a totally different

way: it still retains the wholeness of its power and reflects with a

grimness greater because of the mysteriousness of its supra

human, often inhuman elements, the forces which the returning hero must meet and overcome. Even in the description of the de serted island near the Cyclops, perhaps the most detailed descrip tion of nature in the Odyssey (9.116-141), there is still a certain

seriousness, a sense of nature's double aspect, its richness and its

hardness over against

After describing the island's wildness and its wild inhabitants, the goats,33 Odysseus says of it:

Nor is it in any way a bad land, but would bear all things in due season; for on it are meadows by the shore of the grey sea, well watered and soft (with grass) ; and vineyards would flourish there forever. And plowing is easy; they would ever

reap at the due seasons a deep harvest, since there is a rich

soil beneath. (9.131-35) The man who sees this land sees it with the eye of a practical farmer, versed in the hardness of human existence. He regards it

in terms of its potential fertiUty, as something from which to wrest

his life, not as an admirable setting for bucoUc song. Homer's Cyclopes

too are not just clumsy rustic louts. He in

troduces them as "overweening, lawless' (9.106), and his Poly phemus

is no exception:

And leaning backward he fell on his back; and then he lay bending his thick neck to one side, and sleep, conqueror of

all, took him; and from his gullet up there surged wine and

morsels of human flesh; and heavy with wine he belched.

(9.371-74) Quite different is Theocritus' Cyclops:

I know, graceful maid, why you flee: because a shaggy brow, long and single, is stretched across all my forehead from one ear to the other, and one is the eye beneath, and

flat is the nostril above my Up. (11.30-33) Then, putting his best foot forward, he proceeds to court the re luctant Uymph with an enumeration of his wealth in flocks, cheeses, and milk and the promise of eleven fawns and four bear cubs.

Polyphemus is here a well-meaning, love-sick bumpkin who can be treated with pathos and humor, not a

dangerous monster

who tests the hero's intelUgence to the utmost. The sea also in Theocritus loses the elemental quaUty it had earUer; it becomes the subject for pretty conceits like Galataea's playing or Poly phemus' seeing his reflection in the sixth Idyll (6.9-12, 35-38) or the sympathetic foil for human love as in the Seventh (52ff.).

The seriousness of the ritual elements too, still felt in tragedy and, though much transformed, in the prayers of the Phaedrus, is almost entirely dissipated by the playfulness and Uterary refine

ment of pastoral. Hence pastoral is perhaps furthest from its ritual

origins than any of the Greek literary forms.34 There are, it is true, still traces of the Adonis ritual in the Daphnis lament, but they are not significant; and the beating of Pan in the seventh Idyll (106ff.) is deliberately transformed from its ritual meaning, the

procuring of fertiUty and food for the community, to the amusing frivolity of a

pastoral amour.

Part of the change is due, of course, to a basic change

in the

relation between the gods and the natural world. The gods are less important

now as mediators between the autonomous polis

and the life-giving or Ufe-destroying powers of nature than as the arbiters of a man's personal fate. In this large and

complex civiU

zation, where the individual is likely to have little power to in fluence the events that bear upon his future, where his personal

activity in a polis whose

machinery he can see and understand

has almost no significance, prominence is given to more

arbitrary or "abstract" divinities, such as Chance (Tyche), or to the more

personal savior-gods of the mystery cults and the East. The disruption of the organic clarity of the Archaic and Classi

cal views is perhaps most fully manifest in the divinization of the

ruling monarch whose power, in the vast Hellenistic state, is in

deed Uke a god's and perhaps closer and more terrible. Here the distinctions between man and god deeply rooted in the Archaic tradition are blurred, and with them the basic truth and simphcity of the Archaic and Classical views of man and nature. Hellenistic

poetry is not seeking a deeper confrontation with its world, but an

escape from it.

Still it is a sign of continuing vitality that the Greeks could create a new

Uterary form that would enable them to reintegrate the sense of the natural world into the

complexities and refine

ments of a more cosmopoUtan and urban civiUzation; and this

form was to be meaningful for analogous conditions in the sub

sequent course of Western history. And even the pastoral world of the Greeks has a closeness to the reality of natural processes not to be found in the later tradition. The frame of reference and intention of Vergil's pastoral are already quite different; and, as

Panofsky has well emphasized, his pastoral landscape is much more an unreal, poetical fabrication, overspread with a touch of

his pensive melancholy, than Theocritus' Sicily or Cos.35 Indeed half the beauty of the Eclogues consists in this deUcate modula tion from the rustic reaUties, which never

quite materiaUze, to

the deUcate, half mythical world of songster shepherds in love. Even where these reaUties seem pressing, they only provide a

pleasant tension for the beauty wherein they are set, and they eventually dissolve into the limpidity and grace of the verse and the sound, as in the first Eclogue:

hinc tibi quae semper vicina ab limite saepes Hyblaeis apibus florem depasta saUcti

saepe levi somnum suadebit inire susurro:

hinc alta su brupe

canet frondator ad auras; nee tarnen interea raucae, tua cura, palumbes, nee gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo. (53-58)

Behold! Yon bordering fence of sallow-trees Is fraught with flowers; the flowers are fraught with bees:

The busy bees, with a soft murmuring strain, Invite to

gentle sleep the

labouring swain, While from the neighboring rock, with rural songs, The pruner's

voice the pleasing dream prolongs, Stockdoves and turtles tell their amorous pain,

And, from the lofty elms, of love complain. (Dryden)

And all the talk of dispossession and shepherds' misfortunes is

forgotten in the promise of rest (79-80) and the deep, sonorous

peace of the closing Unes:

et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant,

maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

And now from afar the roofs of the cottages send up their smoke, and longer shadows fall from the lofty hills.

Vergil's contemporaries enjoy nature in an equally artificial combination of unreaUty and imagination. The beautiful land

scape paintings with which they adorn their villas make accessible the grace of an

idylUc nature within the convenience of one's own

house. Some sense of the beauty of nature is considered necessary for the refined Ufe; but it is presented as part of an enclosed, con trolled architectural framework which shuts out the real land

scape and replaces it with one that is man-made. When nature is

regarded no longer in terms of its vital rhythms, but as a static source for pleasant scenes, for the picturesque" and the "idylUc," then it can be transferred to the flat, two-dimensional surface of

a villa wall.

Though the beginnings of these tendencies can be seen in the sell-conscious awareness of the beauty of nature in the Hellenistic

pastoral and perhaps earlier, the Greek feeling for nature is still remote from these developments of a far more

complex and afflu

ent society. Even in one of the latest of its original creations,36 Greek culture shows the freshness and spontaneity with which it could meet and respond to the external world. It continued to

possess the ability to look upon the world with a joyful curiosity, an almost childish enthusiasm, and an unjaded vitality, and main tained the willingness and courage to see it whole. There is thus a deep truth in the words Plato has the old Egyptian priest say to Solon in the Timaeus (22b), "O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are

always children; an old man among you doesn't exist."

The Uterature and art of the Greeks, then, are the embodiment of a people who felt their humanity with a force and clarity rarely reached again. This sense of their humanity made necessary their

clear vision and acceptance of the non-human forces of their

world in all their elemental destructiveness as well as in their fruitfulness. They could so accept them because of the essential

simplicity of their Ufe, the plastic possibilities of their myths, the scale of their cities and surroundings. What they have left us is

of vital importance, not as historical survivals, but as basic docu

ments of man in the nakedness of his humanity encountering the

constant forms of his world.

1. These passages from the Iliad are given in the translation of Rich mond Lattimore ( Chicago 1961 ).

2. For the expression of the individual personaUty in early Greek

lyric, see Bruno SneU, The Discovery of the Mind, tr. T. Rosenmeyer (Oxford 1953) chap. 3.

3. This and foUowing passages from Hesiod are given in Lattimore's translation (Ann Arbor 1959).

4. W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme (Oxford 1954) 35 well notes how rare such reflective' moments are for this hero famed for his wits.

5. For the Archaic ideas of pollution ( miasma ) and related concepts, see E. R. Dodds, The Greek and the Irrational (Berkeley 1951) 35ff,

with notes; Kurt Latte, 'Schuld und S?nde in der griechischen Religion,' Archiv f?r Religionswissenschaft 20 ( 1921 ) 261ff, 278ff. ( I am indebted to both these works for much in this section.) Dodds points out the

significant absence of the idea of an hereditary

or infectious miasma in Homer.

6. For the Archaic fusion of reUgious and secular see Latte op. cit.

278; also J. L. Myres, The Political Ideas of the Greeks (London 1927) chap. 2, passim, esp. pp. 77ff.

7. For the 'topocosm/ see T. H. Gaster, Thespis ( New York 1950 )

8. For the reUgious' cast of thought and language of the early Pre

socratics, see W. W. Jaeger, The Theology of the Prosocratic Philoso

phers ( Oxford 1947 ) 30ff and passim. For the indebtedness of Preso cratic scientific language to certain basic devices of early poetic

pression, especially the Homeric simile, see SneU op. cit. 213ff and

chaps. 9 and 10, passim. 9. For the significance of mythical elements in the Odyssey and the

Theogony for Parmenides, see E. A. Havelock, 'Parmenides and Odys seus/ HSCP 63 (1958) 133ff and E. F. Dolin, Jr., 'Parmenides and

Hesiod,' HSCP 66 ( 1962) 93ff. 10. For nature's loss of it 'divine' character in the fifth century, see

Jaeger op. cit. 170ff.

11. Translation after L. R. Farnell, The Works of Pindar (London

1930)1316-17. 12. For the rejection of a divine or moral causality in On the Sacred

Disease see Jaeger op. cit. 158 with note 19, pp. 240-41; also H. W.

Miller, 'The Concept of the Divine in the De Morbo Sacro,' TAPA 84

(1953) 1-15, esp. 3ff. 13. For Hippodamus of Miletus and his poUtical theories, see Diels

Kranz 39.1 (=Aristot. Polit. 1267b 22ff ). 14. For Pericles and the ceneration of the city, see B. M. W. Knox,

Oedipus at Thebes ( New Haven 1957 ) 160-61. 15. For the psychological 'explanations' of reUgious feeUngs

Diels-Kranz, Democritus A 75; and in general Jaeger op. cit. 175ff. 16. Dodds op. cit. 186.

17. For this aspect of the developed Roman theater, see Frank E.

Brown, Roman Architecture ( New York 1961 ) 28.

18. The power and directness of the description are Uttle affected

by the strong possibiUty that the lines are an 'allegory' for the coming

of war: see C. M. Bowra, 'Signs of Storm/ CR 54 ( 1940) 127-29. 19. This and the foUowing passages from the Oresteia are given in

Lattimore's translation in The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago 1953).

20. A connection with fire is perhaps implicit here too in the verb Lattimore translates as 'drain its yield': KaTaa?evei, Uterally 'quench/ a word applied properly to fire and hence used here in a kind of oxy

moron. R. F. Goheen, 'Aspects of Dramatic SymboUsm: Three Studies in the Oresteia,' AJP 76 (1955) 121, note 17, suggests a

parallel be tween this invocation of the sea

by Clytaemnestra and the enormity of her association with the earth in 1388-92.

21. For the end of the Eumenides and the Panathenaea, see G.

Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens, ed. 2 (London 1946) 295-97. 22. The connection of the torches at the end of the Eumenides with

the beaconfires of the Agamemnon is noted in a somewhat different context by Goheen op. cit. 124-25.

23. The pattern of the imagery whereby the controller becomes the controUed is weU pointed out

by Knox op. cit. chap. 3, passim; for

Oedipus as pilot, see 112-13. 24. Some of the reversals of life and death in the play are

pointed

out by H. Musurillo, Symbol and Myth in Ancient Poetry ( New York 1961 ) 75-77; but I cannot agree with his optimistic interpretation of

their significance. 25. This and the following passages from the Philoctetes are given

in the translation of David Grene in The Complete Greek Tragedies

(Chicago 1957). 26. An example is the careful regulation of lot by the kl?roterion,

discussed by S. Dow, 'Aristotle, the Kleroteria, and the Courts/ HSCP

50 (1939) 1-34. 27. For the fourth-century ideals of a broader culture and humanity,

see Bury's History of Greece 3 Rev. R. Meiggs ( London 1951 ) 574?F; SneU op. cit. chap. 11; W. Jaeger, Paideia (Oxford 1945) III 71-83.

28. Menander frag. 761K, cited by SneU op. cit. 252. For Philan

thropia and the new 'humanity' in general,

see also 250ff. 29. This and the following passages from Plato are given in Jowett's

translation (third edition, Oxford 1892). 30. For pastoral analogies

see Theocritus 5.31-34, 45-49; 1.135ff, etc. This passage of the Phaedrus and other 'pastoral' connections are

discussed in some detail by Adam Parry, 'Landscape in Greek Poetry/ YCS 15 ( 1957 ) 15ff, who cites also the pastoral epigrams attributed to Plato.

31. For the irony of city and country in the Phaedrus see Parry op.

cit. 19-20.

32. For the 'pathetic fallacy' and its absence in early Greek Utera

ture, see Parry op. cit. 5f; also F. O. Copley, 'The Pathetic Fallacy in

Early Greek Poetry/ AJP 58 (1937) 194-209, but he defines the fal lacy somewhat too broadly and hence finds numerous

examples of it in Archaic poetry; but nowhere does it occur there with the explicitness that it has in Theocritus. R. Y. Hathorn, 'The Ritual Origin of Pastoral/ TAPA 92 (1961) 237-38, well notes that the consciousness of this sympathy of nature for man as a

'fallacy' means the end of pastoral: When modern man, thanks to his alienation from nature, came to feel

that the sympathizing of nature with man was no more than a fallacy,

pastoral had its heart torn out from its side, and was replaced by the romantic lyric, expressive of a yearning for universal union (p. 237).

33. Parry, op. cit. 26 well remarks of this passage, 'With the word

agriai, "of the goats," the inhospitable note of the land is struck. The

Cyclops is the type of the agrios...' 34. For a recent review of the theories of the ritual origins of pas

toral, see Hathorn op. cit. 228-38. I regret that I have not been able to consult the first volume of Jacqueline Duchemin's detailed reexamina tion of the origins of pastoral in Greek Uterature and

mythology: La Houlette et la lyre, I, Herm?s et Apollon ( Paris 1960 ).

35. Erwin Panofsky, 'Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac

Tradition/ in Meaning in the Visual Arts ( New York 1955 ) 297-302; also SneU op. cit. chap. 13, esp. 281-83, 288.

36. I call Theocritus' pastoral an 'original creation' in the sense that

with him this genre reaches its final artistic shape and becomes a clearly

recognized and significant literary form for the future. 'Pastoral' motifs can, of course, be traced back to Hesiod or even Homer; and Stesi chorus was said to have originated bucolic songs involving the love and

suffering of Daphnis (frag. 63 Bergk, 102 Page, Aelian V.H. 10.18). See in general Hathorn op. cit. passim and E. A. Barber, 'Pastoral (or (Bucolic) Poetry, Greek/ in OCD (1949).

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