Aeschylus, Eumenides. With Introduction and Notes. By A. SIDGWICK, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1887. 3s.

MR. SIDGWICK's commentary on the Oresteia, now complete, possesses the merits of a Variorum edition without its defects. Everything worth recording in the work of former editors is recorded. But the editor never fails to say, concisely and clearly, which reading or interpretation he prefers, and why. The book is admirable alike for its industry, its critical judgment, the thoroughness of its scholarship, and the lucidity of its style. The close student' is warned that Wecklein is indispensable; but many English students, it may be predicted, will henceforth be content with Sidgwick.

One may be pardoned for wishing to see what an editor of Mr. Sidgwick's sagacity and fertility of resource would do with the perplexities of an Aeschylean chorus, ξυμπεσὼν μόνος μόνοις καὶ δρῶν τι χρηστόν, unencumbered by the apparatus with which (p. 29) he is here equipped. But since he has preferred for the most part the more modest task of tabling and appraising the work of his predecessors, it is only fair to note the scrupulous care, acuteness, and impartiality with which this has been done, not more nor less in the case of the recent French and German commentators, Weil and Wetstein, than in that of one to whom no English student should forget to be grateful-our foremost English editor' of Aeschylus-Dr. Paley.

Mr. Sidgwick will not allow that the Eumenides is an anticlimax. It is, as he says, a drama of reconciliation. But, dramatically, reconciliations are quite capable of being dull; and tragedies do not need to end happily like novels. Moreover, is the solution of the moral problem a wholly satisfactory one? 'The human interest is thrust aside.' 'Orestes is passive in the hands of greater powers.' So far as this is so, it would seem that we have escaped from morality and taken refuge in theology. Again, is it quite true to say that the higher conception of justice defeats the lower; that Orestes was morally innocent though technically guilty; that the Furies embody the lower view that 'guilt lies in the deed,' Apollo the higher,

that the innocent heart must be saved '? Surely this lowers the conception of the Erinyes too much. The embodiment of a merely technical justice is not venerable either at Athens or elsewhere, and can never be converted into a benign and gracious power. And the pleadings before the Areopagus are not accordant with this view. It is Apollo who has recourse to the ultratechnical plea that the mother is not the parent.

If we may not say that the Furies are identified with conscience, they co-exist with it; when its requirements are satisfied, they are appeased. The law which they administer is the unwritten and eternal law of humanity, and conscience is its sanction. Human nature, permanently and inexorably, asserts the right of the mother to the reverence of the child, the right of the weak to the protection of the strong; and the violated right avenges itself. Though the Erinys and the Curse' are in their operation often identified, it needs no 'Curse' to evoke the Erinys; the deed itself evokes her. The persecuted beggar (Od. 17, 475), no less than the murdered mother, has an Erinys, so long as human nature attests his sanctity. Sometimes the Erinys works in and through the conscience of the offender, sometimes independently of it. A dulled or hardened conscience does not exempt from punishment; it is commonly an aggravation of guilt. But it cannot become an instrument of punishment. An Aegisthus cannot be dealt with as an Orestes. The sensitive soul is torn by remorse the vulgar criminal meets with the fate he can understand.

Orestes has acted under the stress of an overwhelming conviction of duty, and yet he is conscience-stricken by the sight of the blood which he has spilt. The conviction of the necessity remains, but with it remains the horror of the deed. It seems to him that a terrible necessity has made it his duty to do a crime. He is divided between selfjustification and remorse. It was right and it was wrong; it was inevitable and it was horrible. The voice of Apollo approves; the voice of the Avengers condemns. With all the strength of his conviction he contends against the condemnation, and ultimately he prevails. prevails. More dramatically-so at least it seems to a modern reader—and more truly he would have prevailed, had some new need

for action (as when Timoleon, inconsolable for the death of his brother, was called to save Syracuse) at once made clear to him the purity of his own motives in the past, and lifted him for the future out of the reach of all self-questionings and doubts. But he prevails, the accusers are defeated, and in the end (by the offer of local honours from Athene) appeased. So far as Orestes is concerned, the knot of the ethical difficulty is rather cut than solved. When the verdict goes against them, the anger of the Erinyes is transferred to the Athenian land and people. And when Athene binds herself, on behalf of the people of Athens, to plant the grove of the Avengers beside the temple of Erechtheus, on them, and not on Orestes, is breathed the gracious whisper of peace, the pardon and benediction. But though in this final dénouement Orestes is forgotten, the character of the Erinyes is fully vindicated. It was not because, though keen to scent blood, they were blind to read motives, that Orestes was pursued by them; but because Orestes was of too sensitive and noble nature not to be haunted by agonies of misgiving whether indeed his heart was clean, his hands being so foul. Every pang of torture that he suffered testified, not to the cruelty or blindness of the Retributive Forces, but to the strength in a good man of the natural piety which so recoils from the commission of an unnatural deed, however necessary, however righteous. And it is to be remembered how studiously Aeschylus divides the guilt in the first instance between Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, so that the duty of Orestes does not lie altogether clear and unmistakable and all on one side; and how Sophocles, who does not divide the guilt, but makes Clytemnestra bear all of it, has no Furies.

Mr. Sidgwick justly extols the closing scene of the Eumenides as (even on the small stage at Cambridge) a fine and impressive spectacle. But it has to be admitted that its interest is spectacular rather than dramatic, and patriotic or political rather than ethical. When we say this, and say it regretfully, we are thinking, not of the Eumenides as it is in itself, but of the Eumenides as a sequel to the Agamemnon. Mr. Sidgwick objects to the 'common view' that the Eumenides was intended 'protest' against recent democratic changes affecting the constitution of the Areopagus. Aeschylus, he says, was too great an artist to have thus descended into the political arena. But that'neither license nor tyranny' means oligarchy cannot be doubted, and is

as a

admitted by Mr. Sidgwick in his note (1. 696). Müller says, Not only is the mythological texture of the play pervaded by political allusions, but the whole treatment of the myth so turns upon political institutions deemed of paramount importance in those times that one may for a while fancy the audience assembled in the theatre to be an Ecclesia convened for the purpose of deliberating on matters of state and law.' Reactionaries have commonly extolled moderation; and the poet, who in the midstream of the democratic movement so eloquently deprecated excess, and magnified the institution which the democracy had just shorn of most of its powers, would hardly have desired to be acquitted of the charge of lending his art to a party purpose. The least polemical way of doing this was to extol what the Areopagus still retained, the jurisdiction in cases of homicide. This Aeschylus does; whether he also laments the powers which it had lost is a question requiring perhaps for its answer a more exact knowledge than we possess of the provisions of the psephisma of Ephialtes.

One or two remarks upon the notes may perhaps be added. 8. παρώνυμον altered from hers' rather than 'made like to hers.' 30. No abridgment: Tŵv piv cioódwv gen. of comparison. 36. Move quickly' suits ὑπερεκταίνοντο (or ὑπερακταίνοντο), Od. 23, 3, and probably ȧKтawwon ('put into swift motion'), Plato, Legg. 672 c. 38. ἀντίπαις etc. are ordinary 'objective 'compounds like exópios or #apávoμos. 64-178. Apollo does not prophesy the wanderings' of Orestes. He says The Furies will haunt you wherever you go, over land or sea. But fear them not; go to Athens, and they shall haunt you no more.' 86. Object of rò un 'μedeîv is justice since you know it, practise it.' 93. Not men will pity you because Hermes conducts you,' but Zeus honours (pities) the outlaw, and shows it by providing him with escort' (ev. T. instrumental or modal). 105. The active meaning of årpóσкожоs must be right but does it not require Hermann's φρενῶν ? How βροτῶν, addressing the Furies 115. xs in the mouth of a ghost' may remind us of Soph. Elect. 841, kaì vôv vπò yaías máμчvxos ȧváσoe, where Prof. Jebb quotes Cho. 504 οὕτω γὰρ οὐ τέθνηκας οὐδέ περ Oavóv. 127. Kúpioi perhaps masterful.' 172. Mr. Sidgwick rightly refuses to identify Fates with Furies; unnecessarily leans to supposed allusion to Alcestis. 349-370. These lines, the most difficult strophe and antistrophe in the déoμos uvos, are fully discussed in Notes and Appendix. Weil's

reading of the last two lines in each is adopted, and good reasons are given for preferring this on the whole to Paley's. But aquaTos véov (gen. of cause) is hardly convincing; nor is véov quite the epithet we expect. δύσφορον μάταν (Weil, for ἄταν) is questionable: why does Mr. Sidgwick translate it a toil intolerable'? [The word in Cho. 918 seems to mean 'rashness' or 'folly,' and in Supp. 820 'quest.'] The important correction épais peλérais (361) is by an oversight not assigned to its author (H. Voss, according to Paley). Mr. Sidgwick with the Schol. explains Ovos rode as 'the race of murderers,' remarking that the Furies would hardly call themselves ȧcióμorov. But what is the point of 'The punishment of the murderer belongs to us and not to the gods: for Zeus does not like to converse with murderers'? Whereas ἀξιόμισον, said of the Furies, accords well with the ironical tone of the passage. We punish the guilty, but do not pollute the gods with our touch or offend them with our black-robed presence at their banquets. Far be it from us to trouble them with a duty which is ours, or come to controversy with them. Zeus deigns not to commune with our hateful tribe, dripping with blood.' Which means 'Let them keep off their hands, and not come to controversy with us.' Mr. Sidgwick, less naturally, takes the subject of bei to be the crime ('and that it come not to trial'). 405. Mr. Sidgwick's explanation of this as metaphorical (comparing aiyidos vióxos Nub. 602) is certainly right. 423. Mr. Sidgwick is probably right in taking μηδαμοῦ with νομίζεται, and explaining the negative as due to the 'generic' character of the relative clause. 'Generic,' but not 'indefinite.' Not Wherever it is not the fashion' (omov âv μǹ voμíčnтai), but 'In a place where it is not the fashion,' viz. Hades. A'generic' clause may refer to a definite antecedent, an 'indefinite' clause cannot. πῶς δ ̓ οὐκ ἄν, ἥτις ἐκ Διός πάσχω κακῶς; (Prom. 759) is 'generic,' with causal meaning (Should not I rejoice, being such an one') Latin, quae with subjunctive.

S

δ ̓ οὐκ ἄν, ὅστις πάσχοι; ( Would not anyone who...') would be 'indefinite': Latin, quicumque. 428. ὁ ἥμισυς τοῦ λόγου hardly

It

justifies ἥμισυς λόγου. 430. πρᾶξαι seems to require δικαίως, and κλύειν δικαίως might stand. (To have diaíws said of you, rather than to act δικαίως.) 432. τὰ μὴ δίκαια μὴ νικᾶν indirect for τὰ μὴ δίκαια μὴ νικᾶτε. 496. What is the meaning of ervua? Should it be ἑτοῖμα, with ὑπέκδυσιν (for the obscure Vπódoσw) in the antistrophe? 506. ǎkeα T' οὐ βέβαια· τλάμων δέ τις παραγορεῖ is perhaps right. (The comforter is in need of comfort.') μάταν is improbable, and τλάμων can hardly stand alone. 523. Metre does not require the insertion of av, and its position (to say nothing of the thrice-repeated sound) is intolerable. 599. πέπεισθι to be like κέκραχθι &c. should be πέπισθι. Compare ἐπέπιθμεν, (Curtius, Verb. Eng. Tr. pp. 387, 402), 645. Is not μηχανή the subject of λύσειεν (ἔστι τοῦδ' ἄκος parenthetical, and καὶ intensive with κάρτα. 653. μητρὸς ὅμαιμον cannot be regarded as a divided epithet, like ròv viv χόλον παρόντα or ὁ πρῶτος φόρος ταχθείς. is kindred blood, that of a mother.' Cp. Prom. 804 τόν τε μουνῶπα στρατὸν ̓Αριμασπὸν ἱπποβάμον, where a prose writer would have bad to use a second article. τοῖς τἀμὰ παρBaívovoi viv opкúμara (768), compared with βαίνουσι ὁρκώματα this in the note (or αἱ Φορκίδες ναίουσι δηναιαὶ Kópaι Prom. 794) is different. The divided attribute' is the attribute divided by the noun which it qualifies: like 'a dedicated beggar to the air.' 655. oude couples Telpaμμένη with παῖς, as if παῖς were a participle. 673. The construction would be improved if we might read τοῖς ἐπισπόροις, so as to allow Táde Tà Tiσтà to go together. 726. It should be pointed out that in all such sentences the opt. is primary (ie. of the future, not of the past). δίκαιον εὐεργετεῖν virtually = δικαίως ἄν τις εὐεργετοίη. 797. Why must ἀλλὰ γὰρ with a single verb be regarded as elliptical? yàp in the combination ei yàp is not a conjunction; and the possibility of putting yàp next to ἀλλὰ (as ἀλλὰ γὰρ οὐκ ἐπίσταμαι) seems to show that it was not so regarded. This collocation however is found occasionally when ἀλλὰ γὰρ = sed quia. 802. τεύχητε a misprint for τεύξητε. (βαρὸν just before for βαρύν.) 803. σπερμάτων after βρωτῆρας, not ἀνημέρους.

R. WHITELAW.

Les Sceptiques Grecs, par VICTOR BROCHARD. Paris, F. Alcan. 1887. 8 frs.

DURING the interval between Aristotle and the rise of Neoplatonism the Greek Sceptics form an important factor in the history of Greek thought. Their work, besides being for the most part negative, was intermittent. Of their chief men several never published anything, the writings of others are lost, the age-even the century-of some of them is uncertain. No authoritative catena even of their names exists, such as the list of Stoic philosophers in the Herculanean Table. The investigation of many subtle questions turns consequently upon second or third hand statements, on the representations of disciples, on a fragmentary work of Cicero, on the gossip of Diogenes Laertius, on chance quotations by Eusebius or Galen, on an abstract in the Myriobiblon of Photius, on the criticisms of Augustine, lastly and chiefly on the miscellaneous compilation (itself of uncertain age) which passes under the name of Sextus Empiricus.

Historians of philosophy have not neglected this region, and much wisdom concerning it is to be found up and down in Zeller. Saisset, in his important work, Le Scepticisme, devoted an elaborate section to Aenesidemus, raising questions which have since been acutely discussed by Haas and Natorp; and Mr. Norman Maccoll, in his Essay on the Greek Sceptics (Cambridge, 1869), has treated the main features of the subject with luminous brevity. It remained for some one to handle this whole aspect of Greek philosophy with completeness in a separate work, and in performing this task M. Brochard has produced a volume which, if not remarkable for solidity, is in many ways admirable. The patient subtlety of his analysis is equalled by the clearness of his exposition. Considering the fragmentariness of the record, the remoteness of the original sources, the concretion as it were of different layers of opinion thrown down upon the page of Sextus or Diogenes or amalgamated by Cicero, out of which this airy fabric has to be reconstructed, it is no mean triumph of critical and dialectical skill to have given an account of these successive thinkers so continuously interesting, so finely varied, and on the whole so convincing as M. Brochard here presents to his readers. Some amount of repetition

was perhaps inevitable and may be taken in part compensation for the want of an index. At the first glance the elements of this philosophy seem poor enough, and indeed there is nothing here, except perhaps Carneades's assertion of free will (p. 148 sqq.) and Aenesidemus's denial of causation (p. 263 8qq.), that is not to be found in some corner of the Platonic dialogues. All later philosophy is apt to read like reμán ảnò Tŵv Πλάτωνος μεγάλων δείπνων. But by connecting the doctrines with the characters of the men and with the circumstances of their lives and times, by testing the value of formulae through their relation to the dogmas which they opposed, by noting as it were the different accents of a series of voices that all seem to be always saying the same thing, above all by bringing together the several phases of sceptical tradition into a suggestive general view-not without fruitful applications to modern thought and science-M. Brochard succeeds in giving life and movement to what might otherwise have been a barren recital.

The difficulties on which ancient scepticism laid stress are traced back by our author, as the difficulties of his own time were by Plato, to the exaggerations of the Eleatic school, exaggerations from which Greek dogmatism never worked itself altogether free. The strength of scepticism lay in the crude conception of truth as a mere absolute with which this negative dialectic was contrasted. As M. Brochard says (p. 293) 'On ne peut formuler le principe d'identité, si on veut échapper aux subtilités des sceptiques, qu'en introduisant précisément l'idée d'une relation. "Une chose ne peut, en même temps et sous le même rapport, être et ne pas être." Plato, once at least, comes near to this solution—Ἐκεῖνο δ' ἤδη καὶ χαλεπὸν ἅμα καὶ καλὸν ...τὸ τοῖς λεγομένοις οἷόν τ ̓ εἶναι καθ ̓ ἕκαστον ἐλέγχοντα ἐπακολουθεῖν, ὅταν τέ τις ἕτερον ὄν πῃ ταὐτὸν εἶναι φῇ καὶ ὅταν ταὐτὸν ἂν ἕτερον, ἐκείνῃ καὶ κατ' ἐκεῖνο ὅ φησι τούτων πεπονθέναι πότερον. τὸ δὲ ταὐτὸν ἕτερον ἀποφαίνειν ἁμῇ γέ πῃ καὶ τὸ θάτερον ταὐτὸν καὶ τὸ μέγα σμικρὸν καὶ τὸ ὅμοιον ἀνόμοιον, καὶ χαίρειν οὕτω τἀναντία ἀεὶ προσφέρε οντα ἐν τοῖς λόγοις, οὔ τέ τις ἔλεγχος οὗτος ἀληθινὸς ἄρτι τε τῶν ὄντων τινὸς ἐφαπτομένου

λos veoyern's wv. (Soph. 259 c.) But the words of the Eleatic Stranger, which some will not accept as Plato's, prove their authenticity by nothing more than by this, that

they slept in the ear of so many succeeding centuries. Meanwhile the spirit of hypostatising dogmatism had its way, and in the Stoics was associated with a materialistic principle, constituting a kind of natural realism. Against this stronghold chiefly the darts of the sceptic were directed from his unassailable covert.

In Pyrrho M. Brochard traces not only the world-weariness and despair of truth occasioned by the decline of national life and the jarring of the schools, but also an Oriental touch of contemplative quietism, derived from contact with the Indian gymnosophists with whom the philosopher had intercourse when, with his master Aristarchus, he followed in the train of Alexander. This point of view, although rejected by Maccoll, is certainly interesting, and may claim to have inherent probability; and the image of the great sceptic who accepted the high priesthood of his native town, and performed its duties as well as another would have done (cf. Isocr. de Antid. § 71), is presented in these pages with considerable impressiveness. It certainly carries more conviction than the tale, which our author does not quite discredit, of the sceptic who, out of zeal for indifferentism, allowed himself to be crucified. (It may be noted by the way that the chief of sceptics sprang from Elis, the home of pavτiký.)

The sceptical doctrines, or negations of doctrine, turn from the first on two pivotquestions, the criterion of knowledge and the rule of life. The genuine Pyrrhonist admits no criterion, even his negation being swept away with that which it denies, nor any rule of life save to do as others do, or to take the line of least resistance. Even he, however, does not deny the subjective reality of impressions, nor the facts of custom and opinion. But he has no real faith in dialectic, and customs are to him indifferent. If it was otherwise with Pyrrho's remote successors, the cause is partly to be sought in the obscure relations of Pyrrhonism to the New Academy.

The imaginary return to Plato, culminating in Philo Academicus, only partially exempts this school from the imputation of scepticism. Their dialectic was, indeed, a weapon of which the later Pyrrhonists largely availed themselves. Their purely subjective criterion was opposed to the Stoic Kaтáλnis, and, with mild inconclusive rationalism, they made probability the guide of life. M. Brochard's account of Carneades is particularly clear and full, His suggestion that the famous sermon against Justice was an argumentum ad homines as addressed to

the Romans is rather over-subtle, but his statement of the theory which the same author set against the Stoical Determinism is both subtle and clear. By a curious oversight Carneades and Philo are each said in the course of the same chapter to be at the apogee of the New Academy (pp. 186, 208), but one must not construe too strictly a rhetorical figure.

Aenesidemus, the dialectical sceptic, gives rise to several questions of great nicety, the most difficult being that occasioned by the discrepancy of statements of nearly equal authority, which represent him now as a Pyrrhonist and now as a Heraclitean. M. Brochard solves this by supposing two periods, the inherent dialectic of scepticism having led this powerful thinker to seek a ground for his opinion in Heracliteanism. There is not room to discuss this opinion here. It is a little strange, however, to find our author following Sextus in alleging Air to have been the principle of Heraclitus without reference to the more constant tradition, according to which Fire was that philosopher's element. He also assumes without hesitation that the pregnant saying xpóvоs πρŵтоν σŵμɑ was due to Aenesidemus. The most interesting thing about Aenesidemus is the fact that he partially anticipated Hume's famous analysis of causation, expressly restricting inquiry to phenomenal succession. That Hume should have been aware of this is, of course, extremely improbable. He was but correcting and amplifying Locke's discussion about Power, but, as an eager student of Cicero's philosophical treatises, the Scottish philosopher may have been directly influenced by the reasonings of the New Academy.

Menodotus appears to have originated the last phase of ancient scepticism in formulating certain rules of observation (rýpηois), and even of crude experiment (uunois), again in so far anticipating modern methods. He and those who followed him were medical men, for whom in the interests of their profession some positive hold upon phenomena was indispensable. Our author,

who has a quick eye for historical parallels without being their slave, regards them as the Comtists of antiquity.

According to M. Brochard, pure scepticism is extinct and cannot rise again, partly because the methods of modern investigation have provided criteria which are universally acknowledged as unquestionable, and partly because the progress of knowledge has familiarised the conception, for which the sceptics, to do them justice, had prepared