THE HELPLESS ONES: THE UNBURIED DEAD

by

LAHOMA POPE SMITH, B.A., M.A.

A DISSERTATION

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved

"Chairman of the^ Committee

^VJCW^A. Jl rU>.^ix.fylJ^

Accepted

August, 1975 ABT' O

SOI T3 D I'-^n 5 Ko,.5' - Cop. -•

The unburied dead are covered by the sky.

--Lucan. Pharsalia, VII:8l9

Call for the robin redbreast and the wren. Since o'er shady groves they hover, And with leaves and flow'rs do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men.

--Webster. The White Devil, V:iv:93-9 « s

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ii

Chapter

I. STATEMENT OF PURPOSE 1

II. THE UNBURIED DEAD AND THE IMORTALS 8

III. THE UNBURIED DEAD AND THE POLITICAL INSTITUTION . . . 6l

IV. THE UNBURIED DEAD AND THE PSYCHE 125

V. CONCLUSIONS 170

BIBLIOGRAPHY 17^ CHAPTER I

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

On the plains outside the walls of Troy, the ghost of Patroclus came in the night and talked with Achilles. When Achilles tried to clasp Patroclus in his arms in an excess of love and grief, the soul vanished like a wisp of smoke and went gibbering underground. Achil­ les looked up in amazement. He beat his hands together and cried,

"It is true, then, that something of us does survive even in the halls 1 of Hades, . . . the ghost and semblance of a man." The Greek warrior had wondered whether the dead really do survive when the body dies.

The world's literature bears witness that others have wondered about the state of man after death. Some have hoped that it might be true that man is an immortal being. Evidence of the antiquity of this hope is found in the most ancient piece of literature known to man, th

Epic of Gilgamish. Though his grandfather warned him that "Grim death 2 is adamant. / Nothing was ever destined to last," Gilgamish went to t underworld to seek immortality, an herb that grows in the well of reju nation. His quest was thwarted by the serpent who stole the herb fron

Homer, The Iliad, trans, by E. V. Rieu (Baltimore, Maryland; Penguin Books, 1957), PP- ^1^-15- 2 The Epic of Gilgamish, trans, with an Introduction by N. K. Sandars (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 19^9)* PP* 9^-10^- him. The Hebrew poet Job wondered about immortality: "If a man die, shall he live again? For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again. . . . But man dieth and wasteth away: yea, 3 man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" Pliny flippantly asked,

"Plague take it, what is this mad idea that life is renewed by death?

What repose are the generations ever to have if the soul retains per­ il manent sensation in the upper world and the ghost in the lower?"

Others have prayed fervently that life might not continue after death. The sorrowing Hebrew poet wept that he had not died at birth and cried out: "For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I 5 should have slept: then had I been at rest." Grief-stricken An­ dromache, being taken into slavery by the Greeks and, having just wit­ nessed the sight of her baby being dashed to death from the wall of Troy, surely spoke in hope when she said, "To die is only not to be; 6 and better to be dead than grievously living." Polyxena, also taken a slave by the Greeks, went uncomplainingly as a sacrifice to the ghost of Achilles, saying "Death is become to me a happier lot than

3 The Hebrew Bible, Job 14:7-10. k Pliny, Natural History, trans, by H. Rackham (19^2; rpt. Cam­ bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 19^7), II, 633.

5 The Hebrew Bible, Job 3:13- 6 Euripides, The Trojan Women in The Complete Greek Drama, ed. by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938), I, 98J+. life." For love of Ithaca and lovely Penelope, Odysseus refused im- 8 mortality as a gift from Calypso. Marlowe's Faustus once begged, 9 "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss," but later grieved that eternity is too long for the damned and accused himself, "Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? Or why is this immortal that thou 10 hast?"

Still others, more presumptuous, have denied the existence of life beyond that of the present senses. The Roman poet Catullus wrote:

Suns may set and still return. When our brief light has set, for us There's one perpetual night of sleep.H

In Diffugeri nives, a spring poem, Horace declared:

Swift-following moons make good their heavenly losses. When we are dead and gone the way of pious Aeneas, rich Tullus, Anc we'll be but dust and shade.12

7 Euripides, Hecuba in The Complete Greek Drama, ed, by VHiitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (New York: Random House, I938), I, 8II.

Homer, The Odyssey, trans, by E. V. Rieu (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 19hb), p. 93. 9 Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, ed, by Frederick S, Boas (1932; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, Inc., 19S6), p, I63, 10 Marlowe, p. 173• 11 Vivamus mea Lesbia, quoted in C. Kerenyi, The Religion of the Greeks and Romans (London: Thames and Hudson, I962), p. 272. 12 Quoted in Kerenyi, p. 293. Subject neither to proof nor disproof, the notion of man's im­

mortality has not only stimulated a wealth of wonder in human thought

but also evoked systems of behavior to be followed by survivors of the

dead, systems which have been modified as the attitudes toward the

dead have varied from time to time among the living. Relics found in

the burial mounds of men who lived as long ago as 1^+0,000 years indi­

cate, the archaeologists say, that primitive man both loved and feared 13 the dead. For love of the dead he provided grave offerings of food,

and for fear of them he tied their corpses and laid flint boulders at 11+ their head and shoulders.

Ancient Greeks and Romans also held ambivalent feelings about

their dead. The Romans loved the manes, their kind friendly old an­

cestors, who were buried in the necropolis and were still like members 15 of the family; ajid every year they held the dies parentalia, a cele­ bration in their honor, when they covered their tombs with small gifts 16 and scattered over them fruits and "the little grains of salt." They

13 Pierre Grimal, "The Problem of Pre-historic Religions," in Larousse World ^^thology, ed. by Pierre Grimal (London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group, Ltd., I965), PP. 17ff. Ik H. B. Hays, In the Beginnings: Early Man and His Gods (New York: G. P, Putnam's Sons, 19^3), PP- 30-31.

15 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 191^), P« 108. 16 Ovid, Fasti, trans, by Sir James G. Frazer (Cambridge, Mass­ achusetts: The Loeb Classical Library, 1951), p. 70. feared the spirits of the dead who had not been buried, whether because they had drowned at sea, had been killed on the battlefield, had been murdered and their bodies hidden away, or were being punished for a

crime. Ovid says that the Romans feared these unburied dead so much that they set aside three days in each calendar year--May 9, 11, and

13—as days of the lemuria, during which they celebrated rites of aver- 17 sion to keep their unfriendly spirits away from the living. Early

Christians added to the Greek and Roman requisites for proper treatment

of the dead a special burial site in ground consecrated by the church.

The emphasis of modern Christian culture has shifted from appeasing the dead, lest they walk and harass the living, to comforting the survivors, though elaborate funerals, grave offerings of flowers, grave stones, and memorial day celebrations all testify to a continuing concern for honoring the dead.

It is not the dead who are honored in burial, but the unburied, with which this studyis concerned. Comments in the Greek and Roman epic literature define and describe this group of spirits which, on his trip to Hades, Aeneas saw pacing up and down the River Acheron as 18 "multitudinous as the leaves that fall in the forest." The Sibyl explained them to Aeneas: "These are the helpless ones, the unburied, none of whom may cross that harsh-voiced river until his bones are laid

17 Fasti, p, 199- 18 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans, by C. Day Lewis (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953), p. 139. 19 to rest." Elpenor, begging Odysseus for burial for himself, was 20 one of these sad souls, the "unburied and unwept." Patroclus de­ scribed them to Achilles as disembodied spirits, who cannot cross over the river that separates the living from the Halls of the Dead but who must pace up and down forlorn on this side of the Gaping 21 Gates.

We cannot be sure, the historians of their religions tell us, that every Greek and Roman believed that the spirits of the unburied dead walked about harassing the living, anymore than we are sure that every twentieth-century man believes in the devil or in the efficacy of the saints. But Homer found that reference to the unburied was an appropriate theme for use in expressing his reverence for life and his abhorrence of war, in which the bodies of men are desecrated. Virgil used the theme when he wanted to show that man is subject to the gods, who can use even an unclean thing, even an unburied body in the camp, to move man in the ways Destiny has chosen for him.

The purpose of this study is to examine a number of pieces of literature in which the motif of the unburied dead has appeared and to consider uses writers have made of it in the establishment or

19 The Aeneid, p. 139. 20 The Odyssey, p. 173,

21 The Iliad, p. klk. 7 intensification of tone, in the delineation of character, or in the development of structure.

Thematically, the works are arranged in three groups. The epics of Homer, the Aeneid of Virgil, and Ajax of Sophocles all present a world view that assumes superhuman oversight of the affairs of man.

The focus of each selection is man responding to divine commands.

The second category includes works in which the motif of the unburied dead is associated with man's relationships with political institutions. Selections focused on man under the rule of a tyrant include Sophocles' Antigone from the Greek tragedies and John Mars- tons Antonio's Revenge and the anonymously written The Second Maiden's

Tragedy from English renaissance tragedy. The Suppliants of Euripides is a story of the democratic experiment in Athens, and Philip Massin- ger's The Fatal Dowry is a renaissance study of the judiciary.

The third group includes stories in which the motif serves to evoke humor, pity and fear, or horror in the mind of man. The range of this miscellaneous group extends from ancient Greek haunted-house stories to the contemporary ghost tale and includes such representa­ tive selections as Matthew Lewis' gothic novel. The Monk, suid Joseph

Conrad's short tale of Horror, "The Inn of the Two Witches." CHAPTER II

THE UNBURIED DEAD AND THE IMORTALS

The ancient poets were teachers who told tales of heroes with whom young warriors might identify, of courageous nobles who knew the gods and were familiar with divine laws. In the banquet halls and at the grave sites of the heroes, they sang about Glaucus, whose motto was, "I lead," and who always remembered that his father had sent him off to war with the instructions: "Strive to be best. Your forefathers 1 were the best men in Ephyre and Lycia. Never disgrace them." They told tales about Prince Achilles, whose father had exhorted him, "Al­ ways strive for the foremost place and outdo your peers" (2l8).

These ancient poets trusted the gods: "Let us begin, goddess of song," Homer invoked the muse. From them they learned the "unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven," whose "life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first 2 put forth." The poets were makers; and as they made their stories, combining old narratives with contemporary incident and music, they chose to

1 The Iliad, p. 122. Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page number cited parenthetically in the text. 2 Sophocles, Antigone in The Complete Greek Draima, ed. by Whitney J, Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938), I, H3U.

8 illustrate their meaning or embellish their episodes by reference to

familiar subjects, or objects or actions. One of the familiar sub­ jects of which they spoke was the fate of the unburied dead. Among

the unwritten laws of the gods was the command, "Bury the dead," The

Goddess Here spoke about it one day on Olympus when she felt called upon to remind Zeus of the world order he was about to violate by

lifting his son Sarpedon out of battle and setting him down alive in

Lycia, Here warned Zeus that he could expect no approval from the

other immortals if he tried to "reprieve a mortal man, whose doom had

long been settled, from the pains of death" (30U), The role of the

gods. Here knew, was to carry out the decree of Destiny: mortal man must die. Here knew, too, that when a man died, his survivors had a part in the scheme of things: they must "give him burial, with the barrow and the monument that are the dead man's rights'' (30U),

When the survivors failed to bury the dead, the whole order of

things suffered. The unburied dead, as the ghost of Patroclus told

Achilles, could not pass the Gates of Hades but were kept out by other disembodied spirits and left to pace up and down forlorn on this side of the Gaping Gates (i4-li4-). Restless and aggrieved, they haunted the place of their death for a hundred years or until their bones were 3 laid to rest, and the living suffered retribution. Hector knew this truth and warned Achilles against casting his body to the dogs: ", . , pause before you act, in case the angry gods remember how you treated

3 The Aeneid, VI:328-29, Subsequent quotations will be indicated by book and line number cited parenthetically in the text. 10 me, when your turn comes and you are brought down at the Scaean Gate in all your glory by Paris and Apollo" (Uo6). Elpenor, left unwept and unburied on Circe's Isle, begged Odysseus in Hades to return to

Aeaea and bury him; or, he warned his royal master, "The gods may k turn against you when they see my corpse."

The poets found the motif of the unburied dead, rooted in the psychological and religious life of the people, useful as they com­ posed their works. They used it in expressing their viewpoint about the world, of their joy in life in the midst of death, of their rev­ erence for the dignity of man, of their faith in the immortals, who could use one of the "helpless ones," an unburied corpse, either to

"pollute a whole expedition" (VI:150), as the body of Misenus threat­ ened to do the Trojan venture, or to force the voyagers to move on­ ward, as the ghost of Polydorus did Aeneas in Thrace (111:30-66).

They used the motif, as they drew their heroic characters, to show howjnen behave in. the.presence of their gods. They told of

Achilles, who defied divine commands and denied the rites of burial to his enemies. But Achilles suffered terrible consequences of his disobedience and, in his suffering, learned modesty and came to be blessed. They told of Aeneas, who, though prone to dismay, obeyed the voice of Heaven even when it was spoken by the ghosts of unburied dead, and, in the strength drawn from divine help, led the remnant of the Trojans to a strange land to establish a new nation.

k The Odyssey, p. 173. 11

As they organized and arranged the episodes in the lives of their

characters into unified structures, the poets found the motif of the

unburied dead useful. They found in it matter sometimes for motivating,

sometimes for sustaining and sometimes for resolving conflict. Con­

flict over the unburied and desecrated bodies of slain warriors sus­

tained the major action of the battles during the climactic days of

the Trojan War. The unburied corpse of mighty Ajax, dead as a sui­

cide, gave the cowardly sons of Atreus bravado for conflict with the

mighty warrior Teucer over whether Ajax's body might be buried. The

unburied body of Polyneices motivated and sustained the conflict of

Creon, ostensibly with Antigone, basically with all Thebans. When

the struggle in the heart of Aeneas favored despair, the soul of Poly­

dorus and the unburied body of Misenus directed the Trojan leader to­

ward hope. On the other hand, the soul of Sychaeus, by sending Dido

to Carthage, where she tempted Aeneas to stay and give up journeying,

could have cost Aeneas his "manifest destiny," had not Jupiter inter­

vened.

Homer, Virgil and Sophocles, ages apart in time, but kin in their

regard for man and their reverence for the gods, pictured a world in

the Iliad, in the Aeneid, and in Ajax in which it was assumed that the affairs of man were under the jealous eyes of superhuman powers. Man was significant, and the gods were concerned for him. In the Iliad,

Zeus confessed that both the Trojans and the Achaeans concerned him, even in their destruction (366). Themes of these works through which the authors expressed their viewpoints are the goodness of life on earth compared with the gloom of death and the heroism of the individual 12 who risks the terrors of death to achieve the good life, however he may define the good life.

Homer, like the Hebrew God, looked at all he had made, and "he

saw it was good." Homer wrote of war and death, and he made them

even more terrifying by setting them in contrast with the good life of

man and gods on earth. Though his Iliad is a story of a hero who

sought fame through early death in war, one wonders whether Homer

might not have believed that the long life in gloomy Hades was a 5 terrible price to pay for a warrior's immortality. All of life on

earth, even the worthless, was good to Homer. The "worthless" father

of Periphetes produced a son who was a "great improvement, . . . who

was excellent in all respects, a fast runner, a good soldier, and one

of the ablest men in l^caenae. The value of the man enhanced the glory

6 of his conqueror" (288-89). Homer praised even the fly, whose per­ sistence is so great "that it returns to the attack however often a man may brush it from-his face" (331), and the wasps, who, when teased, "get up in arms and all fly out to fight for their little ones" (299). He rejoiced at the sight of a stallion who "knows how beautiful he is" (278). He gloried in the nature of lions, who are still "indom­ itably fierce though their bellies are distended" (296).

5 Jan de Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, trans, by B. J. Timmer (London: Oxford University Press, 19^3), PP. 1^-19; 2^+9-50. 6 E. V. Rieu, "Introduction," The Iliad (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1957), p. xx. 13

Homer included in his social order a place for those usually out­ cast or rebuked, those who have received only evil from the two jars of gifts which Zeus keeps in his palace for distribution to mor­ tals (^51). He made room for the bastard son and the rebuked warrior.

He recognized the two ^ty•rmidon lieutenants who were illegitimately- born. Menesthius was the love-child of a daughter of Peleus, the beautiful Polydora, and the River Sperchaeus; and Eudorus was the son of an unmarried girl, Polymele, a beautiful dancer in whose arms the great god Hermes lay. Homer was pleased that in his world a man named Borus came forward with a handsome dowry and married the mother of Menesthius, euid a man called Echecles did the same thing for the mother of Eudorus. He was proud of the grandfather of Eudorus, who

"coiild have shown no greater devotion had he been his own son" (297).

Like God of the sparrows. Homer took account of the fall of every dead warrior, but it was Cebriones, the bastard son of Priam, of whom he spoke as "great even in his fall" (313).

Though a captain might rebuke a warrior under his command, Homer saw the innate worth of the soldier. When Hector singled out Melanip- pus for reprimand. Homer recorded that, though chided, Melanippus fol­ lowed Hector immediately "like the gsOlant man he was" (286), Antilo- chus, the youngest of the Achaean warriors, was once frightened into running by the fierceness of Hector; but Homer pointed out that ^en the young soldier reached his company, he "faced about and stood" (287)

When Patroclus reproved Meriones for engaging in talk "too silly" for a fine soldier, Meriones left off speeches and went with Patroclus,

"looking," Homer said, "like a God" (309). Ik

Homer did not make unfavorable comparisons: each individual had a right to act out his own essential qualities. As Rieu pointed 7 out. Homer accounted dignity even to animals and caused the trace- horse Pedasus, though only a mortal horse, to keep up with the im­ mortal pair of Achilles (296). Patroclus could not wield the formid­ able spear of Achilles, not because he was not a great warrior, but because Achilles "knew the way to handle it" (296). No doubt Achilles learned the art from Heaven, where Patroclus learned to care for the immortal horses; and Automedon did not compare Alcimedon, the new charioteer, unfavorably with the man he replaced. Instead he said:

"There was nobody like you at taming and managing those immortal horses, except Patroclus, while he lived; and he had learnt the

Master touch from heaven" (328-29).

Homer knew that his world was flawed; indeed, his epics are studies in the grievous flaws of characters: their tragic inability to exercise appropriate restraints on their emotions and behavior.

He recognized that young boys could be fools, as were those who pro­ voked the wasps every time they passed their nests (299). Shepherds, he realized, could be careless and permit predatory wolves to steal away the kids from their dams when the flocks were lost in the moun­ tains (302). A man can be a fool, too, or ill-advised. Homer said that Patroclus was such a one (3IO), a fool who fell victim to his own audacity (312). He knew that groups of men can be ill-advised.

7 Rieu, "Introduction," The Iliad, p. xxi. 15 as were the Trojans by Hector, when he directed them to drag the body of Patroclus back into the walls of Ilium (322); and that "regardless of the jealous eye of Heaven men misused their powers, delivered crooked judgments in public session and drove justice out" (3O3),

Homer made no overt judgment on Achilles for his wrath that cost so many men's lives, but he condemned his slaying of the twelve young

Trojans warriors at the pyre of Patroclus as "an evil thing" (U17),

He knew, too, that the immortals practiced deliberate deceit in their relations with one another and with mankind. Goddesses deceived even their own husbands, as Here did when she seduced Zeus to sleep with her and so relax his oversight of the war, to the ill-fortune of the

Trojans, whom Here hated (26O-67),

Yet, when Calypso offered Odysseus immortality and ageless youth, he refused her gift, preferring instead to live with the lovely daugh­ ter of Icarius in earthly Ithaca. When Odysseus praised death to

Achilles in the underworld, Achilles said, "Spare me your praise of

Death, Put me on earth again, and I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man, with little enough for myself to live on, 8 than King of all these dead men that have done with life," The gods spoke of man as "wretched" and as "miserable creatures," but both Zeus and Apollo recognized that man's misery ajid wretchedness issued from his separation from the gods, from his mortality, from the fact that men "like the leaves, flourish for a little while on the bounty of the

8 The Odyssey, p, I8U, 16

earth and flaunt their brilliance, but in a moment droop and fade

away" (392). Zeus was sorry for the immortal horses of Achilles who

grieved when their charioteer was dead. "Poor beasts," he said. "Why

did we give you, who are ageless and immortal, to King Peleus, who is

doomed to die? Did we mean you to share the sorrows of unhappy

men?" (328). Homer's vision of life on earth as a good life made the

hero's willingness to die, to give up the good life in order to ob­

tain fame, an even greater sacrifice. The vague, shadowy, restless

life in Hades was no fair exchange for the vibrant life on earth.

The vision of the good life, as seen by Virgil and Sophocles, was

not so much of a hero who seeks the immortality of fame by an early

death in war as of the individual who seeks by his life to belong to

all time, to his ancestors and to his progeny. Ajax preferred to die

rather than give up the old ways of the warrior and see his son grow 9 up outside "his sire's stern rugged code," which he, in his time, had

inherited from his father; and Aeneas sought a life of continuity, a blending of his identity with that of his father, Anchises, and with

that of his son, Ascanius, Achilles was instructed by his father that

if he would win personal glory, he must never disgrace the ancestors.

In Aeneas and Ajax, the desire to honor the ancestors is motivated not so much by desire for personal fame as by a compulsion to provide a worthy inheritance for one's sons. Aeneas left Troy the night of the

9 Sophocles, Ajax in The Complete Greek Drama, ed. by Whitney J, Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr, (New York: Random House, I938), I, 333. Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page number cited parenthet­ ically in the text. 17 sack with the aged Anchises on his back and the fingers of the child 10 Ascanius twined in the fingers of his right hand, carrying with him his household gods and the gods of their race, a prophetic symbol of the way their life would be henceforward. When Juno harried Aeneas and made him want to quit the stuiggle, it was both the memory of his father and the obligation to his son's destiny that enabled him to endure whatever trial Destiny sent each day. He told Dido: 'Each time the night shrouds the earth in its moist shadows, each time the fiery stars arise, the anxious wraith of my father An­ chises warns me in sleep, and I am afraid. "My son Ascanius also serves as a warning to me; I think of his dear self, and of the wrong I do him in defrauding him of his Italian kingdom, where Fate has given him his lands*(108)- Virgil, like Homer, envisioned the earthly life as a good life.

For many years his hero led the Trojans not toward any heavenly city but toward a new land on earth where an old civilization might be re­ established. When Aeneas visited Anchises in the Underworld, he found there a happy group in the portion of the City of the Dead called the

Land of Joy in the Fortunate Woods (l66). This group was composed of those souls who were destined to live in the body a second time (l68).

Virgil saw them as spirit, representatives, as it were, of the life

force that expressed itself on earth in physical bodies. This force enjoyed, in Virgil's view, an everlasting existence, passing from body to body in a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. So the earthly life was good, providing, as it did, homes for Spirit and Mind.

10 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans, into English prose with an Introduc­ tion by W, R, Jackson Knight (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1956), p, 72. Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page number cited parenthetically in the text. 18

Ajax also sensed that the significance of a man's life was best expressed in the kind of link he made between the generations. He gloried in the memory of his father, who came to Ida's land to win fame and sailed back home only "when crowned with praises" (329),

Then he called for his son and held up before the little boy his own hands, stained with the blood of slain cattle and cried out to the servant who held the child:

'Lift him up, lift him hither. He will not shrink In terror at sight of yonder new-spilt blood. If he be rightly mine, his father's son. Early must he be broken to his sire's Stem rugged code, and grow like-natured with him*(333).

Then he said to the child, the grandson of mighty Telemon (329):

"/Someda^, midst thy father's foes / Thou must show what thou art, and of what breed" (333), Then he gave the little boy the shield that he hoped the child would one day carry and said: "Hold it and wield it by its firm-stitched thong, / This sevenfold spear-proof shield, whence comes thy name" (333). Determined to pass on to his son the code of the warrior—do good to your friends: do evil to your ene­ mies—Ajax committed suicide rather than submit to Menelaus and Age- memnon and deny his son his rightful inheritance: a warrior father who would not do good to enemies.

Among the relationships of Achilles, Ajax, and Aeneas with the gods, each hero's is unique. Achilles disregarded the laws of the gods in his fits of rage, completely ignoring the eternal principle that a man should be modest before the immortals and should avoid ex­ tremes. In refusing to return Hector's body to his family for burial and even more in his inhumsme treatment of the corpse of his enemy. 19 he disobeyed the more specific command to bury the dead, Ajax

scoffed at the gods. When he set forth from home, his father spoke

to him wisely: "NJy son, seek victory by the spear; / But seek it always with the help of Heaven." Ajax boastfully and witlessly an­

swered :

'Father, with heaven' s help a mere man of nought Might win victory: but I, albeit without Their aid, trust to achieve a victor's glory* (339).

When divine Athena at the ships by Troy offered him advice, he forgot

that the gods love modesty and turned on her and "gave voice to this

dire, blasphemous boast: 'Goddess, stand thou beside the other Greeks.

Where I am stationed, no foe shall break through'" (339). Aeneas always

obeyed the voice of Heaven and ordered the least details of his life

according to instructions from the immortals.

Reverence for the gods breathed through the works of Homer,

Virgil, and Sophocles; and reverence for the dignity of man also per­ meated their stories. Nor did their reverence for man cease when his body died, but continued in his death. The heroes of Homer and Virgil were entitled to a monument and a barrow so that they might achieve

their immortality of fame. Even for his aged nurse, Caieta, Aeneas

"correctly paid the demands of her funeral, and firmly he built her burial mound" (175). For his father, when the Trojans celebrated the yearly rite of Anchises' death in Sicily, Aeneas swore to the Trojans:

"And when one day I have established my city and founded its temples, may my father be pleased that I offer him this worship every year" (121).

To Virgil the rites of the dead not only enabled the spirits to enter the place of rest and to leave behind that terrible place outside the 20 gates where "Shapes terrible of Aspect have their dwelling there, pallid Diseases, Old Age forlorn. Fear, Hunger, the Counsellor of

Evil, ugly Poverty, Death and Pain" (155), but also made it possible for them to live in the Home of the Blest in Hades for a thousand years and then return once more to an earthly life (169). Sophocles wanted Ajax to be buried not only to escape being thrown to the sea- birds by some enemy's hand but also to be able to enter Hades and earn fame with the other heroes.

Homer's vision of the dignity of the dead was especially clear.

In his world when man forgot the dead, as Achilles did Patroclus, or defiled their bodies, as Achilles did Hector's, the gods interceded.

Although Zeus dared not rescue a living man from death and Apollo re­ fused to go to war for miserable mankind, a transient upon the earth (392), all the gods intervened for the ssike of the unburied dead. They per- soMuLly provided tendrance for both Patroclus and Hector. Thetis saved

Patroclus from decay by a kindly embalming of "ambrosia and red nec­ tar, which she instilled through his nostrils" (355). Aphrodite and

Apollo cared for Hector's body during the twelve days that Achilles dragged it around the barrow of Patroclus. "Day and night Aphrodite kept /the dogs/ off, and she anointed him with ambrosial oil of roses, so that Achilles should not lacerate him when he dragged him to and fro. Moreover Phoebus Apollo caused a dark cloud to sink from the sky to the ground and settle on the corpse, covering the whole area in \^ich it lay, so that the heat of the sun getting at this side and that should not wither the skin on his sinews and his limbs too soon (I+I7). Apollo also wrapped Hector in his golden aegis, "so that 21

Achilles should not scrape his skin when he was dragging him along" (^+37)

Ultimately, Zeus found it necessary to intervene even further, not by stealing the corpse away as some of the lesser gods wanted to do, but by the more practical expedient of prevailing upon Prince Achilles to accept a ransom and return Hector's body to King Priam. The immortal council sent Thetis in person to Achilles to say to him: "Zeus wishes you to know that the gods are displeased with you and that he himself is the angriest of them all, because in your senseless fury you re­ fused to part with Hector's body and have kept it by your beaked ships" (kkO),

The gods cared, too, for Palinurus, Aeneas' helmsman who, be­ guiled by the God of Sleep, fell overboard and drowned shortly before

Aeneas visited the Underworld. His disembodied spirit was flitting among the unfortunate unburied dead on Acheron's banks when Aeneas arrived there. He pleaded with Aeneas:

'And now I belong.to the waves, and winds roll me to and fro along the shore. So therefore I entreat you, . . . rescue me from my plight. Either cast soil upon me yourself, or else, if any way there be or if your Goddess Mother can show you how, since it is not, I know, without divine sanction that you now prepare to traverse the mighty rivers and float on the Stygiem marsh, then give your poor friend your hand and take me with you to cross the waves, that at least in death I may rest in a place of calm'(l58).

The Prophetess rebuked him: "Palinurus, how dare you harbour this im­ pertinent desire? Shall you, before burial, look on the waters of

Styx . . . ?"(158). But with her rebuke, she gave him comfort:

'But hear what I say, and remember. It may comfort you in your hard plight. For all who dwell near, in many a city far and wide, shall be constrained by wonderous signs from Heaven to make atone­ ment to your relics. They shall erect a tomb, and to the tomb shall send annual offerings; and that place shall bear the name of Palinurus for ever' (I58). 22

And Palinurus was comforted. "His cares were banished by her words and in a little while the pain was driven from his mournful heart. The thought of giving his name to the place brought him joy" (158).

The attitudes of Homer, Virgil and Sophocles which show through in their works are reverence for the gods and respect for the dignity of man, in life and in death. By honoring the dead and assuring their welfare in the afterlife, mankind, in their view, was obedient to the

commands of the immortals and showed proper reverence for the gods.

Then, as now, god's work on earth was truly man's work: to honor man is to honor the gods.

The motif of the unburied dead, while establishing or intensi­

fying the author's tone, also evokes from characters a revelation of

their thoughts and courses of action that reveal them as they are.

Achilles, son of the goddess Thetis and the King of the Nferrmidons, 11 like other ancient heroes, was intimate with the gods, and he spoke face to face with them, especially with his lovely mother. She

often came to earth to comfort him or to help him out of scrapes into which he fell because of his youthful rashness. When he went away

to war, it was Thetis who packed his bags for him, remembering, like an earthly mother, to put in warm blankets and his waterproof cloak.

However, Homer chose to emphasize not Achilles' kinship with the gods but his humanity and to treat him not only as a godlike hero but also as a mortal, a man capable of being affected by circumstances in

11 Cedric H, Whitman, Sophocles: A Study in Heroic Humanism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1951), PP. 59-60. 23

the community in which he lived, an individual who made mistakes, one who suffered in conflict with others and who might, in his sufferings,

either grow or deteriorate.

Critics have said that characters in primitive narrative such

as Homer's epics are often static and flat, that the "concept of the

developing character who changes inwardly is quite a late arrival in

the development of narrative," which did not appear until Jesus Christ,

by his revision of the Commandments, forced his culture to look more

12

at inward life and less at outward appearances. But Homer antici­

pated Christian culture in one aspect of his narrative technique: he

knew that "of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," and he

let Achilles, by the words of his own mouth, reveal the workings of

his heart. In the milieu provided by the quarrels of Greek and Trojsin

warriors over the unburied bodies of their dead, Homer told Achilles'

story, a tale of slow and often uncertain growth from wrathful young

partisan to mature, gentle, though spirited, man of the world.

In action antecedent to the quarrels over the dead in the final

days of the Trojan War, Achilles, though unjustly provoked by Aga­

memnon, was petulant and very nearly paranoid. Like' a woman who can

find no flaw in a man before marriage but who turns avid reformer the

moment the bedroom door closes on her, Achilles repented his decision

to Join his I^rmidon forces with the Greeks and complained of condi­

tions about which he was undoubtedly aware when he joined them. He

12 Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, I966). pp. I65-66. 2k discovered that he had never had a quarrel with the Trojans. "They have never done me any harm," he told Agamemnon. "They have never lifted cow or horse of mine, nor ravaged any crop that the deep soil of Phthis grows to feed her men. , . . The truth is that we joined the expedition to please you" (27). Paranoia crept into his harangue:

"It is not as though I am ever given as much as you when the Achaeans sack some thriving city of the Trojans, The heat and burden of the fighting fall on me, but when it comes to dealing out the loot, it is you that take the lion's share" (27). Like a spoiled child who, be­ cause he cannot have his own way, takes his dolls and goes home,

Achilles pouted: "So now I shall go back to Phthia. That is the best thing I can do--to sail home in my beaked ship. I see no point in staying here to be insulted while I pile up wealth and luxuries for you" (27). Vituperative, he shouted vile and insulting epithets at his commander: "You drunken sot, with the eyes of a dog and the courage of a doe" (29). Vain, arrogant, self-centered, he swore that Agamemnon should some day regret having treated him, "the best man in the expedition," with contempt. Then he went to sit by his fast ships and nurse his anger, absenting himself from the Assembly of the men as well as from the fighting; and so he remained until

Patroclus, his beloved squire, was killed and his body was dragged in a tug-of-war, back and forth between the opposing forces.

From his suffering at the death and maltreatment of Patroclus,

Achilles, though still self-centered, began to move toward a new way of looking at life. When Antilochus brought him the news of Patroc­ lus' death, he was cast into the black depths of despair; but 25 following upon this despair there came to him a glimpse, however fleeting, of the knowledge that he and his sufferings were not unique, that death was the common lot of all the Greeks. His arrogance was momentarily washed out of him, and he grieved for all those whose lives had been ransomed for his unreasonable fury that grew out of his quarrel with Agamemnon. He wept and lamented to Thetis:

'I have proven a broken reed to Patroclus and all my other comrades whom Prince Hector killed, and have sat here by my ships, an idle burden on the earth, I, the best man in all the Achaean force, the best in battle, defeated only in the war of words. Ah, how I wish that discord could be banished from the world of gods and men, and with it anger, insidious as trickling honey, anger that makes the wisest man flare up and spreads like smoke through his whole being, anger such as King Agamemnon roused in me that day I* (339-^0)

But Achilles wept in self-pity and only for his own dead. When the body of Patroclus was recovered and he began to prepare it for the rites of burial, he planned an evil, inhumane ceremony for the

funeral, oblivious of the suffering it would cause the Trojan wives and mothers.. "And at your pyre," he told the dead warrior, "I will cut the throats of a dozen of the highborn youths of Troy, to vent my wrath on them for killing you" (3^5).

He resolved to make peace with the kings of his own people and return to battle, but his rage at the enemy remained excessive. He instructed the l^rmidons to wash and care for the body of Patroclus, to anoint it with oils and an unguent nine-years old (3^6), and he prayed his mother to protect Patroclus' corpse from the flies (35^); yet when he came face to face with Hector, who pleaded for mutual respect for the dead, he would not agree to treat the body of Troy's prince with respect should he kill him. Hector tried to bargain: 26

'My lord Achilles, I have been chased by you three times round the great city of Priam without daring to stop and let you come near. But now I am going to run away no longer. I have made up my mind to fight you man to man and kill you or be killed. But first let us make a bargain. ... If Zeus allows me to endure, and I kill you, I will undertake to do no outrage to your body that custom does not sanction. All I shall do, Achilles, is to strip you of your splendid armour. Then I will give up your corpse to the Achaeans. Will you do the same for me?* (kO'^-Ok),

Achilles refused, and even when they fought and Hector fell, Achilles was adamant and told the dying prince, ''Now the dogs and birds of prey are going to maul and mangle you, while we Achaeans hold Patroclus' funeral" (k06). As Hector died, begging in a failing voice that

Achilles give up his body for ransom, Achilles scowled and replied:

You cur, don't talk to me. . . ,1 only wish I could summon up the appetite to carve and eat you raw myself, for what you have done to me. But this at least is certain, . . . the dogs and birds of prey shall eat you up* (Uo6),

Not even fear of the gods softened Achilles' determination; for at Hector's final warning, "Pause before you act, in case the angry gods remember how you treated me, when your turn comes," Achilles again scowled and gathered his men around Hector so that each of them might strike the Trojan's corpse with a sword, each laughing, as he thrust, at the jest of one who said, "Hector is easier to handle now than when he set the ships on fire" (U07).

The greater grew Achilles' concern for the body of his squire, the greater became his disrespect for the humanity of his enemy. In the excitement that followed immediately after Hector's death, he wanted to reconnoiter the walls of Troy, but he suddenly remembered

Patroclus; and, chiding himself for having forgot the body for even a moment, he rushed back to the ships. Yet, this tender regard for 27

the body of his own comrade did not make him hesitate to outrage the

body of the fallen prince of his enemy, and he slit the tendons of

Hector's feet from heel to ankle, inserted leather straps into the

slits and fastened Hector's feet to his chariot, leaving his head to

drag on the ground. Then he jumped into the chariot and flew around

the walls of Troy, with Hector's head raising a cloud of dust behind.

When he returned to the ships, he thought of one more indignity to

which he could subject Hector: he flung his body down on his face in

the dust beside the bier of Patroclus (^^12),

In the night following this defiling of Hector's body, the ghost

of Patroclus appeared to Achilles to tell him that, while he had been busy desecrating Hector's body and denying it the rites of fire, he

had been denying his friend also:

'You have forgotten me, Achilles, Bury me instantly and let me pass the Gates of Hades, I am kept out by the disembodied spirits of the dead, who have not let me cross the River and join them, but have left me to pace up and down forlorn on this side of the Gaping Gates' (UlU),

Achilles was astonished and amazed—and rebuked, also. He woke his men to tell them that all night the ghost of Patroclus had stood by his side, telling him what he ought to do.

From the time of this visit, from the reminder by Patroclus of the duties that the living owe the dead, Achilles began to take prac­ tical action against the discord which, earlier, he had only lamented.

When his men wept too long at the funeral of Patroclus, he approached the king with whom he had recently quarreled with an attitude of re­ spect: "W^ lord Atreides," he said, "you are the man to whom the troops will listen. ... I ask you to dismiss them from the pyre" (^4.16), 28

He moved into the role of a leader of men instead of a pouting child or a "broken reed" sitting disconsolate by his ships. He directed the funeral games for Patroclus with tact and good humor. His scowl was gone, and a long speech from the windy old Nestor drew a "smile from the swift and excellent Achilles," whose bitter retort was re­ placed with a "gracious answer" (U27).

Even so, Achilles' cruelty toward Hector's corpse went unabated, and he continued to desecrate the body, going from his sleepless bed in the early dawn to drag the corpse three times about the barrow of

Patroclus. It was only when the aged Priam came to beg for his son's body that Achilles' sympathies were enlarged to include the whole family of man. When the old king wept, Achilles remembered his own father; and, almost as in a vision, he understood that these two old men, though enemies at war, were very much alike, that both had once been greatly blessed and both had had sorrows. His new thoughts en­ compassed humanity. "We men are wretched beings," he told the old king kneeling at his feet, "and the gods . . . have woven sorrow into the very pattern of our lives" (^51). Achilles was not a sentimen­ talist, and his self-knowledge was keen enough for him to realize that he must not let Priam see Hector's body within his house lest the king's grief, turning to wrath, might reawaken his own rage and cause him to kill the old man.

But it was in the act of lifting the body of Hector onto the bier and declaring a truce for his burial that Achilles, having come so far in time and temper from the shouts and boasts of that first angry quarrel with his commander, revealed his true stature. He became 29 truly human; yet, paradoxically, his vision was godlike. He was truly both god and man. He could see beyond himself, A warrior still, he was to fight again, indeed to die, before the Achaean ships would leave Troy, other stories about him tell us; but he knew now the fu­ tility of the lamentable war, the terrible waste for both armies.

His sympathies included the sufferings of both sides. He told

Priam:

*Look at my father, Peleus. ... no children in the palace to carry on the royal line, only a single son doomed to an untimely death. And what is more, though he is growing old, he gets no care from me, because I am sitting here in your country, far from my own, making life miserable for you and your chil­ dren (U51).

In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the chorus sang: "^t is/ Zeus, 13 . . . who has laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering."

It was by suffering that Achilles came to wisdom, his every movement toward that enviable state running parallel to his changing attitudes toward the treatment of the dead. As a Greek, Achilles was, from the beginning wholly committed to the imperative of burying the dead of his own family and friends. He was equally committed to desecrating the bodies of his enemies. In the violence of his wrath, in the vehe­ mence with which he defiled the body of the Prince of the Trojans, he committed the unforgiveable offence of forgetting to bury his own dead.

The rebuke which he received from the ghost of Patroclus was the first shock that Achilles suffered. The second came with Priam's visit, the

13 Aeschylus, Agamemnon in Greek Tragedies, Vol. I, ed. by David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 10. 30 sudden realization that respect for the dead is not parochial. These two psychic shocks brought Achilles to the knowledge that one's love for his kin, for his friends, and for his country is valid only so far as he allows other men to love their own.

The nature of heroes other than Achilles was also revealed in the presence of the unburied dead in The Iliad. Patroclus, Achilles' squire, was the first of the Greeks to participate in besmirching bodies of the enemy, when he led the pair of Ajaxes into battle over the corpse of Sarpedon, the Lycian captain. But he had little time to gloat over this enemy, for Zeus sent Phoebus Apollo to pick up his noble son from among the fallen dead and spirit him away to his homeleuid.

Then Zeus made Patroclus overbold; and in his excessive pride, in his desire to meet the mighty Hector in personal combat, he disobeyed

Achilles' order to do no more than drive the Trojans from the Greek ships and charged toward the city walls, killing Trojans as he went.

Among those whom he killed was Cebriones, Priajn's son and Hector's charioteer, at whom he threw a jagged, sparkling stone. The stone shattered both Cebriones' eyebrows, crushing in the bones; and his eyes fell out and rolled in the dust at Patroclus' feet. Cebriones fell from the chariot like a diver. Then, the poet said, Patroclus proved himself a fool: he went too far. First, he jeered at the fallen prince: "Quite an acrobat, I see, judging by that graceful divel The man who takes so neat a header from a chariot on land could dive for oysters from a ship at sea in any weather and fetch 31 up plenty for a feast" (312). Then he hurled himself on the already- dead body of the fallen warrior to strip and defile it.

When Hector saw his beloved charioteer being maltreated by a Greek, he jumped from his chariot and engaged Patroclus in hand-to-hand com­ bat, each "striving with the cruel bronze to tear /the/ other's flesh" (312). They were joined by allies on either side, and the

Achaeans succeeded in dragging the noble Cebriones away from the

Trojans. Ironically, it was this success that led to Patroclus' doom; for it encouraged him to be even more audacious, to charge the walls of Troy. He charged three times, killing nine men at each charge; but on his fourth charge, both men and gods set upon him and he became the victim of Hector's spear, driven clear through his belly.

The Trojan Prince Hector, in the struggle over the unburied dead, revealed the serious flaw in his character that led to his downfall and death: he coiild not distinguish between foolish and wise counsel.

He listened to advisors who chided him into brash behavior, and he ig­ nored the counsel of "wise Polydamus" and of his family to avoid fool­ hardy stratagems. He allowed the angry Lycian captain, Glaucus, to shame him into leading an attack to steal the body of Patroclus from the Greeks. In preparing for this foray, he was insensitive enough to other men's feelings to dare put on and wear the armor of Achilles, which he had stolen from Patroclus' body. This callous act caused Zeus to shake his head and, loathing the thought that Patroclus might become

"carrion for the dogs of hostile Troy," he emboldened the squire's comrades-in-arms to fight in his defense (323). 32

Though he listened to reckless advice from a captain of his allies.

Hector refused to listen to the advice of Polydamus, the only Trojan who could look into the future as into the past. Polydamus wanted to bivouac the troops inside the city walls and so avoid head-on combat with Achilles when he rejoined the Achaean forces. Polydamus was "as brilliant in debate as Hector was in battle," and he argued well for his viewpoint:

*It is my opinion that we ought to withdraw into the city now. ... So long as Achilles was at loggerheads with King Agamem­ non, the Achaeans were easier to deal with. But now I am terri­ fied of the man. That fiery spirit will never be content to stay on the plain, where we and the Achaeans used to meet each other halfway out on equal terms, but will make our town itself and our womenfolk his target. So let me persuade you to retire on Troy'(3U3).

Ignoring the wisdom of Polydamus' words. Hector angrily responded:

'The man who tells us to retire and shut ourselves up in the town sees eye to eye with me no longer. At the very moment when ^j^ighty Zeu£/ has let me have a victory at the ships and drive the Achaeans" back against the sea, you, like a fool, advise us to defend the town, I forbid you to put such notions in the people's heads. Not that a single Trojan will follow your lead—I should not let him' (3^^).

Then he declared he would himself meet Achilles face to face to see who should have the victory, adding, ironically: "The War God has no favourites: he has been known to kill the man who thought he was going to do the killing" (3^5).

When the Ntyrmidon king actually approached Ilium and Hector took

"his stand in front of the gates in the fixed resolve to fight it out with Achilles," Priam warned him: "I beg you, my dear son, not to stand up to that man alone and unsupported. You are courting defeat and death at his hands. He is far stronger than you, and he is 33 savage" (398). Hecuba begged him:

'Deal with your enemy from within the walls and do not go out to meet that man in single combat. He is savage; and you need not think that, if he kills you, I shall lay you on a bier and weep for you; but far away, beside the Argive ships, you will be eaten by the nimble dogs* (399).

Hector ignored the admonition of both his father and his mother, as he did that of Polydamus.

Like Achilles, Hector and Patroclus suffered from an excess of pride. Neither could be advised, one by his own commander, the other by the wisest man in the city; and each, like Achilles, met his doom

as a result. Brutalized in a war that led to excesses of vengeance

as well as of pride, each of them evoked the wrath of the gods and brought about his own downfall.

In the Iliad, Aeneas played a minor role as a warrior. Homer,

in the way he had of never putting any man down, called him a great

champion like Achilles and reported that he could pick up a lump of

rock, which, "Even to lift it was a feat beyond the strength of any

two men bred today" (373). But when Aeneas brashly faced Achilles in

single combat, Poseidon rebuked him and lifted him off the ground and

swept him over the lines of men and horses and set him down on the edge

of the battlefield. "Aeneas," he said, "what is the meaning of this

recklessness? Which of the gods told you to fight with the proud

Achilles, who is not only a better soldier than you but a greater

favourite with the immortals?" (37^). In talking further with Aeneas,

Poseidon promised him that when Achilles was dead, he should boldly play his part on the front line; for none other than Achilles on the

Achaean side should kill him. 3k

Though lifted out of battle by the gods, Aeneas did play a part

in Troy's front lines, for Virgil, in the Aeneid, selected him to lead

the Trojans out of the burned city to a new land where they should build a new nation that would eventually be the great Roman Empire.

Virgil chose Aeneas not only because he was a noble warrior but also because he had other characteristics that made him more suited for

rebuilding a civilization than prowess in war alone would have done.

Ilioneus, the Trojan who first spoke to Dido in Carthage when the

shipwrecked voyagers appealed to her for help, said of their leader whom they believed lost at sea: "Aeneas was our king. No one was ever more just than he, nor any greater in righteousness or in prow­ ess at war" (kk). Justness, righteousness, loyalty to the gods, to homeland, to family and dependents--these were the qualities that

Destiny required in a man when a society was to be rebuilt rather than destroyed.

Aeneas' unusual devotion to family and to the gods is revealed in his careful obedience to the commands to bury the dead. When he visited the Underworld, it was the plight of the resourceless, un­ buried dead that most aroused his pity. The commotion of their spirits at the river distressed and perplexed him; and when he saw there Leu- caspis and Orontes, both "mournful since they had been denied the ritr ual honors of the dead" because their ship had been overwhelmed by the south wind in the stormy sea as they sailed from Troyland, he "checked his steps and halted, brooding deeply, and pitying them from his heart for their unkind lot" (157). 35

One of the concerns he showed for his family and followers was to do his part to make certain that they escaped the plight of the helpless, unburied dead. When his father died at Drepanum, he built a barrow there for the aged Anchises so that his soul might find rest in Hades. When, exactly one year later, he chanced to return to

Drepanum, Aeneas rejoiced at his good fortune to "stand beside the very ashes of his father's bones" (120); and he conducted annual rites for the dead, which he said he would have conducted no matter where he had been, whether "in exile by the Syrtes in Africa, ... or sailing on the Argive Sea, or even while in the very city of l^cenae" (120).

When Caieta died, Aeneas built her a burial mound so that her name might be heard in "legend to last forever" (175). When word came to him that Deiphobus, Priam's son, had fallen slaughtering Greeks that fataJ. last night in Troy, he erected a cenotaph for him ''on the

Rhoetean shore and thrice called loud on /hisj shade" (l62). But he still grieved, as he told the shade of Deiphobus in Hades, that he had not been able to lay the young prince's body in soil of home.

On three occasions Aeneas was personally involved with the un­ buried dead: first, with the spirit of his wife Creusa, who encour­ aged him to begin the search for a new land; then, with the ghost of

Polydorus, who corrected him on his course; and, last, with the corpse of Misenus, who enabled him to find the talisman he needed on his visit to the Underworld. Though the Mother of Heaven cared for the body of Creusa, Aeneas and the Trojans took pains to care for the un­ buried bones of Polydorus and Misenus. Of the body of Polydorus

Aeneas later told Dido: 36

'So we gave Polydorus a new burial, piling masses of earth on his barrow, and erecting to the Shades below an alter sad with dark drapery and the dead black of a cypress. . . . and so we committed the soul to peace in its grave* (77).

For Misenus, drowned by jealous Triton and washed up on the shore, the

Trojans raised an altar-pyre high toward the heavens, washed and ajiointed the cold body of their friend and burned him according to their ancestral rites. Then, Virgil wrote:

Aeneas the True built a barrow of massive size, on which he set the implements which Misenus had used, his oar and his trumpet. The barrow is at the foot of a mountain towering to the sky, which is still called Misenus after him and preserves his name eternally as the centuries pass (15^),

Unlike Aeneas, who played only a minor role in the Homeric epics,

Ajax, in the Iliad, was the bulwark of the Achaeans, the strong man upon whom the Greeks leaned heavily in their battles against the Tro­ jans, With Odysseus, he went as ambassador to persuade Achilles to return to war when the ^tyrmidon prince was sulking by his ships. With the lesser Ajax, he stood guard as Menelaus and ^feriones struggled to rescue the body of Patroclus and frightened the formidable Hector and his Trojans away from the body of Achilles' squire. In Virgil's epic,

Aeneas remembered that Ajax was the most furious of all those who at­ tacked Troy on the night the Greeks gained access to the city (63).

In the Ajax of Sophocles, Ajax was still the mighty hero, more valiant, Odysseus recalled, than any warrior, save Achilles, who came to Troy (357), ready in defense of friends and in opposition to foes.

Though he scorned her, the goddess Athena recognized his greatness and said of him to Odysseus: "Whom couldst thou find more prudent than this man, / Or whom in act more valiant, when need called?" (320), He 37

was like other Homeric heroes-Achilles, Hector, Patroclus-in his single-minded drive for the immortality of fame through military achievement. Like them in his compulsion, he ignored the limits im­ posed by his humanity and forgot his kinship with other men. Like Achilles, who, with no compunction for the suffering he caused their wives and mothers, slew twelve young Trojan princes and burned their bodies on the bier of Patroclus, and Hector, who rejected the advice of the wisest men in the councils of the Trojans and engaged Achilles in single combat, and Patroclus, who ignored the orders of his com­ mander and approached the walls of Troy, Ajax came with violence to the tents of Menelaus and Agamemnon and would have slain them and their retinues had not Athena turned his sword on the herds and droves instead. Each in his pride and over-confidence brought about his own destruction and endangered the lives of his peers.

But Homer recognized in Achilles and Hector and Patroclus a Ik strain of humaneness. Achilles, for all his pride, at the prayer of King Priam was drained of his wrath and filled with compassion that led him to console his enemy. Hector, knowing that Ilium would soon be destroyed, was filled with tender grief for his wife and his son. He prayed that the earth might be deep over his body before

Andromache becajne a slave to the Achaeans and that Astyanax might be 15 as strong and brave as he but "a better man than his father," Pa­ troclus was gentle with the slaves; and the maiden Briseis, though she

Ik 15 De Vries, Heroic Song, p. l8. The Iliad, p, 129, 38 belonged to the tent of Achilles, could never cease to mourn the death of Patroclus because of the kindnesses he did her when Achilles slew her family and took her captive.

Sophocles, like Homer, found in Ajax none of the humanity shown by the other heroes. Militant to the core, the bloody soldier grieved, not because he had slain innocent cattle but because he had not slain the Greek kings. He scorned the tears of his wife and was unmoved by her pleadings that he not take his own life and leave her a widow and his son an orphan. "Women love tears too well," he scoffed (333).

When the chorus begged him to approve Tecmessa's pleas, Ajax responded:

"Verily my approval shall she win, /if only she find heart to do my bidding" (331).

^ Ajax was totaJ.ly committed to the ancient ethical code of doing good to friends and harm to enemies, a code of behavior that presumed 16 superhuman insight into the changing hearts of other men. True, living with this code as a guide for conduct was common in the heroic age. Achilles practiced it when he gave tendrance to the corpse of

Patroclus while dragging the body of Hector through the sand at the base of Troy's wall. On the night of Troy's fall, Aeneas and the Tro­ jans organized their strategy according to this code when they ripped the armour from the bodies of fallen Greeks and used it as camouflage so they might steal among the enemy warriors and kill them, rational­ izing their deception with the callous words, "Who cares whether what

16 Bernard M. W. Knox, "The Ajax of Sophocles," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, LXV (196177"?. 38. 39 we do to an enemy is treachery or valour?" (62). It was this code that lay in the thoughts of Aeneas' Trojans as they sailed around

Italy, carefully lying offshore on the nearer coastline, for "there every walled city contained hostile Greeks" (87), and as they "evaded the rocks of Ithaca . . . and cursed the land that gave birth to savage Ulysseus" (83).

Within this code, no compromise was possible for Ajax. He be­ lieved that to violate it would bring stain upon his personal honor, insult to his ancestors, and threat to the dignity of his son. He could not adapt to life in a world where values changed so swiftly that yesterday's enemy could become today's friend. He pondered the reasons for the sufferings that had come to him--his defeat by Odys­ seus in the contest for Achilles' armour and the heaven-sent madness that caused him to slay cows and sheep instead of the Greek leaders who were his enemies--and he concluded that these misfortunes came to him because he once violated the code of the hero and exchanged gifts with a deadly foe. Hector, prince of the Trojans. "Nought from the

Greeks toward me hath sped well," he said of Hector's gift, "from that hour my hand accepted it" (33^).

Unable to accept change, Ajax died at his own hand, preoccupied even as he approached death with overweening hatred of enemies. His

"slayer," the sword that Hector had given him, he planted in Troy's hostile soil and, praying that Zeus

'send some announcer of the evil news To Teucer, that he first may lift me up. When I have fallen on this reeking sword. ko

Lest ere he come some enemy should espy me And cast me forth to dogs and birds a prey* (3UI); he fell on his sword and died.

It was at this point, in the final third of the drama, that the motif of the unburied dead appeared as a significant element in the portrayal of character. When Ajax had died, his body became the focus of a bitter dispute between his brother Teucer and the Greek kings

Menelaus and Agamemnon. In retaliation for the crime Ajax had at­ tempted against them, the Greek leaders commanded Teucer to leave the body of his brother lying unburied. In the action of the result­ ing dissension, the heroic characteristics of Ajax are reiterated and the motives and attitudes of other characters are revealed.

The good life as defined by all the characters in Ajax was the life in which the hero stood taller than other men, loved friends and hated enemies with great intensity, and was a law unto himself.

Because Ajax saw this way of life being eroded from around him, had even felt pity for a woman in his own hard heart (336), and because he preferred death to life characterized by weakness, he committed suicide. The other characters all understood why the hero had chosen the permanence of death rather than the instability of life in a changing culture, and each reacted according to his own nature.

Odysseus was a strong man and a warrior just as Ajax was, and he too hated his enemies "while hate was honorable" (357). But

Odysseus had one trait lacking in the personality of Ajax: he had the desire to achieve empathy with other men; that is, instead of assuming that other men must feel as he did, he tried to feel as 1+1 other men must feel. When Athena sent delusion upon the mind of Ajax and caused him to be shamed before his troops, Ajax imagined that

Odysseus must be laughing at him because he had laughed when he be­ lieved he had Odysseus in his power. In truth, Odysseus was speaking of his foe to the Goddess Athena in the gentlest of tones, trying to put himself in the place of the distraught hero:

'I know none nobler; and I pity him In his misery, albeit he is my foe. Since he is yoked fast to an evil doom. My own lot I regard no less than his' (320).

Then, with Ajax lying dead on the yellow sands, Odysseus realized that death comes to all men, and he risked rebuke from Agamemnon by pleading for funeral rites for the hero because, as he said, "...

I myself shall come to this" (358). Although Ajax undoubtedly would not have wanted a foe turned friend to defend him, Odysseus chose to do so, arguing with Agamemnon that "It is not righteousness to out­ rage / A brave man dead, not even though thou hate him" (357).

Teucer was as consumed with hatred of enemies as Ajax was and so could accept his brother's choice of death with his hates clutched 17 to him, as he is revealed in a passage in the Odyssey, over life despoiled with tolerance of foes. However, Teucer was not able to resist the noble behavior exhibited by Odysseus in defense of Ajax's corpse; and when the leader of the chorus praised Odysseus, Teucer joined in the adulation:

'Noble Odysseus, for thy words I praise thee Without stint. Wholly hast thou belied my fears.

17 The Odyssey, p. l86. k!2.

Thou his worst foe among the Greeks, hast yet Alone stood by him staunchly, nor thought fit To glory and exult over the dead. Like that chief crazed with arrogance, who came. He and his brother, hoping to cast forth The dead man shamefully without burial' (359).

Still, when Odysseus offered to join in burying the dead man, Teucer could only refuse. Though he might be able to accept noble behavior from one who was once an enemy, he knew that the inflexible Ajax could not, 'But pardon me, thou son of old Laertes," he responded to Odysseus' offer. That I must scruple to allow thine aid / In these rites, lest I so displease the dead" (359-60), Teucer knew that, though Ajax was, as Agamemnon said, "a mere shade" (355), he could not abide the ministering hands of the hated Odysseus at his funeral rites.

The spiteful Atreidae, though warriors and kings, never attained the heroic stature of Achilles or Ajax. Mean and small-minded, they were envious of the hero and resented his independence of their rule.

As Agamemnon confessed, Ajajc had never obeyed them while he was alive; so they were determined that he should be controlled by them once he was dead. Typical law and order men, they used national security as defense of their atrocious behavior toward the dead:

'Yet 'tis a sign of wickedness, when a subject Deigns not to obey those placed in power above him. For never can the laws be prosperously Stablished in cities where awe is not found; Nor may a camp be providently ruled Without the shield of dread and reverence.

He with whom awe and reverence abide. Doubt not, will flourish in security. But where outrage and licence are not checked. Be sure that state, though sped by prosperous winds. Some day at last will founder in deep seas' (3^9)« k3

Typically also they defied the higher law and order while insisting that other men be obedient to their lesser laws. Odysseus pointed out to them that their behavior toward the corpse of Ajax was not so much a dishonor to the dead as a wronging of the "laws of heaven" (357)

These three writers used the motif of the unburied dead in es­ tablishing the tone of their works, in the delineation of character, and also in the motivating and sustaining of dramatic action. In the

Iliad, the motif sustains the total conflict of the climactic days of the Trojan War to its climax and resolution. In the Aeneid the motif appears in action antecedent to that of the present action as well as in the movement -that motivates Aeneas to begin his quest and as a force that moves the action of this venture forward. In the Ajax, the motif appears only in the second diptych, where it is the sustaining theme of the final conflict, a dispute between the feuiily and troops of Ajax and the Greek kings Menelaus and Agamemnon.

In the Introduction to his prose translation of the Iliad,

E. V. Rieu gave a summary of the tragic action of the epic:

King Agamemnon the imperial overlord of Greece (or Achaea as Homer calls it) has, with his brother Menelaus of Sparta, in­ duced the princes who owe him allegiance to join forces with him against King Priam of Troy, because Paris, one of Priam's sons, has run away with Menelaus' wife, the beautiful Helen of Argos. The Achaean forces have for nine years been encamped beside their ships on the shore near Troy, but without bringing the matter to a conclusion, though they have captured and looted a number of towns in Trojan territory, under the dashing leader­ ship of Achilles, son of Peleus, Prince of the %rmidons, the most redoubtable and the most unruly of Agamemnon's royal sup­ porters. The success of these raiding parties leads to a feud between Achilles and his Commander-in-Chief. Agamemnon has been allotted the girl Chryseis as his prize, and he refuses to give her up to her father, a local priest of Apollo, when he comes to the camp with ransom for her release. The priest prays to his god; a plague ensues; and Agsimemnon is forced by the strength kk

of public feeling to give up the girl and so propitiate the angry god. But he recoups himself by confiscating one of Achilles' own prizes, a girl named Briseis. Achilles in high dudgeon refuses to fight any more and withdraws the I^rmidon force from the battlefield. After an abortive truce, intended to allow Menelaus and Paris to settle their quarrel by single combat, the two armies meet, and as a result of Achilles' ab­ sence from the field the Achaeans, who have hitherto kept the Trojan forces penned up in Troy or close to their own city walls, are slowly but surely put on the defensive. They are even forced to make a trench and a wall round their ships and huts. But these defenses are eventually stormed by Hector the Trojan Commander-in-Chief, who succeeds in setting fire to one of the Achaean ships. At this point Achilles, who has remained obdurate to all entreaties, yields to the extent of permitting his squire and closest friend Patroclus to lead the %rmidon force to the rescue of the hard-pressed Achaeans. Patroclus brilliantly succeeds in this mission, but he goes too far and is killed under the walls of Troy by Hector. This disaster brings Achilles to life. In an excess of rage with Hector and grief for his comrade he reconciles himself with Agamemnon, takes the field once more, hurls the panic-stricken Trojans back into their town, and finally kills Hector. Not content with this revenge, he savagely maltreats the body of his fallen enemy. Hector's father. King Priam, in his grief and horror, is inspired by the gods to visit Achilles in his camp by night, in order to recover his son's body. Achilles relents; and the Iliad ends with am uneasy truce for the funeral of Hector.l8

When one examines this story, he sees that the dramatic action grew out of two conflicts. The Trojan War was the first, a struggle that began when Paris stole away Helen, wife of King Menelaus of

Sparta, and took her with him to Troy. Menelaus persuaded his brother.

King Agamemnon, and their neighboring princes to gather troops and ac­ company him to Troy to recover his wife. Against this Greek invasion

Paris and the Trojan princes gathered their allies inside the walls of

Troy and set up a defense. For nearly ten years the conflict between

18 E. V. Rieu, "Introduction," The Odyssey (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 19^6), pp, viii-ix. k5

Greeks and Trojans continued. In the tenth year of the war, the second dramatic conflict of the Iliad began when the wrath of Achilles, the greatest man in the Argive expedition, was aroused. This wrath-- its inception, its rise to a horrible peak, its diminishing to its final appeasement--was the second conflict; and it was inextricably interwoven into the pattern of the war with its growing intensity, its climax in the death of Patroclus, and the final lull paralleling the resolution of Achilles' internal strife.

The flame of Achilles' wrath in the second conflict, like that of

Menelaus in the first, was ignited by contention over a woman. Achilles became enraged when Agamemnon confiscated his slave girl Briseis. To ret£G.iate, Achilles withdrew himself and his fierce I^rmidons from the fighting and sat by his ships and sulked.

At this point in the story. Homer was faced with settling both conflicts--appeasing the wrath of his hero and bringing an end to the war. He used a single theme to bring both struggles to their climax and resolution, to the truce for Hector's funeral and calm in Achilles' heart. The theme that he chose for directing the complication of both actions through their turning point to resolution was the unburied dead.

In the episodic structure of Homer's narrative, particularly in view of the poet's skill in extending present time by casting over it 19 "two shadows . . . that of the past and that of what is yet to come," it is difficult to pinpoint a beginning of an episode within the

19 Rieu, "Introduction," The Odyssey, p. x. kS

greater narrative, as it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to pinpoint

the beginning of any quarrel. But in the Iliad, the point at which

the unburied dead motif begins to serve as a formative element in

the story is a cluster of episodes beginning in Book XVI. In the

first of these episodes, Achilles' squire Patroclus, though he could

not shame Achilles himself into returning to the field, did persuade

him to lend Patroclus his annor so that the squire could lead the

Ifyrmidons out to fight. In his first field encounter, Patroclus

killed the Lycian captain Sarpedon, a son of Zeus. Glaucus, second

in command to Sarpedon, used the unburied body of his leader to in­

cite further action. When he saw that Sarpedon had been struck down

by Patroclus, he gathered around him the Lycians and the most influ­

ential leaders of the Trojans to stir up their patriotic zeal. "Think

of the shame of it," he taunted them, "if the Ntyrmidons, in revenge

for the many Danaans who fell to our spears beside the gsillant ships,

should take Sarpedon's^arms and desecrate his corpse" (307). Among

the opposing forces, Patroclus used the unburied body of the Lycian

chief to whet the appetite for battle on his side. He spurred his

troops on: "^fy lords, . . . Sarpedon lies dead. . . . Let us see if

we can capture and besmirch his corpse. . . . and at the same time

cut to pieces some of the friends who will protect him" (307).

Both sides went at the fight with a roar, with Sarpedon's body the focus of their fury. "They swarmed round the corpse as flies in a cattleyard round the brimming pails on a day in spring when the vessels overflow with milk" (309). But the gods intervened, and Zeus sent Apollo to spirit away the body of Sarpedon to Lycia. hi

In further encounter, Patroclus became overbold and pursued

Hector, who had retreated from the struggle around Sarpedon, to the

very walls of the city, killing Trojans as he went. When, with the help of Apollo, Hector finally stood and engaged Patroclus hand-to- hand, he drove a bronze clear through him, and "death cut Patroclus

short and his disembodied soul took wing for the House of Hades, be­ wailing its lot and the youth and manhood it left" (315).

The death of Patroclus, beloved squire of mighty Achilles, is the point in the narrative at which the two conflicts of the epic merge in climax. Achilles turned his wrath away from Agamemnon and toward himself and upon Hector, the two people responsible for the death of his dearest friend. What had been a smouldering rage be­ came a blast of fury that rushed Achilles back to war and, eventually, precipitated the fall of Troy.

But, even before the news of his squire's death could reach

Achilles, the unburied corpse of Patroclus was the agent that led to the next episode in the war's action. Glaucus, who had replaced

Sarpedon as leader of the Lycians, dared Hector to stage a siege to capture and bring to the Trojan camp the corpse of Patroclus so that they might exchange it for the corpse of Sarpedon:

'Hector, you make a fine show on parade, but in battle you are useless. Your special reputation hides a coward after all. . . . You have not the pluck to save ^Sarpedon/ from the dogs. . . . Why, if the Trojans had any real courage, ... we should soon drag Patroclus into Ilium. And if that man's body could be brought in from the field and lodged in the great city of King Priam, the Argives would at once return Sarpedon's splendid armour and we could bring his body to Ilium. . . . But you have failed us. You do not dare , , , to face the lion-hearted Ajax, to look him in the eye, and fight it out with him—because he is a better man* ( 319-20), kS

Enraged, Hector put on the armor of Achilles, which he had taken from the corpse of Patroclus, and led the Trojans toward the Greek camp. He swore that he would give half the day's spoils to the man who should bring the corpse of Patroclus to Troy. In the Achaean camp, Menelaus, standing guard over Patroclus like a mother cow over a new calf, called to his men to rally round and to "think it infamy that the dogs of Ilium shall have Patroclus for a toy" (323).

A battle over the corpse ensued:

But the grim struggle that had begun over the noble squire of swift Achilles continued unabated all day long, and all the while the knees, the shins, the feet, the very hands and eyes of the contending forces streamed with the sweat of their ex­ ertions. Tugging the body to and fro between them in that restricted space, they were like the men to whom a tanner gives the job of stretching a great bull's hide soaked in fat. They take the hide, stand around in a ring, and tug at it with many hands till it is taut in every part and the moisture comes out while the fat sinks in. Each party had high hopes, the Trojans of dragging Patroclus into Ilium, and the Achaeans of bringing him back to the hollow ships. The result was such a scrimmage over the corpse as would not have displeased even the warmonger Ares, or Athene, in their most pugnacious mood. Such was the toil and agony that Zeus dispensed that day to man and horse alike over the body of Patroclus (326).

In both camps the concern for the dead was compounded by fear of the disgrace that would fall upon survivors who allowed the bodies of their dead to be maltreated. The Achaeans said among themselves:

"Friends, if we let the horse-taming Trojans drag this body off in triumph to their towns, the best thing that could happen would be that the black earth should swallow us, here where we stand." And on their side, the gallant Trojans felt the same, and they called to one another: "Even if all of us are destined to be killed beside this corpse, let none retire" (327). k9

It was only by the great effort of Menelaus and Meriones, who hoisted the corpse over their heads and struggled with it "like mules who put out all their strength to drag a log or some huge timber . . . tugging away till they nearly break their hearts" (335), that the

Achaeans saved the body of Patroclus from the dauntless Hector, who hoped to capture it and hang it from the palisade of Troy's walls.

He led the Trojans in such close pursuit that Menelaus and Meriones would never have reached the huts on time had not Achilles, in his

great grief and wrath upon learning of the death of his squire,

given so great a cry of anguish that the Trojeins were momentarily

frightened back.

Achilles' great cry was the moment of climax in the wrath of the

hero. At this moment his rage reached so great a peak that he deter­

mined to return to war, even before he gave the rites of burial to

Patroclus. Like Creon in Sophocles' Antigone, who went to bury the

dead before he considered the needs of the living and so let three

people die, Achilles confused his priorities. Inversely, Achilles de­

layed the burial of the dead and went to wreak more carnage on the

living. Before he buried his friend, he went back to war to kill

Hector so that the funeral of Patroclus might be accompanied by the

sounds of dogs mauling and mangling his enemy's corpse. He did kill

Hector, and, as he had hoped, his enemy's blood glutted the stubborn

god of war.

The unburied dead, at this point, brought an insupportable ten­

sion to Achilles' wrath. The spirit of Patroclus appeared to Achilles,

"looking and talking like the man himself, with the same stature, the

TEXAS TECH LIBRARY 50

same lovely eyes, the same clothes he used to wear," pleading to be

remembered in the rites of burial: "You have forgotten me. You

neglect me now that I am dead; you never did so when I was alive" (klk)

At the same time. Hector's body, lying near his beaked ships, haunted

Achilles, and he could not master his hatred of it. As he lighted

the funeral pyre for Patroclus, he swore: "For Hector son of Priam

I have other plans--I will not give him to the flames, I will throw

him to the dogs to eat" (klT). Though he was able to preside at the

funeral games for Patroclus with amazing good humor and poise, his hot blood boiled at the sight of Hector's body; and he subjected it to cruel and inhuman treatment.

Then the immortals, who were displeased at Achilles because "in his senseless fury he refused to part with Hector's body and kept it by his beaked ships" (^^O), decided to intervene in this impasse by sending Thetis to bear word to her son of the gods' displeasure with him and by putting into the mind of the noble-hearted Priam the thought of ransoming his son by bearing gifts to Achilles.

Priam did go to Achilles to recover Hector's body, doing, as he said, "a thing no other man on earth has done—I have raised to my lips the hand of the man who killed my son" (^4-50). And Achilles re­ ciprocated: He took the hand of the old king. Priam wept for his son, who had been the bulwark of Troy; and Achilles wept for Patroclus until the hut was filled with the sounds of their lamentations. Then, comforted by the expression of their mutual grief, the king and the hero planned for the release of Hector's body and for a truce for his 51

burial. Thus, from early episodes through the denouement, issues

linked with the unburied dead motivated and sustained narrative

development.

In the Aeneid, the motif of the unburied dead appeared in action

antecedent to the story of the Trojan's quest, but it was action that

affected Aeneas early in his journeying and affected him and the Tro­

jans for years afterward because of Dido's curse. This antecedent

action was the coming of Dido to Carthage.

When Aeneas arrived at Carthage, one of the first pieces of news

he received from his goddess mother, who appeared to him disguised as

a Carthaginian maiden, was the long and intricate tale about how Queen

Dido, director of the counsels of Carthage, happened to be there.

Venus told her son:

The kingdom you see is Carthage, . . .; But the country around is Libya, . . .; Dido, who left the city of Tyre to escape her brother. Rules here—a long and labyrinthine tale of wrong Is hers. . . . Her husband was Sychaeus, a man of great estates Among the Phoenicians and greatly loved by the ill-starred Dido Whose father had given her in marriage to Sychaeus, A virgin bride. Now the throne of Tyre was held by her brother, Pygmalion, a monster who had no rival in wickedness. Maniac evil stepped in. Pygmalion, blinded by love for Gold, godlessly murdered the unsuspecting Sychaeus In secret before the altar . . .; And kept the deed dark for a long time, vilely inventive of fictions To cheat with hollow hope her pining, loving heart. But there came, one night as she slept, the phantom of her unburied Husband, weirdly floating its clay-white face up to her, Exposed the atrocious altar, the breast spitted with steel. And took the cover off the crime hidden in the house. Then the phantom urged her swiftly to fly the country. And told her where she could find in the earth an old treasure, a secret Hoard of gold and silver to help her on her way. Dido, in great disquiet, organized her friends for escape. They met together, all those who harshly hated the tyrant 52

Or keenly feared him: they seized some ships which chanced to be ready And loaded them with the gold: so was that treasure sailed Out of Pygmalion's grasp: a woman led the exploit. They came to this spot, where today you can behold the mighty Battlements and the rising citadel of New Carthage, And purchased a site, which was named "Bull's Hide" after the bargain By which they should get as much land as they could enclose with a bull's hide* (1:338-368).

So at the bidding of the ghost of her unburied husband and with

the hidden treasure about which he told her. Dido moved from Tyre to

Carthage, where she welcomed Aeneas and loved him and, all unknowingly,

collaborated with the Mother of the Gods in her opposition to his des­

tined purpose. Her burning love so very nearly caused Aeneas to for­

get his purpose that Jupiter was forced to send a messenger to remind

him that he must not stop his search for a strange new land short of

Italy. When Aeneas responded to the voice of the gods and deserted

Dido, she cursed him, imploring the gods to let him fall before his

time and lie on a lonely strand, unburied:

'From then onwards shall you, my Phoenicians, torment with acts of pursuing hate all his descendants to come. . . . Neither love nor compact shall there be between the nations. And from my dead bones may some Avenger arise to persecute with fire and sword those settlers from Troy. . . . Let your shores oppose their shores, your waves their waves, your arms their arms. This is my imprecation. Let them fight, they, and their son's sons, for everl'(II6).

Virgil does not tell of the death of Aeneas and whether he lay helpless among the unburied dead, but a portion of Dido's curse was fulfilled in the hundred years of war between Carthage and the Roman Empire and, paradoxically, in the destruction of Dido's own city (l^).

The unburied dead was also the motif out of which grew the early motivation for Aeneas to set out on the journey to establish a new 53

Troy in a new land. The ghost of Hector came to Aeneas in a dream and awakened him the night of the Greek's treacherous sack of the city and told him to take his gods and "face his destiny" (6o); but it was the wraith of Creusa, his unburied wife, that revealed to him in greater detail what Destiny had in store for him and his people. As Aeneas carried his aged father on his back and led his son by the hand to es­ cape from the burning city of Troy, he lost his sense of direction and became separated from his wife. When he had carried his father and son to a safe place, he went back into the city to search for Creusa, "roam­ ing in an endless, frenzied search through the city buildings.' Sud­ denly her ghost, "a figure larger than life," appeared and told him that she had lost her life:

I shall not see the proud halls of ^^rmidons or Dolopes, Nor work as a slave for Greek women—I, who am Dardan And daughter-in-law to the goddess Venus, No, the great Mother of the gods is going to keep me here* (11:784-87),

She insisted that her death was a part of "divine purpose," that even a wife was not too precious to be sacrificed to the cause of restoring

Troy in a new land. The phantom Creusa directed her husband not to seek her any further but to be about the business for which he had been chosen:

'it was not written that you should bring Creusa Away with you; the great ruler of heaven does not allow it. For you, long exile is destined, broad tracts of sea to be furrowed; Then you will reach Hesperia, where Lydian Tiber flows Gently through a land in good heart, and good men live There, your affairs will prosper; a kingdom and a royal bride Await you (11:777-783).

With a final endearing word, "Cherish our love in the son it gave us,"

Creusa faded into thin air, leaving Aeneas free to pursue his destiny, 3k to marry a royal bride, whose blood the Fates had long since decided should blend with his in the leaders of the Roman Empire.

Once he began his journey, Aeneas was moved forward again by one of the unburied dead. At the outset of his adventures, though he felt directed by divine command, he had no true notion as to where or how

Destiny would lead him. So he made mistakes, the first of which was to sail to Thrace and attempt to build there a city called Aeneadae after his own name. But Destiny did not approve and sent a sign to warn Aeneas: a visit from the ghost of Polydorus, upon whose unburied bones the Trojan leader stumbled as he gathered wood for a sacrificial fire. Polydorus was the youngest son of Priam and Hecuba, whom his parents had sent, along with a large amount of gold, to the king of

•Rirace for safety when the Greek barricade had tightened around Troy.

The Thracian ruler had betrayed Priam, stolen the gold and murdered

Polydorus and left his body lying under the spears that cut the youth down. One night in Carthage, during the Trojan stopover there. Dido, intent on keeping the handsome Trojan prince talking to her, asked him questions about Troy and King Priam, about Paris and the other

Trojan warriors, and about his own experiences since he escaped the city. Aeneas told her of happenings that he remembered, and one in­ cident especially vivid in his memory was his encounter with the ghostly Polydorus. He described his experience to Dido:

'l was sacrificing to Venus, my mother and to the rest of The Gods, that they should bless our project.

There was a dune nearby, as it chanced, topped by brushwood Of cornel and of myrtle sprouted with thickset shafts. I approached it, wanting some foliage to festoon over the altar. And tried to root up its dense greenery; as I did so 55

I saw an uncanny thing, which horrifies me to speak of. From the first sapling that I tore up, its roots dissevered. There oozed out, drop by drop, a flow of black blood Fouling the earth with its stain^ (111:19-29).

Wanting to get at the mystery of this strange sapling, Aeneas strug­

gled harder and dropped into the sand on his knees to get a better

hold. Then he heard a voice:

'Aeneas, you're tearing me I I am buried here. Don't hurt me More.

That blood is not drawn from wood. Get away from this cruel land, from these hard fisted shores I I am Polydorus. The spears that nailed me down here have sprouted An iron crop above me, a thicket of javelin wood' {lll:kl~k6).

Once he recovered from his panic at hearing the sapling talk,

Aeneas reported this supernatural affair to his father and the other

counsellors and asked their views about it. They were unanimous in

their decision to leave a land where the laws of hospitality had been

so outraged. But before they sailed, they held a funeral service for

Polydorus, made a great mound of earth and offered fresh milk and blood

in ceremonial rites and "laid the ghost in its tomb." So Virgil used

the ghost of unburied Polydorus to move Aeneas toward Carthage, as he had used the unburied ghost of Sychaeus in a plot device to move Dido

there to await the storm which Juno, "nursing her heart's deep wound,"

sent upon Aeneas to wreck his ships on the coast of Africa.

Yet another movement forward in Aeneas' quest for happiness was directed by the unburied corpse of Misenus, a fellow traveler with the Trojans. At the close of the seventh summer of the Trojans' pil­ grimage, Aeneas had safely escaped the snare of Dido's love and had returned to Sicily to celebrate the annual rites of the dead for 56

Anchises, whom they had buried on a stopover there the previous year.

At the funeral games, the fine fellowship which the older Trojans en­

joyed with Acestes and his family caused them to wonder whether they

wanted to continue the seemingly futile search for a new land. En­

couraged by Juno, some of the old women decided to burn their ships,

hopeful that afterward Aeneas would allow them to cease traveling and

settle down with Sicilian Acestes.

Aeneas was shaken by the burning of the ships; and, turning the

alternatives over in his mind, he pondered what to do. He was tempted

to forget Italy and settle here in Sicily as the older and frailer

voyagers wanted him to do. But Nautes, an older man who had been

given the gift of prophecy, encouraged him to go forward with the

plans Destiny had for him: "Whatever is to befall, it is always our

own power of endurance which must give us control over our fortunes" (l^l)

Nautes suggested that Aeneas might better serve his own purpose if he

would permit those who were discouraged and fearful of further risk to

settle in Sicily and allow the stronger, more daring among them to con­

tinue with him. This advice upset Aeneas even more, and his thoughts were beset by every kind of anxiety as the evening came on following

the day of the fire on the ships. In the black of night the shape of his father appeared to him and told him that he should obey Nautes'

counsel. He told him also that there was another task which he must perform: he must go to the Underworld and seek a meeting with his father. Aeneas, relieved to have his father's approval, left the weak and frail of the pilgrims and set sail with the most valiant of his band to locate Pluto's kingdom and visit his father's shade. 57

Unfortunately, as they sailed, the seas were so quiet and the winds so

moist and mild that Palinurus, the fleet commander, was lulled to

sleep and flung overboard, and Aeneas had to take over and steer to

the coast of Cumae. On Cumae, Aeneas spoke to the Sibyl of the shrine

there; and she told him that if he were to achieve the improbable task

of visiting the House of the Dead, he must first find the golden bough

demanded by Pluto's wife as tribute. This gold-foil branch, the

Sibyl said, was very difficult to find because it was hidden in the

thick shade of the trees and protected by all the forest. Only those

chosen by the Fates could remove it from the tree, but it would come away easily for them. As she gave instructions to Aeneas, the Sibyl added:

. . . and this you know not—the lifeless corpse of a friend Is lying unburied, a dead thing polluting your whole expedition. While you are lingering here to inquire about fate's decrees. Before anything else, you must give it proper burial and make Sacrifice of black sheep: only when you are thus Purified, shall you see the Stygian groves and the regions Not viable to the living (VI:lU9-155).

Aeneas was humbled by the Sibyl's words^ but when he left her cave and waJJced toward the ships, he came upon the lifeless body of Misenus, washed up by the sea. However sad this warrior's death may have been to the Trojans, the necessity of purifying their cajnp of his unburied body was a fortunate circumstance; for while penetrating an ancient forest in search of spruce trees and holm-oak to build an altar-pyre for Misenus, Aeneas was led to the magic golden bough. As he worked with axe and wedge along with all the rest, he breathed a prayer that the magic golden bough would reveal itself to him. At once the pair of doves that are the birds of Venus appeared and led him to the tree 58

on which the golden branch grew. This talisman enabled Aeneas to

visit the Underworld and see there all the souls of the kings of the

empire that he was to found--souls not yet born but a part of the

cycle of birth, death and rebirth which Anchises told Aeneas was

life's plan.

Aeneas also saw on this visit to the Underworld, there among the

helpless unburied dead denied passage across the Styx, Leucaspis and

Orontes, captains of his Lycian ships, who had been drowned at sea

and so denied the ritual honors of the dead. Wandering there, too,

among this multitude of unburied was Palinurus, who spoke to Aeneas

of the circumstances of his death.

So it was that Anchises conducted Aeneas through the Spirit World

and "kindled his imagination with a passion for the glory to be" (17^).

From the day of the ships' burning, with its doubts and frustrations,

Aeneas was led to a day of new hope in which there came to him a vi­

sion of assurance from the Supernatural World that he really would

achieve what he had set out to do.

In the Aeneid, narrative development is no less motivated and

sustained by the motif of the unburied dead than is action in the

Iliad. Appropriately enough, however, attitudes toward the unburied

dead correspond to the major action of the particular selection.

Whereas, in the Iliad the progression of action is toward inevitable

destruction which is accompanied by vengeful motives and willful vio­ lations of the rights of the dead, in the Aeneid progression is toward positive rebuilding of a destroyed civilization--a progression that never tempts Aeneas to forget that, dead or alive, his fellow mortals 59 are entitled to claim self-respect and that only those who honor these claims merit the benedictions of fellow beings both in life and in death.

In Sophocles' Ajax also, the attitudes toward the unburied dead correspond with the basic action of the piece. Structurally, Ajax is a diptych, its two matching pieces joined with amazing precision,

Bernard Knox points out in his article on Ajax in Harvard Classical 20 Studies, at the soliloquy in which the hero decided how he must react to the discovery that the old ways were being superseded by new codes of behavior. Each of the two sections displays, almost as mirror images, pairings of opposing forces: inflexible hatred of and extraordinary love for enemies.

In the first section of the drama the violent hatred of Ajax for the Atreidae and for Odysseus is opposed to the extraordinary pity which Odysseus expressed for his foe. When Odysseus saw Ajax shamed before the Greeks, the fragility of the human condition became ob­ vious to him; and he pitied this man whom he had every reason and every right to hate. Enipathetically, he saw himself and all mankind in a like situation:

'My own lot I regard no less than his. For I see well, nought else are we but mere Phantoms, all we that live, mere fleeting shadows* (320).

In the second portion of the diptych, the hatred of the Atreidae for the hero, equally as determined and inflexible as his had been

20 Knox, "Ajax," Harvard Classical Studies, p. 1. 60 for them, stands opposed to the pity which Odysseus felt for the unburied body of his foe.

Diagrammatically, the diptych can be shown as two opposing triangles. At the apex of each is Ajax. In the first he sits, his heroic spirit crushed and with hatred issuing from his heart toward those situated at the base angles of the triangle. At one of these are the Atreidae, who reciprocate his hatred; and at the other is

Odysseus, who pities him. In the second triangle, Ajax lies a corpse on the sand, dead to affirm his enmity for his foes. Situated as in the first triangle at one base angle are the Atreidae, still adamant in their hatred of the hero, determined to deny his corpse burial.

At the opposite angle of the base is Odysseus, still filled with pity for Ajax and defying the Greek chieftains in this instance as he had the goddess Athena in the first, refusing to participate in the hate­ ful schemes of either.

Homer and Virgil, in the Greek and Roman heroic epics, and

Sophocles, in the drama of the heroic Ajax, found in the motif of the unburied dead a theme through which they revealed their rev­ erence for the gods and their awareness that the gods were concerned also for man, both the living and the dead. They portrayed the life on earth as the good life and glorified the mighty warriors, who were willing, in order to achieve the immortality of fame, to sacrifice the good life on earth for the vagueness of death in Hades. CHAPTER III

THE UNBURIED DEAD AND THE POLITICAL INSTITUTION

The ancient Greek epic poets and the dramatist who told the story

of mighty Ajax used the motif of the unburied dead to reveal their rev­

erence for the dignity of man and their belief in the rule of the gods

in and over the lives of men. The Greek dramatists Sophocles and

Euripides in Antigone and The Suppliants, and the renaissance play­

wrights John Marston in Antonio's Revenge, Philip Massinger in The

Fatal Dowry, and an anonymous writer in The Second Maiden's Tragedy,

also used this motif to express their view of the high estate of man,

but they saw the role of the gods as less imposing.

In these five selections, the conduct of the hero was also viewed

in a different light. Heroes like Achilles and Ajax, who were directed

by their fathers to strive to be superior to others, knew nothing of

the virtues of the man who lives in a society of equals: tolerance, 1 adaptability, persuasiveness. With the gods above supporting them, the heroes were a law unto themselves on the earth, and they domi­

nated the age in which they lived. Then once dead and under the 2 earth, they themselves became gods.

1 , Knox, "Ajax," Harvard Classical Studies, p. 26. 2 Jane E. Harrison, The Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 190b), p. 37.

61 62

But when mighty Ajax fell on Hector's sword, his death was a symbol of the heroic age coming to an end. Around his body the chorus grieved for their dead chief, "his once glorious deeds , , . fallen ^^3 and scorned," They chanted their sorrow that the age that was pass­ ing had gloried so in war: Would he had vanished away from the earth. Rapt to the skies, or sunk to devouring Hades, He who first revealed to the Greeks the use of arms. Leagued in fierce confederate war! AhI Toils eternally breeding toils I Yes, he was the fiend who wrought man's ruin.^

When Odysseus, with extraordinary pity for a fallen hero, ap­ pealed first to Athena that Ajax not be mocked and later to the Greek leaders that his dead body not be denied burial, a new age was born— an age in which the mighty warrior who stood above other men was re­ placed with the ordinary citizen who could feel pity for other men.

The gods, who once abetted the hero in his military aspirations, The­ seus of Athens said, now gave the new man two gifts: the first wisdom 5 and the next a tongue with which to declare his thoughts. With these gifts man could "come out of brutishness," Theseus said, live and com­ municate with others, choose his own leaders and govern himself. The gods were relegated to a new role.

3 Ajax, p, 333.

k Ajax, p. 353.

5 Euripides, The Suppliants in The Complete Greek Drama, ed. by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938), I, 925, Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page num­ ber cited parenthetically in the text. 63

Contention over the unburied bodies of the dead provided the

milieu in which attitudes toward the role of the gods in this new

age were expressed. In Euripides' The Suppliants, the quarrel was

over the seven Argive chieftains who were slain in the battle in

which Polyneices tried to gain rule in Thebes from his brother Eteo-

cles. The victorious Thebans refused to release the bodies of the

slain warriors for burial, and the mothers of the dead went as sup­

pliants to Athens to beg Theseus to help them take up the corpses

and bury them.

Athenians at this time held ambivalent attitudes toward the

gods, Aethra, mother of Theseus, held the orthodox view that the

gods exercised control over the lives of man. It was the gods, not

Fortune, she believed, "who reversed all things again" (928), She

worshipped in the traditional ways, and was, in fact, on a visit to

the shrine of Demeter to offer sacrifice on behalf of the year's new

crops when she was detained by the mothers of the dead Argive princes,

who begged her, as a mother, to intercede for them with her son. Al­

though committed herself to the old ways with the gods, she knew that

Theseus did not altogether share her views. In fact, she pointed out

to him, in her plea that he rescue the bodies of the dead, that he

tended to slight the will of heaven, a single fault she saw in this

son whom she considered "well-advised in all else" (928),

Though Theseus knew that man was presumptuous to think in his

proud heart that he was wiser than the gods, he did believe that the

wisdom of men, a god-given gift, was equal to the wisdom of the gods, who could be confounded. On this matter he told Adrastus: "The 6k deity, confusing their destinies, doth oft destroy by the sinner's fate him who never sinned nor committed injustice" (926), When he went to war, he did not desire the support of all gods but only "the favour of all gods that reverence right" (93^4-), implying that not all gods favor right. He rebuked Adrastus, who did not use his own wis­ dom in making iii5)ortant decisions but who, on one occasion, followed a foolish oracle and gave his daughters in marriage to alien men and, on another, ignored a wise seer and went to war against Thebes.

Some of the Athenians questioned the justice of the gods, and one said: "I see much at variance in their dealings with man" (935).

But in a very human way, many of them called upon the gods when they were fearful, saying: "In our fear this is our first and chief est trust" (935). Also, in a very human way, some of the citizens tried to explain away those attributes of the gods which they could not im­ mediately understand with the promise that with time all would be clear, that eventually the.gods would give respite from affliction, since they held in their hands "each thing's allotted end" (935).

In Antigone, the dispute was over the body of Polyneices, who had just died in single combat with his brother Eteocles, in ful­ fillment of their father's curse. Creon, who became king at their death because of nearness of kin, buried Eteocles with appropriate rites but issued an edict denying burial to Polyneices. Antigone, sister of the dead warriors, disobeyed the royal decree and buried her brother's body.

Creon believed, ostensibly, in the Olympian gods, and it was upon Olympian Zeus that he called. But the State was Creon's god. 65 and he called upon Zeus only as an authority figure whom he could use as a threat when he felt his position as leader might not be as strong as he would like it to be. It was to Zeus that he called in an oath when he needed a god to witness that the state was superior to man.

He needed this support from higher power for his atrocious edict that the body of Polyneices, who, in Creon's judgment, had threatened the welfare of Thebes, was to be cast out unburied. He also called on

Zeus to witness his intent to kill the guard set to watch Polyneices' body unless the hapless guard could produce the person who had buried the corpse. The arrogance of this call for approval from heaven for the murder of one's innocent subject was exceeded only by Creon's use of the name of Zeus in a blasphemous declaration to the blind prophet that he would allow none to bury the dead even if the birds carried carrion to the very throne of the gods. An authoritarian, Creon tried to use Zeus as an instrument of authority, a lever to force from the

Theban citizens the behavior he desired.

Antigone revered the chthonic gods, the dead heroes under the earth. True, her response to Creon's charge, "And thou didst in­ deed dare to transgress that law?" was "Yes, for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict" (k^k). But this taunt to Creon, using the name of Zeus, must have been meant to say, "Creon, you are not a god, and your laws are not the laws of a god"; for all other references which Antigone made to the gods were to "the dead below" {k2k), to "Hades" (U36), to "Hades and the dead" (1+37), to

"the dead" (U38), to "Hades who gives sleep to all" (kk^), to "Hades 66

Jyith. whom the dead are hidden/" {kkQ)y and to "Ye gods, eldest of our race" (J+1+8). She loved her gods with an all-consuming love, and she died before she would cast away the fear of heaven.

In the renaissance drama studied here, the Jewish God, Jesus, and the saints of Christianity were hardly more than literary epi­ thets which were mingled with references to the Greek gods. In

Antonio's Revenge, references to the gods were light and humorous, perhaps in comic relief to the horrors perpetuated in the Venetian court by Duke Pierro, the first of which was to kill one of the young courtiers and leave his body hanging in the palace. When he saw how effective this murder was in his scheme to work revenge on the family of Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, he commended himself gleefully: "By heaven, I think I ha' said my prayers within this month at least, I 6 am so boundless happy." The lusty maid of the Duchess of Genoa, upon being shaken awake by her mistress from a particularly pleasant dream, shrieked out her displeasure, the names of gods and saints punctuating her flow of words:

'Marry, you have disturb'd the pleasure of the finest dream. 0 God, I was even coming to it, la. 0 Jesu, 'twas coming of the sweetest. I'll tell you: now methought I was married; and me- thought I spent (O Lord, why did you wake me?) and methought I spent three spur-royals on the fiddlers for setting up a fresh hornpipe. Saint Ursula, I was even going to bed--and you-- methought my husband was even putting out the tapers--when you—Lord I shsill never have such a dream come upon me as long as . , ,*(11-12).

6 John Marston, Antonio's Revenge, ed, with an Introduction by G, K, Hunter (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, I965), p. 10, Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page number cited parenthetically in the text. 67

In The Second Maiden's Tragedy, the gods were present only to the Lady, who begged her husband to slay her to keep her from the

Tyrant's bed but stayed his hand so that she might say her prayers to her gods:

'a chief and worthy busines whose straung neglect would have made me forgotten wher I desire to be remembred most.*'

But once she died, neither prayer nor death preserved her rest, for the Tyrant violated her tomb suid took her pale corpse to his palace.

In The Fatal Dowry, no gods were present, though the rites which the body of old Charalois was denied by his creditors were called Chris- 8 tian ceremony.

On occasion in these dramas, while the gods were absent or look­ ing on from afar. Fortune appeared, to shock man with her vagaries and to reveal the ironical twists life cam take. In the first scene of The Second Maiden's Tragedy, Govianus, the deposed ruler, mourned that the "adulterat frendship of mankinde, falce fortunes sister," could bring tragedy to kings and "laye usurpers sunnynge in their glories like Adders in warme beames," while at the same time the usurper was rejoicing that his glories had become "fixt lyke unmoved

7 The Second Maiden's Tragedy, ed. by W, W. Greg (l6ll rpt, Lon­ don: Oxford University Press, 1909), p, kl. Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page number cited parenthetically in the text, 8 Philip Massinger and Nathan Field, The Fatal Dowry, ed, by T, A. Dunn (Berkeley: University of California Press, I969), p. 31 Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page number cited paren- theticsOJ-y in the text. 68

Starrs that know not what it is to fall or err" (l). Neither knew nor could foretell how few days would pass before the Tyrant would become so vicious in his violation of the dead body of the Lady that his court would rise in a coup, murder him, and restore the rightful heir to the throne.

In The Suppliants, Theseus was aware of the whims of Fortune', he exhorted those who would keep the dead from their rites of burial and from their place in the tomb to remember that trouble is the com­ mon lot of man and none is exempt from Fortune's reversals:

Go triflers, learn the lesson of human misery: our life is made up of struggles; some men there be that find their fortune soon, others have to wait, while some at once are blest. Fortune leads a dainty life; to her the wretched pays his court and homage to win her smile; her likewise doth the prosperous man extol, for fear the favouring gale may leave him*(933).

The Nfessenger who brought the news that the Athenians had routed the enemy from the field and back to the very gates of the city said that

Theseus, "when he might have come inside the walls, held back his men, for he had not come, said he, to sack the town but to ask for the bod­ ies of the dead" (937). He remembered, the Messenger believed, "that many in their hour of fortune lose the bliss they might have enjoyed, through seeking to scale the ladder's topmost step" (937).

Like Theseus, other Athenians knew that Fortune was so capricious that only the foolish man vaunts himself when she seems to favor him.

They warned one another not to follow the example of the Thebans, who, in gloating over their successful defeat of Adrastus and the Argive chieftains, "/forgot/ how to bear their fortune" (922). When the

Theban Herald accused Theseus of puffing up the citizens with specious 69 words for his own advantage, the Argive mothers cried out against the

Herald and all the Cadmus people: "Look you, how insolent the vil­

lains are, when Fortune is kind to them, just as if it would be well

with them for ever" (931).

None knew better than Adrastus how foolish men are to tempt

Fortune by vaunting the wisdom of man. He told the Messenger who

brought word of the Theban defeat of his experience:

'We thought our Argos irresistible, ourselves a young and lusty host, and so when Eteocles was for making terms, in spite of his fair offer we would not accept them, and so we perished. Then in their turn those foolish folk of Cadmus, to fortune raised, like some beggar with his newly-gotten wealth, waxed wanton, and, waxing so, were ruined in their turn' (938).

In Antigone, the Messenger who came to bring the news of Haemon's

death reported also the ironical results of the turn of Fortune's

wheel. Because Antigone had insisted on burying her brother's body

in spite of a royal decree forbidding his rites, Creon hid her away

in a desolate cave to die, a living corpse with "no home on the earth

or in the shades, no home with the living or with the dead" (UU6).

The Messenger reported the outcome of this cruel and inhuman punish­

ment: Creon himself had become the very thing he made of Antigone:

'. . . there is no estate of mortal life that I would ever praise or blame as settled. Fortune raises and Fortunes humbles the lucky or unlucky from day to day, and no one can prophesy to men concerning those things which are established. For Creon was blest once, as I count bliss; he had saved this land of Cadmus from its foes; he was clothed with sole dominion in the land; he reigned, the glorious sire of princely children. And now all has been lost. For when a man hath forfeited his pleasures, I count him not as living,--I hold him but a breathing corpse* (I+5I+)

Disputes over the unburied dead also provided these playwrights a forum in which to explore some of the qualities of man's life with 70 his fellowmen in an ordered society. Of particular interest were the

ways man used language in dealing with other men once he came to look

askance at physical force as a means of effecting behavior. In

The Suppliants, Theseus thanked "whoe'er of gods" it was that brought

man to "live by rule from brutishness, first by implanting reason,

and next by giving /hlmj' a tongue to declare /his/ thoughts, so as to

know the meaning of what is said" (925). When Adrastus came seeking

help from Athens and lay moaning at the gateway, Theseus said to him,

"Speak, for naught can be achieved save through the utterance of thy

tongue" (921). The five dramatists whose works are being studied

here have demonstrated how much can be achieved through the utterance

of the tongue, and they have shown as well how the tongue can be used

to block achievement. Collectively, they have exhibited the effectual

use of language in persuasion, the inept use of language, examples of

abuses of the use of language, and, in The Fatal Dowry, a specialized

use, forensic language.

In The Suppliants, Euripides displayed both effectual and inef­

fectual uses of language. The old dames of Argos, who came to plead

that Theseus help them recover and bury the bodies of their slain sons, knew the art of effective persuasion. These women did not go directly

to Theseus with their plea; instead, they went to his mother, and they

framed their entreaties in language that would touch the heart of a mother. "Thou too, honoured lady," they addressed her, "once a son did bear . . .; then share with /us/ thy mother's feelings, in such measure as /our/ sad heart grieves for [OMVJ own dead sons" (920).

They begged her to "persuade" her son, to "beseech" him to think of 71

their dead sons, "whose limbs ... are left a prey to savage mountain

beasts," who are "slain in their prime and left without a tomb" (920).

They humbled themselves before her: "At thy knees we fall, with bit­

ter tears which spring to our eyes" (920), they pleaded.

The mother of Theseus, too, was not unacquainted with ways to

use language effectively; and when her turn came to speak to her son

on behalf of the hapless dead, she used every stratagem she knew to

persuade him to do the thing she thought he should do: help recover

the bodies of the slain warriors, "either by cunning words or force

of arms" (919). She first made him think of his manliness by remind­

ing him that she came to him as a woman, and then appealed to his pride

as a leader of the city: "May I a scheme declare, my son, that shall

add to thy glory and the state's" (927). Then, after interjecting a

note of suspense, "Yet the word, that lurks within my heart, makes me

hesitate" (927), she appealed to his pride in the reputation that

Athens had as a defender of the poor and down-trodden, his vanity in

his position as a statesman among the nations of Greece, and his shame

at the thought that any should think him cowardly if he did not help

take up and bury the dead Argives. She said:

r.Further , I would have patiently endured, had it not been my duty to venture somewhat for injured folk; and this my son, it is that brings thee now thy honour, and causes me no fear to urge that thou shouldst use thy power to make men of violence, who prevent the dead from receiving their mead of burial and funeral rites, perform this bounden duty, and check those who would confound the customs of Hellas; for this it is that holds men's states together,—strict observance of laws. And some, no doubt, will say, 'twas cowardice that made thee stand aloof in terror, when thou mightest have won for thy city a crown of glory (928).

Theseus also used the language of persuasion effectively. Un­ like the rulers in each of the other four pieces being studied here. 72 he, spoke with respect to the old and to women. When he came upon his mother in the midst of the women lamenting for the dead, he questioned her: "What means it, mother? 'tis thine to make it plain to me, mine to listen" (921). When she humbled herself as a woman before him, he told her that he wanted her counsel. "For oft even from women's lips issue wise counsels" (927), he said. When she wept at the plight of the mothers of the unburied dead, he spoke tenderly to her: "Mother mine, why weepest thou? . , . Is it because thou didst hear their piteous lamentations? To my own heart it goes" (927). Once he de­ cided to aid the Argives, he spoke to the aged ladies: "But do ye re­ move from n^y mother your holy wreaths that I may take her by the hand and conduct her to the house of Aegeus; for a wretched son is he who rewards not his parents by service" (929).

In his role as a statesman, he used an interview style that was as concise as it was fruitful. Brevity approaching abruptness char­ acterized his conversation with the ambassador sent from Argos. In his message to the head of state in Thebes, he used a conciliatory, even pacific, tone: "Thy neighbor begs as a favour thy permission to bury the dead" (929). He entertained the arrogant, garrulous

Herald from Thebes with amazing patience for a king whose time was precious. He did hint, broadly, that Creon would do well to "send some other messenger less talkative" (931); and, eventually, when he saw they were wasting time and making no advance, he curtly dismissed the Herald: "Yet get thee gone from my land, taking with thee the garrulous words thou broughtest" (93^)* 73

The Theban Herald was an example of one who used language in­ eptly. Not only was he verbose, but he also spoke with a dismaying lack of finesse. His initial greeting: "Who is the despot of this land?" (930), was a linguistic faux pas of the first water in Athens,

a city proud of its democratic way of life; and his first diplomatic

speech was worse than his salutation--tactless, if not downright in­

sulting, to a head of state to whom he came as emissary:

'. . . the city, whence I come, is ruled by one man only, not the mob; none there puffs up the citizens with specious words, and for his own advantage twists them this way or that,—one moment dear to them and lavish of his favours, the next a bane to all; and yet by fresh calumnies of others he hides his former failures and escapes punishment. . . . Verily the better sort count it no healthy sign when the worthless man obtains a rep­ utation by beguiling with words the populace, though aforetime he was naught*(93O).

Although sent by his state as a messenger to "tell the message he

[ya£l bidden and hie him back in haste" (931), the Herald assumed

the tone of dictator and issued orders in the foreign court as if he were a tyrant: "I and all the people of Cadmus forbid thee to admit

Adrastus to this land, but if he is here, drive him forth . . . ere

sinks yon blazing sun, and attempt not violently to take up the dead, seeing thou hast naught to do with the city of Argos" (931). He threatened Theseus: "And if thou wilt hearken to me, thou shalt bring thy barque of state into port unharmed by billows, but if not, fierce shall the surge of battle be, that we and our allies shall raise" (931)

Then he became argumentative and implied that any one who disagreed with him must of necessity be at odds also with the gods. He accused

Theseus of considering himself smarter than Zeus: "Either boast thy wit transcendeth that of Zeus, or else allow that gods are right to 7k slay the ungodly" (932). Then, most undiplomatically, and as a final insult, he dared, after his own much talking, to advise the Athenian leader about prolixity: "Who knoweth when to be quiet is a wise man.

Yea and this too is bravery, even forethought" (932),

Generally speaking, the respect which the Athenian people and their leader held for the unburied dead paralleled that which they showed for the living, Theseus was gentle to the elderly suppliants, tender with his aged mother, and courteous to visiting statesmen.

Beyond these outward manifestations of good will in the language and demeanor of Theseus was his serious intent to draw forth the thoughts of all the people. The gods gave the tongue as a gift to all men, he thought, not to one alone, so that there might be an interchange of thoughts and all might "know the meaning of what is said." He asked counsel of everybody—the suppliants at the gate, his mother, the envoys of states. He fired a battery of questions at Adrastus and the Herald.

Above all in Athens, the leader encouraged the people to sit in the forums and, when they had any counsel, to declare it to the state.

Interestingly enough, he also protested the rights of any who would do so to remain silent. With the people, he rejoiced that there were in the state youthful citizens--a reserve upon which the city could call for counsel.

The rights of all creatures, the living and the dead, was the subject of Theseus' dialogue. It was the right of mother earth, he believed, to receive the bodies of the dead; and for survivors to fail to bury them was to deny her her right. In war, with the death 75 of his enemy, the right of the soldier came to an end. Theseus stated his beliefs about burying the dead to Adrastus:

'Let the dead now be buried in the earth, and each element re­ turn to the place whence it came to the body, the breath to the air, the body to the ground; for in no wise did we get it for our own, but to live our life in, and after that its mother earth must take it back again* (932).

The respect with which the Athenians and Theseus spoke and acted toward the living and with which they treated the dead, was not duplicated in the language or behavior of Creon, King of Thebes in Antigone. Indeed, the lack of respect which Creon showed the dead when he issued the edict denying burial to Polyneices corres­ ponded to his attitudes of speech toward his family, the people of

Thebes, and even the gods. Though a king, Creon was a small man, and his language displayed the fears that must have nagged contin­ uously at his puny heart, fears that made him want to cut down to his own size those who might dare to stand up to him: Antigone, his son, the giiard, the chorus, even the helpless corpse of a dead msm.

The modes of language which he used were belittling to his hearers and would cut them down: flattery, rage, and threat.

Though he tended more to give commands and threaten, Creon did attempt to get what he wanted from the elders of the city in his ini­ tial meeting with them by flattery, a belittling form of address be­ cause it assumes the hearer to be either too stupid or too insensitive to be aware that he is being used. In the first meeting with the elders, Creon wanted their approval for an edict that would trouble the conscience of all Hellas and defy the edicts of the gods. He wanted to people to say that he had power and authority to issue the 76 shocking decree that a dead man was to be denied burial. So he flattered them. "Ye, out of all the folk have been called apart by my summons" (^27), he told them. Select folk, they had an attribute which the king admired: they were loyalists to royal power. He re­ minded them of how significant this characteristic was:

... I knew, first of all, how true and constant was your reverence for the royal power of Laius; how, again, when Oedipus was ruler of our land, and when he had perished, your steadfast loyalty still upheld their children. Since then, his sons have fallen in one day, ... I now possess the throne and all its powers by nearness of kinship to the dead* (1+27-28).

Then he told them of the edict denying sepulchre to Polyneices for which he expected their support; and the Chorus, timid and uncertain, replied: "Thou hast power, I ween, to take what order thou wilt, both for the dead, and for all us who live" (U28).

Small man that he was, Creon was easily angered by the slightest of threats and became wrathful and addressed his audience in rage.

This is also a disparaging manner of speaking because it tends to in­ timidate the hearer and to cut off his speech. It makes his thoughts of no account. When the Leader of the Chorus suggested in the mildest of tones--"0 King, my thoughts have long been whispering, can this deed, perchance, be e'en the work of gods?"—Creon shouted:

'Cease, ere thy words fill me utterly with wrath, lest thou be found at once an old man and foolish. For thou sayest what is not to be borne, in saying that the gods have care for this corpse. Was it for high reward of trusty service that they sought to hide his nakedness, who came to bum their pillared shrines and sacred treasures, to bum their land, fiuidscatte r its laws to the winds? Or dost thou be­ hold the gods honouring the wicked? It cannot be. Nol (i+30). 77

Creon also spoke to his son in anger, driving Haemon to give up his attempt to reason with his father against offending justice and, ultimately, to go to his death. When the Chorus recommended that both Haemon and Creon speak wisely and each profit from the words

of the other, Creon led an angry argument:

Creon: Men of my age--are we indeed to be schooled, then by men of his? Haemon: In nothing that is not right; but if I am young, thou shouldest look to my merits, not to my years.

Creon: Is it a merit to honour the unruly? Haemon: I could wish no one to show respect for evil-doers.

Creon: Then is not she tainted with that malady? Haemon: Our Theban folk, with one voice denies it.

Creon: Shall Thebes prescribe to me how I must rule? Haemon: See, there thou hast spoken like a youth indeed.

Creon: Am I to rxile this land by other judgment than mine own? Haemon: That is no city which belongs to one man.

Creon: Is not the city held to be the ruler's? Haemon: Thou wouldst make a good monarch of a desert.

^Shameless, at. open feud with thy father I Haemon: Nay, I see thee offending agsinst justice.

Creon: Do I offend, when I respect mine own prerogatives? Haemon: Thou dost not respect them, when thou tramplest on the gods' honours.

Creon: 0 dastard nature, yielding place to womanl Haemon: Thou wilt never find me yield to baseness.

Creon: All thy words, at least, plead for that girl. Haemon: And for thee, and for me, and for the gods below.

Creon: Thou canst never marry her, on this side the grave. Haemon: Then she must die, and in death destroy another.

Creon: Howl doth thy boldness run to open threats? Haemon: What threat is it, to combat vain resolve.s?

Creon: Thou Shalt rue thy witless teaching of wisdom. Haemon: Wert thou not my father, I would have called thee unwise 78

Creon: Thou woman's slave, use not wheedling speech with me. Haemon: Thou wouldst spesik and then hear no reply?

Creon: Sayest thou so? Now, by the heaven above us--be sure of it--thou Shalt smart for taunting me in this opprobrious strain {kk2-kk).

Creon also indulged in threats, even to the most innocuous of

the citizens of the city. The unfortunate guard, who by lot was

doomed to bring word to the king that his edict against the dead

had been disobeyed, was threatened with torture and death:

*Now, as Zeus still hath my reverence, know this—I tell it thee on my oath:--If ye find not the very author of this burial,, and produce him before my eyes, death alone shall not be enough for you, till first, hung up alive, ye have revealed this outrage* (^31)'

With the doom of death under which Antigone stood, Creon also threat­

ened the innocent Ismene: "She and her kinfolk shall not avoid a doom

most dire; for indeed I charge that other with a like share in the

plotting of this burial" (^35). But exceeding all his threats, even

that to hang the guard up alive, the most ungodly was that to torture

Haemon by forcing him to watch Antigone die. Creon's last word to his

son before Haemon left the palace to join Antigone in the cave of death

was a threat of torture: "Bring forth that hated thing, that she may

die forthwith in his presence--before his eyes--at her bridegroom's

sidel"(Ul+U).

Antigone, though she declared her reverence for the gods under

the earth, did not, by her speech, show respect for the citizens of

the earth. As the Chorus pointed out, she was "a passionate daughter

of a passionate sire, /who knew/ not how to bend before troubles" (1+35)-

She never learned the art of achieving her desires through the powers of persuasion but had, instead, a penchant for alienating her audience 79

almost before she began speaking. Though she wanted Ismene to help

her bury their brother enough to go to the trouble to bring her out

of the palace for a private audience, she assured herself a negative

response, if for no other reason, by her undiplomatic suggestion that

Ismene might not be noble enough to attempt the deed, might even be

a disgrace to the family, even before she posed the question. As

if to dare her sister to refuse, she said, "... thou wilt soon

show whether thou art nobly bred, or the base daughter of a noble

line" (k2k).

Antigone's tendency to put people down was like that of the

king. They reacted to each other in kind. She knew his smallness

and his fears, and she struck at each of them with her aggressive

femaleness. She reminded him that his edict which she disobeyed was

not that of a god. "It was not Zeus that published me that edict,"

she jabbed at this misogynist. She called him a fool to his face:

"And if my present deeds are foolish in thy sight, it may be that a

foolish judge arraigns my folly" (^+35)- She told him that he bored

her and suggested that she would rather be dead than listen to him:

"Why then dost thou delay /to take and slay meJV she taunted him.

"In thy discourse there is nought that pleases me, . . ."(^35).

The brief incident concerned with the helpless ghost of the

Lady in The Second Maiden's Tragedy is a microcosm of the total drama

insofar as it depicted the Tyrant's use of language in his treatment of the living and the dead; for, in this short segment, the Tyrant remained true to his basic nature already portrayed in the major portion of the drama. 80

In the total drama the Tyrant attempted to bring the Lady to

court as his queen by bribery and threat. Before launching his at­

tempt on her honor, he spoke to her father, obliquely demanding his

cooperation: "Thy honours with thy daughters love shall rise / I

shall reade thy deservings in her eyes" (3). Then, when he sent his

first command and the Lady refused him, the Tyrant blazed out at her

father with the threat that his honors would be withdrawn if he could

not produce results:

*Belvetius,—thow art not worthe the waking neither, I lose but tyme in thee, goe sleep agen, like an old man, thou canst doe nothing, thow takst no paines at all to erne thine honor which ways shall we be able to paie thee to thy content, when we receave not our's, the master of the worke must needes decaie when he wants meanes, and sees his servaunt playe*(6).

Later, after the lyrant permitted the Lady and her husband to live in their own residence near the court, Helvetius chided him for his leniency with the couple: "They should have both bin sent to several prisons / and not Comitted to each others armes" (8). But the dVrant knew what he was doing, and he told Helvetius:

It gives thee freer access to playe the father for us and plye her to our will* (8). Helvetius was amazed at the wisdom of the lyrant:

'mass, so it does let a man think on't twice, your grace hath hapned upon a straung waie, yet it proves the neerest: I do beseech you matie, looke cheerful you shall not want content, if it be lockt in any blood of myne, the keye's your owne you shall comaund the wards* (8-9). With gentle blackmail, promising to restore his lost honors, the 81

Tyrant replied: "I were ungrateful then, should I see thee / want

honor, that provides content for mine" (8-9). When Helvetius repented

of having acted the pander toward his own daughter, the Tyrant im­

mediately, and characteristically, reacted: "I take of all thy honors

and bestowe em, / on any of this ranck that will deserve 'em (35).

After the Lady died and the Tyrant came to violate her grave,

he used the same verbal assault that he used when he tried to violate

her honor while lived: bribery and threat. The thought that he

might be able to relieve the torment he suffered because of her ab­

sence by going to her tomb sent him into a whirl of action. He or­

dered his soldiers to get keys, pickaxes, and lanterns; and to the

soldier who returned the quickest he promised: "Follow me, and wealth

shall follow you" (5^). But the desire for wealth was not lure enough

to make the soldiers work once they came to the cathedral and realized

that the lyrant had in mind "the battering of a ladies tombe." They

were so frightened they sweated as much from fear as the Tyrant did

from trying to remove the stone. Irate at their failure to help and,

following his usual pattern in using language—alternating bribes with

threats—he threatened the terrified soldiers:

'remove the stone that I male see my mistres, setto your handes you villaines, and that nymblie or the same Ax shall make you all flie open* (56).

Afterward, when he had taken her lifeless body to the court and

found her pale face looking too fearfully upon him, he sent out for a beautician who could "hide death upon her face," using still his sys­ tem of promising a reward: this time, one lavish enough to outlast him to whom it was given: 82

*, . , but strive to give our eye delight in that pale parte which draws so many pitties from these springes and thy reward for't shall owtlast thy end,

and reach to thy frendes fortunes, and his frend'(73).

Even approaching death, which he took from the poison Govianus placed upon the Lady's lips, did not alter the Tyrant's customary pattern of language use: still he bribed and threatened, and this time a threat he no longer had power to carry out: r 'What fury gave thee boiiLdnes to attempt this deed, for which ile doome thee with a death beyond the Frenchmans extremest toJrtures?'(75),

Govianus, too, was true to his nature in the scene in which the restless ghost of his Lady appeared. Never did he speak any language except the language of love to her while she lived; and, when her ghost appeared to him at her tomb, though terrified, he spoke only words of endearment to her spirit:

'o never csune astonishment and feare so pleasinge to mankind, I take delight to have my brest shake, and my haire stand stif, if this be horrour let it never die: Cfiune all the paines of hell in that shape to me I should endure 'em smylinge; keep me still in terror I beseech thee, Ide not chainge this fevour for fellcytie of man or all the pleasures of ten thowsand Ages* (6l),

And when she told him of her lost rest and begged him to restore it and then slipped away from him, he cried out:

*I cannot spare thee yet,--ile make my self over to death too, and weele walke together lyke loving spirrits* (62),

When he came to the court disguised as a beautician to dissemble life upon the Lady's face, he feared that his rage would cause him to act rashly. So he struggled to calm the trembling that overcame 83 him, so that his work might be done. "It must go forward," he said,

"tis tyme the spirrit of my love took rest / poore sowle, tis weary, much abusde and toilde" (73).

The language of this brief scene is significant in two respects: it shows the consistency with which the Tyrant and Govianus are de­ lineated throughout the drama, and it supports the thesis that the behavior one can expect of a man toward the living may often be de­ termined by the way he regards the dead.

In Antonio's Revenge, Pierro Sforza was so evil that he made good men turn bad and commit unbelievable atrocities. The dignity of human life meant nothing to him, and he murdered all but indiscrimi­ nately. Although the poisoning of Andrugio was motivated by a life­ long hatred, his choice of Feliche Pandulpho as his hanging victim was little more than a random chance. Felipe just happened to be a pleasant young gentleman in the court whose body would do as well as that of any other man to hang "as bait upon the line of death / To

'tice on mischief" (6-7) and as a balk "to stop the match" between his daughter Mellida and Andrugio's son Antonio (9)«

Pierre's evil deeds found their correspondence in the evil na­ ture of his Isinguage, which he used for two purposes: the first to disparage other men and the second to deceive them. His modes of ad­ dress were the jeer and the lie.

One of the victims of Pierre's jeers was the fool Balurdo.

Balurdo's antics invited the bored smiles of the gentlemen of the court, but they sent Pierro off into soliloquies in which he be^, trayed how little he loved and how ungrateful he was to this man Ok who served him with such childlike pleasure and about whom he pre­ tended to wind his kindest arms:

He that's ambitious-minded, and but man. Must have his followers beasts, dubb'd slavish sots Whose service is obedience and whose wit Reacheth no further than to admire their lord. And stare in adoration of his worth. I love a slave rak'd out of common mud Should seem to sit in counsel with ray heart; High honor'd blood's too squeamish to assent And lend a hand to an ignoble act;

Poison from roses who could e'er abstract? (26).

Pierre's scorn for the buffoon in his court was no greater than that which he expressed privately for Strotzo, his fellow conspirator and one whom he addressed as "my other soul, my life" (39). When he and Strotzo concocted a scheme to falsely charge Antonio with his father's death and the slander of Mellida, Strotzo, braggart that he was, laid his finger upon his lips to signal silence and drew his dag­ ger to signal action and strutted off declaring, "A true rogue's lips are mute; / I do not use to speak, but execute" (l+O-Ul), Pierro watched and then, to himself, mocked Strotzo:

So, So; run headlong to confusion. Thou slight-brain'd mischief; thou art made as dirt To plaster up the bracks of my defects. I'll wring what may be squeez'd from out his use. And good night, Strotzo (Ul).

After the scheme which they had planned came to its conclusion with

Pierro betraying Strotzo and, instead of only pretending to strangle

Strotzo as they agreed, actually choking him to death, he smiled and privately praised his own cleverness as a "statesman," his skill at using men as if they were things:

Why, thus should statesmen do, That cleve through knots of craggy policies, 85

Use men like wedges, one strike out another; Till, by degrees, the tough and knurly trunk Be riv'd in sunder (62).

Not only did Pierro scoff at the citizens of Venice; he lied to them and about them. He lied to them about his hatred for Andrugio, whose hearse he stood alone beside after the mourners had left the

tomb, and vented his pent-up enmity:

*Rot there, thou cerecloth that enfolds the flesh Of my loathed foe; molder to cnmibling dust; Oblivion choke the passage of thy fame I Trophies of honored birth drop quickly down; Let naught of him, but what was vicious liVe. Though thou art dead, think not my hate is dead; . . . Pale-beetie-brow'd hate but newly bustles up' (2k).

He lied to them about his hatred for Antonio, Andrugio's son. In

confidence, he told Strotzo of one motive for this hatred. Andrugio

had married Maria, the woman whom Pierro also loved:

'And from her sweets cropped this Antonio; For which I burn'd in inward swelt'ring hate. And fester'd ranking malice in my breast Till I might belk revenge upon his eyes* (7).

He also hated Antonio because of his engagement to Mellida, whom

Pierro had hoped to marry to a rich Italian prince. He dreamed

alone:

Young Galeatzol Ay, a proper man; Florence, a goodly city; it shall be so. I'll marry her to him instantly (65).

But publicly he spoke of Andrugio as "my most firmly reconciled

friend" (19), and of Antonio he told the court: 'I hold Antonio, for his father's sake So very dearly, so entirely choice. That knew I but a thought of prejudice Imagin'd 'gainst his high enobled blood I would maintain a mortal feud, undying hate •Gainst the conceiver's life' (58). 86

Most unforgiveable of all Pierre's lies were those he told about young Feliche Pandulpho and his daughter Mellida. These false­ hoods violated first the code of honor that will not permit any man, certainly not a father, to defame the character of a woman, and second, the code that denies any man the right to spesik evil of the dead, who cannot stand and defend themselves. To say that these two young people, she on the eve of her wedding to Antonio, had been "found even cling'd in sensuality" (19), ^^s to speak with the tongue of a coward.

The language of Sir Jeffery Balurdo, the fool, made no sense at all. Balurdo played with words as if they were toys and then glee­ fully announced of his senseless jargon, "I think I talk like a coun- silor" (26). Once, when Pierro asked him, "Dost thou know what thou has spoken all this while?" he answered: "Nfeiny men can utter that which no man but themselves can conceive; but I have the good gift to speak that which neither man else nor myself understands" (25). Vac­ uous and silly, Balurdo's language was a kind of foil for the precise diction of his master. Both were empty. Balurdo's nonsensical jumb­ ling of parts of speech would confuse a saint. But it was the vicious confusing of truth and falsehood in Pierre's communications that did drive the good men of the court, desperate to correct their ills, to commit dreadful deeds and indulge in cruel, inhuman jests and taunts.

Antonio, once a gentle lover, murdered the child Julio and served up his body to Pierro on a platter with the taunt: 'Fall to good duke. 0 these are worthless cates. You have no stomach to them. Look, look here: Here lies a dish to feast thy father's gorge. ^ Here's flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov'st (82). 87

Old Pandulpho, once given to reading and philosophy, joined the men

of court when they bound Pierro, cut out his tongue and vilely

cursed him:

'Thus charge we death at thee: Remember hell; And let the howling murmurs of black spirits. The horrid torments of the damned ghosts. Affright thy soul as it descendeth down Into the entrails of the ugly deei^ (83).

And they tortured him, joying as they stabbed at him with rapiers:

"And yet not die till /thou/ hath died and died ten thousand deaths

in agony of heart" (83).

The characters in Antonio's Revenge, like modern parents of

battered children who were, in their childhood, also beaten and

battered, responded in kind to the belittling modes of address of

their leader, resorted to atrocious torture and terrifying mockery,

a frightening outcome of the violation of the human contract, the

agreement that people who would live well in an ordered society will

avoid the abuses of language whose ends are to belittle or confuse.

Philip Massinger's The Fatal Dowry is a courtroom drama, the

seminal theme of which was the treatment of the dead. The language

was the formal stylized langiaage of debate; and the characters,

whether speaking in one of the court trials, in the ceremonial mock

trial, or in their dressing rooms, spoke in the tone and style of

argument. As foil to the legal language, young Charalois, who stood as defendant for his father's corpse, and his friend Romont, who

came to court to rail, both used the highly emotional language of

sarcasm and invective. 88

Outside the courtroom, the characters in The Fatal Dowry spoke as if they were still in court. The smallest subject of their con­ versation, serious or comic, was worthy of debate. When the gallant,

Aymer, invited Charalois to hear a musical program, hoping to find in him a friend of music, Charalois responded, giving first a negative attitude he could have held:

'l never was an enemy to't. Nor yet doe I subscribe to the opinion Of those old Captaines, that thought nothing musicall. But cried of yeelding enemies, neighing horses. Clashing of armor, lowd shouts, drums, and trumpets';

then he continued, presenting an opposing viewpoint he might also

once have assumed:

'Nor on the other side in favour of it, Affirme the world was made by musicall discord, Ot that the happiness of our life consists In a well varied note upon the Lute;

and, in conclusion, he pronounced the verdict: "I love it to the

worth of it and no further" (72).

In her lady's dressing room, the maid Bellapert argued with

Lord Novall the case for adultery. The young lord, having lost

Beaumelle by her marriage to Charalois and desperate about how he

might still gain favor from her, assumed the negative viewpoint;

while the maid, herself a gamester, presented the affirmative side

of the argument and so sold her scheme to bring the two together

clandestinely:

Novall: Flie not to these excuses: thou hast bin False in thy promise, and when I have said Ungratefull, all is spoke.

Bellapert: Good my Lord, but heare me onely. 89

Novall: To what purpose, trifler? Can any thing that thou canst say, make voyd The marriage? Or those pleasures but a dreame. Which Charaloyes (Oh Venus) hath enjoyed?

Bellapert: I yet could say that you receive advantage. In what you thinke a losse, would you vouchsafe me That you were never in the way till now With safety to arrive at your desires. That pleasure makes love to you unattended By danger of repentance?

Novall: That I could But apprehend one reason how this might be, Hope would not then forsake me. Bellapert: The enjoying Of what you most desire, I say th'enjoying Shall, in the full possession of your wishes, Confirme that I am faithfull.

Novall: Give some rellish How this may appeare possible.

Bellapert: I will-- Rellish, and taste, and make the banquet easie: You say my Ladle's married. I confesse it. That Charalois hath injoyed her, 'tis most true That with her, hee's already Master of The best part of my old Lords state. Still better. But that the first, or last, should be your hindrance, I utterly deny: for but observe me: While she went for, and was, I sweare, a Virgin, What courtesie could she with her honour give Or you receive with safety? . . .

Novall: But he tasted the first sweetes, Bellapert.

Bellapert: He wrong'd you shrewdly. He toyled to climbe up to the Phoenix nest. And in his prints leaves your ascent more easie.

Novall: But for her marriage.

Bellapert: "Tis a faire protection 'Gainst all arrests of feare, or shame for ever.

More I could say—but briefely, she doates on you, If it prove otherwise, spare not, poyson me With next gold you give me (kd-k^). 90

Even the poor unburied bones of Old Charalois lying in jail, incarcerated for debt, were subjected to the pros and cons of debate.

Charalois offered himself as bail so that his father's body might be released for burial:

'Yet rather than my fathers reverent dust Shall want a place in that faire monument. In which our noble Ancestors lye intomb'd. Before the Court I offer up my selfe A prisoner for it: Loade me with those yrons That have worne out his life, in my best strength Ile run to th'incounter of cold hunger. And choose my dwelling where no Sun dare enter, So he may be releas'd*(28).

Then the wisdom of this decision became the subject of argument.

Rochfort tried to dissuade Charalois from this sacrifice in behalf of a subject who could not know of it nor of the malice of the cred­ itors :

'Be advis'd, young Lord, And well considerate, you throw away Your liberty, and joyes of life together: Your bounty is imployd upon a subject That is not sensible of it, with which, wise man Never abus'd his goodness; the great vertues Of your dead father vindicate themselves. From these mens malice, and breake ope the prison. Though it containe his body^ (28).

The young gallants took sides, and each presented his judgment upon

Charalois' behavior. Malotin saw a "golden precedent/ in a Sonne' who would let emotion have the better hand of reason. Pontalier thought Charalois very strange:

*rn a man, but young. Yet old in judgement, theorique, and practicke. In all humanity (and to increase the wonder) Religious, yet a Souldier, that he should Yeeld his free-living youth a captive, for 91

The freedome of his aged fathers Corpse, And rather choose to want lifes necessaries Liberty, hope of fortune, then it should In death be kept from Christian ceremony^;

Pontalier continued and suggested that an innocent man shoiad defy unjust laws:

'But wherefore lets he such a barbarous law. And more barbarous to execute it, Prevaile on his soft disposition. That he had rather dye alive for debt Of the old man in prison, then he should Rob him of Sepulture, considering These monies borrow'd bought the lenders peace. And all their meanes they injoy, nor was diffus'd In any iii5)ious or licencious path?^ (3I-32).

Beaumont reccamnended that Charalois ignore the whole matter:

*True, for my part, were it my fathers trunke. The lyrannous Ram-heads, with their homes should gore it Or, cast it to their curres (than they) lesse currish. Ere prey on me so, with their Lion-law, Being In my free will (as in his) to shun it* (32).

Neither Charalois nor Romont, who both loved and revered Old

Charalois, were able to maintain the formal language of the court when they spoke in defense of the unburied corpse, Rcxnont railed at the creditors:

And for the denying of a little earth. To cover what remaynes of our great soldyer: May all your wives prove whores, your factors theeves. And while you live, your ryotous heires undoe you; and then at the judges:

And thou, the patron of their cruelty. Of nM thy Lordships live not to be owner Of so much dung as will conceale a Dog, Or what is worse, thy self in. And thy yeeres. To th'end thou mayst be wretched, I wish many. And as thou hast denied the dead a grave. May misery in thy life make thee desire one, Which men and all the Elements keepe from thee* (25-26), 92

Charalois ranted at the injustice of the court system:

'The damnd, with more ease may ascend from Hell Than we arrive at /justice/. One Cerberus there Forbids the passage, in our Courts a thousand. As lowd, and fertyle headed, and the Client That wants the sops, to fill their ravenous throats. Must hope for no accesse' (17); and he burned the judges' ears with sarcasm:

'l therefore bring the tribute of my prayse To your severitie, and commend the Justice, That will not for the many services That any man hath done the Common wealth, Winke at his least of ills* (26).

Charalois' emotional language and his dramatic sacrifice of his own freedom for his dead father's bail were paralleled later by his equally drajnatic language and behavior in the mock trial in which he convicted his wife of adultery and personally executed her. These outbursts testify to the fact that there are circumstances, as the desecration of the dead or violation of the marriage vow, that defy forensics.

The intent to use language rather than physical force to ac­ complish the goals of society was exhibited around the theme of the unburied dead in these dramas. In The Suppliants, when Creon dared defy the ancient laws to bury the dead, the people of Athens met to­ gether and voted to go to Thebes and, by either cunning words or use of arms, force the Thebans to bury the Argive chiefs. With this theme, Euripides was able to extol the virtues of Athens, a city in which the voice of the people was important in the election of the leaders and in the city councils. In Athens the people leamed from one another, and the tongue was considered a gift given by the gods to enable m£in to know the thoughts of other men. 93

In Antigone, the people had no influence in their government but were intimidated by the voice of a tyrant. Using the motif of the unburied dead, Sophocles demonstrated that rulers who err, as

Creon did in denying proper burial to the dead, and who then use language to cover up their error, can destroy themselves and their city. Such an erring ruler, too, was the Tyrant in The Second

Maiden's Tragedy, who used bribes and threats to satisfy his morbid desires for a woman even after her death.

Antonio's Revenge showed a society fragmented and paralyzed by the vice of an evil leader, a society in which there was 'no music in the mind of man." Language used by the Duke of Venice was a means to deceive and defraud. Coupled with physical force, as in the murder of Feliche Pandulpho and the display of his body in a public place, it was used to terrify and torture.

In The Fatal Dowry, the formal, stylized language of the judi­ ciary broke down and was replaced with sarcasm and invective as the characters tried to settle such emotional issues as the desecration of the dead and the violation of the marriage vows. Massinger ques­ tioned in the drama whether it is possible for men to live together and communicate amicably with one another, even with the aid of formal systems of adjudication.

However serious the intent of men to achieve a good life in a city or state by using the gifts of wisdom and language of which

Theseus spoke, these dramatists indicated that there were great gaps between the intent and the realization. Even in Athens, described as so responsible a society by Euripides in The Suppliants, there 9^^ was the hint that the leader wielded the people to his own wishes.

Theseus said of his plan to rescue the dead Argives that he would first get the approval of the people before he carried it out. "But

I require the whole city's sanction also, which my mere wish will en­ sure" (928). He was too confident, too certain that the people would say "Yes" to whatever he asked. His next comment smacked of patronage:

"Still by communicating the proposal to them I shall find the people better disposed" (928). Theseus sounded as if he worked deliberately at good public relations. Though in the most courteous manner, he also condescended to women. When his mother asked permission to tell him her plan for rescuing the dead, he replied: "Yea, for oft even from women's lips issue wise counsels" (927).

Antigone and Haemon both told Creon in Antigone of the extent of the division that was growing in Thebes between the king and the people.

Antigone assured him that all the people honored her for burying her brother, and she added: "All here would own that they thought it well, were not their lips sealed by fear. But royalty, blest in so much besides, hath the power to do and say what it will" (^35). Haemon pleaded with Creon to reduce the distance between king and people by asking the citizens their thoughts:

"For the dread of thy frown forbids the citizens to speak such words as would offend thine ear, but I can hear these murmurs in the dark, these meanings of the city for this maiden; 'no woman,' they say, 'ever deserved her doom less—none ever was to die so shamefully for deeds so glorious "*(UUl).

Of the separation existing between the king and the people shown in these five tragedies, it appears that even in the best of societies, such as in Athens during the democratic experiment, there was a 95 considerable gap. In Venice of Antonio's Revenge, the duke himself admitted that only dumb clods were suitable citizens under so evil a rule as his, a government in which the people asked often about their leaders, "What villainy are they decocting now?" (6l), In The Fatal

Dowry, the characters believed that the chasm between the people and the courts of justice was immense and not to be spanned without money for the toll. In The Second Maiden's Tragedy, the separation of the people from the state was presented from the viewpoint of the Tyrant, a sad and lonely stance. When the Lady chose to die at her own hand rather than submit to the Tyrant, he was amazed at how great was the distance between himself and the citizens:

'her owne faire hand so cruelll did she chuse destruction before mee? was I no better? how much I am exalted to my face? and wher I would be grac'te, how little worthye? ther's few kinges knowe how ritche they are in goodnes, or what estate they have in grace and vertue, ther is so much deceit in glosers tongues the truth is taken from us, we knowe nothinge but what is for their purpose, that's our stint we are allowde no more,--o wretched greatnesi* (52-53).

While revealing something of the authors' viewpoints and at­ titudes toward man's struggle to leara to live in groups and to govern himself in political institutions, the motif of the unburied dead also gave these dramatists a means for delineating their char­ acters as individuals. The man who pushes the dead around may be found lording it over his fellowmen also. From situations involv­ ing the dead, one man may learn the lesson of human misery and grow to be a better man; another, who cannot, or will not, learn, may be destroyed. 96

Euripides drew Theseus in The Suppliants as a ruler one of whose basic concerns was human rights. Theseus was untroubled by insecur­

ities in his own personality and was intimidated by neither men nor

gods. When Adrastus came to beg his help, he did not hesitate, at

first, to refuse on the grounds that he saw no reason for expending

the men and resources of his city in the cause of a king who was a

son of folly. When the Herald wasted his time, Theseus made the

braggart eat some of his words and then sent him packing. When he

went to war, he asked the favor of only selected gods. Unthreatened

by others, he felt no need to threaten but wanted rather to see other

men fulfilled. He held that there was more good than bad in men, and

he wanted to see the good in man nurtured and cultivated. He believed

this nurturing could best be accomplished in a city in which the laws,

alike for all—rich and poor--were written down, and in which the

weaker man was free to talk back to the rich and to prevail over him,

if justice were on his side. He believed that it was a mark of freedom

in any city to draw forth from its citizens any wholesome counsel they might have to offer, but he also believed in respecting the right to

remain silent of any one who did not wish to speak. The young women, he taught, should not be forced to marry against their own wills or be sent to gratify a tyrant's whim. "May my life end if ever ray

children are wed by violence!" (13I), he vowed to the Herald of

Thebes.

As he respected the rights of the least of his citizens, Theseus also respected the rights of the dead. Even though Athens was not in­ volved in the war in which the seven Argives were killed, he insisted 97 on burying the dead soldiers. "But still I claim to bury the fallen dead, not injuring any state nor yet introducing murderous strife, but preserving the law of all Hellas" (932). Cadmus had no rights that extended beyond life, he said. "If you suffered aught from the

Argives--lol they are dead; ye took a splendid vengeance on your foes and covered them with shame, and now your right is at an end" (932).

The dead must have their due, he thought, and to permit a nation to keep them from the tomb would strike dismay into the stoutest hearts.

Anticipating later ecologists, Theseus also defended the rights of the earth to receive again from the dead the elements which it gave for the body of man.

As he had no fear of either man or gods, Theseus had no fear of the dead; and he scorned the Thebans for what he considered their fear of the dead. He questioned the Herald:

'And art thou come to cast dire threats at me, while thy own folk are afraid of giving burial to the dead? What is your fear? Think you they will undermine your land in their graves, or that they will beget children in the womb of the earth, from whom shall rise an avenger?* (932-33).

Unlike the Theban Herald who wanted to continue punishing the slain warriors because of their acts of insolence, Theseus knew that the tragic turns of war might someday make his city subject to those who would violate the dead and he wanted no law enacted that might someday bring hurt to Athens.

The king in the Euripidean drama was drawn as a character who consistently showed respect for both the living and the dead. Creon, in the Sophoclean drama, was also a consistent character, but of a contrary nature to that of Theseus; for Creon respected neither the 98

living nor the dead. While Theseus stood tall and unafraid, Creon

was a small, fearful man, so insecure that he was threatened by so

insignificant a person as the self-effacing Ismene, who herself was

afraid to help Antigone bury their brother and who believed that women

should always obey the men, and he responded to the threat he imagined

she was to him and to Thebes with threats of his own: "For indeed I

charge that other ^smen£/ with a like share in the plotting of this

burial" (k33). In his paranoiac fear, he watched the face of this

timid sister of Antigone and was more frightened of the mind he could

not delve:

i And summon her—for I saw her e'en now within,—raving, and not mistress of her wits. So oft, before the deed, the mind stands self-convicted in its treason, when folks are plotting mischief in the dark' (i^35). It was not Ismene alone who threatened Creon, but all women.

Uncertain of his own masculinity, he found the aggressiveness of

Antigone so menacing that he decreed her death:

'Now verily I am no man, she is the man, if this victory shall rest with her and bring no penalty. Nol be she sister's child, or nearer to me than any that worships Zeus at the altar of our house,--she and her kinfolk shall not avoid a doom most dire* (^35)-

He warned Haemon of letting his desire for the pleasures of marriage

"dethrone /hisj reason for a woman's sake," and he attempted to coach his son in the defense of law and order against the peril of women's interference:

'Therefore we must support the cause of order, and in no wise suffer a woman to worst us. Better to fall from power, if we must, by a man's hand; then we should not be called weaker than a woman* (^4l).

Her passionate pride menaced him also, and he tried to break her spirit with threats. He belittled her pride in the presence of the people: 99

'Yet I would have thee know that o'er-stubborn spirits are most often humbled; 'tis the stiff est iron, baked to hardness in the fire, that thou shalt oftenest see snapped and shivered; and I have known horses that show temper to be brought to order by a little curb; there is no room for pride when thou art thy neighbor's slave* (J+35).

Perhaps no word of Creon's spoke so clearly of his treatment of women,

Walter James Miller points out in "The Relevance of Antigone Today," 9 an article prepared for a Grene-Lattimore edition of Antigone, as did the behavior of his own wife, who made one walk-on appearance in the drama, asked a single question and, learning that her husband had been responsible for the death of their son, retreated wordlessly to the interior of the palace and took her own life.

As weak and timid as the people of Thebes were, even they threatened Creon. He told the first meeting of his council: "If any, being supreme guide of the State, cleaves not to the best coun­ sels, but, through some fear, keeps his lips locked, I hold him most base"; yet he had declared a decree to all the land with no advice from this conference of elders, who came in response to his mandate with no previous knowledge of the edict and with the question on their lips: "What counsel is he pondering, that he hath proposed this spe­ cial conference of the elders . . . ?" (^27). He obviously maintained an enemies list; for, when one citizen suggested that the gods might have had a hand in the burial of Polyneices, Creon denied that this could be true and declared that the deed was done by his enemies:

9 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), p. 53- 100

'From the first, there were certain in the town that muttered against me, chafing at this edict, wagging their heads in secret; and kept not their necks duly under the yoke, like men contented with my sway* (^30).

He was not king enough to change his mind in the presence of the people; and when Haemon begged him to annul the penalty set against

Antigone, he answered:

'For since I have taken her alone of all the city, in open dis­ obedience, I will not make myself a liar to my people--I will slay her^ (l|itl).

Though Creon blustered in the presence of the gods and called upon Zeus, as though they were bosom friends, to support his every oath, he was in terror of the gods. In a rage at Teiresias he dared blaspheme Zeus: "No, though the eagles of Zeus should bear the car­ rion morsels to their Master's throne—no, not for dread of this de­ filement will I suffer his burial." But before he breathed again, he moderated the impiety: "For well I know that no mortal can defile the gods" (U5O-5I). Fear that the power of the gods would "smite

/his/ pride with ruin" (^^52) made him relent of his hard line against

Antigone and declare to the people, "W heart misgives me, 'tis best to keep the established laws, even to the end of life" (^53), and rush to correct the grievous fault he had committed against them.

Fearful of the living and even of the bones of the dead body of

Polyneices, who, when alive, had threatened his rule of Thebes, Creon behaved toward the living and the dead in so despicable a manner that he came to such a pass that he was afraid to live and begged the fates for death: 'Oh, let it come, let it appear, that fairest of fates for me, that brings my last day,—aye, best fate of all 1 ^ Oh, let it come, that I may never look upon tomorrow's light (459). 101

The strain of misogyny that characterized Creon made Antigone

appear to him as utterly aggressive, arrogant and threatening. Indeed,

she was a tactless person, intimidating those whom she needed most to

please, and she stubbornly defended the right of her own conscience.

But there was also in Antigone a wealth of gentleness toward the dead

that might be called feminine, if it had not also characterized The­

seus of Athens. As Theseus himself washed the bloody wounds of the

hapless youth who fell with the seven Argive chiefs (939), Antigone

gave tendrance to the dead of her family. Though she regretted her

death before the term of her life was spent, she held to the hope

that she would be happily received among the dead because she had

cared for them so tenderly:

But I cherish the good hope that my coming will be welcome to my father, and pleasant to thee, my mother, and welcome, brother, to thee; for when ye died, with my own hands I washed and dressed you, and poured drink-offerings at your graves; and now, Poly­ neices, 'tis for tending thy corpse that I win such recompense as this*(kkj).

Bad Creon been less determined to defend his masculine preroga­ tives, he would have been touched by Antigone's sorrowing, feminine plaint that she was to have "no joy of marriage, no portion in the nurture of children" (kkd), and in her confused apology for her de­ fiance of the royal decree:

Never, had I been a mother of children, or if a husband had been mouldering in death, would I have taken this task upon me in the city's despite. What law, ye ask is my warrant for that word? The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the firstborn: but, father and mother hidden in Hades, no brother's life could ever bloom for me again. Such was the law whereby I held thee first in honour* (kkJ-kQ). 102

The Second Maiden's Tragedy is a strange and morbid love story.

Govianus and the Lady were truly devoted to one another in life and

in death, and the Tyrant was possessed of an overweening, morbid in­

fatuation for the Lady which he had fostered since he lost her to

Govianus and which he allowed to become so perverted that it des­

troyed them both.

In life the Lady was not to be shaken from her devotion to

Govianus: "I have found my matche / and I will never loose him" (5),

she told the Tyrant when he insisted that she desert her husband to

become his queen. Nor in death was her mind to be changed; and when

the Tyrant broke her rest by removing her body from the tomb, her

ghost went straightway to Govianus to tell him of her injuries: "I

leave 'em to thy thought, deerest of men / my rest is lost, thow must

restor't agen" (62).

Govianus was a quiet, gentle man whom nothing could anger except

an affront to the Lady. While she lived and after she died, he found

no cause for outrage—neither loss of power nor exile from his coun­

try—except indignities directed toward the Lady. He was secure in

the knowledge that she loved him, and he never doubted her; for he

knew that even if, by some chance, she saw the riches and pomp of the

Tyrant's kindgom, she would snatch her eyes away and "repent the

lookinge" (3). So it was not jealousy that angered him but some un­

usual insult to her honor, as her own father's approaching her as pander for the king. Govianus struck old Helvetius; and, missing him only for the Lady's sake, he told the white-headed old squire: 103

'O hadst thow bin any thinge beside her father I'de made a fearfull separation on thee, I would have sent thy sowle to a darker prison than any made of claye, and thy dead bodie as a token to the lustfull kinge thy master' (25).

Though he saved Helvetius for the Lady's sake, Govianus did not spare Sophonirus, another ancient courtier whom the Tyrant sent with jewels to court the Lady in his stead. Govianus was aghast that the old man would dare approach the Lady for such a purpose in their own house; and when he saw it was indeed true, when Sophonirus said to the Lady, "I bringe thee pretious ladie this deere stone / and commen­ dations from the kinge my master," he replied to the old man with his sword and the cry, "I set before thee panderous lord this Steele / and much good doo't thy hart, fall to, and spare not" (38).

Govianus was equally angered when he learned that his Lady's body was being disturbed after her death. When he went to the palace disguised as one who could restore the semblance of life on her dead face, he was so angry that he feared he might not be able to complete the task he had to do. So he prayed:

'0 heaven marry patience to my spirrit give me a sober furie I beseech thee, A rage that may not over charge my blood and doo my self most hurt* (72).

The Tyrant was a man who could not give over an unrecipro­ cated love but let his infatuation for the Lady hide in his dark heart until it was a sick passion. While the Lady lived, he tried to force his attention upon her; and when she was dead, he let his morbid love become a psychosis that led him to ravage her tomb and desecrate her body. Unlike Govianus, who respected the wishes of lOU

the Lady while she lived and, when she was dead, risked his own life

because she asked it so that her "poor sowle," so weary and abused,

might have rest, the Tyrant never asked what she wished while she

lived amd, when she was dead, dared to impose himself unwanted upon

her pale, lifeless body.

Pierro Sforza, in Antonio's Revenge, was a deliberately evil man

whose only honest utterances were to admit his own villainy and the

corruption of his court. He bragged of his murders to his cohort

Strotzo:

'Say faith, didst thou e'er hear, or read, or see Such happy vengeance, unsuspected death?

Is't to be equal'd, think'st thou?*(8-9).

He insisted that Strotzo flatter him for his crimes: "Canst thou

not honey me with fluent speech / And even adore my topless villainy?" (9)

He wished that all his lords were as stupid as Balurdo, the fool, so

that his vices might go undetected:

0 then I were secur'd. He that's a villain or but meanly soul'd Must still converse and cling to routs of fools That cannot search the leaks of his defects. 0, your unsalted fresh fool is your only man; These vinegar tart spirits are too piercing. Too searching in the unglued joints of shaken wits. Find they a chink, they'll wriggle in and in, And eat like salt sea at his siddow ribs . . . (59).

When Pandulpho wept at the memory of the songs he had sung to the

child Feliche, Pierro, who also had a son, was momentarily touched and said: "He is a virtuous man," but quickly added: "What has our court to / With virtue, in the devil's name?" (28). Honest only to be a braggart about his own crimes, Pierro was a manipulator of men. He used Strotzo so long as Strotzo served him 105

well as an accomplice in his murders; but when Strotzo knew too much,

Pierro murdered him. He praised Balurdo, the fool, to get errands

done about the court, and he bragged that he could use men as wedges

to pry out other men who had become hindrances; that is, he regarded

living human beings as no more than blocks of wood.

Nor did Pierro treat the dead better. He used the body of the

hapless Feliche to break off the marriage of Antonio and Mellida; but

when he believed Antonio dead and no longer a threat to his plan to

marry Mellida to some rich duke's son, he released the body of

Feliche as unconcernedly as if it were a delivery from the grocers.

He directed Antonio: "Go, take him down and bear him to his father; /

Let him be buried; look ye, I'll pay the priest" (61+).

Although some men learn through suffering to be better men,

the good men in Pierre's court learned in suffering to be evil men.

Treated maliciously, forced to look upon the dead body of Pandulpho's

son hanging suspended in the palace and to hear Antonio's betrothed

called "unchaste, tainted, impure, black as the soul of hell," and

having no legitimate avenues through which they might correct the

ills they suffered, these two men turned cruel and vindictive, be­

came so brutalized that the vengeance which they rightfully took ex­

ceeded the bounds of reason and justice. The youthful lover who had

cried out when he first saw Feliche's body hanging in the palace win­ dow, "What slave hath hung yon gory ensign up, /in flat defiance of humanity?" (l8), himself defied humanity by murdering the child Julio and serving him as a banquet to his father. And the Stoical Pandulpho, who remembered with tears his own son as a little child, joined in 106 serving this morbid feast; and together the two of them taunted

Pierro: "Remorse was banish'd when thou slew'st /those we loved/" (82)

In The Fatal Dowry, the two characters whose natures were re­ vealed as they behaved in the presence of the unburied dead were

Charalois and Romont. Charalois, who at first stood dumb before the judges of the Dijon Parliament, then addressed them eloquently and

contemptuously, and, finally, offered his own freedom as bail for his father's corpse, was characterized by Donald Clark as a quiet, 10 mature man, one deserving of sympathy. The impetuous, fiery Romont, who raged so violently in court that he had to be led away by jailors,

Clark says, was used by Massinger to emphasize more keenly the quieter nature of Charalois.

There was also in Charalois a strong penchant for the dramatic that affected his treatment of his dead father's corpse and, later, his treatment of Beaumelle, his wife, and her lover, LoidNovall.

Charalois may have been a soldier in real life, but in his fantasy life he was a hero of the stage.

Romont was aware of Charalois' obsession with the dramatic; and when Charalois appeared at the trial for his father's corpse in black and affecting sorrow, Romont rebuked him, suggesting that a less theatrical approach might be more effective:

'This obstinate spleene. You thinke becomes your sorrow, and sorts wel With your blacke suits: but grant me wit, or judgement.

10 Donald B. Clark, "An Eighteenth-Century Adaptation of Massinger," Jtt^, XIII (1952), 21+0-Ul. 107

And by the freedome of an honest man. And a true friend to booxe, I sweare 'tis shamefull. And therefore flatter not your selfe with hope. Your sable habit, with the hat and cloake. No, though the ribons helpe, have power to worke'em To what you would: for those that had no eyes, To see the great acts of your father, will not. From any fashion sorrow can put on, Bee taught to know their duties*(16-I7).

In addition to his costume and overall demeanor, Charalois also affected a theatrical quality in his pleading before the court. In­ structed by the judge to avoid the emotional language of his friend

Romont, Charalois began:

'Thus low my duty

Answere• • • s your Lordships counsaile. I will use the temper that you wish mee*(26). Then, in precise, histrionic language he spoke to a cause he knew to be futile and followed his discourse with the melodramatic offer

to go himself to jail if his father's body might be released. His declamation was so effective that even the greedy creditors, whose primary concern was money, said to each other:

'Accept it by all meanes: let's shut him up. He is well-shaped and has a villanous tongue, And should he study that way of revenge. As I dare almost sweare he loves a wench. We have no wives, nor never shall get daughters That will hold out against him^ {2k). In the second division of the drama, Charalois' behavior when he came upon his wife and Lord Novall in adultery also took a theatri­ cal turn. Instead of immediately striking the lover dead as an angry husband would be expected to do, Charalois danced about and made a scene of righting his honor. With taunts and gibes, as in a fencing bout, he forced young Novall to draw and then slew him. Then, still 108

concerned about whether he was putting on the right face, he asked

one of his household: "Do I appear much moved?" Assured that he did

not, he replied that for the time he would dissemble unconcern, leav­

ing genuine grief and mourning until a later time and another place (75)

Later, for this dramatic deed, Romont praised Charalois in the lan­

guage of the theater:

'Nor did Charlois ever Performe an act so worthy the applause Of a full theater of perfect men. As he hath done in this' (90).

The most histrionic of his acts, however, was that at the mock

trial of his wife. In this scene he first set the stage for a court­

room trial with Beaumelle "in the place / Of one to be arraign'd" (79)

and himself in the chair of the accuser. Then, having dressed Roch­

fort in the judge's robe which the old man had worn when he was a

member of Dijon's Parliament, he seated him in the judgefe chair and

placed before them at the bar the body of young Novall, whom he had

just slain. With a grand speech and flourish, he then blindfolded

the old judge so that he seemed to wear the mask of Justice and de­

clared the court in order for a "day of hearing" (80).

This dramatic turn of Charalois did not nullify his basic good­

ness and sincerity and was an interesting mannerism of which he was likely as unaware as he was of the inconsistency of his viewpoint on amelioration of the law. In the case of his father's corpse, Chara­ lois remained convinced that the judgment should have been mitigated in favor of the corpse—and for a matter of money. He was equally convinced that the doom of death against Beaumelle for adultery was just and right. 109

The unburied dead motif serves in one or more phases in the

initiating, sustaining, and fulfilling of dramatic action in the

five dramas considered in this section. In the two Greek plays,

the theme initiates and sustains the action from exposition through

denouement. In The Fatal Dowry and Antonio's Revenge, the motif ap­

pears in the early phases of the rising action and is the substance

out of which the total conflict in each selection emanates. In

Antonio's Revenge the motif is subdued while Pierro compounds his

villainy, but it reappears at the turning point of the action and

activates the conspirators in their final vengeance. In The Second

Maiden's Tragedy, the theme appears in the final phase of the ac­

tion, where it serves as the goad that tiirns the conflict toward

catastrophe and final resolution.

Although considered somewhat episodic in structure. The Suppliants

is unified by the theme of the unburied dead, which persists through­

out the entire drsima. It appeared first in the prologue when the

Argive mothers came as suppliants to beg Theseus, King of Athens, to

help them recover for burial the bodies of their seven sons whom the

Thebans had refused to release.

Theseus refused at first to request his city to provide men and

resources to make such a venture for the Argives, whose leader, he believed, was a foolish man who did not know how to distinguish wise counsel. The ensuing action, verbal in nature, included pleas from Theseus' mother, Aethra, and threats from the Theban Herald about the action Theseus should take, Aethra's argument for going to war in defense of the dead was that good men should use their power no

to make men of violence, who prevent the dead from receiving their mead of burial and funeral rites, perform this bounden duty, and check those who would confound the customs of Hellas; for this is what it is that holds men's states together: strict observance of laws (928),

The Theban Herald believed that any who should bury Thebes' enemy

dead would be "helping our foes even after death, trying to rescue

those whom their own acts of violence have ruined'' (132).

Baving heard the debate on both sides, Theseus went to war, re­

covered the bodies of the chieftains and returned them to Athens, where he and Adrastus prepared a special sepulchre for the leader

Capaneus and a common funeral pyre for the six others. After the

rites of fire had been administered, the Argives swore upon the ashes of the dead never to lead their mail-clad troops against Athens and went in peace to Argos.

In the prologue of the Sophoclean tragedy, Antigone appeared to Ismene at the gates of the palace to tell her sister the dreadful news that the tragic death of their brothers, each at the other's hand in fulfillment of the ancient curse on the house of Laius, had been further complicated by a royal decree that, while Eteocles' body had been with "due observance of right and custom, . . . laid in the earth" (^3), the body of Polyneices was not to be buried but left ''unwept, unsepulchred, a welcome store for birds, as they espy him, to feast on at will" {k2k).

Antigone accepted the royal edict as a personal affront to her and her family. "Such, 'tis said, is the edict that the good Creon hath set forth for thee and me,--yes, for me I" {k2k) she told Ismene; and she responded with the declaration that, though she die for it. Ill

she would bury Polyneices. "Now be what thou wilt," she told Ismene,

"but I will bury him; well for me to die in doing that" (ii25). To

fail to bury her brother would be to dishonor laws "which the gods

have stablished in honour" (1^25), she declared, thus introducing the

controversial issue of the primacy of man's obedience to the gods as

opposed to Creon's dogmatic contention that the citizen's first duty

was to obey the laws of the state. Each was unyielding in his posi­

tion; but, as Ismene pointed out to Antigone, the Spirits Infernal

can be approached from afar for pardon but the rulers of the state,

being nearer, can put force on the citizens (U25). Consequently,

Antigone lost in the conflict and was removed to a secluded place,

••where the path JyasJ loneliest, and Ridden/, living in a rocky

vault" (kk3).

Though Antigone was removed from the conflict by her exile to

the desolate cave, her point of view was taken up by Haemon, her

betrothed and Creon's son, whose dialogue further complicated the

action by drawing about the initial motif of the unburied dead such

themes as relationships between youth and age, male and female, parent

and child.

Creon could not be moved by Haemon's logic auiy more than he was

moved by Antigone's vehemence; so the youth withdrew himself from the

conflict, to be replaced by the blind prophet, Teiresias. Teiresias,

who, the Chorus said, had never prophesied falsely and therefore had

the ear of the king, told Creon that not many days should pass before

tragedy would come to him because he could not let go his oppressive authority, admit he had erred in his treatment of the dead, yield. 112

and "heal the ill into which he had fallen" (I+50). Direfully, the

old prophet spoke:

'One begotten of thy own loins shall /be/ given by thee, a corpse for corpses; because thou has thrust children of the sunlight to the shades, and ruthlessly lodged a living soul in the grave; but keepest in the world one who belongs to the gods infernal, a corpse unburied, unhonoured, all unhallowed' (^^52).

Teiresias' ominous waming, coupled with the pleadings of the

citizens of the choms, so frightened Creon that he decided to yield.

But even in this turning point of the action, the king erred. "Go

thou," the leader of the chorus instructed him, "and free the maiden

from her rocky chamber, and make a tomb for the unburied dead'' (U53).

Creon, instead, went first to attend the unburied corpse and then

turned, too late, to the chamber in which Antigone was immured. The

Messenger brought to Eurydice at the palace the news of what happened:

*I attended thy lord as his guide to the furthest part of the plain, where the body of Polyneices, torn by dogs, still lay unpitied. We prayed the goddess of the roads, and Pluto, in mercy to restrain their wrath; we washed the dead with holy washing; and with freshly-plucked boughs we solemnly burned such relics as there were. We raised a high mound of his native earth; and then we turned away to enter the maiden's nuptial chamber with rocky couch, the cavemed mansion of the bride of Death' (U55).

When they turned to the lonely cave, their turning was to more

tragedy, for a bitter cry came to the king's party, a cry that seemed

to be the voice of Haemon, the king's son. When Creon sent searchers

in to seek out the "furthest part of the tomb," they found there

Antigone hanging by the neck, Haemon embracing her, his arms wrapped

around her waist. When Creon begged him to come forth, Haemon glared

at his father with fierce eyes, spat in his face, thrust at him with his cross-hilted sword, and finally, leaning on the sword with all 113 his weight, sent forth a swift stream of his own bright blood on the pale face of Antigone, his bride in death.

But Creon's ordeal was not yet ended; for, when he came to the palace bearing the body of his son, dead by his father's folly, he was greeted by the Messenger who told him that his grieving wife had taken her life. The drama closed with Creon, bowed down with griefs bom of his guilt, praying for death, but coming to know that "mor­ tals have no escape from destined woes" (^59).

In The Second Maiden's Tragedy, the conflict did not stem from the usurping of the throne and the deposing of the rightful heir,

Govianus, as might be expected. The conflict was bom in an ancient rivalry between the two men for the love of the Lady, who had chosen

Govianus for her husband. When the "lyrant took power, he immediately took advantage of his new station to set the conflict in motion:

fther e was but one in whome my hart tooke pleasure (amongst weomen) one in the whole creation, and in her you darde to be my ryvall. wa'st not bould? now we are kinge, sheele leave the lower path and find the ways to us* (l).

He gave instructions to his lords about bringing her to court at once:

—let her be sent for and honorably attended, as besemes her that we make our Queene, take to your care the royall busines of my heart, conduct her with all respect equall with that to us, if more, it shalbe pardond, so still err, you honour us, but our self honors her (2).

Govianus did not believe that the Lady would leave their humbler home to be queen, and he said of her before the court: lli^

*the losse of her sitts closer to my harte that that of kingdome, or the whorish pompe of this worldes titles that with flatterie swells us and makes us die like beastes fat for destruction, 0 shees a woman, and her eye will stande upon advancement, never wearie yonder, but when she turnes her head, by chaunce, & sees the Fortunes that are my Companions, sheele snatche her eyes of, and repent the lookinge* (3).

True, the Lady had a mind of her own, and when she was called to appear before the Tyrant and his lords as if she were the queen, she appeared in the black of mourning with downcast eyes. Though the

lyrant insisted, she refused to change, explaining to the assembly:

'l am not to be altered. 1 have a mynde, that must be shifted ere I cast of thease or I shall weare straung coloures; — 'tis not titles nor all the bastard-honoures of this frame that I am taken with, I come not hether to pleaze the eye of glorie, but of goodnes, and that concemes not you, sir, you're for greatnes ' I dare not deale with you, I have found my matche and I will never loose him* (5).

Although the Tyrant was angered by the Lady's refusal, he was

patient because he wanted her to come to him "gentlie €ind kindlie

like a debt of love" (7). In truth, he could hardly believe the ex­

istence of such a woman, and he said of her to her father:

''ther standes the first of all her kinde that ever refusd greatnes, A woman to set light by soveraintie what age can bring her forthe, and hide that booke tis their desire most comonlie to rule more then their part comes to, sometymes their husbandsM?).

He vacillated in his decisions as he tried to think of measures to persuade the Lady to give in. First he banished Govianus; but, perceiving that the Lady might join her husband in exile, he res­ cinded that command. At length he decided to let Govianus and the 115 lady live in their residence near the court, where it was convenient for him to send his courtiers to beg the Lady to become his wife or, if not wife, mistress. Finally, at her continued refusals, he threatened to bring her to his bed by force. When she realized that there was never to be any respite from the Tyrant's demands, she begged her husband to kill her to preserve her honor. Govianus could not bear to strike a blow against the woman he loved so dearly; so she took her own life.

Unlike the other unburied dead with which this study has been concerned, the Lady was buried, entombed by the side of her husband's father, whom Govianus loved dearest next to his Lady. It was after her burial that her rest was disturbed and her body lifted up from its place. The Tyrant became so discontent at her death that he went to the cathedral, broke open her monument, removed her life­ less corpse from the tomb emd took it to the palace where he caressed it and wept over it continuously.

Once her body had been disturbed, the spirit of the Lady could not rest until she had revealed her distress to Govianus. Unaware that the body of his Lady had been disturbed, Govianus went one day to the cathedral, taking along a book so that he might sit and read awhile and think quiet thoughts. He took with him, alsc^ a young page to sing a lament at the Lady's tomb. When the youth had sung his song, he withdrew to the door of the cloister so that Govianus might be alone with the Lady. When he began to speak to her, the spirit of the Lady appeared to tell him she was no longer there. With a great rushing of winds, the tomb opened and the ghost of the Lady 116 came out before Govianus' astonished eyes. She told him that the

Oyrant had taken her body to the palace and was sending out for a beautician who could dissemble life upon her pale face "to please his lustful eye' (62).

Up to this point, probably because the Lady, not her husband, was the protagonist in the drama, Govianus was meek and humble, timorously accepting the orders of the Tyrant. He lacked the courage, even at her pleading, to take his wife's life to save her from being

"ceazd upon / and bourne with violence to the tyrants bedd" (kO).

But suddenly, when he realized that his wife's body had been disturbed, he became resolute. He acted with courage, disguised himself as the beautician for whom the Tyrant had sent and went to the palace. He dressed his Lady's lips with color and the "best poison ^o be had/ for monie" (7^^) and watched as the Tyrant kissed her and took his death from her poisoned lips.

As the Tyrant died, the nobles of the court came forth and de­ clared Govianus the rightful king, confessing that the Tyrant's vicious actions had long been weighty for them to bear. Then Go­ vianus placed the Lady on the throne and crowned her his queen be­ fore he and the lords took her body in solemn procession back to its "howse of peace from whence she came" (77).

Though only a brief bit in the dramatic action, the incident with the unburied dead is significant as the turning point in

The Second Maiden's Tragedy. So long as she lived the Lady could defend her honor from the Tyrant's advances. Dead, she must have help. In life, her husband had been there to love her, but he was 117 quiet, gentle kind of man who would not fight unless greatly provoked.

The desecration of his wife's body was the provocation that incited him to do for her in death what he could not do in life--rise up and defy a Tyrant.

In Antonio's Revenge, as in The Second Maiden's Tragedy, the conflict was based on an old love rivalry. When Pierro Sforza,

Duke of Venice, and Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, were both young, in their "^fey of blood," they were rivals for Maria, daughter of the

Duke of Ferrera. Maria chose Andrugio for her husband, and from that time a festering hate for Andrugio began to grow in Pierre's heart.

This enmity did not diminish through the years but grew and spread to include Antonio, Andrugio's son and the heir to Genoa. Alongside this ill will for Andrugio and Antonio, there also grew in Pierre's heart an astounding greed for territorial expansion. 11 In action antecedent to Antonio's Revenge, Pierro defeated

Andrugio in a naval battle after which Andrugio and Antonio were separately cast ashore on Venetian soil. Antonio went in disguise to the court' and there met Mellida, the daughter whom Pierro, in his mania for finding ways to expand his territory, hoped to marry to some Italian prince. Antonio and Mellida fell in love, and he per­ suaded her to flee the country with him. In their flight they met

Andrugio, but they were overtaken and Mellida was returned to court.

Andrugio, having heard that Pierro had promised his love to anyone

11 G. K. Hunter, "Introduction,"Antonio's Revenge, p. ii, 118 who would bring Andrugio's head to court, put Antonio into a coffin and proceeded to court, where he demanded the reward for bringing in his own head. Pretending to be delighted at such valor, Pierro wished Antonio alive also, whereupon Antonio stepped out of his coffin. Pierro could do no less than pretend to rejoice and renew the betrothal of Mellida to Antonio.

In Antonio's Revenge, the action of this tale was picked up on the night Pierro Sforza and his cohort Strotzo committed a double murder: the poisoning of Andrugio, to satisfy Pierre's ancient grudge and to make Maria once more available to the Venetian duke, and the stabbing of a young Venetian courtier, Feliche Pandulpho. Hoping to break up the proposed marriage of Mellida and Antonio, Pierro mur­ dered Feliche, left his body hanging in the window of Mellida's pal­ ace apartment, and circulated the falsehood that Strotzo had come upon Mellida and Feliche making love.

The presence of the unburied body of Feliche hanging in the palace shocked and dismayed Feliche's father and the other nobles at the court; but it did not stir them to take action against the evil duke, though they suspected his villainy. Antonio, even though nudged by the ghosts of his father and Feliche, was so desolated by the death of his father and the charge of infidelity against his be­ trothed, that he was paralyzed; and Pandulpho, introspective and pre­ occupied with his reputation as a Stoic, pretended unconcern and even made sick jokes about the indignity done his son's corpse:

'^Look, sweet youth, How provident our quick Venetians are 119

Lest hooves of jades should trample on my boy; Look how they lift him up to eminence. Heave him 'bove reach of flesh' (22-23).

While Antonio and Pandulpho talked and hesitated, Pierro pur­

sued his strategy of deceit. Disappointed that Antonio did not re­

spond to the tale of Mellida's infidelity as he expected, he tried to

rid himself by other means of this youth who threatened any hopes he

might have to gain Genoa through marriage to Nferia as well as his

hopes to gain other territory by his daughter's marriage. He tried

to persuade Pandulpho to swear that Antonio had killed his own father

and so deserved the doom of death. Pandulpho refused and declared:

"yfy lord the clapper of my mouth's not glibb'd / With court oil;

'twill not strike on both sides yet" (28). But the braggart Strotzo

was coached by Pierro to swear that Antonio bribed him to kill An­

drugio. When Pierro sent for Antonio to answer this charge, he was

told that Antonio had drowned himself. Actually Antonio was in the

court disguised as a fool, but the word of his presumed death sud­

denly made useless the body of Feliche which had been hanging for

hours tainting "the air with stench of flesh, / And human putrefac­

tion's noisome scent" (27); and Pierro sent word for its disposal as

casually as though it were a toy. When Feliche had first been hung

in the window and old Pandulpho had pleaded with Pierro for the corpse:

"Who less boon can crave / Than to bestow upon the dead his grave,"

Pierro had responded: "Grave? Why think'st thou he deserves a

grave?" (27). But when his purposes no longer required the corpse,

in a tone both light and false, Pierro tossed off the order for its burial: 120

'Alberto, I am kind, Alberto, kind; I am sorry for thy coz, i'faith I am. Go, take him down and bear him to his father; Let him be buried; look ye, I'll pay the priest* (61+).

This incident over the unburied body of Feliche was the tuming point in the tragedy, the moment at which the conspirators finally decided to take revenge on Pierro. Alberto wamed the duke of what was to come: ",. . . But mark, Pierro, this: / There is a thing called scourging Nemesis" (65). They they took the body of Feliche in a winding sheet and over its mutilated breast worked themselves up to the pitch of rage necessary to perform the terrible deeds that constituted their vengeance. Pandulpho wept and admitted that his

Stoicism had been a hoax:

'Man will breaic out, despite Philosophy. Why, all this while I ha' but play'd a part Like to some boy that acts a tragedy. Speaks burly words and raves out passion; But when he thinks upon his infant weakness. He drops his eye. I spake more than a god. Yet am less than a man. I £im the miserablest soul that breathes* (71).

The other conspirators responded in kind until their anger was at fever heat. They they began to scheme:

, . , first, let's inter the dead; Let's dig his grave with that shall dig the heart Liver and entrails of the murderer' (71).

So with daggers used later to stab Pierro, they dug Feliche's grave, buried him, and then joined hands as Pandulpho swore: 'Now swear we by the Gordian knot of love. By the fresh tum'd-up mold that wraps my son, By the aged brow of triple Hecate, Ere night shall close the lids of yon bright stars. We'll sit as heavy on Pierre's heart As Etna doth on groaning Pelorus*(73)- 121

Antonio responded: "Thanks, good old man. We'll cast at royal chance. / Let's think a plot; then pell-mell vengeance!" (73).

From this brief, breathless plan, inspired by the mistreatment of the dead, the conspirators wreaked their terrible vengeance upon

Pierro and slipped quietly into oblivion, "to live enclos'd / In holy verge of some religious order, / Most constant votaries" (85),

Although it is true, as Clark wrote, that The Fatal Dowry is a story about a man who married a woman about whom he knew too little 12 and by so doing involved himself in tragic consequences, marriage is not the primary theme of the drama. The primary interest of

Massinger's play was to explore the court of law as an alternative to force as an institution for resolving problems that arise in human societies. The structure which hfessinger used in this drama corres­ ponds to the nature of the subject matter; that is, the drama is it­ self a debate in which affirmative and negative viewpoints are pre­ sented on the thesis that man should use the courts as the avenue for settling his differences with other men. Though faulty, the courts do offer a consensus rather than a single opinion, and they provide an alternative to brute force. The two viewpoints were set forth in this drama in two trials, each trial projecting one point of view. The first trial over the unburied dead led to the marriage of Charalois and Beaumelle, and out of the marriage issued the second trial.

12 Clark, "Adaptation of Massinger," ^5£ (XIIl), 251. 122

The first trial, in which Charalois spoke to his belief that

the courts and the statutes were not suitable institutions for dis­

pensing justice, was a trial for the unburied dead body of Old Chara­

lois. In this trial young Charalois stated that the courts had de­

teriorated from their former state "when justice / Had no gards to

keep off wronged innocence, / From flying to her succors" (17). He

believed that they had come instead to the sad juncture at which only

the rich had access to justice and that the judges took bribes in cor­

ners and elected to "qualifie the riguor of the law" (2l+) for clients

who could pay. Charalois did not believe that the judges should qua­

lify the laws for money, but he did believe that the statutes should

be ameliorated for a defendant who was a good man and who had served

his country long and well as his father had done.

The judges of Dijon Parliament refused to listen to Charalois'

pleadings to mitigate the statute governing bsinkrupts under which

Old Charalois' body was being held for bail; and the first triaj.,

the first argument in the debate, was concluded with Charalois sar­

castically praising judges who were so steadfast in administering

justice that they would not forgive an error in any man even though

he had done many services for the commonwealth. His words loaded

with contempt, he asked the judges:

'. . . what though my father Writ man before he was so, and confirmed it. By numbering that day, no part of his life. In which he did not serve his Country; Was he to be free therefore from the Lawes, And Ceremonious forme in your decrees?' (26).

Continuing in the ssime contemptuous tone, not wishing, he said. 123

"to take away one scruple from / The right of their lawes" (27),

Charalois offered himself as bail for his father's corpse and went

to jail.

The opposing argument was presented in the mock trial in which

Charalois was not a defendant but an accuser--of his own wife Beau­ melle, whom he found in adultery with young Lord Novall. This sec­

ond trial in The Fatal Dowry was altogether extra-legal, conducted

outside the court with only the defendant and her accuser present to present their case before Beaumelle's father, the aging Rochfort,

long retired from his judgeship in Dijon's Parliament.

Just as the law concerning bankrupts was so clear that the pre­

siding judge at the first trial stated that a man of "grosse ignorance" who had not practiced twenty days at the bar should know it (20^+), the law was clear for the adultress. Rochfort declared that there was no appeal for such cases and that "... all suites, which her penitence

can proffer, / As soon as made, are with contempt throwne / Off all the courts of mercy" (8l). Although he pitied Beaumelle, Charalois was convinced, at this extra-legal trial of his own making, that the statutes should be upheld and the sentence carried out; so at old

Rochfort's doom of death for an adultress, Charlois executed his wife with his own sword. He was then astounded that Rochfort should repent his legalistic sentence and suddenly plead for mercy, just as he him­ self had done earlier at the trial for his father. Of the sentence he had pronounced on his daughter, Rochfort cried out to Charalois:

But I pronounced it As a Judge onely, and friend to justice. And zealous in defense of your wrong'd honour. 12k

Broke all the tyes of nature: and cast off The love and affection of a father. I in your cause, put on a Scarlet robe Of red died cruelty, but in returne. You have advanced for me no flag of mercy: I look'd on you, as a wrong'd husband, but You closed your eyes against me, as a father* (82).

Charalois responded: "Nature does prevail above your vertue" (82).

In the ensuing court trial in which Charalois was tried for the

murder of his wife and Lord Novall, the laws protecting the injured

husband were upheld and Charalois was acquitted, only to meet death

at the sword of an angry avenger of Lord Novall. In the tragedy's

denouement, the moral of the tale was pointed to:

. . . how just soever Our reasons are to remedy our wrongs. We are yet to leave them to their will and power. That to that purpose have authority (97).

Euripides, Sophocles, Philip Nfessinger, John Marston, and the

anonymous author of The Second Maiden's Tragedy found the unburied

dead a suitable motif for e:}q)ressing their attitudes toward an era

in time when man's relationships with the gods and with his fellows

were being modified by the gradual phasing out of the military hero

and the emergence in society of the ordinary citizen as a significant

figure. They also found it serviceable as they delineated characters

who lived in an era of the developing political institution and for providing structure for the tales they told of the conflicts that

emerged in such a society. CHAPTER IV

THE UNBURIED DEAD AND THE PSYCHE

The unburied dead provided the epic poets a theme with which to illustrate their love of the good life on the earth and their rever­ ence for the gods, who were, in turn, concerned for man--both the living and the dead. Other poets and playwrights envisioned the good life on earth as life in the city with man using the gifts of wisdom and language to govern himself and, as Theseus said, thankful to "whoe'er of gods" for "bestowing fruitful crops, and drops of rain from heaven to make them grow, wherewith to nourish earth's fruits and to water her lap; and more than this protection from the wintry- storm, and means to ward from us the sun-gods' scorching heat; the art of sailing o'er the sea, so that we might exchange with one an- 1 other whatso our countries lack."

Yet other tellers of tales, not less concerned with man's phys­ ical well-being, but more jealous for his inner life, projected as the good life that in which man enjoyed not only the physical comforts but also the pleasures of the mind. These were the story tellers who found the motif of the unburied dead a suitable theme for use in the creation of tales that entertain and amuse or provide that fearful joy of fear or pity which students of human psychology say all human

Euripides, The Suppliants, p. 925

125 126 beings experience when they hear tales about the supernatural and the marvelous.

Charles Whitmore, in his study of the supernatural in tragedy, stated that a covert belief in the supernatural is as deeply rooted in the psychological nature of man as is the belief in the immortal- 2 ity of the human spirit. Edith Birkhead, in The Tale of Terror, a study of the gothic novel agreed that human beings are extremely credulous about the marvelous, and she added that people everywhere have always enjoyed tales about such matters, taking an intense plea- 3 sure in being moved to pity and fear. Among the astounding collec­ tion of tales of terror which she enumerates—beginning with the most ancient tale of the great flood at which even the gods were fright­ ened, and including stories of monsters like Grendel and his mother, tales of gruesome figures such as Bluebeard, the Demon Lover and the cannibal bridegroom, stories of ghosts, vampires, and witches—are k tales of the restless ghost who yearns for the burisLL of his corpse.

As ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew, Birkhead says of this unburied dead, he appeared in the Iliad as the shade of Patroclus, pleading with Achilles for his funeral rites. He came to Athens also and clanked his chains over the head of Athenodorus, Pliny wrote Sura

2 Charles Edward Whitmore, The Supernatural in Tragedy (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1915), P. 3.

3 Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror; A Study of the Gothic Romance (London: Constable & Company, Ltd,, 1921), p. 3.

k Birkhead, The Tale of Terror, p, 1^. 127

about him. His female counterpart presented herself to Dickens'

nurse requiring her bones, which were under a glass case, to be

"interred with every undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound 5 ten, in another particular place,"

Although some story fellers who find among the unburied dead

material for their tales have adopted a satiric stance, as >fetthew

Lewis did in his gothic novel. The Monk, the tone of many such

writers has been sheer delight, undisguised joy at being able to

evoke from an audience the smile of amusement, the shudder of ter­

ror, the grimace of horror, A modem English novelist and short

story writer, author of Rain, said of this joy in entertaining with

a story: ". , , let no one think that entertainment is a cheap and

shoddy thing, let him leave such a belief to the most snobbish and

vulgar of high brows; entertainment is a form of pleasure and plea- 6 sure is in itself good,"

One of the most entertaining of story tellers, Louis C. Jones,

included in a collection of tales called Things That Go Bump in the

Night stories about the dead. Jones had a way with the dead and was

indiscriminately friendly with them all, whether they were suicides, murder victims, or the restless unburied. "Wfiilk down the streets of

Cooperstown /New York/ with me on a moonlight night," he said, "and

5 Birkhead, p. Ik.

6 W. Somerset Maugham, The Best Short Stories, selected and with an Introduction by John Beecroft (New York: The Modern Library, 1957), pp. x-xi. 128

I'U show you a village where the enchantment of death is a warm and

friendly quality,"

Jones treated the dead in his stories as if they were alive. If

they had been sad while they lived, he grieved with them; but if they

were fun when they were alive, he forewent solemnity and laughed at

them when they were dead. He laughed most heartily at Old Sean, who

drank himself into the coffin. In the midst of his wake, when the

good Irish whiskey was passing from hand to hand. Old Sean could

finally stand it no longer and rose in his coffin to shout: "What's

the matter with me? Ain't I good enough to have a drink wid youse

at me own wake?"

Old Sean, like most of the dead in Cooperstown in Jones' day,

was buried; so Jones had little contact with the unburied dead there.

But in the neighboring towns he did occasionally come upon some folks

who were murdered and their bodies hidden away without burial rites.

Over in Schenectady, for example, he came upon a tale about a local

house:

The house was once a dive. Unfortunately, some of the girls were uncooperative and ended up buried in quickly-dug graves in the cellar. One night there was a brawl and before dawn came, they had to bury the pianist beside the girls. After this gang cleared out, a respectable, hard-working laborer and his family took the place and they had a rough time of it. The mother would make the beds and when she turned to look back into the room as she was leaving, they would be completely mussed up again. She would clean up her kitchen and when she re-entered the room, there would be utter dis­ order, far worse than what she had just straightened out.

7 Louis C, Jones, Things That Go Bump in the Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 1959), p. vii. 129

And each night the family would hear a piano playing in the house, although neither they nor any neighbors owned such an instrument. The family moved out after a while, and when new owners took over the property, the bones were found in the cellar. Once the bones were taken out and buried, the difficulties ceased, and today the place is happily occu­ pied, o

Jones also told stories about certain transients who passed through New York--or nearly through. Some of these were the pack peddlers, perhaps associates of Bronson Alcott, Louisa Mae's father and the friend of Emerson, who once peddled tinware on the eastern seaboard. Jones said of these peddlers:

The peddler was a man alone, with little contact with people who knew him intimately. His customers were often many miles apart, his itinerary was usually known only to himself, he was defenseless against any numbers, and his pack of desirable ar­ ticles and the money he had to carry on his person supplied mo­ tives. His custom of asking for a place to sleep wherever he found himself must frequently have led him to sleep in the homes of the least desirable of our citizenry. After he had been stabbed quietly in his sleep (often his bloodstains re­ fused to come off the floor), he was dragged down to the cel­ lar and buried in the dirt floor; or instead he was thrown down an abandoned well, or laid to an uneasy rest behind the bam where the wood pile could be stacked over his body. Then the trouble began, for these peddlers were rugged souls who might be murdered in their sleep, but that didn't mean there was the end of it. They came back—as strange lights, as the makers of weird sounds, as the industrious haunters of houses, as wraiths, and in their natural persons. Sometimes they re­ turned regularly, sometimes at annual intervals, sometimes now and then, but they kept coming until their bones were found. Sometimes beside the bones were a few pieces of rusted tinware which their murderers had thought it unwise to keep above ground.9

8 Jones, p. 6Q. 9 Jones, pp. 86-87. 130

Long before Jones made his collection of amusing anecdotes about

the dead, the Greeks and Roman sometimes used the unburied dead in

telling amusing incidents or in drawing comic figures. Homer's por­

trayal of Elpenor, who begged Odysseus in the Underworld for burial

of his body, was a predecessor of a long line of comedy figures who

drink too much and, consequently, share a common problem in the night.

When Odysseus saw Elpenor there on the banks of the river and called

out to him: "ElpenorI How did you come here, under the western

gloom? You have been quicker on foot than I in my black ship," El­

penor's answer came: "J^ royal master, ... it was all that wine I

swilled before I went to sleep in Circe's palace. For I clean for­

got to go to the long ladder and take the right way down, and so fell

headlong from the roof, ^fy neck was broken and my soul came down to 10 Hades." Sophocles' portrayal of the guard set to watch over the body of Polyneices is such an instance. The guard's bumbling, breath­ less account of his trips to the palace, his starts and retreats, his naive assunqption that every detail of his personal reaction to the situation was essential to his message, his candid admission that, though death is the common lot of all, he was glad enough that it had come to Antigone and not to him--all make him a comic figure.

Plautus in the Mostellaria made an unburied stranger's ghost a plot device to control the comings and goings of a father in that

Roman comedy:

10 The Odyssey, p. 172. 131

The regiilation father of Roman comedy had gone away on a jour­ ney, and in the meantime, the son, as usual, reached almost the end of his father's fortune. The father came back unexpectedly, and the son turned in despair to his faithful slave, Tranio, for help. Tranio was equal to the occasion, and undertook to frighten the inconvenient parent away again. He gave an account of an apparition that had been seen and had announced that it was the ghost of a stranger from overseas, who had been dead for six years. 'Here must I dwell,' it had declared, 'for the gods of the lower world will not receive me, seeing that I died be­ fore my time. Ify host murdered me, his guest, villain that he was, for the gold that I carried, and secretly buried me, with­ out funeral rites, in this house. Be gone hence, therefore, for it is accursed and unholy ground.' This story was enough for the father. He took the ghost's advice and did not return until Tranio and his son were quite ready for him.H

An incident in The Second Maiden's Tragedy may not have been in­ tentional humor; but were it staged today, it would receive roars of laughter. The scene is the one in which the ghost of the Lady, whose body had just been removed from the tomb by the Tyrant, appeared to her husband to tell him of her broken rest. The gentle Govianus had come to the church to read and sit quietly by his Lady. Alone in the cathedral, he began to speak lovingly to the Lady who he believed was in the tomb:

'Bternsill maid of honor, whose chaste bodie lyes heere lyke vertues closse and hidden seed to springe forth glorious to etemitye at the everlastinge harvest, ' when suddenly, as if in response to his words, a voice came from within: "I am not herel" Govianus, startled, jumped and cried:

"What's that? whoe is not here? I'me forc't to question it; / some idle sowndes the beaten vaults sende forthe1" (6O-61). The element

Lacy Collison-Morley, Greek and Roman Short Stories (Chicago: Argonaunt, Inc., I968). pp. 23-2^^. 132

0!f surprise, the contrast between the expected and the actual,

makes this scene an hilarious one in an otherwise serious, over-

solemn play.

Though the attitude of the writer of stories using the unburied

dead as a theme may be humor, skepticism may also be the mood. This

is true in the case of Andrew Lang, whose tone in his re-telling of

the story of the ghost of Sergeant Arthur Davies, is pure doubt.

The people of the Scottish Highland believed that Davies' ghost

came to beg that his body be buried and that his murderers be 12 brought to justice, but, in a collection called Ghosts and Dreams,

Lang gives his reasons for believing that the ghost was a hoax.

Sergeant Arthur Davies was murdered in September of I7U9 when

he was serving as a member of a regiment whose business was the gen­

eral surveillance of the Scottish countryside following an uprising

of the clans. On a routine march across the hills, Davies veered

off from his men to take a shot at a stag and was never seen again.

The captain of his regiment conducted a thorough search of the hill

where Davies disappeared but to no avail. Among the rumors that flew

about the countryside after his disappearance was that Davies had

been murdered by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Macdonald; but no body

having been found, no arrests were made.

In June of the following year, a young shepherd named MacPherson

came to his friend Donald Farquharson aind told him that he had been

12 Andrew Lang, Qiosts and Dreams (New York: Ames Press, 1970), pp. 133-1^1. 133 greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies, who came to insist

that he should bury his bones or, if he himself could not bury them,

to apply to Farquharson. Farquharson was skeptical but, fearful

that the ghost might come and trouble him also if he did not, he agreed to go see Davies' bones.

It was true, the story MacPherson told Farquharson, and they

did find the bones, along with the Sergeant's mouse-colored hair

and bits of the blue cloth uniform he was wearing that day in the

previous September when he disappeared.

When questioned about his knowledge of the bones of the dead

Sergeant, MacPherson insisted that the ghost of Davies had appeared

to tell him where to find them. In fact, he said, the ghost made two

visits, the first to beg for the burial of his body and the second to

denounce his murderers. Clerk and Macdonald. Strangely, the ghost

spoke in Gaelic, a language unknown to the Sergeant when he was living. Isobel Mac Hardie testified, too, that she had been present when the ghost made one of its appearances to MacPherson. She and

MacPherson, who was in her employee, had been lying one night in a hut built on the hills for shepherds, she at one end and MacPherson at the other, when something naked, walking in a bowing position, came in at the door and frightened her so badly she pulled the clothes over her head.

Yet nothing was done to apprehend the criminals until September,

1753 when Clerk and Macdonald were arrested and tried. At the trial it was proved that Clerk's wife wore a ring Davies was wearing the day of the murder and that after the murder Clerk had become relatively 13^ rich (and it was known Davies had been carrying money, in addition to the silver of his buckles and buttons). An eye witness, Angus

Cameron, testified that he saw the murder committed. Sir Walter

Scott, who knew one of the counsellors for the prisoners, said that everyone of the advocates was convinced of the guilt of Clerk and

Macdonald. Yet a jury of tradesmen acquitted the accused men be­ cause they were so impressed at the trial by the banter of one of the counsellors who made light of a ghost who could learn to speak a new language after the death of its body.

So, though the ghost of Sergeant Davies did get his body buried, it did not get his murderers brought to justice. And worse still, the man who told his story believed that he didn't even exist— except in the creative imagination of MacPherson and Mrs. Mac Hardie.

Lang believed that these two, knowing that the credulous people of the Highland would not disobey the voice of a ghost and not wanting to give evidence themselves, had invented the ghost of Sergeant

Davies. Unfortunately, for the sake of justice, they gave him a language which he co\ild not speak.

Skepticism is also the tone of a tale which Ernest Thompson

Seton recounts from his experiences in the American Northwest. So skeptical was Seton about ghosts that he joined the Society of Psy- chial Research, a society of eminent scientists headed by Sir Oliver

Lodge, who meant to ascertain whether there was such a thing as a ghost in the ordinary sense of the word. Of the hundreds of stories sent to the Research Society, most of the ghosts disintegrated, per­ haps going gibbering underground like the shade of Patroclus, in the 135

light of the scientific approach; but among the few that refused to

dissipate was the ghost of the Mackenzie River, told to Seton by a

bluff old Scotsman, Roderick MacFarlane, an employee of the Hudsons

Bay Company. Though Seton may have been skeptical, NfecFarlane was

not, and the story, after all, was his, as he reminded Seton when

the tale became the subject of their dinner conversation one evening

in 190^4- in Winnipeg many years after it happened, after ^feLcFarlane

had been long retired on a pension. Seton asked MacFarlane that

night, "Did you ever hear anything about the Mackenzie River ghost,

... a ghost that came in broad daylight to some men on the ice of

the Mackenzie River? The story was told by a Hudson's Bay Company

factor." Mac replied indignantly: "Humph, that factor was me. But

Lodge . . . didn't tell it right, nor at full length. I'll give you

the facts right now if you . . . ." And this is the tale MacFarlane

told that night, a tale of special tenderness untouched by even a 13 breath of doubt:

'Away back in the sixties, the Company thought there was a good chance of a successful trading post at the mouth of the Jfeckenzie, since this was Eskimo as well as Indian country and there was no post within ilOO miles in any direction. So, with Sandy l^cDonald for a helper, I was outfitted for the job. When the summer came, we went to the Mackenzie Delta; and then, tuming west, we selected the mouth of Peel River, where we built a couple of log houses, gathered a great pile of drift­ wood, and were ready for any fur trade that came along. Next spring, when the river opened, we had a visitor by canoe—a young fellow named Middleton, about twenty-two years of age, a graduate of Oxford. He came equipped with letters from the High Council of our Company, He was filled with

13 Ernest Thompson Seton, America, ed. with an Introduction by Julia M. Seton (New York: The Devin Adair Company, 195^), PP. 376-381^, 136 missionary zeal, his one hope and dream being to preach the Gospel to the Eskimos. He had no knowledge of the Eskimos or of their language; but he was undaunted by these difficulties, for he felt he was the chosen vessel to bring them the tidings of salvation. He was the most impractical, helpless creature I ever saw in the wilds. He knew nothing but his Oxford and his Bible. He seemed to us something like a madman. But he came with letters from the boss, so we had to take him into our family. Yes, we received him first only on the strength of the letters; but after a month or two, we were ready to accept him on account of his personal worth and charm. Far from strong, and troubled with a hacking cough, he was nevertheless always ready to do his share, and more than his share, of the work. He was the one who got up first in the morning to light fire and start the breakfast. He was the one to wash the dishes or scrub the dirty floor. It might be a zero blizzard outdoors, but he was the one who volunteered first to go after more firewood. He had brought his fiddle with him. He played well and had a string of good songs, and many a long, drearj-- winter night he whiled away for us, with his music and fun. I tell you we leamed to love that poor fellow like a brother. But there was something sad in it all—that cough. It grew worse, and in spite of his bright spirits and cheerful soul, he was plainly fading away. Toward the end of the win­ ter, he was so thin and weak that he couldn't go out of the door without getting frostbite. His cough was terrible, and he was spitting blood. Still he was bright, cheerful, and hopeful, and worked steadily on his Eskimo Grammar. Then came the days when he couldn't leave his bunk. One night he called us to him and said to me: 'Mac, you know I'm not long for this world; ... You fellows have been so good to me that I want to ask one last favor.' 'There isn't anything in our power you can't ask,' I said for both. •When my soul goes on,' he says, 'I don't want my poor body to be thrust into a hole in the ground like some animal. Won't you please bury me in consecrated ground?' •If it costs my last dollar and my life, I give you my word as a man that I will carry out your wishes,' was my ans­ wer, and Sandy and I took his poor thin hands in ours, and we gave our solemn promise. A month later, the end came. He passed away, happy and peaceful. The nearest consecrated burying ground was at Fort Res­ olution, i^OO miles up the Mackenzie River and fully 500 from our post. We had no right to leave our post now, so we wrap­ ped the corpse in caribou hides, then with our axes we chopped a grave three feet deep in the ice that never melts on the Mackenzie Mouth. 137

When he was laid in it, we filled it level with water; and within a few hours, it was one solid mass of ice, level with the rest. We put a little marker at each end of the place, which was all we could do at that time. I tell you living with that kind brave soul had done more than any book or sermon ever did. And Sandy and I just prayed for a way to carry out our promise. Well, sir, it was full two years we had to wait, and we surely felt bad about it. But the chance came. The High Coun­ cil of our Company sent orders to close up the post and travel at once with all books and records to Fort Resolution, where we were to report to the Superintendent of the District. This gave us the chance we had looked for. We had two sleds, each with a team of fine big husky dogs. On one sled we loaded the books and records of the post, our camping outfit, and grub for ourselves and dogs. On the other we loaded the corpse which we were able to dig out after a couple of hours of chopping. Sandy drove one team; an Indian who had been working for us drove the other. I, the boss, trotted ahead to break the trail.

... our big thought was the other sled. We must keep faith with the dead man. And away we went in easy stages to cover 500 miles of ice and snow- The Mackenzie River is two miles wide at the mouth. It has gravel banks and runs through a wide plain with only level snow till the black line of forest begins, three to ten miles away on each side. The best traveling for the sleds is up the middle of the ice, for there the wind has blown the snow away, and the ice is clear and firm for the runners. So each morning we set out up the middle of the river ice, trotting along for maybe twenty miles. Then we made our noon halt. Driving to the nearest gravel bank, we hauled up on the level plain. But there was no wood short of the pine forest, miles away across the deep soft snow; so, in order to avoid this hard trip, we always carried on the front of the sled enough firewood to melt snow smd boil it for our tea, and then a little more to cook our bacon. After an hour's rest, we set out again for twenty miles more. Then at night we would leave the river, and break our way to the forest, where we made a comfortable camp with plenty of wood. And I tell you, I always kept the funeral sled by my bed, for I felt under a solemn vow to protect that. In the morning we gathered our new bundle of wood for the noon and set out again on the ice. This was our daily routine for about a week. Then, one day at noon, after we had driven up on the gravel bank ten feet above the river, I found we had lost some of our firewood. There 138

wasn't enough to melt a kettle of snow and then cook our meal. So I said to the Indian: 'Take the ax and chop through the river ice. If we can get to the water, that will save half the wood we need.' The Indian chopped and chopped till he was down level with the ax handle. But still he was not through the ice. He called and Sandy went down to see if there was any show of the water. Soon he shouted back: 'No good.' I said: 'Then look for an air hole,' and went down to help the search. All of a sudden, we heard loud cries from a human voice on the river bank ten feet above us. 'AllezI AllezI AllezI' it shouted. Then 'MarchezI Marchez1' We did not suppose there was a human being within hund­ reds of miles of us. But again came the ringing 'AllezI AllezI Allezi'--the French that one always uses in ordering and driving the dogs harnessed before the sled. In haste and amazement, we rushed up the bank and into view of our outfit. Here was the wide level expanse of snow bright in the winter sun, and not a sign of a human being in sight ex­ cept ourselves. But there, lying in a groveling heap, were the ten big fierce husky dogs, growling and rumbling, their eyes glowing, their hair bristling. The tracks showed plainly that, taking advantage of our absence, the very first time they were left alone with the corpse, those hungry, half-tame wolves de­ cided to attack and devour the body. But the moment they touched it, that ringing voice of command was heard driving them back in terror. 'Who spoke?' I almost whispered. Sandy replied, also in a whisper: "Well, it was a white man's voice, for an Indian can't say 'Marchez'; he says 'Mush.'" I tell you we never took any chances after that--night or day some one of us always was next the body. Day after day and night after night we went on with the same routine, some days making forty miles, but on many days of blizzard and storm making little or nothing. Finally we arrived at the upper reaches of the Mackenzie, where timber was plentiful, and where islands with trees were right in the river; so we had no trouble finding good camp sites. One evening we came on an island covered with timber, right handy, and decided to camp there. Its shores were clay cut-banks about ten feet high. We left our two sleds on the ice, but Sandy and I climbed up. The Indian caught the dogs one by one, and we hauled them up onto the level top. Here we tumed them loose, for I knew they would not leave the fire, sind that ten-foot drop was as good as a fence all around. About nine o'clock, I was smoking my pipe before turning in, when I heard a strange, far-away call on the wooded shore. 'Ye-hoo-ooo-oool' I started up, for it was repeated. 139

'Ye-hoo-ooo-oooi' At first I thought it was a homed owl, or maybe a wolf call. But again it came with human intonation. 'Ye-hoo-ooo-oool' 'Say, Sandy, there's someone out there, a lost traveler.' So I went to the edge of the island, and shouted back. 'Hallo! Hallo I who are you?' There was no answer, even to a second call, and I went back to the fire. Very soon again there came: 'Ye-hoo-ooo-oool' I went to the edge of the timber, and shouted: 'Who are you? Why don't you come on? Can't you see the fire?' There was no answer to this, and I said to my pal: 'Say, Sandy, I don't feel comfortable about leaving our charge on the ice. The dogs can't get near it; but anyway, let's put it up a tree.' So we three went down in the darkness; and after much trouble, got our burden safe up a thick, bushy tree. We heard no more calls in the night. Next morning, as my helper was packing and making ready for a start, I prowled around in the snow and on the ice. There I leamed from the tracks that all the previous evening, and maybe for a couple of days before, we had been followed by a wolverine. Our charge would have been unprotected by the dogs and exposed to the wolverine, which certainly would have found and disfigured it, had we not acted on the weird warning that came in time. After that, our journey continued with little incident till near Christmas, when we reached Fort Resolution. There I tumed over my charge to the Archbishop, who laid it by the altar in the church, promising to attend to all proper ceremonies as soon as feasible—which meant as soon as the spring­ time made it possible to dig a grave. That night we three travelers slept in the ram pasture, which is the name of the bunk house in a Hudson Bay fort. The moon was full, shining on the snow, and through the window lighted up the place well. About ten o'clock I was awakened with a sudden feeling of alertness. I sat up as un- sleepy as could be, and there right opposite to me were Sandy and the Indian both sitting up. Then there came on me an overwhelming feeling of bliss, of happiness complete; and in the gloom, I thought I saw on Sandy's face the same expression of rapture. I do not know any word to describe the sensation but 'ecstasy.' It gradually faded away. We gazed at each other and at the door and at nowhere. I said: 'Sandy, did you see anything?' 'No,' he whispered. 'Did you?' I asked the Indian. He shook his head. •Did you feel anything, Sandy?' lllO

'I did,' he said. 'I was filled with joy.' 'What was it?' I asked. In a low but certain voice, he said: 'He came in gratitude to us for carrying out our promise. Thank God we didn't fail him I We have surely had our reward.'

Suspending altogether the question of whether the ghosts of the unburied dead do approach the living in the likeness of their own bodily shape, in a dream or vision, or as a voice in the night, some writers have included this motif in their stories solely to share with an audience a feeling of terror. In his study of the supernatural in tragedy, Charles Whitmore said that "the desire to arouse terror is the predominant reason for the introduction of the supernatural in Ik literature." Prominent among the manifestations of the supernatural,

Whitmore continued, are "mortals who have passed by death into another 15 world, but return from it, or in other words ghosts." Ghosts of the unburied dead, restless, and aggrieved at their helpless state, often victims of human malignancy or nature's whims, appear most appropriately in tales designed to call up terror. These tales, evocative in both theme and style, find in ordinary places, sights, and sounds direful suggestions that produce the burning flush and alternate chill char­ acteristic of terror, that emotion blended of shock and fear, and awe.

Ghosts of the unburied dead may appear in visible form, as

Patroclus did to Achilles, and effect the shock and fear of terror.

1^ Charles Whitmore, The Supernatural in Tragedy, p. k. 15 Whitmore, p. 10. li+1

One of the ancient ghosts who appeared in his own shape was that of the persistent old fellow who came to the rented house of the philoso­ pher Athenodorus in Athens. He belonged to the group of robust and earnest ghosts who, Lang wrote, had their purposes clearly before 16 them. They knew what they wanted, asked for it, and saw that they got it. This one wanted sepulchre for his body, and he impatiently clanged his chains to get attention. Pliny wrote his friend Licinius

Sura this story, calling it remarkable and terrifying: In Athens there was a large and spacious mansion with the bad reputation of being dangerous to its occupants. At dead of night the clanking of iron and, if you listened carefully, the rattle of chains could be heard, some way off at first, and then close at hand. Then there appeared the spectre of an old man, emaciated and filthy, with a long flowing beard and hair on end, wearing fetters on his legs and shaking the chains on his wrists. The wretched occupants would spend fearful nights awake in terror; lack of sleep led to illness and then death as their dread increased, for even during the day, when the apparition had vanished, the memory of it was in their mind's eye, so that their terror remained after the cause of it had gone. The house was therefore deserted, condemned to stand empty and wholly abandoned to the spectre; but it was adver­ tised as being to let or for sale in case someone was found who knew nothing of its evil reputation. The philosopher Athenodorus came to Athens and read the notice. His suspicions were aroused when he heard the low price, and the whole story came out on inquiry; but he was none the less, in fact all the more, eager to rent the house. When darkness fell he gave orders that a couch was to be made up for him in the front part of the house, and asked for his notebooks, pen and a lamp. He sent all his servants to the inner rooms, and concentrated his thoughts, eyes and hand on his writing, so that his mind would be occupied and not con­ jure up the phantom he had heard about nor other imaginary fears. At first there was nothing but the general silence of night; then came the clanking of iron and dragging of chains. He did not look up nor stop writing, but steeled his mind to shut out the sounds. Then the noise grew louder, came nearer, was heard in

16 Andrew Lang, Ghosts, p. 110. Ik2

the doorway, and then inside the room. He looked round, saw and recognized the ghost described to him. It stood and beck­ oned, as if summoning him. Athenodorus in his turn signed to it to wait a little, and again bent over his notes and pen, while it stood rattling its chains over his head as he wrote. He looked round again and saw it beckoning as before, so with­ out further delay he picked up his lamp and followed. It moved slowly, as if weighed down with chains, and when it tumed off into the courtyard of the house it suddenly vanished, leaving him alone. He then picked some plants and leaves and marked the spot. The following day he approached the magistrates, and advised them to give orders for that place to be dug up. There they found bones, twisted round with chains, which were left bare and corroded by the fetters when time and the action of the soil had rotted away the body. The bones were collected and given a public burial, and after the shades had been duly laid to rest, the house saw them no more.17

Another determined ghost who was indignant that his body had not been given proper burial rites and who caused a great deal of trouble was Gaius Caligula, who was assassinated and his body hastily buried in the Lamian Gardens without ceremony. Suetonius summarized the account:

He died at the age of twenty-nine after ruling for three years, ten months and eight days. His body was moved secretly to the Lamian Gardens, half-cremated on a hastily-built pyre, and then buried beneath a shallow covering of sods. Later, when his sis­ ters returned from exile they exhumed, cremated, and entombed it. But all the city knew that the Gardens had been haunted until then by his ghost, and that something horrible appeared every night at the scene of the murder until at last the building burned down.-'-'-^ The ancient ghost who came to Athenodorus in its own form was terrifying to Pliny, but the dead can evoke even greater terror when

17 The Letters of the Younger Pliny, trans, with an Introduction by Betty Radice (Baltimore, Maryland: ^Penguin Books, I969), PP. 202-05. 18 Suetonius, Gaius Caligula in The Twelve Caesars, trans, by Robert Graves (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1957), p. 178. 1U3

their power takes no bodily foim but is remote and comes from afar,

"the distance separating the living from the dead /being/ so great,"

Edgar Byrne leamed in Joseph Conrad's story "The Inn of the Two 19 Witches." In Conrad's tale, the manifestation of the unburied dead appeared not as a visible shape but as a sound, 'the most vivid

and compelling of delusions" (l^O), struggling to break through a

wall of silence. The sound was the voice of Tom Corbin not begging,

as many unburied do, for the burial of his body but waming Mr. Byrne to look out for his own life.

Conrad built his tone of terror with ironies so subtle that Mr.

Byrne was completely deceived, though the little old homoculus in the

faded yellow hat who set him off on his venture, told him that "a

cabellero of -parts like your worship might have guessed that there

was a cat in there" (129). To note these ironies is to sketch the

adventure which Edgar Byrne had the year he was twenty-two and offi­

cer on board a Spanish sloop-of-war patrolling off the Northern coast

of Spain.

This venture began when Byrne came ashore with Tom Corbin and

saw the old sailor off on an intelligence mission to "a certain Gon­

zales in the mountains." After Tom Corbin had set off alone, the

little man in the yellow hat wamed Byme that there might be robbers

along the mountain trails which his friend must take, that "where the

19 Joseph Conrad, "The Inn of the Two Witches," Four Stories of Joseph Conrad, ed. by S. F. Moscrop (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1926), p. 150. Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page number cited parenthetically in the text. Ikk honey is, there will be flies"; so Byme decided to follow the sailor and try to overtake and join him, the little man having assured him that "no two travelers had ever been known to disappear together" (13O).

After tramping all day and half the night over broken ground in darkness that wrapped his eyes like a bandage, Byme came suddenly upon the Inn. Inside in the big kitchen, there were a gypsy girl and two old crones. The girl sat on the open hearth, himming sketchytunes and occasionally touching a pair of castanets, and the two ancient witches stirred a pot set over an open fire in the fireplace.

Byme told the trio at the fire about his mission; and at the barely perceptible catch of their breath and the slightest hesitation

in midair of the soup ladle held by one of the old witch-women when he

described his sailor friend, he suddenly had the "sense of really being

on his quest, of having reached the turn of the path, almost within

hail of Tom" (I36). He was suspicious of the women and was surprised

when they readily admitted that they had, indeed, seen the big fierce

Ingles, "who went away in the morning, after eating a piece of bread

and drinking some wine. And if the cabellero wished to follow the

same path, nothing could be easier—in the morning" (137).

Although the gypsy girl watched him with a look which "to know what it was like you have only to observe a hungry cat watching a bird in a cage or a mouse inside a trap," Byme, warmed by the fire

and rested from his exertions of fighting the gale, was comforted

in the sure knowledge of Tom's safety, "that he was now sleeping in

the mountain camp having been met by Gonzales' men" (I38). 1^5

Then the witch-women began to talk, telling of better days when the inn was a stopping place for travelers in their own coaches. An archbishop slept there once, long ago. At the mention of the arch­ bishop, the gypsy girl chuckled impiously and turned a look on Byme.

Lulled into a sense of security, he smiled at her. No one had ex­ pected him; so there could be no plot against him. He half dozed.

Then the gypsy girl came to tell him he was to sleep in the arch­ bishop's room.

He got up, and because he did not mean to be taken unaware, he locked the door and, while the girl and the old witches looked at him in silence, he coolly put the key into his pocket. He wondered whether

Tom had locked the door when he slept here; and thinking of Tom, he had a strange feeling of his nearness:

The world was perfectly dumb. And in this stillness he heard the blood beating in his ears with a confused rushing noise, in which there seemed to be a voice uttering the words, 'Mr. Byme, look out, sir' (lifO).

When the girl preceded him upstairs carrying a lamp, he followed her. He wished her good night politely, and she stood a moment si­ lently gazing at him with her voluptuous mouth and her slanting eyes.

In that moment, in the dumb house, he "heard again the blood pulsating ponderously in his ears,'*while once more the illusion of Tom's voice speaking earnestly somewhere nearby was specially terrifying, because this time he could not make out the words (l^l). Then he closed the door.

He examined the room and found the bed, under an enormous baldaquin­ like canopy with heavy curtains at head and foot, "certainly worthy of an Ik6

archbishop." He tried the doors on the tall wardrobe. They were

locked. He looked behind it: it stood an inch away from the wall

and concealed no hidden entrance. He wished for Tom, that "trusty

seaman, who had always preached to him the necessity to take care of

himself." Tom used to say, "It's no trick to get yourself killed.

Any fool can do that" (li+2). Then, as if bidden by an insistent but

unseen presence in the room, Byme forced the lock on the wardrobe,

and the doors suddenly sprang open.

Tom was there. The trusty seaman had got himself killed.

There was not a mark on Tom to show how he died. Byrne's most

exacting examination found no wound, only the faintest bruise on his

forehead and the slightest abrasion on the knuckles of both his hands.

But he was dead, and his body had been stripped of weapons, money bag,

and the gold buttons from his jacket.

It was the absence of marks on Tom's body that tumed the flame

of terror loose in Byrne's blood. It was too horrible to look at the

body, killed by something that left no wound, and to think that by

morning he too would be dead by the same hand; so he dragged Tom's

body to the bed and, covering it with a sheet, closed the heavy cur­

tains around it, shutting it siltogether from his sight. Then he fell

into an armchair and sat, by turns sweating and icy cold, tortured by

his thoughts of his old friend, the dauntless, the invincible Tom

Corbin.

Then his eyes became still at a movement from the direction of the bed. The curtains stirred and shook, the enormous baldaquin came down, noiselessly and smoothly, slowly at first, and then with a 11+7

sudden rush settled fiiinly down, fitting e^ctly over the bedstead.

This was the force that had killed Tom. Byrne ran to the bed and

"attempted to lift up, to push off the horrible lid smothering the

body. It resisted his efforts, heavy as lead, immovable like a

tombstone" (15O-5I).

This then was the explanation for all the vague uncertainties

Byme had not understood: the old man's warning about honey and

flies, the witches too old and feeble to harm an athletic man like

Tom, the gypsy girl waiting with eyes like a hungry cat, the inn with

its single entrance locked from inside and invulnerable, the wardrobe

locked but set away from the wall so as not to conceal a hidden en­

trance. These were the ironies that escaped Byme because they were

so indefinite, shadowy, veiled, and uncertain.

This vagueness which Conrad employed is the stylistic device

which Whitmore identified as the most effective of the techniques of 20 the tale of terror. Even before the inner story began, the author

set the tone by the indirection of his voice. He presented a narrator,

an unknown person, who had stumbled upon a manuscript in an old box in

a second-hand bookstore and had discovered in the dusty text, with

pages missing here and there, a tale recorded by an old man of sixty,

that age at which most people begin to take "a romantic view of them­

selves," recalling across the years, an adventure that occurred to him when he was twenty-two, that age at which one is "easily reckless and easily frightened--the faculty of reflection being weak and the power

20 Whitmore, The Supernatural in Tragedy, p. 5, 11*8 of the imagination strong" (120). All is so vague and uncertain in this tale that may be only a figment of a twenty-two-year-old sailor's overwrought imagination or of a sixty-year-old man's romanticized memories, a tale rescued from annihilation only by chance.

In the inner story Byrne's terror grew through a series of inci­ dents, all of which were bathed in a vague, indefinite aura of uncer­ tainty. His fears were more terrible because they were shadowy and he could not identify them. They began when he talked with the little man in the yellow hat, a conversation that exasperated him because of its indirection, its musty proverb—"where the honey is there will be flies"—a hint of possible, but not certain, danger, and the sarcastic farewell, Vaya usted con Dios (13O), that suggested perhaps Dios might be needed. Then his tramp across country toward the mountains was

"spurred more by incertitude than by any definite fear or definite hope," his strength "overtaxed by the strain of endeavor half expected to be vain" (132-33). When he came to the Inn, the light first seen swam before his eyes, "illusory as it often happens in dense dark­ ness" (131+). Once inside, he saw the old women, and he wondered whether they were really witches brewing a potion or grotesque ob­ jects displaying "the misery of age, the awful persistency of life" (I36).

He saw, but did not understand, the girl's oblique eyes with their "ex­ pression of expectant sensual ferocity of a baffled cat" and her sus­ tained attention to his face a look "as if she wanted to impress his features forever on her mind" (l^+O).

But the manifestation from the unburied dead was even more faint, more elusive, with more of the quality of Charles Whitmore's dream 1^9 21 spirit than of the actual presence of the dead; and it was with the coming of that indefinite presence that terror began in Byrne.

At first, this indefinable presence was a "queer impression" of Tom's nearness, a "confused rushing noise," in which there "seemed" to be a voice accompanied by a "slight chill" as of a "stealthy" draught that penetrated through his clothes and passed over his body. Its

second appearance was more vague and, consequently, more terrifying.

There was still the heavy beating of blood in his ears; but that time

Tom's voice "somewhere" nearby spoke earnestly, but helplessly, for his words were unintelligible (l^+l). After the second appearance,

Byrne could near no voice at all, only profound silence troubled by

the pulsating throbs of the blood in his ears.

Nor did finding Tom's dead body in the wardrobe clear away the

mists from before Byme's eyes. Indeed, from that moment they grew

heavier, for the absence on Tom's body of any mark to show how he

died made the murderer even more elusive. Byrne could see no way to

fight a force that scorned cutlasses and guns and passed through

locked doors to kill by a breath (ikl). The sight of a smashed head

or a cut throat, of a gaping gunshot wound would have been an in­

expressible relief (1^7), might have suggested some means by which

he could protect himself. The small bruise on Tom's forehead and the

slight abrasion on his knuckles did nothing to explain to Byme how

it could be that his once trusty, sagacious, and courageous friend

21 Whitmore, p. 5- 150 was now "drawn up shadowy and stiff in prudent silence" or to teach him how to prepare to meet a murderer who did not disturb even the dust on his victim's room (1^+6).

Even after Byrne had discovered the murder device and all was made clear to him, he was not altogether sure that it was Tom's spirit that appeared to him in the ponderous flowing of his blood.

He thought of the baldaquin bed that "this was the devilish device of murder poor Tom's soul had 'perhaps' tried from beyond the border to warn him of" (I50). He wondered whether, in the moment that it took its flight, that fearless spirit of the finest seaman that ever lived, had not, "perhaps," turned toward him, his dearest friend, and toward his ship out there rolling on the gray seas off an iron-bound coast.

While Conrad chose to tell a story that evoked the thrill of terror, other writers who used the motif of the unburied dead have chosen to elicit from their readers a response of horror. Close akin to terror, horror encompasses aversion or repugnance as well as the shock and fear of which terror is constituted. The corpse of any dead, and particularly that of the unfriendly unburied dead, may be an object of fear and revulsion. The guard in Antigone described the dank corpse of Polyneices, stripped back to its slimy nakedness, and he told Creon that the soldiers, while on duty, all sat "to windward, 22 heedful that the smell of him should not strike us." In The

22 Antigone, p. U33. 151

Suppliants, Adrastus was surprised that Theseus himself washed the

bloody wounds of the young soldiers, "an awful burden this, involving ^23 some disgrace," he described this task to the Messenger from Thebes.

A ghoulish ghost that inspires horror appeared in Boccaccio's 2k Decameron, in Filomena's story of the love of Isabetta and Lorenzo,

which Keats borrowed for the subject of his "Isabella." The story

also invites pity for the lovelorn girl, helpless as she is in the

power of forces she cannot control.

In Boccaccio•s tale Isabetta was the daughter of a rich merchant,

who took for her lover young Lorenzo, a clerk employed by her brothers

in the family business. When Isabetta's brothers discovered their

sister's love affair, in order that no shame might fall upon them, or

their sister, they secretly murdered Lorenzo and buried his body in a

remote and solitary place. They did not, however, give him the proper

rites of burial; so, as one murdered and his body hidden away, Lorenzo

was one of the helpless, unburied dead.

When Lorenzo disappeared, Isabetta did not know what had happened,

and she grieved for her lover, often at night calling "piteously upon him to come to her." One night Lorenzo did come to her, in the manner

of many of the unburied, in a dream, "his face all pale and disordered and his clothes ragged and tom," to tell Isabetta that he had been

23 The Suppliants, p. 939. 2k Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans, by Richard Aldington (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1930), pp. 276-79. 152

murdered and could not return to her. He told her where his body was

buried and disappeared.

When Isabetta awoke, she believed the dream and went to the place

where Lorenzo told her and dug where the dirt seemed softest. There

she found the body of her lover, and he was not yet cormpted or

rotten. Although Isabetta wanted to remove Lorenzo's body and give

him proper burial, she did not have sufficient strength; so she cut

his head from his shoulders, reburied the rest of his body and re­

turned home, carrying his head with her, wrapped in a cloth.

Once she was home, Isabetta took a handsome pot, "the kind used

to grow marjarom or basil," and put Lorenzo's head in it and covered

it with earth, in which she planted the "finest Salemo basil." She

watered the pot with her tears, and from ttiat day forward, spent all

her time near it, weeping, until the neighbors noticed that she was

Istnguishing away and spoke about her to her brothers, who took the

flowers from her. Isabetta then fell ill and slowly died, begging

until the last for her pot of basil.

This tale is evocative of a peculiar kind of horror, the horror

experienced at the sight of unnatural or diseased growth attacking

normal tissue. The juxtaposition of the gruesome death's head with

the handsome container designed for fine omamentsil herbs elicits

revulsion. The sight of thick, scented herbs growing out of soil whose richness issues from decaying human flesh calls forth the same repugnance felt at the thought of fungus growing in human flesh.

One of the intents of Matthew Lewis, author of The Monk, was to inspire terror and horror in his audience. Although E. A. Baker, who 153 edited an edition of Lewis' romance in I906, believed that this was

Lewis' only purpose and that his greatest joy in life was "enthralling 25 his readers by making their flesh creep," a more recent editor of the novel, Howard Anderson, suggests that Lewis may also have in­ tended, by selection of morbid subject matter, flamboyance of style and a satiric mode, to lead the reader to the discovery of "the in­ finite danger within or beneath what has seemed so familiar and 26 safe." Anderson suggests that this is one of the purposes of gothic fiction at its best and recalls that Jane Austen in North- anger Abbey directed her criticism not so much at gothic as genre but at "readers whose preoccupations with distant fantasies prevent them from seeing dangers near at hand" (xix). He sees The Monk leading the reader to discover those danger sites closest to hand,

"the dark and frightening regions within ourselves and beneath the familiar relationships to which we look for support" (xix).

To achieve what Anderson sees as the purpose of gothic fiction,

Lewis directed his satiric voice toward the snobbery with which the characters of his story viewed the life styles of other people and the smugness with which they saw their own. Ambrosio, the Monk, a priest of the church, was self-satisfied about his accomplishments

25 mtthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, ed. by E. A. Baker (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1906), p. viii.

26 Matthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, ed. with an Introduction by Howard Anderson (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. ix. Subsequent quotations will be indicated by page number cited paren­ thetically in the text. I5k as a minister to Madrid's teeming crowds who came to hear him. In­ side his cell, after one of his public appearances, he exulted at his success:

'Religion cannot boast Ambrosio's equal! How powerful an effect did my discourse produce upon its Auditors! How they crowded round me! How they loaded me with benedictions, and pronounced me the sole uncorrupted Pillar of the Church! What then now is left for me to do?' (kO).

But Lewis' authorial comment spoke the truth about the actual re­ sponse of the audience:

Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled either from motives of piety or thirst of information. But very few were influenced by those reasons; and in a city where supersti­ tion reigns with such despotic sway as in Madrid, to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt. The Audience now assembled in the Capuchin Church was collected by various causes, but all of them were foreign to the ostensible motive. The Women came to show themselves, the Men to see the Women: Some were attracted by curiosity to hear an Orator so cele­ brated; Some came because they had no better means of employ­ ing their time till the play began; Some, from being assured that it would be inrpossible to find places in the Church; and one half of Madrid was brought thither by expecting to meet the other half. The only persons truly anxious to hear the Preacher were a few antiquated devotees, and half a dozen rival Orators, determined to find fault with and ridicule the discourse. As to the remainder of the Audience, the Sermon might have been omitted altogether, certainly without their being disappointed, and very probably without their perceiving the omission (7).

Though reared in a monastery away from the society of women, the

Monk was complacent in his presumption that no woman could tempt him, that his religion would always sustain him in time of trial. Before he was tempted, he stood in his cell and looked at a picture of the

Virgin on his wall, a picture that for two years had been the object of his increasing adoration. He gazed on it and reflected:

•What Beauty in that countenance! ... Oh! if such a Creature existed, and existed but for me! . . . Away, impure ideas! Let 155

me remember, that Woman is for ever lost to me. Never was mor­ tal formed so perfect as this picture. But even did such exist, the trial might be too mighty for a common virtue, but Ambrosio's is proof against temptation. . . . Have I not freed myself from the frailty of Mankind? Fear not, Ambrosiol Take confidence in the strength of your virtue. Enter boldly into a world, to whose failings you are superior; reflect that you are now exempted from Humanity's defects, and defy all the arts of the Spirits of Dark­ ness. They shall know you for what you are' (i+O-Ul).

The Spirits of Darkness did indeed know the Monk for what he was; but the Monk did not know the Spirits of Darkness; for the subject who sat for the painting of the Madonna whose face had so charmed him was

Matilda, a sorceress sent by the devil to direct the destruction of

Ambrosio's career in the church and his very soul. Before the week ended, Matilda came to his cell and Ambrosio forgot his vows, his sanctity, his fame. Thinking only of pleasure and opportunity, with a melodramatic murmur, "Thine, ever thine," he sank upon her breast (9I)

The characters of the subsidary plot, the Marquis de las Cistemas and the woman he loved, Agnes Medina, were equally smug and complacent.

Cistemas, too, lived in a world where he felt superior to other people.

He little supposed that his destiny, as a young man of wealth and power, had been determined by the rotting bones of an ancestress, whose de­ baucheries as a prostitute and an avowed atheist had once scandalized all of Bavaria (173). A well-educated man of the world, he thought he had chosen his own time and schedule for travel on the continent, when in reality his itinerary had been set to correspond with the de­ mands of the Bleeding Nun, the ghost of his kinswoman. A hundred years before she committed a crime for which she was "doomed to suffer during the space of a Century" (I76), and that period was past. Into his scheme, Cistemas had to make time to perfonn the duty for which he 156 alone was chosen, to consign to the grave in the family vault in Anda­ lusia the ashes of Beatrice, a shade come out of the past to harass him so long as her bones remained unburied.

Cistemas first leamed about the Bleeding Nun from Agnes Medina one day when he found her in the garden at Lindenberg Castle where they were guests with a drawing which ±e had made of the servants as she imagined they must have looked at the visitation of a ghost.

When he questioned her about the drawing, she made her reply so witty and satiric, so filled with humorous exaggeration and sarcasm that it is vividly ironic in the light of subsequent episodes in their story:

"It is not surprising that in all the Chronicles of past times this remarkable personage is never once mentioned. Fain would I recount to you her life; but unluckily till after her death she was never known to have existed. Then first did she think it necessary to make some noise in the world; and with that inten­ tion she made bold to seize upon the castle of Lindenberg. Hav­ ing a good taste, she took up her abode in the best room of the house; and, once established there, she began to amuse herself by knocking about the tables and chairs in the middle of the night. Perhaps she was a bad sleeper, but this I have never been able to ascertain. According to the tradition, this en­ tertainment commenced about a century ago. It was accompanied with shrieking, howling, groaning, swearing, and many other agreeable noises of the same kind. But, though one particular room was more especially honoured with her visits, she did not entirely confine herself to it. She occasionally ventured into the old galleries, paced up and down the spacious halls, or some­ times, stopping at the doors of the chambers, she wept and wailed there, to the universal terror of the inhabitants. In these noc­ turnal excursions she was seen by different people, who all de­ scribe her appearance as you behold it here traced by the hand of her unworthy historian." "Did she never speak to those who met Her?" Raymond asked J "Not she. The specimens indeed which she gave nightly of her t£0.ents for conversation were by no means inviting. Sometimes the castle rung with oaths and execrations; a moment after she re­ peated her paternoster; now she howled out the most horrible blas- ' phemies and then chanted De profundis, as orderly as if still in the choir: in short, she seemed a mighty capricious being; but, whether she prayed or cursed, whether she was impious or devout, she 8J.ways contrived to terrify auditors out of their senses. 157

The castle became scarcely habitable, and its lord was so fright­ ened by these midnight revels that one fine morning he was found dead in his bed. This success seemed to please the nun mightily, for now she made more noise than ever. But the next Baron proved too cunning for her. He made his appearance with a celebrated exorcizer in his hand, who feared not to shut himself up for a night in the haunted chamber. There it seems that he had a hard battle with the ghost before she would promise to be quiet. She was obstinate, but he was more so; and at length she consented to let the inhabitants of the castle take a good night's rest. For some time after no news was heard of her; but at the end of five years the exorcizer died, and then the nun ventured to peep abroad again. However, she was now grown much more tractable and well-behaved. She walked about in silence, and never made her appearance above once in five years. This custom, if you will believe the Baron, she still continues. He is fully per­ suaded that on the fifth of May of every fifth year, as soon as the clock strikes one, the door of the haunted chamber opens. (Observe that this room has been shut up for near a century.) Then out walks the ghostly nun with her lamp and dagger; she descends the staircase of the eastern tower, and crosses the great hall. On that night the porter always leaves the gates of the castle open, out of respect to the apparition; not that this is thought by any means necessary, since she could easily whip through the key-hole if she chose it; but merely out of politeness, and to prevent her from making her^ exit in a way so derogatory to the dignity of her ghostship." "And whither does she go on quitting the castle?" "To heaven, I hope; but, if she does, the place certainly is not to her taste, for she always retums after an hour's absence. The lady then retires to her chamber, and is quiet for another five years." "And you believe this, Agnes?" "How can you ask such a question? No, no, ... I have too much reason to lament superstition's influence to be its victim myself" (l39-^l)- Nor did Cistemas believe in the existence of the Bleeding Nun, and he joined Agnes in making sport of the Baron, throughout whose domains the history of the Bleeding Nun was firmly credited, and of the Baroness, who, "would sooner doubt the veracity of the Bible, than of the Bleeding Nun" (139), and of the servants, who were terrified at the thought of her. The two fancied, as they made plans to elope, that they could take advantage of the credulousness 158 of these simple folk. They set the date for their elopement to corre­ spond with the expected visitation of the Visionary Nun, and they chose as a disguise for Agnes a bloody habit borrowed from a friend in the nearby convent. Up to the hour of his enlightenment, Raymond con­ tinued to think about the story of the Bleeding Nun and to reflect on "the influence of superstition and the weakness of human reason" (153)

It was not until later that Raymond found leisure to reflect on his scorn of human reason. Believing the habited figure who slipped out the gates of Lindenberg to be Agnes, Raymond took her to him in the carriage and committed himself to her in ritual words of love, only to learn that he had committed himself to the Bleeding Nun, who afterward came each night to taunt him with her parody of his words of commitment. It was only by recourse to an exorcist, who brought goblets of blood and a crucifix and various "reliques, sculls, and thigh-bones etc." (171), objects that once would have set Raymond and Agnes laughing, that Raymond was released from his bonds to the

Bleeding Nirn.

By choosing as the objects of his satire individuals who were superstitious, Lewis also leads his readers to look at the pitfalls within institutions that thrive best in the presence of superstition, particularly institutionalized religion, symbolized in the novel by the corruption of the tombs lying beneath the imposing beauty of the convent and the adjoining monastery and cemetery. The Convent of

St. Clare was pervaded by sham. Even the statue of the saint was false, appearing to be of solid stone, but "proved on further exami­ nation to be formed of no more than coloured Wood" (366), and concealing 159 beneath its pedestal an underground cave, a chill, loathsome hole,

the grave into which Agnes Medina was placed alive when she sinned

against an ancient code of the church. The Mother Superior marched

at the head of the nuns when they appeared in public, "with a devout

and sanctified air," her "countenance calm and tranquil" (3^8); yet

when approached by the penitent Agnes in prayer for the sake of her

unborn child, answered in hatred, not love:

'Dare you plead for the produce of your shame? Shall a Creature be permitted to live, conceived in guilt so monstrous? . . . Hear me, thou guilty! Expect no mercy from me either for your­ self or Brat. . . . Bring your Offspring into the world yourself. Feed it yourself. Nurse it yourself. Bury it yourself: God grant that the latter may happen soon, lest you receive comfort from the fruit of your iniquity^(^10).

Lewis' most effective manner of directing satire toward organized

religion was his choice to m£ike no distinction between superstition

growing out of legend and that issuing from religious codes. He saw

both as equEilly paralyzing. Agnes told Raymond that her parents com­

mitted her to the convent even before she was bom, making her a

"victim of superstition" (l^^l). Yet, when trouble came to her, she

voluntarily re-entered a life which she had already found distasteful

and hypocritical and refused to seek a dispensation to free herself.

Ambrosio was reared in a monastery, where his education was drenched

in superstition; but, even after he came to hate the restrictions

placed on his freedom by the church, he never once thought of sepa­

rating himself from it. Raymond was powerless on his own to release

himself from the demands of the Bleeding Nun. Lewis smiled a bit at

the absurdity of the tale of the Bleeding Nun; but by bundling aU

superstitions into one bundle, he smiled too at those who, while l6o

laughing at the Bleeding Nun, accept in the name of religion other

superstitions that frustrate and warp the human soul.

Though the simplicity of structure and characterization in the

shorter anecdotes, incidents, and tales designed primarily to evoke

an emotional response discourage analysis in these elements of narra­

tion, both character delineation and narrative structure in Lewis'

extended romance are complex. All^the significant characters in

The Monk--Ambrosio, Raymond, Agnes, and Antonia—were victims of

the antiquated educational systems in which they were reared; and,

with the exception of Raymond, all had suffered the psychic shock

of separation from their families at a very early age. When Ambrosio

was scarcely two years old, his mother had abandoned him with members

of her family when she fled the country to escape her enraged father-

in-law. Antonia had suffered the loss of her father in death and had

been reared in the isolation of a lonely castle in l^ircia, her only

company her mother, a woman who, her outspoken sister said, had barely

the sense "necessary to carry her Soup to her mouth" (12). Agnes was

committed as a child to the seclusion of a convent because of a vow

which her mother made to God. Although he did not suffer isolation

from his own family, as a member of the nobility, Raymond had suffered

the separation of his class from the family of man. None of the four

had experienced the enlargement of his sympathies by contact with the

sufferings and faults of other human beings.

All of these four characters, again excepting Raymond de las

Cistemas, had also been taught to ignore or repress their sexuality.

Antonia, whose mother copied out the Bible for her daughter, omitting I6l or altering the improper passages (26o), was so innocent of men that, though Ambrosio kissed her mouth and "violated with his hand the trea­ sures of her bosom," she was only mildly startled and, when her mother dismissed him, "could not help lamenting, that She was never to see him more" {26k). The mother wanted to warn Antonia of the risk she ran, but "was obliged to treat the subject with caution, lest in re­ moving the bandgage of ignorance, the veil of innocence should be rent away" (261+).

Both Agnes and the Monk were trained in the convent and the mon­ astery, he with such regard for chastity that he was reported "to know not in what consists the difference of Man and Woman" (17). The training which he received in the monastery also tended to root out the good natural qualities which the boy possessed and to cherish in him "every vice which had fallen to his share" (237). The monks en- coursiged him to give over his natural benevolence and substitute in its place a selfish pride in his own particular establishment. He was taught that error was intolerable and destined to be punished with terrible torments. Compassion, therefore, was regarded as a crime of the blackest dye. As would be expected, obvious contradic­ tions in his behavior grew out of the internal conflict between his natural good qualities and the qualities acquired through education:

He pronounced the most severe sentences upon Offenders, which the moment after Compassion induced him to mitigate; He under­ took the most daring enterprizes, which the fear of their Con­ sequences soon obliged him to abandon. His in-born genius darted a brilliant light upon subjects most obscure; and almost instantaneously his Superstition replunged them in dark­ ness more profound that that from which they had been rescued (237-38) 162

The ambivalence which the Monk felt toward the faults of others was magnified when he was tempted by a woman to violate his vow of

chastity. When he learned that the novice Rosario was a woman and he could yet have saved himself from her seduction, he rationalized his wish to err, neither fleeing temptation, as Agnes once accused him of doing, nor vanquishing it {k9). Returning to his cell after

having leamed the true identity of Rosario, he found it impossible

to arrange his ideas:

The scene in which he had just been engaged, had excited such a variety of sentiments in his bosom, that He was incapable of deciding which was predominant. He was irresolute, what con­ duct he ought to hold with the disturber of his repose. He was conscious that prudence, religion and propriety necessitated his obliging her to quit the Abbey: But on the other hand such powerful reasons authorized her stay, that He was but too much inclined to consent to her remaining {66).

When the arguments for Matilda's remaining in disguise in the monastery won and Ambrosio violated his vow of chastity, he was over­

taken by another fault, the sin of hypocrisy. He shuddered to think what would happen to the reputation which he had been thirty years

establishing if some word of his indiscretion should reach the people;

for "since He had lost the reality of virtue, it appeared as if its

semblance was become more valuable" (325). Though momentarily tempted to obtain a mitigation of Agnes' sentence for a similar offence against the church's law, he agreed with Matilda when she advised him: "Be­ ware of what you do. . . . Rather redouble your outward austerity, and thunder out menaces against the errors of others, the better to conceal your own" (231).

The desire to conceal errors which he could not vanquish even­ tually led Ambrosio to the worst fault of all—making a game of death 163

in order to satisfy his sexual desires. Unable to seduce the shel­

tered Antonia without fear of detection and the consequent spoiling

of his reputation, he put into her medication an opiate that produced

the semblance of death, had her body buried in the vaults of the

church, and then violated her when she awoke there among the skele­

tons and rotting corpses. Even Creon, though he "ruthlessly lodged

a living soul in the grave," had no'such evil intent as that of

Ambrosio, whom all Madrid called "The Man of Holiness." Once re­

leased, his sexual nature so long repressed became malignant and

led him to rape, murder, and, though unknowingly, incest.

Like Ambrosio, Cistemas had been taught pride in his particular

establishment, in his case family and social class. When he made his

tour of the continent, he went as his father instructed, "concealing

JhlsJ rank, and presenting himself as no more than a private Gentle­

man" (95). Friends told him that he would "hereafter feel the bene­

fits of this temporary degradation," and a nobleman for whose "abili­

ties and knowledge of the world" Raymond "entertained the most profound

veneration" told him as he prepared for his journey:

'According to my ideas, of these advantages which a Youth des­ tined to the possession of power and wealth may reap frora travel. He should not consider as the least essential, the opportunity of mixing with the classes below him . . .' (96).

Raymond's exaggerated notions of his status in the world were re­ duced by his confrontation in Germany with the Bleeding Nun, a ghost of a debauched ancestress, who taught him that a man may inherit from the past not only wealth and rank but also the flaws and eccentrici­ ties of his ancestors. He also found that there are some problems a l6k man must face alone: "None but this Youth has the right of consigning them to the grave" (172), the Bleeding Nun said of her mouldering bones. The Exorcist reminded Cistemas that, though the crimes which his ancestress committed in life might be abhorrent, the quality of their kinship demanded respect from him (173).

Though unlike the Monk in the vicious abnormalities of his sex­ ual desires, Raymond was deceived by the strength of his own sexual 27 demands and so betrayed the trust Agnes had in him. The two made love in the Convent Garden under which was hidden the dungeon where the Prioress hid Agnes away when she discovered that the young girl had violated her vows. Lying there a prisoner among corpses of the dead, just as Raymond had been humbled in Germany by the discovery of his kinship to an avowed atheist and murderess, Agnes, in the lowli­ ness of her estate, contemplated her own lot and was made aware how delicate is the balance in which man's hopes are weighed and how easily it is upset:

'With a despondent eye did I examine this scene of suffering: When I reflected, that I was doomed to pass in it the remainder of my days, my heart was rent with bitter anguish. I had once been taught to look forward to a lot so different! At one time my prospects had appeared so bright, so flattering! Now all was lost to me. Friends, comfort, society, happiness, in one moment I was deprived of all! Dead to the world. Dead to plea­ sure, I lived to nothing but the sense of misery. How fair did that world seem to me, from which I was for ever excluded! How many loved objects did it contain, whom I never should behold again! As I threw a look of terror round my prison, as I shrunk from the cutting wind, which howled through my subterran­ eous dwelling, the change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. That the Duke de Medina's Niece, that the

27 Anderson, "Introduction," The Monk, p. xiii. 165

destined Bride of the Marquis de las Cistemas, One bred up in affluence, related to the noblest families in Spain, and rich in a multitude of affectionate Friends, that She should in one moment become a Captive, separated from the world for ever, weighed down with chains, and reduced to support life with the coarsest aliments, appeared a change so sudden and incredible, that I believed myself the sport of some fright­ ful vision' (1+11).

The characters in Lewis' romance are unusually affected by forces outside themselves, whether by hurts which they suffered as children, by superstitions inherited from the past, or by an education that em­ phasized abnormal repression of natural desires. While these forces were debilitating to Agnes and Antonia and while they completely de­ stroyed the Monk, Raymond Cistemas grew as a result of his contact with the past, with the ghost of the Bleeding Nun. Though she tem­ porarily thwarted his plans to marry Agnes, she demanded unusual initiative from him and rewarded him eventually by enabling him not only to achieve a happy marriage but also to rescue others from the cruel conditions then existent in Capuchin Monastery in Madrid. Once he leamed the "quality of his kinship" with her, Raymond gave up his scorn of her story and, with due respect for the dead, complied with all her wishes about the disposal of her bones.

Howard Anderson's thesis that the prime accomplishment of gothic fiction is to lead the reader to discover danger beneath what had seemed familiar and safe is borne out in the text of The Monk. Am­ brosio's first sennon to the people was so eloquent that Antonia, hearing him for the first time admired him breathlessly: "Oh! . . .

Till this moment I had no idea of the powers of eloquence" (20); yet his eloquence was a device, a trick to deceive. Later, when Antonia, 166 with a few simple words "overthrew the whole bulk of his sophistical arguments," Ambrosio "took refuge in his eloquence; . . . overpowered her with a torrent of Philosophical paradoxes, to which, not under­ standing them, it was impossible to reply" (257). When delayed in the woods near Strasbourg on his tour of Europe, Raymond was deceived by appearances in Baptiste, the leader of the banditti band, and his wife. He said of them: "l conceived at first sight equal disgust for her, and prepossession in favour of her Husband, whose appear­ ance was calculated to inspire esteem and confidence" (100). But it was the disgusting wife who saved Raymond's life and then told him of her grief at finding herself in her marriage to Baptiste, "united to a Man, who received the unsuspecting Guest with an air of openness and hospitsility, at the very moment he meditated his destruction" {l2k).

Most ironic of all deceptive appearances was that of life in the

Monastery and the Monk, as Lorenzo described it to Antonia the day they first met at the church in Madrid:

^Ambrosio's character is above reproach; and a Man who has passed the whole of his life within the walls of a Convent, cannot have found the opportunity to be guilty, even were He possessed of the inclination' (21).

Anderson's thesis is supported by these and other examples of danger lying beneath what seemed familiar and safe, particularly by the primary theme of the dangers underlying institutionalized religion.

However, the text also supports an inverse thesis, that underneath what appears to be frightening or evil there may lie a concealed bene­ fit. An analysis of the narrative action of the romance, considering the relationship of the motif of the unburied dead to the total story, supports this antithetical thesis. 167

The complex narrative action of The Monk included the primary story of the dissolution of the moral nature of Ambrosio and two sub­ sidiary narratives: the love story of Antonia and Lorenzo and that of Raymond and Agnes. If a beginning can be assigned to stories rooted so deeply in the past, the action of all these stories began ostensibly when Ambrosio preached to the people of Madrid and num­ bered in his audience the beautiful Antonia and the young nobleman

Lorenzo de Medina. Exulting in the flattery of Madrid's masses and in his own sanctity after this sermon, he permitted temptation to come into his cell in the person of the lovely sorceress Matilda and became a victim of her seduction. By giving in to Matilda, the Monk established a pattern of action for himself that led to rape emd mur­ der, both committed while he remained as Superior in the monastery and was believed to be Madrid's most holy man.

The machinery which ferreted out the crimes of the Monk while at the same time uncovering the corruption of the convent was set working in the subsidiary story of Raymond and Agnes when the ghost of the Bleeding Nun intermpted the elopement of the two lovers and sent Agnes, believing herself deserted by her lover, into the convent at Madrid. This apparently meddlesome appearance of the ghost of an ancestress seemed a tragedy to Agnes and Raymond, and, indeed, it did result in much personal suffering for both of them; but it was a necessary sacrifice of these two lovers if the corruption in Capuchin church were to be uncovered and if Ambrosio's incestous attack on

Antonia were to be apprehended. 168

Though this first rude appearance of the Bleeding Nun to the

lovers sent Agnes away to Madrid, it so enfeebled Raymond that he

was unable to move and sat day after day in his room bewildered

by Agnes' disappearance. It was necessary for the Visionary Nun

to appear again to him to get him out of Geimany and into Spain.

Her second appearance, during which she gave Raymond instmctions

to remove her skeleton from Lindenberg Hole and transport it to

Spain, jarred him out of his lethargy and sent him on a mission

that led him indirectly to Madrid, to the convent of Capuchin

church and to Agnes.

The ensuing events of the story of Agnes and Raymond--their

reunion in the Convent Garden, Agnes' imprisonment in the dungeon

under the church, the arrest of the Mother Superior and the riot of

the people into the tombs under the church--were all programmed to

reach their climax simultaneously with the culmination of Ambrosio's

ruinous behavior, the violation and murder of Antonia in the tombs

where Agnes was imprisoned. So the ghost of Beatrice, seemingly so

intent on the burial of her own bones, was instrumental in the simul­

taneous untangling of the three narrative threads of The Monk: Antonia

was killed, leaving Lorenzo free; the obstructions to the happy con­

summation of the marriage of Agnes and Raymond were removed; and the prelude to Ambrosio's final destruction was acted out.

The motif of the unburied dead, in stories written to evoke an emotional response, has served largely as a means of establishing and heightening tone. In the long romance The Monk, the motif did appear in the delineation of the character of Raymond de las Cistemas 169 and established his kinship to characters in the main plot. It served also as a plot device for initiating action and resolving conflict, primarily by moving characters in the subsidiary narrative of Agnes and Raymond to the site of the action of the main plot where the simultaneous untangling of the threads of the three narratives occurred. CHAPTER V

CONCLUSIONS

The study of selected literary works, beginning with Homer's epics and including Virgil's Roman epic, three Greek tragedies, three

English renaissance tragedies, a gothic romance, and tales and stories both ancient and modern, reveals that the motif of the unburied dead has been a medium through which authors have been able to effectively express their viewpoints and attitudes.

From Homer to the Hudson's Bay factor who told the story of the

Mackenzie River ghost, these authors, through the tone which they adopted toward the characters about which they wrote, have revealed their keen awareness that all men are subject to death. The griev­ ing Achilles clasped the hand of Ilium's old king, and the two wept together in sorrow at the losses which both Greeks and Trojans had suffered in the terrible war. In the Sophoclean tragedy of mighty

Ajax, Odysseus did not grieve over national losses but rather en­ visioned the loneliness of one man's death, the terrible separation; and he gazed on the body of Ajax as it lay on the yellow sands of the beach and mourned: "Some day I too will come to this." Antigone told Creon that death is inevitable: whether or not tyrants decree it, man must die. By selecting the unburied dead as a theme, these authors were also able to demonstrate their concern that when man does die his

170 171

body be given the proper rites of burial. The ancient writers per­

sonified this concem in the guise of immortals who gave tendrance

to the unburied dead. Later writers praised mortals who defended

the helpless dead from harm or neglect, as Seton recorded a special

benediction that came to the Hudson's Bay crew that braved a jour­

ney through the wooded Northwest in mid-winter in order to keep

their vow to bury the body of the Mackenzie River missionary. They

recognized the mutual benefit that accrues to both the dead and the

survivors when men obey the ancient laws to bury the dead, if none

other, the avoidance of such terrible conditions as those described by the guard and the blind prophet of Thebes when Polyneices' body

was left lying prey to birds and dogs.

Above and beyond their concern for the care of the physical bodies of the dead was that which the authors expressed for the welfare of the spirits of the dead in the afterlife. They honored the soldier's demand for a tomb and a monument so that his fame might live forever. The sleepy sailor who fell overboard from

Aeneas' ship and his old nurse were each honored with a monument that bears his name to this day. They also respected the wishes of those who believed that burial was a necessary requisite for entry into the world of the dead, a means to escape their sad wandering beside the river that separates the living from the dead, and, in

Virgil's theology, the means to enter Hades and live there for the thousand years of preparation necessary before re-entering earthly life in the cycle of birth-death-rebirth. 172

The theme of the unburied dead was also used by these authors to evoke frora the characters they portrayed behavior that revealed them as they were. As these characters came in contact with the un­ buried dead, they tended to separate themselves into two distinct groups: the men of good will, who respected the dead as they re­

spected themselves and as they respected their fellow men; and the men lacking in humanity who pushed the dead about without apology, belittled their fellow men, and were possessed of such weak egos

that they required flattery from their peers and reacted in para­

noiac frenzy to imagined slights to their dignity. Achilles grew

from arrogant, angry young man to mature humanitarian manhood when he came to full awareness that suffering is the common lot of man and when he learned to respect the dead of all men. Theseus stood

tall as the leader of his city and encouraged all Athenians to stand beside him and speak so that they might all be governed by a common wisdom. When words of persuasion failed against a tyrant, he went to war on behalf of the unburied dead and himself washed their bodies to prepare them for burial. On the other hand, the tyrant Creon denied a kinsman burial and, though he craved their favor, was irascible when

the Theban elders expressed views that differed from him. Weak in

self-esteem, he lacked the courage to change his mind even when he knew he had erred, lest he be made a liar before the people. Pierro

Sforza, also a tyrant, defamed the dead and belittled the living and admitted to himself that he was a king whose best interests were served by fools and dullards. 173

These authors also found the theme of the unburied dead effec­ tive in the development of narrative structure. In the books of the

Iliad in which it appeared, in Antigone and The Suppliants, and in the short stories and tales, it was a sustaining theme of the entire piece. In the Aeneid it appeared in action preceding but significant to the epic action as well as in action in which Aeneas was motivated to begin and continue his journey to reestablish the Trojans in a new land. In The Second Maiden's Tragedy, it appeared at the turning point in the drama. In Antonio's Revenge the motif appeared initially in the rising action of the drama but was subdued by Pierro's in­ volvement in other villanies until it reappeared in the turning point of the tragedy to incite the conspirators to revenge. In The Fatal

Dowry, the motif appeared as a theme in the initial action of the drama, where it revealed its capacity to serve as a sub-structure out of which action issues. In the Iliad, where the quarrels of the rival warriors over the corpses of the dead grew in intensity as the soldiers egged on the conflict, in Antigone, in which the tyrant's edict to leave a dead body unburied led to the destruction of the entire royal household, in Antonio's Revenge, where the corpse of the young noble publicly hanged incited the court to ignoble action, all the action grew naturally out of the theme. However, in The Fatal

Dowry and in the gothic romance, T^ie Monk, the relation to the theme of the unburied dead of the action issuing frora it is less imraediately obvious though, when carefully considered, nonetheless logical. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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