Ancient Story-tellers
THIS book is written with all the charm of style and delicacy of observation which scholars have learnt to expect from Professor Thomson, and deals with a fact concerning Greek literature which is never denied but continually forgotten. It is only by a constant vigilance of the imagination that we can hope to understand what literature meant to a society which revelled in an abundance of legends, stories, poems, songs and dances, but had exceedingly few books of any sort, and those few mostly written out laboriously for the use of their owners. Long after writing was in existence litera- ture was still oral : stories were meant to be told, books to be recited or read aloud. And, apart from the treatment of a story by any particular poet or " logographer," there was always the story itself, handed on from generation to generation, • living, growing and Changing, getting attached to new names and wrought into other contexts, or, it may be, . gradually losing precision and detail and falling into oblivion. The matter was well illustrated by Dr. Robert's book, Bit d rind Lied, published in 1881. Robert studied scenes on Greek vases which were currently supposed to be illustrations of particular poems or tragedies, and showed that this view was a misconception. The scene on the vase represented the Saga itself, just as the poem did. The Saga was there, a real tradition, an (by Xe•yos ; and poet or artist could repre- sent it each in his own way. The best teller of the story was he who was d-xnems., " unforgetting " : who remembered every point and remembered it right. That was how the pre- philosophical man conceived of Truth Robert's problem was in a sense clear cut : the two artistic forms of the Logos lay there distinctly before him. Professor Thomson has the harder task of tracking out the elements of oral saga or traditional story as they exist in our written literature, especially in Herodotus. Herodotus is the king of story-tellers, yet a story-killer, too, since he gives the story a final literary shape and so puts an end to its development.
The story has a power of self-creation ; or, if that is a mythical way of speaking, let us put it more analytically. Various things that happen and are told about tend in the telling to be shaped and dramatized and moralized without any conscious falsification or original invention in the mind of a particular writer. Stories often presented themselves to the Greek mind as illustrations of sin followed by justice, of pride followed by a fall, or sometimes merely of that unintelligible cruelty of circumstances which the Greeks call the Envy of the Gods and we the Inscrutable Ways of Provi- dence. Many stories became more interesting if at the begin- ning the Oracle of Delphi had foretold the event, especially if it had done so in ambiguous language. ,Consequently the story improves itself by inventing the oracle. People telling or talking over the story suggest the possibility that Delphi had given a warning, then state that it had, then invent the kind of warning it had given, and then quote the actual words it uttered. The process is normal. And I warmly agree with Professor Thomson in rejecting the ,theory that these oracles are conscious propagandist frauds perpetrated by the priests at Delphi. Man always reshapes his stories in the telling ; he dares to do so even in our own terrible age, with masses of printed documents ready to confute him on every side.
We moderns know the Greeks through their literature and art ; it is all we have to know them by. Hence we tend to forget the immense wealth of saga on which the poets draw, the innumerable talks and discussions which are pre-supposed by an Aristotelian treatise or a Platonic dialogue. We forget the Logos. A glaring instance, not mentioned by Professor Thomson, has led to a general misunderstanding of an im- portant scene in Euripides', Electra. I imagine every. child in Athens knew that Electra had recognized her brother by his footprint and his lock of hair. These " signs " were used in Aeschylus' Choeplzoroe (458 B.c.), where Electra, eager yet afraid to believe that Orestes has come, finds them insufficient. They are alluded to as notorious by Aristophanes in 422 B.C. They are used by Euripides later in his Electra (413 B.c.). where an old slave suggests them to the heroine, and she
definitely rejects them as useless. Modern scholars, for- . getting the existence of the oral tradition, have imagined that Aeschylus invented the signs, and that Euripides, writing forty-five years after, has put a completely pointless scene into his own tragedy in order to criticize that invention— which he does not succeed in doing!
Professor Thomson. analyses very convincingly the Art of the logopoios. He must be in sympathy with his audience ; his business, as Herodotus often tells us, is to tell the stories and tell them right*; he is not bound to believe them, but he is perhaps bound not to obtrude his scepticism. He must at any rate accept, instinctively and almost unconsciously, the moral and philosophical pre-suppositions of his audience. It is not a personal peculiarity of Herodotus to moralize about the fall of pride or the jealousy of heaven : such moralizing is part of the air he breathes. "An eccentric logos," as Professor Thomson justly says, would be an impOss. ibility."
It is curious what a vast change has been made in literature by the invention of the printing press. The ancient poet or story-teller was expected to tell the same story as his pre- decessors, and to tell it well and " unforgettingly " in the style already known and approved ; to do otherwise would have been to court disaster. A new story about a new event would, of course, be welcome ; a changing taste in the public would have its due effect. But the main duty of the ancient story-teller was to3ceep alive the stories that would otherwise be forgotten. His modern counterpart is not 'a teller of stories but a writer of books, surrounded and worried by millions of previous books ; so naturally he tries hard to "assert his personality" and to make his own book unlike the others.
GILBERT MURRAY.
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