An Introduction to Campaspe

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SOURCE: "An Introduction to Campaspe," in "Campaspe": "Sappho and Phao," by John Lyly, edited by G. K. Hunter and David Bevington, Manchester University Press, 1991, pp. 1-43.

[In the following excerpt, Hunter examines the source materials and traditions Lyly utilized in Campaspe.]

The historical occasion for the action of Campaspe was found by Lyly most probably in a source he employed several times in his play: Plutarch's life of Alexander, used apparently in the translation by Sir Thomas North. Plutarch tells us of Alexander's savage destruction of the city of Thebes and of the shock waves this event sent through the Greek world, felt particularly strongly in Athens. In this aftermath, we are told:

Then the Grecians having assembled a general council of all the states of Greece within the straits of Peloponnesus, there it was determined that they would make war with the Persians. Whereupon they chose Alexander general for all Greece. Then divers men coming to visit Alexander, as well philosophers as governors of states, to congratulate with him for his election, he looked that Diogenes Sinopian (who dwelt at Corinth) would likewise come as the rest had done; but when he saw he made no reckoning of him, and that he kept still in the suburbs of Corinth at a place called Cranium, he went himself unto him …

The occasion of the play is thus set in a moment of peace between two destructive wars—Theban and Persian. Of the fear or the political calculation that may have driven the Greek city-states into this improbable harmony Lyly betrays no consciousness. The antithesis between peace and war, arts and arms, is central to Lyly's presentation; but he declines to consider the political nature of their interaction. The moment of peace is a moment when power relaxes and warriors play games—whether these be the 'authentic' Greek games of philosophy and art or the more modern diversions of courtly (or at least gentlemanly) love.

The love story that Lyly used was one that was already well known in art as in literature. By 1565/6 it had reached far enough down through the social classes to be entered in the Stationers' Register as the subject of a ballad: the 'history of Alexander, Campaspe, and Apelles, and of the faithful friendship between them'. The ballad itself, like most of its fellows, has not survived. One must assume, however, that it was not the vernacular spread of the story that attracted Lyly. On the contrary it was rather the fact that the story and its environment allowed him to draw (as he did) on a wide range of classical sources.

The thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth books of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder are concerned with the methods and personalities of the great Greek painters—Zeuxis, Parrhasius, Protogenes, etc.—among whom, says Pliny, 'Apelles surmounted all that either were before, or came after.' Within his elaborate and detailed account of Apelles, Pliny devotes two paragraphs to his relationship to Alexander the Great. He tells us of Apelles: 'Very courteous he was and fair spoken, in which regard King Alexander the Great accepted the better of him, and much frequented his shop in his own person.' In my book on Lyly [John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier] I have tried to elaborate on the general problem for Renaissance artists (like Lyly) writing primarily for the world of court manners (or 'courtesy'). I suppose that Lyly saw the reported interchange between the 'king' (as he is called in Philemon Holland's translation of 1600) and the courteous artist by the light of this general problem. Pliny describes Apelles as a royal favourite: 'he [Alexander] gave straight commandment that no painter should be so hardy to make his picture but only Apelles'; and his story may be taken as a model of the constraints and opportunities afforded by such a role. Against the strain of sycophancy that might be expected to attach to Apelles' being so 'courteous and fair spoken', Pliny allows a certain freedom or capacity to assert oneself that attaches to the artist as a craftsman professing his own 'mystery'. When Alexander 'being in [Apelles'] shop would seem to talk much and reason about his art, and many times let fall some words to little purpose, bewraying his ignorance, Apelles after his mild manner would desire his grace to hold his peace, and said, "Sir, no more words, for fear the prentice boys there, that are grinding of colours, do laugh you to scorn'". The key phrase here, for the court artist, is probably 'after his mild manner' (translating Pliny's comitas, the actual word that Lyly read). Apelles is said to have been able to exert his own sovereignty, in the area of his special expertise, without giving offence to his prince: 'So reverently thought the king of him, that being otherwise a choleric prince yet he would take any word at his hands in that familiar sort spoken in the best part, and be never offended.' The dangers of being a prince's favourite artist are not concealed here. In his reference to 'choleric prince' Pliny was no doubt remembering the murders of Philotas, Clitus and Parmenio, and especially that of Callisthenes—a case raised by Lyly himself (I.iii.79ff.)—who gave his prince wholesome philosophic advice, but not with the accomplished courtier's mild manner or familiar wit, and suffered torture and death as a consequence. The dangers for the Elizabethan artist were usually less drastic; but Pliny's emphasis on the manner or rhetoric by which a court artist can succeed must have seemed exemplary.

Pliny's next paragraph gives a specific instance of the reward that may come to a court artist whose independence is rendered tolerable by courtesy and fair language. Alexander, 'having among his concubines one named Campaspe whom he fancied especially above the rest … he gave commandment to Apelles for to draw her picture all naked: but perceiving Apelles at the same time to be wounded with the like dart of love as well as himself, he bestowed her upon him most frankly'. Pliny is, of course, making a point about the magnanimity of Alexander: 'In this act of his he won as much honour and glory as by any victory over his enemies, for now he had conquered himself.' But Pliny is also indicating the means by which Alexander, however 'great a commander and high-minded a prince he was otherwise', has been eased into acting magnanimously to a commoner; both prince and commoner have learned by the methods of 'courtesy' to allow the space occupied by the other. This is certainly the moral that Castiglione takes from the story:

I believe Apelles conceived a far greater joy in beholding the beauty of Campaspes than did Alexander, for a man may easily believe that the love of them both proceeded of that beauty, and perhaps also for this respect Alexander determined to bestow her upon him that (in his mind) could know her more perfectly than he did. … And let them think that do enjoy and view the beauty of a woman so thoroughly that they think themselves in Paradise, and yet have not the feat of painting: the which if they had, they would conceive a far greater contentation, for then should they more perfectly understand the beauty that in their breast engendereth such heart's ease.

[The Courtier]

Lyly stays close to the story that Pliny tells; but the difference that time and temperament have imposed on the meaning of the story is equally obvious. Campaspe is not, in Lyly's play, one of Alexander's favourite concubines (' dilectam sibi ex pallacis suis praecipue'); for an Elizabethan audience the love story could not be allowed to conform too closely to these antique manners. What is interesting here is less, however, the revision itself than the method by which Lyly throws his revisionary light on to the material. By a technique which recurs in his work—I shall discuss below its further use in the presentation of Diogenes and Apelles—Lyly brings into close proximity different aspects of behaviour, not so much, however, to achieve contrast as to suggest more central though paradoxical positions. We first meet Campaspe not as a concubine but as a humble Theban captive (and so likely enough to become a concubine). But she is not alone when we meet her: she is in the company of another lady whose condition she seems to share. This is Timoclea, the sister of Theagenes, the Theban general. It is she who does all the talking, while Campaspe stands by. And the talk of this formidable grande dame displays her military/aristocratic background. Timoclea's confrontation with Alexander is not that of captive with captor, but closer to that of Porus, the defeated Indian king, who told Alexander that he expected to be treated 'princely': for "'I comprehend all", said he, "in this word princely'". Lyly here is obviously compressing into a few sentences the whole ethical import of the story Plutarch tells about Timoclea's conduct during the destruction of Thebes. A certain Thracian company, Plutarch tells us, 'spoiled and defaced the house of Timoclea, a virtuous lady of noble parentage'. Their captain, having raped Timoclea, demanded to know where he could find whatever gold and silver she had hidden. Timoclea pretended compliance and took the captain to a well where she said her treasure was stored. But when 'the barbarous Thracian stooped to look into the well she standing behind him thrust him in, and then threw stones on him and so killed him'. For this crime Timoclea was carried before Alexander; he was so impressed by her 'noble answer and courageous deed' that he set her free. Timoclea had appeared at the English court in her own play ten years before Campaspe; presumably Lyly could draw on residual memories of this earlier and fuller presentation.

But his purpose here is not to revive admiration for the paragon; Timoclea is in this play only to affect our attitude to Campaspe. When Alexander has heard and admired Timoclea he turns to his second captive: 'But what are you, fair lady, another sister to Theagenes?' Campaspe denies that she is a duplicate Timoclea: 'No sister to Theagenes, but an humble handmaid to Alexander, born of a mean parentage but to extreme fortune' (I.i.81-5). Campaspe's humility and disposability take her close to the concubine status that Pliny describes; but the twinning with Timoclea in this scene (Timoclea never appears again) is sufficient to guarantee her a share of dignity. Lyly is in search of a paradoxical effect compounded of compliance and independence. The story requires Campaspe to appear both as a chattel and as an honourable individual with freedom of choice; and so Alexander responds immediately to Campaspe's statement of humility by conflating her status with that of Timoclea; both are equally 'ladies' in terms of 'virtues', 'whatsoever your births be' (II. 86-7).

I have already spoken about the relationship between Alexander and Apelles as a balance between freedom and constraint. Here again the achievement of the paradoxical balance arises from the combination of divergent sources. Pliny's account of Apelles' freedom of speech could hardly be reproduced by Lyly in the form in which he found it. Pliny speaks of Apelles' 'courtesy' and of his 'mild manner', as I have noted, but his account of Apelles' 'mild' rebuke to Alexander in the paint shop strikes the modern reader as something short of total complaisance. Certainly it is hard to imagine any such exchange between Elizabeth and a Tudor artist. And so Lyly's version of the scene places a further limitation on the artist's freedom of speech. There is now no reference to the paint boys laughing at the prince. Instead, we are given criticism which is evasive by its very brevity. When Lyly's Alexander tries to paint and then says to Apelles, 'But how have I done here?' Apelles is tightlipped enough to reply only 'Like a king', leaving it for the magnanimous Alexander to turn the point against himself explicitly: 'but nothing more unlike a painter' (III.iv.126-8).

In taking away some of Apelles' freedom of speech Lyly might seem to have unsettled the balance between independence and duty which elsewhere he takes as his central point. It is perhaps with the aim of restoring this balance that he introduces into Pliny's story another figure, whose well-documented dealings with Alexander illustrate independence and freedom of speech with a total absence of awe—Diogenes. Diogenes of Sinope is probably the most famous free-speaker of antiquity, and the accounts of his sharp refusals to compromise with authority came to Lyly from every side of the Humanist tradition. The fullest list is in the Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, the source of most subsequent material. Laertius' biographies are more gossipy than analytic, at least as much concerned with smart sayings as with deep thoughts. And so the Life of Diogenes rivals that of Plato in length, but is little more than a string of epigrams, of sharp and unpalatable exposures of social custom and social hypocrisy, setting the sufficiency of self-denial against the greed, pride and ambition of the social world: 'He was great at pouring scorn on his contemporaries. The school of Euclides he called bilious, and Plato's lectures a waste of time, the performances at the Dionysia great peep-shows for fools, the demagogues the mob's lackeys.' His home in a tub, his one cloak folded for a bed, his lamp held up by daylight to look for an honest man—these famous characteristics or eccentricities have kept Diogenes in the sights of anecdotists and collectors of apophthegms, as in the medieval Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (among the earliest books printed in English) and in the widely read collections of Erasmus.

Erasmus's Apophthegmata, whence Lyly derived most of his Diogenes material, was careful in the dedication of the first edition to stress the morality of the form of the apophthegm, as one which (as it were) set a perpetual Diogenes against a perpetual Alexander, philosophic independence against the assumptions of authority. The one-liner is seen, that is, as having a necessary political function, 'none other kind of argument or matter [being] found more fit for a prince, especially being a young man, not yet broken in the experience of the world'. And again:

The principal best sort of Apophthegms is that saying which in few words doth rather by a colour signify than plainly express a sense not common for every wit to pick out, and such a saying as no man could lightly feign by study and which the longer ye do consider it in your mind, the more and more it doth still delight you … most fit for princes and noble men, who for the urgent causes and busy matters of the commonwealth have not leisure to spend any great part of their life in study or in reading of books … no men's sayings are more taken up and used than those which be sauced with a certain grace of pleasant mirth[;] undoubtedly Socrates, Diogenes and Aristippus would serve better for teaching and training young children than either Xenocrates or else Zeno.

Erasmus gives more space to Diogenes than to any other philosopher, and the social situation which recurs most often is that in which Diogenes' quick answers denote his fearless independence of Alexander. The situation is given plausibility by revealing at the same time the other side of this Humanist ideal: Alexander's magnanimous allowance of Diogenes' refusal to conform. In this case the king's magnanimity cannot be explained by the courtesy and fair speaking of the interlocutor, since these are the qualities Diogenes is most resolute not to possess.

It is not difficult to understand the element of wish-fulfilment in this image of the glory that was Greece. The Humanists (and particularly the northern Humanists) were anxious to assert the importance of education in Greek texts and imitation of Greek culture as routes to a morality that was free of superstition and illiberal obedience. But the world in which they lived was a world of jealous warring principalities and nascent nation states. The histories of the Greek sophists, the orators and the paradoxical sages showed, though with a teasing fragmentariness, the possibility of a social role for learning and wisdom which was not simply to be absorbed into the life of the court but to be held in tension against it. Lyly's Diogenes is presented, of course, with all the comic exaggeration of an extreme instance, but that left aside, he represents well enough one side of the Humanist dream. Erasmus, with different rhetoric but similar aims, spent much of his life avoiding, eluding and declining the stultifying commitments of court or curial honour. The life of his coadjutor, Sir Thomas More, revealed the other side of the coin: commitment killed him.

The literary consequence of these attitudes also points towards Diogenes. Erasmus and More began their literary collaboration with translations and imitations of Lucian, and Lucian seemed in this period an obvious twin to Diogenes. Like Lucian and Diogenes, Erasmus and More chose, in their major literary works—the Utopia and The Praise of Folly—to use forms that combined philosophy and comedy, to 'play the fool', as it were, with matters too serious to be allowed a straightforward statement. Lyly's Diogenes likewise lives on the knife-edge of the same paradox. Clearly he pays his way theatrically by the knockabout farce he provides in his en-counters with a series of low-life characters. In this sense he is the Clown of the piece. But the Athenian context frees the 'allowed fool' from the nervous jokiness of a household entertainer who can be whipped into obedience. In the Greek context his not belonging can be given the full force of a rational choice. It is a choice whose natural consequence is poverty and contempt, just as the natural consequence of Apelles' choice lies in the uneasy compromise he has to maintain between the hope of pleasing and the fear of falling. Lyly is not concerned to indicate a preference between these alternatives but rather, it would seem, to stress their co-existence as inevitable elements in court culture.

The use of Apelles and Diogenes to embody complementary alternative responses to princely authority (leaving the mid-point between them to appear equally desirable and unrealisable) imposes certain features on the conduct of the play. As alternatives they are normally presented alternately. Several scenes (II.ii; III.iii; V.iv) show Alexander dealing first with one and then the other, so that their different attitudes to the same royal power are brought into an obvious comparative relationship; but, understandably enough, they are never allowed to meet—what would they speak about? The artist's love of beauty places him in the direct line of court tastes and court rivalries, giving him immediate access to the centre of power but rendering him vulnerable to military and aristocratic contempt. The thinker or scholar, on the other hand, may claim exemption from such involvement. His pursuit should render him free from flattery or fashion; but his freedom is bought by the sacrifice of comfort and approval. Within the fiction of the play the magnanimity of Alexander allows both responses to achieve success. In the end the 'king' takes up his true role as a military leader; with careless generosity he simply abandons the effort to make Diogenes a court philosopher and, condemning love as unfit for princes, he abandons Campaspe to Apelles. The very arbitrariness of these decisions reminds us, however, that magnanimity cannot be relied on and that the dilemmas of the court artist may then have a crueler conclusion.

In his presentation of Diogenes and the other philosophers Lyly was following the example set by one of his predecessors as a court entertainer and entrepreneur of child acting, Richard Edwards. Edwards's one surviving play, Damon and Pithias, of 1565, takes us to the court of Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse. We are introduced to this world by Diogenes' fellow-philosopher, Aristippus, here the resident court philosopher and favourite. But Dionysius is no Alexander and so Aristippus can have no space to act like Diogenes. Aristippus makes the difference between them quite explicit in his opening speech:

Some philosophers in the street go ragged and torn
And feeds on vile roots whom boys laugh to scorn;
But I in fine silks haunt Dionysius' palace
Wherein with dainty fare myself I do solace.
… I profess now the courtly philosophy,
To crouch, to speak fair, myself I apply,
To feed the king's humour with pleasant devices,
For which I am called Regius canis.
But wot ye who named me first the king's dog?
It was that rogue Diogenes, that vile grunting hog.
Let him roll in his tub to win a vain praise.

The course of the play reveals the limitations on this 'courtly philosophy'. Aristippus wishes to differentiate himself from the rogue Diogenes at one end of the scale; he hopes equally to differentiate himself from mere parasites and flatterers at the other end. And that, as it turns out, is where the shoe really pinches. The court's ethical standards serve the whims of the tyrant, and the philosopher can maintain his balance only as long as he is permitted to do so. Aristippus is caught between his knowledge that Dionysius is wrong (and Damon and Pithias right) and the need to keep up with his principal rival for favour, the total flatterer Carisophus. And so Aristippus can neither speak out nor act well. True ethical standards have to be carried by the Athenian tourists, Damon and Pithias, who, though 'addicted to philosophy' (1. 444), offer no theories, proffer no advice, but act with such transparent virtue and unflinching self-sacrifice that the cruelty of the tyrant is at last overcome. As each of them in turn claims the right to die for his friend, Dionysius' 'spirits are suddenly appalled' (1. 1651). Even the executioner feels the effect: 'My hand with sudden fear quivereth' (1. 1660). These extraordinary effects, comparable to those that Plato describes as a consequence of the vision of The Good, show us that kings, though not amenable to philosophic instruction, may be changed by a real-life experience similar to Christian conversion. Aristippus seems to be in the play principally to reveal the dilemma of courtly philosophy, and once he has done so he is allowed to vanish. His false theory makes him useless in practice; the summingup devolves upon a less contaminated figure, Eubulus, the king's chief counsellor, who can take the practical steps to rescue Damon and Pithias as soon as the king's conversion allows it. In his mouth the doctrine that ideal friendship is a guiding star for kings' courts is plausible as it would not have been if spoken by the self-interested professional philosopher, Aristippus.

A comparison of Lyly's handling of this theme with Edwards's allows us to calculate the degree of indirection that Lyly employs. Lyly does not offer us anything as drastic as a threat of death or a religious conversion. Nevertheless, the strange and apparently dead-end scene of the philosophers' feast (I.iii) provides a cameo view of some of the harsher realities which, though evaded by Apelles and Diogenes, are undoubtedly part of the world in which they live. The scene should also be appreciated as a typical courtly 'show' of famous figures from the past. The 'Seven Sages' are represented here by philosophers from the various Greek schools (spread across several centuries) who engage in philosophic conversation of the type found in Cicero's De Natura Deorum, a principal source of the matter discussed. At the same time the context seems also designed to show up a natural contradiction between authority and thought, military obedience and freedom of speculation.

The scene begins with the summoning of the seven philosophers to attend their ruler. At the end of Alexander's previous appearance he had been hailed as Plato's ideal philosopher-king. Yet in this scene the attempt to realise the ideal is shown to be fraught with difficulties. Chrysippus is the first person invited; but he is too caught up in his thoughts to even notice the messenger, and this summoning has to be reported as a failure: as the messenger says, 'seeing bookish men are so blockish and so great clerks such simple courtiers, I will neither be partaker of their commons nor their commendations' (I.iii. 10-12). Chrysippus' failure to notice the invitation (in fact he turns up later in the scene as a member of Alexander's 'academy') is only a preparative for the more self-conscious and principled refusal of 'an old obscure fellow who, sitting in a tub turned towards the sun, read Greek to a young boy' (11. 14-16), a 'fellow' we are expected to recognise as Diogenes.

All the philosophers save only he—Aristotle, Plato, Cleanthes, Crates, Anaxarchus, Chrysippus—do what they are told and perform as they are instructed. 'They were not philosophers', says Hephestion in his blunt soldierly way, 'if they knew not their duties.' This is an interpretation of de officiis which reduces philosophy to panegyric. 'My court shall be a school wherein I will have used as great doctrine in peace as I did in war discipline', announces Alexander, though the very next point he makes shows how far soldierly discipline continues to dominate peace no less than war. The case of Callisthenes is raised, 'whose treasons against his prince shall not be borne out with the reasons of his philosophy'. This is a reply to Aristotle's flattering account of what 'literature' (books, reading, knowledge) can do to exalt a king. Alexander points to Callisthenes, Aristotle's relative, a philosopher-courtier whose love of truth did not (or rather will not) lead him to exalt the king but to 'seek to destroy' him. Such truth is not permissible, for 'in kings' causes I will not stand to scholars' arguments' (11. 89-90). The philosophers have been summoned to court to speak acceptable truths or they may suffer punishment:

'This meeting shall be for a commandment that you all frequent my court, instruct the young with rules, confirm the old with reasons. Let your lives be answerable to your learnings, lest my proceedings be contrary to my promises.'

(I.iii.90-4)

To illustrate what he means Alexander then makes the philosophers jump through the hoops of 'philosophic questions', one snappy question to each philosopher to be followed by an equally snappy answer. Lyly took this royal quiz-show from Plutarch's account of Alexander's dealings with his enemies the Gymnosophistae of India, where the questions were in fact court-martial issues of life and death: 'He did put them (as he thought) many hard questions, and told them he would put the first man to death that answered him worst, and so the rest in order.' In the event he spared them all; and in any case Lyly makes no reference to the life and death issue. But the example of Callisthenes, inserted into the dialogue, keeps something of the flavour of answering for dear life rather than for truth, as an important ingredient of this as of all court performances.

The absorption of the philosophers into court entertainment and their acceptance of this absorption make a point about the moral integrity of these sages, but it does not devalue philosophy itself. The sages enter discussing a central Humanist issue: the relationship between the philosophical conception of a First Mover and the religious conception of a personal God. This is a subject more Oxfordian than Athenian, but still indicative (and surely meant to seem so) of their concern with serious intellectual issues. Their subsequent decline into quiz-show contestants points up by contrast the philosophic integrity of the sage who is not present, Diogenes. The other philosophers visit Diogenes immediately after their interview with Alexander, and Lyly treats us then to a debate where the problem is very clearly set out. The duty of citizen Diogenes is to obey Alexander as the properly constituted authority (I accept without comment Lyly's quite unHellenic idea of the political arrangements), and this is what the other philosophers tell him. The duty of Diogenes as a seeker after truth and goodness is, however (as his answer indicates), quite separate: the role of the philosopher is to be on guard against courtly flattery and to protect the integrity of virtue by clowning and scorn and plain rudeness when required. And yet this unrelenting posture of rejection is shown to drive Diogenes into a narrow and even mechanistic response to the world. It is characteristic of Lyly's method that integrity here is balanced against a concomitant rigidity of attitude, whether the conversation be with Chrysus, the rival Cynic (III.iv), the performing family of Sylvius (V.i), the courtesan Laïs and her bullies (V.iii), the assembled philosophers (I.iii), or Alexander himself (II.ii; V.iv). In these terms we can see integrity as not the good alternative to courtly flattery but only as an antithetical kind of limitation.

In Campaspe Lyly shows us the contrasting problems of painting and philosophy, art and thought, in the context of the court. He does not speak about literature. Still, it is easy to see that literary art straddles the two difficulties he does talk about. Literature involves conceptual thinking, like philosophy, while the social responsiveness of its content draws it into the orbit of court entertainment and so of royal flattery, like painting. The writer is thus involved in a search for both the independence of thinking and the intimacy of shared cultural communication. Are these compatible? As a court artist Lyly had to hope they were; but Campaspe shows his powerful awareness that only exceptional circumstances could make them so.

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