CHAPTER V

THE WORKS OF EURIPIDES

Of nearly one hundred dramas composed by Euripides nineteen[411] have survived. These are now discussed in the approximate chronological order; the precise date of production is, however, known in but few cases.

The ALCESTIS[412] (Ἄλκηστις), acted in 438 B.C., when the poet was already forty-two years old, is the earliest. It formed the fourth play of a tetralogy which contained the lost works _Women of Crete_, _Alcmæon at Psophis_, and _Telephus_. Euripides obtained the second prize, being vanquished by Sophocles—with what play is not known. The scene is laid at Pheræ and presents the palace of Admetus, King of Thessaly. The god Apollo relates how he has induced the Fates to allow Admetus to escape death on his destined day, if he can find some one to die in his stead. All refused save his wife, Alcestis, whose death therefore is to happen this very day. Thanatos (Death) enters and Apollo in vain asks him to spare the queen; a quarrel follows, and Apollo departs with threats. The chorus of Pheræan elders enter and hear, from a servant, of Alcestis’ courageous leave-takings. Next the queen is borne forth and dies amid the lamentations of her husband and little son. All save the chorus retire to prepare for the funeral, when Heracles enters. Admetus comes forth and insists on making the hero his guest, pretending that it is a stranger who has died. Heracles is taken to the guest-chamber and the elders reproach Admetus for his unseasonable hospitality. The funeral procession is moving forward when Pheres, father of Admetus, enters to pay his respects to the dead. His son with cold fury repels him: why did he, an aged man, not consent to die, and so save Alcestis? A vigorous and coarse altercation follows. When all have gone the butler enters, complaining of Heracles’ drunken feasting; the latter soon follows, and is quickly sobered by learning the truth. He proclaims his intention of rescuing Alcestis from Thanatos, and hurries away. Admetus returns followed by the chorus, expressing his utter grief and desolation. Heracles arrives with a veiled woman, whom he says he has won as a prize at some athletic contest; he must now depart to fulfil his next “labour”—the capture of Diomedes’ man-eating steeds—and requests Admetus to take care of the woman till his return. The king reluctantly consents, and Heracles unveils her, whereupon Admetus recognizes his wife. She does not speak, being (as Heracles explains) for three days yet subject to the infernal deities.[413] The play ends with the joy of Admetus, a dry remark of Heracles on true hospitality, and a few lines[414] from the chorus expressing wonder at the mysterious ways of Heaven.

The Greek introductions to this play contain interesting criticisms: “the close of the drama is somewhat comic”; “the drama is more or less satyric, because it ends in joy and pleasure”. These remarks, coupled with the fact that the _Alcestis_ (as the last play of the tetralogy) occupied the place of the customary satyric drama, have caused much discussion. It is enough to say here: first, that the _Alcestis_ is in no sense a satyric play;[415] second, that it undoubtedly presents comic features; third, that none the less the work belongs to the sphere of tragedy. It is sometimes difficult, and often undesirable, to label dramatic poems too definitely; but we must certainly avoid the impression that this play is a comedy. It deals poignantly with the most solemn interests of humanity; the comic scenes merely show, what is almost as obvious elsewhere, that Euripides imitates actual life more closely than his two great rivals. Nothing is gained, however, by ignoring the comic element. The altercation between Apollo and Thanatos contains much that surprises us—the wit[416] and the eager, wrangling, bargaining tone of the dispute. Again the quarrel between Pheres and his son, admirable in its skilful revelation of character, jars terribly when enacted over the body of Alcestis. Heracles’ half-tipsy lecture to the slave shocks us in a demigod about to wrestle with Death himself. But the whole situation as between Alcestis and Admetus, Admetus and Heracles, is handled with dignity and extraordinary pathos. The death scene, especially Admetus’ despairing address to his wife; the even finer passage when the king returns but shrinks from the cold aspect of his widowed house; the magnificent and lovely odes, above all the song which describes the wild beasts of Othrys’ side sporting to the music of Apollo—these are thoroughly suited to tragedy.

The plot is apparently[417] quite simple, but one fact should be mentioned. The rescue of Alcestis is due directly to the drunkenness of Heracles. He is prevented from learning the facts in an ordinary way by Admetus; had he behaved normally, he would have left Pheræ still unenlightened, since Admetus has forbidden[418] his slave to speak. It is his intoxication alone which goads the butler to explain.

The character-drawing is skilful, often subtle. Heracles, good-hearted but somewhat dense, sensual and coarse-fibred, is half-way between the demigod of the _Heracles Furens_ and the boisterous glutton of comedy. Capable of splendid impulses, he is yet a masterpiece of breezy tactlessness, as when with hideous slyness he suggests to Admetus (in the presence of the restored wife) that the king may console himself by a new marriage. Pheres and Admetus are an admirable pair. Both are selfish, Admetus with pathetic unconsciousness, his father with cynical candour. Pheres is quite willing to give elaborate honour to the dead woman so long as it costs little; Admetus—is it true of him that he is ready to utter splendid heroic speeches so long as the sacrifice is made to save him? Not so; he feels terribly. But the comparison between father and son reminds us how easily sentiment can become aged into etiquette. At present, however, he is a man of generous instincts—“spoiled”. He needs a salutary upheaval of his home: from afar he prophesies of Thorvald Helmer in _A Doll’s House_. Alcestis herself is a curious study. Innumerable readers have extolled her as one of the noblest figures in Euripides’ great gallery of heroines; this in spite of the fact that she is frigid and unimaginative, ungenerous and basely narrow, in her spiritual and social outlook. One great and noble deed stands to her credit—she is voluntarily dying to preserve Admetus’ life. Our profound respect Alcestis can certainly claim, but the love and pity of which so much is said are scarcely due to her. They are extorted, if at all, by the elaborate exertions of the other characters, who vie with one another in painting a picture of the tenderness which has illumined the Pheræan palace like quiet sunshine. But a dramatist cannot build up a great character by a series of testimonies from friends. He has undoubtedly portrayed an interesting personality, as he always does, but to put her beside creations like Medea and Phædra is merely absurd. From the beginning of her first intolerable speech[419] we know her for that frightful figure, the thoroughly good woman with no imagination, no humour, no insight. One hears much of the failures of Euripides; this is perhaps a real failure. For we are not to suppose that the rigidity and coldness of Alcestis are a dexterous stroke of art; it is not his intention to give a novel, true, and unflattering portrait of a traditional stage favourite, as he so often delighted to do. Everything indicates that he wished to make Alcestis sublime and lovable. But there is a fatal difference between her and the later women. Euripides has realized her from the outside. He has given us in the mouths of the other characters warm descriptions of her charm, but he has not succeeded in drawing a charming woman. She has not “come alive” in his hands.

The plot of the _Alcestis_ has been studied by the late Dr. Verrall in an essay[420] of extraordinary skill and interest. He lays special emphasis on certain peculiar features in the treatment. First, Heracles is represented as in no way the sublime demigod who ought to have been depicted, in view of the amazing exploit which awaits him; the only heroic language put into his mouth is uttered when he is intoxicated, and the account—if it can be called such—which he gives later of Alcestis’ deliverance shows a studied lack of impressiveness. Second, Alcestis is interred with unheard-of speed; Admetus, seeing her expire, instantly makes ready to convey her body to the tomb. From these facts in chief and from many details Dr. Verrall deduces his theory that Alcestis never dies at all. Her expectation of death (founded on the story about Apollo’s bargain) and the atmosphere of mourning which hangs over Admetus’ house and capital on the fatal day, have so wrought upon the queen that she finally swoons. Later Heracles visits the tomb, finds Alcestis recovering, and restores her to the king. His annoyance with Admetus, which leads him to allow his host to “think what he pleases,” coupled with his own rodomontade at the palace gate, gave rise to the legend that Heracles fought with Death for a woman who had actually quitted life. Finally, the quasi-theological prologue, in which Apollo and Thanatos appear and give warrant to the orthodox rendering of the story, is a mere figment, revealed as such to the discreet by its utterly ungodlike tone, and only tacked on to a quite human drama in order to save the poet from legal indictment as an enemy of current theology.

This superb essay has met with wide-spread admiration, some adhesion, much opposition, but no refutation. If we are to judge of the existing plays as one mass, the examination of outstanding specimens of rationalism such as the _Ion_ will convince us that the _Alcestis_ is what Dr. Verrall thought it. But this play does stand apart from the rest, as do the _Rhesus_ and the _Cyclops_. However close it may lie to the _Medea_ in date, it is very early in manner; a capital instance of this, the character of Alcestis, has already been mentioned. The best view is, perhaps, that curious features which in other works might appear so bad as to be evidently intended for some other than the ostensible purpose, are in this case due to inexpertness.[421] For example, the extraordinary fact that Alcestis’ rescue is due to nothing but the drunkenness of Heracles, is perhaps a mere oversight on the poet’s part. Similarly the poorness of the last scene may be no cunning device, but comparative poverty of inspiration. It is a tenable view that Euripides intended to write a quite orthodox treatment of the story, but has only

## partially succeeded in reaching the sureness and brilliance of his later

compositions.[422]

The MEDEA (Μήδεια) was produced in 431 B.C. as the first play of a tetralogy containing also _Philoctetes_, _Dictys_, and the satyric play _The Harvesters_ (Θερισταί). Euripides obtained only the third prize, and even Sophocles was second to Euphorion, son of Æschylus. The scene represents the house of Medea at Corinth. She has come there with her two young sons, and her husband Jason, whom she helped to gain the Golden Fleece in Colchis. Jason has become estranged from Medea, owing to his projected marriage with Glauce, the daughter of King Creon. At this point the play opens. The aged nurse of Medea comes forth and, in one of the most celebrated speeches in Euripides, laments her mistress’ flight from Colchis and her subsequent troubles; she fears that Medea will seek revenge. The two boys return from play, attended by their old “pædagogus,” who informs his fellow-servant that King Creon intends to banish Medea and her children. The nurse sends them within. The chorus of Corinthian women enter and inquire after Medea, who comes from the house in the deepest distress. She speaks with deep feeling about the sorrows and restraints which society puts upon women,[423] and after a pathetic description of her own forlorn state, begs her visitors to aid by silence if she finds any means of revenge. They have just consented, when Creon appears and orders her to leave the land on the instant, with her children. When she expostulates, he explains that he fears her: she is well known as a magician; moreover, she has uttered threats against himself, his daughter, and Jason. Medea in vain seeks to escape her reputation for “wisdom”; in spite of her offer to live quietly in Corinth, Creon repeats his behest. By urgent pleading, she obtains from him one day’s grace. When the king has departed, Medea addresses the chorus with fierce triumph: she now has opportunity for revenge. After considering possible methods, she decides on poison. But first, what refuge is she to find when her plot has succeeded? she will wait a little, and if no chance of safe retirement shows itself, she will attack her foes sword in hand. The chorus, impressed by her spirit, declare that after all the centuries during which poets have covered women with infamy, now at last honour is coming to their sex. They lament the decay of truth and honour, as shown in Jason’s desertion. Jason enters, reproaching Medea for her folly in alienating the king, but offering help to lighten her banishment. Medea falls upon him in a terrible speech, relating all the benefits she has conferred and the crime she has committed in his cause. Jason replies that it was the Love-God which constrained her to help him, nor is he ungrateful. But she has her reward—a reputation among the Greeks for wisdom. He is contracting this new marriage to provide for his children; Medea’s complaints are due to short-sighted jealousy. After a bitter debate, in which Medea scornfully refuses his aid, he retires. The chorus sing the dread power of Love, and lament the wreck which it has made of Medea’s life. A stranger enters—Ægeus, King of Athens, who has been to Delphi for an oracle which shall remove his childlessness. Medea begs him to give her shelter in Athens whenever she comes thither from Corinth; in return for this, she will by her art remove his childlessness. He consents, and withdraws. Sure of her future, Medea now triumphantly expounds her plan. She will make a pretended reconciliation with Jason and beg that her children be allowed to remain. They are to seek Jason’s bride, bearing presents in order to win this favour. These gifts will be poisoned; the princess and all who touch her will perish. Then she will slay her children to complete the misery of Jason. The chorus in vain protest; she turns from them and despatches a slave to summon Jason. The choric ode which follows extols, in lines of amazing loveliness, the glory of Attica—its atmosphere of wisdom, poetry, and love. But how shall such a land harbour a murderess? Jason returns, and is greeted by Medea with a speech of contrition by which he is entirely deceived. She calls her children forth, and there is a pathetic scene which affects her, for all her guilty purpose, with genuine emotion. She puts her pretended plan before Jason, and watches the father depart with the two boys and their pædagogus carrying the presents. The ode which follows laments the fatal step that has now been taken. The pædagogus brings the boys back with news that their sentence of exile has been remitted, and that the princess has accepted the gifts. Medea addresses herself to the next task. Now that her plot against Glauce is in train, the children must die. The famous soliloquy which follows exhibits the sway alternately exerted over her by maternal love and the thirst for revenge; after a dreadful struggle she determines to obey her “passion” and embrace vengeance. The children are sent within. The next ode is a most painfully real and intimate revelation of a parent’s anxiety and sorrows. A messenger hurries up, crying to Medea that she must flee; Creon and his daughter are both dead. Medea greets his news with cool delight, braces herself for her last deed, and enters the house. The chorus utter a desperate prayer to the Sun-god to save his descendants; but at once the children’s cries are heard. Scarcely have they died away when Jason furiously enters, followed by henchmen. His chief thought is to save his children from the vengeance of Creon’s kinsmen. The chorus at once tell him they are dead, and how. In frenzy he flings himself upon the door. But he suddenly recoils as the voice of Medea, clear and contemptuous, descends from the air. She is seen on high, driving a magic chariot given to her by the Sun-god. There breaks out a frightful wounding altercation, Jason begging wildly to be allowed to see and to bury his children’s bodies, Medea sternly refusing; she will herself bury them beyond the borders of Corinth. She departs through the air, leaving Jason utterly broken.

The literary history of this play is extremely interesting, though obscure. First, is it later, or earlier, than the _Trachiniæ_? One general idea is common to the two tragedies; but the treatment is utterly dissimilar, and one may not unreasonably believe that Sophocles has sought to reprove Euripides, to paint his own conception of a noble wronged wife, and to show how a woman so placed should demean herself. Secondly, there is some reason[424] to believe that two editions of the _Medea_ where for a time in existence. Euripides almost certainly himself remodelled the work, presumably for a second “production,” but to what extent it is hard to say. Thirdly, and above all, there is the question of his originality. The longer Greek “argument” asserts that he appears to have borrowed the drama from Neophron and to have introduced alterations. This interesting problem has been discussed elsewhere.[425] Neophron’s play, if one is to judge by the style and versification of his brief fragments, should be regarded as written early in the second half of the fifth century.

The dramatic structure of the _Medea_ calls for the closest attention. In Sophocles we have observed how that collision of wills and emotions, which is always the soul of drama, arises from the confrontation of two persons. In the present drama that collision takes place in the bosom of a single person. Sophocles would probably have given us a Jason whose claim upon our sympathy was hardly less than that of Medea. Complication, with him, is to be found in his plots, not in his characters. But here we have a subject which has since proved so rich a mine of tragic and romantic interest—the study of a soul divided against itself. Medea’s wrongs, her passionate resentment, and her plans of revenge do not merely dominate the play, they _are_ the play from the first line to the close. Certain real or alleged structural defects should be noted. First, we observe the incredible part taken by the chorus; they raise not a finger to stay the designs of Medea upon the king and his daughter; and we are given no reason to suppose that they are unfriendly to the royal house. The episode of Ægeus, moreover, is puzzling. Though quite necessary in view of Medea’s helpless condition and prepared for by her remarks as to a “tower of refuge,”[426] it is quite unneeded by one who can command a magic flying chariot. Moreover, this chariot itself has been often censured, notably by Aristotle,[427] who regards it as to all intents and purposes a _deus ex machina_, and on this ground very properly objects to it.

Dr. Verrall’s[428] theory meets all these difficulties. He supposes that several of Euripides’ plays were originally written for private performance. The _Medea_, so acted, had no obtrusive chorus, and no miraculous escape of the murderess. To the episode of Ægeus corresponded a _finale_ in which Medea, by allowing her husband to bury the bodies of his children, and by instituting the religious rites referred to in our present text,[429] induced both Jason and the Corinthians to allow her safe passage to Athens. This view, or a view essentially resembling it, must be accepted, not so much because of the absurdity involved (as it appears to us) by the presence of the chorus, as the utter futility of the Ægeus-scene in the present state of the text.

The characterization shows Euripides at his best. In the heroine he gives us the first and possibly the finest of his marvellous studies in feminine human nature. Alcestis he viewed and described from without; Medea he has imagined from within. Her passionate love, which is so easily perverted by brutality into murderous hate, her pride, will-power, ferocity, and dæmonic energy, are all depicted with flawless mastery and sympathy. Desperate and cruel as this woman shows herself, she is no cold-blooded plotter. Creon has heard of her unguarded threats, and his knowledge wellnigh ruins her project. Her first words to Jason, “thou utter villain,” followed by a complete and appalling indictment of his cynicism[430] and ingratitude, are not calculated to lull suspicion. But however passionate, she owns a splendid intellect. She faces facts[431] and understands her weaknesses. When seeking an advantage, she can hold herself magnificently in hand. The pretended reconciliation with Jason is a scene of weird thrill for the spectators. Her archness in discussing his influence over the young princess is almost hideous; and while she weeps in his arms we remember with sick horror her scornful words after practising successfully the same arts on the king. Above all, there is here no petulant railing at “unjust gods,” or “blind fate”. Her undoing in the past has come from “trust in the words of a man that is a Greek”;[432] her present murderous rage springs from no _Até_ but from her own passion (θυμός). The dramatist has set himself to express human life in terms of humanity.

Jason is a superb study—a compound of brilliant manner, stupidity, and cynicism. If only his own desires, interests, and comforts are safe, he is prepared to confer all kinds of benefits. The kindly, breezy words which he addresses to his little sons must have made hundreds of excellent fathers in the audience feel for a moment a touch of personal baseness—“am I not something like this?” That is the moral of Jason and countless personages of Euripides: they are so detestable and yet so like ourselves. Jason indeed dupes himself as well as others. He really thinks he is kind and gentle, when he is only surrendering to an emotional atmosphere. His great weakness is the mere perfection of his own egotism; he has no power at all to realize another’s point of view. Throughout the play he simply refuses to believe that Medea feels his desertion as she asserts. For him her complaints are “empty words”.[433] To the very end his self-centred stupidity is almost pathetic: “didst thou _in truth_ determine on their death for the sake of wifely honour?”[434] One of the most deadly things in the play hangs on this blindness. Medea has just asked him, with whatever smile she can summon up, to induce “your wife” to procure pardon for the children. Jason, instead of destroying himself on the spot in self-contempt, replies courteously: “By all means; and I imagine that I shall persuade her, _if she is like the rest of women_”.[435] Considering all the circumstances, this is perhaps unsurpassed for shameless brutality. Medea, however, with a gleam in her eye which one may imagine, answers with equal urbanity, even with quiet raillery. She has perhaps no reason to complain; it is precisely this portentous insensibility which will secure her success.

The minor characters are, in their degree, excellently drawn—Creon above all. His short scene is unforgettable; it is that familiar sight—a weak man encouraging himself to firmness by exaggerating his own severity. His delicious little grumble, “my chivalrous instincts have got me into trouble more often than I like to think of,”[436] stamps him as the peer of Dogberry and Justice Shallow.

As a piece of Greek, the _Medea_ is perhaps the finest work of Euripides. The iambics have a simple brilliance and flexible ease which had been unknown hitherto, and which indeed were never rivalled afterwards. Such things as

σὺ γὰρ τί μ’ ἠδίκηκας; ἐξέδου κόρην ὅτῳ σε θυμὸς ἦγεν,[437]

in Medea’s appeal to Creon, or Jason’s rebuke to her:

πᾶν κέρδος ἡγοῦ ζημιουμένη φυγῇ,[438]

or the expression of her “melting mood”:

ἔτικτον αὐτούς· ζῆν δ’ ὅτ’ ἐξηύχου τέκνα, εἰσῆλθέ μ’ οἶκτος εἰ γενήσεται τάδε,[439]

are in their unobtrusive way masterpieces of language. But it is in vain to quote specimens; the whole work is as novel and as great in linguistic skill as in dramatic art. In particular the speeches of the nurse at the opening, of Medea when rebuking and again when conciliating Jason—above all, her fearful soliloquy and address to her children, touch the summit of dramatic eloquence. The lyric passages are on the whole less remarkable, but the mystic loveliness of the ode[440] celebrating the glories of Attica, and the anapæsts[441] which give so haunting an expression to a parent’s yearning over his children, are among the most precious things this tender as well as terrible poet has bequeathed to us.

The HERACLEIDÆ[442] (Ἡρακλεῖδαι) or _Children of Heracles_, is a short[443] play of uncertain date, usually referred to the early years of the Peloponnesian War (431-404) and by some to the date 422 B.C. Nothing is known as to the companion plays, or the success obtained by the tetralogy.

The scene is laid before the temple of Zeus at Marathon in Attica. The young sons of Heracles are discovered with the aged Iolaus, their father’s comrade, who explains how, after Heracles departed to Heaven, Eurystheus of Argos has hunted the hero’s family through Greece. They have taken refuge in Attica; Alcmena, mother of Heracles, and the daughters are now within the temple; Hyllus, the eldest son, has gone to seek another refuge in case Athens fails them. Copreus,[444] a herald from Argos, enters and is dragging the suppliants away when the chorus of aged Athenians enter. Copreus disregards their remonstrances, but is confronted by the king, Demophon, and his brother Acamas. He insists that the Heracleidæ are Argive subjects: let not Demophon risk war with Argos. Iolaus appeals for protection, and is granted it; Copreus retires with threats of instant war. After an ode of defiance by the chorus, Demophon returns with news that a noble virgin must be sacrificed to Persephone, and he will not slay an Athenian girl. Iolaus is in despair, when Macaria, one of Heracles’ daughters, comes forth and offers herself. After a proud but melancholy farewell she goes. A serf of Hyllus arrives, bringing, he says, good news. At this Iolaus joyfully summons Alcmena, who imagines that another herald is assaulting him; but he announces that Hyllus has returned with a large host of allies. Iolaus, despite the serf’s rueful gibes, insists on going to the fray and, dressed in ancient arms from the temple, totters off. The chorus proclaim the justice of their cause, invoking Zeus and Athena. The attendant returns with news of complete victory. Iolaus was taken into Hyllus’ chariot and being (by favour of Heracles and Hebe) miraculously restored for a while to his youthful vigour, captured Eurystheus. The chorus celebrate the glory of Athens and acclaim Heracles, who is now proved (despite report) to be dwelling in Heaven. Eurystheus is led in and Alcmena gloats over him, promising him death. The messenger intervenes: Athenians do not kill prisoners. She insists. Then Eurystheus breaks silence: it was Hera who forced him to these persecutions, and if he is now slain in cold blood, a curse will fall on the slayer. The chorus at length accept Alcmena’s evasion that he be killed and his corpse be given to his friends. Eurystheus presents Athens with an oracle which declares that his spirit shall be hostile to the Heracleidæ, when, forgetting this kindness, they invade Attica.[445] Alcmena bids her attendants convey Eurystheus within and destroy him. The chorus[446] briefly express satisfaction at being free from this guilt, and the play ends.

The _Heracleidæ_ is one of the least popular[447] among Euripides’ works. It has indeed unmistakable beauties. The heroic daughter of Heracles and her proud insistence on no rivalry in her sacrifice have always moved admiration. The Greek style, moreover, though not equal to that of the _Medea_, has all the Euripidean limpidity and ease. Such lines as

τίς δ’ εἶ σύ; ποῦ σοι συντυχὼν ἀμνημονῶ;[448]

in Iolaus’ conversations with Hyllus’ thrall, and the lyric phrase

ἁ δ’ ἀρετὰ βαίνει διὰ μόχθων[449]

haunt the ear. Moreover, the chivalry with which Demophon and his citizens champion the helpless must have stirred Athenian hearts. But our pleasure is repeatedly checked by incidents grotesque, horrible, or inexplicable. To the first category belongs the absurd scene in which Iolaus totters away amid badinage to do battle with Argos. There is a comic note, again, in the scene where Alcmena for the first time appears and supposes that Hyllus’ messenger is another hostile herald from Argos. As we know who he is, her attack on him shows that painful mixture of the pathetic and the ludicrous which so often marks Euripides’ work; here the comic prevails over the touching. Secondly, the interview in which Eurystheus is presented to Alcmena, who gloats at her ease over him, is horrible, however natural. And finally the inexplicable or at least puzzling features are perhaps the most striking of all.

The first difficulty concerns the personality which forms the background of the whole; the apotheosis of Heracles is treated in equivocal fashion throughout. Iolaus[450] alone seems entirely convinced. Alcmena, after news of the victory to which her son has given miraculous aid, utters the candid words:—[451]

After long years, O Zeus, my woes have touched thee, Yet take my thanks for all that hath been wrought. My son—though erstwhile I refused belief— I know in truth doth dwell amid the gods.

And her faith is echoed in less prosaic language[452] by the chorus, who proclaim the falsehood of the story that Heracles after his passing by fire went down to the abode of Hades; in truth he dwells in Heaven and in the golden court lives as the spouse of Hebe. But these confessions are due to the marvels on the battle-field, marvels upon which the narrator himself takes pains to throw grave doubt.[453] Macaria, though she has every reason[454] to dilate on the glories of her father, speaks of him but briefly and with only the normal filial respect.[455] Of the others, Copreus ignores him; from the man’s character we expect sneers and refutations of the miraculous stories such as are put by our poet in the mouth of Lycus.[456] Eurystheus speaks of him generously, but in terms which imply that he has never heard, much less accepted, the marvellous accounts of his enemy: “I knew thy son was no mere cypher, but in good sooth a man; for even though he was mine enemy, yet will I speak well of him, that man of worth”.[457] Demophon himself, the champion of Heracles’ children, even when he has been reminded (by Iolaus) how the hero rescued Theseus, father of Demophon, from Hades itself, in his reply treats this overwhelming claim ambiguously and with nothing more than politeness.[458] All this seems to show the dramatist’s belief that Heracles was simply a “noble man”—an ἐσθλὸς ἀνήρ—whose divine traits are the offspring of minds like those of Iolaus and Alcmena, whose sagacity throughout the drama is painfully low.

Macaria’s fate, also, at first sight causes perplexity. After she leaves the scene, nothing[459] more is heard of her. When and where she dies we are not told; the promise[460] of Iolaus that she shall be honoured by him in death, as in life, above all women, produces no effect—for we are told nothing about her burial; whether the advent of Hyllus’ reinforcements should or does make any difference to the necessity for the sacrifice is not discussed. But there is good reason to suppose that a whole episode, on Macaria’s death, has been lost.

The army of Hyllus is the most astonishing feature in the play. All the

## action and all the pathos depend upon the helplessness which involves

the Heracleidæ. Every other city has rejected them; if Athens fails all is lost—so we are told repeatedly.[461] Yet at the last moment Hyllus returns with a positive army. Whence has it come? How can Iolaus have been ignorant that such aid was possible? We are told nothing. The Athenian leaders apparently, Iolaus and Alcmena[462] certainly, receive these incredible tidings with no feeling save placid satisfaction.

Finally, if this drama is composed in order to extol the nobility of Athens in espousing the cause of the weak, it is extraordinary that so dubious an example should be selected. The suppliants are ancestors of those very Spartans who, when the drama was produced, were the bitter and dangerous enemies of Athens. Was not her ancient kindness in saving the first generation of these foes a piece of folly? Eurystheus points this moral at the close.[463] Alcmena herself, in her cold ferocity[464] and her quibbling[465] over the dues of piety, is a clear prophecy of what fifth-century Athenians most detested in the Spartan character. Moreover, the plea of Copreus is perfectly just: Argos has a right to punish her own people if condemned; whether they were wrongly so condemned is no concern of Athens.

The upshot seems to be that Eurystheus has a bitter quarrel with a powerful noble, so bitter that when his enemy dies the king dares not leave his children at large. Through the sentimental weakness of her ruler Athens is drawn into the dispute, and history shows that she made a frightful mistake.

The HIPPOLYTUS[466] (Ἱππόλυτος Στεφανίας[467] or Στεφανηφόρος) was produced in 428 B.C. and obtained the first prize. The scene is laid in Trœzen before a house belonging to Theseus, King of Athens. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, speaks the prologue, explaining how Hippolytus, son of Theseus, scorns her and consorts always with Artemis, the virgin huntress-deity. Aphrodite therefore has caused Phædra, the wife of Theseus, to fall in love with her stepson. The king in his wrath shall bring about the death of his son. The prince enters followed by his huntsmen, and turning to the statue of Artemis with a beautiful prayer places garlands upon it, but disregards the image of Aphrodite. After the hunters have entered the palace, the chorus of Trœzenian women come to inquire after the ailing Phædra. She is borne forth, attended by her nurse, who seeks to calm the feverishness of her mistress and her passionate longing for the wild regions of the chase. She gradually learns that the queen is consumed by passion for Hippolytus. Phædra, now quite calm, describes her fight with temptation; when she saw that victory was impossible she chose death, and for this reason has refused food. The nurse offers very different counsel. Why should Phædra strive against her instincts? Even the gods have erred through love; she will cure her mistress. The remedy, she soon hints, is nothing but surrender. At this Phædra is so indignant that the other again takes refuge in ambiguity; she retires to fetch certain charms. The ode which follows proclaims the irresistible sway of love. The queen, in the meantime, has been standing near the palace-door and now recoils in horror—she has heard Hippolytus reviling the nurse; nothing, she cries, is now left to her but speedy death. Hippolytus enters in fury, followed by the nurse. After an altercation in which he threatens to break his oath of secrecy, he breaks forth into a lengthy and bitter tirade against women, but finally promises to keep his oath. When the prince has retired Phædra proclaims her resolve to avoid shame for her family and herself by death, obtaining from the chorus a promise not to divulge what has occurred; at the same time she obscurely threatens Hippolytus. After she has gone, the chorus voice their yearning to be free from this world of sin and woe; surely this trouble is a curse brought by Phædra from her house in Crete, a curse which is even now forcing her neck into the noose. A messenger rushes forth crying out that the queen has hanged herself. Theseus returns home and is speedily apprised of his loss. Suddenly he sees a letter clutched in his dead wife’s hand; on reading it he announces in fury that Hippolytus has violated his connubial rights. He appeals to his father Poseidon, god of the sea, who has promised to grant him any three prayers, to destroy Hippolytus. The prince returns, and Theseus, after a stinging attack on his son’s pretensions, banishes him. Hippolytus is prevented by his oath from defending himself effectually, and sorrowfully turns away. The chorus ponder upon the mysterious ways of Heaven and lament the downfall of the brilliant prince. One of Hippolytus’ attendants returns and informs Theseus that his son is on the point of death. A gigantic bull, sent by Poseidon out of the sea, terrified Hippolytus’ horses, which bolted and mangled their master. Theseus receives these tidings with grim satisfaction, but the goddess Artemis appears and reveals all the facts. Theseus is utterly prostrated. Hippolytus is carried in, lamenting his agony and unmerited fate. Artemis converses with him affectionately and there follows between the two men a few words lamenting the curse fulfilled by Poseidon. Artemis consoles her favourite and disappears. Hippolytus gives his father full forgiveness, and dies in his embrace.

The main impression left by a repeated study of this magnificent drama is a sense of the loveliness and delight which the transfusing genius of a poet can throw around the ruin worked by blind instinct and hate, even around a whole world tortured by belief in gods whose supreme intelligence, will, and power, are quick to punish, but never pardon. No poem in the world conveys more pungently the aroma of life’s inextinguishable beauty and preciousness. Life does not become ugly because full of sin or pain. It can only become ugly by growing unintelligible. So long as it can be understood, it remains to man, whose joys are all founded upon perception, a thing that can be loved; this is the one and sufficient reason why tragic drama is beautiful.

For the writer of the _Hippolytus_, then, life is something profoundly sorrowful yet profoundly dear. Hippolytus’ address to Artemis on his return from the chase is compact of that mystic loveliness which fills remote glades with a visible presentment of the beauty of holiness:—

For thee, my Queen, this garland have I twined Of blossoms from that meadow virginal, Where neither shepherd dares to graze his flock, Nor hath the scythe made entry: yet the bee Doth haunt the mead, that voyager of spring, ’Mid Nature’s shyest charm of stream and verdure. There may no base man enter; only he, Who, taught by instinct, uninstructed else, Hath taken Virtue for his star of life, May pluck the flow’rets of that pleasance pure. Come, Queen belovèd, for thy shining hair Accept this wreath from hands of innocence! To me alone of all mankind is given Converse to hold and company with thee, Hearing thy voice, although thy face be hid. To the end of life, as now, may I be thine![468]

This passion for natural beauty as the background of emotional life recurs throughout. The Trœzenian women as they enter tell of their informant—not “some one talking near the place where men play draughts,” as in the _Medea_, but a woman in a picture:—

Where waters leap, Waters that flow (men say) from the far-off western sea, Down the rock-face, And gush from the steep To a deep place Where pitchers may dip far down—thence hath come a message to me.[469]

Phædra in her delirium sees visions of unfettered life “beneath the poplars, amid the deep grass,” she fancies herself cheering on the hunting hounds through the pine-glades, and yearns to feel in her grasp “the iron-pointed shaft”—words to which we come back with deeper pain when in almost the same language Hippolytus, now himself delirious, longs to let out his tortured life with a “two-edged spear”.[470] When she enters the house to seek death, the chorus pour forth their yearning for escape from the sin and sorrow of this life to romantic regions where all is grace and unstained peace:—[471]

In yon precipice-face might I hide me from sorrow, And God, in his love, of the air make me free! Ah, to speed with the sea-gulls—alight on the morrow Where Eridanus mingles his waves with the sea! There for ever the sisters of Phaethon languish, For grief of his fate bowing hush’d o’er the stream; Like eyes in the gloaming, the tears of their anguish Up through the dark water as amber-drops gleam. Or far let me wing to the fäery beaches Where the Maids of the Sunset ’neath apple-boughs dance, And the Lord of the Waters his last purple reaches Hath closed to the mariner’s restless advance; Where from Atlas the sky arches down to the streaming Of the sea, and the spring of Eternity flows Where the mansion of Zeus on earth’s bosom is dreaming ’Mid life like a lily and bliss like a rose.

Theseus himself expresses this sense of the fragile beauty of life in lines[472] which recall the unearthly charm of Sophocles:—

ὄρνις γὰρ ὥς τις ἐκ χερῶν ἄφαντος εἶ, πήδημ’ ἐς Αἵδου κραιπνὸν ὁρμήσασά μοι.

Even Artemis the unloving can tell of life’s charm surviving death itself in some wise, an immortality of beautiful remembrance.[473] Throughout, the poet has used all his power to invest the theme with loveliness of phrasing. Elsewhere, skilful as his writing is, he often gives us what is practically prose; the _Hippolytus_ is his nearest approach to the manner of Sophocles.

Nor is the likeness confined to verbal expression. The theology is, or claims to be, the theology of Sophocles. The traditional Olympians are accepted as persons, with the powers and purposes which current belief attributed to them. This is the view which Sophocles accepts and expounds. Euripides who certainly did not accept it, here expounds it—in his own way and with deadly results. Many times Euripides questions the very existence of these deities, but now he sees fit to accept them for a moment, and depicts life as lived under such rulers. Men and women can feel and recreate the beauty of this world, but these gods time and again dash all into pitiful fragments. “The world is ruled by stupid fiends, who spend eternity thwarting one another. Do we dwell in a universe or a grinning chaos?”

Is this all? Very far from it. Almost all the action of the tragedy could be accounted for—had we not this disconcerting divine explanation—on purely “human” lines, though what “human” means is, as the poet plainly perceives, no less difficult a question than that of theology. But at least the sorrows of Trœzen scarcely need the baneful _persons_ of Olympus. For the three sufferers are, after all, not blameless. They share that casual sinfulness—for we cannot avoid the use of question-begging words—which is the lot of man. Hippolytus errs (in Greek eyes) by his complete aversion from sexual passion; he errs in all eyes by the arrogance with which he proclaims it. His famous speech[474] is too long for a spontaneous burst of resentment; it becomes a frigid piece of self-glorification. It is precisely this arrogance which stings Phædra to the thought of revenge.[475] Theseus, in spite of the pathetic blindness with which he imputes[476] his misery to some ancestor’s sin, is the original cause of it. Hippolytus is the offspring of his youthful incontinence.[477] Then, when he has “settled down,” it is precisely his respectable marriage which brings the consequence of his early amour to fruition; his son and his young wife are of nearly the same age. As for Phædra herself, the passion which she feels need not be attributed to a personal goddess. Lawlessness is in her veins; her mother and sister have both sinned:[478] Crete, “the Isle of Awful Love,”[479] brands its name upon line after line of the play. For this predisposition to unchastity many of Euripides’ contemporaries, as of our own, would have blamed her heartily. The poet himself does not, as his splendidly sympathetic treatment of her shows; but neither does he feel any need to lay the blame upon Aphrodite. Phædra’s offence, her contribution to disaster, lies in her early toying with her passion, when she founded a shrine of the love-goddess in Hippolytus’ name;[480] in her accompanying Theseus (apparently without a struggle) to Trœzen and the society of the prince; in her determination to punish Hippolytus for his bitter pride.

To banish “the gods” and attribute sin to “heredity,” is that not merely to substitute one word for another? Yes, but the poet herein has his eye fixed on formal theology. Well aware that the glib invocation of “heredity” or “environment” is no more conclusive than “the will of the gods,” he yet insists that sin is a matter of psychology. We must study human nature if we mean to understand and conquer sin. If we regard Aphrodite or Artemis as _persons_ external to ourselves and of superhuman power we lose all hope of moral improvement in our own hearts. But if we accept these devastating powers as forces in human nature, we may hope by study and self-discipline in some degree to control them.

Thus the drama is full of subtly wise psychology: it is an interesting comment on much that has been written about “realist” play-writing that the _Hippolytus_, which contains some of the most romantic poetry in Greek literature, is also as sincere and profound in characterization as the work of Ibsen himself. Theseus and his son we have already considered; Phædra and her nurse require deeper study. The latter is a masterpiece among the “minor” characters of Euripides. Her tenderness for the young queen and passionate desire at all costs to win her peace; the dignity which life and its contemplation can give even to coarse-fibred[481] natures; her feeling for the deepest pathos of life—these things constitute a great dramatic figure. It is to her that the poet gives his most poignant expression of that mingled pain and beauty which we discussed a moment ago:—

But if any far-off state there be, Dearer than life to mortality; The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof, And mist is under and mist above, And so we are sick for life and cling On earth to this nameless and shining thing. For other life is a fountain sealed, And the deeps below us are unrevealed, And we drift on legends for ever![482]

She, too, it is who in words[483] of almost equal beauty urges Phædra to yield to her passion:—

Thy love—why marvel thereat? ’Tis the tale Of many. Wouldst thou lose thy life for love? Good sooth! A guerdon strange, if lovers now And evermore must meet such penalty! Who shall withstand the Cyprian’s rising flood? Yield to her spell: she comes in gentleness; Make high thy pride and stand on niceties, She flings thee pell-mell into ignominy. Amid the sky she walks, amid the surge Of the sea-billows. All things live from her. The seed is hers and hers the yearning throe Whence spring we all that tread the ways of earth Ask them that con the half-forgotten seers Of elder time, and serve the Muse themselves. They knew how Zeus once pined for Semele, How for love’s sake the Goddess of the Dawn Stooped from her radiant sphere to Cephalus And stole him to the sky. Yet these abide In Heaven, nor shun the converse of the gods, Bowing, belike, to conquering circumstance. And wilt not _thou_? Nay, if this law thou spurnest, Thy sire, when he begat thee, should have writ Some compact countersigned by gods unknown!

The nurse makes moral weakness into a very religion,[484] and Phædra’s heart, one would suppose, is finally broken when, to this appeal that the gods themselves are against her, is added proof that man is utterly unable to understand. “If thy life had not been in such danger,” says the nurse, “and thou hadst _happened to be a chaste woman_, I should not thus lead thee on,”[485] and again: “_Thy duty, to be sure, forbids sin; but, as things are_, be advised by me”.[486] This hideous purring is perhaps Phædra’s bitterest shame. No one can understand, except the prince who seems so utterly remote. Hippolytus, after her death, can say[487]

Unchaste in passion, chaste in soul was she; Me hath my passionless purity dishonoured.

What does Phædra herself say? Is there any reply to the dreadful eloquence of her old attendant? There is only one reply conceivable, and she offers it: “Whatever gods may do, or men think, I must so act as to be able to respect myself”.[488] Euripides insists that the centre of ethics lies in man himself. For Phædra there is no soul on which she can rely but her own; the conflict must be fought out within herself. The great speech[489] in which she tells her spiritual history to the chorus without any reserve or faltering, is the kernel of the tragedy. We realize how empty of all comfort life can be for those who resolutely reject outworn creeds and turn to seek for a better. Here is no thought, no hint, of a saviour; the puny soul must struggle alone with an uncomprehended universe. Æschylus had found a saviour in Zeus;[490] Euripides can see no comfort in gods who are less virtuous than men. In this speech, too, we note for the first time a portrayal of moral temptation and a clear conception of conscience. Sophocles understands well how duty can brace the soul to heroic life or death, but for him the sanction of duty lies in the will of external deities. For Euripides conscience is sufficient as a rule of conduct.

Phædra is a masterpiece of characterization. Whatever we are to guess of the earlier[491] picture, she is here a noble and spirited woman, who cannot help her instincts but who can and will dispute their power over her life. She is, of course, not perfect—if she were she would be no fit subject for drama—and the manner in which Euripides has caused the action to hinge precisely upon her weaknesses, without lessening our respect and affection, is one of the most improving studies provided by dramatic art. The little crevices of circumstance by which wrong-doing—the destruction of Hippolytus—creeps into her soul are beautifully indicated. She is wasted by fasting,[492] a state conducive to keener perception and weaker will. She has been brought—without any attempt on her part, so surely she may indulge in the disastrous joy[493]—from Athens to the little town where the prince lives. Her husband, as it chances,[494] is from home and her life is left empty for “long, long thoughts”.[495] When she dwells upon her passion the recollection of her mother’s and her sister’s fate half attracts while it half repels.[496] Her passionate nature insists on revealing some part of her distress to the keen eyes of the nurse, who forthwith joins the claims of old affection[497] to this new secret pain. So it is that she is half-conquered by what she will not do:—

Nay, in God’s name, forbear! Thy words are vile But wise withal. Love in my soul too well Hath mined his way. Urge sin thus winningly And passion sweeps my fears into the gulf.[498]

But the nurse will not forbear, and the comforting promise of a charm which shall “still this disease,”[499] as Phædra perhaps half-suspects,[500] is an undertaking to win Hippolytus. The dread strain of illness, passion, and shame have turned the woman for a moment into a nervous child.[501] Thus it comes about that without disgrace, without forfeiture of her conscience, Phædra moves towards the dread moment[502] at which she hears the outcry of Hippolytus. Then after all the anguish, she listens to his intolerable endless speech! Such is the situation in which murder is conceived. In this way Hippolytus’ σωφροσύνη has certainly been his undoing.[503]

We are told[504] that this play is a second version of the theme, and that it was called _The Crowned Hippolytus_ (from the lovely address to Artemis) to distinguish it from the first, called _The Veiled Hippolytus_. This version (now lost) is said to have contained “improprieties” which the poet afterwards removed. This refers to the attitude of Phædra, who showed less reserve in her passion than in the later play. She invoked the moon-goddess, perhaps to aid her in winning Hippolytus, and boldly pointed to the infidelities of Theseus as an excuse for her own passion.[505] The reproaches[506] which Aristophanes lays upon Phædra refer perhaps only to this earlier version, but his most famous gibe[507] is upon a line[508] of our text,

ἡ γλῶσσ’ ὀμώμοχ’, ἡ δὲ φρὴν ἀνώμοτος,

“My tongue hath sworn; my soul abides unsworn.” This seems to give us the measure of the comic poet’s criticism; he blames Euripides for this sentiment, and yet Hippolytus even in his most desperate trouble will not clear himself by breaking his oath. One cannot, however, refrain from pointing out that even if he had broken it, Theseus would not have believed him,[509] and that Hippolytus realizes this.[510]

The HECUBA (Ἑκάβη) is the next play in order of date; it was performed about 425 B.C.[511] This tragedy was enormously popular throughout antiquity, as the great volume of the scholia proves. It was one of the three plays—the others were _Phœnissæ_ and _Orestes_—used as an Euripidean reading-book in the Byzantine schools.

The scene is laid in Thrace, where the Greeks are encamped after the fall of Troy; the background is a tent wherein captive Trojan women are quartered. The ghost of Polydorus, Priam’s youngest son, tells how he has been murdered by the Thracian king, Polymestor; he has appeared in a dream to his mother Hecuba. On his departure, Hecuba enters, and soon learns that her daughter Polyxena is to be sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. Odysseus comes to fetch the maiden, who welcomes death as a relief from slavery. Soon Talthybius enters, summoning Hecuba to bury Polyxena, whose noble death has filled the Greeks with admiration. Hecuba sends a woman to fetch sea-water for the obsequies, and this messenger returns with the body of Polydorus. Hecuba exclaims that the murderer is Polymestor: her dream has told her. Agamemnon enters, and she induces him to connive at her taking vengeance upon the Thracian, his ally. Next she sends for Polymestor and his children, and (after a beautiful ode on the last hours of Troy), they arrive. Polymestor is induced to go with his little sons within the tent, where they are slaughtered and he himself blinded. His cries bring back Agamemnon, who rejects the pleas of Polymestor. The Thracian, in his despair, prophesies the strange end both of Agamemnon and of Hecuba. He is dragged away, and the drama ends with preparations for the voyage to Greece.

This tragedy, let it be said plainly, is on the whole poor and uninteresting.[512] It has been frequently noted, for example, that the plot is “episodic,” that it falls into two divisions, the story of Polyxena and the vengeance upon Polymestor, which are really two small dramas with no genuine connexion. To this it has been replied that the spiritual history of Hecuba supplies unity to the whole; that these episodes bring out her development from a victim into a fiend.[513] But this is scarcely satisfactory. For the two parts are developed so completely along their several lines, they have so little dependence upon one another, that they could stand apart; and that is the real test. Further, the poet himself is uneasy. He is anxious to make some sort of connexion, but it is curiously adventitious. His device, that the corpse of Polydorus is discovered by the woman sent for water wherewith to bathe the body of Polyxena, has won too high praise. An attempt to strengthen it, or rather to draw attention to its neatness, is supplied in the conversation between Hecuba and Agamemnon:[514] “How did he die?” “By the hands of his Thracian host.” ... “Who brought his body hither?” ... “This woman. She found it upon the sea-shore.” “_Was she looking for it, or busied with some other task?_” The last question is absurd; Agamemnon has no reason to ask it. Other little hooks,[515] less obtrusive than this, are provided here and there to connect the two parts. If the play were an unity they would not be needed.

Again, the favourite charge against Euripides, that he delights in quasi-judicial disputes, is brought in here also. The accusation is generally unfair. Critics have been so eager to condemn this poet that they forget the trial scene of the _Eumenides_, the altercation between Œdipus and Creon in the _Œdipus at Colonus_ and various other passages in the earlier tragedians. If a dispute occurs at all, it is in accordance with the genius of Greek tragedy to set it out in formally opposed speeches. One might as well complain of Hamlet’s soliloquies. But in the _Hecuba_ there is more than this. The queen has a gusto not merely for eloquent appeals or invective, but for self-conscious rhetoric, “Filled with lament, not destitute of tears,”[516] is abominable. One is not surprised to learn that the queen is interested in professional teachers of rhetoric,[517] and one remembers that Gorgias, the greatest of them, paid his first visit to Athens a year or two[518] before this play was produced.

The whole piece in its tone and method is far below the best of Euripides’ work. Certain things are undoubtedly excellent—the famous chorus[519] already mentioned, and above all the speech[520] of Polyxena and the narrative of her death.[521] The whole work has not enough calibre. The pathos has no subtlety; the characterization is machine-made; the style, though clear and even elegant—one must allow that the first speech[522] of Polymestor, as a piece of conversational Greek, is unobtrusively perfect—has remarkably few of those feats[523] of idiom which delight us elsewhere.

Polyxena is charming, but a slight sketch only compared with the Medea and the Phædra who have preceded her. Agamemnon the cautious prince, Odysseus the opportunist, Polymestor the brutally wicked barbarian, are characters whom dozens of Euripides’ contemporaries could have produced with ease. Talthybius the herald, still more shadowy, claims remembrance by his naïve conceit.[524] Hecuba herself is hardly better. True, the poet has shown admirably how she progresses from weakness to frightful strength under the pressure of injustice, but without any very sympathetic psychology we fall short of genuine tragedy and touch only melodrama. And she is more than a little grotesque. Her strange passion for rhetorical studies we have already noted. She has, moreover, a taste for inopportune theorizing,[525] even concerning theology.[526] Her griefs themselves command our respect, and she can in one or two flashes of inspiration speak of them in language[527] not unworthy of Shakespeare himself; but there is too much repetition of merely melancholy adjectives, and though there should be only one emotion in us towards a woman who has lost all her children, we can hardly retain it when she reminds us that they were fifty in number.[528]

The apparition of the murdered Polydorus is an interesting element in the action. First, we view the early part of the drama with greater sympathy for the queen, knowing as we do the new horror which awaits her. Secondly, it is necessary that Hecuba should know how Polydorus died. Though but vaguely affected by the vision at first,[529] when parts of it are fulfilled, she remembers and believes definitely in the rest, and knows that Polymestor is the murderer.[530]

The ANDROMACHE (Ἀνδρομάχη) is perhaps the next[531] extant play in the order of time. It was not originally brought out at Athens.[532]

The action takes place before the house of Neoptolemus, prince of Phthia in Thessaly; at one side of the orchestra is the shrine of Thetis. Andromache delivers the prologue. After the fall of Troy she became the prize of Neoptolemus to whom she has borne a son, Molottus. Later the prince married Hermione, daughter of the Spartan king Menelaus. Andromache has hidden the child and herself taken sanctuary in the shrine of Thetis; the boy’s father is from home, having gone to Delphi to ask Apollo’s pardon for demanding reparation for Achilles’ death. Andromache now sends a fellow-slave to ask the aid of Peleus, king of Phthia and her master’s grandfather. Soon she is joined by the chorus, a company of Phthian women who sympathize but urge submission. Hermione enters, and after a spiteful altercation, in which she tries in vain to make the captive leave her sanctuary, departs with threats. Menelaus enters, leading Molottus; he offers Andromache her choice: will she submit to death, or see the boy slain? Andromache gives herself up, whereupon Menelaus announces that, while she must die, Molottus lies at the mercy of Hermione. By this treachery Andromache is goaded into the most bitter invective to be found in Euripides. The chorus dwell upon the folly of domestic irregularities such as those of Neoptolemus. Next Menelaus leads forth Andromache and Molottus for death, when Peleus hurries in and releases them. After a violent quarrel Menelaus throws up his daughter’s cause and departs. Peleus leads the captives away while the chorus sing his youthful exploits. From the palace comes Hermione’s nurse: deserted by her father and dreading her husband’s vengeance the princess is seeking to destroy herself. Next moment Hermione rushes out in distraction and the nurse is attempting to calm her when Orestes enters, explaining that he has called to inquire after his cousin Hermione. She begs him to take her away to Menelaus before her husband returns. Orestes agrees, reminding her that she has in the past been betrothed to him; now Neoptolemus shall pay for his insults by death at Delphi. After their departure the chorus sing of the gods who built but abandoned Troy, and of Orestes’ vengeance upon Clytæmnestra. Peleus returns, having heard of Hermione’s flight. In a moment arrives a messenger who tells how Neoptolemus has been murdered by Delphians at the instigation of Orestes. The body is borne in, and Peleus laments over it until interrupted by the goddess Thetis, his bride of long ago. She comforts him with a promise of immortality. Andromache is to marry Helenus, king of Molossia,[533] and her son is to be ancestor of a dynasty in that land.

Certain remarkable difficulties in the plot must be faced.

First is the breakdown of Menelaus in the presence of Peleus. The first half of the play has exhibited his unswerving resolve to destroy Andromache and her child. Every conceivable argument save one has been addressed to him in vain. That one argument is physical compulsion, and Peleus certainly does not offer it.[534] After a storm of mutual abuse the Spartan withdraws from the whole situation, muttering an excuse which is scarcely meant to be taken seriously: he is in a hurry to chastise an unfriendly state.[535] He goes just far enough to embitter his enemies to the utmost and not far enough to redeem his threats; and he retires without a word to his daughter after committing her to a deeply dangerous project. Menelaus has faults, but crass stupidity is not one of them; on the contrary he is reviled as the type of base cunning. Why, then, does he act with such utter futility at a crisis which anyone could have foreseen?

In the second place, when was Neoptolemus murdered? Orestes declares that the prince will be slain at Delphi, and at once departs with Hermione. After a choric song Peleus comes back, and almost at once receives the news of his grandson’s death. When Orestes utters his prophecy the messenger from Delphi can hardly be more than a mile from the house. Has he already committed the murder as a prelude to an innocent and irrelevant pilgrimage to Dodona? And, if so, why does he reveal, or rather not reveal, the fact? And why has he risked himself in Phthia when the news of his crime may at any moment be revealed?[536]

Thirdly, there is a grave difficulty in the structure, independent of Menelaus’ conduct and the dating of Orestes’ crime. The play seems to fall into two halves with but a slight connexion—the plight of Andromache and the woes of Neoptolemus’ house.

The late Dr. Verrall’s theory[537] of the play explains all these things together. Menelaus has come to see that it is to his interest that his daughter should be the wife of the Argive rather than of the Phthiote prince. He and Orestes therefore concoct a plan to this end. Two things must be achieved: Neoptolemus must be removed, and Hermione, passionately as she loves her lord, must be induced to accept his assassin. The cunning of Menelaus fastens upon the failings of his son-in-law as the path to success. First, he has offended the Delphians, and thus Orestes finds it easy to compass his death. Second, he has caused bitterness in his own house by his connexion with Andromache. Menelaus, while Orestes is at Delphi, urges Hermione into action which her jealousy approves but which her intellect (when it is allowed to speak) must and does condemn. The Spartan has no intention of killing the captives, but he sees to it that Hermione is, in the eyes of Peleus and his subjects, irretrievably committed to such an intention, which will beyond doubt incense Neoptolemus most bitterly—or would, were he still alive as Hermione supposes. Then, when she has committed herself, he calmly bows to the outburst of Peleus and leaves her ready to snatch at any hope in her hysterical despair. At this moment, carefully awaited by the plotters, Orestes appears. He has already murdered Neoptolemus, and is now ready to take Hermione away. But this is not enough. She must appear to come by her own suggestion, and it must appear that she has known at the moment of her elopement what has happened at Delphi. As she hurries from the scene he utters, apparently in consolation of her (though really she is out of hearing), so that it may lodge in the minds of the chorus, a prophecy of Neoptolemus’ fate. Later, she is to be reminded by her father and her new suitor how completely she is involved in suspicion of complicity. Thus she will be thrown into the arms of Orestes, and whatever blame there is will be laid upon Delphi.[538]

This view should in its essentials be adopted. Every dramatist commits faults; but these apparent faults in the _Andromache_ prove too much. They tend to show not that Euripides is here inferior in construction and psychology to Sophocles, but that he is insane. Few readers could compose a speech like that of Andromache beginning ὦ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποισιν ἔχθιστοι βροτῶν, or like the messenger’s narrative. But we could all manage the exit of Menelaus better. There is one great general objection to Verrall’s theory. Is it not much too subtle? If readers have always missed the point, would not spectators do so even more certainly? Verrall, in answer, points to a passage in the Greek _Argument_: τὸ δὲ δρᾶμα τῶν δευτέρων, which he takes to mean “this play is one of the sequels”.[539] He believes that the audience had a sufficient knowledge of the earlier part of the story to follow the _Andromache_ with no perplexity. Whether this knowledge was given by an earlier play of Euripides is not of course certain, but may be regarded as likely.

We next note a feature of equal importance—the atmosphere. Every reader observes strange anachronisms of sentiment and allusion—Hermione’s outburst[540] against women who destroy the confidence between husband and wife, Peleus’ comments on Lacedæmonian society,[541] and the like, which have no relevance to the “Homeric age” of the Trojan war. But the whole tone of the play is unheroic; even if these special features were removed it would remain quite unlike a Sophoclean drama. Euripides has, in fact, written a play about his own generation with a definite purpose. He takes stories from myths as the foundation of his plays, but his interest is in his own time. In spite of “thy mother Helen” and “the hapless town of the Phrygians,” his work concerns essentially fifth-century Athenians. Hence the almost complete absence of poetic colour, which is only found in the conventional lyrics and the goddess of the epilogue, who is no more in tune with the rest of the piece than a fairy-queen would be at the close of _A Doll’s House_. His chief concern is the danger to family life involved in the practice of slave-holding. Neoptolemus loses his life, and Hermione consents to the wreck of her own happiness, simply because of Andromache’s position in the home. She is the fulcrum which the astute villains employ; without her Hermione would never have been manageable.

In harmony with this realistic spirit is the character-drawing. None of the personages is of heroic stature, but all are amazingly real, however disagreeable. The two conspirators, Menelaus and Orestes, of course, do not reveal their natures plainly. The latter, as far as this incident alone is concerned, might strike one as almost featureless; but there cling to him significant little fragments from the earlier history of Hermione. A sinister faithfulness actuates him. In spite of his repulse he has not forgotten his affection for Hermione, not even her last words of renunciation.[542] Nor has he ceased to brood on the insults of Neoptolemus—perhaps nothing in the play is more effective than the gloomy triumph with which he flings back the hated word: “and the matricide shall teach thee”.... Menelaus, as a study in successful villainy combined with the domestic virtues, is quite perfect in his kind; _ces pères de famille sont capables de tout_. But it is upon the three victims, Hermione, Andromache, and Peleus, that the poet has lavished his skill most notably. Each has precisely the virtues and the failings which are fit to make them answer with the precision of machinery to each string pulled by the Spartan diplomatist. Peleus may be relied upon to provide Menelaus with an excuse for retiring when he wishes, and to utter wild language which can be used to prove that he is responsible for Hermione’s flight.[543] Andromache, earning and receiving our pity for her past woes and her present anguish, yet alienates us by her arrogance and a certain metallic brutality in repartee and invective which again are invaluable to the men whose puppet she is. That she should not cower before Hermione or her father is natural, but that is not the point; her trampling tactlessness[544] is a positive disease. She is indeed (except in her love for Molottus) as callous as Menelaus. This is a point of absolutely fundamental import. That interview early in the play, which might have been priceless to both women, ends only in the hopeless embitterment of Hermione. The latter is the best-drawn character of all. Swayed by strong primitive impulses, jealousy and fear, without any balance of mind or emotion, curiously liable to accept the domination of a stronger personality, she is fatally suited to the machinations of her father. When she first appears, it is fairly plain that she has come to suggest a compromise to Andromache.[545] What she wishes is not blood, but servility. Spiteful and vulgar, she cannot forgive the captive for the effortless dignity which she has inherited from Trojan kings. Hers is no vision of a murdered rival: how petty yet how horribly natural it is—she wishes to see Andromache scrubbing the floor![546] But vulgar and spiteful as she is, the princess can be wrought upon, as the later part of the action shows, and if only to self-respect Andromache had added tact and sympathy Hermione would have been her passionate friend before thirty lines had been spoken. The pathos of the scene lies above all in the misunderstanding which pits the two women against one another, where they should have combined against the callous craft which was using them both for the ends of politics.

The deities whom we find in this play need detain us only a moment. Thetis is no more than sweetening for the popular taste. Soothing and beautiful as are her consolations to the aged sufferer, such a personage has no real concern with a drama so utterly secular. As for Apollo, it is here plainer than usual that his name is nothing but a convenient short term for the great priestly organization at Delphi. That there is a genuine divine person who has aided Orestes and punished Neoptolemus we cannot believe. The only touch of religious awe to be found lies in the messenger’s report. When the assassins are fleeing before their courageous victim, “from the midst of the shrine some one raised an awful voice whereat the hair stood up, and rallied the host again to fight”.[547] It is this same speaker, however, who thus sums up his account of the whole event: “And thus hath he that gives oracles to others, he who for all mankind is the judge of righteousness, thus hath he entreated the son of Achilles who offered him amends. Like a man that is base hath he remembered an ancient grudge. How, then, can he be wise?” To the simple Thessalian confronted for the first time with doubts of Olympian justice, such phrasing is natural. For Euripides the conclusion is that Apollo does not exist at all. “Apollo” does not take vengeance upon the blasphemer at the time of his offence, but waits unaccountably till his second visit, when he comes to make amends and when by an accident, fortunate for the god, a conspiracy of villainous men happens to make his enemy their victim.[548]

In keeping with all this is the literary tone of the work. The lyrics are of little interest to a reader, though one[549] of them markedly sums up the situation and forces home the moral. For the rest, the dialogue is utterly unheroic and unpoetical but splendidly vigorous, terse, and idiomatic; in this respect the _Andromache_ is equal to the best work of Euripides. Could anything of its kind be more perfect than the first speech of Hermione[550]—this mixture of pathetic heart-hunger, of childish snobbery and petulance, this terribly familiar instinct to cast in the teeth of the unfortunate precisely those things for which one formerly envied them, these scraps of ludicrously inaccurate slander against “barbarians” picked up from the tattle of gossiping slaves, and the heavy preachments about “the marriage-question” which cry aloud their origin from the lips of Menelaus? In

δεῖ σ’ ἀντὶ τῶν πρὶν ὀλβίων φρονημάτων πτῆξαι ταπεινήν, προσπεσεῖν τ’ ἐμὸν γόνυ, σαίρειν τε δῶμα τοὐμόν, ἐκ χρυσηλάτων τεύχεων χερὶ σπείρουσαν Ἀχελῴου δρόσον, γνῶναι θ’ ἵν’ εἶ γῆς,[551]

the last phrase is marvellous. The very sound and fall of the words, with the two long monosyllables, can only be described as a verbal box on the ears. Observe too the great speech[552] of Andromache. In the lines

νῦν δ’ ἐς γυναῖκα γοργὸς ὁπλίτης φανείς κτείνεις μ’· ἀπόκτειν’, ὡς ἀθώπευτόν γέ σε γλώσσης ἀφήσω τῆς ἐμῆς καὶ παῖδα σήν,

one can hear the words gurgling in her throat before they issue in speech; at the end she is positively hissing. Peleus, too, ineffectual as he may be in argument, is a master of pungent rhetoric.[553]

For readers who admire exclusively the Sophoclean type of play, the _Andromache_ is a painful experience to be forgotten as soon as possible. For any who find interest in the behaviour of ordinary beings at a great testing moment, this work is an endless delight.

The HERCULES FURENS[554] or _Mad Heracles_ (Ἡρακλῆς Μαινόμενος) is perhaps the next play in order of time. Most critics place it about the year 420 B.C. or a little earlier; the chief reason for this is the celebrated chorus about old age—it is natural supposition that the poet had recently passed beyond the military age, and so would now be just over sixty.

The scene is laid before the house of Heracles at Thebes. Amphitryon, reputed father of the hero, explains the situation. Heracles, leaving his wife Megara and his three sons with Amphitryon, has departed to Hades in quest of Cerberus. In his absence one Lycus has seized the throne and intends to murder Heracles’ family. Megara would submit, but Amphitryon still hopes for Heracles’ return. Certain aged Thebans, who form the chorus, arrive, followed by Lycus who, after sneers at Heracles, orders his henchmen to burn his victims in their house. Megara begs of Lycus that they be given time to array themselves for death. He consents, and the sufferers retire. Lycus departs, and soon the sad procession returns. Suddenly Heracles himself enters. He tells that he has brought back Cerberus and released Theseus, King of Athens, from the lower world; he promises to destroy Lycus and goes within. A splendid ode laments the weakness of old age but glorifies the Muses. Lycus returns, enters the house, and is slain; the chorus greet his yells with delight and hail Heracles as now proved the son of Zeus. Suddenly Iris and Frenzy sweep down from the sky, sent by Hera to drive Heracles mad. Frenzy herself is reluctant, but enters the house, and the chorus raise cries of horror, amid which the house totters in ruin. A messenger relates how Heracles, after slaying Lycus, has been seized with madness and destroyed his wife and children. The eccyclema shows the hero sunk in stupor. He awakes and, realizing his situation, meditates suicide, but Theseus arrives and wins him back to courage; after terrible outbursts against Heaven he departs to live with Theseus in Athens.

After a cursory reading of this play one’s impressions are doubtful. Many features excite warm admiration, such as the superb lyric[555] on old age, the speeches[556] of Megara about her fatherless boys, Heracles’ replies[557] to Theseus; even the wrangle between Lycus and Amphitryon is full of idiomatic vigour.[558] But to be blunt, what is the play about? It works up to a climax in the deliverance of Amphitryon and his kin, and then begins again. Long before the close we have forgotten Lycus. We feel that the play is structureless, or (which is worse) that it falls so clearly into two dramas that we cannot view it as a single piece of art. But if we seriously seek for unity, we naturally look for it in the fortunes of Heracles himself. This granted, we shall expect to find that the incident which in a bare summary seems to disjoint the whole is specially treated. Looking then at the incursion of Lycus, we find that at every moment the events are considered from the point of view of Heracles, in terms of his actions, and the sentiments which cling to his personality. We are only prevented from seeing this at first by the modern supposition that the culmination of a tragedy is the death of a leading person, not a spiritual crisis. The discussion between Amphitryon and Megara about instant submission is dominated by despair of the hero’s return in the latter’s mind and by hope of it in the former’s. As soon as Lycus arrives, he asks: “What hope, what defence find ye against death? Believe ye that the father of these lads, he who lies in Hades, will return?” Whereupon he proceeds to a long tirade in abuse of the hero, and Amphitryon’s even more garrulous response deals almost solely with his son’s achievements and the gratitude which he merits from Thebes and Greece. As the doomed party go indoors the old man reminds Heaven itself of the help it owes to Heracles, and the following lyrics are an elaborate chronicle of his marvellous exploits. Finally, when at point to die, Megara in a beautifully natural manner turns her farewell to her sons into a painful memory of the plans which their father used to make for them. In this way the danger of his family is considered as a test of Heracles’ powers and greatness. Will he make good the promise of his past glories? Will he return and free them from Lycus?

Dr. Verrall[559] follows this line of thought, giving to it far greater precision and colour. He believes that the subject of this play is the miraculous tone investing the traditional stories about Heracles. According to popular belief in the poet’s day, Heracles was a son of Zeus; he performed many exploits which were definitely superhuman, culminating in a descent to Hades and return therefrom. These stories are untrue. The play indicates this simply and directly, giving, however, most attention to the method by which they won credence. In a primitive civilization, when men had not yet attained to clear thinking, remarkable but human feats like those of Heracles were extolled as miraculous by the uncritical. Such are Amphitryon and the chorus, who when challenged by Lycus are capable only of violent reiteration of their belief, but offer, and can offer, no proof that the miracles happened. It is a curious symptom of the former’s vague credulity that while loving and defending Heracles as his own son, he yet claims[560] the help of Zeus on the ground that the god is himself Heracles’ father. The Theban elders join[561] in this irrational belief—as soon as it appears that the divine parentage is established by the return from Hades, which even if true would of course have nothing to do with the question. It is in such minds as this that belief in the miraculous life of Heracles first sprang up. But this belief rests largely upon the accounts of his adventures given by Heracles himself; thus we come to the heart of the tragedy, the mental condition of the hero.

Near the end he exclaims against the consolations of Theseus: “Alas! such words as thine are too trivial for my sorrows. I think not that the gods love unlawful unions, and that they put chains upon one another is a belief I never held nor will I ever. God, if he be God, in truth needs naught. These are but poets’ wretched tales.”[562] Plainly, the sober and reasonable speech which begins thus repudiates the highly-coloured but pernicious stories of tradition to which Theseus has just appealed. Heracles believes in one God utterly above human weaknesses. Then what of Zeus’ love of Alcmena, the jealousy of Hera, the whole basis of his suffering as conceived by the orthodox? And what of his own semi-divine nature, the foundation again of his superhuman deeds? They are delusions. Heracles is no demi-god; his exploits, however great and valuable, are in no sense miraculous. This view, moreover, is precisely that which we ought to gain from the early part of the drama. Lycus is no doubt an insolent bully, but would certainly not brave annihilation (whether at the hands of Zeus or of his son) by slaughtering a demi-god’s family. That he acts so proves that he does not believe in the divine parentage of Heracles; and the support so readily given by Thebes to his policy shows as plainly that to the mass of citizens no real proofs of superhuman nature have been offered. In brief, the actions and language of every one in the play except Heracles himself, Amphitryon, and the chorus—of every one, including Theseus and even Megara, imply that in this play Heracles is indeed a person of note, but an “eminent man” of no very startling eminence.

But the hero himself long before this repudiation of “poets’ wretched tales” has himself given them authority. He tells his father that in truth he has visited Hades, dragged Cerberus thence, and rescued Theseus. At many places[563] in the drama he refers without misgiving or query to legendary monsters which he has quelled, and to his safe return from Hades. This inconsistency, according to Dr. Verrall, is the root of the drama. Heracles suffers from a growing tendency to madness; in his sane moods he knows that all his story is human, all the nobler for its humanity, but in his dark hours he accepts the vulgar splendours which rumour throws round his adventures, at such times lending nascent myth the support of his own false witness. The tragedy of his life has been this mental distemper, which has finally caused him to destroy his wife and children. It appears in dreadful paroxysms throughout the first speech which he addresses to Theseus—first an attempt to account for his murderous outbreak by an account of purely human events; then inconsistently a reference to Zeus’ fatherhood and the attempt of Hera upon his infant life, followed by a splendidly vigorous catalogue of legendary deeds, Typhos, the giants, and the rest, culminating with despairing comments on his hopeless guilt and on the complete victory of Hera; then he suddenly rends the goddess with his scorn: “to such a deity who would pray?—for a jealous quarrel she has destroyed the guiltless benefactor of Greece”.

Two important details should be noted in connexion with this theory. First the apparition[564] of Iris and Frenzy seems to overthrow it utterly by a demonstration in presence of the audience that Heracles’ afflictions are caused by Hera. But the past scene, before ever Frenzy arrives, has shown the hero, if not mad, yet not in full possession of his senses.[565] Moreover, she is not seen by him at the moment when he goes mad, yet, if the chorus see her, _a fortiori_ she should be visible when attacking her victim himself; again the scene in which the fiend herself shows kind-hearted scruples, is ludicrous. These personages (Verrall suggests) are a dream beheld by a member of the chorus who has been impressed by what he has already seen of Heracles’ malady. This is proved by an absence of allusion to the event afterwards when the fatal incident is discussed, and when silence is incredible. The aged man (or men) will gradually remember the dream afterwards; this is another way in which stories like that of Hera’s vengeance obtain currency.

The second point arises from the conversation between Theseus and his friend when clearly sane. Does he confirm the story of the visit to Hades? Now, Heracles and he several times refer to his rescue “from below,” but never do they use language which necessarily refers to Hades. “Thou didst bring me back safe to the light from the dead (or corpses)”[566]—such is the style of allusion. Undoubtedly the language can be applied to Hades; undoubtedly also it could fit some natural event like a disaster in a cave or mine which may actually have been suggested[567] by rationalists of the day as an explanation of the myth—a suggestion which the poet is inclined to adopt and for which therefore he leaves room in his phraseology.

Theseus, amiable as he is, yet presents little of interest; it is his function to voice the opinions of the normal unimaginative man. Megara, however, of whom little has been said, deserves sympathetic study. She does not share Amphitryon’s extraordinary beliefs about his son,[568] but loves and admires him with an affection beautifully expressed throughout the too brief portion of the drama in which she appears; it is she who long before the other realizes his mental state.[569] In her, too, poetical imagination shines forth with a radiance which surpasses the charm of the lyrics and Heracles’ impetuous eloquence. It is she who utters the Sophoclean description[570] of sovereignty:—

ἔχων τυραννίδ’, ἧς μακραὶ λόγχαι πέρι πηδώσ’ ἔρωτι σώματ’ εἰς εὐδαίμονα,

and that expression[571] of her yearning grief which in its strange felicity of pathos suggests Shakespeare’s Constance:—

πῶς ἂν ὡς ξουθόπτερος μέλισσα συνενέγκαιμ’ ἂν ἐκ πάντων γόους, εἰς ἓν δ’ ἐνεγκοῦσ’ ἀθρόον ἀποδοίην δάκρυ;

The SUPPLICES[572] (Ἱκετίδες), or _Suppliant Women_, is generally supposed on internal evidence[573] to have been produced about 420 B.C.

The Suppliants, who form the chorus, are the mothers of the Seven who attacked Thebes and their attendants. They surround Æthra, mother of Theseus, the Athenian king, and beg her to win his aid for them, since the Thebans have refused burial to the slain. Theseus at first refuses, but Æthra persuades him. A Theban herald enters to forbid Theseus, in the name of the Theban king Creon, to aid the Suppliants. Theseus rejects this behest and prepares for war. After an ode, news comes of the Athenian victory. The remains of five heroes are brought in (of the other two, Amphiaraus was swallowed up by the earth and Polynices is supposed still at Thebes). Adrastus delivers funeral speeches over them. The obsequies now take place. The body of Capaneus is burned separately, and Evadne his wife throws herself upon his pyre despite the entreaties of her father Iphis. The young sons of the chieftains bear in the funeral urns, and Adrastus promises that Argos will cherish undying gratitude towards Athens. The goddess Athena appears and bids Theseus exact an oath to this effect; she comforts the fatherless boys with a promise of vengeance.

This drama is perhaps the least popular and the least studied of all Greek plays, which is not surprising when one considers that, in spite of the praise merited by certain parts, the whole work considered by really dramatic standards is astonishingly bad. There is no character-drawing worth the name, and though it may be said that the real heroine of the drama is Athens,[574] it is still strange to find Euripides contented with such colourless persons as Theseus, Æthra, and indeed all the characters. Still more striking are the irrelevancies. Theseus’ address[575] to Adrastus and the assembly at large concerning the blessings conferred by Heaven upon man, have hardly a semblance of connexion with the urgent and painful subject of debate. Even more otiose, and far longer, is the dispute[576] between Theseus and the herald on the claims of monarchy and democracy. The scene of Evadne’s _suttee_, however striking, is dramatically unjustifiable; it is an episode in the bad sense meant by Aristotle—no integral part of the

## action. The last scene is spoiled by the intervention of Athena, who

merely causes the Argives to give an oath instead of a simple promise that they will ever be loyal friends of Athens. That this intervention corresponds to very definite historical fact (the league between the two states in 420 B.C. brought about by Alcibiades) makes no difference to the æsthetic fact. None the less one notes in the _Supplices_ certain excellent features. The appeal[577] of Æthra to her son, and the lyric dirge of Evadne over her husband’s pyre, are admirably composed. Several parts of the work are magnificent as spectacle—the opening in which the sorrowing mothers, Adrastus, and the fatherless boys are grouped about the aged queen, the return of Theseus and his troops with the dead bodies, the episode of Evadne as it struck the eye,[578] and the procession of boys carrying the funeral urns.

The ION[579] (Ἴων) is a play of uncertain date, but was probably produced late in Euripides’ life; some would place it as low as 413 B.C.

The scene is laid before the temple at Delphi. Hermes tells how the Athenian princess Creusa, owing to the violence of Apollo, bore a child, which Hermes brought to Delphi, where the boy grew up as a temple-attendant. Later Creusa married Xuthus, and to-day they will come to ask the oracle some remedy for their childlessness. Apollo will give Ion to Xuthus as the latter’s son; later he is to be made known to Creusa as her own. Ion enters, and in a beautiful song expresses his joy in the service of Apollo. The chorus (attendants of Creusa) draw near; they converse with Ion and admire the temple façade. Creusa arrives; she and Ion are mutually attracted, and she tells how “a friend,” having borne a child to Apollo and exposed it, wishes to know whether it still lives. Ion rejects the story, and urges her not to put such a question to the oracle. Xuthus now appears, and goes within to consult the god; Creusa retires, while Ion muses on the immorality of gods. After a choric ode Xuthus returns and greets Ion as his son: the oracle has declared that the first man to meet him will be his offspring. Ion asks who is his mother; they agree that she must be some Delphian Bacchante. The youth is dismayed at the prospect of quitting Delphi for Athens, but Xuthus genially bids him prepare a farewell banquet for his friends, and departs to offer sacrifice upon Parnassus. The Athenian women express their consternation: Athens is to have an alien ruler and Creusa must remain childless. When she returns they tell her the news, and in bitter disappointment she breaks into an agonized recital of her old sorrow. An aged male attendant undertakes to murder Ion by poison at the banquet. Creusa consents. After an ode praying for vengeance, a messenger brings news that the plot has failed and Creusa has been condemned to death. The queen hurries in, pursued by Ion and a mob; she takes refuge on the altar. Bitter reproaches pass between the two till the Pythian prophetess appears; giving Ion the basket in which he was discovered as a babe, and which still contains the articles then found with him, she bids him seek his mother. Creusa greets him as her son and names the three objects. They embrace with joy, but Ion, learning that not Xuthus but Apollo is his father, determines to ask the oracle which account is true. Athena, however, appears and explains that Apollo has been compelled to change his plans; Xuthus must continue to believe Ion his own son.

This drama suggests a rich tasselled robe of gorgeous embroidery; were it not that the basis of the story is so painfully sexual, the _Ion_ would be perhaps the most popular of Greek plays. The sudden changes of situation, the emotional crises, the sheer thrill of many passages, the lovely study of the Greek Samuel at his holy tasks—all these things make a glorious play. But our delight is blurred by a recurrent perplexity. Theology is obtruded throughout, and such a theology as never was.

Apollo ravishes Creusa and by help of Hermes brings her child to Delphi, where he lives happily up to manhood, but Creusa is allowed to suppose her child destroyed by wild beasts. The god, however, intends to secure Ion his rights as prince of Athens. Xuthus is to accept the lad as his son, while Creusa and Ion are to be made secretly known to each other. But this plan is disturbed by the Athenian women, and the god, revising his intention, sends the doves to save Ion, and the prophetess to save Creusa. All would now be well, since both Xuthus and the queen accept Ion as a son. But Ion wishes to know whether the oracle speaks truth or lies.[580] Apollo therefore sends Athena to prevent him from taxing the oracle with inconsistency. She explains the various activities of Apollo, prophesies concerning the Athenian race, and bids Creusa keep Xuthus in ignorance.

Apollo is as much fool[581] as knave.[582] Athena may say that “Apollo hath done all things well,”[583] but mortals will not endorse her sisterly admiration. Even the revised plan cannot succeed. How long will Xuthus remain ignorant of facts which are being proclaimed, not only to Creusa and her son, but also to the crowd of Delphians and the Athenian women? Even if this could be secured, things are no better: Apollo has said both that he himself, and that Xuthus, is the father of Ion. Which of these statements is true matters comparatively little. One of them must be a lie. The god who gives oracles to Greece is a trickster, and no celestial consolations or Athenian throne can compensate the youth for the loss of what filled his heart only this morning.

The _Ion_ is the one play in which Euripides attacks the Olympian theology beyond all conceivable doubt. It is certain (i) that he does not believe in the existence of Apollo and Hermes; (ii) that the Delphic oracle is a human institution making impossible pretensions; and (iii) that his method of attack is by innuendo and implication. Verrall’s theory of the poet’s method is here on absolutely unassailable ground. The story is purely human, and the theological story is a mere addendum designed to suit the religious occasion and many of the spectators. What, then, is this human story? Verrall explains that Creusa was wronged by some man unknown, and that her child perished. The Pythian priestess bore[584] a child which she reared with a natural tenderness.[585] This child was Ion, whom the managers of the shrine determined to place in a station which could assist their influence. Then occurs the deadly scene in which the youth is about to kill Creusa. To save the Delphians from the responsibility of murdering a foreign queen in the open street, and the boy from conduct which would make his admission to Athens impossible, a plot is hastily concocted. It will prevent war with Athens, it will destroy Creusa’s hatred for Ion, and secure his future throne. The priests have already heard, even if Apollo has not, the story shrieked[586] out at him by Creusa. By an impudent master-stroke they determine that Ion shall be the queen’s long-lost child. To this end the history of the two persons supplies most of the means; all that is needed is something tangible to tie the knot. Hurriedly the clues are provided. The necklace exposed long ago upon the babe is an easy matter; its fellow was found upon the person of the Pædagogus.[587] The ever-blooming olive of the Acropolis can be equalled in freshness by sprays plucked to-day in Delphi; and for the embroidery, it is fairly certain that some such covering must have been wrapped round the child, and its pattern is sufficiently vague.[588] The queen in her heart-hunger and peril snatches at these clues, and in a moment the two fall into one another’s arms. Finally, the clear-headed persistence of Ion is met by what may in truth be called a _dea ex machina_.[589] Over the temple façade is protruded the gigantic head[590] of a figure, through which some one offers such fumbling “explanations” as are possible. All this is enough for Creusa—she has a son. As for Ion, whose life has been in his faith, he commits himself to nothing; in one day he has grown to the full stature of a man, but one hardly supposes that he visited Delphi again. Thus may Verrall’s theory be summarized. It has never been answered, nor does it seem possible to make any answer, except that the alleged real story is “far-fetched”—of course; for any rationalistic explanation of a supposed miracle must be strange, otherwise no one would have hitherto believed the miracle in order to account for the facts.

The “theological background” then being merely theatrical gauze and canvas, what of the human action? Though it forms an extraordinarily brilliant, powerful, fascinating spectacle, is it a tragedy?—the story ends with the appearance at any rate of joy and contentment. Yet tragedy is found not only in the death of the body but in the death of ideals; and the destruction of Ion’s faith in his all-knowing unerring father is a fate from which, when we remember his happy carolling upon the dawn-lit temple-steps, we could wish to see him saved even by the Gorgon’s venom. Any out-cry wherewith he might have challenged Creusa’s is checked by the cold disgust which fills him at the sound of Athena’s bland periods; but one knows the kind of man Athens will receive to-morrow—one who will agree with Xuthus that “these things don’t happen,”[591] who will be an admirable connoisseur of party politics,[592] but who has lost his vision. This, then, is spiritually, though not technically, a tragedy. Further, it is technically a melodrama. That is, the external form and texture is calculated to produce not as in tragedy simple, profound, and enduring exaltation, but more superficial, violent, and transitory emotion. The Pædagogus is pure melodrama, witness his change from senile helplessness[593] to ruthless vigour,[594] the wildness of his suggestions—“burn down the temple” ... “murder your husband”; the utter absence of remorse and secondary interests, characteristic of villainous subordinates in melodrama; his complete breakdown when it is demanded by the plot.[595] Such also is the confrontation of Ion and Creusa with the terrified women and scowling Delphians as a background. But the finest thrill, and the touch least justified by any standards save those of melodrama, occurs in the speech of Ion as he stands with the fateful basket in his arms and determines not to open it but to dedicate it to Apollo. The next moment he reflects that he must carry out the god’s will and discover his origin. The genuine plot halts so as to cause theatrical sensation.

It is natural in such a play that the characterization should be simple. Xuthus, the Pædagogus, and the Prophetess, are scarcely more than foils to the two chief persons. Creusa attracts us rather because the poet has so well portrayed woman than because he has created a particular woman. More than this can be said of Ion. He is marked out from all the other persons of this play by sheer intelligence, by the power of facing facts, and of constantly readjusting his perspective.[596] He is a figure of somewhat quaint pathos. The happy child who sings to the birds on the temple-steps and thinks of nothing but his tranquil existence of pious routine, turns in a moment to the discreet adviser who can imagine incredible things: “There is no man who will transmit to thee response to such a question. For were he in his own house proved a villain, Phœbus would justly wreak mishap upon him that gave thee such reply.”[597] As he moves to and fro, filling the holy-water stoups, we can hear him murmuring to himself serene blasphemies. “But I must blame Phœbus. Such conduct! Use violence upon maidens, and betray them? Beget children in secret and leave them to die? Come, come! Since you have the power, remember its responsibility. You punish mankind for wrong-doing” ...[598] and so forth, including the suggestion that if Zeus, Poseidon, and Apollo were compelled to pay damages for their lustful offences, their temples would become bankrupt. In politics, as in religion, Ion observes and deduces for himself. Athenian public life he well understands before entering it;[599] he has views about the influence of perverted religious feelings upon public opinion and the execution of the law.[600] All this prepares us for the splendid moment[601] when forgetting his own rule[602] he insists on bearding the oracle, and for the reception he gives to the patching-up of Apollo’s infallibility.

For the rest, the work is a study of emotions deeply conceived and wonderfully expressed. Creusa is induced to tell her story, though disguised, to Ion largely by her sudden feeling for the youth himself.[603] The revelation which she makes to the Pædagogus and the chorus is wrung from her after all these years by the sudden loneliness which the gift of a son to her husband brings upon her heart. And the gloriously successful climax[604] where she suddenly addresses her executioner as her son is purely emotional also. Even the intellectual revolt of Ion is introduced by a sudden turn of the feelings in the recognition-scene: “Mother, let my father, too, share in our joy”.[605]

The TROADES[606] (Τρῳάδες), or _Trojan Women_, was produced in 415 B.C. together with _Alexander_, _Palamedes_, and _Sisyphus_ as satyric play. This group obtained the second prize, being defeated by the work of Xenocles “whoever he is”.[607]

The action takes place outside Troy after its capture; in the background is a tent wherein are captive Trojan women. Before the tent lies Hecuba in a stupor of grief. The deities Poseidon and Athena explain in a dialogue that they are quitting Troy with reluctance; Poseidon will destroy the Greek fleet on its way home. When they have departed, Hecuba stirs and laments; soon she is joined by the chorus of Trojan women. Talthybius tells her that Cassandra is to become the concubine of Agamemnon; concerning Polyxena he speaks evasively; Andromache is given to Neoptolemus, Hecuba herself to Odysseus, whom she detests above all Greeks. Cassandra rushes forward uttering in frenzy a horrible parody of a marriage-song in her own honour; she prophesies the woes of Agamemnon and Odysseus. Hecuba ponders her former greatness and present misery; the chorus sing the fatal day when Troy welcomed the Wooden Horse. Andromache and her infant Astyanax are brought in, and from her Hecuba hears Polyxena’s death. Though prostrated by grief she urges Andromache to please her new lord, that perchance his son may revive something of Troy’s greatness. Talthybius returns with tidings that Astyanax is to be hurled from the battlements. After an ode on the first siege of Troy, Menelaus enters rejoicing in his long-deferred opportunity of slaying Helen. Hecuba bursts into rapturous thanks to the Power which rules mankind, and when Helen pleads innocence refutes her bitterly. Talthybius brings in the mangled body of Astyanax over which Hecuba utters a speech of reproachful lament. The play ends with the burning of Troy.

In structure archaic, this play is in spirit something quite new to the Attic stage. On the one hand there is little unfolding of a plot; we are reminded strongly of the _Prometheus_ by the portrayal of a situation which changes with extreme slowness. It is the manner of this portrayal which is new and terrible. The _Troades_ was performed after the sack of Melos and before the departure of the Sicilian expedition; it is a statement, by a member of the nation which annihilated Melos, of the horrors wherewith the vanquished are overwhelmed. The glory won by the Greeks who overthrew Troy was the best-known and most cherished gift of tradition. Now a Greek writer reveals the other side of conquest. After the crime of Melos, Euripides never felt as he had felt towards Athens or Greece. His intellect and his heart were appalled by the cold ferocity of which his fellows showed themselves every year more capable. Hitherto he has attacked the evils of human nature; now he impeaches one definite nation, and that his own. No spectator could doubt that “Troy” is Melos, “the Greeks” Athens. Such uncompromising hostility must have produced deep effects on so impressionable an assembly. For it is not merely a denunciation; it is a threat. The poet takes the whole picture of misery and stupid tyranny, and puts it into sinister perspective in his prologue. All the cruelties of the play are committed by the Greeks under shadow of the calamity denounced against them by the deities of the prologue, whereof we are again and again reminded by the sentences casually dropped by Talthybius and others, that the host is eager to embark. And this when the great Athenian armament was itself thronging the Peiræus in preparation for the voyage to Sicily.[608]

Of characterization, therefore, little is to be found. Cassandra, though her pathos is less deep and wide than that of her namesake in the _Agamemnon_, is yet valuable, as aiding in that perspective which is given mainly by the prologue. Talthybius and Andromache are ably sketched, but Menelaus and Helen are introduced merely for the sake of the elaborate dispute between Hecuba and Helen. It is upon Hecuba that the whole poem hangs—not upon her action or even her character, but upon her capacity for suffering. With the progress of the play she changes from the Queen of Troy to a figure summing up in herself all the sorrows of humanity. As each woe is faced, lamented, and at last assimilated into an ennobling experience, another disaster flings her back into the primitive outcry to begin once more the task of resignation. She is a pagan _mater dolorosa_. As each billow of grief descends upon her, leaving her still sentient, nay, filled with eager sympathy for others, the Greeks who oppress her become strangely puny and unreal like the legionaries in some mediæval picture of martyrdom. Even when she confesses to complete despair she yet the next moment begins to fashion within the abyss a tiny abode for hope: Astyanax may grow to manhood, “so that—if chance is kind—sons of thy blood may dwell again in Ilium, and there might yet be a city”.[609] Next moment the child is torn away to be flung from the battlements. Even so, Hecuba recovers her balance in the end and can deliver, as she stands over the little body, the stinging reproach[610] of a “barbarian” revolted by the crimes of “civilization”.[611] It is to this endless capacity for facing sorrow and transmuting it into rich experience that we owe one of the most beautiful and definite philosophic _dicta_ to be found in Euripides:—

ὦ γῆς ὄχημα, κἀπὶ γῆς ἔχων ἕδραν ὅστις ποτ’ εἶ σύ, δυστόπαστος εἰδέναι, Ζεύς, εἴτ’ ἀνάγκη φύσεος, εἴτε νοῦς βροτῶν, προσηυξάμην σε· πάντα γὰρ δι’ ἀψόφου βαίνων κελεύθου κατὰ δίκην τὰ θνήτ’ ἄγεις.[612]

“O Throne of earth, by earth upheld, whosoe’er Thou art, beyond conjecture of our knowledge—Zeus, or the law of Nature, or the mind of Man, to Thee do I address my prayer; for moving along Thy soundless path Thou dost guide all mortal life with justice.” As for the Olympian gods, they are scarcely attacked; there is little more than a jaded recognition that belief in them is no help or inspiration.[613] To this plaintive agnosticism there is here no alternative but fierce pessimism, as when in the frightful eloquence of Hecuba we are told that Fate is “a capering idiot”.[614]

Most mournful of all Greek tragedies, this is yet beautiful, and full of splendid spectacular effects: Cassandra bounding wildly forth with her bridal torches; the entry of Andromache seated in the waggon among the spoils of Troy; Hecuba bending over Astyanax’ body within the great buckler of his father; the little procession which carries the shield to burial, princely robes hanging therefrom; and the aged queen addressing her farewell to the blazing city.

IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS[615] (Ἰφιγένεια ἡ ἐν Ταύροις) or _Iphigenia among the Taurians_, is a work of uncertain date.[616] Nothing is known of its success when produced, and the absence of scholia suggests that it was not popular in later times.

Iphigenia, before the temple of Artemis among the Taurians (in South Russia), relates that she was not slain at Aulis, but brought by Artemis to serve as her priestess here, close to the city of King Thoas, where she is compelled to sacrifice all strangers. A dream has suggested to her that her brother Orestes is dead; she goes within to prepare offerings to his shade. Orestes and Pylades enter; they have been sent by the Delphian oracle to steal the image of Artemis; in this way Orestes will be freed from the Furies. They postpone their attempt till nightfall, and retire. The chorus of Greek captive maidens enter in attendance upon Iphigenia, and a cowherd brings news that two Greeks have been captured and are being brought for sacrifice. After a choric ode, the rustics enter with their prisoners. A conversation follows, in which neither Iphigenia’s name nor that of Orestes is revealed, and she offers to spare his life if he will take a letter to Argos. He insists that Pylades shall go, and the latter asks that the message be read. It proves to be an appeal to Orestes, and, exclaiming that he will at once perform his task, Pylades hands it to his friend. Brother and sister thus become known to one another, and all three agree to escape, taking the image with them. They enter the temple, after Iphigenia has enjoined secrecy upon the chorus, who sing their yearning for home. King Thoas enters and is tricked by Iphigenia into aiding the escape. The chorus sing Apollo’s conquest of Delphi. A messenger rushes in, seeking Thoas; the chorus misdirect him, but in vain. Thoas learns how his people have been beguiled into allowing the Greeks to embark. However, a contrary wind is even now driving them back. Thoas is preparing to hunt the fugitives down when Athena appears and stops him; he is, moreover, commanded to send the Greek maidens home. He consents, and the play ends with the joy of the chorus.

This drama is one of the finest among Euripides’ works. It provides a marked contrast with the _Troades_; there is bitterness here indeed, but it is the bitterness of Voltaire rather than that of Swift. And whereas in the former play plot is almost non-existent, here it is vital. Perhaps the most brilliant piece of construction in Euripides is the celebrated Recognition-scene of this drama. Indeed the whole tragedy is the story of a plot, skilful and breathless. Iphigenia’s method—to deceive by telling the truth (about Orestes’ matricide)—was particularly dear to Greeks, connoisseurs of falsehood both in life and in literature; so beautifully does she succeed that (partly for her own amusement) she tells the king further the news she has just heard concerning her brother’s welfare. But the poet is no more the slave of his wit than of his sympathies, and we are brought to realization of the facts—namely, that the three Greeks are thieves and Iphigenia a traitress—by her own self-mockery: “Falsehood, thy name is Hellas,”[617] and by the simple generosity with which the prince accepts her suggestions.

The second feature of importance is the atmosphere of adventure. A strange grim glamour lies upon this story of breathless dangers in a region which is itself a mystery and a menace. We must forget modern notions about South Russia, lines of steamboats, and Odessa as civilized as Hull. This kingdom of Thoas is as remote from Athens as Thibet or the Upper Congo from us; indeed at many points we recall the African stories of Sir Rider Haggard. Amid these ghastly altars, the secret fire and the cleft of death,[618] deserted seas and bloodthirsty savages, there is an infinite painful sweetness in Orestes’ reminder of a dusty heirloom in his sister’s bedchamber at home.[619] The poem is filled with suggestions of remoteness, the heaving of strange billows, legendary landing-places. Flowing from this is the home-sickness which breaks out again and again, in Pylades’ recollection, during his worst agony, of the winding Phocian glens,[620] and in the lyric songs where the Greek captives long to fly homeward with the halcyon to the hallowed places of Greece.[621]

But not only does religion as a radiant emotion setting a glow around “the hill of Cynthus” and the “circling mere” mark the play. Euripides here, as so often, treats religion intellectually as well as emotionally. By the lips of Orestes he passes judgment upon Olympian religion as a guide of conduct. Taking the story of Æschylus, he acts not as a lesser unbeliever would have acted; he does not dub the reconciliation of the _Eumenides_ a delusion. With a studiously bungling air he explains that one section of the Furies was appeased, and the other not.[622] If the manner of this revision is delightfully impudent, the intention is deadly. Orestes has been sent away by the Delphian priests to _do_ something, to seek and undergo, if possible, a physiological effect simply through the excitement of a far journey. We are very near to the “long holiday and change of air”. The Furies exist nowhere but in his own brain. On the Athenian Areopagus he went through a climax of hallucination. Surrounded by stray animals,[623] he saw in imagination all the tremendous events imagined by Æschylus as objective reality. His mind only partly cleared by this paroxysm, he fled back to Delphi for complete healing. The “oracle” sent him to the remotest region known to Greeks, to a land, moreover, where the natives are wont to murder all strangers. Phœbus is ashamed of his “former responses” and seeks to be rid of his too obedient, too persistent devotee.[624] Such is the opinion of Orestes himself when at last in the “toils,”[625] and the whole work (with an exception presently to be noticed) is pervaded by this unflinching rationalism. The pious herdsmen who see marine deities in the Greek visitors are laughed to scorn by a companion who, though dubbed “a fool reckless and irreverent,”[626] is entirely justified. Iphigenia’s reflections[627] on the human sacrifices of the Tauri lead her to acquit the goddess of “such folly” and to attribute this practice to ferocious savages who make gods in their own image. At one point indeed simple faith is justified. Orestes when faced by death is comforted by his friend: “The god’s oracle hath not yet destroyed thee, close as thou dost stand to slaughter”.[628] In a moment Orestes is free from peril at the priestess’ hands. But no one, least of all Euripides, expects even the “gods” to blunder always. Finally, the ode on Apollo’s conquest of Delphi is a delicate but pungent satire: the “oracle” is a magnificent trade connexion.[629]

This cynical clearness is a guide in studying the exceptional passage above mentioned: in the last scene orthodox piety is upheld by the apparition of Athena. Does then the _Iphigenia_ in the end refute the rationalism impressed on it almost everywhere? We can take our choice, accepting Athena, Apollo’s divinity, and all the other traditional garnishments, but stultifying many passages, and the tone of nine-tenths of the play; or we can accept the latter as a thrilling and pathetic study in human superstition and intrepidity, but reject Athena as a conventional phantom. In this latter case we shall, with Dr. Verrall, consider that the play, for all artistic and intelligible purposes, ends at v. 1434, leaving Thoas to capture and destroy the Greeks. Many will find such a choice difficult. The _Iphigenia_ is certainly not as clear a case as the _Orestes_, to say nothing of the _Ion_. But it is difficult to believe that here he has composed a magnificent play to bolster up theology which elsewhere he strenuously attacks. Nevertheless, the speech of Athena is not in itself contradictory or ludicrous.

The mental pathology—it can hardly be called the character—of Orestes, deserves close study. He provides an admirable instance of that skill in portraying madness for which Euripides was famed.[630] A man of strong simple instincts, he is shaken terribly by the murderous events of his childhood. His brain is overthrown by the sway of the hierarchy and by the deeds to which he was impelled. From this overthrow he never quite recovered, as the dramatist himself carefully indicates.[631] Throughout the _Iphigenia_ we discern, drawn with extraordinary skill and tact, the struggle between the old obsession and an intellect originally clear and acute. The prologue, when he explores the ground with Pylades, shows him (in spite of a ghastly brilliance of thought fit only for frenzy or the nightmare[632]) possessed of shrewdness which, if consistently applied, would have saved him from the expedition altogether. Later he is seen hurled by the excitement of his quest into complete, though temporary, insanity[633]—a fit which throws back strange light upon his “trial” at Athens and provides a comment upon the later scene,[634] where, though at the moment sane, he yet believes in the delusive experience. Everywhere we find this superstructure of sanity on an insane foundation. Though he can see through the “oracle” as clearly as any man with regard to its past deceptions, he is pathetically enthusiastic for the latest nostrum.[635] The long account[636] of his sorrows which he gives his sister is full of such sinister meaning. He essays to describe the origin of the court which tried him: “There is a holy ... _vote_,[637] which long ago Zeus founded for Ares owing to some blood-guiltiness, whatever it was....” He has forgotten half the facts, and bungles the rest. This speech, full of obscurity, irrelevancy, and disconnected thought, is practically ignored by his sister, who realizes his condition both from the report of the herdsman and from the occasional lunacy he manifests in conversation.[638] Orestes, too, knows[639] how it is with him, and the complete absence of lament on his part when faced with death is one of the grimmest things in the drama.

The ELECTRA[640] (Ἠλέκτρα) was probably acted in 413 B.C.[641] The scene is laid before the cottage of a peasant, who explains that he is the husband of Electra, but in name only; she comes forth and they depart to their several tasks. Orestes and Pylades arrive; Orestes has come at Apollo’s bidding to avenge his father, at whose tomb he has offered sacrifice. Seeing Electra they retire. She is invited to a festival by the chorus of Argive women, but refuses, urging her sorrow and poverty. The two strangers approach, Orestes pretending that he has been sent by her brother for tidings of her; she gives him a passionate message begging Orestes to exact vengeance. The peasant returns and sends the strangers within as his guests; the chorus sing the expedition to Troy. An aged shepherd enters with the provisions for which Electra sent, and tells her that he has seen upon Agamemnon’s tomb a sacrifice and a votive lock of hair. He in vain seeks to convince Electra that her brother must be in Argos, but later recognizes Orestes by a scar. Brother and sister embrace with joy; after passionate prayers to Agamemnon’s shade he departs to seek Ægisthus. The chorus sing the crime of Thyestes which caused sun and stars to change their course. A messenger relates how Ægisthus has been cut down by Orestes in the midst of a religious service; the avengers return with the body, over which Electra gloats. Clytæmnestra is seen approaching, lured by a story that Electra has given birth to a child. Orestes feels remorse, but is hardened by his sister, who awaits her mother alone. A dispute follows about the queen’s past, but Clytæmnestra refuses to quarrel, and goes within to perform the birth-ritual. Soon her cries are heard, and Orestes and Electra re-enter, filled with grief and shame. In the sky appear Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux), brothers of Clytæmnestra, who blame the matricide, which they attribute to Apollo; then they depart to the Sicilian sea to save mariners who are righteous and unperjured.

Special interest clings to this play, because here only can we see Euripides traversing precisely the same ground as Æschylus (in the _Choephorœ_) and Sophocles (in the _Electra_), This similarity of subject long damaged Euripides’ play in the eyes of critics. It was assumed that the youngest poet was imitating his forerunners, and it needed small acumen to observe that the imitation was bad. Whereupon, instead of wondering whether perhaps Euripides was after all not copying others, critics proceeded to write cheerful nonsense about “frivolity” and “a profound falling off in art and taste”.[642] The fact simply is that each of these three tragedians discussed the story from a different viewpoint. Æschylus treated it as a religious fact, Sophocles as an emotional fact, Euripides as an ethical fact. Æschylus is on the side of Apollo, Sophocles on the side of Electra, Euripides on the side of no one. He asks himself what circumstances, what perversions of character, can result in this matricide.

Hence his careful study of Clytæmnestra, Electra, and Orestes, so careful that a reader at first supposes the poet a partisan of Clytæmnestra. Not so; he has merely tried to understand her. A placid woman of quick but shallow affections, she was abandoned by her husband for ten years to the memory of a murdered daughter. Delightfully characteristic is her argument: “Suppose Menelaus had been stolen from home; would it have been right for me to slay Orestes that Helen might regain her husband?”[643] Vigorous and damaging, this is yet tinged with comedy by its raw novelty and precision. One almost overhears the _commèrages_ of the street-corner. When Agamemnon brought back openly a concubine to his home, Clytæmnestra assisted[644] her lover in anticipating the king’s revenge by murdering him. From this act she has drifted into condoning cruelty against her unoffending children; throughout she has acted wickedly and acquiesced in worse conduct by others. Nevertheless, she is no figure of tragedy; she only suggests tragedy because she is the mother of her executioners. Her chief love is placid domesticity; if this can be obtained only by murdering those who threaten it, that is very terrible, but the world is notoriously imperfect. Clytæmnestra cannot, and will not, meet Electra on the tragic plane. Her daughter’s great outburst and threat of murderous vengeance she meets in this comfortable fashion: “My child, it was always your nature to love your father. It often happens so. Some favour the male side, while others love their mother rather than their father. I forgive you: for in truth I rejoice not greatly, child, in the acts that I have done.... But you!—unwashed and shabby in attire!” ... And so forth. Clytæmnestra is almost as ill-tuned to the atmosphere which Electra constantly and deliberately creates as Sancho Panza to the high converse of his master. The queen has been summoned to her daughter’s cottage by report of a newly-born infant. She shows her natural goodness of heart by hurrying thither at once (though of course she has not the taste to leave her gorgeous retinue behind) and doing all she can to comfort and help her daughter. By this time she has all unconsciously “taken the wind out of the sails” of the avengers. But Electra can maintain her grimness and actually utter black hints of a wedding-bed in the grave![645] We turn next to her; what manner of woman can this be?

Electra is one of Euripides’ most vivid and successful female characters. She has strong claims on our pity and sympathy, but fails to win them. Her mother is a ready victim of any emotion which breathes upon her; Electra has settled her position emotionally, intellectually, morally, years ago. Nothing can alter her; she is the victim and the apostle of an _idée fixe_. The crimes of love are no less frightful than the crimes of hate; in Electra affection for Agamemnon has become the basis of cold ferocity against Clytæmnestra. It is Orestes who shrinks when the deed is to be done, Electra who braces his resolution. She has borne no child. Instead of beginning a new life in her children, looking to the future, she has fed morbidly upon memories, stiffening natural grief and resentment into permanent inhuman morosity. Clytæmnestra has blandly outlived two murders in her own family, and remains neither unamiable nor uninteresting; but it is impossible to imagine what Electra will do, say, or think, after the events of to-day. This unnatural self-concentration, which means not only her mother’s death but her own spiritual suicide, is mainly the result of her childlessness. And it is on this that Euripides lays his finger. “Announce that I have given birth to a male child.... Then, when she has come, of course it is her death.”[646] This plot of Electra is possibly the most brilliantly skilful and most terrible stroke in all the poet’s work. It indicates the source of her heartlessness, it provides an excellent dramatic motive for the queen’s arrival, and it shows, as nothing else could show, the fiendishness of a woman who can use just this pretext to the very woman who gave her birth. She relies upon the sanctity of motherhood to aid her in trampling upon it. Her first words, as she slips forth to join her husband beneath the star-lit sky, show how the heavens themselves remind her that she has had no infant at her breast during the night-watches: “Black Night, thou _Nurse_ of golden stars”.[647] Moreover, not only does she feel her sorrows, she enjoys the sense of martyrdom. Her wrongs and present trials she is capable of exaggerating;[648] at every opportunity she exploits them for purposes of self-pity, as her husband hints more than once.[649]

Orestes, living in exile, has escaped the blight of Electra only to become a criminal with no illusions, proud of his worldly experience, witness the blundering disquisition on “the true gentleman,”[650] and his cynical comments on his humble brother-in-law.[651] His onslaught upon Ægisthus from behind proves him at the best deficient in gallantry, and on the matricide itself nothing need be said. We can pity Orestes for his fearful position, but he is a poor creature. The _Electra_, in fact, is a clear-sighted attack upon the morality of blood-feuds. The poet feels that Ægisthus and Clytæmnestra, left so long unmolested, should have been left alone still; if Apollo at Delphi, and the peasant in his Argive cottage, had estimated human nature more wisely, this horror would have been escaped, and no harm done. To punish the guilty is not always a virtue; often it is a debauch of self-glory, and sometimes the worst of villainies.

As always, the poet regards the “oracle,” which commanded matricide, as an offence to civilization. But there is novelty in the extreme candour with which this is put forward. The Dioscuri repeatedly stigmatize its murderous command as “foolishness” or worse.[652] Equally outspoken are the chorus, who devote the last stanza of their lovely song on the Golden Lamb and Thyestes’ crime to a brilliant denial of its truth.... “But legends that fill men with dread are profitable to divine worship”[653]—it is admirably put, and may rank with the epigrams of Ovid[654] and Voltaire.[655] As for the Dioscuri, it is impossible to speak without affection of such quaint and charming figures. Their converse with Electra and the chorus is an irresistible combination of dignity and a breezy contempt for official reticence. In his first long _ex cathedra_ speech Castor is on the verge of saying what he really thinks of Phœbus Apollo, remembers himself just in time, and then—gives a broad hint after all.[656] In the less formal talk which follows, these bluff naval deities show a soundness of heart and a simplicity as to the meaning of great affairs which recall delightfully the traditional nautical character of modern literature. The anguish of brother and sister who after long years meet for a few frightful hours only to part for ever awakes their instant deep sympathy.[657] On the other side these subordinate deities are assuredly in a maze as to the theological problem into which they have strayed. “How was it,” ask the Argive women, very pertinently, “that you, being gods and brothers of the woman that hath perished, did not repel destruction from the house?” Electra, too, would know why she was involved in the matricide. In answer the Brethren offer a bundle of reasons some one of which ought surely to be right: “the fate of necessity,” “the guidance of doom,” “the foolish utterances of Phœbus’ tongue,” “a partnership in act and in destiny,” “the ancestral curse”.[658] Even if traditional phrases could solve the problem of human sin, these simple souls are not qualified to use or expound them.

One incident in the _Electra_ is of particular interest to the historian of literature. The pædagogus seeks to convince Electra that the mysterious visitor to Agamemnon’s tomb is her brother. He offers certain evidences which she contemptuously rejects. There can be no doubt that this scene is a criticism of the Recognition in Æschylus’ _Choephorœ_. The severed lock of hair, the footprint, and the embroidered cloth, appear in both scenes. Electra rejects all these clues. How can the hair of an athletic man resemble the soft tresses of a woman? Is not a man’s foot larger than a woman’s? Will the full-grown Orestes wear the same garment as an infant? But Euripides’ attack is probably mistaken.[659] We may suppose that Æschylus could have seen these objections; and it is quite possible that tradition told of physical peculiarities in the Pelopid family. As for the embroidered garment, Æschylus does not call it so. It may well have been a cloth preserved by Orestes. However this may be, we have here the most distinct example of Euripides’ criticism of an earlier poet.

HELEN[660] (Ἑλένη), or _Helena_, was produced in 412 B.C. The scene represents the palace of Theoclymenus, the young Egyptian king, with the tomb of his father Proteus. Helen relates that Hera gave Paris a phantom in place of the true Helen. While Greeks and Trojans fought for a wraith, she herself has lived in Egypt, waiting for Menelaus. Theoclymenus now seeks her hand; she has taken sanctuary in Proteus’ tomb. Teucer enters to consult Theonoe, the king’s prophetess-sister. On seeing Helen he barely refrains from shooting her, but realizing his “mistake” talks with the stranger, revealing that Menelaus and “Helen” have apparently been lost at sea. Helen sends him off and breaks into lamentation for Menelaus, but is advised by the chorus of captive Greek maidens to consult the omniscient Theonoe. She agrees, and they accompany her into the palace. Menelaus enters, a pitiable shipwrecked figure. He has left “Helen” and his comrades in hiding, and is looking for help. When he knocks at the palace-door the portress repels him with the warning that the king is hostile to Greeks because Helen is within his house. Menelaus is thunderstruck, but determines to await Theoclymenus. The chorus and Helen return in joy, for Menelaus, they learn, still lives. Menelaus comes forward; after a moment his wife recognizes and would embrace him, but he repels the stranger. One of his companions arrives announcing that “Helen” has vanished. As he ends his tale he sees the true Helen, who he supposes has played a practical joke; but Menelaus falls into her arms. They plot escape, but realize that all depends upon the omniscient Theonoe; she comes forth, and, explaining that she has a casting-vote in a dispute which to-day takes place in Heaven between Hera and Aphrodite, decides to aid the suppliants. When she has withdrawn it is arranged that Menelaus shall pretend he is the sole survivor, Menelaus being drowned; Helen is to gain permission to offer funeral-rites at sea. The chorus raise a beautiful song concerning Helen’s woes and the Trojan war. Theoclymenus enters and is easily hoodwinked. After an ode on Demeter’s search for Persephone, the plotters are sent on their way by the king. The chorus sing of Helen’s voyage and pray the Dioscuri to convoy their sister. A messenger hurries in and tells of the escape; the Egyptian crew has been massacred by Menelaus’ followers. Theoclymenus would take vengeance upon his sister, but is checked by the Dioscuri, who explain that all has occurred by the will of Zeus.

Two aspects of this play are unmistakable and apparently incompatible. The plot closely resembles that of the _Iphigenia in Tauris_; the style and manner of treatment are curiously light. What can have been Euripides’ purpose in repeating, after so short an interval, a copy of that grim masterpiece, and to execute it in this light-hearted fashion? The _Helen_ is in no possible sense a tragedy. At the point where the audience should be spell-bound by suspense and dread—the cajoling of the king—we are relieved from all oppression by the facility with which the captives succeed. Theoclymenus is an imbecile who gives them all they need with his eyes shut. The earlier action is robbed of all power by the superhuman attributes of Theonoe. How can, or need, Helen have any doubts concerning her husband with an all-knowing friend at hand? The central _datum_, that only a phantom fled to Troy and returned therefrom with Menelaus, is utterly destructive of tragic atmosphere. In the Recognition-scene the possibility of pathos is drowned in absurdity: the messenger suddenly turns to find his mistress smiling at his elbow and greets her with relief: “Ah, hail, daughter of Leda, here you are after all!”[661] Teucer’s scene, besides providing a palmary instance of bad construction (for his function is merely to cause Helen anxiety about her husband’s fate, which one might have expected to arouse her curiosity earlier in the course of these seventeen years), is in itself absurd. After coming all this distance to consult Theonoe about his route, he is sent away happy (without seeing the prophetess) by Helen’s suggestion, “You will pick out your way as you go along”.[662] Equally curious is the diction. Brilliantly idiomatic as are the iambics, they are almost everywhere light, loose in texture, almost colloquial. Such things[663] as φέρ’ ἦν δὲ δὴ νῷν μὴ ἀποδέξηται λόγους;—ἣν γὰρ εἴχομεν θάλασσ’ ἔχει—εἷς γὰρ ὅ γε κατ’ οὐρανόν, and the silly jingle on λόγῳ θανεῖν, are typical of the whole atmosphere. Even the lyrics glow with prettiness rather than beauty; lovely as are the Naiad[664] and the Nightingale[665] they mitigate in no degree the flimsiness of the whole.

Theonoe herself, in an outrageous passage,[666] brings the mockery to a climax: “This very day among the gods there is to be strife and conference concerning thee before the throne of Zeus. Hera, who was thine enemy before, is kindly to thee now, and would bring thee safe to thy home-country with this thy wife, so that Greece may learn how Paris’ love, the gift of Cypris, was but a mockery. But Cypris would fain deny thee thy home-return, that it may never come to light how in Helen’s case she bought the prize of beauty with bridals that were naught. _And the decision lies with me_, whether, as Cypris wishes, I shall destroy thee by revealing thy presence to my brother, or whether I shall join Hera and save thy life.” We should be ill-advised to take this in all earnest as a ludicrous blasphemy. It is graceful trifling. But what is Theonoe—a dread goddess to whom the queen of Heaven sues for aid, or a kind-hearted woman whose strong common-sense might, perhaps, in a circle like that of the dolts and _poseurs_ who fill the stage, raise her to the repute of superhuman wisdom? She is not all playful. When the honour of her dead father is in question, she stirs the heart by her passionate solemnity:—

Aye, all that lie in death must meet their bond, And they that live; yea, all. Beyond the grave The mind, though life be gone, is conscious yet Eternal, with th’ eternal Heav’n at one.[667]

This stands, together with Hecuba’s outburst[668] in the _Trojan Women_, as the most explicit statement of personal religion in the extant plays of Euripides. In the midst of this farrago of fairy-tale and false sentiment, it is doubly startling. The drama is neither tragedy, nor melodrama, nor comedy, nor farce. What are we to think of it?

Dr. Verrall[669] would regard it as a burlesque, that is, as a playful imitation of serious work, with exaggeration of weak features or tendencies. From the facts that one ode[670] has nothing whatever to do with the plot, but with the Mother and the Maid, and that Aristophanes parodies the play in his _Celebrants of the Thesmophoria_, wherein Euripides is accused of profaning that festival, it is inferred that _Helen_ was not written for public presentation, but for private performance at a house on the island of Helene belonging to an Athenian lady. The occasion was a gathering of women who had been celebrating the Thesmophoria, and forms Euripides’ playful answer to the charge that he had never depicted a good woman. To prove his zeal, he chooses Helen (the least reputable of her sex) and completely rehabilitates her character.[671] At the same time he amuses his audience with a parody of his own work. The sanctuary of Helen recalls that of Andromache, and the escape that of Iphigenia and her friends. The news of this _tour de force_ spread, and at last, owing to public curiosity, it was exhibited at the Dionysia.

There is no doubt (i) that the _Helen_ is not serious either in intention or execution; (ii) that there is good evidence for supposing a connexion between the play and the festival of the Mother and the Maid, the Thesmophoria; (iii) that Aristophanes’ jokes about Proteus-Proteas and the rest do support the view that Euripides has in his mind the history of a family who have nothing to do with Menelaus and Helen; (iv) that in the play there are points, such as “Eido” (the baby-name of Theonoe), which are irrelevant to the story. Are we, then, to accept Verrall’s account? The sound view would appear to be that Euripides offered to the Archon a work which for once was a burlesque. So sincere a thinker as Euripides was certain sooner or later to attack himself, at any rate to examine his position and methods with humorous detachment. So far we may, we must, go with Verrall; the elaborate and delightfully detailed development we can hardly accept—the evidence is not sufficiently strong.

But the poet is making fun not only of himself. The false Helen and her disappearance at a crisis in the action, are not merely miracles of a type in which he utterly disbelieves; they are features which even a believer would remove as far as possible into the background. In handling this fairy-tale with such _naïveté_, he is possibly laughing at some indiscreet fellow-dramatist;[672] certainly he is ridiculing the popular belief in such legends. Helen herself cannot credit the tale of Leda and the Swan.[673] When given the choice between two accounts of her brothers’ fate, she prefers the non-miraculous version.[674] Even the dramatist’s own dislike of soothsayers is elaborately expounded by the Greek messenger and sympathetically echoed by the chorus,[675] absurdly enough in a play which contains Theonoe, whom the chorus themselves have induced Helen to consult, and with success; although of course Theonoe knows only what could be learned by listening to the talk of Menelaus.

The PHŒNISSÆ[676] (Φοίνισσαι), or _Phœnician Women_, was produced about the year 410 B.C. The action takes place before the palace of Thebes. Jocasta explains that the blind Œdipus is kept prisoner there by his sons Eteocles and Polynices, whom he has therefore cursed with a prayer that they may divide their inheritance with the sword. They have arranged to rule for a year by turns; but Eteocles, at the end of his term, has refused to retire and Polynices has brought an army against Thebes. Jocasta has arranged that the brothers shall meet. When she has gone, a pædagogus shows the Argive host to Antigone from the roof. Next the chorus appear, a band of Phœnician maidens who sing of their voyage and of Delphi, their destination. Polynices stealthily enters and is greeted rapturously by his mother; Eteocles follows, and the brothers quarrel bitterly and finally. The chorus sing of Cadmus and the harvest of warriors. Eteocles comes forth and is advised by Creon to post a champion at each of the seven gates. He agrees, ratifies the betrothal of Antigone to Hæmon, and bids Creon consult Tiresias as to the hope of victory; if Polynices falls he is not to be buried in Theban ground. The chorus sing to Ares who has filled the land with war in place of the delightful Dionysiac worship; they celebrate the wondrous history of Thebes. Tiresias enters with Creon’s son Menœceus, and declares that victory can be won only if the youth is sacrificed. Creon arranges to send his son away, but Menœceus resolves to slay himself. The next ode celebrates the Sphinx, the tale of Œdipus, and Menœceus’ nobility. A messenger brings to Jocasta tidings that her sons are about to engage in single combat; she hurries to the spot with Antigone. After a brief ode of suspense, Creon returns mourning for his dead son, and another messenger tells at length how Polynices, Eteocles, and Jocasta have died. Thebes has won complete victory. The corpses are brought in, followed by Antigone, who summons the aged Œdipus. Together they bewail the dead till Creon breaks in and decrees that Antigone must marry Hæmon, Œdipus go into exile, and Polynices remain unburied. Antigone defies him: she will bury her brother, she will not marry Hæmon, but will share her father’s exile. Œdipus as they depart asserts his greatness as the Conqueror of the Sphinx.

This work was immensely popular in antiquity.[677] It was repeatedly “revived”; ancient authors quote from it often; together with the _Hecuba_ and the _Orestes_ it formed the final selection of Euripides’ work made in Byzantine times; and the scholia are extremely copious. Because of its popularity, the play was considerably expanded by interpolation. It is no mere question of isolated lines inserted by actors or copyists, though such appear to be numerous; considerable masses are due to a later poet or poets.

The following passages[678] are generally suspected:

(i) vv. 88-201, the scene of Antigone and her attendant upon the roof-terrace. To this it has been objected[679] that the entrance of Polynices should occur as the first event of the play after the closing words of the prologue which mention his expected arrival. This passage contains, moreover, a number of words otherwise unknown which is enormous considering the length of the scene, and several awkward or strained expressions.

(ii) vv. 1104-40, the description of the seven chieftains as they advance upon the gates. It is “full of obscurities and difficulties,”[680]

## particularly two elaborate yet frivolous descriptions of shields.

Moreover, it practically repeats the terrace-scene; both passages can hardly be genuine.

(iii) 1223-58 (or 1282), the messenger’s account of preparations for the single combat, followed by the dialogue in which Jocasta calls Antigone to accompany her to the field. Not only are there marked faults of style;[681] it is impossible, considering the urgency[682] of the news, that the queen should stay for this tedious narrative. Jocasta’s conversation with Antigone is by no means so objectionable. It is very short, and the style is not unworthy[683] of Euripides. Nevertheless, it is strange that the queen should wait for her daughter at so urgent a time.

(iv) the end of the drama, though at what point the addition begins is not agreed. The last address of Œdipus which opens thus[684]:

ὦ πάτρας κλεινῆς πολῖται, λεύσσετ’, Οἰδίπους ὅδε, ὃς τὰ κλείν’ αἰνίγματ’ ἔγνω καὶ μέγιστος ἦν ἀνήρ,

unmistakably recalls part of the finale in _Œdipus Tyrannus_:[685]

ὦ πάτρας Θήβης ἔνοικοι, λεύσσετ’, Οἰδίπους ὅδε, ὃς τὰ κλείν’ αἰνίγματ’ ᾔδει καὶ κράτιστος ἦν ἀνήρ.

If we accept the customary date of Sophocles’ play (405 B.C.), it was produced after Euripides’ death. Further, the whole scene of Œdipus, Antigone, and Creon has evidently been expanded and distorted. According to one version, that followed by Sophocles in the _Antigone_, the maiden remained in Thebes after the battle and buried Polynices; according to the _Œdipus Coloneus_ she accompanied her father into exile. Here the two versions are combined. Moreover, from the entrance of Œdipus onwards the play abounds once more in unnatural or unusual turns of speech. And it may be thought a serious mistake to bring the aged sufferer forth at all,[686] thus creating a new interest at the last moment of a play crowded with incident. But though this portion contains much unauthentic work, it appears to be intermingled with the genuine.

Certain other passages are open to suspicion, especially Jocasta’s prologue and the remainder—hitherto unmentioned—of the first messenger’s speech.[687] We appear to have Euripides’ prologue, padded out by another hand. The same kind of recurrent weakness and flatness marks the messenger’s speech. Above all, when the speaker seeks to rise to the occasion, his efforts result in this:[688] “From the scaling-ladder his limbs were hurled asunder like sling-stones—his hair to Heaven, his blood to earth; his arms and legs whirled round like Ixion’s wheel”. This imbecile bombast is fortunately without parallel in Attic tragedy.

It seems likely that Euripides’ work was in quite early times (probably the fourth century) expanded by another poet, whose main contribution was a large addition to the messengers’ speeches at a date when Æschylus was little enough known to allow such things as the description of the hostile champions a good degree of novelty. The new text was in its turn enlarged by accretions due to actors.[689]

Euripides’ own work is vigorous and interesting,[690] a stirring scene of warfare, patriotism, and strong passions, which, in its present expanded form, reminds one by its spirit and its popularity of Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_, the first favourite of Elizabethan audiences.[691] The two brothers are well distinguished, Polynices by his pathetic sense that intolerable wrong is urging him against his will into crime, Eteocles by a dark fervour of ambition which has grown upon his soul like religion; and their terrible altercation in the sweeping trochaic metre is equal to anything of the kind in Euripides for terse idiomatic vigour. Jocasta’s passionate joy when she sees her exiled son,[692] joy which stirs her aged feet to trip in a dance of fond rapture,[693] provides the one light-hearted moment. And her noble speech of reconciliation[694] is the single great achievement of the drama.

The ORESTES[695] (Ὀρέστης) was produced in 408 B.C. and again in 341.[696] It was extremely popular, and formed with the _Phœnissæ_ and the _Hecuba_ the final selection of Euripides’ work made in Byzantine times; but the later interpolations are probably few. The scene is laid before the palace at Argos. Orestes and Electra, having slain Clytæmnestra and Ægisthus, are imprisoned in their own house by the Argive state, which will to-day decide whether they are to be stoned to death. Orestes has been tormented by madness and is now seen asleep, watched by Electra; she hopes that they may yet be saved by Menelaus, who has come home with Helen. The latter enters and requests Electra to go for her to Clytæmnestra’s tomb with drink-offerings; she is persuaded to send her daughter Hermione instead. The chorus of Argive ladies now enter, and their voices awaken Orestes. Then follows a wonderful scene of affectionate tendance and a sudden paroxysm of the sufferer; the chorus sing of the Furies and the agony through which the house is passing. Menelaus enters and Orestes passionately implores his aid. Tyndareus (father of Helen and Clytæmnestra) arrives and denounces the cowering Orestes: why did he not invoke the law against his mother? The youth’s long speech of exculpation further incenses Tyndareus. When he has departed, Orestes again appeals to Menelaus, who points out that the only hope lies in the Argive Assembly. Orestes watches him go with contempt, but is cheered by the arrival of Pylades, who throws in his lot with his friend, and the two walk off to the Assembly. The chorus sing the story of the house and lament the matricide. A messenger brings to Electra an account of the debate, which ended with permission to the criminals to die by their own hand. Electra pours forth a lyric of painful beauty until the two youths return. Pylades declares that he too will die, but suggests vengeance on Menelaus: let them slay Helen. Electra proposes that Hermione be held as a hostage whereby Menelaus may be induced to save them. The two men go within to despatch Helen, whose shrieks are soon heard. Meanwhile Electra receives Hermione, who is dragged within. A Phrygian slave flings himself in terror from a hole high up in the house-front; in a strange lyric narrative, he tells how amid the confusion Helen has vanished. Orestes rushes forth in pursuit, but he is now insane and the slave contrives to escape. Orestes goes back, and in a moment the house is on fire. Menelaus rushes in distraught, and sees Orestes on the battlements with his sword at Hermione’s throat. A frantic altercation arises, until Menelaus cries to the citizens for a rescue. Apollo appears and bids the quarrel cease. Helen is to become a sea-goddess; Electra shall marry Pylades, and Hermione Orestes, who is to stand his trial at Athens; Apollo will reconcile him to the Argive state.

To appreciate this masterpiece, we must realize that Euripides, who so often insists on considering tradition in the light of his own day, has here insisted on that principle even more definitely than elsewhere. Certain legendary data are, to be sure, retained. Troy has fallen but a few years ago; Iphigenia was offered by her father as a sacrifice at Aulis. Otherwise the events described might have occurred in the fifth century. Agamemnon, though a noble of great eminence, was not a king[697]; Argos is ruled by an Assembly not distinguishable from the Athenian Ecclesia. The youth who exacts vengeance with his own hand is told in language which might have been employed by Pericles, that the vendetta is an outrage upon law and society; punishment for crime rests with the State alone.[698] The behest of Apollo, all-important in the _Choephorœ_, is not even mentioned in the discussion which decides the fate of Orestes. The oracle is indeed treated with scant courtesy even by those most concerned to uphold it; Electra complains of the god’s “wickedness,”[699] and her brother “blames Loxias” for urging him to a villainous deed and then giving no aid.[700] The atmosphere is one in which the slaughter of Clytæmnestra must be regarded with horror and the traditional defence of Orestes as unthinkable. This is not a theological study, but a dramatic essay in criminal psychology.

In Orestes the playwright has given us one of his most terrible portraits. Highly sensitive, weak-minded, over-educated in a bad school, he is unbalanced by the horror of his father’s death and by the oracular command which has blasted his life. In the magnificent sick-bed scene he, like his sister, fills us with nothing but pity. But the calmer he becomes the more are we filled with loathing for this pedant of eighteen, with his syllogisms justifying murder, his parade of rhetoric, his hopeless inability to grasp a situation. Rich as is the world’s drama in villains, Orestes occupies a place conspicuous. He has little heart and no sense. Both failings are common. But that both heart and brain should be replaced by a factitious perverse cleverness, an incredibly superficial passion for scoring logical points against opponents who have in hand urgent interests of real life—this grips us irresistibly. He is an example of the wreck produced by a highly specialized mental training which has ignored character. His first address to Menelaus strikes the note:—

Freely will I divulge my woes to thee. But _as the first-fruits of my plight_, I touch Thy knees, a suppliant, _tying prayer_ the while To thy _unleafèd lips_....[701]

This affected and obscure exordium is followed by verbal subtleties at every opportunity: “through my sorrows I live not, yet see the light”[702]—“my deeds, not my appearance, ravage me”[703]—“my body’s gone, my name alone remains”.[704] But all this is nothing to the detestable exhibition wherewith he answers the aged Tyndareus. To the vital point—that Clytæmnestra should have been brought before a legal tribunal—he makes no reply whatever. His only difficulties are that Tyndareus is wounded to the soul by his daughter’s death, and that he is far older than Orestes. What is to be done? Simply to “contract out of” natural feelings so that the way may be clear for pure logic:—

True, matricide doth taint me, yet again Pure am I, for my sire I did avenge. Therefore let thy great age be set aside From this our conference, for it puts me out; And let me on—’tis but thy hair I dread.[705]

There follows a frigid “statement”—“balance two against two”[706]—of his father’s claim and his mother’s offences, and of his own glorious achievement in purifying social life. The original sinner is Tyndareus himself who begot so vile a daughter! He ends by an appeal to Apollo’s behest, and a pompous comment on the importance of marriage.

The aged Spartan having given his grandson over to justice as irreclaimable, the youth turns to Menelaus, whom he insists on regarding as his real hope, in spite of Menelaus’ plain reluctance and extreme unpopularity in Argos. He is, moreover, unwilling to endure another display: “Let me be; I am reflecting....”[707] At all times he is impatient of subtleties; in the first moments of their meeting he asks his accomplished nephew: “What mean you? Wisdom is shown not by obscurity, but by plain speech.”[708] But now that Orestes has his chance, he refuses to suffer Menelaus’ “reflections,” and with a warning that “a long address is better than a short one, and easier for the auditor to follow”[709] produces a masterpiece of metallic cleverness which presses Seneca himself very hard; perhaps the finest gem is the offer of Hermione as a kind of discount.[710] Before the Assembly he succeeds in combining several insanely tactless insults to the Argives: they are “possessors,” not original citizens, of the land; they were Pelasgians at first, but later “Danaidæ,” descendants of the women who slew their husbands; and he has killed his mother as much for their sake as his father’s.[711] But Euripides’ most frightful satire on “advanced education” is reserved for the nightmare of the close, where the raving Orestes leans down over the battlement to the grief-maddened Menelaus and begins by a lunatic reminiscence of the “Socratic method”: “will you be the questioner or the respondent?”[712]

Prig as he is, Orestes has nevertheless some elements of nobility at the first. He can tell his uncle plainly that his disease is “conscience, which convicts me for a criminal”;[713] he shows real regard for Electra; the splendidly selfless friendship between him and Pylades stirs every one. As the play advances, however, we are lost in the loathing and breathless wonder wherewith we gaze upon the increasing insanity of the wretched prince.[714] Each moment he becomes more vigorous and more lost to sense of right; when Electra suggests the vilest part of the plot—the seizure of Hermione—he breaks forth into a cry like Macbeth’s: “Bring forth men-children only!”[715]

Electra has been the chief definite cause of Orestes’ fall. Amazingly vivid, she fills the whole drama with a thin acrid fume of malice. Her ruling passion is not mere hatred against Clytæmnestra. That bitterness has spread until (saving her tenderness for Orestes) there is nothing in her but a narrow viperishness. When an innocent like Hermione draws near, the fang strikes by instinct. Her intensity of feeling and her years have made her Orestes’ monitor long before he returned home, and it is she to whom Tyndareus points, in searing language, as the more guilty.[716] Another influence has soured her, that lack of husband and children on which Helen, with the brutality so frequent in shallow natures, insists at their first meeting.[717] But Electra has vastly more common-sense than her brother or Pylades, and it is to her that the delightful comment on Helen is given:[718]

Ah, Nature!... Saw ye how tiny was that tress she cut, Sparing her beauty? ’Tis the old Helen still!

But her sense of humour cannot sustain her heart long:

Heaven’s hatred seize thee! Thou hast wrought the fall Of me, and this my brother, and of Greece.

These two women, so pungently contrasted in one brief scene, share, however, one attribute—that nerveless theology which Euripides detested as rotting the moral fibre. Electra muses upon “suffering and disaster sent by Heaven”.[719] Helen attributes her elopement with Paris to the “maddening doom of Heaven,”[720] which has also “destroyed this hapless pair”[721]—her nephew and niece. The latter in her lyric outcry explores[722] all the legends of her line to discover the cause of the present disaster, a method which the chorus, for all their sympathy, indeed complicity,[723] seem to parody by the ludicrous baldness of their reflection that this horror of fiends and bloodshed has fallen upon the house “because Myrtilus fell out of the chariot”![724]

All the minor characters are skilfully drawn—Pylades, the warm-hearted scatter-brained ruffian who conceives the murder of Helen as soon[725] as he learns that she is in his friend’s house; Tyndareus, the hot-tempered, affectionate old king; Menelaus, the vulgar and successful, who has no other ambition than to let bygones be bygones[726] and who has actually expected to find Orestes and Clytæmnestra sharing the same home, quite comfortable after the death of Agamemnon;[727] Helen, that faded, facile creature, who cannot abstain from conversation, even with murderesses if there is no one else. Hermione, minute as is her part, commands our affection, not only because of the vile complot which centres round her, but for the shy graciousness of the little she does say, ἥκω λαβοῦσα πρευμένειαν[728] and the rest; she seems to have strayed from some sunlit lost drama by Sophocles.

The religious sanction which for Sophocles had been the background of Orestes’ story and which for Æschylus provided the most vital part of the action, has in Euripides’ hands become, as it were, a small, rather shabby stage-property hung upon the back-scene. Those Avenging Spirits who hunt the matricide are now called “frenzies”[729] by his sister, and in the anxiously precise account[730] which Menelaus elicits from his nephew, it becomes plain that the three “maidens like night” are an hallucination; any unfettered intercourse between them and ordinary men is out of the question. Traditional belief itself tells rather against their divinity than for it.[731] Another stage property is the incidental miracle. Menelaus at Malea was addressed by the “prophet of Nereus, Glaucus, truthful god,” who told him of his brother’s death.[732] When we learn that at Nauplia he heard of Clytæmnestra’s death but from “some mariner,”[733] we surmise that “Glaucus” too was human.[734] The second miracle is that related[735] by the Phrygian slave; Helen vanished, “either by spells or the tricks of wizards or stolen by Heaven”. Helen has only hidden herself; the Phrygian is crazed by excitement and terror. But the miracle of Helen is vouched for by a more august witness, Apollo, who asserts that he has saved her from Orestes’ sword. Thus we arrive at the final triumph of orthodox religion, the epilogue in which the Delphian god stays at a word the vengeance of Argos and the quarrel between Menelaus and Orestes. In the reality of this epilogue we shall believe according as we find it credible that Euripides could destroy all the effect of his own play. All the action, all the atmosphere, which the dramatist has created, are rent by an utter breach. The objection is not so much that Apollo and his speeches are in themselves absurd, though the consolation offered to Menelaus, that Helen throughout their married life has given him endless trouble,[736] is (however true) distasteful. What jars hopelessly is the monstrous discontinuity of event and emotion. As elsewhere, this orthodox Olympian and his epilogue are a sham, devised to suit the demands of an audience which “knew” how Orestes went forth from Argos to Athens. The real drama ends with the wild breakdown of Menelaus, and for the three criminals and their victim the doom falls which sin and bitter madness have made inevitable.[737]

But the Orestes is not remarkable as a study in scepticism, like the _Ion_. Even the psychology, superb as it is, cannot be regarded as the cause of the immense popularity which the play won in antiquity.[738] It is pre-eminent for magnificent situations. The sick-bed scene is unforgettable, especially that marvellous hushed song[739] of Electra beside her sleeping brother:—

Holy night, outpouring ever Slumber’s boon on souls that mourn, From thy midmost deep dominion Hither bend thy sweeping pinion, Where, ’neath woes that leave it never Lies a princely house forlorn.

The whole progress of the later scenes is splendidly exciting, and in the midst Euripides has set the audacious scene of the Phrygian slave who replaces the conventional messenger’s speech with his wild lyrical narrative, incoherent and baffling. Equally brilliant is the finale in which actual lunacy confronts the delirium of despair and grief, with the frail victim flung upon the parapet, the knife brandished in the madman’s grasp, and the flames which are to end the horror already rising behind.

The BACCHÆ[740] (Βάκχαι), or _Bacchantes_ (female votaries of the god Bacchus or Dionysus), was produced in 405 B.C., soon after the poet’s death in Macedonia, and with its companion-plays obtained the first prize.

Dionysus, standing before the palace of Thebes, tells how, disguised as a prophet, he has brought his religion into Greece. His purpose in Thebes is to punish the sisters of his mother Semele for declaring that their sister had united herself not with Zeus but with some mortal, and to crush the young king Pentheus, who opposes his worship. Already the Theban women are revelling upon Mount Cithæron, filled with the Bacchic ecstasy. He departs to join them, and the chorus of Phrygian votaresses throng in uttering a rapturous eulogy of their religion. Tiresias and Cadmus are next seen preparing to join the revels, when Pentheus enters and reproaches them. Their answers enrage him further and he orders the arrest of the stranger-prophet. The chorus appeal to Holiness against the oppressor, reciting the blessings of Dionysus and the doom of pride; they yearn to revel unchecked. The Stranger is brought in; Pentheus questions and insults him, finally haling him away to the stables. The chorus sing their indignation and desire for the aid of Dionysus in person when the prophet is heard summoning fire and earthquake; the women in frenzy greet the overthrow of the palace. Their leader comes forth and relates how Pentheus in vain sought to bind him and how the god has thrown the house into utter ruin. Pentheus rushes out in fury, but is met by a rustic who relates the revels and miracles performed by the Theban votaresses. This excites the king still further, but the Stranger dissuades him from the use of armed force; let him go disguised as a woman to witness the revels. Pentheus retires into the palace with the prophet, who reveals the king’s coming doom to the chorus; they rejoice in their future freedom and the fate of the ungodly. Pentheus re-appears, dressed as a female reveller and utterly under the Stranger’s influence. The two depart for the mountains, the king being now practically imbecile. The chorus fiercely call for bloody vengeance, then praise the humble endeavour after all that is beautiful in life. A messenger returns with the story of Pentheus’ death: he has been torn to pieces by his mother Agave and her companions. Agave enters in mad triumph with her son’s head, followed by Cadmus, who bears the mangled remains of his grandson and gradually brings Agave back to her senses. He laments[741] the prince who was the comfort of his old age.[742] Dionysus appears in the sky, foretells the future of Cadmus and his wife, and explains that the present sorrows are due to the will of Zeus. Agave turns away, repudiating the new religion.

Intoxicatingly beautiful, coldly sordid, at one moment baffling the brain, at the next thrilling us with the mystic charm of wood and hillside, this drama stands unique among Euripides’ works. Its wonderful effect flows from three sources: primitive dramaturgy, lyrical beauty, the enigma of its theological import. As for the first of these, there is a marked simplicity both of plot and characters. A god brings a strange worship into the land of his birth; the king rejects and scorns him; whereupon the god turns his people to madness so that they avenge him upon the king. It is the simplest possible dramatic concept. If we consider the personages, comparing Agave with Phædra or Medea, Pentheus with Ion or Hippolytus, we find an equal simplicity. The characters of the _Bacchæ_ impress us less by their subtle truth to nature than by the situation in which they stand. In this sense the _Bacchæ_ is the most Æschylean work of Euripides. Like his predecessor when he composed the _Choephorœ_, he is studying directly a great religious fact, which submerges the refinements of individual psychology, leaving somewhat stark figures, the God, the Old Man, the King, the Prophet, and the Woman.[743] In technique we are not far from that primitive stage of modern drama which exhibits the interplay of Avarice, Lovingkindness, and the rest. This imparts an even greater attractiveness to the amazing literary excellence of the whole. This excellence is of two distinct kinds. The episodes are not filled with romantic beauty—only a few splendid passages in the long narratives of messengers exhibit this; they show the same mastery of a brilliant half-prosaic idiom which is familiar elsewhere. But the lyrics are the poet’s finest achievement in this field. Nothing that he had created hitherto can be compared with them, save the praises of Attica in the _Medea_[744] and the song of escape in the _Hippolytus_.[745] The profound beauty of their musings on the life of serene piety, the startling vividness wherewith they express the secluded loveliness which haunts bare peaks or remote woodlands, the superb torrent of glowing song[746] which celebrates the religious ecstasy of Dionysiac votaries, where the glorious diction is swept along by a tempest of ever more tumultuous rhythm—all these contribute to make the _Bacchæ_ something precious and alone.

It is with regard to the third feature, the theological purport, that disagreement begins among critics. Is the playwright commending the Bacchic religion to his fellow-countrymen or is he not? If not, why this magnificent and intense proclamation of the glory conferred by belief? But if he supports it, why this dreary aching scene at the end, when Dionysus hears no voice raised in loyalty, only the despairing accents of the woman who repudiates his worship? It may be objected that perhaps we should not hope for definite interpretation, that since “like a live thing it seems to move and show new faces every time that, with imagination fully working, one reads the play,”[747] perhaps there is no core of central fact to find. Here lurks a dangerous confusion of thought. Every work of art springs from a definite concept held by the artist, some piece of reality clearly understood and sincerely felt, insisting on expression at his hands precisely because it affects him emotionally. The elusiveness of the final expression is not in the least degree any proof that no definite doctrine, or experience, or passionate wish, was its origin; a fern has a physical centre of gravity as truly as an apple, though more difficult to locate. Rather, the luxuriant freedom is the proof that there is deep down something definite, else the freedom would be anarchy. We conclude that however enigmatic is the _Bacchæ_, yet Euripides had a definite opinion about the two questions: Does the god Dionysus exist? Is his religion a blessing to humanity? His opinion could have been written down in a few lucid sentences. Had this not been so, he would have postponed beginning his play until it was. This clear concept may itself indicate “doubt” (if we insist on the word) or rather a bifurcation of truth, as may be observed in the dramaturgy of Sophocles.

There is, then, a secret to be discovered. Is it lost for ever, or not? It appears to some[748] that the drama contains evidence, unmistakable but long overlooked, which conveys Euripides’ opinion concerning Dionysus. The chief, the only certain, clue is contained in the “Palace-Miracle”. The facts are, that the chorus cry aloud at the tottering of the building; that Dionysus a moment later when relating what has happened within, adds, “And this further evil hath Bacchus wrought upon him: he hath flung his dwelling to the ground, where it lies all in ruin”;[749] that, finally, the palace is as a fact uninjured. This latter point is proved by the complete silence of all the personages, except Dionysus and the chorus. Neither Cadmus nor Agave, nor the two messengers, at their several entrances make the least remark about it. Above all, Pentheus, who was within the house when the overthrow is alleged to have occurred, says nothing about it. Later the prince and his enemy enter the palace before proceeding to Cithæron, again with no hint that the building has been destroyed. It follows that the statements made by the chorus and by Dionysus are untrue.[750] The women believe what their leader cries out from within and what he tells them later. That is, they accept what their own eyes tell them is false. Only one power can work this marvel of belief—hypnotism, or, as earlier ages would call it, magic. The Dionysus of this play is precisely what Pentheus calls him, a “foreign wizard,”[751] no god at all, but a human hierophant of the new religion. Brought up in Western Asia, he combines a profound feeling for natural religion with an un-Greek leaning to orgiastic ecstasy and an instinct for fiendish cruelty; so that in spreading the gospel of joy and simple surrender to the mystic loveliness of Nature he crushes those who reject him, not destroying them in passion, but working their misery with a horrible cold relish: he is Shakespeare’s Richard the Third with religious instead of political ambitions. As for the Dionysiac religion itself, the poet feels its vast emotional appeal—feels it so strongly that he has drawn the most wonderful picture of ecstatic religion to be found in literature; but if it is proposed to him as “a way of life” for civilized men he condemns it as firmly as unwillingly. To give free rein to passions and instincts hitherto unconscious or starved, this is a path, perhaps the only path, towards strangely beautiful experience, the thrill of communion with non-human life; but it is not the path for man. Here Euripides stands at one with the great European tradition. If man is to attain the height of his destiny he will seek not the gold of joy but the silver of happiness, not the blazing rapture of absorption in strange beauty, but the calm glow of self-understanding and self-expression. He will not seek to destroy the instinct for ecstasy, but will harness it, and work it into the fabric of a sound coherent life. He may be a spectator, it is true, if not of all time, yet of all existence; his eyes will shrink from nothing, but his heart is not to be reft from him. He must prove all things, but hold fast only that which is good—a moral being, not the slave of sound and colour. In this drama, where Euripides seems to voice like some pagan archangel the glory of a non-moral absorption in the torrent of raw life, he is fundamentally as moral as at any moment in life. As Tannhäuser after his sojourn in the Venusberg is at length won back by the urgency of his own soul into the Roman Church, so does Euripides unflinchingly present, to an audience still breathing hard after the glories of Cithæron, Agave and Cadmus bowed over Pentheus’ mangled body, and the rejection of a god whose unmitigated demands imply the wreckage of sound human life.

What, then, are we to believe of Dionysus? If we refuse him we are liable like Pentheus to be destroyed; if we surrender ourselves, what of Agave? Here is a dilemma which Euripides himself did not foresee. By θεός (“god”) he often means something widely different from the concept of an ordinary Athenian, but he never intends all the associations of our word “God”. For us belief in “God” implies that the universe holds a personal Governor, all-powerful and all-wise, who stands to us in a relation emotional as well as metaphysical. To accept Him is to believe that His purpose embraces the existence and history of the universe and of the humblest creature therein, and because of that belief to merit His love by loving service of our own. These thoughts are to us tremendous commonplaces; they would have bewildered any fifth-century Greek save Æschylus.[752] θεός means a power, usually but not necessarily personal, which is outside ourselves and affects our life in a manner which cannot be affected by any wish or act of ours, save possibly to a small degree by ritual submission. Dionysus, like the other “gods,” is a permanent fact of life personified. We must give him respect, take account of him in our conduct and judgment of others. To ignore him is not so much sin as utter blindness. If we insist on the personality of Dionysus we find him attractive but deadly, a deity who employs his might to entangle the threads of life, crushing hearts better than his own. In so far as he is a person he is unthinkable. But as a fact of life, with no more purpose or will than the force of gravitation, he is neither good nor bad, simply a profound reality, one of the elements we must consider in building our lives. Cadmus expresses this lesson: “If anyone despises the supernatural powers, let him look on the death of this man and believe in the gods”.[753]

Then why does the poet dwell on the personal existence of Dionysus? Even if we refuse to believe the theory outlined already, that this person is a human hierophant, we can still answer the question. Euripides is concerned not merely to tell us the truth about ethics, but to discuss the current theology of his day. The majority of his fellows believed in a personal Zeus, a personal Athena and Dionysus. He wishes to convince them of the falsity, the pernicious falsity, of such a creed. Take this play in its superficial meaning and you find a person who is detestable—a god who does wrong, and who is, therefore, no god at all.[754] Away with him; purify your theology. And when this is done, we find, not that the drama has fallen to pieces, but that now it is coherent and forcible. There is in the human soul an instinct for ecstasy, for a relinquishment of self in order to feel and bathe in the non-human glory of Nature. Trample this instinct ruthlessly down as did Pentheus, and your life is maimed and shrivelled.

IPHIGENIA AT AULIS[755] (Ἰφιγένεια ἡ ἐν Αὐλίδι) was produced soon after the poet’s death in 406 B.C. by his son, together with _Alcmæon at Corinth_ and the _Bacchæ_.

The scene shows Agamemnon’s tent at Aulis, where the Greeks are encamped ready to sail for Troy, but delayed by contrary winds. Before they can set out Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia must be sacrificed to Artemis. The king has written to his wife bidding her send the maiden—to marry Achilles. We now see him in agony beneath the night-sky and entrusting to an aged slave a letter revoking the first. The chorus (women of Colchis) enter and describe the pastimes of various heroes. Menelaus intercepts the letter and reproaches his brother with treachery. After a vigorous dispute they learn that Clytæmnestra and Iphigenia are approaching. Menelaus relents, but they realize that the sacrifice must proceed. The chorus sing Aphrodite’s power and the judgment of Paris. Agamemnon greets his family with half-concealed distress, and in vain attempts to send his wife back forthwith. A choric ode describes the impending doom of Troy. Achilles, seeking Agamemnon, meets Clytæmnestra, who to his amazement greets him as a son-in-law. In the midst of their embarrassment the old slave comes forward and reveals Agamemnon’s purpose. The queen in agony appeals to Achilles, who promises to defend Iphigenia. The chorus sing the bridals of Peleus and Thetis, Achilles’ parents. Then mother and daughter piteously beg Agamemnon to relent; he is heart-broken but determined. Iphigenia utters a lyric lament, after which Achilles tells how the army maltreated him for championing Iphigenia. He and the queen are excitedly debating, when Iphigenia proclaims her readiness to die for the cause of Greece, and departs, singing her farewell to life. A messenger brings a description of the sacrifice: at the last moment the princess miraculously disappeared, and a hind was substituted for her by the goddess. Agamemnon returns and takes leave of Clytæmnestra.

The text of this drama presents curious features.[756] There are two prologues, and the last fifty or sixty lines of the whole are corrupt. It seems that Euripides died before the work was finished; the gaps were filled by his son Euripides who produced the trilogy (_Iphigenia_, _Alcmæon_, _Bacchæ_) soon after 406 B.C. The original prologue, of the ordinary narrative kind, delivered by Agamemnon in iambic metre, is embedded in the later prologue, which takes the form of a dialogue in anapæsts between the king and his aged retainer. This later work is extremely charming, filled with the quiet beauty of night overhanging the feverish ambition and misery of men. But though the younger Euripides probably wrote an ending also, this has been displaced by extremely bad[757] work of a much later time. It is not easy to understand why such inferior matter was allowed to eject the composition of the younger Euripides. Perhaps the explanation is that the concluding lines were known from the first not to be by the master, that the play was often produced, and that for these two reasons rival endings were very early before the public. They would destroy one another’s prestige, so that in later centuries none survived, and some scribe filled up the gap as best he could.

A noteworthy contrast exists between the _Iphigenia_ and the _Bacchæ_, though they were no doubt composed at almost the same time. In this play the chorus has practically no concern with the action, whereas the Asiatic women form the soul of the _Bacchæ_. Instead of the wild loveliness or serene spirituality which thrill us in the lyrics of that drama, we find here nothing more profound than graceful complications of phrase and facile emotion. In compensation, while the _Bacchæ_ is primitive in psychology, its companion is superior to many Greek tragedies in the masterly freedom and subtlety of its character-drawing.

The play is a study of five ordinary characters under the stress of an extraordinary crisis. This common-place quality of the personages conveys the whole purport, giving it a momentous position even among such works as we have been discussing. In this latest tragedy no sincere reader can fail to detect himself under the thin disguise of names. Many men were pointed at as the original of Meredith’s Sir Willoughby Patterne, and for the same good reason most Athenian husbands must have stirred a little on their benches in the presence of this unheroic Agamemnon. There is nothing heroic in any of the persons. Menelaus is an ordinary man—artlessly selfish at one moment, artlessly and uselessly kind-hearted at another, and a master of fluent invective which reveals his own failings. Clytæmnestra is an ordinary woman, showing indeed a queenly dignity in the normal relations of life, but when puzzled or alarmed revealing herself a thorough _bourgeoise_, and when confronted by the doom which threatens her daughter forgetting all her pride, clutching at even the most pitiful means[758] of gaining a respite, and utterly broken when her hope dies away. Agamemnon is an ordinary man, thrown by circumstances into a position where both generalship and statesmanship are needed, attempting to rule his army by diplomacy and his family by military discipline, with ruin as the result. Fatally open to suggestion, he makes and remakes subterfuges, seeking to spare every one’s feelings until at last he drifts into the necessity of slaying his own child. Even Iphigenia is an ordinary girl. It is precisely because she is a common type that we grieve for her anguish and triumph in her exaltation. Macaria in the _Heracleidæ_ is almost unknown save to professed students of Euripides. She knows no fear or hesitation and lives on the heights; we recognize in ourselves no kinship with her. But Iphigenia we meet every day. She is no heroine, but a child. Her delight at seeing her father again shows all a child’s amiable abandon; her pitiful cries and shrinking at the prospect of death are those of the ordinary happiness-loving girl. When finally the agony of her father, the empty clamour of Achilles, her mother’s undignified tremors, nerve her to trample her own dread under foot, we rejoice precisely because what we witness is the triumph of common human nature. Even Achilles, son of a goddess as story reported him, is a common-place person too. This is not the hero who flames through the _Iliad_, but a young noble led into the extreme of folly by this very legend that his origin is divine. Perhaps nothing even in the deadly Euripides is quite so fatal to the traditional halo than the incredible speech[759] wherewith Achilles comforts Clytæmnestra. Of vast length, full of spurious, jerky rhetoric and contradictory comments on the situation—which, however frightful, appeals to him mostly as an atmosphere in which he can pose—this oration reveals him as a sham. Fortunately for him, he is never undeceived. This man is not the Achilles of tradition; he is spiritual brother of the mad prince in the _Orestes_ and the ancestor of Mr. Shaw’s Sergius Saranoff.

In his last work, then, Euripides, so far from showing any exhaustion of power, appears on the verge of new developments.[760] He has drawn still nearer to the new comedy of Menander. The suddenness with which, after the quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus, the crisis is precipitated by the entrance of the messenger announcing Iphigenia’s arrival—the man breaks into the middle of a line[761]—is a remarkable novelty. The altercation itself shows a brilliant freedom of idiom which even this poet has hardly reached hitherto. There is at least one unprecedented license of metre.[762] And the complete change of spirit which comes upon Iphigenia was novel enough to offend Aristotle.[763]

The CYCLOPS[764] (Κύκλωψ) is the only complete[765] satyric play now extant. No indications of date[766] seem available.

The background is a cave on Mount Etna, wherein dwells the Cyclops, or one-eyed giant, Polyphemus. Silenus tells how he and the satyrs have become the ogre’s slaves. He is sweeping out the cavern when the chorus of satyrs drive in their flocks. Odysseus and his men arrive, seeking provisions, which Silenus eagerly sells for a skin of wine. The conversation is interrupted by Polyphemus who decides to devour the intruders. Odysseus eloquently appeals to him, but receives a brutal and blasphemous reply. The giant drives the Greeks within, and the chorus express their disgust at his cannibalism. Odysseus tells how two of his men have been eaten; he himself has gained favour by the gift of wine, and proposes that they all escape, after blinding Polyphemus with a red-hot stake. The chorus joyfully assent. Polyphemus comes forth drunk and intending to visit his brethren, but Odysseus dissuades him. The Cyclops asks Odysseus his name and is told “Noman”; he promises to eat his benefactor last. The revel proceeds until Polyphemus retires, whereupon Odysseus calls for action, but the chorus all offer ridiculous excuses. The hero goes within to perform the task with his comrades. Soon the giant reappears, blind and bellowing with pain, while the satyrs joke about “Noman,” and give him false directions so that the Greeks escape from the cave. Odysseus reveals himself, and Polyphemus recognizes the fulfilment of an oracle. He threatens to wreck the ship, but the others depart unconcernedly to the beach.

This brief play—it has hardly more than seven hundred lines—is invaluable as being the only complete work of the satyric type which we now possess. Considered in itself, it is of small value,[767] though it must have formed an agreeable light entertainment. The lyrics are short and trifling. Of characterization there is little, and that little traditional and obvious—Odysseus is pious, valiant, resourceful; Polyphemus brutally sensual, the satyrs cowardly and frivolous. Though there are passages of tension, the audience can never have felt any marked excitement, as the whole story, except that the satyrs are imported by the dramatist, is taken from a well-known episode in Homer[768]; even such things as the joke on the name Outis[769] (“Noman”) and the comparison[770] between the spit which blinds Polyphemus and the auger of a shipwright, are borrowed from the epic. The nature of satyric drama in general is discussed elsewhere.[771] Here it will be enough to note that there are “tragic” features in this play; Odysseus throughout speaks and acts in a manner as dignified, perhaps more dignified, than in certain tragedies of our poet. The farcical scenes provided by the rascally Silenus, the obscene jests and cowardice of the chorus, and a certain approximation[772] to comedy in the iambic metre used by them or by Polyphemus, are marks of a satyric play. It should be noted, however, that even without them, the _Cyclops_ would be no tragedy. Polyphemus is no tragic antagonist of the hero. His exposition of his philosophy of life,[773] such as it is, must not persuade us that there is here any valid moral antagonism as foundation of the drama. Odysseus contends with him and eludes him as one might escape the violence of a ravening animal.

The RHESUS[774] (Ῥῆσος) is a drama of uncertain date and authorship. The action is founded on the Tenth Book of the _Iliad_, and takes place at night in the Trojan camp. Hector has defeated the Greeks and hopes to destroy them at dawn. The drama opens with a song by the chorus of sentinels, come to warn Hector that the Greeks are astir. He is ordering instant attack when Æneas urges that a spy be first sent. Dolon volunteers, and sets forth disguised as a wolf, followed by the admiration and prayers of the chorus. A herdsman announces the approach of the Thracian prince, Rhesus, with an army to aid Troy, but Hector is displeased with his tardiness, and, despite the joyful ode of the chorus, greets his ally with reproaches. Rhesus offers excuses, promising to destroy the Greeks without Trojan help, and to invade Greece; Hector takes him away to bivouac. The chorus depart to rouse the Lycians, whose watch comes next. Odysseus and Diomedes steal in, intending to slay Hector. They have met Dolon and learned from him the position of Hector’s tent and the watchword, “Phœbus”. Athena appears, bidding them slay Rhesus and take his wondrous steeds. They depart, and, seeing Paris draw near, she calms his suspicions under the guise of his protectress Aphrodite. Next she recalls the Greeks, who have slain Rhesus. An exciting scene follows, in which the chorus seize Odysseus, who escapes by using the pass-word. The chorus sing the daring of Odysseus. A wounded charioteer of Rhesus staggers in, proclaiming his master’s death, of which he accuses Hector, who sends him away for tendance. As the chorus lament, a Muse appears in the sky, bearing the body of her son Rhesus. She sings a dirge and curses Odysseus and Diomedes. Next she tells of her union with the river-god, father of Rhesus, and upbraids Athena. Hector promises glorious obsequies, but she declares that her son shall live on in the Thracian mountains as a spirit half-divine.[775] Hector orders an assault upon the Greeks, and the chorus sing a few courageous words.

This admirable drama stands quite by itself. There is a minimum of psychology; the lyrics are mostly of slight value. But the writer has not aimed at a tragedy of the usual type. Its excellence lies in the vigour and excitement of the action. Almost all the scenes, especially the debate at the opening, and the escape of the Greeks, are written by a master of vivid realism, who is less concerned with character-drawing. The unwearied Hector, the cautious Æneas, the vaunting, splendid, barbarian prince, the fiercely loyal charioteer—these are all obvious types. The only really fine stroke of psychological insight occurs where Hector, himself reckless at first, is by the absurd presumptuousness of Rhesus forced into discretion.[776] What really stirs one is the thrilling atmosphere of danger and the magical little lyric[777] which falls half-carelessly from the wearied sentries when the night begins to wane:—

Hark! Hark! That voice, as of a thousand strings! The nightingale, where Simois moves along ’Mid corpses stark! Upon the listening air she flings Her grief transfusèd into song. E’en now on Ida graze the sheep. One distant pipe through darkness cries Over the upland lawn. Now layeth velvet-footed sleep Enchantment on my drooping eyes, Sweetest at hush of dawn.

Some ancient critics denied that Euripides wrote the _Rhesus_, and the great majority of modern scholars have accepted this view.[778] The evidence for Euripidean authorship is as follows: (i) The play comes down to us in the manuscripts of that poet. (ii) That Euripides wrote a _Rhesus_ is known from the _Didascaliæ_ or Dramatic Records. (iii) Early Alexandrian writers quote passages from our text as from “the _Rhesus_ of Euripides”. On the other side are (i) a statement in the _Argument_:[779] “Some have suspected this drama to be spurious, and not the work of Euripides, for it reveals rather the Sophoclean manner”; (ii) various features of the work which modern critics have regarded as suggesting an inferior playwright: (_a_) the plot is superficial; (_b_) there is no prologue;[780] (_c_) four actors are needed; (_d_) Æneas and Paris have practically nothing to do; (_e_) the chorus is employed in a manner foreign to Euripidean plays; (_f_) there is a lack of force and pathos; (_g_) there is no rhetoric; (_h_) there is no sententiousness; (_i_) we have here the beginning of historical drama, which is later than the fifth century; (_j_) the style is eclectic: imitations of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are to be observed.[781]

Several of these objections are plainly unfounded. Four actors are not clearly necessary, as was shown above. Pathos, of a kind quite Euripidean, is to be found in the scene where the Muse laments her glorious son. And how deny rhetorical force to a poet who can write such brilliantly vigorous things as:—

Aye, friends in plenty shall I find, now Heaven Stands firm for us, and Fortune guides my sword. I need them not! Where hid they those long years When Troy, a galleon with her canvas rent, Reeled onward through war’s shrieking hurricane?[782]

The high-hearted defence[783] of Rhesus is full of the same tingling rhetoric. Yet many critics[784] of the highest rank have denied Euripidean authorship to the _Rhesus_. On the other side stands[785] the testimony of the almost contemporary record. One consideration, obvious yet too often ignored, may help us. The earliest work of Euripides to which we can assign a date—the _Alcestis_—belongs to the year 438. The poet was then at least forty-two years old. Is it beyond belief that twenty years before the _Alcestis_ the youthful dramatist composed a stirring tale of war and hair-breadth escape, which owed much to the manner of Æschylus, especially in his handling of the chorus? During the period for which we have evidence, he was constantly testing the possibilities of his art. Need we assume that until the _Alcestis_ he had not advanced?

The soundest view appears to be that we have here a very early work of Euripides. This is confirmed by the critic Crates, an Academic philosopher of the second century before Christ, who asserted that Euripides was still young when he wrote the _Rhesus_.[786] To this should be added whatever help may be drawn from contemporary history. It is natural to suppose that when this drama was composed Athenian politics were closely concerned with Thrace. An Athenian colony at Nine Ways, afterwards called Amphipolis, was destroyed by the Thracians in 465 B.C. In 436 the place was resettled under the new name by Hagnon, who brought the bones of Rhesus from the Troad back to Thrace. The later year, as connected with the hero, would seem the more suitable, were it not for the words[787] of his mother who refuses burial for her son and proclaims his strange life after death: “hidden in caverns of the silver-yielding soil he shall lie as a human spirit, still living”. Such language would rather be avoided after the bones themselves had been visibly committed to Thracian earth. On the whole, one thinks the situation more suitable to some period, anterior to Hagnon’s expedition, when Thracian politics were in the air, perhaps quite soon after the disaster of 465 B.C.[788]

* * * * *

Of the lost plays we have about eleven hundred fragments. Few of these comprise more than three or four lines, but a fair conception of several dramas can be formed from reports of the plot, parodies by Aristophanes, and the remains themselves.

The TELEPHUS was acted in 438 B.C., together with _The Cretan Women_, _Alcmæon at Psophis_, and _Alcestis_. Sophocles won the first prize, Euripides the second. Telephus, King of Mysia, was wounded by Achilles when the Greeks invaded Mysia in mistake for Troy. His wound would not heal, and he entered his enemies’ country disguised as a beggar, to consult the Delphic oracle, which declared that “the wounder would heal him”. Meanwhile the Greek heroes were deliberating at Argos about a second expedition. Agamemnon refused to set forth again, and uttered to Menelaus the celebrated words: Σπάρτην ἔλαχες· ταύτην κόσμει—“Sparta is thy place: make thereof the best”. While the council was in progress Telephus begged audience. His disguise was penetrated by Odysseus, and he was about to be slain when he snatched up the infant Orestes, threatening to kill the child if the Greeks molested him. He was given a hearing and justified his action in fighting the Greeks when they invaded his country. His hearers were won over, but it was found that Achilles had no knowledge of medicine. Odysseus suggested that the real “wounder” was Achilles’ spear. Telephus was thus healed, and in his gratitude consented to guide the Greeks to Troy.

We possess in the _Acharnians_ of Aristophanes an elaborate and brilliant parody of the interview granted to Telephus. Dicæopolis, an Athenian farmer who has made peace on his own account with Sparta, is attacked by his fellow-citizens, the charcoal-burners of Acharnæ, and only obtains leave to plead his cause by threatening to slay their darling—a coal-basket. Then he begs from Euripides the beggar’s outfit of Telephus, and, returning, delivers a clever harangue denouncing the war. The baby-hostage idea Aristophanes used again in the _Thesmophoriazusæ_, where Mnesilochus, in great danger from the infuriated women, seizes the infant which one of them is carrying, only to find it a concealed wine-skin.

PHILOCTETES was produced in 431 B.C. with the _Medea_, _Dictys_, and _Harvesters_ (Θερισταί), when both Euripides and Sophocles were defeated by Euphorion, the son of Æschylus. Our knowledge is derived almost wholly from Dio Chrysostom[789] who compares the three plays called _Philoctetes_ by Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. He offers interesting comments on the differences in plot. In Euripides, as in Æschylus, the chorus consists of Lemnian men, but the later poet anticipates criticism by making his chorus apologize for not visiting the sufferer earlier. One Lemnian, by name Actor, takes part as a friend of Philoctetes. The “prologue” is spoken by Odysseus (here working with Diomedes, not Neoptolemus, as in Sophocles) who explains that he would not have undertaken this present task for fear of being recognized by Philoctetes, had not Athena changed his appearance. (Here, as in the apology offered by the chorus, we have implied criticism[790] on Æschylus.) The Trojans are sending an embassy in the hope of gaining Philoctetes. Later in the drama, no doubt, occurred a set dispute between the Greek and the Trojan envoys.

In the BELLEROPHON Euripides seems to have gone to the extreme in depicting the passionate atheism inspired by the sight of prosperous wickedness. “If the gods do aught base,” he exclaims in a famous line, “they are not gods.” Another vigorous fragment begins:—

Then dare men say that there are gods in Heaven? Nay, nay! There are not. Fling the tale away, The ancient lie by human folly bred! Base not your judgment on these words of mine— Use but your eyes.

Bellerophon ascended to Heaven on his winged steed Pegasus in order to remonstrate with Zeus. This idea is used farcically in Aristophanes’ _Peace_, where Trygæus ascends on a monstrous beetle.

ERECHTHEUS was a beautiful picture of patriotism. Athens being attacked by the Eleusinians and Thracians, King Erechtheus was told by the Delphic oracle that he could secure victory for Athens by sacrificing his daughter. His wife Praxithea, in a speech of passionate patriotism, consented to give up her child; Swinburne has used this fragment in his own _Erechtheus_. Another long fragment contains the advice which Erechtheus gives to his son, and which in its dry precision curiously resembles the farewell of Polonius to Laertes. While the issue of battle remains uncertain, the chorus of old Athenians sing a lyric which charmingly renders their yearning for peace:

Along my spear, at last laid by, May spiders weave their shining thread; May peace and music, ere I die, With garlands crown my whitening head.

I’d deck Athene’s cloistered fane With shields of Thracian mountaineers, And ope the well-loved page again Where poets sing across the years.

Another popular play was the ANTIOPE. It dealt with the persecution of Antiope by Lycus, King of Thebes, and his wife Dirce. She was rescued from death by her two sons, Amphion and Zethus, whom she had been compelled to abandon at birth, and who discovered the relationship in the critical hour. The chief interest of the play was the contrast between the brothers—Zethus a man of muscle, devoted to farming; Amphion, a musician and lover of the arts. Euripides developed this contrast in a long debate wherein culture was upheld against the “Philistine”. We still read one criticism of myth which recalls a blunt passage of the _Ion_.[791] Story said that Antiope’s sons were the offspring of Zeus, but Amphion has the hardihood to express doubt to his mother herself.

With the _Helen_ (B.C. 412) was produced a work of the first importance—the ANDROMEDA, a charming love-story full of romance and poetical loveliness. It was immensely popular; Aristophanes gives in his _Thesmophoriazusæ_ a parody as elaborate as that of _Telephus_ in the _Acharnians_, and it was a perusal of this drama which excited Dionysus in the _Frogs_ to descend to Hades for the purpose of fetching back the dead playwright. Lucian[792] tells how Archelaus, the tragic actor, came to Abdera and performed the _Andromeda_. The whole town grew crazy over it. “They used to sing the solo from the _Andromeda_ and recite Perseus’ speech from beginning to end. The town swarmed with these actors of a week’s standing, pale and lean, shouting with all the strength of their lungs

O Love, of gods and men tyrannic Lord,

and all the rest of it. This went on for a long time, in fact till winter, when a severe frost cured them of their nonsense.” The _Andromeda_ points forward to the novel, and it is interesting to note that in the best Greek novel—the _Æthiopica_ of Heliodorus, who wrote about eight hundred years after Euripides’ death—the heroine’s father, like Andromeda’s, was an Æthiopian king.

Scanty as are the remnants of this drama, we can still form some idea of its structure.[793] “It is the crowning virtue of all great art that, however little is left of it by the injuries of time, that little will be lovely.”[794] The country of Cepheus, the Ethiope king, was ravaged by a sea-monster, and the only help lay in sacrificing to the creature Andromeda, the king’s daughter, who was bound to a rock and left as his prey. At this point the action begins. It is still night and from the cliff rises the lament of the captive:—

O solemn night, How slow thy coursers trace, Amid the holy Heaven star-bedight, Their pathway through the deeps of space!

At each pause in her song comes the voice of Echo repeating the sad syllables, till Andromeda is joined by the maidens who form the chorus. The lyric dialogue concluded, it seems[795] that the father and mother, Cepheus and Cassiopeia, enter and that there is some talk of attacking the monster; Phineus, brother of the king and the affianced of Andromeda, shrinks from the risk. But now comes unlooked-for aid. Perseus, fresh from his slaughter of the Gorgon, arrives, borne through the air on his winged sandals. Though Zeus is his father, in this play he figures as the lowly hero familiar in our own fairy-tales. Certainly he appears to be contrasted with the rich but cowardly Phineus, and the helpless despairing king. His first words have been preserved:—

Gods! To what alien kingdom am I come On sandals swift, between the earth and Heaven Journeying homewards on these wingèd feet?... But soft! what crag is that by tossing foam Surrounded? Lo, the statue of a maid Hewn from the living rock by patient art, Its craftsman’s master-work!

Drawing near, he perceives that this thing of beauty is a living maiden, and at once longs to make her his bride. When she asks his name, instead of proudly claiming Zeus as his father, he mentions his own name, his journey’s end, and his achievement:—

Περσεύς, πρὸς Ἄργος ναυστολῶν, τὸ Γοργόνος κάρα κομίζων.

But he is no mediæval knight; he does not forbear to state his claim before addressing himself to the task: “And if I save thee, maid, wilt give me thanks?” Andromeda, on her side, feels and speaks without subtlety:—

Stranger, have pity on my sore distress: Free me from bonds,

and again

Take me, O stranger, for thy handmaiden, Or wife, or slave.

Before encountering the monster Perseus comes to an understanding with Cepheus and goes forth to the conflict, calling upon Eros to aid his chosen:—

O Love, of gods and men tyrannic Lord, Either teach Beauty to unlearn her power, Or speed true lovers, through th’ adventurous maze That in thy name they enter, to success. So shall all men to thee pay reverence. Refuse, and lo! thy glories fade to naught E’en through thy very boon of wakened hearts.

Two or three lines picture the grateful crowd of rustics who surrounded the victor: “all the shepherd-folk flowed around him, one bringing an ivy-bowl of milk for his refreshing, another the joyous grape-juice”. Phineus sought to assert his claim upon Andromeda, but was repulsed by her father. Later the maiden’s parents themselves begged her not to leave them desolate. In a thrilling[796] reply she declared that she would cleave to her husband. Then follows mention of a wedding-feast, and at the close it seems probable that Athena foretold the future.

Of the PHAETHON we are fortunate in possessing two unusually long fragments of seventy and seventy-five lines respectively. It is an exciting and romantic story—the legend of Phaethon, child of the Sun-god, who called upon his father to prove their relationship by permitting him for one day to drive the chariot of the Sun. This conception, gorgeous with the spirit of adventure and an un-Greek yearning for what transcends mortal power, seems to have filled the whole play with glow and rushing movement. A fragment of the prologue marks this at once: it tells how Clymene is wedded

To Merops, lord of this our land Which first of all the earth the Sun-God smites With golden radiance of his risen car, Nam’d by black-visaged folk that dwell around The gleaming stable of the Sun and Dawn.

From Strabo,[797] to whom we owe this extract, we learn that the palace of Merops is close to the abode of the Sun-god. This notion that the youth’s home is only an hour’s walk from the palace of the Sun, gives a sense of delightful verisimilitude.[798] It appears that Phaethon in this prologue tells how his father Merops plans to marry him to a goddess, but that he himself is unwilling.[799] Clymene, his mother, to persuade her son that he will not be distastefully united to one vastly his superior, reveals that he is the son not of Merops but of the Sun-god, Helios, who promised her long ago that he would grant her child one wish. Let Phaethon approach Helios with some request, and prove her story. The prince resolves to do so. The chorus of female attendants enter with a lovely song in honour of Phaethon’s wedding; they picture the whole earth awakening to daily activities. Next appears the king, who describes the brilliant future which awaits his son.[800] Phaethon views with distaste this life of easeful splendour; to him at this moment may well be attributed the vigorous words[801]

Each nook of earth that feeds me is my home.

Goethe has indicated, with splendid insight, the dramatic power which must have filled this scene: the aged king offering the easy joys of riches and a royal home to this youth already burning in secret for the high enterprise of seeking his real and divine father.

Later the interview was described between Phaethon and Helios, who after seeking to dissuade him, granted his request and added anxious instructions:—

“Let not thy steeds invade the Afric sky: Its temper hath no moistness, and thy wheels Downward must sink.... Direct thy path toward the Pleiads Seven.” Impatient of the rest, he snatched the reins And smote the wingèd coursers till they flew Unchecked thro’ opening vistas of the heaven. His father, mounted on a blazing star, Rode after, warning him: “Drive thither, boy!” “Wheel yonder!”

The messenger seems to have continued with a picture of Phaethon’s fall. The body, still giving off the smoke of destruction, is next brought in, and we possess part of Clymene’s frantic speech. Her grief is mingled with terror: the strange manner of her son’s death may provoke her husband Merops to inquiry and reflexion and so her long-past union with the Sun-god may come to light. She bids them hide the body in the treasure-chamber, of which she alone holds the keys. Soon the king enters amid lyric strains celebrating the marriage-day of Phaethon. He is giving orders for merry-making when a servant hurries out to inform him that the treasure-chamber is giving forth clouds of smoke. Merops hastens within, and the chorus bewail the disclosure which is imminent. In a moment the stricken father is heard returning with lamentation. The course of the last scene is not certain, but probably a god reconciled the king and his wife, giving directions for the disposal of Phaethon’s body; a beautiful but obscure fragment,[802] redolent with the charm of breezes and murmuring boughs after all this blaze and splendour, seems to point to the story of Phaethon’s sisters, who mourned him beside the western waters and were transformed into poplars. This god was probably Oceanus,[803] the father of Clymene. He alone (deity of the world-encircling water) could give unity to these two pictures, the radiant eastern land of Phaethon’s youthful enterprise, and the distant western river where his sorrows and his end are bathed in dim beauty.

This sketch allows us to realize how much we have lost in the _Phaethon_. The romantic events and setting recall the _Andromeda_. Clymene’s sorrow and shame mingle strangely with the gallant enterprise and bright charm of the whole, somewhat as Creusa’s story is contrasted with the fresh cheerfulness of Ion. Above all, the noble simplicity and high-hearted adventurousness of Phaethon, inspired by his new-found kinship with a god and chafing at the placid programme of domestic honour and luxury which his supposed father sets before him—this is a concept of boundless promise.

The HYPSIPYLE,[804] which was produced late[805] in Euripides’ life, is specially interesting through the discovery in 1906 of extensive fragments at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Previously it was known by scanty quotations of no great interest, though apparently much prized in ancient times.[806] The plot is now in the main clear. Hypsipyle, grand-daughter of the god Dionysus and daughter of Thoas, King of Lemnos, was exiled because she refused to join in the massacre of the Lemnian men by their women. Previously she had borne twin sons to Jason. These she lost when expelled from her home. She is now slave to Eurydice, Queen of Nemea in the north of the Peloponnese, and nurse to her infant son Opheltes. Her own sons come in quest of her, and without recognizing their mother are entertained in the palace. Hypsipyle is quieting the child with a song and a rattle when the chorus of Nemean women enter. Next certain soldiers arrive from the host which the seven chieftains are leading against Thebes. Their commander, the prince Amphiaraus, explains that the army is in need of water, and Hypsipyle consents to show them a spring. Later she returns in anguish: during her absence the child has been killed by a great serpent. Eurydice is about to slay her, when she appeals to Amphiaraus, who pleads her cause and promises Eurydice that the Greeks shall found a festival in honour of the child. (This festival is that of the famous Nemean Games.) He sees that this fatal accident is a bad omen for the enterprise of the Seven, and names the child Archemorus[807] instead of Opheltes. Eurydice is appeased. Later we find Hypsipyle and her sons made known to one another, and the god Dionysus appears, apparently to arrange future events.

Though there is one difficulty as to the plot, namely, that we do not know what function was assigned to Hypsipyle’s sons—they cannot have been introduced merely for the recognition-scene—the whole conception strikes one as simple and masterly. It has been well remarked[808] that while a modern dramatist would have omitted the Theban expedition, “nothing seemed to the Greeks worthy of contemplation in the theatre by a great people, unless it had some connexion with the exploits and the history of nations.... On the same canvas the death of one little child and the doom of the seven chieftains with their crowding battalions are depicted in a perspective which sets the former fatality in the foreground.”

The captive princess, even through the ruins of the text, shines forth with great charm. Her whole life centres round her lost children and the brief magical time of her union with Jason. The chorus reproach her with her indifference to the exciting presence of Adrastus’ great army—she will think of nothing save Argo and the Fleece. When at point to die her spirit flashes back to those old days in a few words of amazing poignancy:—

ὦ πρῷρα καὶ λευκαῖνον ἐξ ἅλμης ὕδωρ Ἀργοῦς, ἰὼ παῖδ’....

“Ah, prow of Argo and the brine that flashed into whiteness! ah, my two sons!” Her talk with them towards the end is a pathetic and lovely passage equal to anything Euripides ever wrote in this kind.

MELANIPPE THE WISE[809] appears to have been a drama of unusual personal interest. Æolus espoused Hippe, whose daughter Melanippe became by Poseidon mother of twin sons. The god bade her hide them from Æolus, and they were discovered by grooms in the care of a bull and a cow. They, supposing the children miraculous offspring of these animals, reported their discovery to Æolus, who decided to expiate the portent by burning the infants alive. Melanippe was instructed to shroud them for death. In order to save her children without revealing her own secret she denied the possibility of such portentous births, but seems to have found herself forced at length to confess in order to prove the natural origin of the infants. Æolus condemned her to be blinded and imprisoned, her offspring to be exposed. Her mother Hippe appeared as _dea ex machina_[810] and saved her kin.

The great feature of this play was the heroine’s speech in which she sought to convince her father that such a portent was impossible. Lines from the opening of this argument are preserved: “The story is not mine—from my mother have I learned how Heaven and earth were once mingled in substance; when they separated into twain they engendered and brought into the light of day all creatures, the trees, birds, beasts, nurslings of the sea, and the race of men”. The speech was an elaborate scientific sermon to disprove the possibility of miracles. Similarly, according to a famous story, the drama opened originally with the line: “Zeus, whoever Zeus may be, for only by stories do I know of him ...”; but this open agnosticism gave such offence that Euripides produced the play again with the words: “Zeus, as Truth relates....” A different but closely-connected source of interest is the fact that here Euripides veiled his own personality less thinly than usual. That Melanippe was only his mouthpiece appears to have been a recognized fact. Dionysius of Halicarnassus[811] observes that it presents a double character, that of the poet, and that of Melanippe; and Lucian[812] selects the remark on Zeus in the prologue as a case where the poet is speaking his own views. The “mother” from whom “Melanippe” learned her philosophy has been identified with the great metaphysician and scientist Anaxagoras, who was banished from Athens in 430 B.C.; and it is natural to suppose that this _Melanippe_ is not much later than that year, perhaps much earlier[813] in view of the strongly didactic manner.[814] Hartung refers to this play the splendid fragment:—

ὄλβιος ὅστις τῆς ἱστορίας ἔσχε μάθησιν, μήτε πολιτῶν ἐπὶ πημοσύνῃ μήτ’ εἰς ἀδίκους πράξεις ὁρμῶν, ἀλλ’ ἀθανάτου καθορῶν φύσεως κόσμον ἀγήρω, πῇ τε συνέστη καὶ ὅπῃ καὶ ὅπως. τοῖς δὲ τοιούτοις οὐδέποτ’ αἰσχρῶν ἔργων μελέτημα προσίζει.

“Happy is he who hath won deep learning. He setteth himself neither to hurt his fellow-citizens nor towards works of iniquity, but fixeth his gaze upon the ageless order of immortal Nature, the laws and methods of its creation. Unto such a man never doth there cling the plotting of base deeds.” If these lines point at Anaxagoras and belong to our play, the two significant clauses which defend the moral character of the philosopher in question indicate the year 430 itself.

The CRESPHONTES had immense success as a powerful melodrama. Polyphontes, having slain his brother Cresphontes, King of Messenia, seized his throne and married his widow Merope, who sent her infant son Cresphontes away to safe keeping in Ætolia. When he grew up he returned to avenge his father. At this point the action begins. Cresphontes seems to have delivered the prologue; since Polyphontes fearing his return has offered a reward to whoever shall slay him, he has determined to win the usurper’s confidence by claiming to have destroyed his enemy. Meanwhile, Merope, alarmed by the proclamation of the king, has sent an aged slave to find whether Cresphontes is well; he returns with tidings that the prince has disappeared from Ætolia. Merope gives her son over for lost, and observing the youthful stranger who is received with joy by the king, she becomes convinced that he is the murderer of her son. While he lies asleep she steals upon him with an axe, when the old slave recognizes the stranger and stops her arm. Mother and son are united, and at once plot to slay Polyphontes. Merope pretends to be reconciled to the king, who in his joy goes to sacrifice, accompanied by the youth, who takes advantage of a suitable moment to slay his enemy.

Plutarch, nearly six centuries later, testifies[815] to the sensation which the Recognition caused in the audience. Merope herself seems to have been a figure ranking with Hecuba in the _Troades_. The tidings of her son’s death draw from her words which in their quiet dignity of grief have something of Wordsworth:—

Children have died ere now, not mine alone, And wives been widow’d. Yea, this cup of life Unnumber’d women have drain’d it, as do I.... ... Insistent Fate, Taking in fee the lives of all I lov’d, Hath made me wise.

Probably it was Merope again who uttered the famous lines which advise lament over the newly-born and a glad procession to accompany the dead. The recognition-scene is singled out for especial praise by Aristotle.[816]

The fragments of this tragedy include a perfect jewel of lyric poetry, a prayer to Peace:—

Εἰρήνα βαθύπλουτε καὶ καλλίστα μακάρων θεῶν, ζῆλός μοι σέθεν, ὡς χρονίζεις. δέδοικα δὲ μὴ πρὶν πόνοις ὑπερβάλῃ με γῆρας, πρὶν σὰν χαρίεσσαν ὥραν προσιδεῖν καὶ καλλιχόρους ἀοιδὰς φιλοστεφάνους τε κώμους. ἴθι μοι, πότνα, πόλιν. τὰν δ’ ἐχθρὰν στάσιν εἶργ’ ἀπ’ οἴ- κων τὰν μαινομέναν τ’ ἔριν θηκτῷ τερπομέναν σιδάρῳ.

A paraphrase might run thus:—

O Peace, thou givest plenty as from a deep spring: there is no beauty like unto thine, no, not even among the blessed gods.

My heart yearneth within me, for thou tarriest; I grow old and thou returnest not.

Shall weariness overcome mine eyes before they see thy bloom and thy comeliness? When the lovely songs of the dancers are heard again, and the thronging feet of them that wear garlands, shall grey hairs and sorrow have destroyed me utterly?

Return, thou Holy One, to our city: abide not far from us, thou that quenchest wrath.

Strife and bitterness shall depart, if thou art with us: madness and the edge of the sword shall flee away from our doors.

Matthew Arnold’s _Merope_ has the same plot and includes a recognition-scene which probably resembles the lost original closely. His conception of Polyphontes is thoroughly Euripidean.

Of the other lost plays little can be said here. Still amid this faint glow of star-dust many marvellous things are to be discerned—words of tremulous tenderness from the _Danae_ describing the charm of infancy; a line from _Ino_ which in its powerful grimness recalls Æschylus, “like a lone beast, he lurks in caves unlit”;[817] out of the _Polyidus_ the celebrated query,

Who knows of life that it is aught but death, And death aught else than life beyond the grave?[818]

From an unknown drama comes a line which owes its preservation to St. Paul[819]:

φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθ’ ὁμιλίαι κακαί,

“evil communications corrupt good manners”. Euripides’ cosmopolitan sympathy nowhere finds finer expression than in the distich

Where’er spreads Heaven the eagle cleaves his path; Where’er lies earth the righteous are at home.[820]

But the student must at his leisure explore the marvels of these rock-pools left by the retiring ocean. One majestic passage[821] from the _Cretans_ shall suffice to close this survey. The lines are from a march sung by the Curetes or priests of the Cretan Zeus, and show that even in the Hellenic world the monastic spirit was not unknown:—

Thou whom the Tyrian princess bare To mighty Jove, thou Lord of Crete, To whom her hundred cities bow, Lo, I draw near thy judgment-seat,

Quitting my home, yon hallowed place Where beams of cypress roof the shrine, By far-brought axes lopped and hewn, Close knit by oxen’s blood divine.

Pure is my life’s unbroken calm Since Zeus to bliss these eyes unsealed; The feast of quivering flesh I shared While through the dark strange thunder pealed.

The Mountain-Mother heard my vows, And saw my torch the darkness ride; The Hunter named me for his priest, A mail-clad Bacchant sanctified.

Now robed in white I keep me pure From food that e’er has throbbed with breath; I shun the new-born infant’s cry, And gaze not on the couch of death.

It now remains for us to attempt a synthesis—to set before ourselves as clearly as may be the whole personality of Euripides. We are studying not the programme of a politician, but the spirit and method of a great artist, the inspiration of a great teacher. An artist has other things to heed than a superficial consistency of presentation; and a teacher of permanent value shows his followers not what to think, but how to think—not opinions, but the reasoned basis of opinion. Euripides is a man not of dogmas, nor indeed of negations; he is the apostle of a spirit which blows whither it lists, setting up a healthful circulation of tingling life throughout regions which have languished in the heavy air of convention. His work forces us to think and feel for ourselves, not necessarily to think and feel with him.

The briefest description of his special quality is that he is in the same moment a great artist and a great rationalist—a man profoundly conscious of the beauty and value of all life, all existence, all energy, and yet an uncompromising critic of the vesture which man throws around those parts of the Universe which are subjected to him. No man has ever loved and expressed beauty with a mind less swayed by illusion. These two instincts, the instinct to study life in all its unforced manifestations, and the instinct to question all conventions, lie at the root of his work. It is in virtue of these that he has been called enigmatic. Like Renan he was ἀνὴρ δίψυχος, a man of two souls[822]; but he is no more an enigma than others. His peculiarity lies herein, that the duality of nature often found in ordinary men was by him exhibited at the heights of genius. That is why he so often seems labouring to destroy the effect he has created; he is “inconsistent” because he is equally at home in the two worlds of feeling and of thought. Precisely for this reason he created a new type of drama. Horace Walpole wrote that “Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel”; thus, when a genius of Euripides’ type addressed itself to the theatre, the result was drama which could not but shock people who, bred in the school of Æschylus, had no conception of “tragedy” which could be witty, light, modern, destructive. Menander is the successor of Euripides, not of Aristophanes.

Anyone who follows out these two strands of instinct will understand much that might seem strange, much that gave offence, in his work. It will be well therefore to bring together the faults which have been found with him in ancient and in later times. Leaving on one side, since it is by no means certainly a reproach, the celebrated remark[823] of Sophocles, “I represent people as they should be, Euripides as they are,” we find our chief material in Aristophanes and Aristotle. The _Frogs_ contains an elaborate attack upon the tragedian which, whether fair or not, has a _prima facie_ reasonableness. Euripides is twitted with moral and literary offences. In the first place, his predilection for depicting the power of love, especially the adulterous or incestuous passions of women[824] and the sophistical restlessness of mind which he inculcates,[825] mark him as a corrupter of Athens. On the technical side, his music[826] is affected and decadent, the libretto[827] of his choruses is both elaborate and jejune, the style of his iambics[828] lacks weight and dignity, his prologues[829] are tiresome and written in a mechanical fashion. Aristotle in his turn objects to certain weaknesses of characterization: Menelaus in the _Orestes_ is particularly bad, the speech of Melanippe—no doubt that celebrated oration on miracles—is indecorous and out of character; in the Aulid _Iphigenia_ the heroine is inconsistent.[830] He gives two examples[831] of the irrational, Ægeus in the _Medea_ and Menelaus once more in the _Orestes_. Euripides’ use of the _deus ex machina_ is also often bad; he instances Medea’s miraculous chariot. Lastly there is the famous mixture[832] of praise and blame: “Euripides, faulty as he is in the general management of his subject, is yet felt to be the most tragic of the poets.” If we pass now to modern detractors, we find one fault overshadowing all the rest—bad construction, what Aristotle calls “episodic” plots, namely, plays the several scenes of which are more or less accidentally combined and form no organic whole.

There is truth in some of this fault-finding; whether we are to regard such features as actually blemishes is another matter. Two certainly are defects of the gravest possible description—“episodic” plots and the _deus ex machina_. If a man produces plays which have no organic unity, or which at the close of the action are in such a tangle that a being of superhuman information and power is necessary to “cut the knot,” he is no “unskilful dramatist” but merely a blockhead, for he can always fling his rubbish into the fire. So hopelessly damaging are these two accusations that one really cannot believe Euripides obnoxious to them. One might as well allege that Alexander did not understand tactics, or that Pericles believed Byzantium was in Sicily. The charge of faulty construction has been considered earlier in connexion with the plays which are supposed examples thereof. But the _deus ex machina_ needs a few words. “The god out of the machine” is a phrase of two applications. It may mean a deity brought in to round off the play by giving information about the future history of the personages. Or the god may be introduced when the plot, owing to the human limitations of the characters, has become knotted and progress is impossible; then a being who miraculously knows all the facts appears and “cuts” the knot. In the first case the epiphany is practically outside the drama; in the second it is only too vital to it. Of the first case there are five[833] instances in the extant plays: to these, of course, our grave objection cannot apply. Of the second type there are seven[834] examples if we regard the miraculous car of Medea as a “deus”. _Granted the story which is known to the audience_, such interventions are necessary. Medea cannot escape the vengeance of Corinth, Orestes the verdict of the Argive State, without supernatural aid; Theseus would, it might seem, never have been persuaded by mortal witness that Hippolytus is innocent; in the Tauric _Iphigenia_ and the _Helena_[835] nothing but a miracle can save from death the fugitives who as a matter of “history” reached home in safety: the _Supplices_ would end without the formal compact between rescuers and rescued if the goddess did not intervene; as for the _Ion_, Euripides’ contemporaries knew that Delphi still flourished, so that the annihilating investigation of Ion must, it appeared, have been somehow arrested. For these seven plays, then, we can choose between two theories of the _deus ex machina_ (in that second sense of a pseudo-dramatic expedient). The first theory is that the poet wishes to end with “historical” truth, but in the course of his action has so blundered that he cannot naturally do so; therefore he puts forward a god who asserts that the action _shall_ continue as “history” asserts that it did; so might a competitor in a match of archery employ a confederate who, whenever his arrow missed the target, should pick it up and plant it in the white. The other theory is that Euripides intended to work out an interesting situation of legend as a study in natural psychology and social development. The situation according to story came to a certain end; according to Euripides that was not the natural end. And he emphasizes this legendary distortion by pointing out clearly that to square nature and the story nothing less than a miracle is required. To assert that he needed the supernatural intervention to save his play is absolutely to reverse the facts. Can we doubt which of these theories is sound?

Two further questions at once arise. Why did he select situations from misleading legends? And, is there then no pseudo-dramatic _deus ex machina_ at all? The first question is of vital importance. It is incorrect to say that he was bound by convention to the traditional stories; Phrynichus, Agathon, and Moschion all defied this “convention”. Euripides was a student of human thought, of the development of belief, as well as a dramatist. Convinced that his contemporaries held false beliefs about the gods and that the myths were largely responsible for this, hypnotizing thought by their beauty and paralyzing logic by their authority, he sets himself to show, not only that they are untrue, but also how, though untrue, they ever won credence. As for the _deus ex machina_ the truth is that he does not exist (save, of course, in the rôle of a non-dramatic narrator). He is, like the three unities, a figment based on uncritical and hasty reading. Outside this poet the only possible case is that of the _Philoctetes_, which has been shown no genuine instance.

We may now return to the objections raised by Aristophanes and Aristotle. They are all due to the two instincts we have described—his interest in every manifestation of life, and his stern rationalism. Most of the technical flaws, for instance, alleged against him are proofs that he was attracted by the possibilities of his own art; he is constantly testing the limits to which development can go. The iambics of the _Orestes_, for example, are extraordinarily full of resolved feet; after that play he restrains himself more. In music too he appears to have been an explorer; at any rate the fault found with the words of his choruses points to a development like the modern, in which libretto was becoming subservient to music. The comic poet, again, fastens eagerly upon the prologues, and puts into the mouth of Æschylus a famous jest:—[836]

_Æsch._: And now, by Jove, I’ll not smash each phrase word by word, but with heaven’s aid I’ll ruin your prologues with—a little oil-flask.

_Eur._: An oil-flask? You ... my prologues?

_Æsch._: Just one little flask. You write so that anything will fit into your iambics—a little fleece, a little flask, a little bag. I’ll show you on the spot.

_Eur._: Oh! you will?

_Æsch._: Yes.

_Dion._: Now you must recite something.

_Eur._:

“Ægyptus, as the far-spread story tells, With fifty sons in voyage o’er the deep Landing at Argos....”

_Æsch._: (interrupting) ... “lost his flask of oil”.

Several other absurd instances follow.

This celebrated jest means (i) that Euripides constructs the early sentences of his prologue in such a way that a subordinate clause (usually containing a participle) leads up to a short main clause at the end of the sentence; (ii) that his prologues descend to trivial details; (iii) that the _cæsura_ occurs always in the third foot; (iv) that he is viciously addicted to resolved feet. The tragedian can be defended from these charges, such as they are, but the idea at the back of Aristophanes’ mind is true, namely, that these prologues are often dull performances. Probably the poet did not intend much more. He wishes to put his hearers _au fait_ with the precise legend and the precise point with which he is concerned;[837] as is often said, these passages take the place of a modern play-bill.

Later in the _Frogs_ Dionysus produces a huge pair of scales; each is to utter a line into his scale-pan, and the heavier line wins. Euripides declaims into his pan the opening line of the _Medea_, εἴθ’ ὤφελ’ Ἀργοῦς μὴ διαπτάσθαι σκάφος, and his rival Σπερχειὲ ποταμὲ βουνομοί τ’ ἐπιστροφαί. Dionysus absurdly explains that the latter wins because he has put in water like a fraudulent woollen-merchant, while Euripides has offered a “word with wings”. Underlying this nonsense is the truth that the Æschylean line is ponderous and slow, that of Euripides light and rapid; it is like contrasting Marlowe and Fletcher. The difference is not between good and bad, but between old and new. Æschylus’ iambic style is fitted most admirably for his purpose. But Euripides has not the same purpose—that is all. It is one of his most remarkable innovations that he practically invented the prose-drama. A very great deal of his “verse” is simply prose which can be scanned. To compare such a passage[838] as:

ἥξει γὰρ αὐτὸς σὴν δάμαρτα καὶ τέκνα, ἕλξων φονεύσων κἄμ’ ἐπισφάξων ἄναξ· μένοντι δ’ αὐτοῦ πάντα σοὶ γενήσεται, τῇ τ’ ἀσφαλείᾳ κερδανεῖς· πόλιν δὲ σὴν μὴ πρὶν ταράξῃς πρὶν τόδ’ εὖ θέσθαι, τέκνον,

or a hundred others, with the beacon-speech in _Agamemnon_ or Athena’s charge to the Areopagite court, is to ignore the whole point of a literary revolution. Who would set a page of Hedda Gabler’s conversation against an extract from _Macbeth_, and affirm that Ibsen could not write dialogue?

Ibsen, indeed, it is particularly instructive to bear in mind here. According to him “the golden rule is that there is no golden rule”.[839] Dr. Stockman’s nobility consists in telling the truth at all costs. Gregers Werle insists on that course, and is seen to be a meddlesome prig who ruins his friend’s home. Here the Greek and the Norwegian agree heartily; for the “sophistry” with which many at Athens were disgusted is only Euripides’ way of putting his conviction that there is no fixed rule of conduct, still less any fixed rule for our self-satisfied attempts to praise or blame the abnormal. An impulse of pity ruins Creon in the _Medea_; Lycus in the _Heracles_ turns his back on mercy, and is destroyed also. The pride of glorious birth nerves Macaria to heroism; of Achilles it makes merely a pathetic sham. Consciousness of sin wrecks and tortures Phædra, while to Helen in _Orestes_ it means little more than a picturesque melancholy. Hermione in _Andromache_ and Creusa both go to all lengths in their passionate yearning for domestic happiness; one destroys her husband and her own future, the other reaps deeper bliss than she dared to hope. Iphigenia and Hippolytus serve the same goddess, but amid what different atmospheres and diverse destinies! This consciousness that effort brings about results different from its aims, that chance, whatever chance may be, is too potent to allow any faith in orthodox deities, only in moods of despair wrings from the poet such outcry as Hecuba’s, that Fate is “a capering idiot”.[840] But it has planted surely in his mind the conviction that there is no golden rule of conduct. And hence that “love of forensic rhetoric” of which we hear so much—each case must be considered on its own merits.

To this agnosticism we owe not only that treatment of religious legend which we have already studied but the poet’s greatest achievement. Socrates, because, as he said, he could not understand metaphysics or astronomy, gave his attention to man. His friend because he despaired of a satisfying theology threw his genius into psychological drama. The centre of his interest is the human heart. Only one fact about destiny can be stated as consistently held by him, namely, that the spring of

## action and the chief factor in happiness or misery is, not the will of

Heaven or dogmatic belief, but the nature (φύσις) of the individual.[841] Because he studies sin, not to condemn but to understand, he has earned that reproach of Aristophanes who rages at his predilection for Phædras and Sthenebœas. What attracted him was not a desire to gloat or even to pardon; it was the fact that the sinners he depicts are so intensely alive. A being dead in virtue engaged his interest less than one who, however evilly, existed with vigour. To this passionate interest in human life can be referred as basis all the other themes on which he spent study. Religion, as we have found, only attracts him because it guides or misleads conduct. His political studies have little concern with ethnology or economics; they are only an expansion to a wider field of this same interest in sheer humanity. Philosophy and natural science are of value for him, as for Lucretius, in that they provide an escape from paralyzing superstition. If they are presented as a refuge from the facts of life, he will have none of them. When Electra[842] seeks in her knowledge of astronomy a far-fetched consolation for self-fostered misery, she strikes us not as heroic but as own kin to the febrile “intellectuals” of Tchekov’s _Cherry Orchard_ or the novels of Dostoevsky.

His dislike of convention in morals is answered by his originality in portraiture as well as in dramatic situations. Nothing is more thrilling than to observe how in the hands of a great realist whole masses of human beings come to life. What was the background of one novelist suddenly begins in the pages of another to stir, to articulate itself, to move forward and discover a language. “The men” commanded by Captain Osborne in _Vanity Fair_ become Private Ortheris or Corporal Mulvaney in the pages of Kipling. So in Euripides the dim and familiar background of “barbarians” who existed merely to give colour and outline to Achilles and Odysseus, the women who bore the necessary children and ground the needed flour, the henchmen without whom horses would not be groomed or trees felled, suddenly awake and reveal passions of love and hatred, pathetic histories, opinions about marriage and the grave. In every age the man who points to the disregarded, the dormant, hitherto supposed securely neutral and plastic, who cries “it is alive, watching you and reflecting, waiting its time”—such a man is met in his degree with the reception given to Euripides by the elder generation of Athenians. The clamour of “crank!” “faddist!” “this is the thin end of the wedge,” and kindred watchwords, may be found translated into brilliant Attic by Aristophanes. But in virtue of these same interests Euripides became the Bible of later Greek civilization. He would have passed into a fetish had it not been that the destructively critical side of his genius prevented the most narrow-minded from reducing him to a system. To the last he remains inconclusive, provocative, refreshing.

On the other side his sensitiveness to all aspects of life—his “feeling for Beauty” to use the familiar phrase—held him back from mere cynicism. The _Hippolytus_ remains as perhaps the most glorious support in literature for unflinching facing of facts—it shows triumphantly how a man may feel all the sorrow and waste which wreck happiness, yet declare the endless value and loveliness of life. We may detect two aspects in which this joy in life shows itself most markedly—his romance and his wit.

Romance is not improperly contrasted with “classicism,” but as few Greek or Roman writers are classical in the rigid sense it is not surprising to find romantic features outcropping at every period of their literature. Euripides himself is the most romantic author between Homer and Appuleius, whatever our definition of romance may be. R. L. Stevenson’s remark that “romance is consciousness of background,” Hegel’s doctrine that “romantic art is the straining of art to go beyond itself,”[843] and a more recent _dictum_ that “romance is only the passion which is in the face of all realism,”[844] each of them definitely recalls some feature of Euripides’ work already discussed. A modern writer with whom he can be fruitfully compared, at this point especially, is Mr Bernard Shaw. In many characteristics these two dramatists are notably alike: their ruthless insistence upon questioning all established reputations, whether of individuals, nations, or institutions; their conviction that there is no absolute standard of conduct; their blazing zeal for justice; their mastery of brilliant lithe idiom. But in their feeling about romance they diverge violently. Perhaps the largest ingredient in Mr. Shaw’s strength is his hatred and distrust of emotion and of that spirit, called romance, which organizes emotion and sees in it a basic part of life. But Euripides appreciates it all the more highly that he is not enslaved by it. Even in such ruthless dramas as the _Medea_ and the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ one remarks how the thrill and beauty of life gleams out, if only as a bitter memory or a present pain of contrast—the magic fire-breathing bulls and the heapy coils of the glaring dragon in the remote land where Jason won his quest, the strange seas, deserted beaches, and grim savages among whom Iphigenia cherishes her thoughts of childhood in Argos. The same sense of glamour which inspires early in his life such a marvellous flash as the description of Rhesus’ steeds:

στίλβουσι δ’ ὥστε ποταμίου κύκνου πτερόν,[845]

and indeed the whole dashing buoyant drama—this passion survives the shames and disillusionment wrought by twenty-five years of tyranny and war; it persists even in those black but glorious hours when he wrote the _Troades_ and at the close of his life culminates in the splendours of the _Bacchæ_. No attentive student of his work can ignore this effect, but if we possessed all his plays we should be in no danger of accepting the idea that Euripides is beyond all other things a bitter realist. The _Andromeda_ and the _Phaethon_ would have redressed the balance.

The wit of Euripides cannot easily be discussed; it often depends upon idiomatic subtlety, and must almost disappear in translation. But frequently, again, it consists in the method of handling a situation. Just as the playwright often makes of his drama, among other things, an elaborate _reductio ad absurdum_ of myth, so is he capable of writing a whole scene with a twinkle in his eye. The clearest example is the _Helena_; Menelaus’ stupefaction at learning that Egypt contains an Helen, daughter of Zeus, is indeed definite comedy:

Διὸς δ’ ἔλεξε παῖδά νιν πεφυκέναι. ἀλλ’ ἦ τις ἔστι Ζηνὸς ὄνομ’ ἔχων ἀνήρ Νείλου παρ’ ὄχθας; εἷς γὰρ ὅ γε κατ’ οὐρανόν.[846]

“And she told me that the lady was a daughter of Zeus! What! is there some person called Zeus living beside the Nile? There’s one in Heaven, to be sure, but that’s another story.” Such a translation gives perhaps the intention of the words and colloquial rhythm of the last sentence. Here is comedy, but that of Congreve, not of Aristophanes. The distinction is important. Euripides is less comic than witty. As we turn his pages we rarely laugh, but a thousand times we break into the slight smile of intellectual enjoyment; one delight in reading an Euripidean play—tragedy though it be—is the same as that aroused by the work of Meredith. Euripides’ sense of the ludicrous is a part of his restlessness in conception. Again and again he startles us by placing at some tragic moment a little episode which passes the pathetic and becomes absurd. When Clytæmnestra and Achilles bring each other into awkward perplexity over the espousal of Iphigenia the effect is amusing, and the intervention of the old slave who puts his head out of the tent-door must provoke a smile, even though we realize that he has misery and death on his lips.[847] After Creusa has given her instructions for the assassination of Ion, it is, though natural, yet quaint for the prospective murderer to reply: “Now do you retire to your hotel”.[848] In the _Medea_ the whole episode of Ægeus, to which Aristotle objected as “irrational,” is tinged with the grotesque. That the horrible story of Medea’s revenge must hang upon a slow-witted amiable person like Ægeus is natural to the topsy-turviness of life as the dramatist saw it. In fact, just as Euripides on the linguistic side practically invents the prose-drama, so in the strictly dramatic sphere he invents tragicomedy. Nothing can induce him to keep tears and laughter altogether apart. The world is not made like that, and he studies facts, depicting the phases of great happenings not as they “ought to be” but “as they are”. He would have read with amused delight that quaint sentence of Dostoevsky: “All these choruses sing about something very indefinite, for the most part about somebody’s curse, but with a tinge of the higher humour”.[849] It is indeed significant that sparkles of incidental mirth are (so far as a modern student can tell) commonest in that most heartbreaking play _Orestes_. One dialogue between Orestes and Menelaus, to take a single passage, is a blaze of wit—it exemplifies every possible grade of witticism, from the downright pun[850] to subtle varieties of iambic rhythm. Perhaps the most light-hearted and entertaining example[851] is provided by Helen who (of all casuists!) evolves a theory of sin as a method of putting her tigerish niece into good humour and so inducing her to perform for Helen an awkward task. Even more skilful, but ghastly in its half-farcical horror, is the dialogue between Orestes and the escaped Phrygian slave.

Later ages of Greek civilization looked upon Euripides as a mighty leader of thought, a great voice expressing all the wisdom of their fathers, all the pains and perplexities familiar to themselves. After generations had passed it was easy to dwell upon one side only of his genius, and for Plutarch or Stobæus to regard him as the poet of sad wisdom:—

Amongst us one, Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne; And all his store of sad experience he Lays bare of wretched days![852]

But his own contemporaries, living in the days before Ægospotami and knowing the many facets of his spirit, could not so well accept a man of such contradictions, who was in strange earnest about things they felt to be indifferent, and who smiled at such odd moments. Euripides must often have felt himself very lonely in Athens. “My soul,” he cries, “lay not hold upon words of subtlety. Why admit these strange high thoughts, if thou hast no peers for audience to thy serious musings?”[853] And again;—

Though far beyond my ken a wise man dwell, Across the earth I greet him for a friend.[854]

It may be that Europeans of our own day are better fitted to estimate him aright than enthusiasts under the Empire or his companions who saw him too close at hand. During the last half-century we have witnessed great changes which have their counterpart in the Athens for which he wrote. Hopes have been realized only to prove disappointments and the source of fresh perplexities. In England the spread of knowledge has resulted not in a cultivated, but in a mentally restless people. Universal ability to read has for its most obvious fruit not wider knowledge of literature, but more newspapers and a rank jungle of “popular” writing. Similarly at Athens the sophists had produced mental avidity where there was no quickening of spiritual vigour to correspond. Another fact of vital import has been the rise of our working-class to solidarity and political power: it probably resembles that “demos” which Cleon led more closely than “the masses” with which Peel or Russell had to deal. Again, experience of war has shown how small is the effect which settled government, social reform, and education have exercised upon the raw, primitive, human instincts, both base and noble. In Greece, the empire of Athens, with its tyranny and selfishness, and the Peloponnesian war which had produced a frightful corruption of conduct and ideals,[855] tainted society with that cynicism (ἀναίδεια) of which Euripides so often speaks. Just as we are severed by a wide gulf from the crude but not ignoble certainty, the superficial worship of progress which marked the Victorian era, so was Euripides severed from the “men of Marathon” for whom Æschylus wrote.

So it is that we can judge the poet of “the Greek enlightenment”[856]—or rather of the Athenian disillusionment—better than most generations of his readers. To aid us, there have naturally arisen writers to voice, in a manner often like his, our own disappointment and our renewed interest in parts of life and the world which we had ignored as unmeaning or barren. The disinherited are coming into their own. Mr. Thomas Hardy has written of the English peasant with a richness and profundity unknown since Shakespeare. He offers indeed another interesting analogy with Euripides: while the critics are concerned with his “pessimism” he remains for an unsophisticated reader a splendid witness to the majesty and charm of the immense slow curves of life, the deep preciousness which glows from the gradual processes of nature and that dignity of mere existence which survives all sin and effort. _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ is the best modern parallel to _Hippolytus_. Meanwhile M. Anatole France has given us many an example of that ironical wit of which the Greek poet is so consummate a master. Another Frenchman, Flaubert, has set as the climax to his dazzling phantasy, _La Tentation de St. Antoine_, an expression in un-attic vehemence and elaboration of that passionate sympathy with all existence which blazes in the lyrics of the _Bacchæ_—a yearning which Arnold in the _Scholar-Gipsy_ has uttered in milder and still more haunting language.

There is no final synthesis of Euripides. Throughout his life he held true to those two principles, the worship of beauty, and loyalty to the dry light of intelligence. Glamour never blinded him to sin and folly; misery and coarse tyranny never taught his lips to forswear the glory of existence. One of his own noblest songs sets this triumphantly before us[857]:—

οὐ παύσομαι τὰς Χάριτας Μούσαις συγκαταμειγνύς, ἁδίσταν συζυγίαν. μὴ ζῴην μετ’ ἀμουσίας, αἰεὶ δ’ ἐν στεφάνοισιν εἴην.

“I will not cease to mingle the Graces with the Muses—the sweetest of fellowships. When the Muses desert me, let me die; may the flower-garlands never fail me.” The Graces and the Muses—such is his better way of invoking Beauty and Truth, the two fixed stars of his life-long allegiance.

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