weapon which had been employed on the other side. The very purpose of Aeschylean drama is, as Aristophanes puts it[1] to make gods and heroes think, speak, and look 'as they naturally would', in other words, to aid people, just conscious of a difficulty about the matter, in continuing to feel that the Heracles who raised Alcestis was a person as real and well certified as Darius, and the ghost of Darius a thing which, in suitable circumstances, you might as naturally expect to see as the living Darius himself. When things were so, it was neither useless nor tasteless to compose a drama with the contrary purpose, with the purpose of diffusing the conviction, or at least the suspicion, that the exploits of Heracles, whatever they were, did not include the raising of the dead, and that the appearance of Darius after death ought not to be as readily supposed as the construction of the bridge over the Hellespont. But that things were so in the time of Euripides is one of those facts which, according to the true distinction of the philosopher, 'we know but do not believe'. It is not hard to ignore a proposition, however manifest, which we cannot really take into our minds without first hypothetically annihilating and 'thinking away' the intellectual atmosphere which has been inhaled by ourselves and our predecessors for a hundred generations.
Accordingly it is not in general surprising that modern readers should have failed to find, or even to seek, the clue to such a piece as the Alcestis. It is true that without the clue we have been unable, as we loudly proclaim, to make sense of it. Nevertheless the author's point of departure lies so remote from our habits, and he on the other hand was necessarily so far from anticipating such readers as us, that there is little wonder if we remain blind to signals, which he must have thought almost too grossly legible for the intended effect. But the prologue is really too much. Almost every one stumbles over it (as witness the annotations); and we can scarcely believe that even Balaustion, though Browning does not betray her, sat through it without a smile. Among the devices of Euripides for discrediting the inhabitants of Olympus, none were more effective or better understood, than that of painting them in his own colours; 'by representing the gods he persuades men that they
- ↑ Frogs, 1060.
