can be happy if he turns entirely away from πράγματα, from affaires, from the things that weighed on all Athens. The Helena is a light play with a clear atmosphere and beautiful songs; Helen and Menelaus are both innocent. The Andromeda* was apparently the one simple unclouded love-story that Euripides wrote. It was very celebrated. Lucian has a pleasant story of the tragedy-fever which fell upon the people of Abdêra: how they went about declaiming iambics, "and especially sang the solos in the Andromeda and went through the great speech of Perseus, one after another, till the city was full of seven-day-old tragedians, pale and haggard, crying aloud, 'O Love, high monarch over gods and men,' and so on." The Andromeda* opened (without a prologue?) giving the heroine chained on the cliff, and watching for the first glimmer of dawn with the words, "O holy Night, how long is the wheeling of thy chariot!" Some little fragments help us to see the romantic beauty of the play as a whole: the appeal of the chorus to the echo of the sea-cliffs "by Aidôs that dwelleth in caves"; and the words of Andromeda to her lover and deliverer:
"Take me, O stranger, for thine handmaiden,
Or wife or slave."
The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides had never struck before; and the note of superhuman mystery, of sea-cliff and monsters and magic, not since the Phaëthon.*
This, of course, is the Euripides of the end of the war, when his antagonisms had become more pronounced. But from his first appearance in 455 with the Daughters of Pelias,* the man must have impressed people as unlike anything they had known before. He showed himself at once as the poet of the Sophistic
