ineffectually indeed, to deliver them, as he had been delivered himself, from the bondage of custom, from apathy or ignorance. Compelled, by the laws that regulated scenic exhibitions, to deal with the gods as the state prescribed, or the multitude required, he could only insinuate, not openly proclaim, his opinions, either on politics or religion. Yet if unsocial, he was not timid, and it is really with extraordinary boldness that he attacks soothsayers in his plays. He puts into the mouth of the ingenuous Achilles—then a youth whose heart had not been hardened by war—the following attack on Calchas the seer:—
"His lustral lavers and his salted cakes
With sorrow shall the prophet Calchas bear:
Away! The prophet!—what is he? a man
Who speaks 'mongst many falsehoods but few truths,
Whene'er chance leads him to speak true; when false,
The prophet is no more."
In the "Electra," Orestes says that he believes Apollo will justify his oracle, but that he deems lightly of human—that is, of professional—prophecies. Perhaps his dislike of prophets may have received new edge and impulse from the mischief done by them in encouraging by their idle predictions the Athenians to undertake the expedition to Sicily. And a time was at hand when the dupes of the soothsayers viewed their pretensions with as small favour as Euripides himself did. Deep was the wrath in the woe-stricken city, when the worst reports of the destruction of their fleet and army at Syracuse were confirmed by eye-
