Tragedies of Euripides (Way)/Euripides and His Work

Layout 2

 

EURIPIDES AND HIS WORK.

The position of Euripides in literature may fairly be called unique. Other great writers, not only of antiquity, but of modern times, have, when once immediate posterity has countersigned the verdict of their contemporaries which allotted them a place amongst the immortals, thereafter held it as by unassailable right. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, are but examples of a multitude whose crowns have not only never been challenged, but have gathered lustre with the lapse of ages. The eighteenth-century eclipse of Shakspeare is, in our own literature, the one striking exception to the rule. Yet this phenomenon, due to a transient foreign literary influence, was but the temporary reversal of a verdict which had not been as yet confirmed by long prescription. But it has been the singular fate of Euripides, after more than two thousand years of intellectual sovereignty, to find himself within the last hundred years assailed as thinker, as poet, as moralist, as dramatic artist, by a sturdy phalanx of very positive scholar-critics, who seem for some time to have carried with them at least the tacit acquiescence of the Universities. The vituperative phase of their opposition has indeed passed by; but the note of judicial condemnation is still heard from some whose learning invests their judgment with a certain authority which makes it no light matter to differ from them.

That with Sophocles the dramatic art of Greece reached its culminating point of perfection, and that Euripides led, if he did not precipitate, its decadence, that he banished the ideal from his stage, that he was sensational, sophistical, sceptical, that he tried to compensate for poverty of construction by florid elaboration of detail—these are still almost the commonplaces, the preliminary axioms, of comparative dramatic criticism with certain Greek scholars. It is no part of my intention here to combat these views in detail. The translator who introduces an author to the English reader thereby invites him to judge for himself, but at the same time to bear in mind that the original is everywhere noble, felicitous, and musical to a degree to which no translator can hope to attain. The reader who has heard that Schlegel called the Electra "of all Euripides' plays the very vilest," may examine for himself the work, a few lines of which paralysed the hands uplifted to destroy conquered Athens. When Donaldson stigmatizes him as "a bad citizen and an unprincipled man, a dramatist who degraded the moral and religious dignity of his own sacred profession," it is sufficient to ask the reader to find, if he can, in the poet's own pages a justification for such a diatribe.

But, as the general reader can hardly be aware how very modern a thing is this revised estimate of Euripides, to how large an extent it is coeval with this age of emendation and philological study of classical texts, it seems not out of place, while giving a brief account of his life and work, to dwell a little on the view taken of him in times when spectators and readers had far more complete data for forming a correct judgment than we can ever hope to have, to show how widely this view extended and how long it prevailed, and to suggest some explanation of this latter-day tendency to reverse the verdict of the ages.

Birth and Childhood.The traditional day of Euripides' birth was of all days that which should have most appropriately given light to a Greek patriot-poet's eyes, the day whereon, in 480 B.C., the great sea-fight of Salamis rolled away for ever the nightmare-dread of enslavement to Asian despotism, and assured to Greece the right to live thenceforth her own life, and to achieve her high intelledtual destiny. The child's first cry mingled with the triumphant cheers of the victorious crews and the rapturous thanksgivings of those in whose defence they had fought—of the old fathers, the helpless women and children, huddled together in the little rugged isle of Salamis.

His father was named Mnesarchus (or Mnesarchides), his mother Kleito. They must have been wealthy, for their son possessed not only considerable property, which no man could have made by literature, but also, what was especially rare then, a valuable library. They must have been well-born, for it is on record that Euripides took a prominent part as a boy in certain festivals of Apollo for which anyone of mean birth would have been ineligible. But because, as it would seem, some of the surplus produce from their country property occasionally appeared in the Athenian market, what may have been a light jest at the time was by the malice of Aristophanes perverted (some forty or fifty years later) into a persistent allegation that Euripides' mother was a vegetable-hawker.

The poet's childhood was passed amid scenes which were in themselves an inspiration. He watched while, day by day, from the ruins of that Athens which the Persians had made a heap of ashes, there rose a new city, greater, stronger, and more beautiful by far than that for which the men of Marathon and Salamis had fought. Athens had by her warlike enterprise become the head of the confederacy which the Ionian seaboard states and islands formed for mutual defence against the Persians. When Euripides was eight years old, the common treasury of the allies was transferred from Delos to Athens, and, as some of them found it more convenient to make their contributions in money than in men and ships, the imperial city found herself with vast sums at her disposal. Her obligation to keep the fleet and army of the confederacy in efficiency discharged, she did not hesitate to apply the surplus of the revenue and of the spoils of Persia to her own strengthening and adorning, So the boy's earliest memories were of the construction of magnificent harbours and docks, of the rising of the Long Walls which linked Athens with her ports, of the new-born splendour of the temple-crowded Acropolis, of colonnades whose walls flushed bright with pictures of battles by land and sea, of gleaming statues that day by day were multiplied, till the Gods and heroes seemed to outnumber the men of the city, of spacious gymnasia, of humming law-courts, and—of more interest than all, had he known it, to himself—the vast sweep of the hewn-stone seats and the gigantic stage of the Great Theatre of Dionysus. He beheld the creation of all these; he was an eye-witness of the transformation of Athens into something that far transcended Homer's fairest visions of "goodly-builded towns."

With the growth of the city came a stir of life, a quickening of commercial enterprise, an awakening of thought, which were also new. Merchants from Egypt, from Spain, from the Black Sea, and from all islands and lands that lie between these, artificers from Tyre, artists, poets, and philosophers from wherever Greek was spoken, all these brought their wealth, their cunning, their wisdom, to the feet of Athens. As though this were not enough to stimulate the mind and to make the pulses leap, through all the years of his boyhood the Dionysiac Theatre resounded with immortal verse and rang with glorious song. He was eight years old when the vast audience thrilled with triumph and shouted for rapture as Aeschylus' Persians renewed for them the great day of Salamis. He was twelve when the victorious generals of Athens, appointed judges of a contest between giants, awarded to Sophocles the victory over Aeschylus.

A mistaken vocationAll these influences were silently moulding his genius, and fostering powers as yet uncomprehended by himself, certainly unsuspected by his parents, save, perhaps, that they may have come to regard him as not an ordinary lad who would follow unquestioningly his father's vocation. Some tokens of a restless ambition may have moved them to consult oracle or soothsayer touching their son's future. This was the answer they received:—

"A son shalt thou have, O son of Mnesarchus, whom all shall acclaim
With honour, a son who shall win the renown of a glorious name,
Who shall bind on his brows the grace of the wreaths of hallowed fame."

Hallowed wreaths suggested inevitably to a Greek the wreath of wild-olive won at the festival of Zeus in the Olympic Games. The parents could imagine no prouder ambition, especially if effort were sweetened by such a divine assurance of success; and the youth was promptly placed in the hands of the trainers. Of course nothing came of it, except a local victory or two: he was indeed entered for the Olympic Games, but was disqualified on some technical grounds by the board of managers at their preliminary scrutiny. But those two or three years of probation remained for him no pleasant memory. His experience of the life of athletes, of their absorption in the body, of their brutality, empty-headedness, and vanity, filled him with a lasting aversion for the class, which breaks out now and again into scornful expression in his plays.

First Essays.His father resigned himself to the inevitable, and for a while the son hovered unsettled between literature and art. He painted, and would seem to have painted well, since a picture by him was long exhibited at Megara.^[1] He attended the lectures of the philosophers. Anaxagoras introduced him to physical, and Protagoras to moral science; he heard Prodicus discourse on rhetoric; and under the guidance of these teachers collected a library, one of the best of his day. So the years passed over the scholar-poet: spring after spring found him witnessing the grandeurs of Aeschylus, the splendours of Sophocles, and the ephemeral brilliance of those rivals whose dramas, utterly forgotten now, were sometimes esteemed by judges and spectators worthy to be preferred to theirs. How early he tried the wings of his inspiration we cannot tell; but we do know that the first play of his that obtained the honour of being represented in the great theatre at the spring festival of Dionysus appeared in the year 455 B.C., when Euripides was twenty-five years old. It is interesting to note that Aeschylus and Sophocles commenced their dramatic career, the former at twenty-six, the latter at twenty-eight years of age.

Dramatic Competitions.It seems advisable at this point to give, for the information of the general reader, some explanation of the circumstances attending the representation of a drama in Athens, so wholly different as they were from anything in our own experience.^[2] There was but one theatre; but it was large enough to contain the whole free population (all of whom made a point of attending), and a great concourse of visitors besides. The representations were, primarily, not a mere public entertainment, but part of a great national religious function, the worship of Bacchus. Hence they were confined to the few days of his festival in the month of March, and were under the control of the state, by which also their expenses were defrayed. A poet who wished his plays^[3] to be performed had to submit them to a board presided over by the Archon^[4] of the year. Here he found himself, at the outset, in competition with rival poets, since only a limited number of plays could be represented at each year's festival. To each of the poets whose work was approved for representation the Archon "assigned a chorus," an expression which covered the provision of all requisites for staging his plays. The chorus was composed of fifteen professional singers and dancers. The cost of the instruction of these by skilled teachers, of their salaries and dresses, of their maintenance during the period of their training and performance, the expense of the musicians and supernumeraries, were defrayed, not directly from the state treasury, but, according to the peculiar system of taxation by which the Athenians exploited their millionaires, by one of the wealthy men on whom such burdens devolved in rotation, and who was called the Choregus. The actors, who were not more than three in number,^[5] and who therefore had constantly to double parts, seem to have been paid directly from the treasury, and were, in the rehearsals, "coached" by the poet himself. The Choregus, thus responsible for the singing and dancing, and for the general staging of the four pieces under his charge, was, in his way, in competition with the choregi of the other poets, just as the poets were with each other; and, as it was a question of gaining the approval and favour of the sovereign people, and as any shortcomings would be sure to recoil upon himself, he had every motive for sparing neither expense nor pains. Hence it must be borne in mind that the literary excellence of a play, which is all that we can judge it by, constituted but a small element in its success at the public performance. The merits of the actors,^[6] the favour in which they stood with the public, the perfection of the drill of the chorus, the excellence of their singing and dancing, the beauty of the dresses, the equipment of the guards, handmaids, and other supernumeraries, together with the various stage accessories demanded by the peculiar features of each play—there were thousands of the audience with whom these would weigh far more than artistic development of plot, splendour of poetic diction, or depth and beauty of thought.

How the prizes were awarded.The judges were chosen by lot from amongst the audience, and, the chances being thus enormously against their possessing any special literary or artistic qualification of their own, we may safely assume that they were largely guided in their award by their general impression of the applause, or by the known sympathies of influential men, or by the pressure of the cliques, political and social, which swarmed in Athens. Such as it was, the award of the judges carried with it ivy wreaths for the victorious poet and his performers, and a tripod for the choregus, which he was expected to be at the expense of consecrating in a miniature temple or shrine in the Street of the Tripods. In the popular estimation, indeed, the choregus may sometimes have bulked as much larger than the author, as the manager does in our own day.

In the hundred years during which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote for the stage, we find that these three carried off between them but thirty-six of the annual first prizes, the rest falling to authors of whom time has not deigned to preserve more than the bare names of some half-dozen, with the titles of a few of their plays. We should, however, be rash in inferring that these forgotten poets were as inferior as this oblivion might seem to suggest, and, even if they were, the patrons of the modern theatre have little right to cast a stone at those old Athenian audiences.

Into this arena, already crowded with a host of competitors, where Sophocles had first appeared twelve years before, and whence Aeschylus had just been removed by death, Euripides stepped down at the age of twenty-five. He was thirty-nine before a play of his won the first prize,^[7] and the success was repeated only four times afterwards.^[8] Since a poet had to present his dramas in sets of four, this means that, competing some twenty times in fifty years, he was adjudged first once out of four times. These official recognitions were, however, as we shall see, no measure of his real popularity.

Enemies and detractors.Successful or not, he wrote on with the tireless, undaunted energy of genius. It was uphill work, for Euripides was above all things original, and originality, as the history of letters has often shown since, makes conquest of the judges of literature last. All conservatives in dramatic art, all who could think only in the old grooves, and appreciate the old simple music, all sticklers for convention, all railers against new ideas, all who found salvation only in the old religious and social formulas, all who shuddered to see bubbles pricked—these, (with probably the whole athletic interest) were, according to their lights, honestly opposed to him. All brawling demagogues and their jackals, all who despised their inferiors in wealth or birth, all friends of selfish, overbearing, and faithless Sparta, all who had something to gain by trading on the credulity and superstition of the populace, all who envied genius that soared beyond their vision, who sneered at the earnestness that spoke to the heart, the human sympathy that had love and admiration for poor peasants and trampled slaves—these were dishonestly opposed to him. The unsophisticated reader of Aristophanes will find it not easy (even with the assistance of eminent scholars) to comprehend how, headed by him, the comic poets could have attacked Euripides out of pure zeal for religion,^[9] for old-time simplicity and virtue, and how such as they could accuse him of "sapping the springs of civic manliness, of patriotism, and even of morality."

"What private griefs they had, alas, I know not,
That made them do it,"—^[10]

but for twenty years, from 425 B.C. to the year after his death, Euripides was the objedl of the most persistent and merciless attacks from the comic stage. In play after play, from the Acharnians to the Frogs, Aristophanes made him the butt of the keenest and most telling wit that has ever stirred men to laughter. His lines were parodied, his characters were travestied, his plots were burlesqued, his morality was impugned, his friends were slandered, his mother was jeered at, he himself was represented on the stage in disreputable and contemptible situations. And all this was done with such exquisite fooling, with such irresistible drollery, that even the friends of the victim, we may well imagine, could not choose but laugh amid their indignation. Never has any writer endured such a purgatory of ridicule. A Cibber pilloried in the Dunciad, a Keats scourged by the Quarterly, may seem sufficiently unenviable; but no victim of modern satire is exposed to such crucifying publicity, is so utterly unscreened from the tempest of derision, has the mocking faces of a nation so thrust against his own, as he at whom Aristophanes gibed year after year in the great theatre of Athens. Of what iron endurance must have been the soul of the man who could uncrushed sit there, and see the faces of thousands upon thousands agleam with merry mockery of him, could behold them rocking to and fro, "slain with mirth," and hear the laughter surging over tier on tier of the vast curves like the roaring of a sea! Of what steadfast fibre must his purpose have been wrought that he should hold on unswerving in the path he had chosen, bating no jot of heart or hope, but still speaking out the thing that was in him, still publishing to his countrymen and countrywomen the message that was given him for them, through twenty embittered years! By what high thoughts was he sustained, by what loving sympathy comforted, by what consciousness of right made strong, that he fainted not nor faltered, who trod that long path of thorns!

Popularity.He had his reward, not in "first prizes," which were so seldom the reward of first merit, but in an ever increasing hold on the hearts of his countrymen, and not of these alone, but of all who inhabited that Greater Greece whose cities gemmed the shores of the Mediterranean. Not all the twenty years' ridicule of Aristophanes, not all the hostility of conservatives and aristocrats, availed to thrust back the rising tide of his popularity. In Aristophanes' own pages we find again and again an exasperated recognition of Euripides' influence, to the power of which the comic dramatist bears sufficient, if grudging, testimony. How wide-spread it was, we may infer from the story preserved by Plutarch. After describing the completeness of the disaster that overtook the great Athenian armament which invaded Sicily 415—413 B. C., and the ruthlessness with which the survivors were exterminated, he proceeds:—

"Some there were who owed their preservation to Euripides. Of all the Greeks, his was the muse whom the Sicilians were most in love with. From every stranger that landed in their island they gleaned every small specimen or portion of his works, and communicated it with pleasure to each other. It is said that on this occasion a number of Athenians, upon their return home, went to Euripides, and thanked him in the most respectful manner for their obligations to his pen; some having been enfranchised for teaching their masters what they remembered of his poems, and others having got refreshments when they were wandering about after the battle, for singing a few of his verses. Nor is this to be wondered at, since they tell us, that when a ship from Caunus, which happened to be pursued by pirates, was going to take shelter in one of their ports, the Sicilians at first refused to admit her; but upon asking the crew whether they knew any of the verses of Euripides, and being answered in the affirmative, they received both them and their vessel."^[11]

Life of Nicias—Langhorne's trans.)

Such crowns as these no partial judges, no envious detractors, no malicious critics could take away; and it may well be that the last six years of Euripides' life were his happiest.

Marriage relations.Of his home-affairs we know but little. We are told, in the anonymous "Life" contained in certain inferior MSS., of his two wives, Melito and Chœrilè, both of whom were in succession unfaithful to him. There is good reason for doubting the fact of a second marriage,^[12] and little evidence for his domestic unhappiness at all. Aristophanes, who would assuredly have made the most of any such scandal, refers to one wife only; and the sole reference which can be construed into an imputation on her chastity is to be found—not in any play brought out during Euripides' life—but in the Frogs, which appeared the year after his death. The passage runs thus:—

Aesch.

None knows of any woman whom I drew by passion cursed.

Eurip.

Ha! little part had you in Aphroditè!

Aesch.

Heaven forbid! But you and yours had all too much: to you she did her worst. Ay, your own self she overthrew.

Bacchus.

My word, and so she did! The things you wrote of others' wives, yourself had suffered first.

Whatever meaning and weight this imputation may have, it is significant that it was not made even in the Thesmophoriazusæ, brought out five years before, the whole theme of which is the women's impeachment of Euripides for taxing them with unchastity. It is too much to suppose that Aristophanes would have neglected to make the fullest use of a scandal so apposite to the whole tenor of that play, had he been in possession of it. It may well be that the story is of that numerous family of slanders which do not lift their heads during a man's life.

Departure from Athens.Aeschylus, at the age of fifty-seven, disgusted, it is said, with the preference of Sophocles to himself, forsook Athens for Sicily; and though he returned for a time, he again left his country finally ten years after. Euripides was seventy-two when he accepted the invitation of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, to repair to his court, whither other distinguished Greeks,—painters, poets, and musicians,—friends of Euripides, had preceded him, and where men of letters were not only honoured guests, but (as happened, it is said, to Euripides himself) were sometimes placed in positions of official dignity. He visited Magnesia on the way, and was there fêted and loaded with every honour. The court of Macedonia may well have seemed a haven of rest to him, after the ceaseless vexations, the political unrest, and the now imminent perils of Athens. Amidst the magnificent scenery of that northern land, its forest-clad mountains, its lovely glens, its noble rivers, his muse was kindled with new inspiration; and he wrote with a freedom, a rapidity, a depth and fervour of thought, and a splendour of diction, which even he had scarcely attained before. The Iphigeneia at Aulis and the Bacchanals remain to us out of the four plays which were the fruits of his unharassed leisure.

Death.Felix opportunitate mortis, he was spared the knowledge of the shameful sequel of Arginusæ, the miserable disaster of Aegospotami, the last lingering agony of famished Athens, and her humiliation in the dust before her foes. He died 406 B.C. at the age of seventy-five, more than a year before these calamities befell. For the wild legend of his having been torn by dogs, and for the still wilder story of his death at the hands of furious women, there is no contemporary authority—as there certainly would have been, had any such particulars reached Athens along with the news of his death. When the tidings arrived, a play of Sophocles was on the eve of representation. The old poet put on mourning for his dead rival, and made his actors and chorus appear without their crowns, and the great concourse in the theatre wept aloud. The people sent an embassy entreating that his body might be given to them, but in vain. He was magnificently buried near Arethusa in Macedon, and his tomb was said to have been struck by lightning from Zeus, an honour vouchsafed to none other of men save the ancient lawgiver Lycurgus. His countrymen built a cenotaph to his memory, and graved thereon this:—

"The shrine of Euripides dead is the heart of all Hellas, though lying
In Macedon rest his bones, for that there did he end his days.
His birth-land was Athens, the Hellas of Hellas: his strains undying
Gladdened the Queens of Song: the nations acclaim him with praise."

Posthumous fame.In the year after his death, the Iphigeneia at Aulis, the Bacchanals, and the Alkmeon (a lost play) were brought out, and gained the first prize. Three months before,^[13] Aristophanes had made a last futile attempt to discredit him, in his comedy of the Frogs. Here he makes Aeschylus say, "My poetry has not died with me, but this man's has died with him." Never was literary judgment more shortsighted. Whatever popularity Euripides had enjoyed in life, it was as nothing to that which followed on his death. Athenians soon had cause to look upon him as the guardian-genius of his country. In the very next year, when Athens was taken, and the generals of the allies were considering the Thebans' proposal to destroy her, they were, Plutarch tells us, diverted from their purpose by listening to the declamation, "by a man of Phocis," of that choral passage in the Electra, beginning l. 167. Their quick perceptions were struck with the parallel between the forlorn state of the royal house and of the royal city.

As the years passed on, Euripides' hold upon heart and intellect became only the more assured. To quote the words of a great French critic^[14]:—"If Aeschylus had risen from Hades a hundred years after the representation of the Frogs, he would have found that his own poetry was, indeed, not forgotten on earth, but that it was eclipsed by that of Euripides. Sophocles himself, had he returned, would have had great reason to be astonished. It was no longer his tragedies, however perfect they were, which were oftenest played, and with most success; it was not he who was most read, most quoted, most admired of the tragic poets; it was Euripides.^[15] This poet who, in his lifetime, found such difficulty in pleasing the judges of the dramatic festivals, passes, immediately after his death, to the undisputed position of founder of a new school in literature." Dramatic authors of succeeding generations all formed their style on that of Euripides;^[16] artists turned from Homer and the cyclic poets, and came to Euripides for subjects. The vase-paintings to this day attest his influence on art. Philosophers quarried in him for doctrine and maxim, orators kindled their hearers to higher patriotism and nobler self-sacrifice by quotations from his pages. One of the longest fragments preserved from any of his lost plays is from the Erechtheus: it has come down to us in a speech (of date 330 B.C.) of the orator Lycurgus, who prefaces his quotation of it with the remark, "You will observe in these lines a heroism and nobleness worthy of our city," The dramatist Philemon wrote:

"Could I be sure, friends, that men after death
Retain their consciousness, as some aver,
I'd hang myself to see Euripides."

But no more striking instance of the power of a poet to play upon men as upon a musical instrument has ever been given than that which we find recorded by Lucian. He tells that, about a hundred years after Euripides' death, a travelling theatrical troupe represented one summer at Abdera his Andromeda.^[17] So thrilled by the art of the actor, so intoxicated by the charm of the poetry, were the audience (which, in a Greek city, implied the whole population), that they left the theatre in a state of impassioned exaltation, in a tragic frenzy. With pale cheeks and shining eyes they paced to and fro in street and square, declaiming and chanting" at the top of their voices" the speeches, monodies, and choruses, especially that beginning, "O Love, thou despot over Gods and men!" It was not a transient excitement: it lasted for months, until, in fact, the winter came, and a keen frost cooled their fevered blood.

When "Greece led her conqueror captive," it was Euripides whom Roman poets, orators, and philosophers delighted to honour, Ennius, Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, are but the greatest among a host of his admirers. As Verrall puts it,—"The most cultivated men of the ancient world speak of Euripides regularly and habitually as modest men would now speak of Shakspeare or Goethe, and sometimes as reverent men would now speak of Dante or St. Paul." The early Christian Fathers quoted him with approval. He was for them the chief witness for righteousness, the purest teacher of morality, amongst the ancients; in some sort, a forerunner of Christianity.^[18] A sacred drama, "Christ's Passion," was composed by some early Father, of passages taken from various plays of Euripides. In the Middle Ages, Dante knew, or cared to recognize, Euripides alone of the three. To Milton's love and minute critical study of him we owe the Comus and the Samson Agonistes. It is only since the beginning of the present century that a new school of criticism, of German origin, has arisen, which, not content with exalting Aeschylus and Sophocles far above him, has spared no pains to depreciate Euripides. It can hardly be said that the detractors have carried the poets with them. Goethe indignantly cried: "If a modern like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees." Coleridge said, "Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than Sophocles." Macaulay, who in his salad days carped at him, in his maturity wrote: "I can hardly account for the contempt which, at school and college, I felt for Euripides. I own that I now like him better than Sophocles."^[19] Browning, in Balaustion's Adventure and Aristophanes' Apology, has done a great poet's utmost to commend him to our reverent study. "It is ill," says Joubert, "to differ from the poets in poetry, and from the saints in religion."

Modern opinion: its limitations.The world of scholars is, perhaps, still divided into two camps on the question of his true position; but the voice of dispraise is not as of old. It is tempered by much discrimination, and somewhat faint with diffidence. It may be doubted whether critics who brush aside the judgment of antiquity with a few supercilious observations on "degraded taste" and "decadence of literature," have given full weight to an important consideration, viz., that the ancients, whose verdict, early pronounced and adhered to with increasing emphasis through hundreds of years, they have called in question, were, in many respects, in a far better position to judge than we moderns can be. Whereas we possess but seven plays of Aeschylus, seven of Sophocles, and nineteen of Euripides, they possessed all, or nearly all, that these three had written,^[20] as well as a vast number of the works of the contemporary and later dramatists. Hence a full comparative study was possible to them. Again, to these old-time students the great dramatists spoke in their mother-tongue; and, however ripe may be the scholarship, and however "thrice-repured " the taste of a modern critic, there are inevitable limitations to his judgment of an ancient, which none will recognise more promptly and appreciate more fully than himself. The nuances of signification, the connotation of words which usage creates, and which no lexicon can preserve, no comparative study of authors recover for us; the verse-music of which only the ear could be cognisant, and which must be lost to men who now cannot even agree on such elementary requisites for its appreciation as the pronunciation of the Greek alphabet and the effect of accentuation—all these entered into the old readers' and hearers' estimate, and weighed with an absolute sureness where we must needs depend on guesswork. Scholars are of course fully alive to all this; and so, in their appraisement of the Greek dramatists, limit their consideration mainly to features which the baldest prose translation displays as well as the original text. Such are, the poet's adherence to or departure from a certain standard of the ideal, his philosophy of life, his attitude to religion, his social and political views, the artistic perfection of his plots, his management of dialogue, the subject-matter of his choruses, his presentment of character, and so forth. Yet here too we have to guard against judging the thought, the art, the feeling, the ethics of a far-off age and alien race by canons which have been in part modified by influences that have had birth in far later times and under very different conditions.^[21] In some respects the Greeks regarded their drama and its teachings from a point of view now lost. Some critics, while recognising this, yet assume that they can set themselves right by taking Aristophanes as their guide. Here, however, they need to exercise as much caution as we ourselves should recommend to critics of some future age who should assume that they could recover the lost literary standpoint of our nineteenth century by taking Byron to adjust their estimate of Wordsworth, and certain issues of Blackwood and the Quarterly to assist them in finding the true place of Keats. Once more, while the special kind of artistic excellence in which we are told that Sophocles alone attained consummate perfection was not pursued, was not essayed, after his day, but became like some lost art, for the productions of which changed conditions of society have destroyed all demand, the peculiar feature of Euripides' genius which appealed to the ancient world, which came to them like a revelation, has been developed continuously through later times, and more especially since the dawn of Christianity. The sympathies that had not been voiced till Euripides gave them utterance, the chords in our nature on which no hand had fallen before his, have since his time touched men and thrilled men through many generations. Some of us may be inclined to undervalue early examples of a type of literary excellence which the world has since cultivated assiduously through many centuries, and to overvalue a type of artistic excellence which is so absolutely a thing of the past that we cannot even recover with certainty the standpoint from which its results were viewed by those to whom the Athenian drama was part of the ordinary experience of their lives.

In estimating the literary standing of Euripides with his contemporaries, and his artistic and ethical influence, it would be well to bear in mind that his salient characteristic was originality—the originality of a workman who, rigidly coniined to certain prescribed materials, tools, patterns, and general style of treatment, yet, by sheer force of genius, sets the stamp of his own individuality on every piece of work he touches.

The "Ideal Treatment."The class of characters to be represented on the stage was already fixed by tradition. when Euripides appeared.^[22] The Gods and Heroes of myth and legend must be the leading personages in every play. As the dress in which they appeared was magnificent, with no attempt at historical correctness or scenic illusion, and as their attitudes and groupings were rather statuesque than histrionic, so it had come to be the custom to maintain a certain "grand style" in their diction. Their humanity must be of the heroic type; by "calm sorrows and majestic pains" they must stir pity and awe, and whatever lesson or warning the spectator drew from their triumph or their defeat, its application to himself was not based on the reflection, "These are of like passions with me: out of even such weakness as mine they are made strong." They were beings of a far-off world, superhuman in fortitude, Titanic in crime, magnificent in overthrow. They were compassed with nets of Fate and Necessity: their steps were dogged by Nemesis, and Divine Retribution was ever at the door. It was for them to show how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong, with what grace and majesty a Laocoon can agonize in toils of despair. This is what is implied by what scholars call the ideal as distinguished from the realistic treatment; and, though Sophocles has certain notable lapses from it,^[23] on the whole he and Aeschylus adhered to it. An excellent type it is, so long as it is considered sufficient that a Tragedy shall be a fragment of an epic poem dramatized.^[24] But when some five or six hundred plays constructed on these lines had been produced by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the lesser stars, and the public and the judges had, after their wont, settled down into the conviction that perfection was stereotyped, a third great genius arose, and had the audacity to reconsider the whole question. And he seems to have begun by going to the root of the matter, and asking, "What is the truest, highest, and most practical function of the drama? Has it no possibilities yet unrealized, no message to the hearts and consciences of these men and women of a new day?" It was indeed a new day: men had lived fast since Athens had entered upon her career of heroism and power. Their thoughts had widened with their knowledge of other peoples: they knew the world was not as the poets of the past had imagined it; and the old-time fables of the Gods, of their amours, their quarrels, their disguises in human form, might still hold a place in the conventions of religion, but had no part in living faith. The spirit of the new scepticism had appeared in Herodotus and Aeschylus: Pindar refused to credit baseness, injustice, and impurity of the Deity. The unreality of the old conceptions of Gods and heroes had forced itself on men's minds; and the Athenians were least of all likely to sacrifice truth, or honest doubt, and free inquiry, to a supposed artistic ideal, or to go on putting new wine into old bottles, to save themselves from "decadence." There is, even in poetry and art, something higher than the worship of the fetish of the ideal. It must be remembered, too, that to suffer the stage to be permanently monopolized by creations raised above the sympathies and needs of common life was to sacrifice far more than would be involved in such a procedure now. The drama, and more especially Tragedy, was the pulpit and the press of the time, the one means of directly influencing popular thought, as the Pnyx was of influencing national action. And such an influence was sorely needed. Men had wider opportunities, larger knowledge, were confronted with deeper and more complicated problems: old chains were straining and snapping. Were they to be henceforth wholly unfettered? Were there no eternal principles whose obligations would survive outworn prescription and decaying faith? If the Gods were not as myth and poet represented them, were there no Gods? Humanity's great inarticulate challenge had been flung down before priest, philosopher, and poet. The temple-doors closed against it with sullen clang: the philosopher plucked aside his robes and withdrew into his cultured coteries, his exclusive lecture-halls: the singers murmured, "We know our mission, and we have learnt our tune." So it was left to this one poet to take it up—alone. But his freedom of choice was strictly limited. The one channel of publication open to a dramatist was through the theatre, and hence an author could only hope to reach the public by conforming to conventional requirements, however these might trammel him. He must of necessity utter the new message through the old media: he must out of the experiences of the heroes and heroines of legend find an answer to the questions which perplexed common men, find help and guidance for very human weakness and bewilderment. If the old legends were of any ethical value for his day, it was because those represented in them were real, not ideal beings, hence of like passions with us, swayed by the same motives, sinning from the same temptations, excusing their errors by the same pleas, and, when they dared to face the unseen, disquieted by the same doubts. Looking deeper than the surface, moreover, he saw that there is nothing necessarily ideal in high descent or royal station, still less in the stately accessories of costume and environment associated with these. In peasant and bondman he found types of noble humanity, of selfless honour, of loyal faith. He showed that poverty did not starve out true manhood, nor rags degrade it. He would not be contented with the conventional exclusiveness of a vocabulary which bade fair to become too narrow for the thoughts which were demanding expression; but his enrichments no more made it "more commonplace" than Shakspeare made English poetry more commonplace by his use of law-terms, or Tennyson by the touches he drew from science, or by the words he rescued from half-oblivion on rustic lips.

The "Forensic Debates."He laid bare the human heart not only in the ecstasies and agonies of its love, in the shudderings of its haunting fears, in the sacredness of its grief, in the exaltation of high resolve, but also in those darker processes of the mind wherein the sinner wrestles with his own conscience, and would fain justify his transgression before God and man. With a subtle instinct he perceived how prone the evil-doer is to evade the broad issues of right and wrong, and to seek refuge in a multitude of separately casuistic or irrelevant pleas, to essay to make a strong chain out of many defective links, as though an untenable position could, by occupying all available outposts, be made to seem unassailable.^[25] So a Helen shifts from plea to plea to excuse her faithlessness: a Jason marshals all the audacious sophisms of egotism: a Klytemnestra demands new canons of right and wrong to suit her special case: or an Eteocles desperately claims that justice shall give way when injustice proffers the whole world as a bribe. The smiling hypocrisy, the plausible evasion, the naked cynicism, the angry obstinacy of those whom the strong delusion of selfishness constrains to believe a lie—Euripides unveils them all; but it is surely a little superficial to characterize this feature of his genius as "a fondness for sophistical reasoning," or to claim that noble diction is sacrificed and the ideal "large utterance" marred, because the war between right and wrong is fought out with disciplined forces. Sophocles was hardly of one mind with the latter-day critics who carp at this practice of Euripides. In four out of his seven plays he has what would be called "forensic debates," were they found in Euripides;^[26] and in five he has the same kind of "wrangling dialogues" of which we have heard so much from the detractors of the younger poet.^[27]

Attitude to Religion.In the mythological representations of the Gods we can find little indeed that is essentially ideal. Had the epic poets not thrown around that Pantheon of lust, of mutual jealousy and contention, the glamour of stately verse, these forms which gleamed luridly against the heavy clouds of superstition and nature-worship might have faded like evil dreams with the first dawn of the intellectual day of Greece. But the poets imparted to men's conceptions of the Gods a precision and harmony, an aesthetic beauty and verisimilitude, which gave them a new, an almost indefinite lease of life, so that even we moderns find it easier to imagine the actual being of Apollo and Aphroditê than of the Gods of our fathers, Odin and Freya. As subjects for poetry and art they became wholly satisfying; for purposes of ritual and public worship they were conventionally adequate. The difficulty was felt when men asked, "What are the eternal powers that make for righteousness?—who are the sleepless providences of our world of hopes and fears?—in whom shall we put our trust, and to whom pray?—who are the unswerving vindicators of purity, of truth, of honesty? Are these Gods of the temples and the poets the all-pervading, the all-wise, the confidence of the ends of the earth, and of them that are afar off upon the sea?" Sophocles passed by on the other side, left the question untouched, as a thing not affecting the laws of conscience and the claims of duty, and testified that enough of the beautiful and the hopeful remained for him, enough of strength and encouragement in the assurance that all things still are working together for good. Only twice does a discordant note sound in his pages, when Hyllus appeals to men "not to forgive the Gods, seeing the mischief they do," and Philoctetes cries that "honouring the Gods, he finds the Gods base."^[28] Aeschylus proclaimed a Power that manifested itself in retribution, a God to whom vengeance belongeth: if, as in the Prometheus, he was confronted with an evil legend of the old Pantheon, he dashed himself against it in sullen indignation, pointing, as in scornful silence, to Zeus the usurper, the tyrant, the evil genius of humanity, the Doomed One.

While Sophocles believed and trusted, and Aeschylus believed and trembled, Euripides gazed steadily and fearlessly on the great veil hiding the unknown. "He fought his doubts and gathered strength; he would not make his judgment blind." Because the Gods of fable and poetry were impossible, he did not therefore deny the existence of Gods. To the scientific sceptic of his day he referred as one

"Who scans this universe, and finds no God,
But babbles those star-gazers' aimless lies,
Whose pestilent tongue flings random dreams abroad
Of the Unseen, whom wisdom makes not wise."^[29]

(Fragment 905.)

He took the legendary stories of amorous or revengeful deities and used them as artistic material, accepting, for artistic purposes, the popular view of them as irresponsible powers, not subject to earthly laws of justice and right, who made human beings their playthings and their victims. But ever and anon flashes through the romance the passionate cry of a Kreusa's outraged heart, the stern reprobation of one who tells of Apollo's revenge upon a hero's son, a Herakles' indignant rejection of the doctrine of Gods at feud with Gods. A chorus wails that faith is without knowledge: a votary bids his God in might remember righteousness: a God charges his fellow-god with folly. It behoves us, indeed, to exercise extreme caution in assuming that in the expression of this or that opinion by one of his characters we find a self-revelation of the poet: it is a principle of interpretation the adoption of which will in the great majority of cases mislead us, and involve us in contradictory conclusions. We might more safely lay it down as a rule, that, wherever there is manifest dramatic propriety in the sentiment put into the mouth of a particular character, there the poet was not making that person the mouthpiece of his own views:^[30] the sentiment may indeed in certain cases coincide with his own; but, in a wide range of character and incident, that was inevitable. But to many of these references to mythical religion this rule does not apply. They are often of the nature of passing comment, or obiter dicta. Had Euripides found no difficulty in popular theology, he might, without sacrifice of dramatic fitness, have omitted them without changing the general drift of the speeches in which they occur. The conclusion forces itself on the reader that Euripides not only saw clearly the inconsistency of ascribing the baser human vices to those supreme beings who demand righteousness in their creatures; but, while he did not aim at flouting the simple popular faith, he at all events sought to lead his audiences to think seriously, to question their own consciences, and to strive to dissociate fable from faith. To say that "his stories assume that the Gods do not exist,"^[31] is surely to take for granted that, by representing the popular divinities in the naked deformity of their lust, their cruelty, their jealousy, a poet would expect to drive his audience to the inevitable conclusion that these Gods were non-existent. The experience of all ages and all nations disproves the theory. Men have always worshipped their Gods, not for their goodness, but for their power; and the more realistic such stories were, the more they brought home to believers the nearness, the formidable irresponsibility, the readiness to harm if offended, to help if propitiated, of these beings. It does not appear that the faith of Sophocles, much less that of his audience, staggered at the ruthless vindictiveness and partiality of Athena, in his Ajax.

But Euripides differed from his countrymen in that he refused to see in the constitution and moral government of the world any reason for accepting fables about its supreme rulers for which he felt the only ultimate authority was the imagination of men. The existence of Zeus, Apollo, Aphroditê,^[32] he did not call in question; but he more than hinted that our conceptions of them must not be degrading. He was very far from being either atheist or sceptic, as some have hastily called him. He believed earnestly, passionately, in a Divinity, in a watching Providence, in the revelation of his will by oracles,^[33] in his vindication of the right, in his regard for human suffering:—

"There is, howe'er ye gibe thereat,
A Zeus, and Gods who look on woes of men."

(Fragment 981).

"I, whensoe'er I see the wicked man
Cast down, aver that there are Gods indeed."

(Frag. Oenomaus).

With the fashionable scepticism of the sophists and philosophers, reckless as it was in speculation, audacious in negation, he had no sympathy. It was one thing to say that our conception of the Gods must be cleansed of what, if we be right-minded, we must recognise as impiety, nay, blasphemy; another to deny the being of Gods, to dogmatize on the unseen. Thus he says:—

"Slowly on-sweepeth, but unerringly,
The might of Heaven, with sternest lessoning
For men who in their own mad fantasy
Exalt their unbelief, and crown it king—

Mortals who dare belittle things divine!
Ah, but the Gods in subtle ambush wait:
On treads the foot of time; but their design
Is unrelinquished, and the ruthless fate

Quests as a sleuth-hound till it shall have tracked
The godless down in that relentless hunt.
We may not, in the heart's thought or the act,
Set us above the law of use and wont."

(Bacchanals, 882—893).

So, as he stretched lame hands of faith to "the all-beholding, unbeheld Himself,"^[34] if haply he might feel after him and find him, it seemed to him at times that he gained a far-off vision of the truth, that he was touched by the skirts of the glory passing by, and knew that this was no presence that could be shapen in marble or in ivory and gold, nor could be contained in any temple made with hands:—

"What manner of house by hands of craftsmen framed
May compass with its walls the form divine?"

(Fragment 968).

As Wordsworth felt the immanence of that great Soul in nature which filleth heaven and earth,

"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things,"

so Euripides felt that only the all-enfolding could be coextensive with the all-upholding:—

"Seest thou the boundless ether there on high
That folds the earth around with dewy arms?
This deem thou Zeus, this reckon one with God;"^[35]

(Fragment 935).

and, rapt in adoration, beheld a vision sublime as that of Hebrew psalmist—

"Thee, self-begotten, who, in ether rolled
Ceaselessly round, by mystic links dost blend
The nature of all things, whom veils enfold
Of light, of dark night flecked with gleams of gold,
Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end."

(Frag. Peirithous).

No marvel that men said afterwards that Zeus had shown especial honour to the tomb of him who had ascribed exceeding majesty to him, who had lifted men's thoughts far above the grovelling conceptions of the priests, far beyond the fairyland of the poets.

Attitude to morality and religion.He who believed in a higher type of divinity believed also in a higher type of humanity, Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report—these he commended to his countrymen. In the noble rheses so frequent in his plays, in chorus-chants that throb with patriotism, that thrill with human sympathy, that breathe solemn reverence for sanctities, he raised men into an atmosphere high above the sordid round of daily life. In golden aphorisms—the "arrows of the soul" which strike into men's hearts and there remain to sting them on to nobler aims—he spoke of virtue—

"Three virtues are there; practise these, my son—
Honour the Gods, the parents that reared thee,
The common laws of Hellas. This do thou,
And aye a crown of glory shalt thou win:"—

(Frag. Antiope.)

of the solid permanence of character—

"Safer than law is upright character—
For this can none by crafty words pervert,
But that the pleader oft turmoiling turns
This way and that, and staineth it with wrong:"—

(Frag. Peliades.)

of wealth gotten by vanity—

"Snatch honours by the strong hand, wicked men;
Get wealth, yea, hunt the prey from every side,
Unrighteous gain and righteous undistinguished—
Then the grim harvest reap of all these things:"—

(Frag. Ino.)

of our accountability—

"Mortals hold their possessions not in fee;
We are but stewards of the gifts of God:
Whene'er he will, he claims his own again."

(Phoenician Maidens, 555—557.)

of the wisdom of resignation —

"Never was man born but to toil and pain.
He burieth children, getteth him new babes,
And dies himself. Yet men are grieved hereat
When dust to dust they bear; needs must it be
That death like corn-shocks garner lives of men,
That this man be, that be no more. Now why
Mourn what all must by nature's law pass through?
There is no horror in the inevitable:"—

(Frag. Hypsipyle.)

and of the grandeur of noble, though unsuccessful, endeavour—

"Though one fail, greatly failing, he
By death wins immortality."

(Frag. Aigeus.)

It is not, however, by exhortation that one moves his fellows most deeply and permanently, but by setting before them inspiring examples, by creating great ideals.

One of the foremost of English scholars and critics, arguing that Aristophanes is, in his indictment of Euripides, substantially right from the Athenian point of view, says:

"His Aeschylus (in the Frogs) complains that Euripides had sapped the springs of civic manliness, of patriotism, and even of morality. It is true that Euripides, as a dramatic poet, had contributed to tendencies setting in that direction. Homer had been regarded by the Greeks as their greatest teacher, because the heroes were the noblest ideals of human life which they possessed. Aeschylus and Sophocles, in their different ways, had preserved the Homeric spirit. If the heroes once ceased to be ideals of human life, the ordinary Greek of the fifth century had no others."^[36]

It does not seem incontestably obvious that heroes elevated above commonplace humanity do furnish the best conceivable ideals for common men. But, assuming this to be so, what traits of character in these heroes would the Greek wisely take for imitation? Their splendid physical and mental endowments?—these were, by hypothesis, unattainable. Their bravery?—certainly the bravery of the Homeric heroes may be said to represent fairly the average of Hellenic courage. There was none of them whose heart did not fail in the face of overwhelming odds,—save Diomedes, whom Nestor censures^[37] for this very trait, the Berserk element in his character, and Achilles, who was so divinely endowed and assisted that for him no odds could be overwhelming,—none of them who ever stood as the Spartans stood at Thermopylæ, or the Athenians at Marathon. A painful, not a disabling wound would send any one of them from the battle-field.^[38] The grasping greed and tyrannous insolence of Agamemnon, the sublime selfishness of Achilles in leaving thousands of Greeks to perish, the unfailing mendacity of Odysseus, will hardly be upheld as ideal qualities. If, however, the Greeks who saw the rise of the drama really had no other ideals, was it possible for genius to create no others—none which might hold up purity, stainless honour, unflinching patriotism, self-sacrifice, for men's worship and emulation? This, it seems to me, was what Euripides set himself to do; and this he succeeded in doing to a degree unparalleled in the extant dramas of either of his great rivals.

Alcestis, the ideal of a devoted wife and mother; Polyxena, of a brave martyr-maiden; Aithra, of an intercessor for the oppressed; Theseus, of a patriot statesman; Andromache, of queenly courage and love stronger than death; Makaria and Iphigeneia, of heroic self-sacrifice; Helen (in the play of that name), of wifely constancy; Hippolytus, of youthful purity; Ion, of youthful piety; Peleus, of chivalrous old age; Achilles, of chivalrous youth; the Peasant (in Electra), of chivalry in humble life; Pylades (in Orestes and Iph. in Taur.), of self-forgetting friendship; Electra (in Orestes) of sisterly devotion; Menoikeus, of sublime patriotism; Theonoë, of reverence for right overriding claims of kinship and personal safety;—can as many, can half as many such inspiring ideals as these be collected from all the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles—characters which, like these, could strengthen the weak, could confirm the wavering, could kindle self-devotion, could impress upon the hearers that none of them lived unto himself, that they owed their help, their love, their life, to friends and country—that not steadfast endurance, not the unconquerable will, not jealous self-respect, is noblest in a man, but the recognition of Duty as paramount It has been truly said that heroism (εὐψυχία) is with him the supreme virtue; but it must be added that it is the consecrated heroism out of which self is utterly cast, which faces pain and death in the spirit, not of the warrior, but of the martyr, which lives, not in the fierce energy of abounding vitality, nor in the grim exultation of him whose red sword testifies that he falls not unavenged, nor in the defiance which desperately braves a tyrant, but in that triumph of the soul over the weakness of the flesh, which is not kindled by excitement, nor sustained by sympathy, but abides calm and steadfast where an Achilles wails to Gods that seem to abandon him,^[39] where a Hector is broken down into suppliance to his conqueror, where an Antigone laments that she must die so young, with life's promise unfulfilled. What Athenian would not be uplifted in spirit, and made capable of giving up his all for Athens, by the noble example of frail girls like Makaria and Iphigeneia? Whose pulses would not leap in response to those last words of Menoikeus in which he announces his purpose of fulfilling the oracle's requirement by self-immolation for the salvation of his country?—

"No forgiveness should be mine
If I betray the city of my birth.
Doubt not but I will go and save the town,
And give my soul to death for this land's sake.
'Twere shame that men no oracles constrain,
Who have not fallen into the net of fate,
Shoulder to shoulder stand, blench not from death,
Fighting before the towers for fatherland,
And I, betraying father, brother, yea,
My city, craven-like flee forth the land—
A dastard manifest, where'er I dwell!
* * * * * * *
I go, to give my country no mean gift,
My life, from ruin so to save the land:
For, if each man would take his all of good,
Lavish it, lay it at his country's feet,
Then fewer evils should the nations prove,
And should through days to come be prosperous."

(Phœnician Maidens, 995—1018).

There is in all Greek literature no finer defence of the energetic policy of Athens, of her readiness to champion the cause of the weak, than that uttered in the appeal of Aithra in the Suppliants, and in the speeches and chorus-chants in the Children of Herakles. He consistently denounced the practices of the demagogues who would mislead her, he pointed to the sources of her truest strength, he vindicated her free institutions, he recalled her heroic past. It was fitting that to him who in life so passionately loved Athens, who sang his soul out in praise of her beauty and her glory, it should be vouchsafed to plead from his grave for her, and plead not in vain.

Attitude to woman.But Euripides rendered not only to his country, but to all Greece, a yet higher, because a more enduring service, and one whose effects went deeper into the national character. The reader has doubtless been struck with the fact that, though Admetus in the play of Alcestis stands justified by the public opinion of the drama, and by the audience, he yet reproaches himself in words even bitterer than the venomous tongue of Pheres had found. Why? Because Euripides was not in heart at one with his countrymen with respect to the character, capabilities, and rights of woman; and here for the first time he strikes the new note. It was his glory to have introduced and to have developed a new and higher conception of woman. Lovely, gentle, noble, devoted women had indeed been depicted in epic poetry; but, ideal as these might be in beauty, their place in the heroic age and in a state of society which had passed away with the epoch of the despots made them too remote from the daughters of his own day to be ideals for them. The position of woman had, in fact, become in the Attic age degraded from the older type. In the city-life of the republic women of the higher classes were no longer permitted the old freedom, nor honoured with the same trust; nor were they regarded as equals or companions of their husbands. In consequence probably of the influence of oriental example on Greek life,^[40] they lived in almost harem-like seclusion, their liberty to go abroad being well-nigh limited to occasions of religious festivals, and their daily companions being the female slaves of their households. Such conditions reacted, as they were sure to do, on female character, fostering frivolity, pettiness, intrigue and scandal-mongering. Men became contemptuous and jealous of their wives, and were ceasing to look for capacities of better things in them, while the women were forgetting that they could be anything nobler than drudges or dolls. Aeschylus and Sophocles never touch upon this problem. There is no indication that the former was conscious that a change was passing over social life: the latter gives no hint that he regarded this as other than the best of all possible worlds in that respect. But Euripides, to whom the sorrows and wrongs and perils of humanity were a burden too heavy to bear, who palpitated with indignation, and yearned with sympathy over the evils wrought by human selfishness and blindness, set himself to find the remedy. He did not assail the social system which had perhaps originated, had certainly aggravated, the evil. It may be that he did not clearly understand its history: it is often no easy matter to distinguish between the mischief done by institutions in the midst of which we live from that which has its roots deeper in our propensities, our prejudices, and our habits. Certainly his instinct was right in this abstention: the sudden removal of the pressure of a social or political injustice by no means involves the immediate elevation of those who have been already degraded by it; rather, the first effect often is to accentuate the evil, by removing restraints before self-control has been learnt, or higher aims conceived. He set himself to appeal to human hearts as he found them, to exalt men's estimate of woman, to redeem women from despair of themselves, by uplifting before them inspiring ideals of womanhood, which might be types and examples for all time. And, first, he gave them those transcendent four—who in the union of the sweetness and lovable gentleness of the pure womanly with the magnificent exaltation of the highest heroism are unapproached by Homer's Penelope and Andromache, or by Sophocles' Antigone. He gave them Alcestis, who surrendered her life freely, not so much for her husband as for wifely duty's sake, and never flinched nor faltered as the horror of great darkness swallowed her up, but by strength of a mother's love stayed up the feet that were sinking into Hades, till her dying breath had made her children's future sure, and then in death's grasp quietly laid her hand, and so was drawn down, faintly and ever more faintly murmuring love. He gave them Iphigeneia, who, summoned from the cloistered shelter of her home as to a bridal, found herself set without warning before the altar of death, and yet shrank and shuddered only till the full import of the great sacrifice demanded dawned upon her, and then sprang full-statured to the height of a godlike resolve; who grasped in her pure hands the scales of national justice, who bore up with her slender wrists the fate of her fatherland, and sang the triumph-pæan of Hellas as she paced to death. He gave them Makaria, who attained a height of selfless heroism unimagined till that hour, in that unasked she gave her life for the salvation of a noble house and of alien helpers, who refused to hearken to the suggestion which whispered a hope of escape, but with unreverted eyes turned from all joys and all hopes of young life, and spent her last breath in consolation and encouragement to those who clung with adoring love and passionate tears about her parting feet. He gave them Polyxena, the most pathetic figure of all, sustained by no proud consciousness of salvation wrought from suffering, but only welcoming death as an angel of deliverance from shame and long regrets, who stood on the grave-mound arrayed in spotless innocence, with modest lips that calmly made in the name of honour their last request, and so gave her throat to the sword, while the fierce men who but now had clamoured for her blood acclaimed her of all maidens noblest of soul.

He brought before them women in all the relations of life, everywhere surpassing the men in goodness, in constancy, in wisdom in counsel. They watched the ministering angel who sat by a brother's bed, and wiped the dew of agony from his brow and the foam of madness from his lips: they held their breath while a gentle-hearted priestess bemoaned to her unknown brother the cruel destiny which even then drew her to the verge of fratricide. They saw the wife who hailed a death of fire to be re-united to her slain lord, and the wife who devoted herself to save, or to die with, her husband. They heard one mother plead the cause of honour and right against cold statecraft: they listened as another besought her doomed sons to be reconciled. They thrilled beholding the princess-slave whose love was stronger than death, and whose high-born spirit flashed defiance to a treacherous foe; and that other who, remembering her hero-husband, would not suffer the imminent death to make herself or her children play a craven part, but mingled proud scorn of the murderous usurper with regrets for hopes foregone. In the noble words of Professor Mahaffy, "These are the women who have so raised the ideal of the sex, that in looking upon them the world has passed from neglect to courtesy, from courtesy to veneration: these are they, who across many centuries, first of frivolity and sensuality, then of rudeness and barbarism, join hands with the ideals of our religion and our chivalry, the martyred saints, the chaste and holy virgins of romance—nay more, with the true wives, the devoted mothers, of our own day."^[41]

But there are female characters in his plays which have been pointed to as proving a very different attitude towards women. Of these, Phædra was the best-abused by his enemies, who wilfully shut their eyes to her true character. She is, by the very plot of the play, the helpless victim of the malice of a Goddess. With her brain beclouded by fever-frenzy, she agonizes for clear vision and wails for peace of mind. She is a pure-souled, true-hearted woman, who tingles with shame and shudders with horror at the hideous thing that has been born in her. She is driven by the imminence of ruin to a desperate expedient to shield her name from the unmerited dishonour which she might well believe, from the ambiguously-worded threat with which Hippolytus departed, was to be cast upon her. He gave her cause to think^[42] that he would accuse her to his father of a crime of which she knew herself innocent. In her despair, she saw no help but to forestall him by an accusation equally false.

Medea and Kreusa,—even Klytemnestra and Hermionê,—are not portrayed as transgressors without excuse: in each case the audience heard the woman plead her cause and proclaim the doctrine that woman has rights as well as man, that what man avenges as the inexpiable wrong is not a light offence against her. It may well be that they were not ripe for the reception of ideas so unheard of, that many of them mistook his drift; but the seed sank in, to bear fruit in due time.

In each instance the sinner is a woman deeply wronged, or in sore straits, or under dæmonic influence: there are no such gratuitously wicked characters as Goneril, Lady Macbeth, or Tamora. Yet no one calls Shakspeare a misogynist. Why then was it possible for Euripides' enemies to charge him with being one, a charge doubtless echoed by a good many thoughtless and stupid people in his day, but little creditable to modern scholarship? For three reasons:—first, the wilful or obtuse misunderstanding of such characters as Phædra: the representation of these by Euripides was the main ground on which Aristophanes alleged that the tendency of his plays was immoral. Secondly, we occasionally come upon censures of the faults and foibles of women—their proneness to scandal, to uncharitable judgments of their fellows, their pettiness, frivolity, and so forth. It must be admitted, too, that the context sometimes justifies us in concluding that the poet is uttering his own sentiments. It was indeed to be expected that a thinker who had so high a conception of what women might be should be painfully impressed by the contrast presented by what they too often were. Nor is it matter for wonder that he should take opportunities of bringing the same feeling home to them. It is not enough to set noble ideals before people who are not yet conscious of the incompatibility of their present habits and aims with the emulation of those ideals. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, as indeed these were, compared with the hideous presentments of female morality in which Aristophanes revels, till his readers might imagine that pure and temperate women were quite the exception in the Athens of his day. And was not he a friend to women who gave, for the sake of his sisters for whom heroic ideals might seem set too high, this winsome model, "not too fair and good for human nature's daily food?"—

"Beauty wins not love for woman from the yokemate of her life:
Many an one by goodness wins it; for to each true-hearted wife,
Knit in love unto her husband, is Discretion's secret told.
These her gifts are:—though her lord be all uncomely to behold,
To her heart and eyes shall he be comely, so her wit be sound;
('Tis not eyes that judge the man; within is true discernment found):—
Whensoe'er he speaks, or holds his peace, shall she his sense commend,
Prompt with sweet suggestion when with speech he fain would please a friend:—
Glad she is, if aught untoward hap, to show she feels his care:
Joy and sorrow of the husband aye the loyal wife will share:—
Yea, if thou art sick, in spirit will thy wife be sick with thee,
Bear the half of all thy burdens—nought unsweet accounteth she:
For with those we love our duty bids us taste the cup of bliss
Not alone, the cup of sorrow also—what is love but this?"

(Fragment 901.)

Thirdly, here and there through his plays we find an angry speech, or a malicious epigram uttered, of course in character, by some speaker who thus vents his spleen against a woman. We find, on examination, that such utterances are always put into the mouths of speakers who are in the wrong, and would fain gloze their villainy, like Jason and Polymestor, or are under a false impression at the time, like Hippolytus. There are some dozen similar passages preserved among the fragments of his lost plays, and we are certainly justified in concluding that these also were spoken in character.

Here, in fact, is but another instance of that old, old slavery to texts, which has in like manner led to so much misuse of the Bible. A striking passage is often remembered apart from its connection; and it was so easy for the cynic to use such to point a sneer, for the malicious critic to turn them against the author, and for the angry husband to carry away and to quote, apart from the conveniently forgotten context, lines which would in a domestic wrangle hit the wife hard. But modern scholarship can hardly claim sober critical judgment as its distinguishing feature so long as quotations are in this unfair way given as though they expressed the mind of the poet.

"The human."Euripides speaks not only for women, but for the many whose souls were in his day troubled by the riddle of the painful earth. More perhaps than any other ancient writer he reveals to us the true inner Greek life, lays bare the secrets of its hearts. The fancy of our modern poet-aesthetes, that the Greeks revelled in a careless buoyancy of existence, in which beings of perfect mould moved in a dream of beauty through a fairyland of marble fashionings, their thoughts kindling with music and song, and anon uplifted in serene philosophies—this fades away into a dim background, and the sad earnest faces grow upon us, the hearts that strain beneath the burden of duty, the souls that weary over the problems of right and wrong, the voices that moan the unanswered question touching the mystery of suffering, the women who beat against the bars of convention and prescription, who wail for sympathy and plead for trust—these who were too mean for Aeschylus' regard, too un-ideal for Sophocles, these of whom Socrates took no heed, to whom he left no legacy, to whose heart-hunger Plato offered the stones of his ideal city. To all such Euripides stretched the brother hand of one who had also passed through deep waters, who had faced the spectres of the mind, who sighed with them that were desolate and oppressed, who came close to each bereaved heart, sorrowing with stricken parents, and loving the little children.

The true nature of the question at issue in the whole controversy, ancient and modern, with respect to the literary merits of Euripides, cannot, I think, be better expressed than in the words of Professor Moulton, in his Ancient Classical Drama (p. 160):—

"Next to Shakespeare, Euripides has been the best abused poet in the history of literature. And the reason is the same in both cases: each has been associated prominently with a dramatic revolution vast enough to draw out the fundamental difference between two classes of minds—those that incline to a simple ideal perfectly attained, and those that sympathize rather with a more complex purpose which can be reached only through conflict. The changes in ancient drama promoted by this third of the three great masters are all in the direction of modern variety and human power: from the confined standpoint of Attic Tragedy they may represent decay; in the evolution of the universal drama they are advance and development, Euripides laid the foundation for an edifice of which the coping-stone is Shakespeare."

1. His plays contain many allusions to painting and sculpture, such as could come only from one who possessed the taste and technical knowledge of an artist.
2. The minor performances at the Lenæa and Country Dionysia, of which little is known, are, for the purposes of this description, left out of account.
3. A set of four, three tragedies and one satyric drama (of which Euripides' Cyclops is the only extant example) were required of each competitor.
4. The Archon Eponymus, or chief of the nine.
5. There are two apparent exceptions, the Andromache, and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. In the former, the short singing part of Molossus rnay have been taken by a member of the chorus: in the latter, by a little management, Ismêné may have been represented by a mute supernumerary during the time she is, without speaking, present on the stage with those actors who take part in the dialogue.
6. Though nominally the actors were assigned by lot to the competing poets, the rule was continually being waived in deference to the predilections of the great actors, who preferred to stick to the poets in whose plays they had made their name, and who, like leading artistes in all ages, were not to be dictated to. Aeschylus could always command the services of Kleander and Myniskus, and Sophocles of Tlepolemus and Kleidemides: the latter poet is said indeed to have written some of his plays especially for these eminent actors.
7. Aeschylus was forty-one before he won the same distinction, Sophocles twenty-eight.
8. The old Greek MS. "Life" gives the number of his victories as fifteen; but other evidence has led scholars to agree in regarding this as a transcriber's error.
9. "We must join with Aristophanes . . . in regarding him as a dramatist who degraded the moral and leligious dignity of his own sacred profession." (Donaldson, Theatre of the Greeks, p. 158.)
   Sophocles was, we must conclude, so dull, that, failing to perceive ihat Athens was well rid of such a man, he set the example of the national mourning which followed on Euripides' death.
10. Prof. Jebb (Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, pp. 226—230) has found for us an excellent and sufficient reason, which turns out, on examination, to be identical with that of Demetrius—"this our craft is in danger to be set at nought." Only the Comedians were not so frank as the silversmith—nor as their apologist. If, as Prof. Jebb argues, "Comedy, with sure instinct, saw here a dramatist who was using the Dionysia against the very faith to which that festival was devoted," it is odd that Aristophanes, (if he saw this) should have represented Dionysus as going to Hades on purpose to bring back Euripides to his stage, when he might, at the cost of sacrificing but two good jokes on the altar of truth, have more appropriately made him go thither for Aeschylus.
11. This incident forms the basis of Browning's Balaustion's Adventure.
12. See Decharme, Euripide et l'Esprit de son Théatre pp. 12, 13.
13. At the Lenæa, in Jan., 405 B.C.
14. Decharme, Euripide et l'Esprit de son Thêatre, p. 20.
15. There are more quotations by ancient writers from his single play of Orestes than from all the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles put together. (Paley.)
16. As we do not possess a single work of any of these, it does seem a little arbitrary to account for their preference of him by alleging the decadence of Greek dramatic literature in their hands. If they were dwarfs, they stood upon giants' shoulders, and may not have been tasteless fools.
17. This is the play, a perusal of which on a voyage stirred Bacchus (Aristophanes, Frogs, ll. 52–70) to start for Hades to bring back Euripides to his theatre.
18. Decharme, Euripide, p. 23.
19. Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, vol. i, appendix.
20. Perhaps about seventy by Aeschylus, the same number by Sophocles, and seventy-five by Euripides.
21. "No modern can strictly confine his thoughts within the mental boundaries of ancient Greece; despite all his efforts, disturbing cross-lights from later ages will steal in, and colour or obscure his vision of that far-off world." (Prof. Jebb, Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, p. 250.)
22. No precedent had been established by the only two known exceptions, Phrynicus' Capture of Miletus, and Aeschylus' Persians.
23. "The Atreidae (in the Ajax) are drawn as vulgar tyrants, and without a single redeeming feature." (Mahaffy—History of Greek Classical Literature, p. 84.)
    "Agamemnon, arguing like an astute lawyer or an ingenious demagogue, may be a more familiar type of person, but the illusion that we are listening to the king of Mycenæ is ruined." (Prof. Jebb, Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, p. 221.)
    It is, we must suppose, to the Ajax that the foregoing remark refers, since it is applicable to no scene in any other extant Greek play.
    "In none of his plays has Euripides depicted such a thorough-going scoundrel as the Sophoclean Odysseus in the Philoctetes." (Donne—Ancient Classics for English Readers, p. 68.)
24. Aeschylus described his own plays as "mere fragments from the banquet of Homer."
25. "Justice needs no subtle sophistries:
    Itself hath fitness; but the unrighteous plea,
    Having no soundness, needeth cunning salves."
    (Phœnician Maidens, 470—472.)
26. In Oedipus Coloneus, 939—1013; Antigone, 639—725; Ajax, 1226—1315; Electra, 516—609.
27. In Oedipus Rex, 334—446, 532—630; Oedipus Coloneus, 800—810; Antigone, 80—99, 542—560, 726—765; Ajax, 1120—1162; Electra, 340—375. 1017—1057.
28. Trachineæ, 1267, and Philoctetes, 446—452 (Plumptre's rendering). The more generally adopted interpretation removes the defiant impiety from the first passage, but preserves the note of condemnation.
29. Of the illustrative extracts which follow, I have purposely taken none from any of the twelve plays which my readers may now consult for themselves; and have also thought it unnecessary to give more than a very few references to passages in them. The numerical references to fragments are to Nauck's edition of 1885.
30. Typical examples are Hippolytus' tirade against women (Hipp. 616—668); the Theban herald's recommendation of peace—an inglorious peace in this case—(Suppl. 479—493); Kassandra's sneer at heralds (Daughters of Troy, 424—426).
31. Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist, p. 260.
32. His saying (Daughters of Troy, 989) "Thine heart became thy Kypris. All folly is for men their Aphroditê," no more expresses a disbelief in Aphrodite than St. James's "Whose god is their belly" expresses a disbelief in God.
33. We must distinguish his unshaken faith in the oracles (see Helen, l. 1150) from his contempt for the soothsayers, prophets, diviners, and all the tribe whose lies misled the Athenians to their ruin.
34. Fragment, 1115; and cf. Daughters of Troy, 884—888.
35. Aeschylus, in a rare outburst of speculative daring, had already said,
    "Zeus is the ether, Zeus the earth, Zeus heaven;
    Yea, Zeus is all, and what is above all."
    (Fragment 379).
36. Prof. Jebb, Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, p. 232.
37. Iliad, ix, 63, 64.
38. For a full discussion of the character of Homer's heroes the reader is referred to Mahaffy's Social Life in Greece, ch. ii.
39. Iliad, xxi, 273—283.
40. See on the whole subject Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, ch. vi.
41. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, p. 204.
42. See Hippolytus, ll. 659—663, and 689—692.