Euripides and his age

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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

BY

GILBERT MURRAY

London
WILLIAMS & NORGATE

HENRY HOLT & Co., New York
Canada: WM. BRIGGS, Toronto
India : R. & T. WASHBOURNE, Ltd.

HOME

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

OF

MODERN KNOWLEDGE

Editors :

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A., LL.D.
PROF. rilLBF.RT MURRAY, D.LITT., LL.D.,

F.B..^.
PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON', M.A., LL.D.
PROF. \%n MAM T. EREV.STER, M.A.

(Colu;.:bia UNivsRSiiy, U.S.A.)

i

NEW YORK.

HENRY FIOLT AND COMPANY

EURIPIDES AND
HIS AGE

GILBP:RT MURRAY

LL.D., D.L.rT., F.B.A.

Regi .s lioitssoi of Greek ia the Uiiiveisi'y
of Oxiord

LONDON

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

PA
Mi?

PRiNlLD B1

THH LONDON AND NOPaVICH PRESS LIMITED

LONDON AND NORWICH

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I Intkoductory 7

II SOUKCES FOR A LiFE OF EuRIPIDES : MEM-
ORIES REMAINrSQ O THE FoURTH CEN-
TURY : Youth : Athens after the
Persian War: the great Sophists . 20

III What is a Greek Tragedy ? Euripides'

EARLY Plays up to 438 B.C., " Alcestis "

AND " Telephus " . . . . 60

IV Beginning of the War : the Plays

OF Maturity from " Medea " to -<

" Heracles " . . . . . ^^

V Full Expression : the Embittering of
the War : Alcibiades and the Dema-
gogues : THE " Ion " : the " Trojan
Women" 107

VI After 415 : Euripides' last years in
Athens : from " Andromeda " and

" IpHIGENIA " TO " ElECTRA " AND

" Orestes " 142

VII After 408 : Macedonia : " Iphigenia in

AuLis " : "Bacchae" .... 165

4'

6 CONTENTS

CHAPTER PACE

VIII The Art of Euripides : Traditional
Form and Liv'ino Spirit : the Proloqtte,
THE Messenger, the " God from the --^^
Machine " . . . . . . (188

IX The Art OF Euripides, continued : The -^.,

Chorus : Conclusion .... (^2S

Bibliography ..... 247

Note on the Pronunciation of Xame^s . 251

Index 253

EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Most of the volumes of this series are
occupied with large subjects and subjects
commonly recognized as important to great
masses of people at the present day. In
devoting the present volume to the study of
a single writer, remote from us in time and
civilization and scarcely known by more
than name to many readers of the Library,
I am moved by the belief that, quite apart
from his disputed greatness as a poet and
thinker, apart from his amazing and perhaps
unparalleled success as a practical playwright,
Euripides is a figure of high significance in
the history of humanity and of special interest
to our own generation.

Bom, according to the legend, in exile and

fated to die in exile, Euripides, in Avhatever

light one regards him, is a man of curious

and ironic history. As a poet he has lived

7

8 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

through the ages in an atmosphere of con-
troversy, generally — though by no means
always — loved by poets and despised by

I critics. As a thinker he is even to this day
treated almost as a personal enemy by scholars
of orthodox and conformist minds ; defended,
idealized and sometimes transformed beyond
recognition by various champions of rebellion

/and the free intellect. The greatest difficulty
that I feel in writing about him is to keep in
jnind without loss of proportion anything
like the whole activity of the many-sided man.
Recent writers have tended to emphasize
chiefly his work as a destructive thinker.
Dr. Verrall, the most brilliant of all modern
critics of Euripides, to whose pioneer work
my own debt is greater than I can well
express, entitled one of his books " Euripides

I the Rationalist " and followed to its extreme
limit the path indicated by this particular
clue. His vivid and interesting disciple
Professor Norwood has followed him. In
Germany Dr. Nestle, in a sober and learned
book, treating of Euripides as a thinker, says
that " all mysticism was fundamentally repug-
nant to him " ; a view which is certainly
wrong, since some of the finest expressions

I of Greek mysticism known to us are taken

INTRODUCTORY 9

from the works of Euripides. Another good
writer, Steiger, draws an elaborate parallel
between Eurij)ides and Ibsen and finds the
one key to Euripides in his realism and his
absolute devotion to truth. Yet an older
generation of Euripides-lovers felt these
things quite differently. When Macaulay
proclaimed that there was absolutely nothing
in literature to equal The Bacchae, he was
certainly not thinking about rationalism
or realism. He felt the romance, the magic,
the sheer poetry. So did Milton and Shelley
and Browaiing. And so did the older Eng-
lish scholars like Porson and Elmsley. Porson,
while admitting that the critics have many
things to say against Euripides as compared,
for instance, with Sophocles, answers in his
inarticulate way " ilium admiramur, hunc
Icgimus " — " we admire the one, but we
read the other." Elmsley, so far from
regarding Euripides as mainly a thinker,
remarks in passing that he was a poet singu-
larly addicted to contradicting himself. To
Porson and Elmsley the poetry of Euripides
might or might not be good on the highest
plane, it was at any rate delightful. Quite
different again are the momentous judgments
pronounced upon him as a writer of tragedy

10 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

by two of the greatest judges. Aristotle,
writing at a period when Euripides was
rather out of fashion, and subjecting him to
much serious and sometimes unintclhgent
criticism, considers him still " the most
tragic of the poets." And Goethe, after
expressing his surprise at the general belittling
of Euripides by " the aristocracy of philolo-
gists, led by the buffoon Aristophanes," asks
emphatically : " Have all the nations of
jthe world since his time produced one drama-
[tist who was worthy to hand him his
I slippers ? " (Tagebiichern, November 22, 1831.)
We must try, if we can, to bear duly in
mind all these different lines of approach.

As a playwright the fate of Euripides has
been strange. All through a long life he
was almost invariably beaten in the State
competitions. He was steadily admired by
some few philosophers, like Socrates ; he
enjoyed immense fame throughout Greece ;
but the official judges of poetry were against
him, and his own people of Athens admired
him reluctantly and with a grudge.

After death, indeed, he seemed to come
into his kingdom. He held the stage as no
other tra<j:edian has ever held it, and we hear of

INTRODUCTORY 11

his plays being performed with popular success
six hundred years after they were written,
and in countries far removed from Greece.
He influenced all the higher forms of Greek
writing, both in prose and poetry. He is
more quoted by subsequent writers than any
other Greek tragedian ; nay, if we leave out
of count mere dictionary references to rare
words, he is more quoted than all the other
tragedians together. And nineteen of his
plays have survived to our own day as against
seven each of Aeschylus and Sophocles. This
seems enough glory for any man. Yet the
fate that grudged him prizes in his lifetime
contrived afterwards to spread a veneer of
commonplaceness over the success which it
could not prevent. To a great extent Euri-
pides was read because he was, or seemed,
easy ; the older poets were neglected because
they were difficult. Attic Greek in his hands
had begun to assume the form in which it
remained for a thousand years as the recog-
nized literary language of the east of Europe
and the great instrument and symbol of civi-
lization. He was a treasure-house of Attic
style and ancient maxims, and eminently
useful to orators who liked quotations. lilean-
time the melody and meaning of his lyrics

12 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

were lost, because men had forgotten the
pronuifciation of fifth-century Greek and
could no longer read lyrics intelligently. The
obviously exciting quality of his plays kept
its effect ; but there Avas no one to understand
the subtlety of his craftsmanship, the intimate
study of character, the skilful forging of links
and clashes between scenes, the mastery of
that most wonderful of Greek dramatic instru-
ments, the Chorus. Plays had practically
ceased to be written. They were thought of
either as rhetorical exercises or as spectacles
for the amphitheatre. Something similar
happened to the whole inward spirit in which
he worked, call it philosophy or call it religion
Its meaning became obscured. It had indeed
a powerful influence on the philosophers of
the great fourth century schools : they
probably understood at least one side of him.
But the sayings of his that are quoted broad-
cast and repeated through author after author
of the decadence are mostly thoughts of quite
the second rank, which have lost half their
value by being torn from their context, often
commonplace, often — as is natural in frag-
ments of dramas — mutually contradictory,
though almost always simply and clearly
expressed.

INTRODUCTORY 18

It was this clear expression which the late
Greeks valued so highly. " Clarity " —
sapheneia — was the watchword of style in
Euripides' own day and remained always the
foremost aim of Greek rhetoric. Indeed what
a Greek called " rhetorike " often implied
the very opposite of what we call " rhetoric."
f To think clearly, to arrange your matter under
< formal heads, to have each paragraph defin-
itely articulated and each sentence simply and
I exactly expressed : that was the main lesson of
the Greek rhetor. The tendency was already
beginning in classical times and no classical
writer carried it further than Euripides.
But here again Fate has been ironical with
him. The ages that were incapable of under-
standing him loved him for his clearness :
nour own age, which might at last understand
him, is instinctively repelled by it. We
do not much like a poet to be very clear, and
^^we hate him to be formal. We are clever
readers, quick in the up-take, apt to feel
flattered and stimulated by a little obscurity ;
mystical philosophy is all very well in a
poet, but clear-cut intellect — ^no. At any
rate we are sharply offended by " firstlys,
secondlys and thirdlys," by divisions on
the one hand and on the other hand.

14 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

And all this and more Euripides insists on
giving us.

It is the great obstacle between him and us.
Apart from it we have only to exercise a little
historical imagination and we shall find in him
a man, not indeed modern — half his charm
is that he is so remote and austere — ^but a man
who has in his mind the same problems as
ourselves, the same doubts and largely the
same ideals ; who has felt the same desires
and indignations as a great number of people
at the present day, especially young people.
Not because young people are cleverer than
old, nor yet because they are less wise ; but
because the poet or philosopher or martyr
who lives, half-articulate, inside most human
beings is apt to be smothered or starved to
death in the course of middle life. As long as
he is still alive we have, most of us, the key
to understanding Euripides.

What, then, shall be our method in approach-
ing him ? It is fatal to fly straight at him
with modern ready-made analogies. We must
see him in his own atmosphere. Every man
who possesses real vitality can be seen as the
resultant of two forces. He is first the child
of a particular age, society, convention ; of
what we may call in one word a tradition. He

INTRODUCTORY 15

is secondly, in one degree or another, a. rebel
against that tradition. And the best tradi-
/ tions make the best rebels. Euripides is the
child of a strong and splendid tradition and is,
together with Plato, the fiercest of all rebels
against it.

There is nothing paradoxical in this. No
tradition is perfect. The best brings only a
passing period of peace or triumph or stable
equilibrium ; humanity rests for a moment,
but knows that it must travel further ; to
rest for ever would be to die. The most
thorough conformists are probably at their
best when forced to fight for their ideal against
forces that would destroy it. And a tradition
itself is generally at its best, not when it is
I universally accepted, but when it is being
I attacked and broken. It is then that it learns
to search its own heart and live up to its
full meaning. And in a sense the greatest
triumph that any tradition can accomplish
is to rear noble and worthy rebels. The Greek
tradition of the fifth century B.C., the great
age of Athens, not only achieved extraordinary
advances in most departments of human life,
put it trained an extraordinary band of critical
tr rebellious children. Many a reader of
Plato's most splendid satires against demo-

16 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

cratic Athens will feel within him the con-
clusive answer : "No place but Athens could
ever have reared such a man as this, and
taught him to see these faults or conceive these
ideals."

We are in reaction now against another great
age, an age whose achievements in art are
memorable, in literature massive and splendid,
in science and invention absolutely unparal-
leled, but greatest of all perhaps in the raising
of all standards of public duty, the humanizing
of law and society, and the awakening of high
ideals in social and international politics.
The Victorian Age had, amid enormous
differences, a certain similarity with the Peri-
clean in its lack of self-examination, its rush
and chivalry and optimism, its unconscious
hypocrisy, its failure to think out its problems
to the bitter end. And in most of the current
criticism on things Victorian, so far as it is
not mere fashion or folly, one seems to feel
the Victorian spirit itself speaking. It ar-
raigns Victorian things by a Victorian stand-
ard ; blames them not because they have
moved in a particular direction, but because
they have not moved far enough ; because
so many of the things they attempted are still
left undone, because the ideals they preached

INTRODUCTORY 17

and the standards by which they claimed to be
acting were so much harder of satisfaction
than they knew. Euripides, Hke ourselves,
comes in an age of criticism following upon an
age of movement and action. And for the
most part, like ourselves, he accepts the
general standards on which the movement and
action were based. He accepts the Athenian
ideals of free thought, free speech, democracy,
" virtue " and patriotism. He arraigns his
country because she is false to thein^

We have spoken of the tradition as a homo-
geneous thing, but for any poet or artist there
are two quite different webs in it. There are
the accepted conventions of his art and the
accepted beliefs of his intellect, the one set
aiming at the production of beauty, the others
at the attainment of truth.

Now for every artist who is also a critic or
rebel there is a difference of kind between
these two sets of conventions. For the
purposes of truth the tradition is absolutely
indifferent. If, as a matter of fact, the earth
goes round the sun, it does so not a whit
the less because most ages have believed the
opposite. The seeker for truth can, as far as
truth is concerned, reject tradition without a

/'

/,

18 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

qualm. But with art the case is different.
Art has to give a message from one man to
another. As you can only speak to a man
in a language which you both know, so you
can only appeal to his artistic side by means
of some common tradition. His natural ex-
pectation, whether we try to satisfy or to
surprise it, to surpass or to disappoint it, is
always an essential element in the artistic
effect. Consequently the tradition cannot
be disregarded.

This distinction is often strongly marked in
the practice of different artists. One poet
may be both a pioneer of new roads in thought
and a breaker of the laws of technique, like
Walt Whitman— an enemy of the tradition
in both kinds. Another may be slack and
anarchical in his technique though quite con-
ventional in his thought. I refrain from sug-
gesting instances. Still more clearly there are
poets, such as Shelley or Swinburne, whose
works are full of intellectual rebellion while
their technique is exquisite and elaborate.
The thoughts are bold and strange. The
form is the traditional form developed and
made more exquisite.

Now Euripides, except for some so-called
licences in metre, belongs in my judgment

INTRODUCTORY 19

markedly to the last class, in speculation
he is a critic and a free lance ; in artistic form
he is intensely traditional. He seems to have
loved the very stiffnesses of the form in which
he worked. He developed its inherent powers
in ways undreamed of, but he never broke
the mould or strayed away into shapelessness
or mere realism. His last, and in many
respects his greatest, play, the Bacchae, is,
as far as our evidence goes, the most formal
that he ever wrote.

These, then, are the lights in which we
propose to look at Euripides. In attempting
to reconstruct his life we must be conscious of
two backgrounds against which he will be
found standing, according as we regard him
as Thinker or as pure Artist. We must first
try to understand something of the tradition
of thought in which he was reared, that is the
general atmosphere of fifth century Athens,
and watch how he expressed it and how he
reacted against it. Next, we must understand
what Greek tragedy was, what rituals and con-
ventions held it firm, and what inner fire
kept it living, and so study the method in
which Euripides used it for his chosen mode
of expression, obeying its laws and at the
same time liberating its spirit.

CHAPTER II

THE SOURCES FOR A LIFE OF EURIPIDES :
THE MEMORIES REMAINING IN THE
FOURTH CENTURY : HIS YOUTH AND
ITS SURROUNDINGS : ATHENS AFTER THE
PERSIAN WAR : THE GREAT SOPHISTS

It is in one sense impossible to write a life
of Euripides, for the simple reason that he
lived too long ago. In his time people were
only just beginning to write history at all ;
Herodotus, the " father of history," was
his close contemporaiy. They had begun
to record really great events ; but it had
not occurred to them that the life of any
individual was worth all the trouble of tracing
out and writing down. Biography of a sort*
began about two generations afterwards,
when the disciples of Aristotle and Epicurus
exerted themselves to find out and record
the lives of their masters. But biography
in our sense — the complete writing of a life
year by year Avith dates and documents — was
never practised at all in antiquity. Think of

20

ANCIENT BIOGRAPHY 21

the Gospels, of the Acts, even of Tacitus's
Life of Agricola. They are different one from
another, but they are all unlike any modern bio-
graphy in their resolute indifference to any-
thing like completeness. Ancient " Lives "
as a rule select a few great deeds, a few great
sayings or discourses ; they concentrate upon
the last years of their subject and often es-
pecially upon his death.

The dates at which various eminent men
of antiquity died are well known. The man
was then famous and his death was a memor-
able event. But — except in a few aristocratic
states, like Cos, which records the actual
birthday of the great physician Hippocrates
— no baby was eminent and not many young
men. Very few dates of birth are known ;
and in the case of almost all the famous men
of antiquity their early histories are forgotten
and their early works lost. So it is with
Euripides.

History in later antiquity was chiefly a
branch of belles lettres and made no great
effort after exactness. As a rule it contented
itself with the date at which a man " flour-
ished," a very rough conception, conventionally
fixed either by the time when he did his most
memorable work or the year when he reached

22 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

the age of forty. The year commonly assigned
to Euripides' birth is a good instance of ancient
method in these things. The system of
chronology was badly confused. In the first
place there was no generally accepted era
from which to date ; and even if there had
been, the numerical system, before the
invention of Arabic ciphers, was as confused
as English spelling is at the present day, and
made it hard to do the simplest sums. So the
ordinary educational plan was to group events
together in some scheme that might not be
quite exact but was calculated to have some
symbolic interest and to stay in the memory.
For instance, the three great tragedians were
grouped together round the Battle of Salamis,
the great triumph of the Persian Wars in
480 B.C. Aeschylus fought among the heavy-
armed infantry, Sophocles danced in a choir
of boys to celebrate the victory, and Euripides
was born in Salamis on the day of the battle.
We do not know the origin of this pleasant
fable ; but we have another date given in a
very ancient chronicle called the Parian
Marble, which was found in the island of
Paros in the seventeenth century and was
composed in the year 264 B.C. It puts the
birth of Euripides in 484 b.c, and since we

THE TRADITIONAL LIFE 23

cannot find any reason why this year should
be invented, and since the Marble is the oldest
-witness now extant, we shall probably do
well provisionally to accept its statement.

In some of the MSS. which preserve Euri-
pides' plays there are " scholia " or ancient
traditional commentaries written round the
margin. A few of the oldest notes in them
come from Alexandrian scholars who lived
in the second century b.c. Others date from
Roman times, in the first few centuries of the
Christian era ; others from the eleventh
century and even later. And among them
there is a quite ancient document called
Life and Race of Euripides.

It is anonymous and shapeless. Sentences
may have been added or omitted by the various
people who at different times have owned or
copied the MSS. But we can see that it is
derived from early sources, and notably from
a " Life " which was written by one Satyrus,
a writer of the Peripatetic or Aristotelian
school, towards the end of the third century
B.C. Fragments from the same source have
been detected in the Latin authors Varro and
Gellius ; and it has influenced the biographi-
cal notice in the ancient Greek lexicon of
Suidas (tenth century a. d.). Suidas used also

24 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

another earlier and l)etter sonrce, the Attic
Chronicle of Philochorus.

Philochorus was a careful and systematic
annalist of the early third century B.C., who
used official documents and verified his state-
ments. His main work was to record all that
affected Athens — history, myths, festivals, and
customs, but he also wrote various special
treatises, one of which was On Euripides.
Satyrus wrote a series of Lives of Famous Men,
which was very popular, and we are now —
since 1911 — in a position to judge how unde-
served its popularity was. For fragments
of his Life of Euripides have been unearthed
in Egypt by Drs. Grenfell and Hunt and
published in their Oxyrrhyncus Papyri, vol.
ix. The life takes the form of a dialogue
— apparently a dialogue with a lady. It is a
mass of quotations, anecdotes, bits of literary
criticism, all run together with an air of
culture and pleasantness, a spice of gallantry
and a surprising indifference to historical fact.
Evidently anecdotes amused Satyrus and
facts, as such, did not. He cared about
literary style, but he neither cared nor knew
about history. The following considerations
will make this clear.

Euripides was, more than any other figure

SATYRUS 25

in ancient history, a constant butt for the
attacks of comedy. And we find, oddly
enough, that most of the anecdotes about
Euripides in Satyrus are simply the jokes of
comedy treated as historical fact. For in-
stance, in Aristophanes' play. The Women at
the Thesmophoria, the women, while alone
at this private festival, agree to murder
Euripides because, by his penetrating study
of female character on the stage, he has made
life too difficult for them. Euripides, hearing
of the plot, persuades his elderly father-
in-law to go in disguise to the forbidden
celebration and defend him — which he does
in a ruinously tactless way. Some scenes of
brilliant farce are succeeded by a solemn
truce between Euripides and the women of
Athens, It shows what our tradition is
worth when we find that both the " Life and
Race,'" and Gellius and Satyrus himself,
give as sober fact this story which we know
— and if we did not know could surely see —
to be comic invention. There is another
class of fabulous anecdote which plays an
even larger part in the Satyrus tradition.
In Aristophanes' Frogs (1.1048), in a scene
where Euripides is defending his plays against
the attacks of Aeschvlus, there occurs the

26 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

chance suggestion that Euripides had learnt
from his owti experience all the varied vil-
lanies of his wicked heroines. The idea
took root, and he is represented in the anec-
dotes as a deceived husband, like his ovm
Theseus or Proetus, and uttering lines suitable
to the occasion out of his own tragedies ;
as having two \dves at once, like his OAvn
Neoptolemus — one of them named Choirile,
or " Piggy," and each of course worse than
the other ; as torn to pieces by hounds, like
his own Actaeon, or by wild women, like
his own Pentheus.

Something of this sort is possibly the origin
of a famous joke about Euripides' mother,
which runs through Aristophanes and is
repeated as a fact in all the Lives. We know
from Philochorus that it was not true. The
joke is to connect her with chervil — a grassy
vegetable which grew wild and was only
eaten in time of famine — or with wild green-
stuff in general, or simply to call her a green-
grocer. It was also a joke to say anything
about beet-root. {Acharn. 894, Frogs 942),
A man begs Euripides to bring

" A new-born chervil from thy mother's breast."

(Achani. 478.)

SATYRUS AND PHILOCHORUS 27

Or we hear that

" Wild wrongs he works on women,
Wild as the greens that waved about his cradle."

{Thesm. 455.)

When some one is about to quote Euripides
his friend cries :

" Don't, don't, for God's sake ! Don't be-chervil me ! "

{Knights 19.)

Now a much-quoted Hue from Euripides'
tragedy Melanippe the Wise runs : " It is
not my word but my mother's word " ; and
Ave know that Melanippe, and still more her
mother, was an authority on potent herbs and
simples. Turn his heroine's mother into his
own mother and the potent herbs into some
absurd vegetable, and the fable is made.

Setting aside this fog of misunderstanding
and reckless anecdote, let us try to make out
the method on which our best authority, Philo-
chorus, may have put together his account
of Euripides. He had almost no written
materials ; he had no collection of letters
and papers such as go to the making of a
modern biography. He could, however, con-
sult the public records of tragic performances
as collected and edited by Aristotle and his
pupils and thus fix the dates of Euripides'

28 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

playsj especially his first and last performance,
his first victory, and the like. He would also
find a few public inscriptions in which the
poet's name was mentioned, for the archives
of that time were mostly engraved on stone
and put up in public places. There was also
a portrait bust, authentic though slightly
idealized, taken in the poet's old age, and
showing the worn and beautiful face, the thin
hair, and the lips somewhat fallen in. These
sources would give him a few skeleton facts ;
for anything more he would have to depend
on the accidental memories that survived.
If he wrote about 300-290 B.C. there was
no one living who could remember a man
who died in 406. But there might be
men of seventy whose fathers had spoken
to Euripides and whose grandfathers had
known him well. Thus he might with luck
have struck some vein of intimate and intel-
ligent memory, which would have helped
us to understand the great man. But he
did not. The memories are all about the
poet's old age, and they are all very external.
We hear that he wore a long beard and had
moles on his face. He lived very much alone,
and hated visitors and parties. He had a
quantity of books and could not bear women.

MEMORIES 29

He lived on the island of Salamis in a cave
which had two openings and a beautiful
view — a good cave was probably more com-
fortable than many a Greek house, so this
may not have been a great eccentricity — and
there you could see him " all day long, thinking
to himself and writing, for he simply despised
anything that was not great and high." It is
like the memories of a child, rather a puzzled
child, watching the great man from a distance.
Some few things come out clearly. He
lived in his last years \vith a small knot of
intimates. Mnesilochus, his wife's father —
or, perhaps, another Mnesilochus of the same
family — was a close friend. So was his ser-
vant or secretary, Cephisophon. We do not
hear of Socrates as an intimate : the two
owed a great debt to one another, and we hear
that Socrates never went to the theatre except
when Euripides had a play performing : to
see a Euripides play he would even stir himself
so far as to walk all the way to the Piraeus.
But it is likely enough that both men were too
vivid and original, perhaps too much accus-
tomed to dominate their respective circles, to
be quite comfortable in the same room.
And we never find Euripides conversing with
Socrates in Plato's dialogues.

30 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Some of Euripides' older friends were by this
time driven out from Athens. The great " So-
phist," Protagoras, had read his famous book,
On the Gods, in Euripides' own house. But he
was now dead, dro^vned at sea, and the poet's
master, Anaxagoras, had died long before.
Some of the younger artists seem to have
found a friend in Euripides. There was
Timotheus, the young Ionian composer, who
— like most musicians of any originality — was
supposed to have corrupted the music of the
day by his florid style and bold inventions.
His first performance in Athens was a mortify-
ing failure, and we are told that the passion-
ate Ionian was on the point of killing himself
when the old poet came and encouraged him.
He had only to hold fast, and the people who
now hissed would turn and applaud.
Jt" One fact is especially clear, the restless
enmity of the comic writers. Of the eleven
comedies of Aristophanes which have come
down to us three are largely devoted to Euripi-
des, and not one has managed altogether to
avoid touching him. I know of no parallel to
it in all the history of literature. Has there
ever again been a tragic poet, or any poet, who
so centred upon liimself year after year till
he \vas nearly eighty the mocking attention of

TRADITIONS 31

all the popular wits ? And how was it that
the Athenian public never tired of this inces-
sant poet-baiting, these incessant appeals
to literary criticism in the midst of farce ? The
attacks are sometimes rough and vicious,
sometimes acute and searching, often enough
they hide a secret admiration. And the chief
enemy, Aristophanes, must, to judge from his
parodies, have known a large number of Euri-
pides' ninety-two plays by heart, and been at
least half fascinated by the object of his satire.
However that may be, the hostility of the
comic writers had evidently a general hostility
behind it. Our tradition states this definitely
and the persistency of the attacks proves it.
You cannot go on constantly deriding on the
stage a person whom your audience does not
wish derided. And the unpopularity of
Euripides, as we shall see later, is not hard to
understand. The Satyrus tradition puts it
down to his personal aloofness and austerity.
He avoided society, and he " made no effort
to please his audience." So that at least he
did not soften by personal pleasantness the
opposition they felt to his whole view of life.
It was not only that he was utterly alienated
from the War Party and the mob leaders :
here he only agreed with Aristophanes. It

32 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

was that he had pierced through to a deeper
stratum of thought, in which most of the
pursuits and ideals of the men about him stood
condemned. Socrates reached the same plane,
and they killed Socrates.

It is somewhat harder to understand the
imiversal assumption of our authorities that
Euripides was a notorious castigator of the
female sex and that the women of Athens
naturall}^ hated him. To us he seems an
aggressive champion of women ; more ag-
gressive, and certainly far more appreciative,
than Plato. Songs and speeches from the
Medea are recited to-day at suffragist
meetings. His tragic heroines are famous
and are almost always treated with greater
interest and insight than his heroes. Yet
not only the ancients, but all critics up to the
last generation or so, have described him as
a woman-hater. What does it mean ? Is
Aristophanes ironical, and are the scholiasts
and grammarians merely stupid ? Or is there
some explanation for this extraordinary
judgment ?

I think the explanation is that the present
age is the first, or almost the first, that has
learned to treat its heroines in fiction as real
human beings, with what are called " mixed

TRADITIONS 83

characters." As lately as the time of Sir
Walter Scott, perhaps as lately as Dickens,
common convention demanded that a heroine,
if sympathetic, should be so free from faults
as to be almost without character. Ibsen's
heroines, who were real human beings studied
with sympathy but with profound sincerity,
seemed to their generation shocking and even
horrible. All through the ages the ideal of
womanhood in conventional fiction has mostly
been of the type praised by one great Athenian
thinker : " the greatest glory for a woman is
I to be as little mentioned as possible among
I men." If that ideal was really predominant
among the women of Athens, it is no wonder
that they felt outraged by Euripides. They
had not reached, and most of their husbands
had not reached, the point of being interested
in good study of character, much less the point
of demanding a freer and more strenuous life.
To the average stupid Athenian it was prob-
ably rather wicked for a woman to have any
character, wicked for her to wish to take
part in public life, wicked for her to acquire
learning, or to doubt any part of the conven-
tional religion, just as it was wicked for her to
deceive her husband. Such women should not
be spoken about ; above all they should not

!

34 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

be treated with understanding and sym-
pathy. The understanding made it all infi-
nitely worse. To people of this type the
women of Euripides must have been simply
shocking and the poet himself a cruel enemy of
the sex. One only wonders that they could
stand Sophocles' heroines, such as Antigone
and Jocasta. To cleverer men, like Aristo-
phanes, the case would, no doubt, seem rather
more complicated. But Aristophanes, amid
the many flashes of sympathy he shows for
" advanced " women, was not the man to go
against his solid conservative audience or to
forgo such rich material for jokes.

In any case this is the kind of picture we
have of Euripides in his last years ; a figure
solitary, austere, with a few close intimates,
%vrapped up in living for what he would call
" the service of the Muses," in music, poetry
and speculation ; capable still of thrilling
his audiences with an intensity of tragic
emotion such as no other poet had ever
reached ; but bowed with age, somewhat
friendless, and like other solitaries a little
strange in his habits ; uncomprehendingly
admired and hated, and moving always
through a mist of half-envious, half-derisive
laughter. Calvus et calvinisia — one is

HIS YOUTH 85

reminded, amid many differences, of the
quaint words in which William the Silent
describes his OAvn passage from youth to age,
till the brilliant Catholic prince, leader of
courts and tourneys, sate at last in his
lonely council chamber " bald and a Cal-
vinist." Let us try to trace the path of
life which led him to this end.

He was the son of Mnesarchus or Mnesar-
chides — such names often have alternative
forms — who is said to have been a merchant.
His mother, Cleito, the supposed greengrocer,
was, according to Philochorus, " of very high
birth." He was born at Phlya, a village in
the centre of Attica. The neighbourhood is
celebrated still for its pleasant trees and
streams in the midst of a sunburnt land. In
Euripides' time it was more famous for its
temples. It was the seat of Demeter Anesi-
dora (Earth, Upsender of Gifts), of Dionysus
of the Blossom, and the Dread Virgins, old-
world and mysterious names, not like the
prevailing gods of the Homeric mythology.
Most famous of all, it possessed the mystery
temple of Er6s, or Love. Owing to the re-
searches of recent years, these mysteries
can now be in their general nature under-

86 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

stood. They are survivals of an old tribal
society, in which all the boys as they reached
maturity were made to pass through certain
ordeals and initiations. They were connected
both with vegetation and with re-birth after
death, because they dated from a remote age
in which the fruitfulness of the tribal fields
was not differentiated from the fruitfulness of
the flocks and the human families, and the
new members born into the community were
normally supposed to be the old ancestors
returning to their homes. By Euripides'
day such beliefs had faded into mystical
doctrines, to be handled with speechless
reverence, not to be questioned or under-
stood, but they had their influence upon his
mind. There were other temples too, belong-
ing to the more aristocratic gods of heroic
mythology, as embodied in Homer. Euri-
pides was in his youth cup-bearer to a certain
guild of Dancers — dancing in ancient times
had always religious associations about it
■ — who were chosen from the " first families
in Athens " and danced round the altar of
the Delian Apollo. He was also Fire-bearer
to the Apollo of Cape Zoster ; that is, it was
his office to carry a torch in the procession
which on a certain night of each year met the

HIS YOUTH 37

Delian Apollo at Cape Zoster, and escorted
him on his mystic path from Delos to Athens.
When the child was four years old he had
to be hurried away from his home and then
from his country. The Persians were coming.
The awful words lost none of their terror from
the fact that in Greek the word " Persai,"
Persians, meant " to destroy." So later it
added something to the dread inspired by
Rome that her name, " Roma," meant
" strength." The family must have crossed
the narrow seas to Salamis or further, and
seen the smoke of the Persian conflagrations
rising daily from new towns and villages of
Attica and at last from the Acropolis, or
Citadel, itself. Then came the enormous
desperate sea-battle ; the incredible victory ;
the sight of the broken oriental fleet beating
sullenly away for Asia and safety, and the
solenm exclamation of the Athenian general,
Themistocles, "It is not we who have done
this ! " The next year the Athenians could
return to Attica and begin to build up their
ruined farms. Then came the final defeat of
the Persian land army at Plataea, and the
whole atmosphere lifted. Athens felt that
she had acted like a hero and was reaping a
hero's reward. She had borne the full brunt

38 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

of the war ; she had voluntarily put herself
under the orders of Sparta rather than risk
a split in the Greek forces ; and now she
had come out as the undisputed mistress of
the sea, the obvious champion round whom
the eastern Greeks must rally. Sparta,
not interested in matters outside her own
borders, and not capable of any constructive
policy, dropped sulkily out, and left her to
carry on the offensive war for the liberation
of the Greeks in Asia. The current of things
was with her.

But this great result was not merely the
triumph of a particular city ; it was the
triumph of an ideal and a way of life. Freedom
had defeated despotism, democracy had
defeated kings, hardy poverty had defeated
all the gold of the East. The men who fought
of their free will for home and country had
proved more lasting fighters than the con-
scripts who were kept in the lines by fear of
tortures and beheadings and impalements.
Above all " virtue," as the Greeks called it,
or " virtue " and " wisdom " together, had
sho"wn their power. The words raise a smile
in us ; indeed, our words do not properly
correspond with the Greek, because we can
not get our ideas simple enough. " Virtue "

IDEALS OF ATHENS 39

is what makes a man, or anything else, good ;
it is the quahty of a good soldier, a good
general, a good citizen, a good bootmaker,
a good horse or almost a good sword. And
" wisdom " is that by which a man knows
how to do things — to use a spear, or a tool, to
think and speak and write, to do figures and
history and geometry, to advise and convince
his fellow-citizens. All these great forces
moved, or so it seemed at the time, in the
same direction ; and probably it was hardly
felt as a dangerous difference when many
people preferred to say that it was " piety "
that had won in the war against " impiety,"
and that the Persians had been destroyed
because, being monotheists, they had denied
the Gods. No doubt " piety," properly
understood, was a kind of " wisdom." Let
us take a few passages from the old Ionian
historian, Herodotus, to illustrate what
the feeling for Athens was in Euripides'
youth.

Athens represented Hellenism. {Hdt. I. 60.)
" The Greek race was distinguished of old
from the barbarian as more intelligent and
more emancipated from silly nonsense (or
' savagery ') . . . And of all the Greeks
the Athenians were coimted first in Wisdom."

40 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Athens, as the old epigram put it, was " The
Hellas of. Hellas."

And this superior wisdom w^nt with freedom
and democracy. " So Athens grew. It is
clear wherever you test it, what a good thing
is equality among men. Athens under the
tyrants was no better than her neighbours,
even in war ; when freed from the tyrants
she was far the first of all." (V. 78.)

And what did this freedom and democracy
mean ? A speaker in Herodotus tells us
(III. 80) : " A tyrant disturbs ancient laws,
violates women, kills men without trial.
But a people ruling — first the very name of it is
beautiful, and secondly a people does none
of these things."

And the freedom is not mere licence. When
Xerxes heard the small numbers of the Greeks
who were opposed to him he asked why they
did not all run away, " especially as you say
they are free and there is no one to stop them ? "
And the Spartan answered : " They are free,
O King, but not free to do everything. For
there is a master over them named Law, whom
they fear more than thy servants fear thee."
(VII. 104. This refers specially to the
Spartans, but the same tale is told by
Aeschylus of the Athenians. It applies to

IDEALS OF ATHENS 41

any free Greeks as against the enslaved
barbarian. )

The free Atheniaii must also have arete,
" virtue." He must be a better man in all senses
than the common herd. As Themistocles
put it ; at every turn of life there is a choice
between a higher and a lower, and they must
choose the higher always. Especially there
is one sense in which Athens must profess
arete ; the sense of generosity or chivalry.
\^Tien the various Greek states were contend-
ing for the leadership before the battle of Ar-
temisium, the Athenians, though contributing
much the largest fleet, " thought that the
great thing was that Greece should be saved,
and gave up their claims." {Hdt. VIII. 3.)
In the similar dispute for the post of honour
and danger, before the battle of Plataea, the
Athenians did plead their cause and won it.
But they pleaded promising to abide loyally
by Sparta's decision if their claims were
rejected, and their arguments show what
ideal they had formed of themselves. They
claim that in recent years they alone have met
the Persians single-handed on behalf of all
Greece ; that in old times it was they who gave
refuge to the children of Heracles when hunted
through Greece by the t}Tant Eurystheus ;

42 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

it was they who, at the cost of war, prevented
the conquering Thebans from leaving their
dead enemies to rot unburied and thus offend-
ing against the laws of Greece and humanity.
This is the light in which Athens conceived
herself ; the ideal up to which, amid much con-
fused, hot-headed and self-deceiving patriot-
ism, she strove to live. She was to be the
Saviour of Hellas.

Euripides was about eight when the ruined
walls of Athens were rebuilt and the city,
no longer defenceless against her neighbours,
could begin to rebuild the " House of Athena "
on the Acropolis and restore the Temples and
the Festivals throughout Attica. He can
hardly have been present when the general
Themistocles, then at the height of his fame,
provided the Chorus for the earliest of the
great tragedians, Phrjaiichus, in 476 B.C.
But he must have watched the new paintings
being put up by the same Themistocles in
the temples at Phlya, with scenes from the
Persian War. And through his early teens he
must have watched the far more famous series
of pictures with which Polygnotus, the first of
the great Greek painters, was adorning the
Acropolis ; pictures that canonized scenes

HIS YOUTH 43

from the Siege of Troy and other legendary
history. When he was ten he may probably
have seen a curious procession which brought
back from the island of Skyros the bones of
Theseus, the mythical king of Athens and
the accepted symbol, king though he was,
of Athenian enlightenment and democracy.
Athens was now too great and too self-con-
scious to allow Theseus to lie on foreign soil.
When he was twelve he may have seen
Aeschylus' Persae, " the one great play dealing
with an historical event that exists in litera-
ture." When he was seventeen he pretty
certainly saw the Seven against Thebes and
was much influenced by it ; but the Choregus
this time was a new statesman, Pericles.
Themistocles was in banishment; and the
other great heroes of the Persian time, Aristides
and Miltiades, dead.

Next year, 466 B.C. Euripides became offi-
cially an "Ephebus," or "Youth." He was
provided with a shield and spear, and set to
garrison and police duty in the frontier forts
of Attica. Full military service was to
follow in two years. Meantime the current
of his thoughts must have received a shock.
For, while his shield and spear were still fresh,
news came of one of the most stunning mili-

44 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

tary disasters in Athenian history. A large
colony which had been established on the
river Strymon in Thrace had been lured into
dangerous country by the Thracian tribes,
then set upon by overwhelming numbers and
massacred to the number of ten thousand.
No wonder that one of Euripides' earliest
plays, when he took to writing, was the story
of Rhesus, the Thracian, and his rushing hordes
of wild tribesmen.

But meantime Euripides had not found his
work in life. We hear that he was a good
athlete ; there were records of his prize-
winning in Athens and in Eleusis. Probably
every ambitious boy in Greece did a good deal
of running and boxing. More serious was his
attempt at painting. Polygnotus was at
work in Athens, and the whole art advancing
by leaps and bounds. He tried to find his
true work there, and paintings by his hand
were discovered by antiquarians of later times
— or so they believed — in the town of Megara.
His writings show a certain interest in painting
here and there, and it is perhaps the painter
in him that worked out in the construction of

fhis dramas such fine and varied effects of
grouping.

But there was more in the air than painting

THE SOPHISTS 45

and sculpture. The youth of Euripides fell
in an age which saw perhaps the most extra-
ordinary intellectual awakening known to
human history. It had been preparing for
about a century in certain cities of Ionian
Greece, on the coast of Asia Minor, rich and
cultivated states, subject for the most part to
Lydian or Persian governors. The revolt of
these cities and its suppression by Persia had
sent numbers of Ionian " wise men," philoso-
phers, poets, artists, historians, men of science,
to seek for refuge in Greece, and especially in
Athens. Athens was held to be the mother-
city of all the Ionian colonies, and had been
their only champion in the revolt. She became
now, as one of these Ionian exiles put it, " the
hearth on which the fire of Hellas burned."
It is difficult to describe this great movement
in a few pages, but one can, perhaps, get
some idea of it by an imaginary comparison.
Imagine first the sort of life that was led in
remote parts of Yorkshire or Somerset towards
the end of the eighteenth century, a stagnant
rustic life with no moving ideas, and unques-
tioning in its obedience to authority, in which
hardly any one could read except the parson,
and the parson's reading was not of a kind to
stir a man's pulse. And next imagine the

46 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

intellectual ferment which was then in pro-
gress in London or Paris ; the philosophers,
painters, historians and men of science, the
voices proclaiming that all men were equal,
that the laws of England were unjust to the
poor, that slavery was a crime, and that mon-
archy was a false form of government, or that
no action was morally wTong except what
tended to produce human misery. Imagine
then what would occur in the mind of a clever
and high-thinking boy who was brought sud-
denly from the one society into the heart of
the second, and made to realise that the battles
and duties and prizes of life were tenfold more
thrilling and important than he had ever
dreamed. That is the kind of awakening that
must have occurred in the minds of a large
part of the Greek people in the early fifth
century.

A thoroughly backward peasant in a Greek
village — even an Attic village like Phlya —
had probably as few ideas as other unedu-
cated peasants. In Athens some fifty years
later we hear that it was impossible, with the
best will in the world, to find any one who
coidd not read or write. {Ar. Knights 188 ff.)
But the difference in time and place is cardinal.
The countryman who voted for the banishment

THE SOPHISTS 47

of Aristides the Just had to ask some one else
to write the name for him. Such a man did
not read nor yet think. He more or less hated
the next village and regarded its misfortunes
as his own advantage. He was sunk in super-
stition. His customs were rigid and not under-
stood. He might worship a goddess with a
horse's head or a hero with a snake's tail. He
would perform for the welfare of his fields
traditional sacrifices that were often filthy
and sometimes cruel. On certain holy days
he would tear small beasts to pieces or drive
them into a fire ; in very great extremities
he would probably think no medicine so good
as human blood. His rules of agriculture
would be a mixture of rough common sense
and stupid taboos : he would not reap till the
Pleiades were rising, and he would carefully
avoid sitting on a fixed stone. When he
sought for learning, he would get it in old
traditional books like Hesiod, which taught
him how Ouranos had been mutilated by his
son Cronos, and Cronos bound with chains
by his son Zeus ; how Zeus was king of gods
and men, but had been cheated by Prometheus
into accepting bones instead of meat in a
sacrifice. He would believe that Tantalus
had given the gods his son Pelops to eat, to see

48 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

if they would know the difference, and some
of them had eaten bits of him. He would
perhaps be ready, with great hesitation, to
tolerate certain timid attempts to expurgate
the story, like Pindar's, for instance, which
results, according to our judgment, in mak-
ing it rather worse. And this man, rooted
in his customs, his superstitions, his narrow-
minded cruelties, will of course regard every
departure from his own way of life as so much
pure wickedness. In every contest that goes
on between Intelligence and Stupidity, be-
tween Enlightenment and Obscurantism, the
powers of the dark have this immense advan-
tage : they never understand their opponents,
and consequently represent them as always
wrong, always ^vicked, whereas the intelligent
party generally makes an effort to understand
the stupid and to sympathize with anything
that is good or fine in their attitude. Many of
our Greek Histories still speak as if the great
spiritual effort which created fifth century
Hellenism was a mass of foolish chatter
and intellectual trickery and personal self-
indulgence.

It was not that, nor anything like that.
Across the mind of our stupid peasant the
great national struggle against Persia brought

THE SOPHISTS 49

first the idea that perhaps really it was better
to die than to be a slave ; that it was well to
face death not merely for his own home but
actually — incredible as it seemed — for other
people's homes, for the homes of those wretched
people in the next village. Our own special
customs and taboos, he would reflect with a
shiver, do not really matter when they are
brought into conflict with a common Hellenism
or a common humanity. There are greater
things about us than we knew. There are also
greater men. These men who are in every-
body's mouth : Themistocles above all, who
has defeated the Persian and saved Greece :
but crowds of others besides, Aristides the
Just and Miltiades, the hero of Marathon ;
Demokedes, the learned physician, who was
sought out by people in need of help from
Italy to Susa ; Hecataeus, who had made a
picture of the whole earth, showing all the
countries and cities and rivers and how far
each is from the next, and who could have
saved the lonians if they had only listened
to him ; Pythagoras, who had discovered all
about numbers and knew the wickedness of
the world and had founded a society, bound by
strict rules, to combat it. What is it about
these men that has made them so different

50 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

from you and me and the other farmers
Avho meet in the agora on market-day ?
It .is Sophia, wisdom ; it is arete, virtue.
They are not a bit stronger in the arm, not
bigger, not richer, or more high-born : they
are just wiser, and thus better men. Cannot
I we be made wise ? We know we are stupid,
' we are very ignorant, but we can learn.

The word Sophistes means either " one who
makes wise," or, possibly, as some scholars
think, " one who deals in wisdom." The
difference is slight. In any case it was in
answer to this call for sophia that the Sophists
arose. Doubtless they were of all kinds ;
great men and small, honest and dishonest ;
teachers of real wisdom and of pretence. Our
tradition is rather bitter against them, be-
cause it dates from the bitter time of reaction
and disappointment, when the hopes of the
fifth century and the men who guided it
seemed to have led Athens only to her fall.
Plato in particular is against them as he is
against Athens herself. In the main the
judgment of the afterworld upon them will
depend on the side we take in a never-ending
battle : they fought for light and knowledge
and freedom and the development of all man's
powers. If we prefer blinkers and custom,

THE SOPHISTS *-^

link them

subordination and the rod, we shall thi
dangerous and shallow creatures. But, to
see what the sophists were like, let us consider
two of them who are recorded as having
specially been the teachers of Euripides.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, in Ionia, was
about fifteen years older than Euripides, and
spent some thirty years of his life in Athens.
He discovered for the first time that the moon
shines by the reflection of the sun's light ;
and he explained, in the main correctly, the
cause of eclipses. The sun was not a god :
it was a white-hot mass of stone or earth, in
size perfectly enormous. In describing its
probable size, language failed him ; he only
got as far as saying — what must have seemed
almost a mad exaggeration — that it was
many times larger than the Peloponnese. He
held, if he did not invent, a particular form of
the atomic theory which has played such a
great role in the history of modern science.
He was emphatic on the indestructibility of
matter. Things could be broken up into their
elements and could grow together again, but
nothing could be created or destroyed. There
was order in the world and purpose, and this
was the work of a conscious power which he
called " Nous," or Mind. " All things were

52 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

together in a mass, till IVIind came and put
order into them." Mind is outside things,
not mixed with them, and some authorities
say that Anaxagoras called it " God." Mean-
time, he showed by experiment the reality
and substance of air, and disproved the com-
mon notion of " empty space." It will be
seen that these ideas, if often crudely ex-
pressed, are essentially the same ideas which
gave new life to modern science after the sleep
of the Middle Ages. Almost every one of
them is the subject of active dispute at the
present day.

Apart from physical science, we learn that
Anaxagoras was a close friend and adviser of
the great Athenian statesman, Pericles ; and
we have by chance an account of a long dis-
cussion between the two men about the theory
of punishment — whether the object of it is
to do " justice " upon a wi*ong-doer apart
from any result that may accrue, or simply
to deter others from doing the same and thus
make society better. The question is the
subject of a vigorous correspondence in the
Times while these words are writing. We can
understand what an effect such a teacher as
this would have on the eager young man
from Phlya. One great word of liberatjpon

THE SOPHISTS 53

was already in the air and belongs to no one
sophist or philosopher. This was the dis-
itinction between Nature on the one hand and
[Custom or Convention on the other. The
historian Herodotus, who was no sophist but
loved a good story, tells how the Persian king,
Darius, called some Greeks and some Indian
tribesmen together into his presence. He
then asked the Greeks what payment would
induce them to eat the dead bodies of
their fathers. " Nothing in the world," they
cried in indignation. " They would rewfer-
ently burn them." He proceeded to ask
the Indians what they would take to burn
their fathers' bodies, and they repelled the
bare thought with horror ; they would do
nothing but eat them with every mark of
love and respect. " Fire burns in the same
way both here and in Persia," the saying
was, " but men's notions of right and
wrong are not at all the same." The one
is Nature ; the other is man's Custom
or Convention. This antithesis between
" Phusis " and " Nomos " ran vividly through
the whole of Greek philosophy, and awoke
with renewed vigour in Rousseau and the
radical writers of the eighteenth century. It
is an antithesis against which conformist

54 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

dialecticians have always turned their sharp-
est weapons. It has again and again been
dissected and refuted and sho^vn to be philoso-
phically untenable : but it still lives and has
still something of the old power to shatter and
to set free. All the thinkers of Greece at the
time we are treating were testing the laws and
maxims of their day, and trying to find out
what really rested on Nature and what was
the mere embroidery of man. It is always a
I dangerous and exciting inquiry ; especially
I because the most irrational conventions are
j apt also to be the most sacrosanct.

This whole spirit was specially incarnate in
another of Euripides' teachers. We hear
of Protagoras in his old age from that enemy
of the sophists, Plato. But for this sophist
even Plato's satire is kindly and almost rever-
ent. Protagoras worked not at physical
science, but at language and philosophy. He
taught men to think and speak ; he began the
study of grammar by dividing sentences into
four kinds, Optative, Interrogative, Indicative,
Imperative. He taught rhetoric ; he formu-
lated the first theory of democracy. But
it was as a sceptic that he struck men's imag-
inations most. " About the Gods, I have no
I means of knowing either that they are or

THE SOPHISTS 55

are not. For the hindrances to knowledge
are many, the darkness of the subject and the
shortness of man's Hfe." Numbers of people,
no doubt, went as far as this, and without
suffering for it as Protagoras did ; but his
scepticism cut deeper and raised questions still
debated in modern thought. " Man is the
measure of things " ; there is no truth to be
had beyond the impression made on a man's
mind. When this given object seems one
thing to A and another thing to B, it is to each
one exactly what it seems ; just as honey not
only seems sweet but is sweet to a healthy
man, and not only seems bitter but is bitter
to a man with jaundice. Then you can not
say, we may ask, that one or other impression
is false, and mil prove false on further in-
quiry ? No : he answers ; each impression
is equally true. The only difference is that
each state of mind is not equally good. You
cannot prove to the jaundiced man that his
honey is sweet, for it is not : or to the drunk-
ard that he does not desire his drink, for he
does : what you can do is to alter the men's
state of mind, to cure the jaundice or the
drunkenness. Our cognition flows and
changes. It is the result of an active impact
upon a passive percipient. And, resulting

56 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

from this change, there are in practice always
two things to be said, a pro and a con. about
every possible proposition. There is no
general statement that cannot be contradicted.
Other teachers also are represented as
having influenced Euripides ; Archelaus, who
tried to conceive Anaxagoras's "Mind " in some
material form, as air or spirit — for spiritus,
of course, means " breath " ; Prodicus, who,
besides his discoveries in grammar, is the
author of a popular and edifying fable which
has served in many schoolrooms for many
centuries. It tells how Heracles once came
to some cross roads, one road open, broad, and
smooth and leading a little downhill, the other
narrow and uphill and rough : and on the first
you gradually became a worse and worse man,
on the second a better one. There was Dio-
genes of Apollonia, whose theories about air
seem to have had some effect on Euripides'
writings ; and of course there was, among
the younger men, Socrates. Socrates is too
great and too enigmatic a teacher to be summed
up in a few sentences, and though a verse of
ancient comedy has come down to us, saying,
" Socrates piles the faggots for Euripides'
fife," his influence on his older friend is not
very conspicuous. Euripides must have

u^

THE SOPfflSTS 57

caught something from his scepticism, his
indifference to worldly standards, his strong
purpose, and something also from his resolute
rejection of all philosophy except that which
was concerned with the doings and feelings of
men. " The fields and trees will not talk to
me ; it is only the human beings in the city
that will." That saying of Socrates might be
the motto of many a dramatist.

The greatness of these philosophers or
sophists of the fifth century does not, of course,
lie in the correctness of their scientific results.
The dullest and most unilluminated text-book
produced at the present day is far more correct
than Anaxagoras. Their greatness lies partly
in the pioneer quality of their work. They
first struck out the roads by which later
workers could advance further. Partly in the
daring and felicity with which they hit upon
great and fruitful ideas, ideas which have
brought light and freedom with them when-
ever they have recurred to men's minds, and
which, as we have seen, are to a great extent
still, after more than two thousand years,
living issues in philosophic thought. Partly
it lies in the mere freedom of spirit with which
they set to work, unhampered by fears and
taboos, to seek the truth, to create beauty,

58 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

and to improve human life. The difference
of atmosphere between the sophists of the
Periclean circle and the ordinary backward
Attic farmer must have been visible to every
observer. If more evidence of the great
gulf was needed, it was supplied emphatically
enough in the experience of Euripides. He
was himself prosecuted by Cleon, the dema-
gogue, for " impiety." The same charge had
been levelled even against his far less destruc-
tive predecessor, Aeschylus. Of these three
special friends whom we have mentioned,
Euripides did not live to see Socrates con-
demned to death and executed. But he saw
Anaxagoras, in spite of the protection of
Pericles, accused of " impiety " and compelled
to fly for his life. He saw Protagoras, for the
book which he had read aloud in Euripides'
own house, prosecuted and condenmed. The
book was publicly burned ; the author escaped,
it is said, only to be drowned at sea, a signal
mark in the eyes of the orthodox of how the
gods regarded such philosophy.

Thought was no doubt freer in ancient
Athens than in any other city within two
thousand years of it. Those who suffered for
religious advance are exceedingly few. But
it was not in human nature, especially in such

THE SOPHISTS 59

early times, for individuals to do such great
service to their fellow men and not occasion-
ally be punished for it. They induced men
for a time to set reason and high ideals above
the instincts of the herd : and sooner or later
the herd must turn and trample them.

One of the ancient lives says that it was this
sense of the antagonism between Anaxagoras
and the conservative masses that turned
Euripides away from philosophy. One need
scarcely believe that. The way he took was
not the way to escape from danger or unpopu-
larity. And when a man shows extraordinary
genius for poetry one need not search for the
reasons which induced him not to write prose.
He followed in the wake not of Anaxagoras
but of Aeschvlus.

CHAPTER III

LIFE CONTINUED ; WHAT IS A GREEK TRAGEDY ?
EURIPIDES' EARLY PLAYS : " ALCESTIS "
AND " TELEPHUS "

To the public of the present day a play is
merely an entertainment, and it was the same
to the Elizabethans. Shakespeare can say
to his audience " Our true intent is all for your
delight," and we feel no particular shock in
reading the words. The companies were just
noblemen's servants ; and it was natural
enough that if Lord Leicester's players did
not amuse Lord Leicester's guests, they
should be sent away and others hired. If
they too proved dull, the patron could drop
the play altogether and call for tumblers and
dancing dogs.

To a playwright of the twelfth century, who
worked out in the church or in front of it his
presentation of the great drama of the Gospel,
such an attitude would have seemed debased
and cynical. However poor the monkish

GREEK TRAGEDY 61

players or playwright might be, surely that
which they were presenting was in itself enough
to fill the mind of a spectator. To them, as
the great mediaevalist, Gaston Paris, puts it,
" the universe was a vast stage, on which was
played an eternal drama, full of tears and
joy, its actors divided between heaven, earth
and hell ; a drama whose end is foreseen, whose
changes of fortune are directed by the hand of
God, yet whose every scene is rich and thril-
ling." The spectator was admitted to the
councils of the Trinity ; he saw the legions of
darkness mingling themselves with the lives
of humanity, tempting and troubling, and the
saints and angels at their work of protection
or intercession ; he saw with his own eyes
the kiss of Judas, the scourging and crucifixion,
the descent into Hell, the resurrection and
ascension ; and, lastly, the dragging down to
red and bloody torment of the infinite multi-
tudes of the unorthodox or the wicked.
Imagine what passed in the minds of those
who witnessed in full faith such a spectacle !
[PoSsie du Moyen Age I, Essay I.]

Now, in spite of a thousand differences of
social organization and religious dogma, the
atmosphere of primitive Greek tragedy must
have been most strangely similar to this. It

n

L • 'iA'U, '••^aA

62 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

is not only that, like the mediaeval plays,
Greek tragedy was religious ; that it was
developed out of a definite ritual ; not even
that the most marked links of historical
continuity can be traced between the death-
and-resurrection ritual of certain Pagan
" saviours " and those of the mediasval drama.
It is that the ritual on which tragedy was
based embodied the most fundamental Greek
conceptions of life and fate, of law and sin
and punishment.

When we say that tragedy originated in a
dance, ritual or magical, intended to represent
the death of the vegetation this year and
its coming return in triumph next year, the
above remarks may seem hard to justify.
But we must remember several things. First,
a dance was in ancient times essentially
religious, not a mere capering with the feet
but an attempt to express with every limb and
and sinew of the body those emotions for which
words, especially the words of simple and un-
lettered men, are inadequate (see p. 229).
Again, vegetation is to us an abstract common
noun ; to the ancient it was a personal being,
not "it" but "He." His death was as our
own deaths, and his re-birth a thing to be
anxiously sought with prayers and dances.

GREEK TRAGEDY 63

For if He were not re-born, what would
happen ? Famine, and wholesale death by
famine, was a familiar thought, a regularly
returning terror, in these primitive agricul-
tural villages. Nay, more, why must the cycle
of summer and winter roll as it does ? Why
must " He " die and men die ? Some of the
oldest Greek philosophers have no doubt about
the answer : there has been " Hubris " or
"Adikia," Pride or Injustice, and the result
thereof must needs be death. Every year He
waxes too strong and commits " Hubris,"
and such sin has its proper punishment.
" The sun shall not transgress his measures,"
says Heraclitus ; " if he does he shall be pur-
sued by Erinyes, till justice be re-fulfilled."
It is the law of all existing things. " They
all pay retribution for injustice, one to another,
according to the Ordinance of Time " {Hera-
clitus, fr. 9-i, Anaximander, fr. 9). And the
history of each year's bloom was an example
of this refluent balance. The Year Daemon
— Vegetation Spirit or Corn God or whatever
we call him — waxes proud and is slain by
his enemy, who becomes thereby a murderer
and must in turn perish at the hands of the
expected avenger, who is at the same time
the Wronged One re-risen. The ritual of this

64 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Vegetation Spirit is extraordinarily wide-
spread in all quarters of the globe, and may
best be studied in Dr. Frazer's Golden Bough,
especially in the part entitled, " The Dying
God.'"' Dionysus, the daemon of tragedy, is one
of these Dying Gods, like Attis, Adonis, Osiris.
The Dionysiac ritual which lay at the
back of tragedy, may be conjectured in its
full form to have had six regular stages :
(1) an Agon or Contest, in which the Daemon
fights against his enemy, who — since it is
really this year fighting last year — is apt to be
almost identical with himself ; (2) a Pathos, or
disaster, which very commonly takes the
shape of a " Sparagmos," or Tearing in pieces ;
the body of the Corn God being scattered in
innumerable seeds over the earth ; sometimes
of some other sacrificial death ; (3) a Mes-
senger, who brings the news ; (4) a Lamenta-
tion, very often mixed with a Song of Rejoic-
ing, since the death of the Old King is also the
accession of the new ; (5) the Discovery or
Recognition of the hidden or dismembered
god ; and (6) his Epiphany or Resurrection in
glory. 1

^ The above is the present writer's re-statement,
published in Miss Harrison's Themis, pp. 341 flf., of the
orthodox view of the origin of tragedy. See also Corn-

GREEK TRAGEDY 65

This ritual of Dionysus, being made into a\
drama and falling into the hands of a remark- \\
able set of creative artists, developed into L
what we know as Greek tragedy. The crea-
tive passion of the artist gradually conquered
the emotion of the mere worshipper.

Exactly the same development took place
in mediaeval drama, or rather it was taking
place when new secular influences broke in
and destroyed it. The liturgical plays first
enacted the main story of the New Testament ;
then they emphasized particular parts — ^there
is a beautiful play, for instance, on the Mas-
sacre of the Innocents ; then they developed
imaginatively scenes that are implied but not
mentioned in the Gospel, such as the expe-
riences of the Magdalen when she lived " in
joy," her dealings with cosmetic-sellers and
the like ; then, rangmg right outside the
Gospel histories, they dealt with the lives of
St. Nicholas, St. Antony or any person who
provided a good legend and had some claim
to an atmosphere of sanctity.

In the same way Greek tragedy extended its

^ford From Religion to Philosophy, first few chapters.
The chief non-Dionysiac theory is Professor Ridgeway's,
who derives tragedy directly from the funeral cult of
individual heroes : Origin of Tragedy, Cambridge, 1910.

66 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

range first to embrace the histories of other
Heroes or Daemons — the difference is slight —
who were essentially like Dionysus : Pentheus,
Lycurgus, Hippolytus, Actaeon and especially,
I should be inclined to add, Orestes. Then it
took in any heroes to whose memory some
ritual was attached. For the play is, with the
rarest and most doubtful exceptions, essentially
the enactment of a ritual, or rather of what the
Greeks called an " aition " — ^that is, a supposed
historical event which is the origin or " cause "
of the ritual. Thus the death of Hippolytus
is the " aition " of the lamentation-rite per-
formed at the grave of Hippolytus ; the
death of Aias is the " aition " of the festival
called Aianteia ; the death of Medea's
children, the " aition " of a certain ritual
at Corinth ; the story of Prometheus the
" aition " of a certain Fire-festival in Athens.
The tragedy, as ritual, enacts its own
legendary origin.

There is then a further extension of the
theme, to include a very few events in recent
history. But we must observe that only those
events were chosen which were felt to have
about them some heroic grandeur or mystery ;
I think we may even say, only those events
which, like the Battle of Salamis or the Fall

EARLY PLAYS 69

run. The record of his early work is, as we
had reason to expect, terribly defective. But
we do happen to know the name and subject
of the first play for which he " was granted a
chorus." It was called the Daughters of
Pelias. Its story was based on the old ritual of
the Year-god, who is cut to pieces or scattered
like the seed, and then restored to life and
youth. Medea, the enchantress maiden from
the further shores of the Friendless Sea, had
fled from her home with the Greek adventurer
Jason, the winner of the Golden Fleece. She
came with him to Thessaly, where his uncle
Pelias was king. Pelias had usurped Jason's
ancestral crown and therefore hated him.
The daughters of Pelias doubtless sneered at
Medea and encouraged Jason's growing dis-
taste for his barbarian prize. The savage
woman determined at one blow to be rid of
Pelias, to punish his daughters, and reconquer
Jason's love. She had the power of renovating
the life of the old. She persuaded the
daughters of Pelias to try her method on their
father, with the result that he died in agony,
and they stood guilty of a hideous murder.
Medea, we may conjecture, was triumphant,
till she found she had made Jason a ruined
man and taught him really to hate her. The

M

70 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

play is characteristic in two ways. It was
clearly based on the old ritual, and it treated
one of Euripides' great subjects, the passions
of a suffering and savage woman.

The Daughters of Pelias was produced in
455, when the poet was twenty-nine, just a
year after the death of Aeschylus and thirteen
years after the first victory of Sophocles.
Euripides' o-vvn first victory — we do not know
the name of the successful play — did not come
till 442, a year before Sophocles' masterpiece,
the Antigone.

We have only two examples, and those not
certain, of Euripides' work before that time.
The Cyclops is a satyr-play pure and simple,
and the only complete specimen of its class.
It is probably earlier than the Alcestis, and is
interesting because it shows Euripides writing
for once without any arriere pensee, or second-
ary intention. It is a gay and grotesque piece,
based on Homer's story of Odysseus in the
Cyclops' cave. The farcical and fantastic note
is firmly held, so that the climax of the story,
in which the monster's eye is burnt out with a
log of burning wood, is kept unreal and not dis-
gusting. The later Euripides would probably
have made it horrible and sA^omg our sympa-
thies violently round to the side of the victim.

EARLY PLAYS 71

The Rhesus has come down to us in a very
peculiar condition and is often considered
spurious. We know, however, that Euripides
wrote a Rhesus, and tradition says that he
was " very young " when he wrote it. My
own view — explained in the preface to my
translation — ^would make it probably a very
early pro-satyric play which was produced
after the poet's death and considerably re-
written. It is a young man's play, full of war
and adventure, of spies in wolf-skins and white
chargers and gallant chivalry. That is not
much like the Euripides whom we know else-
where ; but his mark is upon the last scene,
in which the soldiers stand embarrassed and
silent while a solitary mother weeps over
her dead son. The poetry of the scene is
exquisite ; but what is most characteristic
is the sudden flavour of bitterness, the cold
wind that so suddenly takes the heart out of
joyous war. Some touch of that bitter flavour
will be found hereafter in every play, how-
ever beautiful or romantic, that comes from
the pen of Euripides.

Up to the year 438, when the poet was
forty-six, the records, as we have said, almost
fail us. But in that year he produced a set of
four plays, The Cretan Women, Alcmaeon in

72 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Psdphis, Telephus, and, in place of a satyr-
play, the Alcestis. The last is still extant and
is very characteristic of the master's mind.
The saga told how Admetus, a king in Thessaly,
was fated to die on a certain day, but, in return
for his piety of old, was allowed to find a
substitute to die for him. His old father and
mother refused ; his young wife, Alcestis,
gladly consented to die. Amid exquisite
songs of mourning she is carried to her grave,
when the wild hero, Heracles, comes to the
house seeking hospitality. Admetus, with
primitive courtesy, conceals what has hap-
pened and orders him to be given entertain-
ment. The burial is finished when Heracles,
already revelling and drunken and crowned
with flowers, learns the truth. Sobered at the
touch he goes out into the night to wrestle
with Death amid the tombs and crush his ribs
for him till he yields up his prey. One sees
the fantastic satyr note. The play is not truly
tragic ; it touches its theme tenderly and
with romance. But amid all the romance
Euripides cannot keep his hand from unveiling
the weak spot in the sacred legend. Alcestis,
no doubt, is beautiful, and it was beautiful
of her to die. But what was it of Admetus to
let her die ? An ordinary playwright would

PLAYS OF 438 73

elude the awkward question. Admetus would
refuse his wife's sacrifice and she would per-
form it against his will or without his know-
ledge. We should somehow save our hero's-
character. Not so Euripides. His Admetus
weeps tenderly over his wife, but he thinks
it entirely suitable that she should die for him.
The veil is not removed from his eyes till his
old father, Pheres, who has bluntly refused to
die for anybody, comes to bring offerings to
Alcestis' funeral. A quarrel breaks out be-
tween the two selfish men, brilliantly written,
subtle and merciless, in which Admetus's
weakness is laid bare. The scene is a great
grief to the purely romantic reader, but it just'^
makes the play profound instead of superficial.
All the plays of 438 are, in different ways,
typical of their author. And we will spend a
little time on each. The Alcmaeon in Psophis
was what we should call a romance. Alcmaeon
was the son of that Eriphyle who betrayed her
husband to death for the sake of a charmed
necklace which had once belonged to Har-
monia, the daughter of Ares. Alcmaeon slew
his mother and became in consequence mad
and accursed. Seeking purification he fled
to the land of Psophis, where the King cleansed
him and gave him the hand of his daughter-

74 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Arsinoe, who duly received the necklace.
However, Alcmaeon's sin was too great for any
such cleansing. He wandered away, all the
earth being accursed to him, till he should find
some land that had not been in existence at
the time of his sin and was consequently un-
polluted. He discovered it in some alluvial
islands, just then making their appearance at
the mouth of the River Acheloiis. Here he at
last found peace and married the daughter of
Acheloiis, Callirrhoe. She asks for the neck-
lace and Alcmaeon goes back to get it from
Arsinoe. He professes to need it for his own
purification and she willingly gives it him ;
then she finds that he really wants it for his
new bride, and in fury has him murdered on his
road home. A romantic and varied story with
one fine touch of tragic passion.

The Telephus also deserves special mention.
It had apparently the misfortune to be seen
by Aristophanes, then a boy about sixteen.
At any rate the comedian was never able to
forget it, and we know it chiefly from his paro-
dies. It struck out a new style in Attic drama,
the style of adventure and plot-interest,
which threw to the winds the traditional tragic
dignities and pomps. The usual convention
in tragedy was to clothe the characters in

PLAYS OF 438 75

elaborate priestly dress with ritual masks
carefully graduated according to the rank of
the character. Such trappings came to
Tragedy as an inheritance from its old
magico-religious days, and it never quite suc-
ceeded in throwing them off, even in its
most vital period. It is very difficult for
us to form a clear notion what the ordinary
Greek tragedy looked like in 438, and how
much we should have noticed any great
change of dressing in the Telephus. But
there was a change which raised a storm
of comment. Telephus was a King of Mysia,
not very far from the Troad. The Greeks
in sailing for Troy had missed their way and
invaded Telephus' country by mistake. He
had fought them with great effect but had
been wounded by Achilles with his magic
spear. The wound would not close, and an
oracle told Telephus " the wounder shall heal."
The Greeks were back in Greece by this time,
planning a new invasion of Troy. The king
goes, lame and disguised as a beggar, into the
heart of the Greek army and into Agamem-
non's palace. Euripides, since the king had
to be a beggar, dressed him as a beggar, with
rags and a wallet. It is hard to see how he
could possibly have done otherwise, but we

76 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

may surmise that his beggar's dress was a
little more realistic and less merely symbolical
than his audience expected. In any case,
though critics were shocked, the practice
established itself. Telephus and Philoctetes
were afterwards regularly allowed to dress in
" rags," even in the work of Sophocles.

There were great scenes owing to the bold-
ness of the ragged and intrusive stranger.
The Greek chieftains proposed to kill him, but
granted him at last the right of making one
speech to save his life. He seems to have
spoken beside, or over, the headsman's block.
And the case he had to plead was characteristic
of Euripides. 'T'^he Greeks considered quite
simply that Te. phus was their enemy and
must be destroyed on their next expedition.
The beggar explained that Telephus had
found his country ravaged and was bound to
defend it. Every man among the Greeks
would have done the same ; there is nothing
to blame Telephus for. At the end of this
scene, apparently, the beggar was discovered.
It is Telephus himself speaking ! They fly
to their spears. But Telephus has snatched
up the baby prince, Orestes, from his cradle
and stands at bay ; if one of his enemies moves
the child shall die. Eventually they accept

PLAYS OF 438 77

his terms and make peace with him. A fine
melodrama, one would guess, and a move
in the direction of , realism.— ^a direction which
Euripides only followed within certain strict
limits. But we find two marks of Euripides
the philosopher. The beggar who pleads for
reasonable justice towards the national enemy
strikes a note which Euripides himself often
had to sound afterwards. It was not for
nothing that Aristophanes in his Acharnians,
thirteen years later, used a parody of this
scene in order to plead the dangerous cause of
reasonableness towards Sparta. The other
mark is a curious tang of sadness at the
close. The Greeks demand ^'^hat Telephus,
so brave and resourceful, sfc?Ml be their ally
against Troy. But his wife is a Trojan prin-
cess and he refuses. He consents reluctantly
to show the army the road to his wife's
fatherland and then turns away.

The remaining play of the trilogy performed
in 438 strikes a chord that proved more
dangerous to Euripides. The Cretan Women
told the story of Aerope, a Cretan princess
who secretly loved a squire or young soldier.
Her intrigue is discovered, and her father
gives her to a Greek sailor to throw into the
sea. The sailor spares her life and takes her

78 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

to Greece. The story as it stands is a common
ballad motive and not calculated to disturb
any one. But the disciple of the sophists
did not leave these romances where he found
them. He liked to think them out in terms
of real life. The songs in which Aerope
poured out her love were remembered against
Euripides after liis death. It was all very
well to sympathize in a remote artistic way
with these erring damsels ; but Euripides
seemed to come too near raising an actual
doubt whether the damsel had done anything
so very wrong at all, that respectable people
should want to murder her. Euripides is,
as a matter of fact, not loose but highly
austere in his moral tone. But next to
religion itself, the sphere of sexual conduct
has always been the great field for irrational
taboos and savage punishments, and the
sophists naturally marked it as a battle-field.
The kings of Egypt commonly married their
sisters, and did so on religious grounds : '^to a
Greek such marriage was an unspeakable
sin. There is a problem here, and Euripides
raised it sharply in a play, Aeolus, based on
the old fairy-tale of the King of the winds
who dwells as a patriarch on his floating island
with his twelve sons married to his twelve

EARLY PLAYS 79

daughters. " Canst face mine eyes, fresh from
thy deed of shame ? " says the angry father /
in this play; and his son answers, '*What|/
is shame, when the doer feels no shame ? " *
Euripides also treated several times legends
where a god became the lover of a mortal
maiden, and, as we shall see in the Ion, he loved
to rouse sympathy for the maiden and con-
tempt for the god (p. 121). In one case he
even treats, through a mist of strange religious
mysticism, the impossible amour of Pasiphae
of Crete with the Cretan Bull-god. It is
interesting, however, to observe that there
is in Euripides no trace of sympathy for the
one form of perverted indulgence on which
the ancient tone was markedly different
from ours. It is reserved for the bestial
Cyclops and Laius the accursed.

Adventure, brilliance, invention, romance
and scenic effect ; these together with
delightful lyrics, a wonderful command over 1
the Greek language, and a somewhat daring
admixture of sophistic wisdom which some-
times took away a spectator's breath, were
probably the qualities which the ordinary
public had felt in Euripides' work up to the
year 438. They perhaps felt also that these
pleasant gifts were apt to be needlessly

80 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

) marred by a certain vmintelligible note of
discord. It was a pity ; and, as the man
was now forty-six, he ought surely to have
learnt how to smooth it out !

It was not smoothness that was coming.

CHAPTER IV

BEGINNING OF THE WAR ; THE PLAYS OF
MATURITY, " MEDEA " TO " HERACLES "

The next play of which we have full know-
ledge must have staggered its audience.
The Medea was promptly put by the official
judges at the bottom of the list of competing
plays, and thereafter took its place, we do
not know how soon, as one of the consummate
achievements of the Greek tragic genius. Its
stamp is fixed on all the imagination of
antiquity.

The plot of the Medea begins where that
of the Daughters of Pelias (p. 69) ended. Jason
had fled with Medea and her two children to
Corinth, which is ruled by Creon, an old king
with a daughter but no son to succeed him.
The famous warrior-prince will just suit
Creon as a son-in-law, if only he will dismiss
his discreditable barbarian mistress. Jason
has never been able to tell the truth to Medea
yet ; who could ? He secretly accepts Creon's
F 81

82 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

terms ; he marries the princess ; and Creon
descends on Medea with soldiers to remove
her instantly from the territory of Corinth.
Medea begs for one day in which to make
ready for exile, for the children's sake. One
day will be enough. By desperate flattery
and pleading she gets it. There follows a
first scene with Jason, in which man and
woman empty their hearts on one another
— at least they try to ; but even yet some
fragments of old habit and conventional
courtesy prevent Jason from telling the full
truth. Still it is a w^onderful scene, Jason
reasonable and cold, ready to recognize all
her claims and provide her with everything
she needs except his own heart's blood ;
Medea desolate and half mad, asking for
nothing but the one thing he will not give.
Love to her is the whole world, to him it is a
stale memorj^. This scene ends in defiance,
but there is another in which IMedea feigns
repentance and submission, and sends Jason
with the two children to bear a costly gift to
the new bride. It may, she suggests, induce
Creon to spare the children and let her go to
exile alone. The gift is really a robe of burning
poison, which has come to Medea from her
divine ancestor, the Sun. The bride dies

THE MEDEA 83

in agony together with her father who tries
to save her. Jason rushes to save his two
children from the vengeance which is sure
to come upon them from the kinsmen of the
murdered bride ; but Medea has already-
slain them with her own hand and stands
laughing at him over their bodies. She too
suffers, but she loves the pain, since it means
that he shall have happiness no more. The
Daughter of the Sun sails away on her dragon-
chariot and an ecstasy of hate seems to blind
the sky.

The Medea shows a new mastery of tragic
technique, especially in the extraordinary
value it gets out of the chorus (p. 240). But
as illustrating the life of Euripides there are
one or two special points in it that claim
notice. In the first place it states the cause
of a barbarian woman against a Greek man
who has wronged her. Civilized men have
loved and deserted savage women since the
world began, and I doubt if ever the deserted
one has found such words of fire as Medea
speaks. The marvel is that in such white-
hot passion there is room for satire. But
there is ; and even a reader can scarcely
withhold a bitter laugh when Jason explains
the advantage he has conferred on Medea by

84 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

bringing her to a ci\'ilized country. But
Medea is not only a barbarian ; she is also a
woman, and fights the horrible war that
Hes, an eternally latent possibility, between
woman and man. Some of the most pro-
found and wounding things said both by
Medea and by Jason might almost be
labelled in a book of extracts "Any wife
to any husband," or *• Any husband to
any wife." And Medea is also a witch ; she
is also at heart a maniac. It is the madness
produced by love rejected and justice denied,
by the sense of helpless, intolerable wrong.
A lesser poet might easily have made Medea
a sympathetic character, and have pretended
that long oppression makes angels of the
oppressed. In the great chorus which h\Tnns
the rise of Woman to be a power in the world
it would have been easy to make the Woman's
day a day of peace and blessing. But
Euripides, tragic to the heart and no dealer
in pleasant make-believe, saw things other-
wise; wheri these oppressed women strike
back, he seems to say, when these despised
and enslaved barbarians can endure no
longer, it will not be justice that comes but
the revenge of madmen.

This kind of theme was not in itself likely

THE MEDEA 85

to please an audience ; but what always
galls the average theatre-goer most in a new
work of genius is not the subject but the
treatment. Euripides' treatment of his sub-
ject was calculated to irritate the plain man
in two ways. First it 'was enigmatic. He
did not label half his characters bad and half
good ; he let both sides state their case and
seemed to enjoy leaving the hearer bewildered.
And further, he made a point of studying
closely and sympathetically many regions of
thought and character which the plain man
preferred not to think of at all. When Jason
had to defend an obviously shabby case, no
gentleman cared to hear him ; but Euripides
insisted on his speaking. He enjoyed track-
ing out the lines of thought and feeling which
really actuate men, even fine men like Jason, in
Jason's position. When Medea was revealed
as obviously a wicked woman the plain man
thought that such women should simply
be thrashed, not listened to. But Euripides
loved to trace all her complicated sense of
injustice to its origins, and was determined
to understand and to e:xplain rather than to
condemn. The plain man had a kind of
justification for saying that Euripides actually
seemed to like these traitors and wicked

86 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

women ; for such thorough understanding
as this involves always a good deal of
sympathy.

This charge could with even more reason
be brought against another masterpiece of
drama, which followed three years after the
Medea. The Hippolytus (428 B.C.) did indeed
win the first prize from the official judges,
besides establishing itself in the admiration
of after ages and inspiring Seneca and Racine
to their finest work. But it profoundly
shocked public opinion at the same time.
The plot is a variant of a very old theme
found in ancient Egypt and in the Pentateuch.
Theseus, not here the ideal democrat on the
Athenian throne, but the stormy and adven-
turous hero of the poets, had early in life
conquered the Amazons and ravished their
virgin Queen. She died, leaving a son like
herself, Hippol}i;us. Theseus some twenty
years after married Phaedra, the young
daughter of IVIinos, king of Crete, and she by
the evil will of Aphrodite fell in love with
Hippolytus. She told no one her love, and
was trying to starve herself to death, when
her old Nurse contrived to worm the secret
from her and treacherously, under an oath
of secrecy, told it to Hippol>i;us. Phaedra,

THE HIPPOLYTUS 87

furious with the Nurse and with Hippolytus,
in a blind rage of self-defence, writes a false
accusation against Hippolytus and hangs
herself. Hippolytus, charged by Theseus with
the crime, will not break his oath and goes out
to exile under his father's curse. The gods,
in fulfilment of the curse, send death to him,
but before he actually dies reveal his inno-
cence. The story which might so easily be
made ugly or sensual is treated by Euripides
with a delicate and austere purity. In
construction, too, and general beauty of
workmanship, though not in greatness of
idea or depth of passion, the Hippolytus is
perhaps the finest of all his plays, and has
still a great appeal on the stage. But the
pliilistine was vaguely hurt and angered by
the treatment, so tender and yet so inexor-
able, accorded to a guilty love, and doubtless
the more conventional Athenian ladies shocked
themselves over the bare idea of such a
heroine being mentioned. It gives us some
measure of the stupidity of public criticism
at the time, that we find special attacks made
upon one phrase of Hippolytus. In his first
rage with the Nurse he vows he will tell
Theseus of her proposal. She reminds him
of his oath, and he cries :

88 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

" 'Twas but my tongue, 'twas not my heart that fewore."
It is a passing flash of indignation at the
trap in which he has been caught. When the
time comes he keeps his oath at the cost of
his hfe. Yet the line is repeatedly cited as
showdng the dreadful doctrines of Euripides
and the sophists ; doctrines that would
justify any perjury !

The Hippolytus, as we have it, is a re-
written play. In his first version Euripides
had a scene in which Phaedra actually declared
her love. This more obvious treatment
was preferred by Seneca and Racine ; but
Euripides in his second thoughts reached a
far more austere and beautiful effect. His
Phaedra goes to her death without having
spoken one word to Hippolytus : she has
heard him but has not answered. The
Hippolytus has more serene beauty than any
of Euripides' plays since the Alcestis, and is
, specially remarkable as the first great drama
on the subject of tragic or unhappy love, a
theme which has been so extraordinarily
fruitful on the modern stage. To contem-
poraries it was also interesting as one of the
earliest treatments of a purely local Attic
story, v> hich had not quite found its way into
the great sagas of epic tradition.

THE HECUBA 89.

The note of the Medea was struck again
some two years later (426 ?) in a play almost
equally powerful and more horrible, the
Hecuba. The heroine is the famous Queen of
Troy, a barbarian woman like Medea, majestic
and beautiful at the beginning of the action
and afterwards transformed by intolerable
wrongs into a kind of devil. Her " evils '*
are partly the ordinary evils that come to the
conquered in war, but they are made worse by
the callousness of her Greek conquerors.
The play strikes many notes of special bitter-
ness. For instance, the one champion whom
Hecuba finds among her conquerors is the
general, Agamemnon. He pleads her cause in
the camp, because, God help him ! he has
taken her daughter Cassandra, the mad
prophetess vowed to eternal virginity, to be
his concubine, and consequently feels good-
natured. There is another note, remarkable
in an Athenian. The mob of the Greek army,
in a frenzy of superstition, clamour to have a
Trojan princess sacrificed at Achilles' tomb.
In the debate on this subject we are told that
several princes spoke ; among them the two
sons of Theseus, the legendary kings of Athens.
They would surely, as enlightened Athenians,
prevent such atrocities ? On the contrary.

90 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

all we hear is that they spoke against one
another, but both were for the murder ! At
the end of the Hecuba, as at the end of the
Medea, we are WTOught to a pitch of excite-
ment at which incredible legends begin to seem
possible. History related that the Queen of
Troy, maddened by her wrongs, had been
transformed into a kind of Hell-hound with
fiery eyes, whom sailors saw at night prowling
round the hill where she was stoned. In her
bloody revenge on the only enemy she can
trap into her power, she seems already to have
become this sort of being in her heart, and
when her blind and dying victim prophesies
the coming transformation, it seems natural.
One only feels that perhaps the old miraculous
stories are true after all. The one light that
shines through the dark fury of the Hecuba is
the lovely and gentle courage, almost the joy,
with which the virgin martyr, Polyxena, goes
to her death.

I have taken the Hecuba slightly before its
due date, because of its return with increased
bitterness to the tone and subject of the
Medea. We will now go back. There had
been in the interim a change in the poet's
mind, or, at the least, a strong clash of con-
flicting emotions. The Medea was produced

BEGINNING OF THE WAR 91

iiV 431, the first year of the Peloponnesian War.
This war, between the Athenian empire,
representing the democratic and progressive
forces of Greece, and the Peloponnesian con-
federacy with Sparta at its head, lasted with
one interruption for twenty-seven years and
ended in the capture of Athens and the
destruction of her power. When war was first
declared it represented the policy of Pericles,
the great statesman of the Enlightenment, the
friend of Anaxagoras, and of those whom
Euripides honoured most. It seemed at first
like a final struggle between the forces of
progress and those of resolute darkness.
Pericles in a famous speech, which is recorded
for us by Thucydides, had explained to his
adlierents th^ great causes for which Athens
stood ; had proclaimed her as the Prmcess
of Cities for whom it was a privilege to die ;
and urged them, using a word more vivid in
Greek than it is in English, to stand about her
like a band of Lovers round an Immortal
Mistress. Euripides was as a matter of fact
still going through his military service and
must have seen much hard fighting in these
first years of the war.

He responded to Pericles' call by a burst of
patriotic plays. Even in the Medea there is

92 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

one chorus, a little out of place perhaps, but
famous in after days, describing the glories
of Athens. They are not at all the conven-
tional glories attributed by all patriots to their
respective countries. " It is an old and
happy land which no conqueror has ever
subdued ; its children walk delicately through
air that shines with sunlight ; and Wisdom
is the very bread that they eat." (The
word is " Sophia," embracing Wisdom,
Knowledge, Art, Culture ; there is no one
word for it in English, and the names for
the various parts of it have lost their poetry.)
''A river," he continues, " flows through the
land ; and legend tells that Cypris, the
Goddess of Love, has sailed upon it and
dipped her hand in the water ; and now
when the river-wind at evening blows it
comes laden Avith a spirit of longing;
but it is not ordinary love, it is a Passion
and a great Desire for all kinds of godlike
endeavour, a Love that sits with Wisdom upon
her throne." . . . " A pity the man should
be so priggish." We may imagine the com-
ment of the average Athenian paterfamilias.
Towards the beginning of the war we may
safely date the Children of Heracles, a muti-
lated but beautiful piece, which rings with this

BEGINNING OF THE WAR 93

particular spirit of patriotism (cf. p. 41
above). Heracles is dead ; his children and
mother are persecuted and threatened with
death by his enemy, Eurystheus, king of
Argos. Under the guidance of their father's
old comrade, lolaus, they have fled from
Argos, and tried in vain to find protectors in
every part of Greece. No city dares protect
them against the power of Argos. At the
opening of the play we find the children and
lolaus clinging as suppliants to an altar in
Athens. The herald of Argos breaks in upon
them, flings down the old man and prepares
to drag the children off. " What hope can
lolaus possibly cherish ? " lolaus trusts in
two things, in Zeus who will protect the inno-
cent, and in Athens which is a free city and not
afraid. The king of Athens, a son of Theseus,
appears and rebukes the herald. The herald's
argument is clear : " These children are Argive
subjects and are no business of yours ; further,
they are utterly helpless and will be no
possible good to you as allies. And if you do
not give them up peacefully, Argos declares
instant war." The king " wishes for peace
with all men ; but he will not offend God,
nor betray the innocent ; also he rules a free
city and will take no orders from any outside

94 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

power. As to the fate of these children
not being his business, it is always the busi-
ness of Athens to save the oppressed."
One remembers the old claim, emphatically
approved by the historian of the Persian
Wars, that Athens was the saviour of Hellas.
One remembers also the ultimatum of the
Peloponnesian confederacy which Pericles
rejected on the eve of the present war ; and
the repeated complaints of the Corinthians
that Athens " will neither rest herself nor let
others rest." These supply the clue to a large
part of the patriotism of the Children of
Heracles. There is another element also,
and perhaps one that will better stand the
test of impartial criticism, in Euripides' ideal
of Athens. She will be true to Hellas and
all that Hellas stands for : for law, for the
gods of mercy, for the belief in right rather
than force. Also, as the king of Athens is
careful to observe, for democracy and con-
stitutional government. He is no despot
ruling barbarians.

The same motives recur with greater fulness
and thoughtfulness in another play of the
early war time — the exact year is not certain —
the Suppliant Women. Scholars reading the
play now, in cool blood, with the issues at

THE SUPPLIANT WOMEN 95

stake forgotten, are inclined to smile at a sort
of pedantry in the poet's enthusiasm. It
reminds one of the punctiliousness with which
Shelley sometimes gives one the sincere milk
of the word according to Godwin. This play
opens, like the last, with a scene of supplica-
tion. A band of women — Argive mothers
they are this time, whose sons have been slain
in war against Thebes — have come to Athens
as suppliants. They are led by Adrastus,
the great and conquered lord of Argos, and
finding Aethra, the king's mother, at her
prayers beside the altar, have surrounded her
with a chain of suppliant branches which she
dares not break. They only ask that Theseus,
her son, shall get back for them the bodies of
their dead sons, whom the Thebans, contrary
to all Hellenic law, have flung out unburied for
dogs to tear. Theseus at first refuses, on
grounds of policy, and the broken-hearted
women take up their branches and begin to
go, when Aethra, who has been weeping
silently, breaks out : "Is this kind of wrong
to be allowed to exist ? "

" Thou shalt not suffer it, thou being my child !
Thou hast seen men scorn thy City, call her wild
Of counsel, mad ; thou hast seen the fire of mom
Flash from her eyes in answer to their scorn.

96 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Come toil on toil ; 'tis this that makes her grand ;
Peril on peril ! And common states, that stand
In caution, twilight cities, dimly wise —
Ye know them, for no light is in their eyes.
Go forth, my son, and help. My fears are fled-
Women in sorrow call thee, and men dead."

(Suppl 320 ff.)

Theseus accepts his mother's charge. It
has been his old habit to strike wherever he
saw oppression without counting the risk ;
and it shall never be said of him that an
ancient Law of God was set at naught when
he and Athens had power to enforce it. It is
Athens as the " saviour of Hellas " that we
have here. It is Athens the champion of
Hellenism and true piety, but it is also the
Athens of free thought and the Enlighten-
ment. For later on, when the dead bodies are
recovered from the battle-field, they are a
ghastly sight. The old unreflecting Greece
would in the first place have thought them a
pollution, a thing which only slaves must be
sent to handle. In the second place, since
the mothers were making lamentation, the
bodies must be brought to their eyes, so as to
improve the lamentation. But Theseus feels
differently on both points. Why should the
mothers' grief be made more bitter ? Let the
bodies be burned in peace and the decent

THE SUPPLIANT WOMEN 97

ashes given to the mothers. Aiid as to the
defilement, the king himself, we hear, has
taken up the disfigured bodies in his arms
and washed their wounds and " shown
them love." No slave touched them. " How
dreadful ! Was he not ashamed ? " asks a
bystander — the Greek word means something
between " ashamed " and " disgusted." " No,"
is the answer : " Why should men be
repelled by one another's sufferings ? " (768)
It is a far-reaching answer, with great conse-
quences. It is the antique counterpart of St.
Francis kissing the leper's sores. The man
of the herd is revolted by the sight of great
misery and inclines to despise and even hate
the sufferer ; the man of the enlightenment
sees deeper, and the feeling of revulsion passes
away in the wish to help.

We spoke of a slight pedantry in the
enthusiasms of the Swppliant Women, It is
illustrated even by points like this, and by
a tendency in Theseus to lecture on good
manners and the Athenian constitution. The
rude Theban herald enters asking, " Who
is monarch of this land ? " using the
word " tyrannos " for "monarch." Theseus
corrects him at once. " There is no
' tyrannos ' here. This is a free city ; and

98 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

when I say a free city, I mean one in which the
whole people by turns takes part in the
sovereignty, and the rich have no privilege
as against the poor " (399-408). The^e dis-
sertations on democratic government could
stir men's passions and force their way into
scenes of high poetry legitimately enough at a
time when men were fighting and dying for
their democracy. To those who are not
" Lovers " of the beautiful city they will
seem cold and irrelevant.

Other plays of this period show marks of
the same great wave of love for Athens. The
lost plays Aigeus, Theseus, Erechtheus, all on
Attic subjects, can be dated in the first years of
the war ; the Hippolytus is built on an old
legend of the Acropolis and a poetic love of
Athens shines through the story. The Andro-
mache especially is a curious document, the
meaning of which is discussed later on (p. 112).
But the two plays we have described at
length, The Children of Heracles and the
Suppliant Women, give the best idea of what
patriotism meant to our poet. With most
men patriotism is a matter of association and
custom. They stick to their country because
it is theirs ; to their own habits and prejudices
and even neighbours for the same reason.

THE HERACLES 99

But with Euripides his ideals came before his
actual surroundings. He loved Athens because
Athens meant certain things, and if the real
Athens should cease to mean those things he
would cast her out of his heart. At least he
would try to do so ; in point of fact that is
always a very difficult thing to do. But if
ever Athens should be false, it was pretty
certain that Euripides would find hatred
mingling with his betrayed love. There were
signs of this even in the Medea and the
Hecuba.

But before dealing with that subject we must
dwell for a few moments upon another fine
play, which marks in more than one sense
the end of a period. The Heracles, written
about the year 423, shows Theseus in the same
role of Athenian hero. In the Suppliant
Women he had helped Adrastus and the
Argive mothers and shown them the path of
true Hellenism ; in the Heracles he comes to
the rescue of Heracles in his fall. That hero
has been mad and slain his own children ; he
has recovered and awakes to find himself
bound to a pillar, with dead bodies that he
cannot recognize round about him. He rages
to be set free. He compels those who know
to tell him the whole truth. Frantic with

100 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

shame and horror, he wishes to curse God and
die, when he sees Theseus approaching.
Theseus has been his friend in many hard
days and Heracles dares not face him nor
speak to him. The touch of one so blood-
guilty, the sound of his voice, the sight of his
face, would bring pollution. He shrouds
himself in his mantle and silently waves
Theseus away. In a moment his friend's
arms are round him, and the shrouding mantle
is drawn off. There is no such thing as
pollution ; no deed of man can stain the
immortal sunlight, and a friend's love does not
fear the infection of blood. Heracles is
touched : he thanks Theseus and is now
ready to die. God has tempted him too far,
and he will defy God. Theseus reminds him
of what he is : the helper of man, the powerful
friend of the oppressed ; the Heracles who
dared all and endured all ; and now, like a
common, weak-hearted man, he speaks of
suicide ! " Hellas will not suffer you to die in
your blindness ! " (1254). The great adven-
turer is softened and won over by the " wis-
dom" of Theseus, and goes to Athens to fulfil,
in spite of suffering, whatever further tasks
life may have in store for him.

This condemnation of suicide was unusual in

THE HERACLES 101

antiquity ; and the Heracles also contains one
remarkable denial of the current myths, the
more remarkable because, as Dr. Verrall has
pointed out, it seems almost to upset the plot
of the play. Heracles' madness is sent upon
him by the malignity of Hera ; we see her
supernatural emissary entering the room
where Heracles lies. And the hero himself
speaks of his supernatural adventures. Yet
he also utters the lines :

Say not there be adulterers in Heaven
Nor prisoner gods and gaoler. Long ago
My heart has known it false and will not alter.
God, if he be God, lacketh naught. All these
Are dead unhappy tales of minstrelsy.
{Her. 1341 ; cf. Iph. Taur. 380-392 ; Bdlerophon fr. 292.)

But in another way, too, the Heracles
marks an epoch in the poet's life. It seems
to have been written in or about the year 423,
and it was in 424 that Euripides had reached
the age of sixty and was set free from military
service. He had had forty years of it, steady
work for the most part ; fighting against
Boeotians, Spartans, Corinthians, against Thra-
cian barbarians, in all probability also against
other people further overseas. We have no
record of the campaigns in which Euripides
served ; but we have by chance an inscription

102 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

of the year 458, when he was twenty-six, giving
the names of the members of one particular
tribe, the Sons of Erechtheus, who fell in war
in that one year. They had fallen " in Cyprus,
in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, in Aegina
and at Megara." There were ten such tribes
in Athens. And this record gives some notion
of the extraordinary energy and ubiquity of
the Athenian armies.

It is strange to reflect on the gulf that lies
between the life of an ancient poet and his
modern descendants. Our poets and men of
letters mostly live either by writing or by in-
vestments eked out by writing. They are
professional writers and readers and, as a rule,
nothing else. It is comparatively rare for any
one of them to face daily dangers, to stand
against men who mean to kill him and beside
men for whom he is ready to die, to be kept a
couple of days fasting, or even to work in the
sweat of his body for the food he eats. If
such things happen by accident to one of us
we cherish them as priceless " copy," or we
even go out of our way to compass the
experience artificially.

But an ancient poet was living hard, work-
ing, thinking, fighting, suffering, through
most of the years that we are A\Titing about

POETS ANCIENT AND MODERN 103

life. He took part in the political assembly,
in the Council, in the jury-courts ; he worked
at his own farm or business ; and every year
he was liable to be sent on long military expedi-
tions abroad or to be summoned at a day's
notice to defend the frontier at home. It is
out of a life like this, a life of crowded reality
and work, that Aeschylus and Sophocles and -
Euripides found leisure to write their trage-
dies ; one writing 90, one 127, and the third
92 ! Euripides was considered in antiquity a
bookish poet. He had a library — in numbers
probably not one book for every hundred that
Tennyson or George Meredith had : he was a
philosopher, he read to himself. But on what
a background of personal experience his philo-
sophy was builded ! It is probably this immer-
sion in the hard realities of life that gives
ancient Greek literature some of its special
characteristics. Its firm hold on sanity and
common sense, for instance ; its avoidance
of sentimentality and paradox and various
seductive kinds of folly ; perhaps also its
steady devotion to ideal forms and high con-
ventions, and its aversion from anything that
we should call " realism." A man everlast-
ingly wrapped round in good books and safe
living cries out for something harsh and real —

104 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

for blood and swear-words and crude jagged
sentences. A man who escapes with eager-
ness from a hfe of war and dirt and brutahty
and hardship to dwell just a short time among
the Muses, naturally likes the Muses to be
their very selves and not remind him of the
mud he has just washed off. Euripides has
two long descriptions of a battle, one in the
Children of Heracles and one in the Suppliant
Women ; both are rhetorical Messenger's
Speeches, conventionally well-written and
%vithout one touch that suggests personal
experience. It is curious to compare these,
the writings of the poet who had fought in
scores of hand-to-hand battles, with the far
more vivid rhapsodies of modern writers who
have never so much as seen a man pointing
a gun at them. Aeschylus indeed has written
one splendid battle piece in the Persians.
But even there there is no realism ; it is the
spirit of the war of liberation that thrills in
us as we read, it is not the particular incidents
of the battle.

Forty years of military service finished :
as the men of sixty stepped out of the ranks
they must have had a feeling of mixed relief
and misgiving. They are now officially
" Gerontes," Old Men : they are off hard work,

END OF MILITARY SERVICE 105

and to be at the end of hard work is peri-
lously near being at the end of life. There is
in the Heracles a wistful chorus, put in the
mouths of certain Theban elders (637 ff.),
" Youth is what I love for ever ; Old Age is
a burden upon the head, a dimness of light
in the eyes, heavier than the crags of Etna.
Fame and the crown of the East and
chambers piled with gold, what are they all
compared with Youth ? " A second life is
what one longs for. To have it all again and
live it fully ; if a man has any arete in
him, any real life left in his heart, that is
what ought to be possible. . . . For
Euripides himself it seems there is still a life
to be lived. The words are important and
almost untranslatable. " I will never cease
mingling together the Graces and the
Muses " — such words are nearly nonsense,
like most literal translations. The " Graces "
or Charities are the spirits of fulfilled desire, the
Muses are all the spirits of " Music " or of
" Wisdom " — of History and Mathematics, by
the way, just as much as Singing and Poetry.
" I will not rest. I will make the spirits of
Fulfilled Desire one with the spirits of Music,
a marriage of blessedness. I care not to live
if the Muses leave me ; their garlands shall

106 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

be about me for ever. Even yet the age-
worn minstrel can turn Memory into song."

Memory, according to Greek legend, was the
mother of the Muses ; and the " memory "
of which Euripides is thinking is that of the
race, the saga of history and tradition, more
than his own. The Muses taught him long
ago their mystic dance, and he will be theirs for
ever ; he will never from weariness or faint
heart ask them to rest. He was thinking
doubtless of the lines of the old poet Alcman
to his dancing maidens, lines almost the most
beautiful ever sung by Greek lips : " No more,
ye maidens honey-throated, voices of longing ;
my limbs will bear me no more. Would God
I were a ceryl-bird, over the flower of the
wave with the halcyons flying, and never a
care in his heart, the sea-blue bird of the
spring ! " Euripides asks for no rest : cares
and all, he accepts the service of the Muses
and prays that he may bear their harness to
the end. It was a bold prayer, and the Muses
in granting it granted it at a heavy price.

CHAPTER V

LIFE CONTINUED ; THE EMBITTERING OF THE
WAR : ALCIBIADES AND THE DEMAGOGUES :
THE "ion": the " TROJAN WOMEN "

Our Greek historians, with Thucydides at
their head, are practically unanimous in
associating with the Peloponnesian War a
progressive degradation and embitterment in
Greek public life, and a reaction against
the old dreams and ideals. We can measure
the change by many slight but significant
utterances.

When Herodotus records his opinion that
in the Persian Wars the Athenians had been
" the Saviours of Hellas " he has to preface
the remark by a curious apology (VII. 139) :
" Here I am compelled by necessity to express
an opinion which will be offensive to most
of mankind, but I cannot refrain from putting
it in the way which I believe to be true." He
was writing at the beginning of the Pelopon-
nesian War, and by that time Athens was
10/

108 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

not the Saviour but " the Tyrant City." Her
" alhes " had from time to time refused to serve
or tried to secede from the alhance ; and one
by one she had reduced them to compulsory
subjection. The " League " had become
confessedly an " Empire."

Even Pericles, the great statesman of the
good time, who had sought and achieved so
many fine ends, had failed to build up a free
League based on a representative elected
body. The possibility of such a plan had
hardly yet been conceived in the world, though
a rudimentary system of international coun-
cils did in some places exist between neighbour-
ing villages ; and Pericles must not be per-
sonally blamed for an error, however fatal,
wliich no one living knew how to avoid. But
he realized at last in 430 B.C. what Athens
had come to {Thuc. II. 63): "Do not
imagine you are fighting about a simple
issue, the subjection or independence of
certain cities. You have an Empire to lose,
and a danger to face from those who hate you
for your empire. To resign it now would be
impossible — if at this crisis some timid and
inactive spirits are hankering after Righteous-
ness even at that price ! For by this time
your empire has become a Despotism (Tyran-

EFFECT OF THE WAR 109

nis), a thing which it is considered unjust
to acquire, but which can never be safely
surrendered."

The same thought is emphasized more
brutally by Cleon [Thuc. III. 37) :

" I have remarked again and again that
a democracy cannot govern an empire, and
never more clearly than now. . . . You
do not realize that when you make a conces-
sion to the allies out of pity, or are led away
by their specious pleading, you commit a
weakness dangerous to yourselves without
receiving any gratitude from them. Remem-
ber that your empire is a Despotism exercised
over unwilling men who are always in con-
spiracy against you." " Do not be misled,"
he adds a little later, " by the three most
deadly enemies of empire, pity and charm of
words and the generosity of strength "
{Thuc. III. 40).

So much for the ideals of chivalry and free-
dom and " Sophia " : for I think the second
of Cleon's " enemies " refers especially to the
eloquent wisdom of the philosophers. And
as for democracy we do not hear now that
" the very name of it is beautiful " : we
hear that it is no principle on which to govern
an empire. And later on we shall hear

110 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Alcibiades, an Athenian of democratic ante-
cedents, saying at Sparta : "Of course all
sensible men know what democracy is, and
I better than most, from personal experience ;
but there is nothing new to be said about
acknowledged insanity " {Time. VI. 89).

The ideals failed, and, if we are to believe
our contemporary authors, the men failed
too. Pericles, with all his errors, was a
man of noble mind ; he was pure in motive,
lofty, a born ruler ; he led his people towards
" beauty and wisdom," and he wished it to be
written on his grave that no Athenian had
put on mourning through his act. Cleon,
they all tell us, was a bellowing demagogue ;
violent, not over honest, unscrupulous,
blundering ; only resolute to fight for the
demos of Athens till he dropped and to keep
the poor from starving at whatever cost of
blackmailing the rich and flaying the allied
cities. And when he — by good luck, as
Thucj^dides considers — was killed in battle,
he was succeeded by Hyperbolus, a caricature
of himself — as a pun of the comic poets' puts
it, a " Cleon in hyperbole." This picture
has been subjected to just criticism in many
details, but it represents on the whole the
united voice of our ancient witnesses.

ALCIBIADES 111

One character only shines out in this
period with a lurid light, Alcibiades, so far
as one can understand him at all from our
fragmentary and anecdotal records, must
have been something like a Lord Byron on
a grand scale, turned soldier and statesman
instead of poet. His disastrous end and his
betrayal of all political parties have probably
affected his reputation unfairly. Violent and
unprincipled as he certainly was, the peculiar
dissolute caddishness implied in the anecdotes
is probably a misrepresentation of the kind that
arises so easily against a man who has no
friends. It needs an effort to imagine what
he looked like before he was found out. Of
noble birth and a nephew of Pericles ; famous
for his good looks and his distinguished, if
insolent, manners ; a brilliant soldier, an
ambitious and far-scheming politician ; a
pupil of the philosophers and an especially
intimate friend of Socrates, capable both of
rising to great ideas and of expounding them
to the multitude ; he was hailed by a large
party as the destined saviour of Athens, and
seems for a time at least to have made the
same impression upon Euripides. Even in
the Suppliant Women, peace-play as it is,
Euripides congratulates Athens on possessing

112 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

in Theseus " a general good and young,"
and critics have connected the phrase with
the election of Alcibiades, at a very early
age, to be General in the year 420. More
significant perhaps is the curious case of the
Andromache. The ancient argument tells
us definitely that it was not produced in
Athens. And we find from another source
that it was produced by one Democrates or
Timocrates. Now Euripides had a friend
called Timocrates, who was an Argive ; so
it looks as if the play had been produced in
Argos. This would be astonishing but by
no means inexplicable. It was an old Athen-
ian policy to check Sparta by organizing a
philo-Athenian league in the Peloponnese
itself {Ar. Knights, 465 ff.). The nucleus
was to consist in three states, Argos, Elis
and Mantinea, which had been visited by
Themistocles just after the Persian wars and
had set up democracies on the Athenian model.
It was Alcibiades who eventually succeeded
in organizing this league in 420, and it seems
likely that the Andromache was sent to Argos
for production in much the same spirit in
which Pindar used to send his Chorus of
Dancers with a new song to compliment some
foreign king. The play seems to contain a

ALCIBIADES lia

reference to the Peloponnesian War (734),
it indulges in curiously direct denunciations
of the Spartans (445 ff., 595 ff.), and the
Spartan Menelaus is the villain of the
piece — a more stagey villain than Euripides^
in his better moments would have permitted.
We have also one doubtful external record
of our poet's temporary faith in Alcibiades.
In the year 420 there fell an observance of the
Olympian Festival, the greatest of all the
Pan-Hellenic Games, which carried with it
a religious truce. Alcibiades succeeded in
getting Sparta convicted of a violation of this
truce, and consequently excluded from the
Festival, which was a marked blow at her
prestige. Then, entering himself as a com-
petitor, he won with his own horses a whole
series of prizes, including the first, in the
four-horse chariot competition. And Plutarch,
in his Life of Alcibiades, refers to a Victory
Ode which was written for him on this occa-
sion, " as report goes, by the poet Euripides '"
(ch, 11). This revival of the Pindaric
Epinikion for a personal victory would fit
in with the known character of Alcibiades ;
and it would be a sharp example of the irony
of history if Euripides consented to write
the Ode.

114 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Euripides' delusion was natural and it was
short-lived. The Suppliant Women points
towards peace, and the true policy of Alci-
biades was to make peace impossible. And
even apart from that the ideals of the two men
were antipathetic. The matter is summed
up in the Frogs of Aristophanes, produced in
405, when the only question remaining about
Alcibiades was whether he was more dangerous
to the city as an honoured leader or as an
enemy and exile. The two great poets of
the Dead are asked for their advice on this
particular subject and their answers are
clear. Aeschylus says : " Submit to the
lion's whelp ; " Euripides rejects him with
three scathing lines {Frogs, 1427 ff., cf.
1446 ff.). Long before the date of the Frogs
Alcibiades had probably gro^vn to be in the
mind of Euripides the very type and symbol
of the evil times.

All Greece — we have the emphatic and
disinterested testimony of Thucydides for
the statement — was gradually corrupted and
embittered by the long war. Probably all
war, as it accustoms people more and more
to desperate needs and desperate expedients
for meeting them, and sets more and more
aside the common generosities and humani-

EFFECT OF THE WAR 115

ties of life, tends to some degradation of
character. But this particular war was
specially harmful. For one thing it was a
struggle not simply between two foreign
powers, but between two principles, oligarchy
and democracy. In almost all the cities
of the Athenian alliance there were large
numbers of malcontent rich, who were only
too ready, if chance offered, to overthrow the
constitution, massacre the mob, and revolt
to Sparta. In a good many of the cities on
the other side there were masses of discon-
tented poor who had been touched by the
breath of democratic doctrines, and were
anxious for a chance to cut the throats of
the ruling Few. It was like the state of
things produced in many cities of Europe
by the French Revolution. A secret civil
strife lay in the background behind the open
war ; and the open war itself was a long
protracted struggle for life or death. Prob-
ably the most high-minded man when engaged
in a death-grapple fights in much the same
way as the most low-minded. And there
can be no doubt that as the toils of war closed
tighter round Athens, and she began to feel
herself fighting, gasp by gasp, for both her
empire and her life, the ideals of the Saviour

116 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

of Hellas fell away from her. She fought
with every weapon that came.

Such times called forth naturally the men
that suited them. The assembly cared less
to listen to decent and thoughtful people, not
to speak of philosophers. It was feeling
bitter and fierce and frightened and it liked
speakers who were feeling the same. The
same fear that made it cruel made it also
superstitious. On one occasion the whole
city went mad with alarm because of a
prank played on some ancient figures of
Hermes. On another a great army was lost
because it and its general were afraid to move
during an eclipse of the moon. So soon had
Anaxagoras been forgotten.

Is this the result, one is inclined to ask, of
the great ideals of democracy and enlighten-
ment ? Of course the old Tory type of Greek
historian, like Mitford, revelled in an affirma-
tive answer. But a more reflective view of
history suggests a different explanation. We
must distinguish carefully between the two
notions, Enlightenment and Democracy. They
happen to have gone together in two or three
of the greatest periods of human progress and
we are apt to regard them as somehow neces-
sarily allied. But they are not. Doubtless

EFFECT OF THE WAR 117

Democracy is itself an exalted conception
and belongs naturally to the ideas of the
Enlightenment, just as does the belief in
Reason, in the free pursuit of knowledge, in
justice to the weak, the wish to be right rather
than to be victorious, or the hatred of violence
and superstition as such. But the trouble is
that, in a backward and untrained people,
the victory of democracy may result in the
defeat of the other exalted ideas. The
Athenian democracy as conceived by Pericles,
Euripides or Protagoras was a free people,
highly civilized and pursuing " wisdom," free
from superstition and oppression themselves
and helping always to emancipate others.
But the actual rustics and workmen who voted
for Pericles had been only touched on the
surface by the " wisdom " of the sophists.
They liked him because he made them great
and admired and proud of being Athenians.
But one must suspect that, when they were
back at their farms and the spell of Pericles'
" wisdom " was removed, they practised again
the silliest and cruellest old agricultural
magic, were terrified by the old superstitions,
beat their slaves and wives and hated the
" strangers " a few miles off, just as their
grandfathers had done in the old times. What

118 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

seems to have happened at the end of the war-
time is that, owing largely to the democratic
enthusiasm of the sophistic movement in
Athens, the common people is strongly in
power ; owing to the same movement its old
taboos and rules of conduct are a little shaken
and less able to stand against strong tempta-
tion ; but meantime the true moral lessons
of the enlightenment, the hardest of all lessons
for man to learn, have never worked into their
bones. Just as the French Revolution called
into power the brutal and superstitious peasant
who was the product of the Old Regime and
could never rise to the ideas of the Revolution,
so the Athenian enlightenment had put into
power the old unregenerate mass of sentiment
that had not been permeated by the enlighten-
ment. Cleon was no friend of sophists, but
their avowed enemy. And when he told the
Assembly in its difficulties simply to double
the tribute of the allies and sack their towns
if they did not pay ; when he urged the killing
in cold blood of all the Mitylenean prisoners,
he was preaching doctrines that would
probably have seemed natural enough in the
old days, before any sophists had troubled
men's minds with talk about duties towards
dirty foreigners. And the people who followed

EFFECT OF THE WAR 119

his lead were the same sort of people who would
naturally be terrified about the mutilation of a
taboo image or an eclipse of the divine moon.
What they had, perhaps, acquired from
the sophistic movement was a touch of
effrontery. Boeotians or Acarnanians might
commit crimes, when they needed to, by
instinct, without stating their reasons : in
Athens you had at least to discuss the principle
of the proposed crime and accept it for what it
was worth. A cynic or a hypocrite trained in
a sophistic school might offer occasional help
with the theory.

Perhaps the earliest touch of Euripides'
bitterness against his country comes, as we
have seen, in the Hecuba (p. 89). But the
period we have just reached, soon after the
Heracles^ is marked by one of the most ironic
and enigmatical plays he ever wrote. The
Ion is interesting in every line and contains
one scene which is sometimes considered the
most poignant in all Greek tragedy, yet it
leaves every reader unsatisfied. Is it a pious
offering to Apollo, the ancestor of the Ionian
race ? If so, why is Apollo the villain of the
piece ? Is it a glorification of ancient Athens,
her legends and her shrines ? If so, why are
the shrines polluted by lustful gods, the legends

120 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

made specially barbaric, and the beautiful
earth-born Princess shown as a seduced
woman and a would-be murderess ? Nay,
further, why does the hero of the play explain
in a careful speech that he would sooner live
a friendless slave in the temple at Delphi than
a free man and a prince in such a place as
Athens — a city " full of terror," where men
" who are good and might show wisdom are
silent and never come forward," while the men
in power watch enviously round to destroy
any possible rival ? (598 ff. Cf. Euripides'
words in Frogs, 1446 ff.) In Delphi he has
peace, and is not jostled off the pavement
by the scum of the earth (635) — a complaint
which is often made in Greek literature
^bout democratic Athens.

I think the best way to understand the Ion
is to suppose that Euripides, in his usual
manner, is just taking an old canonical legend,
seeing the human drama and romance in it,
and working it together in his o^vn clear
ironic mind till at last he throws out his play,
saying ; " There are your gods and your holy
legends ; see how you like them ! " The
irony is lurking at every corner, though of
-course the drama and romance come first.

The Ion is, of all the extant plays, the most \

THE ION 121

definitely blasphemous against the traditional]
gods. Greek legend was full of stories of'
heroes born of the love of a god and a mortal
woman. Such stories could be turned into
high religious mysteries, as by Aeschylus in
his Suppliant Women ; into tender and
reverent legends, as by Pindar in one or two
odes. Euripides uses no such idealization.
In play after play, Auge, Melanippe, Danae,
Alope he seems to have scarified such gods, as
he does now in the Ion. Legend told that
Ion, the hero-ancestor of the Ionian s, was the
son of the Athenian princess Creusa. Creusa
was married to one Xuthus, an Aeolian
soldier, but the real father of Ion was the god
Apollo. Euripides treats the story as if Apollo'
were just a lawless ravisher, utterly selfish
and ready to lie when pressed, though good-
natured in his way when he lost nothing by it
■ — a sort of Alcibiades, in fact. Xuthus is
butt ; a foreigner with abrupt and violent
manners, lied to by Apollo, befooled by his
wife, disobeyed by her maids, and eventually
made happy by the belief that her illegitimate
son is really his own. Creusa herself, though
drawn with extraordinary sympathy and
beauty, is at heart a savage.

Creusa, when she bore her child, laid him,

122 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

in her terror, in the same cavern where Apollo
had ravished her : surely the god would save
his own son. She came again and the child
was gone. As a matter of fact the god had
carried him in his cradle to Delphi, where he
was discovered by the priestess and reared as a
foundling in the temple courts. Creusa was
then married to Xuthus, who knew nothing of
her adventure. Some seventeen years or so
afterwards, since the pair had no children,
they came to Delphi to consult the god.
Creusa there meets the foundling, Ion, and the
two are strangely attracted to one another.
She almost confides to him her story, and he
tells her what he knows of his own. Meantime
Xuthus goes in to ask the god for a child ; the
god tells him that the first person he meets on
leaving the shrine will be his son. (This, of
course, is a lie.) He meets Ion, salutes him
as his son and embraces him wildly. The boy
protests : " Do not," cries Xuthus, " fly from
what you should love best on earth I " "I
do not love teaching manners to demented
foreigners," retorts the youth. Sobered by
this, Xuthus tries, with Ion's help, to think
out what the god can mean by saying that this
youth is his son. His married life has always
been correct ; but once when he was a young

THE ION 123

man, there was a time ... It was a great
religious feast at Delphi and he was drunk.
Ion accepts the explanation, though he
evidently does not much like his new father.
He makes difficulties about going to Athens.
He is sorry for Creusa. He wishes to stay as
he is. Xuthus decides that Creusa must be
deceived ; he will say he has taken a fancy to
Ion and wishes to adopt him. Meantime let
them have a great birth-feast . . . and if
any of the Chorus say a word to Creusa they
shall be hanged ! Creusa enters, accompanied
by one of Euripides' characteristic Old Slaves.
The man has tended Creusa from childhood,
lives for her and thinks of nothing else ; he is
utterly without scruple apart from her. The
Chorus immediately tell Creusa what they
know of the story. Ion is Xuthus's illegitimate
son ; he must have known it all the time ; he
has now, with the god's connivance, arranged
to take the son back to Athens ; as for Creusa,
the god says she shall have no child. Stung
to fury to think that her child is dead, that
the boy whom she so loved is deliberately
deceiving her, and that Apollo is adding
this deliberate insult to his old brutal wrong,
Creusa casts away shame and standing up in
front of the great Temple cries out her reproach

124 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

against the god. She is disgraced publicly
and for ever, but at least she will drag down
this devil who sits crowned and singing to the
lyre while the women he has ravished go mad
with grief and hjs babes are torn by wild
beasts. In the horror-stricken silence that
follows there is none to advise Creusa except
the old Slave. Blindly devoted and fostering
all her passions, he wrings from her line by line
the detailed story of her seduction, and then
calls for revenge. " Bum down the god's
temple ! " She dare not. " Poison Xuthus ! "
No ; he was good to her when she was miser-
able. " Kill the bastard ! "... Yes :
she will do that. . . . The Slave takes
poison with him and goes to poison Ion at the
birth-feast. The plot fails ; the Slave is
taken and Creusa, pursued by the angry
youth, flies to the altar. It is fury against
fury, each bewildered to find such evil in the
other, after their curious mutual attraction.
Here the Delphian Prophetess enters, bringing
Mdth her the tokens that were with the found-
ling when she first came upon him in the
temple courts. Creusa, amazed, recognizes
the old basket-cradle in which she had exposed
her own child.

She leaves the altar and gives herself up to

THE ION 125

Ion. For a moment it seems as if he would
kill her ; but he tests her story. What else
is there in the basket ? She names the things,
her own shawl with gorgons on it, her own
snake-twined necklace and wreath of undying
olive. The mother confesses to the son and
the son forgives her. But Apollo ? What of
him ? He has lied. . . . Ion, temple-child
as he is, is roused to rebellion : he will break
through the screen of the sanctuary and
demand of the god one plain answer — when
he is stopped by a vision of Athena. She
comes instead of Apollo, who fears to face the
mortals he has wronged ; she bids them be
content and seek no further. Creusa forgives
the god ; Ion remains moodily silent.

The Ion is so rich in romantic invention that
it sometimes seems to a modern reader
curiously old-fashioned ; it is full of motives
— ^lost children, and strawberry-marks, and
the cry of the mother's heart, and obvious
double meanings — which have been repeated
by so many plays since that we instinctively
regard them as " out of date." It is redeemed
by its passion and its sincere psychology. On
the other hand, it is more ironical than any
other extant Greek play. The irony touches
every part of the story, excepting the actual

126 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

tragedy of the wronged woman and the
charming carelessness of the foundling's life.
We should remember that an attack on the god
of Delphi was not particularly objectionable
in Athens. For that god, by the mouth of his
official prophets, at the beginning of the war,
had assured the Spartans that if they fought
well they would conquer and that He, the God,
would be fighting for them. The best that a
pious Athenian could do for such a god as that
was to suppose that the official prophets were
liars. Still Euripides attacks much more than
Delphi. If his thoughts ever strike home, it
is not merely Delphi that will fall, it is the
whole structure of Greek ritual and m>i:hology.
It is against the gods and against Athens that
his irony cuts sharpest.

Irony is the mood of one who has some
strong emotion within but will not quite trust
himself on the flood of it. And romance is
largely the mood of one turning away from
realities that disgust him. In the year 416 B.C.
Euripides, in liis relation to Athens, was shaken
for the first time out of any thought of either
romance or irony. During the summer and
winter of that year there occurred an event of
very small military importance and no direct
political consequences, to which nevertheless

MELOS 127

Thucydides devotes twenty-six continuous
chapters in a very significant part of his work,
the part just before the final catastrophe.
The event is the siege and capture by the
Athenians of a little island called Melos, the
massacre of all its adult men and the enslave-
ment of the women and children. The island
had no military power. It had little commerce
and lived on its own poor agriculture. Its
population was not large ; when it was de-
populated five hundred colonists were enough
to people it again. Why then this large place
in Thucydides' brief and severe narrative ?
Only, I think, because of the moral issue in-
volved and the naked clarity of the crime.
Thucydides tells us of a long debate between
the Athenian envoys and the Melian Council
and professes to report the arguments used
on each side. No doubt there is conscious
artistic composition in the reports. We
cannot conclude that any Athenian envoy
used exactly these horrible words. But we
can be sure that Thucydides took the war on
Melos as the great typical example of the
principles on which the Athenian war party
were led to act in the later part of the war ;
we can go further and be almost sure that he
selected it as a type of sin leading to punish-

128 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

ment — that sin of " Hubris " or Pride which
according to Greek ideas was associated with
some heaven-sent bhndness and pointed
straight to a fall.

In cool and measured language the Athen-
ian envoys explain to the Melian Senate — for
the populace is carefully excluded — ^that it
suits their purpose that Melos should become
subject to their empire. They will not pre-
tend— being sensible men and talking to
sensible men — that the Melians have done
them any wrong or that they have any lawful
claim to Melos, but they do not wish any
islands to remain independent : it is a bad
example to the others. The power of Athens
is practically irresistible : Melos is free to
submit or to be destroyed. The Melians, in
language carefully controlled but vibrating
with suppressed bitterness, answer as best they
can. Is it quite safe for Athens to break all
laws of right ? Empires are mortal ; and the
vengeance of mankind upon such a tyranny
as this . . . ? " We take the risk of that,"
answer the Athenians ; " the immediate
question is whether you prefer to live or die."
The Melians plead to remain neutral ; the
plea is, of course, refused. At any rate they
will not submit. They know Athens is vastly

MELOS 129

stronger in men and ships and military skill ;
still the gods may help the innocent (" That
risk causes us no uneasiness," say the envoys :
" we are quite as pious as you ") ; the Lace-
daemonians are bound by every tie of honour
and kinship to intervene (" We shall of course
see that they do not ") ; in any case we choose
to fight and hope rather than to accept slavery.
" A very regrettable misjudgement," say the
Athenians ; and the war proceeds to its
hideous end.

As I read this Melian Dialogue, as it is
called, again and again, I feel more clearly the
note of deep and angry satire. Probably the
Athenian war-party would indignantly have
repudiated the reasoning put into the mouths
of their leaders. After all they were a demo-
cracy ; and, as Thucydides fully recognizes, a
great mass of men, if it does commit infamies,
likes first to be drugged and stimulated with
lies : it seldom, like the wicked man in
Aristotle's Ethics, " calmly sins." But in any
case the massacre of Melos produced on the
minds of men like Thucydides and Euripides
— and we might probably add almost all the
great writers who were anywise touched by the
philosophic spirit — this peculiar impression.
It seemed like a revelation of naked and trium-

130 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

phant sin. And we can not ])ut feel the inten-
tion with which Thucydides continues his
story. " They put to death all the MeUans
whom they found of man's estate, and made
slaves of the women and children. And they
sent later five hundred colonists and took the
land for their own.

" And the same winter the Athenians sought
to sail with a greater fleet than ever before and
conquer Sicily. . . ." This was the great
Sicilian expedition that brought Athens to her
doom.

Euripides must have been brooding on the
crime of Melos during the autumn and winter.
In the spring, when the great fleet was still
getting ready to sail, he produced a strange
play, the work rather of a prophet than a mere
artist, which was reckoned in antiquity as one
of his masterpieces but which set a flame of dis-
cord for ever between himself and his people.
One would like to know what Archon accepted
that play and what rich man gave the chorus.
It was called The Trojan Women, and it tells
of the proudest conquest wrought by Greek
arms in legend, the taking of Troy by the
armies of Agamemnon. But it tells the old
legend in a peculiar way. Slowly, reflectively.

THE TROJAN WOMEN 131 %A^*

with little stir of the blood, we are made to i
look at the great glory, until we see not glory I
at all but shame and blindness and a world 'J
swallowed up in night. At the very begin-
ning we see gods brooding over the wreck of
Troy ; as they might be brooding over that
wrecked island in the Aegean, whose walls were
almost as ancient as Troy's own. It is from
the Aegean that Poseidon has risen to look
upon the city that is now a smoking ruin,
sacked by the Greeks. " The shrines are
empty and the sanctuaries run red with
blood." The unburied corpses lie polluting
the air ; and the conquering soldiers, home-
sick and uneasy, they know not why, roam
to and fro waiting for a wind that will take
them away from the country they have made
horrible. Such is the handiwork of Athena,
daughter of Zeus ! (47).

The name gives one a moment of shock.
Athena is so confessedly the tutelary goddess
of Athens. But Euripides was only following
the regular Homeric story, in which Athena
had been the great enemy of Troy, and the
unscrupulous friend of the Greeks. Her name
is no sooner mentioned than she appears.
But she is changed. Her favourites have
gone too far ; they have committed " Hubris,"

132 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

insulted the altars of the gods and defiled
virgins in holy places. Athena herself is now
turned against her people. Their great fleet,
flushed with conquest and stained with sin,
is just about to set sail : Athena has asked
Zeus the Father for vengeance against it,
and Zeus has given it into her hand. She
and Poseidon swear alliance ; the storm shall
break as soon as the fleet sets sail, and the
hungry rocks of the Aegean be glutted with
wrecked ships and dying men (95 ff.).

How are ye blind
Ye treaders down of Cities ; ye that cast
Temples to desolation and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead, yourselves so soon to die !

And the angry presences vanish into the
night. Were the consciences of the sackers of
IMelos quite easy during that prologue ?

Then the day dawiis and the play begins,
and we see what, in plain words, the great
glory has amounted to. We see the shattered
walls and some poor temporary huts where
once was a city ; and presently we see a
human figure rising wearily from sleep. It is
an old woman, very tired, her head and her
back aching from the night on the hard ground.
The old woman is Hecuba, lately the queen of

THE TROJAN WOMEN 133

Troy, and in the huts hard by are other cap-
tives, " High women chosen from the waste
of war " to be slaves to the Greek chieftains.
They are to be allotted this morning. She
calls them and they come startled out of sleep,
some terrified, some quiet, some still dreaming,
one suddenly frantic. Through the rest of
jjthe play we hear bit by bit the decisions of the
I [Greek army-council. .Cassandra, the virgin
priestess, is to be Agamemnon's concubine.
The stupid and good-natured Herald who
brings the news thinks it good news. How
lucky for the poor helpless girl ! And the
King, too ! There is no accounting for tastes ;
but he thinks it was that air of unearthly
holiness in Cassandra which made Agamemnon
fancy her. The other women are horror-
stricken, but Cassandra is happy. God is
leading her ; her flesh seems no longer to be
part of her ; she has seen something of the
mind of God and knows that the fate of Troy
and of dead Hector is better than that of their
conquerors. She sees in the end that she
must discrown herself, take off the bands of the
priestess and accept her desecration ; she
sees to what end she is fated to lead Agamem-
non, sees the vision of his murdered body —
murdered by his wife — cast out in precipitous

134 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

places on a night of storm ; and beside
him on the wet rocks there is some one else,
dead, outcast, naked . . . who is it ?
She sees it is herself, and goes forth to what is
appointed (445 ff.).

The central portion of the play deals \vith
the decision of the Greeks about Hector's
little boy, Astyanax. He is only a child now ;
but of course he will grow, and he will form
the natural rallying point for all the fugitive
Trojans and the remnants of the great Trojan
Alliance. On the principles of the JMelian
dialogue he is best out of the way. The Herald
is sent to take the child from his mother,
Andromache, and throw him over the battle-
ments. He comes when the two w^omen,
Andromache and Hecuba, are talking together
and the child playing somewhere near. Andro-
mache has been allotted as slave to Pyrrhus,
the son of Achilles, and is consulting with
Hecuba about the horror she has to face.
Shall she simply resist to the end, in the hope
that Pyrrhus may hate and kill her, or shall
she try, as she always has tried, to make the
best of things ? Hecuba advises : " Think-
of the boy and think of your own gentle nature.
You are made to love and not to hate ; when
things were happy you made them happier ;

THE TROJAN WOMEN 135

when they are miserable you will tend to heal
them and make them less sore. You may
even win Pyrrhus to be kind to your child,
Hector's child ; and he may grow to be a help
to all who have once loved us. . . ."
As they speak the shadow of the entering
Herald falls across them ; he cannot speak
at first, but he has come to take the child to
its death, and his message has to be given.
This scene, with the parting between Andro-
mache and the child which follows, seems to me
* perhaps the most absolutely heart-rending
in all the tragic literature of the world. After
rising from it one understands Aristotle's
judgment of Euripides as " the most tragic of
the poets."

For sheer beauty of writing, for a kind of
gorgeous dignity that at times reminds one
of Aeschylus and yet is compatible with the
subtlest clashes of mood and character, the
Trojan Women stands perhaps first among all
the works of Euripides. But that is not its
most remarkable quality. The action works
up first to a great empty scene where the child's
body is brought back to his grandmother,
Hecuba, for the funeral rites. A solitary old
woman with a dead child in her arms ; that,
on the human side, is the result of these deeds

136 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

of glory. Then, in the finale, come scenes of
almost mystical tone, in which Hecuba appeals
first to the gods, who care nothing ; then to
the human dead who did at least care and
love ; but the dead, too, are deaf like the
gods and cannot help or heed. Out of the
noise and shame of battle there has come
Death the most Holy and taken them to his
peace. No friend among the dead, no help in
God, no illusion anywhere, Hecuba faces That
Which Is and finds somewhere, in the very
intensity of Troy's affliction, a splendour which
cannot die. She has reached in some sense
not the bottom, but the crowning peak of her
fortunes. Troy has already been set on fire
by the Greeks in preparation for their depart-
ure, and the Queen rushes to throw herself
into the flames. She is hurled back by the
Iguards, and the women watch the flaming
city till with a crash the great tower falls.
The Greek trumpet sounds through the dark-
ness. It is the sign for the women to start
for their ships ; and forth they go, cheated
of every palliative, cheated even of death, to
the new life of slavery. But they have seen
in their very nakedness that there is something
in life which neither slavery nor death can
touch.

PALAMEDES AND ALEXANDER IST

The play is a picture of the inner side of
a great conquest, a thing which then, even
more than now, formed probably the very
heart of the dreams of the average unregener-
ate man. It is a thing that seemed before-
hand to be a great joy, and is in reality a great
misery. It is conquest seen when the heat of
battle is over, and nothing remains but to wait
and think ; conquest not embodied in those
Avho achieved it — we have but one glimpse
of the Greek conquerors, and that shows a
man contemptible and unhappy — but in
those who have experienced it most fully,
the conquered women.

We have so far treated the Trojan Women
as though it stood alone. In reality of course
it belonged to a group, and one cannot but
ask what the other plays were, and whether
their themes were such as could stand beside
this and not be shrivelled into commonplace
or triviality. Fortunately, though the plays
are both lost, we know something about
them. They were Palamedes and Alexander ;
and both are on great subjects. The Palamedes
tells of the righteous man condemned by
an evil world ; the Alexander has for its hero
a slave.

Slavery had always been one of the subjects

138 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

that haunted Euripides. We do not happen
to find in our remains of his work any definite
pronouncement that slavery is " contrary to
nature," as was held by most Greek philoso-
phers of the succeeding century. Probably
no practical man of the time could imagine
a large industrial city living without the
institution of slavery. But it is clear that
Euripides hates it. It corrupts a man ; it
makes the slave cowardly and untrustworthy.
Yet " many slaves are better men than their
masters " ; " many so-called free men are
slaves at heart." And again, in the style of
a Stoic, " A man without fear cannot be a
slave " (fr. 958 : cf. fr. 86, 511, etc.). Much
more important than such statements as
these, which are, according to his manner,
generally put in the mouth of a slave, are
the many instances of " sympathetic " and
courageous slaves, and the panegyrics on men
who have no slaves but work with their own
hands. These show the bent of the poet's
mind. It is not, however, till the year of the
Trojan Women that he takes the bold step
of actually making a slave his hero and filling
his play with discussions of slavery, including
a definite contest in arete between the slaves
and the masters. True, the slave turns out in

THE PALAMEDES 139

the end to be a prince. The herdsman whose
favourite bull the young nobles have seized
for a sacrifice, and who pursues and challenges
and eventually conquers them in strength and
skill as well as magnanimity, turns out to be
Alexander, son of Priam, who has been reared
by the slave herdsmen of Mt. Ida. By our
standards that is a pity. We should have
preferred him a real slave. But probably on
the Greek stage thus much of romance was
inevitable, and after all it had its connection
with real life. Many a Scythian and Thracian
and even Phrygian chief, like this Alexander,
must have stood for sale in Greek slave
markets.

The root idea of the Palamcdes, the righteous
man falsely slain, has a momentous place in
the history of Greek thought. It starts, of
course, as a bitterness or a paradox. Right-
eousness to the fifth century Athenian was
almost identical with social service, and, in
a healthy society with normal conditions,
the man who serves his city well will naturally
be honoured by his city. But then comes
the thought, itself fraught with the wisdofti
of the sophists : " What if the multitude is
bent on evil, or is blind ? There are many
men who are evil but seem righteous : what

140 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

if the man who is righteous seems to be evil ? "
Hence come the story of Aias in Pindar, and
Palamedes in this play, and the ideal Righteous
Man of Plato's Republic who " shall be
scourged, tortured, bound . . . and at
last impaled or crucified " {Rep. p. 362a).
The idea runs through the various develop-
ments of later Greek mysticism and attains
its culminating point in Christianity. It is
in full concord with the tone of the Trojan
Women.

We know little of the Palamedes. That
hero was the true wise man, and his enemy
was Odysseus, the evil man who " seemed
wise " and had the ear of the multitude.
Palamedes is falsely accused of treason,
condemned by the unanimous voice of his
judges and sent to death. Fragments tell
us of some friend, perhaps a prisoner, carving
message after message upon oar-blades
and throwing them into the sea that the
truth might be known ; and we have two
beautiful untranslatable lines uttered by
the Chorus : "Ye have slain, ye Greeks, ye
have slain the nightingale ; the winged-one
of the Muses who sought no man's pain."
Tradition saw in the words a reference to the
wise Protagoras, lately slandered to his death.

THE PLAYS OF 415 141

The consideration of these other plays of
the same trilogy strengthens the impression
that I receive already from the Trojan Women,
an impression of some deepening of experience,
some profound change that has worked into
the writer's soul. Other critics, and notably
Wilamowitz and Mr. Glover, have similarly
felt that this play marks a turning point. It
was not a change of front ; it was not sudden ;
it was not dependent on visions or super-
natural messages. It was the completion of
a long process of strong feeling and intense
thought, not the less sane because of its
decided element of mysticism. It probably
differed in many ways from the sudden and
conscious conversions which began the min-
istry of certain Greek pliilosophers, both Cynic
and Stoic, in the fourth and third centuries
before Christ. It differed still more from the
experience of Paul on the road to Damascus
or Augustine beneath the fig-tree. But it
does seem to me that in this tragedy the
author shows a greatly increased sense of
some reality that is behind appearances,
some loyalty higher than the claims of friends
or country, which supersedes as both false
and inadequate the current moral code and
the current theologies.

CHAPTER VI

AFTER THE " TROJAN WOMEN " : EURIPIDES*
LAST YEARS IN ATHENS : FROM THE
"IPHIGENIA" TO THE " ORESTES "

Critics have used various words to describe
the change of mood which followed the
Trojan Women. They speak of a period of
despair, pessimism, progressive bitterness,
Verzweiflung und W eltschmertz. But such
phrases seem to me misleading. In the first
place I do not think they describe quite
truly even the particular plays they are
meant to describe ; in the second, they do
not allow for the great variety which subsists
in the plays of this period. The mood of the
Trojan Women is not exactly pessimism or
despair ; and whatever it is, it does not
colour all the subsequent plays.

The plays after 415 fall into two main
divisions. First the works of pure fancy or
romance, in which the poet seems to turn
intentionally away from reality. Such are
the Ifhigenia in Tauris, the Helena and the
142

PLAYS AFTER 415 143

Andromeda ; they move among far seas and
strange adventures and they have happy
endings. Next there are the true tragedies,
close to life, ruthlessly probing the depths of
human nature ; not more acutely bitter
than such earlier works as the Medea and
Hecuba, but with a bitterness more profound
because it is comparatively free from indigna-
tion. The glory has fallen away and the
burning anger with it. The poor miserable
heroes and heroines . . . what else can
you expect of them ? Rage is no good ;
punishment worse than useless. The road to
healing lies elsewhere,

A good key to the first of these types of
play is to be seen in Aristophanes' comedy,
The Birds. The gayest, sweetest and most
irresponsible of all his plays, it was written
just after the news of the final disaster in
Sicily, when ruin stared Athens in the face.
And the two heroes of it, disgusted with the
ways of man, depart to live among the birds
and build, with their help, a splendid Cloud
City. In much the same spirit Euripides
must have written his Andromeda. He pro-
duced it in 412, the same year in which he was
invited by the anti-war government which
came into power after the news of the great

144 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

disaster to write the national epitaph on the
soldiers slain in Sicily. He wrote the epitaph
in the old severe untranslatable style of
Simonides : " These men won eight victories
over the Sjrracusans when the hand of God
lay even between both." In English it seems
cold ; it seems hardly poetry. But in
Greek it is like carved marble. Then, one
must imagine, he turned right away from
the present and spent his days with Andro-
meda. Only a few fragments of the Andro-
meda remain, but they are curiously beautiful ;
and the play as a whole seems to have been
the one unclouded love-romance that Euri-
pides ever wrote. It was fantastic, remote from
life, with its heroine chained to a cliff over
the blue sea awaiting the approach of the
sea-monster, and its hero, Perseus, on winged
sandals, appearing through the air to save
her. Yet the fragments have a wistful
ring : " O holy Night, how long is the path
of thy chariot ! " "By the Mercy that
dwelleth in the sea caves, cease, O Echo ;
let me weep my fill in peace." Or the
strange lines (fr. 135) :

Methinks it is the morrow, day by day,
That cows us, and the coming thing alway
Greater than things to-day or yesterday.

ANDROMEDA, IPHIGENIA 145

There was a story told, in later times, of a
tragedy-fever that fell on the folk of Abdera,
in Thrace, through this play, till in every street
you could see young men walking as though
in a dream, and murmuring to themselves the
speech beginning, " O Love, high monarch over
gods and men. ..." The Andromeda was hve
hundred years old when people told that story.
The Iphigenia in Tauris came one year
earlier. It is one of the most beautiful of the
extant plays, not really a tragedy in our sense
nor yet merely a romance. It begins in gloom
and rises to a sense of peril, to swift and dan-
gerous adventure, to joyful escape. So far it
is like romance. But it is tragic in the sin-
cerity of the character-drawing. Iphigenia,
especially, with her mixed longings for revenge
and for affection, her hatred of the Greece
that wronged her and her love of the Greece
that is her only home, her possibilities of
stony cruelty and her realities of swift self-
sacrifice, is a true child of her great and
accursed house. The plot is as follows : —
Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, who was
supposed to have been sacrificed by her father
at Aulis, was really saved by Artemis and is
now priestess to that goddess in the land of the
Taurians at the extremity of the Friendless

146 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Sea. The Taurians are savages -who kill
all strangers, and if ever a Greek shall land
in the wild place it will be her task to prepare
him for sacrifice. She lives with this terror
hanging over her, and the first Greek that
comes is her unkno\vn brother, Orestes. Their
recognition of one another is, perhaps, the
finest recognition- scene in all Tragedy ; and
with its sequels of stratagem and escape
forms a thrilling play, haunted not, like a
tragedy, by the shadow of death but rather
by the shadow of homesickness. The charac-
ters are Greeks in a far barbarian land, longing
for home or even for the Greek sea. The lyrics
are particularly fine, and most of them full of
sea-light and the clash of waters.

In the same year as the Andromeda came
another romantic play, the Helena. It is a
good deal like the Iphigcnia in structure, but
it is lighter, harder, and more artificial. The
romance of Euripides is never quite the easy
dreaming of lighter-hearted %\Titers. And the
Helena, in which he seems to have attempted
a work of mere fancy, is, if we understand
it rightly, a rather brilliant failure. Some
critics — quite mistakenly in my judgment —
have even argued that it is a parody. The
plot is based on a variant of the canonical

THE HELENA 147

legend about Helen, a variant generally asso-
ciated with the ancient lyric poet, Stesichorus.
Story tells that Stesichorus at one time lost
his eyesight and took it into his head that this
was a punishment laid on him by the goddess
Helen, because he had told the story of her
flight with Paris from her husband's house.
He wrote a recantation, based on another form
of the Helen-legend, in which Helen was borne
away by the God Hermes to Egypt and there
lived like a true wife till Menelaus came and
found her. The being that went with Paris to
Troy was only a phantom image of Helen,
contrived by the gods in order to bring about
the war, and so reduce the wickedness and
multitude of mankind. In Euripides' play
there is a wicked king of Egypt, who seeks to
marry Helen against her will and kills all
Greeks who land in his country. The war at
Troy is over, and Menelaus, beaten by storms
out of his way, is shipwrecked on the coast of
Egypt. He and Helen meet, recognize one
another, and by the help of the king's sister,
who has second sight, contrive to escape. It
is hard to say what exactly is wrong with the
Helena ; and it may only be that we moderns
do not know in what spirit to take it. But the
illusion is difficult to keep up and the work

148 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

seems cold. Reality has gone out of it. For
one thing, Helen, in her thorough process of
rehabilitation, has emerged that most insipid of
fancies, a perfectly beautiful and blameless
heroine with no character except love of her
husband, whom, by the way, she has not seen
for seventeen years.

Another large experiment of this time is the
Phoenissae, or Tyrian Women (410 ?). It is
the longest Greek tragedy in existence, and
covers the greatest stretch of story. Aeschy-
lus, we remember, had the habit of writing
true " trilogies " — three continuous dramas,
carrying on the same history. The Phoenissae
seems like an attempt to run the matter of a
whole trilogy into one play. It does not fall
into either of the divisions which I have
sketched above : it is neither a play of fancy
nor yet a realistic tragedy. But even if we
had no external tradition of its date we could
tell to what part of the author's life it belongs.
It is \vi-itten, as it is conceived, in the large and
heroic style ; but it shows in the regular
manner of this period a general clash of hatreds
and frantic ambitions and revenges and cruel
statesmanship standing out against the light
of a young man's heroism and a mother's
and a sister's love. It is like Euripides, too,

THE PHOENISSAE 149

that this beautiful mother should be Jocasta,
whose unknowing incest had made her an
abomination in the eyes of orthodox Greece.
The play tells the story of Thebes. The
sin of Oedipus and Jocasta is a thing of the
past ; Oedipus has blinded himself and
cursed his children, and they have in course of
time imprisoned him in the vaults of the
palace. Jocasta still lives. The sons Poly-
neices and Eteocles have agreed to reign by
turns ; Polyneices, the elder, has reigned his
year and gone abroad to Argos ; Eteocles
having once got the crown has refused to yield
it up. Polyneices comes with an Argive
army to lay siege to Thebes and win his rights
by war. The drama is developed in a series of
great pictures. We have first the Princess
Antigone with an old slave looking from the
wall out towards the enemy's camp, seeking
for a glimpse of her brother. Next comes a
man with face hidden and sword drawn steal-
ing through the gates, seeking for Jocasta. It
is Polyneices. The mother has induced her
sons to have one meeting before they fight.
The meeting reveals nothing but ambition and
mutual hatred. They agree to look for one
another on the field, and Polyneices goes.
There are consultations in the beleaguered

150 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

city. Creon, who is Jocasta's brother and a
sort of Prime Minister, advises the rash Eteo-
eles ; but the prophets must be consulted too,
that the gods may be favourable. The pro-
phet Tiresias — blind and old and jealous, as
so often in Greek tragedy — proclaims that the
only medicine to^save the state is for Creon's
son, Menoikeus, to be slain as a sin-offering
in the lair of the ancient Dragon whom Cad-
mus slew. Creon quickly refuses ; he dis-
misses the prophet and arranges for his son to
escape from Thebes and fly to the ends of
Greece. The boy feigns consent to the plan
of escape, but, as soon as his father has left
him, rushes enthusiastically up to a tower of
the city and flings himself over into the
Dragon's den. A messenger comes to Jocasta
with news of the battle. " Are her sons
slain ? " No ; both are alive and unhurt.
He tells his story of the Argive attack and its
repulse from every gate. — " But what of the
two brothers ? " — He must go now and will
bring more news later. — Jocasta sees he is
concealing something and compels him to
speak. The truth comes out ; the brothers
are preparing a single combat. With a
shriek the mother calls Antigone ; and the
two women, young and old, make their way

THE PHOENISSAE 151

through the army to tiy to separate the blood-
mad men. We learn from a second messenger
how the brothers have slain each other " in
a meadow of wild lotus," and Jocasta has
killed herself with one of their swords. Anti-
gone returns and to bring the news to her only
friend, the blind Oedipus. Creon by Eteocles'
charge takes over the government, he, too,
a broken-hearted man, but none the less ruth-
less ; he proclaims that Polyneices' body shall
lie unburied and that Oedipus, the source of
pollution, shall be cast out of the land ; Anti-
gone meantime shall marry Creon's son, Hae-
mon. Antigone, defies him. She will not
wed Haemon nor any of Creon's kin : her father
shall not be cast out to die, for she will go
with him and protect him. Polyneices shall
not lie unburied, for she herself will return by
stealth and bury him. There is still one human
love that Oedipus yearns for most ; that of the
sin-stained wife and mother who is lying dead
in the meadow of wild lotus. But meantime
he takes the hand of his daughter. Old man
and young maiden they go forth together,
away from the brutalities of human kind, to
the high mountains, to the holy inviolate places
on Kithairon where only the wild White
Women of Dionysus dance their mystic dances.

152 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

The Phoenissae stands half way between
the pure Romances and the tragedies of the
last period. Of these latter the clearest
type is the Electra (probably 413), a play which
before it was understood used to receive the
unstinted abuse of Critics, as " the meanest
of Greek tragedies," " the very worst of all
Euripides' plays." It deals with the moral
problem of the Blood-Feud, stated in its
sharpest terms.

Now the blood-feud, we must realize,
in any society where there is no public law
and no police, is a high moral duty. A man
commits an abominable crime and revels in
comfort on the proceeds ; his victim is dead,
and there is no law which will act automati-
cally. It becomes the duty of some one —
normally the heir or representative of the
dead man — to devote himself to the work of
justice, to forsake all business and pleasure
in life till the wrong has been righted and the
dead man avenged. A man who would let his
kinsman be murdered and then live on at his
ease rather than pursue the murderer, would
obviously be a poor false creature. Now
comes the problem. The strongest possible
claim is that of a father murdered ; the most
horrible act a Greek could conceive was for a

THE ELECTRA 153

man to slay his mother. Suppose a wife
murdered her husband, ought her son to slay
her ? The law of the blood-feud, as tradi-
tionally preached from the Temple of Apollo
at Delphi, answered, in spite of all repug-
nances, Yes.

The story had been treated before Euripides
by many poets, including Homer, Stesichorus,
Pindar, Aeschylus and possibly — though the
dates are not certain — Sophocles. Clytem-
nestra had with the help of her lover Aegisthus
murdered her husband Agamemnon ; her son
Orestes slays her in obedience to Apollo's
command, and his sister Electra aids him.
Aeschylus in his Libation-Bearers had dealt
with this theme on broad lines and with
gorgeous intensity of imagination. His
Orestes is carried to the deed on a great wave
of religious passion and goes mad as soon as
it is done. The deed as commanded by God
is right, but it is too much for human nature
to endure. In an ensuing play Orestes, after
long sufferings, is tried for the matricide and,
when the human judges are evenly divided,
acquitted by the divine voice of Athena.
Sophocles treats the subject very differently.
He makes a most brilliant play with extra-
ordinary clashes of emotion and moments of

154 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

tragic beauty. But, evidently of set purpose,
he makes the whole treatment hard and
archaic. There is no shrinking back, no ques-
tion of conscience at all. Clytemnestra is a
furious tyrant ; she beats Electra with her
fists, and Aegisthus does worse (1196, 517).
The climax of the play is not the mother-
murder but the killing of Aegisthus, which was
presumably the harder and more exciting job.
When Orestes and his friend Pylades come out
of the palace streaming with Clytemnestra's
blood their nerves are unshaken and the
Chorus is careful to say that they are not to be
in any way blamed (1423).

The spirit of Euripides is exactly the
opposite ; so much so indeed that most critics
feel clear that the two Electra plays are closely
related, and related in opposition. The one
is a deliberate protest against the other ;
unfortunately the play of Sophocles cannot be
dated and it is not clear from internal evidence
which play was wTitten first.

In the Electra of Euripides we find two main
qualities. First, there is psychological realism
of the subtlest kind. Secondly, there is a new
moral atmosphere. With a power of sym-
pathy and analysis unrivalled in ancient drama
he has imagined just what kind of people these

THE ELECTRA 155

children must have been, who would thus
through long years nurse the seeds of hatred
and at the end kill their mother. He studies
them all ; Electra, a mixture of heroism and
broken nerves ; a poisoned and haunted
woman, eating her heart in ceaseless broodings
of hate and love, both alike unsatisfied ; for
he suggests, somewhat cruelly, that she might
have lived contentedly enough, had she only
had a normal married life. The name in its
original Doric form suggested the meaning,
1 " Unmated.^^ Orestes is a youth bred in the
unwholesome dreams of exile, and now
swept away by his sister's stronger will ;
subject also, as Orestes always is in Greek
tragedy, to delusions and melancholy mad-
ness. The mother herself is not forgotten,
and a most piteous figure she shows, f this
sad, middle-aged woman, whose first words
are an apology ; controlling quickly her old
fires, anxious to be as little hated as possible ;
ready even to atone for her crime, if only there
were some safe way of atonement." Thus,
in the first place, Euripides has stripped the
old bloody deed of the heroic glamour that
surrounded it. His actors are not clear-
minded heroes moving straight to their pur-
pose. They are human creatures, erring,

156 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

broken by passion, mastered by their own
inhibitions and doubts and regrets. In the
second place he has no doubt at all about the
ethics of the mother-murder. It was an
abomination, and the god who ordained it — •
if any did — was a power of darkness.

After the deed the two murderers come
forth as in Sophocles. But this time they are
not triumphant and the Chorus does not hail
them as having done right. They reel from
the door, " red-garmented and ghastly " and
break into a long agony of remorse. The
Chorus share their horror. Electra's guilt
is the greater since she drove her brother td
the deed against his will ; even while they love
her, they can not quite forget that, though they
feel that now at last, by this anguish, her heart
may be " made clean within." The play
ends with an appearance of the gods. The
Heavenly Horsemen, Castor and Polydeuces,
who were kinsmen of the dead, appear on a
cloud, and speak in judgement and comfort.
With a definiteness rare in Euripides they
pronounce the deed of vengeance to be evil ;

" And Phoebus, Phoebus . . . Nay :
He is my lord, therefore I hold my peace.
But though in Hght he dwell, not light was this
He showed to thee, but darkness."

THE ELECTRA 157

Another note is also struck, that of pity for
the suffering of humanity. Orestes and
Electra, condemned to part, break, as they bid
one another farewell, into a great cry, and the
gods, hearing it, are shaken :

Alas ! what would ye ? For that cry
Ourselves and all the sons of heaven
Have pity ; yea, our peace is riven

By the strange pain of these that die.
* * « * «

But hark ! The far Sicilian sea
Calls, and a noise of men and ships
That labour sunken to the lips

In bitter billows ; forth go we

With saving.

They speak such words of comfort and groping
wisdom as they can find — no one has ever
claimed that they are omniscient — and depart
upon their own eternal task, which is not to
punish but to save.

The appearance of the gods in the Electra
is so beautiful that no critics have yet tried to
explain it away as nonsense ; and the lesson
of it so clear that its meaning is seldom
denied. But I find just the same lesson in
the final scene of the Orestes, which is com-
monly taken as the very worst instance of
Euripides' habit of closing with a " God from
the machine."

158 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

The Orestes (408 B.C.) deals with the fate
of Orestes some days after his mother's murder.
He is mad and sick ; his sister is nursing him
with devotion. The people have risen against
them and they are helcj prisoners in the
palace till an assembly shall try them for
murder and pronounce their fate. Meantime
Menelaus — Orestes' uncle and king of Sparta
— has arrived at the harbour with his wife
Helen and their daughter Hermione. He has
sent on his wife and daughter to the palace
and is expected hourly himself. He is
Agamemnon's brother ; he has with him an
army of Trojan veterans ; he can surely be
counted on to cow the Argive populace and
save his dead brother's son. All our hopes
hang on Menelaus, and when at last he comes
he proves false. He would like to help ; but it
would be wrong for him, a foreigner, to dictate
to the Argives ; and he has only a very small
force with him. However, he will reason with
Orestes' enemies. One does not forget that,
if Argos is left without a king, Menelaus will
normally inherit. The sick man blazes into
rage against him and Menelaus becomes an
open enemy. Exasperation follows on exas-
peration : Orestes' friend Pylades breaks
through the guards and enters the palace to

THE ORESTES 159

share the prisoners' fate. The assembly hears
and at length condemns them. They are given
a day in which to die as they best please. Like
scorpions surrounded by fire, the three,
Orestes, Electra and Pylades, begin to strike
blindly. A brilliant idea ! They can kill
Helen : that will punish Menelaus, and Helen
deserves many deaths. Better still, kill Helen
and then capture Hermione ! Hold a dagger
at her throat and then bargain with Menelaus
for help even at the last hour ! Murder his
wife and then force him to help ! Splendid !
The madness of Orestes infects the whole play.
Helen escapes, being half-divine ; but they
catch Hermione, who, as a matter of fact,
has always been kind to them. Menelaus,
who has heard news from an escaping slave,
rushes up to save Helen, but he finds no sign
of her ; he finds only the palace barred and
the madman on the roof, shrieking derision
and holding the knife at his daughter's throat.
There is a brief wild attempt at bargaining ;
then hate in Menelaus overcomes fear. He
rejects all terms. Orestes' party sets fire to
the palace ; and Menelaus at the head of his
soldiers beats blindly at the barred gate.
" The fire of Hell," to use Dr. Verrall's phrase,
has been let loose ; rage, hatred, revenge, all

160 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

blazing to the point of madness ; what more
can befall ?

What does befall is strange and daring.
An entry of a god not in gentleness, not with
any preparation or introduction, but sudden
and terrific, striking all beholders into a trance
from which they awaken changed men. The
point has not been generally observed, though
it is, I think, clear.

At Apollo's first sudden cry " Menelaus, be
still ! " (line 1625) we know that Orestes is
supporting Hermione in one arm while with
the other hand he is holding the knife at
her throat. He is in exactly the same position
at line 1653 ; he only moves from it at 1671.
That is the conduct of a man in a trance,
suddenly, as it were, struck rigid. And we
shall find that the words spoken by both Mene-
laus and Orestes when Apollo has finished his
charge, are like nothing but the words of men
emerging from a trance ; a trance, too, of some
supernatural kind, like that for instance which
falls on the raging world in Mr. Wells's book.
In the Days of the Comet. Here, too, a raging
world wakes to find itself at peace and its past
hatreds unintelligible. And the first thought
that comes to the surface is, in each case, the
great guiding preoccupation of each man's

END OF THE ORESTES 161

life ; with Menelaus it is Helen ; with Orestes
the oracle that made him sin. Nay more ;
when Orestes wakens, half-conscious, to find
Hermione lying in his arms, his natural
movement, as experiments on hypnotized
persons have shown, is to accept the sugges-
tion and draw her to him in love. Greek
legend knew well that, as a matter of history,
Hermione became Orestes' bride. There is
daring, perhaps excessive daring, in making it
occur this way ; but the psychology of some-
thing like hypnotism had a fascination for
both Aeschylus and Euripides. For the rest,
Apollo has spoken the word of forgiveness and
reconciliation. He concludes :

Depart now, each upon his destined way,
Your hates dead and forgotten.
Men. I obey.

Or. I too ; mine heart is as a wine of peace

Poured with the past and thy dark mysteries.
Apollo Go now your ways : and without cease
Give honour in your hearts to one.
Of spirits all beneath the sun
Most beautiful ; her name is Peace.

I rise with Helen Zeus-ward, past

The orb of many a shining star ;

Where Heracles and Hebe are
And Hera, she shall reign at last.

162 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

A goddess in men's prayers to be
For ever, with her Brethren twain
Enthroned, a great help in pain

And queen of the eternal sea.

"Helen a goddess!" say some critics; "the
notion is impossible. We have seen her in
this same play, a heartless ordinary woman."
Yet I think Euripides was serious enough.
I do not say he believed either this or any
other particular bit of the mythology. But
he was writing seriously and aiming at beauty,
not at satire. All legend said that Helen
was made a goddess ; and Euripides was
always curiously haunted by the thought of
Helen and by the mysterious and deadly
power of mere superlative beauty. As Apollo
had said to Menelaus (1638) :

Thy bride shall be another : none may know
Her. For the Gods, to work much death and woe,
Devised this loveliness all dreams above,
That men in Greece and Troy for thirst thereof
Should strive and die, and so the old Earth win
Peace from mankind's great multitude and sin.

The superlative beauty may probably
enough be found in company with heartless-
ness and treachery ; but cannot these things
be purged away, like the hates of Menelaus
and Orestes, and the pure beauty remain a
thing to pray to and be helped by, much as the

LAST YEARS IN ATHENS 163

old sagas pretend ? There is here again the
touch of mysticism.

But however it be about Helen, or even about
the above explanation in detail of the last
scene of the Orestes, it is clear that both the
most characteristic plays of the so-called
period of gloom end with a strong, almost a
mystically strong, note of peace and recon-
ciliation. This note occurs, though with less
intensity, at the end of other late plays, such
as the Iphigenia in Tauris and the Helena ;
and, though without a god, in the Phoenissae.
It does not occur at all in the early plays.
The Medea and Hecuba end in pure hate ; the
Hippolytus ends in wonderful beauty and a
reconciliation between the hero and his father,
who are natural friends, but it keeps up the
feud of Aphrodite and Artemis and contains a
strange threat of vengeance (v. 1420 ff.) The
lovely Thetis of the Andromache brings com-
fort and rest but preaches no forgiveness ; on
the contrary the body of Pyrrhus is to be
buried at Delphi as an eternal reproach.
Euripides all through his life was occupied with
the study of revenge. It was a time, as
Thucydides tells us, when " men tried to
surpass all the record of previous times in the
ingenuity of their enterprises and the enormity

164 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

of their revenges." Euripides seems first to
have been almost fascinated by the enormous
revenges, at least when they were the work of
people who had suffered enormous wTong.
He seems, in plays like the Medea, to be saying :
" If you goad people beyond endurance, this is
the sort of thing you must expect them to do
. . . and serve you right ! " In the plays
after 415 the emphasis has rather changed :
" You must expect to be wronged, and revenge
will do good to nobody. Seek peace and
forgive one another."

CHAPTER VII

MACEDONIA: THE " IPHIGENIA IN AULIS " ;
THE "BACCHAE"

Thus we come round to the figure from which
we started, the old sad man with the long
beard, who seldom laughed and was not easy
to speak to; who sat for long hours in his
seaward cave on Salamis, meditating and
perhaps writing one could not tell what, except
indeed that it was " something great and
high." It was natural that he should be sad.
His dreams were overthrown ; his City, his
Beloved, had turned worse than false. Public
life was in every way tenfold more intimate
and important to an ancient Greek than it is
to us moderns who seldom eat a mutton-
chop the less when our worst political enemies
pass their most detested bills. And Athens
had not only been false to her ideals ; she had
sinned for the sake of success and had then
failed. And her failure probably made the
daily life of her citizens a thing of anxiety
165

166 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

and discomfort. You were never quite sure
of your daily food. You were never quite
safe from a triumphant raid of the enemy.
And the habitual bodily discomfort which is
the central fact of old age must have had for
Euripides much to aggravate and little to
soften it.

It was natural, too, that his people should
hate him. Nations at war do not easily for-
give those who denounce their wars as unjust ;
when the war, in spite of all heroism, goes
against them, their resentment is all the
bitterer. There is, of course, not the ghost of
a suggestion in Euripides that he thought
the Spartans right or that he wished Athens
to be defeated ; far from it. But the Athenian
public was not in a mood for subtle distinc-
tions, and his air of disapproval was enough.
Besides, thought the meaner among them,
the man was a known blasphemer. He had
been the friend of the sophists ; he had
denied the gods; worse, he had denounced
the doings of the gods as evil. These
misfortunes that hurtled round the City's
head must surely be sent for some good
reason. Very likely just because the City,
corrupted by the " charm of words," had
allowed such wicked sophists to live ? He

LAST YEARS IN ATHENS 167

was at one time prosecuted for impiety ; we
do not know the date or the details, but he
seems to have been acquitted. The day of
Socrates had not yet come. But other charges
remained. He was a wicked old man : he
had preached dreadful things about women ;
he had defended in his plays adulteresses and
perjurers and workers of incest. What must
his personal life be, if these were his principles ?
No wonder that he lived so secretly, he and
his wife and that dark-skinned secretary,
Cephisophon I

Perhaps he was a miser and had secret
stores of wealth ? We hear of an action
brought against him on these lines. A
certain Hygiainon was selected, as a rich
man, to perform some " Liturgy " or public
service at his own cost, and he claimed that
Euripides was richer and should be made to
do it instead. We do not know the result
of the trial ; we only know that the plaintiff
attempted to create prejudice against Euri-
pides by quoting the line of the Hippolyius
(see above p. 88) which was supposed to
defend perjury.

These things were annoyances enough.
But there must have been some darkei? cloud
that fell over Euripides' life at this time.

168 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

For we are not only told in the Lives that
" The Athenians bore a grudge against him,"
and that "he lost patience with the ill-will
of his fellow-citizens," but one of our earliest
witnesses, Philodemus, says that when he
left Athens he did so " in grief, because almost
all in Athens were rejoicing over him." The
word used means, like the German " Schaden-
freude," rejoicing at another's injury. So
there must have been some injury for them
to rejoice at.

The old Sat>Tus tradition, with its tone
of scandal and misunderstanding, says that
his wife was false to him, but the story will
not bear historical criticism. And it would
not be safe to use so rotten a foundation to
build any theory upon, however likely it may
be in itself that a man of this kind should
meet with domestic unhappiness in one or
other of its many forms. In thinking of
Euripides one is constantly reminded of
Tolstoy. And there are many ways of
making husbands miserable besides merely
betraying them.

WTiatever the cause, shortly after the
production of the Orestes in 408 the old poet's
endurance snapped, and, at the age appar-
ently of seventy-six, he struck off into volun-

DEPARTURE FROM ATHENS 169

tary exile. It is only one instance among
many of his extraordinary vital force. The
language of the ancient Life is unfortunately
confused just here, but it seems to say that
he went first to Magnesia, with which city
he had had relations in earlier days. He had
been granted some civic honours there, and
had acted as Proxenus — a kind of consul
or general protector — for Magnesians in
Athens. There was more than one town
of the name. But the one meant is probably
a large town in the Maeander Valley, not far
from Ephesus. It lay in Persian territory,
but had been granted by Artaxerxes to the
great Themistocles as a gift, and was still
ruled, subject to the Persian king, by The-
mistocles' descendants. Doubtless it was
to them that the poet went. We know
nothing more, except that he did not stay
long in Magnesia, but went on to another
place where barbarians or semi-barbarians
were ruled by a Greek dynasty.

The king of Macedon, Archelaus, an able
despot who was now laying the seeds of the
great kingdom which, before the lapse of a
century, was to produce Philip and Alexander
the Great, had always an eye for men of
genius who might be attracted to his court.

170 EURIPIDES -\ND HIS AGE

He had inWted Euripides before and now
renewed his invitation. Other men of " wis-
dom " were already with Archelaus. Agathon,
the tragic poet ; Timotheus, the now famous
musician whom Euripides had once saved,
so the story ran, from suicide ; 2^uxis, the
greatest painter of the time ; and perhaps
also Thucydides. the historian. It would
not be like living among barbarians or even
uncultivated Greeks. And it is likely enough
that the old man hankered for the ease and
comfort, for the atmosphere of daOy " spoil-
ing," which the royal patron was hkely to
provide for a hon of such special rarity-. For
it must have been a Uttle before this time
that Greece was ringing with a tale of the
value set on Euripides in distant and hostile
Sicily. Seven thousand Athenians had been
made slaves in S\Tacuse after the failure of the
expedition ; and the stor\- now came that some
of them had been actually granted their free-
dom because they were able to recite speeches
and choruses of Euripides. Apparently there
was no book trade between the warring cities ;
and the S\Tacusans could only leam the great
poems by word of mouth. Sicily and Mace-
donia were proud to show that they appreciated
the highest poetr\- better than Athens did.

MACEDONIA 171

It was a curious haven that Euripides
found. In many ways ^facedonia must have
been Hke a great fragment of that Homeric
or heroic age from which he had drawn most
of his stories. The scenery was all on the
grand scale. There were greater plains and
forests and rivers, wilder and higher mountain
ranges than in the rest of Greece. And the
people, though ruled by a d\aiasty of Greek
descent and struggling up towards Hellenism,
was still tribal, militar}^ and barbaric. A
century later we hear of the " old " Macedonian
customs. A young man might not dine at
the men's tables till he had killed his first wild
boar. He had to wear a leathern halter
round his waist until he had killed his first
man. We hear that when some Macedonian
at the court made a rude remark to Euripides
the King straightway handed him over to the
Athenian to be scourged, a well-meant but
embarrassing intervention. And the story told
of Euripides' o's\ti death, if m^-thical, is very
likely faithful in its local colour. Tliere was
a village in Macedonia where some Thracians
had once settled and their descendants still
lived. One of the king's big Molossian hounds
once strayed into this place, and the natives
promptly killed and ate her. The king fined

172 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

the village a talent, which was more than it
could possibly pay, and some dreadful fate
might have overtaken the dog-eaters had not
Euripides interceded and begged them off.
And not long afterwards, the story continues,
Archelaus was preparing a hunt, and the
hungry hounds were set loose. And it so
happened that Euripides was sitting alone
in a wood outside the city, and the hounds fell
on him and tore him to pieces. And behold,
these hounds proved to be the children of that
Molossian who, through the poet's inter-
ference, had died unavenged ! The story can
hardly be true, or we should hear some echo
of it in Aristophanes' Frogs ; but no doubt
it was the kind of fate that a lonely man
might well meet in Macedonia when the
king's hounds were astir.

How the poet really died we do not know.
We know that he left Athens after the spring
of 408, and that he was dead some time before
the production of the Frogs in January, 405.
And there is reason to believe the story given
in the Life that when Sophocles in the previous
year was introducing his Chorus in the " Pro-
agon," or Preliminary Appearance, he brought
them on without the customary garlands in
mourning for his great rival's death. The

MACEDONIA 178

news, therefore, must have reached Athens by
the end of March, 406. Euripides had hved
only some eighteen months in Macedon.

The time was not long but it was momentous.
After his death three plays were found, Iphi-
genia in Aulis, Alcmaeon and Bacchae, suffi-
ciently finished to be put on the stage together
by his third son, the Younger Euripides. Two
of them are still extant, and one, the Bacchae,
remains for all time to testify to the extra-
ordinary return of youth which came to the
old poet in his last year. A " lightning before
death " if ever there was one !

But let us take first the Iphigenia in Aulis.
It is a play full of problems. We can make
out that it was seriously incomplete at the
poet's death and was finished by another hand,
presumably that of its producer. Unfor-
tunately we do not possess even that version
in a complete form. For the archetype of
our MSS. was at some time mutilated, and the
present end of the play is a patent forgery.
But if we allow for these defects, the Iphi-
genia in Aulis is a unique and most interesting
example of a particular moment in the history
of Greek drama. It shows the turning-point
between the old fifth century tragedy and the
so-called New Comedy which, in the hands of

174 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Menander, Philemon and others, dominated
the stage of the fourth and third centuries.

Euripides had united two tendencies : on
the one hand he had moved towards freedom
in metre, realism in character-drawing, variety
and adventure in the realm of plot ; on the
other he had strongly maintained the formal
and musical character of the old Dionysiac
ritual, making full use of such conventions
as the Prologue, the Epiphany, the traditional
tragic diction, and above all the Chorus.
The New Comedy dropped the chorus, brought
the diction close to real life, broke up the stiff
forms and revelled in romance, variety, and
adventure. Its characters ceased to be legend-
ary Kings and Queens ; they became fictional
characters from ordinary city life.

The Iphigema in Aulis shows an unfinished
Euripidean tragedy, much in the manner of
the Orestes, completed by a man of some
genius whose true ideals were those of mod-
ernity and the New Comedy. Two openings
of the play are preserved. One is the old
stiff Euripidean prologue ; the other a fine
and vigorous scene of lyric dialogue, which
must have suited the taste of the time far
better, just as it suits our own. We have
early in the play a Messenger ; but instead of

THE IPHIGENIA IN AULIS 175

his entrance being formally prepared and
announced in the Euripidean manner, he
bursts on to the stage interrupting a speaker
in the middle of a verse and the middle of a
sentence. There are also peculiarities of
metre, such as the elision of -ai, which are
unheard of in tragic dialogue but regular in
the more conversational style of the New-
Comedy.

The plot runs thus. — It is night in the Greek
camp at Aulis ; Agamemnon calls an Old
Slave outside his tent and gives him secretly
a letter to carry to Clytemnestra. She is at
home, and has been directed in previous
letters to send her daughter, Iphigenia, to
Aulis to be wedded to Achilles. This letter
simply bids her not send the girl. — The Old
Slave is bewildered ; " What does it mean ? "
It means that the marriage with Achilles was
a blind. Achilles knew nothing of it. It was
a plot to get Iphigenia to the camp and there
slaughter her as a sacrifice for the safe passage
of the fleet. So Calchas, the priest, had
commanded and he was backed by Odysseus
and Menelaus. Agamemnon had been forced
into compliance, and is now resolved to go
back upon his word. The Old Slave goes.
Presently comes the entrance of the Chorus,

176 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

women of Aulis who are dazzled and thrilled
by the spectacle of the great army and the
men who are prepared to die overseas for the
honour of Hellas. But we hear a scuffle
outside, and the Old Slave returns pursued
by Menelaus, who seizes the letter. He calls
for help. Agamemnon comes out and com-
mands Menelaus to give the letter back. A
violent scene ensues between the brothers,
each telling the other home truths. Mene-
laus's besotted love for his false wife, his reck-
less selfishness and cruelty ; Agamemnon's
consuming ambition, his falseness and weak-
ness, his wish to run with the hare and hunt
with the hounds, are all laid bare in a masterly
quarrel scene. At last Agamemnon flatly
refuses to give his daughter : " Let the army
break up, let Menelaus go without his accursed
wife, and the barbarians laugh as loudly as
they will ! Agamemnon will not have his
child slain and his own heart broken to please
any one." " Is that so ? " says Menelaus :
" Then I go straight to. . . ." He is
interrupted by a Messenger who announces
that Iphigenia has come and her mother,
Clytemnestra, is with her. Agamemnon sends
them a formal message of welcome ; dismisses
the Messenger, and then bursts into tears.

THE IPHIGENIA IN AULIS 177

This shakes Menelaus ; he hesitates ; then
abruptly says, " I cannot force 5^011. Save
the girl as best you can." But now it is too
late. The army knows that the Queen has
come ; Calchas and Odysseus know. Aga-
memnon has lost the power of action. The
next scene is between the mother, father and
daughter ; Clytemnestra, full of questions
about the marriage, Iphigenia full of excite-
ment and shy tenderness, which expresses
itself in special affectionateness towards her
father. He tries to persuade Clytemnestra
to go home and leave the child with him ;
she is perplexed and flatly refuses to go.

The next scene is close to comedy, though
comedy of a poignant kind. Achilles, knowing
naught of all these plots and counter-plots,
comes to tell the General that his men — the
Myrmidons — are impatient and want to sail
for Troy at once. At the door of the tent he
meets Clytemnestra, who greets him with
effusive pleasure and speaks of " the marriage
that is about to unite them." The young
soldier is shy, horrified, anxious to run away
from this strange lady who is so more than
friendly, when suddenly a whisper through
the half-closed door startles them. " Is the
coast clear ? Yes ? " — then the whisperer

178 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

will come. It is the Old Slave, who can bear it
no more but reveals the whole horrible plot ;
Iphigenia is to be slaughtered by the priests ;
the marriage with Achilles was a bait for
deceiving Clytemnestra. — Clytemnestra is
thunderstruck, Achilles furious with rage.
" He is dishonoured ; he is made a fool of.
What sort of man do they take him for, to
use his name thus without his authority ?
Why could not they ask his consent ? They
could sacrifice a dozen girls for all he cares,
and he would not have stood in the way. But
now they have dishonoured him, and he will
forbid the sacrifice. . . ." Clytemnestra,
who has watched like a dro^vning woman to
see which way the youth's fierce vanity would
leap, throws herself at his feet in gratitude ;
" Shall her daughter, also, come and embrace
his knees ? " No ; Achilles does not want any
woman to kneel to him. Let the women try
to change Agamemnon's mind ; if they can do
it, all is well. If not, Achilles will fight to the
last to save the girl.

There follows the inevitable scene in which
mother and daughter — the latter inarticulate
with tears — convict the father and appeal to
him. A fine scene it is, in which each character
comes out clear, and through the still young

THE IPHIGENIA IN AULIS 179

and obedient Clytemnestra one descries the
shadow of the great murderess to be.
Agamemnon is broken but helpless. It is
too late to go back.

The two women are left weeping at the door
of the tent, when they hear a sound of tumult.
It is Achilles, and men behind stoning him.
Iphigenia's first thought is to fly ; she dare
not look Achilles in the face. Yet she stays.
Achilles enters. The whole truth has come
out ; the army clamours for the sacrifice and
is furious against him. . . . " Will not
his own splendid Myrmidons protect him ? "
— " It is they who were the first to stone him !
Nevertheless he will fight. He has his arms.
Clytemnestra must fight too ; cling to her
daughter by main force when they come, as
they presently will, to drag her to the altar.
. . ." " Stay !" says Iphigenia : "Achilles
must not die for her sake. What is her
miserable life compared with his ? One man
who can fight for Hellas is worth ten thousand
women, who can do nothing. Besides, she
has been thinking it over ; she has seen the
great gathered army, ready to fight and die
for a cause, and, like the Chorus, has fallen
under the spell of it. She realizes that it
lies with her, a weak girl, to help them to

180 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

victory. All great Hellas is looking to her ;
and she is proud and glad to give her life for
Hellas." — It is a beautiful and simple speech.
And the pride of Achilles withers up before it.
In a new tone he answers ; " God would indeed
have made him blessed if he had won her for
his wife. As it is, Iphigenia is right. . . ."
Yet he offers still to fight for her and save her.
She does not know what death is ; and he
loves her. — She answers that her mind is
made up. " Do not die for me, but leave me
to save Hellas, if I can." Achilles yields.
Still he will go and stand beside the altar,
armed ; if at the last moment she calls to him,
he is ready. So he goes. The mother and
daughter bid one another a last farewell, and
with a song of triumph Iphigenia, escorted by
her maidens, goes forth to meet the slaughter-
ers. . . . Here the authentic part of our
play begins to give^out. There are fragments
of a messenger's speech afterwards, and it is
likely on the whole that Artemis saved the
victim, as is assumed in the other Iphigenia
play.

The Iphigenia in Aulis, in spite of its good
plot, is not really one of Euripides' finest
works ; yet, if nothing else of his were pre-
served, it would be enough to mark him out

" IPHIGENIA " : " THE BACCHAE " 181

as a tremendous power in the development
of Greek literature. Readers who enjoy
drama but have never quite accustomed
themselves to the stately conventions of fifth
century tragedy very often like it better than
any other Greek play. It is curiously different
from its twin sister the Bacchae.

A reader of the Bacchae who looks back at
the ritual sequence described above (p. 64) will
be startled to find how close this drama,
apparently so wild and imaginative, has kept
to the ancient rite. The regular year-
sequence is just clothed in sufficient myth
to make it a story. The daemon must have his
enemy who is like himself ; then we must
have the Contest, the Tearing Asunder, the
Messenger, the Lamentation mixed with Joy-
cries, the Discovery of the scattered members
• — and by a spri^of-jiQublingJthe Discovery of
the true God — and the Epiphany of the
Daemon in glory. All are there in the Bacchae.
The god Dionysus, accompanied by his Wild
Women, comes to his own land and is rejected
by his kinsman, King Pentheus, and by the
women of the royal house. The god sends
his divine madness on the women. The wise
Elders of the tribe warn the king ; but Pen-
theus first binds and imprisons the god ;

182 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

then yielding gradually to the di\'ine power,
agrees to go disguised in woman's garb to
watch the secret worship of the Maenads on
Mt. Kithairon. He goes, is discovered by
the Maenads and torn in fragments. His
mother, Agave, returns in triumph dancing
with her son's head, which, in her madness, she
takes for a lion's. There is Lamentation
mixed with mad Rejoicing. The scattered
body is recovered ; Agave is restored to her
right mind and to misery ; the god appears
in majesty and pronounces doom on all who
have rejected him. The mortals go forth
to their dooms, still faithful, still loving one
another. The ghastly and triumphant god
ascends into heaven. The whole scheme of the
play is given by the ancient ritual. It is the
original subject of Attic tragedy treated once
more, as doubtless it had already been treated
by all or almost all the other tragedians.

But we can go further. We have enough
fragments and quotations from the Aeschylean
plays on this subject — especially the Lycurgus
trilogy — to see that all kinds of small details
which seemed like invention, and rather fan-
tastic invention, on the part of Euripides,
are taken straight from Aeschylus or the ritual
or both. The timbrels, the fawnskin, the ivy.

THE BACCHAE 183

the sacred pine, the god taking the forms of
Bull and Lion and Snake ; the dances on the
mountain at dawn ; the Old Men who are by
the power of the god made young again ; the
god represented as beardless and like a woman ;
the god imprisoned and escaping ; the earth-
quake that wrecks Pentheus' palace ; the
victim Pentheus disguised as a woman ; all
these and more can be shoAvn to be in the ritual
and nearly all are in the extant fragments of
Aeschylus. Even variants of the story which
have been used by previous poets have some-
how a place found for them. There was, for
instance, a variant which made Pentheus lead
an army against the Wild Women ; in the
Bacchae this plan is not used, but Pentheus
is made to think of it and say he will perhaps
follow it, and Dionysus is made to say what
will happen if he does. {Aesch. Bum. 25 f. ;
Bac. 50 ff. 809, 845.) There never was a great
play so steeped in tradition as the Bacchae.

The Iphigema was all invention, construc-
tion, brilliant psychology ; it was a play of
new plot and new characters. The Bacchae
takes an old fixed plot, and fixed formal char-
acters : Dionysus, Pentheus, Cadmus, Teire-
sias, they are characters that hardly need
proper names. One might just as well call

184 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

them — The God, the Young King, the Old
King, the Prophet ; and as for Agave, our
MSS. do as a rule simply call her " Woman."
The IpJdgema is full of informalities, broken
metres, interruptions. Its Chorus hardly
matters to the plot and has little to sing. The
Bacchae is the most formal Greek play known
to us ; its Chorus is its very soul and its lyric
songs are as long as they are magnificent.
For the curious thing is that in this extreme
of formality and faithfulness to archaic tradi-
tion Euripides has found both his greatest
originality and his most perfect freedom.

He is re-telling an old story ; but he is not
merely doing that. In the Bacchae almost
every reader feels that there is something
more than a story. There is a meaning, or
there is at least a riddle. And we must try
in some degree to understand it. Now, in
order to keep our heads cool, it is first necessary
to remember clearly two things. The Bacchae
is not free invention ; it is tradition. And
it is not free personal expression, it is drama.
The poet cannot simply and without a veil
state his own views ; he can only let his own
personality shine through the dim curtain in
front of which his puppets act their traditional
parts and utter their appropriate sentiments

THE BACCHAE 185

Thus it is doubly elusive. And therein no
doubt lay its charm to the poet. He had a
vehicle into which he could pour many of
those " vaguer faiths and aspirations which
a man feels haunting him and calling to him,
but which he cannot state in plain language
or uphold with a full acceptance of responsi-
bility." But our difficulties are even greater
than this. The personal meaning of a drama
of this sort is not only elusive ; it is almost
certain to be inconsistent with itself or at least
incomplete. For one only feels its presence
strongly when in some way it clashes with the
smooth flow of the story.

Let us imagine a great free-minded modern
poet — say Swinburne or Morris or Victor
Hugo, all of whom did such things — making
for some local anniversary a rhymed play
in the style of the old Mysteries on some legend
of a mediaeval saint. The saint, let us
suppose, is very meek and is cruelly perse-
cuted by a wicked emperor, whom he threatens
with hell fire ; and at the end let us have the
emperor in the midst of that fire and the saint
in glory saying, " What did I tell you ? "
And let us suppose that the play in its course
gives splendid opportunities for solemn Latin
hymns, such as Swinburne and Hugo de-

186 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

lighted in. We should probably have a result
something like the Bacchae.

For one thing, in such a play one would not
be troubled by little flaAvs and anachronisms
and inconsistencies. One would not be
shocked to hear St. Thomas speaking about
Charlemagne, or to find the Mouth of Hell
situated in the same street as the emperor's
lodging. Just so we need not be shocked in
the Bacchae to find that, though the god
is supposed to be appearing for the first time
in Thebes, his followers appeal to " immemorial
custom " as the chief ground for their wor-
ship (201, 331, 370 : cf. Aesch. fr. 22 ?),
nor to observe that the Chorus habitually
makes loud professions of faith under the very
nose of the tyrant without his ever attending
to them (263 f., 328 f., 775 f.). Nor even that
the traditional earthquake which destroys the
palace causes a good deal of trouble in the
thinking out. It had to be there ; it was an
integral part of the story in Aeschylus (fr. 58),
and in all probability before him. One may
suppose that the Greek stage carpenter was
capable of some symbolic crash which served
its purpose. The language used is carefully
indefinite. It suggests that the whole palace is
destroyed, but leaves a spectator free, if he so

THE BACCHAE 187

chooses, to suppose that it is only the actual
prison of Dionysus, which is " off-stage "
and unseen. In any case the ruins are not
allowed to litter the stage and, once over,
the earthquake is never noticed or mentioned
again.

Again, such a play would involve a bewil-
dering shift of sympathy, just as the Bacchae
does. At first M^e should be all for the saint
and against the tyrant ; the persecuted
monks with their hymns of faith and endur-
ance would stir our souls. Then, when the
tables were turned and the oppressors were
seen writhing in Hell, we should feel that,
at their worst, they did not quite deserve
that : we should even begin to surmise that
perhaps, with all their faults, they were not
really as horrible as the saint himself, and
reflect inwardly what a barbarous thing, after
all, this mediaeval religion was.

This bewildering shift of sympathy is com-
mon in Euripides. We have had it before
in such plays as the Medea and Hecuba :
oppression generates revenge, and the revenge
becomes more horrible than the original
oppression. In these plays the poet offers
no solution. He gives us only the bitterness
of life and the unspoken " tears that are in

188 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

things." The first serious attempt at a
solution comes in the Electra and Orestes.

In a Mystery-play such as we have imagined,
re-told by a great modem poet, the interest
and meaning would hardly lie in the main
plot. They would lie in something which the
poet himself contributed. We might, for
instance, find that he had poured all his soul
into the Latin hymns, or into the spectacle
of the saint, alone and unterrified, defying all
the threats and all the temptations which the
Emperor can bring to bear upon him. There
might thus be a glorification of that mystic
rejection of the world which lies at the heart
of mediaeval monasticism, without the poet
for a moment committing himself to a belief in
monasticism or an acceptance of the Catholic
Church.

We have in the Bacchae — it seems to me
impossible to deny it — a heartfelt glorification
of " Dionysus." No doubt it is Dionysus
in some private sense of the poet's own ;
something opposed to " the world " ; some
spirit of the wild woods and the sunrise, of
inspiration and untrammelled life. The pre-
sentation is not consistent, however magical
the poetry. At one moment we have the
Bacchantes raving for revenge, at the next

THE BACCHAE 189

they are uttering the dreams of some gentle
and musing philosopher. A deliberate con-
trast seems to be made in each Chorus between
the strophe and the antistrophe. It is not
consistent ; though it is likely enough that,
if one had taxed Euripides with the contra-
diction, he might have had some answer that
would surprise us. His first defence, of course,
would be a simple one ; it is not the play-
wright's business to have any views at all ; he
is only re-telling a traditional story and
trying to tell it right. But he might also
venture outside his defences and answer more
frankly : " This spirit that I call Dionysus,
this magic of inspiration and joy, is it not as
a matter of fact the great wrecker of men's
lives ? While life seems a decent grey to
you all over, you are safe and likely to be
prosperous ; when you feel the heavens
opening, you may begin to tremble. For the
vision you see there, as it is the most beautiful
of things, is likely also to be the most destruc-
tive." For the poet himself, indeed, the
only course is to pursue it across the world
to the cold mountain tops (410 ff.) :

For there is Grace, and there is the Heart's Desire,
And peace to adore Thee, Thou spuit of guiding fire !

He will clasp it even though it slay him. i

190 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

The old critics used to assume that the
Bacchae marked a sort of repentance. The
veteran free-lance of thought, the man who
had consistently denounced and ridiculed
all the foul old stories of mythology, now saw
the error of his ways and was returning
to orthodoxy. Such a view strikes us now
as almost childish in its incompetence. Yet
there is, I think, a gleam of muddled truth
somewhere behind it. There was no repent-
ance ; there was no return to orthodoxy ;
nor indeed was there, in the strict sense, any
such thing as " orthodoxy " to return to.
For Greek religion had no creeds. But there
is, I think, a rather different attitude towards
the pieties of the common man.

It is well to remember that, for all his
lucidity of language, Euripides is not lucid
about religion. His general spirit is clear :
it is a spirit of liberation, of moral revolt,
of much denial ; but it also a spirit of search
and wcHider and surmise. He was not in any
sense a " mere " rationalist. We find in
his plays the rule of divine juvStiee often
asserted, sometimes passionately denied ; and
one tragedy, the BcUerophontes, is based
on the denial. It is in a fragment of this play
that we have the outcry of some sufferer :

HIS RELIGION 191

Doth any feign there is a God in heaven ?
There is none, none !

And afterwards the hero, staggered by the
injustice of things, questions Zeus himself and
is, for answer, blasted by the thunderbolt. A
clearer form of this same question, and one
which vexed the age a good deal, was to ask
whether or no the world is governed by some
great Intelligence or Understanding (" Sun-
esis "), or, more crudely, whether the gods are
" sunetoi." Euripides at times " hath deep
in his hope a belief in some Understanding,"
and is represented in the Frogs as actually
praying to it by that name ; but he some-
times finds the facts against him {Hippo-
lytus, 1105 ; Frogs, 893 ; Iph. AuL, 394a ;
Her., 655 ; Tro., 884 ff., compared with the
sequel of the play). The question between
polytheism and monotheism, which has
loomed so large to some minds, never troubled
him. He uses the singular and plural quite
indifferently, and probably his " gods," when
used as identical with " God " or " the Divine,"
would hardly even suggest to him the gods of
mythology. If one is to venture a conjecture,
his own feeling may, perhaps, be expressed by
a line in the Orestes (418) :

/ We are slaves of gods, whatever gods may be.

:■ 192 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

That is, there are unknown forces which

shape or destroy man's Hfe, and which may be

conceived as in some sense personal. But

morally, it would seem, these forces are not

I better, but less good, than man, who at least

loves and pities and tries to understand. Such

I is the impression, I think, left on readers of

i the Bacchac, the Hippohjtus or the Trojan

Women.

But there is one thought which often recurs
»iii 'Euripides in plays of all periods, and is
specially thrown in his teeth by Aristophanes.
That satirist, when piling up Euripides'
theatrical iniquities, takes as his comic climax
" women who say Life is not Life." The
reference is to passages like fr. 833, from the
Phrixus :

Who knovveth if the thing that we call death
Be Life, and our Life dying — who knoweth ?
Save only that all we beneath the sun
Are sick and suffering, and those foregone
Not sick, nor touched with evil any more.

(C/. fr. 638, 816 ; also Helena, 1013; Frogs,
1082, 1477). The idea recurs again and again,
as also does the thought that death is " some
other shape of life " in the Medea and even
in the Ion {Med., 1039 ; Ion, 1068). Nay, more,
death may be the state that we unconsciously

HIS RELIGION 193

long for, and that really fulfils our inmost
desires : " There is no rest on this earth,"
says a speaker in the Hippolytus (191 f.),

And whatever 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 thus," she continues, " we cling to this \ /\
strange thing that shines in the sunlight, and W
are sick with love for it, because we have not ij
seen beyond the veil." A stirring thought |j
this, and much nearer to the heart of mysti-
cism than any mere assertion of human immor-
tality. Thus it is not from any position like
what we should call " dogmatic atheism "
or " scientific materialism " that the child of
the Sophists started his attacks on the current
mythology. The Sophists themselves had
no orthodoxy.

Euripides was always a rejecter of the Laws
of the Herd. He was in protest against its
moral standards, its superstitions and follies,
its social injustices ; in protest also against
its worldliness and its indifference to those
things which, both as a poet and a philosopher,
he felt to be highest. And such he remained
throughout his life. But in his later years the
direction of his protest did, I think, somewhat

194 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

change. In the Athens of Melos and the
Sicihan expedition there was something that
roused his aversion far more than did the mere
ignorance of a stupid Greek farmer. It was
a deeper " amathia,^' a more unteachable
brutality. The men who spoke in the MeHan
Dialogue were full of what they considered
" Sophia." It is likely enough that they
conformed carefully to the popular religious
prejudices — such politicians always do : but
in practice they thought as little of " the
gods " as the most pronounced sceptic could
wish. They had quite rejected such unprofit-
able ideals as " pity and charm of words
and the generosity of strength," to which the
simple man of the old times had always had
the door of his heart open. They were haunt-
ers of the market-place, mockers at all sim-
plicity, close pursuers of gain and revenge :
rejecters, the poet might feel in his bitter-
ness, both of beauty and of God. And the
Herd, as represented by Athens, followed
them. Like other ideal democrats he turned
away from the actual Demos, which sur-
rounded him and howled him down, to a Demos
of his imagination, pure and uncorrupted, in
which the heart of the natural man should
speak. His later plays break out more than

HIS RELIGION 195

once into praises of the unspoiled country-
man, neither rich nor poor, who works with
his own arm and whose home is " the solemn
mountain " not the city streets (c/. especially
Orestes, 917-922, as contrasted with 903 ff. ;
also the Peasant in the Electra ; also Bac,
717). In the Bacchae we have not only
several denunciations — not at all relevant to
the main plot — of those whom the world calls
" wise " ; we have the wonderful chorus about
the fa^vn escaped from the hunters, rejoicing
in the green and lonely places where no pur-
suing voice is heard and the " little things of
the woodland " live unseen. (866 ff.) That
is the poetry of this emotion. The prose of
it comes in a sudden cry :

The simple nameless herd of humanity

Have deeds and faith that are truth enough for me ;

though even that prose has followed imme-
diately on the more mystical doctrine that
man must love the Day and the Night, and
that Dionysus has poured the mystic Wine that
is Himself for all things that live (421-431,
284). In another passage, which I translate
literally, he seems to make his exact position
more clear : " As for Knowledge, I bear her no
grudge ; I take joy in the pursuit of her.

196 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

But the other things " {i.e., the other elements
of existence) " are great and shining. Oh,
for Life to flow towards that which is beautiful,
till man through both light and darkness
should be at peace and reverent, and, casting
from him Laws that are outside Justice, give
glory to the gods ! " i

Those " Laws which are outside Justice '
would make trouble enough between Euripides
and the " simple herd " if ever they reached
the point of discussing them. He who most
loves the ideal Natural Man seldom agrees
with the majority of his neighbours. But
for the meantime the poet is wrapped up in
another war, in which he and religion and
nature and the life of the simple man seem to
be standing on one side against a universal
enemy.

I am not attempting to expound the whole
meaning of the Bacchae. I am only suggesting
a clue by which to follow it. Like a live thing
it seems to move and show new faces every
time that, with imagination fully worldng,
one reads the play. There were many factors

^ In my verse translation I took a slightly different
reading, being then misinformed about the MS., but the
general sense is the same. (" Knowledge, we are not
foes," etc.)

THE BACCHAE 197

at work, doubtless, to produce the Bacchae :
the peculiar state of Athens, the poet's ecstasy
of escape from an intolerable atmosphere, the
simple Homeric life in Macedonian forests
and mountains, and perhaps even the sight
of real Bacchantes dancing there. But it
may be that the chief factor is simply this.
When a man is fairly confronted with deatlx
and is consciously doing his last work in the
world, the chances are that, if his brain is
clear and unterrified, the deepest part of his
nature will assert itself. Euripides was both
a reasoner and a poet. The two sides of his
nature sometimes clashed and sometimes
blended. But ever since the Heracles he had
known which service he really lived for ; and
in his last work it is the poet who speaks, and
reveals, so far as such a thing can be revealed,
the secret religion of poetry.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ART OF EURIPIDES : IDEAL FORM AND

SINCERE SPIRIT : PROLOGUE : MESSENGER ;

"DEUS EX M^CHINA"

Euripides was so much besides a poet that we
sometimes tend to regard him exchisively as a
great thinker or a great personality and forget
that it is in his poetry that he hves. A bio-
graphy hke that which we have attempted to
sketch is of httle value except as a kind of clue
to guide a reader through the paths of the poet's
own work. It is only by reading his plays
that we can know him ; and unfortunately,
owing to the two thousand odd years that have
passed since his death, we must needs approach
them through some distorting medium. We
read them either in a foreign language, as a
rule most imperfectly understood, or else in a
translation. It is hard to say by which
method a reader who is not a quite good
Greek scholar will miss most. A further
difficulty occurs about the translations. I
need not perhaps apologize for assuming
198

THE ART OF EURIPIDES 199

normally in the present volume the use of my
own. There has been lately, since the work
of Verrall in England and Wilamowitz in
Germany, a far more successful effort made
to understand the mind of Euripides, while
the recent performances of his plays in London
and elsewhere have considerably increased our
insight into his stagecraft. Consequently we
can now see that the older translations, even
when verbally defensible and even skilful, are
often seriously inadequate or misleading. A
comparison of Dr. Verrall's English version of
the Ion with practically any of its predecessors
will illustrate this point.

The greatest change that has come over
our study of Greek civilization and literature
in the last tv.'o generations is this : that we
now try to approach it historically, as a thing
that moves and grows and has its place in the
whole life-history of man. The old viev/, some-
times called classicist, was to regard the great
classical books as eternal models ; their style
was simply the right style, and all the varia-
tions observable in modern literature were, in
one degi'ce or another, so many concessions
to the weakness of human nature. There is
in this view an element of truth. The
fundamental ideals which have produced

200 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

results so singularly and so permanently
successful cannot be lightly disregarded.
Books that are still read with delight after
two thousand years are certainly, in some
sense, models to imitate. But the great flaw
in the classicist view, as regards the ancient
literature itself, was that it concentrated
attention on the external and accidental ;
on the mannerism, not the meaning ; on the
temporary fashion of a great age, not on the
spirit which made that age great. A historical
mind will always try, by active and critical
use of the imagination, to see the Greek poet
or philosopher in his real surroundings and
against his proper background. Seen thus he
will appear, not as a stationary " ancient "
contrasted with a " modern," but as a moving
and striving figure, a daring pioneer in the
advance of the human spirit, fore-doomed to
failure because his aims were so far greater
than his material resources, his habit of mxind
so far in advance of the world that surrounded
him. We seem in ancient Greece to be
moving in a region that is next door to
savagery, and in the midst of it to have speech
with men whom we might gladly accept as our
leaders or advisers if they lived now.

Meantime there are screens between us and

THE ART OF EURIPIDES 201

these men ; the screens of a foreign language, a
strange form of hfe, different conventions in art.
It is these last that we must now deal with,
for we shall find it hard ever to understand
Greek tragedy if we expect from it exactly
what we expect from a modern or Elizabethan
play.

One would have to make no such preface
if we were dealing with the form of Greek
Drama that immediately succeeded the great
age of Tragedy. There arose in the fourth
century, b.c, a kind of play that we could
understand at once, the so-called New Comedy ^ ^^U'l-
of Menander and Philemon. New Comedy ^-v'
is neither tragic nor comic, but, like our own ^^
plays, a discreet mixture of both. It has no"
austere religious atmosphere. Its interest —
like ours — is in love and adventure and
intrigue. It has turned aside from legend
and legendary Kings and Queens, and operates,
as we do, with a boldly invented plot and
fictitious characters, dra^vn mostly from every-
day life. The New Comedy dominated the
later Attic stage and called into life the
Roman. It was highly praised and immensely
popular. It was so easy in its flow and it
demanded so little effort. Yet, significantly
enough, it has passed away without leaving a

202 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

single complete specimen of its work in
existence. When after ages were exerting
themselves to save from antiquity just that
minimum of most precious things that must
not be allowed to die, it was the greater and
more difficult form of drama that they
preserved.

Let us try to see and to surmount the
difficulties. Every form of art has its con-
ventions. Think, for instance, of the con-
ventions of modern Opera. Looked at in
cold blood, from outside the illusion, fev/
forms of art could be more absurd, yet, I
suppose, the emotional and artistic effect of a
great opera is extraordinarily high. The
analogy may help us in tlie understanding of
Greek tragedy.

. Let us remember that it is at heart a religious
ritual. We shall then understand — so far as it
is necessary for a modern reader to think of
such things — the ceremonial dress, the religious
masks, the constant presence or nearness of
the supernatural. We shall understand, per-
haps, also the formal dignity of language
and action. It is verse and, like all Greek
verse, unrhymed ; but it is not at all like
the loose go-as-you-please Elizabethan verse,
which fluctuates from scene to scene and

THE ART OF EURIPIDES 203

makes up for its lack of strict form by
extreme verbal ornamentation. In Greek
tragic dialogue the metrical form is stiff and
clear ; hardly ever could a tragic line by any
mistake be taken for prose ; the only normal
variation is not towards prose but towards a
still more highly wrought musical lyric. Yet
inside the stiff metrical form the language is
clear, simple and direct. A similar effect can,
in my opinion, only be attained in English by
the use of rhyme. You must somehow feel
always that you are in the realm of verse, yet
your language must always be simple. In
blank verse the language has to be tortured a
little, or it will read like prose. .

Now all this sounds highly conventional ;
that it is. And artificial and unreal ? That
it is not. We are apt at the present moment
of taste to associate together two things
that have no real connexion with one another
• —sincerity of thought and sloppiness of form.
Take on the one hand dramatic poems like
Swinburne's Locrine, wi'itten all in rhymed
verse and partly in sonnets, or George Mere-
dith's Modern Love, which is all in a form of
sonnet. These are works of the most highly-
wrought artistic convention ; their form is
both severe and elaborate ; in that lies half

204 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

their beauty. But the other half hes in their
sincerity ar\d dehcacy of thought and their
intensity of feehng. They are sincere but
not formless. Of the other extreme, which
is formless without being sincere, I need give
no examples. The reader can think of the
worst-^vritten novel he knows and it will
probably satisfy the conditions. In Greek
tragedy we have the element of formal con-
vention extremely strong ; we have also
great subtlety and sincerity.

This quality of sincerity is, perhaps, the
very first thing that should be pointed out to
a reader who is beginning Greek tragedy.
Coming in the midst of so much poetical con-
vention it takes a modern reader by surprise ;
he expected romantic idealism and he finds
clear character-drawing. I once read a
critic who argued that Euripides had low
ideals of womanhood because, in the critic's
carefully pondered judgment, Medea was
not a perfect wife. Even Coleridge com-
plained that the Greek tragedians could
not make a heroine interesting without " un-
sexing her." Such criticisms imply a con-
ception of drama in which the women are
conventionally seen through a roseate mist of
amatory emotion. We mean to be in love

SINCERITY AND FORMALITY 205

with the heroine, and in order that she may-
be worthy of that honour the author must
endow her with all the adorable attributes. The
men in such plays suffer much less from beauti-
fication, but even they suffer. This spurious
kind of romanticism implies chiefly an indiffer-
ence to truth in the realm of character ; it is
generally accompanied by an indifference to
truth in other respects. It leads stage-
writers to look out for the effect, not the truth ;
to write with a view to exciting the audience
instead of expressing something which they
have to express. It leads in fact to all the
forms of staginess. Now from Greek tragedy
this kind of falseness is almost entirely absent.
" It has no utter villains, no insipidly angelic
heroines. Even its tyrants generally have
some touch of human nature about them ;
they have at least a case to state. Even its
virgin martyrs are not waxen images." The
stories are no doubt often miraculous ; the
characters themselves are often in their origin
supernatural. But their psychology is severely
true. It is not the psychology of melodrama,
specially contrived to lead up to " situations."
It is that of observed human nature, and
human nature not merely observed but
approached with a serious almost reverent

206 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

sympathy and an unlimited desire to under-
stand. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his Quintessence
of Ihsenism (1913), writes of a new element
brought into modern drama by the Nor-
wegian school. " Ibsen was grim enough in
all conscience ; no man has said more terrible
things ; and yet there is not one of Ibsen's
characters who is not, in the old phrase, the
temple of the Holy Ghost, and who does not
move you at moments by the sense of that
mystery." Allowing for the great difference
of treatment and the comparative absence
of detail in the ancient drama, this phrase
would, I think, be true of all the great Greek
tragedians. In Euripides it is clear enough.
Jason, as well as Medea, Clytemnestra as
well as Electra, even satirized characters
like Menelaus in the Trojan Women or
Agamemnon in the Iphigenia in Aulis, are
creatures of one blood with ourselves ; they
are beings who must be understood, who
cannot be thrust beyond the pale ; and they
all "move us at moments by the sense of
that mystery." But it holds in general for
the other tragedians too, for the creators
of Creon and Antigone, of Prometheus
and Zeus. " What poet until quite modern
times would have dared to make an audience

THE PROLOGUE 207

sympathize with Clytemnestra, the blood-
stained adulteress, as Aeschylus does ? Who
would have dared, like Sophocles, to make
Antigone speak cruelly to her devoted sister,
or Electra, with all our sympathies concen-
trated upon her, behave like a wild beast and
be disgusted with herself for so doing ?
{Soph. Elec. 616 ff.)."

But what we have now to realize is that this
sincerity of treatment takes place inside a shell
of stiff and elaborate convention.

At the very beginning of a play by Euripides
we shall find something that seems deliberately
calculated to offend us and destroy our inter-
est : a Prologue. It is a long speech with no
action to speak of ; and it tells us not only the
present situation of the characters — which
is rather dull — but also what is going to happen
to them — which seems to us to spoil the rest
of the play. And the modern scholastic
critic says in his heart, " Euripides had no
sense of the stage."

Now, since we know that he had a very great
sense of the stage and enormous experience
also, let us try to see what value he found in
this strange prologue. First, no doubt it was
a convenience. There were no playbills to

208 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

hand round, with hsts of the dramatis per-
sonam Also, a Greek tragedy is always highly
concentrated ; it consists generally of what
would be the fifth act of a modern tragedy,
and does not spend its time on explanatory
and introductory acts. The Prologue saved
time here. But why does it let out the secret
of what is coming ? Why does it spoil the
excitement beforehand ? Because, we must
answer, there is no secret, and the poet does
not aim at that sort of excitement. A certain
amount of plot-interest there certainly is :
we are never told exactly what thing will
happen but only what sort of thing ; or we are
told what will^happen but not how it will
happen. But the enjoyment which the poet
aims at is not the enjoyment of reading a
detective story for the first time ; it is that
of reading Hamlet or Paradise Lost for the
second or fifth or tenth. When Hippolytus
or Oedipus first appears on the stage you know
that he is doomed ; that knowledge gives an
increased significance to ever}i;hing that he
says or does ; you see the shadow of disaster
closing in behind him, and when the catas-
trophe comes it comes with the greater force
because you were watching for it.

" At any rate," the modern reader may

THE PROLOGUE 209

persist : " the prologue is rather dull. It does
not arrest the attention, like, for instance,
the opening scenes of Macbeth or Julius
Caesar or Romeo and Juliet.'" No; it does
not. Shakespeare, one may suppose, had a
somewhat noisy audience, all talking among
themselves and not disposed to listen till their
attention was captured by force. The Greek
audience was, as far as we can make out,
sitting in a religious silence. A prayer had
been offered and incense burnt on the altar of
Dionysus, and during such a ritual the rule en-
joined silence. It was not necessary for the
Greek poet to capture his audience by a scene of
bustle or excitement. And this left him free to
do two things, both eminently characteristic of
Greek art. He could make his atmosphere and
he could build up his drama from the ground.

Let us take the question of building first.
If you study a number of modern plays, you
will probably find that their main " effects "
are produced in very different places, though
especially of course at the fall of each curtain.
A good Greek play moves almost always in a
curve of steadily increasing tension — increas-
ing up to the last scene but one and then, as a
rule, sinking into a note of solemn calm. It
often admits a quiet scene about the middle
o

210 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

to let the play take breath ; but it is very
chary indeed of lifting and then dropping
again, and never does so without definite
reason. In pursuance of this plan, Euripides
likes to have his opening as low-toned, as still,
as slow in movement, as he can make it :
its only tension is a feeling of foreboding or
of myster3^ It is meant as a foundation to
build upon, and every scene that follows will
be higher, swifter, more intense. A rush of
excitement at the opening would jar, so to
speak, the whole musical scheme.

And this quiet opening is especially used to
produce the right state of mind in the
audience— or, as our modern phrase puts it, to
give the play its atmosphere. Take almost
any opening : the Suppliant Women, with
its band of desolate mothers kneeling at an
altar and holding the Queen prisoner while
she speaks : the Andromache, the Heracles,
the Children of Heracles almost the same —
an altar and helpless people kneeling at it —
kneeling and waiting: the Trojan Women
with its dim-seen angry gods ; the Hecuba
with its ruined city walls and desolate plain
and the ghost of the murdered Polj^dorus
brooding over them ; the Hippolyius with its
sinister goddess, potent and inexorable, M'ho

THE PROLOGUE 211

vanishes at the note of the hunting horn but
is felt in the background throughout the whole
play ; the Iphigenia, with its solitary and
exiled priestess waiting at the doors of her
strange temple of death. Most of the pro-
logues have about them something super-
natural ; all of them something mysterious ;
and all of them are scenes of waiting, not acting
— waiting till the atmosphere can slowly gain
its full hold. Regarded from this point of
view I think that every opening scene in
Greek tragedy will be seen to have its signifi-
cance and its value in the whole scheme of the
play. Certainly the prologue generally justifies
itself in the acting.

And when the prologue is over and the
action begins, we need not expect even then
any rapid stir or bustle. Dr. Johnson has
told us that a man who should read Richard-
son for the story might as well hang himself ;
the same fate might overtake one who sate
at Greek tragedies expecting them to hurry
at his bidding. The swift rush will come, sure
enough, swift and wild with almost intolerable
passion ; but it will not come anywhere near
the first scenes. We shall have a dialogue
in longish speeches, each more or less balanced

212 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

against its fellow, beautiful no doubt and
perhaps moving, but slow as music is slow.
Or we shall have a lyrical scene, strophe
exactly balanced against antistrophe, more
beautiful but slower still in its movement,
and often at first hearing a little difficult to
follow. Poetry is there and drama is there,
and character and plot interest ; but often
they are unrolled before you not as things
immediately happening, but as things to feel
and reflect upon. It is a bigger world than ours
and every movement in it is slower and larger.
And when the poet wants to show us the
heroine's state of mind his method will be
quite different from ours. We should rack
our brains to compose a " natural " dialogue
in which her state of mind would appear, or
we should make her best friend explain what
she is like, or we should invent small incidents
to throw light upon her. And our language
would all the time be carefully naturalistic ;
not a bit — or, if the poet within us rebels,
hardly a bit — more dignified than the average
diction of afternoon tea. The ancient poet
has no artifice at all. His heroine simply
walks forward and explains her o\mi feelings.
But she will come at some moment that seems
just the right one ; she will come to us through

THE LONG SPEECHES 213

a cloud, as it were, of musical emotion from
the Chorus, and her words when she speaks
will be frankly the language of poetry. They
will be none the less sincere or exact for that.
When Phaedra in the Hippolytus has re-
solved to die rather than show her love, much
less attempt to satisfy it, and yet has been so
weakened by her long struggle that she will
not be able to resist much longer, she explains
herself to the Chorus in a long speech :

O Women, dwellers in this portal seat
Of Pelops' land, looking towards my Crete,
How oft, in other days than these, have I
Through night's long hours thought of man's misery
And how this life is wrecked ! And, to mine eyes,
Not in man's knowledge, not in wisdom, lies
The lack that makes for sorrow. Nay, we scan
And know the right — ^for wit hath many a man —
But will not to the last end strive and serve.
For some grow too soon weary, and some swerve
To other paths, setting before the right
The diverse far-off image of Delight,
And many are delights beneath the sun. . . .

It is not the language that any real woman
ever spoke, and it is not meant to be. But
it is exactly the thought which this woman
may have thought and felt, transmuted into
a special kind of high poetry. And the women
of the Chorus who are listening to it are like
no kind of concrete earthly listeners ; they

214 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

are the sort of listeners that are suited to
thoughts rather than words, and their own
answer at the end comes not Hke a real com-
ment but like a note of music. When she
finishes, defending her resolve to die rather
than sin :

O'er all this earth
To every false man that hour comes apace
When Time holds up a mirror to his face,
And marvelling, girl-like, there he stares to see
How foul his heart. — Be it not so with me !

They answer :

Ah, God, how sweet is virtue and how wise.
And honour its due meed in all men's eyes !

" A commonplace ? " "A not very original
remark ? " There is no need for any original
remark ; what is needed is a note of harmony
in words and thought, and that is what we are
given.

At a later stage in the play we shall come
on another fixed element in the tragedy, the
Messenger's Speech. It was probably in the
ritual. It was expected in the play. And
it was — and is still on the stage — immensely
dramatic and effective. Modem writers like
Mr. Masefield and Mr. Wilfred Blunt have seen
what use can be made of a IMessenger's speech.
Now for the understanding of the speech itself,

THE MESSENGER 215

what is needed is to read it several times, to
mark out exactly the stages of story told, and
the gradual rising of emotion and excitement
up to the highest point, which is, as usual,
near the end but not at the end. The end
sinks back to something like calm. It would
take too long to analyse a particular Messen-
ger's speech paragraph by paragraph, and the
printed page cannot, of course, illustrate the
constant varieties of tension, of pace and of
emphasis that are needed. But I find the
following notes for the guidance of an actor
opposite the Messenger's Speech in an old
copy of my Hippolytus. Opposite the first
lines comes, " Quiet, slow, simple." Then
'' quicker." " Big " (at " O Zeus . .
hated me.") Then " Drop tension : story.'
"Pause: more interest." "Mystery." "Awe
rising excitement." " Excitement well con
trolled." " Steady excitement ; steady
swifter." " Up : excitement rising." " Up
but still controlled." " Up ; full steam
let it go." " Highest point." " Down to
quiet." "Mystery." "Pause." "End steady:
with emotion." These notes have, of course,
no authority : as they stand they are due
partly to my own conjecture, partly to
observation of a remarkable performance.

216 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

But they have this interest about them. They
grow out of the essential nature of the speech
and probably would, in their general tenour,
be accepted by most students ; and further,
some very similar^scheme would suit not only
almost every Messenger's Speech, but also,
with the necessary modifications, almost every
Greek tragedy as a whole. The quiet begin-
ning, the constant rise of tension through
various moods and various changes of tone
up to a climax ; the carefully arranged drop
from the climax to the steady close, without
bathos and without any wrecking of the
continuity.

But there is another point about Messengers
that can be more easily illustrated. Their
entrance in Euripides is nearly always carefully
prepared. The point is of cardinal import-
ance and needs some explanation. In mere
literature it is the words that matter ; in
dramatic literature it is partly the words, and
partly the situation in which they are uttered.
A Messenger's Speech ought not only to be a
good story in itself, but it ought to be so pre-
pared and led up to that before the speaker
begins we are longing to hear what he has to
say. An instance of a Messenger's speech
with no preparation is in Sophocles' Oedipus^

THE MESSENGER 217

The King. (I do not at all suggest that pre-
paration is needed ; very likely the situation
itself is enough.) Oedipus has rushed into
the house in a fury of despair, and the
Messenger simply walks out of the house
crvang

0 ye above this land in honour old

Exalted, what a tale shall ye be told,

What sights shall see and tears of horror shed. . . .

Contrast with this the preparation in the
Hippoli/tus (1153 ff.). Hippolytus, cursed, and
of course wrongfully cursed, by his father,
Theseus, has gone forth to exile. His friends
and the women of the Chorus have been griev-
ing for him : Theseus has refused to listen to
any plea. Then

Leader of the Chorits
Look yonder ! . . . Surely from the Prince 'tis one
That Cometh, full of haste and woe-begone.

We are all watching ; a man in great haste
enters. Observe what he says.

Henchman

Ye women, whither shall I go to seek

King Theseus ? Is he in this dwelling ? Speak !

Our suspense deepens. The Leader evi-
dently has hesitated in her answer ; she wants
to ask a question. . . . But at this
moment the door opens and she falls back :

218 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

Leader
Lo, where he cometh through the Castle Gate.

Through the gate comes Theseus, wrapped
in gloom, evidently trying still to forget Hip-
pol>i;us. The Henchman crosses his path.

Henchman

O King, I bear thee tidings of dire weight j

To thee, yea, and to every man, I ween, I

From Athens to the marches of Trozen, j

Will Theseus gLiess ? Will he see that this is !
one of his son's servants ? At any rate he I

shows no sign of so doing. !

Theseus !

What ? Some new stroke hath touched, unknown to i

me I

The sister cities of my sovranty ? . j

Henchman j

Hippolytus is. . . . Nay, not dead ; but stark \

Outstretched, a hairsbreadth this side of the dark. |

The forbidden name is spoken ; there is j
evidently a moment of shock, but how will j
Theseus take the news ? Will he soften ?

Theseus [as though unmoved]
How slain ? Was there some other man, whose wife
He had like mine defiled, who sought his life ?

Stung by the taunt the Henchman answers
boldly.

PREPARATION 219

Henchman
His own wild team destroyed him, and the dire
Curse of thy lips. . . . The boon of the great Sire
Is granted thee, O King, and thy son slain.

Will Theseus turn in fury on the speaker ?
Or will he even now soften ? Neither.

Theseus
Ye Gods ! . . . And thou, Poseidon, not in vain
I called thee Father. Thou hast heard my prayer.

The shock is heavy but he recovers his calm,
and with it comes the horrible conviction that
his curse was just and the gods have struck
dead a guilty man.

How did he die ? Speak on. How closed the snare
Of Heaven to slay the shamer of my blood ?

Then the Messenger begins his story.

Such preparations are regular in Euripides.
In the Electra, Orestes has gone forth to find
King Aegisthus, and if possible slay him.
Electra is waiting in her hut, a drawn sword
across her knees, sworn to die if Orestes fails.
How is the Messenger brought on ? First the
Leader of the Chorus thinks she hears a noise
in the distance ; she is not sure. . . . Yes ; a
noise of fighting ! She calls Electra, who
comes, the sword in her hand. The noise
increases ; a cry ; cheering. Something has
happened, but what ? The cheers sound

220 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

like Argive voices ; " Aegisthus's men ! "
cries Electra ; " then let me die ! " The
Chorus restrain her. " There is no Messen-
ger ; Orestes would have sent a Messenger,"
" Wait, wait ! " cries the Leader, holding her
arm : and a man rushes in, shouting, " Vic-
tory ! Orestes has slain Aegisthus, and we are
free " (747-773).

That seems enough, but even now Euripides
has not extracted his full effect from the
situation. Electra, steeped to the lips in
fears and suspicions, recoils from the man.
" Who are you ? . . . It is a plot ! " She
must get the sword. . . . The Man bids her
look at him again ; he is her brother's servant ;
she saw him with Orestes an hour ago. She
looks, remembers, and throws her arms round
the man's neck. " Tell me again. Tell me all
that happened." And so the Messenger begins.

This art of preparation belongs, of course,
to the modern stage as much as to the ancient,
or more. So do the similar arts of making the
right juncture between scenes, of arranging
the contrasts and clashes, and especially of so
ending each scene as to make the spectator
look eagerly for the next move. He must be
given just enough notion of the future to

DEUS EX MACHINA 221

whet his appetite ; not enough to satisfy it.
These are general rules that apply to all good
drama. They can all be studied in Mr. Archer's
book, Play-Making : A Manual of Craftsman-
ship. In ancient times they were more
developed by Euripides than by his pre-
decessors, but that is all we need say.

Prologue ; Set Speech ; Messenger ; there
still remain two stumbling-blocks to a modern
reader of Greek tragedies, the Deus ex Mdchind
(or " God from the Machine ") and the Chorus.

About the appearance of the god we need
say little. We have seen above that an epi-
phany of some Divine Being or a Resurrection
of some dead Hero seems to have been an
integral part of the old ritual and thus has its
natural place in tragedy. His special duty is""^
to bring the action to a quiet close and to /
ordain the ritual on which the tragedy is \
based — thus making the performance itself a (
fulfilment of the god's command (see above )
p. 66). The actual history of this -epiphan/^^
is curious. As far as our defective evidence
allows us to draw conclusions we can make
out that Aeschylus habitually used a divine
epiphany, but that he generally kept it for the
last play of a trilogy ; that he often had a whole

222 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

galaxy of gods, and that, with some exceptions,
his gods walked the floor of earth with the
other actors. (The evidence for this is given in
Miss Harrison's Themis, pp.347 ff.) Sophocles,
moving towards a more " natural " and less
ritual tragedy, used the divine epiphany
comparatively little. ; Euripides, somewhat
curiously for one so hostile to the current
mythology, intensified this ritual element in
drama as he did all the others. And he used
it more and more as he grew older. He
evidently liked it for its own sake.

There is one view about the Deus ex
Mdchind which needs a word of correction.
It is widely entertained and comes chiefly
from Horace's Ars Poetica. It takes the Deits
as a device — and a very unskilful one — for
somehow finishing a story that has got into a
hopeless tangle. The poet is supposed to
have piled up ingenious complications and
troubles until he cannot see any way out
and has to cut the knot by the intervention
of something miraculous — in this case, of a
machine-made god. Now devices of this sort —
the sudden appearance of rich uncles, the
discovery of new wills, or of infants changed
at birth and the like — are more or less common
weaknesses in romantic literature. Hence

DEUS EX MACHINA 223

it was natural that Horace's view about Eurip-
ides's god should be uncritically accepted.
But as a matter of fact it is a mere mistake.
It never in any single case holds good — not
even in the Orestes. And there are some
plays, like the Iphigenia in Tauris, in which,
so far from the god coming to clear up a
tangled plot, the plot has to be diverted at
the last moment so as to provide an excuse for
the god's arrival. Euripides evidently liked a"^
supernatural ending, and when he had to do/
without a real god — as in the Medea and the
Hecuba — he was apt to end with winged
chariots and prophecies. Can we in the least
understand what he gained by it ?

We must remember one or two things. The
epiphany was in the ritual. It was no new
invention in itself ; the only new thing, appar-
ently, was an improved piece of stage machinery
enabling the god to appear more effectively.
Further, if we try to put ourselves into the
minds of fifth century Greeks, there was
probably nothing absurd, nothing even un-
likely, in supposing the visible appearance
of a god in such an atmosphere as that of
tragedy. The heroes and heroines of tragedy
were themselves almost divine ; they were all
figures in the great heroic saga and almost all

224 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

of them — the evidence is clear — received actual
worship. If Orfestes or Agamemnon is present
on the stage, it is not surprising that Apollo
should appear to them. It is, I think, chiefly
due to the mistake of over-emphasizing the
realism of Euripides that recent writers — •
myself at one time included — have been so
much troubled over these divine epiphanies.

I suspect, also, that we are troubled by a
difference of convention about the way in
which supernatural beings ought to speak. We
moderns like them to be abrupt, thunderous,
wrapped in mystery. We expect the style of
ancient Hebrew or Norse poetry. Probably
a Greek would think both barbaric. At any
rate the Greek gods, both in Euripides and
elsewhere, affect a specially smooth and fluent
and lucid utterance.

And apart from the artistic convention there
is a historical consideration which we must
never forget, though we are constantly tempted
to do so. A well-educated Athenian of the
fifth century before Christ was, after all, not
as securely lifted above what he called
" primaeval simplicity " as a similar man in
Western Europe in the eighteenth or nine-
teenth century after. He was just beginning,
with great daring and brilliance, to grasp at

DEUS EX MACHINA 225 V

something like a philosophic or scientific
view of the world ; but his hold was very
precarious and partial, and when it slipped
he fell unsuspectingly into strange abysses.
A visible god in the theatre laid probably no
more strain on his credulity than, say, a
prophetic dream on ours.

However, the above considerations are only
pleas in mitigation of sentence. They tend
to show that the Deus ex Mdchind was not in
itself ridiculous to the contemporaries of
Euripides ; we must go further and try to see
why he liked it. The best way is simply,
with our antecedent prejudices removed, to
read and re-read some of the best epiphany
scenes ; those, for instance, which close the
Electra, the Hippolytus, the Rhesus or the
Andromache. We have already seen in the
Electra how the poet can use his gods for
delivering his essential moral judgment on
the story ; the condemnation of revenge,
/ the pity for mankind, the opening up of a
! larger atmosphere in which the horror through
j which we have just passed falls into its due
resting-place. In the Hippolytus the sheer
beauty of the Artemis scene speaks for itself
and makes a marvellous ending. Notably it at-
tains an effect which could scarcely be reached

226 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

in any other way, a strange poignant note
amid the beauty, where mortal em.otion
breaks against the chffs of immortal calm.
After many words of tenderness Artemis
finishes (1437 ff.):

Farewell ! I may not watch man's fleeting breath,
Nor stain mine eyes with the effluence of death.
And sure that terror now is very near. . . .
{The Goddess slowly rises and floats away.]

HrPPOLYTUS

Farewell ! Farewell, most blessed ! Lift thee clear
Of soiling men. Thou wilt not grieve in heaven
For our long love. . . . Father, thou art forgiven ;
It was Her will ; I am not wroth with thee. . . .
I have obeyed her all my days !

Of course the epiphany does not give what
our jaded senses secretly demand, a strong
" curtain." It gives the antique peaceful
close. The concrete men and women whom
we have seen before us, striving and suffering,
dissolve into the beautiful mist of legend ;
strife and passion and sharp cries sink away
into the telling of old fables ; then the fables
themselves have their lines of consequence
reaching out to touch the present world and
the thing that we are doing now : to make it
the fulfilment of an ancient command or pro-
phecy, to give it a meaning that we had

DEUS EX MACHINA 227

never realized ; and thus we are awakened to
the concrete theatre and the audience and
the hfe about us not with a shock but
gradually, like one lying with his eyes half
shut and thinking about a dream that has
just gone.

I do not for a moment say that the divine
epiphany is the right, or even the best, way
of ending any tragedy ; I only plead that if we
use our imaginations we can find in it a very
rare beauty and can understand why one of the
greatest of the world's dramatists held to it
so firmly.

CHAPTER IX

THE ART OF EURIPIDES CONTINUED : THE
CHORUS : CONCLUSION

And lastly there is the Chorus, at once the
strangest and the most beautiful of all these
ancient and remote conventions. If we can
understand the Chorus we have got to the very-
heart of Greek tragedy.

Tlie objections to the Chorus are plain to
any infant. These dozen homogeneous per-
sons, old men or young women, eternally
present and almost never doing anything,
intruded on action that often demands the
utmost privacy : thdx^bsurdity, on any plane-
of reali^mfc_is_jaanifest! We needwaste no
more words upon it. Verisimilitude is simply
throvvTi to the Vvinds. That is, no doubt, a
great sacrifice, and fine artists do not as a rule
incur a sacrifice without making sure of some
compensating gain. Let us try to find out
what that gain was, or at least what the great
Greek artists were aiming at. And let us
228

THE CHORUS 229

begin by forgetting the modern stage alto-
gether and thinking ourselves back to the very
origins of drama.

The word " chorus" means, '' dance " or
*' dancing-ground." There were such dancing
floors on Greek soil before ever the Greeks
came there. They have been found in pre-
historic Crete and in the islands. We hear in
Homer of the " houses and dancing-grounds "
of the Morning Star. The dance was as old
as mankind ; only it was a kind of dance that
we have almost forgotten. The ancient dance
was not, like our ballets, rooted in sexual
emotion. It was religious : it was a form of
prayer. It consisteH~m 'tKelise of the whole
body, every limb and every muscle, to express
somehow that overflow of emotion for which
a man has no words. And primitive man had
less command of words than we have. When
the men were away on the war-path, the
women prayed for them with all their bodies.
They danced for the men's safe return. When
the tribe's land was parching for lack of rain
the tribesmen danced for the rain to come.
The dance did not necessarily imply move-
ment. It might consist in simply maintaining
the same rigid attitude, as when Moses held
out his arms during the battle with the Amale-

230 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

kites or AJiure in the Egyptian story waited
kneeling and fasting for Nefrekepta's return.

Now if we consider what kind of emotion
will specially call for this form of expression
it is easy to see that it will be the sort that
tends quickly to get beyond words : religious
emotions of all kinds, helpless desire, ineffectual
regret and all feelings about the past. When
we JJiinkL_QLJ±ie_kirid of ritual from which
trajLcdy eme^ed, the lament for a dead god,
we can see how well a dancewas fitted, in
primitrve times, to express the emotions that
we call tragic.

This dance ^a^uaUy^^grewL^ into d^
how it did so is an old story. Into the inar-
ticulate mass of emotion and dumb show
which is the Dance there comes some more
articulate element. There comes some one
who relates, or definitely "enacts, the actual
death or " pathos " of the hero, while the

C Chorus goes on as before expressing emotion
abputit. This emotion, it is easy to see, may
be quite different from that felt by the Hero.
There is implied in the contemplation of any
great deed this ultimate emotion, which is not
as a rule felt by the actual doers of it, and is
not, at its highest power, to be expressed by the
ordinary language of dialogue. The dramatist

THE CHORUS 231

may make his characters express all that they
can properly feel ; he may put into articulate
dialogue all that it will bear. But there still
remains some residue which no one on the
stage can personally feel and which can only
express itself as music or yearning of the body.
This residue finds its one instrument in the
Chorus.

Imagine the death of some modern hero,
of Lincoln or of Nelson, treated in the Greek
form. We should have first a Messenger
bringing news of the battle of Trafalgar or the
pistol-shot in the Washington Theatre. The
hero would be borne in dying ; his friends
would weep over him ; we should hear his last
words. But there would always remain some
essential emotion or reflection — sadness,
triumph, pathos, thoughts of the future from
which this man will be lacking or of the mean-
ing of this death in human history : neither
Lincoln nor Nelson can express this, nor with-
out falsity any of their human companions.
In a novel the author can express it ; in a
modern play or a severely realistic novel it is
generally not expressed except by a significant
silence or some symbol. For realistic work
demands extreme quickness in its audience,
and can only make its effect on imaginations

232 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

already trained by romance and idealism. On
the Greek stage the Chorus will be there just
for this purpose, to express in music and
movement this ultimate emotion and, as Mr.
Haigh puts it, to " shed a lyrical splendour
over the whole." It will translate the par-
ticular act into something universal. It will
make a change in all that it touches, increasing
the elements of beauty and significance and
leaving out or reducing the element of crude
pain. This is nothing extraordinary : it is
the normal business of poetry, at least of great
tragic poetry. An actual bereavement is an
experience consisting of almost nothing but
crude pain ; when it is translated into religion
or poetry, into " Rachel weeping for her
children," or into " Break, break, break," it
has somehow become a thing of beauty and
even of comfort.

The important thing to observe is what
Mr. F. M. Comford has explained in his
Thucydides Mythistoricus (pp. 144 ff.), that a
Greek tragedy normally proceeds in two planes
or two worlds. When the actors are on the
stage we are following the deeds and fates of
so maiiy particular individuals, lovers, plot-
ters, enemies, or whatever they are, at a par-
ticular point of time and space. When the

THE CHORUS 233

stage is empty and the Choral Odes begin,
\^[ehave no longer the_particular acts and^
places' and^ pefsons^but something universal
and eternal. The body, as it were, is gone
and the ^ence remains. We have the great-
ness of love, the vanity of revenge, the law of
eternal retribution, or perhaps the eternal
doubt whether in any sense the world is
governed by righteousness.

Thus the talk about improbability with
which we started falls into its proper insignifi-
cance. The Chorus in Euripides is frequently
blamed by modern scholars on the ground
that " it does not further the action," that
its presence is " improbable," or its odes
" irrelevant." The answer is that none of
these things constitute the business of the
Chorus ; its business is something consider-
ably higher and more important.

Of action and relevancy we will speak
later. They are both closely connected with
the question of verisimilitude. And as for
verisimilitude, we simply do not think of it.
We are not imitating the outside of life. We
'^T? <^xp^^'^'^^^g ^^^ &OH]j iiot depicting its body.
And if Ave did attempt verisimilitude we should
find that in a Chorus it is simply imattainable.
In Nelson's case a Chorus of Sailors would

?34 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

be every bit as improbable as a Chorus of
Mermaids or Angels, and on the whole rather
more strikingly so. If we try to think of the
most effective Choruses in modern tragedies,
I do not think we shall hit on any bands of
Strolling Plaj'ers or Flower Girls or Church
Choirs or other Choruses that aim at " natural-
ness " ; we shall probably go straight to the
Choruses of Spirits in Prometheus Unbound
or those of The Ages and The Pities in Mr,
Hardy's Dynasts. The Choinis belongs not
to the plane of ordinary experience, where
people are real and act and make apposite
remarks, but to ^ that higher world where
in Mr. Cornford's words " metaphor, as we
call it, is the very stuff of life."

With very few exceptions, Greek Choruses
are composed of beings who are naturally
the denizens or near neighbours of such a
world. Sometimes they are frankly super-
natural, as in the Eumenides, .or half super-
natural, as in the Bacchae ; sometimes they
^Te~humahnbeings seen through the mist of
a great emotion, like the weeping Rachels of
the Suppliant Women ; the captives of the
Trojan Women or the Iphigenia ; the old
men who dream dreams in the Heracles.
Even if they start as common men or

THE CHORUS 235

women, sooner or later they become trans-
formed.

The problem of the Chorus to Euripides
was not how to make it as little objectionable
as possible ; it was how to get the greatest and ^_^
highest value out of it. And that resolves
itself largely into the problem of handling
these two planes of action, using now the
lower and now the upper, now keeping them
separate, now mingling them, and at times
letting one forcibly invade the other. I can-
not here go into details of the various effects
obtained from the Chorus by Euripides ; but
I will take a few typical ones, selecting in
each case scenes that have been loudly con-
^^mned by critics.

( I JThe first and most normal effect is to use
^-bne Chorus for " relief " ; to bring in, as it
were, the ideal world to heal the wounds
of the real. It is not, of course, " comic
relief," as indulged in so freely by the Eliza-
bethans. It is a transition from horror or \
pain to mere beauty or music, with hardly \
any change of tension. I mean, that if the
pain has brought tears to your eyes, the beauty
mil be such as to keep them there, while of
course changing their character. It is this
use of lyrics that enables the Greek play\vi-ight

236 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

lose the prevailing atmosphere of high beauty.
Look at the Salamis Chorus in the Trojan
Women immediately following the child's
death ; the lyrics between Oedipus and the
Chorus when he has just entered with his bleed-
ing eyes ; or, in partimilar^j^hft F'^^^g ^'^^^ by
the Chnnix; in TRppoLypu^ jn^ft -afte^-^PJmedra
has rushed off Jo_kil1 hergdf. We have had a
scene of high "teriiSinT^ ?nd plTiost. intolerable
pain, anjd^Jth^-Chorus, left alone, make
certainly no relevant remarks. I can
think of no relevant remark that would
not be an absurd bathos. They simply break
out (732 ff.) :

Could I take me to some cavem for mine hiding,
In the hill-tops, where the sun scarce hath trod.

Or a cloud make the home of mine abiding.

As a bird among the bird-droves of God. . , ,

It is just the emotion that was in our own
hearts ; the cry for escape to some place, how-
ever sad, that is still beautiful : to the poplar
grove by the Adriatic where his sisters weep
for Phaethon ; or, at last, as the song con-
tinues and grows bolder, to some place
that has happiness as well as beauty ; to
that "strand of the Daughters of the
Simset,"

THE CHORUS 237

Where a sound of living waters never ceaseth

In God's quiet garden by the sea,
And Earth, the ancient Life-giver, increaseth

Joy among the meadows, like a tree.

And the wish_ for escage_brings jaoi actual.
escape, on some wind of beauty, as it were,
from the Chorus's oAvn world. This is, on
the whole, the most normal use of the Choric
odes, though occasionally they may also be
used for helping on the action. For instance,
in the ode immediately following that just
quoted the Chorus gives a sort of prophetic or
clairvoyant description of Phaedra's suicide.

But the Greek Chorus does not only sing
its great odes on an empty stage ; it also
carries on, by the mouth of its Leader, a cer-
tain amount of ordinary dialogue with the
actors. Its work here is generally kept unob-
trusive, neutral and low-toned. When a
traveller wants to ask his way ; when the
hero or heroine announces some resolve, or
gives some direction, the Leader is there to
make the necessary response. But only within
certain carefully guarded limits. The Leader
must never become a definite full-blooded
character with strongly personal views. He
must never take really effective or violent

238 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

action. He never, I think, gives information
which we do not already possess or expresses
views which could seem paradoxical or original.
He is an echo, a sort of music in the air.
This comes out clearly in another fine scene
of the Hippolytus, where Phaedra is listening
at the door and the Leader of the Chorus
listens with her, echoing and making more
vibrant Phaedra's o\\ai emotion (565-600).

At times, in these dialogue scenes, an effect
is obtained by allowing the Chorus to turn for
a moment into ordinary flesh and blood. In
the Iphigenia in Tauris (1055 ff.) the safe
escape of Iphigenia and Orestes depends on
the secrecy of the Chorus of Greek captives.
Iphigenia implores them to be silent, and,
after a moment of hesitation, because of the
danger, they consent. Iphigenia, with one
word of radiant gratitude, forgets all about
them and leaves the stage to arrange things
with her brother. And the captives left
alone watch a sea-bird winging its way towards
Argos, whither Iphigenia is now going and
they shall never go, and break into a beautiful
home-sick song. Similarly in the splendid
finale of Aeschylus' Prometheus the Daughters
of Ocean, who have been mostly on the
unearthly plane throughout the play, are

THE CHORUS 239

suddenly warned to stand aside and leave
Prometheus before his doom falls : in a rush
of human passion they refuse to desert him
and are hurled with him into Hell.

At other times the effect is reached by
emphasizing just the other side, the uneartlili-
ness of the Chorus. In the Heracles, for
instance, when the tyrant Lycus is about to
make some suppliants leave the protection
of an altar by burning them — a kind of atro-
city which just avoided the technical religious
offence of violating sanctuary — the Chorus
of old men tries for a moment to raise its hand
against the tyrant's soldiers. It is like the
figures of a dream tr^dng to fight — " words
and a hidden-featured thing seen in a dream
of the night," as the poet himself says,
trying to battle against flesh and blood ; a
helpless visionary transient struggle which is
beautiful for a moment but would be grotesque
if it lasted. Again, in the lost Antiope there
is a scene where the tyrant is inveigled into a
hut by murderers ; he manages to dash out
and appeals to the Chorus of old men for help.
But they are not really old men ; they are
only ancient echoes or voices of Justice, who
speak his doom upon him, standing moveless
while the slayers come.

240 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

These examples enable us to understand a
still stronger effect of the same kind which
occurs m the Medea and has, until very lately,
been utterly condemned and misunderstood.
It is an effect rather reminding one of the
Greek fable of a human wTong so terrible that
it shook the very Sun out of his course. It is
like the human cry in the Electra (p. 157), which
shook the eternal peace of the gods in heaven.
There is something delirious about it, an
impossible invasion of the higher world by the
lower, a shattering of unapproachable bars.

Medea has gone to murder her children inside
the house. The Chorus is left chanting its
own, and our, anguish outside. " \Vhy do
they not rush in and save the children ? "
asked the critics. In the first place, because
that is not the kind of action that a Chorus can
ever perform. That needs flesh and blood.
" Well," the critic continues, " if they cannot
act effectively, why does Euripides put them
in a position in which we instinctively clamour
for effective action and they are absurd if they
do not act ? " The answer to that is given in
the play itself. They do not rush in ; there
is no question of their rushing in : because the
door is baiTed. "When Jason in the next scene
tries to enter the house he has to use soldiers

THE CHORUS 241

with crowbars. The only action they can
possibly perform is the sort that specially
belongs to the Chorus, the action of baffled
desire.

Medea is in the house ; the Chorus is chant-
ing its sublimated impersonal emotion about
the Love that has turned to Hate in Medea,
and its dread of things to come (1267 ff.) :

For fierce are the smitings back of blood once shed
Where Love hath been : God's wrath upon them that
kill.
And an anguished Earth, and the wonder of the dead
Haunting as music still. . . .

when a sudden cry is heard within. The song
breaks short, and one woman speaks :

Hark ! Did ye hear ? Heard ye the children's cry ?
Another.

0 miserable woman ! O abhorred !

Voice of a Child within.
What shall I do ? What is it ? Keep me fast
From Mother !

The Other Child.

I know nothing. Brother ! Oh,

1 think she means to kill us.

One of the Chorus.

Let me go !
I will ! — Help, help ! And save them at the last !
Child.
Yes, in God's name. Help quickly or we die !

The Other Child.
She has almost caught me now : she has a sword.
Q

242 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

One sees the Women of the Chorus listening
for the Children's words ; then they break,
as it were, from the spell of their own super- ^
mortal atmosphere, and fling themselves~~on ,
the" barred door. They beat in vain against
the bars and the Children's voices cry for help
from the other side.

But the inrush of violent horror is only
tolerated for a moment. Even in the next
words we are moving back to the realm of
formal poetry :

Women Beating at the Door.
Thou stone, thou thing of iron ! Wilt verily
Spill with thine hand that life, the vintage stored
Of thine own agony ?

Others
A woman slew her babes in days of yore,
One, only one, from dawn to eventide. , . .

and in a moment we are away in a beautiful
remote song about far-off children who have
been slain in legend. That death-cry is no
longer a shriek heard in the next room. It is
the echo of many cries of children from the
beginning of the world, children who are now
at peace and whose ancient pain has become
part mystery and part music. Memory —
that Memory who was mother of the Muses
— has done her work upon it.

CONCLUSION 243

We see here the justification of the high
formahsm and convention of Greek tragedy.
It can touch without flinching any horror of
tragic hfe, without faihng in sincerity and
without marring its normal atmosphere of
beauty. It brings things under the great
magic of something which is hard to name, but
which I have tried in these pages to indicate ;
something that we can think of as eternity or
the universal or perhaps even as Memory.
For Memory, used in this way, has a magical
power. As Mr. Bertrand Russell has finely put
it in one of his Essays, " The Past does not
change or strive. Like Duncan in Macbeth
' After life's fitful fever it sleeps well.' What
was eager and grasping, what was petty and
transitory, has faded away. The things that
were beautiful and eternal shine out like stars
in the night."

This power of transfiguration belongs in
varying degrees to all poetry, but it belongs
in special force to Greek Tragedy ; and Greek
Tragedy attains it in part by all its high
religious traditions and severities of form, but
most fully by means of its strangest conven-
tion, the Chorus ; the band of half -embodied
emotions and memories, the lyric song and the
dance expressing things beyond speech. It

244 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE

is through this power that tragedy attains its
pecuHar quaHty of encouragement and triumph.
We must not forget that Aristotle, a judge
whose dicta should seldom be dismissed with-
out careful reflection, distinguishes tragedy
from other forms of drama not as the form that
represents human misery but as that which
represents human goodness or nobleness.
If his MSS. are to be trusted he even goes so
far as to say that tragedy is " the represen-
tation of Eudaimonia," or the higher kind of
happiness. Of course he fully recognizes the
place of death and disaster in it, and he prefers
the so-called " unhappy ending." The powers
of evil and horror must be granted their full
scope ; it is only thus that we can triumph
over them. Only when they have worked
their uttermost will do we realize that there
remains something in man's soul which is for-
ever beyond their grasp and has power in its
own right to make life beautiful. That is the
great revelation, or the great illusion, of
tragedy.

It is achieved, apparently, by a combination
of two extremes ; in matter a full facing of
tragic facts, and in form a resolute transfigura-
tion of them by poetry. The weak artist
shirks l^he truth by a feeble idealism ; the

CONCLUSION 245

prosaic artist fails to transfigure it. Euripides
seems to me to have gone further than any
other writer in the attempt to combine in one
unity these separate poles. In this lies, for
good or evil, his unique quality as a poet. To
many readers it seems that his powers failed
him ; his mixture of real life and supernatural
atmosphere, of wakeful thought and dreaming
legend, remains a discord, a mere jar of over-
MTOught conventions and violent realism. To
others it is because of this very quality that
he has earned the tremendous rank accorded
him by Goethe, and in a more limited sense
by Aristotle, and still stands out, as he stood
over two thousand years ago, "even if faulty
in various ways, at any rd-te clearly the most ;
tragic of the poets."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Texts.— Murray, 3 vols., 3s. 6d. each (Oxford, 1901-1913),
with brief critical notes. This edition received
much help from Wilamo^vitz and Verrall, Wecklein-
Prinz (Leipzig, about 1895 to 1905), edited by Dr.
Wecklein from Priuz's collations of MSS. ; large
critical apparatus and lists of emendations. Text
much altered.

Fragments. — Fragmenta Tragicorum Graecorum by
Nauck (Leipzig, second edition, 1889) : this fine
book still holds the field (26s.). Supplementum
Euripideum by H. von Amim (Bonn, 1912). (Price
2s.) Contains the recent papyrus discoveries ; a
convenient and learned little book, defaced by
metrical errors.

Texts with Commentabv. — Paley, 3 vols., 8s. each
(Cambridge, second edition, 1880). Though old-
fashioned and often based on wrong information
about the MSS. and other matters this is a most
sound and thoughtful work. Of the numerous modern
editions (especially school editions) of particular
plays we may mention Euripides'* Herakles erklart
von UTrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (first
edition, Berlin, 1889) ; since re-edited in two volumes.
This is an epoch-making book, and together with
the same author's Analecta Euripidea (1875) has
laid the foundation for modem criticism : also
247

248 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Verrall's Medea, Sandys' Bacchae, Keene's Electra,
Powell's Phoenissae. In French, Weil's Sept Tragedies
d'Euripide; in German Bruhn's editions of the
Iphigenia in Tanris and the Bacchae deserve special
note.

Translations. — ^There are complete translations of the
extant plays in prose by Cioleridge (Bohn) and in
verse by A. Way (Macmillan). A good prose trans-
lation, which should really bring out the full meaning
of the Greek, is greatly needed. By Murray there
are at present translations of the following plays :
Hippolytus, Bacchae, Trojan Women, Electra,
Medea, Iphigenia in Tauris, Rhesus. In paper Is.
each, in cloth 2s. (George Allen).

Essays, etc. — ^The best starting point is Haigh's Tragic
Drama of the Greeks (Oxford, 1896), pp. 204-321 ;
Introduction to vol. i. of Paley's Commentary (see
above) ; Articles in the Histories of Greek Literature
by Mahaffy, Jebb (both Primer and article in Ency-
clopaedia Britannica), Jevons, Murray. In French,
the article in Croiset's History of Literature ; P.
Decharme, Euripide et V esprit de son Theatre (Paris,
1893) ; P. Masqueray, Euripide et sea Id'ees (Paris,
1908). In German, the " Einleitung " to Wila-
mowitz's Herakles, vol. i. (Berlin, 1889) ; Dieterich's
article on Euripides in Pauly-Wissowa's Real
Encycloyadie is excellent, though severely compressed
and ignorant of English work ; articles in the Histories
of Literature by Bergk (still valuable), Christ (in
Ivan Miiller's Handbuch), Bethe (in Gercke und

BIBLIOGRAPHY 249

Norden's Handbuch), Wilamowitz (in Kultur der

Gegenwart) ; the account in Eduard Meyer's Oeschichte

des AUerthums, vol. iv., is good. Also Ed. Schwartz,

Charahterlcopfe aus der Antiken Literatur (Leipzig,

1906), second study, very good : H. Steiger, Euripides,

seine Dichtung und seine Persvnlichkeit (Leipzig,

1912). Useful, though often uncritical, is W.

Nestle Euripides, der Dichter der Oriechischert

AufklcLrung (Stuttgart, 1901) ; also Die Philoso-

phische Quellen des Euripides (Leipzig, 1902). The

ideas of " the Enlightenment," to which reference

is often made, can be well studied in Mr. Brailsford's

book in this Library, Shelley, Oodunn, and Their

Circle.

Dr. A. W. Verrall's theory of Euripides is developed

in Euripides the Rationalist (Cambridge, 1905) ; Euripides''

Ion (1890) ; Four Plays of Euripides (1905) ; The Bac-

dmntes of Euripides (1910). See also G. Norwood, The

Riddle of the Bacchae (London, 1908).

Murray's previous writings include the chapter in his
Ancient Qreek Literature (1898) ; introduction to vol.
ii. of The Athenian Drama (George Allen, 1902). (This
volume is called " Euripides " and contains, besides the
translations of the Hippolytus, Bacchae and Frogs, since
republished separately, an Introduction and an Appendix
on the lost plays of Euripides). Introductions to his
translations of separate plays : see above ; Greek and
English Tragedy, an essay in English Literature and the
Gassics, edited by G. S. Gordon (Oxford, 1912); and
the article on Euripides in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of

250 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ethics and Religion. (These writings have been sometimes
quoted ifi the present volume.)

The Lives can best be read in the edition of the Scholia
by Ed. Schwartz (Berlin, 1887). To this must now be
added the fragments of Satynis in Oxyrhyncus Papyri,
vol. ix. (also contained, though without Dr. Hunt's
introduction, in Arnim's Supplementum Euripideum ;
see above). The ancient references to the facts of Euri-
pides' life are admirably collected in vol. i. of Nauck's
small text of Euripides. See also Wilamowitz's Herakles,
pp. 1-40.

Chronology of the Plays. — Wilamowitz-Moellendor£F,
Analecta Euripidea (Berlin, 1875). Grace Macurdy,
The Chronology of the extant Plays of Euripides (C!ol-
umbia University, 1905).
Lost Plays. — Fragments in Nauck ; see above. No
complete translation. A good many of the lost plays
are treated and fragments translated in the Appendix
to Murray's Euripides, Athenian Dra7na, vol. ii. ; see
above. The classical work on this subject is still
Welcker's Griechische Tragoedie, a great book : 3
vols. (Leipzig, 1839-41.) Hartung's Euripides
Restiiutus, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1844), is uncritical and
somewhat prejudiced against Welcker, but has
much charm.
Antiquities, etc. — The standard book is Haigh's Atlic
Theatre, 3rd edition, by A, W. Pickard-Cambridge
(Oxford, 1907). See also Greek Tragedy by J. T.
Sheppard (Cambridge Manuals) and Greek Drama
by Barnet in Dent's Series.

PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK

NAMES

Greek names have mostly come to the modem world
through Latin and consequently are generally given in
their Latin form. Thus in Latin the K-sound was denoted
by C ; KH by CH, AI- by AE ; OU- by U ; U by Y,
which is really a Greek letter taken over into Latin for
this express purpose. Also one or two common ter-
minations are given in their Latin form, Homeros
becoming Homerus, Apollon Apollo, and Alexandros
Alexander. This difference in writing did not mean
a difference in pronunciation ; the Latin Aeschylus
was pronounced (except perhaps in the termination)
exactly like the Greek " Aiskhulos," Thucydides like
" Thoitkudides.'^

The conventional English pronunciation follows the
Latin form and pronounces all vowels and diphthongs as
in English, except that E is always pronounced, and never
used merely to lengthen a previous vowel: e.g., "Euri-
pides " rhymes with " insipid ease," not with " glides,"
" Hermione " roughly with " bryony," not with " tone."
OE and AE are pronounced as one syllable, Hke " ee "
in " free," except when marked as two syllables, as
" Arsinoe : EU as in " feud. Of the consonants C is
pronounced as in English, CH as K. The only difficulty
251

PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK NAMES

then is to know where the stress comes and what vowels
are long or short.

By Latin custom, if the last syllable but one is long, it
will have the stress (as surprising, everlasting, Achilles,
Agamemnon) ; if the last syllable but one is short, the
stress will be on the syllable before (as ddamant, ddngeroiis,
Aischylus, Thucydides).

In the following index ' denotes a stressed short vowel
sound, as in cattle, imbidded, pitiful, bidlogy : a denotes
a stressed long vowel as in cdke, creeper, spiteful, Octtber,
endtlrable, gproscope.

INDEX

[ Not iticluding the Bibliography.]

Abdera, 144
Achillea, 177 ff.
Acts, book of, 21
Actaeon, 66

Afeechylus, 11, 25, 58, 59, 67, 70,
121, 135, 182 ff., 186. 206, 234
Agamimnon, 153, 207
ChSephoH, 153
Euminides, 183, 234
Lycurgda, 66, 182 /., 186
Pirsae, 43, 104
Prometheus, 66, 206, 238
Seven, 43
Suppliants, 121
Agamfimnon, 133, 175-179, 206
Igathon, 170
Agtn (Contest), 64
AUion (mythical cause), 66
Alcibiades (u iu Greek), 110-114
i.lcman, 106
Altar, in tragedy, 210 /.
AnaxAgoras, 30, 51 /., 58, 116
Anaximinder, 63
Apollo, 36, 121-126
Archeliiis (like " slay us ") : (1)
pliilosopher, 56 ; (2) King of
Macedon, 169
Archer, W., 221

Architecture of plays, 209 ff., 215
Arete (virtue), 38, 41, 50
Argos, 112
Aristldes, 43, 47, 49
Arist6phaiies, 25, 30 /., 74
Acharnians, 26, 77
Birds, 143
Frogs, 25, 26, 114, 120, 172, 191,

192
Knights, 27, 46, 112
Women at the Thesmophdria, 25,
27
Aristotle, 10, 20, 129, 244, 245
Athena, 42, 131

Athens, after Persian War, 37 ff. ,
39-42, 45, 110; Ideals of,
89-42, 109, 115 ; changes in,
107-115; and Euripides, 30-
84, 89, 99, 119, 166 ff.
conaiitution of, 97 /.

253

Atmosphere of play, 210 /.
Augustine, 141

Biography, 21 ; of Euripides, 23
Blood-feud, 152, 153
Browning, E,., 9

Cephlsophon, 29, 167

Charites (Graces), 105

Chervil, 26

Chorus, 83, 228-242 ; in dialogue,

237 /.
Clarity in style, 13
Classicism, 199
Cleon, 58, 109 /., 118
Clytemn&tra, 152-157, 175-180

206
Coleridge, 204
Comedy. See Aristophanes, Kcw

Comedy
Convention in art, 201 ff. ; as

opposed to nature, 53 /.
Conversion, 141
Coniford, F. M., 64, 232, 234

Dance, 62, 229 /.
Demokfedes, 49, 194 /.
^Pemocracy, 38 ff., U6 •,

fDeus ex mdchind (appearance of aj
7 God from a stage machine)/
M^ iafi>/.. 160-164. 221-227.
See Epiphany-^^ .

Dickens, 33

Di6genes of ApoUonia, 56
Dionysus, 64 /. ; his ritual, 64 /. ;
festival, 68 ; in Bacchae, 188
Drama, Greek. See Tragedy
mediaeval liturgical. 62, 65
Elizabethan. 60. 235

Elizabethans, 60, 235

Elmsley, 9

Empire, Athenian, 108-110

■' Enlightenment," 48, 96, 116.

See Ideas
Ephebi, 43
Epicurus, 20

254

INDEX

\

Epiphany,._fi4,afe5. /., 100-164.

See DeusexMdthinA ^^ ^

Euripides : birtli, 22, 35 ; death,
171 /. ; biograpliy, 23 ff. ;
portrait, 28 ; fatlier, 35 ;
mottier, 26 /., 35 ; boolts, 28,
103 ; cave at Salamis, 29,
165 ; ideas, 7, 99 ; teachers,
50-59 ; as playwrlglit, 7,
10, 85 ; mysticism, 8, 163 ;
attitude to IteligioBr+se-lW ;
influence after death, 10 ff. ;
relation to Athens, 30 /.,
89, 99, 119 ff., 126, 166 ff. ;
and Ctomedy, 30 ; attitude
to women, 28, 32 ff., 84 ff.,
121-126 ; style, 13 /. ; tech-
nique, 125, 198 ff. ; battle
pieces, 104
Euripides' Ode on Alcibiades, 113
Epitaph on those slain in
Sicily, 144

Sigeus, 98

Aeolus, 78

Alcistis, 70, 72 /., 88

Alcmaion in Corinth, 173

Alcmaeon in Psophis, 71, 73 /.

Alexander, 137-139

Alope, 121

Andrdmache (like " from a
key "), 98, 112, 163, 210, 224

Andr6meda, 143-145

^n«iop<'(lin Greek), 239

AUge, 121

Bacchae, 9, 19, 173, 181-190, 195

Bdieroph6ntes, 101, 190
Children of UiracUs, 93 /., 98,

210
Cretans, 79
Cretan Women, 71, 77
Cyclops, 70
Danae, 121

Daughters of PHias, 69 /., 81
ElMra, 138, 152-157, 195, 219 /.,

224, 240
Erichtheus, 98
Eieuha, 89-90, 143, 163, 187,

229
Hilena, 142, 146148, 163, 192
Biracles, 99-105, 191, 197, 210,

234, 239
Bippolytus, 85-88, 163, 191 ff.,

210, 213 /., 217-219, 224,
^ 286, 238

ton, 79, 119-126, 192, 199
hhigenla in Aulis, 173-181, 191

Iphigenia in Tauris, 101, 142,

145-146, 163, 210, 229, 234,,

238
■^ Medea, 32, 81-86, 90, 143, 163,

187, 192, 206, 229, 240-242
Melanippe, 27, 121
Orhtes, 158-163, 163, 191, 195,

229
Palamedes, 137, 139 /.
Phoenissae, 148-152, 163
Rhesus, 44, 71, 224
Suppliant Women, 94-98, 111,

210, 234
THephus, 72, 74 ff.
Theseus, 92
Trojan Women, 130-137, 140 ff.,

191, 210, 234, 236.

Forgiveness, doctrine of, 162-184
Frazer, J. G., 64
Freedom of Thought, 58, 96
French Revolution, 118

Gellius, 25
Glover, 141
Gods, 191-192; on stage, 156 /.

See Deus ex Mdchind
Goethe, 10, 245
Graces, The, 105
Grenfcll, 24

Haigh, 232

Hardy, T., 234

Harrison, J. H., 64, 222

Hecataeus, 49

Hflen, 162

Hellenism, 39

H6racles, Children of, 41. See

under Euripides
Heraclltus, 63
Herd, The, 193/., 195
Heroes, 65 /.

Her6dotus, 20, 39-42, 53 /., 107
Hesiod, 47
Hippocrates, 21
Historical Spirit, 199 /,
Homer, 36, 131, 229
Horace, 222
Hubris, 63, 128
Hunt, 24
Hvgialnon, 167
Hypferbolus, 110 /.

Ibsen, 9, 33, 206
Ideas, 45/., 116
Immortality, 36
Initiations, 36

INDEX

255

Innocents, Massacre of, Si
I6ma, 45 ff., 49, 51

J4?on, 82-85, 206
Johnson, S., 211

Law, 39 ff.
Leicester, Earl of, 60
Lincoln, Abraham, 231

Macaulay, 9

Macedonia, 169-173

Magnesia, 169

Mary Magdalen, 65

Masks, 75

Mediaeval Drama, 62, 65

M^gara, 44

Melian Dialogue, 127-130

Melos, 127-132, 194

Memory, 106/., 242

Menander. See New Comedy

Menelails (" elay us"), 113, 158

i?., 176/., 206
Meredith, G., 103, 203
Messenger, 214-220
Miletus, Fall of, 66
Military Service, 43, 101 /., 105
Miltiades (i in Greek), 43, 49
Milton, 9, 208
Muesilochus, 29
Muses, 34, 105
Mysteries, 36

Mystery Plays, 62, 65, 185
Mysticism, 8, 163

Isature, opposed to Convention,

53/.
Nelson, Horatio, 281
Nefrekepta, 230
Nestle, 8

New Comedy, 173 /., 201 /.
" Nomos." See Convention
Norwood, G., 8

Old Age, 166
Old Year, 63 /.
Olympic Games, 113
Orfetes, 66, 153 ff. See under
Euripides

Parian Marble, 22
Paris, Gaston, 61
Pasiphae, 79

Patriotism, 98. See Plays, patri-
otic
Paul, 141
Peasants, Greek, 46 /., 117

Peloponn^ian War, 91, 94, 107-
110

P^ntheus, 86, 181 ff.

Pericles, 43, 52, 58, 91, 108 /.

Persians, 37

Persian War, 37, 48

Phafidra, 86-88, 213 /.

Philochorus, 24 ff., 27

Philodemus, 168

Phlya, 35 /., 46

Phrynichus, 42

•Phuiii { u in Greek). See Nature

Pindar, 48, 121, 140

Plato, 15, 29, 32, 50, 140

Plays. See under Authors : Euri-
pides', patriotic, 91 /., 98 ;
early, 70-73 ; after 4i5.
142^.

Piatarch, 113

Poets, ancient and modern, 102 /.

Polygnotus, 42, 44

Person, 9

Preparation, 216-221

Prodicus, 56

Prologues, 207-212

Prometheus, 206. See Aeschylus

Protdgoras, 30, 54-56

Pythagoras, 49

Realism, 19, 76, 174, 224 ; avw-

sion from, 103 /.
Religion, 190-194
fieaurrection, 35, M, 181, 190 /.
Rhyme, 203
Ridgeway, 65
Ritual in tragedy, 62-67, 174,

202 ; forms, 64, 181
Romance, 73 /., 142-146, 205
Russell, B., 243

Salamis, 29, 37, 165; battle of,

22, 68
Sdtyrus, 23 ff., 31
Satyr-plays, 67 /.
Scott, W., 33
Sex questions, 78 /., 121
Shakespeaie, 60, 208 /., 243
Shaw, G. B., 206
Shelley, 9, 18, 95, 234
Sicilian Expedition, 130, 170, 194
Sicily, 130, 170
Simonides, 144

Sincerity of Greek Tragedy, 204
Slavery, 137-139, 175-178, 123-

125
Socrates, 29, 56
Sophists, 45/., 50-59, 116

256

INDEX

Sdphia (Wisdom), 3S, 50, 92, 109,

194
S6phocles, 9, 11, Si, 172, 206

Ajax, 66

Antigone, 34, 70, 206

El^ctra, 153, 156, 207

Oedipus Tyrannus, 34, 216, 23G

Pliiloctetes, 76
Sparta, 33

Speeclies in tragedy, 212
Steigcr, 9
Stesiclioriis, 147
" Siinesis," 191

Superstition, 43 /., 116-119, 224 /.
Swinburne, 18, 185, 203
Sympatliy, sliiit of, 187 /.

Tdcitus, 21

Tennyson, 103

Thebes, 42, 149

Themfstocles, 37, 41 ff., 49, 169

Theophany. See Detis ex MAchind

Tlieseus, 43, 95 ; sons of, 89 ;

in Hippolytus, 87
Thesmoplioria. See Aristophanes
Tliracians, 44

Thucydides, 107-110, 127-130, 170
Tim6theus, 30, 170
Tolstoy, 168
Tradition, 14 ; of fifth century,

15; in tragedy, 62-67, 174,

183 ; in art, 17

Tragedy, origin, 64 /. ; ritual in,
see Ritual ; essence, 244 /. ;
dress, etc., 75 /. ; perform-
ances, 68 ; " most tragic,"
10, 135, 245

Translations, 198 //.

Trilogy, 67

Vegetation-spirit, 35, 62 ff.
Verisimilitude in art, 229, 233
Verrall, A. \V., 8, 101, 159, 199
Victorian age, 16
■• Virtue," 38, 41, 50

War Party, 31, 114, 143, 166
Wars, Persian and Peloponnesian.

See s.v.
Wells, H. G., 160
Whitman, W., 18
Wilamowitz, 141, 199
William the Silent, 35
■• Wisdom," 38, 50, 92, 109, 194
Women in Athens, 32 /., 84 ff. ;

in Euripides, 84 ff., 121-126,

137

Xuthus, 121-126

Year, Old and New, 62 ff.

Zeus, 206
Zeuxis, 170

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(With Maps.) " A stirring study." — The Guardian.

51. WARFARE IN BRITAIN

By HiLAiRE Belloc, M. a. " Rich in suggestion for the historical student."
— Edinburgh Evening News.

55- MASTER MARINERS

By J. R. Spears. "Acontinuous story of shipping progress and adventure. . .
It reads like a romance." — Glasgow Herald.

61. NAPOLEON

By Herbert Fisher, M. A., F.B. a. (With Maps.) The story of the great
Bonaparte's youth, his career, and his downfall, with some sayings of Napoleon,
a genealogy of bis family, and a bibliography.

66. THE NAVY AND SEA POWER

By David Hannav. The author traces the growth of naval power from early
times.and discusses its principles and effects upon the history of the Western world.

In Preparation

ANCIENT GREECE. By Prof Gilbert Murray, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A.
ANCIENT EGYPT. By F. Ll. Griffith, M.A.
THE ANCIENT EAST. By D. G. Hogakth, M.A., F.B.A.
A SHORT HISTORY OE EUROPE. By Herbert Fisher, M.A., F.B.A.
PREHISTORIC BRITAIN. By Robert Munro, M.A., M.D., LL.D.
THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE. l!y Norman H. Bavnes.
THE RE FOR MA TION. By Principal Lindsay, LL.D.
A SHORT HISTORY OE RUSSIA. By Prof. Milyoukov.
MODERN TURKEY. By D. G. Hogarth, M.A.
FRANCE OF TO-DAY. By Albert Thomas.
GERMANY OF TO-DAY. By Charles Tower.
HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. By R. S. Rait, M.A.
SOUTH AMERICA. By Prof. W. R. Shepherd.
LONDON. By Sir Laurence Gomme, F.S.A.

HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF SPAIN. By J. Fitzmaurice-
Kellv, F.B.A., Litt.D.

Literature and zArt

2. SHAKESPEARE

By John Masefield. " The book is a joy. We have had half-a-dozen more
learned books on Shakespeare in the last few years, but not one so wise."—
Mancke<:fer Guardian.

27. ENGLISH LITERA TURE : MODERN

By G. H. Mair, M.A. "Altogether a fresh and individual hook."— Observer.

35. LANDMARKS IN FRENCH LITERATI RE

By G L. Strachey. '' It is difficult to imagine how a better account of
French Literature could be given in 250 small pages." — The Times.

39. ARCHITECTURE

By Prof. W. R. Lfthaby. (Over forty Illustrations.) " Popular guide-books
to architecture are, as a rule, not worth much. This volume is a welcome excep-
tion."— Building News. "Delightfully bright reading." — Christian World.

3

By Prof. J. Frskinf. and Prof. W. P. Trent. '"An admirable summary from
Franklin to Mark Twain, enlivened by a dry humour." — Athcnaum.

43. ENGLISH LITERATURE: MEDIEVAL

By Prof. W. P. Kf.r, M.A. "Prof. Ker, one of the soundest scholars in English
we have, is the very man to put an outline of English Mediaeval Literature
before the uninstructed public. His knowledge and taste are unimpeachable,
and his style is effective, simple, yet never dry." — The Athenaeum.

45. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

By L. Pearsall Smith, M.A. "A wholly fascinating study of the different
streams that went to the making of the great river of the English speech." —
Daily News.

52. GREAT WRITERS OE AMERICA

By Prof. J. Erskine and Prof. W. P. Trent. '
Franklin to Mark Twain, enlivened by a dry hun

63. PAIVTERS AND PAINTING

By Sir Frederick Wedmore. (With 16 half-tone illustrations.) From the

Primitives to the Impressionists.

64. PR JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE

By John Bailey, M.A.

65. THE LITERATURE OE GERMANY

By Professor J. G. Robertson, M.A., Ph.D. A review of one of the greatest
literatures of the world by a high authority.

70. THE VICTORIA /Y AGE IN LITERATURE

By G. K. Chesterton. " The Victorian Compromise and its Enemies" —
"The Great Victorian Novelists "—" The Great Victorian Poets"— "The
Break-up of the Compromise."

In Preparation

ANCIENT ART ay' RITUAL. By Miss Jane Harrison, LL.D., D.Litt.

GREEK LITERATURE. By Prof Gilbert Murray, D.Litt.

LA TIN LITER A TURE. By Prof. J. S. Phillimore.

CHAUCER AND HIS TIME. By Miss G. E. Hadow.

THE RENAISSANCE. By Miss Edith Sichel.

ITALIAN ART OE THE RENAISSANCE. By Roger E. Fry, M.A.

ENGLISH COMPOSITION. By Prof. Wm. T. Brewster.

LITERARY TASTE. By Thomas Seccombe.

WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS CIRCLE. By A. Ci utton Brock.

GREA T WRITERS OE RUSSIA. By C. T. Hagberg Wright, LL.D.

SCANDINA VI AN HIS TORY &= LITERA TURE. Bv T. C. Snow, M.A.

7. MODERN GEOGRAPHY

By Dr Marion- Newbigin. (Illustrated.) "Geography, again : what a dull,
tedious study that was wont to be ! . . . But Miss iMarion Newbigin invests its
dry bones with the flesh and blood of romantic interest." — Daily Telegraph.

9. THE EVOLUTION OE PLANTS

By Dr D. H. Scott, M.A., F.R.S., late Hon. Keeper of the Jodrell Laboratory,
Kew. (Fully illustrated.) " Tlie information is as tru-tworihy as first-hand
knowledge can make it. . . . Dr Scott's candid and familiar style makes the
difficult subject both fascinating and easy." — Gardeners' Chronicle.

4

17- HEALTH AND DISEASE

By W. Leslie Mackenzie, M.U., Local Government Board, Edinburgh.
" rVr Mackenzie adds to a thorough grasp of the problems an illuminating style,
and an arresting manner of treating a subject often dull and sometimes
\xa%^yoMxy."—Ecotto>iust.

i8. INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS

By A. N. Whitehead, Sc.D., F.R.S. (With Diagrams.) "Mr Whitehead
has discharged with conspicuous success the task he is so exceptionally qualified
to undertake. For he is one of our great authorities upon the foundations of
the science." — Westminster Gazette.

19- THE ANIMAL WORLD

By Professor F. W. Gamble, D..Sc., F.R.S. With Introduction by Sir Oliver
Lodge. (Many Illustrations.) " A delightful and instructive epitome of animal
(and vegetable) life. ... A fascinating and suggestive survey." — Morning Post .

20. EVOLUTION

By Professor J. Arthur Thomson and Professor Patrick Geddes. "A
many-coloured and romantic panorama, opening up, like no oiher book We
know, a rational vision of world-development." — Belfast News-Letter.

22. CRIME AND INSANITY

By Dr C. A. Mercier. " Furnishes much valuable information from one
occupying the highest position among medico-legal psychologists." — Asylum
News.

28. PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

By Sir W. F. Barrett, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College of
Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "What he has to say on thought-reading,
hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spiritualism, divinings, and so on, will be
read with avidity." — Dundee Courier.

31. ASTRONOMY

By A. R. HiNKS, M. A., Chief Assistant, Cambridge Observatory. "Original
in thought, eclectic in subsiance, and critical in treatment. . . . No better
little book is available." — School World.

32. INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE

By J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., Regius Professor 01 Natural History, Aberdeen
University. "Professor Thomson's delightful literary style is well known ; and
here he discourses freshly and easily on the methods of science and its relations
with philosophy, art, religion, and practical Wi^."— Aberdeen Journal.

36. CLIMATE AND WEATHER

By Prof. H. N. Dickson, D.Sc.Oxon., iM.A., F.R.S.E., President of the
Royal Meteorological Society. (With Diagrams.) "The author has succeeded
in presenting in a very lucid and agreeable manner the causes of the movements
of the atmosphere and of the more stable winds."— Manchester Guardian.

41. ANTHROPOLOGY

By R. R. Marett, M.A., Reader in Social Anthropology in Oxford University.
"An absolutely perfect handbook, so clear that a child could understand it, so
fascinating and human that it beats fiction 'to a frazzle.'" — Morning- Leader.

44. THE PRINCIPLES OE PHYSIOLOGY

By Prof. J. G. McKenkrick, M.D. "It is a delightful and wonderfully
comprehensive handling of a subject which, while of importance to all, does
not readily lend itself to untechnical explanation.^ . . . Upon every page of it
is stamped the impress of a creative imagination." — Glasgow Herald.

46. MATTER AND ENERGY

By F. SoDDY, M.A., F.K.S. "Prof. Soddy has successfully accomplished
the very difficult task of making physics of absorbing interest on popular
Wn^s."— Nature.

5

49- PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR

By Prof. W. McDougall, F.R.S., M.B. "A happy example of the non-
technical handling of an unwieldy science, suggesting rather than dogmatising.
It should whet appetites for deeper study." — Christian World.

53. THE MAKING OF THE EARTH

By Prof. J. W. Gregory, F.R.S. (With 38 Maps and Figures.) "A
fascinating little volume. . . . Among the many good things contained in the
series this takes a high place." — The Athenceum.

57. THE HUMAN BODY

By A. Kkith, M.D., LL.D., Conservator of Museum and Hunterian Professor.
Royal College of Surgeons. (Illustrated.) " It literally makes the 'dry bones'
to live. It will certainly take a high place among the classics of popular
science." — Manchester Guardian.

58. ELECTRICITY

By GiSBiiRT Kapp, D.Eng., Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Univer-
sity of Birmingham. (Illustrated.) " It will be appreciated greatly by learners
and by the great number of amateurs who are interested in what is one of the
most fascinating of scientific studies."— G/aj-^oa; Herald.

62. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE

By Dr Benjamin Mooke, Professor of Bio-Chemistry, University College,
Liverpool.

67. CHEMISTRY

By Raph.\el Meldola, F.R.S., Professor of Chemistry in Finsbury Technical
College, London. Presents clearly, without the detail demanded by the
expert, the way in which chemical science has developed, and the stage it has
reached.

In Preparation

THE Mlf^ERAL WORLD. By Sir T. H. Holland, K.C.I.E., D.Sc.

PLANT LIFE. By Prof. J. B. Farmer, F.R.S.

NERVES. By Prof. D. Fraskr Harris, M.D., D.Sc.

A STUDY OF SEX. By Prof. J. A. Thomson and Prof. Patrick Geddes.

THE GROWTH OF EUROPE. By Prof. Grenville Cole.

OCEANOGRAPHY. By Sir John Murray, K.C. B,, F.R.S.

Philosophy and "Religion

i;. MOHAMMEDANISM

•By Prof. D. S. Margoliouth, M.A., D.Litt. "This generous shilling's
worth of wisdom. ... A delicate, humorous, and most responsible tractate
by an illuminative professor." — Daily Mail.

40. THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY

By the Hon. Bertranu Russell, F.R.S. "A book that the ' man in the
street' will recognise at once to be a boon. . . . Consistently lucid and non-
technical throughout." — Christian World.

47- BUDDHISM

By Mrs Rhys Davids, M.A. " The author presents very attractively as well
as very learnedly the philosophy of Buddhism as the greatest scholars of the
day interpret it." — Daily News.

6

so. NONCONFORMITY: Its ORIGIN and PROGRESS

By Principal W. B. Selbie. M.A. "The historical part is brilliant in its
insight, clarity, and proportion ; and in the later chapters Dr Selbie proves
himself to be an ideal exponent of sound and moderate views." — Christian
World.

54. ETHICS

By G. E. Moore, M.A., Lecturer in Mor.T.1 Science in Cambridge University.
"A very lucid though closely reasoned outline of the logic of good conduct.
. . . This non-technical little book should make for clear thinking and wider
tolerance." — Christian World.

56. THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

By Prof. B. W. Bacon, LL.D., D.D. "Professor Bacon has boldly, and
wisely, taken his own line, mentioning opposing views only occasionally, and
has produced, as a result, an extraordinarily vivid, stimulating, and lucid
book." — Manchester Guardian.

60. MISSIONS: THEIR RISE and DEVELOPMENT

By Mrs Creighton. "Very interestingly done. ... Its style !s simple,
direct, unhackneyed, and should find appreciation where a more fervently
pious style of writing repels." — Methodist Recorder.

68. COMPARATIVE RELIGION

By Prof. J. EsTLiN Carpenter, D.Litt., Principal of Manchester College,
Oxford.

In Preparation

THE OLD TESTAMENT. By Prof. George Moork, D.D., LL.D.
BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. By R. H.

Charles, D.D.
A HISTORY 0/ FREEDOM 0/ THOUGHT. By Prof. J. B. Bury, LL.D.
A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By Clement Wekb, M.A.

Social Science

I. PARLIAMENT

Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir Courtekay P. Ilbert,
G.C.B., K.C.S.I., Clerk of the House of Commons. " The best book on the
history and practice of the House of Commons since Bagehot's 'Constitution.'"
—Yorkshire Pest.

5. THE STOCK EXCHANGE

By F. W. Hirst, Editor of " The Economist." " To an unfinancial mind must
be a revelation. . . . The book is as clear, vigorous, and sane as Bagehot's' Lom-
bard Street,' than which there is no higher com^WmenX.."— Mornings Leader.

6. IRISH NATIONALITY

By Mrs J. R. Green. " As glowing as it is learned. No book could be more
timely." — Daily News.

IP. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

By J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P. "Admirably adapted for the purpose of
exposition." — The Times.

II. CONSERVATISM

By Lord Hugh Cecil, M.A., M.P. "One of those great little books which
seldom appear more than once in a generation." — Morning Post.

7

i6. THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH

By J. A HoBSON, M.A. " Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique position among
living economists. . . . Original, reasonable, and illuminating." — Tlu Nation.

21. LIBERALISM

By L. T. HoBHOu^E, iVi.A. , Professor of Sociology in the University of London-
"A book of rare quality. . . . We have nothing but praise for the rapid and
masterly summaries of the arguments from first principles which form a large
part of this book." — IVestnihister Gazette.

24. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY

By D. H. Macgrkgok;. M..A., Protestor of Political Economy in the University
of Leeds " A volume so dispassionate in terms may be read with orofit by all
interested in the present state of unrest." — Aberdeen Journal.

26. AGRICULTURE

By Prof. VV. Somenvili.e, F.L.S. " It makes the results of laboratory work
at the University accessible to the practical farmer." — AtheniFum.

30. ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW

By W. iM. Gkldart, M A., B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English Law at
Oxford. " Contains a very clear account of the elementary principles under-
lying the rules of English Law." — Scots Law Times.
38. THE SCHOOL: An Introduction to the Study of Education.

By J. J. FiNDi.AY, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Education in Manchester
University. " .An amazingly comprehensive volume. ... tt is a remarkable
performance, distinguished in its crisp, striking phraseology as well as its
inclusiveness of subject-matter." — Morning Post.

59. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

By S. J. Chapman, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in Manchester
University. " Its importance is not to be measured by its price. Probably
the best recent critical exposition of the analytical method in economic
science." — G/asgozu Herald.

69. THE NEWSPAPER

By G. BiNNEV DiBBLEE, M..\. (Illustrated.) The best account extant of the
organisation ol the newspaper press, including Continental, American, and
Colonial journals.

In Preparation

POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bacon to Locke.
By G. P. GoocH, M.A.

POLITIC -^L THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bentham to J. S.
Mill. By Prof. W. I,. Davidson

POLIIICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Herbert Spencer
to To-day. By Ermest Barker, M.A.

SHELLEY, GODWIN, AND THEIR CIRCLE. By H. N. Brails-
ford.

THE CRIMINAL AND THE COMMUNITY. By Viscount St.

CVRES, M.A.

COMMONS ENSE IN LAW. By Prof. P. Vinogradoff, D.C.L.
THE CIVIL SERVICE. By Graha.m Wallas, .M A.
ENGLISH VILLAGE LIFE. By E. K. Bennett. M.A.
CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT-SHARING. By Aneurin

Williams, J. P.
THE SOCIAL SR-rTLEMENT. By Jane Addams and R. A. Woods.
GREA T INVENTIONS. By Prof J. L. Myres, M.A., F.S. A.
TOWN PLANNING. By RaymoniS Unwin.

London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls.

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