SOURCE: Cedric H. Whitman, "The Scope of Myth," in Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth, Harvard University Press, 1974, pp. 104-49.

[In the essay that follows, Whitman describes Euripides's ironic use of myth.]

Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep, wide sea of misery.

Amid his despair at post-Napoleonic Europe, Shelley, his mind as always on human redemption, wandered into the Euganean Hills and experienced in imagination a renewal of the world's youth, by way of a hazy vision of Venetian glory reborn, or else transfigured in a final sea change. History offers no answer to why, in the Athens of Pisander and Cleophon, with the echoes of the Sicilian disaster still sounding, and the city's ultimate defeat the only realistic prospect, the poet of the Medea, the Heracles, and the Trojan Women should have produced the three most reassuring plays of his career, at least as we know it. Escape has been the most frequent suggestion, and the most absurd. Apart from the discrepancy of the term with that other label, realism, so often applied to him, it is hard to see how Euripides could have sought, or the Athenians found, escape from their trials in these plays of suffering, misapprehension, struggle and barely won victory. Positive though they are in the event, they are far from lighthearted entertainment, and their moments of humor are simply not enough to construe them into comedies, in the New Comic sense. They are regularly, and perhaps rightly, looked upon as forebears of New Comedy, because they make elaborate use of intrigue, long-lost persons, and plots of somewhat far-fetched unlikelihood, but it is a perverse hypostasis to turn Euripides into a comedian because he developed themes that later proved productive—monotonously so—for comic poets.

There is nothing essentially comic about such themes. No plot is less likely than that of Oedipus Rex, unless it be the Trachiniae. Ion is not merely a lost child, he is a lost heroic child; one might say, a foundling father, destined for great things though raised in obscurity. As such, he fits far better into the myth of the young hero, of dual paternity and early years in exile, along with Theseus, Sigurd, and Zeus himself, than he does in the comic pattern of freeborn but mislaid children. The woman spirited away has her archetype in Persephone and her Near Eastern sisters, as Euripides made clear in the Helen; and as for intrigue, the last twelve books of the Odyssey, hardly a comedy in any later acceptance, provide venerable precedent. Mythic shapes, not comic gambits, are the springs of these three dramas, with all their tenderness, passion, and cloudlike detachment.

And yet, they inevitably contrast with Euripides' earlier and later works, all equally founded on myth. They rise like Shelley's "green isle" out of the murky chiaroscuro of lust, cruelty, and sheer madness that colors so many of the tragedies. What was this new vision of Euripides', and how did he come to it? If no promptings toward a drama of redemption can be found in the times, or in any circumstances known to us, yet the plays speak for themselves, as mythic structures of the poetic imagination, and their own best interpreters; for myth is both a commentary and the story it expounds, narrative and interpretation in one. Seen in the light of the myth that it enacts, the conventions that it fulfills, and the characters created in the process, the Ion, for instance, might be regarded as not, after all, so great a contrast with Euripidean art in general, but rather as a kind of culmination, or better, the most rounded example of what that art includes. Throughout his life Euripides dramatized myths, but always with irony, sometimes as delicate as that of the Alcestis, sometimes intensely caustic, as in the Heracles, so that the mythic and ironic modes, to use Northrop Frye's terms, seemed to strive in hopeless and irreconcilable conflict, which suggested to many critics, ancient as well as modern, the view so often repeated in the handbooks, that the poet was satirizing the mythology of traditional religion, demolishing clay-footed gods, and teaching reason. Yet the positive substance of Euripides' rationalism has never been revealed by anyone, and its very existence has been devastatingly cross-examined by E. R. Dodds, so that one is left with a sorry picture of the poet destroying with sly malice something that he could not replace with anything better, and, if Verrall could be believed, taking a puerile joy in it. Nietzsche even saw him as writing to please Socrates, and Socrates alone, as if Socrates were guilty as charged, and Euripides his gifted accomplice in the dismantling of religion. That fantasy has faded, but the confusions linger, and the question of what Euripides was really doing with myth remains.

The trilogies of Aeschylus were mythic dramas in the fullest sense of the word. Often, according to an ancient account, he peopled his stage exclusively with gods, as is certainly the case with the Prometheus plays, and very nearly with the Eumenides. But even when the characters are quite human, the import of their deeds and suffering extends into the context of cosmic speculation, and attains its final stage there. Every action, every word is a summons to the universe to respond. And it does respond in all its resonance and prismatic splendor, through masterful poetic rhythms and images as visionary as they are imprecise. The art of Aeschylus is agglutinative, after the fashion of epic; it aims at collecting within its scope no less than totality, as the great myths do, even though not all the parts may be logically assimilated. In such a scheme, irony's chief function is to reflect the discrepancy between the world process, as conceived, and the things men do as only partially aware participants in that process; men are identified with what they do, and the resolution of the conflict lies in the recovery of balance, as random human action, like a comet settling into orbit, finds a new and valid course within the universal ritual of moral order. The very emphasis on world process in such drama places it firmly within the mythic mode, even when a vitally individual character like Clytaemnestra threatens to give birth to psychological drama before its time.

Sophocles' dramatic scope, though not necessarily its implications, is far more restricted. Less mythic than Aeschylus in the meaning described above, he fixes his lens on a great individual of transcendent stature, a hero in fact, whose complex spirit, whole from the start, reveals itself in the brief temporal process of the play's action and, like the proverbial Spaniard, lives the life of the universe in one day. This mode—and we adhere to Frye's terminology—is the high mimetic, the mode of the single figure isolated in the merciless glare of crucial deed and thought. The basis of tragic irony here is the discrepancy between the hero's deed and his heroic self, the clearest example being, of course, Oedipus, who resolutely affirms that discrepancy to the citizens of Colonus throughout the first third of Sophocles' last play. This kind of irony seems to be Sophocles' particular own, but the mode is that of tragedy par excellence, and it returns in Shakespeare, Racine, and all poets who can focus their world view on individual experience as universal. Different as they are, both Sophocles and Aeschylus, whether through microcosm or macrocosm, offer a surmise of totality, a feat that became less and less a natural product as the years of the fifth century went on, and increasingly an "artifice of eternity."

When we look at the earliest preserved work of Euripides, we are struck at once by the lack of any such artifice. Myth is there in abundance, that is, mythic stories are retold and laced with allusions to other myths. Euripides is learned in the tradition; his mind seems to spin horizontally outward, as by some centrifugal force, to touch on tale after tale, motif on motif, whether as ornament, as something to be rejected, or as a remote explanatory cause. But there is no mythic artifice in the large sense to enclose this multiplicity, no intuition of a grand design, even if limited to the understanding of one person, as in Sophocles. Instead there is irony; not, in the early plays, internal irony coextensive with the dramaturgical forces of action and character, but the poet's own irony externally imposed, and ubiquitously corroding the mythic texture while the traditional structure remains untouched. Euripides could create neither cosmic nor heroic order. His mind swept over the kaleidoscope of mythology, choosing the little colored pieces for scrutiny, not estimating the total pattern in the tube but finding, quite honestly, that it is all done with mirrors; the pieces, however, were real, and he viewed them with the eye of a collector. There was genius in this ironic and disordered acceptance of the myths, for it meant that, whenever and if a vision of totality were to arise, it would give full measure to human and divine perversity as structurally inherent in the world. It would take account of small, contriving mortals; of gods remote and unregenerate, but indirectly drastic; and of the ambiguities of the irrational that works per accidens, but exists of an ineradicable necessity.

In short, it would be a vision of dramatic causality such as is found in the Iphigeneia, Helen, and Ion, where three motive forces, in constant interplay, become perceptible through the action: the effort of human characters, in the form of a plan or intrigue (techne, mechane), strives onward step by step, sometimes aided and sometimes thwarted by chance (tyche), while influences from divinity (daimon), whether as commands, oracles, deceptions, or epiphanies, play over both the rational and irrational elements of human experience with motley brilliance. The part of the gods, indeed, is sometimes difficult to distinguish from that of chance, for the gods confuse as much as they clarify; yet there is a felt difference in the enlarged perspective that they bring to bear, for divinity, though often in Euripides moved to action by the most dubious promptings, nonetheless is held to be sentient, where chance is not, and to be framed in the large dimensions of power and immortality. The gods need not be just, admirable, or even, perhaps, all-knowing; but they are always there, and Euripides invariably reckons with them as real forces in what might be called the motivational triad: techne, tyche, daimon. Often there is little discernible equilibrium in the working of the three; one or another may preponderate and the result may be the warped and tilted world so frequently thought of as typically Euripidean. But in the three late romances, the interplay works toward something like a harmonious wholeness, where most of the pieces, if not absolutely all, seem to construct among themselves a semblance, or hypothesis, of order.

At first, however, there were only the pieces, scattered and disappointing. The Alcestis provides a good example of how Euripides saw myth in 438 B.C., and suggests a contrast with how he was to see it later. The myth is the myth of Return from the Dead, which recurs, at least by way of metaphor, in all three romances, and is basic to all mythologies. Admetus, Argonaut and friend of Heracles, was a figure of heroic legend, who had won his bride by duly performing a princely impossibility, and Alcestis was one of the great heroines. Out of love for Admetus, Apollo had favored him with the privilege of escaping death if someone else would die for him; Alcestis sacrificed herself, but was restored by Heracles. The legend was originally conceived, of course, as ennobling to all concerned. Euripides, without altering a single detail, reduces all three principals to subheroic statue: Alcestis, about whom the play might have been expected to center, appears briefly and reveals herself as simultaneously agonized by the loss of her children and her own young life, and contemplating, with some detachment, her own nobility; she is little concerned with Admetus, save that he should appreciate her and not remarry. Heracles, slightly tipsy, rescues Alcestis as part of the day's work and gives her back to her husband inexplicably disguised. As for the protagonist, the virtues of Admetus have been sought, but not found. A subtle yet by no means ambiguous poltroon, he praises his wife's sacrifice, and tearfully accepts it, only later to wonder, amid his laments, what people will think of him. He cannot understand his parents' unwillingness to do his dying for him, and upbraids them mightily. By a dexterous use of falsehood, he turns the famed hospitality of his palace into an ostentatious farce, and when Heracles, by way of reward, brings Alcestis back to him, veiled and unidentified, he accepts her with reluctance, again out of fear of what people will say. As for Apollo's favor, like many of the gods' gifts, it seems to have done him harm, for it has convinced him that he is the most valuable person on earth, for whom all should be glad to consign themselves to the grave. Like the divinely favored Tantalus, he could not digest his great good fortune; he wears it with a kind of pseudo-godlike conceit, as if his almighty friend had granted him immortality, instead of a temporary stay. Could not Apollo, god of prophecy, have foreseen this? There is no reason to think that he could not, had Euripides chosen to deal with the matter; as the play stands, Apollo, like a true Olympian, seems to have simply confirmed the man in what he was, loftily toying the while with the human situation, as the prologue makes clear.

Surely the story could have been told differently; none of all this cool irony is native to it. Yet Euripides' haunting classic seems now so inevitable as to be the only possible rendition, despite the widely divergent constructions placed upon it. For some, perhaps because it stood in the place of a satyr play with the Telephus trilogy, it is a burlesque of heroic fiction, for others a "graceful masque," or a comedy; yet the language is too delicate for burlesque, and the prevailing mood, despite Heracles in his cups, is grave and tremulous under the palpable shadow of death. It has sometimes been classed with the romances, because of its happy ending, but the intensity of human struggle, the tilting matches with the gods, and above all, the wide speculative horizons of the romances are wholly lacking. The scene never extends beyond the palace at Pherae, Admetus makes no effort of any kind, and even Heracles' fight with Death is a simple, foregone victory in wrestling. Most important, the happiness of the ending is at least doubtful. When Heracles has unveiled the returned Alcestis, Admetus notices that she does not speak. Heracles explains that she must be silent for three days, until "purified before the nether gods." The language is vague, philologists explain that the Alcestis was written for only two actors, and therefore there was no one to speak the part, an answer that makes one ask why Euripides deliberately called attention to this limitation, especially when he had already introduced one supernumerary to sing the part of Eumelus. Heracles' reason is said to be supported by a popularly alleged regulation for revenants, but the evidence is scarce. The dramatic point of Alcestis' reticence is clear and effective: she has nothing to say. What could she have to say to the husband who assured her, in all his devotion to her beauty, that he would have a statue of her made, to place beside him in bed? Heracles' words, as he hands her over to him, are, "You have everything that you wished for," and one is driven to feel that this Apollonian beauty-lover's desires have indeed been well fulfilled in the receipt of something very like a statue. Apt comparison has been drawn with the close of A Winter's Tale, another play called a comedy, though it contains far less to laugh at than Hamlet. The "statue" of Hermione does speak, but exclusively to Perdita, and not a word to Leontes. In the austere Greek version, the returned says nothing at all, with a presage of silence for the remainder of a lifetime to come.

The Alcestis is tragedy, tragedy of the Return from Death to Death in Life, and Euripides has cast a cold eye on both; it is also tragedy of the self-fascinated ego, and of its resulting blight on human nature. But it is not high mimetic tragedy, for it explicitly rejects the heroic individual, while retaining the mythic tale which was originally identified with a hero. Throughout his life, Euripides made use of heroic fiction, without ever shaping a heroic figure, and by so doing he laid the foundations of a persistent misunderstanding—in which he was helped no little by Aristophanes—to the effect that he had degraded the art of tragedy to a daily household level, in which maidservants, clever schemers, and decrepit old men replaced the grand figures of yore with an intolerable volubility as lacking in poetic elevation as it was in the moral virtues. Like most of the half-truths about Euripides, this hardy perennial confuses things that he did not do with things that he did. True, he allowed more scope in his theater to characters of low social status, some of whom are splendid creations: probably the most moving single speech in the Alcestis is the slave girl's account of her mistress' farewell to her household (152 ff); certainly a crucial speech to the plot of the Ion is the doddering old retainer's analysis to Creusa of her husband's betrayal (808 ff). Medea's Hermione's, and Phaedra's nurses, Electra's farmer-spouse, Antigone's pedagogue, and sundry philosophizing messengers all illustrate the frequently uttered maxim that slaves can think as well and as nobly as the freeborn. With extreme artistic self-consciousness, Euripides transplants quotidian characters, native to what Frye calls the low mimetic mode, into the world of myth, to breathe its air as best they can in company with their reduced masters.

What Euripides did not do was abandon either the framework or the implications of the myth in which all these characters move. The framework continues to surround them, slaves, minions, and demythologized heroes alike, and the overtones are still those of the wide universal world of the grand tradition. The result is a jarring discrepancy of ethos between the two factors, a kind of deliberate polytonality, as if tragedy were now being written in two keys at once. This is precisely the manner of irony, and it should not be confused with the low mimetic mode, though such confusion occurs in the above-mentioned criticism by Aristophanes and others. The low mimetic is the mode of the novel and other forms of realistic and quasi-realistic representationalism; it creates its own illusion, recognizable as true or false by its degree of resemblance to the familiar, everyday experience of the reader; its power lies in the immediacy of its mimesis in the strictest sense, and its metaphysical dimension is practically nonexistent. Irony, however, has a metaphysical dimension, in that it supports the simultaneous existence of contraries in a single capsule of meaning, be it word, image, or entire work of art; and the creator of such a capsule always betrays his presence, which is why Euripides' personality is felt in his plays much more strongly than is Sophocles' or Aeschylus'. He constantly reminds his audience that he is making what they see before them, whereas the two earlier poets foster the illusion that the mythic tale is creating or recreating itself. In Euripides' telling of a tale, one is reminded of how Thomas Mann's Joseph, in the last book of his great tetralogy, reveals to his brothers, with charming clairvoyance, that they are all characters in a story, thus indirectly recalling the Prelude to the whole series, with its bemused speculation on the timeless existence of a story within the infinite recesses of time. Coexistent contrarieties, maintained by a detached, unfaltering self-consciousness, unconcealedly timing and managing all, hold the key to the art of the ironic mode.

In the earlier known tragedies, the contrarieties are for the most part allowed simply to coexist. It has been argued back and forth whether certain plays of Euripides are genuine tragedies, but the quarrel is chiefly over words. It has been said that the high mimetic was the mode of tragedy, or of the Sophoclean variety, at least, but for our one word "tragedy" we are indebted to three poets who all wrote differently, and there is small profit in narrowing the term to exclude the ironic tragedy of the Alcestis and other Euripidean plays, or, for that matter, the low mimetic tragedy of Death of a Salesman. The term is most convenient if left without too rigorous definition; if we overdefine it, or abandon it in criticizing Euripides, we miss his purposive use of conventional elements, and lose ourselves in tragical-pastoral-comical labels, picked ad hoc and utterly beyond any definition.

In any case, no one has ever denied that the Medea and the Hippolytus deserve to be called tragedies, though their manner of handling myth is ironic to the full. It is hard to find the Jason of Pythian IV in Euripides' play of 431. The self-interested brute who confronts us is far more repellent than the feeble Admetus, and his residual tormented human feeling, if that is what reveals itself in the final scene, comes too late to make any vital difference to the picture of him already staged. Medea's character is something more to be expected of the witch of tradition, who had murdered her little brother and old Pelias by the agency of his own daughters, but it is given complication in the play by her tragedy as a mother, the murder of her children, and its attendant anguish. This domestic aspect was not prescribed: there was an alternative version in which Medea destroyed only the princess and her father, the children being killed by the Corinthians in retaliation. Euripides wanted the vision of shattered domesticity, which he emphasizes and renders immediate in the figures of the Nurse and the Pedagogue, not merely in order to dramatize the violence of conflicting emotions and the extremities of revenge, but also for a thematic reason. The barbaric Medea, wronged and isolated, at first cuts an almost superhuman figure, contrasting powerfully with the low-mimetic persons of her household and the passive chorus. Even the fact of her motherhood is given heroic or at least martial dimensions by her famous statement: "I would rather stand with spear and shield three times / Than bear one child" (250-251). But as the determination grows upon her to slay the children, she herself grows, ironically, more and more human, though the tenderer affections are destined to be defeated, they are given full measure, and we witness the ruination, not of a heroine, but of a woman. What emerges thereafter is neither human nor heroic, but daemonic. Aristotle took exception to Medea's departure in the suddenly appearing chariot of the Sun on grounds that it was inorganic; rather, from the thematic point of view it is inevitable. Medea had come from Colchis, a sorceress and a barbarian; her adventure with Jason had been one of love and married life in Greece, whose advantages are stressed in the play (536 ff); but neither Greece nor marriage had brought advantage to her, only a heartless betrayal. Her departure, in the end, though geographically for Athens, is spiritually a return to Colchis; she had tried to be human, but the human scene was wanting in humanity, and she reverts to the witch. The detached and harrowing vista of the close amounts to a dismissal of the human condition, with all its supposed amenities, and an assertion of uncontrollable, daemonic power.

The impact of the Hippolytus is not much more encouraging. It begins with uncontrollable power, in the apparition of Aphrodite in the prologue, and ends with an epiphany of Artemis, equally uncontrolled, and potentially just as cruel (1420 ff). Between these Olympian poles, the drama of two basically noble persons destroyed plays like a puppet show, save that the puppets are convincingly alive and appealing. Again, two figures of lower social caste, the huntsman companion of Hippolytus and Phaedra's loyal but morally shabby nurse, throw an instant, immediate light on the principals, modifying them, while the Olympians dwarf them. Euripides had no need to diminish them further, to achieve his irony, as he had diminished Jason or Admetus. It was enough to allow them the foregone, vain struggle toward their opposed extremes of highmindedness, and let the end speak for itself. Phaedra's resolve to die of her passion, rather than to gratify it, crumbles, or is crumbled for her by the Nurse, and she sinks to criminal libel; Hippolytus maintains, even to the letter, his allegiance to purity in word and act, but is equally ruined. Theseus, guilty of one furious but understandable deed, is left to mourn both wife and son, with the godly reproof ringing in his ears. Humanity has failed again, but more beautifully; the insufferable arrogance of the young hero's asceticism is forgotten in the light of his tragic adherence to it, and Phaedra's personal hurt, both at Hippolytus' contempt and her own failure, is brought to bear too poignantly for simple condemnation. Both pathetically resemble the two deities who destroy them. The wide gulf between god and mortal is nowhere in Greek literature more touchingly envisioned than in the quiet finale. Artemis approves her votary, but abandons him because he is dying, and she cannot lend her immaculate presence to death; Hippolytus, on the brink of fulfilling his mortality, acknowledges the unscathed freedom of the divine in words of tender sorrow, tinged faintly with reproach: "You part with ease from our long fellowship" (1441). Artemis is sorrowful too, but cannot weep (1396 ff); rather, she plans revenge by destroying a favorite of Aphrodite's (1420 ff). As in the Iliad, the game of the immortals goes on; the mortal players die of their parts. And yet, in the rhythm of this closing scene, there spreads a broad wake of compassion, embracing both the dying and the deathless; Artemis, despite herself, leaves with a slight stain of human anguish on her heavenly garments.

In its gentle handling of humanity the Hippolytus complements and balances the Medea's dismissal of it. Taken together, the two plays present two important Euripidean themes which, as we have seen, were to be dramatized in close juxtaposition later in the romances; the earlier play concentrates on violence with terrible insistence; the Hippolytus, coming not long after, centers around the idea of purity, particularly in the figure of the hero, whose conception of it is firm, if not wholly sympathetic. But Phaedra too strives for purity, while yearning for something that would destroy it. Perhaps in both their cases it is more a matter of innocence than of purity in the sense of wholeness; the narrowly sexual terms of the plot tend to obscure whatever wider implications may have been in Euripides' mind at this period. In any case, he did not suggest the outlines of any larger whole as yet, either in the characters or in their myth. Yet he seems to reach toward them in the aetiological passages near the end of both plays: Medea, as she passes from protagonist to dea ex machina, says she will found a cult—one which actually existed—in honor of the dead children; and Artemis prophesies the equally real cult of the martyred Hippolytus. Euripides, whose concern with the origins of cults and other aetiological matters appears at times to be little more than antiquarian, here seems to intend more. Aeschylus could see the foundation of a cult as a kind of seal of validity upon the achievements of a trilogy; Euripides, whose plays contained no such achievements, nonetheless may have felt in the establishment of a religious institution some hint of permanence arising out of the ruins of dramatic world upon world, as though his keenly felt lack of comprehensive, or comprehensible scheme drove him to grasp at straws. If tragic mythology could not be rounded out into any form of salvation, even of the austerely structural, moral kind that Sophocles erected, at least it might leave memorials. The Medea and Hippolytus end at the tombs of innocence; true purity, wholeness, and salvation were still to seek.

Of all poets, Euripides did not see life steadily, and his era provided him with little help in seeing it whole. In the earlier plays, his dramatic renderings of myth are partial, in the sense that his detachment permits him only selective scrutiny of the parts of what once was an indissoluble whole: he sees the crushed flower of Phaedra's chastity, and the bright splinters of Hippolytus' self-admiring mirror; upon them the divine framework closes in like the walls in The Pit and the Pendulum. He sees Medea's volcanic despair bursting out of all frameworks, or, in another mood, a puny Admetus reprieved from all experience by the prince of gods, the prince of heroes, and a queen among wives. He sees all the pieces, but their snagged edges resist compliance with a total picture, or even with each other. The first task of the ironic mode is to disintegrate, and the gods in these plays, even the Medea where they take no overt part, function as the executors of a design of wholesale dismemberment, if design that be, and are far removed from the stately shapes who in earlier days, and always in Sophocles, could lend the inclusive magnitude and symmetry of their contours to the most shattering actions. Even the arraignment of Zeus that closes Sophocles' bitterest play, the Trachiniae, has a grand, sweeping, and apocalyptic ring in comparison to the mean and paltry spite of Cypris as avouched by Artemis (Hipp. 1400).

Skepticism and fragmentation lay deep in the spirit of the age, an age of intellectual enlightenment, political darkness, and war; an age that, far from having no mythology, was haunted by numberless little myths, mostly paranoid, myths of empire, myths of the threat of astronomy or new gods, rhetorical myths about panaceas such as oligarchy, panhellenism, or Persian gold, and whole clusters of myths surrounding Alcibiades, and of course Socrates. It was easy to gain a reputation for atheism in that era, and Euripides among others did, while the truly godless escaped; the beady eye, with its tunnel-vision, found a threat in every instance of nonconformity. Euripides was not an atheist; but so far, though nonconformist certainly, he was still too much of his age, too shrewd, and above all too honest to be able to command more than a partial gathering of threads from the great myths, overlaid as they now were by all the little ones. True myth adumbrates the life of the world, with men and the gods in it, functioning in their proper spheres, or perhaps transgressing them, but always illustrating them and reenacting them, as in the figures of a cosmic dance. Myth takes narrative form because it must include time, to be whole; but its ultimate shape is static. It requires collective affirmation by the community, and individual recreation by the poet. But the poet's task is made inordinately difficult when collective affirmation is in abeyance. The age, not Euripides, was godless; he and Sophocles faced the same problem, though with widely differing responses. In the abundance of his religious suffering and poetic intensity, Euripides strove, as poets do, for the myth of the life of the world, the myth of salvation, while all the little myths scattered his work with by-products easily mistaken for his purpose. But the full rondure was not yet in sight, and partial structures, if any, were the most that he could build. Master of diversity that he was, he tried all manner of approaches; he was even to try the heroic mold, only once, and then not with heroic satisfaction.

Most of the plays that survive from the next decade or so deal with war, or its aftermath, and probe less deeply into the mysterious possibilities of myth as such. No plays illustrate more sharply the fitful disjointedness of Euripides' dramaturgy, or the ironic shifts and ambivalences to which it was subject. One may perhaps regret the mixed process of chance and selection by which the Heracleidae, Andromache, Hecuba, and Suppliants were preserved, rather than works far more famous in their own time, such as the Telephus or the Andromeda. Yet these, together with the Trojan Women, supply some knowledge of Euripides' reaction to the great war that was in progress, and its effect on his poetic creativity. The two earlier ones have been usually read as propaganda, and there is certainly anti-Spartan sentiment expressed in both; yet it may be wondered whether Euripides was not always too many-sided ever to write straight propaganda, and whether these plays are not rather motley products of a lifelong attempt to see myth whole, an attempt out-flanked by inherent contradictions seen all too clearly.

The Heracleidae, for instance, could almost have been a drama of deliverance: the motifs are there. The children of Heracles are rescued from the persecutor of their father, Eurystheus, by lolaus, Heracles' nephew and old comrade, and the intervention of the Athenians led by the sons of Theseus. Here is Athens, in her favorite role of protectress of the suppliant, engaged against Peloponnesians, if not actual Spartans; to this extent, propaganda may be at work. So far too the play enacts a vindication of right and innocence over darker powers, with justice supported by the willing self-sacrifice of Macaria, daughter of Heracles, and symbolized by the rejuvenation of old Iolaus in the battle (796). Rejuvenation, as a triumph over time, is closely akin to Return from the Dead, and indeed in the original myth, lolaus actually returned from the underworld to protect the children and slay Eurystheus. Euripides is fond of the theme: besides Alcestis, Iphigeneia and Menelaus are both represented as figuratively returning from death, and Creusa, on recovering Ion, cries out that the long-dead Erechtheus "grows young again, and the earthborn house no longer gazes into night" (Ion 1465 f). In the Heracleidae, the idea is also lyrically celebrated in the apotheosis of Heracles and his marriage with Hebe, eternal youth (871 f, 910 ff).

Noble self-sacrifice, high-minded defense of a cause, defeat of the tyrant and triumph of justice, rejuvenation or return from the dead—all was at hand for a play of redemption, save that Euripides chose a variant in which Eurystheus was not slain in battle, but taken prisoner and executed, with much gloating, by order of Alcmena, over the protests of the Athenians. To complicate matters further, Eurystheus, like Oedipus, bequeaths his body to the Athenians as an eternal blessing, in return for their attempt to defend him. The propaganda has gotten hard to follow, but the Euripidean schema, or anti-schema, is familiar. Revenge is too potent a motive throughout Euripides' theater to be omitted here, in the context of war and bitterness, and Alcmena's revenge is at once bitter and understandable (981 f). It reduces her stature and totally reverses the moral tenor of the play, but so be it; she has gained the upper hand and will make unsparing use of it. As for Eurystheus, his sudden access of ambiguity seems to balance Alcmena in what might be called the transformation by war, a process to be studied again in the Hecuba. As the helpless Alcmena turns into a vengeful fury, the vicious Eurystheus acquires some of the grace of martyrdom, merely by virtue of being her victim, somewhat in the way the Aeschylean Agamemnon, once his blood is spilt, becomes a rallying point for justice, his crimes forgotten. "Such is the life of man as the day that Zeus brings on," said Homer. Moral fixity is nowhere in view; relative situation is all. Myth has not yet been seen as the life story of the world, but at most as the framework for separate life stories, not all edifying.

The Andromache is perhaps the least elevated work that has come down to us; ironical as it is, it offers little internal irony, and no ambiguity, of either character or event. The good characters, Andromache, her son Molossus, and Peleus, emerge in safety, while the Spartan Menelaus and his barren, hysterical daughter are baffled in their jealous efforts to destroy the captive Trojan princess and the boy she has borne to Neoptolemus. Orestes, also represented as thoroughly Spartan and a thug, arrives in time to carry off Hermione from her husband, who would have been justly angry, if Orestes had not murdered him. We never meet Neoptolemus, but he seems to belong to the "good" characters, and we never learn why Apollo abetted his assassination—a problem that also embarrassed Pindar. Strictly speaking, although Andromache's captivity and her future in Epirus as the mother of the Molossians belongs to tradition, and despite the struggle between good and evil, the play as it stands is not myth at all; even Orestes' murder of Neoptolemus represents only the bedraggled epilogue of Greek heroic saga. The play is a domestic triangle, quite on the low mimetic level, the homeliest work by a dramatist often criticized for homeliness. As such, it is lively, especially in the psychological study of the two women, and in the rough but humane outspokenness of the heroine's savior, old Peleus, in whom appear, once more, some signs of opportune, though undeveloped, rejuvenation (761 ff).

But Euripides deliberately, by touch after touch, keeps the tone low and intimate. Andromache in bonds is not shown as a proud, noble sufferer; she pleads for her life with desperate eloquence, using vivid rhythmic devices in her lines (387 ff), such as those that later make lphigeneia's appeal to the chorus so vocally audible and touching (Iph. T. 1056 ff). We are even told, to keep us aware that she is just human, that the cords on her arms are unnecessarily tight and painful: "Did you think you were tying up a bull or a lion?" asks Peleus as he releases her (720). And as for what she says in her defense against Hermione's jealousy, not even Hector, long dead, is allowed to escape Euripides' ironic determination to reduce everybody. Homer would have read with some surprise of Andromache patiently suckling Hector's various illegitimate offspring. Nowhere in Euripides is the diminution of heroic stature so complete and wholesale. Even Thetis at the end speaks less like the mourning goddess of the Iliad than like a good wife consoling her husband after long absence. Euripides has seen his characters as what is left in the wake of the disintegrating force, war. The structure too is disjointed: Andromache's rescue and Hermione's repentant terror have nothing to do with each other, from the point of view of cause and effect. Menelaus' departure to subdue a rebellious city is absurdly adventitious, while the roles of Orestes and Neoptolemus are poorly developed. Yet in the very chaos of this melodrama may be seen an embryo of the world of tyche, techne, and divinity, the motivational triad of the romances: characters devise, the unexpected intervenes to save both women, the good and the bad, while one god, Apollo, promotes an unjust murder, to the moral revulsion of the messenger (1161 ff), and another, Thetis, brings a touch of bittersweet charis to the close. The forces are not yet knit into a tight dramatic structure, but they are traceable.

The disintegrating power of war is at work to the full in the Hecuba, though now its effect is seen in gradual process, and it is joined also by a force of opposite trend, the growth of spiritual nobility amid suffering. Euripides seems to have had a special love for youth, and a corresponding, though less consistent, suspicion of those who have lived through the abrasiveness of many years. Polyxena, lovely in her youth and purity, and her aged mother, in her moral decay, divide the action in a fashion that has sometimes led critics to regard it as two separate dramas. But it is quite single in effect, its upward and downward movements complementing each other, the one exalting human nature until the self all but escapes from the cycle of growth and dissolution, the other following that cycle, boring steadily deeper into the morass of psychic corruption where the self is swallowed up. Polyxena, sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles, cannot be called a real martyr, for she sustains no cause, as does Macaria. She is the victim of a cruel whim, and her death is a waste, but her steadfast integrity, symbolized in her injunction that no one touch her except with the sword (547 ff), creates a moral monument a little after the Sophoclean manner, something out of nothing. Perhaps her beauty, as she kneels to the stroke, is compared to a statue for more than aesthetic reasons (560 ff); certainly her mother's reflection on a noble nature's inviolability under misfortune implies as much (597 f). But, like Alcmena, who inverts the affirmative march of events in the Heracleidae, Hecuba herself now unfolds the other, sadder, one might say more Euripidean, side of the story. The proud queen, who has just said that moral knowledge once gained is unfailing, now proceeds to a revenge on her son's murderer that is both morally and physically grotesque, though speciously grounded on Nomos, the law that guarantees religion and justice (799 ff). Her conspiracy to blind Polymestor and murder his children begins with her gaining the complicity of Agamemnon, in return for the sexual pleasure he derives from Cassandra; it ends with the prophecy that Hecuba will be metamorphosed into a red-eyed hound, mad and screaming. This finely wrought tragedy, deliberately inconclusive as are so many plays of Euripides, involves no evident workings of the gods, and tyche is barely mentioned (786). Built entirely out of human, or inhuman, action, it forms a kind of detached but passionate dialectic of war's grim soil, both as matrix of the spirit's rootless loftiness, and the charnel house of its decrepit end.

Far less shapely in design, and more pervasively ironical in its treatment of war, the Suppliants begins as if it were going to be a festival drama in honor of one of Athens' most famous exploits, the rescue of the bodies of the Seven against Thebes, and their burial at Eleusis. But after Theseus, the idealized and here incongruously democratic King of Athens, has adopted the cause of Adrastus, bidden defiance to tyrannical Thebes, and recovered the corpses, the heroic action is suddenly stunted and dispersed in three sensational scenes presenting a new perspective on what has happened and what is still to happen. Having brought the corpses, Theseus directs Adrastus to give an oration over them, but warns him not to make foolish, unverifiable remarks about who did bravely or who stood next to whom; battle is too busy a time to ascertain such things. This prescriptive speech, with its critique of funeral rhetoric, breaks the illusion with something of the force of a parabasis. It is not funny, but its peremptory tone implies, "Go ahead, talk; but don't make too much of a fool of yourself." Adrastus then delivers an astonishing eulogy of his fallen comrades. Traditionally, the Seven, especially Capaneus and Tydeus, were champions hewn out of the toughest, most ungovernable vein of the old heroic rock, and Aeschylus so represented them; but in Adrastus' eloquence, these ruffians become gentlemen of such statesmanship, moderation, and simplicity of life as to seem positively demure in their valor. This done, the pyres begin to blaze; Evadne, wife of Capaneus, commits suttee, and her aged father resolves on death by starvation. The mothers and children of the fallen then collect their bones, general mourning being punctuated by the sons' prayer to avenge their fathers, a prayer that will be fulfilled, according to Athena, who speaks the epilogue. The tenor of these three scenes is ironical and reckless, yet coolly contrived to bring into view the uncontrollable; cheap rhetoric, self-destruction, and revenge suddenly replace nobility and devotion to a cause as motive powers.

The Suppliants has been associated with the Peace of Nicias (421 B.C.), and also with the refusal of Thebes to ailow burial to the Athenian dead after the Battle of Delium (424 B.C.). But neither of these possible connections explains why Euripides built his play as he did. If the Hecuba comprises two contrary movements within a single mythic frame, the Suppliants seems to have two frames, one of dubiously simulated gold, the other of shabby wood with the veneer peeling off; or perhaps the frame simply breaks two-thirds of the way through, and fragments of the design spill out. The fine old Athenian legend would have made a good festival play, for the precinct of the Seven, mentioned by Athena (1211 f), was actually shown to visitors at Eleusis and could have been an aetiological point of reference for an affirmative achievement of order within a mythological archetype. But Euripides sees elements that will not join in such a picture, separate empirical realities that belong to the story but have yet to find the frame that will afford them due proportion and stance within a whole.

The Trojan Women of 415 B.C., one of the most telling antiwar plays ever written, exhibits the extreme of fragmentation on the one hand, in scene after scene of suffering intense to the point of dementia, and on the other a lyrical unity not found in earlier treatments of the theme of war. It is all sustained, high-pitched lament, without countermovement and without relief. With the exception of the inconclusive debate between Helen and Hecuba, there is no real conflict, no cause and effect; only a steady, disjunctive series of mounting horrors, culminating in the burial of a murdered infant and the burning of the desolated city. For once, Euripides did not try to see everything in two ways at once, but simply wrote an extended threnody of overwhelming power, which presents no dramaturgical problems because it is not really a drama at all.

The work of Euripides is so diversified that any classification of it rests uneasily. Four of the five dramas here hesitantly grouped as war plays, however, have an interesting feature in common, from the point of view of playmaking, and that is the nature of their peripeties. The Trojan Women, of course, has none. A potential one might have developed in the Helen scene, had Euripides chosen to let Hecuba win her case with Menelaus; but he did not, and the play remained within the bounds of its dark lyricism. Yet it might be noted that neither the Medea nor the Hippolytus, which are real dramas, has a peripety in the full meaning of the word, that is, reversal of fortune, or change in the direction of the action. In both, the action is already well on its charted way when the drama begins, and no further access of knowledge or entrance of a character is needed to change it, or indeed could change it. The questionable arrival of Aegeus in the Medea may be discounted, on grounds that the heroine's actions are not altered by it, but at most facilitated. The Alcestis has a peripety in the arrival of Heracles, and is therefore more conventional in structure, though the pervasive irony of the play is not directly connected with it.

But the Heracleidae, Andromache, Hecuba, and Suppliants all have peripeties, and of a kind unwitnessed before on the Attic stage. Peripety, as a rule, is a reversal that corresponds with the climax of an irony inherent in the dramatic situation from the start. In these war plays, however, the reversals are not reversals of plot; they are reversals of moral perspective that come from outside, rather than from any inherent, organic dynamics of the action such as would bring them about inevitably; they are arbitrarily imposed by the hand of the poet in order to evolve a counterpiece that somehow negates the first half of the play. Thus in the Heracleidae, lolaus, supported by the Athenians, performs an act of deliverance by rescuing Heracles' children; but for Alcmena, whose entrance marks the turning point, the victory is incomplete without the morally gratuitous, and openly deplored, counteract of mortal vengeance on Eurystheus. In the Andromache, the heroine is similarly delivered by an aged hero from her jealous enemy; but Orestes enters to save the pusillanimous Hermione and murder her husband in the act of making his peace with Apollo in the Delphian shrine. In the Hecuba and the Suppliants, the reversal is not accompanied by any new character, but enacted by those already present; Hecuba's plight is aggravated by the finding of Polydorus' body, but this discovery, nothing new in kind, is merely a final straw to bring the queen to a breaking point whose possibility she had implicitly denied. The reversal in the Suppliants is the most arbitrary of all; there seems to be no assignable reason for it, save that it suited Euripides' dramatic intuition to offset the socially understandable defense of civilization by Theseus against the torrid spectacle of Adrastus' sham oratory, Evadne's delirium, and the next generation's cry for vengeance. If there is any connection between the two parts, it lies in Theseus' initial hesitation to take up Adrastus' cause, which struck him at the very first as less than righteous (185 ff); but the emphasis of the play as built falls on its jerky discontinuity, rather than on a consistently developed story or moral scheme. Euripides, not the myth, is in control.

This kind of dramatic structure—for it is structure and not the failure thereof—stands in strong contrast to the organic architecture of Sophocles' plays. The form of a Sophoclean tragedy, even in the plays so drearily misnamed diptychs, is periodic, its contours rounded to include actions and characters proportionably conceived, and duly subordinated to the whole. Like myth itself, it finds an inevitable place within its self-wrought limits for every element, however disruptive or violent; it admits nothing irrelevant, and omits nothing that conduces to its fullness of representation and symmetry of design. Its dynamics, including those of peripety, are wholly interior to the scheme; its voice is one of high decorum, both rich and economical, while its mode, the high mimetic, builds its rondure upon a heroic, vertical axis creating intension and unity.

The plays of Euripides so far have shown a very different pattern. It is as if, to continue the figure, the axis were horizontal, with implications of unlimited extension and scope, and the circumference sometimes lost beyond the horizon. Its ironic mode, tinctured with the low mimetic, admits dynamic influences from any source whatever, rather favoring those that come from outer chaos, and leaving their results for the most part unassimilated. As for what it chooses to represent, its concern is with parts in all their vividness, and it deliberately ignores whatever whole they may be thought to belong to. Symmetry is no object, but rather disparity, inconcinnity, and rough edges, in a perspective where no places are proper to the fragments in their eternal flux. The myth does not fulfill itself, for the spiritual periphery, whether belonging to men or gods, is lost, so that even the mythic frame, the phrase used above to denote a traditional story, becomes only an alien outline drawn by the arbitrary hand of the artist himself.

The result is a totally unperiodic form, paratactic and episodic, in which scene follows scene because it does, rather than because it must; in which even a character need have few, if any, inner springs of action. If Medea and Phaedra are three-dimensional, there are few figures in the war plays to be compared with them: Hecuba and Adrastus have rudimentary shading, but Theseus, Andromache, lolaus, and Peleus are as paper-thin "good" characters, as Menelaus, Alcmena, Odysseus, and the Theban herald are "bad." The struggle between good and evil is melodramatically uncomplicated, not because Euripides, of all people, was unable to represent it otherwise, but because he chose this approach as suited to his detachment, and to his gift for clear delineation of parts, details, and fragments. In so choosing, he created an extremely productive medium, traceable through Seneca, the historical dramas of the Elizabethans, and into the so-called "epic theater" of Brecht. The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Mother Courage probably have more of the artistic flavor of this phase of Euripides' work than any translations of him could convey.

Epic theater, though regular with Euripides in plays whose theme is war, does not by any means account for his formal repertoire in general. He was capable of a more coherent internal syntax and of a deeper involvement with character, as the Electra and Heracles both show. In the Electra, the mainspring of both action and character is revealed by that keen psychological perception for which Euripides has been justly celebrated; and the peripety, if such is the right name for the emotional collapse that overtakes the two principals at the end, comes about as the direct result of their warped criminal natures. For the poet has made clear that Orestes and his sister are criminal in spirit as in deed, in contrast to Sophocles' avenging pair, for whom the murder of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus was a satisfying act of long-delayed justice. In contrast also with Aeschylus, for whom the traditional deed identified and determined the dramatic character, here, as in the Orestes, the deed rises out of a welter of psychic entanglement within the character; rather than simply attaching itself to the agent in the moment of the criminal act, the daemonic force is the product of the human soul, not, however, of a large, commanding soul, but of a mean one, grievance-laden and waveringly at odds with itself. Euripides has not lost his reductive irony. The heroic Orestes of the Odyssey has been replaced by an Orestes both stealthy and infirm of purpose, and Sophocles' strong-fibered, virgin witness-bearer by a small, hate-racked Electra, married to a dirt farmer, and piqued at her own deprivation. Euripides' rejection of any heroic treatment of the myth is pressed so far that his play has been thought a parody of Sophocles', and certain passages may actually be subtly parodic.

Yet, for all the dismissal of heroic dimensions, neither parody nor even irony accounts for the Electra, which seems to be an attempt to understand retribution not as justice, but as a morbid disorder of the mind. Euripides was wrestling frontally and effectively with one of the greatest archetypal myths, the myth of retribution, violence, and madness, whose themes pursued his imagination throughout his life. The factor of tyche is wholly absent, though that of techne, intrigue, is of course strong. The Dioscuri, who come to patch together some kind of orderly prospect for the guilty pair, and even mention Orestes' ultimate acquittal, can scarcely be said to stanch the engulfing misery of the close, or bring all into a rounded, divine perspective. But their assignment of responsibility to the oracle of Phoebus does not mean that Euripides is mounting an outspoken, total assault upon Apollo, as is so often said. All the Dioscuri say is that the exaction of justice is not necessarily a just deed, and that Apollo in his wisdom had enjoined what was unwise for them to perform (1244 f, 1301 f). As usual, Euripides has left the divine and the human in a state of unresolved paradox; divinity remains only vaguely concerned, the human agents suffer, and the framework of mythic wholeness is as incomplete as ever.

So is it also in the Heracles. In no other play did Euripides come so near to staging a genuinely heroic figure, or contrive a peripety so startling. The contest, as in the Heracleidae, is again over the children of Heracles, whom the tyrant Lycus wants to kill, along with their mother, lest they avenge his murder of their grandfather. They have taken refuge at an altar, for Heracles is in Hades fetching the hound Cerberus, and is thought dead. Old Amphitryon alone clings to the hope of his return, but Megara prefers to abandon the altar and die with dignity, rather than be burned alive at it. Upon this scene of gloom, Heracles appears, rather like the rising sun, and kills Lycus. So far, the Heracles is a play of deliverance, built upon the myth of Return from the Dead. Despite the melodramatic pattern, the characters are given convincing roundness of life, especially Heracles, whose enduring greatness is movingly tempered with parental love. But this heartening picture is suddenly, hideously ruined. Lyssa, the spirit of raving madness, enters, reluctantly she says, but forced by the malevolence of Hera; the great, genial protector turns instantly maniac and slays the family that he has just rescued. In the messenger's appalling speech that describes the slaughter, Euripides spares no detail to make the reversal complete.

The murder of Megara and her children was one of the numberless traditional stories told about Heracles; it is an example of the contradictory criminal deed that so frequently occurs in the stories of great heroes. But it was Euripides' idea to put it immediately after the return from Hades, and no hint of motivation for this sudden access of madness can be found in the first part of the play. Unlike that of Orestes and Electra, the criminality of Heracles comes not from within but from without, and the goddess of unreason herself argues, most reasonably, against afflicting so good a man with so undeserved an evil (849 ff). It is the most telling instance of peripety imposed with external detachment by the playwright, such as was found in the war plays. But the Heracles is not confined by the circumstance of war; its reference is much wider, and the poet's irony seems applied directly to life itself. The myth of heroic salvation is shatteringly juxtaposed beside the myth of heroic destructiveness, to create a pageant of irrationality scarcely equaled even by the Bacchae. In the last scene Theseus, himself recently delivered from Hades by Heracles, enters to deter his benefactor from suicide, and to sustain him in bearing his grief. This lends a suggestion of trilogic synthesis to the foregoing thesis-antithesis; but one hears at most fragmentary, broken harmonies, and the end is muted more by despair than by true resolution.

But irony ultimately depletes itself, and a cloudlike detachment has a necessary kinship with cloudlike vision. Northrop Frye has noted how a recurrent cycle of modes can be discerned in the course of literary history. The mythic world of gods and cosmic heroes, created by early man, yields to the more sophisticated, though fabulous mode of the romantic mise-en-scene, a magical forest studded with mystic chapels and transforming fountains, peopled by puissant knights, sorcerers, and lovely damsels, and approximately limitless. Then, by a selective process, the scope is narrowed, the supernatural is confined or expelled, and the single great figure of the high mimetic mode stands forth. He is followed by the more general populace of the world, objectively and realistically envisioned in low mimetic colors; after which objectivity leads on to ever increasing detachment, and irony becomes the characteristic mode of literature. Then at a certain point a new cycle begins. The ironic mode, when exercised to the extreme, grows so remote from the immediacy of daily experience that the details become indistinct, leaving only broad outlines that presently begin to take on mythic shape, and to resemble once more primordial hypotheses of the totality of things. The direction is now diametrically away from the precision of the low mimetic and toward the large approximations of myth. Myth is reborn as a kind of order perceived in the residual, vague, and ironically distanced outlines of the world, an order that is the invention of the mind to be a stay against the threat of encroaching chaos, as what was formerly precise vision becomes attenuated and confused.

It is at this juncture of modes that we find the art of Euripides as he set about the composition of the Iphigeneia, Helen, and Ion. Partly as a result of the age in which he lived, and partly because of his own temperament, he had found irony a native element. But with the Heracles he reached a point beyond which he could not proceed without rediscovering what lay behind him, as if he were walking on the surface of a sphere. The extreme detachment of the Heracles betrays itself only with the entrance of Lyssa. Up till then, we have been beguiled into a high degree of emotional involvement with Heracles and his family; the cold horror of the reversal is a shock beyond description because it comes so totally from outside the dramatic texture, and shows us that we, like Megara and the children, have been mercilessly deceived, not by Heracles, but by the mindless, chaotic nature of existence. Irony could scarcely be carried farther, and Euripides, to our knowledge, never tried to do so. Instead he pushed on to something new, as was his habit, and it is not impossible that he was surprised to find himself rediscovering myth as a pattern of some kind of whole, arising out of the wisplike tatters of a world strewn across a steadily receding sky.

The intellect, or imagination, necessarily forms such patterns, though they shift and change with equal necessity. The extreme of irony must begin to recreate myth, because it is the basic function of the mind to create categories of the recognizable, to make ordered intelligibility out of the chaos of infinitely diverse experience; and the more diverse and unintelligible experience is found to be, the more the mind must invent, if it is to transmit its findings. Chaos is incommunicable by the mind, except for the name, so that the most detached, honest, and complete acknowledgment of chaos is the most inevitably bound to create hypotheses of order as a recourse for communication. The only alternative would be silence, a kind of death of the world. Hence order is, one might say, a byproduct of the mind compelled by chaos, a hypothesis; and a complete hypothesis of order is one definition of myth. Another definition, one that looks to its narrative aspect, is the story of the world's life, the mind's grasp of which becomes the ver novum in which the world is reborn in its visionary wholeness, with gods, men, and nature all performing their own interacting parts.

The story of the world's life is what Euripides seems to have come to in the Iphigeneia and its two companion works. In these as in no others he was content to let the full pattern of myth have its say, without diminution or distortion. He was able to do this not because of any "real" event, least of all because of any desire to escape from reality, but because he had traversed the full course of irony and brought a new reality into view, a more complete reality, and one that included salvation in its scope. No mystical insight, or dawn of hitherto unheard-of knowledge, was involved, but only the natural conclusion of one process and the beginning of another. Nor was he bound to the new process as to a newly revealed religion. These plays were not the end of his career, and he was to go on, once these were done, to write other and different works. Rather they marked a perception, momentary perhaps, but a perception appropriate to a phase, which had arisen inevitably out of the pursuit of his art, something which, like the clarity and deliverance that the protagonists of these plays discover in their destinies, had been inherent from the first. Euripides has been too much identified with the beginnings of philosophy, and not enough with the mythology of the age and tradition in which he worked. It was not philosophy that had made him an ironist to begin with, but the unruly horde of ironies already existent in his chosen form of tragedy as a world view. These gave birth to partial and biased views of myth, but myth never ceased to be the point of reference; it was both the matrix and the prospective aim of tragedy to see a mythic whole, and to embrace at least some glimpse of order, however fleetingly. In the vision of these three dramas, Euripides followed his myths to the brink of their fullest import, and accepted the possibility of redemption as part of the complete tragic scope.

Before concluding his poem in the Euganean Hills, Shelley wrote:

Other flowering isles must be
In the sea of life and agony.

We should have to possess Euripides' entire work in order to know if his irony at other periods in his life led him full circle to other flowering isles of healing myth; but it seems to have done so once, at least. A better name should be found for the romances, for though two of them satisfy many of the requirements of Frye's romantic mode, the greatest of them, Ion, does not, and all three imply more than the deep forest realm of haunted spots and unlikely encounters, of magic and metamorphosis. In their outcomes, Euripides' unlikelihoods are shown to be tokens of the inevitable, and metamorphosis, when it is operative as in the Helen, presents a temporary obstruction certainly, but later a new phase of reality; it is more like an Ovidian or Apuleian metamorphosis than those of Spenser's Angelica. The Iphigeneia, Helen, and Ion are bound together by something more basic than the orientation of romance. Perhaps they could be called the mythic plays, in the special sense that in them a traditional story has been dramatized to attain a kind of wholeness, a totality in which all external irony is suppressed or assimilated, and where elements of romance, melodrama, and even depth psychology may enter, but only to play contributory parts, subsumed and adjusted to the larger controlling vision. For the first time in Euripides' known work, the mythic frame completes itself; the characters, too, complete themselves by remaining within it and discovering selves they had scarcely hoped they might possess. Iphigeneia, the victim, becomes her own and her brother's savior, while he, the tainted fugitive, participates in the act of salvation and becomes the rightful king of his land. A phantom Helen, destroyer of men, is absorbed into universal aether and replaced by the true and redemptive wife, no longer the antithesis of Penelope, but her counterpart. Ion, the waif, finds himself the son of a great god and father of the Ionian people; Creusa, who believed herself to be Apollo's forgotten plaything, finds herself a whole woman, suddenly numbered with the ageless heroines.

These redemptions, though hard-won in the eleventh hour, are far from the vulgar timely arrivals of a melodramatic or romantic hero. They are all recognitions of truth built from within the plays themselves; they are recognitions of others linked with self-recognition, and dramatized through organic peripeties. The recognition scene of the Iphigeneia is justly famous; the Helen's is less vivid; but that of the Ion is perhaps the most beautiful, because of the powerful symbolism of integrity in Creusa's crown of imperishable olive. No external irony can legitimately be read into these great moments of change, for their revelations are of inherent truth, like axioms rightly stated. They have also a touch of the apocalyptic in them, since they disclose the part played by divinities along with faceless chance and human choice, or contrivance, to form that triad of causation whose factors seem to work independently and as they please, but, when seen entire, in a kind of uncertain union. There is a hypothesis of wholeness in these three plays not found in any earlier ones, the wholeness of myth adumbrating human experience viewed whole.

Widely as the three stories differ, the underlying myth is the same for all three, and one that Euripides had made use of in two previous plays, the Alcestis and the Heracles. It is the great myth of Return from the Dead, which appears in numberless guises, the archetype in Greek literature being the Odyssey. Literal death is not necessary, nor is any doctrine of immortality involved. Odysseus does not literally die; he visits the land of the dead and returns, as do all heroes in one way or another. Part of the even larger myth of the hero, which is the world's life cycle seen in its individual aspect, this journey frames a metaphor of victory over death; it betokens the rounding of the cycle, as the Return of Persephone betokens vegetational rebirth. It is immaterial that for the fields rebirth is a fact, for the hero an aspiring venture of the mind; for the spirit conquers through the transmutation of experience, real or imagined, into knowledge. Knowledge is all that Odysseus brought home from his metaphoric journey, and it is the metaphor of rebirth, with access of true knowledge, that is woven into the fabric of these three plays. The spectators at Aulis witnessed the slaughter of Iphigeneia; Creusa with her own hands exposed her infant; Menelaus was supposed dead, and the real Helen has been all but dead, save to herself, for many years (Helen 286). The great recognitions each mark the return of someone who has been lost; true knowledge supervenes, and the cycle is found complete. Iphigeneia and Orestes embrace with words expressive of new life (827 ff); the sepulchral music of the Sirens invoked by Helen is supplanted by the celebrant flutes and timbrels of the Great Mother (167 ff; 1346 ff); the house of Erechtheus is revived in Ion (1465 ff).

To what a different purpose had Euripides turned this myth in the Alcestis and the Heracles! Though both of those returns take place, neither brings about a vision of wholeness or of lasting salvation; Alcestis comes back an ironic ghost, a statue silently scanning a dramatic world void of spiritual stature; Heracles' return is that of a real hero, but its saving power is instantly annulled by a stroke of the cosmic Irrational that subverts his very essence. Euripides could not, or at least did not at that point, see any terminal of deliverance arising from heroic mythology. He took stories whose core was the defeat of death and all its dark powers, and denied them their inalienable right to triumphant music, in the one play by showing the world as morally dead, in the other by disallowing the possibility of meaningful salvation in a world of meaningless unreason. He had yet to give the myth its head and let it tell its story in full. Still, that mythic aspiration, the defeat of decay and death, haunted his creative process, and in two other plays, the Andromache and Heracleidae, he permitted the closely related motif of rejuvenation to hint at it. The rejuvenation of lolaus is real, but its moral potential is left without direction, as the emphasis shifts to Alcmena's revenge. The restored youth of Peleus does, however, achieve the rescue of Andromache and, as we have seen, that play also moves by the same motive power, techne, tyche, daimon, that functions so intricately in the three "mythic plays." The Andromache is too haphazardly constructed and too lacking in unity to equal them in effect, but in this regard it may be seen as a precursor of their attainment of mythic and spiritual fullness.

It is a matter of taste whether or not one chooses to regard the achievement of the Iphigeneia, Helen, and Ion as the climax of Euripides' development. One might do so on the grounds that to include the possibility of salvation within the tragic scheme, as something, in fact, inherent to it, provides the act of synthesis that tragedy strives toward, an ulterior state of equilibrium that presumably was the regular keynote of the third play of an Aeschylean trilogy. Tragic action, so filled out, then corresponds to the full sweep of myth as principle of order and as the life history of the world. In his Tragedy and Comedy, Walter Kerr contends that tragedy, for all its mimesis of destruction, is in reality an affirmative statement of the human spirit; when enacted in its complete form, as in the trilogy, the tragic rhythm comprises action and suffering, followed by some manner of redemption, much as in Fergusson's formula: purpose, passion, perception. Plays of tragic flavor that do not include this third function are either only partial representations arising, one may suppose, from only partial envisionment of the tragic experience or, if full envisionments, ones in which the redemptive element is at most suggested in "continuing figures" like Horatio and Fortinbras in Hamlet, or motifs of permanence, such as the cults of Hippolytus or Medea's children. If that be true, Euripides' earlier works belong to the less complete category, while the mythic plays comprehend the whole tragic cycle. Evaluated in that light, they might be taken as a culminating point, something that the poet had been striving for and had at last achieved, a kind of artistic and philosophic completeness expressed in a drama rounded to fit the liberating wholeness of myth.

There is much to be said in favor of this view, but it calls for some caution. In the first place, it leaves out of account the last plays, or, worse, implies that they are to be reckoned as failures of the newly won completeness, and reversions to the more limited tragic outlook. Secondly, one might be misled into confusing the kind of wholeness found in Euripides' mythic plays with Sophocles' very different vision. The figure, earlier proposed, of the vertical versus the horizontal axis might be helpful here in drawing the distinction. Sophocles' vertical axis is abstracted from the spinal column of the hero, the central, indispensable figure of the high mimetic mode. Through choice, action in isolation, reversal and suffering, this figure is fleshed out in all its identity, both individual and representative, and given a moral stature comparable to the dynamic stature of the divine, so that the two stand in an indissoluble ontological union. This dramaturgy was called periodic because all its parts turn toward the center and are confined within the outlines of the dominating heroic figure; he (or she) is, in fact, the action, and nothing happens in the play that is not of this figure's own doing. Euripides never staged such a figure, or strove to; his art is not concerned with the ontology of the individual, nor is it markedly metaphysical, if at all. Though assuredly concerned with gods as well as men, its concern finds itself in jarring juxtapositions, spiked antitheses of action and personalities, dilemmas of belief or the lack of it. The axis of Euripidean drama lies in a horizontal plane of phenomenological experience, gathering within its sweep all the diversity of things in whatever disarray, and inciting them to react at will among themselves. Elements need not be organic to enter into Euripidean drama, which is collective rather than selective, and so nonperiodic that at times it resembles disorder, or even chaos itself. But if this horizontal axis be regarded as revolving, and its motion be produced to one full revolution, the circle so described will be complete, and everything collected within it will have a place, as in a myth seen whole.

The semblance of order thus captured will, however, be momentary, for the axis will continue its circuit and may stop anywhere. A culmination need not be the end, nor all that follows it a decline. Hence, if the subsequent plays differ from the mythic three, if the Orestes seems to resemble the Electra, and the Phoenissae brings back the epic theater of the war plays, they must not be regarded as retrogressions, but as part of a continuing process of dramaturgical gathering and observation. As for the Bacchae, with its unique staging of frontal conflict between a man and a god, and its universal vision of indiscriminate creation and indiscriminate wreckage, that is something new again, the world-imperiling drama where the ironical god of the Seventh Homeric Hymn plays the role of hero in the myth of his own triumph.

With these reservations in mind, then, it may be permissible to regard the mythic plays as a culmination. They do not, of course, constitute a rejection of earlier work, such as Yeats and other poets have voiced; but they are the only plays in the corpus that rely on their myths in their entirety, without either that kind of corrosive irony that imposes upon their action and forestalls its reaching a point of rest, or the kind that reduces the agents so completely that they no longer bear any relation, save a mocking one, to the heroic world where they were born. It is not that irony has disappeared; Euripidean drama would be unthinkable without it. But it is more restrained; it appears chiefly in the familiar guise of internal, dramatic irony, which arises out of the plot and emerges in speeches implying more than the character knows, or foreshadowing what the audience has yet to learn. For the rest, the poet's own irony is evident in the general conception, but it plays with forbearance over the characters and the texture of the language, making the young Ion believe quite easily that Erichthonius was born out of the earth, but causing the sophisticated Helen to wonder, in a troubled way, about her own origin in an egg.

It is a serious error to inflate these and other delicate touches of humor, such as the mental limitations of Xuthus and Menelaus, to the extent of turning the plays into comedies. In all three there is only one line that really breaks the dramatic illusion (Helen 1056), and the main characters, though lacking the monolithic greatness of Sophoclean heroes, all have a genuine dignity that enforces their serious acceptance. The protagonists are not quite high mimetic, but they are not low mimetic either; they are ironic figures moving homeward into myth. All are compounded of small and large, of helplessness and strength. Iphigeneia is a blend of girlishness and self-sacrificial power; Ion is a boy germinating the seeds of heroism; Helen, destroyer and destroyed, preserves herself and her husband. Creusa, the fullest and loveliest portrait of a woman in all Euripides, relives the shock and terror of a violated girl under her queenly poise. With restrained and tender hand, Euripides has allowed them all to complete themselves as the myth foresaw them.

One is not surprised to find that the women in these plays are more impressive than the men, who waver and fumble; but that fact does not make Euripides a feminist, any more than certain glib, derogatory remarks from various characters—often female—make him a misogynist. Society has always enjoyed formulating and attributing vulgar generalities about women, and since neither label fit Euripides, he has been awarded both. A better answer might be found in the kind of artistic venture that the poet has in hand. If the women of the mythic plays wear the mantle of the Ewig-weibliche and surpass the men, it is perhaps because in this context woman, like myth, is looked upon as peculiarly able to contain and hold in suspension all manner of contradictory influences and equivocal signs until their equipoise is reached. Again, Creusa offers the most moving example; until the very end she remains thoroughly ambiguous in her feelings toward Apollo, never forgiving his treatment of her, yet never quite abandoning her hope in him. The myth is Creusa; its completion is her completion, and by implication the world's.

Perhaps the real question is not, how Euripides came to write the way he did around 412 B.C., but why he never wrote that way before, or for that matter, afterwards. That question is simply not answerable. Without a reliable biography, we cannot ascertain what influences were brought to bear upon the formation of his poetic gift, so that it emerged in such contrast with Sophocles'. Possibly the slight difference in their ages was made more significant by the fact that Sophocles grew up in the heady days of the Persian Wars, while Euripides did not have those heroic paradigms at first hand in his memory. Possibly too his outlook on myth was affected by what is vaguely called the decline of religion in the later fifth century, under the pressure of the Sophistic Enlightenment. The second answer, though honored by time, is specious, for poets do not work primarily with concepts nor are they mere products of a Zeitgeist. After all, Sophocles also felt the impact of the Enlightenment and reacted with quite a different kind of tragic art. But ever since his own day it has been common practice to put Euripides into strained religious postures, and make him an apostate from religion and myth. It seems more true to say that he was probing for the meaning of myth, as all his predecessors had done, and finding it in his own way.

As for his rejecting religion, it is hard to explain that judgment upon a poet so obviously religious as Euripides. The assumption seems to be that he could not put faith in gods who behaved as badly as the Olympians did. But the Olympians did not require faith, they required observance, and by Euripides' day they must have been used to complaints about their morals; they had been hearing a good many since the days of Xenophanes, and probably before. Such moral diatribes were hackneyed quibbles by Euripides' time, and if some of his characters, in moments of stress or puzzlement, felt driven to repeat them, the community of Olympians may have listened with some boredom, but we should credit them with the intelligence not to mistake a stage persona for the poet's own, as so many critics have done. It is hard to say which is more naive, to imagine, with Verrall, a philosopher of the stage who devoted his life work to deriding the gods with complacent cynicism, in protest against a blind faith that nobody ever entertained, or to see him, as some more recently have done, as an apologist for the inherited religion trying to show how the gods do all for the best. If Apollo in the Ion does not live up to quite all the worst fears expressed about him, his image must not therefore be tortured into embracing all the providential benignity ever piously hoped for in a deity. What he did live up to was a quite familiar Olympian standard.

Euripides' ideas about the gods were probably as unsteady as most of his contemporaries'. He often represented the universe as alien and cruel, the gods included. For the gods, though mightier and longer-sighted than mortals, provide only a partial understanding of ultimate mysteries. Men and gods alike are figures in a myth, which alone presumes to embrace those mysteries, and in the Iphigeneia, Helen, and Ion Euripides appears to have tested its claim fully for the first time. It was not a case of the ironic poet's escaping from the bitterness of his own irony into a world of half-comic romance; his own irony had led him back to myth by the long route. Myth arrived at in this way differs in tone from the pristine myth of society in its formative stage, but it has the same qualities of self-completeness and approximation of order. Yet all myth, whether pristine or recovered, speaks less in the voice of conviction than of aspiration, and such is Euripides' mood here. His task as a tragic poet was to find adequate framework for his vision of the world about him, and the conventions of tragic form provided him with the infinite, demiurgic wealth of mythology. Much of the time he had found only parts of the structure to his purpose, but at the period in question he must have seen myth as a tentative hypothesis of wholeness, a hypothesis that reaches out and, after crucial effort, waiting, and confusion, comprehends a kind of redemptive fulfillment that exists for man only as he and the myth coexist and reach their completeness together. As the sweep hand of the tale comes round, things that had been thought to have perished are rediscovered in all their purity, and in Pindar's words, "A bright glow is upon man, and his life is sweet." The profound seriousness of the mythic dramas has been too long obscured by the lightness of their creator's touch. Creusa's crown of olive does not belong in the lost-and-found department of New Comedy; it belongs with the anonymous poet's Pearl.