SOURCE: J. T. Sheppard, "Euripides," in Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, 1911, pp. 122-55.

[In the following essay, Sheppard discusses how Euripides expressed his philosophical and religious ideas in his plays and how they were received by his contemporaries.]

The Athens of Pericles was the parent of another Athens less harmonious but not less great. Pericles, according to the Funeral Oration, found in his city the perfect marriage of reflectiveness and action, of art and simplicity, of philosophy and sense. Sophocles and Pheidias appeared to celebrate a religion free of superstition, and a spirit of enquiry neither flippant nor insane. In the salon of Aspasia, pious, austere and dignified Athenians may have listened to old Damon expounding the principles of music; to Zeno putting logical dilemmas; to Anaxagoras explaining how the world is a cosmos created by divine intelligence, the Nous; or to Protagoras discussing with his host the interminable problem of the theory of punishment, perhaps suggesting as a commonsense hypothesis that "the individual is the measure of truth." It may well have seemed that the age of reasonable freedom had come. Nor are we to suppose that Pericles or his friends were insincere when, from such discussions, they passed to the worship of the gods. Ritual meant more than dogma in the pagan cults: we know of nothing in the speculations of Anaxagoras which need have prevented him from honouring the Zeus whose image Pheidias created, and the logic of Zeno was devised for the defence of a doctrine easily reconciled with the practice of the ordinary cults. Though immoral inferences were to be drawn from the hypothesis of Protagoras, they were assuredly not drawn by the respectable moralist himself.

Superstition, however, still prevailed among the mass of citizens. Damon was thought dangerous and driven into exile. Anaxagoras, as his opinions become known, was suspected of impiety, and, just before the death of Pericles, was tried and banished. Later, Protagoras, for an expression of what has been called "a cautious agnosticism," was threatened with prosecution, fled from Athens, and is said to have been drowned on his voyage. His books were publicly burnt. Nor is all this surprising. For, in fact, if the sun is an incandescent rock, as Anaxagoras supposed, and no divinity, there is danger also for Zeus the Thunderer. If man is the measure of all things, the sacrilegious traitor is no worse than the pious citizen. So long, moreover, as morality meant duty to the state, and the state depended on Olympians, cruel, jealous, lustful, capricious, so long must a moral reformer question the very basis of morality; and so long must such a questioner, though he were as pious as Socrates, be thought a danger and a perverter of the young. So Socrates was put to death.

Superstition still prevailed. Therefore the Enlightenment was salutary, and was necessarily disruptive. It was also inevitable. When the fathers think the Age of Reason is achieved, the sons may be trusted, if they are of a good stock, to see that it is still far off. The revolution in thought, which Aristophanes deplored, was the legitimate offspring of the Periclean age, though like most children it scandalised its parent. From the time when Pericles became supreme, Athens was the centre of Greece. Her citizens travelled, and saw the customs of many nations. In the assembly and the law-courts they needed the arts of rhetoric, even before teachers came from Sicily to teach them argument. All men who had ideas found listeners and ready talkers in Athenian gymnasia, and the seeds of opinion ripened after the sowers had perhaps been sent about their business. Everything, divine and human, had to stand the test of criticism. Women presumed, or some men on behalf of them presumed, to protest against the social system which made the strange position of Aspasia possible. It was even suggested that barbarians or slaves might sometimes be as good as Greeks and citizens. Nobler spirits sought a sanction for morality in human feeling and good sense, but of course there were baser men to whom enlightenment meant nothing but the breaking of old sanctions. Some held, a few professed, probably some also put into practice, the doctrine that justice is no more than the rule of the strong. Pericles had spoken of wisdom joined with manliness, and of reflection that did not hinder action: in a few years after his death, the manly cry of Cleon urging a massacre was heard—"Act now: delay is fatal: reflection will unman you." To some it seemed that politics had become a questionable business, that a man should find out what was good before he tried to guide his fellows, that the pursuit of truth was nobler than the service of a city. Yet all the while, this city was fighting the war which was to end in the destruction of her material supremacy, in which her territory was ravaged, her citizens swept away by plague, whole armnies cut to pieces. It is an absorbing spectacle. Hardly a question that interests us was not in some form asked by this astonishing people. And the plays of Euripides are the mirror of it all.

Sophocles survived him and put the chorus at the Dionysia into mourning for him, yet the difference in their age is not without significance. The boyhood of Sophocles was spent in the old Athens which the Persians destroyed. Euripides, according to the pleasant legend, was born in Salamis on the day of victory. He was a boy when Sophocles produced his earliest tragedies, for it was thirteen years later that he first as a young man competed in the festival. By that time Pericles was already the acknowledged leader of the victorious democrats. Still, the difference of temperament was probably more important than this difference of age. Had Sophocles been as young in years as Euripides he would still have been the spiritual contemporary of Pericles and Pheidias. But Euripides, had he been born as early as Sophocles, could hardly have been in old age the poet of the younger generation. As it was, he was probably one of the first to sympathise with the new movement, and to the end of his life (witness the Bacchants) he retained his power of absorbing new ideas.

He is represented as the poet of ideas in ancient stories of his life. Aloof from affairs, melancholy, even morose, he is contrasted with the genial and versatile Sophocles. Observing the life in which he took no active part, immersed in conversation or in books,—for he possessed the rare luxury of a library—or meditating in a cave that opened towards Salamis, he gathered matter for the tragedies that shocked old age and puzzled simple minds and made the young exult and think and chatter. The attacks of Aristophanes are the measure of his popularity and also of the consternation which he caused. His powers were acknowledged even by those who were most alien from his spirit. Not only Aristophanes, whose hostility is discounted by his rôle as caricaturist, but also the whole audience of Aristophanes, must have been steeped in his poetry in order to appreciate the satire. But he was unpopular with many of those who were compelled to admire. In the disasters of the war those who had listened eagerly to some new doctrine might in a few hours turn against the teacher in a superstitious panic, attribute some misfortune to the anger of the gods, and demand that the impiety be driven from the city. Euripides on his side seems to have been oppressed by the war and by the temper of his fellow citizens. In his last years he lived in voluntary exile, and he died in Macedonia at the court of Archelaus.

To a modern reader, his plays are likely to appear at first sight ill-constructed, platitudinous, dull. The beauty of Professor Murray's translation seems to contradict that view, but it must be confessed that (if we except the lyrics and some isolated passages of dialogue) it is difficult to find in Euripides the romantic grace which gives to that translation its peculiar charm. Even with the aid of Professor Murray's genius we shall probably admit that much of the original still leaves us cold. Happily the work of Dr Verrall is well known, and, whether we agree with his conclusions or not, we shall not readily reject his doctrine that the fault is more probably in us than in the author. We shall at least make some effort to understand the reason which gave these dramas such a vogue in Athens.

Perhaps the best introduction is the brilliant comedy in which Euripides was represented as contending for the post of tragic laureate to the underworld. The Frogs of Aristophanes was produced soon after the death of Euripides and almost immediately after that of Sophocles. Athens had now entered on the last phase of the war. Many of her allies had deserted: her coinage had been debased, her food supplies in large measure cut off: many citizens were suspected, not without reason, of treachery, many were disfranchised, some, and among them Alcibiades, in exile. There can have been few men in the audience who had not lost a father or a brother by plague or battle or the hemlock: many of them were to be among the prisoners whom Lysander slaughtered after Aegospotami: none, except the traitors, can have expected that if Athens yielded he would himself be spared. In these circumstances Aristophanes made an appeal for the abandonment of rationalism, that is to say of impious sophistry, and for a return to safe and simple piety. The appeal is interwoven with a plea for political generosity, especially for the recall of Alcibiades. The chorus of the happy Initiates is thus not only beautiful in itself, but also vitally connected with the drama. As they weave their dances in the sunlit meadows of Persephone; as they sing their processional to Iacchus and the Ladies of Eleusis, mingling, in their good pagan fashion, piety and jest; they remind the audience of Alcibiades, once led astray by sophistry, once the enemy of the Eleusinian goddesses, but received back, as all men knew, into their favour when, in spite of the invader, he had led down their procession to Elusis. They point, at the same time, the contrast between Aeschylus, the poet of religion, and Euripides, the poet of persuasion, reason, argument.

We must remember this political purpose, nor must we forget that we are dealing with a comedy. Much that has been seriously pondered by the critics is pure jesting, or a subtle playing on the theme of Alcibiades. Yet, after all deductions, there remains a serious criticism of Euripides, artistic, political and moral, as well as religious. For an Athenian indeed these things are not distinct, but interdependent. The basis of it all is the contrast between Euripides and the spirit of old piety represented by Aeschylus and the Mysteries. Much of the detail is uncertain, but this much can safely be inferred: that to those who agreed with Aristophanes the drama of Euripides seemed irreligious. In the theatre whose purpose was the celebration of the gods and heroes, it was felt that these gods and heroes had been attacked. Secondly, the poet was thought to have ruined his art by his introduction of "familiar things of daily life and common use," things artistically incongruous. Thirdly he seemed to have destroyed its moral value by arguing matters best left undiscussed, and by depicting action and passions which, although they are implied in the legends, ought not to be publicly displayed. In a word, he had robbed tragedy of its religion, of its beauty, of its ethical grandeur. The effect of his plays, we gather, was not that men marvelled and became strong, but that they went away to argue.

If we accept the hypotheses of Aristophanes it must be admitted that his attack is just, and many people are inclined to agree with Jebb's reluctant censure: "His influence on the multitude in his own day was perhaps, on the whole, not good; for he blurred those Hellenic ideals which were the common man's best without definitely replacing them." It is an old complaint against the critical spirit, and perhaps partly just, that it can destroy but not replace. But it is well to remember that among the hypotheses of Aristophanes were such ideas as these: that it is impious to say "Either Apollo did not ravish women, or he is not a god; for a god who does evil is no god at all," that it is immoral to suggest that a man who through insanity sheds blood does not infect the air, that it is indecent to represent upon the stage a woman in love. And it is well to remember that "the common man's best" included a narrow patriotism, a contempt for foreigners and slaves, a belief in the right and duty of rancour and revenge, which would shock the most intolerant and irascible of modern Jingoes. Criticism which shakes superstition often seems for the moment to be shaking truth and morality: but it is never true that it destroys "the common man's best," for it sets free the human spirit, and the human spirit is better than the creeds and laws and moralities in which from time to time it finds expression.

This account of the general tendency of Euripides is confirmed by consideration of the three technical faults which most critics and, I suppose, all readers find in the dramas:—that the prologues are often undramatic and wearisome in their elaborate statement of facts; that the epilogues (whether or not the god from the machine appears) are careless and unconvincing; and that the chorus seems often out of place and poorly manipulated. In each case what has been said provides the explanation. Euripides, like Aeschylus, treats a story for the sake of the thoughts it suggests: but the thoughts are very different from those of Aeschylus. Like Aeschylus he faces all the moral issues; but the result again is different. Where Aeschylus sees a divine legend, conveying a moral that is wrapped in mystery, Euripides sees something simply immoral and untrue, or something that suggests the inadequacy and stupidity of current notions. Therefore when Euripides treats such a story, he presents it in a form which shows its immorality or shows the folly of the popular ideas. That form is an approximation to realism. He strips the story and the characters of mystery, and says in effect: "There! That is how it looks in the light of day. What now do you think—of the god or hero—of the legend—of your attitude to your wife or concubine—of the war—of Athens?" Of course it is not always so: his interest in the emotions, good and bad, of ordinary men makes him a realist even where he is not directly criticising: his instinct is to portray humanity as it is. In any case it is fairly clear that the audience expected in his plays some reduction of the legends to the standards and emotions of contemporary life. That fact implies all the rest. When a story is to be expounded in order to be self-exposed, or to be presented in any new and startlingly unorthodox shape, it is necessary, if we are to catch the meaning of the author, to have clearly in our minds the version of the tale with which he starts. That is one reason why the prologue is elaborate in detail. Another reason is the fact which, more than any other, explains the forced improbable epilogues, namely that Euripides is in the pulpit, where at least a colour of orthodoxy must be preserved. He often banishes the supernatural altogether from the body of his play: but he is obliged to use heroic stories as his theme, and therefore in the prologue and the epilogue, without much caring for the business, rarely troubling to make it plausible, sometimes deliberately making it ridiculous, he pours out as much heroic as the story and the occasion demand.

His realism again is the cause of his comparative failure with the chorus. His lyrics are melodious and fanciful, often not unworthy to be ranked with those of Sophocles, and usually as relevant as his. Yet in Sophocles the effect is felt to be in harmony with the play because the play is a revelation of the heroic world where choruses and masks are perfectly natural. The more the drama approximates to ordinary life, the more we notice the incongruity of such things. Religion insisted that Tragedy was an act of choral worship, and so the chorus had to stay. Euripides felt the embarrassment of their too intimate presence in domestic scenes and secret conspiracies. He did not succeed in solving the problem, but the methods he adopted are instructive. Sometimes he makes the chorus seem for a time realistic. Examples are the entry of Athenian maidens in the Ion and the visit of inquisitive women to the camp in the Iphigeneia at Aulis. The former is a masterpiece of its kind: the serving-maids are visiting Delphi for the first time, and are pleased above all to notice what reminds them of home: their natural comments are in spirit like the famous conversation of the Syracusan ladies in Theocritus. But it is, of course, only for a few moments and in isolated scenes that a group of fifteen persons can be made so realistic and convincing as that. So other methods are employed. The chorus holds lyrical dialogue with the leader, sections converse with one another or with the leader or with an actor, probably in excited passages individuals speak for themselves. These devices are not new: in the Suppliants of Aeschylus we noticed lyrical dialogue. Still this turning of the ode into a half-dramatic scena is one of the means by which Euripides tries to make the incongruous chorus plausible. An example is the entry of the chorus in the Electra, where instead of the ode we have only a few sentences of lyric as excuse and accompaniment for the lyrical solo of the heroine.

There was another way, less courageous but on the whole more likely to succeed, namely to treat the chorus rigidly as a convention, to exclude it altogether from the action, though allowing it still to mark divisions between scenes. There is no reason why the choral entr'acte should not play upon the motives of the drama, and add to its effect, but logically the musicians should be silent except in the intervals. That is a method which Euripides, like Sophocles, sometimes tends to adopt. He does not adopt it outright, and his art suffers from a conflict between the tendency to make the chorus real and the tendency to make them conventional.

There are, of course, occasions when the lyrical form is consistent with Euripidean realism. When a company is seized by strong emotion (panic, for instance, as in the Seven, or enthusiasm, as in the Bacchants) the varied rhythms, the music and the dance are an aid, not a hindrance, to realistic expression. Now the portrayal of violent emotion was a part of the Euripidean method; and his characteristic monodies, lyrical soli sung by the actor on the stage, are in most cases used to heighten the effect of some strong feeling. The realism of Euripides is not photographic. Those who talk of his language, for instance, as if it were that of the Athenian market-place, are deceived by its art. It is not the language of common life. Nor is it, like that of Sophocles, more alive than ordinary speech. Simply it is more lucid, capable of expressing in easy polished sentences all manner of ideas. Therefore a lyrical monody is a not incongruous expression for the strong emotion of characters who ordinarily talk the language of Euripides. Examples are the tragic marriage-song of Cassandra in the Trojan Women, and the splendid outburst of Creusa in the Ion. The one instance of a monody expressing "calm and gentle sentiments" is, as M. Decharme observes, that of the young temple servant, Ion. There the effect is natural because the poet is creating an atmosphere of romance. The realism of the Ion is in the sordid tale which is contrasted with the beauty of the setting. The more romantic Ion seems, the more effective is his gradual realisation that Apollo is either a ravisher and child-deserter, or a fraud, or an excuse for fraud, or all these things, or nothing.

Why, it may be suggested, did not Euripides, who had ideas to preach, find in the chorus, as Aeschylus had found, a vehicle for his opinions? The answer has already been implied. The ideas of Aeschylus, though they were in advance of current notions, were ultimately religious, tended to a harmonising of popular belief with truth. Euripides, on the other hand, whatever precisely he thought, held certainly opinions which he dared not generally utter by the mouth of the religious chorus. The opinions expressed by his chorus are as a rule conventional and pious: sometimes irony is felt behind the convention, and the pious moralising reveals the inadequacy of current sentiment. But for the direct expression of his own opinion Euripides could not use the chorus. His characters therefore are to some extent their own chorus. That is one reason for their loquacity. They say not simply what a man would say in such and such a situation, but what a man might say or think. Sometimes their speeches are dramatic: sometimes they express opinions about which we can only say that Euripides thought them interesting: occasionally we can feel sure that the opinions are the opinions of the poet: often, however, the characters, like the chorus, express the conventional view in order that it may refute itself.

The technique of Euripides is thus almost inevitably associated with his general point of view. With regard to both it must be apparent that the present writer accepts with gratitude the teaching of Dr Verrall. The lucidity of Euripides is deceptive; it is a mistake to assume that he approves of his story or his hero; he does not necessarily sympathise with the sentiments that come so glibly from the mouth of the actor. His tendency was to treat the story as a piece of ordinary life, though he was checked at every turn by convention. The result is inevitably that the legend, thus presented, is exposed. Euripides was aware of that, and was sometimes quite deliberately exposing latent immorality. Sometimes he meant his audience to feel uneasy, to think that if the story were true it was highly discreditable: sometimes he meant them to infer that it was not true. But Dr Verrall goes further. He believes that by scatered "hints and signals and cues," intelligent Athenians, acquainted with the method, could detect a rationalistic explanation of the myth, a theory as to its possible origin. On that point it is well to avoid dogma, and to generalise about Euripides is always dangerous; but it is at least not proven that the audience were ever intended to reflect:—"Thus indeed, or in some such way, the thing may have taken place, and the story may have arisen." It is doubtful whether even in the most intelligent circles the rationalising of miracle and the power of fallacy-hunting were sufficiently advanced to make such a reflection possible. In general the exposure of the myth is moral rather than intellectual. Inconsistencies are sometimes pointed out, but it is the naked presentation of the moral grossness of the legends which is characteristic and which must have thrilled the audience with horror or delight. The intellectual achievement of Euripides is this:—that a story which is ostensibly a celebration of a god may in its effect expose his immorality, and that a piece of rhetoric which is ostensibly a tirade against women may in effect expose the egoism of the man who utters it.

I have been trying to suggest the general impression made by Euripides on his contemporaries, and the general tendency of his mind. To leave the matter there might imply that all his plays are of a like nature. The truth is, his variety of form is as great as his mental versatility. Many critics, after Aristotle, have been led astray by judging him as if he aimed at effects like those of Sophocles, but there is another habit equally misleading. I mean the habit of supposing that all his plays were meant to produce similar effects, and were constructed on similar principles. Every tragedy must be considered separately before we can see what in each particular tragedy Euripides was in fact attempting to do. Rules which apply, criticisms which are pertinent, to one type of drama are impertinent and misleading in regard to another.

Sometimes, to begin at the beginning, Euripides purposely and for a definite effect adopts the form of the old lyrical tragedy, the illustrating by song and speech and action of some dramatic theme or situation. In this old type there was no advancing plot, no unity of action, but, from beginning to end, simply the unity of a lyrical poem. In Euripides, when he adopts this style, dialogue occupies the greater part of the time, but the construction has all the looseness of the lyrical form. The difference between this type of drama as composed by Euripides and the earlier compositions is this, that instead of choral lyrics interspersed with dramatic tableaux we now have loosely connected dramatic scenes interspersed with choral lyrics. The finest example is the Trojan Women, a dramatic sequence, partly acted, partly sung, whose theme is the fall of Troy, the horror of conquest, the degradation of the conquerors, the beauty that may belong to extreme sorrow. Upon the old queen Hecuba crowd the calamities of Troy and the insolence of Greece. The whole is shot with reminiscence of the Agamemnon, and doubtless of lost epics, the Sack of Troy and the Returns of the Heroes. There was moreover a living meaning in this vision of the wrong which conquest entails. A few months before the performance, Melos had been punished for revolt with a cynicism which Thucydides, for all his lack of superstition, made the fatal turning point in the war. The poem is a poem, not a political tract. But the sympathy with weakness and the hatred of oppression were felt more strongly by the poet and were more moving in his drama because of things which Athenians had lately done. In its spirit and in details—the confronting of Helen with Hecuba, for instance, and the pathos given to the death of a child, Astyanax—the poem is Euripidean. In composition it is of the old free type.

Both the Heracleidae and the Suppliant Women are performances of an old-fashioned kind on themes of Attic glory. In each the simple theme (a coming of weak suppliants to Athens, a fight for their cause, victory and the promise of benefits that piety has earned) proves inadequate in these days when the part of the chorus is comparatively small. In each the play is lengthened and the interest complicated by an episode. The excuse is the freedom of the old-fashioned type of drama. In the Heracleidae soothsayers demand a human sacrifice for the success of Athens, and Macaria, a daughter of Heracles, offers herself as a noble victim. lolaus, the old comrade of Heracles, goes to the fight, and is miraculously re-endowed with youth. It is true, as Dr Verrall has pointed out, that the speaker who narrates this incident alludes to it with a pleasant touch of scepticism. It is true also that at the end there is a wholly Euripidean scene, in which Alcmena stands for the old doctrine of revenge, and Eurystheus, the traditional villain of the piece, appeals from her murderous clamour to the fairness of Athenian citizens. Apart from details, however, the piece appears to be a frankly patriotic show, not "a satire on the barbarity of ancient religion and manners." In passing we may notice that the Hecuba, a play of the old-fashioned kind, since its unity depends entirely on the central figure of the queen, suggests in more perfectly constructed drama the same moral issues which were felt in episodes of the Heracleidae. The wickedness of the religious slaughter of Polyxena recalls Macaria, and the terrible revenge of Hecuba indicts again the popular opinion (sanctified by proverb) that it is right to hate an enemy and to exact full vengeance.

The Suppliant Women is a treatment of a theme familiar from Chaucer, at the beginning of whose Knight's Tale, Theseus,

In all his wealth and in his moste pride
He was war, as he cast his eye aside,
Wher that ther kneled in the hye weye
A companye of ladies, tweye and tweye,
Ech like the other, clad in clothes blake.

These ladies are the mothers of the chieftains slain before the walls of Thebes (cf. p. 60), and their petition is that Athens of her piety will force the Thebans to give up the bodies for burial. Here, as in the Antigone, Creon and the Thebans violate the sacred rights of the dead. Nor was it only in legend that those old enemies of Athens were held guilty of such impiety: after the battle of Delium in 424 B.C. they refused for some time to give up Athenian dead. Probably that fact was in the mind of the audience. In any case the play is full of patriotic sentiment, and for Athenians any faults of construction must have been outweighed by the flattering piety of tone. The scene is holy Eleusis: characteristically the poet has made a woman of Athens intercede for the Argive mothers: to the prayers of the women are added those of Adrastus, leader and survivor of the expedition. The first half is, then, a simple presentation of the petition and its success. The latter half, however, must have seemed most thrilling. The Athenians are victorious, the bodies are brought to Athens, and in a solemn ceremony they are burnt, Capaneus who died by the lightning of Zeus on a separate pyre, the rest together. The ceremony recalls the public funeral in which Athenians who died in war were honoured by the state, the occasion made memorable for us by the Funeral Speech of Pericles: to suit this ceremony Adrastus makes a panegyric of the dead that illustrates the freedom which such patriotic shows admit, since his praises have no relation to the traditional characters of the heroes, but remind us of Athenian warriors and statesmen. In a scene of fine melodrama Evadne, the wife of Capaneus, throws herself into the flames of her husband's pyre; the children of the fallen heroes bear a part in the lamentation; and, to crown the whole, Athene herself appears. She bids the Athenians exact from Adrastus an oath of an abiding Argive friendship to her city (an oath which may well be meant to be the ancient counterpart of a modern alliance), and foretells a time when the children shall avenge on Thebes their fathers' wrongs.

At this point may be mentioned a curious entertainment, composed on an original scheme, but only to be understood if we remember the old lyrical tradition. This is the Phoenissae, in which Euripides has compressed into one play reminiscences of the whole cycle of Theban legends. The pleasure of witnessing this drama must have depended on a knowledge of much literature now lost: happily we possess enough to make most of the scenes alive. The Seven, the Antigone, the Oedipus Tyrannus and even the Oedipus at Colonus (which was not yet produced, but was probably based on earlier poetry) must be known before we can appreciate this strange performance. The whole Theban legend in one drama: that is the task which Euripides set himself. And so locasta, the wife and mother of Oedipus, who in Sophocles committed suicide before the self-blinding of her husband, is here preserved alive to speak the prologue and to kill herself over the bodies of the sons whom she has tried to reconcile. Oedipus also must be there; so he is not in banishment, but kept in the palace, a blind old man, to appear and lament his sons in a scene which recalls his last appearance in the Oedipus Tyrannus. Creon is there and, that nothing may be wanting, he forces the blind prophet Teiresias to reveal a fatal secret, the divine command that he should sacrifice his son. Of course the impious Creon refuses the sacrifice: of course, like Haemon, the son Menoeceus seems to yield to his father, but slays himself in spite of him. Antigone is there, though a certain clumsiness has made critics suspect that some of her scenes are due to changes made at revivals. In view of the peculiar nature of the work, the hypothesis is unnecessary. In the finale, for instance, it is true that Antigone would find it difficult to explain to a cross-examiner how she can stay at Thebes to bury her brother and also go with her father into exile: but the excitement of the lyrics, and the pleasure of recognising that all the elements of the legend have been somehow worked in, may have prevented hearers from attempting cross-examination. As for the brothers, the poet, not content with showing Eteocles, has contrived an interview between them, in which, characteristically, the defender of Thebes is made odious, the returning exile Polyneices rather attractive. Eteocles implies a criticism of Aeschylus when he observes that it would be waste of time to tell the names of all the champions when the enemy is at the gates. Yet we are not deprived of the traditional catalogue; only, Euripides has a new and plausible way of working that too into his scheme; for Antigone has surveyed the advancing army from the ramparts, in a lyrical scene of considerable beauty. Even now we are not at the end of ingenuities. More than the tale of Oedipus and his children is to be included. Laius is brought in by the prologue, spoken by his wife, whose elaborate detail we now can understand: she speaks also of Phoenician Cadmus, ancestor of Theban kings, by whose person Thebes is connected with the eastern world. Finally the chorus have their part in the scheme. They are Phoenician women, descended from Agenor, father of Cadmus, and so related to the Theban princes: they claim kinship with Argive lo, and are so related to the invading army. They happen to be here because war broke out when they were staying with their Theban kinsmen on their way to Delphi, where they were to be consecrated to the service of the god. Could anything be more ingenious? They can sing of Cadmus and Harmonia and the dragon's teeth; of Apollo whose name (as we saw in the Seven) stood for so much in the story; and, with equal appropriateness, of the Sphinx and of the Erinyes that haunt the royal house. They are equally at home in prayers to Io, and to the gods of Thebes, and to the gods of Delphi. Thus their persons and their songs form a kind of cement, which binds together the different motives, and fills in the gaps in this great edifice of reminiscence. The whole is a dramatic fantasia of Theban legend, and cannot justly be expected to conform to the standards of an ordinary play.

But Euripides did sometimes write plays. Consider, for instance, the Medea, the wonderful proof that a Greek could sympathise with a woman, a bad woman, and—strangest of all—a barbarian. It is a strain upon our sympathy when Medea, having killed her children simply to hurt the man who had abandoned her, departs for Athens on her flying car. There are signs that the poet felt embarrassment, but was driven by tradition to end his tragedy so. In any case the play shocked Athenians, partly because the mere representation of so terrible a love and hate was felt to be immoral, but also, I think, because the wicked witch was treated with too great a sympathy. As for the heroic Jason, if only we will listen with our minds, we shall realise that he stands, and is meant to stand, for the eternal selfishness of men. His views of Medea, of the advantages (which she ought to appreciate) of living in a Greek city, of his princess, of women and of life, are mutatis mutandis the views of Sir Willoughby Patterne. Similarly in the Hippolytus, another drama very shocking to orthodox taste (though the form in which we have the play is said to be a second version with the impropriety toned down), we are actually made to sympathise with Phaedra, one of the Greek counterparts of Potiphar's wife, worse indeed than Potiphar's wife, since her passion was for her stepson. Euripides makes pity prevail over disapprobation; he makes us feel that Phaedra is like most of us, only more unfortunate rather than more wicked; and he suggests reflections by the picture of the selfish vulgar nurse, and in other ways, as to the kind of life an Athenian lady leads, and the results which must be expected in a woman of passionate nature. As for the virtuous hero, he is noble, but he has a touch of priggishness. Thus, instead of a piece of edification, we have a tragedy of two real human beings, the one carried away by the passion of love, and the other lacking it altogether. Artemis and Aphrodite are accessories, incarnations of two warring elements in man, asceticism and sexual love. Probably Greek feeling saw nothing shocking in such a conception, nor would any Greek have been shocked (as some modern critics are) by the powerlessness of Artemis to save her favourite. Two points may be mentioned which may not be detected in the reading of the drama, but are clear enough when it is acted. The motive of Phaedra, when she kills herself and leaves the slander that incriminates the man she loves, is not simply the desire to keep an honourable name. Her thought is not merely, nor perhaps chiefly, for herself. It is the good name of her children that she wishes to save. That fact is perhaps less clearly emphasised because it was so obvious to a Greek audience. For a parallel we may go to modern Japan, where in this matter as in regard to ancestor-worship, patriotism, filial duty, and many other things, instinctive feeling is nearer to the Greek than ours. It helps us to understand why Euripides was so scandalous when he exhibited love stories on the stage if we consider the following sentence of Lafcadio Hearn: "The typical woman often figures in Japanese romance as a heroine; as a perfect mother; as a pious daughter, willing to sacrifice all for duty; never as a sentimental maiden, dying or making others die for love": and again, "Our novels seem to them indecent for somewhat the same reason that the Scripture text, 'For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife,' appears to them one of the most immoral sentences ever written." A man who tried to break down all that sentiment would be thought, as was Euripides, indecent and the hater of good women.

The Alcestis exposes the average man's attitude to women by a different method. Here the heroine is a good woman, worshipped for her self-sacrifice, Alcestis who died for her husband. There is no irony in the treatment of her heroism, but the poet says something like this: "Yes, a good wife, whom you do well to honour. But the husband? The friend and host of Apollo? He accepted such a sacrifice, and let his wife, the mother of young children die? As for his vaunted hospitality, his welcoming of Heracles when his wife was lying dead, is that so fine? Is it not rather, perhaps, indecent?" Alcestis, though she dies for him, has in her last moments insight into his character: his protestations leave her, and the audience, cold. When she dies, it is the voice of her child, not the voice of Admetus, that touches us. Admetus is real, and terribly selfish: therefore to those who thought of him as a friend of the gods, the drama must have been disquieting. As for the fight of Heracles with death it seems to me to have interested Euripides very little: this, with the fact that the Alcestis was an experiment, a serious drama substituted for the satyric play, sufficiently accounts for the incongruous traits in Heracles. The suggestion that Alcestis was not dead but simply in a trance is not, I think, convincing.

In the plays of which we have spoken there are hints of the attitude of Euripides towards the gods, but they are scattered and incidental. The Ion, on the contrary, which turns on the alleged birth of the hero from Apollo and an Athenian princess, is a barely veiled attack upon Apollo himself, or at any rate upon Apollo as represented by piety and by the priestly managers of his oracle. Romantic beauty, realism, fine characterisation, and, it may be added, wit, are combined in this masterpiece, for the exposing of what passed for a religious story. The Electra, moreover, which is from one point of view stern realism, is also an attack on the Delphic oracle. The murder of Clytaemnestra, which Aeschylus had treated as a mysterious but righteous dispensation, and Sophocles as just retribution, is regarded by Euripides as a crime, and the guilt is put upon Apollo. As is his habit with traditional villains, the poet makes Clytaemnestra human: she is trapped by a heartless trick, and murdered at a moment when maternal feeling has triumphed over fear. Electra illustrates a favourite motive, the degrading effect of misery upon the character. The worthy peasant is a good example of the doctrine that low birth is consistent with nobility of life: even democratic Athens thought enough of birth to find that rather obvious suggestion interesting. The Andromache, a melodrama, full of hatred for Sparta (as represented by the lurking Menelaus), characteristically contrasts the weak, vain, jealous, superstitious Greek Hermione with the noble Trojan Andromache. There is also an implied attack on Delphi: for the plot by which Neoptolemus is murdered reflects no more credit on the ministers of Apollo than on their protégé Orestes.

The Heracles is a fine drama, but when the legend was still part of popular belief it had also the effect of a destructive criticism. The suggestion that the construction is spoilt by the double plot is due to failure to imagine the effect upon Athenians. The tendency. is to show that the current myth is indefensible, or at any rate cannot be reconciled with the belief that the government of the world is good. The first part, with its picture of the family of Heracles, oppressed by the tyrant in their father's absence and delivered as if by miracles at his return, is intended to impress us with the merit of the hero. The sequel shows whether, in the words of the chorus, spoken just before Madness appears, "that which is just is pleasing to the gods."

But again Euripides wrote plays of different kinds. Not all, nor even most of his dramas are intended primarily to expose the myth. The Orestes is a story of meanness, rancour, and homicidal mania, skilfully constructed as effective melodrama. The Iphigeneia in Tauris has a spirit of adventure and the Iphigeneia at Aulis a charming air of domestic realism. The delicate and almost homely character-drawing of the latter play, the suggestion of romance in the relations of Achilles and the heroine, remind us that Euripides was the precursor of the New Comedy, of the Greek romantic novel, and, through these, of the modern novel. The Hypsipyle, of which several scenes have lately been discovered, belongs to this class of romantic and adventurous melodrama. The Helena is of all the plays the most fanciful: the touch of the poet here is light and humorous: the incidents are exquisitely unconvincing. The effect is that of a graceful, somewhat pathetic, but only half serious romance.

Finally in the Bacchants, composed in Macedonia, Euripides has created so sympathetic a picture of fanatical enthusiasm that some people have believed the work a recantation. The opinion will not bear investigation, but it is equally inaccurate to call the play an attack on Dionysus. In Macedonia Euripides saw the efforts of a Hellenising king to give discipline and order to a barbarous people: he saw also the worship of Dionysus, god of nature and intoxicated life, in its wild state, untamed by the Hellenic moderation. He saw the ecstasy that devotees attained, the poetical beauty, and in a sense the goodness, of this freedom from restraint. The intolerance and the dangerous zeal and the contempt for reason and good government were also obvious to the observer who did not believe. In a tragedy (based on a well-known legend of a king who had opposed the young Dionysus), Euripides has presented both sides of this matter. Pentheus is right. Law and order are good, and ought to be maintained. Only, if you maintain them you do it at a price. Reason is on the side of Pentheus, yet Dionysus also is right. Emotion is on his side. It is a case of reason against fundamental and volcanic forces which, like reason, are a part of human nature. The triumph of Euripides the Rationalist is that he also understood the spirit of Dionysus.

Of the lingering death of Attic Tragedy this is not the place to speak. Though tragedy languished, theatres sprang up throughout Greece, and guilds of professional actors, called "the Artists of Dionysus," acted and prospered. From the fourth century one play survives, the Rhesus, a poor composition on an incident from Homer. But for us Greek Tragedy is the art that was born and flourished and died with the great Athenian democracy of the fifth century.