or finer :

" Be of good cheer, thou livest; but my Ife

For the dead's sake these many days is dead."

The claims of the dead form, in fact, a note common
to this play and the Electra. They repeat the protest
already uttered by yEschylus in the Choirphoroi, agains,
treating wrong done merely as it affects the convenien;-



246 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

of the living. The love-motive in Hasmon is not likely
to be due to Sophocles's invention ; it is unlike his
spirit, and he makes little use of it, much less than
Euripides did in his lost Antigone* The idea would
naturally come froiii Mimnermus or one of the erotic
elegists.

The TrachinicB and the Philoctetes show clearly the
influence of Euripides. The former deals with the
death of Heracles by the coat of burning poison which
his enemy the centaur Nessus has given to the hero's
wife Deianira, professing that it is a love - charm.
Deianira finds that Heracles is untrue to her, and that
an unhappy princess whom he has sent as captive of
war to her house is really the object for whom he
made the war. She bethinks her of the love-charm
and sends it, and the burly demi-god dies raging.
The Dorian hero, a common figure in satyr-plays, had
never been admitted to tragedy till Euripides's Heracles,
where he appears as the lusty conquering warrior, jovial
and impulsive, with little nobleness of soul to fall back
upon. There are some definite imitations of the
Heracles in the TrachinicB, apart from the Euripidean
prologue and the subtly dramatic situation between
Deianira and her husband's unwilling mistress. One
would like to know if there can be any connection
between the writing of this play and the history con-
tained in Antiphon's speech On Poisoning (p. 335).

The Philoctetes (409 B.C.) is markedly a character-play.
The hero, once the companion of Heracles, and now
owner of his unerring bow, had been bitten by a noxious
snake. The festering wound seemed about to breed a
pestilence, and the Greeks left the sick man marooned
n Lemnos. Long years afterwards an oracle reveals



THE LATE PLAYS OF SOPHOCLES 247

that the bow, and Philoctetes with it, must come to
Troy, if the town is to be taken. It is all but im-
possible to approach the injured man ; but Odysseus,
the great contriver, agrees to try it, and takes with
him the son of Achilles, Neoptolemus. Odysseus him-
self is known to Philoctetes; so he keeps in the back-
ground, and puts Neoptolemus forward to entrap the
man on board his ship by ingenious lies. The young
soldier reluctantly consents. He wins entirely the
confidence of the old broken-hearted solitary ; every-
thing is in train for the kidnapping, when a spasm of
agony from the incurable wound comes on Philoctetes.
Neoptolemus does his best to tend him, and cannot
face his victim's gratitude. At the last moment he
confesses the truth. Philoctetes has taken him for
his single friend ; he is really a tool in the hand
of his cruellest enemy. This very interesting and
Euripidean knot is loosed in the bad Euripidean
manner by Heracles as " a god from the Mechane "
(see p. 268).

The Qidipus at Colonus is a play of the patriotic-
archaeological type, of which our earliest example is
the HeracleidcB of Euripides. It turns on the alleged
possession by Attica of the grave of CEdipus — evidently
only ' alleged,' and that not in early tradition, for we
find in the play that no such supposed grave was
visible. When CEdipus is an old man, and has, as it
were, worn out the virulence of the curse upon him
by his long innocent wanderings with his daughter
Antigone, news is brought to him from Thebes by
Ismene of a new oracle. His body is to keep its
'hagos' or taboo — the power of the supernaturally
pure or supernaturally polluted — and w'ill be a divine



248 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

bulwark to the country possessing it. Consequently
the Thebans intend to capture him, keep him close
to their border till he dies, and then bury him
in Theban ground, (Edipus meantime has reached
Colonus, m Attica, the seat of the 'Semnai,' 'Dread
Goddesses,' where he knows that he is doomed to
die. Theseus accepts him as a citizen, and he passes
mysteriously away. This is the only play in which
Sophocles has practically dispensed with a plot, and
it is interesting to see that the experiment pro-
duces some of his very highest work. The poetry
leaves an impression of superiority to ordinary tech-
nique, of contentment with its own large and reflec-
tive splendour. But the time was past when a mere
situation could by imaginative intensity be made to
fill a whole play. Sophocles has to insert 'epeisodia'
of Creon and Polyneikes, and to make the first exciting
by a futile attempt to kidnap the princesses, the second
by the utterance of the father's curse. The real appeal
of the play is to the burning, half-desperate patriotism
of the end of the War Time. The glory of Athens,
the beauty of the spring and the nightingales at Colo-
nus, the holy Acropolis which can never be conquered,
represent the modern ideals of that patriotism : the
legendary root of it is given in the figure of Theseus,
the law-abiding, humane, and religious king ; in the
eternal reward won by the bold generosity of Athens ;
in the rejection of Argos and the malediction laid
for ever on turbulent and cruel Thebes. The piece
is reported to be effective on the stage. Certainly
the spiritual majesty of CEdipus at the end is among
the great things of Greek poetry ; and the rather
harsh contrast which it forms with the rage of the



THE (EDIPUS AT COLONUS 249

curse-scene, could perhaps be made grand by sympa-
thetic acting.

The play is said by the ' didascalise ' ^ to have been
produced after the poet's death by his grandson of the
same name. The verse, however, seems decidedly earlier
than that of the Philoctctes (409), and the political allu-
sions have led to various unconvincing theories about its
composition at earlier dates. Prof. L. Campbell's (411)
is perhaps the most probable.

Though not one of the most characteristic of the
poet's plays, it is perhaps the most intimate and per-
sonal of them ; and it would be hard to find a more
typical piece of Sophoclean writing than the beautjful
lines of CEdipus to Theseus :

" Fair Aigeus' son, only to gods in heaven
Comes no old age nor death of anything;
All else is tur)>ioiled by our master Time.
The eartJUs stre?igth fades and manhood^ s glory fades ,
Faith dies, and unfaiih blossoms like a flower.
And who shall find in the open streets of men
Or secret places of his own hearfs love
One wind blow true for ever? "

^ Catalogues of the annual performances, collected from the official lists by
Aristotle and others.



XII

EURIPIDES
Euripides, son of Mnesarchides or Mnesarchus,

FROM PHLYA {ca. 480-406 B.C.)

We possess eighteen plays from the hand of Euripides,
as against seven each from the other two tragedians ;
and we have more material for knowledge about him
than about any other Greek poet, yet he remains, per-
haps, the most problematic figure in ancient literature.
He was essentially representative of his age, yet appa-
rently in hostility to it ; almost a failure on the stage —
he won only four ^ first prizes in fifty years of production —
yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece. His contem-
porary public denounced him as dull, because he tortured
them with personal problems ; as malignant, because he
made them see truths they wished not to see ; as blas-
phemous and foul-minded, because he made demands
on their religious and spiritual natures which they could
neither satisfy nor overlook. They did not know whether
he was too wildly imaginative or too realistic, too romantic
or too prosaic, too childishly simple or too philosophical
— Aristophanes says he was all these things at once. They
only knew that he made them angry and that they could
not help listening to him. Doubtless they realised that
he had little sense of humour and made a good butt ;

^ The fifth was after his death.
250



THE TRADITIONAL LIFE 251

and perhaps, on the other hand, they felt that he really
was what they called him in mockery, 'wise.' At any
rate, after the great disaster of Syracuse he was the
man they came to, to write the epitaph on the hopes of
Athens.

The tradition, so gentle to Sophocles, raves against
Euripides. " He was a morose cynic, privately vicious
for all his severe exterior." " He did not write his plays ;
they were done by his slaves and casual acquaintances."
" His father was a fraiidulent bankrupt ; his mother a
greengroceress, and her greens bad. His wife was called
Choirile (' Sow'), and acted up to her name ; he divorced
her, and his second wife was no better." It delights in
passages between the two tragedians in which the poverty-
stricken misanthrope is crushed by the good Sophocles,
who took to his cups and their bearers like a man, and
did not profess to be better than his neighbours.

A few of these stories can be disproved ; some are
grossly improbable ; most are merely unsupported by
evidence. It can be made out that the poet's father,
Mnesarchides, was of an old middle-class family owning
land and holding an hereditary office in the local
Apollo-worship at Phlya. His mother, Kleito the 'green-
groceress,' was of noble family. Our evidence suggests
that her relation towards her son was one of exceptional
intimacy and influence ; and motherly love, certainly
forms a strong element in his dramas. Of Euripides's
wife we only know that her name was not Choirile, but
Melite, and that Aristophanes in 411 could find no ill
to say of her. Of his three sons, we hear that Mnesar-
chus was a merchant, Mnesilochus an actor, Euripides
apparently a professional playwright ; he brought out
the IphigeniUy Bacchce, and Alcnieon * after his father's



252 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

death. The poet lived, so Philochorus says, on his own
estate at Salamis, and worked in a cave facing the sea,
which was shown to tourists down to PUny's time. He
avoided society and public life — as much, that is, as an
Athenian of that day could avoid them. He served in
the army. He had at least once to perform a 'liturgy'
of some sort, perhaps fitting out a trireme ; he was a
' Proxenus ' of Magnesia, an office which resembled that
of a modern consul, and involved some real political
work. These expensive posts must have come to him
early in his life ; he was reduced to poverty, like all the
landed proprietors, towards the end of the war. For the
rest, he was the first Greek who collected a library,
the writer and thinker, not the man of affairs.

At one time, indeed, we find him taking at least an
indirect part in pohtics. About 420, at the end of the
Ten Years' War, he wrote a play with a definite * tend-
ency.' The Suppliants not only advocates peace with
Sparta — that was the case with the Cresphontes * and the
E^^echtheus * as well — it also advocates alliance with
Argos, and proclaims the need in Athens of " a general
young and noble!' " A general young and noble " was at
that moment coming to the front, and especially press-
ing forward the Argive alliance — Alcibiades. Next year
he was appearing at Olympia with that train of four-
horse chariots which made such a noise in Greece, and
winning the Olympian victory for which Euripides wrote
a Pindaric ode. This lets us see that the philosophic
poet, like Socrates and most other people, had his period
of Alcibiades-worship. We do not know how long it
lasted. Euripides was for peace, and Alcibiades for
war ; and by the time of the Sicilian Expedition, it
would seem, Euripides had lost faith in the ' daemonic '



THE GREAT CHANGE IN EURIPIDES 253

leader. The Troiades (415 B.C. ?) starts by describing
a great fleet sailing triumphantly to sea, unconscious of
the shadow of blood-guiltiness that rests upon it, and
the gods who plot its destruction as it goes.

The plays from this time on, all through the last agony
of the war, are written in fever, and throw a strong
though distorting light on the character of the man
behind them. His innermost impulses betray them-
selves at the expense of his art, and he seems to be bent
on lacerating his own ideals. Patriotism, for instance,
had always been a strong feeling in Euripides. In 427
we had the joyous self-confident patriotism of the
HeracieidcE, the spirit of a younger Pericles. Earlier
still there had been the mere sentimental patriotism of
the Hippolytus (428 B.C.) Later came the Erechtheus*
Theseus* Suppliants (421 B.C.). But in the last plays
the spirit has changed. Dying Athens is not mentioned,
but her death-struggle and her sins are constantly
haunting us ; the joy of battle is mostly gone, the horror
of war is left. Well might old yEschylus pray, " God
grant I may sack no city ! " if the reality of conquest is
what it appears in the later plays of Euripides. The
conquerors there are as miserable as the conquered ;
only more cunning, and perhaps more wicked.

Another motive which was always present in him, and
now becomes predominant, is a certain mistrust of the
state and all its ways — the doctrine explicitly preached
to the present generation by Tolstoi. The curse of life
is its political and social complication. The free individual
may do great wrongs, but he has a heart somewhere ; it
is only the servant of his country, the tool of the ' compact
majority,' who cannot afford one. Odysseus in the
Troiades and Palanicdes* (415 B.C.) has got beyond even
18



2 54 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

the Odysseus of the Hecuba (424 ?), where the type is
first sketched clearly. He is not personally blood-thirsty,
but he is obliged to put the interest of the Achaioi
before everything. The most disagreeable consequences
are to be apprehended if he does not lie, murder, and
betray ! It is the same with Menelaus in the Orestes,
and, above all, with Agamemnon in the Iphigenia in
Aulis. They are so placed that ordinary social con-
siderations seem to make justice and honour impossible.
Another note which marks the last years of the war is a
tendency to dwell on the extreme possibilities of revenge.
It was an old theme of Euripides — the Medea had taught
it in 431 — but he now saw all about him instances of the
rule that by wronging people beyond a certain point you
make them into devils. It is this motive which gives unity
to the Hecuba, the gradual absorption of the queen's whole
nature into one infinite thirst for vengeance ; which
answers the scholiast's complaint about the Orestes, that
" everybody in it is bad." Another deepening sentiment
in Euripides is his aversion to the old tales that call
themselves heroic. His Elect^-a was enough to degrade
for ever the blood-feud of the Atridae. Read after it
what any other poet says on the subject, Sophocles or
yEschylus or Homer, and the conviction forces itself
upon you : " It was not like this ; it was just what
Euripides says it was. And a SoXocjjovia, a ' craft-murder,'
is not a beautiful thing after all."

It is at this last period of his life at Athens that we
really have in some part the Euripides of the legend —
the man at variance with his kind, utterly sceptical, but
opposed to most of the philosophers, contemptuous of
the rich, furious against the extreme democracy,^ hating

^ Or. 870-930.



NOTES OF EURIPIDES'S LAST PERIOD 255

all the ways of men, commanding attention by sheer
force of brain-power. He was baited incessantly by a
rabble of comic writers, and of course by the great pack
of the orthodox and the vulgar. He was beaten. After
producing the Orestes in 408, he left Athens for the court
of Archelaus of Macedon. We hear that he went " be-
cause of the malicious exultation of almost everybody,"
though we have no knowledge of what the exultation
was grounded on. In Macedon he found peace, and
probably some congenial society. Agathon the tragedian
and Timotheus the musician were there, both old friends
of his, and the painter Zeuxis, and probably Thucydides.
Doubtless the barbarism underneath the smooth surface
of the Macedonian court, must sometimes have let itself
appear. The story of Euripides being killed by the
king's hounds is disproved by the silence of Aristo-
phanes ; but it must have produced a curious effect
on the Athenian when one of the courtiers, who had
addressed him rudely, was promptly delivered up to him
to be scourged ! He died about eighteen months after
reaching Macedon; but the peace and comfort of his
new surroundings had already left their mark upon his
work. There is a singular freshness and beauty in the
two plays, BacchcB and Iphigenia in Aulis, w'hich he left
unfinished at his death ; and the former at any rate has
traces of Macedonian scenery (565 ff.). Of iho. Archelaus*
which he wrote in his host's honour, but few fragments
survive.

Not that in the last period of Euripides's work at Athens
his gloom is unmixed. There is nothing that better illus-
trates the man's character than the bright patches in
these latest plays, and the particular forms taken by his
still-surviving ideals. In his contempt for society and



2 56 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

statecraft, his iconoclastic spirit towards the all-admired
Homeric demi-gods, his sympathy with the dumb and
uninterpreted generally, he finds his heroism in quiet
beings uncontaminated by the world. The hero of the
Electra is the Working Peasant, true-hearted, honourable,
tactful, and of course as humbly conscious of his in-
feriority to all the savage chieftains about him as they
are confident of their superiority to him. But, above
all, Euripides retains his old belief in the infinite possi-
bilities of the untried girl. To take only the complete
plays, we have a virgin-martyr for heroine in the Hera-
cleidcEj Heaiba, IpJiigenia in Aulis ; we have echoes of her
in the Troiades and the Suppliants. She is always a real
character and always different. One pole perhaps is in
the Troiades, where the power to see something beyond
this coil of trouble, the second sight of a pure spirit, gets
its climax in Cassandra. The other, the more human
side, comes out in the IpJiigenia. The young girl, when
she first finds that she has been trapped to her death,
breaks down, and pleads helplessly, like a child, not to
be hurt; then when the first blinding shock is past, when
she has communed with herself, when she finds that
Achilles is ready to fight and die for her, she rises to
the height of glad martyrdom for Hellas' sake. The
life of one Achilles is worth that of a thousand mere
women, such as she ! That is her feeling at the moment
when she has risen incomparably beyond every one in
the play and made even her own vain young hero
humble. Aristotle — such are the pitfalls in the way of
human critics — takes her as a type of inconsistency !

An element of brightness comes also in the purely
romantic plays of the last years, the Helena and Andro-
meda.* One is reminded of the Birds (p. 286). Euripides



BRIGHTER SIDE OF LAST PERIOD 257

can be happy if he turns entirely away from irpwyiiara,
from affaires, from the things that weighed on all Athens.
The Helena is a light play with a clear atmosphere and
beautiful songs; Helen and Menelaus are both innocent.
The Andromeda* was apparently the one simple un-
clouded love-story that Euripides wrote. It was very
celebrated. Lucian has a pleasant story of the tragedy-
fever which fell upon the people of Abdera: how they
went about declaiming iambics, " and especially sang the
solos in the Andromeda and went through the great
speech of Perseus, one after another, till the city was full
of seven-day-old tragedians, pale and haggard, crying
aloud, ' O Love, high monarch over gods and mett,' and
so on." The Andromeda* opened (without a prologue?)
giving the heroine chained on the cliff, and watching
for the first glimmer of dawn with the words, " O holy
Night, how long is the wheeling of thy chariot!" Some
little fragments help us to see the romantic beauty of the
play as a whole : the appeal of the chorus to the echo
of the sea-cliffs ^^ by Aidos that dwelleth in caves" ; and
the words of Andromeda to her lover and deliverer :

" Take me, O stranger, for thi?ie handmaiden.
Or ivfe or slaveP

The love-note in this pure and happy sense Euripides
had never struck before ; and the note of superhuman
mystery, of sea-cliff and monsters and magic, not since
the Phacthon*

This, of course, is the Euripides of the end of the
war, when his antagonisms had become more pro-
nounced. But from his first appearance in 455 with
the Daughters of Pelias,* the man must have impressed
people as imlike anvthing they had known before. He
showed himself at once as the poet of the Sophistic



258 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

Movement, of the Enlightenment ; as the apostle of
clearness of expression, who states everything that he
has to say explicitly and without bombast. His language
was so much admired in the generations after his death
that it is spoilt for us. It strikes us as hackneyed and
undistinguished, because we are fam.iliar with all the
commonplace fellows who imitated it, from Isocrates
to Theodore Prodromus. He probably showed even
in the Daughters of Pelias* his power to see poetry
everywhere. His philosophical bent was certainly fore-
shadowed in lines like " />z God there is no injustice"
(frag. 606) ; his quick sympathy with passion of every
sort, in the choice of the woman Medea for his chief
figure.

But the most typical of the early plays, and the one
which most impressed his contemporaries, was the
THephus'^ (438 B.C.). It has a great number of the
late characteristics in a half-developed state, overlaid
w^ith a certain externality and youthfulness. It is worth
while to keep the Telephus* constantly in view in tracing
the gradual progress of Euripides's character and method.
The wounded king of Mysia knows that nothing but the
spear of Achilles, which wounded him, can cure him ;
the Greeks are all his enemies ; he travels through
Greece, lame from his wound, and disguised as a
beggar ; speaks in the gathering of hostile generals,
is struck for his insolence, but carries his point; finally,
he is admitted as a suppliant by Clyt?emestra, snatches
up the baby Orestes, reveals himself, threatens to dash
out the baby's brains if any of the enemies who
surround him move a step, makes his terms, and is
healed. The extraordinarily cool and resourceful hero
—he recalls those whom we meet in Hugo and Dumas



TECHNIQUE OF EURIPIDES 259

— was new to the stage, and fascinating. There was
originality, too, in his treatment of ' anagnorisis ' or
' recognition ' as a dramatic climax — the overturning
of a situation by the discovery who some person really
is — the revelation, in this case, that the lame beggar is
Telephus. This favourite Euripidean effect had become
by Aristotle's time a common and even normal way of
bringing on the catastrophe. Of our extant plays, the
/(?«, Electra, Helena^ IpJiigenta in Tauris contain 're-
cognitions.' A celebrated instance among the lost plays
was in the Cresphontes* That hero, son of the murdered
king of Messenia, had escaped from the usurper Poly-
phontes, and was being reared in secret. His mother,
Merope, was in the tyrant's power. He comes back to
save her, gains access to Polyphontes by pretending that
he has slain Cresphontes, and asks for a reward. Merope
hears that a stranger is in the house claiming a reward
for having murdered her son. She sends quickly to her
son's refuge and finds that he has disappeared. In
despair she takes an axe and goes to where the boy
sleeps. At the last instant, while she is just speaking the
words, " Infernal HadeSy this is mine offering to thee," her
husband's old slave, who holds the light for her, re-
cognises the youth, and rushes in to intercept the blow.
Even in Plutarch's time this stage effect had not lost its
power.

Apart from the technical 'recognition,' the Telephus*
gave the first sign of a movement towards melodra-
matic situations, the tendency which culminates in the
Orestes. That play opens some days after the slaying
of Clytjemestra and Aigisthus. Orestes and Electra are
besieged in the castle by the populace, and the Assembly
is at the moment discussing their doom. Orestes is ill



26o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

and mad ; Electra wasted with watching and nursing.
If she saves him, the two will probably be stoned.
News comes of safety. Menelaus, their father's brother,
has sailed into the harbour with Helen. Helen comes