to the castle, and Menelaus's veterans guard the entrances.
Orestes gradually recovers his mind ; it seems as if he and
his sister were saved. But Menelaus is the natural heir
to the kingdom after Orestes ; and he has always dis-
approved of deeds of violence ; he will not thwart the
will of the people ; and cannot offend his father-in-law
Tyndareus, who claims vengeance for Clytsemestra. In
short, he means to let the brother and sister be stoned.
Scenes of vivid contrast and strain succeed one another,
till the two see that all is lost. The blood-madness
comes on Orestes. He gets possession of his sword
and turns upon Helen and Hermione. To take one
touch from many : to escape stoning, Electra and
Orestes are resolved to die. She begs him to kill her.
He turns from her: ^' My mothers blood is enough. I
will not kill thee. Die as best thou mayest."
The Telephus * was in these several respects the typical
play of Euripides's early period, but it strikes one as a
young play. The realism, for instance, was probably not
of the subtle type we find in the Electra. The great mark
of it was the disguised beggar's costume, which threw
stage convention to the winds. In the Acharnians of
Aristophanes the hero has to make a speech for his life,
and applies to Euripides for some ' tragic rags ' which will
move the compassion of his hearers. He knows just the
rags that will suit him, but cannot remember the name
of the man who wore them. " The old unhappy Oineus
appeared in rags," says Euripides. "// ivas not Oineus;
some one much wi'etcheder." " The blind Phcenix perhaps?"
MELODRAMA REALISM 261
" Ohy mucky much wretcheder than Phcenix ! '"' " Possibly
you mean Philoctetes the beggarman?" ^^ No, a far worse
beggar than Philoctetes!' " The cripple Bellerophon ? "
" No, not Bellerophon ; though my man was a cripple too,
and a beggar and a great speaker!' " / know ; Telephus
of Mysia! — Boy, fetch Telephus' s beggar-clothes ; they are
just above Thyestes's rags, between them and Ino's!'^
It is difficult, too, to make out any subtlety or delicacy
of situation in the Telephus,* such as we have ten years
after, for instance, in the Hippolytus (11. 900-1100), when
Hippolytus returns to find his father standing over
Phaedra's body, and reading the tablet which contains
her accusation against him. He does not know the
contents of the tablet, but he can guess well enough
why Phaedra died. He is inevitably unnatural in
manner, and his constraint inevitably looks like guilt.
That is one subtlety ; and there is another a moment
afterwards, where Hippolytus is on his defence, and
has sworn not to tell the one thing that will save
him. His speeches get lamer and more difficult. At
least twice it seems as if he is at the point of giving
way — why should he not ? The oath was forced from
him by a trick, and he had rejected it at the time :
^^ My tongue hath sworn ; there is no bond upon my heart!'
Nevertheless he keeps silence, as he promised; appeals
desperately to the gods, and goes forth convicted.-
There is another subtlety of Euripidean technique in
the Hippolytus, and one which is generally misunder-
stood. The main difficulty to the playwright is to carry
1 Ach. 418 f.
^ There was a similar scene in Melmiippe the Wise,* where Melanippe has
to plead for the life of her own secretly-born children, saying everything but
the truth ; even hinting that ' some damsel ' may have borne them and hidden
them from shame.
262 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
the audience with Pha3dra on the wave of passion which
leads to her murderous slander. It can only be done at
the expense of Hippolytus, and it is hard to make a true
and generous man do right and be odious for doing
so. The long speech of Hippolytus (11. 6i6 ff.) manages
it. At his exit the spectator is for the moment furious,
and goes whole-heartedly with Phjedra.
It w^as in 431, before the Hippolytus, but seven years
after the TclepJms* that Euripides first dealt with the
motive of baffled or tragic love, which he afterwards
made peculiarly his own. The Medea is, perhaps, the
most artistically flawless of his plays; though, oddly
enough, it was a failure when first acted. The bar-
barian princess has been brought from her home by
Jason, and then deserted, that he may marry the
daughter of the king of Corinth. She feigns resigna-
tion ; sends to the bride " a gift more beautiful than
any now among men, which has come from the fiery
palaces of her ancestor the sun." It is really a robe of
burning poison. The bride dies in torture. Medea
murders her children for the sake of the pain it will
be to their father, and flies.
This is the beginning of the wonderful women-studies
by which Euripides dazzled and aggrieved his con-
temporaries. They called him a hater of women ; and
Aristophanes makes the women of Athens conspire for
revenge against him (see p. 288). Of course he was
really the reverse. He loved and studied and ex-
pressed the women whom the Socratics ignored and
Pericles advised to stay in their rooms. Crime, how-
ever, is always more striking and palpable than virtue.
Heroines like Medea, Phaedra, Stheneboia, Aerope,
Clytcemestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than
THE WOMEN OF EURIPIDES 263
those of the angelic or devoted type — Alcestis, who
died to save her husband, Evadne and Laodamia,
who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of
virgin-martyrs. But the significant fact is that, like
Ibsen, Euripides refuses to idealise any man, and does
idealise women. There is one youth-martyr, Menoikeus
in the Phcenisscs, but his martyrdom is a masculine
business-like performance — he gets rid of his prosaic
father by a pretext about travelling-money (11. 990 ff.) —
without that shimmer of loveliness that hangs over the
virgins. And again, Euripides will not allow us to dis-
hke even his worst women. No one can help siding
with Medea ; and many of us love Phaedra — even when
she has lied an innocent man's life away.
It is a step from this championship of women to the
other thing that roused fury against Euripides— his
interest in the sex question in all its forms. There
are plays based on questions of marriage-breaking, like
the Hippolytus and Stheneboia* — in which the heroine
acted to Bellerophon as Potiphar's wife to Joseph. There
was one, the Chrysippus* in condemnation of that rela-
tion between men and boys which the age regarded
as a peccadillo, and which Euripides only allowed to
the Cyclops. There was another, the Aiolus* which
made a problem out of the old innocent myth of the
Wind-god with his twelve sons and twelve daughters
married together and living in the isle of the W^inds.
It is Macareus in this play who makes the famous plea :
" What thing is shameful if a ina?i's heart feels it no
shame?" But more important than the special dramas
is the constant endeavour of this poet to bring his ex-
periences into relation with those of people whom he
is trying to understand, especially those of the two
264 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
silent classes, women and slaves. In the sweat of
battle, perhaps when he was wounded, he had said to
himself, " This must be like child-bearing, but not half so
bad ! " ^ No wonder the general public did not know
what to do with him ! And how were they to stand
the man who was so severe on the pleasures of the
world, and vet did not mind his heroes being bastards ?
Nay, he made the priestess Auge, whose vow of virginity
had been violated, and who was addressed in terms of
appropriate horror by the virgin goddess Athena, answer
her blasphemously :
" Arms black with rotted blood
And dead 7nen''s wreckage are not foul to thee —
Nay, these thou loves t : only A uge's babe
Frights thee with shame ! "
And so with slavery : quite apart from such plays as
the Archelaus* and Alexander f which seem to have
dealt specially with it, one feels that Euripides's thought
was constantly occupied with the fact that certain people
serve and belong to certain others, and are by no means
always inferior to them.
Towards religion his attitude is hard to define. Dr.
Verrall entitles his keen-sighted study of this subject,
Euripides the Rationalist ; and it is clear that the plays
abound in marks of hostility towards the authoritative
polytheism of Delphi, and even to the beliefs of the
average Athenian. And further, it is quite true that in the
generation which condemned Protagoras and Socrates,
and went mad about the Hermae, the open expression of
freethinking views was not quite safe for a private in-
dividual in the market-place ; very much less so for the
poet of an officially accepted drama of Dionysus, on the
1 Med. 250.
THE GODS IN EURIPIDES 265
feast-day and in the sacred precinct. Any view of
Euripides which impHes that he had a serious artistic
faith in his " gods from the mechane " — a form of super-
stition too gross even for the ordinary pubHc — is practi-
cally out of court. His age held him for a notorious
freethinker, and his stage go(;Js are almost confessedly
fictitious. Yet it is a curious fact that Euripides is
constantly denouncing the inadequacy of mere rational-
ism. There is no contrast more common in his plays
than that between real wisdom and mere knowledge or
cleverness ; and the context generally suggests that the
cleverness in question includes what people now call
'shallow atheism.' He speaks more against the a6(f)oi
than with them. It seems, in fact, that here, as in the
rest of his mental attitude, he is a solitary rebel.
He is seldom frankly and outspokenly sceptical; when
he is so, it is always on moral grounds. No stress can
be laid on mere dramatic expressions like the famous
" T/iey are not, are not!" of Bellerophon (frag. 286),
or the blasphemies of Ixion, or the comic atheism of the
Cyclops. There is more real character in the passages
which imply a kind of antitheism. In the Bellerophon*
for instance (frag. 311), the hero, bewildered at the
unjust ordering of things, attempts to reach Zeus and
have his doubts set at rest, whereupon Zeus blasts him
with a thunderbolt. He sees that he is Oeol<i e;^^/3o? and
condemned, yet he cannot seriously condemn himself.
He speaks to his heart :
" Reverent thou wast to God, had he but known ;
Thy door oped to the stranger, and thi?ie help
For thou that loved thee knew no weariness."
One cannot take these for the poet's actual sentiments,
but the fact that such thoughts were in his mind has
266 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
its sii^nificance. One of the rare instances of a plain
personal statement is in the Heracles (11. 1341 £f.):
" Say not there be adulterers in heaven,
Nor prisoner gods and gaolers : — long ago
My heart hath named it vile and shall not alter / —
Nor one god master and another thrall.
God, if he be God, lacketh naught. All these
Are dead unhappy tales of 7ninstrelsyP
These words seem clearly to represent the poet himself,
not the quite iinphilosophic hero who utters them.
They read like the firm self -justification of a man
attacked for freethinking. That was written about 422,
before the time of bitterness. For the most part, Euripi-
des is far from frank on these subjects. The majority of
the plays draw no conclusions, but only suggest premisses.
They state the religious traditions very plainly, and leave
the audience to judge if it believes in them or approves
of them. His work left on his contemporaries, and, if
intelligently read, leaves on us, an impression of uneasy,
half-disguised hostility to the supernatural element which
plays so large a part in it. It is a tendency which makes
havoc in his art. Plays like the Ion, the Electra, the
Iphigenia in Tauris, the Orestes, have something jarring
and incomprehensible about them, which we cannot
dispose of by lightly calling Euripides a * botcher,' or
by saying, what is known to be untrue in history, that
he was the poet of the * ochlocracy ' and played to
the mob.
For one thing, we must start by recognising and trying
to understand two pieces of technique which are specially
the invention or characteristic of Euripides, the Pro-
logue and the Deus ex viachind. The Prologue is easily
explained. There were no playbills, and it was well to
PROLOGUE AND 'DEUS EX MACHINA' 267
let the audience know what saga the play was to treat.
The need was the more pressing if a poet was apt, like
Euripides, to choose little-known legends or unusual
versions of those that were well known. The Prologue
was invented to meet this need. But, once there, it
suggested further advantages. It practically took the
place of an explanatory first act. Euripides uses it to
state the exact situation in which he means to pick up
his characters ; the Orestes and the Medea, for instance,
gain greatly from their prologues. They are able to begin
straight at the centre of interest. It must, of course, be
fully recognised that our existing prologues have been
interpolated and tampered with. Euripides held the
stage all over the Hellenistic world for centuries after
his death, and was often played to barbarian audiences
who wanted everything explained from the beginning.
Thus the prologue of the Electra, to take a striking
example, narrates things that every Athenian knew from
his infancy. But the Prologue in itself is a genuine
Euripidean instrument.
If we overcome our dislike for the Prologue, we are
still offended by the way in which Euripides ends his
plays. Of his seventeen genuine extant tragedies, ten
close with the appearance of a god in the clouds, com-
manding, explaining, prophesying. The seven which
do not end with a god, end with a prophecy or some-
thing equivalent — some scene which directs attention
away from the present action to the future results. That
is, the subject of the play is really a long chain of events;
the poet fixes on some portion of it — the action of one
day, generally speaking— and treats it as a piece of vivid
concrete life, led up to by a merely narrative introduc-
tion, and melting away into a merely narrative close.
268 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
The method is to our taste quite undramatic, but it is
explicable enough : it falls in with the tendency of Greek
art to finish, not with a climax, but with a lessening of
strain.
There is a growth visible in this method of ending. In
the earliest group of our extant plays, there is, with the
merely apparent exception of the Hippolytus (see p. 270),
no dens ex machind. From about 420 to 414 the god
appears, prophesies, or pronounces judgment, but does
not disturb the action ; in the * troubled period ' he pro-
duces what is technically called a ' peripeteia,' a violent
reversal of the course of events.^ Now, if Pindar had
done this, we might have said that his superstition was
rather gross, but we could have accepted it. When it is
done by a man notorious for his bold religious speculation,
a reputed atheist, and no seeker of popularity, then it
becomes a problem. Let any one who does not feel the
difficulty, read the Orestes. Is it credible that Euripides
believed that the story ended or could end as he makes
it ; that he did not see that his deus makes the whole
grand tragedy into nonsense ? Dr. Verrall finds the solu-
tion of this knot in a bold theory that Euripides, writing
habitually as a freethinker, under circumstances in which
outspokenness was impossible, deliberately disguised his
meaning by adding to his real play a sham prologue and
epilogue, suitable for popular consumption, but known
by those in the poet's confidence to have no bearing on
his real intent. The difficulties in this view are obvious.
^ (i) No deus ex machind: Alcestis (438), Cyclops, Medea (431), Heracleidce
(427), Heracles (422), and Hecuba (424?); also Trdiades (415) and Phcenissce
(410). (2) Deus with mere prophecy or the like : Andromache {^2^), Siipplices
(421), Ion, Electra (414?). (3) Deus with 'peripeteia': Iphigenia in Tauris
(413), Helena (412), Orestes (408). Iphigenta in Aulis and Bacchce doubt-
ful ; probably ' peripeteia ' in each.
THE DISCORDANT NOTE IN EURIPIDES 269
It is safer to confine ourselves to admitting that, as a
thinker, Euripides was from the outset out of sympathy
with the material in which he had to work. He did not
believe the saga, he did not quite admire or like it ;
but he had to make his plays out of it. In his happier
moods this dissonance does not appear — as in the Medea
or Hippolytus ; sometimes it appears and leaves us
troubled, but is overcome by the general beauty of
treatment. That is the case with the Alcestis, where the
heroine's devotion suggests at once to Euripides, as it
does to us, the extreme selfishness of the husband who
let her die for him. Sophocles would have slurred or ex-
plained away this unpleasantness. Euripides introduces
a long and exquisitely hard-hitting scene merely for the
purpose of rubbing it in {Ale. 614 f.). In a third stage
the dissonance runs riot : he builds up his drama only
to demolish it. What can one make of the Ion ? " A
patriotic play celebrating Ion, the Attic hero, the semi-
divine son of Creusa and Apollo." That is so. But is
it really a celebration or an exposure ? The old story
of the divine lover, the exposed child, the god saving his
offspring — the thing Pindar can treat with such reverence
and purity — is turned naked to the light. " If the thing
happened," says Euripides — " and you all insist that it
did — it was like this." He gives us the brutal selfishness
of Phoebus, the self-contempt of the injured girl, and at
last the goading of her to the verge of a horrible murder.
If that were all the play has to say, it would be better ; but
it is not all. It is inextricably and marringly mixed with
a great deal of ordinary poetic beauty, and the play ends
in a perfunctory and unreal justification of Apollo, in
which the culprit does not present himself, and his repre-
sentative, Athena, does not seem to be telling the exact
19
2 70 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
truth! In tliis point, as in others, the over-comprehen-
siveness of Euripides's mind led him into artistic sins,
and made much of his work a great and fascinating
failure.
There are two plays, one early and one late, in which
the divine element is treated with more consistency,
and, it would seem, with some real expression of the
poet's thought — the Hippolytus and the BacchcB. The
Love-goddess in the former (428 B.C.) is a Fact of Nature
personified ; her action is destructive, not (1. 20) per-
sonally vindictive ; her bodily presence in the strangely-
terrible speech which forms the prologue, is evidently
mere symbolism, representing thoughts that are as much
at home in a modern mind as in an ancient. Hippo-
lytus is a saint in his rejection of the Cyprian and
his cleaving to the virgin Artemis ; it is absurd to
talk of his ' impiety.' Yet it is one of the poet's rooted
convictions that an absolute devotion to some one
principle — the 'All or nothing' of Brand, the 'Truth'
of Gregers Werle — leads to havoc. The havoc may
be, on the whole, the best thing : it is clear that Hippo-
lytus ' lived well,' that his action was koXov ; but it did,
as a matter of fact, produce malediction and suicide
and murder. Very similar is the unseen Artemis of
the end, so beautiful and so superhumanly heartless.
The fresh virginity in nature, the spirit of wild meadows
and waters and sunrise, is not to be disturbed because
martyrs choose to die for it.
The BacchcB is a play difficult to interpret. For
excitement, for mere thrill, there is absolutely nothing
like it in ancient literature. The plot is as simple as
it is daring. The god Dionysus is disowned by his
own kindred, and punishes them. There comes to
INNER RELIGION OF EURIPIDES 271
Thebes a * Bacchos ' — an incarnation, it would seem,
of the god himself — preaching the new worship. The
daughters of Cadmus refuse to accept his spirit ; he
exerts it upon them in strength amounting to madness,
and they range the hills glorifying him. The old
Cadmus and the prophet Teiresias recognise him at
once as God ; the unearthly joy fills them, and they
feel themselves young again. The king Pentheus is
the great obstacle. He takes his stand on reason and
order : he will not recognise the ' mad ' divinity. But
Pentheus is the wrong man for such a protest ; possibly
he had himself once been mad — at least that seems to
be the meaning of 1. 359, and is natural in a Bacchic
legend — and he acts not calmly, but with fury. He
insults and imprisons the god, who bears all gently
and fearlessly, with the magic of latent power. The
prison walls fall, and Dionysus comes straight to the
king to convince him again. Miracles have been done
by the Maenads on Cithaeron, and Dionysus is ready
to show more ; will Pentheus wait and see ? Pentheus
refuses, and threatens the * Bacchos ' with death ; the
god changes his tone (1. 810). In a scene of weird
power and audacity, he slowly controls — one would fain
say ' hypnotises ' — Pentheus : makes him consent to don
the dress of a Maenad, to carry the thyrsus, to perform
all the acts of worship. The doomed man is led forth to
Cithaeron to watch from ambush the secret worship of
the Bacchanals, and is torn to pieces by them. The mad
daughters of Cadmus enter. Agave bearing in triumph
her son's head, which she takes for a lion's head, and
singing a joy-song which seems like the very essence
of Dionysiac madness expressed in music. The story
is well known how this play was acted at the Parthian
272 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
capital after the defeat of Crassus at Carrhae. The actor
who represented Agave, entered bearing the actual head
of Crassus; and the soldier who had really slain Crassus
broke out in the audience, clamouring for the ghastly
trophy. That was what semi-Hellenised savages made
out of the BacchcB !
What does it all mean ? To say that it is a reactionary
manifesto in favour of orthodoxy, is a view which hardly
merits refutation. If Dionysus is a personal god at all,
he is a devil. Yet the point of the play is clearly to
make us understand him. He and his Maenads are
made beautiful ; they are generally allowed the last
word (except 1. 1348); and the swift lonic-a-minore songs
have, apart from their mere beauty, a certain spiritual
loftiness. Pentheus is not a 'sympathetic' martyr. And
there is even a certain tone of polemic against 'mere
rationalism ' which has every appearance of coming
from the poet himself.^ The play seems to represent
no volte-face on the part of the old free-lance in thought,
but rather a summing up of his position. He had
always denounced common superstition ; he had always
been averse to dogmatic rationalism. The lesson of
the Bacchce is that of the Hippolyhis in a stronger form.
Reason is great, but it is not everything. There are
in the world things not of reason, but both below and
above it ; causes of emotion, which we cannot express,
which we tend to worship, which we feel, perhaps, to
be the precious elements in life. These things are
Gods or forms of God : not fabulous immortal men,
but 'Things which Are,' things utterly non-human and
non-moral, which bring man bliss or tear his life to
shreds without a break in their own serenity. It is a
^ See, e.g., Bruhn's Introduction.
REALIST AND MYSTIC 273
religion that most people have to set themselves in some
relation to ; the religion that Tolstoi preaches against,
that people like Paley and Bentham tried to abolish,
that Plato denounced and followed. Euripides has got
to it in this form through his own peculiar character,
through the mixture in him of unshrinking realism
with unshrinking imaginativeness ; but one must re-
member that he wrote much about Orphism in its
ascetic and mystic side, and devoted to it one complete
play, the Cretans.
In the end, perhaps, this two-sidedness remains as
the cardinal fact about Euripides : he is a merciless
realist ; he is the greatest master of imaginative music
ever born in Attica. He analyses, probes, discusses,
and shrinks from no sordidness ; then he turns right
away from the world and escapes " to the caverns
that the Sun's feet tread," ^ or similar places, where
things are all beautiful and interesting, melancholy
perhaps, like the tears of the sisters of Phaethon, but
not squalid or unhappy. Some mysticism was always
in him from the time of the Hippolytus (1. 192): " IVhat-
ever far-off state there may be that is dearer to man than
life, Darkness has it in her arms and hides it in cloud.