As Giotto rough-hewed the early path of Italian painting, and Raphael subd ed the art with a quiet spirit into technical perfection, and Michelange a completed the development in works of tortured genius; as Bach with incredible energy forced open a broad road to modern music, and Mozart perfected its form in melodious simplicity, and Beethoven completed the development in works of unbalanced grandeur; so Aeschylus the forms for Greek drama with his harsh verse and stern philosophy, Sophocles fashioned the art with measured music and placid wisdom, and Euripides completed the development in works of passionate feeling and turbulent doubt. Aeschylus was a preacher of almost Hebraic intensity; Sophocles was a "classic" artist clinging to a broken faith; Euripides was a romantic poet who could never write a perfect play because he was distracted by philosophy. They were the Isaiah, Job, and Ecclesiastes of Greece.

Euripides was born in the year – some say on the day – of Salamis, probably on the island itself, to which, we are told, his parents had fled for refuge from the invading Medes. His father was a man of some property and prominence in the Attic town of Phyla; his mother was of noble family, though the hostile Aristophanes insists that she kept a grocer's shop and hawked fruit and flowers on the street. In later life he lived on Salamis, loving the solitude of its hills, and its varied prospects of blue sea. Plato wished to be a dramatist and became a philosopher; Euripides wished to be a philosopher and became a dramatist. He "took the entire course of Anaxagoras," says Strabo; he studied for a while with Prodicus, and was so intimate with Socrates that some suspected the philosopher of having a hand in the poet's plays. The whole Sophistic movement entered into his education, and through him captured the Dionysian stage. He became the Voltaire of the Greek Enlightenment, worshiping reason with destructive innuendo in the midst of dramas staged to celebrate a god.

The records of the Dionysian Theater credit him with seventy-five plays, from The Daughters of Pelias in 455 to The Bacchae in 406; eighteen survive, and a medley of fragments from the rest. [The major plays appeared in approximately the following order: Alcestis, 438; Medea, 431; Hippolytus 428; Andromache, 427; Hecuba, ca. 425; Electra; ca. 416; The Trojan Women, 415; Iphigenia in Tauis, ca. 413; Orestes, 408; Iphigenia in Aulis, 406; The Bacchae, 406.] Their subject matter tells again the legends of the early Greeks, but with a note of skeptical protest sounding timidly and then boldly between the lines. The Ion presents the reputed founder of the Ionian tribes in a delicate dilemma: the oracle of Apollo declares Xuthus to be his father, but Ion discovers that he is the son of Apollo, who seduced his mother and then palmed her off on Xuthus; can it be, Ion asks, that the noble god is a liar? In Heracles and Alcestis the mighty son of Zeus and Alcmena is described as a good-natured drunkard, with the appetite of Gargantua and the brains of Louis XVI. The Alcestis recounts the unprepossessing story of how the gods, as a condition of allowing further life to Admetus (king of Thessalian Pherae), required that some other should consent to die in his stead. His wife offers herself as a sacrifice, and bids him a hundred-line farewell, which he hears with magnanimous patience. Alcestis is carried out for dead; but Heracles, between wlitary drinking bouts and banquets, goes forth, argues and browbeats Death into relinquishing Alcestis, and brings her back alive. The play can be understood only as a subtle attempt to make the legend ridiculous.

The Hippolytus applies with more finesse and grace the same method of reduction to the absurd. The handsome hero is a youthful huntsman who vows to Artemis, virgin goddess of the chase, that he will always be faithful to her; will ever shun women, and will find his greatest pleasure in the woods. Aphrodite, incensed by this insulting celibacy, pours into the heart cf Phaedra, Theseus' wife, a mad passion for Hippolytus, Theseus' son by the Amazon Antiope. Here is the first love tragedy in extant literature, and he--e at the outset are all the symptoms of love at the crisis of its fever: Phaedra, rejected by Hippolytus, languishes and fades to the point of death. Her nurse, suddenly become a philosopher, muses with Hamletlike sk:pticism about a life beyond the grave:

Yet all man's life is but ailing and dim,

And rest upon the earth comes never.

But if any far-off state there be,

Dearer than life to mortality,

The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof,

And mist is under and mist above.

And some are sick for life, and cling

On earth to this nameless and shining thing;

For other life is a fountain scaled,

And the deeps below us are unrevealed,

And we drift on legends forever.

The curse bears a message to Hippolytus that Phaedra's bed will welcome him; ]e, knowing that she is his father's wife, is horrified, and bursts into one of thoe passages that earned Euripides a reputation for misogyny:

Oh God, why hast though made this gleaming snare.
Woman, to dog us on the happy earth?
Was it thy will to make man, why his birth
Through love and woman?

Phaedra dies; and in her hand her husband finds a note saying that Hippolytus seduced her. Theseus wildly calls upon Poseidon to slay Hippolytus. The youth protests his innocence, but is not believed. He is driven our of tile land by Theseus; and as his chariot passes along the shore a sea lion emerges from the waves and pursues him; his horses run away, upset the chariot, and drag the entangled Hippolytus (i.e., "torn by horses") over the rocks to a mangled death. And the chorus cries out, in lines that must have startled Athens,

Ye gods that did snare him,
Lo, I cast in your faces
My hate and my scorn!

In the Medea Euripides forgets for a while his war against the gods, and transforms the story of the Argonauts into his most powerful play. When Jason reaches Colchis, the royal princess Medea falls in love with him, helps him to get the Golden Fleece, and, to shield him, deceives her father and kills her brother. Jason vows eternal love to her, and takes her back with him to Iolcus. There the almost savage Medea poisons King Pelias to secure the throne that Pelias promised to Jason. Since the law of Thessaly forbids him to marry a foreigner, Jason lives with Medea in unwedded love, and has two children by her. But in time he tires of her barbarian intensity, looks about him for a legal wife and heir, and proposes to marry tile daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. Creon accepts him, and exiles Medea. Medea, brooding upon her wrongs, speaks one of the famous passages of Euripides in defense of woman:

Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow,
A herb most bruised is woman. We must pay
Our store of gold, hoarded for that one day,
To buy us some man's love; and lo, they bring
A master of our flesh! There comes the sting
Of the whole shame. And then the jeopardy,
For good or ill, tvhat shall that master be . . . .
Home never taught her that-how best to guide
Toward peace the thing that sfeepeth at her side.
And she who, laboring long, shall find some way
Whereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray
His yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath
That woman draws! Else let her pray for death.
Her lord, if he be wearied of her face
Within doors, gets him forth; some merrier place
Will ease his heart; but she waits on, her whole
Vision enchained on a single soul.
And then they sar•'tis they that face the call
Of war, while we sit sheltered, hid from all
Peril! False mocking! Sooner would I stand
Three times to face their battles, shield in hand,
Than bear one child.

Then follows the terrible story of her revenge. She sends to her rival, in pretended reconciliation, a set of costly robes; the Corinthian princess puts one on, and is consumed in fire; Creon, trying to rescue her, is burned to death. Medea kills her own children and drives off with their dead bodies before Jason's eyes. The chorus chants a philosophic end:

Great treasure halls hath Zeus in Heaven,
From whence to man strange dooms be given,
Past hope or fear.
And the end men looked for cometh not,
And a path is there where no man thought:
So hath it fallen here.

The remaining plays turn for the most part upon the tale of Troy. In Helen; we get the revised version of Stesichorus and Herodotus: the Spartan queen does not elope with Paris to Troy; she is carried against her will to Egypt, and chastely awaits her master there; all Greece, Euripides suggests, has been hoodwinked by the legend of Helen in Troy. In Iphigenia in Aulis he pours into the old story of Agamemnon's sacrifice a profusion of sentiment new to the Greek drama, and a Lucretian horror of the crimes to which the ancient faith persuaded men. Aeschylus and Sophocles had also written on this theme, but their plays were soon forgotten in the brilliance of this new performance. The arrival of Clytaemnestra and her daughter is visioned with Euripidean tenderness; Orestes, "yet a wordless babe" is present to witness the superstitious murder that will dictate his destiny. The girl is all shyness and happiness as she runs to greet the King:

Iphig. Fain am I, father, on thy breast to fall,
After so long! Though others I outrun –
For oh, I yearn for thy face! – be not wroth . . .
So glad to see me – yet what troubled look!
Agam. On kings and captains weigheth many a care.
Iphig. This hour be mine-this one! Yield not to care!
Agam. Yea, I am all thine now; my thoughts stray not . . .
Iphig. And yet – and yet – thine eyes are welling tears!
Agam. Yea, for the absence yet to come is long.
Iphig. I know not, know not, dear my sire, thy meaning.
Agam. Thy wise discernment stirs my grief the more.
Iphig. So I may please thee, folly will I talk.

When Achilles comes she finds that he knows nothing of their supposed marriage; instead she learns that the army is impatient for her sacrifice. She throws herself at Agamemnon's feet, and begs for her life.

I was thy first-born – first I called thee Sire,
And sat, thy child, upon thy knees the first;
And we exchanged sweet charities of life.
And this was thy discourse with me – "My child,
Shall I behold thee happy in the home
Of thy liege lord and husband, as befits?"
And nestling in the beard which now I clasp
A suppliant, I made answer unto thee:
"I too will welcome thee, when grey with vears,
In the sweet shelter of my home, my Sire,
And with fond fostering recompense thy love."
Such were our swords, which I remember well;
But thou forgettest, and wouldst take my life.

Clytaemnestra denounces Agamemnon's surrender to a savage ritual, and utters a threat that contains many tragedies – "Constrain me not to turn traitress to thee." She encourages Achilles' attempt to rescue the girl, but Iphigenia, changing her mood, refuses to escape.

Hear the thing that flashed upon me, mother, as I thought hereon:
Lo, I am resolved to die; and fain am I that this be done
Gloriously – that I thrust ijnoble thoughts away . . . .
Unto me all mighty Hellas looks; I only can bestow
Boons upon her-sailing of her galleys, Phrygia's overthrow,
Safety for her daughters from barbarians in the days to come,
That the ravisher no more rnay snatch them from a happy home,
When the penalty is paid for Paris' outrage, Helen's shame.
All this great deliverance I in death shall compass, and my name,
As of one who Lxave to Hellas freedom, shall be blessing-crowned.

When the soldiers come for her she forbids them to touch her, and moves of her own accord to the sacrificial pyre.

In the Hecuba the war is over; Troy has been taken, and the victors are apportioning the spoils. Hecuba, widow of King Priam, sends her youngest son Polydorus with a treasure of gold to Priam's friend Polymnestor, King of Thrace. But Polymnestor, thirsting for the gold, slays the boy and throws his corpse into the sea; it is cast up on the shores of Ilion, and is brought to Hecuba. Meanwhile the shade of dead Achilles holds the winds from blowing the Greek fleet homeward till he has received in human sacrifice the fairest of Priam's daughters, Polyxena. The Greek herald, Talthybius, comes to take the girl from Hecuba. Finding her prostrate, disheveled, and distraught who had so recently been a queen, he utters some lines of Euripidean doubt:

What shall I say, Zeus? – that thou look'st on men?
Or that this fancy false we vainly hold
For naught, who deem there is a race of gods,
While chance controlleth all things among men?

The next act of the composite drama takes the form of The Trojan Womem. It was produced in 415, shortly after the Athenian destruction of Melos (416), and almost on the eve of the expedition that aimed to conquer Sicily for the Athenian Empire. It was at this moment that Euripdes, shocked by the massacre in Melos and by the brutal imperialism of the proposed attack upon Syracuse, dared to present a powerful plea for pace, a brave portrayal of victory from the standpoint of the defeated, "the greatest denunciation of war in ancient literature." He begins where Homer ends – after the capture of Troy. The Trojans lie dead after a general slaughter, and their women, bereaved to madness, pass down from their ruined city to be the concubines of the victors. Hecuba enters with her daughters Andromache and Cassandra. Polyxena has already been sacrificed, and now Talthybius comes to lead Cassandra to Agamemnon's tent. Hecuba falls to the ground in grief. Andromache tries to console her, but she too breaks down, as clasping the little prince Astyanax to her breast, she thinks of his dead father.

And I . . . long since I drew my bow
Straight at the heart of good fame; and I know
My shaft hit; and for that am I the more
Fallen from peace. All that men praise us for,
I loved for Hector's sake, and sought to win.
I knew that always, be there hurt therein
Or utter innocence, to roam abroad
Hath ill report for women; so I trod
Down the desire thereof, and walked my way
In mine own garden. And light words and gay
Parley of women never passed my door.
The thoughts of mine own heart – I craved no more –
Spake with me, and I was happy. Constantly
I brought fair silence and a tranquil eye
For Hector’s greeting, and watched well the way
Of living, where to guide and where obey . . .

One night – aye, men have said it – maketh tam
A woman in a man's arms. O shame, shame!
What woman's lips can so forswear her dead,
And give strange kisses in another's bed?
Why, not a dumb beast, not a colt will run
In the yoke untroubled, when her mate is gone . . .
O my Hector! best beloved
That, being mine, vast all in all to me,
My prince, my wise one, O my majesty
Of valiance! No man's touch had ever come
Near me, when than from out my father's home
Didst lead me and make me thine . . . And thou art dead,
And I war-flung to slavery and the bread
Of shame in Hellos, over bitter seas!

Hecuba, dreaming of some distant revenge, bids Andromache accept her new master graciously, that he may allow her to rear Astyanax, and that Astyanax may some day restore the house of Priam and the splendor of Troy. But the Greeks have thought of this too; and Talthybius comes to announce that Astyanax must die: "'Tis their will thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death." He tears the child from its mother's arms, and Andromache, holding it for a last moment, bids it an hysterical farewell.

Go, die, my best beloved, my cherished one,
In fierce men's hands, leaving me here alone.
Thy father was too valiant; that is why
They slay thee . . . .
And none to pity thee! . . . Thou little thing
That curlest in my arms, what sneer scents cling
All round thy neck! Beloved, can it be
All nothing, that this bosom cradled thee
And fostered, all the weary nights wherethrough
I watched upon thy sickness, till I grew
Wasted with watching? Kiss me. This one time;
Not ever again. Put up thine arms, and climb
About my neck; now kiss me, lips to lips . . .
Oh, ye have found an anguish that outstrips
All tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks! . . .
Quick, take him; drag him; cast him from the wall,
If cast ye will! Tear him, ye beasts, be swift!
God hath undone me, and I cannot lift
One hand, one hand, to save my child from death.

She becomes delirious, and swoons; soldiers carry her away. Menelaus appears, and bids his soldiers bring Helen to him. He has sworn that he will kill her, and Hecuba is comforted at the thought that punishment is at last to find Helen.

I bless thee, Menelaus, I bless thee,
If thou wilt slay her! Only fear to see
Her visage, lest she snare thee and thou fall!

Helen enters, untouched and unafraid, proud in the consciousness of her beauty.

Hecuba. And comest thou now
Forth, and hast decked thy bosom and thy brow,
And breathest with thy lord the same blue air,
Thou evil heart? Low, low, with ravaged hair,
Rent raiment, and flesh shuddering, and within,
Oh, shame at last, not glory for thy sin . . . .
Be true, O King; let Hellas bear the crown
Of justice. Slay this woman . . . .
Menelaus. Peace, aged woman, pence . . . . (To the soldiers)
Have some chambered galley set for her,
Where she may sail the seas . . . .
Hecuba. A lover once, will always love again.

As Helen and Menelaus leave, Talthybius returns, bearing the dead body of Astyanax.

Talth. Andromache . . . hath charmed these tears into mine eyes,
Weeping her fatherland, as o'er the wave.
She gazed, speaking words to Hector's grave.
Howbeit, she prayed us that due rites be done
For burial of this babe . . . . And in thine hands
She bade me lay him, to be swathed in bands
Of death and garments . . . (Hecuba takes the body.)
Hecuba. Ah, what a death hath found thee, little one? . . .
Ye tender arms the same dear mold have ye
As his . . . . And dear proud lips, so full of hope,
And closed forever? What false words ye said
At daybreak, when ye crept into my bed,
Called me kind names, and promised, "Grandmother,
When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair
And lead out all the captains to ride by
Thy tomb." Why didst thou cheat me so? 'Tis I,
Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed
Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead.
Dear God! the pattering welcomes of thy feet,
The nursing in my lap; and oh, the sweet
Falling asleep together! All is gone.
How should a poet carve the funeral stone
To tell thy story true? "There lieth here
A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear
Slew him." Aye, Greece will bless the tale it tells! . . .
Oh, vain is man, Who glorieth in his joy and hath no fears,
While to and fro the chances of the years
Dance like an idiot in the wind! . . . (She wraps the child in the burial garments.)
Glory of Phrygian raiment, which my thought
Kept for thy bridal day with some far-sought
Queen of the East, folds thee
for evermore . . ."

In the Electra the ancient theme is far advanced. Agamemnon is dead, Orestes is in Phocis, and Electra has been married off by her mother to a peasant whose simple fidelity, and awe of her royal descent, survive her brooding negligence of him. To her, wondering will Orestes never find her, Orestes comes, bidden by Apollo himself (Euripides drives this point home) to avenge Agamemnon's death. Electra stirs him on; if he will not kill the murderers she will. The lad finds Aegisthus and slays him, and then turns upon his mother. Clytaemnestra is here a subdued and aging woman, gray-haired and frail, haunted by the memory of her crimes, at once fearing and loving the children who hate her; asking, but not begging, for mercy; and half reconciled to the penalty, of her sins. When the killing is over Orestes is overcome with horror.

Sister, touch her again,

Oh, veil the body of her,
Shed on her raiment fair,
And close that death-red stain.
Mother? And didst thou bear,
Bear in thy bitter pain,
To life, thy murderer?

The final act of the drama, in Euripides, is called Iphigenia in Tauris – Iphigenia among the Tauri. Artemis, it now appears, substituted a deer for Agamemnon's daughter on the pyre at Aulis, snatched the girl from the flames, and made her a priestess at the shrine of Artemis among the half-savage Tauri of the Crimea. The Tauri make it a rule to sacrifice to the goddess any stranger who sets foot unasked upon their shores; and Iphigenia is the unhappy, brooding ministrant who consecrates the victims. Eighteen years of separation from Greece and those she loved have dulled her mind with grief. Meanwhile the oracle of Apollo has promised Orestes peace if he will capture from the Tauri the sacred image of Artemis, and bring it to Attica. Orestes and Pvlades set sail, and at last reach the land of the Tauri, who gladly accept them as gifts of the sea for Artemis, and hurry them off to be slain at her altar. Orestes, exhausted, falls in an epileptic fit at Iphigenia's feet; and though she does not recognize him, she is overwhelmed with pity as she sees the two comrades, in the fairest years of youth, faced with death.

Iphig. To none is given
To know the coming nor the end of woe;
So dark is God, and to great darkness go
His paths, by blind chance mazed from our ken.
Whence are ye come, O most unhappy men? . . .
What mother then was yours, O strangers, say,
And father? And your sister, if you have
A sister: both at once, so young and brave
To leave her brotherless . . . .
Orestes. Would that my sister's hand could close mine eyes
Iphig. Alas, she dwelleth under distant skies,
Unhappy one, and vain is all thy prayer.
Yet, oh, thou art from Argos; all of care
That can be I will give, and fail thee not.
Rich raiment to thy burial shall be brought,
And oil to cool thy pyre in golden floods,
And sweet that from a thousand mountain buds
The murmuring bee hath garnered,
I will throw To die with thee in fragrance.

She promises to save them if they will carry back to Argos the message which she bids them store in their memories.

Iphig. Say, "To Orestes, Agamemnon's son,
She that was slain in Aulis, dead to Greece
Yet quick, Iphigenia, sendeth peace."
Orestes. Iphigenia? Where? Back from the dead?
Iphig. 'Tis I. But speak not, lest thou break my thread.
"Take me to Argos, brother, ere I die."

Orestes wishes to clasp her in his arms, but the attendants forbid it; no man may touch the priestess of Artemis. He declares himself Orestes, but she cannot believe him. He convinces her by recalling the tales Electra told them.

Iphig. Is this the babe I knew,
The little babe, light-lifted like a bird? . . .
O Argos land, O hearth and holy flame
That old Cyclopes lit,
I bless ye that he lives, that he is grown,
A light and strength, my brother and mine own;
I bless your name for it.

They offer to rescue her, and in turn she helps them to capture the image of Artemis. By her subtle ruse they reach their ship safely, and carry the statue to Brauron; there Iphigenia becomes a priestess, and there, after her death, she is worshiped as a deity. Orestes is released from the Furies, and knows some years of peace. The thirst of the gods is sated, and the drama of The Children of Tantalus is complete.

2. The Dramatist

We must agree with Aristotle that these plays, from the viewpoint of dramatic technique, fall short of the standards set by Aeschylus and Sophocles. The Medea, the Hippolytus, and The Bacchae are well planned, but even they cannot compare with the structural integrity of the Oresteia, or the complex unity of Oedipus the King. Instead of plunging at once into the action, and explaining its antecedents gradually and naturally in the course of the story, Euripides employs the artificial expedient of a pedagogical prologue, and, worse still, puts it sometimes into the mouth of a god. Instead of showing us the action directly, which is the function of drama, he too often introduces a messenger to describe the action, even when no violence is involved. Instead of making the chorus a part of the action he transforms it into a philosophical aside, or uses it to interrupt the development with lyrics always beautiful, but often irrelevant. Instead of presenting ideas through action, he sometimes displaces action with ideas, and turns the stage into a school for speculation, rhetoric, and argument. Too often his plots depend upon coincidences and "recognition" though these are well arranged and dramatically presented. Most of the plays (like a few by his predecessors) end with intervention by the deus ex machina, the god from the crane-a device that can be forgiven only on the assumption that for Euripides the real play ended before this theophany, and the god was let down to provide the orthodox with a virtuous conclusion to what would otherwise have been a scandalous performance. With such prologues and epilogues the great humanist won the privilege of presenting his heresies on the stage.

The material, like the form, is a medley of genius and artifice. Euripides is above all sensitive, as every poet must be; he feels the problems of mankind intensely, and expresses them with passion; he is the most tragic and the most human of all dramatists. But his feeling is too frequently sentimentality; his "droppings of harm tears"" are too easily released; he loses no chance to show a mother parting from her children, and wrings all possible pathos out of every situation. These scenes are always moving, and sometimes are described with a power unequaled in tragedy before or since; but they descend occasionally to melodrama, and a surfeit of violence and horror, as at the close of the Medea. Euripides is the Byron and Shelley and Hugo of Greece, a Romantic Movement in himself.

He easily surpasses his rivals in the delineation of character. Psychological analysis replaces with him, even more than with Sophocles, the operation of destiny; he is never weary of investigating the morals and motives of human conduct. He studies a great variety of men, from Electra's peasant husband to the kings of Greece and Troy; no other dramatist has drawn so many types of women, or drawn them with such sympathy; every shade of vice and virtue interests him, and is realistically portrayed. Aeschylus and Sophocles were too absorbed in the universal and eternal to see the temporal and the particular clearly; they created profound types, but Euripides creates living individuals; neither of the older men, for example, realized Electra so vividly. In these plays the drama of the conflict with fate yields more and more to the drama of situation and character, and the way is prepared by which, in the following centuries, the Greek stage will be captured by the comedy of manners under Philemon and Menander.

But it would he foolish to judge Euripides chiefly as a playwright; his ruling interest is not dramatic technique but philosophical inquiry- and political reform. He is the son of the Sophists, the poet of the Enlightenment, the representative of the radical younger generation that laughed at the old myths, flirted with socialism, and called for a new social order in which there should be less exploitation of man by man, of women by men, and of all by the state. It is for these rebel souls that Euripides writes; for them he adds his skeptical innuendoes, and inserts a thousand heresies between the lines of supposedly religious plays. He covers his tracks with pious passages and patriotic odes; he presents a sacred myth so literally that its absurdity is manifest and yet his orthodoxy cannot be impeached; he gives the body of his plays over to doubt, but surrenders the first and last words to the gods. His subtlety and brilliance, like those of the French Encyclopedists, is due in some part to the compulsion laid upon him to speak his mind while saving his skin.

His theme is that of Lucretius –

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

– so great are the evils to which religion has led men: oracles that breed violence upon violence, myths that exalt immorality with divine example, and shed supernatural sanctions upon dishonesty, adultery, theft, human sacrifice, and war. He describes a soothsayer as "a man who speaks few truths but many lies; he calls it "sheer folly" to chart the future from the entrails of birds; he denounces the whole apparatus of oracles and divination. Above all he resents the immoral implications of the legends:

Men shall know there is no God, no light
In heaven, if wrong to the end shall conquer right . . . .
Say not there be adulterers in heaven,
Nor prisoner gods and gaolers: long ago
My heart hash named it vile, and shall not alter . . . .
These tales be false, false as those feastings wild
Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child.
This land of murderers to its gods hath given
Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven . . . .
All these Are
dead unhappy tales of minstrelsy.

Sometimes such passages are softened with hymns to Dionysus, or psalms of pantheistic piety; but occasionally a character extends the Euripidean doubt to all the gods:

Doth some one say that there be gods above?
There are not, no, there are not. Let no fool,
Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.
Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words
No undue credence; for I say that kings
Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,
And doing thus are happier than those
Who live calm pious lives day after day.

He begins his lost Melanippe with a startling couplet –

O Zeus, if there be a Zeus,
For I know of him only by report –

whereupon the audience, we arc told, rose to its feet in protest. And he concludes:

The gods, too, whom mortals deem so wise,
Are nothing clearer than some winged dream;
And all their ways, like man's ways, but a stream
Of turmoil. He who cares to suffer least,
Not blind as fools are blinded by a priest,
Goes straight . . . to what death, those who know him know.

The fortunes of men, he thinks, are the result of natural causes, or of aimless chance; they are not the work of intelligent supernatural beings. He suagests rational explanations of supposed miracles; Alcestis, for example, did not really die, but was sent off to burial while still alive; Heracles caught up with her before she had time to die. He does not clearly tell us what his belief is, perhaps because he feels that the evidence does not lend itself to clear belief; but his most characteristic expressions are those of the vague pantheism that was now replacing polytheism among the educated Greeks.

Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high Throne
Above the World, whoe'er thou art, unknown
And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be,
Or Reason of our Reason; God to thee
I lift my praise, seeing the silent road
That bringeth justice ere the end be trod
To all that breathes and dies.

Social justice is the minor theme of his songs; like all sympathetic spirits he longs for a time when the strong will be more chivalrous to the weak, and there will be an end to misery and strife. Even in the midst of war, with all its compulsion to a patriotic belligerency, he presents the woes and horrors of war with unsparing realism.

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

He gnaws his heart out at the sight of Athenians fighting Spartans for half a century, each enslaving the other, and both killing off their best; and he indites in a fate play a touching apostrophe to peace:

O Peace, thou givest plenty as from a deep spring; there is no beauty like unto thine; no, not even among the blessed gods. My heart yearneth within me, for thou tarriest; I grow old and thou returnest not. Shall weariness overcome mine eves before they see thy bloom and thy comeliness? When the lovely songs of the dancers are heard again, and the thronging feet of them that wear garlands, shall prey hairs and sorrow have destroyed me utterly? Return, thou holy one, to our tin; abide not far from us, thou that quencheth wrath. Strife and bitterness shall depart if thou art with us; madness and the edge of tire sword shall flee from our doors.

Almost alone among the great writers of his time he dares to attach slavery; during the Peloponnesian War it became obvious that most slaves were such not by nature but by the accidents of life. He does not recognize any natural aristocracy; environment rather than heredity makes the man. The slaves in his dramas play important parts, and often speak his finest lines. With the imaginative sympathy of a poet he considers women. He knows the faults of the sex, and exposes them so realistically that Aristophanes was able to make him out a misogynist; but he did more than any other playwright of antiquity to present the case for women, and to support the dawning movement for their emancipation Some of his plays are almost modern, post-Ibsen studies in the problems of sex, even of sexual perversion. He describes men with realism, but women with gallantry; the terrible Medea gets more compassion from him than he accords to the heroic but unfaithful Jason. He is the first dramatist to make a play turn upon love; his famous ode to Eros in the lost Andromeda was mouthed by thousands of young Greeks:

O Love, our Lord, of gods and men the king,
Either teach not how beauteous beauty is,
Or help poor lovers, whom like clay thou moldest,
Through toil and labor to a happy end.

Euripides is naturally a pessimist, for every romantic becomes a pessimist when reality impinges upon romance. "Life," said Horace Walpole, "is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."" "Long ago," says our poet,

I looked upon man's days, and found a grey
Shadow. And this thing more I surely say
That those of all men who are counted wise,
Strong wits, devisers of great policies,
Do pay the bitterest toll. Since life began
Hath there in God's eye stood one happy man?

He wonders at the greed and cruelty of men, the resourcefulness of evil, and the obscene indiscriminateness of death. At the beginning of the Alcestis Death says, "Is it not my function to take the doomed?" – to which Apollo answers, "No; only to dispatch those who have ripened into full old age." When death comes after life has been fully lived it is natural, and does not offend us. "We should not lament our fate if, like the harvests that follow each other in the passage of the years, one generation of men after another flowers, fades, and is carried off. So it is ordered in the course of Nature; and we must not be dismayed by anything that is rendered inevitable by her laws." His conclusion is stoicism: "Do thou endure as men must, chafing not." Now and then, following Anaximenes and anticipating the Stoics, he consoles himself with the thought that the spirit of man is part of the divine Air or pneuma, and will, after death, be preserved in the Soul of the World.'

Who knows if that be life which we call death,
And life be dying? – save alone that men
Living bear grief, but when they yield their breath
They have no sorrow then, and grieve no more.

The man whom we picture from these plays resembles sufficiently the sitting statue in the Louvre, and the busts at Naples, to let us believe that these are faithful copies of authentic Greek originals. The bearded face is handsome, but overwrought with meditation, and softened with a tender melancholy. His friends agreed with his enemies that he was gloomy, almost morose, not given to conviviality or laughter, and spending his later years in the seclusion of his island home. He had three sons, and derived some happiness from their childhood. He found solace in books, and was the first private citizen in Greece, so far as we know, to collect a substantial library. [There had already been royal or state libraries in Greece, as we have seen; and such collections in Egypt can be traced back to the Fourth Dynasty. A Greek library consisted of scrolls arranged m pigeonholes in a chest. Publication meant that an author had allowed his manuscript to be copied, and the copies to be circulated; thereafter further copies could be made without permission or "copyright." Copies of popular works were numerous, and not costly; Plato tells us in the Apology that Anaxagoras' treatise On Nature could be bought for a drachma ($1). Athens, in the age of Euripides, became the chief center of the book trade in Greece.] He had excellent friends, including Protagoras and Socrates; the latter, who ignored other dramas, said that to see a play by Euripides he would walk to the Piraeus-a serious matter for a stout philosopher. The younger generation of emancipated souls looked up to him as their leader. But he had more enemies than any other writer in Greek history. The judges, who felt themselves bound. presumably, to protect religion and morals from his skeptical arrows, crowned only fire of his efforts with victory; even so it was liberal of the archon basileus to admit so many Euripidean plays to a religious stage. Conservatives in all fields looked upon the dramatist as responsible with Socrates for the growth of unbelief among Athenian youth. Aristophanes declared war upon him at the outset in The Acharnians, satirized him with hilarious caricature in The Thesrnophoriazusae, and, in the year after the poet's death, continued the attack in The Frogs; nevertheless, we are told, the tragic and the comic dramatist were on friendly terms to the end. As for the audience, it denounced his heresies and crowded to his plays. When, at line 612 of the Hippolytus, the young hunter said, "My tongue hash sworn, but my mind remains unbound," the crowd protested so loudly against what seemed to be an outrageously immoral proposition that Euripides had to rise in his seat and comfort them with the assurance that Hippolytus would suffer edifyingly before the story closed – a safe promise for almost any character in Greek tragedy.

About 410 he was indicted on a charge of impiety; and soon afterward Hygiaonon brought against him another suit, involving much of the poet's fortune, and adduced Hippolytus' line as proof of Euripides' dishonesty. Both accusations failed; but the wave of public resentment that met The Trojan Women led Euripides to feel that he had hardly a friend left in Athens. Even his wife, it is said, turned against him because he could not join in the martial enthusiasm of the city. In 408, at the age of seventy-two, he accepted the invitation of King Archelaus to be his guest in the Macedonian capital. At Pella, under the protection of this Frederick – who had no fears for the orthodoxy of his people – Euripides found peace and comfort; there he wrote the almost idyllic Iphigenia in Aulis, and the profound religious play, The Bacchae. Eighteen months after his arrival he died, attacked and dismembered, said pious Greeks, by the royal hounds.

A year later his son produced the two dramas at the city Dionysia, and the judges gave them the first prize. Even modern scholars have thought that The Bacchae was Euripides' apology to Greek religion, and yet the play may have been intended as a bitter allegory of Euripides' treatment by the public of Athens. It is the story of how Pentheus, King of Thebes, was torn to pieces by a mob of female Dionysian orgiasts, led by his own mother Agave because he had denounced their wild superstition and intruded upon their revelry. It was no invention; the tale belonged to the religious tradition; the dismemberment and sacrifice of an animal, or of any man who dared to attend the ceremonies, was part of the Dionysian rite; and this powerful drama, by returning for its plot to the legend of Dionysus, bound Greek tragedy at its culmination with Greek tragedy at its birth. The play was composed among the Macedonian mountains which it describes in lyrics of unfailing power; and perhaps it was intended for performance in Pella, where the Bacchic cult eras especially strong. Euripides enters with surprising insight into the mood of religious ecstasy, and puts into the mouths of the Bacchantes psalms of passionate devotion; it may indeed be that the old poet had gone to the limits of rationalism and beyond it, and recognized now the frailty of reason, and the persistency of the emotional needs of women and men. But the story does dubious honor to the Dionysian religion; its theme is once more the evils that may come of superstitious creeds.

The god Dionysus visits Thebes in disguise as a Bacchus, or incarnation of himself, and preaches the worship of Dionysus. The daughters of Cadmus reject the message; he hypnotizes them into pious ecstasy, and they go up into the hills to worship him with wild dances. They clothe themselves with the skins of animals, girdle themselves with snakes, crown themselves with ivy, and suckle the young of wolves and deer. The Theban king Pentheus opposes the cult as hostile to reason, morals, and order, and imprisons its preacher, who bears his punishment with Christian gentleness. But the god in the preacher asserts himself, opens the prison walls, and uses his miraculous power to hypnotize the young ruler. Under this influence Pentheus dresses himself as a woman, climbs the hills, and joins the revelers. The women discover that he is a man, and tear him limb from limb; his own mother, drunk with "possession," carries Pentheus' severed head in her hands, thinking it the head of a lion, and sings a song of triumph over it. When she comes to her senses and sees that it is the head of her son, she is revolted with the cult that intoxicated her; and when Dionysus says, "Ye mocked me, being God; this is your wage," she answers, "Should God be like a proud man in his rage?" The last lesson is the same as the first; even in his dying play the poet remained Euripides.

After his death he achieved popularity even in Athens. The ideas for which he had fought became the dominant conceptions of the follc;ving centuries, and the Hellenistic age looked back to him and to Socrates as the greatest intellectual stimuli that Greece had ever known. He had dealt with living problems rather than "dead tales of minstrelsy," and it took the ancient world a long time to forget him. The plays of his predecessors slipped into oblivion while his own were repeated in every year, and wherever the Greek world had a stage. When, in the collapse of that expedition to Syracuse (415) whose failure had been forecast in The Trojan Women, the captive Athenians faced a living death as chained slaves in the quarries of Sicily, those were given their freedom (Plutarch tells us) who could recite passages from the plays of Euripides. The New Comedy molded itself upon his dramas, and grew out of them; one of its leaders, Philemon, said, "If I were sure that the dead have consciousness, I would hang myself to see Euripides." The revival of skepticism, liberalism, and humanitarianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made Euripides almost a contemporary figure, more modern than Shakespeare. All in all, only Shakespeare has equaled him; and Goethe did not chink so. "Have all the nations of the world since Euripides," asked Goethe of Eckermann, "produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?" Not more than one.