The first prize for tragedy seas won from Aeschylus in 468 by a newcomer, aged twenty-seven, and bearing a name that meant the Wise and Honored One. Sophocles was the most fortunate of men, and almost the darkest of pessimists. He came from Colonus, a suburb of Athens, and was the son of a sword manufacturer, so that the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, which impoverished nearly all Athenians, left the dramatist a comfortable income. In addition to wealth he had genius, beauty, and good health. He won the double prize for wrestling and music – a combination that would have pleased Plato; his skill as a ballplayer and a harpist enabled him to give public performances in both fields; and after the battle of Salamis it was he who was chosen by the city to lead the nude youths of Athens in a dance and song of victory. Even in later years he was handsome; the Lateran Museum statue shows him old and bearded and rounded, but still vigorous and tall. He grew up in the happiest age of Athens; he was the friend of Pericles, and held high offices under him; in 443 he was Imperial Treasurer; in 440 he was one of the generals who commanded the Athenian forces in Pericles' expedition against Samos – though it should be added that Pericles preferred his poetry to his strategy. After the Athenian debacle in Syracuse he was appointed to the Committee of Public Safety; and in this capacity he voted for the oligarchical constitution 411. His character pleased the people more than his politics; he was genial, witty, unassuming, pleasure-loving, and endowed with a charm that atoned for all his errors. He had a fancy for money and boys, but in his old age he turned his favor to courtesans. He was very pious, and occasionally filled the office of priest.

He wrote 113 plays; we have only seven, and do not know the order in which they were produced. Eighteen times he won the first award at the Dionvsian, twice at the Lenaean, festivals; he received his first prize at twenty-five, his last at eighty-five; for thirty years he ruled the Athenian stage pore completely than Pericles contemporaneously ruled Athens. He increased the number of actors to three, and played a role himself until he lost his voice. He (and after him Euripides) abandoned the Aeschylean form of trilogy, preferring to compete with three independent plays. Aeschylus was interested in cosmic themes that overshadowed the persons of his drama; Sophocles was interested in character, and was almost modern in his flair for psychology. The Trachinian Women is on its surface a sensational melodrama: Deianeira, jealous of her husband and Heracles' love for Iola, sends him unwittingly a poisoned robe, and, when it consumes him, kills herself; what draws Sophocles here is not the punishment of Heracles, which would have seemed central to Aeschylus – nor even the passion of love, which would have attracted Euripides – but the psycholology of jealousy. So in the Ajax no attention is paid to the mighty deeds of the hero; what lures the author is the study of a man going mad. In the Philoctetes there is almost no action, but a frank analysis of injured simplicity and diplomatic dishonesty. In the Electra the story is as slight as it is old; Aeschylus was fascinated by the moral issues involved; Sophocles almost ignores them in his eagerness to study with psychoanalytic ruthlessness the young woman's hatred of her mother. The play has given its name to a neurosis once widely discussed, as Oedipus the King has provided a name for another.

Oedipus Tyrannus is the most famous of Greek dramas. Its opening scene is impressive: a motley throng of men, women, boys, girls, and infants sit before the royal palace in Thebes, carrying boughs of laurel and olive as symbols of supplication. A plague has fallen upon the city, and the people have gathered to hear king Oedipus to offer some appeasing sacrifice to the gods. An oracle announces that the lague will leave Thebes with the unknown assassin of Laius, the former king. Oedipus lays a bitter curse upon the murderer, whoever he may he, whose crime has brought such misery to Thebes. This is a perfect instance of that method which Horace advised, of plunging in medias res, and letting explanations enter afterward. But the audience, of course, knew the story, for the tale of Laius, Oedipus, and the Sphinx was part of the folklore of the Greeks. Tradition said that a curse had been laid upon Laius and his children because he had introduced an unnatural vice into Hellas; the consequences of this sin, ruining generation after generation, formed a typical theme for Greek tragedy. Laius and his queen Jocasta, said an oracle, would have a son who would slay his father and marry his mother. For once in the world's history two parents wanted a girl for their first child. But a son came; and to avoid fulfillment of the oracle he was exposed on the hills. A shepherd found him, called him Oedipus from his swollen feet, and gave him to the king and queen of Corinth, who reared him as their son. Grown to manhood, Oedipus learned, again from the oracle, that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Believing the king and queen of Corinth to be his parents, he fled from that city and took the road to Thebes. On the way he met an old man, quarreled with him, and slew him, not knowing that the old man was his father. Nearing Thebes he encountered the Sphinx, a creature with the face of a woman, the tail of a lion, and the wings of a bird. To Oedipus the Sphinx presented its renowned riddle: "What is that which is four-footed, three-footed, and two-footed?" All who failed to answer correctly were destroyed by the Sphinx; and the terrified Thebans, longing to clear the highway of this monster, had vowed to have as their next king whoever should solve the riddle, for the Sphinx had agreed to commit suicide if anyone answered it. Oedipus replied: "Man; for as a child he crawls on four feet, as an adult he walks on two, and as an old man he adds a cane." It was a lame answer, but the Sphinx accepted it, and loyally plunged to its death. The Thebans hailed Oedipus as their savior, and when Laius failed to return they made the newcomer king. Obeying the custom of the land, Oedipus married the queen, and had by her four children: Antigone, Polynices, Eteocles, and Ismene. In the second scene in Sophocles' play – the most powerful scene in Greek drama – an old high priest, commanded by Oedipus to reveal, if he can, the identity of Laius' murderer, names Oedipus himself. Nothing could be more tragic than the King's reluctant and terrified realization that he is the slayer of his father and the mate of his mother. Jocasta refuses to believe it, and explains it away as a Freudian dream: "It has been the lot of many men in dreams," she reassures Oedipus, "to think themselves partners of their mother's bed; but he passes throigh life most easily to whom these things become trifles." When the identification is complete she hangs herself; and Oedipus, mad with remorse, gouges out his own eyes, and leaves Thebes as an exile, with only Antigone to help him.

Ir Oedipus at Colonus, the second play of an unintentional trilogy, the former king is a white-haired outcast leaning upon his daughter's arm and begging his bread from town to town. He comes in his wandering to shady Colonus, and Sophocles takes the opportunity to sing to his native village, and its faithful olive groves, an untranslatable song which ranks high in Greek poetry:

Stranger, where thy feet now rest
In this land of horse and rider,
Here is earth all earth excelling,
White Colonus here doth shine.
Oftenest here, and homing best
Where the close green coverts hide her,
Warbling her sweet mournful tale,
Sings the melodious nightingale . . .
Fresh with heavenly dews, and crowned
With earliest white in shining cluster,
Each new morn the young narcissus
Blooms . . . .

And a marvelous herb of the soil grows here,
Whose match I never had heard it sung
In the Dorian Isle of Pelops near
Or in Asia far hath sprung.
'Tis a plant that flourishes unsubdued,
Self-engendering, self-renewed,
To her armed foes' dismay:
That never so fair but in this land bloomed, –
With the grey-blue silvery leaf soft-plumed,
Her nurturing Olive-Spray.
No force, no ravaging hand shall raze it,
In youth so rash or in age so wise,
For the orb of Zeus in heaven surveys it,
And blue-grey light of Athena's eyes.

An oracle has foretold that Oedipus will die in the precincts of the Eumenides; and when he learns that he is now in their sacred grove at Colonus the old man, having found no loveliness in life, thinks that here it would be sweet to die. To Theseus, King of Athens, he speaks lines that sum up with clairvoyant insight the forces that were weakening Greece – the decay of the soil, of faith, of morals, and of men:

Only to gods in heaven
Comes no old age, nor death of anything;
All else is turmoiled by our master Time.
The earth's strength fades, and manhood's glory fades,
Faith dies, and unfaith blossoms like a flower.
And who shall find in the open streets of men,
Or secret places of his own heart's love,
One wind blow true forever?

Then, seeming to hear the call of a god, Oedipus bids a tender farewell to Antigone and Ismene, and walks into the dark grove, Theseus alone accompanying him.

Going on
A little space we turned. And lo, we saw
The man no more; but he, the King [Theseus] was there,
Holding a hand to shade his eyes, as one
To whom there comes a vision drear and dread
He may not bear to look upon . . . .
What form of death
He died, knows no man but our Theseus only . . . .
But either same one whom the gods had sent
To guide his steps, or else the abvss of earth
In friendly mood had opened wide its jaws
Without one pang. And so the man was led
With naught to mourn for – did not leave the world
As worn with pain and sickness; but his end,
If any ever was, was wonderful.

The last play, in the sequence, but apparently the first of the three to be composed, carries the faithful Antigone to her grave. Hearing that her brothers Polynices and Eteocles are warring for the kingdom, she hurries back to Thebes in the hope of bringing peace. But she is ignored, and the brothers fight to their death. Creon, ally of Eteocles, seizes the throne, and, as punishment for Polynices' rebellion, forbids his burial. Antigone, sharing the Greek belief that the spirit of the dead is tortured so long as the corpse is not interred, violates the edict and buries Polynices. Meanwhile the chorus sings one of the most renowned of Sophocles' odes:

Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man.
Over the surging sea, with a whitening south wind wan,
Through the foam of the firth man makes his perilous way;
And the eldest of deities, Earth that knows not toil or decay,
Ever he furrows and scores, as his team, year in year out,
With breed of the yoked horse the ploughshare turneth about.

The light-witted birds of the air, the beasts of the weald and the wood,
He traps with his woven snare, and the brood of the briny flood.
Master of cunning he: the savage bull, and the hart
Who roams the mountain free, are tamed by his infinite art;
And the shaggy rough-maned steed is broken to bear the bit.

Speech, and the wind-swift speed of counsel and civic wit,
He hath learned for himself all these; and the arrowv rain to fly,
And the nipping airs that freeze, 'neath the open winter sky.
He hath provision for all; fell plague he hath learned to endure;
Safe whate'er may befall: yet for death he hath found no cure.

Antigone is condemned by Creon to be buried alive. Creon's son Haemon protKsts against the awful sentence, and, being repulsed swears to his father "thou shalt never more set eyes upon my face." Here for a moment love plays a part in a Sophoclean tragedy and the poet intones to Eros a hym long remembered in antiquity:

Love resistless in fight, all yield at a glance of thine eve;
Love who pillowed all night on a maiden's cheek doth lie;
Over the upland folds thou roamest, and the trackless sea.
Love the gods captive holds; shall mortals not yield to thee?

Haemon disappears; and in search for him Creon orders his soldiers to open the cave in which Antigone has been entombed. There they find Antigone dead and beside her Haemon, resolved to die.

We looked, and in the cavern's vaulted gloom
I saw the maiden lying strangled there,
A noose of linen twined about her neck;
And hard beside her, clasping her cold form,
Her lover lay bewailing his dead bride . . .
When the king saw him, with a terrible groan
He moved towards him, crying, "O my son,
What hast thou done? What ailed thee? What mischance
Has reft thee of thy reason? Oh, come forth,
Come forth, my son; thy father supplicates."
But the son glared at him with tiger eyes,
Spat in his face, and then, without a word,
Drew his two-hilted sword and smote, but
Missed his father flying backwards. Then the boy,
Wroth with himself, poor wretch, incontinent,
Fell on his sword and drove it through his side
Home; but, yet breathing, clasped in his lax arms
The maid, her pallid cheek incarnadined
With his expiring gasps. So there they lay
Two corpses, one in death.

The dominant qualities of these plays, surviving time and translation, are beauty of style and mastery of technique. Here is the typically "classic" form of utterance: polished, placid, and serene; vigorous but restrained, dignified but graceful, with the strengrh of Pheidias and the smooth delicacy of Praxiteles. Classic too is the structure; every line is relevant, and moves towards that moment in which the action finds its climax and its significance. Each of these plays is built like a temple, wherein every part is carefully finished in derail, but has its proper and subordinate place in the whole; except that the Philoctetes lazily accepts the deus ex machina (which is a jest in Euripides) as a serious solution of a knotty plot. Here, as in Aeschylus, the drama moves upward towards the hybris of some crowning insolence (as in Oedipus' bitter curse upon the unknown murderer); turns around some anagnorisis or sudden recognition, some peripeteia or reversal of fortune; and moves downward toward the nemesis of inevitable punishment. Aristotle, when he wished to illustrate perfection of dramatic structure, always referred to Oedipus the King, and the two plays that deal with Oedipus illustrate well the Aristotelian definition of tragedy as a purging of pity and terror through their objective presentation. The characters are more clearly drawn than in Aeschylus, though not as realistically as in Euripides. "I draw men as they ought to be drawn," said Sophocles, "Euripides draws them as they are" – as if to say that drama should admit some idealization, and that art should not be photography. But the influence of Euripides appears in the argumentativeness of the dialogue and the occasional exploitation of sentiment; so Oedipus wrangles unroyally with Teiresias, and, blinded, gropes about touchingly to feel the faces of his daughters. Aeschylus, contemplating the same situation, would have forgotten the daughters and thought of some eternal law.

Sophocles, too, is a philosopher and a preacher, but his counsels rely less than those of Aeschylus upon the sanctions of the gods. The spirit of the Sophists has touched him, and though he maintains a prosperous orthodoxy, he reveals himself as one who might have been Euripides had he not been so fortunate. But he has too much of the poet's sensitivity to excuse the suffering that comes so often undeserved to men. Says Lyilus, over Heracles' writhing body:

We are blameless, but confess
That the gods are pitiless.
Children they beget, and claim
Worship in a father's name,
Yet with apathetic eye
Look upon such agony.

He males Jocasta laugh at oracles, though his plays turn upon them creakingly; Creon denounces the prophets as "all a money-getting tribe"; and Philoctetes asks the old question, "How justify the ways of Heaven, finding Heaven unjust?" Sophocles answers hopefully that though the moral order of the world may be too subtle for us to understand it, it is there, and right will triumph in the end. Following Aeschylus, he identifies Zeus with this moral order, and comes even more closely to monotheism. Like a good Victorian he is uncertain of his theology, but strong in his moral faith; the highest wisdom is to find that law which is Zeus, the moral compass of the world, and follow it.

Oh, may my constant feet not fail,
Walking in paths of righteousness.
Sinless in word and deed,
True to those eternal laws
That scale forever the high steep
Of heaven's pure ether, whence they sprang:
For only in Olympus is their home,
Nor mortal wisdom gave them birth;
And howsoe'er men may forget,
They will not sleep.

It is the pen of Sophocles, but the voice of Aeschylus, faith making the last stand against unbelief. In this piety and resignation we see the figure of Job repentant and reconciled; but between the lines we catch premonitions of Euripides.

Like Solon, Sophocles counts that man most blessed who has never been born, and him next happiest who dies in infancy. A modern pessimist has taken pleasure in translating the somber lines of the chorus on the death of Oedipus, lines that reflect a world-weariness brought on by old age, and the bitter fratricide of the Peloponnesian War:

What man is he that yearneth
For length unmeasured of days?
Folly mine eye discerneth
Encompassing all his ways.
For years over-running the measure
Shall change thee in evil wise:
Grief draweth nigh thee; and pleasure,
Behold it is hid from thine eyes.
This to their wage have they
Which overlive their day.

Thy portion esteem I highest
Who vast not ever begot;
Thine next, being born, who diest
And straightway again art not.
With follies light as the feather
Doth Youth to man befall;
Then evils gather together,
There wants not one of them all –
Wrath, envy, discord, strife,
The sword that seeketh life.
And sealing the sum of trouble
Doth tottering Age draw nigh,
Whom friends and kinsfolk fly;
Age, upon whom redouble
All sorrows under the sky . . . .

And he that looseth from labor
Doth one with other befriend,
Whom bride nor bridesmen attend,
Song, nor sound of the tabor,
Death that maketh an end.

Every scholastic gossip knows that Sophocles consoled his old age with the hetaira Theoris, and had offspring by her. His legitimate son Iophon, fearing, perhaps, that the poet would bequeath his wealth to Theoris' child, brought his father to court on a charge of financial incompetence. Sophocles read to the jury, as evidence of his mental clarity, certain choruses from the play which he was writing, probably the Oedipus at Colonus; whererpon the judges not only acquitted him, but escorted him to his home. Born many years before Euripides, he lived to put on mourning for him: and then, in that same vear 406, he too died. Legend tells how, as the Spartans besieged Athens, Dionysus, god of the drama, appeared to Lysanier and obtained a safe-conduct for the friends of Sophocles, who wished to bury him in the sepulcher of his fathers at Deceleia. The Greeks rende ed him divine honors, and the poet Simmias composed for him a quiet epitaph:

Creep gently, ivv ever gently creep,
Where Sophocles sleeps on in calm repose;
Thy pale green tresses o'er the marble sweep,
While all around shall bloom the purple rose.
There let the vine with rich full clusters hang,
Its fair young tendrils flung around the stone;
Due meed for that sweet wisdom which he sang,
By Muses and by Graces called their own.

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 withincredible 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 Hippolyttu 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 faithfu. to her; will ever shun women, and will find his greatest pleasure in the wcods. 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 o f 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.

Greek tragedy is more somber than the Elizabethan, because it seldom employs that principle of comic relief by which, through a humorous interruption of the tragical, the auditor's tolerance for tragedy is increased. The Greek playwright preferred to keep his tragic drama on a persistently high plane, and relegated comedy to a "satyr" play which carried no serious import, but allowed the excited emotions of the audience to subside into humor and ease. In the course of time the comic drama declared its independence of tragedy, and a day was allotted to it, at the Dionysian festivals, when the entire program consisted of three or four comedies, written by different authors, played in succession, and competing for a separate prize.

Comedy, like oratory, had its first Greek bloom in Sicily. About 484 there came to Syracuse from Cos a philosopher, physician, poet, and dramatist, Epicharmus, who expounded Pythagoras, Heracleitus, and rationalism in thirty-five comedies, of which only occasional quotations remain. Twelve years after Epicharmus' arrival in Sicily the Athenian archon allowed its first chorus to comedy. The new art developed rapidly under the stimulus of democracy and freedom, and became the principal medium, in Athens, of moral and political satire. The wide license of speech permitted to comedy was a tradition of the Dionysian phallic procession. The abuse of this freedom led in 44o to a law against personal attacks in comedy; but this prohibition was repealed three years later, and full freedom of criticism and abuse continued even during the Peloponnesian War. The Greek comedy took the place, as political critic, of a free press in modern democracies.

We hear of many comic dramatists before Aristophanes, and the great Rabelais of antiquity even condescended to praise some of them when the smoke of his battles with them had cleared away. Cratinus was the mouthpiece of Cimon, and made rabid war against Pericles, whom he called "the squill-headed God Almighty"; merciful time has spared us the necessity of reading him. Another forerunner was Pherecrates, who, about 420, satirized, in The Wild Men, those Athenians who professed to dislike civilization and to long for a "return to nature": so old are the brave innovations of our youth. The ablest competitor of Aristophanes was Eupolis; they at first co-operated, then quarreled and parted, after which they satirized each other vigorously, but still agreed in attacking the democratic party. If comedy throughout the fifth century was hostile to democracy, it was partly because poets like money and the aristocracy was rich, but chiefly because the function of Greek comedy was to amuse with criticism, and the democratic party was in power. Since the leader of the democracy, Pericles, was sympathetic to new ideas like the emancipation of woman and the development of a rationalist philosophy, the comic dramatists ranged themselves, with suspicious unanimity, against all forms of radicalism, and called for a return to the ways and reputed morals of the "Men of Marathon." Aristophanes became the voice of this reaction, as Socrates and Euripides were the protagonists of the new ideas. The conflict between religion and philosophy captured the comic stage.

Aristophanes had some excuse for liking aristocracy, since he came of a cultured and prosperous family, and appears to have owned land in Aegina. His very name was a patent of nobility, meaning "the best made manifest." Born about 450, he was in the springtime of life when Athens and Sparta began that war which was to be a bitter theme of his plays. The Spartan invasion of Attica compelled him to abandon his country estate and come to live in Athens. He disliked city life, and resented the sudden demand upon him to hate Megarians, Corinthians, and Spartans; he denounced this conflict of Greek killing Greek, and called, in play after play, for peace.

After the death of Pericles in 429 supreme power in Athens passed into the hands of the rich tanner, Cleon, who represented those commercial interests that wanted a "knock-out blow" – i.e., the utter destruction of Sparta as a competitor for the mastery of Greece. In a lost play, The Babylonians (426), Aristophanes subjected Cleon and his policies to such stinging ridicule that the burly strategos prosecuted him for treason, and had him fined. Two years later Aristophanes revenged himself by presenting The Knights. Its leading character was Demos (i.e., the People), whose major-domo was called the Tanner; everyone understood the transparent allegory, including Cleon, who saw the play. The satire was so sharp that no actor would play the part of the Tanner for fear of political misfortune, whereupon Aristophanes took the role himself. Nicias (the name of the superstitious leader of the oligarchic faction) announces that an oracle has told him that the next ruler of Demos' house will be a sausage-seller. Such a huckster comes along, and the slaves hail him as "Chief that shall be of our glorious Athens!" "Prithee," says the Sausage-Seller, "let me go wash my tripes . . . you make a fool of me." But one Demosthenes assures him that he has just the qualifications for ruling the people – is he not a rascal, and free from all education? The Tanner, fearing that he is to be deposed, protests his services and his loyalty to Demos; no one except the harlots, he urges, has done so much for Demos as he. There is the usual Aristophanic burlesque: the Sausage-Seller belabors the Tanner with tripe, and primes himself for an oratorical contest in the Assembly by eating garlic. A contest in adulation ensues, to see which of the candidates can praise Demos the more lavishly, and "deserve better of Demos and his belly." The rivals bring a feast of good things and lay them before Demos like a platter of pre-election promises. The Sausage-Seller proposes that as a test of their honesty each candidate's locker shall be searched. In the Tanner's locker a heap of succulent dainties is found, in particular a massive cake, from which he has cut only a tiny slice for Demos (a reference to a current charge that Cleon had embezzled state funds). The Tanner is dismissed, and the Sausage-Seller becomes the ruler of Demos' house.

The Wasps (422) continues the satire on democracy in a milder and weaker vein; the chorus is composed of idle citizens – dressed as wasps – who seek to make an obol or two every day by serving as jurymen, in order that they may, by listening to "sycophants" and levying confiscatory fines, vote the money of the rich into the coffers of the state and the pockets of the poor. But Aristophanes' ruling interest in these early plays is to ridicule war and promote peace. The hero of The Acharnians (425) is Diceopolis ("Honest Citizen"), a farmer who complains that his land has been devastated by armies, so that he can no longer live by squeezing wine from his vineyards. He sees no reason for war, and is clear that he himself has no quarrel with the Spartans. Tired of waiting for the generals or the politicians to make peace, he signs a personal treaty with the Lacedaemonians; and when a chorus of war-patriotic neighbors denounces him he replies:

Well, the very Spartans even, I've my doubts and scruples whether
They've been totally to blame, in every instance, altogether.
Chorus. Not to blame in every instance? Villain, vagabond, how dare ye,
Talking treason to our faces, to suppose that we will spare ye?

He agrees to let them kill him if he cannot prove that Athens is as much to blame for the war as Sparta. His head is laid upon a chopping block, and he begins his argument. Presently an Athenian general enters, defeated, blustering, and profane; the Chorus is disgusted with him, and releases Diceopolis, who pleases all by selling a wine called Peace. It was a play of considerable audacity, possible only among a people trained to hear the other side. Taking advantage of the parabasis or digression in which the custom of comedy allowed the author to address the audience through the chorus or one of the characters, Aristophanes explained his function as a comic gadfly among the Athenians:

Never since our poet presented comedies has he praised himself upon the stage . . . . But he maintains that he has done you much that is good. If you no longer allow yourselves to be too much hoodwinked by strangers or seduced by flattery, if in politics you are no longer the ninnies you once were, it is thanks to him. Formerly, when delegates from other cities wanted to deceive you, they had but to style you "the people crowned with violets"; at the word "violets" you at once sat erect on the tips of your bums. Or if, to tickle your vanity, some one spoke of "rich and sleek Athens," he would get all, because he spoke of you as he would have of anchovies in oil. In cautioning you against such wiles, the poet has done you great service.

In The Peace (421) the poet was triumphant: Cleon was dead, and Nicias was about to sign for Athens a treaty pledging peace and friendship with Sparta for fifty years. But a few years later hostilities were resumed; and in 411 Aristophanes, abandoning hope in his fellow citizens, invited the women of Greece to end the bloodshed. As the Lysistrata opens, the ladies of Athens, while their men are still asleep, gather at dawn in council near the Acropolis. They agree to withhold the comforts of love from their spouses until these come to terms with tile enemy; and they send an embassy to the women of Sparta to invite their co-operation in this novel campaign for peace. The men, awake at last, call to the women to come home; when these refuse, the men besiege them, but the attackers are repulsed with pails of hot water and torrents of speech. Lysistrata ("Dissolver of Armies") reads the men a lesson:

During the wars of old we bore with you . . . . But we observed you carefully; and oftentimes, when we were at home, the used to hear that you had decided some matter badly. When we inquired about it, the men would answer, "What's that to you? Be silent." And we asked, "How is it, husband, that you men manage these affairs so foolishly?"

The leader of the men answers that women must keep out of public matter because they cannot manage the treasury. (As they debate, some of the women steal away to their husbands, muttering Aristophanic excuses.) Lysistrata replies, "Why not? The wives have long had the management of their husbands' purses, to the great advantage of both." She argues so well that the men are finally persuaded to call a conference of the warring states. When the delegates are gathered, Lysistrata arranges that they shall have all the wine they can drink. Soon they are in a happy mood, and the long-delayed treaty is signed. The chorus ends the play with a paean to peace.