Euripides and His Age

delight," and we feel no particular shock in reading the words. The companies were just noblemen's servants; and it was natural enough that if Lord Leicester's players did not am

stage, on which was played an eternal drama, full of tears and joy, its actors divided between heaven, earth and hell; a drama whose end is foreseen, whose changes of fortune are directed by the hand of God, yet whose every scene is rich and thrilling." The spectator was admitted to the councils of the Trinity; he saw the legions of darkness mingling themselves with the lives of humanity, tempting and troubling, and the sai

i?val plays, Greek tragedy was religious; that it was developed out of a definite ritual; not even that the most marked links of historical continuity can be traced between the death-and-resurrection ritual

For if He were not re-born, what would happen? Famine, and wholesale death by famine, was a familiar thought, a regularly returning terror, in these primitive agricultural villages. Nay, more, why must the cycle of summer and winter roll as it does? Why must "He" die and men die? Some of the oldest Greek philosophers have no doubt about the answer: there has been "Hubris" or "Adikia," Pride or Injustice, and the result thereof must needs be death. Every year He waxes too strong and commits "Hubris," and such sin has its proper punishment. "The sun shall not transgress his measures," says Heraclitus; "if he does he shall be pursued by Erinyes, till justice be re-fulfilled." It is the law of all existing things. "They all pay re

identical with himself; (2) a Pathos, or disaster, which very commonly takes the shape of a "Sparagmos," or Tearing in pieces; the body of the Corn God being scattered in innumerable seeds over the earth; sometimes of some other sacrificial death; (3) a Messenger,

arkable set of creative artists, developed into what we know as Greek tragedy. The c

cular parts-there is a beautiful play, for instance, on the Massacre of the Innocents; then they developed imaginatively scenes that are implied but not mentioned in the Gospel, such as the experiences of the Magdalen when she lived "in joy,"

l was attached. For the play is, with the rarest and most doubtful exceptions, essentially the enactment of a ritual, or rather of what the Greeks called an "aition"-that is, a supposed historical event which is the origin or "cause" of the ritual. Thus the death of Hippolytus is the "aition" of the lamentation-ri

those events were chosen which were felt to have about them some heroic grandeur or mystery; I think we may even say, only t

ays without even suspecting the ritual form that lies behind them. Aeschylus had also made the whole performance much longer and more impressive: he composed three continuous tragedies forming a single whole and followed by the strange performance called a Satyr-play. The wild element of revelry which was proper to Dionysus worship, with its bearded dancing half-animal satyrs, had been kept severely away from the stage during the

Nikê," or victory, into the celebration, and you could only get this by means of a contest. The Archon, or magistrate, in charge of the festival selected three poets to compete, and three rich men to be their "Chorêgoi," that is, to provide all the expenses of the performance. The poet was then said to have "ob

further shores of the Friendless Sea, had fled from her home with the Greek adventurer Jason, the winner of the Golden Fleece. She came with him to Thessaly, where his uncle Pelias was king. Pelias had usurped Jason's ancestral crown and therefore hated him. The daughters of Pelias doubtless sneered at Medea and encouraged Jason's growing distaste for his barbarian prize. The savage woman determined at one blow to be rid of Pelias, to punish his daughters, and reconquer Jason's love. She had

eschylus and thirteen years after the first victory of Sophocles. Euripides' own first victory-we do not kno

e it shows Euripides writing for once without any arrière pensée, or secondary intention. It is a gay and grotesque piece, based on Homer's story of Odysseus in the Cyclops' cave. The farcical and fantastic note is firmly held, so that the clim

the poet's death and considerably rewritten. It is a young man's play, full of war and adventure, of spies in wolf-skins and white chargers and gallant chivalry. That is not much like the Euripides whom we know elsewhere; but his mark is upon the last scene, in which the soldiers stand embarrassed and silent while a solitary mother we

h primitive courtesy, conceals what has happened and orders him to be given entertainment. The burial is finished when Heracles, already revelling and drunken and crowned with flowers, learns the truth. Sobered at the touch he goes out into the night to wrestle with Death amid the tombs and crush his ribs for him till he yields up his prey. One sees the fantastic satyr note. The play is not truly tragic; it touches its theme tenderly and with romance. But amid all the romance Euripides cannot keep his hand from unveiling the weak spot in the sacred legend. Alcestis, no doubt, is beautiful, and it was beautiful of her to die. But what was it of Admetus to let her die? An ordinary playwright would elude

he land of Ps?phis, where the King cleansed him and gave him the hand of his daughter Arsino?, who duly received the necklace. However, Alcmaeon's sin was too great for any such cleansing. He wandered away, all the earth being accursed to him, till he should find some land that had not been in existence at the time of his sin and was consequently unpolluted. He discovered it in some alluvial islands, just then making their appearance

quite succeeded in throwing them off, even in its most vital period. It is very difficult for us to form a clear notion what the ordinary Greek tragedy looked like in 438, and how much we should have noticed any great change of dressing in the Telephus. But there was a change which raised a storm of comment. Telephus was a King of Mysia, not very far from the Troad. The Greeks in sailing for Troy had missed their way and invaded Telephus' country by mistake. He had fought them with great effect but had been wounded by Achilles with his magic spear. The wound would not close, and an oracle told Telephus "the wounder shall heal." The Gre

re is nothing to blame Telephus for. At the end of this scene, apparently, the beggar was discovered. It is Telephus himself speaking! They fly to their spears. But Telephus has snatched up the baby prince, Orestes, from his cradle and stands at bay; if one of his enemies moves the child shall die. Eventually they accept his terms and make peace with him. A fine melodrama, one would guess, and a move in the direction of realism-a direction which Euripides only followed within certain strict limits. But we find two marks of Euripides the philosopher. The beggar who pleads for reaso

es seemed to come too near raising an actual doubt whether the damsel had done anything so very wrong at all, that respectable people should want to murder her. Euripides is, as a matter of fact, not loose but highly austere in his moral tone. But next to religion itself, the sphere of sexual conduct has always been the great field for irrational taboos and savage punishments, and the sophists naturally marked it as a battle-field. The kings of Egypt commonly married their sisters, and did so on religious grounds: to a Greek such marriage was an unspeakable sin. There is a problem here, and Euripides raised it sharply in a play, Aeolus, based on the old fairy-tale of the King of the winds who dwells as a patriarch on his floating island with his twelve sons married t

sdom which sometimes took away a spectator's breath, were probably the qualities which the ordinary public had felt in Euripides' work up to the year 438. They perhaps felt also that these ple

moothness th

the origin of tragedy. See also Cornford From Religion to Philosophy, first few chapters. The chief non-Dionysiac theory is Pr