Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/277

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

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

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