Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/278

254 the Odysseus of the Hecuba (424 ?), where the type is first sketched clearly. He is not personally blood-thirsty, but he is obliged to put the interest of the Achaioi before everything. The most disagreeable consequences are to be apprehended if he does not lie, murder, and betray! It is the same with Menelaus in the Orestes, and, above all, with Agamemnon in the Iphigenîa in Aulis. They are so placed that ordinary social considerations seem to make justice and honour impossible.

Another note which marks the last years of the war is a tendency to dwell on the extreme possibilities of revenge. It was an old theme of Euripides—the Medea had taught it in 431—but he now saw all about him instances of the rule that by wronging people beyond a certain point you make them into devils. It is this motive which gives unity to the Hecuba, the gradual absorption of the queen's whole nature into one infinite thirst for vengeance; which answers the scholiast's complaint about the Orestes, that "everybody in it is bad." Another deepening sentiment in Euripides is his aversion to the old tales that call themselves heroic. His Electra was enough to degrade for ever the blood-feud of the Atridæ. Read after it what any other poet says on the subject, Sophocles or Æschylus or Homer, and the conviction forces itself upon you: "It was not like this; it was just what Euripides says it was. And a, a 'craft-murder,' is not a beautiful thing after all."

It is at this last period of his life at Athens that we really have in some part the Euripides of the legend—the man at variance with his kind, utterly sceptical, but opposed to most of the philosophers, contemptuous of the rich, furious against the extreme democracy, hating