Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/283

Rh was new to the stage, and fascinating. There was originality, too, in his treatment of 'anagnôrisis' or 'recognition' as a dramatic climax—the overturning of a situation by the discovery who some person really is—the revelation, in this case, that the lame beggar is Têlephus. This favourite Euripidean effect had become by Aristotle's time a common and even normal way of bringing on the catastrophe. Of our extant plays, the Ion, Electra, Helena, Iphigenîa in Tauris contain 'recognitions.' A celebrated instance among the lost plays was in the Cresphontes.* That hero, son of the murdered king of Messenia, had escaped from the usurper Polyphontes, and was being reared in secret. His mother, Meropê, was in the tyrant's power. He comes back to save her, gains access to Polyphontes by pretending that he has slain Cresphontes, and asks for a reward. Meropê hears that a stranger is in the house claiming a reward for having murdered her son. She sends quickly to her son's refuge and finds that he has disappeared. In despair she takes an axe and goes to where the boy sleeps. At the last instant, while she is just speaking the words, "Infernal Hades, this is mine offering to thee," her husband's old slave, who holds the light for her, recognises the youth, and rushes in to intercept the blow. Even in Plutarch's time this stage effect had not lost its power.

Apart from the technical 'recognition,' the Têlephus* gave the first sign of a movement towards melodramatic situations, the tendency which culminates in the Orestes. That play opens some days after the slaying of Clytæmestra and Aigisthus. Orestes and Electra are besieged in the castle by the populace, and the Assembly is at the moment discussing their doom. Orestes is ill