Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/289

Rh feast-day and in the sacred precinct. Any view of Euripides which implies that he had a serious artistic faith in his "gods from the mêchanê"—a form of superstition too gross even for the ordinary public—is practically out of court. His age held him for a notorious freethinker, and his stage gods are almost confessedly fictitious. Yet it is a curious fact that Euripides is constantly denouncing the inadequacy of mere rationalism. There is no contrast more common in his plays than that between real wisdom and mere knowledge or cleverness; and the context generally suggests that the cleverness in question includes what people now call 'shallow atheism.' He speaks more against the than with them. It seems, in fact, that here, as in the rest of his mental attitude, he is a solitary rebel.

He is seldom frankly and outspokenly sceptical; when he is so, it is always on moral grounds. No stress can be laid on mere dramatic expressions like the famous "They are not, are not!" of Bellerophon (frag. 286), or the blasphemies of Ixion, or the comic atheism of the Cyclops. There is more real character in the passages which imply a kind of antitheism. In the Bellerophon,* for instance (frag. 311), the hero, bewildered at the unjust ordering of things, attempts to reach Zeus and have his doubts set at rest, whereupon Zeus blasts him with a thunderbolt. He sees that he is and condemned, yet he cannot seriously condemn himself. He speaks to his heart:

One cannot take these for the poet's actual sentiments, but the fact that such thoughts were in his mind has