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266 its significance. One of the rare instances of a plain personal statement is in the Heracles (ll. 1341 ff.):

These words seem clearly to represent the poet himself, not the quite unphilosophic hero who utters them. They read like the firm self-justification of a man attacked for freethinking. That was written about 422, before the time of bitterness. For the most part, Euripides is far from frank on these subjects. The majority of the plays draw no conclusions, but only suggest premisses. They state the religious traditions very plainly, and leave the audience to judge if it believes in them or approves of them. His work left on his contemporaries, and, if intelligently read, leaves on us, an impression of uneasy, half-disguised hostility to the supernatural element which plays so large a part in it. It is a tendency which makes havoc in his art. Plays like the Ion, the Electra, the Iphigenîa in Tauris, the Orestes, have something jarring and incomprehensible about them, which we cannot dispose of by lightly calling Euripides a 'botcher,' or by saying, what is known to be untrue in history, that he was the poet of the 'ochlocracy' and played to the mob.

For one thing, we must start by recognising and trying to understand two pieces of technique which are specially the invention or characteristic of Euripides, the Prologue and the Deus ex machinâ. The Prologue is easily explained. There were no playbills, and it was well to