Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/291

Rh let the audience know what saga the play was to treat. The need was the more pressing if a poet was apt, like Euripides, to choose little-known legends or unusual versions of those that were well known. The Prologue was invented to meet this need. But, once there, it suggested further advantages. It practically took the place of an explanatory first act. Euripides uses it to state the exact situation in which he means to pick up his characters; the Orestes and the Medea, for instance, gain greatly from their prologues. They are able to begin straight at the centre of interest. It must, of course, be fully recognised that our existing prologues have been interpolated and tampered with. Euripides held the stage all over the Hellenistic world for centuries after his death, and was often played to barbarian audiences who wanted everything explained from the beginning. Thus the prologue of the Electra, to take a striking example, narrates things that every Athenian knew from his infancy. But the Prologue in itself is a genuine Euripidean instrument.

If we overcome our dislike for the Prologue, we are still offended by the way in which Euripides ends his plays. Of his seventeen genuine extant tragedies, ten close with the appearance of a god in the clouds, commanding, explaining, prophesying. The seven which do not end with a god, end with a prophecy or something equivalent—some scene which directs attention away from the present action to the future results. That is, the subject of the play is really a long chain of events; the poet fixes on some portion of it—the action of one day, generally speaking—and treats it as a piece of vivid concrete life, led up to by a merely narrative introduction, and melting away into a merely narrative close.