Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/292

268 The method is to our taste quite undramatic, but it is explicable enough: it falls in with the tendency of Greek art to finish, not with a climax, but with a lessening of strain.

There is a growth visible in this method of ending. In the earliest group of our extant plays, there is, with the merely apparent exception of the Hippolytus (see p. 270), no deus ex machinâ. From about 420 to 414 the god appears, prophesies, or pronounces judgment, but does not disturb the action; in the 'troubled period' he produces what is technically called a 'peripeteia,' a violent reversal of the course of events. Now, if Pindar had done this, we might have said that his superstition was rather gross, but we could have accepted it. When it is done by a man notorious for his bold religious speculation, a reputed atheist, and no seeker of popularity, then it becomes a problem. Let any one who does not feel the difficulty, read the Orestes. Is it credible that Euripides believed that the story ended or could end as he makes it; that he did not see that his deus makes the whole grand tragedy into nonsense? Dr. Verrall finds the solution of this knot in a bold theory that Euripides, writing habitually as a freethinker, under circumstances in which outspokenness was impossible, deliberately disguised his meaning by adding to his real play a sham prologue and epilogue, suitable for popular consumption, but known by those in the poet's confidence to have no bearing on his real intent. The difficulties in this view are obvious.