Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/701

Rh E U K I P I D E S G75 has features which distinctly separate it from a Greek tragedy of the normal type. First, the subject belongs to none of the great cycles, but to a by-way of mythology, and involves such strange elements as the servitude of Apollo in a mortal household, the decree of the fates that Admetus must die on a fixed day, and the restoration of the dead Alcestis to life. Secondly, the treatment of the subject is romantic and even fantastic, strikingly so in the passage where Apollo is directly confronted with the daemonic figure of Thanatos. Lastly, the boisterous, remorseful, and generous Heracles makes not, indeed, a satyric drama bat a distinctly satyric scene a scene which, in the frank original, hardly bears the subtle interpretation which in Balaustion is hinted by the genius of Mr Browning, that Heracles got drunk in order to keep up other people s spirits. When the happy ending is taken into account, it is not sur prising that some should have called the Alcestis a tragi comedy. But we cannot so regard it. The slight and purely incidental strain of comedy is but a moment of relief between the tragic sorrow and terror of the opening and the joy, no less solemn, of the conclusion. In this respect, the Alcestis might more truly be compared to such a drama as the Winter s Tale ; the loss and recovery of Hermione by Leontes do not form a tragi-comedy because we are amused between-whiles by Autolycus and the clown. It does not seem improbable that the Alcestis the earliest of the extant plays may represent an attempt to substitute for the old satyric drama an after-piece of a kind which, while preserving a satyric element, should stand nearer to Tragedy. The taste and manners of the day were perhaps tiring of the merely grotesque entertainment that old usage appended to the tragedies; just as, in the sphere of comedy, we know from Aristophanes that they were tiring of broad buffoonery. An original dramatist may have seen an op portunity here. However that may be, the Alcestis has a peculiar interest for the history of the drama. It marks in the most signal manner, and perhaps at the earliest moment, that great movement which began with Euripides, the movement of transition from the purely Hellenic drama to the romantic. (2.) The Medea was brought out in 431 B.C. with the PhiloctcteK, the Dictya, and a lost satyr-play called the Reapers (Theristce}. Euripides gained the third prize, the first falling to Euphorion, the son of /Eschylus, and the second to Sophocles. If it is true that Euripides modelled his Medea on the work of an obscure predecessor, Neophron, at least he made the subject thoroughly his own. Hardly any play was more popular in antiquity with readers and spectators, with actors, or with sculptors. Ennius is said to have translated and adopted it. We do not know how far it may have been used by Ovid in his lost tragedy of the same name ; but it certainly inspired the rhetorical performance of Seneca, which may be regarded as bridging the interval between Euripides and modern adaptations. We may grant at once that the Medea of Euripides is not a faultless play ; that the dialogue between the heroine and yEgcus is not happily conceived ; that the murder of the children lacks an adequate dramatic motive ; that there is something of a moral anti-climax in the arrangements of Medea, before the deed, for her personal safety. But the Medea remains a tragedy of first-rate power. It is admir able for the splendid force with which the character of the strange and strong-hearted woman, a barbarian friendless among Hellenes, is thrown out against the bnckground of Hellenic life in Corinth. Those modern versions of the drama which have recently been illustrated by actresses of genius develop the romantic element beyond the limit of Euripides he has nothing like the wavering and the final obedience to a Greek instinct of the children who have to make their choice who slowly and silently turn away from their barbarian mother, and move towards the outstretched arms of Jason. Yet the essential motive of the pathos there is true to the Greek poet s conception. It is the pro found contrast between the Greek and the non-Greek nature the hopeless isolation in Greece of the alien who has left everything to follow Jason that Euripides has drawn with such mastery. It may be asked, could either ./Escliylus or Sophocles, in their different manifestations of the genuinely Hellenic spirit, have shown this more cosmopolitan sympathy, this insight into the strength and the anguish of a nature not Hellenic 1 Here, too, Euripides belongs to the coming time. (3.) The extant Hippolytus sometimes called Stephane- phoros, the &quot; wreath-bearer,&quot; from the garland of flowers tyt which, in the opening scene, the hero offers to Artemis was not the first drama of Euripides on this theme. In an earlier play of the same name, we are told, he had shocked both the moral and the esthetic sense of Athens. In this earlier Hippolytus^ Phaedra herself had confessed her love to her step-son, and, when repulsed, had falsely accused him to Theseus, who doomed him to death; at the sight of the corpse, she had been moved to confess her crime, and had atoned for it by a voluntary death. This first Hippolytus is cited as Hippolytus the Veiled (KaAuTrro/xevos), either, as Toup and Welcker thought, from Hippolytus covering his face in horror, or, as Bentley with more likelihood suggested, because the youth s shrouded corpse was brought upon the scene. It can scarcely be doubted that the chief dramatic defect of our Hippolytus is connected with the unfavourable reception of its predecessor. Euripides had been warned that limits must be observed in the dramatic portrayal of a morally repulsive theme. In the later play, accordingly, the whole action is made ta turn on the jealous feud between Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Artemis, the goddess of chastity. Phaedra not only shrinks from breath ing her secret to Hippolytus, but destroys herself when she learns that she is rejected. But the natural agency of human passion is now replaced by a supernatural machinery; the slain son and the bereaved father are no longer the martyrs of sin, the tragic witnesses of an inexor able law; rather they and Phaedra are alike the puppets of a divine caprice, the scapegoats of an Olympian quarrel in which they have no concern. But if the dramatic effect of the whole is thus weakened, the character of Phaedra is a fine psychological study; and, as regards form, the play is one of the most brilliant. Boeckh (De Tragcediaf Grcec. Principiis, p. 180 f.) is perhaps too ingenious in finding an allusion to the plague at Athens (430 B.C.) in the u&amp;gt; KO.KO. Oi -rjrwv a-Tvyfpai re voVot of v. 177, and in v. 209 f. ; but it can scarcely be doubted that he is right in suggesting that the closing words of Theseus (v. 14GO) Si Kfiv A.6rjviav fladSos 6piff/j.ara, o tov trrep-fifffffB avSpds, and the reply of the chorus, KOIVOV roS uxs&amp;gt; &c., contain a reference to the recent death of Pericles (429 B.C.). (4.) The Hecuba may be placed about 425 B.C. Thucy- elides (iii. 104) notices the purification of Delos by the Athenians, and the restoration of the Panionic festival there, in 426 B.C. an event to which the choral passage, v. 462 f., probably refers. It appears more hazardous to take v. 650 f. as an allusion to the Spartan mishap at Pylos. The subject of the play is the revenge of Hecuba, the widowed queen of Priam, on Polymestor, king of Thrace, who had murdered her youngest son Polydorus, after her daughter Polyxena had already been sacrificed by the Greeks to the shade of Achilles. The two calamities which befall Hecuba have no direct connexion with each other. In this sense it is an unanswerable objection that the play lacks unity of design. On the other hand, both events serve the same end, viz., to heighten the tragic pathos