Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/704

Rh 678 EURIPIDES worship the Dionysus myth was so congenial. The play is sometimes quoted as the Pentheus. It has been justly observed that Euripides seldom named a piece from the chorus, unless the chorus bore an important part in the action or the leading action was divided between several persons. Possibly, however, in this instance he may designedly have chosen a title which would at once interest the Macedonian public. Pent/teas would suggest a Greek legend about which they might know or care little. The Bacchce would at once announce a theme con nected with rites familiar to the northern laud. It is a magnificent play, alone among extant Greek tragedies in picturesque splendour, and in that sustained glow of Dionysiac enthusiasm to which the keen irony lends the strength of contrast. If Euripides had left nothing else, the Bacchce, would place him in the first rank of poets, and wuuld prove his possession of a sense rarely manifested by Greek poets, perhaps by no one of his own contemporaries in equal measure except Aristophanes, a feeling for natural beauty lit up by the play of fancy. Mr R. V. Tyrrell, in his edition of the Bacchce, has given the true answer to the theory that the Bacchue is a recantation. Euri pides had never rejected the facts which formed the basis of the popular religion. He had rather sought to interpret them in a manner consistent with belief in a benevolent Providence. The really striking thing in the Bacchce is the spirit of contentment and of composure which it breathes, as if the poet had ceased to be vexed by the seeming contradictions which had troubled him before. Nor should ifc be forgotten that, for the Greek mind of his age, the victory of Dionysus in the Bacchce carried a moral even more direct than the victory of Aphrodite in the Ilippolytus. The great nature-powers who give refreshment to mortals cannot be robbed of their due tribute without provoking a nemesis. The refusal of such a homage is not, so the Greeks deemed, a virtue in itself: in the sight of the gods it may be only a cold form of uySpts, overweening self-reliance the quality personified in Pentheus. The Bacchce was always an exceptionally popular play, partly because its opportunities as a spectacle fitted it for gorgeous representation, and so recommended it for per formance at courts and on great public occasions. &quot; Deme trius the Cynic &quot; (says Lucian) &quot; saw an illiterate person at Corinth reading a very beautiful poem, the Bacchce of Euripides, I think it was; he was at the place where the messenger narrates the doom of Pentheus and the deed of Agave. Demetrius snatched the book from him and tore it up, saying, it is better for Pentheus to be torn up at once by me than to be mangled over and over again by you. &quot; (18.) The Cyclops, of uncertain date, is the only extant example of a satyric drama. The plot is taken mainly from the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus in the 9th book of the Odyssey. In order to be really successful in farce of this kind, a poet should have a fresh feeling for the nature of the art parodied. It is because Euripides was not in accord with the spirit of the heroic myths that he is not strong in mythic travesty. His own tragedies, such as the Helen, the Electro,, and the Orestes, had, in their several ways, contributed to destroy the meaning of satyric drama. _They had done gravely very much what satyric drama aimed at doing grotesquely. They had made the heroic persons act and talk like ordinary men and women. The finer side of such parody had lost its edge; only broad comedy remained. _ (19.) The Rhesus is still held by some to be what the didascaliae and the grammarians call it, a work of Euri pides; and Mr Paley has ably supported this view. But the scepticism first declared by Valckniir has steadily gained ground, and the Rhesus is now almost universally recognized as spurious. The art and the style, still more evidently the feeling and the mind, of Euripides are absent. If it cannot be ascribed to a disciple of his matured school, it is still less like the work of an Alexandrian. The most probable view seems to be that which assigns it to a versifier of small dramatic power in the latest days of Attic Tragedy. It has this literary interest, that it is the only extant play of which the subject is directly taken from our Iliad, of which the tenth book, the AoAoivaa, has been followed by the playwright with a closeness which is sometimes mechanical. When the first protests of the comic poets were over, Litera Euripides was secure of a wide and lasting renown. As histpr the old life of Athens passed away, as the old faiths lost * their meaning and the peculiarly Greek instincts in art lost their truth and freshness, yEschylus and Sophocles might cease to be fully enjoyed save by a few ; but Euripides could still charm by qualities more readily and more universally recognized. The comparative nearness of his diction to tbe idiom of ordinary life rendered him less attractive to the grammarians of Alexandria than authors Alexa whose erudite form afforded a better scope for the display ^ ria - of learning or the exercise of ingenuity. But there were two aspects in which he engaged their attention. They loved to trace the variations which he had introduced into the standard legends. And they sought to free his text from the numerous interpolations which even then had resulted from his popularity on the stage. Philochorus (about 30G-2GO B.C.), best known for his Atthis, dealt, in his treatise on Euripides, especially with the mythology of the plays. From 300 B.C. to the age of Augustus, a long series of critics busied themselves with this poet. The first systematic arrangement of his reputed works is ascribed to Dicaiarchus and Callimachus in the early part of the 3d century B.C. Among those who furthered the exact study of his text, and of whose work some traces remain in the extant scholia, were Aristophanes of Byzantium, Callistratus, Apollodorus of Tarsus, Timachidas, and pre-eminently Didymus; probably also Crates of Pergamus and Aristar- chus. At Home Euripides was early made known through the translations of Ennius and the freer adaptations of Pacuvius. When Hellenic civilization was spread through Influ. the East, the mixed populations of the new settlements of El welcomed a dramatic poet whose taste and whose senti-j 8 ment were not too severely or exclusively Attic. The isnii Parthian Orodes and his court were witnessing the Bacchcv of Euripides when the Agave of the hour was suddenly enabled to lend a ghastly reality to the terrible scene of frenzied triumph by displaying the gory head of the Roman Crassus. Mommsen has noted the moment as one in which the power of Rome and the genius of Greece were simul taneously abased in the presence of sultauism. So far as Euripides is concerned, the incident may suggest another and a more pleasing reflection; it may remind us how the charm of his humane genius had penetrated the recesses o the barbarian East, and had brought to rude and fierce peoples at least some dim and distant apprehension of that gracious world in which the great spirits of ancient Hellas had moved. A quaintly significant testimony to the popularity of Euripides is afforded by a strange composition, The probably of the 4th ceatury A.D., the Xpurros rrao-^wi. T ^ 1 This drama, narrating the events which preceded and xwv attended the Passion, is a cento of no less than 2610 verses, taken from the plays of Euripides, principally from the Bacchce, the Troades, and the Rhesus. The traditional ascription of the authorship to Gregory of Nazianzus is now generally rejected ; a more probable conjecture assigns it to Apollinaris of Laodicea, and places the date of composi tion at about 330 A.D. Although the text used by t .nj