Page:Euripides (Donne).djvu/67

Rh but a religious institution, and to what extent and in what particulars it was so, has already been told in the volume of this series assigned to Æschylus. There had been, however, after the Persian had been humbled and Hellas secured and exalted, a silent change in the faith of the Athenian people, as well as in their mental training. As years rolled on over their renovated city, though the forms of their myths and legends were retained, living belief in them was on the wane. They were accepted as respectable traditions, and when they recorded the brave deeds of their forefathers, were jealously cherished, but no longer regarded with awe, or exempted from innovation. In the time of Euripides, there had appeared an historian, or perhaps more properly a chronicler—a man of much faith and honest piety, and yet one who scrupled not to canvass the credibility of tale and tradition, and sometimes even to find a secular explanation for spiritual doctrines. Herodotus, as well as Euripides, was under the influence of the age, though he usually apologises for his doubts. Yet doubt he did. The Father of History, no less than the pupil of Anaxagoras, disbelieved in the baneful effects of an eclipse, and had, for his time, very fair notions of geography; and if he thought that the gods envy human greatness, and sooner or later punish the pride of man, his faith, as contrasted with that of Phrynicus and Æschylus, was feeble, and his view of Destiny and the Benign Deities savoured more of habit than earnest conviction. In such matters the beginning of distrust is the dawn of a rationalistic epoch. The ancient faith of the