Page:Euripides (Mahaffy).djvu/119

VIII.] these cases Euripides adhered to the traditions of his predecessors.

91. But there are other plays, especially the melodramas, in which the chorus sympathise so deeply with the actor as to become his accomplices, and aid in the plot generally with prevarication and with deceit. Such is the part of the chorus in the Medea, where they side against their own royal house; in the Tauric Iphigenia, where they endeavour to mislead a messenger with falsehood; in the Ion, where they screen Creusa's crime.

This is considered an Euripidean innovation in tragedy, and perhaps the criticism is just. But in no case does this narrower sympathy prevent them from recalling the spectators, in their odes, to the broader and more philosophic aspects of the story. The dolours of old age and childlessness, the obligations of noble birth, the calamities of violent desire, the idleness of abstract speculation, these high topics are sung in the odes of his partisan chorus. There are, moreover, plays in which he went a step farther, and foreshadowed that abandonment of the chorus which marked the new comedy. He seeks out a stranger chorus, with no more than a general interest in the actors, and allows them to sing irrelevant odes, as a mere rest to the actors and the audience, in those intervals which we should mark by the close of successive acts. Such are the chorus of the Helena and of the Phœnissæ—the latter, Phœnician maidens sojourning by an accident at Thebes, and witnessing the horrors of the siege, with its suicides, fratricides, and exiles. Such again are the chorus of the Iphigenia, maidens of Eubœa, who have crossed over from curiosity to visit the fleet at Aulis.

This is evidently the deliberate innovation of Euripides, and it gives him far greater scope and licence in the topics which his lyric poetry embraces. Hence some of his deepest philosophic teaching was conveyed in these odes, and it was his habit, even with the most interested chorus, to open an ode with