Page:Euripides (Mahaffy).djvu/122

116 strict reproduction, gives an excellent idea of the original.

93. But even where the modern scholar is not able to feel distinctly the music of the metre, there is infinite beauty and variety in the choral odes of Euripides. Thus we find him celebrating the birth and establishment of Apollo at Delphi in an ode (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1234) of the dignity and power of Pindar, to whose style this piece has a strong family likeness. Again the parodos, or opening song of the Supplices (vv. 42 sqq.), is thoroughly Æschylean in tone and conception, and the ode on Ares in the Phœnissæ (v. 784)—an ode very easy to read from its simple dactylic structure—is well worthy of the best of the older masters. The pathetic descriptive odes of the fall of Troy in both Hecuba and the Troades are more peculiar to himself, and masterpieces in their way; where he competes with Sophocles in singing the power of love, or the sad destinies of old age (Hippolytus, 525; Hercules Furens, 637), he seems to me hardly inferior to that acknowledged prince of poets. The last I will quote in full,