Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/125

Rh definitely blasphemous against the traditional gods. Greek legend was full of stories of heroes born of the love of a god and a mortal woman. Such stories could be turned into high religious mysteries, as by Aeschylus in his Suppliant Women; into tender and reverent legends, as by Pindar in one or two odes. Euripides uses no such idealization. In play after play, Auge, Melanippe, Danae, Alope he seems to have scarified such gods, as he does now in the Ion. Legend told that Ion, the hero-ancestor of the Ionians, was the son of the Athenian princess Creusa. Creusa was married to one Xuthus, an Aeolian soldier, but the real father of Ion was the god Apollo. Euripides treats the story as if Apollo were just a lawless ravisher, utterly selfish and ready to lie when pressed, though good-natured in his way when he lost nothing by it—a sort of Alcibiades, in fact. Xuthus is a butt; a foreigner with abrupt and violent manners, lied to by Apollo, befooled by his wife, disobeyed by her maids, and eventually made happy by the belief that her illegitimate son is really his own. Creusa herself, though drawn with extraordinary sympathy and beauty, is at heart a savage.

Creusa, when she bore her child, laid him,