Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/141

Rh The play is a picture of the inner side of a great conquest, a thing which then, even more than now, formed probably the very heart of the dreams of the average unregenerate man. It is a thing that seemed beforehand to be a great joy, and is in reality a great misery. It is conquest seen when the heat of battle is over, and nothing remains but to wait and think; conquest not embodied in those who achieved it—we have but one glimpse of the Greek conquerors, and that shows a man contemptible and unhappy—but in those who have experienced it most fully, the conquered women.

We have so far treated the Trojan Women as though it stood alone. In reality of course it belonged to a group, and one cannot but ask what the other plays were, and whether their themes were such as could stand beside this and not be shrivelled into commonplace or triviality. Fortunately, though the plays are both lost, we know something about them. They were Palamedes and Alexander; and both are on great subjects. The Palamedes tells of the righteous man condemned by an evil world; the Alexander has for its hero a slave.

Slavery had always been one of the subjects