Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/177

Rh news, therefore, must have reached Athens by the end of March, 406. Euripides had lived only some eighteen months in Macedon.

The time was not long but it was momentous. After his death three plays were found, Iphigenîa in Aulis, Alcmaeon and Bacchae, sufficiently finished to be put on the stage together by his third son, the Younger Euripides. Two of them are still extant, and one, the Bacchae, remains for all time to testify to the extraordinary return of youth which came to the old poet in his last year. A "lightning before death" if ever there was one!

But let us take first the Iphigenîa in Aulis. It is a play full of problems. We can make out that it was seriously incomplete at the poet's death and was finished by another hand, presumably that of its producer. Unfortunately we do not possess even that version in a complete form. For the archetype of our MSS. was at some time mutilated, and the present end of the play is a patent forgery. But if we allow for these defects, the Iphigenîa in Aulis is a unique and most interesting example of a particular moment in the history of Greek drama. It shows the turning-point between the old fifth century tragedy and the so-called New Comedy which, in the hands of