Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/195

Rh Doth any feign there is a God in heaven? There is none, none!

And afterwards the hero, staggered by the injustice of things, questions Zeus himself and is, for answer, blasted by the thunderbolt. A clearer form of this same question, and one which vexed the age a good deal, was to ask whether or no the world is governed by some great Intelligence or Understanding ("Sunesis"), or, more crudely, whether the gods are "sunetoi." Euripides at times "hath deep in his hope a belief in some Understanding," and is represented in the Frogs as actually praying to it by that name; but he sometimes finds the facts against him (Hippolytus, 1105; Frogs, 893; Iph. Aul, 394a; Her., 655; Tro., 884 ff., compared with the sequel of the play). The question between polytheism and monotheism, which has loomed so large to some minds, never troubled him. He uses the singular and plural quite indifferently, and probably his "gods," when used as identical with "God" or "the Divine," would hardly even suggest to him the gods of mythology. If one is to venture a conjecture, his own feeling may, perhaps, be expressed by a line in the Orestes (418):

We are slaves of gods, whatever gods may be.