Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/196

192 That is, there are unknown forces which shape or destroy man's life, and which may be conceived as in some sense personal. But morally, it would seem, these forces are not better, but less good, than man, who at least loves and pities and tries to understand. Such is the impression, I think, left on readers of the Bacchae, the Hippolytus or the Trojan Women.

But there is one thought which often recurs in Euripides in plays of all periods, and is specially thrown in his teeth by Aristophanes. That satirist, when piling up Euripides' theatrical iniquities, takes as his comic climax "women who say Life is not Life." The reference is to passages like fr. 833, from the Phrixus:

Who knoweth if the thing that we call death Be Life, and our Life dying—who knoweth? Save only that all we beneath the sun Are sick and suffering, and those foregone Not sick, nor touched with evil any more.

(Cf. fr. 638, 816; also Helena, 1013; Frogs, 1082, 1477). The idea recurs again and again, as also does the thought that death is "some other shape of life" in the Medea and even in the Ion (Med., 1039; Ion, 1068). Nay, more, death may be the state that we unconsciously