Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/74

70 play is characteristic in two ways. It was clearly based on the old ritual, and it treated one of Euripides' great subjects, the passions of a suffering and savage woman.

The Daughters of Pelias was produced in 455, when the poet was twenty-nine, just a year after the death of Aeschylus and thirteen years after the first victory of Sophocles. Euripides' own first victory—we do not know the name of the successful play—did not come till 442, a year before Sophocles' masterpiece, the Antigone.

We have only two examples, and those not certain, of Euripides' work before that time. The Cyclops is a satyr-play pure and simple, and the only complete specimen of its class. It is probably earlier than the Alcestis, and is interesting because it shows Euripides writing for once without any arrière pensée, or secondary intention. It is a gay and grotesque piece, based on Homer's story of Odysseus in the Cyclops' cave. The farcical and fantastic note is firmly held, so that the climax of the story, in which the monster's eye is burnt out with a log of burning wood, is kept unreal and not disgusting. The later Euripides would probably have made it horrible and swung our sympathies violently round to the side of the victim.