Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/83

Rh daughters. "Canst face mine eyes, fresh from thy deed of shame?" says the angry father in this play; and his son answers, "What is shame, when the doer feels no shame?" Euripides also treated several times legends where a god became the lover of a mortal maiden, and, as we shall see in the Ion, he loved to rouse sympathy for the maiden and contempt for the god (p. 121). In one case he even treats, through a mist of strange religious mysticism, the impossible amour of Pasiphaë of Crete with the Cretan Bull-god. It is interesting, however, to observe that there is in Euripides no trace of sympathy for the one form of perverted indulgence on which the ancient tone was markedly different from ours. It is reserved for the bestial Cyclops and Laius the accursed.

Adventure, brilliance, invention, romance and scenic effect; these together with delightful lyrics, a wonderful command over the Greek language, and a somewhat daring admixture of sophistic wisdom which sometimes took away a spectator's breath, were probably the qualities which the ordinary public had felt in Euripides' work up to the year 438. They perhaps felt also that these pleasant gifts were apt to be needlessly