Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/94

90 all we hear is that they spoke against one another, but both were for the murder! At the end of the Hecuba, as at the end of the Medea, we are wrought to a pitch of excitement at which incredible legends begin to seem possible. History related that the Queen of Troy, maddened by her wrongs, had been transformed into a kind of Hell-hound with fiery eyes, whom sailors saw at night prowling round the hill where she was stoned. In her bloody revenge on the only enemy she can trap into her power, she seems already to have become this sort of being in her heart, and when her blind and dying victim prophesies the coming transformation, it seems natural. One only feels that perhaps the old miraculous stories are true after all. The one light that shines through the dark fury of the Hecuba is the lovely and gentle courage, almost the joy, with which the virgin martyr, Polyxena, goes to her death.

I have taken the Hecuba slightly before its due date, because of its return with increased bitterness to the tone and subject of the Medea. We will now go back. There had been in the interim a change in the poet's mind, or, at the least, a strong clash of conflicting emotions. The Medea was produced