Page:Euripides the Rationalist.djvu/100

84 depicted, and lax in general as to intellectual belief. The local varieties of cult and legend could stand together on no other supposition. To make a jest for the moment of the almighty father and his offspring was an excellent means to keep men in that flaccid, wavering habit of mind by which Zeus this, Apollo that, and Artemis the other, could be accepted according to the ritual of the place or shrine where the worshipper happened to be. It was another thing to indict these personages in the name of intelligence, and with constant incitements to clarify your thoughts and arrange your propositions.

Thus the conditions of the time and his own talents combined to obtain for Euripides the permission to speak from the stage of tragedy, and to speak there in his own sense. But it did not therefore follow that he could speak there without disguise, nor that he would choose to do so, if he could. As things stood in Athens, a certain disguise or semblance of disguise was desirable alike for safety and for effect. It was necessary that the veil should be transparent for all who cared to look through it; and this it was sure to be from the nature of the case. Take the Alcestis as an example. The legend commemorates a miracle wrought on behalf of a man specially beloved and favoured by the Pythian Apollo. Now there cannot have been a man in Athens interested in literature, not any one to whom the tragic festival was more than an amusement for the eye, who was unaware that Euripides laughed at the miracles of legend and regarded the pretensions of Delphi with scorn. It is possible indeed, or probable, that when the Alcestis was exhibited, he had not yet delivered himself on the stage so frankly as he does in some of the extant plays. He had perhaps not yet denounced the Pythian deity as the accomplice and instigator of murders, which he does in the Electra, the Orestes, and the Andromache, or as a lying, shuffling, cheating ravisher, which he does in the Ion. Probably he became bolder as the new speculations spread wider and were more widely avowed. But we have remains enough of his work at all periods to see that its tendency had been the same throughout; nor to his fellow-citizens, as we have already said, was the stage the only or the most authentic source of information about him,