Page:Euripides the Rationalist.djvu/40

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As conquered in the harder,—those who boxed

And wrestled,—cattle; and to crown the prize

A woman followed. Chancing as I did,

Base were it to forego this fame and gain!

Well, as I said, I trust her to thy care:

No woman I have kidnapped, understand!

But good hard toil has done it: here I come!

''Some day, who knows? even thou wilt praise the feat.''

Such is Heracles as he paints himself, delineating the part from his knowledge of himself and of other people's opinion about him. It should be remembered that Admetus, as Heracles now knows, is in the first agony of a widower, and that Heracles has many other friends in Pherae. Further comment seems superfluous: and if, dismissing the question how Euripides came to make him such, we ask simply what he is, we need not after this passage hesitate about the answer. He is drawn from a type well known in the age of the poet, the athlete-adventurer, the class of which a specially brilliant specimen was his supposed descendant the Heracleid Dorieus of Rhodes, the high-born ill-starred enemy whom the Athenians, having taken him prisoner, spared and liberated for his personal beauty and Olympian renown. The story of Dorieus presents the romance of such a career; the portrait of Heracles in the Alcestis, omitting for the moment his encounter with Death, offers the prose of it. Such persons, the less well-endowed or less fortunate members of the aristocracies formerly hymned by Pindar, were driven, by an education which fitted them for nothing else, to pick up what they could in a life of shifty wandering service, sometimes rising as in the case of Dorieus to the level of the condottiere, more often probably sinking, like our Heracles, to something nearer the bravo. The Athenians, notwithstanding their generosity to the Rhodian, whose singularly splendid misfortunes marked him as a proper object for a theatrical act of generosity, were by no means in the latter part of the fifth century indiscriminating cultivators of the athlete in general, and Euripides in particular had no great love for them. What he has given us in his Heracles is a portrait drawn, as it would seem, without flattery and without caricature—a high-born athlete-soldier of Argos, engaged in the service of the 'despot' Eurystheus. All that he does, still