Page:Euripides the Rationalist.djvu/95

Rh likely that any one would offer to the Lyceum a Marriage in Cana or Jairus' Daughter, even if there were a chance that it would be accepted. But it is notorious, although easily forgotten in practice, that in Athens at the time of which we are speaking the conditions, positive and negative, were exactly the reverse of these. Drama was essentially the vehicle, not of pleasure, though this was part of its purpose and one of its necessary instruments, but of instruction and controversy on the most exciting themes of the day. Comedy dealt mainly with politics, tragedy always directly or indirectly with religion, and with morals as related to religion. When Aristophanes in the Frogs presents the personages of Aeschylus and Euripides, each defending himself as an artist and assailing the other, he assumes as a matter of course that the rivals must be judged as public preachers, as aiming deliberately at the spread of certain opinions and the production of a certain character in their auditors. Upon this comparison he throws all the weight of the discussion, and gives to other matters, such matters as we should call literary, a treatment altogether subordinate and scarcely serious. In the fore-front of the argument he places a pair of contrasted prayers, both tragedians coming forward as representatives of religion, of two opposed religions. Aeschylus, representing the class of which he had in fact been the greatest prophet, the class who desired to deepen and spiritualize the legendary traditions without breaking with them, prays in sacramental form to Demeter of Eleusis 'who feedest my soul', and asks to be found worthy of her mysteries. Euripides, rejecting the gods of tradition for 'a mintage of his own', asks of 'Air and the turn of the Tongue, Intelligence and the nostril of Perception' to make him 'a true critic of every subject presented to his sense'; nor does this petition deviate beyond the reasonable limits of professed parody from some which the tragedian himself finds occasion to put in the mouth of his characters. The creed of Euripides was that of nascent philosophy, science, and rationalism; between which and the worship of the popular gods there was a war to which modern religious controversies offer no parallel. It was not merely that the current legends assumed as possible and true things which science rejected as incredible; but the whole character of pagan tradition, loose,