Page:Frogs (Murray 1912).djvu/138

130 P. 88, l. 1196, Erasinides.]—One of the commanders at Arginusae. There was one piece of bad luck that Oedipus missed.

P. 88, l. 1200, One umbrella.]—Literally "one oil cruse." An ancient Athenian carried a cruse of olive oil about with him, both to anoint himself with after washing and to eat like butter with his food. Naturally he was apt to lose it, especially when travelling. I can find no object which both ancient Greeks and modern Englishmen would habitually use and lose except an umbrella.

The point of this famous bit of fooling is, I think, first, that Euripides' tragic style is so little elevated that umbrellas and clothes-bags are quite at home in it; secondly, that there is a certain monotony of grammatical structure in Euripides' prologues, so that you can constantly finish a sentence by a half-line with a verb in it.

The first point, though burlesquely exaggerated, is true and important. Euripides' style, indeed, is not prosaic. It is strange that competent students of Greek tragic diction should ever have thought it so. But it is very wide in its range, and uses very colloquial words by the side of very romantic or archaic ones—a dangerous and difficult process, which only a great master of language can successfully carry through. Cf. the criticism on the 'light weight' of his lines, below, pp. 97 ff.

As to the second point, it is amusing to make out the statistics. Of the extant Greek tragedies, the following can have stuck on to one of the first ten lines of the prologue: Aesch. Prom. 8, Sept. 6, Eum. 3 (a good one,