Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/419

Rh characters words that reflected upon the received belief in the gods, and on the providential government of the universe. But, in the first place, it is dangerous to attribute to the poet all that he represents as the reflections of characters in a drama; and, in the second place, if they are to be taken as the expressions of the poet's own sentiments, we cannot but sympathise with a spirit which felt the weight of the unsolved riddle of life, and rejected as impossible many of the solutions which were so easily admitted, by his contemporaries. One of these speculations, ridiculed by Aristophanes, seems to show a profound insight into the supreme difficulty—"Who knows whether our life is not a death, our death a life?" The other sentence so often brought up against him, once even in a law court, to show that his oath could not be trusted— "My tongue has sworn, but my mind is bound by no oath,"—is put into the mouth of Hippolytus, who nevertheless braves death rather than break the oath. If again there are many evil things said of women in his plays, there are also many splendid testimonies to their high qualities, and the noble courage and devotion of Alcestis, Polyxena, Iphigeneia and Macaria. are proofs that Euripides could rise to the highest conception of womanly excellence. It must be remembered, moreover, that the literary activity of Euripides fell for the most part in the period immediately preceding the Peloponnesian war and during that war itself. It was a time in which party feeling ran high, and it would seem that