Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/381

359 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 359 prostitute, and Menelaus as a great simpleton, who, in order to get back his worthless wife, has brought so many brave men into distress and danger — and distinctly to blame and misrepresent the deed of Orestes as a crime to which he had been urged by the Delphic oracle ; whereas iEsehylus has striven to exhibit it as an unavoidable though a dreadful deed. § 2. Although Euripides, as an enlightened philosopher, might have found pleasure in showing the Athenians the folly of many of the tra- ditions which they believed in and considered as holy, yet it is somewhat strange that he all along kept close to these mythical subjects, and did not attempt to substitute for them subjects of his own invention, as his contemporary Agathon did, according to Aristotle, in his piece called " the Flower" (avdoc). It is certain that Euripides regarded these mythological traditions as merely the substratum, the canvas, on which he paints his great moral pictures without the restraint of any rules. He avails himself of the old stories in order to produce situations in which he may exhibit the men of his ovm time influenced by mental excitement and passionate emotion. There is great truth in the dis- tinction which Sophocles, according to Aristotle, made between the characters of his plays and those of Euripides, when he said that he re- presented men as they ought to be, Euripides men as they are :* for, while Sophocles' persons have all something noble and great in the"- composition, and even the less noble are in a measure justified and ennobled by the sentiments of which they are the vehicle, f Euripides, on the other hand, strips his of the ideal greatness which they claimed as heroes and heroines, and allows them to appear with all the petty pas- sions and weaknesses of people of his own time} — properties which often make a singular contrast to the grave and measured speeches and the outward pomp which the tragic cothurnus carries with it. All the characters of Euripides have that loquacity and dexterity in the use of words§ Which distinguished the Athenians of his day, and that vehe- mence of passion which, formerly restrained by the conventions of morality, was now appearing with less desire for concealment every day. They have all an extraordinary fondness for arguing, and consequently f Like the Atridae in the Ajax, Creon in the Antigone, Uhsses in the Philoctetes. TYciv are no absolute villains in Sophocles ; but in Euripides, Polymestor in the Hecuba, Menelaus in the Orestes, and the Achaean princes in the Troades, very nearly deserve that appellation. In general, every person in ancient tragedy is, to a tertiiia extent, right in his way of thinking : the absolutely insignificant and con- tenipiible occupy by no means so much space in ancient tragedy as in our own. + Thus. Euripides repivsents heroes, like Bell- rophon and Ixion, as mere misers. With similar caprice, lie turns the seven heroes warring against Thebe* into so many characters from common life, interesting enough, it is true, but not elevated above the ordinary standar.i. §i irrcipuXia., %uv'o7n;. Coup chap. XX. 7.
 * Arist. Poet. 25.