Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/384

362 362 HISTORY OF THE parties, ^ir lie had actually found the means of reconciling and uniting in himself the old deep-rooted morality and the more enlightened views of the age. That the Athenians were conscious of this, and that in his life-time Euripides had not so many partizans as we might have supposed, may be 'seen in the fact that, although he wrote a great number of plays (in all ninety-two),* he did not gain nearly so many tragic victories as Sophocles. t § 4. We may connect with these remarks on the developement of the thoughts in the tragedies of Euripides, some observations on their form or outward arrangement, since it may easily be shown how nearly this is connected with his mode of treating the subjects. There are two elements in the outward form of tragedy which are almost entirely due to Euripides — the prologue and the dens ex machina, as it is called. In the prologue, some personage, a god or a hero, tells in a monologue who he is, how the action is going on, what has happened up to the present moment, to what point the business has come, nay more, if the prologuer is a god, also to what point it is destined to be carried, j Every unprejudiced judge must look upon these prologues as a retro- grade step from a more perfect form to one comparatively defective. It is doubtless much easier to show the state of affairs by a detached nar- rative of this kind than by speeches and dialogues which proceed from the action of the piece ; but the very fact that these narratives have nothing to do with the context of the drama, but are only a make-shift of the poet, is also a reason why the form of the drama should suffer from them. That Euripides himself probably felt this appears from the manner in which he has been at the pains of justifying, or at least ex- cusing, this sort of prologue in the Medea, one of the oldest of his re- maining plays. The nurse of Medea there says, after having recounted the hard fate of her mistress and the resentment which it has excited in her, that she has herself been so overcome with grief on Medea's ac- count, that she is possessed with a longing to proclaim to earth and heaven her mistress's unhappy lot.§ Euripides, however, with his peculiar tendencies, could not well have dispensed with these prologues. As it is his sole object to represent men under the influence of passion, he found it necessary to lay before the spectator a concise statement of the sidered genuine. Euripides did not gain a victory till Olymp. 84. 3. b. c. 441. His victories amounted on the whole to five ; according to some writers, to fifteen. Sophocles gained eighteen, twenty, or twenty-four victories. J For example, in the Ion, the Hippolytus, and the Bacchse ; in the Hecuba, too, the shade of Polydorus appears with the divine power of foretelling the future. In the Alcestis, however, the whole form of the prologue is different. In the Troades the prologue, included in the dialogue between Poseidon arid Athena, goes a good way beyond the action of the piece. Comp. § 16. § Eurip. Med. 56 foil.
 * Of which seventy-five are spoken of as extant ; and of these three were not con-