Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/391

369 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 369 action of the piece ; and the love of Phaedra is, in reference to this action, only a lever set in motion by the goddess hostile to Hippolytus. It cannot be denied that this plot, as it turns upon the selfish and cruel hatred of a deity, can give but little satisfaction, notwithstanding the great beauties of the piece, especially the representation of Phaedra's passion. § 11. The Hecuba also, although a little more recent,* belongs to this class of tragedies, in which the emotion of passion, a pathos in the Greek sense of the word, is set forth in all its might and energy. The piece has been much censured, because it is deficient in unity of action, which is certainly much more important to tragedy than the unity of time or place. The censure, however, is unjust. It is only necessary that the chief character, Hecuba, should be made the centre-figure throughout the piece, and that all that happens should be referred to her, in order to bring the seemingly inconsistent action to one harmo- nious ending. Hecuba, the afflicted qi*een and mother, learns at the very beginning of the piece a new sorrow; it is announced to her that the Greeks demand the sacrifice of her daughter Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles. The daughter is torn from her mother's arms, and it is only in the willing resignation and noble resolution with which the young maiden meets her fate that we have any alleviation of the pain which we feel in common with Hecuba. Upon this, the female servant, who was sent to fetch water to bathe the dead body of Polyxena, finds on the sea-shore, washed up by the breakers, the corpse of Polydorus, the only remaining hope of his mother's declining age. The revolution, or peripeteia, of the piece consists in this, that Hecuba, though now cast down into the lowest abyss of misery, no longer gives way to fruitless wailings ; she complains now much less than she did before of this last and worst of misfortunes ; but she, a weak, aged woman, a captive, and deprived of all help, nevertheless finds means in her own powerful and active mind (for the Hecuba of Euri- pides is from first to last a woman of extraordinary boldness and free- dom of mindf) to take fearful vengeance on her perfidious and cruel enemy, the Thracian king, Polymestor. With all the craft of a woman, and by sagaciously availing herself of the weak as well as of the good side of Agamemnon's character, she is enabled not merely to entice the b. c. 423. The passage v. 649 seems to refer to the misfortunes of the Spartans at Pylos in b. c. 425. T She is also a sort of free-thinker. She says (Hecuba, 794) "that law and custom (vo/uo;) rule over the gods ; for it is in conformity with custom that we be- lieve in the gods." And in the Troades (v. 893) she prays to Zeus, whoever he may be in his inscrutable power whether he is the necessity of nature or the mind of men ; upon which Menelaus justly remarks lhat she has " innovated"' the prayers to the gods (iv%d; ixalvura;.)
 * Aristophanes ridicules the play in the Clouds, consequently in Olymp. 89. 1.