Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/394

372 372 HISTORY OF THE that he is his father. With this view he delivers an ambiguous oracle, which induces Xuthus, the husband of Creusa, to believe that Ion is his own son, begotten before his marriage with the Athenian princess. The violence of Creusa, however, hinders the success of this plan. She endeavours to poison him, whom slie considers as her husband's bastard and as an intruder into the ancient royalty of the Erechtheida?, and Ion, protected by the gods from her attempt upon his life, is about to take a bloody revenge on the authoress of the murderous design. Upon this, the woman who took care of Ion in his infancy appears with the tokens which prove his origin, and Ion at once embraces as his mother the enemy whom he was about to punish. The worthy Xuthus, however, whom gods and men leave in his error, undoubtingly receives the stranger youth into his house and kingdom as his son and heir. It is clear that the general object of this play is to maintain undimmed and undiminished the pride of the Athenians, their au- tochthony, their pure descent from their old earth born patriarchs and national kings. The common ancestor of the Ionians who ruled in Attica must not be the son of a stranger settled in the country, an Achaean chieftain, like Xuthus, but must belong to the pure old Attic stock of the Erechtheidee. § 15. The Raging Hercules contains very definite indications that the poet composed it at a time when he began to feel the inconvenience of old age, which might easily be the case from Olymp. 89. 3. B.C. 422.* This piece is also constructed so as to produce a great effect in the way of surprise, and contains scenes — such as the appearance of the goddess Lyssa (Madness), and the representation, by means of an eccyclema, of Hercules, bound and recovering from his madness — which must have produced a powerful effect on the stage. But it is altogether want- ing in the real satisfaction which nothing but a unity of ideas per- vading the drama could produce. It is hardly possible to conceive that the poet should have combined in one piece two actions so totally different as the deliverance of the children of Hercules from the persecutions of the blood-thirsty Lycus, and their murder by the hands of their frantic father, merely because he wished to surprise the audience by a sudden and unexpected change to the precise contrary of what had gone before. We believe that the afflictions of Hercules and his family are over, when suddenly the goddess of madness appears to bring about a new and greater sorrow, and to destroy the children by the hands of the very person who had delivered them from death in the first part of the play, and that too with no apparent ground, except that Hera will give no rest to Hercules, although he has got over all the labours hitherto imposed upon him. ylgwv aodSoi xtXah? /^.vauaa-vvrcv. Compare with this Cresphontes, frag. 15, ed. MatthiS.
 * In the choral song, v. 639 foil, a vi'oto.; pot <(si}.t>v — especially in the words it <rii