Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/396

374 374 HISTORY OF THE certainty that it was brought out Olymp. 91. 1. b. c. 415,* is the most irregular of all the extant pieces of Euripides. It is nothing more than a picture of the horrors which befall a conquered city and of the cruelties exercised by arrogant conquerors, though it is continually hinted that the victors are in reality more unhappy than the vanquished. The distribution of the Trojan women among the Achreans; the selec- tion of the prophetic maiden, Cassandra, to be the mistress of Aga- memnon, whose death she prophesies; the sacrifice of Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles, Astyanax torn from his mother's arms in order that he may be thrown from the battlements of the city walls ; then the strange contest between Hecuba and Helen before Menelaus, in which he pretends to desire to bring the authoress of all the calamities to a severe account, but is clearly in his heart actuated by different motives, and is willing to take his faithless wife home with him ; lastly, the burning of the city, which forms the grand finale of the piece ; what are all these but a series of significant pictures, unfolded one after the other and submitted to the contemplation of the reflective spectator ? The remarkable feature, however, in this play is, that the prologue goes a good way beyond the drama itself, and contains the proper conclusion of the whole; for in it the deities, Athena and Poseidon, determine between themselves to raise a tempest as the Greeks are returning home and so make them pay for all the sins they have committed at Troy. In order to gain an end which will satisfy the intentions of the poet, we must suppose that this compact is really fulfilled at the end of the piece. We almost feel ourselves compelled to conjecture that we have lost the epilogue, in which some deity, Poseidon or Athena, ap- peared as the deus ex machina, and described the destruction of the fleet as in the act of taking place ; there might also have been a per- spective view, such as that which we have pointed out in several other pieces (§ 5 note), representing the sea raging and the fleet foundering; and thus there would be contrasted with the burning city another pic- ture, necessary to give a suitable conclusion to the ideas developed in the drama and to satisfy the moral requisitions suggested by it. § 18. We must next speak of the Electra t which must obviously be assigned to the period of the Sicilian expedition.! In this piece Euri- pides goes farther than in any other in his endeavour to reduce the old likewise referred to the Trojan war. an the fleet which sailed from Athens to Sicily ; and the following lines possibly refer to the charge of impiety under which Alcibiades then laboured.
 * In conjunction with two other pieces, the Alexander and the Palamedes, which