Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/397

375 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 375 mythical stories to the level of every-day life. He has invented an incident, not altogether improbable — that yEgisthus married Electra to a common countryman, in order that her children might never gain power or influence enough to endanger his life — and this enables the poet to put together a set of scenes representing domestic arrangements of the most limited and trifling kind. The king's daughter spends her time in labours of housewifery, not so much from need, as in a spirit of defiance, in order to show how ill she is treated by her mother; she represents an economical manager, who scolds her husband for bringing into their poor cottage guests of too great expectations ; she tells him he must go out and get something to eat from an old friend of his, for it is impossible to obtain anything from her father's house. Euripides considers the murder of iEgisthus and Clytemnestra as proceeding from the vindictive spirit of the brother and sister; they bitterly regret it as soon as done, and even the Dioscuri, who ap pear as dii ex machina, censure it as the unwise act of the wise god Apollo. § 19. In the concluding scene of the Electra,* Euripides hints at an alteration in the story of Helen, which he worked out shortly after (Olymp. 91. 4. B. c. 412) in a separate play, the Helena^ in which this personage, so often abused by Euripides, is on a sudden repre- sented as a most faithful wife, a pattern of female virtue, a most noble and elevated character. This is effected by assuming and arbi- trarily adapting to his own purpose an idea started by Stesichorus,J that the Trojans and Achaeans fought for a mere shadow of Helen. Of course it is not to be imagined that Euripides was in earnest when he adopted this idea, and that he considered this form of the tradition as the true and genuine one ; he uses it merely for this tragedy, and, as we may see in the Orestes, soon returns to the easier and more con- genial representation of Helen as a worthless runaway wife. The Helena turns entirely on the escape of this heroine from Egypt, where the young king wishes to compel her to marry him. Her deliverance is effected entirely by her own cunning plans, and Menelaus is only a subordinate instrument in carrying them into execution. The country t The Helena was performed along with the Andromeda (Schol. Ravenn. on Aristoph. Thesm. 1012); and the Andromeda came out in the eighth year before ♦ he Frogs of Aristophanes {Schol. on the Frogs, 53), which appeared in Olymp. 93. 3. b. c. 405 The Andromeda is parodied in the Thesmop/wriazuscs (Olymp. 92. 1. b. c. 4! 1), as a piece brought out the year before ; and in several passages of the same play, Aristophanes also ridicules the Helena: consequently, the Helena must have been brought out Olymp. 91. 4. B. c. 412. This applies very well to the violent invectives agai, st the soothsayers (v. 744 folU, probably occasioned by the recent failure of the Sicilian expedition, which (according to Thucydides and Aris- tophanes) the soothsayers of Athens had especially urged the people to undertake. I On this see Chap. XIV. § 5.
 * V. 1290.