Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/400

378 378 HISTORY OF THE pieces which Euripides brought out at Athens,* but it is certainly by no means one of the least valuable of his works. In general, it would be very difficult to discern in the last pieces of Euripides any marks of the feebleness of age, which seems, on the whole, to have had little effect on the poets of antiquity. There are great beauties in the Phcenissae, such as the splendid scene at the beginning, — in which Antigone, at- tended by an aged domestic, surveys the army of the seven heroes from a tower of the palace, — and the entrance of Polyneices into the hostile city ; we might add the episode about Menoeceus, were it not a mere repetition of the scene about Macaria in the Heracleidse ; besides, Euripides has made too much use of these voluntary self-sacrifices to produce any striking effect by means of them. Notwithstanding, how- ever, all the beauties of the details and all the abundance of the ma- terials (for the piece contains, in addition to the fall of the hostile brother, also the expulsion of CEdipus and Antigone's two heroic re- solves to perform the funeral rites for her brother and to accompany her banished fatherf), we miss in this play, too, that real unity and harmony of action which can result only from an jdea springing from the depths of the heart and ripened by the genial warmth of the feelings. § 23. Three pieces, of which two are still extant, were brought out by the younger Euripides, a son, or more probably a nephew, of the celebrated tragedian, and were performed, after the death of the author, as new plays at the great Dionysia. These were the Iphigenia at Aulis, the Alcmaeon, a lost play,J and the Bacchae. Of these three plays the BacchcB was, as far as we can see, completed by the author himself; not, however, immediately for Athens, but for representation in Macedonia. Euripides spent the last years of his life, when Athens was groaning under the weight of the Peloponnesian war, at the court of the Macedonian king, Archelaus, who was not a man of exalted moral character, but a politic ruler who had taken great pains in civilizing his country, and for that object had collected around himself a considerable circle of Greek poets and musicians. It is the common tradition of antiquity that Euripides died here. The worship of Bac- chus was very prevalent in Macedonia, especially in Pieria near Olympus, where, at a later period, Olympias, the mother of Alexander, roamed about with the Mimallones and Clodones ; Archelaus may have cele- brated the feast of Bacchus here with dramatic spectacles,§ at which f One does not see, however, how Antigone could find it possible to carry both her resolutions into effect at once. J This was the 'AXe^i'si S;a Kofnv&ov, for the 'AXxfcaiuiy S/a 'Vatfi'bos was brought out by Euripides along with the Alcestis. § As he also instituted dramatic contests at Dion in Pieria in honour of Zeus and the Muses. Diodor. Sic xvii. 16. Wesseling on xvi. 56.
 * Schof. on Aristoph. Frogs, 53.