Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/401

379 LITERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE. 379 the Bacchae was performed for the first time. To this there is an allusion in the words of the chorus* — " Happy Pieria, thee Bacchus honours, and he will come in order to dance in thee with Bacchic revelry ; he will conduct his Maenads over the swift flowing Axius and the Lydias, whose streams pour forth blessings." Euripides would hardly have celebrated these rivers in such a manner had not Pella, ihe residence of the Macedonian kings, been situated between them, and had not the court of the king - come to Pieria in order to bear a part in the dramatic festival celebrated there. The Bacchce, or Bacchanalians, developes the story of Pentheus, who was so fearfully punished for his attempt to keep the Dionysian rites from being- introduced into Thebes, and gives a lively and compre- hensive picture of the impassioned and enthusiastic nature of this worship; at the same time, this tragedy furnishes us with remarkable conclusions in resrard to the religious opinions of Euripides at the close of his life. In this play he appears, as it were, converted into a positive believer, or, in other words, convinced that religion should not be ex- posed to the subtilties of reasoning; that the understanding of man cannot subvert ancestral traditions which are as old as time ; that the philosophy which attacks religion is but a poor philosophy, and so forth ;-f- doctrines which are sometimes set forth with peculiar impres- siveness in the speeches of the old men, Cadmus and Teiresias, or, on the other hand, form the foundation of the whole piece : although it must be owned that Euripides, with the vacillation which he always dis- plays in such matters, ventures, on the other hand, to explain the offen- sive story about the second birth of Bacchus from the thigh of Zeus, by a very frigid pun on a word which he assumes to have been misunder- stood in the first instance.^ § 24. The case is different with the Iphigenia at Aulis, which has obviously not come down to us in so perfect a state from the hands of the author. In its really genuine and original parts, this Iphigenia is one of the most admirable of this poet's tragedies, and it is based upon such a noble idea that we might put. it on the same footing with the works of his better days, such as the Medea or the Hecuba. This idea is, that a pure and elevated mind, like that of Iphigenia, can alone find a way out of all the intricacies and entanglements caused by the pas- sions and efforts of powerful, wise, and brave men, contending with and running counter to one another. In this play Euripides has had the skill to invest the subject with such intense interest by depicting the fruitless efforts of Agamemnon to save his child, the too late compunc- f See v. 200, euih tropigoptfffix ro766.
 * By an interchange of /x.r,^os and ofin^os, v. 292.