Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/25

Rh "holds the trump card," in having Hermionê's life at his mercy: it was to be expected that Menelaus would yield, and indeed he does not refuse to do so. Orestes simply loses patience with his shifty hesitation; and his precipitating a catastrophe averted in the end only by Apollo's intervention is directly counter to the natural outcome of the plot. Again, in the Iphigeneia in Taurica, the escape of the heroine and her friends is, in the natural course of events, as much assured as in the very similar situation in the Helen: the adverse wind is a pure contretemps. Thus both poets appear to have made a gratuitous difficulty, purposely staving off the natural dénouement, sacrificing dramatic probability to, we may surely assume, a higher object.

In the remaining seven plays which end with a divine intervention, there is no knot to untie. The introduction of the deity takes place in each after the dénouement is effected. What the God does is to speak the epilogue, so to say, of the piece in the form of prophecy or ordinance. His intervention serves, not to save the credit of the dramatist, but to bring home to the spectators the religious significance of this, and, by inference, of every drama of human destiny.

The poet's object we may conceive to have been twofold:—1. To remind the audience that, if their deities were real beings, they were as real for them as for the men of the heroic age. The average Greek believed implicitly in the historical truth of the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and remembered that not only were the heroes guarded and guided at every turn by the Immortals, but that the consummation of the Iliad, the burial of Hector, and that of the Odyssey, the reconciliation of Odysseus with his subjects, were alike