Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/27

Rh plays in which the deus ex machinâ appears, the speech of the deity has special reference to Athens and her future. In the Ion, Athena proclaims the divine origin of the Ionian race, and foretells the greatness of her colonial empire. In the Suppliants, the foreign policy of Athens is vindicated, and Athena puts her for ever in the right as against Argos. In the Iphigeneia in Taurica, the Orestes, and the Electra, the origin of some of her religious institutions, particularly of the sacred court of the Areopagus, is stamped with divine sanction. In the Helen, a passing allusion makes an island on the Attic coast holy ground. In the Rhesus, the Muses are proclaimed authors of the inspiration of the poets and religious teachers of Athens, and the rites of the Mysteries are declared to have been taught from heaven.

Each such drama, in which the storm and stress of human struggle and suffering is closed by a note of peace and divine assurance and far-reaching promise, became an object-lesson in patriotism. Athens would seem better worth living for and dying for, when men realized that they held her in joint-possession with Gods, when they recognised that, in guarding as a sacred trust her immemorial institutions, in celebrating her splendid festivals, they were sealing to themselves the blessings intertwined with these, when they grasped the thought that in planning, toiling, and fighting for her, they were fellow-workers with Athena, Apollo, and the Twin Brethren.

As M. Decharme acutely observes, "Aristotle, who regards the introduction of supernatural machinery as perfectly legitimate 'for whatever is outside the limits of the action of