ineffectually indeed, to deliver them, as he had been delivered himself, from the bondage of custom, from apathy or ignorance. Compelled, by the laws that regulated scenic exhibitions, to deal with the gods as the state prescribed, or the multitude required, he could only insinuate, not openly proclaim, his opinions, either on politics or religion. Yet if unsocial, he was not timid, and it is really with extraordinary boldness that he attacks soothsayers in his plays. He puts into the mouth of the ingenuous Achilles -then a youth whose heart had not been hardened by war-the following attack on Calchas the

seer:

"His lustral lavers and his salted cakes

With sorrow shall the prophet Calchas bear:
Away! The prophet !—what is he? a man

Who speaks 'mongst many falsehoods but few truths,
Whene'er chance leads him to speak true; when false,
The prophet is no more."

In the "Electra," Orestes says that he believes Apollo will justify his oracle, but that he deems lightly of human that is, of professional-prophecies. Perhaps his dislike of prophets may have received new edge and impulse from the mischief done by them in encouraging by their idle predictions the Athenians to undertake the expedition to Sicily. And a time was at hand when the dupes of the soothsayers viewed their pretensions with as small favour as Euripides himself did. Deep was the wrath in the woe-stricken city, when the worst reports of the destruction of their fleet and army at Syracuse were confirmed by eye

witnesses, against the orators who had advised, and the oracle-mongers and prophets who had guaranteed, the success of that disastrous expedition.*

66

There was, indeed, much in the Homeric theology that, however well suited to the artist, was intolerable to the philosopher. The gods themselves were criminals, and Euripides made no secret that he thought them so. "He could not," says K. O. Müller, bring his philosophical convictions into harmony with the contents of the old legends, nor could he pass over their incongruities." Yet far advanced as he was beyond his time, the time itself was not quite unprogressive. Eschylus, who belonged to an earlier generation, and Sophocles, who avoided every disturbing force as perilous to the composure of art, accepted the Homeric deities as they found them. Nevertheless faith in them was in the sear and yellow leaf, and the reverence that should accompany old age was nearly worn out. The court of Areopagus in Athens was, without any similar external violence, sharing the fate of our High Commission Court in the seventeenth century. It no longer took cognisance of every slight offence against religion; it consulted its own safety by letting the gods, in many instances, look after their own affairs. Euripides was at the most a pantheist. He believed in the unity of God, in His providence, His omnipotence, His justice, His care for human beings. Supreme mind or intelligence was his Jupiter—the destroyer of the Typhon, unreasoning faith, his Apollo. Aristophanes, who professed to believe, and * Thucydides, viii. c. 1.

not Euripides, who professed to doubt, was the real scoffer.

There is space for only a few samples of the moral opinions of Euripides. Shakespeare's reputation with posterity might have fared very scurvily had there been a great comic poet among his detractors, opposed to him in theology or politics, or jealous of the company kept by him at the Mermaid. Only impute to the author personally the sentiments he ascribes to Iago, Iachimo, Richard of Gloucester, Edmund in "Lear," or Lady Macbeth,-refer to certain things connected with his marriage or his poaching,—and the purest in morals as well as the loftiest in thought of our own scenic poets would have made as poor a figure as Euripides did in his time, whether it were on the grounds of his creed, his civic character, or his private life and conversation. "Envie," says Chaucer, in his 'Legende of Good Women,'

"Is lavender to the court alway,

For she ne parteth neither night ne day
Out of the house of Cæsar;"

and the envy of one generation becomes with the credulous the fact of another. "In the first place," as Mr Paley most justly observes, "many of his sentiments which may be said to wear an equivocal complexion, as the famous one,

"If the tongue swore, the heart abides unsworn,"

have been misconstrued as undermining the very foundations of honour and virtue. They are assumed to be A. C. vol. xii.

E

general statements, whereas they really have only a special reference to existing circumstances, or are at least susceptible of important modifications." The same may be said of a verse of Euripides that Julius Cæsar was fond of quoting;

"If ever to do ill be good, 'tis for a crown;

For that 'tis lawful to push right aside :

In other things let virtue be the guide."

But the Roman perverted to his own ends a sentiment well suited to the character-a false and violent oneof the speaker, Eteocles.*

Some injury has been done to Euripides by the abundance of fragments from his plays that are preserved. Undoubtedly many of these "wear an equivocal complexion," as, for example-

or

"What must be done by mortals may

be done;"

"Nor shameful aught unless one deem it so;"

but we know not the speakers of the words, nor the circumstances under which they were spoken.

What are the proofs of an often-repeated assertion that Euripides was a sensual poet? On the score of indecency the comic poets are rather damaging witnesses to themselves. Have the Germans, have we ourselves, no poets infinitely more culpable in this respect than Euripides? A very third-rate contributor to the English drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would the Greek poet have been, had he written nothing worse than we find * Phoenician Women, v. 573.

ones.

in his extant plays or the fragments of his lost And on this delicate question we have a most unexceptionable witness in his favour-no less a person than the decent and pious Aristophanes himself! The "Phædras" and "Stheneboeas" of Euripides, we are told by him, were dangerous to morals.* Yet in another of his comedies he says that in consequence of Euripides's plays women mended their manners.† Here, with a vengeance, has "a Daniel come to judg ment!"—the woman-hater, it seems, had been preaching with some success to a female congregation. The purity of the poet's morals, so far as they can be inferred from his writings, is displayed in his Hippolytus, in the chaste Parthenopaus in the "Suppliant Women," in the Achilles of his "Iphigenia," and above all, in the character of the boy Ion. "Consecrated to Apollo, and devoting himself wholly to the service of the altar, he speaks of his patron god in language that would not dishonour a better cause. One cannot help feeling that the poet must have been at heart a good man who could make a virtuous asceticism appear in so amiable a light."+

"Let me tell you," says Councillor Pleydell, "that Glossin would have made a very pretty lawyer, had he not been so inclined to the knavish side of his profession." It cannot be denied that Euripides has some tendency of the sort. He employs frequently, and seemingly without much compunction, the arts of falsehood and deceit. The tricksters in his tragedy "Frogs," 1049. "Thesmoph." 398.

*

Paley, Preface to Euripides.