Euripides

EURIPIDES (c. 484-407), the third of the great Greek trage dians, apart from his success as a playwright—he held the stage for 60o years—is a figure of much significance in human history. The date of his death can be fixed. He produced the Orestes in 408 B.C., but was dead before Aristophanes began writing the Frogs (produced Jan. 405 B.e.) and before the Dionysia of March 406, when we hear that Sophocles, in the Proagon, brought his Chorus on without garlands in mourning for his great rival. His year of birth, however, as usual with famous men in antiquity, seems to have been a matter of conjecture. One tradition groups the three tragedians round the battle of Salamis in 48o B.C.: Aeschylus fought in the ranks, Sophocles danced in the Boys' Chorus, Euripides was born. This has the air of a Hellenistic literary "combination," more convenient to the memory than strictly historical. More authentic perhaps is the date given by the Parian Marble, 484 though, since that chronicle (in scribed 264 B.e.) puts for 484: "Euripides born; Aeschylus' first victory," and for 455 "Aeschylus' death; Euripides' first pro duction," this dating also may be a "combination." At any rate he must have been over 20 by the time of that first production; and this may be the ground of the statements of Philochorus that he was "more than 70," and Eratosthenes that he was "75" when he died.

Euripides has had always a chequered fate. During his life he was famous throughout Greece, but won only four first prizes out of 22 competitions. He was incessantly assailed by the comedians, especially by Aristophanes in the Acharnians (423), the Thesmophoriazusae (41I), which is largely made up of parodies of Euripides, and the Frogs (4o5), which contains an elaborate comparison of his art with that of Aeschylus. Yet an obvious liking and admiration enter into the ridicule, and the attacks are not quite consistent with one another. He is too real istic, dressing his exiled kings in rags; he is too romantic, with his disguised princes and inspired princesses. His heroes talk the lan guage of common life : his diction is all tragic tags. He is an unbeliever, rejecting the gods and worshipping Aether or Intelli gence ; he is an unintelligible mystic with his doctrine that "Life is not life." He is too austere ; he is dangerously immoral. His lyrics are parodied—and beautifully parodied—partly for metrical licences, partly for their extreme melodiousness. The fact is that Euripides, as Aristophanes repeatedly says, was essentially rows, and ao41a was a word of wide range. His intellect broke the bounds of custom not in one direction but in many.

Similarly in modern times he is apt to be treated almost as a personal enemy by the type of scholar which dreads unortho doxy or which dislikes elaborate clarity (aa(M'ivECa) of style: while by another he is idealized for the most various and contra dictory reasons : as a rationalist, a realist, a mystic ; as the in ventor of romance; as a dramatist who ought to have written in prose, as a great lyric poet who cared little for drama. Elmsley remarks that he is "marvellously addicted to contradicting him self"; Swinburne calls him "a botcher"; Schlegel treats him as the wrecker of Greek classic poetry ; while Aristotle, in spite of serious criticisms in detail, calls him "the most tragic of the poets." Milton profoundly admires him, and Goethe asks indig nantly whether all the nations of the world since his time have produced one playwright worthy to hand him his slippers.

This striking discord of opinion goes back to a discord in the poet himself. Euripides was a child of that great intellectual awakening which made 5th century Athens a new era in the history of mankind. There arose after the Persian War a wide spread realization of the value of aockla, "wisdom" or "knowl edge," with its companion &pFT1i, "virtue," and concomitantly a whole generation of "educators" or Sophistae, ready to make men wise in all the varieties of wisdom: science, music, art, poetry, history, philosophy or politics. Euripides is said to have been a pupil of Anaxagoras, who had proved the existence of air as a substance, taught that the sun was not a god but a mass of incandescent metal, incredibly large ; that the order in the uni verse was produced by Mind or Thought (Noes). He was a close friend of Protagoras who confessed that he knew nothing about the gods; studied the principles of language and of human society; emphasized the distinction between Nature (4vacs) and Custom (Noµos) and the extreme relativity of all human judgements. And we are told that Socrates himself never went to the theatre unless there was a play by Euripides; then he would walk as far as the Peiraeeus to see it.

Thus Euripides belonged to the sophoi, and his sophia startled the old-fashioned Athenian now in one way and now in another. At the same time the art at which he worked was the most rigid and old-fashioned of all the great arts. A painter or sculptor or lyric poet was, comparatively speaking, free. But a tragedian could choose neither his form nor his subject. He must compose in a traditional pattern, based on a religious ritual and exhibited on the festival of Dionysus under the presidency of his priest; his subject is always some traditional story of heroes or gods, and is mostly a representation of the origin of some religious rite, the Torch-race at the Prometheia, the Burial of Ajax at the Aianteia, the mourning service for Hippolytus, etc.

The clash is obvious. Indeed to an Englishman there is danger of overemphasizing it. For we must remember that questions of personal belief or unbelief mattered little in the ancient world. Religion was chiefly a matter of ritual or practice, and Euripides himself held, probably as an ancestral privilege, the positions of "fire-bearer" and "cup-bearer" in the worship of the Delian Apollo. Nevertheless there was evidently a certain conflict be tween the poet's audacious questioning and original mind and the stately and antique art-form in which he laboured.

Qualities of his Art.

As an artist he seems to have liked formality. In Sophocles we can see a movement towards natural ness in language and composition. There is sometimes elision at the end of the verse; there is variety in the length of speeches in dialogue; there is much colloquial idiom. In Euripides there is a return to formality. With all his variety of invention and his resolute sincerity in the treatment of character, he keeps more closely even than Aeschylus to the art-f orm imposed by the ancient Dionysiac ritual (see DRAMA: Greek). His matter, so to speak, is not conventionalized, but his form is. Each play, as a rule, opens with one solitary figure, generally supernatural or half supernatural, in the darkness before dawn, speaking a prologue. One thinks of the prorrhesis spoken by the hierophant bef ore a sacred ceremony. Artistically this serves an important purpose. It makes the atmosphere and starts the play in extreme dignity and quiet. Thereafter carefully, by set stages, the action quick ens, rises to climax after climax, and then sinks again to calm in the last scene. That last scene is often like the first. In about half the plays it contains the epiphany (generally on a machina in the air) of a god or goddess who calms the strife, explains or half-explains the mystery, reconciles the combatants, of the play itself, and by foretelling the future fates of the characters gradu ally brings the performance down from the stir of drama to the calm of narrative. This peaceful end, or Karaa-rpo4.n , was almost essential in Greek art. Later ages, which liked a bustling first scene and a "strong curtain" have been puzzled by the prologue and dens ex machina, and have imagined that they were mere mechanical expedients by which an unskilful dramatist contrived to "cut the knots" of his story. The view is unhistorical and un tenable; in scarcely any case is the theophany really used to "cut a knot" : in some cases (e.g., I ph. Taur. ff.) a difficulty is invented in order to give an excuse for the theophany.

Another element in the ritual of the dying Year God, is highly developed in Euripides, viz., the messenger who announces the irhOos. His entrance is carefully prepared, so as to keep us hanging on his word§. His speech is a formal recitation, con structed on rhetorical principles and highly effective on the stage, but with no attempt at "naturalness." The scenes of dialogue, again, are formal. There is seldom any ordinary conversation. (The one fragment of prose from the blinded Thracian in the Hecuba [1,091 ff.] seems to aim not at realism but at an artistic shock.) There are scenes in which long speech answers long speech, each closed by two formal lines of Chorus with an effect like a chord of music ; and there are scenes in which single line answers single line, like the clashing of swords. This highly wrought form was part of the poet's aocla.

Most significant of all, the Chorus, which in Aeschylus' earliest plays occupied half the performance and was reduced by Soph ocles in the Oedipus Rex to less than one-fifth, increases again in the later plays of Euripides, both in length and in importance. In the Troades and Bacchae the Chorus is practically protagonist. By realistic standards of course the Chorus is grotesquely un dramatic, and Sophocles had tactfully minimized its obtrusiveness. By other standards it is not only the rock out of which tragedy was hewn, it has a beauty and dramatic power which are all its own. Euripides uses it for all it is worth, casting aside verisimili tude for the sake of something greater.

The Chorus is sometimes described as "an ideal spectator." This means that it is there to express, in music and yearning of the body, an emotion which is not the emotion of one particular person at one moment of the play but something more impersonal and eternal. Examples would be the Ocean Spirits in Aeschylus' Prometheus, expressing the anguish of the world ; the Bacchae of Euripides with their mystic worship ; the Trojan women, like "half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow"; or the Old Men who dream dreams in the Heracles. The Chorus in Euripides often seems to float, as it were, between earth and heaven. Sometimes they bring comfort to us from that world of music where "meta phor, as we call it, is the very stuff of life" ; at times by some intensity of emotion they are shaken into personal life and feeling: as when at the child-murder in the Medea they beat vainly against the barred door.

This strictness of convention in part emphasizes the conflict of which we have spoken, in part it lifts the poetry above it. The conflict is by no means all to the bad. The artistic flaw was often compensated by a gain in depth, in observation and in pas sion. Euripides' revolt against custom took various forms. At one time he would make a strangely ingenious and adventurous plot (Telephus*, Ph. Aul.) ; at another he would raise problems of morality or religion (BellerophonteL*, Cressae*, Heracles) ; he would make use, austere by our standards but fuller than any previous dramatist, of the motive of love (Andromeda*, Hippo lytus), sometimes in abnormal forms (Cretes*, Aeolus*) ; he would study the intrigues and vindictiveness of political strife (Orestes, Andromache) ; or again he would deal with the wrongs and revenges of woman, or the madness of war (Medea, Troades). Sometimes he would take a heroic story as it stood, and show not its heroic quality but its barbarity (Electra).

This variety of creative imagination explains, so far as it needs explanation, the great variety of philosophic statements or gnomae which can be found in Euripides, and which cause him to be such a frequent source of quotations. There is of course no in consistency in making one hero, when staggered by the injustice of the world, exclaim: "There are no gods!" (frag. 286), and another, in a different situation, comment on the folly of the man who denies the gods. But Euripides does seem to take the full licence of a dramatist in letting his thoughts run strongly first in this direction and then in that. A dramatist illustrates his problems ; he is not bound to commit himself to a decision about them.

His Life.

An anonymous and shapeless Life and Race of Euripides is found, in varying forms, in some of the mss. It is derived from earlier sources, notably from a Life by Satyrus, an Aristotelian of the later 3rd century B.C., and an Attic Chronicle by the i ether earlier antiquarian, Philochorus. A considerable fragment of Satyrus discovered on a papyrus in 1911 enables us to see how unhistorical most of the anecdotic tradition is. Much of it is made up simply of the inventions of comedy treated as facts. Thus, the plot of the Thesmophoriazusae (in which the women at their secret festival plot t3 murder Euripides, because he has so "shown them up" on the stage and he sends his hirsute father-in law disguised among them as a spy) is seriously repeated as his tory by Satyrus, Gellius, and the Life. Equally fictitious must be the story that he had two wives, like his own Neoptolemus, and that both deceived him, like his own Aerope. In the Thes mophoriazusae, produced when he was 73, he is still married to his first wife, Melite, and there is no hint of matrimonial trouble. Neither need we believe that he was torn in pieces by hounds, like Actaeon, or by wild women, like Pentheus. We know from Philo chorus that his mother Cleito, was "of very high family" ; but for some reason it was a recognized joke to say she was a greengrocer and sold inferior greens. This may come from a much-quoted line in Melanippe the Wise*: "It is not my word but my mother's word," the said mother being an authority on magic herbs and simples. Turn the heroine's mother into the poet's mother, and the potent herbs into "wild cabbages," and the fable is made.

For reliable information even Philochorus, our best authority, must have been poorly off. He had no collection of letters and papers, like a modern biographer. He would have the public records of the plays performed at Athens year by year ; he might find a few mentions of Euripides in odd inscriptions. If he wrote about 30o B.C. there was no one living who could remember a man *An asterisk denotes a lost play.

who died in 406 B.c. There might at most be men of 7o whose fathers had spoken to Euripides and whose grandfathers had known him well. Such memories as we have are all about the poet's old age, and all very external. He wore a long beard and had moles on his face. He lived much alone and hated society. He had crowds of books and did not like women. He lived in Salamis, in a cave with two openings and a beautiful sea view, and there you could see him "all day long, thinking to himself and writing, for he simply despised anything that was not great and high." He was the son of Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides, a merchant, and born at Phlya, a village in the centre of Attica, a seat of temples to Demeter, Dionysus and the Dread Goddesses, and a mystery cult of Eros. If born in 484, he would be about eight when the ruined walls of Athens were rebuilt after the Persian in vasion; at he may have seen Aeschylus' Persae; at 17 he pretty certainly saw that poet's Seven against Thebes and was much in fluenced by it. In 466 he began his military service with garrison duty in frontier forts, and while his spear and shield were still new received the news of the massacre of i o,000 Athenian settlers by the Thracian tribes of the Strymon. No wonder one of his earliest plays was about Rhesus, the Thracian hero.

His First Plays.

We hear that he was an athlete ; he won prizes both in Athens and Eleusis. He also painted ; and paintings by his hand were found by later antiquarians in Megara. His first play was performed in 455 B.c., on the Daughters of Pelias*, who were led by Medea to kill their father when trying to rejuvenate him. His first victory was in 442 with a play of unknown name. Two plays, however, have come down to us which seem to belong to an earlier date. The Cyclops is a satyr-play and the only com plete specimen of its class, though we may now compare it with the papyrus fragments of Sophocles' Ichneutae. A satyr-play is neither tragedy nor comedy : it has the general tone, form and dic tion of tragedy, but the Chorus are satyrs and one of the charac ters must belong to the "comic" rather than the "tragic" tradition —i.e., to the Komos, or revel, rather than the Lament—like the Cyclops himself, or the drunken Heracles, or the thief Hermes. The Cyclops is a gay and fantastic piece, based on Homer's story of Odysseus' escape from the Cyclops' cave. Shelley's translation well catches the spirit of it.

The Rhesus has come down to us in a peculiar condition and is generally considered spurious. However it is known that Euripides did write a Rhesus, and tradition says he was "very young" at the time, which might account for the peculiarities of style in the extant play and particularly for its imitation of Aeschylus. It is a young man's play, full of war and adventure, spies in wolf-skins and white chargers and chivalry. On the other hand there are marks of lateness in the use of four actors and the free treatment of the Chorus; and something very like the later Euripides in the exquisite final scene, where the Muse weeps for her slain son. The Rhesus cannot possibly be a work of the late or middle period of Euripides ; the style proves that. But it might be a youthful play, as tradition says, worked over by one or more later hands. The working-over indeed is certain from the fact that we know of three versions of the opening scene.

Alcestis.—In the year 438 appeared the romantic tetralogy Cressae* (or Women of Crete), Alcmaeon in Psophis*, Telephus* and Alcestis. The Alcestis, still extant, took the place of a satyr play as fourth in the tetralogy, and may be called pro-satyric in style and plot. Admetus has been granted the right, when his day of death comes, to escape if he can find a willing substitute. His old parents refuse to die for him; his young wife Alcestis consents and dies. Heracles passing the house on his travels is given hospi tality, and is already revelling and crowned with flowers when he learns what has happened. He goes out into the night to wrestle with Death and rends his prey from him. We have here one "comic" character, the revelling Heracles, and a touch of the fantastic in the scenes between Thanatos and Apollo, Admetus and Pheres. The death of Alcestis is an obvious poetic theme, and most tenderly treated, but it is like Euripides to raise pointedly the question of Admetus' conduct in asking her to die. His self satisfaction is broken down in a biting scene between him and the *An asterisk denotes a lost play.

old father who had refused to die for him, but at least had not shifted his own fate on to another. As he returns to his empty house he cries: "At last I understand." The other plays of this tetralogy also show the romantic style i.e., an admixture of adventure, variety and love interest with the strict theme of tragedy. The hero of the Alcmaeon* is the son of that Eriphyle who had betrayed her husband to death for the sake of a magic necklace with a curse upon it. Alcmaeon kills his mother, seeks purification from the king of Psophis and is be trothed to his daughter Arsinoe, to whom he gives the necklace. But the whole earth is polluted by his mother's blood, and he wanders on till he comes to the alluvial islands at the mouth of the Achelous, which are untainted because they had not existed at the time of his sin. He settles there and marries Achelous' daughter. She demands the necklace, and he returns to get it from Arsinoe, who discovers why he wants it, and has him murdered on his road back.

In the Cressae* the princess Aerope secretly loved a young soldier; her angry father cannot bring himself to kill her, but gives her to a Greek sailor to throw into the sea. The sailor helps her to escape to Greece. The story itself is a common ballad motive and offends no one as long as it is not made too real. But it seems that Euripides did make it too real, and Aerope's songs of love were remembered against him even after his death. The Telephus* was apparently seen by Aristophanes, then a boy of 16, and made an impression on him which he never forgot. Telephus, king of Mysia, had been wounded by Achilles and, when the wound would not close, was told by an oracle "the wounder shall heal." Consequently he goes disguised as a beggar to the enemy's country, to the heart of the Greek army and Agamemnon's palace. He is discovered ; but snatches the baby Orestes from the cradle and threatens to dash him on the ground unless the Greeks will hear him. They consent ; and he pleads the cause of himself and his country, and convinces them. The parodies in Aristophanes, Acharnians lay stress on the "gift of the gab" possessed by Telephus, on his hair-breadth escapes, and, curiously enough, on the rags and wallet of his beggar's disguise. It is hard to see how else he could have been dressed, if he was to be disguised at all, but apparently the treatment was a little more realistic, or less purely symbolical, than the audience of 438 B.C. expected. Later we find even Sophocles dressing the outcast Philoctetes in rags.

Medea.

Up to this time the chief notes of Euripides' work were variety, invention, romance and scenic effect ; his analytic and destructive power of thought had hardly shown itself. The next play that we possess is the Medea. It appeared in 431 s.c. with the Philoctetes*, Dictys* and a satyr-play The Reapers*. The Medea was placed by the judges at the bottom of the list, and thereafter took its place as one of the consummate masterpieces of Greek tragedy. It begins where the Daughters of Pelias* ended. Jason has fled with Medea to Corinth, which is ruled by an old king, Creon, with a daughter but no son to succeed him. The famous Jason will exactly do as a son-in-law, if only he will discard the mad barbarian woman who is ruining him. Jason consents. Creon orders Medea to instant exile, but she obtains one day's grace . . . to make arrangements for her children. She uses it for her revenge. There is a wonderful scene with Jason, the man still held back by some conventional courtesy from telling the woman how he hates her, and offering to provide her generously with everything in the world except the one thing she needs, and she torturing him because he will not love her. Eventually she sees that the way to break him is to make him childless. She sends her two children to bear a gift to the new bride. It is a crown and robe, a gift from her divine ancestor, the Sun, which she has steeped in burning poison. The bride dies in agony to gether with her father who has tried to save her. Medea kills her two children behind the barred door of her house, against which the women of the Chorus beat in vain. Jason finds her laughing over the bodies. She loves her own pain since it means that he shall have happiness no more, and the daughter of the Sun sails away on her dragon chariot.

*An asterisk denotes a lost play, The play is remarkable not merely for its concentrated passion, but for its daring and realistic psychology. The case for barbarian against Greek and for woman against man, with all its madness as well as its reason, is marvellously stated. More than one wo man now in Broadmoor has killed her child for the same motive as Medea. The Aristotelian Dicaearchus says that Euripides based his play on the Medea of Neophron, a writer of unknown date, There would be nothing improbable in this. All heroic or legend ary subjects were treated again and again. But the lines that are quoted from Neophron's Medea seem clearly to be modelled on Euripides, and not vice versa.

Hippolytus.

The Hippolytus, produced in 428 B.e., did win the first prize, besides establishing itself in permanent fame and inspiring Seneca and Racine to some of their finest work. The plot is a variant of a theme found in an ancient Egyptian "novel" and in the Pentateuch; the wife who falls in love with the chaste youth, and, when rejected, slanders him. Theseus—not here the ideal democratic king, but the stormy adventurer of the poets— had in. his youth conquered the Amazons and ravished their virgin queen. She died leaving a son like herself, Hippolytus, who rejects the love of woman and lives in mystic communion with the virgin goddess, Artemis. Some 20 years later Theseus wedded Phaedra, daughter of Minos, and she by the evil will of Aphrodite against Hippolytus, fell in love with him. She con cealed her love and was trying to starve herself to death, when her old nurse discovered the secret and told Hippolytus under an oath of secrecy. He contemptuously rejected her. Phaedra, in a rage of fear, writes a false accusation against Hippolytus and hangs herself ; Hippolytus, charged by Theseus with the crime, will not break his oath, and goes out to exile and death under his father's curse.

The story is treated by Euripides with wonderful power and purity. The strife of superhuman forces in the background, Aphrodite speaking the prologue and Artemis bringing peace at the end, seems to make the human beings more sympathetic and their fate typical of an eternal conflict. The play, as we have it, is said to have been re-written. The first version seems to have told the story of the "novel" straightforwardly, with a shameless heroine who personally declares her love to Hippolytus, and, to judge from Seneca's imitation, with other strong theatrical effects. In the extant play Phaedra never speaks a word to Hippolytus. It looks as if we had here a rare phenomenon ; a second treat ment of a theme which, instead of keying everything higher and adding to the stage effects, deliberately aimed at restraint and Sophrosyne. To Comedy, however, any stick was good enough to beat Euripides with. We find repeated attacks on one phrase : spoken by Hippolytus : h 'y & rci , ii 8i 0,00 av()µoros ("'Twas but my tongue, 'twas not my heart that swore"). The line is a passing flash of indignation at the trap in which he has been caught, and when the time comes he keeps his oath at the cost of his life. Yet it is cited as a wicked sophistry ! The extant play has the second name of Stephanephoros, "The Wreath-bearer," from the wreath which Hippolytus lays on the altar of Artemis; the first was called 6 KaXvmroµevoc, "who veils himself," though as a matter of fact Hippolytus does that in our play also (1. 946).

Andromache.

The Andromache is said by the scholiast to have been produced "about the beginning of the Peloponnesian War," a date which would suit the style and metre. No "An dromache of Euripides" was recorded in the official Lists of Per formances at Athens, and Callimachus found the play inscribed with the name of "Democrates," a person otherwise unknown. It would seem, therefore, that for some reason Euripides gave his play to another man to produce, as Aristophanes sometimes did. The situation is moving, and some scenes and lyrics effective; but the play as a whole rather unsatisfactory. (The scholiast's phrase To 8paµa TWV 8evnEpwv is obscure.) Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, who had taken Andromache, the widow of Hector, as his concubine, has put her away on his marriage to Hermione, daughter of Helen, but still likes and trusts her. Hermione is childless and suspects Andromache of bewitching her. Her old betrothed, Orestes, still loves her; and her father, Menelaus- represented as a villain—is possibly in league with him. Neoptole mus being away at Delphi, Andromache and her child are about to be murdered by Menelaus, but are saved by the old Peleus. Menelaus retreats, leaving Hermione in despair, when Orestes, who has been waiting on the borders for this moment, suddenly appears and gets her to fly with him. "She need never fear Neoptolemus again ! The meaning of these words presently appears, when a Messenger comes from Delphi announcing the murder of Neoptolemus by Orestes and his men. Old Peleus, broken with grief, is comforted by the appearance of Thetis ex machina, one of the most beautiful of these divine epiphanies.

Hecuba.

Before Aristophanes' Clouds in 423, and perhaps after the purification of Delos in 426 (1. 455 ff.), came the Hecuba. The play shows the transformation of Hecuba, by the cruelties and treacheries of war, from a stately barbarian queen into a sort of devil. Her daughter Polyxena, the most beautiful of all Euripides' virgin martyrs, is sacrificed on Achilles' tomb to satisfy a super stitious mob. (It shows the beginning of a new note of bitter ness in Euripides that the two Athenian heroes, the sons of Theseus, amid all these horrors, did what? They quarrelled, but both were for the murder!) Her other daughter, Cassandra, the virgin prophetess, has been taken for Agamemnon's slave. But the worst is that her youngest son, Polydorus, whom she had sent for safety away from the war to her guest-friend Polymestor, king of Thrace, has been murdered by the Thracian for his gold. Having persuaded Agamemnon to stand aside, Hecuba inveigles Polymestor and his two children into her room among her women: they kill the children and then blind the father, and the eyeless barbarian crawls back shrieking to Agamemnon for help. Legend told that Hecuba, maddened with suffering, was transformed into a sort of hell-hound with fiery eyes, whom sailors saw at night round the hill where she was stoned. The prophesies of the dying Thracian speak of this, and in the fury of the scene it seems credible, just as Medea's dragon-chariot does.

Two Patriotic Plays.

As against the bitterness of the Hecuba we may note two patriotic plays, the Heraclidae, dating early in the war and the Suppliant Women, about the Peace of Nicias (421 B.e.). In the Heraclidae the children of Heracles hunted by the tyrant Eurystheus, and led by Heracles' old compan ion, Iolaus, take refuge in Athens. The king, Demophon, son of Theseus, defies the overbearing Argive herald and undertakes to protect them. An oracle, however, has declared that a virgin of royal birth must die if they are to be saved. One of the daughters of Heracles, Macaria, overhears the discussion of this and offers herself. Iolaus says, "No : lots must be drawn," but she prevails on him. She is led out to die, and Iolaus, despairing and unarmed, takes down the sacred armour hanging in a temple, and prays to be made young for one day. The prayer is granted and the battle won. (The Heraclidae seems to have come down to us in a muti lated condition. It is very short : there is no account of Macaria's death, and some passages quoted from it by ancient writers are not found in our text.) The Suppliant Women also opens with a scene of supplication. The mothers of the Seven Argive Chieftains slain before Thebes, led by Adrastus, have found Aethra, King Theseus' mother, at her prayers beside the altar of Eleusis, and have surrounded her with a chain of suppliant branches which she dares not break. They ask that Theseus shall recover for burial the bodies of their sons, whom the Thebans have flung out to dogs and birds. Theseus at first refuses. The Argives did wrong to make war; he will not risk war for their sake. At last : "Women in sorrow call thee, and men dead," says Aethra, and he yields.

Patriotic plays are generally too shallow and boastful to make good literature. But it is interesting to see what qualities the patriot boasts about. Euripides idealizes Athens as the helper of the oppressed, the champion of Hellenism and true piety; but also as the city of enlightenment. For when the putrefying bodies are recovered from the field, the old practice would have been, first, to treat them as polluted and let only slaves tend them, and next to lay them before their mothers so as to increase the weeping; Theseus tends them and "shows them love" himself, and he keeps the mothers away from the hideous sight. It is the Hellenism or humanity of Athens that Euripides loved, and her failure in that is the cause of his quarrel with her. It is strange to observe that he seems at this time to have favoured Alcibiades as a leader. A phrase about "a shepherd young and noble" in the Suppliant Women (1. 190) may be meant to suggest him: the play com mends his pro-Argive policy, and the ode for his Olympian victory in 420 B.C., which Plutarch read, was said to be the work of Euripides.

Heracles.

The same note is struck in the later part of the Heracles (called in the Aldine edition `HpaKXijs Macv6 €vos, Hercules Furens). That play opens with a suppliant scene : in the absence of Heracles his wife and children are left in Thebes in the power of the tyrant Lycus ("Wolf"), who is determined to extirpate the whole race. They have fled to an altar, hoping to stay there till Heracles' return, but Lycus proceeds to burn them out. They get leave to perform the funeral rites for the children, and have done so—a terrible omen—when at last Heracles appears. He saves them ; but the deliverer is strangely excited and boastful and unlike himself. The Elders of the Chorus see in a dream a vision of Madness descending upon him. It comes : he murders his wife and children, and then, finding what he has done, is about to kill himself, when Theseus arrives. He hides his face and warns Theseus to keep away and avoid the pollution ; but in a moment his friend's arms are round him and the shrouding mantle drawn off. Theseus persuades him that the great Heracles, the saviour of Hellas, must not die, but fulfil in spite of suffering whatever further tasks life may have in store. The scene is re markable both in its treatment of the problem of suicide and in showing again Euripides' conception of the "wisdom" of Athens, typified as usual by Theseus.

The Heracles is noteworthy in two other ways : for its plain and outspoken denial of current myths: Say not there be adulterers in heaven, Nor prisoner gods and gaoler. Long ago My heart hath known it false and will not alter. God, if he be God, lacketh naught: all these Are dead unhappy tales of minstrelsy.

(Her. 1341 ff.; cf. I. T. 385 ff.) (aocbwv oib€ b)QTflvoc X6yoc). And secondly for a wonderful lyric about youth and age, claiming that, while all else passes, poetry does not. The poet had now, it seems, reached the age of 6o and was a Geron, relieved of military service. "I care not to live if the Muses leave me; may their garlands be about me for ever! Even yet the age worn minstrel can turn Mem ory' into song." "ETC Toc yipwv aocbas KeXab€i µva iou u'ay. The prayer was granted, but granted at a heavy price. His poetry remained with him undimmed, but it was a cause of strife with the city he loved and a proclamation of his broken hopes. Thucyd ides and all our other authorities testify to the growing corrup tion of life wrought by the Peloponnesian War, and the increas ing savagery of the democratic war-party.

Ion.

The Ion is sometimes described as a glorification of Apollo and of Athens. If so, why is Apollo the villain of the piece, why are the legends of Athens made barbaric, her shrines unclean and her legendary princess a polluted woman? Why does the hero explain that he would sooner be a slave at Delphi, where one is not jostled off the pavement by the scum of the earth, than a free man in Athens "a city full of terror," where good men dare not speak? The princess Creusa, ravished by Apollo, had laid her babe in the cavern where she had met him. She came again and the child was gone. Later she married a foreigner, Xuthus. Having no children the pair went to Delphi to consult the god. There Creusa meets the foundling Ion—really her own son whom Apollo had saved—and the two are strangely attracted to one another. She intends to ask Apollo what he has done with her child, but in the meantime Xuthus has questioned the god and is made to believe that Ion is his own illegitimate son. He proposes inventing some lie to deceive his wife and adopting the boy. An old household slave, devoted to Creusa, tells her of this plot. Betrayed by god and man, she cries out her story against the Holy Place. She may be disgraced for ever, but at least she will drag down this devil who sits crowned with flowers and singing to the lyre, while the woman he has ravished goes mad and his child is torn by wild beasts ! In the horror-stricken silence which follows there is none to advise her but the old slave. He wrings from her the whole story, and then calls for revenge. "Burn down the god's temple!" She dare not. "Poison Xuthus!" No; he was good to her when she was so unhappy. "Kill the bastard!" Yes; she will do that. The attempt is made but fails; Ion is revealed as Creusa's own son and the general confusion more or less satisfactorily cleared up, not by Apollo, who dares not show his face, but by Hermes who comes on his behalf. The Ion is the most ironic of the ex tant plays, and perhaps the most blasphemous. Many heroes in Greek legend were born of the love of a god for a mortal woman and their stories could be beautiful in the hands of Aeschylus or Pindar; but they were generally treated by Euripides in any thing but a sympathetic spirit : e.g., in the Auge*, Melanippe*, Danae*, Alope*.

The year 416 was to bring to a head the discord between Euripides and his city. In that year occurred an event of very small military or political importance, to which nevertheless Thucydides devotes 26 closely written chapters : the unprovoked siege of the small neutral island of Melos followed by massacre and enslavement. The whole case is argued out in Thucydides ; its utter wickedness clearly exposed, and cynically justified by the Athenians. The next chapter begins the Sicilian expedition and the ruin of Athens.

The Trojan Women.

Euripides, apparently stirred by the same indignation as Thucydides, produced in the following spring an extraordinary tragedy, the Trojan Women. It represents the capture of Troy, the proudest triumph of legendary Greece, seen through the eyes of those who knew most about it, the conquered women. We see first, in the darkness, the gods of Troy, reinforced by the offended Athena, waiting their hour. The captured women creep out from their huts ; the Greek herald comes to announce how the slaves are to be distributed and to take Cassandra, the mad priestess, to Agamemnon's bed. Hecuba and the other women are filled with horror, but Cassandra herself is happy, seeing everything through a mist of vision, including her own ghastly death and that of "her bridegroom." Meantime Andro mache, made slave to Neoptolemus, is planning how to win favour with her masters so that her child Astyanax may be allowed eventually to return and re-build Troy, when the herald comes back. He must take the child. The Greeks have decreed its death. The scene is perhaps the most harrowing in Greek tragedy. A scene between Menelaus and Helen, whom he longs to kill, and yet dares not, shows the conqueror as miserable as the conquered, and more contemptible. The body of Astyanax is brought back and decked for burial by his grandmother, the dead child and the very old woman being all that is left of the great city. In the finale come scenes of almost mystical grandeur. Hecuba cries first to the gods, who care not at all. Then to the dead, who did at least care and love, but cannot help. With no hope, no illusion anywhere, Hecuba faces That-Which-Is, and finds somewhere in the very intensity of Troy's affliction a splendour that cannot die. She looks on the burning city and tries to hurl herself into the flames, but is held back. With a crash the great tower falls; the Greek trumpet sounds through the darkness calling the women to the ships; and they go forth to their slavery.

The two plays that were produced with this tremendous tragedy seem to have led up to it : Alexandros*, showing the curse upon Troy that came through sparing the fire-brand, "the seed of wrath" ; and Palamedes*, showing the curse upon the Greeks, who believed the liar and slew the innocent.

Two Romantic Plays.

The Troades is sometimes spoken of as introducing a period of gloom or pessimism in Euripides, but this is an exaggeration. One result of the "bad years" of the Sicilian expedition was a turn towards fantasy and romance, of which the most famous example is Aristophanes' Birds. In comes the Iphigenia in Tauris, a delightful play in which the tragedy lies largely in exile and homesickness and the romance in lyrics of the sea. Iphigenia, about to be sacrificed at Aulis, was *An asterisk denotes a lost play.

saved by Artemis and carried off to be her priestess among the savage Tauri, who sacrifice strangers. After many years two Greek youths are found on the shore and brought to the Priestess to be consecrated for death. (They are really her brother Orestes with his friend Pylades, who have been sent by Apollo's command to bring to Athens the statue of the goddess.) Much moved, she ques tions the strangers about Greece, and tries vainly somehow to show pity for them. She can save the life of one, if he will bear a letter for her to Greece ; Orestes in a beautiful scene constrains Pylades to go. But to whom is the letter to go? "To Orestes." So the truth is revealed, but the danger remains. Eventually a plot is made for the three to deceive the king, get the statue to sea, and fly together. They have practically escaped when the wind changes and drives them back. But Athena, ex machine, makes Thoas forgive them and institutes the ritual connected with Iphigenia at Brauron.

The Iphigenia seems to have had such a success that, since there was no opportunity for a long "run," the poet used a similar plot again next year in the Helena. He follows the old story of Hesiod that it was not Helen herself who was taken to Troy, but only her eidolon or image. (Helen was the Spartan marriage goddess ; and the rape of an image of the marriage-goddess was a known ritual in places where the marriage ceremony consisted in a carrying-off of the bride, as in Sparta.) The real Helen, an innocent and devoted wife, has been all the time in Egypt. First there was a good king who kept her for her husband, then came a bad king who wanted her for himself. She takes refuge at an altar. Meantime Menelaus, having taken Troy and suffered ship wreck, comes to the Palace. He and Helen meet ; there are ex planations and mutual amazement ; and eventually the two escape by a plot very similar to the plot in the Iphigenia. There are charming lyrics in the Helena and the plot is ingenious ; but as a whole it is unsatisfactory. It looks as if Euripides had been groping, with inadequate resources, towards a style of fanciful and unreal play—something like Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night's Dream—for which the form of Greek tragedy was not suited. It is hard where it should be tender, and strikes us as absurd when it is meant to be miraculous or astonishing.

Much more successful, apparently, was the Andromeda*, a romantic story of the rescue of the heroine by Perseus, when she was exposed to be devoured by the sea-monster. The fragments have a rare charm, and Lucian has a pleasant story of a tragedy fever that fell on the folk of Abdera and set them walking as if in a dream muttering verses of the Andromeda*, by that time Soo years old! Electra.—About the same date, or slightly earlier, came a play of a very different sort, the Electra, dubbed by Schlegel "the meanest of Greek tragedies." It treats the same theme as Aeschylus' Choephoroe and Sophocles' Electra, but in a different spirit. It may be described as a study of a heroic bloodfeud from the point of view of a civilized man. The vengeance of Orestes and Electra upon their mother and her paramour had been treated by Aeschylus as a problem of clashing duties. His hero obeys the god's command, but the horror of it unseats his reason. Sophocles treats the story in a Homeric or "heroic" spirit, with no qualms of conscience and no madness. Euripides studies closely what sort of children they could have been who would so nurse their hatred for years and at last work out their mother's murder. His Electra is a mixture of heroism and broken nerves, a lonely woman eating her heart in ceaseless broodings of hate and love, both unsatisfied. Orestes is a youth bred among the false dreams of exile and now swept away by his sister's more passionate will; haunted also, as Orestes traditionally was, by the shadow of madness. The same psychological study is applied to Clytemnes tra. Most remarkable is the scene after the mother-murder when the brother and sister reel out from the house "red-garmented and ghastly" and break into an agony of remorse. The play ends with an appearance of the heavenly horsemen, Castor and Polydeuces, who definitely pronounce the deed of vengeance to be evil, speak words of pity for mankind and go forth on their eternal duty, which is not to punish but to save.

*An asterisk denotes a lost play.

Phoenissae.

The Phoenissae, or iV omen of Tyre ( i'41 o B.c.) is an experiment of a different kind. It is the longest Greek tragedy and covers the longest stretch of story. Some critics have described it as "a whole trilogy in one play"; others as "epic rather than dramatic." It is written in a large and heroic style ; but, in the manner of this period, it shows a background of clashing hatreds, ambitions and revenges, against which we see standing out one man's self-sacrifice and a mother's and a sister's love.

Polynices is besieging Thebes. Eteocles is king : the blind Oedipus lives imprisoned in the vaults of the palace. Jocasta speaks the prologue. After a scene in which Antigone looks from the wall on the enemy host, as Helen did in the Iliad, a dis guised man with drawn sword enters looking for Jocasta. It is Polynices, whom she has begged to come and be reconciled with his brother. The brothers meet, but part in increased anger, and the battle begins. Creon consults the prophet Teiresias, who says that Thebes will be saved if Menoiceus, Creon's son, dies. Creon desperately arranges for Menoiceus to escape; the boy feigns consent, but as soon as his father's back is turned, rushes up a tower of the city and throws himself into the dragon's den. A messenger comes to Jocasta with news of the battle. The Argives are repulsed. Her sons are safe, but—the truth is forced from him—just about to engage in single combat. The mother, with Antigone, makes her way out through the army to separate the brothers, but too late. They have already slain each other in a "meadow of wild lotus," where she too kills herself with one of the swords. Creon, who takes over the government, proclaims that the body of Polynices shall be left unburied, that the accursed Oedipus shall be cast out of the land, and that the princess Antigone shall marry his son Haemon. Antigone defies him, and goes out to exile with her blind father, away from the brutalities of men, to the untrodden mountain.

Orestes.

The Orestes (408 B.c.) is a strangely violent play. Orestes, a few days after his matricide, lies mad and sick, nursed by his sister. They are prisoners in the palace, and the Assembly of Argos is debating their fate. Meantime safety dawns on their despair. Menelaus, with Helen and an army of veterans, has arrived in the harbour. He will of course save his nephew ! Un fortunately he is the next heir to the kingdom and he behaves ambiguously. The sick man blazes into rage and Menelaus be comes an open enemy. All is lost, when the faithful Pylades breaks into the palace to share his friend's fate. The decision of the assembly is announced : the prisoners must die. But at least they can strike first : kill Menelaus—or, better, kill Helen and then die. Better still, capture Hermione, and threaten to kill her unless the villain Menelaus will save them ! The madness of Orestes infects the whole play. Helen escapes, being divine; but Hermione is captured. Menelaus rushes up only to find the gate barred and the madman on the roof shrieking derision and holding a sword at his daughter's throat. Menelaus rejects all terms. Orestes' party sets fire to the palace, Menelaus batters at the burning gate, when suddenly with a crash of thunder Apollo speaks and strikes all beholders into a trance. They awake from their trances with the fury gone out of them and the immediate past forgotten. Finding Hermione in his arms Orestes draws her to him, and thus it happens that, as all Greeks knew, she became his wife ! Apollo tells them of their future lives and charges them to forgive one another. This violent epiphany of a god, changing at a word the whole course of action, is unique in our remains of tragedy (cf., however, the Iphigenia in Tauris). The success or failure of the effect would probably depend on the audience and the stage-management.

Estrangement from Athens.

The Orestes was the last play which Euripides produced in Athens. We hear much of his in creasing isolation. In indeed he had been invited to write the national epitaph on the soldiers slain in Sicily; but that short lived Government of "intellectual" was soon swamped again by the war party. This was the time when, as Thucydides says, "men tried to surpass all records by the ingenuity of their plots and the enormity of their revenges." The old poet was doubtless considered half a traitor for being against the war party. He was anyhow a dangerous sophist ; and we hear that he was prose cuted for impiety. He was not convicted, but other charges re mained. He had written plays to deny the gods, to advocate perjury, to defend adulteresses and worse. What must his per sonal life be? No wonder he lived so secretly, he and his black avised secretary Cephisophon. Perhaps he was a miser with secret wealth? An action was brought by one Hygiainon to make Euripides perform some liturgy instead of himself as being richer. The result is not known, but the line "My tongue has sworn" was brought up in court to show how little the defendant could be believed. There may have been some darker cloud (not the infidelity of his wife; see above) . The Life tells us that "he lost patience with the ill-will of his fellow-citizens"; Philodemus says he left Athens "in grief, because almost all people were maliciously rejoicing over him." Whatever the cause, at the age of 76 he struck off into voluntary exile. He went first to Magnesia, prob ably the Magnesia near Ephesus, where he had already some connections, having been proxenus—a sort of consul—to Mag nesians resident in Athens; soon however he went on to the court of Archelaus of Macedon, where he produced a tragedy, Archelaus, called after his host's legendary ancestor. The king was anxious to Hellenize his semi-barbarous court by collecting "wise men" from all parts of Greece, and must have heard the story how some of the Athenian prisoners in the quarries of Syracuse had been granted their freedom for teaching their captors choruses of Euripides. • There are several stories of the poet's adventures with these wild Macedonians, among whom a youth could not dine with grown men till he had killed a boar, nor put off a leathern girdle till he had killed a man; but if he had really been eaten by the king's hounds or caught in some sensational intrigue, Aristophanes would certainly have mentioned it in the Frogs. We only hear that he was dead before the Dionysia of 406, leaving behind him three plays Iphigenia in Aulis, Alcmaeon in Corinth* and Bacchae. The first and third are still extant.

Last Plays.

The Iphigenia in Aulis presents many problems. It is incomplete in our mss., to which an unmetrical last scene was added at the time of the Renaissance. But it must also have been seriously incomplete at the time of the poet's death and been finished by another hand. The plot deals with the trapping of Iphigenia to Aulis to be sacrificed; the mental struggles of Agamemnon, the intrigues of Menelaus, the discovery of the plot by Clytemnestra, the bewilderment and indignation of Achilles and the acceptance of her doom by Iphigenia. She was probably rescued at the altar by Artemis, but the last scene is lost. The play shows a transition from the style of tragedy proper to that of the New Comedy. Its metre deviates from the tragic, per mitting for example the elision of - at ; the messenger, instead of being formally announced, rushes in and begins his speech in the middle of a line; there are two different opening scenes in artistically combined (cf. the Rhesus), and great variety of inci dent, including one scene closely akin to Menandrian comedy— where Achilles thinks that Clytemnestra is making overtures to him. There is much psychology : the brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus quarrel and fiercely analyze one another's faults, but by the end each wishes to give way to the other. There are fine studies of Clytemnestra still young and innocent, of Achilles and above all of Iphigenia herself, at first utterly crushed, but, on reflection, exalted by the thought of dying for Hellas.

The Iphigenia is all invention, entertainment, psychology; it is full of informalities and interruptions: its Chorus is insignificant. Curiously different is the Bacchae. The Bacchae takes an old ritual story with fixed characters : God, Old King, Young King, Prophet, Mother. It is formal throughout and its Chorus is its very soul. In this extreme of formality and faithfulness to ancient tradition Euripides seems to have found his greatest originality and freedom.

The plot is little more than the regular sequence of scenes belonging to the cult of the Year Daemon : the Daemon and his Enemy, who is exactly like himself : the Contest, the sparagmos or Rending, the Messenger, the Lamentation mixed with Joy cries, the Discovery of the scattered members, and the Epiphany *An asterisk denotes a lost play.

of the God. The god Dionysus comes with his inspired Bacchanals to his own land of Thebes and is rejected by his kindred. He sends his divine madness upon them. The king, Pentheus, perse cutes and imprisons the god and the holy women; then yielding in spite of himself to the divine power, agrees to go, disguised as a Maenad to watch the secret worship on Mt. Cithaeron. He is discovered and torn to fragments. His mother returns in triumph, dancing, with her son's head, which she takes for a lion's. It is too much. The Chorus of Maenads, hitherto wildly devoted to Dionysus, are transfixed with horror. Dionysus appears in glory pronouncing judgment on all who have rejected him. The mortals go forth to their dooms, still faithful, still loving one another, while the ghastly and triumphant god ascends to heaven.

The marvellous power of the Bacchae is beyond doubt. The spell of Dionysus affects the reader and makes the world seem mad. But the meaning of the play, for it certainly seems to have a meaning, is much disputed, and may perhaps be helped out by an analogy. Imagine a free-minded modern poet composing for some local anniversary a rhymed play in the style of the Mys teries on the legend of some mediaeval saint, persecuted by a wicked emperor, whom he threatens with hell-fire. Imagine the emperor brutal and despotic, the saint very saintly and the songs of the persecuted Christians very beautiful; and at the end the emperor writhing in hell-fire and the saint in glory saying "Halle lujah! What did I tell you?" Neither the exquisite beauty of the Bacchanal poetry nor the savage cruelty of the god can be denied. Both are true. After all, Euripides, with all his lucidity, never professes to be lucid about the ultimate mystery of the world. He sometimes denies, sometimes asserts, the rule of divine justice, or the existence of some "Great Understanding" and some life beyond the grave "dearer to man than this" (Hipp. 191 $.). He is never apparently exercised by the problem whether God, or "the divine," is one or many, but, with all his passionate belief in "wisdom," he seems to have a strong sense of man's comparative unimportance in the presence of unknown powers: SovXeboµEv 6TL 7 ELQIP of Owl (Or. 418).

BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The Alexandrians possessed of Euripides 67 trageBibliography.—The Alexandrians possessed of Euripides 67 trage- dies and 7 satyr-plays plus 3 tragedies and one satyr-play which were considered spurious. They believed him to have written altogether 92 plays, i.e., 23 tetralogies; but it is not clear whether they took into account one or two plays, like the Andromache and the Archelaus, which were not recorded in the didascaliae (Wilamowitz, Analecta Euripidea, p. 145). Nauck's collection of the Fragmenta (end ed. 1889) gives 1,132 fragments, the last 26 being doubtful, from 55 lost plays. Papyri and other sources (esp. Johannes Logothetes, see Rhein. Mus. 63) have added passages from the Antiope, the two Melanip pae, Oeneus, Stheneboea, Phaethon and above all the Hypsipyle. See Hunt, Fragmenta Tragica Papyracea (1910) and von Arnim, Supplementum Euripideum (1913) .

The mss. of Euripides fall into two classes: one with scholia and one without. The former represents a collection of ten plays (Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae, Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, Andromache, Tro ades, Rhesus and originally Bacchae) selected for the use of the schools about the 4th century A.D., with a commentary compiled from earlier sources ; the latter, comprising 18 or more plays, seems to repre sent some odd volumes of a complete edition of Euripides, with argu ments, dramatis personae, and variant readings but no commentary. Its archetype was doubtless the edition by Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 200 B.C.) of which we can form an adequate picture from the papyrus of the Hypsipyle (Pap. Oxyrh. 852). A further selection was made in Byzantine times of three plays, Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae, which occur in a vast number of mss.

The scholia-plays are all found in Vat. 909 (V.), saec. xiii., and some in the better mss. Marc. 471 (M) and Paris 2712, 2713 (A, B) . The uncommented plays depend on Laurentianus xxxii. 2 , saec. xiv. (L or C), which contains all the plays except the Troades, and one on a ms. (P) of which half is in the Vatican (Pal. 287) and half (formerly called G) in the Medicean library (Laur. 172) : this contains all the plays. There are many inferior Byzantine mss., while some 32 papyrus fragments and other ancient remains are useful in testing the soundness of the texts (Oldfathers Greek Literary Texts, Madison, Wis., 1923) . Of similar value is the curious Byzantine tragedy, Christus Patiens, a cento attempting Evpi,riinv TO EL7rELV 7r60os. It bears the name of Gregory of Nazianzus, but is attributed by Krumbacher to the nth century. The scholia may be divided into those belonging to the 4th century edition (Sch. Vetera) and containing much knowl edge from the best periods of Alexandrine and Roman scholarship, and those added afterwards (Sch. Recentia) . There are great masses of late Byzantine scholia, especially on metres (editions by Dindorf, 4 vols., 1863 ; rather promiscuous ; better selected and arranged by E. Schwartz, 2 vols., 1887, 1891) .

Editiones principes: J. Lascaris (Florence, 1496), Medea, Hippo lytus, Alcestis, Andromache. M. Musurus (Aldus, Venice, 1503), all the extant plays except Electra, which was first published by P. Victorius in Of the older commentaries we may note especially: Valckenaer's Phoenissae 0755) and Diatribe in Eur. perditorum dramatum relliquias (1767) ; Markland, Supplices and 1phigeniae (1763-71) ; Porson, valu able for establishing metre and diction, Hec., Or., Phoen., Med. 18o1) ; Elmsley (similar) Med., Bac., Hclld., Suppl. (1813-21) ; Wed, Sept Tragedies d'Euripide (1879) ; Paley, the whole, oldfashioned but thoughtful (1872-8o). In recent times may be mentioned the numer ous commentaries of Wecklein ; Bruhn, Bacchae, I ph. in Tauris; Sandys, Bacchae, with archaeological notes (4th ed. I9o0) and above all Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Herakles (1889, reprinted 1895, with epoch making introduction), Hippolytus (1891), Ion (1926). Also J. U. Powell, Phoenissae (1911) .

Among the numerous essays on Euripides may be mentioned A. W. Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist (1895), Four Plays of Euripides (1905), The Bacchants of Euripides (1910) ; G. Norwood, The Riddle of the Bacchae (1908) ; Gilbert Murray, Euripides and His Age and introduction to his translations. P. Decharme, Eur. et l'esprit de son Theatre (1893) ; P. Masqueray, Eur. et ses Idees (1908) ; Nestle, Euripides der Dichter der Gr. Erklarungzeit (19oi) ; Steiger, Eur. Dichtung and Personlichkeit (1912) . The article by Dieterich in Pauly Wissowa's Encyclopadie is excellent. Invaluable for the poet's works as a whole is Welcker's Griechischen Tragoedien mit Riicksicht auf den Epischen Cyclus geordnet vol. ii. (1839) ; Hartung's Eur. Restitu tus (1843) ; W. N. Bates, Euripides (1929)• Critical editions: Matthiae (1829) ; Kirchhoff, important Wecklein (1898-1901) from Prinz's collations; Gilbert Murray, with help from Wilamowitz and Verrall (19o2–o9) .

Translations: In English verse by Way (the whole, 3 vols., 1894-98) : Gilbert Murray (Hippolytus, Bacchae, Trojan Women, Electra, Medea, I phigenia in Tauris, Rhesus, Alcestis) . Verrall, Ion. In German Hippolytus and other plays by Wilamowitz.

Some interest attaches to Browning's "transcript" of the Alcestis in Balaustion's Adventure, and to Goethe's reconstruction of the lost Phaethon in his Sammtliche Werke, vol. 33 (1840). (G. G. A. M.)