See

speeches of the Medea, Alcestis, and Hecuba. also the speech of Cadmus in Bacchae, s.f. (where that of Agavè is unfortunately lost.1) It is to be observed as further proof of the relaxation of tragic severity that children not only appear upon the stage, but are allowed to speak (Alcestis, Her. Fur.; cp. Aristoph. Ranae, 948).

On the whole, one sees that in Euripides the tragic art is in course of being transformed, descending from its pedestal so as to reap more from the "lacrymae rerum," the tearfulness of

"Hector expiring at the chariot-wheel,

And Ilion's piteous fires; then as a captive,
Unto the Argive ships dragged by the hair,
I came to Phthia, where my husband's murderer
Must be my husband! What is life to me?
What hope does time, present or past, afford?
One child I have, the comfort of mine eye,
All that remains to me from vanished days ;-
They would destroy him !-Not if death of me
May buy him off. Hope gilds his living head.
But shame were mine, not dying for my boy.
Behold, I leave the altar. I am thine

To bind, to smite, to strangle. Child, to save thee
From death thy mother dies. I go. But thou,

Escaping from the threatful hurricane,

Remember my affliction and mine end.

And tell thy father, kissing him with tears,

And clinging round him with thy arms of love,

What griefs were mine.-Our children are our souls.

If any blame that maxim, having none,

He is spared much sorrow; but his gain is loss,
And in privation stands his envied state."

1 Both Goethe and Dean Milman have attempted to restore it.

common things, but also tending somewhat towards melodrama and losing some of its central fire. What Aristotle means by calling him "the most tragic of poets," is to our apprehension rather a "sentimental" or "sensational" tendency. What remains of genuine tragic effect has become more self-conscious, more subjective. In some places, however, the very feebleness of the characterisation has the result of sending home a grand impression of the overmastering force of circumstance, of the predominance of the collective over the individual will,—so hinting powerfully at "the whole tragedy and comedy of human life." No instance of this is more remarkable than the treatment in the Iphigenia in Aulis of the crushing and irresistible force of popular clamour, the

Civium ardor prava jubentium.

Agamemnon has reluctantly consented to the sacrifice of his daughter, but has afterwards repented. In time, however, he again yields her to the pleadings of his brother Menelaus. Then Menelaus in his turn recoils before the grief which Agamemnon has shown, and urges him to take back his gift. But the General only now becomes aware of the resistless power which in reality is constraining him. He cannot, if he would, recall his consent. Once more-Iphigenia has been taken from her mother through the

pretence that she is to be married to Achilles. That hero's chivalrous spirit recoils from the policy that has made him the stalking-horse of such a scheme. He declares his opposition. But when he has done so, his own Myrmidons are the first to rise against him. Even his valour is powerless to save the predestined victim. Then, "at long last," the maiden herself makes a virtue of necessity and becomes (like Macaria and the rest) a voluntary sacrifice. The characters, except that of Achilles, are flat and unimpressive, -that of Iphigenia, as Aristotle says, is decidedly inconsistent, but the main situation is driven home with masterly force and emphasis.

It is in reading such sad lessons of experience that Euripides excels, much more than in holding up any great ideal either of individual or of national life. His Athenian patriotism is occasionally keen, but it is on the one hand embittered with party spirit, and on the other diluted with humane or Pan-Hellenic sentiments. Lessons of gentleness, of home affection, of friendship, of self-denial, he does occasionally teach, and it is here that he shows most of a universal, widely - reaching mind. But such passages stand out as something alien from the general scope of his work. They are like the strawberry-plants which an artist like Conegliano

loves to paint in the foreground of a picture otherwise conventional.

In Aeschylus and Sophocles, the fables in which the people still believed are transfigured by the alchemy of dramatic poetry. Euripides came at a time when this was no longer possible. The myths, whose hold is weakened while their form is varied, become to him the vehicle for a new mode of art, less strong and perfect, although in some directions more genial and penetrative. His permutations and combinations of tragic fable could after all only be carried a little way, while the simplicity which had characterised the art in its great period was inevitably lost.

CHAPTER XIV

FRAGMENTS OF LOST PLAYS

THE fragments of the tragic poets are naturally disappointing. Preserved as they have mostly been for the sake of some general sentiment, or some picturesque expression,-sometimes merely to exemplify the use of an uncommon word, they seldom throw much light upon lost plays, or even illustrate forcibly the characteristics of the writers. Such as they are, however, the reader is here presented with a selection from them. As may

be readily imagined, quotations from Euripides are most abundant, both because he was most in vogue in the learned Alexandrian age, and because his love of graphic description and of rhetorical moralising renders him a peculiarly fit subject for the collection of elegant extracts.

The fragments are here numbered as in the edition of Nauck.

AESCHYLUS.

The most considerable fragment of Aeschylus