BEGINNING OF THE WAR: THE PLAYS OF MATURITY, "MEDEA" TO "HERACLES"
The next play of which we have full knowledge must have staggered its
audience. The _Medea_ was promptly put by the official judges at the
bottom of the list of competing plays, and thereafter took its place, we
do not know how soon, as one of the consummate achievements of the Greek
tragic genius. Its stamp is fixed on all the imagination of antiquity.
The plot of the Medea begins where that of the _Daughters of Pelias_ (p.
69) ended. Jason had fled with Medea and her two children to Corinth,
which is ruled by Creon, an old king with a daughter but no son to
succeed him. The famous warrior-prince will just suit Creon as a
son-in-law, if only he will dismiss his discreditable barbarian
mistress. Jason has never been able to tell the truth to Medea yet; who
could? He secretly accepts Creon's terms; he marries the princess; and
Creon descends on Medea with soldiers to remove her instantly from the
territory of Corinth. Medea begs for one day in which to make ready for
exile, for the children's sake. One day will be enough. By desperate
flattery and pleading she gets it. There follows a first scene with
Jason, in which man and woman empty their hearts on one another--at
least they try to; but even yet some fragments of old habit and
conventional courtesy prevent Jason from telling the full truth. Still
it is a wonderful scene, Jason reasonable and cold, ready to recognize
all her claims and provide her with everything she needs except his own
heart's blood; Medea desolate and half mad, asking for nothing but the
one thing he will not give. Love to her is the whole world, to him it is
a stale memory. This scene ends in defiance, but there is another in
which Medea feigns repentance and submission, and sends Jason with the
two children to bear a costly gift to the new bride. It may, she
suggests, induce Creon to spare the children and let her go to exile
alone. The gift is really a robe of burning poison, which has come to
Medea from her divine ancestor, the Sun. The bride dies in agony
together with her father who tries to save her. Jason rushes to save his
two children from the vengeance which is sure to come upon them from the
kinsmen of the murdered bride; but Medea has already slain them with her
own hand and stands laughing at him over their bodies. She too suffers,
but she loves the pain, since it means that he shall have happiness no
more. The Daughter of the Sun sails away on her dragon-chariot and an
ecstasy of hate seems to blind the sky.
The _Medea_ shows a new mastery of tragic technique, especially in the
extraordinary value it gets out of the chorus (p. 240). But as
illustrating the life of Euripides there are one or two special points
in it that claim notice. In the first place it states the cause of a
barbarian woman against a Greek man who has wronged her. Civilized men
have loved and deserted savage women since the world began, and I doubt
if ever the deserted one has found such words of fire as Medea speaks.
The marvel is that in such white-hot passion there is room for satire.
But there is; and even a reader can scarcely withhold a bitter laugh
when Jason explains the advantage he has conferred on Medea by bringing
her to a civilized country. But Medea is not only a barbarian; she is
also a woman, and fights the horrible war that lies, an eternally latent
possibility, between woman and man. Some of the most profound and
wounding things said both by Medea and by Jason might almost be labelled
in a book of extracts "Any wife to any husband," or "Any husband to any
wife." And Medea is also a witch; she is also at heart a maniac. It is
the madness produced by love rejected and justice denied, by the sense
of helpless, intolerable wrong. A lesser poet might easily have made
Medea a sympathetic character, and have pretended that long oppression
makes angels of the oppressed. In the great chorus which hymns the rise
of Woman to be a power in the world it would have been easy to make the
Woman's day a day of peace and blessing. But Euripides, tragic to the
heart and no dealer in pleasant make-believe, saw things otherwise; when
these oppressed women strike back, he seems to say, when these despised
and enslaved barbarians can endure no longer, it will not be justice
that comes but the revenge of madmen.
This kind of theme was not in itself likely to please an audience; but
what always galls the average theatre-goer most in a new work of genius
is not the subject but the treatment. Euripides' treatment of his
subject was calculated to irritate the plain man in two ways. First it
was enigmatic. He did not label half his characters bad and half good;
he let both sides state their case and seemed to enjoy leaving the
hearer bewildered. And further, he made a point of studying closely and
sympathetically many regions of thought and character which the plain
man preferred not to think of at all. When Jason had to defend an
obviously shabby case, no gentleman cared to hear him; but Euripides
insisted on his speaking. He enjoyed tracking out the lines of thought
and feeling which really actuate men, even fine men like Jason, in
Jason's position. When Medea was revealed as obviously a wicked woman
the plain man thought that such women should simply be thrashed, not
listened to. But Euripides loved to trace all her complicated sense of
injustice to its origins, and was determined to understand and to
explain rather than to condemn. The plain man had a kind of
justification for saying that Euripides actually seemed to like these
traitors and wicked women; for such thorough understanding as this
involves always a good deal of sympathy.
This charge could with even more reason be brought against another
masterpiece of drama, which followed three years after the Medea. The
_Hippolytus_ (428 B.C.) did indeed win the first prize from the official
judges, besides establishing itself in the admiration of after ages and
inspiring Seneca and Racine to their finest work. But it profoundly
shocked public opinion at the same time. The plot is a variant of a very
old theme found in ancient Egypt and in the Pentateuch. Theseus, not
here the ideal democrat on the Athenian throne, but the stormy and
adventurous hero of the poets, had early in life conquered the Amazons
and ravished their virgin Queen. She died, leaving a son like herself,
Hippolytus. Theseus some twenty years after married Phaedra, the young
daughter of Minos, king of Crete, and she by the evil will of Aphrodite
fell in love with Hippolytus. She told no one her love, and was trying
to starve herself to death, when her old Nurse contrived to worm the
secret from her and treacherously, under an oath of secrecy, told it to
Hippolytus. Phaedra, furious with the Nurse and with Hippolytus, in a
blind rage of self-defence, 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 under his father's curse. The
gods, in fulfilment of the curse, send death to him, but before he
actually dies reveal his innocence. The story which might so easily be
made ugly or sensual is treated by Euripides with a delicate and austere
purity. In construction, too, and general beauty of workmanship, though
not in greatness of idea or depth of passion, the _Hippolytus_ is
perhaps the finest of all his plays, and has still a great appeal on the
stage. But the philistine was vaguely hurt and angered by the treatment,
so tender and yet so inexorable, accorded to a guilty love, and
doubtless the more conventional Athenian ladies shocked themselves over
the bare idea of such a heroine being mentioned. It gives us some
measure of the stupidity of public criticism at the time, that we find
special attacks made upon one phrase of Hippolytus. In his first rage
with the Nurse he vows he will tell Theseus of her proposal. She reminds
him of his oath, and he cries:
"'Twas but my tongue, 'twas not my heart that swore."
It is a passing flash of indignation at the trap in which he has been
caught. When the time comes he keeps his oath at the cost of his life.
Yet the line is repeatedly cited as showing the dreadful doctrines of
Euripides and the sophists; doctrines that would justify any perjury!
The _Hippolytus_, as we have it, is a rewritten play. In his first
version Euripides had a scene in which Phaedra actually declared her
love. This more obvious treatment was preferred by Seneca and Racine;
but Euripides in his second thoughts reached a far more austere and
beautiful effect. His Phaedra goes to her death without having spoken
one word to Hippolytus: she has heard him but has not answered. The
_Hippolytus_ has more serene beauty than any of Euripides' plays since
the _Alcestis_, and is specially remarkable as the first great drama on
the subject of tragic or unhappy love, a theme which has been so
extraordinarily fruitful on the modern stage. To contemporaries it was
also interesting as one of the earliest treatments of a purely local
Attic story, which had not quite found its way into the great sagas of
epic tradition.
The note of the _Medea_ was struck again some two years later (426?) in
a play almost equally powerful and more horrible, the _Hecuba_. The
heroine is the famous Queen of Troy, a barbarian woman like Medea,
majestic and beautiful at the beginning of the action and afterwards
transformed by intolerable wrongs into a kind of devil. Her "evils" are
partly the ordinary evils that come to the conquered in war, but they
are made worse by the callousness of her Greek conquerors. The play
strikes many notes of special bitterness. For instance, the one champion
whom Hecuba finds among her conquerors is the general, Agamemnon. He
pleads her cause in the camp, because, God help him! he has taken her
daughter Cassandra, the mad prophetess vowed to eternal virginity, to be
his concubine, and consequently feels good-natured. There is another
note, remarkable in an Athenian. The mob of the Greek army, in a frenzy
of superstition, clamour to have a Trojan princess sacrificed at
Achilles' tomb. In the debate on this subject we are told that several
princes spoke; among them the two sons of Theseus, the legendary kings
of Athens. They would surely, as enlightened Athenians, prevent such
atrocities? On the contrary, all we hear is that they spoke against one
another, but both were for the murder! At the end of the _Hecuba_, as at
the end of the _Medea_, we are wrought to a pitch of excitement at which
incredible legends begin to seem possible. History related that the
Queen of Troy, maddened by her wrongs, had been transformed into a kind
of Hell-hound with fiery eyes, whom sailors saw at night prowling round
the hill where she was stoned. In her bloody revenge on the only enemy
she can trap into her power, she seems already to have become this sort
of being in her heart, and when her blind and dying victim prophesies
the coming transformation, it seems natural. One only feels that perhaps
the old miraculous stories are true after all. The one light that shines
through the dark fury of the _Hecuba_ is the lovely and gentle courage,
almost the joy, with which the virgin martyr, Polyxena, goes to her
death.
I have taken the _Hecuba_ slightly before its due date, because of its
return with increased bitterness to the tone and subject of the _Medea_.
We will now go back. There had been in the interim a change in the
poet's mind, or, at the least, a strong clash of conflicting emotions.
The _Medea_ was produced in 431, the first year of the Peloponnesian
War. This war, between the Athenian empire, representing the democratic
and progressive forces of Greece, and the Peloponnesian confederacy with
Sparta at its head, lasted with one interruption for twenty-seven years
and ended in the capture of Athens and the destruction of her power.
When war was first declared it represented the policy of Pericles, the
great statesman of the Enlightenment, the friend of Anaxagoras, and of
those whom Euripides honoured most. It seemed at first like a final
struggle between the forces of progress and those of resolute darkness.
Pericles in a famous speech, which is recorded for us by Thucydides, had
explained to his adherents the great causes for which Athens stood; had
proclaimed her as the Princess of Cities for whom it was a privilege to
die; and urged them, using a word more vivid in Greek than it is in
English, to stand about her like a band of Lovers round an Immortal
Mistress. Euripides was as a matter of fact still going through his
military service and must have seen much hard fighting in these first
years of the war.
He responded to Pericles' call by a burst of patriotic plays. Even in
the _Medea_ there is one chorus, a little out of place perhaps, but
famous in after days, describing the glories of Athens. They are not at
all the conventional glories attributed by all patriots to their
respective countries. "It is an old and happy land which no conqueror
has ever subdued; its children walk delicately through air that shines
with sunlight; and Wisdom is the very bread that they eat." (The word is
"sophia," embracing Wisdom, Knowledge, Art, Culture; there is no one
word for it in English, and the names for the various parts of it have
lost their poetry.) "A river," he continues, "flows through the land;
and legend tells that Cypris, the Goddess of Love, has sailed upon it
and dipped her hand in the water; and now when the river-wind at evening
blows it comes laden with a spirit of longing; but it is not ordinary
love, it is a Passion and a great Desire for all kinds of godlike
endeavour, a Love that sits with Wisdom upon her throne." . . . "A pity
the man should be so priggish." We may imagine the comment of the
average Athenian paterfamilias.
Towards the beginning of the war we may safely date the _Children of
Heracles_, a mutilated but beautiful piece, which rings with this
particular spirit of patriotism (cf. p. 41 above). Heracles is dead; his
children and mother are persecuted and threatened with death by his
enemy, Eurystheus, king of Argos. Under the guidance of their father's
old comrade, Iolaus, they have fled from Argos, and tried in vain to
find protectors in every part of Greece. No city dares protect them
against the power of Argos. At the opening of the play we find the
children and Iolaus clinging as suppliants to an altar in Athens. The
herald of Argos breaks in upon them, flings down the old man and
prepares to drag the children off. "What hope can Iolaus possibly
cherish?" Iolaus trusts in two things, in Zeus who will protect the
innocent, and in Athens which is a free city and not afraid. The king of
Athens, a son of Theseus, appears and rebukes the herald. The herald's
argument is clear: "These children are Argive subjects and are no
business of yours; further, they are utterly helpless and will be no
possible good to you as allies. And if you do not give them up
peacefully, Argos declares instant war." The king "wishes for peace with
all men; but he will not offend God, nor betray the innocent; also he
rules a free city and will take no orders from any outside power. As to
the fate of these children not being his business, it is always the
business of Athens to save the oppressed." One remembers the old claim,
emphatically approved by the historian of the Persian Wars, that Athens
was the saviour of Hellas. One remembers also the ultimatum of the
Peloponnesian confederacy which Pericles rejected on the eve of the
present war; and the repeated complaints of the Corinthians that Athens
"will neither rest herself nor let others rest." These supply the clue
to a large part of the patriotism of the _Children of Heracles_. There
is another element also, and perhaps one that will better stand the test
of impartial criticism, in Euripides' ideal of Athens. She will be true
to Hellas and all that Hellas stands for: for law, for the gods of
mercy, for the belief in right rather than force. Also, as the king of
Athens is careful to observe, for democracy and constitutional
government. He is no despot ruling barbarians.
The same motives recur with greater fulness and thoughtfulness in
another play of the early war time--the exact year is not certain--the
_Suppliant Women_. Scholars reading the play now, in cool blood, with
the issues at stake forgotten, are inclined to smile at a sort of
pedantry in the poet's enthusiasm. It reminds one of the punctiliousness
with which Shelley sometimes gives one the sincere milk of the word
according to Godwin. This play opens, like the last, with a scene of
supplication. A band of women--Argive mothers they are this time, whose
sons have been slain in war against Thebes--have come to Athens as
suppliants. They are led by Adrastus, the great and conquered lord of
Argos, and finding Aethra, the king's mother, at her prayers beside the
altar, have surrounded her with a chain of suppliant branches which she
dares not break. They only ask that Theseus, her son, shall get back for
them the bodies of their dead sons, whom the Thebans, contrary to all
Hellenic law, have flung out unburied for dogs to tear. Theseus at first
refuses, on grounds of policy, and the broken-hearted women take up
their branches and begin to go, when Aethra, who has been weeping
silently, breaks out: "Is this kind of wrong to be allowed to exist?"
"Thou shalt not suffer it, thou being my child!
Thou hast seen men scorn thy City, call her wild
Of counsel, mad; thou hast seen the fire of morn
Flash from her eyes in answer to their scorn.
Come toil on toil; 'tis this that makes her grand;
Peril on peril! And common states, that stand
In caution, twilight cities, dimly wise--
Ye know them, for no light is in their eyes.
Go forth, my son, and help. My fears are fled.
Women in sorrow call thee, and men dead."
(_Suppl._ 320 ff.)
Theseus accepts his mother's charge. It has been his old habit to strike
wherever he saw oppression without counting the risk; and it shall never
be said of him that an ancient Law of God was set at naught when he and
Athens had power to enforce it. It is Athens as the "saviour of Hellas"
that we have here. It is Athens the champion of Hellenism and true
piety, but it is also the Athens of free thought and the Enlightenment.
For later on, when the dead bodies are recovered from the battle-field,
they are a ghastly sight. The old unreflecting Greece would in the first
place have thought them a pollution, a thing which only slaves must be
sent to handle. In the second place, since the mothers were making
lamentation, the bodies must be brought to their eyes, so as to improve
the lamentation. But Theseus feels differently on both points. Why
should the mothers' grief be made more bitter? Let the bodies be burned
in peace and the decent ashes given to the mothers. And as to the
defilement, the king himself, we hear, has taken up the disfigured
bodies in his arms and washed their wounds and "shown them love." No
slave touched them. "How dreadful! Was he not ashamed?" asks a
bystander--the Greek word means something between "ashamed" and
"disgusted." "No," is the answer: "Why should men be repelled by one
another's sufferings?" (768) It is a far-reaching answer, with great
consequences. It is the antique counterpart of St. Francis kissing the
leper's sores. The man of the herd is revolted by the sight of great
misery and inclines to despise and even hate the sufferer; the man of
the enlightenment sees deeper, and the feeling of revulsion passes away
in the wish to help.
We spoke of a slight pedantry in the enthusiasms of the _Suppliant
Women_. It is illustrated even by points like this, and by a tendency in
Theseus to lecture on good manners and the Athenian constitution. The
rude Theban herald enters asking, "Who is monarch of this land?" using
the word "tyrannos" for "monarch." Theseus corrects him at once. "There
is no 'tyrannos' here. This is a free city; and when I say a free city,
I mean one in which the whole people by turns takes part in the
sovereignty, and the rich have no privilege as against the poor"
(399-408). These dissertations on democratic government could stir men's
passions and force their way into scenes of high poetry legitimately
enough at a time when men were fighting and dying for their democracy.
To those who are not "Lovers" of the beautiful city they will seem cold
and irrelevant.
Other plays of this period show marks of the same great wave of love for
Athens. The lost plays _Aigeus_, _Theseus_, _Erechtheus_, all on Attic
subjects, can be dated in the first years of the war; the _Hippolytus_
is built on an old legend of the Acropolis and a poetic love of Athens
shines through the story. The _Andromache_ especially is a curious
document, the meaning of which is discussed later on (p. 112). But the
two plays we have described at length, _The Children of Heracles_ and
the _Suppliant Women_, give the best idea of what patriotism meant to
our poet. With most men patriotism is a matter of association and
custom. They stick to their country because it is theirs; to their own
habits and prejudices and even neighbours for the same reason. But with
Euripides his ideals came before his actual surroundings. He loved
Athens because Athens meant certain things, and if the real Athens
should cease to mean those things he would cast her out of his heart. At
least he would try to do so; in point of fact that is always a very
difficult thing to do. But if ever Athens should be false, it was pretty
certain that Euripides would find hatred mingling with his betrayed
love. There were signs of this even in the _Medea_ and the _Hecuba_.
But before dealing with that subject we must dwell for a few moments
upon another fine play, which marks in more than one sense the end of a
period. The _Heracles_, written about the year 423, shows Theseus in the
same role of Athenian hero. In the _Suppliant Women_ he had helped
Adrastus and the Argive mothers and shown them the path of true
Hellenism; in the _Heracles_ he comes to the rescue of Heracles in his
fall. That hero has been mad and slain his own children; he has
recovered and awakes to find himself bound to a pillar, with dead bodies
that he cannot recognize round about him. He rages to be set free. He
compels those who know to tell him the whole truth. Frantic with shame
and horror, he wishes to curse God and die, when he sees Theseus
approaching. Theseus has been his friend in many hard days and Heracles
dares not face him nor speak to him. The touch of one so blood-guilty,
the sound of his voice, the sight of his face, would bring pollution. He
shrouds himself in his mantle and silently waves Theseus away. In a
moment his friend's arms are round him, and the shrouding mantle is
drawn off. There is no such thing as pollution; no deed of man can stain
the immortal sunlight, and a friend's love does not fear the infection
of blood. Heracles is touched: he thanks Theseus and is now ready to
die. God has tempted him too far, and he will defy God. Theseus reminds
him of what he is: the helper of man, the powerful friend of the
oppressed; the Heracles who dared all and endured all; and now, like a
common, weak-hearted man, he speaks of suicide! "Hellas will not suffer
you to die in your blindness!" (1254). The great adventurer is softened
and won over by the "wisdom" of Theseus, and goes to Athens to fulfil,
in spite of suffering, whatever further tasks life may have in store for
him.
This condemnation of suicide was unusual in antiquity; and the
_Heracles_ also contains one remarkable denial of the current myths, the
more remarkable because, as Dr. Verrall has pointed out, it seems almost
to upset the plot of the play. Heracles' madness is sent upon him by the
malignity of Hera; we see her supernatural emissary entering the room
where Heracles lies. And the hero himself speaks of his supernatural
adventures. Yet he also utters the lines:
Say not there be adulterers in Heaven
Nor prisoner gods and gaoler. Long ago
My heart has known it false and will not alter.
God, if he be God, lacketh naught. All these
Are dead unhappy tales of minstrelsy.
(_Her._ 1341; cf. _Iph. Taur._ 380-392; _Bellerophon_ fr. 292.)
But in another way, too, the _Heracles_ marks an epoch in the poet's
life. It seems to have been written in or about the year 423, and it was
in 424 that Euripides had reached the age of sixty and was set free from
military service. He had had forty years of it, steady work for the most
part; fighting against Boeotians, Spartans, Corinthians, against
Thracian barbarians, in all probability also against other people
further overseas. We have no record of the campaigns in which Euripides
served; but we have by chance an inscription of the year 458, when he
was twenty-six, giving the names of the members of one particular tribe,
the Sons of Erechtheus, who fell in war in that one year. They had
fallen "in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, in Aegina and at
Megara." There were ten such tribes in Athens. And this record gives
some notion of the extraordinary energy and ubiquity of the Athenian
armies.
It is strange to reflect on the gulf that lies between the life of an
ancient poet and his modern descendants. Our poets and men of letters
mostly live either by writing or by investments eked out by writing.
They are professional writers and readers and, as a rule, nothing else.
It is comparatively rare for any one of them to face daily dangers, to
stand against men who mean to kill him and beside men for whom he is
ready to die, to be kept a couple of days fasting, or even to work in
the sweat of his body for the food he eats. If such things happen by
accident to one of us we cherish them as priceless "copy," or we even go
out of our way to compass the experience artificially.
But an ancient poet was living hard, working, thinking, fighting,
suffering, through most of the years that we are writing about life. He
took part in the political assembly, in the Council, in the jury-courts;
he worked at his own farm or business; and every year he was liable to
be sent on long military expeditions abroad or to be summoned at a day's
notice to defend the frontier at home. It is out of a life like this, a
life of crowded reality and work, that Aeschylus and Sophocles and
Euripides found leisure to write their tragedies; one writing 90, one
127, and the third 92! Euripides was considered in antiquity a bookish
poet. He had a library--in numbers probably not one book for every
hundred that Tennyson or George Meredith had: he was a philosopher, he
read to himself. But on what a background of personal experience his
philosophy was builded! It is probably this immersion in the hard
realities of life that gives ancient Greek literature some of its
special characteristics. Its firm hold on sanity and common sense, for
instance; its avoidance of sentimentality and paradox and various
seductive kinds of folly; perhaps also its steady devotion to ideal
forms and high conventions, and its aversion from anything that we
should call "realism." A man everlastingly wrapped round in good books
and safe living cries out for something harsh and real--for blood and
swear-words and crude jagged sentences. A man who escapes with eagerness
from a life of war and dirt and brutality and hardship to dwell just a
short time among the Muses, naturally likes the Muses to be their very
selves and not remind him of the mud he has just washed off. Euripides
has two long descriptions of a battle, one in the _Children of Heracles_
and one in the _Suppliant Women_; both are rhetorical Messenger's
Speeches, conventionally well-written and without one touch that
suggests personal experience. It is curious to compare these, the
writings of the poet who had fought in scores of hand-to-hand battles,
with the far more vivid rhapsodies of modern writers who have never so
much as seen a man pointing a gun at them. Aeschylus indeed has written
one splendid battle piece in the _Persians_. But even there there is no
realism; it is the spirit of the war of liberation that thrills in us as
we read, it is not the particular incidents of the battle.
Forty years of military service finished: as the men of sixty stepped
out of the ranks they must have had a feeling of mixed relief and
misgiving. They are now officially "Gerontes," Old Men: they are off
hard work, and to be at the end of hard work is perilously near being
at the end of life. There is in the _Heracles_ a wistful chorus, put in
the mouths of certain Theban elders (637 ff.), "Youth is what I love for
ever; Old Age is a burden upon the head, a dimness of light in the eyes,
heavier than the crags of Etna. Fame and the crown of the East and
chambers piled with gold, what are they all compared with Youth?" A
second life is what one longs for. To have it all again and live it
fully; if a man has any _arete_ in him, any real life left in his heart,
that is what ought to be possible. . . . For Euripides himself it seems
there is still a life to be lived. The words are important and almost
untranslatable. "I will never cease mingling together the Graces and the
Muses"--such words are nearly nonsense, like most literal translations.
The "Graces" or Charities are the spirits of fulfilled desire, the Muses
are all the spirits of "Music" or of "Wisdom"--of History and
Mathematics, by the way, just as much as Singing and Poetry. "I will not
rest. I will make the spirits of Fulfilled Desire one with the spirits
of Music, a marriage of blessedness. I care not to live if the Muses
leave me; their garlands shall be about me for ever. Even yet the
age-worn minstrel can turn Memory into song."
Memory, according to Greek legend, was the mother of the Muses; and the
"memory" of which Euripides is thinking is that of the race, the saga of
history and tradition, more than his own. The Muses taught him long ago
their mystic dance, and he will be theirs for ever; he will never from
weariness or faint heart ask them to rest. He was thinking doubtless of
the lines of the old poet Alcman to his dancing maidens, lines almost
the most beautiful ever sung by Greek lips: "No more, ye maidens
honey-throated, voices of longing; my limbs will bear me no more. Would
God I were a ceryl-bird, over the flower of the wave with the halcyons
flying, and never a care in his heart, the sea-blue bird of the spring!"
Euripides asks for no rest: cares and all, he accepts the service of the
Muses and prays that he may bear their harness to the end. It was a bold
prayer, and the Muses in granting it granted it at a heavy price.