"but in the gods alone is no age or death; all else Time confounds, mastering everything. Strength of the Earth and of the body wastes, trust dies, disloyalty grows, the same spirit never stands firm among friends or allies. To some men early, to others late, pleasures become bitter and then again sweet."

The secret Oedipus will impart at the proper time. The need for protection soon comes. Creon attempts to persuade Oedipus to return to Thebes but is met by a curse, whereupon the Theban guards lay hold of Antigone—they had already seized Ismene—and menace Oedipus himself. Theseus hearing the alarm rushes back, reproaches Creon for his insolence and quickly returns with the two girls. He has strange news to tell; another Theban is a suppliant at the altar of Poseidon close by, craving speech with Oedipus. It is Polyneices, whom Antigone persuades her father to interview. The youth enters, ashamed of his neglect of his father, and begs a blessing on the army he has mustered against Thebes. He is met by a terrible curse which Oedipus invokes on both his sons. In despair Polyneices goes away to his doom.

"For me, my path shall be one of care, disaster and sorrows sent me by my sire and his guardian angels; but, my sisters, be yours a happy road, and when I am dead fulfil my heart's desire, for while I live you may never perform it."

A thunderstorm is heard approaching; the Chorus are terrified at its intensity, but Oedipus eagerly dispatches a messenger for Theseus. When the King arrives he hears the secret; Oedipus' grave would be the eternal protection of Attica, but no man must know its site save Theseus who has to tell it to his heir alone, and he to his son, and so onwards for ever. The proof of Oedipus' word would be a miracle which soon would transform him back to his full strength. Presently he arises, endued with a mysterious sight, beckoning the others to follow him. The play concludes with a magnificent description of his translation. A voice from Heaven called him, chiding him for tarrying; commending his daughters to the care of Theseus, he greeted the earth and heaven in prayer and then without pain or sorrow passed away. On reappearing Theseus promised to convey the sisters back to Thebes and to stop the threatened fratricidal strife.

The Oedipus Coloneus, like the Philoctetes, the other play of Sophocles' old age, closes in peace. The old fiery passions still burn fiercely in Oedipus, as they did in Lear; yet both were "every inch a king" and "more sinned against than sinning". Oedipus' miraculous return to strength before he departs is curiously like the famous end of Colonel Newcome. There are subtle but unmistakable marks of the Euripidean influence on this drama; such are the belief that Theban worthies would protect Athens, the Theseus tradition, and the recovery of worn-out strength. These features will meet us in the next chapter. But it is again noteworthy that Sophocles has added those touches which distinguish his own firm and delicate handiwork. There is nothing of melodrama, nothing inconsequent, nothing exaggerated. It is the dramatist's preparation for his own end. Shakespeare put his valediction into the mouth of Prospero; Sophocles entrusted his to his greatest creation Oedipus. Like him, he was fain to depart, for the gods called. Our last sight of him is of one beckoning us to follow him to the place where calm is to be found; to find it we must use not the eyes of the body, but the inward illumination vouchsafed by Heaven.

To the Athenians of the Periclean age Sophocles was the incarnation of their dramatic ideal. His language is a delight and a despair. It tantalises; it suggests other meanings besides its plain and surface significance. This riddling quality is the daemonic element which he possessed in common with Plato; because of it these two are the masters of a refined and subtle irony, a source of the keenest pleasure. His plots reveal a vivid sense of the exact moment which will yield the intensest tragic effects—only on one particular day could Ajax die or Electra be saved. Accordingly, Sophocles very often begins his play with early dawn, in order to fill the few all-important hours with the greatest possible amount of action. He has put the maximum of movement into his work, only the presence ofthe Chorus and the conventional messengers (two features imposed on him by the law of the Attic theatre) making the action halt.

But it is in the sum-total of his art that his greatness lies; the sense of a whole is its controlling factor; details are important, indeed, he took the utmost pains to see that they were necessary and convincing—yet they were details, subordinate, closely related, not irrelevant nor disproportionate. This instinct for a definite plan first is the essence of the classical spirit; exuberance is rigorously repressed, symmetry and balance are the first, last and only aim. To some judges Sophocles is like a Greek temple, splendid but a little chilly; they miss the soaring ambition of Aeschylus or the more direct emotional appeal of Euripides. Yet it is a cardinal error to imagine that Sophocles is passionless; his life was not, neither are his characters. Like the lava of a recent eruption, they may seem ashen on the surface, but there is fire underneath; it betrays itself through the cracks which appear when their substance is violently disturbed.

They, much enforced, show a hasty spark And straight are cold again.

Repression, avoidance of extremes, dignity under provocation are the marks of the gentle Sophoclean type and it is a very high type indeed.

For we have in him the very fountain of the whole classical tradition in drama. Sophocles is something far more important than a mere influence; he is an ideal, and as such is indestructible. To ask the names of writers who came most under his "influence" is as sensible as to ask the names of the sculptors who most faithfully followed the Greek tradition of statuary. He is Classical tragedy. The main body of Spanish and English drama is romantic, the Sophoclean ideal is that of the small but powerful body of University men in Elizabeth's time headed by Ben Jonson, of the typically French school of dramatists, of Moratin, Lessing, Goethe, of the exponents of the Greek creed in nineteenth-century England, notably Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and of Robert Bridges. To this school the cultivation of emotional expression is suspicious, if not dangerous; it leads to eccentricity, to the revelation of feelings which frequently are not worth experiencing, to sentimental flabbiness, to riot and extravagance. Perhaps in dread of the ridiculous the Classical school represses itself too far, creating characters of marble instead of flesh. These creations are at least worth looking at and bring no shame; they are better than the spectral psychological studies which many dramatists, now dead or dying, have bidden us believe are real men and women.

TRANSLATIONS:

Jebb (Cambridge). This is by far the best; it renders with success the delicacy of the original.

Storr (Loeb Series).

Verse translations by Whitelaw and Campbell.

See Symonds' Greek Poets, and Norwood Greek Tragedy, as above.



EURIPIDES

No-Man's Land was the scene of many tragedies during the Great War. There has come down to us a remarkable tragedy, called the Rhesus, about a similar region. It treats first of the Dolon incident of the Iliad. Hector sent out Dolon to reconnoitre, and soon afterwards some Phrygian shepherds bring news that Rhesus has arrived that very night with a Thracian army. Reviled by Hector for postponing his arrival till the tenth year of the war, Rhesus answers that continual wars with Scythia have occupied him, but now that he is come he will end the strife in a day. He is assigned his quarters and departs to take up his position.

Having learned the password from Dolon, Diomedes and Odysseus enter and reach the tents of Hector who has just left with Rhesus. Diomedes is eager to kill Aeneas or Paris or some other leader, but Odysseus warns him to be content with the spoils they have won. Athena appears, counselling them to slay Rhesus; if he survives that night, neither Achilles nor Ajax can save the Greeks. Paris approaches, having heard that spies are abroad in the night; he is beguiled by Athena who pretends to be Aphrodite. When he is safely got away, the two slay Rhesus.

The King's charioteer bursts on to the stage with news of his death. He accuses Hector of murder out of desire for the matchless steeds. Hector recognises in the story all the marks of Odysseus' handiwork. The Thracian Muse descends to mourn her son's death, declaring that she had saved him for many years, but Hector prevailed upon him and Athena caused his end.

This play is not only about No-man's land; it is a No-man's land, for its author is unknown; it is sometimes ascribed to Euripides, though it contains many words he did not use, on the ground that it reflects his art. For it shows in brief the change which came over Tragedy under Euripides' guidance. It is exciting, it seizes the tragic moment, the one important night, it has some lovely lyrics, the characters are realistic, the gods descend to untie the knot of the play or to explain the mysterious, some detail is unrelated to the main plot—Paris exercises no influence on the real action—it is pathetic.

Sophocles said that he painted men as they ought to be, Euripides as they are. This realistic tendency, added to the romanticism whence realism always springs, is the last stage of tragedy before it declines. A Euripides is inevitable in literary history.

Born at Salamis on the very day of the great victory of 480, Euripides entered into the spirit of revolution in all human activities which was stirring in contemporary Athens. He won the first prize on five occasions, was pilloried by the Conservatives though he was a favourite with the masses. Towards the end of his life he migrated to Macedonia, where he wrote not the least splendid of his plays, the Bacchae. On the news of his death in 406 Sophocles clothed his Chorus in mourning as a mark of his esteem.

The famous Alcestis won the second prize in 438. Apollo had been the guest of Admetus and had persuaded Death to spare him if a substitute could be found. Admetus' parents and friends failed him, but his wife Alcestis for his sake was content to leave the light. After a series of speeches of great beauty and pathos she dies, leaving her husband desolate. Heracles arrives at the palace on the day of her death; he notices that some sorrow is come upon his host, but being assured that only a relation has died he remains. Meanwhile Admetus' parents arrive to console him; he reviles them for their selfishness in refusing to die for him, but is sharply reminded by them that parents rejoice to see the sun as well as their children; in reality, he is his wife's murderer.

Heracles' reckless hilarity shocked the servants who were unwilling to look after an unfeeling guest. He enters the worse for liquor and advises a young menial to enjoy life while he can. After a few questions he learns the truth. Sobered, he hurries forth unknown to Admetus to wrestle with Death for Alcestis. Admetus, distracted by loss of his wife, becomes aware that evil tongues will soon begin to talk of his cowardice. Heracles returns with a veiled woman, whom he says he won in a contest, and begs Admetus keep her till he returns. After much persuasion Admetus takes her by the hand, and on being bidden to look more closely, sees that it is Alcestis. The great deliverer then bids farewell with a gentle hint to him to treat guests more frankly in future.

This play must be familiar to English readers of Browning's Balaustion's Adventure. It has been set to music and produced at Covent Garden this very year. The specific Euripidean marks are everywhere upon it. The selfish male, the glorious self-denial of the woman, the deep but helpless sympathy of the gods, the tendency to laughter to relieve our tears, the wonderful lyrics indicate a new arrival in poetry. The originality of Euripides is evident in the choice of a subject not otherwise treated; he was constantly striving to pass out of the narrow cycle prescribed for Attic tragedians. A new and very formidable influence has arisen to challenge Sophocles who may have felt as Thackeray did when he read one of Dickens' early emotional triumphs.

In 431 he obtained the third prize with the Medea, the heroine of the world-famous story of the Argonauts related for English readers in Morris' Life and Death of Jason. A nurse tells the story of Jason's cooling love for Medea and of his intended wedlock with the daughter of Creon, King of Corinth, the scene of the play. Appalled at the effect the news will produce on her mistress' fiery nature, she begs the Tutor to save the two children. Medea's frantic cries are heard within the house; appearing before a Chorus of Corinthian women she plunges into a description of the curse that haunts their sex.

"Of all things that live and have sense women are the most hapless. First we must buy a husband to lord it over our bodies; our next anxiety is whether he will be good or bad, for divorce is not easy or creditable. Entering upon a strange new life we must divine how best to treat our spouse. If after this agony we find one to live with us without chafing at the yoke, a happy life is ours—if not, better to die. But when a man is surfeited with his mate he can find comfort outside with friend or compeer; but we perforce look to one alone. They say of us that we live a life free from danger, but they fight in wars. It is false. I would rather face battle thrice than childbirth once."

Desolate, far away from her father's home, she begs the Chorus to be silent if she can devise punishment for Jason.

Creon comes forth, uneasy at some vague threats which Medea has uttered and afraid of her skill as a sorceress. He intends to cast her out of Corinth before returning to his palace, but is prevailed upon to grant one day's grace. Medea is aghast at this blow, but decides to use the brief respite. After a splendid little ode which prophesies that women shall not always be without a Muse, Jason emerges. Pointing out that her violent temper has brought banishment he professes to sympathise, offering money to help her in exile. She bursts into a fury of indignation, recounting how she abandoned home to save and fly with him to Greece. He argues that his gratitude is due not to her, but to Love who compelled her to save him; he repeats his offer and is ready to come if she sends for him. Salvation comes unexpectedly. Aegeus, the childless King of Athens, accidentally visits Corinth. Medea wins his sympathy and promises him children if he will offer her protection. He willingly assents and she outlines her plan. Sending for Jason, she first pretends repentance for hasty speech, then begs him to get her pardon from the new bride and release from exile for the two children. She offers as a wedding gift a wondrous robe and crown which once belonged to her ancestor the Sun. In the scene which follows is depicted one of the greatest mental conflicts in literature. To punish Jason she must slay her sons; torn by love for them and thirsting for revenge she wavers. The mother triumphs for a moment, then the fiend, then the mother again—at last she decides on murder. This scene captured the imagination of the ancient world, inspiring many epigrams in the Anthology and forming one of the mural paintings of Pompeii.

A messenger rushes in. The robe and crown have burnt to death Glauce the bride and her father who vainly tried to save her: Jason is coming with all speed to punish the murderess. She listens with unholy joy, retires and slays the children. Jason runs in and madly batters at the door to save them. He is checked by the apparition of Medea seated in her car drawn by dragons. Reviled by him as a murderess, she replies that the death of the children was agony to her as well and prophesies a miserable death for him.

This marvellous character is Euripides' Clytemnestra. Yet unlike her, she remains absolutely human throughout; her weak spot was her maternal affection which made her hesitate, while Clytemnestra was past feeling, "not a drop being left". Medea is the natural Southern woman who takes the law into her own hands. In the Trachiniae is another, outraged as Medea was, yet forgiving. Truly Sophocles said he painted men as they ought to be, Euripides as they were.

The Hippolytus in 429 won the first prize. It is important as introducing a revolutionary practice into drama. Aphrodite in a prologue declares she will punish Hippolytus for slighting her and preferring to worship Artemis, the goddess of hunting. The young prince passes out to the chase; as he goes, his attention is drawn to a statue of Aphrodite by his servants who warn him that men hate unfriendly austerity, but he treats their words with contempt. His stepmother Phaedra enters with the Nurse, the Chorus consisting of women of Troezen, the scene of the play. A secret malady under which Phaedra pines has so far baffled the Nurse who now learns that she loves her stepson. She had striven in vain against this passion, only to find like Olivia that

Such a potent fault it is That it but mocks reproof.

She decided to die rather than disgrace herself and her city Athens. The Nurse advises her not to sacrifice herself for such a common passion; a remedy there must be: "Men would find it, if women had not found it already". "She needs not words, but the man." Scandalised by this cynicism the Queen bids her be silent; the woman tells her she has potent charms within the house which will rid her of the malady without danger to her good name or her life. Phaedra suspects her plan and absolutely forbids her to speak with Hippolytus. The answer is ambiguous:

"Be of good cheer; I will order the matter well. Only Queen Aphrodite be my aid. For the rest, it will suffice to tell my plan to my friends within."

A violent commotion arises in the palace; Hippolytus is heard indistinctly uttering angry words. He and the Nurse come forth; in spite of her appeal for silence, he denounces her for tempting him. When she reminds him of his oath of secrecy, he answers "My tongue has sworn, but not my will"—a line pounced upon as immoral by the poet's many foes. Hippolytus' long denunciation of women has been similarly considered to prove that the poet was an enemy of their sex. Left alone with the Nurse Phaedra is terror-stricken lest her husband Theseus should hear of her disgrace. She casts the Nurse off, adding that she has a remedy of her own. Her last speech is ominous.

"This day will I be ruined by a bitter love. Yet in death I will be a bane to another, that he may know not to be proud in my woes; sharing with me in this weakness he will learn wisdom."

Her suicide plunges Theseus into grief. Hanging to her wrist he sees a letter which he opens and reads. There he finds evidence of her passion for his son. In mad haste he calls on Poseidon his father to fulfil one of the three boons he promised to grant him; he requires the death of his son. Hearing the tumult the latter returns. His father furiously attacks him, calling him hypocrite for veiling his lusts under a pretence of chastity. The youth answers with dignity; when confronted with the damning letter, he is unable to answer for his oath's sake. He sadly obeys the decree of banishment pronounced on him, bidding his friends farewell.

A messenger tells the sequel. He took the road from Argos along the coast in his chariot. A mighty wave washed up a monster from the deep. Plunging in terror the horses became unruly; they broke the car and dashed their master's body against the rocks. Theseus rejoices at the fate which has overtaken a villain, yet pities him as his son. He bids the servants bring him that he may refute his false claim to innocence. Artemis appears to clear her devotee. The letter was forged by the Nurse, Aphrodite causing the tragedy. "This is the law among us gods; none of us thwarts the will of another but always stands aside." Hippolytus is brought in at death's door. He is reconciled to his father and dies blessing the goddess he has served so long.

The play contains the first indication of a sceptical spirit which was soon to alter the whole character of the Drama. The running sore of polytheism is clear. In worshipping one deity a man may easily offend another, Aeschylus made this conflict of duties the cause of Agamemnon's death, but accepted it as a dogma not to be questioned. Such an attitude did not commend itself to Euripides; he clearly states the problem in a prologue, solving it in an appearance of Artemis by the device known as the Deus ex machina. It is sometimes said this trick is a confession of the dramatist's inability to untie the knot he has twisted. Rather it is an indication that the legend he was compelled to follow was at variance with the inevitable end of human action. The tragedies of Euripides which contain the Deus ex machina gain enormously if the last scene is left out; it was added to satisfy the craving for some kind of a settlement and is more in the nature of comedy perhaps than we imagine. Hippolytus is a somewhat chilly man of honour, the Nurse a brilliant study of unscrupulous intrigue. Racine's Phedre is as disagreeable as Euripides' is noble. Like Hamlet, the play is full of familiar quotations.

Two Euripidean features appear in the Heracleidae, of uncertain date. Iolaus the comrade of Heracles flees with the hero's children to Athens. They sit as suppliants at an altar from which Copreus, herald of their persecutor Eurystheus, tries to drive them.

Unable to fight in his old age Iolaus begs aid. A Chorus of Athenians rush in, followed by the King Demophon, to hear the facts. First Copreus puts his case, then Iolaus refutes him. The King decides to respect the suppliants, bidding Copreus defy Eurystheus in his name. As a struggle is inevitable Iolaus refuses to leave the altars till it is over.

Demophon returns to say that the Argive host is upon them and that Athens will prevail if a girl of noble family freely gives her life; he cannot compel his subjects to sacrifice their children for strangers, for he rules a free city. Hearing his words, Macaria comes from the shrine where she had been sheltering with her sisters and Alcmena, her father's mother. When she hears the truth, she willingly offers to save her family and Athens.

"Shall I, daughter of a noble sire, suffer the worst indignity? Must I not die in any wise? We may leave Attica and wander again; shall I not hang my head if I hear men say, 'Why come ye here with suppliant boughs, cleaving to life? Depart; we will not help cowards.' Who will marry such a one? Better death than such disgrace."

A messenger announces that Hyllus, Heracles' son, has returned with succours and is with the Athenian army. Iolaus summons Alcmena and orders his arms; old though he is, he will fight his foe in spite of Alcmena's entreaties. In the battle he saw Hyllus and begged him to take him into his chariot. He prayed to Zeus and Hebe to restore his strength for one brief moment. Miraculously he was answered. Two stars lit upon the car, covering the yoke with a halo of light. Catching sight of Eurystheus Iolaus the aged took him prisoner and brought him to Alcmena. At sight of him she gloats over the coming vengeance. The Athenian herald warns her that their laws do not permit the slaughter of captives, but she declares she will kill him herself. Eurystheus answers with great dignity; his enmity to Heracles came not from envy but from the desire to save his own throne. He does not deprecate death, rather, if he dies, his body buried in Athenian land will bring to it a blessing and to the Argive descendants of the Heracleidae a curse when they in time invade the land of their preservers.

Though slight and weakly constructed, this play is important. Its two features are first, the love of argument, a weakness of all the Athenians who frequented the Law Courts and the Assembly; this mania for discussing pros and cons spoils one or two later plays. Next, the self-sacrificing girl appears for the first time. To Euripides the worthier sex was not the male, possessed of political power and therefore tyrannous, but the female. He first drew attention to its splendid heroism. He is the champion of the scorned or neglected elements of civilisation.

The Andromache is a picture of the hard lot of one who is not merely a woman, but a slave. Hector's wife fell to Neoptolemus on the capture of Troy and bore him a son called Molossus. Later he married Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen; the marriage was childless and Hermione, who loved her husband, persecuted Andromache. She took advantage of her husband's absence to bring matters to a head. Andromache exposed her child, herself flying to a temple of Thetis when Menelaus arrived to visit his daughter. Hermione enters richly attired, covered with jewels "not given by her husband's kin, but by her father that she may speak her mind." She reviles Andromache as a slave with no Hector near and commands her to quit sanctuary. Menelaus brings the child; after a long discussion he threatens to kill him if Andromache does not abandon the altar, but promises to save him if she obeys. In this dilemma she prefers to die if she can thus save her son; but when Menelaus secures her he passes the child to his daughter to deal with him as she will. Betrayed and helpless, Andromache breaks out into a long denunciation of Spartan perfidy.

Peleus, grandfather of Neoptolemus, hearing the tumult intervenes. After more rhetoric he takes Andromache and Molossus under his protection and cows Menelaus, who leaves for Sparta on urgent business. When her father departs, Hermione fears her husband's vengeance on her maltreatment of the slave and child whom he loves. Resolving on suicide, she is checked by the entry of Orestes who is passing through Phthia to Dodona. She begs him to take her away from the land or back to her father. Orestes reminds her of the old compact which their parents made to unite them; he has a grievance against Neoptolemus apart from his frustrated wedlock, for he had called him a murderer of his mother. He had therefore taken measures to assassinate him at Delphi, whither he had gone to make his peace with Apollo.

Hearing of Hermione's flight Peleus returns, only to hear more serious news. Orestes' plot had succeeded and Neoptolemus had been overwhelmed. In consternation he fears the loss of his own life in old age. His goddess-wife Thetis appears and bids him marry Andromachus to Hector's brother Helenus; Molossus would found a mighty kingdom, while Peleus would become immortal after the burial of Neoptolemus.

A very old criticism calls this play "second rate". Dramatically it is worthless, for it consists of three episodes loosely connected. The motives for Menelaus' return and Hermione's flight with an assassin from a husband she loved are not clear, while the Deus ex machina adds nothing to the story. It is redeemed by some splendid passages, but is interesting as revealing a further development of Euripides' thought. He here makes the slave, another downtrodden class, free of the privileges of literature, for to him none is vile or reprobate. The famous painting Captive Andromache indicates to us the loneliness of slavery.

The same subject was treated more successfully in the Hecuba: she has received her immortality in the famous players' scene in Hamlet. The shade of Polydorus, Hecuba's son, outlines the course of the action. Hecuba enters terrified by dreams about him and her daughter Polyxena. Her forebodings are realised when she hears from a Chorus of fellow-captives that the shade of Achilles has demanded her daughter's sacrifice. Odysseus bids her face the ordeal with courage. She replies in a splendid pathetic appeal. Reminding him how she saved him from discovery when he entered Troy in disguise, she demands a requital.

"Kill her not, we have had enough of death. She is my comfort, my nurse, the staff of my life and guide of my way. She is my joy in whom I forget my woes. Victors should not triumph in lawlessness nor think to prosper always. I was once but now am no more, for one day has taken away my all."

He sympathises but dare not dishonour the mighty dead. Polyxena intervenes to point out the blessings death will bring her.

"First, its very unfamiliar name makes me love it. Perhaps I might have found a cruel-hearted lord to sell me for money, the sister of Hector; I might have had the burden of making bread, sweeping the house and weaving at the loom in a life of sorrow. A slave marriage would degrade me, once thought a fit mate for kings."

Bidding Odysseus lead her to death, she takes a touching and beautiful farewell. Her latter end is splendidly described by Talthybius.

A serving woman enters with the body of Polydorus; she is followed by Agamemnon who has come to see why Hecuba has not sent for Polyxena's corpse. In hopeless grief she shows her murdered son, begging his aid to a revenge and promising to exact it without compromising him. A message brings on the scene Polymestor, her son's Thracian host with his sons. In a dialogue full of terrible irony Hecuba inquires about Polydorus, saying she has the secret of a treasure to reveal. He enters her tent where is nobody but some Trojan women weaving. Dismissing his guards, he lets the elder women dandle his children, while the younger admire his robes. At a signal they arose, slew the children and blinded him. On hearing the tumult, Agamemnon hurries in; turning to him, the Thracian demands justice, pretending he had slain Polydorus to win his favour. Hecuba refutes him, pointing out that it was the lust for her son's gold which caused his death. Agamemnon decides for Hecuba, whereupon Polymestor turns fay, prophesying the latter end of Agamemnon, Hecuba and Cassandra.

The strongest and weakest points of Euripides' appeal are here apparent. The play is not one but two, the connection between the deaths of both brother and sister being a mere dream of their mother. The poet tends to rely rather upon single scenes than upon the whole and is so far romantic rather than classical. His power is revealed in the very stirring call he makes upon the emotions of pity and revenge; because of this Aristotle calls him the most tragic of the poets.

The Supplices, written about 421, carries a little further the history of the Seven against Thebes. A band of Argive women, mothers of the defeated Seven, apply to Aethra, mother of Theseus, to prevail on her son to recover the dead bodies. Adrastus, king of Argos, pleads with Theseus who at first refuses aid but finally consents at the entreaties of his mother. His ultimatum to Thebes is delayed by the arrival of a herald from that city. A strange discussion of the comparative merits of democracy and tyranny leads to a violent scene in which Theseus promises a speedy attack in defence of the rights of the dead.

In the battle the Athenians after a severe struggle won the victory; in the moment of triumph Theseus did not enter the city, for he had come not to sack it but to save the dead. Reverently collecting them he washed away the gore and laid them on their biers, sending them to Athens. In an affecting scene Adrastus recognises and names the bodies. At this moment Evadne enters, wife of the godless Capaneus who was smitten by the thunderbolt; she is demented and wishes to find the body to die upon it. Her father Iphis comes in search of her and at first does not see her, as she is seated on a rock above him. His pleadings with her are vain; she throws herself to her death. At the sight Iphis plunges into a wild lament.

"She is no more, who once kissed my face and fondled my head. To a father the sweetest joy is his daughter; son's soul is greater, but less winsome in its blandishments."

Theseus returns with the children of the dead champions to whom he presents the bodies. He is about to allow Adrastus to convey them home when Athena appears. She advises him to exact an oath from Adrastus that Argos will never invade Attica. To the Argives she prophecies a vengeance on Thebes by the Epigoni, sons of the Seven.

This play is very like the Heraclidae but adds a new feature; drama begins to be used for political purposes. The play was written at the end of the first portion of the Peloponnesian war, when Argos began to enter the world of Greek diplomacy. This illegitimate use of Art cannot fail to ruin it; Art has the best chance of making itself permanent when it is divorced from passing events. But there are other weaknesses in this piece; it has some fine and perhaps some melodramatic situations; here and there are distinct touches of comedy.

The Ion is a return to Euripides' best manner. Hermes in a prologue explains what must have been a strange theme to the audience. Ion is a young and nameless boy who serves the temple of Apollo in Delphi. There is a mystery in his birth which does not trouble his sunny intelligence. Creusa, daughter of Erectheus King of Athens, is married to Xuthus but has no issue. Unaware that Ion is her son by Apollo, she meets him and is attracted by his noble bearing. A splendid dialogue of tragic irony represents both as wishing to find the one a mother, the other a son. Creusa tells how she has come to consult the oracle about a friend who bore a son to the god and exposed him. Ion is shocked at the immorality of the god he serves; he refuses to believe that an evil god can claim to deliver righteous oracles. Addressing the gods as a body, he states the problem of the play.

"Ye are unjust in pursuing pleasure rather than wisdom; no longer must we call men evil, if we imitate your evil deeds; rather the gods are evil, who instruct men in such things."

Xuthus embraces Ion as his son in obedience to a command he has just received to greet as his child the first person he meets on leaving the shrine. Ion accepts the god's will but longs to know who is his mother. Seeing an unwonted dejection in him Xuthus learns the reason. Ion is afraid of the bar on his birth which will disqualify him from residence at Athens, where absolute legitimacy was essential; his life at Delphi was in sharp contrast, it was one of perfect content and eternal novelty. Xuthus tells him he will take him to Athens merely as a sightseer; he is afraid to anger his wife with his good fortune; in time he will win her consent to Ion's succession to the throne.

Creusa enters with an old man who had been her father's Tutor. She learns from the Chorus that she can never have a son, unlike her more lucky husband who has just found one. The Tutor counsels revenge; though a slave, he will work for her to the end.

"Only one thing brings shame to a slave, his name. In all else he is every whit the equal of a free man, if he is honest."

The two decide to poison Ion when he offers libations. But the plot failed owing to a singular chance. The birds in the temple tasted the wine and one that touched Ion's cup died immediately. Creusa flees to the altar, pursued by Ion who reviles her for her deed. At that moment the old Prophetess appears with the vessel in which she first found Ion. Creusa recognises it and accurately describes the child's clothing which she wove with her own hands; mother and son are thus united. The play closes with an appearance of Athena, who prophesies that Ion shall be the founder of the great Ionian race, for Apollo's hand had protected him and Creusa throughout.

The central problem of this piece is whether the gods govern the world righteously or not. No more vital issue could be raised; if gods are wicked they must fall below the standard of morality which men insist on in their dealings with one another. Ion is the Greek Samuel; his naturally reverent mind is disturbed at any suggestion of evil in a deity. His boyish faith in Apollo is justified and Euripides seems to teach in another form the lesson that "except we become as children, we cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven."

The Hercules Furens belongs to Euripides' middle period. Amphitryon, father of Heracles, and Megara, the hero's wife, are in Theban territory waiting for news. They are in grave danger, for Lycus, a new king, threatens to kill them with Heracles' children, as he had already slain Megara's father. He has easy victims in Amphitryon, "naught but an empty noise", and Megara, who is resigned to the inevitable. Faced with this terror, Amphitryon exclaims:—

"O Zeus, thou art a worse friend than I deemed. Though a mortal, I exceed thee in worth, god though thou art, for I have never abandoned my son's children. Thou canst not save thy friends; either thou art ignorant or unjust in thy nature."

As they are led out to slaughter, Amphitryon makes what he is sure is a vain appeal to Heaven to send succour. At that moment the hero himself appears. Seeing his family clad in mourning, he inquires the reason. At first his intention is to attack Lycus openly, but Amphitryon bids him wait within; he will tell Lycus that his victims are sitting as suppliants on the hearth; when the King enters Heracles may slay him without trouble.

When vengeance has been taken Iris descends from heaven, sent by Hera to stain Heracles with kindred bloodshed. She summons Madness who is unwilling to afflict any man, much less a famous hero. Reluctantly consenting she sets to work. A messenger rushes out telling the sequel. Heracles slew two of his children and was barely prevented from destroying his father by the intervention of Athena. He reappears in his right mind, followed by Amphitryon who vainly tries to console him. Theseus who accompanied Heracles to the lower world hurries in on hearing a vague rumour. To him Heracles relates his life of never-ending sorrow. Conscious of guilt and afraid of contaminating any who touch him, he at length consents to go to Athens with Theseus for purification. He departs in sorrow, bidding his father bury the slain children.

Like the Hecuba, this play consists of two very loosely connected parts. The second is decidedly unconvincing. Madness has never been treated in literature with more power than in Hamlet and Lear. Besides Shakespeare's work, the description in the mouth of a messenger, though vivid enough, is less effective, for "what is set before the eyes excites us more than what is dropped into our ears" as Horace remarks. But the point of the play is the seemingly undeserved suffering which is the lot of a good character. This is the theme of many a Psalm in the Bible; its answer is just this—"Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth."

In 415 Euripides told how Hecuba lost her last remaining child Cassandra. The plot of the Trojan Women is outlined by Poseidon and Athena who threaten the Greeks with their hatred for burning the temples of Troy. After a long and powerful lament the captive women are told their fate by the herald Talthybius. Cassandra is to be married to Agamemnon. She rushes in prophesying wildly. On recovering calm speech she bids her mother crown her with garlands of victory, for her bridal will bring Agamemnon to his death, avenging her city and its folk. Triumphantly she passes to her appointed work of ruin.

Andromache follows her, assigned to Neoptolemus. She sadly points out how her faithfulness to Hector has brought her into slavery with a proud master.

"Is not Polyxena's fate agony less than mine? I have not that thing which is left to all mortals, hope, nor may I flatter my mind heart with any good to come, though it is sweet to even to dream of it."

This despair is rendered more hopeless when she learns that the Greeks have decided to throw her little son Astyanax from the walls.

Menelaus comes forward, gloating at the revenge he hopes to wreak on Helen. On seeing him Hecuba first prays:—

"Thou who art earth's support and hast thy seat on earth, whoever thou art, past finding out, Zeus, whether thou art a natural Necessity or man's Intelligence, to thee I pray. Moving in a noiseless path thou orderest all things human in righteousness."

She continues:—

"I praise thee, Menelaus, if thou wilt indeed slay thy wife, but fly her sight, lest she snare thee with desire. She catcheth men's eyes, sacketh cities, burneth homes, so potent are her charms. I know her as thou dost and all who have suffered from her."

Hecuba and Helen then argue about the responsibility for the war. The latter in shameless impudence pleads that she has saved Greece from invasion and that Love who came with Paris to Sparta was the cause of her fault. Hecuba ridicules the idea that Hera and Artemis could desire any prize of beauty. It was lust of Trojan gold that tempted Helen; never once was she known to bewail her sin in Troy, rather she always tried to attract men's eyes. Such a woman's death would be a crown of glory to Greece. Menelaus says her fate will be decided in Argos. Talthybius brings in the body of Astyanax, over which Hecuba bursts into a lament of exceptional beauty and then passes out to slavery.

In this drama Euripides draws upon all his resources of pathos. It is a succession of brilliantly conceived sorrows. Cassandra's exulting prophecy of the revenge she is to bring is one of the great things in Euripides. In this play we have a most vivid picture of the destructive effects of evil, an inevitable consequence of which it is that the woman, however innocent she may be, always pays. Hecuba drank the cup of bereavement to the very last drop.

The Electra, acted about 418, is characteristic. Electra has been compelled to marry a Mycenean labourer, a man of noble instincts who respects the princess and treats her as such. Both enter the scene; the man goes to labour for Electra, "for no lazy man by merely having God's name on his lips can make a livelihood without toil". Orestes and Pylades at first imagine Electra to be a servant; learning the truth they come forward and question her. She tells the story of her mother's shame and Aegisthus' insolence which Orestes promises to recount to her brother, "for in ignorant men there is no spark of pity anywhere, only in the learned." The labourer returns and by his speech moves Orestes to declare that birth is no test of nobility. Electra sends him to fetch an old Tutor of her father to make ready for her two guests; he departs remarking that there is just enough food in the house for one day.

The old Tutor arrives in tears; he has found a lock of hair on Agamemnon's tomb. Gazing intently on the two strangers, he recognises Orestes by a scar on the eyebrow. They then proceed to plot the death of their enemies. Orestes goes to meet Aegisthus is close by sacrificing, and presently returns with the corpse, at which Electra hurls back the taunts and jeers he had heaped on her in his lifetime. She had sent to her mother saying she had given birth to a boy and asking her to come immediately.

Orestes quails before the coming murder, but Electra bids him be loyal to his father. Clytemnestra on her arrival querulously defends her past, alleging as her pretext not the death of Iphigeneia but the presence of a rival, Cassandra. Electra after refuting her invites her inside the wretched hut to offer sacrifice for her newly born child, where she is slain by Orestes. At the end of the play the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, bid Pylades marry Electra, tell Orestes he will be purified in Athens and prophesy that Menelaus and Helen, just arrived from Egypt, will bury Agisthus real Helen never went to Troy, a wraith of her being sent there with Paris.

The startling realism of this drama is apparent. The poverty of Electra, the more certain identification of Orestes by a scar than by a lock of hair, the mention of Cassandra as the real motive for the murder of Agamemnon all indicate that Euripides was not content with the accepted legend. His Clytemnestra is a feeble creation even by the side of that of Sophocles.

Stesichorus in a famous poem tells how Helen blinded him for maligning her; she never went to Troy; it was a wraith which accompanied Paris. Such is the central idea of a very strange play, the Helen. The scene is in Egypt. Teucer, banished by his father, meets the real Helen; to her amazement he tells of her evil reputation and of the great war before Troy, adding that Menelaus is sailing home with another Helen. The latter enters, to learn that he is in Egypt, where the real Helen has lived for the last seventeen years. Warned by a prophetess Theonoe that her husband is not far off, Helen comes to be reunited to him. A messenger from the coast announces that the wraith has faded into nothingness.

Helen then warns Menelaus of her difficult position. She is wooed by Theoclymenus, king of the land, brother of Theonoe. Menelaus in despair thinks of killing himself and Helen to escape the tyrant. Theonoe holds their fate in her hands; Helen pleads with her; "It is shameful that thou shouldest know things divine, and not righteousness." Menelaus declares his intention of living and dying with his wife. The prophetess leaves them to discover some means of escape which Helen devises. Pretending that Menelaus is a messenger bringing news of her husband's death at sea, she persuades the tyrant to provide a ship and rowers that Helen may perform the last rites to the dead on the element where he died. At the right moment the Greek sailors overpowered the rowers and sailed home with the united pair.

Very commonly real drama suffers the fate which has overtaken it in this piece; it declines into melodrama. Here are to be found all the stock melodramatic features—a bold hero, a scheming beauty, a confidante, a dupe, the murder of a ship's crew. Massinger piloted Elizabethan drama to a similar end. Given an uncritical audience melodrama is the surest means of filling the house. Reality matters little in such work; the facts of life are like Helen's wraith, when they become unmanageable they vanish into thin air.

About 412 the Iphigeneia in Tauris appeared. South Russia was the seat of a cult of Artemis; the goddess spirited Iphigeneia to the place when her father sacrificed her at Aulis. Orestes, bidden by Apollo to steal an image of the goddess to get his final purification, comes on the stage with Pylades; on seeing the temple they are convinced of the impossibility of burgling it. A shepherd describes to Iphigeneia their capture, for strangers were taken and offered to the goddess without exception. One of the two was seized with a vision of the avenging deities; attacked by a band of peasants both were overpowered after a stubborn resistance. Formerly Iphigeneia had pitied the Greeks who landed there; now, warned of Orestes' death by a dream, she determines to kill without mercy. One of them shall die, the other taking back to Greece a letter. Orestes insists on dying himself, reminding Pylades of his duty to Electra. When the letter is brought Pylades swears to fulfil his word, but asks what is to happen if the ship is wrecked. Iphigeneia reads the letter to him; it is addressed to Orestes and tells of his sister's weary exile. After the recognition is completed, Orestes relates the horrors of his life and begs his sister to help him to steal the all-important image.

Thoas, the King of the land, learns from her that the two Greeks are guilty of kindred murder; their presence has defiled the holy image which needs purification in the sea as well as the criminals. The priestess obtains permission to bind the captives and take the image to be cleansed with private mystic rites. The plot succeeds; Orestes' ship puts in; after a struggle the three board it, carrying the image with them. Thoas is prevented from pursuit by an intervention of Athena.

Goethe used this play for his drama of the same name; he made Thoas the lover of Iphigeneia, whom he represents as the real image whom Orestes is to remove. Her departure is not compassed by a stratagem, but is permitted by the King, a man of singular nobility and self-denial.

The Phaenissae has been much admired in all ages. Jocasta tells how after the discovery of his identity Oedipus blinded himself but was shut up by his two sons whom he cursed for their impiety. Eteocles then usurped the rule while Polyneices called an Argive host to attack Thebes. A Choral description of this army is succeeded by an unexpected entry into the city of Polyneices who meets his mother and tells her of his life in exile. She sends for Eteocles in the hope of reconciling her two sons. Polyneices promises to disband his forces if he is restored to his rights, but Eteocles, enamoured of power, refuses to surrender it. Jocasta vainly points out to him the burden of rule, nor can she persuade Polyneices not to attack his own land.

When the champions have taken up their position at the gates, Teiresias tells Creon that Thebes can be saved by the sacrifice of his own son Menoeceus. Creon refuses to comply and urges his son to escape. Pretending to obey Menoeceus threw himself from the city walls. The struggle at the gates is followed by a challenge to Polyneices issued by Eteocles to settle the dispute in single combat. Jocasta and Antigone rush out to intervene, too late. They find the two lying side by side at death's door. Eteocles is past speech, but Polyneices bids farewell to his mother and sister, pitying his brother "who turned friendship into enmity, yet still was dear". In agony, Jocasta slays herself over her sons' bodies.

Led in by Antigone, Oedipus is banished by Creon, who forbids the burial of Polyneices. After touching the dead Jocasta and his two sons, he passes to exile and rest at Colonus.

The harsh story favoured by Sophocles has been greatly humanised by Euripides, who could not accept all the savagery of the received legend. Apart from the unexplained presence of Polyneices in the city, the plot is excellent. The speeches are vigorous and natural, the characters thoroughly human. The criticising and refining influence of Euripides is manifest throughout, together with a simple and noble pathos.

An ancient critic says of the Orestes, written in 408, "the drama is popular but of the lowest morality; except Pylades, all are villains". Electra meets Helen, unexpectedly returned from Egypt to Argos with Menelaus, who sends her daughter Hermione with offerings to the tomb of Agamemnon. Electra's opinion of her is vividly expressed.

"See how she has tricked out her hair, preserving her beauty; she is old Helen still. Heaven abhor thee, the bane of me and my brother and Greece."

The Chorus accidentally awakens Orestes who is visited by a wild vision of haunting Furies. When he regains sanity he begs the assistance of Menelaus, his last refuge. His uncle, a broken reed, is saved from committing himself by the entry of Tyndareus, father of Clytemnestra and Helen. He righteously rebukes the bloodthirsty Orestes, though he is aware of the evil in his two daughters. Orestes breaks out into an insulting speech which alienates completely his grandfather. Menelaus, when appealed to again, hurries out to try to win him back.

Pylades suggests that he and Orestes should plead their case before the Argive Assembly, which was to try them for murder of Clytemnestra. A very brilliant and exciting account of the debate tells how the case was lost by Orestes himself, who presumed to lecture the audience on the majesty of the law he himself had broken. He and Electra are condemned to be stoned that very day. Determined to ruin Menelaus before they die, they agree to kill Helen, the cause of all their troubles, and to fire the fortified house in which they live. Electra adds that they should also seize Hermione and hold her as a check on Menelaus' fury for the death of Helen. The girl is easily trapped as she rushes into the house hearing her mother's cries for help. Soon after a Trojan menial drops from the first story. He tells how Helen and Hermione have so far escaped death, but the rest is unknown to him. In a ghastly scene Orestes hunts the wretch over the stage, but finally lets him go as he is not a fit victim for a free man's sword. Almost immediately the house is seen to be ablaze; Menelaus rushes up in a frenzy, but is checked by the sight of Orestes with Hermione in his arms. When Menelaus calls for help, Orestes bids Pylades and Electra light more fires to consume them all. A timely appearance of Apollo with Helen deified by his side saves the situation.

It is plain that Euripides has here completely rejected the old legend. He never makes Orestes even think of pleading Apollo's command to him to slay his mother. He is concerned with the defence which a contemporary matricide might make before a modern Athenian assembly and with the fitting doom of self-destruction which would overtake him. Like Vanity Fair, the play shows us the life of people who try to do without God.

The Bacchae is one of Euripides' best plays. In the absence of Pentheus the King, Cadmus and Teiresias join in the worship of the new god Dionysus at Thebes. Pentheus returns to find that noble women, including Agave, his own mother, have joined the strange cult brought to the place by a mysterious Lydian stranger "whose hair is neatly arranged in curls, his face like wine, his eyes as full of grace as Aphrodite's".

Teiresias advises him to welcome the god, Cadmus to pretend that he is divine, even if he is only a mortal; this new religion is the natural outlet of the desire for innocent revelry born in both sexes. The Lydian is arrested and brought before Pentheus, whom he warns that the god will save him from insult, but Pentheus hurries him away into a dungeon.

The Chorus of Bacchae are alarmed on hearing a tumult. The stranger appears to tell how Pentheus was made mad by Dionysus in the act of imprisoning him. The King in amazement sees his prisoner standing free before him and becomes furiously angry on hearing that his mother has joined a new revel on Mount Cithaeron. The stranger suggests that he should go disguised as a Bacchante to see the new worship. When he appears transformed, the Lydian comments with exquisite and deadly irony on his appearance. His fate is vividly and terribly painted. Placing him in a pine, the stranger suddenly disappeared, while the voice of Dionysus summoned the rout to punish the spy. Rushing to the tree, the woman tore it up by the roots and then rent Pentheus piecemeal, Agave herself leading them on.

She comes in holding what she imagines to be a trophy. Cadmus slowly reveals to her the horror of her deed, the proof of which is her son's head in her grasp. Dionysus himself comes in to point out that this tragedy is the result of the indignity which Thebes put upon him and his mother Semele. Broken with grief, Agave passes out slowly to her banishment. The Bacchae was composed in Macedonia; it contains all the mystery of the supernatural. Dionysus' character is admirably drawn, while the infatuation of Pentheus is a fitting prelude to his ruin. The cult of Dionysus was essentially democratic, intended for those who could claim no share in aristocratic ritual: hence its popularity and prevalence. We may regard the Bacchae as the poet's declaration of faith in the worship which gave Europe the Drama; it is altogether fitting that he who has left us the greatest number of tragedies should have been chosen by destiny to bequeath us the one drama which tells of one of the adventures of its patron deity.

The Iphigeneia in Aulis was written in the last year of the poet's life. Agamemnon sends a private letter to his wife countermanding an official dispatch summoning her and Iphigeneia. This letter is intercepted by Menelaus, who upbraids his brother; later, seeing his distress, he advises him to send the women home again. But public opinion forces the leader to obey Artemis and sacrifice his daughter. When he meets his wife and child, he tries to temporise but fails. Achilles meets Clytemnestra and is surprised to hear that he is to marry Iphigeneia, such being the bait which brought Clytemnestra to Aulis. Learning the real truth, she faces her husband, pleading for their daughter's life. Iphigeneia at first shrinks from death; the army demands her sacrifice, while Achilles is ready to defend her. The knot is untied by Iphigeneia herself, who willingly at last consents to die to save her country.

This excellent play shows no falling in dramatic power; it was imitated by Racine and Schiller. The figures are intensely human, the conflict of duties firmly outlined, the pathos sincere and true, there is no divine appearance to straighten out a tangled plot. Thus Euripides' career ends as it began, with a story of a woman's noble self-sacrifice.

The poet's popularity is indicated by the number of his extant dramas and fragments, both of which exceed in bulk the combined work of Aeschylus and Sophocles. All classes of writers quoted him, philosophers, orators, bishops. In his own lifetime Socrates made a point of witnessing his plays; the very violence of Aristophanes' attack proves Euripides' potent influence; his lost drama Melanippe turned the heads of the Athenians, the whole town singing its odes. Survivors of the Sicilian disaster won their freedom by singing his songs to their captors, returning to thank their liberator in person; the fragments of Menander discovered in 1906 contain many reminiscences of him, even slaves quoting passages of him to their masters. For it was the very width of his appeal that made him universally loved; women and slaves in his view were every whit as good as free-born men, sometimes they were far nobler. If drama is the voice of a democracy, the Athenians had found a more democratic mouthpiece than they had bargained for.

With the educated men it was different. They suspected a poet who was upsetting their tradition. Besides, they were asked to crown a person who told them in play after play that they were really like Jason, Menelaus, Polymestor, poor creatures if not quite odious. He made them see with painful clearness that the better sex was the one which they despised, yet which was sure one day to find the utterance to which it had a right in virtue of its greater nobility. The feminism of Euripides is evident through his whole career; it is an insult to our powers of reading to imagine that he was a woman-hater. It is then not to be wondered at that he won the prize only five times, and it can hardly be an accident that he gained it once with the Hippolytus, which on a surface view condemns the female sex.

For the officials could not see that Euripides was not a man only, he was a spirit of development. Privilege and narrowness in every form he hated; he demanded unlimited freedom for the intelligence. The narrow circle of legends, the conventional unified drama, state religion, a pseudo-democracy based on slavery he fearlessly criticised. Rationalism, humanism, free speculation were his watchwords; he was always trying new experiments in his art, introducing politics, philosophy, melodrama and trying to get rid of the chorus wherever he could. He was a living and a contemporary Proteus, pleading like an advocate in a lawsuit, discussing political theory, restating unsolved problems in modern form and seasoning his work with his own peculiar and often elevating pathos. Such a man was anathema to conservative Athens.

But to us he is one of ourselves. He exactly hits off our modern taste, with its somewhat sentimental tendency, its scepticism, love of excitement, and its great complexity. We know we have many moods and passions which strangely blend and thwart each other; these we treat in our novels, and Euripides' plays are a sort of novel, but for the divine appearances in the last scenes. He shows us the inevitable end of actions of beings exactly like ourselves, acting from merely human motives, neither higher nor lower than we, though perhaps disguised under heroic names. He is in a word the first modern poet.

TRANSLATIONS:

A. S. Way, Loeb Series. This verse translation is the most successful; it renders the choric odes with skill.

Professor Gilbert Murray has published verse translations of various plays. He is an authority on the text. His volume on Euripides in the Home University Library is admirable.

Euripides the Rationalist and Four Plays of Euripides by A. W. Verrall are well known; the latter is particularly stimulating. The views it expounds are original but not traditional.

See Symonds' Greek Poets as above.



ARISTOPHANES

At the end of the Symposium Plato represents Socrates as convincing both Agathon, a tragedian, and Aristophanes that the writer of tragedy will be able to write comedy also. That the two forms are not wholly divorced is clear from the history of ancient drama itself: Each dramatist competed with four plays, three tragedies and a Satyric drama. What this last is can be plainly seen in the Cyclops of Euripides, which relates in comic form the adventures of Odysseus and Silenus in the monster's company. Further, the tendency of tragedy was inevitably towards comedy. The extant work of Aeschylus and Sophocles is not without comic touches; but the trend is clearer in Euripides who was an innovator in this as in many other matters. Laughter and tears are neighbours; a happy ending is not tragic; loosely connected scenes are the essence of Old Comedy, and loosely written tragic dialogue (common in Euripides' later work) closely resembles the language of comedy, which is practically prose in verse form. The debt which later comedy owed to Euripides is great; reminiscences of him abound; he is quoted directly and indirectly; his stage tricks are adopted and his realistic characters are the very population of the Comic stage.

The logically developed plot is the characteristic of serious drama. Old Comedy, its antithesis, is often a succession of scenes in which the connection is loose without being impossible. In it the unexpected is common, for it is an escape from the conventions of ordinary life, a thing of causes and effects. It might be more accurate to say that farce is a better description of the work which is associated with the name of Aristophanes.

This writer was born about 448, was a member of the best Athenian society of the day, quickly took the first place as the writer of comedy and died about 385. He saw the whole of the Peloponnesian war and has given us a most vivid account of the passions it aroused and its effect on Athenian life. He first won the prize in 425, when he produced the Acharnians under an assumed name. Pericles had died in 429; the horrors of war were beginning to make themselves felt; the Spartans were invading Attica, cutting down the fruit-trees and compelling the country folk to stream into the city. One of these, Dicaeopolis enters the stage. It is early morning; he is surprised that there is no popular meeting on the appointed day. He loathes the town and longs for his village; he had intended to heckle the speakers if they discussed anything but peace. Ambassadors from foreign nations are announced; seeing them he conceives the daring project of making a separate peace with the Spartan for eight drachmae. His servant returns with three peaces of five, ten and thirty years; he chooses the last.

A chorus of angry Acharnians rush in to catch the traitor; they are charcoal burners ruined by the invasion. Dicaeopolis seizes a charcoal basket, threatening to destroy it if they touch him. Anxious to spare their townsman, the basket, they consent to hear his defence, which he offers to make with his neck on an executioner's block. He is afraid of the noisy patriotism appealed to by mob-orators and of the lust for condemning the accused which is the weakness of older men. Choosing from Euripides' wardrobe the rags in which Telephus was arrayed to rouse the audience to pity, he boldly ventures to plead the cause of the Spartans, though he hates them for destroying his trees. He asserts that "Olympian Pericles who thundered and lightened and confounded Greece" caused the war by putting an embargo on the food of their neighbour Megara, his pretext being a mere private quarrel.

The Chorus are divided; his opponents send for Lamachus, the swashbuckling general; the latter is discomfited and Dicaeopolis immediately opens a market with the Peloponnesians, Megarians and Boeotians, but not with Lamachus. In an important choral ode the poet justifies his existence. By his criticism he puts a stop to the foreign embassies which dupe the Athenians; he checks flattery and folly; he never bribes nor hoodwinks them, but exposes their harsh treatment of their subjects and their love of condemning on groundless charges the older generation which had fought at Marathon.

The play ends with a trading scene; a Boeotian in exchange for Copaic eels takes an Athenian informer, an article unknown in Boeotia. Lamachus returns wounded while Dicaeopolis departs in happy contrast to celebrate a feast of rustic jollity.

Aristophanes' chief butts were Cleon, Socrates and Euripides; the last is treated with good nature in this play. To modern readers the comedy is important for two reasons; first, it attacks the strange belief that a democracy must necessarily love peace; Aristophanes found it as full of the lust for battle as any other form of government; all it needed was a Lamachus to rattle a sword. Again, the unfailing source of war is plainly indicated, trade rivalry. War will continue as long as there are markets to capture and rivals to exclude from them.

In the next year, 424, Aristophanes produced the Knights, the most violent political lampoon in literature. The victim was Cleon who had succeeded Pericles as popular leader. He was at the height of his glory, having captured the Spartan contingent at Pylos, prisoners who were of great importance for diplomatic purposes. The comedy is a scathing criticism of democracy; the subject is so controversial that it will be best to give some extracts without comment.

Two servants of Demos (the People) steal the oracles of the Paphlagonian (the babbler, Cleon) while he is asleep. To their joy they find that he will govern Demos' house only until a more abominable than he shall appear, namely a sausage-seller. That person immediately presenting himself is informed of his high calling. At first he is amazed. "I know nothing of refinement except letters, and them, bad as they are, badly." The answer is:

"Your only fault is that you know them badly; mob-leadership has nothing to do with a man refined or of good character, rather with an ignoramus and a vile fellow."

To his objection that he cannot look after a democracy the reply is,

"it is easy enough; only go on doing what you are doing now. Mix and chop up everything; always bring the mob over by sweetening it with a few cook-shop terms. You have all the other qualifications, a nasty voice, a low origin, familiarity with the street."

The Paphlagonian Cleon runs in bawling that they are conspiring against the democracy. They call loudly for the Knights, who enter as the Chorus to assist them against Cleon, encouraging the sausage-seller to show the brazen effrontery which is the mob-orator's sole protection, and to prove that a decent upbringing is meaningless. Nothing loth, he redoubles Cleon's vulgarity on his head. Cleon rushes out intending to inform the Upper House of their treasons; the sausage-seller hurries after him, his neck being well oiled with his own lard to make Cleon's slanders slip off. A splendid ode is sung in the meantime; it contains a half-comic account of Aristophanes' training in his art and a panegyric on the old spirit which made Athens great. The sausage-seller returns to tell of Cleon's utter defeat; he is quickly followed by Cleon, who appeals to Demos himself, pointing out his own services.

"At the first, when I was a member of the Council, I got in vast sums for the Treasury, partly by torture, partly by throttling, partly by begging. I never studied any private person's interest if I could only curry favour with you, to make you master of all Greece."

The sausage-seller refutes him.

"Your object was to steal and take bribes from the cities, to blind Demos to your villainies by the dust of war, and to make him gape after you in need and necessity for war-pensions. If Demos can only get into the country in peace and taste the barley-cakes again, he will soon find out of what blessings you have rid him by your briberies; he will come back as a dour farmer and will hunt up a vote which will condemn you."

Cleon, the new Themistocles, is deposed from his stewardship.

He appeals to some oracles of Bacis, but the sausage-seller has better ones of Bacis' elder brother Glanis. The Chorus rebuke Demos, whom all men fear as absolute, for being easily led, for listening to the newest comer and for a perpetual banishment of his intelligence. In a second contest for Demos' favours Cleon is finally beaten when it appears that he has kept some dainties in his box while the sausage-seller has given his all. An appeal to an oracle prophesying his supplanter—one who can steal, commit perjury and face it out—so clearly applies to the sausage-seller that Cleon retires.

After a brief absence Demos appears with his new friend—but it is a different Demos, rid of his false evidence and jury system, the Demos of fifty years before. He is ashamed of his recent history, of his preferring doles to battleships. He promises a speedy reform, full pay to his sailors, strict revision of the army service rolls, an embargo on Bills of Parliament. To his joy he recovers the Thirty Years' peace which Cleon had hidden away, and realises at last his longing to escape from the city into the country.

This violent attack on Cleon was vigorously met; Aristophanes was prosecuted and seems to have made a compromise. In his next comedy, the Clouds (which was presented in 423) he changes his victim. Strepsiades, an old Athenian, married a high-born wife of expensive tastes; their son Pheidippides developed a liking for horses and soon brought his father to the edge of ruin. The latter requests the son to save him by joining the academy conducted by Socrates, where he can learn the worse argument which enables its possessor to win his case. Aided by it he can rid his father of debt. As the son flatly refuses, the old man decides to learn it himself. Entering the school he sees maps and drawings of all kinds and finally descries Socrates himself, far above his head in a basket, high among the clouds, studying the sun. Strepsiades begs him to teach him the Worse Argument at his own price. After initiating him, Socrates summons his deities the Clouds, who enter as the Chorus. These are the guardian deities of modern professors, seers, doctors, lazy long-haired long-nailed fellows, musicians who cultivate trills and tremolos, transcendental quacks who sing their praises. The old gods are dethroned, a vortex governing the universe. The Chorus tells Socrates to take the old man and teach him everything.

The ode which follows contains the poet's claim to be original.

"I never seek to dupe you by hashing up the same old theme two or three times, but show my cleverness by introducing ever-new ideas, none alike and all smart."

Socrates returns with Strepsiades, whom he can teach nothing. The Chorus suggest he should bring his son to learn from Socrates how to get rid of debts. At first Pheidippides refuses but finally agrees, though he warns his father that he will rue his act. The Just and Unjust arguments come out of the academy to plead before the Chorus. The former draws a picture of the old-fashioned times when a sturdy race of men was reared on discipline, obedience and morality—a broad-chested vigorous type. In utter contempt the latter brands such teaching as prehistoric. Pleasure, self-indulgence, a lax code of morality and easy tolerance of little weaknesses are the ideal. The power of his words is such that the Just Argument deserts to him.

Strepsiades, coached by his son, easily circumvents two money-lenders and retires to his house. He is soon chased out by his son, who when asked to sing the old songs of Simonides and Aeschylus scorned the idea, humming instead an immoral modern tune of Euripides' making. A quarrel inevitably followed; Strepsiades was beaten by his son who easily proved that he had a right to beat his mother also. Stung to the quick the old man burns the academy; when Socrates and his pupils protest, he tells them they have but a just reward for their godlessness.

The Socrates here pilloried is certainly not the Socrates of history; his teaching was not immoral. But Aristophanes is drawing attention to the evil effects produced by the Sophists, who to the ordinary man certainly included Socrates. The importance of this play to us is clear. We are a nation of half-trained intelligences. Our national schools are frankly irreligious, our teachers people of weak credentials. Parental discipline is openly flouted, pleasure is our modern cult. Jazz bands, long-haired novelists and poets, misty philosophers, anti-national instructors are the idols of many a pale-faced and stunted son of Britain. The reverence which made us great is decadent and openly scoffed at. What is the remedy? Aristophanes burnt out the pestilent teachers. We had better not copy him till we are satisfied that the demand for them has ceased. A nation gets the instruction for which it is morally fitted. There is but one hope; we must follow the genuine Socratic method, which consisted of quiet individual instruction. Only thus will we slowly and patiently seize this modern spirit of unrest; our object should be not to suppress it—it is too sturdy, but to direct its energies to a better and a more noble end.

Finding that the Clouds had been too wholesome to be popular, Aristophanes in 422 returned to attack Cleon in the Wasps. Early in the morning Bdelycleon (Cleon-hater) with his two servants is preventing his father Philocleon from leaving the house to go to the jury-courts. The old man's amusing attempts to evade their vigilance are frustrated, whereupon he calls for assistance. Very slowly a body of old men dressed as wasps, led by boys carrying lanterns, finds its way to the house to act as Chorus. They make many suggestions to the father to escape; just as he is gnawing through the net over him his son rushes in. The wasps threaten him with their formidable stings. After a furious conflict truce is declared. Bdelycleon complains of the inveterate juryman's habit of accusing everybody who opposes them of aiming at establishing a tyranny. Father and son consent to state their case for the Chorus to decide between them.

Philocleon glories in the absolute power he exercises over all classes; his rule is equal to that of a king. To him the greatest men in Athens bow as suppliants, begging acquittal. Some of these appeal to pity, others tell him Aesop's fables, others try to make him laugh. Most of all, he controls foreign policy through his privilege of trying statesmen who fail. In return for his duties he receives his pay, goes home and is petted by his wife and family. Bdelycleon opens thus:

"it is a hard task, calling for a clever wit and more than comic genius to cure an ancient disease that has been breeding in the city."

After giving a rough estimate of the total revenue of Athens, he subtracts from it the miserable sum of three obols which the jurymen receive as pay. Where does the remainder go? It is evident that the jurymen are the mere catspaw of the big unscrupulous politicians who get all the profit and incur none of the odium. This argument convinces both the Chorus and Philocleon, old heroes of Marathon who created the Empire.

The latter asks what he is to do. His son promises to look after him, allowing him to gratify at home his itch for trying disputes. Two dogs are brought in; by a trick the son makes his father acquit instead of condemn. He then dresses him up decently and instructs him in the etiquette of a dinner-party, whither they proceed. But the old man behaves himself disgracefully, beating everyone in his cups. He appears with a flute-girl and is summoned for assault by a vegetable-woman, whose goods he has spoiled, and by a professional accuser. His insolence to his victims is checked by his son who thrusts him into the house before more accusers can appear.

It is sometimes believed that democracy is a less corrupt form of polity than any other. Aristophanes in this play exposes one of its greatest weaknesses.

Flattered by the sense of power which the possession of the vote brings with it, the enfranchised classes cannot always see that they easily become the tools of the clever rogues who get themselves elected to office by playing on the fears of the electors. The Athenian voter was as easily scared by the word "tyranny" as the modern elector is by "capital". The result is the same. Not only do the so-called lower orders sink into an ignorant slavery; they use their power so brainlessly and so mercilessly that they are a perfect bugbear to the rest.

Literary men's prophecies rarely come true. In 421 the Peace, produced in March, was followed almost immediately by a compact between Athens and Sparta for fifty years. An old farmer, Trygaeus, sails up to heaven on the back of a huge beetle, bidding his family farewell for three days. He meets Hermes, who tells him that Zeus in disgust has surrendered men to the war they love. War himself has hidden Peace in a deep pit, and has made a great mortar in which he intends to grind civilisation to powder. He looks for the Athenian pestle, Cleon, but cannot find him—the Spartan pestle Brasidas has also been mislaid; both were lost in Thrace. Before he can find another pestle Trygaeus summons all men to pull Peace out of her prison. Hermes at first objects, but is won over by offers of presents. At length the goddess is discovered with her two handmaids, Harvest and Mayfair.

A change immediately comes over the faces of men. In pure joy they laugh through their bruises. Hermes explains to the farmers who form the Chorus why Peace left the earth. It was the trade rivalry which first drove her away; at Athens the subject cities fomented strife with Sparta, then the country population flocked to the city, where they fell easy victims to the public war-mongers, who found it profitable to continue the struggle. The god then offers to Trygaeus Harvest as a bride to make his vineyards fruitful. In the ode which follows the poet claims that he first made comedy dignified

"with great thoughts and words and refined jests, not lampooning individuals but attacking the Tanner war-god."

Returning to earth Trygaeus sends Harvest to the Council, while the marriage sacrifice is made ready. A soothsayer endeavours to impose on the rustics with prophecies that the Peace will be a failure. Trygaeus refutes him with a quotation from Homer. "Without kin or law or home is a man who loveth harsh strife between peoples." The makers of agricultural implements quickly sell all their stock, while the makers of helmets, crests and breastplates find their market gone. A glad wedding song forms the epilogue.

Aristophanes believed that the war meant an extinction of civilisation and loathed it because it was useless. What would he have thought of the barbarous and bloodthirsty Great War of our own day? The causes which produced both struggles were identical—trade rivalry and a set of jingoes who found that war paid. But he was mistaken in believing that peace was the normal condition of Greek life. He was born just before the great period began during which Pericles gave Greece a long respite from quarrels, and seems to have been quite nonplussed by what to him was an abnormal upheaval. His bright hopes soon faded and he seems to have given up thinking about peace or war during a period of eight years. In the meanwhile Athens had attacked Sicily; perhaps a change had come over comedy itself owing to legal action. At any rate, the old and virulent type of political abuse was becoming a thing of the past; the next play, the Birds, produced in 414, abandons Athens altogether for a new and charming world in which there was a rest from strife.

Two Athenians, Peithetairus (Persuasive) and Euelpides (Sanguine) reach the home of the Hoopoe bird, once a mortal, to find a happier place than their native city. Suddenly, as the bird describes the happy careless life of his kind, Peithetairus conceives the idea of founding a new bird city between earth and heaven. The Hoopoe summons his friends to hear their opinion; as they come in he names them to the wondering Athenians. At first the Birds threaten to attack the mortals, their natural enemies. They listen, however, to Peithetairus' words of wisdom.

"Nay, wise men learn much from their foes, for good counsel saves everything. We cannot learn from a friend, but an enemy quickly forces the truth upon us. For example, cities learn from their enemies, not their friends, to create high walls and battleships, and such are the salvation of children, home and substance."

A truce is made. Peithetairus tells them the Birds once ruled the world but have been deposed, becoming the prey of those who once worshipped them. They should ring round the air, like Babylon, with mighty baked bricks and send an ultimatum to the gods, demanding their lost kingdom and forbidding a passage to earth; another messenger should descend to men to require from them due sacrifices. The Birds agree; the two companions retire to Hoopoe's house to eat the magic root which will turn them into winged things. After a choral panegyric on the bird species Peithetairus returns to name the new city Cloudcuckootown, whose erection is taken in hand. Impostors make their appearance, a priest to sacrifice, a poet to eulogise, an oracle-dealer to promise success, a mathematician to plan out the buildings, an overseer and a seller of decrees to enact by-laws; all are summarily ejected by Peithetairus.

News comes that the city is already completed. Suddenly Iris darts in, on her way to earth to demand the accustomed sacrifices from men which the new city has interrupted; she is sent back to heaven to warn the gods of their coming overthrow. A herald from earth brings tidings that more than a myriad human beings are on their way to settle in the city. A parent-beater first appears, then a poet, then an informer —all being firmly dealt with. Prometheus slips in under a parasol, to advise Peithetairus to demand from Zeus his sceptre and with it the lady Royalty as his bride. Poseidon, Heracles and an outlandish Triballian god after a long discussion make terms with the new monarch, who goes with them to fetch his bride. A triumphant wedding forms the conclusion.

The purpose of this comedy has been the subject of much discussion. As a piece of literature it is exquisite. It lifts us out of a world of hard unpleasant fact into a region where life is a care-free thing, bores or impostors are banished and the reign of the usurper ends. The play is not of or for any one particular period; it is really timeless, appealing to the ineradicable desire we all have for an existence of joy and light, where dreams always come true and hope ends only in fulfilment. It is therefore one of man's deathless achievements; the power of its appeal is evident from the frequency with which it has been revived—it was staged at Cambridge this very year. Staged it will be as long as men are what they are.

Having learned that men are a naturally combative race, lusting for blood, the poet saw it was hopeless to bring them to terms. Nor could he for ever live in Cloudcuckootowns; he therefore bethought him of another expedient for obtaining peace. In 411 he imagines the women of Athens, Peloponnese and Boeotia combining to force terms on the men by deserting their homes, under the leadership of Lysistrata. She calls a council of war, explaining her plot to capture the Acropolis. A Chorus of men rush in to smoke them out, armed with firebrands, but are met by a Chorus of women bearing pitchers to quench the flames. An officer of the Council comes to argue with Lysistrata, who points out that in the first part of the war (down to 421) the women had kept quiet, though aware of men's incompetence; now they have determined to control matters. They are possessed of the Treasury, their experience of household economy gives them a good claim to organise State finance; they grow old in the absence of their husbands; a man can marry a girl however old he is. A woman's prime soon comes; if she misses it, she sits at home looking for omens of a husband; women make the most valuable of all contributions to the State, namely sons. The officer retires to report to the Council.

Lysistrata, seeing a weakness in the women's resolution, encourages them with an oracle which promises victory if they will only persist. A herald speedily arrives from Sparta announcing a similar defection in that city. Ambassadors of both sides are brought to Lysistrata who makes a splendid speech.

"I am a woman, but wit is in me and I have no small conceit of myself. Having heard many speeches from my father and elder men I am not ill-informed. Now that I have caught you I will administer to you the rebuke you richly deserve. You sprinkle altars from the same lustral-bowl, like relatives, at Olympia, Pylae, Delphi and many other places. Though the barbarian enemy is on you in armed force, you destroy Greek men and cities."

She points out that both sides have been guilty of injustice; both should make surrenders and agree to a peace which is duly ratified. The Chorus of men believe that Athenian ambassadors should go to Sparta in their cups:—

"As it is, whenever we go there sober, we immediately see what mischief we can make. We never hear what they say; what they do not say we conjecture and never bring back the same tale about the same facts."

Odes of thanksgiving wind up the piece.

Exactly twenty years earlier Euripides in the Medea had written the first protest against women's subjection to an unfair social lot. By a strange irony of fortune his most severe critic Aristophanes was the first man in Europe to give utterance to their claim to a political equality. True, he does so in a comedy, but he was speaking perhaps more seriously than he would have us think. Women do contribute sons to the State; they do believe that they are as capable as men of judging political questions—with justice, in a system where no qualifications but twilight opinions are necessary. On this ground they have won the franchise. Nor has the feminist movement really begun as yet. We may see women in control of our political Acropolis, forcing the world to make peace to save our chances of becoming ultimately civilised.

The Thesmophoriazousae, staged in 411, is a lampoon on Euripides. That poet with his kinsman Mnesilochus calls at the house of Agathon, a brother tragedian whose style is amusingly parodied. Euripides informs him that the women intend to hold a meeting to destroy him for libel; they are celebrating the feast of the Thesmophoria. As Agathon refuses an invitation to go disguised and defend Euripides, Mnesilochus undertakes the dangerous duty; his disguise is effected on the stage with comic gusto. At the meeting the case against the poet is first stated; he has not only lampooned women, he has taught their husbands how to counter their knaveries and is an atheist. Mnesilochus defends him; women are capable of far more villainies than even Euripides has exposed. The statement of these raises the suspicions of the ladies who soon unmask the intruder, inquiring of him the secret ritual of the Thesmophoria.

One of them goes to the Town Council to find out what punishment they are to inflict.

Mnesilochus meanwhile snatches a child from the arms of one of them, holding it as a hostage. To his amazement it turns out to be a wine-stoup. He vainly tries some of the dodges practised in Euripides' plays to bring him to the rescue. The Chorus meantime expose the folly of calling women evil.

"If we are a bane, why do you marry us? Why do you forbid us to walk abroad or to be caught peeping out? Why use such pains to preserve this evil thing? If we do peep out, everybody wants this bane to be seen; if we draw back in modesty, every man is much more anxious to see this pest peep out again. At any rate, no woman comes into the city after stealing public money fifty talents at a time."

A better plan would be

"to give the mothers of famous sons the right of place in festivals; those whose sons are evil should take a lower place."

In an amusing series of scenes Euripides enters dressed up as some of his own characters to save Mnesilochus. A borough officer enters with a policeman whom he orders to bind the prisoner and guard him. More disguises are adopted by Euripides who succeeds at last in freeing his kinsman by pretending to be an old woman with a marriageable daughter whom the policeman can have at a price. When the latter goes to fetch the money Euripides and his relative disappear.

The poet has in this play very skilfully palmed off on Euripides his own attack on women. We have already seen what Euripides' attitude was to the neglected sex. Feminine deceit has been a stock theme in all ages; it had already been treated in Greek literature and was to be passed through Roman literature to the Middle Ages, in which period it received more than its due share of attention. In itself it is a poor theme, good enough perhaps as a stand-by, for it is sure to be popular. Those who pose as woman-haters might consider the words of the Chorus in this play.

The most violent attack on Euripides was delivered after his death by Aristophanes in the Frogs, written in 405. This famous comedy is so well-known that a brief outline will suffice. It falls into two parts. The first describes the adventures of Dionysus who with his servant Xanthias descends to the lower world to bring back Euripides. The god and his servant exchange parts according as the persons they meet are friendly or hostile. In the second part the three great tragedians are brought on the scene. Euripides, who has just died, tries to claim sovereignty in Hades; Sophocles, "gentle on earth and gentle in death" withdraws his claim, leaving Aeschylus to the contest. The two rivals appoint Dionysus, the patron of drama, to act as umpire. In a series of admirable criticisms the weaknesses of both are plainly indicated. Finally Dionysus decides to take back Aeschylus.

This play is as popular as the Birds. It contains one or two touches of low comedy, but these are redeemed by the spirit of inexhaustible jollity which sets the whole thing rocking with life and gaiety. It is an original in Greek literature, being the first piece of definitely literary criticism. A long experience had made the sense of the stage a second nature to Aristophanes who here criticises two rival schools of poetry as a dramatist possessed of inside professional knowledge. So far his work is of the same class as Cicero's De Oratore and Reynolds' Discourses. His object, however, was not to preserve a balance of impartiality but to condemn Euripides as a traitor to the whole tradition of Attic tragedy. He does so, but not without giving his reasons—and these are good and true. No person is qualified to judge the development of Greek tragedy who has not weighed long and carefully the second portion of the Frogs.

In 393 Aristophanes broke entirely new ground in the Ecclesiazousae (women in Parliament), a discussion of social and economic problems. Praxagora assembles the women of Athens to gain control of the city. They meet early in the morning, disguise themselves with beards and open the question.

"The decisions of men in Parliament are to reflecting people like the derangements of drunken men. I am disgusted with our policy, we always employ unscrupulous leaders. If one of them is honest for one day, he is a villain for ten. Doling out public money, men have eyes only for what they can make out of the State. Let women govern; they are the best at providing money and are not likely to be deceived in office, for they are well versed in trickery."

They proceed to the Assembly to execute their plot.

On the opening of the discussion one Euaeon proposed a scheme of wholesale spoliation of the property owners to support the poor. Then a white-faced citizen arose and proposed flatly that women should rule, that being the one thing which had never yet been tried. The motion was carried with great enthusiasm, the men declaring that "an old proverb says all our senseless and foolish decisions turn out for good". When Praxagora returns to the stage, she declares she intends to introduce a system of absolute communism. All citizens are to live and dine in common and possess wives in common, existing on the work of slaves. Any person who refuses to declare his wealth is to be punished by losing his rations, "the punishment of a man through his belly being the worst insult he can suffer". A vivid description of the workings of the new system ends the play.

Aristophanes is no doubt criticising Plato's Republic, but allowing for altered circumstances we cannot go far wrong if we see here a picture of the suggested remedy for the social distress which is inseparable from a great war. At Athens, beaten and impoverished, there must have been widespread discontent; the foundation upon which society was built must have been criticised, its inequalities being emphasised by idealists and intriguers alike. Our own generation has to face a similar situation. We have seen women in Parliament and we are deluged by a flood of communistic idealism emanating from Russia. Its one commendation is that it has never yet been tried among us and many simple folk will applaud the philosophy which persuades itself that all our mistakes will somehow come right in the end. The problem of finding somebody to do the work was easily solved in ancient Athens where the slaves were three times as numerous as the free. England, possessing no slaves, would under communism be unable to feed herself and would die of starvation.