EXCURSUS D.
[[P. 59.]]
While on the subject of the Hippolytus, I cannot refrain from suggesting a couple of emendations in the last scene of the play, which certainly improve the present text artistically, and, perhaps, gain some support from what we know of the two versions of the work.
The first version ended with the promise of immortality to Hippolytus as a reward for his constancy (Eur. Fr. 446); in the second, this feature has entirely disappeared, and the last words of the play are a lament for the dead and a complaint of the injustice of heaven. Indeed, it may be said that the injustice of heaven is the chief moral of this second version.
Read therefore in l. 1415
εἴθ’ ἦν ἀραιὸν δαίμοσιν βροτῶν γένους.
“Were there but a little humanity in the gods!”
Could one but
Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath,
And mix his immortality with death!
And, once again, in l. 1440, when Artemis leaves Hippolytus with the remark that she is very sorry, but she doesn’t like death-bed scenes, he exclaims bitterly:
χαίρουσα καὶ σὺ στεῖχε, παρθέν’ ὀλβία.
μακρὰν δὲ λείπεις ῥᾳδίως ὁμιλίαν.[357]
I don’t much think that Euripides wrote either of these lines so, but I think it is a pity he didn’t.