Doth any feign there is a God in heaven? There is none, none!
And afterwards the hero, staggered by the injustice of things, questions Zeus himself and is, for answer, blasted by the thunderbolt. A clearer form of this same question, and one which vexed the age a good deal, was to ask whether or no the world is governed by some great Intelligence or Understanding ("Sunesis"), or, more crudely, whether the gods are "sunetoi." Euripides at times "hath deep in his hope a belief in some Understanding," and is represented in the Frogs as actually praying to it by that name; but he sometimes finds the facts against him (Hippolytus, 1105; Frogs, 893; Iph. Aul., 394a; Her., 655; Tro., 884 ff., compared with the sequel of the play). The question between polytheism and monotheism, which has loomed so large to some minds, never troubled him. He uses the singular and plural quite indifferently, and probably his "gods," when used as identical with "God" or "the Divine," would hardly even suggest to him the gods of mythology. If one is to venture a conjecture, his own feeling may, perhaps, be expressed by a line in the Orestes (418):
We are slaves of gods, whatever gods may be.
That is, there are unknown forces which shape or destroy man's life, and which may be conceived as in some sense personal. But morally, it would seem, these forces are not better, but less good, than man, who at least loves and pities and tries to understand. Such is the impression, I think, left on readers of the Bacchae, the Hippolytus or the Trojan Women.
But there is one thought which often recurs in Euripides in plays of all periods, and is specially thrown in his teeth by Aristophanes. That satirist, when piling up Euripides' theatrical iniquities, takes as his comic climax "women who say Life is not Life." The reference is to passages like fr. 833, from the Phrixus:
Who knoweth if the thing that we call death Be Life, and our Life dying—who knoweth? Save only that all we beneath the sun Are sick and suffering, and those foregone Not sick, nor touched with evil any more.
(Cf. fr. 638, 816; also Helena, 1013; Frogs, 1082, 1477). The idea recurs again and again, as also does the thought that death is "some other shape of life" in the Medea and even in the Ion (Med., 1039; Ion, 1068). Nay, more, death may be the state that we unconsciously long for, and that really fulfils our inmost desires: "There is no rest on this earth," says a speaker in the Hippolytus (191 f.),
"And whatever far-off state there be, Dearer than Life to mortality, The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof And mist is under and mist above: