Strife and bitterness shall depart, if thou art with us: madness and the edge of the sword shall flee away from our doors.
Matthew Arnold’s Merope has the same plot and includes a recognition-scene which probably resembles the lost original closely. His conception of Polyphontes is thoroughly Euripidean.
Of the other lost plays little can be said here. Still amid this faint glow of star-dust many marvellous things are to be discerned—words of tremulous tenderness from the Danae describing the charm of infancy; a line from Ino which in its powerful grimness recalls Æschylus, “like a lone beast, he lurks in caves unlit”;[817] out of the Polyidus the celebrated query,
Who knows of life that it is aught but death,
And death aught else than life beyond the grave?[818]
From an unknown drama comes a line which owes its preservation to St. Paul[819]:
φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθ’ ὁμιλίαι κακαί,
“evil communications corrupt good manners”. Euripides’ cosmopolitan sympathy nowhere finds finer expression than in the distich
Where’er spreads Heaven the eagle cleaves his path;
Where’er lies earth the righteous are at home.[820]