8. The Heracleidae—a companion piece to the Suppliants, and of the same period—is decidedly inferior in merit. Here, too, there are direct references to contemporary history. The defeat of Argos by the Spartans in 418 B.C. strengthened the Argive party who were in favour of discarding the Athenian for the Spartan alliance (Thuc. v. 76). In the Heracleidae, the sons of the dead Heracles, persecuted by the Argive Eurystheus, are received and sheltered at Athens. Thus, while Athens is glorified, Sparta, whose kings are descendants of the Heracleidae, is reminded how unnatural would be an alliance between herself and Argos.
9. The Heracles Mainomenos[2] (Hercules Furens), which, on grounds of style, can scarcely be put later than 420-417 B.C., shares with the two last plays the purpose of exalting Athens in the person of Theseus. Heracles returns from Hades—whither, at the command of Eurystheus, he went to bring back Cerberus—just in time to save his wife Megara and his children from being put to death by Lycus of Thebes, whom he slays. As he is offering lustral sacrifice after the deed, he is suddenly stricken with madness by Lyssa (Fury), the daemonic agent of his enemy the goddess Hera, and in his frenzy he slays his wife and children. Theseus finds him, in his agony of despair, about to kill himself, and persuades him to come to Athens, there to seek grace and pardon from the gods. The unity of the plot may be partly vindicated by observing that the slaughter of Lycus entitled Heracles to the gratitude of Thebes, whereas the slaughter of his own kinsfolk made it unlawful that he should remain there; thus, having found a refuge only to lose it, Heracles has no hope left but in Athens, whose praise is the true theme of the entire drama.
10. Iphigenia among the Tauri, which metre and diction mark as one of the later plays, is also one of the best—excellent both in the management of a romantic plot and in the delineation of character. The scene is laid at the temple of Artemis in the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea)—on the site of the modern Balaklava. Iphigenia, who had been doomed to die at Aulis for the Greeks, had been snatched from that death by Artemis, and had become priestess of the goddess at the Tauric shrine, where human victims were immolated. Two strangers, who had landed among the Tauri, have been sentenced to die at the altar. She discovers in them her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades. They plan an escape, are recaptured, and are finally delivered by the goddess Athena, who commands Thoas, king of the land, to permit their departure. Iphigenia, Orestes and Pylades return to Greece, and establish the worship of the Tauric Artemis at Brauron and Halae in Attica. The drama of Euripides necessarily suggests a comparison with that of Goethe; and many readers will probably also feel that, while Goethe is certainly not inferior in fineness of ethical portraiture, he has the advantage in his management of the catastrophe. But it is only just to Euripides to remember that, while his competitor had free scope of treatment, he, a Greek dramatist, was bound to the motive of the Greek legend, and was obliged to conclude with the foundation of the Attic worship.
11. The Troades appeared in 415 B.C. along with the Alexander, the Palamedes, and a satyr-play, the Sisyphus. It is a picture of the miseries endured by noble Trojan dames—Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra—immediately after the capture of Troy. There is hardly a plot in the proper sense—only an accumulation of sorrows on the heads of the passive sufferers. The piece is less a drama than a pathetic spectacle, closing with the crash of the Trojan towers in flame and ruin. The Troades is indeed remarkable among Greek tragedies for its near approach to the character of melodrama. It must be observed that there is no ground for the inference—sometimes made an accusation against the poet—that the choral passage, v. 794 f., was intended to encourage the Sicilian expedition, sent forth in the same year (415 B.C.). The mention of the “land of Aetna over against Carthage” (v. 220) speaks of it as “renowned for the trophies of prowess”—a topic, surely, not of encouragement but of warning.
12. The Helena—produced, as we learn from the Aristophanic scholia, in 412 B.C., the year of the lost Andromeda—is not one of its author’s happier efforts. It is founded on a strange variation of the Trojan myth, first adopted by Stesichorus in his Palinode—that only a wraith of Helen passed to Troy, while the real Helen was detained in Egypt. In this play she is rescued from the Egyptian king, Theoclymenus, by a ruse of her husband Menelaus, who brings her safely back to Greece. The romantic element thus engrafted on the Greek myth is more than fantastic: it is well-nigh grotesque. The comic poets—notably Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae—felt this; nor can we blame them if they ridiculed a piece in which the mode of treatment was so discordant with the spirit of Greek tradition, and so irreconcilable with all that constituted the higher meaning of Greek tragedy.
13. The Phoenissae was brought out, with the Oenomaus and the Chrysippus, in 411 B.C., the year in which the recall of Alcibiades was decreed by the army at Samos, and, after the fall of the Four Hundred, ratified by the Assembly at Athens (Thuc. viii. 81, 97). The dialogue between Iocaste and Polynices on the griefs of banishment (τἰ τὸ στέρεσθαι πατρίδος, v. 388 f.) has a certain emphasis which certainly looks like an allusion to the pardon of the famous exile. The subject of the play is the same as that of the Aeschylean Seven against Thebes—the war of succession in which Argos supported Polynices against his brother Eteocles. The Phoenician maidens who form the chorus are imagined to have been on their way from Tyre to Delphi, where they were destined for service in the temple, when they were detained at Thebes by the outbreak of the war—a device which affords a contrast to the Aeschylean chorus of Theban elders, and which has also a certain fitness in view of the legends connecting Thebes with Phoenicia. But Euripides has hardly been successful in the rivalry—which he has even pointed by direct allusions—with Aeschylus. The Phoenissae is full of brilliant passages, but it is rather a series of effective scenes than an impressive drama.
14. Plutarch (Lys. 15) says that, when Athens had surrendered to Lysander (404 B.C.) and when the fate of the city was doubtful, a Phocian officer happened to sing at a banquet of the leaders the first song of the chorus in the Electra of Euripides—
| Ἀγαμέμνονος ὦ κόρα, ἤλυθου, Ἠλέκτρα, ποπὶ σὰν ἀγροτέραν αὐλάν, |
and that “when they heard it, all were touched, so that it seemed a cruel deed to destroy for ever the city so famous once, the mother of such men.” The character of the Electra, in metre and in diction, seems to show that it belongs to the poet’s latest years. If Müller were right in referring to the Sicilian expedition the closing passage in which the Dioscuri declare that they haste “to the Sicilian sea, to save ships upon the deep” (v. 1347), then the play could not be later than 413 B.C. But it may with more probability be placed shortly before the Orestes, which in some respects it much resembles: perhaps in or about the year 410 B.C. No play of Euripides has been more severely criticized. The reason is evident. The Choephori of Aeschylus and the Electra of Sophocles appear to invite a direct comparison with this drama. But, as R.C. Jebb suggested,[3] such criticism as that of Schlegel should remember that works of art are proper subjects of direct comparison only when the theories of art which they represent have a common basis. It is surely unmeaning to contrast the elaborate homeliness of the Euripidean Electra with the severe grandeur of its rivals. Aeschylus and Sophocles, as different exponents of an artistic conception which is fundamentally the same, may be profitably compared; Euripides interprets another conception, and must be tried by other principles. His Electra is, in truth, a daring experiment—daring, because the theme is one which the elder school had made peculiarly its own.