silent classes, women and slaves. In the sweat of battle, perhaps when he was wounded, he had said to himself, "This must be like child-bearing, but not half so bad!"[1] No wonder the general public did not know what to do with him! And how were they to stand the man who was so severe on the pleasures of the world, and yet did not mind his heroes being bastards? Nay, he made the priestess Augê, whose vow of virginity had been violated, and who was addressed in terms of appropriate horror by the virgin goddess Athena, answer her blasphemously:
"Arms black with rotted blood
And dead men's wreckage are not foul to thee—
Nay, these thou lovest: only Augê's babe
Frights thee with shame!"
And so with slavery: quite apart from such plays as the Archelaus* and Alexander,* which seem to have dealt specially with it, one feels that Euripides's thought was constantly occupied with the fact that certain people serve and belong to certain others, and are by no means always inferior to them.
Towards religion his attitude is hard to define. Dr. Verrall entitles his keen-sighted study of this subject, Euripides the Rationalist; and it is clear that the plays abound in marks of hostility towards the authoritative polytheism of Delphi, and even to the beliefs of the average Athenian. And further, it is quite true that in the generation which condemned Protagoras and Socrates, and went mad about the Hermæ, the open expression of freethinking views was not quite safe for a private individual in the market-place; very much less so for the poet of an officially accepted drama of Dionysus, on the
- ↑ Med. 250.
