It is safer to confine ourselves to admitting that, as a thinker, Euripides was from the outset out of sympathy with the material in which he had to work. He did not believe the saga, he did not quite admire or like it; but he had to make his plays out of it. In his happier moods this dissonance does not appear—as in the Medea or Hippolytus; sometimes it appears and leaves us troubled, but is overcome by the general beauty of treatment. That is the case with the Alcestis, where the heroine's devotion suggests at once to Euripides, as it does to us, the extreme selfishness of the husband who let her die for him. Sophocles would have slurred or explained away this unpleasantness. Euripides introduces a long and exquisitely hard-hitting scene merely for the purpose of rubbing it in (Alc. 614 f.). In a third stage the dissonance runs riot: he builds up his drama only to demolish it. What can one make of the Ion? "A patriotic play celebrating Ion, the Attic hero, the semi-divine son of Creusa and Apollo." That is so. But is it really a celebration or an exposure? The old story of the divine lover, the exposed child, the god saving his offspring—the thing Pindar can treat with such reverence and purity—is turned naked to the light. "If the thing happened," says Euripides—"and you all insist that it did—it was like this." He gives us the brutal selfishness of Phœbus, the self-contempt of the injured girl, and at last the goading of her to the verge of a horrible murder. If that were all the play has to say, it would be better; but it is not all. It is inextricably and marringly mixed with a great deal of ordinary poetic beauty, and the play ends in a perfunctory and unreal justification of Apollo, in which the culprit does not present himself, and his representative, Athena, does not seem to be telling the exact
