seats and exalting the humble and meek." The gods, who appear in prologues and epilogues, are mere scene-shifters, called in to expedite the course of the play, and are kind, spiteful, or indifferent, as it suits the requirements of the moment. Many of the slaves, on the contrary, are noble and cultivated beyond the fashion of the older tragedy, and there are few finer touches than the outburst of joy in the old retainer of Menelaus, when he finds that the real Helen had not fled from her home or disgraced her royal name and race. So too the peasant, the pretended husband of Electra, who guards her as a sacred deposit from his royal master, is a remarkable character, whose nobility is specially lauded in one of the finest monologues of the play.
86. I will conclude with a word concerning Euripides' conception of old age in men and women. He often has characters of this description: the father of Heracles, the mother of Theseus, the father of Admetus, of Pentheus, and many others. In no case does he make an old man one of his chief heroes, and his Hecuba is merely a queen of suffering. For, as to the characteristics of old age, he insists perpetually either upon its weakness or its selfishness, never on its dignity, and seldom on the ripeness of its experience. In the Alcestis, the selfishness of Admetus' old parents in not volunteering to die for him is constantly and seriously insisted upon. In the Heracleidæ and in the Bacchæ the impotent excitement of old men is treated as ridiculous, and as introducing a comic element into tragic scenes. Here again the poet is a Periclean Athenian, in whose eyes old age was an unmixed evil; for it was a dead weight in the struggle for life, and gave the old man no chance against his younger and stronger competitors.[1] All
- ↑ Nothing can be stronger than the despairing speech of Iphis, in the Supplices (v. 1080), who concludes with these words:
ὦ δυσπάλαιστον γῆρας, ὡς μισῶ σ᾽ ἔχων,
μισῶ δ᾽ ὅσοι χρῄζουσιν ἐκτείνειν βίον
