Hippolytus: "My tongue has sworn, but my heart is free," which so many authors quote with reprobation, been preserved to us by itself, without the context of the play, none of us could have guessed that Hippolytus, who utters it, actually loses his life rather than break the very oath in question, though at the first moment of anger he indignantly repudiates it as extorted from him by fraud. Thus, again, the many slanderous attacks upon the female sex spoken by angry or disappointed characters, which are commonly regarded as decisive proofs of the poet's hatred of women, fade out in a wider and truer estimate before the splendour of the leading female characters throughout his plays.
17. It is therefore an inquiry of no little difficulty, though of engrossing interest, to gather the poet's mind and views from these conflicting evidences. There are, perhaps, two sources a little more trustworthy than the rest, and on which I suggest that any estimate should be based: (1) The soliloquies so frequent in Euripides' plays, when the actor turns aside from the immediate subject of the play to reflect upon the broader question it suggests.[1] We are the more likely here to find a Greek dramatist's mind, seeing that in earlier times he had himself been an actor and appeared in person; even in Euripides' day the chief actor seems to have stood in intimate personal relations with his author. There are also (2) The opening strophe and antistrophe of many choral odes, which are general and even irrelevant in import, though the ode reverts afterwards to the subject in hand.
These, then, are the safest materials for such a purpose. It is, moreover, likely that the dramatic poets of that day had some special means of indicating their own sentiments when they occurred in a play; though not so clearly as the comic poets in
- ↑ Let the reader examine the soliloquy of the nurse in Medea, v. 190 sq.; of Iphis in the Supplices, 1080 sq.; of Orestes in the Electra, 367 sq.; as specimens. I quote throughout from Dindorf 's Poetæ Scenici.
