plot and anticipates the solution—a vital defect in the prologue of a modern play, and therefore contrary to modern practice. For the Greeks, even in plots of ingenuity, did not propose primarily to instruct the hearers in the solution, but rather in the manner with which a known complication was worked out. The real objection to admitting the present opening of the Ion is that the whole matter is expounded over again in the opening scenes of the play, so that I believe its original form was that of the lost Andromeda,[1] and perhaps of other Euripidean plays. It opened therefore with the lyrical monody of Ion, and, like both the Andromeda and the Aulid Iphigenia, with the actor's attention fixed upon the heavens, thus announcing the time and scene of the action.
38. Ion, the hallowed attendant of the Delphic temple, a youth of the beauty and purity which we imagine in the child Samuel when he ministered in the temple of Jehovah, appears and sings a descriptive hymn (vv. 82–183) in discharge of his morning duties. A chorus of Athenian women enter in separate groups, delighted sightseers of the wonders of the great shrine, wandering with questions and exclamations from one art-treasure to another, and in attendance upon a silent and troubled lady, to whom they point as their queen when questioned by Ion, after his courteous refusal to admit mere visitors within the shrine. At the sight of Apollo's temple, the queen (Creusa) bursts into tears, and betrays strange emotion, but masters herself when Ion asks with wonder why she is in sorrow where all others come with joy. It is a situation not unlike that of Samuel's mother, agitated and weeping in the temple before Eli. "Stranger," she replies (v. 247), "I hold it no rudeness in you to wonder at my tears. But the sight of the temple of Apollo brought back to me some old memories, and my mind wandered to my home from this scene. (Aside.) Alas!
- ↑ The opening lines of the Andromeda, with the statement that they are such, happen to be preserved in a quotation by the scholiast on Aristophanes (Thesm., v. 1065).
