ment or else of impatience. Before a Periclean audience it was the only open manifestation of affection between the sexes which had hitherto been tolerated; nor did Euripides here attempt the innovation which modern society has carried through so completely in all forms of the drama.
The fate of Hippolytus is indeed tragic—a lofty and pure character destroyed by his own purity; but the spectator is partly reconciled to it, and the vengeance of the deity is palliated, by the bold and somewhat impious contempt for her which he expresses at the opening of the play. The aged servant who begs him to offer the customary sacrifice to Aphrodite, and not brave her anger, touches the proper string; the bold self-opinion of the hero gives a jarring sound.
Moreover the vengeance of the goddess, who is drawn in the most repulsive colours, seems to express the retaliation of nature upon those who violate her decrees, for asceticism was not honoured by the Greeks, who even in their tragedies are never weary of recommending a moderate share in the delights of love. But in addition to this larger conception, the spite of Aphrodite, as well as the weakness of Artemis, who is the hero's patron goddess, does seem intended by the poet to lower the respect for these deities in the public mind. It is indeed a reductio ad absurdum of Divine Providence, when the most awful misfortunes of men are ascribed to the malice of hostile, and the impotence of friendly, deities. And even Artemis, when powerless to save her favourite, threatens (v. 920) that she will be avenged by slaying with her arrows some favourite of Aphrodite. Euripides can hardly have assigned to goddesses these miserable parts, without intending to satirise the popular creed, and to open the way for higher and better notions.
The chorus is a weak and sometimes inconvenient spectator of the action—the necessary consequence of its being present all through the play, and therefore rather a general defect in Greek plays, than a fault in Euripides. But nothing will show more closely the
