ION.
"Hermes thus, Cyllenian, Argeiphontes
Spake with a wink in his eye."
Homeric Hymn.
If modern criticism has not been occupied as much with the inconsistencies, confusions, and errors chargeable (according to current assumptions) upon the author of the Ion, as with the like faults when exhibited (ex hypothesi) in the Alcestis, this is not the fault of Euripides. The case of the Ion is neither better nor worse. Both plays exhibit (always ex hypothesi) the same crying incongruity between promise and execution, the same inexplicable carelessness of development, the same futility in the termination, in short the same marks of 'the botcher'. If the Ion has encountered comparatively little censure, that is because it has been comparatively neglected, and in fact, like the majority of Euripides' extant works, has been studied mostly, by those who have studied it at all, as a piece of instructive Greek, a collection of references. From this fate, from being relegated to the school-room and the lecture-room, the Alcestis has been saved, as we said, by the character of the heroine, which appealing directly to universal feelings has kept alive interest enough in the whole work, not erudite interest but naïve emotional interest, to provoke denunciation of its supposed offences. The attractiveness of the youthful devotee who gives his name to the Ion, though none would dispute it, depends more than that of the unselfish wife upon historical imagination; and he is marred, as a mere object for affection, by traits of opposite tendency. To the ordinary world of readers, outside of Hellenistic circles, he and his legend seem to be altogether unknown; and
