which he now can do, no future happiness which he can give her (even if there were the least reason to expect that she will get it) will affect the brutality of his original outrage and the cruelty of his fifteen years' silence about the fate of her child, —all this is pointed out again and again in the plainest and most biting terms which the author can find.[1] And if we suppose him to presume reverence for Apollo as the ground of his play, this raises over again all the regular, hopeless difficulties, and leads to the regular conclusion that the author is a 'botcher'. But to our immediate purpose the moral character of Apollo is not directly relevant; for what we propose to show is that according to the story the oracle is a fraud and its god non-existent. Now the question of his existence is not, strictly speaking, affected by his moral character. It is theoretically possible to take Euripides as holding, and meaning to recommend by his play, the view that there really was a person of superhuman intelligence, who knowing both past and future did veritably make revelations through the Delphian prophetess, and also further that this superhuman person had a moral character deserving hatred and contempt, that he was in short a 'devil'. There is no logical inconsistency or impossibility in such a view. It has been actually maintained by many Christians. I do not think indeed that those who are acquainted with the condition of Greek thought and controversy in the fifth century before Christ will hold it probable that Euripides meant this. Such a view was not then in the field ; whereas the belief that the oracles were fraudulent human tricks was not only in the field but gaining. Nor, as could easily be shown, does such a view suit with the rationalistic and vaguely monotheistic tendency of Euripides' speculations in general. However it is a conceivable view; and therefore we will here pass over the attacks on Apollo's moral character, and examine the story strictly upon the question, whether there spoke by the Pythia at Delphi a person of superhuman intelligence.
The facts exhibited are as follows : —
At the temple of Delphi lives a youth just come to manhood, who has been ever since his birth a slave in the service of the oracle and has become a minister of importance. It is a day of
- ↑ vv. 357-8, 436 foil., 859 foil. and passim.
