. e, it mustbe confessed that we look in vain in his playsfor the unquestioning faith of Aeschylus; norcan we fail to admit that the pupil of Anaxa-goras could not sympathise with the popularreligious system around him. He frequentlyaltered the traditional treatment of ancientlegends. Thus, in the Orestes, Menelaiis comesbefore us as a selfish coward, and Helen as aworthless wanton; in the Helena, the notion ofStesichorus is adopted, that the heroine wasnever carried to Troy at all, and that it was amere eiSoiAor of her for which the
. e, it mustbe confessed that we look in vain in his playsfor the unquestioning faith of Aeschylus; norcan we fail to admit that the pupil of Anaxa-goras could not sympathise with the popularreligious system around him. He frequentlyaltered the traditional treatment of ancientlegends. Thus, in the Orestes, Menelaiis comesbefore us as a selfish coward, and Helen as aworthless wanton; in the Helena, the notion ofStesichorus is adopted, that the heroine wasnever carried to Troy at all, and that it was amere eiSoiAor of her for which the Greeks andTrojans fought; Andromache, the widow ofHector and slave of Neoptolemus, seems almostto forget the past in her quarrel with Hermioneand the perils of her present situation; tragedyis brought down into the sphere of every-daylife ; men are represented, according to the re-mark of Sophocles quoted with approval byAristotle {Poet. 25), not as they ought to be, butas they are; under the names of the ancientheroes the characters of his own time are set. BuBt of Euripides. before us; it is not Medea, or Iphigenia, orAlcestis that is speaking, but abstractedly amother, a daughter, or a wife. All this, indeed,gave fuller scope, perhaps, for the exhibition ofpassion and for those scenes of tenderness andpathos in which Euripides especially Aristotle {Poet. 13) calls Euripides themost tragic of poets, because he neglected nomeans of appealing to the feelings of theaudience—not even the misery of appearance,such as that of Telephus—and therefore mostworked upon pity, which is the office of Tragedy,Hence, perhaps, also the preference given to hisplays by the practical Socrates, who is saidto have never entered the theatre unless whenthey were acted, as well as for the admirationfelt for him by Menander and Philemon, andother poets of the New Comedy. The mostserious defects in his tragedies, artisticallyspeaking, are: his constant employment of the Deus ex mach
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