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Once when he saw a tragedian performing Euripides' tragedy, the 'Troades, he went suddenly out of the theatre, and sent a message to him to be of good courage, and not act worse for this, for he had not left the house because he disliked his acting, but because he felt ashamed that the citizens should see him weeping at the woes of Hekuba and Andromache, though he never had pitied any of the people whom he had put to death himself.
Perhaps it was such pictures of universal sorrow, of the fall of flourishing families and states from the greatest glory to the lowest misery, nay, to entire annihilation, as Euripides has sketched in the Troades, that gained for him, from Aristotle, the title of the most tragic of poets.
Judged by common standards, the Troädes is far from a perfect play; it is scarcely even a good play. It is an intense study of one great situation, with little plot, little construction, little or no relief or variety.
William Morris's Helen, in the "Earthly Paradise," charms at the time of reading, but, perhaps, leaves little abiding memory. The Helen of "Troilus and Cressida" is not one of Shakespeare's immortal women, and Mr. Rossetti's ballad is fantastic and somewhat false in tone a romantic pastiche. Where Euripides twice failed, in the "Troades" and the "Helena," it can be given to few to succeed.
The real religion of the fifth century was, as we have said, a devotion to the City itself. It is expressed often in Aeschylus and Sophocles, again and again with more discord and more criticism in Euripides and Plato; for the indignant blasphemies of the Gorgias and the Troades bear the same message as the ideal patriotism of the Republic.
When you speak of having finished four tragedies in sixteen days, I presume you are borrowing from some one else? And do you deign to be indebted to others after writing the Electra, and the Troades? Don't be idle; and don't think the proverbial γνῶθι σεαυτόν was only meant to discourage vanity: it means also that we should be aware of our own qualities.
And the prophet, bound to deliver his message, walks outside the regular ways of the artist. For some time before the Troädes was produced, Athens, now entirely in the hands of the War Party, had been engaged in an enterprise which, though on military grounds defensible, was bitterly resented by the more humane minority, and has been selected by Thucydides as the great crucial crime of the war.
So it was with Euripides. The Troädes itself has indeed almost no fierceness and singularly little thought of revenge. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music, as it were, and made beautiful by "the most tragic of the poets."
At this time Rome teemed with poets; as Pliny in one of his letters tells us, people reckoned the year by the abundance of its poetic harvest. TURNUS seems to have been a satirist of some note; among others he satirised the poisoner Locusta. SCAEVIUS MEMOR was a tragedian; a Hecuba, a Troades, and perhaps a Hercules, are ascribed to him.
Indeed, the most usual condemnation of the play is not that it is dull, but that it is too harrowing; that scene after scene passes beyond the due limits of tragic art. There are points to be pleaded against this criticism. But the main defence is that, like many of the greatest works of art, the Troädes is something more than art. It is also a prophecy, a bearing of witness.
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