Note 113.1 — Chapter IV · THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.

But the student of Greek religion must confront these two questions about him: (a) What was his real sentiment concerning the popular religion? (b) What were his contributions to religious thought, and what was likely to be his influence on the religious temperament? To make up one’s mind on these questions demands a long and critical study, also a tactful sense of the distinction between Euripides the playwright and Euripides the thinker. It is the confusion of this distinction that leads, for instance, to the strangely erroneous views held concerning the religious significance of his ‘Bacchæ.’ A sympathetic reading of many of the plays must convey the impression that certain cult-figures and legends of the polytheism filled the poet with scorn and loathing; and at times he seems to compose as if he had a personal hatred of Apollo and Aphrodite in particular, for instance, in the Ion and Hippolytus. When he can interpret Aphrodite as a cosmic force he can dilate on this as beautifully and ardently as Lucretius; if he could have believed that Apollo was merely the Sun, as he tells us ‘the wise’ were well aware, he might have forgiven him. But it is the real personal Aphrodite of Homer and Helen, the personal Apollo, the father of Ion, the seducer of Kreusa, and the beloved ancestor of the Athenians, that rankled in his mind. When he handles the story of the madness of Herakles and brings madness on the stage, he uses her first as his mouthpiece to convey to the Athenians what he thought of Hera;113.1 just as he puts into the mouth of Amphitryon his own mordant criticism of the action of Zeus.113.2 Yet with other parts of the polytheism he seems at times in the most glowing sympathy; in the Hippolytus, for instance, where he expresses for the first time in literature the religious rapture of purity; in the Bacchæ where he discovers the necessary phrase for the expression of the Bacchic communion, for the ecstasy of the Mænad-revel on the mountain, in verses that tingle with the nature-magic which was at the root of this wild cult. Yet no one should be deceived into thinking that he is preaching the cause of Dionysiac worship; for the Bacchæ closes with that depressing anti-climax, where Dionysos plays the sorriest part, and Euripides’ own sour dislike of the personal traditional God gives an unpleasant flavour to the last scene. It is this bitterness of protestantism and criticism in this poet that strikes a new note in Greece; and Euripides may be regarded as the first in European history to be possessed with the theologic temper. It cannot be said that he preached a new religion; he was no votary even of Orphism, for though, as the Bacchæ and the fragment of his ‘Cretans’ attest, he felt something of its spell, he was not of that cast of mind that could be deceived by its pharisaic ritual and laws of diet, and he certainly cherished no mystic belief concerning the life after death; for even in the ‘Bacchæ’ there is no reference to this attractive dogma, which was the main anchor of the Orphic faith. Nor can he be truly described as a zealous reformer of the people’s faith and practice; for the reformer must have some belief in that which he wishes to reform; and that Euripides firmly believed in any part of the polytheism is hard to maintain; his final attitude is generally a doubt. Nevertheless, his protests might have been of value to the more cultured citizen who still clave to his civic worship. They are directed mainly and most forcibly against the stories of divine vindictiveness and divine licentiousness. He is evidently touched with the new idea that vengeance is alien to the perfect nature of God; this was still more insistently proclaimed by Plato and by the Pythagoreans and later philosophers.115.1 On the second count his protest is suggested by the notion that was dawning in him that purity in every sense was essential to the divine nature; he is then the herald in literature of a thought which Orphism may have prompted and which was to play a leading part in later religion and religious speculation, but which was unfamiliar to his contemporaries either in Hellas or anywhere in the Mediterranean except in Israel. His leading principle of criticism in all these matters is expressed in the Iphigeneia in Tauris, namely, that the evil in religious practice and legend arises from men imputing their own evil nature to God.115.2 We owe much to the man who first uttered this warning against a debasing anthropomorphism.