[793] See Hartung’s masterly treatment in Euripides Restitutus, II, pp. 344-60.
[794] Ruskin, Mornings in Florence, I, 14.
[795] The statements in this sentence are taken from Hartung, who bases his conception here upon other authors; there are no Euripidean fragments to this effect.
[796] Eratosthenes (Catast. 15, quoted by Nauck) says: οὐχ εἵλετο τῷ πατρὶ συμμένειν οὐδὲ τῇ μητρί, ἀλλ’ αὐθαίρετος εἰς τὸ Ἄργος ἀπῆλθε μετ’ ἐκείνου εὐγενές τι φρονήσασα. The last three words suggest a scene of irresolution followed by a speech of high resolve, as in the Iphigenia at Aulis.
[797] I, 33.
[798] See Goethe’s enthusiastic and brilliant discussion, Altgriechische Literatur (Works, Vol. V, p. 127, edition of 1837).
[799] Hartung’s brilliant sketch of Phaethon’s character (Eur. Restitutus, II, pp. 192 sq.), however imaginary, will be read with interest.
[800] This is an acute suggestion of Goethe.
[801] ὡς πανταχοῦ γε πατρὶς ἡ βόσκουσα γῆ.
[802] δένδρεα φίλοισιν ὠλέναισι ψυκτήρια λέξεται.
[803] The chorus in their terror bid the queen seek refuge with her father Oceanus.
[804] See Oxyrhynchus Papyri, VI, pp. 19-106.
[805] The scholiast on Frogs, v. 53, which was performed in 405 B.C. (the year after Euripides’ death) mentions the Hypsipyle among recent plays.
[806] The critic Didymus, for instance, knew the Hypsipyle better than the Bacchæ. For “Achelous” as a synonym for “water” he quotes the former play rather than Bacchæ, 625. See Macrobius, V, xviii. 12.
[807] That is, “the beginning of doom”.
[808] Hartung, Eur. Rest. II, p. 442.
[809] Μελανίππη ἡ σοφή, so called to distinguish it from Μ. δέσμωτις, or Melanippe in Prison. The latter play seems to have been much less important. Unfortunately there is often a doubt, when authorities quote the “Melanippe,” from which of the two the quotation comes.
[810] See pp. 313-5.
[811] ἔχει δὲ διπλοῦν σχῆμα, τὸ μὲν τοῦ ποιητοῦ, τὸ δὲ τοῦ προσώπου τοῦ ἐν τῷ δράματι, τῆς Μελανίππης (quoted by Nauck).
[812] Jupiter Tragœdus, 41.
[813] Hartung assigns it to 448 B.C.
[814] Cp. Aristotle’s criticism, Poetic, 1454a: τοῦ δὲ ἀπρεποῦς καὶ μὴ ἁρμόττοντος (παράδειγμα) ... ἡ τῆς Μελανίππης ῥῆσις.
[815] Moralia, 110 D, 998 E.
[816] Poetic, 1454a.
[819] 1 Cor. xv. 33.
[820] Fr. 1034:—
[821] Fr. 475.
[822] Mr. F. Manning, Scenes and Portraits (Preface, p. viii).
[823] Aristotle, Poetic, 1460b: Σοφοκλῆς ἔφη αὐτὸς μὲν οἵους δεῖ ποιεῖν, Εὐριπίδην δὲ οἷοί εἰσιν.
[824] Frogs, vv. 850, 1043 sq.
[825] Ibid. 954-8.
[826] Ibid. 1304-8, 1314, 1348.
[827] Ibid. 1309-63.
[828] Ibid. 1378-1410.
[829] Ibid. 1198 sqq.
[830] Poetic, 1454a.
[831] Ibid. 1461b.
[832] Ibid. 1453a. ὁ Εὐριπίδης εἰ καὶ τὰ ἄλλα μὴ εὖ οἰκονομεῖ ἀλλὰ τραγικώτατός γε τῶν ποιητῶν φαίνεται.
[833] Andromache, Electra, Bacchæ, Rhesus, and the original text of the Iphigenia at Aulis (see Murray’s Apparatus at the end of the play). Aristotle naturally allows such as these (Poetic, 1454b): μηχανῇ χρηστέον ἐπὶ τὰ ἔξω τοῦ δράματος, κτἑ.
[834] In the extant plays. Of course there were others, which we cannot discuss with knowledge, e.g. the close of Melanippe the Wise.
[835] For the Iphigenia carries the Helena with it (see the discussion of the latter, pp. 260 sqq.). As a matter of cold fact, to be sure, Theoclymenus could never have overtaken the Greeks.
[836] Frogs, 1198-1247.
[837] He seems in private conversation to have maintained the necessity of this; compare the criticism of Æschylus which he utters in the Frogs, 1122: ἀσαφὴς γὰρ ἦν ἐν τῇ φράσει τῶν πραγμάτων. φ.τ.π. is precisely “prologue” in the Euripidean sense.
[838] Herc. Fur., 601 sqq.
[839] Mr. G. B. Shaw.
[840] Troades, vv. 1204-6. Cp. Helena, 1140-3.
[841] See Mr. W. H. S. Jones, The Moral Standpoint of Euripides, pp. 28 sq. This view is also set forth by Jebb, The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, p. 218, and by Nestle, Euripides der Dichter der Gr. Aufklärung, p. 174.
[842] Orestes, vv. 982 sqq.: μόλοιμι τὰν οὐρανοῦ κτἑ.
[843] See Mr. E. F. Carritt, The Theory of Beauty, p. 156.
[844] Ibid. p. 89.
[845] v. 618.
[846] Helena, vv. 489 sqq.
[847] Iph. Aul., vv. 819 sqq.
[848] Ion, v. 1039.
[849] The Possessed, Ch. I.
[850] v. 674: ὦ πατρὸς ὅμαιμε θεῖε.
[851] Orestes, vv. 71-111.
[852] M. Arnold, The Scholar-Gipsy. Cp. Mrs. Browning’s well-known lines on “Our Euripides the human”.
[853] Fr. 916:—
[854] Fr. 894:—
And Nestle (p. 368) aptly quotes from Schiller’s Don Carlos (III, 10):
[855] See the celebrated sketch of progressive degradation in Thucydides (III, 82, 83).
[856] Dr. W. Nestle’s work is entitled Euripides der Dichter der griechischen Aufklärung.
[857] Herc. Fur., 673 sqq.
[858] A totally different thing from the written Greek accents ΄, `, and ῀, which refer to pitch, not stress.
[859] συνάφεια, “connexion,” “continuity.”
[860] These cause almost all the difficulty of scanning iambics. Till one is quite familiar with them it is a good plan to begin at the end. Nearly all resolved feet occur in the third or fourth place.
[861] Sophocles sometimes neglects this pause. Not only does he occasionally end a line with a word (such as the definite article) which belongs closely to the first word of the next line; in a few places he elides a vowel at the end before a vowel in the following line. See, for instance, Œd. Tyr., 29.
[862] Latin, cæsura “a cutting”.
[863] No such lines are extant in Greek, but an analogy can be found in Ennius’ hexameter:
In the Peruigilium Veneris, the trochee is much too often contained in a single word, e.g.:
[864] It is so called because the second half of the fifth foot plus the sixth will obviously have the metrical form –⏑–, which sequence of syllables, when it forms a single foot (as, of course, it does not in iambics), is called a cretic. The rule is therefore often thus stated: “When the final cretic extends over a whole word or whole words, it must be preceded by a short syllable”.
[865] Iambics were adopted because nearer to the rhythm of everyday speech. It has been held, for instance by Dr. J. H. H. Schmidt, that iambics are nothing but trochaics with “anacrusis” (for this term see below, p. 342). So near is the iambic metre to ordinary talk that one now and again finds accidental “lines” in prose. Thus Demosthenes (Olynth., I, 5) writes δῆλον γάρ ἐστι τοῖς Ὀλυνθίοις ὅτι.... George Eliot, early in Middlemarch, actually produces two consecutive “lines”: “Obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for my salad-oil”.
[866] Euripides is much fonder of this metre than the other two masters. Sophocles in particular is very sparing of it. That passage (Philoctetes, 1222 sqq.), where Odysseus and Neoptolemus hurry upon the scene in violent (iambic) altercation, would infallibly have been put into trochaics by Euripides.
[867] From καταλήγω, “to stop short”.
[868] The two instances given are, in fact, all that I have found.
[869] διαίρεσις, “division”.
[870] For example, the splendid poem by Anacreon beginning πῶλε Θρῃκίη is printed by some in long lines, by others in short, even though the first, third, etc., long lines are not catalectic.
[871] The meaning of this term is uncertain.
[872] I have, here and later, printed the readings and arrangement best suited to my purpose.
[873] Greek συγκοπή, “coalescence”. But ⏗ need not fill a foot: for instance in a true dactylic system we find (Œd. Col., 1082):—
Analogously to ⏗ as a trochee, dactyls admit ⏘ (= ⏑⏑⏑⏑) as a foot.
[874] Before condemning this statement as a mere evasion, the student should reflect that all such poetry is written for music, which would in performance make the rhythm “come right”.
[875] λογαοιδικός, “mingled of prose and verse”.
[876] ἀνάκρουσις, “striking up”.
[877] Not all, for the first short syllable may be part of a resolved foot.
[878] The first syllable of πρυμνησίων in the second line, though long, is musically equivalent to a short. Such syllables are marked with the sign ˃, and the foot τοῑ πρυ͐μν- may be called an “accelerated spondee”. Syllables which carry a musical length different from their metrical length are named “irrational”.
[879] The existence of these cola forms (to us who have not the music written for Greek lyrics) one of the greatest obstacles to a clear and easy perception of periodic structure.
[880] In lyrics a long syllable (if it does not end with a consonant) may be shortened—instead of disappearing by elision—before a vowel.
[881] ἡ ἐπῳδός. The masculine word, ὁ ἐπῳδός, has a different meaning, with which we are familiar from the Epodes of Horace—a poem which repeats from beginning to end the same period, each period being usually two cola “which either have equal length, or the second of which is catalectic or ‘falling’ or is even shortened by an entire measure” (see Schmidt’s Introduction, Eng. tr. by Prof. J. W. White, pp. 93 sqq.).
[882] Though my obligations to Dr. J. H. H. Schmidt’s volumes, especially Die Eurhythmie in den Chorgesängen der Griechen, are very great, I cannot see in his verse-pause—according to him (Eurhythmie, p. 89) the foundation of his system—anything but a delusion. Dr. Schmidt’s own appendices show a good minority of “verses” which end with no pause.
[883] The first two syllables (⏑⏑) correspond to the first (–) of Οἰδίπου.
[884] How? By examination of the whole period. If we look at the seventh line of the strophe from Antigone, scanned above, it may seem arbitrary to write
rather than
But the former method is suggested by the corresponding fourth line, which cannot possibly be scanned otherwise than as above, and which therefore has four feet; hence we scan -αιναν so as to give the seventh line also four, not five, feet altogether.
[885] It is therefore possible to scan the ordinary iambics of dialogue as trochees:—
This is the method followed by Dr. J. H. H. Schmidt, and of course changes altogether the rules given above (§ II), but will hardly perplex the student. It has the advantage of bringing “iambic” dialogue closer to lyric and to episodic trochees, but it has seemed more convenient to keep the traditional statement.
[886] Printed as one line, though containing a colon which ends with the end of a word, because the corresponding line of the antistrophe contains a colon which does not:—
[887] Because spondaic words are lacking. It is sometimes said that the only spondee in English is “amen”. The peculiar pronunciation of this word is due to the fact that it is so often sung to music where each syllable is given a whole bar. The name of Seaford in Sussex is undoubtedly pronounced by its inhabitants ∸∸; but one may perhaps therefore argue that it should be written “Sea Ford”.
[888] This important sequence may be conveniently memorized—if we substitute accent for quantity—by the sentence “Attack Rome at once”.
[889] I take this figure from Schmidt’s Introduction (English Translation, p. 76).
[890] The first two syllables of this word form the anacrusis, though the metre is trochaic; that is, we find ⏑⏑ instead of ⏑. In such cases the two “shorts” are given the length of one only, and this is indicated by the sign ω.
[891] I have taken Schmidt’s readings and arrangement for the sake of an example. Murray’s arrangement is quite different.