692 THE DEAMA 



the two philosophers, and the dramatist may have caught the domi- 

 nant notes of the newer era from either the one or the other. The 

 older Olympians were being stormed by a young divinity called after 

 no names of imperial or divine majesty, but by the simple term of 

 "intelligence," " vovs " Whether the human analytic intelligence 

 is applied to antique structures of religion, or superstition, or old- 

 fashioned political theory, or hoary dogmas of morality, the result 

 is always primarily destructive; and a chaotic period supervenes be- 

 fore reason can mould out of the scattered and inconsistent theories 

 the fabric of a better and more intelligible world order. 



Shall we look at it on the side of ethics? There comes the dis- 

 covery that there are no abstract moral laws, true forever and in all 

 places, but only recognized conventions which one country or city 

 can adopt, and another community can reject. Shall we look at it 

 from the side of political theory? We shall make strange discoveries 

 as to the real seat of authority in a state, the meaning of justice, the 

 rationale of civic law, the justification of state punishment. Shall we 

 look at it from the side of religious belief ? Here for the poet and 

 the imaginative artist the acid seems to bite deeper still. Either the 

 gods are good, and then the stories told about them are false, or else 

 the stories are true, and then the gods are no gods at all. How can 

 Zeus and Apollo have carried out their dominion over the earth by 

 means of actions reprobated by the better feeling of humanity ? Cheat- 

 ing and stealing and adultery, these are the acts which the ancient 

 legends impute to the gods, to say nothing of an absurd jealousy and 

 a miserable system of favoritism. Such, speaking in general terms, 

 was the character of the destructive work done by the Sophists and 

 teachers of the new enlightenment. 



The ordinary conception held in Athens about Socrates was that 

 his influence was exerted on similar lines. He was brought up on a 

 charge of corrupting the youth. It was an absolutely unjust charge, 

 if we may trust Plato, who, indeed, gives us a glorified Socrates. Yet 

 even Socrates' great pupil has to allow that dialectics, the business of 

 argument and discussion and controversy, taught young men to wran- 

 gle like puppies and Aristotle said without hesitation that people 

 ought to have come to years of discretion before they learned moral 

 philosophy. Euripides, however, lived in the flood tide of these ideas, 

 and whether he learned from the lips of Anaxagoras the notion that 

 intelligence was the supreme principle in the universe, or caught from 

 Socrates the trick of argument and analysis of the current notions of 

 the day, his dramas, ostensibly like some of the older ones, are yet 

 inspired by a perfectly different spirit. The effect in his case is 

 all the more interesting to us because there are many superficial and 

 some real likenesses between the age of the Sophists in Greece and 

 that spirit which has been called fin de siecle in our modern world. 



