54 Ernest Heinrich Klotsche 



sages he confounds the dweller in the ether with his dwelling so 

 that ether and' Zeus are one, cf . Fragm. 596, 869, 935. 



The curious prayer of Hecuba shows how vacillating Euripides' 

 view on this subject was: 



Tr. 884-88: 



CO yrjs oxviJ-f- kclttI yfis exc^v edpav, 

 ocrrts TTor' el av, SucrroTracrTOS eiSevai, 

 Zeus, etr' avdyK-q cfivaeos eire vovs fipoTOiv, 

 ■irpocr7iv^a,fj.r]v ae- iravTa yap dl a\p64>ov 

 fiaivcov KeXeMov Kara SLktiv to, j^j'ijt' a7ets. 



" O Earth's Upbearer, thou whose throne is Earth, 

 Whoe'er thou be, O past our finding out, 

 Zeus, be thou Nature's law, or Mind of Man, 

 Thee I invoke ; for, treading soundless paths. 

 To Justice' goal thou bring'st all mortal things." 



The audience may well have echoed Menelaus' exclamation : 



Tr. 889: 



tL 5' eaTLv; euxas cos eKalviaas d^ecbv. 

 "How now? — what strange prayer this unto the Gods?" 



This prayer was of a new kind, indeed ! Zeus had never heard 

 its like. — What do we find in it? All through the play Hecuba 

 is a woman of remarkable intellectual power and of fearless 

 thought. She treats the Olympian Gods as beings that have be- 

 trayed her, and whose names she scarcely deigns to speak. Zeus, 

 if there is such a being at all, is either the air, that both sustains 

 the earth and rests upon it, or the irresistible power of nature to 

 produce all things after a certain law ; or else intellect, or, rather 

 the directing agency which ordains all things from the first and 

 which exists in the soul of every man. She is far from denying 

 the existence of a divine power, and yet in her prayer she rejects 

 all current polytheism. In the first place we have in this prayer 

 the poet's customary identification of Zeus with ether. Here we 

 notice the influence of Anaximenes and especially of Diogenes of 

 Apollonia. The theory that the earth is supported by the air is 

 ascribed by Plutarch (Mor. 896 E) to Anaximenes, and by Aris- 

 totle (De Cselo H, 13) to Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, and De- 

 mocritus. The following words of Anaximenes imply this view: 



io3 



