90 Ernest Hcinrich Klotsche 



the multitude and another to the " advanced thinkers " of the 

 day. " The orthodoxy is pretended fiction, a mere theatrical trick, 

 required in the first instance, and to some extent throughout, by 

 the peculiar conditions of the tragic stage at Athens, but main- 

 tained in part out of a natural love for duplicity, ambiguity, irony, 

 and the play of meaning, which was characteristic of the people 

 and the time" (Euripides the Rationalist, pp. 231-232). But if 

 Euripides really was concealing a rationalistic doctrine under the 

 garb of his drama, we can hardly imagine how this would have 

 escaped the scrutiny of the most keen-eyed and merciless of 

 critics, Aristophanes. Nor can we understand that for more than 

 two thousand years none of all the painstaking students has been 

 able to penetrate the disguise, which Dr. Verrall has discovered 

 in the works of Euripides. There can be no doubt that the opin- 

 ion of modern scholars has been influenced by Aristophanes who 

 presents Euripides as a proselyting atheist. Yet the comic poet 

 must not be mistaken for a historian, and his manifest exag- 

 gerations should have put professional critics on their guard, all 

 the more as he swung his comic lash over Euripides with special 

 vigor because of personal feeling. 



To do Euripides justice we must first of all realize that he was 

 the child of a particular age. He lived in a time of general dis- 

 solution when everything in the moral, religious, and social life 

 was fluctuating. It was the age of the sophists with their agnos- 

 ticism on the one hand and their virtual atheism on the other. 

 Protagoras had been expelled from Athens for his free-thinking. 

 To quote his own words : " About the Gods I am unable to affirm 

 either that they exist or that they do not exist, nor what they are 

 like." Prodicus declared that the so-called Gods were only per- 

 sonifications of those objects which experience had found benefi- 

 cial to the life of man : Demeter was only the apotheosis of bread, 

 as Dionysus of wine, Poseidon of Avater, Hephaestus of fire, and 

 so forth. With these men Euripides was contemporary, and he 

 undoubtedly acquainted himself with their thoughts on nature, 

 man, and God. Then the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) 

 in its bearings on religious ideas was also of vital importance. In 

 time of distress and misfortune, men often begin to reconsider 



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