98 Ernest Heinrich Klotsche 



illustrated in prayer and divination in the " Bacchse " is in keep- 

 ing with the poet's general attitude toward the supernatural. 

 Even if we accept the view held by C. H. Moore and James Adam 

 that Dionysus in the play " stands for the spirit of enthusiasm 

 in the ancient Greek meaning of the word," and " that the prin- 

 cipal lesson of the drama is to be found in the words : Not ivith 

 knotvledge is zvisdom bought (395), that is, there is something 

 stronger and greater than reason in the life of man, namely en- 

 thusiasm, inspiration," — the indisputable fact still remains that 

 our poet even in the " Bacchse " relapses into the old iconoclastic 

 manner. 



Euripides marks a transition-period. He stands between tra- 

 ditional belief, which still retained its hold over the minds of the 

 common people, and modern thought, which had already awak- 

 ened and enlightened the minds of many thinking men. He has 

 not altogether thrown off the shackles of tradition, nor has he 

 stepped into the freedom of a new belief. Himself a tragic poet 

 and an advanced and philosophical thinker he is at a double dis- 

 advantage. Constrained by the unwritten laws of Greek tragedy 

 he could not sever all connection with the past. Like his prede- 

 cessors he had to take the subjects for his plays from the myths 

 and heroic legends, but in contrast with the two older tragedians 

 he used his themes as the old forms which he filled with a new 

 spirit. He had to put new wine into old bottles. 



But the new wine bursts the outworn bottles. H we consider 

 that Euripides for nearly half a century presented, before all 

 Athens in the theatre, again and again, his modern conceptions 

 of the supernatural, it is out of question that he helped hurry to 

 complete overthrow the falling superstition of Olympus and 

 thus contributed even more than the sophists to the dissolution of 

 the ancient beliefs. In this negative or destructive aspect of his 

 teaching Euripides closely resembles the great satirist of the sec- 

 ond century A.D., Lucian of Samosata, who far more openly than 

 Euripides professes the scorn of irrational belief and unsparingly 

 drives the pagan Gods from their thrones in the minds of think- 

 ing men. But the Church — strange to say ! — did not consider him 

 an ally but an enemy of Christianity, who, according to Suidas, in 



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