26 Prosser Hall Frye 



private affair — though it might serve to wheedle the pity of the 

 spectators or bystanders or even the commiseration of the gods, 

 as its theatrical representation did in the case of the spectators. 



Now, in a good many cases, it must be acknowledged, there is 

 a practical difficulty in deciding just what is the moral quality of 

 an act as such, regardless of motive. But it seemed fairly safe 

 to assume that those acts might be reckoned good which brought 

 happiness in their train, and contrariwise. At least such a belief 

 appears to be one of the natural tenets of conscience. To be 

 happy is so evidently to have done well in life. ''To 8'ev ^rjv koI 

 TO ev wpdrreiv ravrov inroXafji^dvovcn tQ> evSai/jLovelv."^^^ Here is 

 the whole story, with the exception of Plato's wise thiriking. To 

 be sure, the standard of happiness or well-being was likely to be 

 low with the vulgar — hardly more than worldly prosperity, which 

 is not much of a criterion either in ancient Attica or modern 

 America. And perhaps it was this baseness of ideal which led 

 Euripides to criticize and even condemn the old moral standard 

 altogether, with its identification of righteousness and well-being, 

 of wickedness and adversity, which constitutes Sophocles' con- 

 stant thesis — just as it was the general degeneracy of public 

 opinion on the same subject which inspired Plato in his attempt 

 to raise the ideal by disassociating happiness from all material 

 accompaniments whatever and by confining it to the contempla- 

 tion of the supreme good — an attempt which ultimately drove 

 him to his doctrine of suprasensibk ideas as the sole means of 

 rescuing the eudsemonistic truism from the dissolving criticism 

 of a Callicles or a Thrasymachus as well as of a Euripides. 



In the Hippolytiis, however, Euripides does for the nonce re- 

 main fairly loyal to the traditional belief in the moral quality of 

 actions as a determinant of prosperity and misery. It is Hippo- 

 lytus' conduct, not his motive, which renders him obnoxious to 

 divine as well as to poetic justice. The offense which he has 

 committed unthinkingly (with Racine we should probably acquit 

 him of ill doing) consists in his exclusive and hence excessive 

 cult of Artemis to the neglect and disparagement of Aphrodite. 



-8a Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea, I, 4, 2. 



198 



