SOURCE: Cedric H. Whitman, "The Scope of Myth," in Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth, Harvard University Press, 1974, pp. 104-49.

In the essay that follows, Whitman describes Euripides's ironic use of myth.

Many a green isle needs must be
 In the deep, wide sea of misery.

Amid his despair at post-Napoleonic Europe, Shelley, his mind as always on human redemption, wandered into the Euganean Hills and experienced in imagination a renewal of the world's youth, by way of a hazy vision of Venetian glory reborn, or else transfigured in a final sea change. History offers no answer to why, in the Athens of Pisander and Cleophon, with the echoes of the Sicilian disaster still sounding, and the city's ultimate defeat the only realistic prospect, the poet of the Medea, the Heracles, and the Trojan Women should have produced the three most reassuring plays of his career, at...