For some time before the Troaedes was produced, Athens, now entirely in the hands of the War Party, had been engaged in an enterprise which, though on military grounds defensible, was bitterly resented by the more humane minority, and has been selected by Thucydides as the great crucial crime of the war.  She had succeeded in compelling the neutral Dorian island of Melos to take up arms against her, and after a long siege had conquered the quiet and immemorially ancient town, massacred the men and sold the women and children into slavery.  Melos fell in the autumn of 416 B.C.  The Troaedes was produced in the following spring.  And while the gods of the prologue were prophesying destruction at sea for the sackers of Troy, the fleet of the sackers of Melos, flushed with conquest and marked by a slight but unforgettable taint of sacrilege, was actually preparing to set sail for its fatal enterprise against Sicily.

Not, of course, that we have in the Troaedes a case of political allusion.  Far from it.  Euripides does not mean Melos when he says Troy, nor mean Alcibiades’ fleet when he speaks of Agamemnon’s.  But he writes under the influence of a year which to him, as to Thucydides, had been filled full of indignant pity and of dire foreboding.  This tragedy is perhaps, in European literature, the first great expression of the spirit of pity for mankind exalted into a moving principle; a principle which has made the most precious, and possibly the most destructive, elements of innumerable rebellions, revolutions, and martyrdoms, and of at least two great religions.

Pity is a rebel passion.  Its hand is against the strong, against the organised force of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods.  It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light.  It brings not peace, but a sword.

So it was with Euripides.  The Troaedes itself has indeed almost no fierceness and singularly little thought of revenge.  It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music, as it were, and made beautiful by “the most tragic of the poets.”  But its author lived ever after in a deepening atmosphere of strife and even of hatred, down to the day when, “because almost all in Athens rejoiced at his suffering,” he took his way to the remote valleys of Macedon to write the Bacchae and to die.

G. M.

THE TROJAN WOMEN

CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY

THE GOD POSEIDON.

The goddess Pallas Athena.