A safeguard of the city, not possess'd
By Scythia or the places of the south.
This court, majestic, incorruptible,
Instant in anger, over those who sleep
The sleepless watcher of my land, I set."
Again, there are at least two tragedies of Euripides—the Heracleidae and the Supplices—in which the strain of allusion to the politics of the Peloponnesian War in unmistakable. It is needless to dwell on the larger sense in which Euripides everywhere makes drama the vehicle of teachings—political, social, moral—which could nowhere have received such effective publicity as in the theatre. Nowadays, they would have been found in the pages of a newspaper or a magazine accepted as the organ of a party or a school. In the days of Voltaire, journalism, as free countries now understand it, had no more existence than in the days of Euripides; and, as a recent historian of French literature remarks, it has been thought that the tragedies of Voltaire owed their popularity chiefly to the adroit manner in which the author made them opportunities for insinuating the popular opinions of the time[1]. We must not forget that peculiar feature of Greek drama, the Chorus, who may be regarded as a lineal descendant of the Homeric Tis. The interest of the Chorus, in this connection, does not depend so much on the maxims that it uttered as on the fact that it constituted a visible link between the audience and the drama, bringing the average spectator into
- ↑ Saintsbury's Short History of French Literature, p. 405.
