Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/44

"His Aeschylus (in the Frogs) complains that Euripides had sapped the springs of civic manliness, of patriotism, and even of morality. It is true that Euripides, as a dramatic poet, had contributed to tendencies setting in that direction. Homer had been regarded by the Greeks as their greatest teacher, because the heroes were the noblest ideals of human life which they possessed. Aeschylus and Sophocles, in their different ways, had preserved the Homeric spirit. If the heroes once ceased to be ideals of human life, the ordinary Greek of the fifth century had no others."^[1]

It does not seem incontestably obvious that heroes elevated above commonplace humanity do furnish the best conceivable ideals for common men. But, assuming this to be so, what traits of character in these heroes would the Greek wisely take for imitation? Their splendid physical and mental endowments?—these were, by hypothesis, unattainable. Their bravery?—certainly the bravery of the Homeric heroes may be said to represent fairly the average of Hellenic courage. There was none of them whose heart did not fail in the face of overwhelming odds,—save Diomedes, whom Nestor censures^[2] for this very trait, the Berserk element in his character, and Achilles, who was so divinely endowed and assisted that for him no odds could be overwhelming,—none of them who ever stood as the Spartans stood at Thermopylæ, or the Athenians at Marathon. A painful, not a disabling wound would send any one of them from the battle-field.^[3] The grasping greed and tyrannous insolence of Agamemnon, the sublime selfishness of Achilles in leaving thousands of Greeks to perish, the unfailing mendacity of Odysseus, will hardly be upheld as ideal qualities. If, how-