at conquest, a thing celebrated in paeans and
thanksgivings, the very height of the day-dreams of unregenerate man--it
seems to be a great joy, and it is in truth a great misery. It is
conquest seen when the thrill of battle is over, and nothing remains but
to wait and think. We feel in the background the presence of the
conquerors, sinister and disappointed phantoms; of the conquered men,
after long torment, now resting in death. But the living drama for
Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is from them that he has named
his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly lit and
heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless and
barely articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow.

Indeed, the most usual condemnation of the play is not that it is dull,
but that it is too harrowing; that scene after scene passes beyond the
due limits of tragic art. There are points to be pleaded against this
criticism. The very beauty of the most fearful scenes, in spite of their
fearfulness, is one; the quick comfort of the lyrics is another, falling
like a spell of peace when the strain is too hard to bear (cf. p. 89).
But the main defence is that, like many of the greatest works of art,
the _Troaedes_ is something more than art. It is also a prophecy, a
bearing of witness. And the prophet, bound to deliver his message, walks
outside the regular ways of the artist.

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 mea