n 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.

HECUBA, _Queen of Troy, wife of Priam, mother of Hector and Paris_.

CASSANDRA, _daughter of Hecuba, a prophetess_.

ANDROMACHE, _wife of Hector, Prince of Troy_.

HELEN, _wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta; carried off by Paris, Prince
of Troy_.

TALTHYBIUS, _Herald of the Greeks_.

MENELAUS, _King of Sparta, and, together with his brother Agamemnon,
General of the Greeks_.

SOLDIERS ATTENDANT ON TALTHYBIUS AND MENELAUS.

CHORUS OF CAPTIVE TROJAN WOMEN, YOUNG AND OLD, MAIDEN AND MARRIED.

_The Troaedes was first acted in the year_ 415 B.C. "_The first prize was
won by Xenocles, whoever he may have been, with the four plays Oedipus,
Lycaon, Bacchae and Athamas, a Satyr-play. The second by Euripides with
the Al