poraries--during his lifetime he was an object of the
most violent animosity owing, among other things, to his free-thinking
views--partly because he, as a dramatist, was obliged to put his ideas into
the mouths of his characters, so that in many cases it is difficult to
decide how much is due to dramatic considerations and how much to the
personal opinion of the poet. Even to this day the religious standpoint of
Euripides is matter of dispute. In the most recent detailed treatment of
the question he is characterised as an atheist, whereas others regard him
merely as a dialectician who debates problems without having any real
standpoint of his own.

I do not believe that Euripides personally denied the existence of the
gods; there is too much that tells against that theory, and, in fact,
nothing that tells directly in favour of it, though he did not quite
escape the charge of atheism even in his own day. To prove the correctness
of this view would, however, lead too far afield in this connexion. On the
other hand, a short characterisation of Euripides's manner of reasoning
about religious problems is unavoidable as a background for the treatment
of those--very rare--passages where he has put actually atheistic
reflections into the mouths of his characters.

As a Greek dramatist Euripides had to derive his subjects from the heroic
legends, which at the same time were legends of the gods in so far as they
were interwoven with tales of the gods' direct intervention in affairs. It
is precisely against this intervention that the criticism of Euripides is
primarily directed. Again and again he makes his characters protest
against the manner in which they are treated by the gods or in which the
gods generally behave. It is characteristic of Euripides that his
starting-point in this connexion is always the moral one. So far he is a
typical representative of that tendency which, in earlier times, was
represented by Xenophanes and a little later by Pindar; in no other Greek
poet has the method of using the higher conceptions of the gods against
the lower found more complete expression than in Euripides. And in so far,
too, he is still entirely on the ground of popular belief. But at the same
time it is characteristic of him that he is familiar with and highly
influenced by Greek science. He knows the most eminent representatives of
Ionian naturalism (with the exception of Democritus), and he is fond of
displaying his knowledge. N