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Excerpt from Classical Studies in Honor of Charles Forster Smith: By His Colleagues
It will be understood that this summary is merely a point of reference for my discussion and in no sense undertakes to give the spirit or the content of the play. Nothing but the full text of Euripides can convey the tragic crisis before the entrance of Heracles, or its joyous resolution, and most especially am I conscious of the unpersuasive emptiness, which an outline can not fill, oi all that splendid conclusion which contains the remorse and purification of the hero. It is there that Euripides is most original and touches modern feeling most closely. Fair reader at the old tale take a glance, - and the play is accessible as few are in the translation of a master, in Browning's Aristophanes' Apology. The first point about this argument which may strike the general reader, who recalls the Laban of Hercules from his first Latin reading or from the T anglewood Tales, is the fact that it presents none of the usual stories which made up the substance of the Heracles myth. They are in fact (with the exception of allusion to the voyage to the lower world, which motivates the absence of Heracles) wholly lacking to the action of the play, though some of them are mentioned in the dialogue and they find an important place in the choral songs.
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