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Excerpt from Classical Studies in Honor of Charles Forster Smith: By His Colleagues
But though the myth had lost its vitality and was no longer regarded popularly with anything like religious fervor, yet Euripides was still close enough to Pindar and the Older Hel lenism to appreciate the dignity and grandeur of this Doric ideal. His treatment, with all its modern boldness Of thought, is yet archaic and severe, as Of one conscious Of dealing with a figure whose meaning and vitality belonged to an earlier time. As modern mythologists have formulated it, Heracles was the imaginative or poetical embodiment Of human perfection (the Doric dperd), dedicated to the welfare Of mankind: that is, in the first instance to the welfare Of his tribe, the primitive Dor ians, and then by extension to the Hellenic race.6 He was in the guise Of this ancient allegory the representative Of good against evil, the embodiment of all the Slow civilizing forces against the barbarism from which man was emerging. It is really a noble conception, finer and purer than the ideas which give substance to the greater gods Of the Greek pantheon. In fact, one may suspect that to Euripides the opportunity was not unwelcome to set over against the vindictiveness which the myth attributed to Hera, the pure and human beneficence Of this man-made god.
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