for the exposing of the manlike egoism and self-satisfaction of the hero. If we are to appreciate the wit of Euripides we must remember the familiarity of this combination. Thus, in line 536, we all appreciate the irony of the suggestion that Medea ought to be thankful for the advantage of living in Greece, the land of justice, where laws, and not the right of might, prevail. But when we hear how grateful she ought to be for the opportunity she has had of spreading her reputation (acquiring dóğa) throughout Greece, and when Jason magnanimously alleges that he himself prefers fame to gold, and even to a poetic talent surpassing that of Orpheus, we shall miss the delicious irony, unless we know how familiar this contrast is. Medea retorts that reputation was his motive for abandoning her (592), and the effect of his valiant protest against this imputation is only to produce from Medea an even shrewder thrust, implying that his deepest motive was in fact the other half of the stock temptation, wealth (599). This Jason, who marries his princess for money and respectability, shows his character by his insistence that he will supply Medea most generously with material help for her exile, and by the scandalized protest which he makes at the reckless wastefulness of Medea's present to his bride (959).

At 627 the chorus takes up the theme of Modest Measure, with special reference to love and marriage, and thus completes the moralizing background for the drama. Review the opening movement of the play once more, and you will perceive that there is a lyrical progression, which may be thus roughly represented :

1. The first scene reaches a climax in the elaboration by the nurse of the theme 'Terrible are the passions of Princes.' That elaboration is justified, not only as an illustration of the tendency of humble persons like the nurse to indulge in proverbial philosophizing, but also, and tragically, by the fact that the praise of the Modest Mean and the deprecation of excessive Power and Prosperity are felt to be ominous for Jason, not Medea.

2. The chorus enter, and after Medea has won them to her side, and pledged them to secrecy, if she find a way of vengeance, Creon gives his practical example of the abuse of Power. Medea harangues the chorus on her schemes for vengeance, and

3. The famous ode on the triumph of women is sung. Its final phrases lead up to

4. Jason's entry. Jason shows that he is dominated by the passion for excessive Glory and excessive Wealth.

5. The chorus deprecate excess in the passion of Love. They refer to Medea's sorrows and jealousy: but we think, when they pray for Sophrosune, the fairest gift of heaven, of Jason and his royal wedlock.

It is the memory of all this that gives such energy to the scornful words of Medea at 698, when she tells of Jason's mighty passion

ἀνδρῶν τυράννων κῆδος ἠράσθη λαβεῖν.

ΙΟ

ΤΥΡΑΝΝΟΣ, ΚΕΡΔΟΣ, ΕTC.

Have we not now the right to claim that both here and later (778 and 877, for instance) this word rúpavvos has a sinister effect? However that may be, it is more important to notice the value given to the passionate development of the play by the reminiscence of the simple motifs introduced by the nurse. When Medea sends her gift to the princess, she bitterly recallsand the audience notices it, though not the self-satisfied Jason-the theme of the ill-gotten gain. The princess, she cries, will have not one cause for happiness, but thousands (952 evdaiμovýσei, a cruel reminiscence of Jason's evdaiμovoínv 565), what with you for her husband, and this robe for her possession. And then, immediately, we hear (957) Tŷ Tuρávvą μakapią vúμėŋ. . . The same theme rings out again in 965 sqq.

Finally, when the catastrophe has been related, the messenger sums up the story with the moral, first suggested by the nurse's lament, 1228 :

No man is happy: when wealth pours in upon a man, he may perhaps be luckier than others-but it is not happiness.

J. T. SHEPPARD

THE FATES, THE GODS, AND THE FREEDOM OF

MAN'S WILL IN THE AENEID.

FATES OF PARTICULAR PERSONS OR COMMUNITIES.

VERGIL has a strong idea of personal fate. A certain fate becomes attached to a certain person (or community) and follows him all his life; then the fates are spoken of as the fates of that person. As a parallel one might quote the idea in Maeterlinck's essay 'La Chance' (in the volume, Le Temple enseveli, 1902, pp. 229 sqq.). For both Maeterlinck and Vergil men are marked out, one might almost call it annexed, by good or bad fortune; yet both authors refuse to endow this good or bad fortune with personality: they deal with personal fates which yet lack personality.

Fate,' if we are

This is at once to introduce an inherent contradiction. to attach any real philosophical content to the word, must mean something bigger than what happens to one person. The world of persons is full of contradictions, rivalries and jars, and the poet (philosopher) looks for a harmonizing or ordering principle: let men struggle in the grip of the disordered and disjointed earthly sphere, yet fate' at least should partake of that which harmonizes or orders. But if fate is attached to particularities and persons, it enters into their limitations and pettinesses; it becomes drawn into the conflict, instead of directing the conflict. A 'personal fate' implies the limitation of the infinite by the finite, and verges on being a contradiction in terms, simply because one personal fate will contradict another personal fate. But how can fate, if it means that which is 'ordered,' be self-contradictory?

Ancient thought failed to grapple with the difficulty. Vergil is here entirely the interpreter of his age.1 He has an excuse, which Maeterlinck cannot claim, of being confused on a subject where his contemporaries and predecessors were confused. He accepts without misgiving the widespread ancient idea of a personal fate attached to this man or to that, with all its inherent difficulties. Thus we hear of the fates of Priam (II. 554), of Deïphobus (VI. 511), of Lavinia (VII. 79), of Turnus (X. 472), of Latinus (XI. 160), of Aeneas' descendents (VI. 683, VIII. 731). We hear also of the fates of a community, Troy (II. 34, III. 182). And more than anything else there dominates the poem the idea of the fates of Aeneas (I. 382, II. 294, VI. 66, VII. 234, where Ilioneus swears by the fates of Aeneas '). The fates, then can be closely attached to particular persons.

1 Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity, p. 61 sqq.

Vergil further admits the conflict of fate with fate. One person's fate may be better than another's (VI. 546); or fates may be positively opposed to fates; in VII. 294 Juno speaks of the fates of the Trojans as contrary to her own fates,

Heu stirpem inuisam et fatis contraria nostris
fata Phrygum.

In VII. 224 the world is driven forward to a disaster because of the awful clash between the rival fates of Asia (Troy) and Europe (Greece). In IX. 133 Turnus boasts that the fate-inspired answers of the gods' (which have promised Italy to the Trojans) do not terrify him: for he too has his own fates': 'sunt et mea contra Fata mihi.' And clearer than all else Jupiter weighs in the scale the 'opposing' fates, 'fata diuersa,' of Aeneas and Turnus just before the final struggle (XII. 725-8).

It is very much the same line of thought when a person's fate is said to change; he then has 'new' fates, or 'different' fates. This again involves an absurdity, if we put the contents of our English word 'fate' into the Vergilian 'fata': the English 'fate' presupposes not only what is orderly, but what is fixed beforehand, an irrevocable destiny; but how can what has been fixed be altered, unless the whole universe is to fall to pieces? What is destined must be, and nothing can alter it. Hence to talk of 'new' and 'old' fates is meaningless. Yet Vergil gives us the following: Venus asks Jupiter how it can be allowable for anyone to make new fates for the Trojans: 'noua condere fata' (X. 35); Aeneas, in a striking passage, cries that he is being called out of one set of fates into another: 'nos alia ex aliis in fata uocamur' (III. 494), words which taken in their context1 mean that the old glories of Troy are passed away, now begins a new era. And there is very much the same idea in I. 239, when Venus tells Jupiter how she consoles herself for the present misery of Aeneas with the thought of the 'contrary' fates, which would come to him later,

hoc equidem occasum Troiae tristesque ruinas
solabar fatis contraria fata rependens.

Again, Latinus, in despair, says 'by living he has worsted his own fate' (XI. 160), a very odd expression; he means that fate intended him to be happy, but that he has lived too long and seen his happiness turned into grief by the death of his son; here there is very dimly expressed a contrast between what life is and what it should be, and fate' is made to stand for what it should be, its best possibilities. In an almost exactly opposite sense, Tarchon and the Lydians are said to have 'freed themselves from their fate'; they were doomed. to misfortune unless they could find a foreign leader, of whom there seemed no hope; but they did find one (Aeneas), and so were set free (X. 154).

These two examples put over against each other are surely very instructive. In the first, fate is what life ought to be contrasted with what life is; in the 1 They occur in his farewell to Andromache.