A goddess in men's prayers to be For ever, with her Brethren twain Enthronèd, a great help in pain And queen of the eternal sea. "Helen a goddess!" say some critics; "the notion is impossible. We have seen her in this same play, a heartless ordinary woman." Yet I think Euripides was serious enough. I do not say he believed either this or any other particular bit of the mythology. But he was writing seriously and aiming at beauty, not at satire. All legend said that Helen was made a goddess; and Euripides was always curiously haunted by the thought of Helen and by the mysterious and deadly power of mere superlative beauty. As Apollo had said to Menelaus (1638): Thy bride shall be another: none may know _Her_. For the Gods, to work much death and woe, Devised this loveliness all dreams above, That men in Greece and Troy for thirst thereof Should strive and die, and so the old Earth win Peace from mankind's great multitude and sin. The superlative beauty may probably enough be found in company with heartlessness and treachery; but cannot these things be purged away, like the hates of Menelaus and Orestes, and the pure beauty remain a thing to pray to and be helped by, much as the old sagas pretend? There is here again the touch of mysticism. But however it be about Helen, or even about the above explanation in detail of the last scene of the _Orestes_, it is clear that both the most characteristic plays of the so-called period of gloom end with a strong, almost a mystically strong, note of peace and reconciliation. This note occurs, though with less intensity, at the end of other late plays, such as the _Iphigenîa in Tauris_ and the _Helena_; and, though without a god, in the _Phoenissae_. It does not occur at all in the early plays. The _Medea_ and _Hecuba_ end in pure hate; the _Hippolytus_ ends in wonderful beauty and a reconciliation between the hero and his father, who are natural friends, but it keeps up the feud of Aphrodite and Artemis and contains a strange threat of vengeance (v. 1420 ff.) The lovely Thetis of the _Andromache_ brings comfort and rest but preaches no forgiveness; on the contrary the body of Pyrrhus is to be buried at Delphi as an eternal reproach. Euripides all through his life was occupied with the study of revenge. It was a time, as Thucydides tells us, when "men tried to surpass all the record of previous times in the ingenuity of their enterprises and the enormity of their revenges." Euripides seems first to have been almost fascinated by the enormous revenges, at least when they were the work of people who had suffered enormous wrong. He seems, in plays like the _Medea_, to be saying: "If you goad people beyond endurance, this is the sort of thing you must expect them to do . . . and serve you right!" In the plays after 415 the emphasis has rather changed: "You must expect to be wronged, and revenge will do good to nobody.