Certain other passages are open to suspicion, especially Jocasta’s prologue and the remainder—hitherto unmentioned—of the first messenger’s speech.[687] We appear to have Euripides’ prologue, padded out by another hand. The same kind of recurrent weakness and flatness marks the messenger’s speech. Above all, when the speaker seeks to rise to the occasion, his efforts result in this:[688] “From the scaling-ladder his limbs were hurled asunder like sling-stones—his hair to Heaven, his blood to earth; his arms and legs whirled round like Ixion’s wheel”. This imbecile bombast is fortunately without parallel in Attic tragedy. It seems likely that Euripides’ work was in quite early times (probably the fourth century) expanded by another poet, whose main contribution was a large addition to the messengers’ speeches at a date when Æschylus was little enough known to allow such things as the description of the hostile champions a good degree of novelty. The new text was in its turn enlarged by accretions due to actors.[689] Euripides’ own work is vigorous and interesting,[690] a stirring scene of warfare, patriotism, and strong passions, which, in its present expanded form, reminds one by its spirit and its popularity of Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_, the first favourite of Elizabethan audiences.[691] The two brothers are well distinguished, Polynices by his pathetic sense that intolerable wrong is urging him against his will into crime, Eteocles by a dark fervour of ambition which has grown upon his soul like religion; and their terrible altercation in the sweeping trochaic metre is equal to anything of the kind in Euripides for terse idiomatic vigour. Jocasta’s passionate joy when she sees her exiled son,[692] joy which stirs her aged feet to trip in a dance of fond rapture,[693] provides the one light-hearted moment. And her noble speech of reconciliation[694] is the single great achievement of the drama.