All the minor characters are skilfully drawn—Pylades, the warm-hearted scatter-brained ruffian who conceives the murder of Helen as soon[725] as he learns that she is in his friend’s house; Tyndareus, the hot-tempered, affectionate old king; Menelaus, the vulgar and successful, who has no other ambition than to let bygones be bygones[726] and who has actually expected to find Orestes and Clytæmnestra sharing the same home, quite comfortable after the death of Agamemnon;[727] Helen, that faded, facile creature, who cannot abstain from conversation, even with murderesses if there is no one else. Hermione, minute as is her part, commands our affection, not only because of the vile complot which centres round her, but for the shy graciousness of the little she does say, ἥκω λαβοῦσα πρευμένειαν[728] and the rest; she seems to have strayed from some sunlit lost drama by Sophocles. The religious sanction which for Sophocles had been the background of Orestes’ story and which for Æschylus provided the most vital part of the action, has in Euripides’ hands become, as it were, a small, rather shabby stage-property hung upon the back-scene. Those Avenging Spirits who hunt the matricide are now called “frenzies”[729] by his sister, and in the anxiously precise account[730] which Menelaus elicits from his nephew, it becomes plain that the three “maidens like night” are an hallucination; any unfettered intercourse between them and ordinary men is out of the question. Traditional belief itself tells rather against their divinity than for it.[731] Another stage property is the incidental miracle. Menelaus at Malea was addressed by the “prophet of Nereus, Glaucus, truthful god,” who told him of his brother’s death.[732] When we learn that at Nauplia he heard of Clytæmnestra’s death but from “some mariner,”[733] we surmise that “Glaucus” too was human.[734] The second miracle is that related[735] by the Phrygian slave; Helen vanished, “either by spells or the tricks of wizards or stolen by Heaven”. Helen has only hidden herself; the Phrygian is crazed by excitement and terror. But the miracle of Helen is vouched for by a more august witness, Apollo, who asserts that he has saved her from Orestes’ sword. Thus we arrive at the final triumph of orthodox religion, the epilogue in which the Delphian god stays at a word the vengeance of Argos and the quarrel between Menelaus and Orestes. In the reality of this epilogue we shall believe according as we find it credible that Euripides could destroy all the effect of his own play. All the action, all the atmosphere, which the dramatist has created, are rent by an utter breach. The objection is not so much that Apollo and his speeches are in themselves absurd, though the consolation offered to Menelaus, that Helen throughout their married life has given him endless trouble,[736] is (however true) distasteful. What jars hopelessly is the monstrous discontinuity of event and emotion. As