The wit of Euripides cannot easily be discussed; it often depends upon idiomatic subtlety, and must almost disappear in translation. But frequently, again, it consists in the method of handling a situation. Just as the playwright often makes of his drama, among other things, an elaborate _reductio ad absurdum_ of myth, so is he capable of writing a whole scene with a twinkle in his eye. The clearest example is the _Helena_; Menelaus’ stupefaction at learning that Egypt contains an Helen, daughter of Zeus, is indeed definite comedy: Διὸς δ’ ἔλεξε παῖδά νιν πεφυκέναι. ἀλλ’ ἦ τις ἔστι Ζηνὸς ὄνομ’ ἔχων ἀνήρ Νείλου παρ’ ὄχθας; εἷς γὰρ ὅ γε κατ’ οὐρανόν.[846] “And she told me that the lady was a daughter of Zeus! What! is there some person called Zeus living beside the Nile? There’s one in Heaven, to be sure, but that’s another story.” Such a translation gives perhaps the intention of the words and colloquial rhythm of the last sentence. Here is comedy, but that of Congreve, not of Aristophanes. The distinction is important. Euripides is less comic than witty. As we turn his pages we rarely laugh, but a thousand times we break into the slight smile of intellectual enjoyment; one delight in reading an Euripidean play—tragedy though it be—is the same as that aroused by the work of Meredith. Euripides’ sense of the ludicrous is a part of his restlessness in conception. Again and again he startles us by placing at some tragic moment a little episode which passes the pathetic and becomes absurd. When Clytæmnestra and Achilles bring each other into awkward perplexity over the espousal of Iphigenia the effect is amusing, and the intervention of the old slave who puts his head out of the tent-door must provoke a smile, even though we realize that he has misery and death on his lips.[847] After Creusa has given her instructions for the assassination of Ion, it is, though natural, yet quaint for the prospective murderer to reply: “Now do you retire to your hotel”.[848] In the _Medea_ the whole episode of Ægeus, to which Aristotle objected as “irrational,” is tinged with the grotesque. That the horrible story of Medea’s revenge must hang upon a slow-witted amiable person like Ægeus is natural to the topsy-turviness of life as the dramatist saw it. In fact, just as Euripides on the linguistic side practically invents the prose-drama, so in the strictly dramatic sphere he invents tragicomedy. Nothing can induce him to keep tears and laughter altogether apart. The world is not made like that, and he studies facts, depicting the phases of great happenings not as they “ought to be” but “as they are”. He would have read with amused delight that quaint sentence of Dostoevsky: “All these choruses sing about something very indefinite, for the most part about somebody’s curse, but with a tinge of the higher humour”.[849] It is indeed significant that sparkles of incidental mirth are (so far as a modern student can tell) commonest in that most heartbreaking