like a spell of peace when the strain is too hard to bear (cf. p. 89).
But the main defence is that, like many of the greatest works of art,
the _Troädes_ is something more than art. It is also a prophecy, a
bearing of witness. And the prophet, bound to deliver his message, walks
outside the regular ways of the artist.

For some time before the _Troädes_ was produced, Athens, now entirely in
the hands of the War Party, had been engaged in an enterprise which,
though on military grounds defensible, was bitterly resented by the more
humane minority, and has been selected by Thucydides as the great
crucial crime of the war. She had succeeded in compelling the neutral
Dorian island of Mêlos to take up arms against her, and after a long
siege had conquered the quiet and immemorially ancient town, massacred
the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Mêlos fell in the
autumn of 416 B.C. The _Troädes_ was produced in the following spring.
And while the gods of the prologue were prophesying destruction at sea
for the sackers of Troy, the fleet of the sackers of Mêlos, flushed with
conquest and marked by a slight but unforgettable taint of sacrilege,
was actually preparing to set sail for its fatal enterprise against
Sicily.

Not, of course, that we have in the _Troädes_ a case of political
allusion. Far from it. Euripides does not mean Mêlos when he says Troy,
nor mean Alcibiades' fleet when he speaks of Agamemnon's. But he writes
under the influence of a year which to him, as to Thucydides, had been
filled full of indignant pity and of dire foreboding. This tragedy is
perhaps, in European literature, the first great expression of the
spirit of pity for mankind exalted into a moving principle; a principle
which has made the most precious, and possibly the most destructive,
elements of innumerable rebellions, revolutions, and martyrdoms, and of