# Euripides (Donne)/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.
LIFE OF EURIPIDES.
"How about Euripides? He that was born upon the battle-day: Might you know any of his verses too?"
—Browning: Balaustion's Adventure.
The received date of the "birth of Euripides is the year 480 B.C. He was accordingly forty-five years junior to Æschylus, and fifteen years younger than Sophocles. This difference in their respective ages is not unimportant as regards their very different views of dramatic art. His birthplace was the island of Salamis, where his mother, with other Athenian women, and with men too old, or children too young, for the defence of their native city, was taking refuge, and he came into the world on the day of the great sea-fight that has immortalised its name. Of his father Mnesarchus little is known; hut it may be supposed he was a person of good station and property, since he could afford his son a liberal and expensive education, such as at that time was within reach of only wealthy families. His mother Clito, thanks to the poet's enemies, is better known to us. Probably she was not of ​the same social grade as her husband; a "metic" perhaps, or half-caste, with pure Athenian blood on one side only. But that Clito was ever a herb-woman, kept a greengrocer's stall, or hawked fruit and flowers about the streets, is doubtless a tale devised by her son's ill-wishers. Demosthenes, the orator's father, was a master cutler, and, as his son's suit against his knavish guardians shows, drove a brisk trade in swords, spearheads, knives, and shears; but it does not therefore follow that either the orator or his sire hammered on the anvil or blew the bellows themselves. In democratic Athens there was at all times a prejudice in favour of high birth, and one of the most effective arrows in Demosthenes's quiver against Æschines was, that his rival had once been a player, that his father was a low fellow, and his mother a dancer, a fortune-teller, and an altogether disreputable person. Clito and her husband very possibly owned some garden-ground near Athens, and its produce may have for a time supplied a convenient addition to their income. The Persians can hardly have been twice quartered on Attic soil without affecting seriously the rents or dividends of its owners, and thus the parents of Euripides may have been glad to sell their vegetables. To represent Clito as ​vending her own wares was an irresistible temptation to comic dramatists, indifferent whom they used for mirth and, laughter, whether it were a Pericles or a Cleon.
Like many fathers before him and since, Mnesarchus was puzzled about his son's proper calling in life; and so, as modern parents often consult some sound divine about the choice of a school for their lads, he took counsel of those who understood what the stars or birds of the air forebode as to the destiny of mortals. But either there was a mistake in casting the boy's nativity, or else the birds lied; for both they and the stars advised Mnesarchus to train up his child in the way of boxing and wrestling. So far this muscular education was successful; it enabled the young Euripides to gain a prize or two in the ring, but at local matches only, for though entered for the Olympian games, he was not allowed to put on either the gloves or the belt. There was some informality—he was too young or too old—and he was struck from the lists. It is remarkable, in connection with this period of his life—at the time of his rejection by the Olympic managers he is said to have been about seventeen years of age—that, in his plays, Euripides has never a good word for prophets and soothsayers; while, as for athletes, he denounces them as the most useless and brutal of men. His aversion to them may have arisen from these youthful misadventures. His proper vocation was yet to seek; and until he found it, he seems to have been rather devious in his pursuits, since, among other arts, he studied that of painting, and ​practised it with some success, a picture by him being, long after his decease, exhibited at Megara, either as a creditable performance or a curiosity. The painter may have been of service to the poet; his dramas, especially the lyrical portions of them, display much fondness for words expressing colour. Painting was perhaps as useful an ally to the Greek poet, as skill in music was to Milton in the construction of his verse. The real business of Euripides turned out to be the cultivation of his mind, and not of his muscles. His lines were set in the (to him) always pleasant places of poetry and philosophy; his wrestling powers were to be exercised in combats with dramatic rivals, and still more hostile critics. And this was perhaps what the stars really said, only the stupid soothsayers did not read them aright. Such people have more than once brought those who consult them into trouble, as poor king Crœsus, long before Euripides was born, found to his cost. The instructors of Euripides in philosophy were Anaxagoras for physical and Protagoras for moral science. Prodicus gave him lectures in rhetoric, and the studies of his youth were confirmed, expanded, or corrected in his manhood by the good sense of Socrates, who, besides being a guide and philosopher, was also his friend. An education of this kind implies that either Mnesarchus was a man of fortune, or that his son early came into one, inasmuch as the Greek sophistical lecturers were quite as costly as many English private tutors are now. We do not know their actual terms, but we do know that they were beyond the reach of ordinary incomes. "Think," says Hippias to ​Socrates, "of the sums of money which Protagoras and Prodicus collected from Greece. If you knew how much I had made myself, you would be surprised. From one town, and that a very small one, I carried off more than 150 minse (£609), which I took home and gave to my father, to the extreme astonishment of himself and his fellow-townsmen." It is also a token of Euripides being well provided with money, that he collected a library—large enough to excite observation at the time, and to be recorded afterwards. Forming a library in any age, heathen or Christian, is an expensive taste; and, on the whole, printed books are cheaper than those transcribed by the hand. Grecian sheepskin or good Egyptian paper (papyrus) was a costly luxury.
In his twenty-sixth year Euripides presented himself for the first time among the candidates for the dramatic crown. In that year (455 B.C.) death removed one formidable rival from his path, since in it Æschylus expired. Of the three tragedies produced by him on this his first trial, one was entitled, "The Daughters of Pelias," and a few lines of it which have been preserved show that it turned upon some ​adventures of Medea—a theme that a few years after he was to handle with signal success. The third prize was awarded to him—no mean distinction for a novice. But not until Euripides was just forty years old did he obtain the first prize; and the name of this successful trilogy is not preserved. Prominent as the "Medea" now stands among his works, the trilogy of which it formed a part gained only the third prize. Six years after the production of the "Medea," Aristophanes opened upon its author his double battery of sarcasm and parody, not indeed against the "Medea," but against a companion drama, now lost, the "Philoctetes." It is difficult to perceive any possible link between the Colchian princess and the possessor of the bow and arrows of Hercules; we may therefore infer that the group to which these two plays belonged was made up of fables unconnected with each other—a departure from earlier practice that did not originate with Euripides, though he is sometimes taxed with it.
He was twice married; his first wife was Chœrilla, a daughter of the Mnesilochus who appears in Aristophanes's comedy of the "Thesmophoriazusæ;" by her he had three sons: his second was Melitto. According to some accounts he was a bigamist; in ​Athens, however, bigamy, though uncommon, was not a punishable offence. There was some scandal about one or other or both of these ladies; probably, if there were any ground for it, it applied to Melitto, since Euripides lived for many years with Chœrilla upon, so far as is known, ordinary connubial terms. Athens, however, it must be recollected, in justice to both ladies, was a very gossiping city; nothing (we have it on the authority of St Paul, seconded by that of Demosthenes) pleased them so much as to tell and to hear news, and any news about Euripides was certain of welcome to those who had laughed at the representation of him in the "Acharnians." If it be fair to draw inferences from the wedded happiness of "the laureate fraternity of poets," it might appear that Euripides would have fared better had he remained a bachelor. Dante complains that Gemma, his wife, held him in subjection; Shakespeare was not quite comfortable, it would seem, at home; Milton's start in married life was unlucky; Wycherley and Addison were fearfully henpecked. If Christian husbands ​fared so ill, it may have been worse with a heathen poet, at a time and in a country where a man's lawful wife was scarcely more than his cook and housekeeper.
There is no trace of Euripides having, at any period of his life, taken part in public affairs. He seems never to have been archon, or general, as Sophocles was, or priest, or ambassador, or foreman of a jury. Doubtless he paid some rates or taxes in his parish (deme), Phylæ of the Cecropid tribe. He was commonly accounted a morose and sulky fellow; and since he shunned general society, he was naturally charged with keeping low company. He was indeed—far more than was usual in his time, and among a people passing most of their days in public—"a literary man," preferring solitude and his library to the hubbub of the market-place, or the crowding and noise of popular assemblies. According to a story preserved by a Roman anecdotist, Euripides pursued his studies in a grim and gloomy fashion. One Philochorus professed to have seen a "grotto shagged with horrid thorn," in which he composed his tragedies. He is said never to ​have laughed, rarely to have even smiled, and to have worn habitually a sorrowful visage. If it were so, Euripides was such a man as the vivacious Gratiano disliked, and even suspected:—
"Why should a man whose blood is warm within Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster? Sleep when he wakes, and creep into the jaundice By being peevish?"
And Cæsar perhaps might have thought him dangerous, though we have no reason for supposing Euripides "lean and hungry," as Cassius was, but, on the contrary, as will appear, a well-favoured, though a grave and silent man. Perhaps Euripides's horoscope may have resembled that of the good knight of Norwich: "I was born," says Sir Thomas Browne, "in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardise of company."
The 'Spectator' remarks that "a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author." There are ​means for "gratifying this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader;" for, thanks to some scholiast or painstaking collector of the curiosities of literature, there exists a brief life of Euripides containing some account of his personal appearance. He is said to have worn a bushy beard, and to have had freckles on his face. This, indeed, is not much; yet it is somewhat for us to learn—a scrap redeemed from the wallet that Time bears on his back. On the same authority we may fairly assume, that when a beardless youth, and perhaps unfreckled, he was noted for fair visage, and that he was "a gentleman born." He was a torch-bearer at the festival of Apollo of Zoster, a village on the coast of Attica. Now none but handsome and well-born youth were chosen for that office. It is to be hoped that many of our readers are acquainted with Charles Lamb's righteous indignation at the conduct of the "wretched Malone," the Shakespearian editor and commentator, in covering with white paint the portrait-bust of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, "which, in rude but lively fashion, depicted him to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the eyebrow, hair, the very dress he used to wear—the only ​authentic testimony we have, however imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him." If we balance in each case probable facts against equally probable traditions, we may conclude Euripides to be known to us almost as well as Shakespeare, owing to this good Dryasdust, the Greek biographer, who disdains not to chronicle even "freckles."
But it is impossible to believe Euripides to have been a mere recluse. His vocation as a writer for the stage must have brought him into contact with many persons connected with the theatre—with the archon who assigned him a chorus, with the actors, singers, and musicians who performed in his plays, and with the judges who awarded the prizes. Yet if we ask what company he kept, we pause for a reply, and do not get one. We know that he was a friend of Socrates, who never missed attending on the "first night" of a play by Euripides. We know also that every man's house and many men's tables were open to the Silenus-like son of Sophroniscus. We can tell the names of the guests at Plato's and at Xenophon's banquets. Socrates of course is at both, and that of Plato is held at the house of Agathon, Euripides's intimate friend. Some kind of acquaintance, perhaps not exactly friendship, existed between Alcibiades and Euripides, who once celebrated in verse a chariot-victory of that brilliant but dangerous citizen's at the Olympic games. Neither at Plato's nor Xenophon's feast, however, is Euripides present. Nor is it likely that travelling into foreign parts was among the causes for his absence on such festive occasions, since, until in ​his later years he quitted Athens, there is no trace of his leaving Attica, except the single fact of an inscription in the island of Icarus ascribed to him. This, however, is no evidence at all of his being from home, since a waxen tablet or a snip of papyrus could have conveyed the inscription, while Euripides remained in his grotto or his library, wrapt in contemplation on his next new play, or striving to solve hard sayings of Prodicus or Protagoras.
Once, indeed, we find him at home. It was in his house that Protagoras is said to have read one of the works by which that philosopher incurred a charge of atheism; and this worshipful society, once bruited abroad, was not likely to be overlooked by the pious writers of comedy. Often, indeed, does Athens, at the period of the Peloponnesian war, present an image of Paris in the last century. There the Church was despised, and yet stanchly supported by men of notoriously evil life; in Athens, divinities, whom the people worshipped superstitiously, if not devoutly, when the theatre was closed, were butts for the people's mirth and laughter when it was open. We have a record of only the two banquets of this time already mentioned. Could we have a report of a "petit souper d'Alcibiades," it might very likely remind us of those symposiums where the head of the Church, Leo the Tenth, encouraged his parasites and buffoons to debate on the greatest mysteries of religion; or the still better known conversations that took place at the supper-table of Baron Holbach. Had we any such report of the petits soupers at Athens, possibly ​some resemblance might be found between Protagoras and D'Alembert, or between the brilliant, versatile, and unprincipled Philip of Orleans and Alcibiades. With Alcibiades there was certainly some party or friendly relation with Euripides; but it is vain to speculate on its nature. Whatever it was, it would do the tragic poet no good with Aristophanes; and if the story be true that Alcibiades and his associates marred the first and hindered the second representation of "The Clouds," the baffled and irritated satirist may have suspected Euripides of having a hand in his failure, and for that, and perhaps other weightier reasons, have put him down in his black book.
Certain it is that Aristophanes regarded Euripides with a feeling seemingly compounded of fear and contempt—of contempt for him as a scenic artist, and fear of him as a corrupter of youth. Yet it is difficult to detect the cause for such hostility; political motives can hardly have been at the root of it. Did Aristophanes detest the war with Peloponnesus, and yearn for the return of peace? so did Euripides. Did he regard the middle class of citizens as the pith and marrow of the commonwealth? Euripides thought so too. The husbandman who tilled his little plot of ground they both set above the shopkeeper, who applauded the demagogue of the hour, and spent, or more properly idled away, half his time on the stone benches of the Pnyx. Did the comic writer love Athens in his heart of hearts, though he often told her from the stage that she was a dolt and a dupe? the tragic vriter loved her no less, and paid her ​compliments sometimes not to the advantage of a play or a trilogy. Did the one look upon orators with an unfavourable eye? so did the other; while both agreed that nobility of birth and depth of purse did not necessarily constitute the best citizen. Yet, in spite of so much harmony in their opinions, there were differences that could not be bridged over; there was repugnance that defied reconciliation, and views of Athens as it had been, and Athens as it was then, which kept them in the compass of one town as far apart as if rivers and mountains, clime or race, had sundered them.
The enmity of Aristophanes increased with the years, and did not relax with the death of Euripides. The first known attack upon him was made in his comedy of "The Acharnians" or "The Charcoal-Burners." The last was made two years after "sad Electra's poet" had been struck down by a yet more "insatiate archer" than Aristophanes himself. The spirit that breathes in "The Acharnians" reappears, but with increased bitterness, in "The Frogs," and to sharp censure on Euripidean art is added still sharper on Euripidean theology. Some modern writers on the subject of the Greek drama have contemplated Euripides through the eyes of his great satirist. They might, perhaps, have done better to consider, before following their witty leader, whether he was guiding them in the right road; whether the comic writer's objections rested on patriotic or moral, or on party or personal grounds. Aristophanes was a stubborn reactionist: the men of Marathon and Platæa, of ​Salamis and Mycale, he held to be the type of good Athenians. The new schools appeared to him in the same light as Greek philosophy in general appeared to the sturdy old Sabine Cato—schools of impudence and lying. Pericles himself he seems never to have really liked, but set him below Myronides and Thucydides, men of the good old time, for the return of which, as all reactionists must ever do, he yearned in vain. Euripides, on the other hand, was a man of the new time, perhaps a little beyond as well as of it. More cheerful views of humanity, ampler range of inquiry, greater freedom of thought, supplanted in his mind the gloomy superstition or the slavish faith of a past generation, with whom an eclipse was a token of the wrath of the gods, and by whom the sun was thought to be no bigger than a heavy-armed soldier's buckler. "Between the pass and fell incensed points" of two such opposites there could be nothing but collision; and the tragic poet laboured under this serious disadvantage, that he could not bring his antagonist on the stage.
Yet the most ardent admirer of Euripides is compelled to allow that this indefatigable writer of plays and laborious student can hardly be ranked among successful poets. "It has been observed," says an eminent judge of Greek literature, "that the success of Euripides, if it is measured by the prizes which he is said to have gained, would not seem to have been very great; and perhaps there may be reason to suspect that he owed much of the applause which he obtained in his lifetime to the favour of a party, which ​was strong rather in rank and fortune than in numbers,—the same which is said to have been headed by Alcibiades."—"It is not quite certain that, even in the latter part of his career, Euripides was so popular as Sophocles. In answer to a question of Socrates, in a conversation with Xenophon, probably heard during the latter part of the Peloponnesian war, Sophocles is mentioned as indisputably the most admirable in his art." If, according to this very probable suggestion, Euripides were the poet of the few and not of the Athenians in general, his frequent failure to win the ivy wreath may easily be explained. Democracy, though in all times it delights in clubs, is very jealous of coteries, especially if composed of men well-to-do in the world, or of men noted for their learning or refinement, and particularly jealous would all old-fashioned Cecropids be of a club in which Alcibiades was chairman. If, however, the wayward Phidippides of the comedy may sometimes have hindered the poet's success in a theatrical contest, he may as probably have atoned for this grievance at home by obtaining for him a better reception abroad. "There were dwellers out of" Attica, without going to the realm of the Birds to find them. And among the dependencies of Athens, in the tributary islands and among the Greeks of the Lesser Asia, where Alcibiades had much influence, he may have been an efficient patron of the often, at home, mortified dramatist.
​An historian, who wrote centuries after Euripides had passed beyond these and other vexations, cannot conceal his surprise that one Xenocles should have been the successful competitor in a contest with the son of Mnesarchus. He fairly calls the judges and spectators on the occasion a parcel of fools—dunderheads unworthy to bear the name of Athenian. But in missing the first or even the second crown, Euripides only fared alike with Æschylus and Sophocles; and that, with such samples of the two latter as have come to our hands, is a much more remarkable circumstance than the one it puzzled Arrian to account for. What dramatic giants must they have been who strove for the mastery with the old Marathonian soldier, and with the Shakespeare of the Grecian world! Perhaps another cause occasionally cost Euripides the crown. He, like Ben Jonson, was at times perverse in the choice or in the treatment of his subjects. Even from the satire of Aristophanes it is plain that he had an unlucky propensity to tread on debatable, and even dangerous, ground. By his innovations in legendary stories, by occasionally tampering with criminal passion, by perhaps carrying to excess his fondness for mere stage effect, he perplexed or offended his audience, not inclined to accept as an apology for the exhibition of wicked characters his plea that in the end they were all well punished for their sins. Even his constant applauder from the benches, Socrates, had, it is said, once to implore him to cut out from a play certain offensive lines; and a story preserved by a ​Roman anecdotist shows that occasionally he was obliged to come on the stage himself, and crave the spectators to keep their seats until the end of the performance. It seems that Euripides could give a tart reply to his audience when their opinions happened to differ from his own; for when the whole house demanded that an offensive passage or sentiment in a tragedy should be struck out, he said, "Good people, it is my business to teach you, and not to be taught by you." How the "good people" took this curt rebuff is not recorded; but if they damned his play, he at least did not, as Ben Jonson did, sulk for a few years and leave the "loathèd stage" in dudgeon, after venting his wrath on the public by an abusive ode and some stinging epigrams. On the contrary, Euripides went on preparing plays for the greater and lesser seasons of the theatrical period, until he left Athens and his enemies therein—for ever.
Amid frequent disappointments, and smarting under the lash of the comic poets—for we may be sure that where an Aristophanes led the way, others, however inferior to him, would follow eagerly—Euripides at a moment of universal dismay perhaps enjoyed some personal consolation. The mighty host which Athens had sent to Syracuse had been nearly annihilated. Of forty thousand citizens or allies that had gone forth, ten thousand only survived. Of her vast armament—vast if we bear in mind that her free population fell below that of many English fourth-rate cities—not a war-galley, not a transport-ship returned to Peiræus: of ​her soldiers, a handful only found refuge in a friendly Sicilian town. The last months of autumn in 413 B.C. were months of national consternation and household grief. Not long since we were reading of the general aspect of mourning for the slain at Berlin and other German cities. The mourning in Athens was of a deeper dye, since it was accompanied by dismay, if not despair, for the immediate future. Syracuse had been to Athens what Moscow was for Napoleon. Yet early perhaps in the next year there reached the "violet Queen" at first rumours, then credible reports, and at last the glad assurance, that any Athenian prisoner who could recite scenes or passages from the dramas of Euripides was taken out of the dreary stone-quarries of Syracuse, was kindly entreated in Sicilian homes, was nursed if sick or wounded, and if not presently restored to freedom (for such self-denial the captors prized their captives too highly), yet treated not as a slave, but as a welcome and honoured guest. Some indeed—how few or how many cannot be told—were suffered to return to Attica; and of these—poor gleanings after a bloody reaping—some can hardly have failed to go to the house of their deliverer, and with faltering voice and tearful eyes implored the gods, since they could not, to reward him. "Little thought we," they may be imagined to have said to him, "when we saw represented in your 'Trojan Women' the desolation of a hostile city, troops of warriors dragged in chains to the black ships of the Achæans, tender and delicate princesses told off to their allotted owners; or again, in your 'Suppliants,' ​the wives of the slain weeping for their husbands denied burial; or that bloody meadow before the seven-gated Thebes strewn with the dead in your 'Phœnicians'—little then thought we that these mimic shows were but shadows of what we beheld on the banks of the Asinarus on that dreary October morning, when, faint and worn by our night-march, and maddened by thirst, captain and soldier, hoplite and peltast, we rushed into its stream, careless of the archers that lined its banks, and hardly recking of the iron sleet that struck down our best and bravest. By the magic of your song, though 'sung in a strange land,' we poor survivors were rescued and redeemed from graves and the prison-house, from hunger and nakedness, from the burning sun and the sharp night-frosts of autumn, and from what was as hard to bear, the scoffs of the insolent foe gazing down upon us from mom to eve, and aggravating by brutal taunts and ribald jests the pains of the living and the terrors of the dying." If the character of Euripides may be inferred from his writings, the most pathetic of Greek tragic poets—he who sympathised with the slave, he who so tenderly depicted women—wept at such moments with those who were weeping before him, and was cheered by these proofs that he had not written or lived in vain.
The "Orestes" was the last play exhibited at Athens by Euripides; and he must have quitted that city shortly afterwards, if he was in exile for two years. He was a self-banished man; at least no cause is assigned for his departure. Of the three great dramatic ​poets whose works have in part been preserved, one only died in his birthplace. Æschylus quitted Athens in dudgeon at a charge of sacrilege, and Euripides ended his days at a foreign court. After a short sojourn in Magnesia, he went to Pella, the capital of the then small, and in the eyes of republican Greeks unimportant, kingdom of Macedonia. He was invited to it by the reigning sovereign, Archelaus, who in his way was a sort of Lorenzo de' Medici, attracting to his court artists, poets, and philosophers, and corresponding with them when at a distance. Among those whom he invited was Socrates; but he, who cared for neither money nor goods, and who spoke his mind pretty freely at all times and to all people, declined going to Pella, thinking perhaps that he would make an indifferent courtier, and knowing that despots have (as well as long hands) their caprices. Archelaus—the Macedonian kings always affected to be zealously Hellenic—established a periodical Olympic festival in honour of Jupiter and the Muses, and perhaps spoke Greek as his native tongue, and with as good accent as Frederick the Great is said to have spoken French. At Pella Euripides met with a reception that may have led him to regret his not sooner quitting litigious and scurrilous Athens, where housewives abominated his name and doubtless pitied Chœrilla and Melitto, and where orthodox temple-goers were scandalised by his theological opinions, Lucian mentions a report that the poet held some public office in Macedonia, which, seeing that he never meddled with even parish business at home, is scarcely probable. As little likely is it that ​he turned flatterer of kings in his later days. We can as soon believe that the grim Dante became a parasite at the court of Can Grande della Scala. Aristotle, indeed, a more trustworthy authority than Lucian, tells the following story:—Decamnichus, a young Macedonian, and a favourite of the king, gave deep offence to Euripides by remarks on his bad breath. Complaint being made, the indiscreet youth was handed over to the incensed poet, with the royal permission to flog him; and soundly flogged he seems to have been, since Decamnichus bore his chastisement in mind for six years, and then relieved his feelings by encouraging some friends or acquaintances, Euripides being out of reach, to murder Archelaus.
At the Macedonian court Euripides was not the only Athenian guest. His friend Agathon, flying perhaps from duns, critics, or public informers, found a royal city a pleasanter residence than a democratic one. There, was the celebrated musical composer, Timotheus, whom, when he was hissed at the Odeum some years before, Euripides is said to have consoled by predicting that "he would soon have the audience at his feet"—a prophecy that was fully realised. His presence at Pella may have been convenient to Euripides, who was then employed in putting the last touches to, if not actually composing, two of his finest plays—"The Bacchanals" and the "Iphigenia at Aulis." There, too, was Chœrilus, an epic poet, who celebrated in Homeric verse the wars of the Greeks with Darius and Xerxes. The society at King Archelaus's table, ​so richly furnished. with celebrities, very probably resembled the better-known assemblages at Sans Souci; but we do not read that the Macedonian prince put on his crown, as Frederick the Great did his cocked-hat, when his guests, Bacchi pleni, were becoming personal, or trespassing on the royal preserve of politics.
Euripides did not long enjoy "retired leisure." He died at Pella in the 76th year of his age, in the year 406 B.C., having, as is supposed, quitted Athens in 408. But his enemies, so far as it lay with them, did not permit him to depart in peace, or even in reputable fashion. One report, current indeed long after his decease, makes him to have been torn to pieces by mastiffs set upon him by two rival poets, Arrhidæus and Cratenas; another, that he was killed by women when on his way to keep an assignation. This bit of scandal is probably an echo of his ill-repute at home as a woman-hater; and the story of the mastiffs may be a disguise of the fact that he was "cut up" by Macedonian theatrical critics. Yet one who had been handled as he was by Aristophanes and survived, might well have set at nought all dogs, biped or quadruped: and as to nocturnal trysts, they are seldom proposed, or at least kept, by gentlemen over threescore and ten." ​Far more pleasant is it to know that Sophocles was deeply affected by his death, and in the next play he produced forbade the actors to wear crowns or their usual gorgeous dresses. The Athenians were prone to unavailing regret. Often they would say in their haste, "We are betrayed," and banish or put to death men who had served them well. Socrates had not been dead many years, before, with "woe that too late repented," they acknowledged having condemned a just man, and turned rabidly on his accusers for misleading them. And so, when Euripides was no more, they sent envoys to Pella to bring home his remains. But his host Archelaus would not part with them, and buried them with much pomp and circumstance; and his countrymen were fain to content themselves with a cenotaph on the road from Peiræus to the city, and with a bust or statue of the poet, which they placed in the Dionysiac theatre. They,
"Slowly wise and meanly just, To buried merit raised the tardy bust;"
and they were not the first, nor will they be the last, of nations, to imagine posthumous homage compensation for years of detraction. Books or furniture that had belonged to Euripides were much sought for and highly prized by their possessors; and Dionysius of Syracuse, himself a dramatic poet, and not an unsuccessful one, purchased at a high price his tablets and pen, and dedicated them in the Temple of the Muses in his own capital. "They kept his bones in Arqua;" and there was seemingly, for centuries after ​he was quietly inurned, a deep interest, and even a tender sentiment, attached to his tomb. It was situated near the confluence of two rivers, where there appears to have been a house or caravansary, at which travellers refreshed themselves, attracted by the purity of the air. Of the rivers, one was noted for the unwholesome character of its water. From another account it may be inferred that the tomb was much visited, even if pilgrimages were not made to it.
On his cenotaph was graven the following inscription:—
"To Hellas' bard all Hellas gives a tomb: On Macedon's far shores his relics sleep: Athens, the pride of Greece, was erst his home, Whom now all praise and all in common weep."
These lines, attributed to Thucydides the historian, or to Timotheus the musician, are difficult to reconcile with the caricature-portraits of him by Aristophanes; yet are consistent with the opinion that it was the conservative party in Athens, and not Athenians generally, that were hostile to him in life, or to the memory of—
"Our Euripides, the human, With his droppings of warm tears, And his touches of things common, Till they rose to touch the spheres."
In one thing he was happier than Sophocles—" ​opportunitate mortis"—in the priority of his death; since he lived not, as his great rival did, long enough to hear of the sentence passed on the victorious generals at Arginusæ, of the capture of the Athenian fleet at the Goat River, and of the utter, hopeless, irretrievable ruin of the city he had celebrated so often in immortal verse, admonished so wisely, and loved so well.
* ↑ "Bleared with the glowing mass, the luckless sire From anvils, sledges, bellows, tongs, and fire, From tempering swords, his own more safe employ, To study rhetoric sent his hopeful boy." —Juvenal, Sat. x., Gifford.
* ↑ One account reverses the story: according to it, Clito was "a person of quality," and Mnesarchus not a gentleman but a shopkeeper, or at least "in business."
* ↑ Among the few fragments preserved of this play are four lines, apparently indicating that Medea was devising mischief to somebody—perhaps putting on the copper or sharpening a knife for the behoof of Pelias. Whatever it was, she is asking advice, and her monitor gives it like a person of good sense:— "A good device; yet to my counsel list: Whilst thou art young, think as becomes thy years: Maidenly manners maidens best become. But when some worthy man has thee espoused, Leave plots to him; they suit not with thy sex."
* ↑ Of this "Philoctetes" there is a very fair account—by no means a common piece of luck with Euripides—by Dion Chrysostom, Oration lii. Dion compares the "Philoctetes" of Æschylus (lost) and that of Sophocles (extant) with the Euripidcan drama; and he shows that each of these pieces has its several merits.
* ↑ Hume, in his 19th Essay, writes:—"I have somewhere read that the republic of Athens, having lost many of its citizens by war and pestilence, allowed every man to marry two wives, in order the sooner to repair the waste which had been made by these calamities. The poet Euripides happened to be coupled to two noisy vixens, who so plagued him with their jealousies and quarrels that he became ever after a professed woman-hater; and is the only theatrical writer, perhaps the only poet, that ever entertained an aversion to the sex." The "good David," though sceptical enough on some subjects, was rather credulous on the score of anecdotes of this sort.
* ↑ The spirits in Hades, that in "The Frogs" rejoice in the rhetorical tricks ascribed to Euripides, are supposed, while on earth, to have inhabited the bodies of cut-purses, highwaymen, burglars, and parricides—such "minions of the moon" being, in Aristophanes's opinion, the pupils of sophistical tutors; or, at least, their notions of property and filial piety, he thinks, were probable results of their education. There was a time when to be a Hobbist or a Benthamite was thought to tend to similar aberrations from virtue.
* ↑ Ben Jonson, certainly not an unsocial man (witness the things said at the Mermaid, his butt of sack, his 'Tribe of Ben'), describes himself in these lines:— "I, that spend half my nights and all my days Here in a cell to get a dark pale face, To come forth worth the ivy and the bays," &c. Did we know as little of the English as we do of the Greek poet, here would be ground enough for a legend of a "grotto."
* ↑ The festival was held at Delphi, and probably, therefore, Euripides was conveyed thither in the galley (paralus) which annually carried offerings to Apollo's shrine. The young men, clad in Theraic garments, danced round the altar. May not this visit to Delphi have been the germ of the poet's beautiful drama, "Ion"? In any case the report of it shows that no ignobility of birth was attached to the name of Euripides by those who circulated it; and among them was Theophrastus, who indeed wrote long afterwards, but yet weighed his facts.
* ↑ Thirlwall's Hist. of Greece, iv. 273.
* ↑ Phidippides, in "The Clouds" of Aristophanes, is reputed to be a caricature of Alcibiades.
* ↑ Various Histories, v.
* ↑ Valerius Maximus.
* ↑ Valerius Maximus.
* ↑ Aristotle, Politics, v. 10, sec. 20.
* ↑ This story of dogs and angry women is indeed noticed in some verses ascribed to Sophocles, who, as Schlegel says, uttered "some cutting sayings against Euripides." To readers interested in the matter, it may he convenient to be told that it is mentioned by Athenæus, book xiii. p. 557. Against Sophocles, if the gossip collected by Plutarch is accepted, there were also some "sayings" of a similar kind, and far less creditable to him.
* ↑ Vitruvius, viii. c. 3, 'Mortifera.'
* ↑ Ammianus, xxvii. c. 4.
* ↑ Translated by Mr Paley.
* ↑ Browning, 'Balaustion.'