All that is known about his outward life may be shortly told. He was born in 480 b.c., on the very day, according to the legend, of the Greek victory at Salamis, where his Athenian parents had taken refuge; and a whimsical fancy has even suggested that his name— son of Euripus —was meant to commemorate the first check of the Persian fleet at Artemisium. His father Mnesarchus was at least able to give him a liberal education; it was a favourite taunt with the comic poets that his mother Clito had been a herb-seller—a quaint instance of the tone which public satire could then adopt with plausible effect. At first he was intended, we are told, for the profession of an athlete,— a calling of which he has recorded his opinion with something like the courage of Xenophanes. He seems also to have essayed painting; but at five-and-twenty he brought out his first play, the Peliades, and thenceforth he was a tragic poet. At thirty-nine he gained the first prize, and in his career of about fifty years he gained it only five times in all. This fact is perfectly consistent with his unquestionably great and growing popularity in his own day. Throughout life he had to compete with Sophocles, and with other poets who represented tragedy of the type consecrated by a splendid tradition. It was but natural that the judges should crown works of that school more frequently than the brilliant experiments of an innovator. The hostile criticism of Aristophanes was witty; and, what has not always been observed, it was true, granting the premise from which Aristophanes starts, that the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles is the only right model. Its unfairness, often extreme,.consists in ignoring the changing conditions of public feeling and taste, and the possibilities, changed accordingly, of an art which could exist only by continuing to please large audiences. It has usually been supposed that the unsparing derision of the comic poets contributed not a little to make the life of Euripides at Athens uncomfortable; and there is certainly one passage (in a fragment of the Melanippe, — Nauck, Frag. 495) which would apply well enough to his persecutors :—

αvl>ρωv δt πολλοί του y∈λωτos ο'ύνίκα άσκοΰσι χaριτas κepτ6μουs' lγω δ ∈ πωs μισό) yeKοlουs, ο'iτιvts σοφών πίρι άχάλίν tχουσι στόματα.

To raise vain laughter, many exercise The arts of satire; but my spirit loathes These mockers whose unbridled mockery Invades grave themes.

The infidelity of two wives in succession is alleged to explain the poet’s tone in reference to the majority of their sex, and to complete the picture of an uneasy private life. He appears to have been repelled by the Athenian democracy, as it tended to become less the rule of the people than of the mob. Thoroughly the son of his day in intellectual matters, he shrank from the coarser aspects of its political and social life. His best word is for the small farmer (autοurgos), who does not often come to town, or soil his rustic honesty by contact with the crowd of the marketplace.

About 409 b.c. Euripides left Athens, and after a residence in the Thessalian Magnesia repaired, on the invitation of King Archelaus, to the Macedonian court, where Greeks of distinction were always welcome. Tn his Archelaus Euripides celebrated that legendary son of Temenus, and head of the Temenid dynasty, who had founded Aegae; and in one of the meagre fragments he evidently alludes to the beneficent energy of his royal host in opening up the wild land of the North. It was at Γella, too, that Euripides composed or completed, and perhaps produced, the Bacchoe. Jealous courtiers, wc are told, contrived to have him attacked and killed by savage dogs. It is odd that the fate of Actaeon should bo ascribed, by legend, to two distinguished Greek writers, Euripides and Lucian; though in the former case at least the fate has not such appropriateness as the Byzantine biographer discovers in the latter, on the ground that its victim “had waxed rabid against the truth.” The death of Euripides, whatever its manner, occurred in 406 b.c., when he was seventy-four, t Sophocles followed him in a few months, but not before he had been able to honour the memory of his younger rival by causing his actors to appear with less than the full costume of the Dionysiae festival. Soon afterwards, in the Frogs, Aristophanes pronounced the epitaph of Attic Comedy on Attic Tragedy.

The historical interest of such a life as that of Euripides consists in the very fact that its external record is so scanty —that, uulike Aeschylus or Sophocles, he had no place in the public action of his time, but dwelt apart as a student and a thinker. He has made his Medea speak of those who, through following quiet paths, have incurred the reproach of apathy (paβυμdav). Undoubtedly enough of the old feeling for civic life remained to create a prejudice against one who held aloof from the affairs of the city. Quietness (άπ-ραγ/Λοσύ^), in this sense, was still regarded as akin to indolence (αργία). Yet just here we see how truly Euripides was the precursor of that near future which, at Athens, saw the more complete divergence of society from the state. His work is his biography. The first requisite for a just appreciation, both of the artist and of the man, is rightly to apprehend the conditions under which his work wa3 done.

In an age which is not yet ripe for reflection or for the subtle analysis of character, people are content to express in general types those primary facts of human nature which strike every one. Achilles will stand well enough for the young chivalrous warrior, Odysseus for the man of resource and endurance, even without such elaboration of detail as would enable us surely to recognize the very man—to say, if we met him, this is the Λchille3, the Odysseus, whose exact portrait we know. The poetry of such an age pre3ent3 types rather than individuals. In the case of the Greeks, these types had not merely an artistic and a moral interest; they had, further, a religious interest, because the Greeks believed that the epic heroes, sprang from the gods, were their own ancestors. Direct lineage was the ground on which the Greeks trusted that the Greek gods would help them against other men, speaking barbarian tongues, and other gods, the progenitors of barbarians. Greek Tragedy arose when the choral worship of Dionysus, the god of physical rapture, had engrafted upon it a dialogue between actors who represented some persons of the legeuds consecrated by this faith. Now, in order that the representation should express the3e persons without transgressing the typical character of the legends themselves, and thereby straining or lowering this faith, it is necessary to observe a limit. The dramatist was obliged to refrain from multiplying those minute touches which, by individualizing the characters too highly, would bring them closer, indeed, to daily experience, but would detract from their general value a3 types in which all Hellenic humanity could recognize its own image glorified and raised a step nearer to the immortal gods. This necessity wa3 further enforced by the existence of the Chorus, the original element of the drama, and the very essence of its nature as an act of Dionysiae worship. Those utterances of the Chorus, which to the modern sense are so often platitudes, were not so to the Greeks, just because the moral issues of Tragedy were felt to have the same typical generality as these comments themselves.

An unerring instinct keeps both Aeschylus and Sophocles within the limits imposed by this law. Euripides was only fifteen year3 younger than Sophocles. But, when Euripides began to write it must have been clear to any man of his genius and culture that, though an established prestige might be maintained, a new poet who sought to construct Tragedy on the old basis would be building on sand. For, first, the popular religion itself—the very foundation of Tragedy—had been undermined. Secondly, scepticism had begun to be busy with the legends which that religion consecrated. Neither gods nor heroes commanded all the old unquestioning faith. Lastly, an increasing number of the audience in the theatre began to be destitute of the training, musical and poetical, which had prepared an earlier generation to enjoy the chaste and placid grandeur of ideal Tragedy.

Euripides made a splendid effort to maintain the place of Tragedy in the spiritual life of Athens by modifying its interests in the sense which his own generation required. Could not the heroic persons still excite interest if they were made more real,—if, in them, the passions and sorrows of every-day life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness? And might not the less cultivated part of the audience at least enjoy a thrilling plot, especially if taken from the home-legends of Attica? Euripides became the virtual founder of the Romantic Drama. In so far as his work fails, the failure is one which probably no artistic tact could then have wholly avoided. The frame within which he had to work was one which could not be stretched to his plan. The chorus, the masks, the narrow stage, the conventional costumes, the slender opportunities for change of·» scenery, were so many fixed obstacles to the free development of Tragedy in the new direction. But no man of his time could have broken free from these traditions; in attempting to do so he must have wrecked either his fame or his art. It is not the fault of Euripides if in so much of his work we feel the want of harmony between matter and form. Art abhors compromise; and it was the misfortune of Attic Tragedy in his generation that nothing but a compromise could save it. A word must be said on the two devices which have become common phrases of reproach against him—the prologue, and the deus ex machina. Doubtless the prologue is a slipshod and sometimes ludicrou3 expedient. But it should be remembered that the audiences of his days were far from being so well versed as their fathers in the mythic lore, and that, on the other hand, a dramatist who wished to avoid trite themes had now to go into the by-ways of mythology. A prologue was often perhaps desirable or necessary for the instruction of the audience. As regards the deus ex machina, a distinction should be observed between those cases in which the solution is really mechanical, as in the Andromache and perhaps the Orestes, and those in which it is warranted or required by the plot, aβ in the Hippolytus and the Bacchoe. The choral songs in Euripides, it may be granted at once, have often nothing to do with the action. But the choru3 was the greatest of difficulties for a poet who was seeking to present drama of romantic tendency in the plastic form consecrated by tradition. So far from censuring Euripides on this score, we should be disposed to regard his management of the chorus as a signal proof of his genius, originality, and skill

In a poetical career of about fifty years Euripides is said to have written 92 dramas, including 8 satyr-plays. The best critics of antiquity allowed 75 as genuine. Nauck has collected 1117 Euripidean fragments. Among these, numbers 1092-1117 are doubtful or spurious: numbers 842-1091 are from plays of uncertain title f numbers 1-841 represent fifty-five lost pieces, among which some of the best known are the Andromeda, Antiope, Bellerophon, Cresρhontes, Erectheus, (Edipus, Phaethon, and Telephus.

(1.) The Alcestis, as the didascaliae tell us, was brought out in 01. 85. 2, de., at the Dionysia in the spring of 438 b.c., as the fourth play of a tetralogy comprising the Cretan Women, the Alcmoeon at Psophis, and the Telephus. The Alcestis is altogether removed from the character, essentially grotesque, of a mere satyric drama. On the other hand, i t has features which distinctly separate it from a Greek tragedy of the normal type. First, the subject belongs to none of the great cycles, but to a by-way of mythology, and involves such strange elements as the servitude of Apollo in a mortal household, the decree of the fates that Admetus must die on a fixed day, and the restoration of the dead Alcestis to life. Secondly, the treatment of the subject is romantic and even fantastic,—strikingly so in the passage where Apollo is directly confronted with the daemonic figure of Thanatos. Lastly, the boisterous, remorseful, and generous Heracles makes—not, indeed, a satyric drama— but a distinctly satyric scene—a scene which, in the frank original, hardly bears the subtle interpretation which in Balaustion is hinted by the genius of Mr Browning, that Heracles got drunk in order to keep up other people’s spirits. When the happy ending is taken into account, it is not surprising that some should have called the Alcestis a tragicomedy. But we cannot so regard it. The slight and purely incidental strain of comedy is but a moment of relief between the tragic sorrow and terror of the opening and the joy, no less solemn, of the conclusion. In this respect, the Alcestis might more truly be compared 1jo such a drama as the Winter’s Tale; the loss and recovery of Hermione by Leontes do not form a tragi-comedy because we are amused between-whiles by Autolycus and the clown. It does not seem improbable that the Alcestis — the earliest of the extant plays—may represent an attempt to substitute for the old satyric drama an after-piece of a kind which, while preserving a satyric element, should stand nearer to Tragedy. The taste and manners of the day were perhaps tiring of the merely grotesque entertainment that old usage appended to the tragedies; just as, in the sphere of comedy, we know from Aristophanes that they were tiring of broad buffoonery. Au original dramatist may have seen an opportunity here. However that may be, the Alcestis has a peculiar interest for the history of the drama. It marks in the most signal manner, and perhaps at the earliest moment, that great movement which began with Euripides,—the movement of transition from the purely Hellenic drama to the romantic.

(2.) The Medea was brought out in 431 b.c. with the Philoctetes, the Dictys, and a lost satyr-play called the Reapers (ThcristcP). Euripides gained the third prize, the first falling to Euphorion, the son of Aeschylus, and the second to Sophocles. If it is true that Euripides modelled his Medea on the work of an obscure predecessor, Neophron, at least he made the subject thoroughly his own. Hardly any play was more popular in antiquity with readers and spectators, with actors, or with sculptors. Ennius is said to have translated and adopted it. We do not know how far it may have been used by Ovid in his lost tragedy of the same name; but it certainly inspired the rhetorical performance of Seneca, which may be regarded as bridging the interval between Euripides and modern adaptations. We may grant at once that the Medea of Euripides is not a faultless play; that the dialogue between the heroine and Aegeus is not happily conceived; that the murder of the children lacks an adequate dramatic motive; that there is something of a moral anti-climax in the arrangements of Medea, before the deed, for her personal safety. But the Medea remains a tragedy of first rate power. It is admirable for the splendid force with which the character of the strange and strong-hearted woman, a barbarian friendless among Hellenes, is thrown out against the background of Hellenic life in Corinth. Those modern versions of the drama which have recently been illustrated by actresses of genius develop the romantic element beyond the limit of Euripides · he has nothing like the wavering and the final obedience to a Greek instinct of the children who have to make their choice—who slowly and silently turn away from their barbarian mother, and move towards the outstretched arms of Jason. Yet the essential motive of the pathos there is true to the Greek poet’s conception. It is the pro found contrast between the Greek and thenon-Greek nature —the hopeless isolation in Greece of the alien who has left everything to follow Jason—that Euripides has drawn with such mastery. It may be asked, could either Aeschylus or Sophocles, in their different manifestations of the genuinely Hellenic spirit, have shown this more cosmopolitan sympathy, this insight into the strength and the anguish of a nature not Hellenic? Here, too, Euripides belongs to the coming time.

(3.) The extant Hippolytus — sometimes called Stephaηe-phoros, the “wreath-bearer,” from the garland of flowers which, in the opening scene, the hero offers to Artemis— was not the first drama of Euripides on this theme. In an earlier play of the same name, we are told, he had shocked both the moral and the aesthetic sense of Athens. In this earlier Hippolytus, Phaedra herself had confessed her love to her step-son, and, when repulsed, had falsely accused him to Theseus, who doomed him to death; at the sight of the corpse, she had been moved to confess her crime, and had atoned for it by a voluntary death. This first Hippolytus is cited as Hippolytzιs the Veiled (καλυ7rro∕z∈vov), either, as Toup and Welcher thought, from Hippolytus covering his face in horror, or, as Bentley with more likelihood suggested, because the youth’s shrouded corpse was brought upon the scene. It can scarcely be doubted that the chief dramatic defect of our Hippolytus is connected with the unfavourable reception of its predecessor. Euripides had been warned that limits must be observed in the dramatic portrayal of a morally repulsive theme. In the later play, accordingly, the whole action is made to turn on the jealous feud between Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Artemis, the goddess of chastity. Phaedra not only shrinks from breathing her secret to Hippolytus, but destroys herself when she learns that she is rejected. But the natural agency of human passion is now replaced by a supernatural machinery; the slain son and the bereaved father are no longer the martyrs of sin, the tragic witnesses of an inexorable law; rather they and Phaedra are alike the puppets of a divine caprice, the scapegoats of an Olympian quarrel in which they have no concern. But if the dramatic effect of the whole is thus weakened, the character of Phaedra is a fine psychological study; and, as regards form, the play is one of the most brilliant. Bceckh (De Tragcediae Groec. Principiis, p. 180 f.) is perhaps too ingenious in finding an allusion to the plague at Athens (430 b.c.) in the ω κακά θνητών στυγιpοd τe νόσοι of V. 177, and in V. 209 f.; but it can scarcely be doubted that he is right in suggesting that the closing words of Theseus (v. 1460)

ώ κλelv 'hθ∙ηvωv ∏αλλαδos θ'ip'κτματα, ο'h>υ <rτeρhσeσθ' àvSpôs, and the reply of the chorus, κοιvοv τo8' aχο<s, &c., contain a reference to the recent death of Pericles (429 b.c.).

(4.) The Hecuba may be placed about 425 b.c. Thucydides (iii. 104) notices the purification of Delos by the Athenians, and the restoration of the Panionic festival there, in 426 B.c.—an event to which the choral passage, V. 462 f., probably refers. It appears more hazardous to take V. 650 f. as an allusion to the Spartan mishap at Pylos. The subject of the play is the revenge of Hecuba, the widowed queen of Priam, on Polymestor, king of Thrace, who had murdered her youngest son Polydorus, after her daughter Polyxena had already been sacrificed by the Greeks to the shade of Achilles. The two calamities which befall Hecuba have no direct connexion with each other. In this sense it is an unanswerable objection that the play lacks unity of design. On the other hand, both event3 serve the same end,—viz., to heighten the tragic pathos with which the poet seeks to surround the central figure of Hecuba. The chief interest of the drama consists in its illustration of the skill with which Euripides, while failing...