FOOTNOTE:

[1] The confluence for about 500 years was at Korna, over 30 m.

higher up. Sir W. Willcocks discovered (1909) that from

Suk-esh-Sheiukh the Euphrates had formed a new channel through the

marshes. (See _Geog. Journal_, Jan. 1910).

EUPHRONIUS, the most noted of the group of great vase-painters, who

lived in Athens in the time of the Persian wars, and worked upon

red-figured vases (see GREEK ART and CERAMICS). There is a monograph by

W. Klein dealing with the artist. As all the great paintings of Greece

have disappeared, we are obliged to trust to the designs on vases for

our knowledge of Greek drawing and composition. Euphronius is stiff and

archaic in style, but his subjects are varied, his groupings original

and striking, and his mastery of the line decided. In their way, the

vases which he painted will hold their own in comparison with those of

any nation; for simplicity, truthfulness and charm they can scarcely be

matched.

EUPHROSYNE, the name of two Byzantine empresses.

1. EUPHROSYNE, a daughter of Constantine VI. Although she had taken a

monastic vow she became the second wife of Michael II. (q.v.), a

marriage which was practically forced upon her by Michael, who was

anxious to strengthen his claims to the throne by an alliance with the

last representative of the Isaurian dynasty, and secured the compliance

of senate and patriarch with his desire. No issue was born of this

union, and after the death of her husband and accession of her stepson

Theophilus Euphrosyne again retired into a convent.

2. EUPHROSYNE, the wife of Alexius III. (q.v.). After securing the

election of her husband to the throne by wholesale bribery she virtually

took the government into her hands and restored the waning influence of

the monarchy over the nobles. In spite of her talent for government she

went far to hasten the empire's downfall by her unbounded extravagance,

and made the dynasty unpopular by her open profligacy, which went

unpunished but for one short term of banishment. She followed her

husband into exile in 1203 and died seven years later in Epirus.

EUPHUISM, the peculiar mode of speaking and writing brought into fashion

in England towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth by the vogue of the

fashionable romance of _Euphues_, published in 1578 by John Lyly. As

early as 1570 Ascham in his _Schoolmaster_ had said that "Euphues" (that

is, a man well-endowed by nature, from the Gr. [Greek: eu, phye], well,

growth) is "he that is apt by goodness of wit, and appliable by

readiness of will, to learning, having all other qualities of the mind

and parts of the body that must another day serve learning." Lyly

adopted this word as the name of the hero of his romance, and it is with

him that the vogue of Euphuism began. John Lyly, "always averse to the

crabbed studies of logic and philosophy, and his genie being naturally

bent to the pleasant paths of poetry," devoted himself exclusively to

the service of the ladies, a thing absolutely unprecedented in English

literature. He addressed himself to "the gentlewomen of England," and he

had the audacity, in that grave age, to say that he would rather see his

books "lie shut in a lady's casket than open in a scholar's study." In

order to attain this object, he set himself to create a superfine style

in writing, and to illustrate this in his compositions. He undertook to

produce a pleasurable literature for the boudoir and the bower. Lyly was

twenty-six when he published in 1579 the first part of _Euphues: the

Anatomy of Wit_: a second part, entitled _Euphues and his England_,

appeared in 1580. His object was diametrically opposed to that of

writers who had striven to instruct, reprove or edify their

contemporaries. Lyly, assuming that women only will read his book,

says:--"After dinner, you may overlook it to keep you from sleep, or if

you be heavy to bring you asleep, for to work upon a full stomach is

against physic, and therefore better were it to hold _Euphues_ in your

hands, though you let him fall when you be willing to wink, than to sew

in a closet and prick your fingers when you begin to read."

For a comprehension of the nature of Euphuism it is necessary to

remember that the object of its invention was to attract and to disarm

the ladies by means of an ingenious and playful style, of high

artificiality, which should give them the idea that they were being

entertained by an enthusiastic adorer, not instructed by a solemn

pedagogue, For fifty years the romance of _Euphues_ retained its

astonishing popularity. As late as 1632 the publisher Edward Blount

(1560?-1632), recalling the earliest enthusiasm of the public, wrote of

John Lyly, "Oblivion shall not so trample on a son of the Muses, and

such a son as they called their darling. Our nation are in his debt for

a new English which he taught them. _Euphues and his England_ began

first that language. All our ladies were then his scholars, and that

beauty in Court, which could not parley Euphuism, was as little

regarded, as she which, now there, speaks not French." Among those who

applied themselves to this "new English," one of the most ardent was

Queen Elizabeth herself, who has been styled by J.R. Green "the most

affected and destestable of euphuists." At the height of the popularity

of this strange dialect, it was said by William Webbe, in his _Discourse

of English Poetry_ (1586), to consist in a combination of "singular

eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, in fit

phrases, in pithy sentences, in gallant tropes, in flowing speech,"

while a French poet of the same age calls Lyly a "raffineur" of the

English speech; another panegyrist describes him as "_alter Tullius_,"

meaning that, in inventing Euphuism, he had introduced into English the

refinements of a Ciceronian style.

When we put aside these excessive compliments, and no less the attacks

from which the style suffered as soon as it began to go out of fashion,

we are able to observe merits as well as faults in this very curious

experiment. Euphuism did not attempt to render the simplicity of nature.

On the contrary, in order to secure refinement, it sought to be as

affected, as artificial, as high-pitched as possible. Its most prominent

feature was an incessant balancing of phrases in chains of antitheses,

thus:--"Though the tears of the hart be salt, yet the tears of the boar

be sweet, and though the tears of some women be counterfeit to deceive,

yet the tears of many be current to try their love"; or this:--"Reject

it not because it proceedeth from one which hath been lewd, no more than

ye would neglect the gold because it lieth in the dirty earth, or the

pure wine for that it cometh out of a homely presse, or the precious

stone _aetites_ which is found in the filthy nests of the eagle, or the

precious gem _draconites_, that is ever taken out of the poisoned

dragon." This second excerpt, moreover, suggests another of the main

characteristics of Euphuism, the incessant use, for purposes of

ornament, of similes taken from fabulous records of zoology, or relating

to mythical birds, fishes or minerals. This was a feature of the "new

English" which was excessively admired, and copied with a senseless

extravagance. Instances of it are found on every page of Lyly's books,

thus:--"Although the worm entereth almost into every wood, yet he eateth

not the cedar-tree; though the stone _cylindrus_ at every thunder-clap

roll from the hill, yet the pure sleek stone mounteth at the noise;

though the rust fret the hardest steel, yet doth it not eat into the

emerald; though polypus change his hue, yet the salamander keepeth his

colour"; and so on, _ad infinitum_. That lady was considered most

proficient in euphuism who could keep up longest these chains of

similes taken out of fabulous natural history. Alliteration was also a

particular ornament of the euphuistic style, as: "The bavin, though it

burn bright, is but a blaze," but the use of this artifice by Lyly

himself was rarely exaggerated; for instances of its excess we have

rather to turn to his imitators. In the following passage the typical

forms of Euphuism, in its pure and original conditions, are so combined

and illustrated as to require no further commentary: "Do we not commonly

see that in painted pots is hidden the deadliest poison? that in the

greenest grass is the greatest serpent? in the clearest water the

ugliest toad? Doth not experience teach us that in the most curious

sepulchre are enclosed rotten bones? that the cypress tree beareth a

fair leaf, but no fruit? that the ostrich carrieth fair feathers, but

rank flesh?"--and so forth. It will be noticed that these

characteristics differ in many respects from the specimens of euphuism

which are most familiar to a modern reader, namely the extravagant

speech placed in the mouth of Sir Piercie Shafton in Sir Walter Scott's

romance of _The Monastery_. Scott modelled this character on what he

called that "forgotten and obsolete model of folly, once fashionable,"

Lyly's novel of _Euphues_, but he had not studied the original to

sufficient purpose, and the bombastic ravings of Sir Piercie, who simply

talks like a lunatic, have deceived many readers as to the real

characteristics of Euphuism. Scott betrays his own error when he says

that "the extravagance of Euphuism ... predominates in the romances of

Calprenede and Scuderi," in which it is true that a tone of preposterous

gallantry finds a language of its own, but that is not the language of

Euphues. What Sir Piercie Shafton talks is a mixture of the style of

these French romances, with the ostentation of Sir Fopling Flutter and

the extravagances of the Scotch translator of Rabelais. But these

various sorts of pretentious eloquence have little or nothing in common

with the balanced and conceited style of Euphues.

We find that the genuine sort of this kind of superfine conversation was

originally called "Euphues," simply, as Overbury speaks of a man "who

speaks Euphues, not so gracefully as heartily." The earliest instance of

the word "Euphuism" which has been traced occurs in a letter, written by

Gabriel Harvey in 1592, when he speaks of a man, who would be smart, as

talking "a little Euphuism." Dekker, in the _Gull's Hornbook_ of 1609,

uses the word as an adjective, and denounces "Euphuised gentlewomen."

When the practice was going out of fashion we find it thus severely

stigmatized by Michael Drayton, a poet who had little sympathy with the

artificial refinement of Lyly. In an elegy, printed in 1627, Drayton

refers to the merit of Sir Philip Sidney, who recalled English prose to

sanity, and

"did first reduce

Our tongue from Lyly's writings then in use,

Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,

Playing with words and idle similes,

As th' English apes and very zanies be

Of everything that they do hear and see,

So imitating his ridiculous tricks

They spake and writ, all like mere lunatics."

This severe censure of Euphuism may serve to remind us that hasty

critics have committed an error in supposing the _Arcadia_. of Sidney to

be composed in the fashionable jargon. That was certainly not the

intention of the author, and in fact the publication of the _Arcadia_,

eleven years after that of _Euphues_, marks the beginning of the

downfall of the popularity of the latter. Sidney's prose, it is true,

was extremely ornamented, but it was instinct with romantic fancy, and

it affected a chivalrous and florid fulness which was artificial enough,

but wholly distinct from the more homely elegance of Euphuism as we have

defined it. The publication of the _Arcadia_ was a severe blow to the

Euphuists. Immediately the ladies began to desert their former

favourite, and the object at court became, as Ben Jonson noted, to

"observe as pure a phrase and use as choice figures in ordinary

conference as any be in the Arcadia." But, in the meantime, Lyly had

found in Greene, Lodge, Dickenson, Nicholas Breton and others

enthusiastic disciples who had learned all the formulas of Euphuism, and

could bring them forth as fluently and elegantly as he could himself.

Nevertheless the trick wore out, with the taste that it had created, and

by the close of the reign of James I. Euphuism had become a dead

language.

Critics have not failed to insist, on the other hand, that a species of

Euphuism existed before Euphues was thought of. It has been supposed

that a translation of the familiar epistles, or, as they were called,

the "Golden Letters," of a Spanish monk, Antonio de Guevara, led Lyly to

conceive the extraordinary style which bears the name of his hero.

Between 1574 and 1578 Edward Hellowes (fl. 1550-1600) translated into a

very extravagant English prose three of the works of Guevara. Earlier

than this, in 1557, Sir Thomas North had published a version of the same

Spanish writer's _Reloj de Principes_ (The Dial of Princes), a moral and

philosophical romance which is not without a certain likeness in plan

and language to _Euphues_. It is extremely difficult to know to what

extent these translations, which were not strikingly unlike many other

specimens of the ornamented English prose of their period, can be said

to be responsible for the production of Euphuism. At all events no one

can doubt that it was Lyly who concentrated the peculiarities of

mannerism, and who gave to it the stamp of his own remarkable talent.

See Landmann, _Der Euphuismus_ (1881); Arber's edition of _Euphues_

(1869); R.W. Bond's _Complete Works of Lyly_ (1902); Hallam,

Jusserand, S. Lee, _passim_. (E. G.)

EUPION (Gr. [Greek: eu], well, [Greek: pion], fat), a hydrocarbon of the

paraffin series, probably a pentane, C5H12, discovered by K. Reichenbach

in wood-tar. It is also formed in the destructive distillation of many

substances, as wood, coal, caoutchouc, bones, resin and the fixed oils.

It is a colourless highly volatile and inflammable liquid, having at 20 deg.

C. a specific gravity of 0.65.

EUPOLIS (c. 446-411 B.C.), Athenian poet of the Old Comedy, flourished

in the time of the Peloponnesian War. Nothing whatever is known of his

personal history. With regard to his death, he is said to have been

thrown into the sea by Alcibiades, whom he had attacked in one of his

plays, but it is more likely that he died fighting for his country. He

is ranked by Horace (_Sat_. i. 4, 1), along with Cratinus and

Aristophanes, as the greatest writer of his school. With a lively and

fertile fancy Eupolis combined a sound practical judgment; he was

reputed to equal Aristophanes in the elegance and purity of his diction,

and Cratinus in his command of irony and sarcasm. Although he was at

first on good terms with Aristophanes, their relations subsequently

became strained, and they accused each other, in most virulent terms, of

imitation and plagiarism. Of the 17 plays attributed to Eupolis, with

which he obtained the first prize seven times, only fragments remain. Of

these the best known were: the _Kolakes_, in which he pilloried the

spendthrift Callias, who wasted his substance on sophists and parasites;

_Maricas_, an attack on Hyperbolus, the successor of Cleon, under a

fictitious name; the _Baptae_, against Alcibiades and his clubs, at

which profligate foreign rites were practised. Other objects of his

attack were Socrates and Cimon. The _Demoi_ and _Poleis_ were political,

dealing with the desperate condition of the state and with the allied

(or tributary) cities.

Fragments in T. Kock, _Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta_, i. (1880).

EUPOMPUS, the founder of the great school of painting which flourished

in the 4th century at Sicyon in Greece. He was eclipsed by his

successors, and is chiefly remembered for the advice which he is said to

have given to Lysippus to follow nature rather than any master.

EURASIAN, a term originally confined to India, where for upwards of half

a century it was used to denote children born of Hindu mothers and

European (especially Portuguese) fathers. Following the geographical

employment of the word _Eurasia_ to describe the whole of the great land

mass which is divided into the continents of Europe and Asia, Eurasian

has come to be descriptive of any half-castes born of parents

representing the races of the two continents. It has further an

ethnological sense, A.H. Keane (_Ethnology_, 1896) proposing to find in

the Eurasian Steppe the true home of the primitive Aryan groups. Joseph

Deniker (_Anthropology_, 1900) makes a Eurasian group to include such

peoples (Ugrians, Turko-Tatars, &c.) as are represented in both

continents. Giuseppe Sergi, in his _Mediterranean Race_ (London, 1901),

uses Eurasiatic to denote that variety of man which "brought with it

into Europe (from Asia in the later Neolithic period) flexional

languages of Aryan or Indo-European type."

EURE, a department of north-western France, formed in 1790 from a

portion of the old province of Normandy, together with the countship of

Evreux and part of Perche. Pop. (1906) 330,140. Area, 2330 sq. m. It is

bounded N. by the department of Seine Inferieure, W. by Calvados, S.W.

by Orne, S. by Eure-et-Loir, and E. by Seine-et-Oise and Oise. The

territory of Eure, which nowhere exceeds 800 ft. in altitude, is broken

up by its rivers into well-wooded plateaus with a general inclination

from south to north. Forests cover about one-fifth of the department.

The Seine flows from S.E. to N.W. through the E. of the department, and

after touching the frontier at two or three points forms near its mouth

part of the northern boundary. All the rivers of the department flow

into the Seine,--on the right bank the Andelle and the Epte, and on the

left the Eure with its tributaries the Avre and the Iton, and the Risle

with its tributary the Charentonne. The Eure, from which the department

takes its name, rises in Orne, and flowing through Eure-et-Loir, falls

into the Seine above Pont de l'Arche, after a course of 44 m. in the

department. The Risle likewise rises in Orne, and flows generally

northward to its mouth in the estuary of the Seine. The climate is mild,

but moist and variable. The soil is for the most part clayey, resting on

a bed of chalk, and is, in general, fertile and well tilled. The chief

cereal cultivated is wheat; oats, colza, flax and beetroot are also

grown. There is a wide extent of pasturage, on which are reared a

considerable number of cattle and sheep, and especially those horses of

pure Norman breed for which the department has long been celebrated.

Fruit is very abundant, especially apples and pears, from which much

cider and perry are made. The mineral products of Eure include

freestone, marl, lime and brick-clay. The chief industries are the

spinning of cotton and wool, and the weaving, dyeing and printing of

fabrics of different kinds. Brewing, flour-milling, distilling, turnery,

cotton-bleaching, cider-making, metal-founding, tanning, and the

manufacture of glass, paper, iron ware, nails, pins, wind-instruments,

bricks and sugar are also carried on. Coal and raw materials for its

industries are the chief imports of Eure; its exports include cattle,

poultry, eggs, butter, grain and manufactured goods. The department is

served chiefly by the Western railway; the Seine, Eure and Risle provide

87 m. of navigable waterway. Eure is divided into the following

arrondissements (containing 36 cantons, 700 communes):--Evreux,

Louviers, Les Andelys, Bernay, and Pont-Audemer. Its capital is Evreux,

which is the seat of a bishopric of the ecclesiastical province of

Rouen. The department belongs to the III. Army Corps and to the academie

(educational division) of Caen. Its court of appeal is at Rouen.

Evreux, Les Andelys, Bernay, Louviers, Pont-Audemer, Verneuil, Vernon and

Gisors are the principal towns of the department. At Gaillon there are

remains of a celebrated chateau of the archbishops of Rouen (see

LOUVIERS). Pont de l'Arche has a fine Gothic church, with stained-glass

windows of the 16th and 17th centuries; the church of Tillieres-sur-Arvre

is a graceful specimen of the Renaissance style. The churches of Conches

(15th or 16th century) and of Rugles (13th, 15th and 16th centuries), and

the chateau of Beaumesnil (16th century) are also of architectural

interest.

EURE-ET-LOIR, an inland department of north-western France, formed in

1790 of portions of Orleanais and Normandy. Pop. (1906) 273,823. Area,

2293 sq. m. It is bounded N. by the department of Eure, W. by Orne and

Sarthe, S. by Loir-et-Cher, S.E. by Loiret, and E. by Seine-et-Oise. The

Perche in the south-west and the Thimerais in the north-west are

districts of hills and valleys, woods, lakes and streams. The region of

the east and south is a level and uniform expanse, consisting for the

most part of the riverless but fertile plain of Beauce, sometimes called

the "granary of France." The northern part of Eure-et-Loir is watered

by the Eure, with its tributaries the Vegre, Blaise and Avre, a small

western portion by the Huisne, and the south by the Loir with its

tributaries the Conie and the Ozanne. The air is pure, the climate mild,

dry and not subject to sudden changes. The soil consists, for the most

part, either of clay intermixed with sand or of calcareous earth, and is

on the whole fruitful. Agriculture is better conducted than in most of

the departments of France, and the average yield per acre is greater.

Cereals occupy half the surface, wheat and oats being chiefly

cultivated. Among the other agricultural products are barley, hemp, flax

and various vegetables, including good asparagus. Wine is not

extensively produced, nor is it of the best quality; but in some parts,

especially in the Perche, there is an abundant supply of apples, from

which cider is made as the common drink of the inhabitants. The

extensive meadows supply pasturage for a large number of cattle and

sheep, and the horses raised in the Perche have a wide reputation as

draught animals. Bee-farming is commonly prosecuted. The department

produces lime, grindstones and brick-clay. The manufactures are not

extensive; but there are flour- and saw-mills, tanneries and

leather-works, copper and iron foundries, starch-works, dyeworks,

distilleries, breweries and potteries; and agricultural implements,

cotton and woollen goods, and yarn, hosiery, boots and shoes, sugar,

felt hats and paper are made. Eure-et-Loir exports the products of its

soil and live-stock; its imports include coal, wine and wearing apparel.

It is served by the railways of the Western and the Orleans Companies

and by those of the state, but it has no navigable waterways. The

department has Chartres for its capital, and is divided into the

arrondissements of Chartres, Chateaudun, Dreux and Nogent-le-Rotrou (24

cantons and 426 communes). It forms the diocese of Chartres (province of

Paris), and belongs to the academie (educational division) of Paris and

the region of the IV. Army Corps. Its court of appeal is at Paris.

Chartres, Dreux, Chateaudun, Nogent-le-Rotrou and Anet are the more

noteworthy places in the department (q.v.). At Bonneval the lunatic

asylum occupies the 18th-century buildings of a former Benedictine

abbey. The abbey church belonged to the 13th century, but only a gateway

flanked by two massive towers is left. The chateau of Maintenon dating

from the 16th and 17th centuries was presented by Louis XIV. to Madame

de Maintenon, by whom additions were made; the aqueduct (17th century)

in the park was designed to carry the water of the Eure to Versailles,

but was not completed. There is a fine chateau of the late 15th century,

restored in modern tunes, at Montigny-le-Gannelon, and another of the

15th, 16th and 17th centuries, at one time the property of Sully, at

Villebon. St Lubin-des-Joncherets has a handsome church of the 11th

century, in which there are stained-glass windows dating from the 16th

century.

EUREKA, a city, port of entry, and the county seat of Humboldt county,

California, U.S.A., on the E. shore of Humboldt Bay. Pop. (1880) 2639;

(1890) 4858; (1900) 7327 (2035 foreign-born); (1910) 11,845. It has a

good harbour, greatly improved by the National government, and is

connected with San Francisco, Portland and other coast ports by

steamship lines. In 1909 a railway (the Northwestern Pacific), to

connect Eureka with San Francisco, was under construction. The district

owes its reputation as a health resort to its equable climate and to the

protection afforded by the wide coast timber belt. Eureka is the

principal point for the shipment of redwood lumber, and saw-milling is

carried on here on an enormous scale. Several short railways run from

Eureka and Arcata (pop. in 1900, 952) across the bay, into the forests,

and bring lumber to the mills, most of which are in or near Eureka.

Humboldt county was organized in 1853. Eureka was then already the

centre of an important lumber trade, principally in spars. It was

incorporated in 1856, displacing Union (now Arcata) as the county-seat

in the same year.

EUREKA SPRINGS, a city and health resort, one of the

county-seats--Berryville being the other--of Carroll county, in the

extreme north-western part of Arkansas, U.S.A., in the Ozark uplift,

1800 ft. above the sea-level. Pop. (1890) 3706; (1900) 3572 (142 of

negro descent); (1910) 3228. There is a transient population of

thousands of visitors during the year. The city is built picturesquely

on the sides of a gulch, down which runs the Missouri & North Arkansas

railway. A creek running through the city empties into the White river,

only a few miles distant. The surrounding country varies in character

from mountains to rolling prairie. The encircling hills are laden with a

covering of pine. The normal mean temperature for the year is about 59 deg.

F. (42 deg. F. in winter, 61 deg. F. in spring, 75 deg. F. in summer, and 58 deg. F. in

autumn); the average rainfall, about 33 in. The atmosphere is dry and

clear. Apart from its share in the agricultural interests of the

surrounding region,--devoted mainly to Indian corn, small grains and

fruits,--the entire economy of Eureka Springs centres in its medicinal

springs, more than forty of which, lying within the corporate limits,

are held in trust by the city for the free use of the public. The

temperature of the springs varies from about 57 deg. F. to 64 deg. F. Each

gallon of their waters contains about 28.5 cub. in. of gaseous matter

and from 6 to 9 grains of solids held in solution. The city waterworks

are owned by the municipality. The springs have been exploited since

1879, when the first settlement was made. The city was chartered in

1880.

EURIPIDES (480-406 B.C.), the great Greek dramatic poet, 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 tradition. The hostile criticism of Aristophanes was

witty; and, moreover, 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:--

[Greek: andron de polloi tou gelotos houneka

askousi charitas kertomous ego de pos

miso geloious, hoitines sophon peri

achalin echousi stomata.]

(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 ([Greek: autourgos]), who

does not often come to town, or soil his rustic honesty by contact with

the crowd of the market-place.

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.

In his _Archelaus_ Euripides celebrated that legendary son of Temenus,

and head of the Temenid dynasty, who bad 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

Pella, too, that Euripides composed or completed, and perhaps produced,

the _Bacchae_. Jealous courtiers, we are told, contrived to have him

attacked and killed by savage dogs. It is odd that the fate of Actaeon

should be 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. 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 Dionysiac 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, unlike

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 ([Greek: rhathumian]). 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 ([Greek:

apragmosune]), in this sense, was still regarded as akin to indolence

([Greek: argia]). Yet 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.

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. 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, sprung from the gods, were their own ancestors. 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 legends consecrated by this faith. The dramatist was

accordingly obliged to refrain from multiplying those minute touches

which, by individualizing the characters too highly, would detract from

their general value as types in which all Hellenic humanity could

recognize its own image glorified and raised a step nearer to the

immortal gods. This necessity was 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 Dionysiac 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 years 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. Two devices have become common phrases of

reproach against him--the prologue and the _deus ex machina_. Doubtless

the prologue is a slipshod and sometimes ludicrous expedient. But the

audiences of his days were far from being so well versed as their

fathers in the mythic lore, and, on the other hand, a dramatist who

wished to avoid trite themes had now to go into the byways 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, as in the _Hippolytus_

and the _Bacchae_. The choral songs in Euripides, it may be granted,

have often nothing to do with the action. But the chorus 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.

Works.

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; numbers 1-841 represent fifty-five lost pieces, among which

some of the best known are the _Andromeda, Antiope,[1] Bellerophon,

Cresphontes, Erechtheus, Oedipus, Phaethon_, and _Telephus_.

1. The _Alcestis_, as the didascaliae tell us, was brought out in Ol.

85. 2, i.e. at the Dionysia in the spring of 438 B.C., as the fourth

play of a tetralogy comprising the _Cretan Women_, the _Alcmaeon at

Psophis_, and the _Telephus_. The _Alcestis_ is altogether removed

from the character, essentially grotesque, of a mere satyric drama. On

the other hand, it 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 byway 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

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 tragi-comedy.

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 to 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. An 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_ (_Theristae_).

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.

3. The extant _Hippolytus_ (429 B.C.)--sometimes called

_Stephanephoros_, 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 _Hippolytus

the Veiled_ ([Greek: kaluptomenos]), either, as Toup and Welcker

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. Boeckh (_De

tragoediae Graecae principiis_, p. 180 f.) is perhaps too ingenious in

finding an allusion to the plague at Athens (430 B.C.) in the [Greek:

o kaka thneton stugerai te nosoi] 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)

[Greek: o klein' Athenon Pallados th' orismata, hoiou steresesth'

andros],

and the reply of the chorus, [Greek: koinon tod' hachos], &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 Polyzena 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 the play lacks unity of design. On the other hand, both events

serve the same end--viz. to heighten the tragic pathos with which the

poet seeks to surround the central figure of Hecuba. The drama

illustrates the skill with which Euripides, while failing to satisfy

the requirements of artistic drama, could sustain interest by an

ingeniously woven plot. It is a representative _Intriguenstueck_, and

well exemplifies the peculiar power which recommended Euripides to the

poets of the New Comedy.

5. The _Andromache_, according to a notice in the _scholia Veneta_

(446), was not acted at Athens, at least in the author's life-time;

though some take the words in the Greek argument ([Greek: to drama ton

deuteron]) to mean that it was among those which gained a second

prize. The invective on the Spartan character which is put into the

mouth of Andromache contains the words, [Greek: adikos eutucheit' an'

Hellada], and this, with other indications, points to the

Peloponnesian successes of the years 424-422 B.C. Andromache, the

widow of Hector, has become the captive and concubine of Neoptolemus,

son of Achilles. During his absence, her son Molossus is taken from

her, with the aid of Menelaus, by her jealous rival Hermione. Mother

and son are rescued from death by Peleus; but meanwhile Neoptolemus is

slain at Delphi through the intrigues of Orestes. The goddess Thetis

now appears, ordains that Andromache shall marry Helenus, and declares

that Molossus shall found a line of Epirote kings, while Peleus shall

become immortal among the gods of the sea. The _Andromache_ is a poor

play. The contrasts, though striking, are harsh and coarse, and the

compensations dealt out by the _deus ex machina_ leave the moral sense

wholly unsatisfied. Technically the piece is noteworthy as bringing on

the scene four characters at once--Andromache, Molossus, Peleus and

Menelaus (v. 545 f.).

6. The _Ion_ is an admirable drama, the finest of those plays which

deal with legends specially illustrating the traditional glories of

Attica. It is also the most perfect example of the poet's skill in the

structure of dramatic intrigue. For its place in the chronological

order there are no data except those of style and metre. Judging by

these, Hermann would place it "neither after Ol. 89, nor much

before"--i.e. somewhere between 424 and 421 B.C.; and this may be

taken as approximately correct. The scene is laid throughout at the

temple of Delphi. The young Ion is a priest in the temple of Delphi

when Xuthus and his wife Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, come to

inquire of the god concerning their childlessness; and it is

discovered that Ion is the son of Creusa by the god Apollo. Athena

herself appears, and commands that Ion shall be placed on the throne

of Athens, foretelling that from him shall spring the four Attic

tribes, the Teleontes (priests), Hopletes (fighting-men), Argadeis

(husbandmen) and Aigikoreis (herdsmen). The play must have been

peculiarly effective on the Athenian stage, not only by its

situations, but through its appeal to Attic sympathies.

7. The _Suppliants_ who give their name to the play are Argive women,

the mothers of Argive warriors slain before the walls of Thebes, who,

led by Adrastus, king of Argos, come as suppliants to the altar of

Demeter at Eleusis. Creon, king of Thebes, has refused burial to their

dead sons. The Athenian king Theseus demands of Creon that he shall

grant the funeral rites; the refusal is followed by a battle in which

the Thebans are vanquished, and the bodies of the Argive dead are then

brought to Eleusis. At the close the goddess Athena appears, and

ordains that a close alliance shall be formed between Athens and

Argos. Some refer the play to 417 B.C., when the democratic party at

Athens rose against the oligarchs. But a more probable date is 420

B.C., when, through the agency of Alcibiades, Athens and Argos

concluded a defensive alliance. The play has a strongly marked

rhetorical character, and is, in fact, a panegyric, with an immediate

political aim, on Athens as the champion of humanity against Thebes.

8. The _Heracleidae_--a companion piece to the _Suppliants_, and of

the same period--is decidedly inferior in merit. Here, too, there are

direct references to contemporary history. The defeat of Argos by the

Spartans in 418 B.C. strengthened the Argive party who were in favour

of discarding the Athenian for the Spartan alliance (Thuc. v. 76). In

the _Heracleidae_, the sons of the dead Heracles, persecuted by the

Argive Eurystheus, are received and sheltered at Athens. Thus, while

Athens is glorified, Sparta, whose kings are descendants of the

Heracleidae, is reminded how unnatural would be an alliance between

herself and Argos.

9. The _Heracles Mainomenos_[2] (_Hercules Furens_), which, on grounds

of style, can scarcely be put later than 420-417 B.C., shares with the

two last plays the purpose of exalting Athens in the person of

Theseus. Heracles returns from Hades--whither, at the command of

Eurystheus, he went to bring back Cerberus--just in time to save his

wife Megara and his children from being put to death by Lycus of

Thebes, whom he slays. As he is offering lustral sacrifice after the

deed, he is suddenly stricken with madness by Lyssa (Fury), the

daemonic agent of his enemy the goddess Hera, and in his frenzy he

slays his wife and children. Theseus finds him, in his agony of

despair, about to kill himself, and persuades him to come to Athens,

there to seek grace and pardon from the gods. The unity of the plot

may be partly vindicated by observing that the slaughter of Lycus

entitled Heracles to the gratitude of Thebes, whereas the slaughter of

his own kinsfolk made it unlawful that he should remain there; thus,

having found a refuge only to lose it, Heracles has no hope left but

in Athens, whose praise is the true theme of the entire drama.

10. _Iphigenia among the Tauri_, which metre and diction mark as one

of the later plays, is also one of the best--excellent both in the

management of a romantic plot and in the delineation of character. The

scene is laid at the temple of Artemis in the Tauric Chersonese (the

Crimea)--on the site of the modern Balaklava. Iphigenia, who had been

doomed to die at Aulis for the Greeks, had been snatched from that

death by Artemis, and had become priestess of the goddess at the

Tauric shrine, where human victims were immolated. Two strangers, who

had landed among the Tauri, have been sentenced to die at the altar.

She discovers in them her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades. They

plan an escape, are recaptured, and are finally delivered by the

goddess Athena, who commands Thoas, king of the land, to permit their

departure. Iphigenia, Orestes and Pylades return to Greece, and

establish the worship of the Tauric Artemis at Brauron and Halae in

Attica. The drama of Euripides necessarily suggests a comparison with

that of Goethe; and many readers will probably also feel that, while

Goethe is certainly not inferior in fineness of ethical portraiture,

he has the advantage in his management of the catastrophe. But it is

only just to Euripides to remember that, while his competitor had free

scope of treatment, he, a Greek dramatist, was bound to the motive of

the Greek legend, and was obliged to conclude with the foundation of

the Attic worship.

11. The _Troades_ appeared in 415 B.C. along with the _Alexander_, the

_Palamedes_, and a satyr-play, the _Sisyphus_. It is a picture of the

miseries endured by noble Trojan dames--Hecuba, Andromache,

Cassandra--immediately after the capture of Troy. There is hardly a

plot in the proper sense--only an accumulation of sorrows on the heads

of the passive sufferers. The piece is less a drama than a pathetic

spectacle, closing with the crash of the Trojan towers in flame and

ruin. The _Troades_ is indeed remarkable among Greek tragedies for its

near approach to the character of melodrama. It must be observed that

there is no ground for the inference--sometimes made an accusation

against the poet--that the choral passage, v. 794 f., was intended to

encourage the Sicilian expedition, sent forth in the same year (415

B.C.). The mention of the "land of Aetna over against Carthage" (v.

220) speaks of it as "renowned for the trophies of prowess"--a topic,

surely, not of encouragement but of warning.

12. The _Helena_--produced, as we learn from the Aristophanic scholia,

in 412 B.C., the year of the lost _Andromeda_--is not one of its

author's happier efforts. It is founded on a strange variation of the

Trojan myth, first adopted by Stesichorus in his Palinode--that only a

wraith of Helen passed to Troy, while the real Helen was detained in

Egypt. In this play she is rescued from the Egyptian king,

Theoclymenus, by a ruse of her husband Menelaus, who brings her safely

back to Greece. The romantic element thus engrafted on the Greek myth

is more than fantastic: it is well-nigh grotesque. The comic

poets--notably Aristophanes in the _Thesmophoriazusae_--felt this; nor

can we blame them if they ridiculed a piece in which the mode of

treatment was so discordant with the spirit of Greek tradition, and so

irreconcilable with all that constituted the higher meaning of Greek

tragedy.

13. The _Phoenissae_ was brought out, with the _Oenomaus_ and the

_Chrysippus_, in 411 B.C., the year in which the recall of Alcibiades

was decreed by the army at Samos, and, after the fall of the Four

Hundred, ratified by the Assembly at Athens (Thuc. viii. 81, 97). The

dialogue between Iocaste and Polynices on the griefs of banishment

([Greek: ti to steresthai patridos], v. 388 f.) has a certain emphasis

which certainly looks like an allusion to the pardon of the famous

exile. The subject of the play is the same as that of the Aeschylean

_Seven against Thebes_--the war of succession in which Argos supported

Polynices against his brother Eteocles. The Phoenician maidens who

form the chorus are imagined to have been on their way from Tyre to

Delphi, where they were destined for service in the temple, when they

were detained at Thebes by the outbreak of the war--a device which

affords a contrast to the Aeschylean chorus of Theban elders, and

which has also a certain fitness in view of the legends connecting

Thebes with Phoenicia. But Euripides has hardly been successful in the

rivalry--which he has even pointed by direct allusions--with

Aeschylus. The _Phoenissae_ is full of brilliant passages, but it is

rather a series of effective scenes than an impressive drama.

14. Plutarch (_Lys._ 15) says that, when Athens had surrendered to

Lysander (404 B.C.) and when the fate of the city was doubtful, a

Phocian officer happened to sing at a banquet of the leaders the first

song of the chorus in the Electra of Euripides--

[Greek: Agamemnonos o kora,

elython, Elektra, poti san agroteran aulan],

and that "when they heard it, all were touched, so that it seemed a

cruel deed to destroy for ever the city so famous once, the mother of

such men." The character of the _Electra_, in metre and in diction,

seems to show that it belongs to the poet's latest years. If Mueller

were right in referring to the Sicilian expedition the closing passage

in which the Dioscuri declare that they haste "to the Sicilian sea, to

save ships upon the deep" (v. 1347), then the play could not be later

than 413 B.C. But it may with more probability be placed shortly

before the _Orestes_, which in some respects it much resembles:

perhaps in or about the year 410 B.C. No play of Euripides has been

more severely criticized. The reason is evident. The _Choephori_ of

Aeschylus and the _Electra_ of Sophocles appear to invite a direct

comparison with this drama. But, as R.C. Jebb suggested,[3] such

criticism as that of Schlegel should remember that works of art are

proper subjects of direct comparison only when the theories of art

which they represent have a common basis. It is surely unmeaning to

contrast the elaborate homeliness of the Euripidean _Electra_ with the

severe grandeur of its rivals. Aeschylus and Sophocles, as different

exponents of an artistic conception which is fundamentally the same,

may be profitably compared; Euripides interprets another conception,

and must be tried by other principles. His _Electra_ is, in truth, a

daring experiment--daring, because the theme is one which the elder

school had made peculiarly its own.

15. The _Orestes_, acted in 408, bears the mark of the age in the

prominence which Euripides gives to the assembly of Argos--which has

to decide the fate of Orestes and Electra--and to rhetorical pleading.

The plot proceeds with sufficient clearness to the point at which

Orestes and Electra have been condemned to death. But the later

portion of the play, containing the intrigues for their rescue and the

final achievement of their deliverance, is both too involved and too

inconsequent for a really tragic effect. Just as in the _Electra_, the

heroic persons of the drama are reduced to the level of commonplace.

There is not a little which borders on the ludicrous, and it can be

seen how easy would have been the passage from such tragedy as this to

the restrained parody in which the Middle Comedy delighted. It is,

however, inconceivable that, as some have supposed, the _Orestes_ can

have been a deliberate compromise between tragedy and farce. It cannot

have been meant to be played, as a fourth piece, instead of a regular

satyric drama. Rather it indicates the level to which the heroic

tragedy itself had descended under the treatment of a school which was

at least logical. The celebrity of the play in the ancient world--as

Paley observes, there are more ancient quotations from the _Orestes_

than from all the extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles together--is

perhaps partly explained by the unusually frequent combination in this

piece of striking sentiment with effective situation.

16. The _Iphigenia at Aulis_, like the _Bacchae_, was brought out only

after the death of Euripides. It is a very brilliant and beautiful

play,--probably left by the author in an unfinished state,--and has

suffered from interpolation more largely, perhaps, than any other of

his works. As regards its subject, it forms a prelude to the

_Iphigenia in Tauris_. Iphigenia has been doomed by her father

Agamemnon to die at Aulis, as Calchas declares that Artemis claims

such a sacrifice before the adverse winds can fall.

The genuine play, as we have it, breaks off at v. 1508, when Iphigenia

has been led to the sacrificial altar. A spurious epilogue, of

wretched workmanship (v. 1509-1628), relates, in the speech of a

messenger, how Artemis saved the maiden.

17. The _Bacchae_, unlike the preceding play, appears to have been

finished by its author, although it is said not to have been acted, on

the Athenian stage at least, till after his death. It was composed, or

completed, during the residence of Euripides with Archelaus, and in

all probability was originally designed for representation in

Macedonia--a region with whose traditions of orgiastic worship the

Dionysus myth was so congenial. The play is sometimes quoted as the

_Pentheus_. It has been justly observed that Euripides seldom named a

piece from the chorus, unless the chorus bore an important part in the

action or the leading action was divided between several persons.

Possibly, however, in this instance he may designedly have chosen a

title which would at once interest the Macedonian public. _Pentheus_

would suggest a Greek legend about which they might know or care

little. The _Bacchae_ would at once announce a theme connected with

rites familiar to the northern land.

It is a magnificent play, alone among extant Greek tragedies in

picturesque splendour, and in that sustained glow of Dionysiac

enthusiasm to which the keen irony lends the strength of contrast. If

Euripides had left nothing else, the _Bacchae_ would place him in the

first rank of poets, and would prove his possession of a sense rarely

manifested by Greek poets,--perhaps by no one of his own

contemporaries in equal measure except Aristophanes,--a feeling for

natural beauty lit up by the play of fancy. R.Y. Tyrrell, in his

edition of the _Bacchae_, has given the true answer to the theory that

the _Bacchae_ is a recantation. Euripides had never rejected the facts

which formed the basis of the popular religion. He had rather sought

to interpret them in a manner consistent with belief in a benevolent

Providence. The really striking thing in the _Bacchae_ is the spirit

of contentment and of composure which it breathes,--as if the poet had

ceased to be vexed by the seeming contradictions which had troubled

him before. Nor should it be forgotten that, for the Greek mind of his

age, the victory of Dionysus in the _Bacchae_ carried a moral even

more direct than the victory of Aphrodite in the _Hippolytus_. The

great nature-powers who give refreshment to mortals cannot be robbed

of their due tribute without provoking a nemesis. The refusal of such

a homage is not, so the Greeks deemed, a virtue in itself: in the

sight of the gods it may be only a cold form of [Greek: hybris],

overweening self-reliance--the quality personified in Pentheus.

The _Bacchae_ was always an exceptionally popular play--partly because

its opportunities as a spectacle fitted it for gorgeous

representation, and so recommended it for performance at courts and on

great public occasions. "Demetrius the Cynic" (says Lucian, _Adv.

Indoctum_, 19) "saw an illiterate person at Corinth reading a very

beautiful poem--the _Bacchae_ of Euripides, I think it was; he was at

the place where the messenger narrates the doom of Pentheus and the

deed of Agave. Demetrius snatched the book from him and tore it up,

saying, 'It is better for Pentheus to be torn up at once by me than to

be mangled over and over again by you.'"

18. The _Cyclops_, of uncertain date, is the only extant example of a

satyric drama. The plot is taken mainly from the story of Odysseus and

Polyphemus in the 9th book of the _Odyssey_. In order to be really

successful in farce of this kind, a poet should have a fresh feeling

for the nature of the art parodied. It is because Euripides was not in

accord with the spirit of the heroic myths that he is not strong in

mythic travesty. His own tragedies--such as the _Helen_, the

_Electra_, and the _Orestes_--had, in their several ways, contributed

to destroy the meaning of satyric drama. They had done gravely very

much what satyric drama aimed at doing grotesquely. They had made the

heroic persons act and talk like ordinary men and women. The finer

side of such parody had lost its edge; only broad comedy remained.

19. The _Rhesus_ is still held by some to be what the didascaliae and

the grammarians call it--a work of Euripides; and Paley has ably

supported this view. But the scepticism first declared by Valcknaer

has gained ground, and the _Rhesus_ is now almost universally

recognized as spurious. The art and the style, still more evidently

the feeling and the mind, of Euripides are absent. If it cannot be

ascribed to a disciple of his matured school, it is still less like

the work of an Alexandrian. The most probable view seems to be that

which assigns it to a versifier of small dramatic power in the latest

days of Attic tragedy. It has this literary interest, that it is the

only extant play of which the subject is directly taken from our

_Iliad_, of which the tenth book--the [Greek: Doloneia]--has been

followed by the playwright with a closeness which is sometimes

mechanical.

Literary history of Euripides.

When the first protests of the comic poets were over, Euripides was

secure of a wide and lasting renown. As the old life of Athens passed

away, as the old faiths lost their meaning and the peculiarly Greek

instincts in art lost their truth and freshness, Aeschylus and Sophocles

might cease to be fully enjoyed save by a few; but Euripides could still

charm by qualities more readily and more universally recognized. The

comparative nearness of his diction to the idiom of ordinary life

rendered him less attractive to the grammarians of Alexandria than

authors whose erudite form, afforded a better scope for the display of

learning or the exercise of ingenuity. But there were two aspects in

which he engaged their attention. They loved to trace the variations

which he had introduced into the standard legends. And they sought to

free his text from the numerous interpolations which even then had

resulted from his popularity on the stage. Philochorus (about 306-260

B.C.), best known for his _Atthis_, dealt, in his treatise on Euripides,

especially with the mythology of the plays. From 300 B.C. to the age of

Augustus a long series of critics busied themselves with this poet. The

first systematic arrangement of his reputed works is ascribed to

Dicaearchus and Callimachus in the early part of the 3rd century B.C.

Among those who furthered the exact study of his text, and of whose work

some traces remain in the extant scholia, were Aristophanes of

Byzantium, Callistratus, Apollodorus of Tarsus, Timachidas, and

pre-eminently Didymus; probably also Crates of Pergamum and Aristarchus.

At Rome Euripides was early made known through the translations of

Ennius and the freer adaptations of Pacuvius. When Hellenic civilization

was spread through the East, the mixed populations of the new

settlements welcomed a dramatic poet whose taste and whose sentiment

were not too severely or exclusively Attic. The Parthian Orodes and his

court were witnessing the _Bacchae_ of Euripides when the Agave of the

hour was suddenly enabled to lend a ghastly reality to the terrible

scene of frenzied triumph by displaying the gory head of the Roman

Crassus. Mommsen has noted the moment as one in which the power of Rome

and the genius of Greece were simultaneously abased in the presence of

sultanism. So far as Euripides is concerned, the incident may suggest

another and a more pleasing reflection; it may remind us how the charm

of his humane genius had penetrated the recesses of the barbarian East,

and had brought to rude and fierce peoples at least some dim and distant

apprehension of that gracious world in which the great spirits of

ancient Hellas had moved. A quaintly significant testimony to the

popularity of Euripides is afforded by the Byzantine [Greek: Christos

paschon]. This drama, narrating the events which preceded and attended

the Passion, is a cento of no less than 2610 verses, taken from the

plays of Euripides, principally from the _Bacchae_, the _Troades_ and

the _Rhesus_. The traditional ascription of the authorship to Gregory of

Nazianzus is now generally rejected; another conjecture assigns it to

Apollinaris of Laodicea, and places the date of composition at about

A.D. 330.[4] Although the text used by the author of the cento may not

have been a good one, the value of the piece for the diplomatic

criticism of Euripides is necessarily very considerable; and it was

diligently used both by Valcknaer and by Porson.

Dante, who does not mention Aeschylus or Sophocles, places Euripides,

with the tragic poets Antiphon and Agathon, and the lyrist Simonides, in

the first circle of Purgatory (xxii. 106), among those

"piue

Greci, che gia di lauro ornar la fronte."

Casaubon, in a letter to Scaliger, salutes that scholar as worthy to

have lived at Athens with Aristophanes and Euripides--a compliment which

certainly implies respect for his correspondent's powers as a

peacemaker. In popular literature, too, where Aeschylus and Sophocles

were as yet little known, the 16th and 17th centuries testify to the

favour bestowed upon Euripides. G. Gascoigne's and Francis Kinwelmersh's

_Jocasta_, played at Gray's Inn in 1566, is a literal translation of

Lodovico Dolce's _Giocasta_, which derives from the _Phoenissae_,

probably through the Latin translation of R. Winter (Basel, 1541). Among

early French translations from Euripides may be mentioned the version of

the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ by Thomas Sibilet in 1549, and that of the

_Hecuba_ by Bouchetel in 1550. About a century later Racine gave the

world his _Andromaque_, his _Iphigenie_ and his _Phedre_; and many have

held that, at least in the last-named of these, "the disciple of

Euripides" has excelled his master. Bernhardy notices that the

performance of the _Hippolytus_ at Berlin in 1851 seemed to show that,

for the modern stage, the _Phedre_ has the advantage of its Greek

original. Racine's great English contemporary seems to have known and to

have liked Euripides better than the other Greek tragedians. In the

_Reason of Church Government_ Milton certainly speaks of "those dramatic

constitutions in which Sophocles and Euripides reign"; in the preface to

his own drama, again, he joins the names of Aeschylus, Sophocles and

Euripides,--"the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any." But the

_Samson Agonistes_ itself clearly shows that Milton's chief model in

this kind was the dramatist whom he himself has called--as if to suggest

the skill of Euripides in the delineation of pathetic women--"sad

Electra's poet"; and the work bears a special mark of this preference in

the use of Euripidean monodies. In the second half of the 18th century

such men as J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768) and G.E. Lessing (1729-1781)

gave a new life to the study of the antique. Hitherto the art of the old

world had been better known through Roman than through Greek

interpreters. The basis of the revived classical taste had been Latin.

But now men gained a finer perception of those characteristics which

belong to the Greek work of the great time, a fuller sense of the

difference between the Greek and the Roman genius where each is at its

best, and generally a clearer recognition of the qualities which

distinguish ancient art in its highest purity from modern romantic

types. Euripides now became the object of criticism from a new point of

view. He was compared with Aeschylus and Sophocles as representatives of

that ideal Greek tragedy which ranges with the purest type of sculpture.

Thus tried, he was found wanting; and he was condemned with all the

rigour of a newly illuminated zeal. B.G. Niebuhr (1776-1831) judged him

harshly; but no critic approached A.W. Schlegel (1767-1845) in severity

of one-sided censure. Schlegel, in fact, will scarcely allow that

Euripides is tolerable except by comparison with Racine. L. Tieck

(1773-1853) showed truer appreciation for a brother artist when he

described the work of Euripides as the dawn of a romantic poetry

haunted by dim yearnings and forebodings. Goethe--who, according to

Bernhardy, knew Euripides only "at a great distance"--certainly admired

him highly, and left an interesting memorial of Euripidean study in his

attempted reconstruction of the lost _Phaethon_. There are some passages

in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann which form effective quotations

against the Greek poet's real or supposed detractors. "To feel and

respect a great personality, one must be something oneself. All those

who denied the sublime to Euripides were either poor wretches incapable

of comprehending such sublimity or shameless charlatans who, in their

presumption, wished to make more of themselves than they were." "A poet

whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle lauded, whom Alexander

admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of Athens put on mourning

on hearing of his death, must certainly have been some one. If a modern

man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought

only to do it upon his knees" (J.A. Symonds, _Greek Poets_, i. 230). We

yield to no one in admiration of Goethe; but we cannot think that these

rather bullying utterances are favourable examples of his method in

aesthetic discussion; nor have they any logical force except as against

those--if there be any such--who deny that Euripides is a great poet.

One of the most striking of modern criticisms on Euripides is the sketch

by Mommsen in his history of Rome (bk. iii. ch. 14). It is, in our

opinion, less than just to Euripides as an artist. But it indicates,

with true historical insight, his place in the development of his art,

the operation of those external conditions which made him what he was,

and the nature of his influence on succeeding ages.

Manuscript tradition of Euripides.

The manuscript tradition of Euripides has a very curious and

instructive history. It throws a suggestive light on the capricious

nature of the process by which some of the greatest literary treasures

have been saved or lost. Nine plays of Euripides were selected,

probably in early Byzantine times, for popular and educational use.

These were--_Alcestis, Andromache, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Medea, Orestes,

Phoenissae, Rhesus, Troades_. This list includes at least two plays,

the _Andromache_ and the _Troades_, which, even in the small number of

the extant dramas, are universally allowed to be of very inferior

merit--to say nothing of the _Rhesus_, which is generally allowed to

be spurious. On the other hand, the list omits at least three plays of

first-rate beauty and excellence, the very flower, indeed, of the

extant collection--the _Ion_, the _Iphigenia in Tauris_, and the

_Bacchae_--the last certainly, in its own kind, by far the most

splendid work of Euripides that we possess. Had these three plays been

lost, it is not too much to say that the modern estimate of Euripides

must have been decidedly lower. But all the ten plays not included in

the select list had a narrow escape of being lost, and, as it is, have

come to us in a much less satisfactory condition.

A. Kirchhoff was the first, in his editions, thoroughly to investigate

the history and the affinities of the Euripidean manuscripts.[5] All

our MSS. are, he thinks, derived from a lost archetype of the 9th or

10th century, which contained the nineteen plays (counting the

_Rhesus_) now extant. From this archetype a copy, also lost, was made

about A.D. 1100, containing only the nine select plays. This copy

became the source of all our best MSS. for those plays. They are--(1)

Marcianus 471, in the library of St Mark at Venice (12th century):

_Andromache, Hecuba, Hippolytus_ (to v. 1234), _Orestes, Phoenissae_;

(2) Vaticanus 909, 12th century, nine plays; (3) Parisinus 2712, 13th

century, 7 plays (all but _Troades_ and _Rhesus_). Of the same stock,

but inferior, are (4) Marcianus 468, 13th century: _Hecuba, Orestes,

Medea_ (v. 1-42), _Orestes, Phoenissae_; (5) Havniensis (from

_Hafnia_, Copenhagen, according to Paley), a late transcript from a

MS. resembling Vat. 909, nine plays. A second family of MSS. for the

nine plays, sprung from the same copy, but modified by a Byzantine

recension of the 13th century, is greatly inferior.

The other ten plays have come to us only through the preservation of

two MSS., both of the 14th century, and both ultimately derived, as

Kirchhoff thinks, from the archetype of the 9th or 10th century. These

are (1) Palatinus 287, Kirchhoff's B, usually called Rom. C., thirteen

plays, viz. six of the select plays (_Androm., Med., Rhes., Hipp.,

Alc., Troad._), and seven others--_Bacchae, Cyclops, Heracleidae,

Supplices, Ion, Iphigenia in Aulide, Iphigenia in Tauris_; and (2)

Flor. 2, Elmsley's C., eighteen plays, viz. all but the _Troades_.

This MS. is thus the only one for the _Helena_, the _Electra_, and the

_Hercules Furens_. By far the greatest number of Euripidean MSS.

contain only three plays,--the _Hecuba, Orestes_ and

_Phoenissae_,--these having been chosen out of the select nine for

school use--probably in the 14th century.

It is to be remembered that, as a selection, the nine chosen plays of

Euripides correspond to those seven of Aeschylus and those seven of

Sophocles which alone remain to us. If, then, these nine did not

include the _Iphigenia in Tauris_, the _Ion_ or the _Bacchae_, may we

not fairly infer that the lost plays of the other two dramatists

comprised works at least equal to any that have been preserved? May we

not even reasonably doubt whether we have received those masterpieces

by which their highest excellence should have been judged?

Scholia.

The extant scholia on Euripides are for the nine select plays only.

The first edition of the scholia on seven of these plays (all but the

_Troades_ and _Rhesus_) was published by Arsenius--a Cretan whom the

Venetians had named as bishop of Monemvasia, but whom the Greeks had

refused to recognize--at Venice in 1534. The scholia on the _Troades_

and _Rhesus_ were first published by L. Dindorf, from Vat. 909, in

1821. The best complete edition is that of W. Dindorf (1863).[6] The

collection, though loaded with rubbish--including worthless analyses

of the lyric metres by Demetrius Triclinius--includes some invaluable

comments derived from the Alexandrian critics and their followers.

EDITIONES PRINCIPES.--1496. J. Lascaris (Florence), _Medea,

Hippolytus, Alcestis, Andromache_. 1503. M. Musurus (Aldus, Venice),

_Eur. Tragg._ XVII., to which in vol. ii. the _Hercules Furens_ was

added as an 18th; i.e. this edition contained all the extant plays

except the _Electra_, which was first given to the world by P.

Victorius from Florentinus C. in 1545. The Aldine edition was

reprinted at Basel in 1537.

The complete edition of Joshua Barnes (1694) is no longer of any

critical value. The first thorough work done on Euripides was by L.C.

Valcknaer in his edition of the _Phoenissae_ (1755), and his _Diatribe

in Eur. perditorum dramatum relliquias_ (1767), in which he argued

against the authenticity of the _Rhesus_.

PRINCIPAL EDITIONS OF SELECTED PLAYS.--J. Markland (1763-1771),

_Supplices, Iphigenia A., Iphigenia T._; Ph. Brunck (1779-1780),

_Andromache, Medea, Orestes, Hecuba_; R. Porson (1797-1801), _Hecuba,

Orestes, Phoenissae, Medea_; H. Monk (1811-1818), _Hippolytus,

Alcestis, Iphigenia A., Iphigenia T._; P. Elmsley (1813-1821), _Medea,

Bacchae, Heraclidae, Supplices_; G. Hermann (1831-1841), _Hecuba_

(animadv. ad R. Porsoni notas, first in 1800), _Orestes, Alcestis,

Iphigenia A., Iphigenia T., Helena, Ion, Hercules Furens_; C. Badham

(1851-1853), _Iphigenia T., Helena, Ion_; H. Weil, _Hipp., Medea,

Hec., Iph. in T., Iph. in A., Electra, Orestes_ (2nd ed., 1890). It is

impossible to give a list of the English and foreign editions of

single plays, but mention may be made of the _Bacchae_, by J.E. Sandys

(4th ed., 1900) and R.Y. Tyrrell (1892); _Medea_, by A.W. Verrall

(1883); _Hippolytus_, by J.P. Mahaffy (1881); and of the _Hercules

Furens_, by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (2nd ed., 1895), with a

comprehensive introduction on the literature of Euripides. A selected

list (up to 1896) will be found in J.B. Mayor's _Guide to the Choice

of Classical Books_; see also N. Wecklein in C. Bursian's

_Jahresbericht_, xxviii. (1897), and for the earlier literature W.

Engelmann, _Scriptores Graeci_ (1881). The little volumes on Euripides

by J.P. Mahaffy (1879) and W.B. Donne in Blackwood's "Ancient Classics

for English Readers" will be found generally useful; see also P.

Decharme, _Euripide et l'esprit de son theatre_ (1893); A.W. Verrall,

_Euripides the Rationalist_ (1895), and _Essays on Four Plays of

Euripides_ (1905); N.J. Patin, _Etude sur Euripide_ (1872); O.

Ribbeck, _Euripides und seine Zeit_; and (for the life of the poet)

Wilamowitz's ed. of the _Hercules Furens_ (i. 1-42); P. Masqueray,

_Euripide et ses idees_ (1908).

MODERN COMPLETE EDITIONS.--W. Dindorf (1870, in _Poet. Scenici_, ed.

5); A. Kirchhoff (1855, ed. min. 1867); F.A. Paley (2nd ed.,

1872-1880), with commentary; A. Nauck (1880-1887, Teubner series);

G.G. Murray in Oxford _Scriptorum Classicorum bibliotheca_ (1902,

foll.).

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS.--Among these may be noted the complete verse

translation by A.S. Way (1894-1898); that in prose by E.P. Coleridge

(1896); and G.G. Murray's verse translations (1902-1906). A literary

interest attaches to Robert Browning's "Transcript" of the _Alcestis_

in his _Balaustion_, and to Goethe's reconstruction of Euripides' lost

_Phaethon_ in the 1840 edition of his works, vol. xxxiii. pp. 22-43.

(R. C. J.; X.)