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EURIPIDES was born in the island of Salamis on the very day of the naval victory obtained by Greece over Persia, which immortalized the name of that little island. It lies about a league's distance from the Eleusinian shore of Attica, and had already been distinguished as the birth-place of Ajax and Solon. Whether the parents of Euripides had before resided, or continued afterwards to reside, in Salamis, is a matter of uncertainty; but a cavern in the island was long pointed out by tradition as the place in which he studied his tragic compositions. This tradition, however, has no collateral proofs; and unfortunately the whole personal history of the poet is involved in as much obscurity as that of his great dramatic predecessors. Dr. Barnes wholly rejects. Aristophanes's story of his mother Clito having sold greens. I doubt, however, if the comic poet's authority can be so easily set aside. Philochorus, who lived 200 years later, says nothing against it, except that Clito was a noble woman. Misfortune has reduced nobility to as humble shifts, Odious and illiberal as the sneer of Aristophanes was, I suspect he was too shrewd at detraction to deal in what was palpably false. When he attacked Socrates, in "The Clouds," his falsehoods were by no means obvious to detection; for the philosopher was at that time so obscure a person, that the piece was withdrawn from the stage for being uninteresting. But the parentage of Euripides must have been notorious in Athens, and a glaring fiction on the subject would have been a jest without point or meaning.

Yet, though this passage in Aristophanes, and another tradition respecting the poet's father having been disgraced as a bankrupt in Boeotia, leave it to be suspected that his family was unfortunate at some particular period, it must be inferred that their indigence was only temporary, from their having been able to afford him a liberal education. The oracle having been consulted about his pursuits in life, it was declared that he was destined to gain renown in contests; and his parents, imagining that no other contests could be meant than the public games, had him trained to athletic exercises. But, if he ever entered the olympic lists, it is certain that he was never crowned in them. Nature, it was soon found, had destined him for nobler contests than with racers and boxers and hurlers of the quoit. From his own writings, it appears that he despised those pursuits, and denied their utility to public weal in the day of battle. It is agreeable to contrast this sagacious opinion of the poet with the reveries of pedants, and even philosophers, on the same subject. The olympic games were undoubtedly

480 years B. C.

In Scotland, where family pride is at least as strong as it was in Athens, a peer of the realm (I allude to the case not for the sake of ridicule, but for illustration) subsisted, to his credit, within the memory of living persons, by a common mechanical trade.{1

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Tail1, 22. Fragment of the Satiric drama Autolycus.

Nov. 1826.-VOL. XVII. NO. 'LXXI. '

2 D.

of some use to Greece as points of national intercourse and attraction to foreigners; and there is something imposing to the imagination in their pomp and solemnities, and display of muscular forms and manly emulation. But, on closer inspection, they offer traits of gross and barbarous absurdity. To read of crowns being awarded, altars and statues erected, and literally divine honours paid to bruisers and wrestlers, gives us no very spiritual idea of a people to whom the world otherwise owes so many spiritual obligations. It has been said, that the Greeks were made better soldiers by those exercises; but Greece was successively conquered, by the Macedonians, who never practised them, and by the Romans, who had not a word for them in their language. Galen speaks of the proper Athletæ as remarkably stupid and useless in the business both of peace and war, and compares them to swine. Independently of the large salaries that were thrown away on those animals, Greece must have made an incalculable waste of the health and vigour of her men in her athletic conflicts. They drew them away even in boyhood from useful labours and liberal pursuits; they must have promoted all inflammatory and pulmonary complaints, and wantonly visited times of peace with the pains and accidents of war. The heat of the arena at Elis was often like that of an oven, and literally produced death by suffocation. Laws, it is true, were made to prevent certain excesses of cruelty in the combatants; and a victor was once refused the crown for having torn out the bowels of his antagonist. But the limits to barbarity could necessarily be but slight; and we hear of statues in honour of wrestlers whose forte lay in crushing the fingers of their adversaries. Prodigies of strength and dexterity were, no doubt, exhibited; but decrepitude, and even death, more or less immediate, must have been the lot of numberless competitors. The victim of the cæstus is described, by a Greek epigrammatist, as left so battered and featureless, that his identity could not have been recognized by the mother who had borne him. Surgical aid could often cure the wounded gladiators of Rome; but it was impossible to restore those members that were torn from each other by the Greek athlete, who, bereft of eyes, teeth, nose, and chin, looked like men who had escaped from the paws of a tiger.

Happily, Euripides applied himself to better pursuits. He studied painting, and is said to have produced works in that art sufficiently valued to have been preserved and exhibited at Megara, but down to what period they were shown the reporter of the tradition has not informed us. I know not where Potter found any grounds for asserting that Euripides set to Timanthes the example literally in painting, of veiling Agamemnon's head in the picture of his daughter's sacrifice. His Iphigenia at Aulis unquestionably gave that hint to the artist.

He also studied rhetoric with Prodicus of Ceos, and philosophy with Anaxagoras of Clazomene. His education was for his age scientific and profound; and his taste and genius were formed during a period of Athens, glorious for energy without, and for liberty within. The first thirty years of his life, those years during which we must suppose his mental character to have been decided, compreliended the latter part of Cimon's, and the earlier part of Pericles's career: it witnessed the

Life of Euripides prefixed to Potter's translation.

Academy being endowed with those bowers and fountains, amidst which philosophy took up her home for 700 years; and it included the victories obtained by Myronides, equal in importance to those of Marathon and Platea. It was an age to Athens of expanding wealth and colonization, that greatly multiplied the number of her citizens who could apply themselves to liberal pursuits.

*

It is, nevertheless, to his times and teachers that some of the most eminent of modern critics mainly ascribe all the faults of his poetry. Both of the celebrated Schlegels, and the writer of a very able article on the character of Euripides, in Sulzer's Appendix to his Dictionary of the Fine Arts, carry this idea (I cannot help thinking) to exaggeration. As to his teachers, Prodicus, it is true, was a sophist, but he is honourably mentioned by Xenophon as author of the most beautiful moral apologue that has come down to us from antiquity, viz. The Choice of Hercules between Virtue and Pleasure. This shows at least that the more respectable sophists could inculcate virtuous sentiments, and would lead us to conjecture favourably of the moral impressions which Euripides received, even from Prodicus. But in point of fact, do the writings of this poet entitle him to be ranked in the school of Sophistry, taking that term in the heartless and unprincipled sense which we usually apply to it? I am aware that this question would require more illustration than I shall give it; and I am sensible what a weight of critical authority is against me, on dissenting from the opinion of the distinguished author of the "Course of Dramatic Literature." Yet I cannot, even in that great writer's remarks, find the proofs of lax morality and sophistry conclusively deduced from the writings of Euripides. He delineated life, not on the lofty ideal scale of Sophocles, but according to individual nature and its faults and passions. That was taking a lower sphere of dramatic imitation, no doubt; but surely we are to judge of him according to that sphere, and to try his sentiments, not by their abstract truth and purity, but by their consistency with the faulty and impassioned beings who express them. In palliation of perjury, one of his characters says, "My lips had sworn, but not my heart." Is this more pointed sophistry than Shakspeare, the purest of moralists, puts into the mouth of the starved apothecary: My poverty and not my will

Prodicus was a sophist, and, according to Cicero, of dubious orthodoxy as to the immortality of the soul. But that Euripides imbibed his opinions, is contradicted by his own declared sentiments, and by the partiality of Socrates for his dramas. The term Sophist was certainly applied to men exceedingly different in worth and talents; and from some of the sophists it has been confessed that even their adversaries derived important information. But, taking them at the worst, I cannot help thinking that they have incurred a blame for the depravation of Greek morality beyond their deserts, absurd as many of their tenets may have been. An age before the sophists were known at Athens, the good citizens had in their memories strains commemorating the enjoyments of their own divinities, that were calculated, infinitely more than the jargons of metaphysicians, to inflame the passions and corrupt the heart. Among a people who had Anacreon by rote, and religious hymns on the rape of Ganymede, and the amours of Venus and Anchises, the sophists could be but dull missionaries of licentiousness. It is in vain to deny that, many of the Pagan fables practically inculcated vice; for we find Socrates obliged to rebuke a villain for alleging the conduct of Jupiter as a plea for cruelty to his own father. The very rites of Paganism, a picture of which Euripides has left in his Bacchæ, may show us that Greece owed incalculably more of her moral corruption to the temples of her faith than to the schools of her scepticism.

consents. The Eteocles of Euripides declares, that it is worth while to commit injustice for the sake of mounting a throne, but for no other object. What is this but the natural language and logic of usurpation? If we blame its immorality, what shall we say to Shakspeare's Richard, pronouncing Conscience to be a word used by cowards, and devised at first to keep the strong in awe; or for Lady Macbeth, desiring her husband to look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it? On the whole, I should be much more inclined to rank him as the religionist and philosopher, than as the sceptic and sophist of the stage. He is censured for hostility to Paganism, because he has challenged the truth of some of its traditions, and explained others allegorically. True it is that he denies the cannibalism and incest of the Gods; and, in allusion to the legend of Mount Ida, sceptically asks whether Minerva could hope by such a rivalship to increase her renown for wisdom, or Juno to obtain a husband of higher dignity. If Paganism could ever have been elevated to a decorous system of faith, it was only by stripping it of such puerile traditions; and, in this instance, Euripides seems to me to evince less disposition to shake the established faith of his country, than to purify and reclaim it.

Granting, too, that the passion for eloquence which distinguished his age has impressed at times a technical air of rhetoric on his writings, it may be equally contended that the contemporary progress of inquiry and civilization must have contributed to that fulness of thought, picturesqueness of fancy, and tenderness of feeling, which unquestionably belong to his genius. In that corrupted age of Athens which Jacobst dates from the epoch of the victory on the Eurymedon, such was still the simplicity of Athenian manners, that an Attic feast was a proverb in other states for a frugal repast. But, though private life was simple, public luxury was prodigal and ostentatious-in the structure of temples, in the pomp of religion, and in the splendour of naval and military display. If we must theorize, however, so far as to identify the history of a poet's mind with that of his country, it is by no means clear that this period was unpropitious to Euripides's inspiration. On

Anaxagoras, his instructor in philosophy, brought Ionian philosophy to Athens, and, earlier than Socrates himself, recognized a supreme intelligence directing the universe. Was his system perfect? it may be asked. The question is best answered by another: What theistical system of antiquity can lay any pretensions to perfection? Plato blames his precursors, and his successors find fault with Plato. Aristotle finds Anaxagoras' notions of the divine agency too mechanical, and Mosheim has shown that the same objections can be retorted on those of the Stagyrite. Mr. Frederic Schlegel insists that Anaxagoras' doctrines led necessarily to Atheisma hard sentence, methinks, on a philosopher of whose opinions we have no explanation from himself, but who declared himself a theist, and, when asked where his country was, pointed to the heavens. But is Euripides, in fact, irreligious? Cudworth quotes his religious passages as striking proofs of man, even in Pagan times, acknowledging the ties of his heart to the author of his being. He makes Talthybius, no doubt, question the existence of providence; but does not Shakspeare make Queen Margaret exclaim to the Almighty, "Why didst thou sleep when such a deed was done?" (Richard III. Act 4, Scene 3.) Allowance should be made for passionate exclamation. We are told of Ixion having spoken blasphemy in a play of Euripides; but what had Eschylus made Prometheus utter about Jove? He calls the king of heaven, in direct terms, a traitor and a tyrant.

He is the author, I believe, of the article in Sulzer's Appendix, to which I have alluded; and though unknown in England, is deservedly celebrated in Germany.

the contrary, when we look to his picturesque descriptions of the camp, the battle, the pavilion, the jubilee, and the sculptured fane, it may strike us that his imagination often appears like a beautiful reflector of his Country's glory.

The sophists are accused of having prejudiced him against women. When it is told, however, that he was twice married, and as often obliged to divorce his partners for infidelity, his splenetic reflections on the sex may be differently accounted for. Yet, after all, was the author of Alcestis a misogynist, even on the stage?

ture.

His motives for leaving Athens in his old age and repairing to the court of Archelaus of Macedon, if he had any other than the welcome of a hospitable monarch to meet with such men as Timotheus, and Zeuxis, and Agathon, are now beyond the reach of more than conjecDr. Barnes comforts us, for the possible truth of the tradition that he was killed by wild dogs in one of his solitary walks in Macedon, by reminding us of the deaths of St. Paul and John the Baptist. As the story of his death, however, is told in different ways, it is an easier consolation to distrust it altogether. Archelaus refused his remains to his countrymen, and buried him beside the kings of Macedon. But, whilst his dust reposed at Pella, Athens raised a cenotaph to his memory, that was seen five hundred years afterwards by the traveller Pausanias.

Though the people of Sicily reprieved from death their Athenian prisoners who could repeat the verses of Euripides; though Aristotle called him the most tragic of poets, and Quintilian pronounced him the greatest master of impassioned language; though Ovid and Milton adopted his thoughts; and though the modern stage has borrowed more from him than from any other ancient dramatist,-yet his fame is far from being unalloyed. The voice of criticism, from Aristophanes downwards, has descanted loudly on his faults. The objections to his theatre are, the want of unity and design in his plots, his having too frequent recourse to preternatural machinery, his explanatory prologues that forestall curiosity, his superabundance of set speeches and moral remarks, and his characters being overcharged with the accidental meannesses of Nature. A great deal of exceptions and limitations must be made to those objections, even whilst we admit their general justice. It is true that he is defective in dramatic economy; and when we speak of his more regular tragedies, any comparison with the perfect concinnity of Sophoclean design must be understood to be out of the question. Yet still there is a bold and clear march of action in his Medea; the story of both the Iphigenias is distinct as well as interesting; that of Alcestis is equally simple; and the sweep of incidents in Ion is rapid, impressive, and skilful. The Iphigenia at Aulis is a masterpiece, not only for pathos, but regular dramatic skill. It is more than probable, however, that the tragedy was remodelled after his death, and that the piece, as we possess it, was actually brought out by his nephew.*

In character-painting also, though it is true that he too often imitated the faultiness of individual nature, yet how perfectly beautiful

See Professor Boëck's Inquiry into the genuineness of the remains of the three great Greek Tragedians; published at Heidelburgh.

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