EURIPIDES, son of Mnesarchus, a retail dealer of the Attic village, Phlya: b. 480 Re. on the island of Salamis, and, according to tradition, on the day of the famous battle; d. 406. His mothees name was Clito, which indi cates aristocratic lineage. Under the influence of his father Euripides first paid attention to athletics, then to painting, and finally to philos ophy. He learned much from Protagoras, from Prodicus and from Anaxagoras, with whom he holds that nothing which exists per ishes. The poet entered upon his real career at 25. His first success was limited, but he became more and more the favorite of the people. The popularity of his plays at the close of his life and throughout late antiquity was extraordinary. Later comedy was based on his methods. The Romans had a strong predilection for him. In modern times the admiration for Euripides was unbounded until Schlegel set up a standard against him. But Schlegel is unfair: a poet must be measured by his aims. Nevertheless, the poet's works failed at first to win the approval of the Athenians. He was unsuccessful until he was 38, and he won only five first prizes in his whole life. He was also personally unpopular, for he was essentially a pessimist. He felt that the evil in life was not counterpoised by good. He loved retirement and sequestration from open haunts and popularity; preferred the contemplative life of the student to the active life of the statesman. He even acquired the reputation of being a morose cynic, vicious in his private life despite his austere exterior. His gloomy visage, rendered doubly so by un happy domestic relations, was not attractive to the Athenians, who detested an unsociable dis position. So he lived the life of a recluse, on his estate at Salamis, rapt in secret studies. His library was dulcedom enough for hint. Late in his life he repaired to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia. Here he died in 406. The Macedonians built him a magnifi cent tomb at Pella. The Athenians erected for him a cenotaph in Athens.
Euripides is the most rhetorical of the three tragic poets, because he is most affected by the spirit of the new school. He is the representa tive of the new Athens, of the new ideas which were crowding out the simpler beliefs of the JEschylean and Sophoclean school. Eurip ides is nearer ourselves. He marks the transition to the modern world. The antique
standard cannot be applied to him. With Alfred de Musset he might have said: 9e ne pais m' enfuir hors de l'humaniteP His heart is full of compassion for the poor. None is too lowly for his Alcestis to address, as she bids farewell to the household. Euripides was the first dramatic poet to hold aloof from the world. But the motive was not pure indiffer ence: he spoke to a larger audience. . No tragedian treated a greater number of patriotic themes; but he had no affection for the demagogue. The pomp and glory of war had no fascination for him. The suffering of all humanity appeals to his generous heart. In the cosmopolitanism of Socrates, traces of which we find in Euripides, he anticipates Goethe. A poetic associate of the sophists, he was naturally not orthodox. He did not act ually deny the existence of the gods — that were dangerous in Athens and in the theatre impossible. Euripides simply puts the question to his audience and so troubles their souls. He shrinks from discussing no question of heaven or earth. Toward the close of his life he is supposed to have drawn nearer to the religion of his fathers, but the only monument of this change is that remarkable play, the 'Bacchm.) No chronological develop ment in his religious views can be shown. He was a skeptic and a seeker after truth, but not a creative philosopher. No other poet gives us a better conception of what the truth-seek ing Athenian knew and read.
Much has been written about the poet's hatred of women. But we have only to read the 'Alcestis,) or to discover that he can portray the noblest types of womanhood. Euripides knew le mal que peut faire use femme, but no man understood better the ca pabilities of woman's nature. He is the first Greek after Homer that showed any approach to a just conception of what under normal cir cumstances woman may and should be to so ciety. True, he assailed fiercely a certain type of woman, but this does not prove that the women of his time were especially depraved. Often the condemnation is due to the dramatic situation. He does satirize the women of his time for their gossiping disposition, for their cleverness and for their love of slander with a persistence that leaves no doubt as to his in tentions; but, being a pessimist, his mind em phasized the bad rather than the good.