EURITIDES of Athens is said to have been born at Salamis in the year B.C. 480, on the day of the great victory obtained over the fleet of Xerxes. His father Mneearchus and his mother Clito were among the refugees driven to Salamis by the progress of the invading army. They seem to have been Athenian citizens of the poorer clan, as we find that the mean occupation of this poet's mother was made by Aristophanea one of the standing subjects of the ridicule which he so perseveringly heaped upon hlm. Philochorua, on the contrary, says that he was of noble birth ; but still his parents might be poor. (Suidas, Ebpor(ber). Euripides however found means to devote him• self early and closely to the study of philosophy in the school o: Anaxagoras, as well as to that of eloquence under Prodicus. While he was yet very young, the persecution and banishment of Anaxagorae appear to have deterred him from the cultivation of philosophy as profession, and combined with the strong natural bent of his genius to have directed his exertions chiefly to dramatic composition. He ie said to have commenced writing at the age of eighteen ; and in the course of a long life he composed not fewer than seventy-five, or according to other authorities, ninety-two tragedies, which rivalled ii the public approbation the contemporary productions of Sophoclea notwithstanding the constant and bitterly satirical attacks which a the author's own time, they sustained from such as were exclusively nd intolerantly attached to the elder tragic school, they secured him or all succeeding ages a place beside its two great masters. When. , Lpwards of aeventy years old, weary, it should seem, of the feverish xcitement in which he must have been kept alike by the petulant riticism and the turbulent applause that attended him at Athena, he .ccepted the invitation of Arehelaus, king of Macedou, and went to ive in honoured and tranquil retirement at his court. Here however singular as well as tragical end awaited him. According to one .ccount (for, in this as in many other matters of ancient biography, here are discrepancies), he had spent three years in this retreat, when valking one day in a solitary spot, he was met by some of the king's sounds, which, rushing furiously upon him, tore him ao violently that ce died in consequence of the laceration. Aulus Gelliva tells us that he Athenians sent to Macedon to ask for the body of Euripides, but hat the Macedonians constantly refused it, in order that their own country might retain the honour of the magnificent tomb which they erected for him at Pella, and which, according to Ammianus Mar Lellinus, was sanctified by the thunder-stroke, as Plutarch informs us tad been the case with Lyeuigus. Thna Athens was obliged to con ant herself with engraving the name of Euripides upon an empty nonument, which is the time of Pausanias was yet standing beside he road from the Pirteus to Athens (Pusan., Attic.' 1, 2), near the omb of Menander.
Of the numerous tragedies of Euripides, nineteen survive—a much larger proportion than has descended to us of the works of either of he two elder tragic masters. We may point out his 'Electra' to the reader's attention, not as a favourable specimen of the general powers A' Euripides—for indeed, as a work of art it is decidedly one of the least meritorious of his extant pieces—but as affording the clearest point of comparison between his moat prominently distinctive features L3 a dramatist and those of his two great predecessors; this being the anly instance in which we have a piece from each of the three com posed upon one and the same historical or mythological subject. ' Orestes; the subject of which, inasmuch as it relates to the persecu tion of that hero by the furies of his mother and his proscription as e matricide, is the same as that of the Eumenides' of .iEschylua,
though in scene, incident, and character, excepting that of Orestes himself, they are wholly different, is more vigorous and more affecting than the 'Electra."Iphigenia in Tauria ' and Andromache' follow out still farther the fortunes of Orestes; both rank among those pieces of the second order in which the highest praise can be given only to certain portions. The same may be said of the six following pieces : the Treacles; the mournfully grand conclusion of which exhibits tho captive Trojan women leaving Troy in flames behind them ; ' Hecuba,' relating to the subsequent history of the captive queen ; the 'Hercules Furens, or ' Raging Hercules;' the 'Phcenisses; having the same historical groundwork as the ' Seven against Thebes' of Aschylus; the ' Heraclidee; which celebrates the Athenian protection of the children of Hercules, ancestors of the Lacedtemonian kings, from the persecution of Eurystheus; and the Supplicea; which in like manner commemorates the interment of the Seven before Thebes and their army, effected, on behalf of Admetus king of Argos, by a victory of the Athenlana over the Thebans. 'Helen' is a very entertaining and singular drama, full of marvellous adventures and appearances, being founded on the assertion of the Egyptian priests that Helen had in fact remained concealed in Egypt, while Paris had merely carried off an airy semblance of her. The genuineness of ' Rhesus,' taken from the eleventh book of the 'Iliad,' has been much disputed, chiefly ou the ground of its great relative inferiority—an argument which is outweighed by certain internal characteristics of the piece itself, com bined with the external testimony of the ancient writers ascribing it to Euripides. For beautiful morality and unaffected yet overpowering pathos, his Ion,' his 'lphigeuia in Aulls; and above all, his Alcestis,' are peculiarly distinguished. He found subjects especially suited to the development of his finer powers in the purity and sanctity of the youth from whom the first of these three tragedies is named, in the unsuspecting innocence of the heroine of the second, and in the tender yet resolute devotedness of connubial affection portrayed in the third. The 'Hippolytus' and the 'Medea,' exhibiting all the romantic violence of irregular and vehement feminine passions, are deservedly celebrated among the greatest and most thoroughly successful achievements of this dramatist. After the 'Hippolytus,' Schlegel is disposed to assign the next place among all the remaining works of Euripides to tho Bacchee; on account of its harmonious unity, its well-sustained vigour, and of the appropriateness to the very peculiar subject here treated, of that luxuriance of ornament which Euripides constantly displays. This piece also merits especial attention as being the only one remaining of the 'serious' dramas that were composed expressly and immediately in honour of Bacchus himself, the patron deity of the theatre. In this instance the glory and the power of Bacehua are not merely the occasion—they form the subject of the tragedy; and the wildly picturesque chorus of Bacchantes, as Schlegel observes, "repre sent the infectious and tumultuous inspiration of the worship of Bacchus with great sensual power and vividness of conception." An interest yet more peculiar attaches to the Cyclops,' as being the sole remaining specimen of the ' satyric' tragedy, so called from the" chorus of satyrs, which formed an essential part of its composition.