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Perhaps it was such pictures of universal sorrow, of the fall of flourishing families and states from the greatest glory to the lowest misery, nay, to entire annihilation, as Euripides has sketched in the Troades, that gained for him, from Aristotle, the title of the most tragic of poets.
The city is on every boy's horizon. Its glow is in every prairie sky at twilight. When a boy on those silent plains I had my Horace and my Euripides in the field. The unattainable eternal cities lent their charm and glory to the valley whose childhood horizon I had not crossed. But now no country boy thinks of the ancient or the mediaeval.
The comedy of Menander and his contemporaries completed what Euripides had begun on the tragic stage a hundred years before their time. They deprived their characters of that ideal grandeur which had been most conspicuous in the creations of Aeschylus and the earlier poets, and thus tragedy and comedy, which had started from such different beginnings, here met as at the same point.
The drama reached its perfection in the masterly tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the comedies of Aristophanes. The Athenian community, through its political eminence, its intellectual character, so original and diversified, its culture, such that almost every citizen was qualified for civil office, has no parallel in history.
The instinctive consciousness also of their limited poetical powers may partly have induced the Roman composers to keep mainly by Euripides and Menander and to leave Sophocles and even Aristophanes untouched; for, while poetry is essentially national and difficult to transplant, intellect and wit, on which the poetry of Euripides as well as of Menander is based, are in their very nature cosmopolitan.
He attacked the gods, the politicians, the philosophers, and the poets of Athens; even private citizens did not escape from his shafts, and women were subjects of his irony. Socrates was made the butt of his ridicule, when most revered, and Cleon in the height of his power, and Euripides when he had gained the highest prizes.
"Why, I ask myself, do I see much that I can easily admire in Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Theocritus, parts of Lucretius, Horace's satires and epistles, to say nothing of other ancient writers, and yet find myself at once repelled by even those works of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides which are most generally admired.
This spectre gives an account of each character, which is perhaps done after the manner of Euripides, who introduced one of the chief actors as the Prologue, whose business it was to explain all those circumstances which preceded the opening the stage. He has not in one scene throughout introduced above two speakers, in compliance with Horace's rule in his Art of Poetry;
With the discovery of certain books of ancient history, Plutarch, Euripides and Emerson's Essays there came an unexpected close to my student life at the Worcester Academy. Several of my classmates and myself agreed that we could be better fitted for college at Phillips Academy, Andover, than where we were, and accordingly we put ourselves under the tuition of Dr.
Pardon me if I am vain enough to feel assured that my little play will touch my husband's heart as ever Racine, Shakespeare, and Euripides never did!" There was a triumphant, exultant ring in her silvery voice that only charmed her infatuated companion, and tenderly pressing the hand that lay on his arm, he added pleadingly; "At least, my dear Odille, you will tell me the title?"
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