democracy in which the reign of reason should be still less fettered by prescription. The death of Pericles, in 429, removed a great moderating power; but Euripides had the pain of seeing the democracy, when freed from that strong hand, degrade liberty into license, and drown the voice of sober counsel in the strife of demagogues. He shrank from this debased democracy. His best word is for the small farmer, who seldom comes to town, and who does not soil his rustic honesty by contact with the crowd of the market-place. For a while, indeed, Euripides had one bright hope it was the young and dazzling Alcibiades, for whose victory in the Olympian chariot-race (420 B. C.) he composed the last recorded example of the epinikion. Might not Alcibiades become a second Pericles, only with more advanced aims? That hope was cruelly disappointed. About 409 B. C. Euripides left Athens: and he was not destined to return. He went to king Archelaus in Macedonia. In the rough military world of that half-barbarian court, Euripides, now just seventy, would have met a younger Athenian dramatist, Agathon. The wild scenery of the northern land is reflected in the Bacchae. He died there in the

winter of 407-406 B. C.

The dramatic work of Euripides interests alike. by its success and by its failure. It is His works as

the most instructive of comments on the a dramatist. nature of Attic Tragedy, and on the limits which that nature imposed. It is also fraught with the

germs of a new drama; it is the source of influences which proved fruitful in the later literature of antiquity; it is even a link between the ancient and the modern theatre. But few literary questions are more difficult to estimate fairly than the relation of Euripides to a form of art which he enriched with some of its noblest ornaments, but on which he also impressed tendencies that could lead only to decay and extinction.

Tragedy had been ideal.

Tragedy came to Euripides with its general conditions fixed in a manner which he could not attempt to alter. Three actors, a chorus, subject-matter to be taken from the heroic legends, these were the essentials. Aeschylus and Sophocles, unlike in so much, were alike in this, that to the external traditions of their drama. they had added an unwritten law as to its spirit, which they both observed with unwavering constancy it was that the treatment should be ideal. Agamemnon, for example, was not to be taken out of the heroic atmosphere with which the myth surrounded him. He was, indeed, to be made living; but the life was to be that of a Greek hero, in other words, of a man belonging to the faroff age when gods mingled in the warfare on the plain of Troy; a man, moreover, directly descended from Zeus himself. The divine light which played around that age was compatible with the full humanity of the heroes, as it is in the Iliad, only the humanity must be noble. That nobleness is inde pendent of rank or circumstance. The Homeric

swineherd Eumaeus has it as well as Achilles. The necessary minimum of such nobleness might be defined negatively. Persons whose life is placed in the heroic age must not so act or speak as to resemble ordinary men or women of the contemporary world. If they do so, they may be interesting, but they lose their ideal character. By ceasing to be ideal they also become, as heroic persons, less real. Agamemnon, arguing like an astute lawyer or an ingenious demagogue, may be a more familiar type of person, but the illusion that we are listening to the king of Mycenae is ruined.

Now Euripides was a poet fertile in ideas, full of views on all the questions of his day, The problem —religious, moral, political, social. If he for Euripides. was to write Tragedy, he could only use the heroic myths. Tragedy was an act of worship. He could not be allowed to write a tragedy about Miltiades or Themistocles; but when he had chosen his heroic dramatis personae, the impulse was irresistible to make these persons the exponents of his teeming thoughts on contemporary life. "It was easy enough for Aeschylus," we can imagine him saying, "to exclude modern thought; there were no pressing problems then; the era of reason had scarcely dawned; besides his poetical vision, Aeschylus had only his half-mystic theology, which suited it. It is easy, too, for worthy Sophocles, a pious soul who lives for art, not for philosophy; but if I am to give the people of my best, if I

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am to teach and improve them through my poetry at the Dionysia, how can I keep within those old limits of conventional utterance?"

solving it.

So Euripides went to work in his own new His mode of way. The extent to which he modernized the heroes must not be exaggerated. He observed measure. Still, he introduced a most vital change; he brought the diction and thought of the heroic persons far nearer to that of every-day life; he added small traits of character, which, in contrast to the finer touches of Sophocles, did not (as a rule) deepen the significance of those persons, but merely made them appear more commonplace. And, pervading his plays, there was what must be called the sophistical strain, most prominent in the Protagorean rhetoric of the debates, where λόγος is pitted against λόγος, but seen also in the remarks on the gods, or on moral questions. Here the light of common day was let in upon the heroic age, with disastrous results for dramatic effect. A new treatment of the Chorus was an inevitable consequence. In this respect the difference between Aeschylus and Sophocles had been less important than the agreement: both had maintained the organic bond between Chorus and dialogue. This was possible, because the animating spirit of their dialogue was one which could be continued in lyric utterance; it was noble; it belonged to the age of the heroes. But after a

The Chorus.

dialogue in which two disputants had displayed the latest novelties of rhetorical casuistry, how could a choral ode be in accord with it? And besides this difficulty, there was a positive motive for a change the wish for variety. Thus the choral odes of Euripides came to be either wholly irrelevant to the dramatic context, or connected with it only slightly and occasionally.

The instinct which told Euripides that the day of Attic Tragedy, as the elder masters had understood it, could not be much prolonged, was a true one; the signs were around him. But it is a different question, and one not easily answered, how far he actually felt, in his last twenty or thirty years, the pressure of a public demand, which his innovations were designed to meet. It is a significant fact that, in 409 B. C., when the career of Euripides was nearing its close, the Philoctetes of Sophocles gained the first prize. The old style of Tragedy could still hold its own, then, with the public-at least in the hands of Sophocles. But the veteran poet may have been a favored exception. Certainly there are several features in the work of Euripides which look like concessions to a new popular taste. Foremost among these is his adoption in his lyrics of the musical novelties associated with the new dithyrambic school, and especially with Timotheus. The The new

Concessions to popular

taste.

general tendency of these was to substi- Music.

tute a florid style, with profuse ornament, for the