Chapter X: "1. Then, after being filled, thus give ye thanks (6)

When we put aside these excessive compliments, and no less the attacks from which the style suffered as soon as it began to go out of fashion, we are able to observe merits as well as faults in this very curious experiment. Euphuism did not attempt to render the simplicity of nature. On the contrary, in order to secure refinement, it sought to be as affected, as artificial, as high-pitched as possible. Its most prominent feature was an incessant balancing of phrases in chains of antitheses, thus:--"Though the tears of the hart be salt, yet the tears of the boar be sweet, and though the tears of some women be counterfeit to deceive, yet the tears of many be current to try their love"; or this:--"Reject it not because it proceedeth from one which hath been lewd, no more than ye would neglect the gold because it lieth in the dirty earth, or the pure wine for that it cometh out of a homely presse, or the precious stone _aetites_ which is found in the filthy nests of the eagle, or the precious gem _draconites_, that is ever taken out of the poisoned dragon." This second excerpt, moreover, suggests another of the main characteristics of Euphuism, the incessant use, for purposes of ornament, of similes taken from fabulous records of zoology, or relating to mythical birds, fishes or minerals. This was a feature of the "new English" which was excessively admired, and copied with a senseless extravagance. Instances of it are found on every page of Lyly's books, thus:--"Although the worm entereth almost into every wood, yet he eateth not the cedar-tree; though the stone _cylindrus_ at every thunder-clap roll from the hill, yet the pure sleek stone mounteth at the noise; though the rust fret the hardest steel, yet doth it not eat into the emerald; though polypus change his hue, yet the salamander keepeth his colour"; and so on, _ad infinitum_. That lady was considered most proficient in euphuism who could keep up longest these chains of similes taken out of fabulous natural history. Alliteration was also a particular ornament of the euphuistic style, as: "The bavin, though it burn bright, is but a blaze," but the use of this artifice by Lyly himself was rarely exaggerated; for instances of its excess we have rather to turn to his imitators. In the following passage the typical forms of Euphuism, in its pure and original conditions, are so combined and illustrated as to require no further commentary: "Do we not commonly see that in painted pots is hidden the deadliest poison? that in the greenest grass is the greatest serpent? in the clearest water the ugliest toad? Doth not experience teach us that in the most curious sepulchre are enclosed rotten bones? that the cypress tree beareth a fair leaf, but no fruit? that the ostrich carrieth fair feathers, but rank flesh?"--and so forth. It will be noticed that these characteristics differ in many respects from the specimens of euphuism which are most familiar to a modern reader, namely the extravagant speech placed in the mouth of Sir Piercie Shafton in Sir Walter Scott's romance of _The Monastery_. Scott modelled this character on what he called that "forgotten and obsolete model of folly, once fashionable," Lyly's novel of _Euphues_, but he had not studied the original to sufficient purpose, and the bombastic ravings of Sir Piercie, who simply talks like a lunatic, have deceived many readers as to the real characteristics of Euphuism. Scott betrays his own error when he says that "the extravagance of Euphuism ... predominates in the romances of Calprenede and Scuderi," in which it is true that a tone of preposterous gallantry finds a language of its own, but that is not the language of Euphues. What Sir Piercie Shafton talks is a mixture of the style of these French romances, with the ostentation of Sir Fopling Flutter and the extravagances of the Scotch translator of Rabelais. But these various sorts of pretentious eloquence have little or nothing in common with the balanced and conceited style of Euphues.

We find that the genuine sort of this kind of superfine conversation was originally called "Euphues," simply, as Overbury speaks of a man "who speaks Euphues, not so gracefully as heartily." The earliest instance of the word "Euphuism" which has been traced occurs in a letter, written by Gabriel Harvey in 1592, when he speaks of a man, who would be smart, as talking "a little Euphuism." Dekker, in the _Gull's Hornbook_ of 1609, uses the word as an adjective, and denounces "Euphuised gentlewomen." When the practice was going out of fashion we find it thus severely stigmatized by Michael Drayton, a poet who had little sympathy with the artificial refinement of Lyly. In an elegy, printed in 1627, Drayton refers to the merit of Sir Philip Sidney, who recalled English prose to sanity, and

"did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly's writings then in use,
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words and idle similes,
As th' English apes and very zanies be
Of everything that they do hear and see,
So imitating his ridiculous tricks
They spake and writ, all like mere lunatics."

This severe censure of Euphuism may serve to remind us that hasty critics have committed an error in supposing the _Arcadia_. of Sidney to be composed in the fashionable jargon. That was certainly not the intention of the author, and in fact the publication of the _Arcadia_, eleven years after that of _Euphues_, marks the beginning of the downfall of the popularity of the latter. Sidney's prose, it is true, was extremely ornamented, but it was instinct with romantic fancy, and it affected a chivalrous and florid fulness which was artificial enough, but wholly distinct from the more homely elegance of Euphuism as we have defined it. The publication of the _Arcadia_ was a severe blow to the Euphuists. Immediately the ladies began to desert their former favourite, and the object at court became, as Ben Jonson noted, to "observe as pure a phrase and use as choice figures in ordinary conference as any be in the Arcadia." But, in the meantime, Lyly had found in Greene, Lodge, Dickenson, Nicholas Breton and others enthusiastic disciples who had learned all the formulas of Euphuism, and could bring them forth as fluently and elegantly as he could himself. Nevertheless the trick wore out, with the taste that it had created, and by the close of the reign of James I. Euphuism had become a dead language.

Critics have not failed to insist, on the other hand, that a species of Euphuism existed before Euphues was thought of. It has been supposed that a translation of the familiar epistles, or, as they were called, the "Golden Letters," of a Spanish monk, Antonio de Guevara, led Lyly to conceive the extraordinary style which bears the name of his hero. Between 1574 and 1578 Edward Hellowes (fl. 1550-1600) translated into a very extravagant English prose three of the works of Guevara. Earlier than this, in 1557, Sir Thomas North had published a version of the same Spanish writer's _Reloj de Principes_ (The Dial of Princes), a moral and philosophical romance which is not without a certain likeness in plan and language to _Euphues_. It is extremely difficult to know to what extent these translations, which were not strikingly unlike many other specimens of the ornamented English prose of their period, can be said to be responsible for the production of Euphuism. At all events no one can doubt that it was Lyly who concentrated the peculiarities of mannerism, and who gave to it the stamp of his own remarkable talent.

See Landmann, _Der Euphuismus_ (1881); Arber's edition of _Euphues_
(1869); R.W. Bond's _Complete Works of Lyly_ (1902); Hallam,
Jusserand, S. Lee, _passim_. (E. G.)

EUPION (Gr. [Greek: eu], well, [Greek: pion], fat), a hydrocarbon of the paraffin series, probably a pentane, C5H12, discovered by K. Reichenbach in wood-tar. It is also formed in the destructive distillation of many substances, as wood, coal, caoutchouc, bones, resin and the fixed oils. It is a colourless highly volatile and inflammable liquid, having at 20 deg. C. a specific gravity of 0.65.

EUPOLIS (c. 446-411 B.C.), Athenian poet of the Old Comedy, flourished in the time of the Peloponnesian War. Nothing whatever is known of his personal history. With regard to his death, he is said to have been thrown into the sea by Alcibiades, whom he had attacked in one of his plays, but it is more likely that he died fighting for his country. He is ranked by Horace (_Sat_. i. 4, 1), along with Cratinus and Aristophanes, as the greatest writer of his school. With a lively and fertile fancy Eupolis combined a sound practical judgment; he was reputed to equal Aristophanes in the elegance and purity of his diction, and Cratinus in his command of irony and sarcasm. Although he was at first on good terms with Aristophanes, their relations subsequently became strained, and they accused each other, in most virulent terms, of imitation and plagiarism. Of the 17 plays attributed to Eupolis, with which he obtained the first prize seven times, only fragments remain. Of these the best known were: the _Kolakes_, in which he pilloried the spendthrift Callias, who wasted his substance on sophists and parasites; _Maricas_, an attack on Hyperbolus, the successor of Cleon, under a fictitious name; the _Baptae_, against Alcibiades and his clubs, at which profligate foreign rites were practised. Other objects of his attack were Socrates and Cimon. The _Demoi_ and _Poleis_ were political, dealing with the desperate condition of the state and with the allied (or tributary) cities.

Fragments in T. Kock, _Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta_, i. (1880).

EUPOMPUS, the founder of the great school of painting which flourished in the 4th century at Sicyon in Greece. He was eclipsed by his successors, and is chiefly remembered for the advice which he is said to have given to Lysippus to follow nature rather than any master.

EURASIAN, a term originally confined to India, where for upwards of half a century it was used to denote children born of Hindu mothers and European (especially Portuguese) fathers. Following the geographical employment of the word _Eurasia_ to describe the whole of the great land mass which is divided into the continents of Europe and Asia, Eurasian has come to be descriptive of any half-castes born of parents representing the races of the two continents. It has further an ethnological sense, A.H. Keane (_Ethnology_, 1896) proposing to find in the Eurasian Steppe the true home of the primitive Aryan groups. Joseph Deniker (_Anthropology_, 1900) makes a Eurasian group to include such peoples (Ugrians, Turko-Tatars, &c.) as are represented in both continents. Giuseppe Sergi, in his _Mediterranean Race_ (London, 1901), uses Eurasiatic to denote that variety of man which "brought with it into Europe (from Asia in the later Neolithic period) flexional languages of Aryan or Indo-European type."

EURE, a department of north-western France, formed in 1790 from a portion of the old province of Normandy, together with the countship of Evreux and part of Perche. Pop. (1906) 330,140. Area, 2330 sq. m. It is bounded N. by the department of Seine Inferieure, W. by Calvados, S.W. by Orne, S. by Eure-et-Loir, and E. by Seine-et-Oise and Oise. The territory of Eure, which nowhere exceeds 800 ft. in altitude, is broken up by its rivers into well-wooded plateaus with a general inclination from south to north. Forests cover about one-fifth of the department. The Seine flows from S.E. to N.W. through the E. of the department, and after touching the frontier at two or three points forms near its mouth part of the northern boundary. All the rivers of the department flow into the Seine,--on the right bank the Andelle and the Epte, and on the left the Eure with its tributaries the Avre and the Iton, and the Risle with its tributary the Charentonne. The Eure, from which the department takes its name, rises in Orne, and flowing through Eure-et-Loir, falls into the Seine above Pont de l'Arche, after a course of 44 m. in the department. The Risle likewise rises in Orne, and flows generally northward to its mouth in the estuary of the Seine. The climate is mild, but moist and variable. The soil is for the most part clayey, resting on a bed of chalk, and is, in general, fertile and well tilled. The chief cereal cultivated is wheat; oats, colza, flax and beetroot are also grown. There is a wide extent of pasturage, on which are reared a considerable number of cattle and sheep, and especially those horses of pure Norman breed for which the department has long been celebrated. Fruit is very abundant, especially apples and pears, from which much cider and perry are made. The mineral products of Eure include freestone, marl, lime and brick-clay. The chief industries are the spinning of cotton and wool, and the weaving, dyeing and printing of fabrics of different kinds. Brewing, flour-milling, distilling, turnery, cotton-bleaching, cider-making, metal-founding, tanning, and the manufacture of glass, paper, iron ware, nails, pins, wind-instruments, bricks and sugar are also carried on. Coal and raw materials for its industries are the chief imports of Eure; its exports include cattle, poultry, eggs, butter, grain and manufactured goods. The department is served chiefly by the Western railway; the Seine, Eure and Risle provide 87 m. of navigable waterway. Eure is divided into the following arrondissements (containing 36 cantons, 700 communes):--Evreux, Louviers, Les Andelys, Bernay, and Pont-Audemer. Its capital is Evreux, which is the seat of a bishopric of the ecclesiastical province of Rouen. The department belongs to the III. Army Corps and to the academie (educational division) of Caen. Its court of appeal is at Rouen.

Evreux, Les Andelys, Bernay, Louviers, Pont-Audemer, Verneuil, Vernon and Gisors are the principal towns of the department. At Gaillon there are remains of a celebrated chateau of the archbishops of Rouen (see LOUVIERS). Pont de l'Arche has a fine Gothic church, with stained-glass windows of the 16th and 17th centuries; the church of Tillieres-sur-Arvre is a graceful specimen of the Renaissance style. The churches of Conches (15th or 16th century) and of Rugles (13th, 15th and 16th centuries), and the chateau of Beaumesnil (16th century) are also of architectural interest.

EURE-ET-LOIR, an inland department of north-western France, formed in 1790 of portions of Orleanais and Normandy. Pop. (1906) 273,823. Area, 2293 sq. m. It is bounded N. by the department of Eure, W. by Orne and Sarthe, S. by Loir-et-Cher, S.E. by Loiret, and E. by Seine-et-Oise. The Perche in the south-west and the Thimerais in the north-west are districts of hills and valleys, woods, lakes and streams. The region of the east and south is a level and uniform expanse, consisting for the most part of the riverless but fertile plain of Beauce, sometimes called the "granary of France." The northern part of Eure-et-Loir is watered by the Eure, with its tributaries the Vegre, Blaise and Avre, a small western portion by the Huisne, and the south by the Loir with its tributaries the Conie and the Ozanne. The air is pure, the climate mild, dry and not subject to sudden changes. The soil consists, for the most part, either of clay intermixed with sand or of calcareous earth, and is on the whole fruitful. Agriculture is better conducted than in most of the departments of France, and the average yield per acre is greater. Cereals occupy half the surface, wheat and oats being chiefly cultivated. Among the other agricultural products are barley, hemp, flax and various vegetables, including good asparagus. Wine is not extensively produced, nor is it of the best quality; but in some parts, especially in the Perche, there is an abundant supply of apples, from which cider is made as the common drink of the inhabitants. The extensive meadows supply pasturage for a large number of cattle and sheep, and the horses raised in the Perche have a wide reputation as draught animals. Bee-farming is commonly prosecuted. The department produces lime, grindstones and brick-clay. The manufactures are not extensive; but there are flour- and saw-mills, tanneries and leather-works, copper and iron foundries, starch-works, dyeworks, distilleries, breweries and potteries; and agricultural implements, cotton and woollen goods, and yarn, hosiery, boots and shoes, sugar, felt hats and paper are made. Eure-et-Loir exports the products of its soil and live-stock; its imports include coal, wine and wearing apparel. It is served by the railways of the Western and the Orleans Companies and by those of the state, but it has no navigable waterways. The department has Chartres for its capital, and is divided into the arrondissements of Chartres, Chateaudun, Dreux and Nogent-le-Rotrou (24 cantons and 426 communes). It forms the diocese of Chartres (province of Paris), and belongs to the academie (educational division) of Paris and the region of the IV. Army Corps. Its court of appeal is at Paris.

Chartres, Dreux, Chateaudun, Nogent-le-Rotrou and Anet are the more noteworthy places in the department (q.v.). At Bonneval the lunatic asylum occupies the 18th-century buildings of a former Benedictine abbey. The abbey church belonged to the 13th century, but only a gateway flanked by two massive towers is left. The chateau of Maintenon dating from the 16th and 17th centuries was presented by Louis XIV. to Madame de Maintenon, by whom additions were made; the aqueduct (17th century) in the park was designed to carry the water of the Eure to Versailles, but was not completed. There is a fine chateau of the late 15th century, restored in modern tunes, at Montigny-le-Gannelon, and another of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, at one time the property of Sully, at Villebon. St Lubin-des-Joncherets has a handsome church of the 11th century, in which there are stained-glass windows dating from the 16th century.

EUREKA, a city, port of entry, and the county seat of Humboldt county, California, U.S.A., on the E. shore of Humboldt Bay. Pop. (1880) 2639; (1890) 4858; (1900) 7327 (2035 foreign-born); (1910) 11,845. It has a good harbour, greatly improved by the National government, and is connected with San Francisco, Portland and other coast ports by steamship lines. In 1909 a railway (the Northwestern Pacific), to connect Eureka with San Francisco, was under construction. The district owes its reputation as a health resort to its equable climate and to the protection afforded by the wide coast timber belt. Eureka is the principal point for the shipment of redwood lumber, and saw-milling is carried on here on an enormous scale. Several short railways run from Eureka and Arcata (pop. in 1900, 952) across the bay, into the forests, and bring lumber to the mills, most of which are in or near Eureka. Humboldt county was organized in 1853. Eureka was then already the centre of an important lumber trade, principally in spars. It was incorporated in 1856, displacing Union (now Arcata) as the county-seat in the same year.

EUREKA SPRINGS, a city and health resort, one of the county-seats--Berryville being the other--of Carroll county, in the extreme north-western part of Arkansas, U.S.A., in the Ozark uplift, 1800 ft. above the sea-level. Pop. (1890) 3706; (1900) 3572 (142 of negro descent); (1910) 3228. There is a transient population of thousands of visitors during the year. The city is built picturesquely on the sides of a gulch, down which runs the Missouri & North Arkansas railway. A creek running through the city empties into the White river, only a few miles distant. The surrounding country varies in character from mountains to rolling prairie. The encircling hills are laden with a covering of pine. The normal mean temperature for the year is about 59 deg. F. (42 deg. F. in winter, 61 deg. F. in spring, 75 deg. F. in summer, and 58 deg. F. in autumn); the average rainfall, about 33 in. The atmosphere is dry and clear. Apart from its share in the agricultural interests of the surrounding region,--devoted mainly to Indian corn, small grains and fruits,--the entire economy of Eureka Springs centres in its medicinal springs, more than forty of which, lying within the corporate limits, are held in trust by the city for the free use of the public. The temperature of the springs varies from about 57 deg. F. to 64 deg. F. Each gallon of their waters contains about 28.5 cub. in. of gaseous matter and from 6 to 9 grains of solids held in solution. The city waterworks are owned by the municipality. The springs have been exploited since 1879, when the first settlement was made. The city was chartered in 1880.

EURIPIDES (480-406 B.C.), the great Greek dramatic poet, was born in 480 B.C., on the very day, according to the legend, of the Greek victory at Salamis, where his Athenian parents had taken refuge; and a whimsical fancy has even suggested that his name--_son of Euripus_--was meant to commemorate the first check of the Persian fleet at Artemisium. His father Mnesarchus was at least able to give him a liberal education; it was a favourite taunt with the comic poets that his mother Clito had been a herb-seller--a quaint instance of the tone which public satire could then adopt with plausible effect. At first he was intended, we are told, for the profession of an athlete,--a calling of which he has recorded his opinion with something like the courage of Xenophanes. He seems also to have essayed painting; but at five-and-twenty he brought out his first play, the _Peliades_, and thenceforth he was a tragic poet. At thirty-nine he gained the first prize, and in his career of about fifty years he gained it only five times in all. This fact is perfectly consistent with his unquestionably great and growing popularity in his own day. Throughout life he had to compete with Sophocles, and with other poets who represented tragedy of the type consecrated by tradition. The hostile criticism of Aristophanes was witty; and, moreover, it was true, granting the premise from which Aristophanes starts, that the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles is the only right model. Its unfairness, often extreme, consists in ignoring the changing conditions of public feeling and taste, and the possibilities, changed accordingly, of an art which could exist only by continuing to please large audiences. It has usually been supposed that the unsparing derision of the comic poets contributed not a little to make the life of Euripides at Athens uncomfortable; and there is certainly one passage in a fragment of the _Melanippe_ (Nauck, Frag., 495), which would apply well enough to his persecutors:--

[Greek: andron de polloi tou gelotos houneka
askousi charitas kertomous ego de pos
miso geloious, hoitines sophon peri
achalin echousi stomata.]

(To raise vain laughter, many exercise
The arts of satire; but my spirit loathes
These mockers whose unbridled mockery
Invades grave themes.)

The infidelity of two wives in succession is alleged to explain the poet's tone in reference to the majority of their sex, and to complete the picture of an uneasy private life. He appears to have been repelled by the Athenian democracy, as it tended to become less the rule of the people than of the mob. Thoroughly the son of his day in intellectual matters, he shrank from the coarser aspects of its political and social life. His best word is for the small farmer ([Greek: autourgos]), who does not often come to town, or soil his rustic honesty by contact with the crowd of the market-place.

About 409 B.C. Euripides left Athens, and after a residence in the Thessalian Magnesia repaired, on the invitation of King Archelaus, to the Macedonian court, where Greeks of distinction were always welcome. In his _Archelaus_ Euripides celebrated that legendary son of Temenus, and head of the Temenid dynasty, who bad founded Aegae; and in one of the meagre fragments he evidently alludes to the beneficent energy of his royal host in opening up the wild land of the North. It was at Pella, too, that Euripides composed or completed, and perhaps produced, the _Bacchae_. Jealous courtiers, we are told, contrived to have him attacked and killed by savage dogs. It is odd that the fate of Actaeon should be ascribed, by legend, to two distinguished Greek writers, Euripides and Lucian; though in the former case at least the fate has not such appropriateness as the Byzantine biographer discovers in the latter, on the ground that its victim "had waxed rabid against the truth." The death of Euripides, whatever its manner, occurred in 406 B.C., when he was seventy-four. Sophocles followed him in a few months, but not before he had been able to honour the memory of his younger rival by causing his actors to appear with less than the full costume of the Dionysiac festival. Soon afterwards, in the _Frogs_, Aristophanes pronounced the epitaph of Attic comedy on Attic tragedy.

The historical interest of such a life as that of Euripides consists in the very fact that its external record is so scanty--that, unlike Aeschylus or Sophocles, he had no place in the public action of his time, but dwelt apart as a student and a thinker. He has made his _Medea_ speak of those who, through following quiet paths, have incurred the reproach of apathy ([Greek: rhathumian]). Undoubtedly enough of the old feeling for civic life remained to create a prejudice against one who held aloof from the affairs of the city. Quietness ([Greek: apragmosune]), in this sense, was still regarded as akin to indolence ([Greek: argia]). Yet here we see how truly Euripides was the precursor of that near future which, at Athens, saw the more complete divergence of society from the state.

In an age which is not yet ripe for reflection or for the subtle analysis of character, people are content to express in general types those primary facts of human nature which strike every one. Achilles will stand well enough for the young chivalrous warrior, Odysseus for the man of resource and endurance. In the case of the Greeks, these types had not merely an artistic and a moral interest; they had, further, a religious interest, because the Greeks believed that the epic heroes, sprung from the gods, were their own ancestors. Greek tragedy arose when the choral worship of Dionysus, the god of physical rapture, had engrafted upon it a dialogue between actors who represented some persons of the legends consecrated by this faith. The dramatist was accordingly obliged to refrain from multiplying those minute touches which, by individualizing the characters too highly, would detract from their general value as types in which all Hellenic humanity could recognize its own image glorified and raised a step nearer to the immortal gods. This necessity was further enforced by the existence of the chorus, the original element of the drama, and the very essence of its nature as an act of Dionysiac worship. Those utterances of the chorus, which to the modern sense are so often platitudes, were not so to the Greeks, just because the moral issues of tragedy were felt to have the same typical generality as these comments themselves.

An unerring instinct keeps both Aeschylus and Sophocles within the limits imposed by this law. Euripides was only fifteen years younger than Sophocles. But, when Euripides began to write, it must have been clear to any man of his genius and culture that, though an established prestige might be maintained, a new poet who sought to construct tragedy on the old basis would be building on sand. For, first, the popular religion itself--the very foundation of tragedy--had been undermined. Secondly, scepticism had begun to be busy with the legends which that religion consecrated. Neither gods nor heroes commanded all the old unquestioning faith. Lastly, an increasing number of the audience in the theatre began to be destitute of the training, musical and poetical, which had prepared an earlier generation to enjoy the chaste and placid grandeur of ideal tragedy.

Euripides made a splendid effort to maintain the place of tragedy in the spiritual life of Athens by modifying its interests in the sense which his own generation required. Could not the heroic persons still excite interest if they were made more real,--if, in them, the passions and sorrows of every-day life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness? And might not the less cultivated part of the audience at least enjoy a thrilling plot, especially if taken from the home-legends of Attica? Euripides became the virtual founder of the romantic drama. In so far as his work fails, the failure is one which probably no artistic tact could then have wholly avoided. The frame within which he had to work was one which could not be stretched to his plan. The chorus, the masks, the narrow stage, the conventional costumes, the slender opportunities for change of scenery, were so many fixed obstacles to the free development of tragedy in the new direction. But no man of his time could have broken free from these traditions; in attempting to do so he must have wrecked either his fame or his art. It is not the fault of Euripides if in so much of his work we feel the want of harmony between matter and form. Art abhors compromise; and it was the misfortune of Attic tragedy in his generation that nothing but a compromise could save it. Two devices have become common phrases of reproach against him--the prologue and the _deus ex machina_. Doubtless the prologue is a slipshod and sometimes ludicrous expedient. But the audiences of his days were far from being so well versed as their fathers in the mythic lore, and, on the other hand, a dramatist who wished to avoid trite themes had now to go into the byways of mythology. A prologue was often perhaps desirable or necessary for the instruction of the audience. As regards the _deus ex machina_, a distinction should be observed between those cases in which the solution is really mechanical, as in the _Andromache_ and perhaps the _Orestes_, and those in which it is warranted or required by the plot, as in the _Hippolytus_ and the _Bacchae_. The choral songs in Euripides, it may be granted, have often nothing to do with the action. But the chorus was the greatest of difficulties for a poet who was seeking to present drama of romantic tendency in the plastic form consecrated by tradition. So far from censuring Euripides on this score, we should be disposed to regard his management of the chorus as a signal proof of his genius, originality and skill.

Works.

Euripides is said to have written 92 dramas, including 8 satyr-plays.
The best critics of antiquity allowed 75 as genuine. Nauck has
collected 1117 Euripidean fragments. Among these, numbers 1092-1117
are doubtful or spurious; numbers 842-1091 are from plays of uncertain
title; numbers 1-841 represent fifty-five lost pieces, among which
some of the best known are the _Andromeda, Antiope,[1] Bellerophon,
Cresphontes, Erechtheus, Oedipus, Phaethon_, and _Telephus_.

1. The _Alcestis_, as the didascaliae tell us, was brought out in Ol.
85. 2, i.e. at the Dionysia in the spring of 438 B.C., as the fourth
play of a tetralogy comprising the _Cretan Women_, the _Alcmaeon at
Psophis_, and the _Telephus_. The _Alcestis_ is altogether removed
from the character, essentially grotesque, of a mere satyric drama. On
the other hand, it has features which distinctly separate it from a
Greek tragedy of the normal type. First, the subject belongs to none
of the great cycles, but to a byway of mythology, and involves such
strange elements as the servitude of Apollo in a mortal household, the
decree of the fates that Admetus must die on a fixed day, and the
restoration of the dead Alcestis to life. Secondly, the treatment of
the subject is romantic and even fantastic,--strikingly so in the
passage where Apollo is directly confronted with the daemonic figure
of Thanatos. Lastly, the boisterous, remorseful, and generous Heracles
makes, not, indeed, a satyric drama, but a distinctly satyric scene--a
scene which, in the frank original, hardly bears the subtle
interpretation which in _Balaustion_ is hinted by the genius of
Browning, that Heracles got drunk in order to keep up other people's
spirits. When the happy ending is taken into account, it is not
surprising that some should have called the _Alcestis_ a tragi-comedy.
But we cannot so regard it. The slight and purely incidental strain of
comedy is but a moment of relief between the tragic sorrow and terror
of the opening and the joy, no less solemn, of the conclusion. In this
respect the _Alcestis_ might more truly be compared to such a drama as
the _Winter's Tale_; the loss and recovery of Hermione by Leontes do
not form a tragi-comedy because we are amused between-whiles by
Autolycus and the clown. It does not seem improbable that the
_Alcestis_--the earliest of the extant plays--may represent an attempt
to substitute for the old satyric drama an after-piece of a kind
which, while preserving a satyric element, should stand nearer to
tragedy. The taste and manners of the day were perhaps tiring of the
merely grotesque entertainment that old usage appended to the
tragedies; just as, in the sphere of comedy, we know from Aristophanes
that they were tiring of broad buffoonery. An original dramatist may
have seen an opportunity here. However that may be, the _Alcestis_ has
a peculiar interest for the history of the drama. It marks in the most
signal manner, and perhaps at the earliest moment, that great movement
which began with Euripides,--the movement of transition from the
purely Hellenic drama to the romantic.

2. The _Medea_ was brought out in 431 B.C. with the _Philoctetes_, the
_Dictys_, and a lost satyr-play called the _Reapers_ (_Theristae_).
Euripides gained the third prize, the first falling to Euphorion, the
son of Aeschylus, and the second to Sophocles. If it is true that
Euripides modelled his Medea on the work of an obscure predecessor,
Neophron, at least he made the subject thoroughly his own. Hardly any
play was more popular in antiquity with readers and spectators, with
actors, or with sculptors. Ennius is said to have translated and
adopted it. We do not know how far it may have been used by Ovid in
his lost tragedy of the same name; but it certainly inspired the
rhetorical performance of Seneca, which may be regarded as bridging
the interval between Euripides and modern adaptations. We may grant at
once that the _Medea_ of Euripides is not a faultless play; that the
dialogue between the heroine and Aegeus is not happily conceived; that
the murder of the children lacks an adequate dramatic motive; that
there is something of a moral anti-climax in the arrangements of
Medea, before the deed, for her personal safety. But the _Medea_
remains a tragedy of first-rate power. It is admirable for the
splendid force with which the character of the strange and
strong-hearted woman, a barbarian friendless among Hellenes, is thrown
out against the background of Hellenic life in Corinth.

3. The extant _Hippolytus_ (429 B.C.)--sometimes called
_Stephanephoros_, the "wreath-bearer," from the garland of flowers
which, in the opening scene, the hero offers to Artemis--was not the
first drama of Euripides on this theme. In an earlier play of the same
name, we are told, he had shocked both the moral and the aesthetic
sense of Athens. In this earlier _Hippolytus_, Phaedra herself had
confessed her love to her step-son, and, when repulsed, had falsely
accused him to Theseus, who doomed him to death; at the sight of the
corpse, she had been moved to confess her crime, and had atoned for it
by a voluntary death. This first _Hippolytus_ is cited as _Hippolytus
the Veiled_ ([Greek: kaluptomenos]), either, as Toup and Welcker
thought, from Hippolytus covering his face in horror, or, as Bentley
with more likelihood suggested, because the youth's shrouded corpse
was brought upon the scene. It can scarcely be doubted that the chief
dramatic defect of our _Hippolytus_ is connected with the unfavourable
reception of its predecessor. Euripides had been warned that limits
must be observed in the dramatic portrayal of a morally repulsive
theme. In the later play, accordingly, the whole action is made to
turn on the jealous feud between Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and
Artemis, the goddess of chastity. Phaedra not only shrinks from
breathing her secret to Hippolytus, but destroys herself when she
learns that she is rejected. But the natural agency of human passion
is now replaced by a supernatural machinery; the slain son and the
bereaved father are no longer the martyrs of sin, the tragic witnesses
of an inexorable law; rather they and Phaedra are alike the puppets of
a divine caprice, the scapegoats of an Olympian quarrel in which they
have no concern. But if the dramatic effect of the whole is thus
weakened, the character of Phaedra is a fine psychological study; and,
as regards form, the play is one of the most brilliant. Boeckh (_De
tragoediae Graecae principiis_, p. 180 f.) is perhaps too ingenious in
finding an allusion to the plague at Athens (430 B.C.) in the [Greek:
o kaka thneton stugerai te nosoi] of v. 177, and in v. 209 f.; but it
can scarcely be doubted that he is right in suggesting that the
closing words of Theseus (v. 1460)

[Greek: o klein' Athenon Pallados th' orismata, hoiou steresesth'
andros],

and the reply of the chorus, [Greek: koinon tod' hachos], &c., contain
a reference to the recent death of Pericles (429 B.C.).

4. The _Hecuba_ may be placed about 425 B.C. Thucydides (iii. 104)
notices the purification of Delos by the Athenians, and the
restoration of the Panionic festival there, in 426 B.C.--an event to
which the choral passage, v. 462 f., probably refers. It appears more
hazardous to take v. 650 f. as an allusion to the Spartan mishap at
Pylos. The subject of the play is the revenge of Hecuba, the widowed
queen of Priam, on Polymestor, king of Thrace, who had murdered her
youngest son Polydorus, after her daughter Polyzena had already been
sacrificed by the Greeks to the shade of Achilles. The two calamities
which befall Hecuba have no direct connexion with each other. In this
sense the play lacks unity of design. On the other hand, both events
serve the same end--viz. to heighten the tragic pathos with which the
poet seeks to surround the central figure of Hecuba. The drama
illustrates the skill with which Euripides, while failing to satisfy
the requirements of artistic drama, could sustain interest by an
ingeniously woven plot. It is a representative _Intriguenstueck_, and
well exemplifies the peculiar power which recommended Euripides to the
poets of the New Comedy.

5. The _Andromache_, according to a notice in the _scholia Veneta_
(446), was not acted at Athens, at least in the author's life-time;
though some take the words in the Greek argument ([Greek: to drama ton
deuteron]) to mean that it was among those which gained a second
prize. The invective on the Spartan character which is put into the
mouth of Andromache contains the words, [Greek: adikos eutucheit' an'
Hellada], and this, with other indications, points to the
Peloponnesian successes of the years 424-422 B.C. Andromache, the
widow of Hector, has become the captive and concubine of Neoptolemus,
son of Achilles. During his absence, her son Molossus is taken from
her, with the aid of Menelaus, by her jealous rival Hermione. Mother
and son are rescued from death by Peleus; but meanwhile Neoptolemus is
slain at Delphi through the intrigues of Orestes. The goddess Thetis
now appears, ordains that Andromache shall marry Helenus, and declares
that Molossus shall found a line of Epirote kings, while Peleus shall
become immortal among the gods of the sea. The _Andromache_ is a poor
play. The contrasts, though striking, are harsh and coarse, and the
compensations dealt out by the _deus ex machina_ leave the moral sense
wholly unsatisfied. Technically the piece is noteworthy as bringing on
the scene four characters at once--Andromache, Molossus, Peleus and
Menelaus (v. 545 f.).

6. The _Ion_ is an admirable drama, the finest of those plays which
deal with legends specially illustrating the traditional glories of
Attica. It is also the most perfect example of the poet's skill in the
structure of dramatic intrigue. For its place in the chronological
order there are no data except those of style and metre. Judging by
these, Hermann would place it "neither after Ol. 89, nor much
before"--i.e. somewhere between 424 and 421 B.C.; and this may be
taken as approximately correct. The scene is laid throughout at the
temple of Delphi. The young Ion is a priest in the temple of Delphi
when Xuthus and his wife Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, come to
inquire of the god concerning their childlessness; and it is
discovered that Ion is the son of Creusa by the god Apollo. Athena
herself appears, and commands that Ion shall be placed on the throne
of Athens, foretelling that from him shall spring the four Attic
tribes, the Teleontes (priests), Hopletes (fighting-men), Argadeis
(husbandmen) and Aigikoreis (herdsmen). The play must have been
peculiarly effective on the Athenian stage, not only by its
situations, but through its appeal to Attic sympathies.

7. The _Suppliants_ who give their name to the play are Argive women,
the mothers of Argive warriors slain before the walls of Thebes, who,
led by Adrastus, king of Argos, come as suppliants to the altar of
Demeter at Eleusis. Creon, king of Thebes, has refused burial to their
dead sons. The Athenian king Theseus demands of Creon that he shall
grant the funeral rites; the refusal is followed by a battle in which
the Thebans are vanquished, and the bodies of the Argive dead are then
brought to Eleusis. At the close the goddess Athena appears, and
ordains that a close alliance shall be formed between Athens and
Argos. Some refer the play to 417 B.C., when the democratic party at
Athens rose against the oligarchs. But a more probable date is 420
B.C., when, through the agency of Alcibiades, Athens and Argos
concluded a defensive alliance. The play has a strongly marked
rhetorical character, and is, in fact, a panegyric, with an immediate
political aim, on Athens as the champion of humanity against Thebes.

8. The _Heracleidae_--a companion piece to the _Suppliants_, and of
the same period--is decidedly inferior in merit. Here, too, there are
direct references to contemporary history. The defeat of Argos by the
Spartans in 418 B.C. strengthened the Argive party who were in favour
of discarding the Athenian for the Spartan alliance (Thuc. v. 76). In
the _Heracleidae_, the sons of the dead Heracles, persecuted by the
Argive Eurystheus, are received and sheltered at Athens. Thus, while
Athens is glorified, Sparta, whose kings are descendants of the
Heracleidae, is reminded how unnatural would be an alliance between
herself and Argos.

9. The _Heracles Mainomenos_[2] (_Hercules Furens_), which, on grounds
of style, can scarcely be put later than 420-417 B.C., shares with the
two last plays the purpose of exalting Athens in the person of
Theseus. Heracles returns from Hades--whither, at the command of
Eurystheus, he went to bring back Cerberus--just in time to save his
wife Megara and his children from being put to death by Lycus of
Thebes, whom he slays. As he is offering lustral sacrifice after the
deed, he is suddenly stricken with madness by Lyssa (Fury), the
daemonic agent of his enemy the goddess Hera, and in his frenzy he
slays his wife and children. Theseus finds him, in his agony of
despair, about to kill himself, and persuades him to come to Athens,
there to seek grace and pardon from the gods. The unity of the plot
may be partly vindicated by observing that the slaughter of Lycus
entitled Heracles to the gratitude of Thebes, whereas the slaughter of
his own kinsfolk made it unlawful that he should remain there; thus,
having found a refuge only to lose it, Heracles has no hope left but
in Athens, whose praise is the true theme of the entire drama.

10. _Iphigenia among the Tauri_, which metre and diction mark as one
of the later plays, is also one of the best--excellent both in the
management of a romantic plot and in the delineation of character. The
scene is laid at the temple of Artemis in the Tauric Chersonese (the
Crimea)--on the site of the modern Balaklava. Iphigenia, who had been
doomed to die at Aulis for the Greeks, had been snatched from that
death by Artemis, and had become priestess of the goddess at the
Tauric shrine, where human victims were immolated. Two strangers, who
had landed among the Tauri, have been sentenced to die at the altar.
She discovers in them her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades. They
plan an escape, are recaptured, and are finally delivered by the
goddess Athena, who commands Thoas, king of the land, to permit their
departure. Iphigenia, Orestes and Pylades return to Greece, and
establish the worship of the Tauric Artemis at Brauron and Halae in
Attica. The drama of Euripides necessarily suggests a comparison with
that of Goethe; and many readers will probably also feel that, while
Goethe is certainly not inferior in fineness of ethical portraiture,
he has the advantage in his management of the catastrophe. But it is
only just to Euripides to remember that, while his competitor had free
scope of treatment, he, a Greek dramatist, was bound to the motive of
the Greek legend, and was obliged to conclude with the foundation of
the Attic worship.

11. The _Troades_ appeared in 415 B.C. along with the _Alexander_, the
_Palamedes_, and a satyr-play, the _Sisyphus_. It is a picture of the
miseries endured by noble Trojan dames--Hecuba, Andromache,
Cassandra--immediately after the capture of Troy. There is hardly a
plot in the proper sense--only an accumulation of sorrows on the heads
of the passive sufferers. The piece is less a drama than a pathetic
spectacle, closing with the crash of the Trojan towers in flame and
ruin. The _Troades_ is indeed remarkable among Greek tragedies for its
near approach to the character of melodrama. It must be observed that
there is no ground for the inference--sometimes made an accusation
against the poet--that the choral passage, v. 794 f., was intended to
encourage the Sicilian expedition, sent forth in the same year (415
B.C.). The mention of the "land of Aetna over against Carthage" (v.
220) speaks of it as "renowned for the trophies of prowess"--a topic,
surely, not of encouragement but of warning.

12. The _Helena_--produced, as we learn from the Aristophanic scholia,
in 412 B.C., the year of the lost _Andromeda_--is not one of its
author's happier efforts. It is founded on a strange variation of the
Trojan myth, first adopted by Stesichorus in his Palinode--that only a
wraith of Helen passed to Troy, while the real Helen was detained in
Egypt. In this play she is rescued from the Egyptian king,
Theoclymenus, by a ruse of her husband Menelaus, who brings her safely
back to Greece. The romantic element thus engrafted on the Greek myth
is more than fantastic: it is well-nigh grotesque. The comic
poets--notably Aristophanes in the _Thesmophoriazusae_--felt this; nor
can we blame them if they ridiculed a piece in which the mode of
treatment was so discordant with the spirit of Greek tradition, and so
irreconcilable with all that constituted the higher meaning of Greek
tragedy.

13. The _Phoenissae_ was brought out, with the _Oenomaus_ and the
_Chrysippus_, in 411 B.C., the year in which the recall of Alcibiades
was decreed by the army at Samos, and, after the fall of the Four
Hundred, ratified by the Assembly at Athens (Thuc. viii. 81, 97). The
dialogue between Iocaste and Polynices on the griefs of banishment
([Greek: ti to steresthai patridos], v. 388 f.) has a certain emphasis
which certainly looks like an allusion to the pardon of the famous
exile. The subject of the play is the same as that of the Aeschylean
_Seven against Thebes_--the war of succession in which Argos supported
Polynices against his brother Eteocles. The Phoenician maidens who
form the chorus are imagined to have been on their way from Tyre to
Delphi, where they were destined for service in the temple, when they
were detained at Thebes by the outbreak of the war--a device which
affords a contrast to the Aeschylean chorus of Theban elders, and
which has also a certain fitness in view of the legends connecting
Thebes with Phoenicia. But Euripides has hardly been successful in the
rivalry--which he has even pointed by direct allusions--with
Aeschylus. The _Phoenissae_ is full of brilliant passages, but it is
rather a series of effective scenes than an impressive drama.

14. Plutarch (_Lys._ 15) says that, when Athens had surrendered to
Lysander (404 B.C.) and when the fate of the city was doubtful, a
Phocian officer happened to sing at a banquet of the leaders the first
song of the chorus in the Electra of Euripides--

[Greek: Agamemnonos o kora,
elython, Elektra, poti san agroteran aulan],

and that "when they heard it, all were touched, so that it seemed a
cruel deed to destroy for ever the city so famous once, the mother of
such men." The character of the _Electra_, in metre and in diction,
seems to show that it belongs to the poet's latest years. If Mueller
were right in referring to the Sicilian expedition the closing passage
in which the Dioscuri declare that they haste "to the Sicilian sea, to
save ships upon the deep" (v. 1347), then the play could not be later
than 413 B.C. But it may with more probability be placed shortly
before the _Orestes_, which in some respects it much resembles:
perhaps in or about the year 410 B.C. No play of Euripides has been
more severely criticized. The reason is evident. The _Choephori_ of
Aeschylus and the _Electra_ of Sophocles appear to invite a direct
comparison with this drama. But, as R.C. Jebb suggested,[3] such
criticism as that of Schlegel should remember that works of art are
proper subjects of direct comparison only when the theories of art
which they represent have a common basis. It is surely unmeaning to
contrast the elaborate homeliness of the Euripidean _Electra_ with the
severe grandeur of its rivals. Aeschylus and Sophocles, as different
exponents of an artistic conception which is fundamentally the same,
may be profitably compared; Euripides interprets another conception,
and must be tried by other principles. His _Electra_ is, in truth, a
daring experiment--daring, because the theme is one which the elder
school had made peculiarly its own.

15. The _Orestes_, acted in 408, bears the mark of the age in the
prominence which Euripides gives to the assembly of Argos--which has
to decide the fate of Orestes and Electra--and to rhetorical pleading.
The plot proceeds with sufficient clearness to the point at which
Orestes and Electra have been condemned to death. But the later
portion of the play, containing the intrigues for their rescue and the
final achievement of their deliverance, is both too involved and too
inconsequent for a really tragic effect. Just as in the _Electra_, the
heroic persons of the drama are reduced to the level of commonplace.
There is not a little which borders on the ludicrous, and it can be
seen how easy would have been the passage from such tragedy as this to
the restrained parody in which the Middle Comedy delighted. It is,
however, inconceivable that, as some have supposed, the _Orestes_ can
have been a deliberate compromise between tragedy and farce. It cannot
have been meant to be played, as a fourth piece, instead of a regular
satyric drama. Rather it indicates the level to which the heroic
tragedy itself had descended under the treatment of a school which was
at least logical. The celebrity of the play in the ancient world--as
Paley observes, there are more ancient quotations from the _Orestes_
than from all the extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles together--is
perhaps partly explained by the unusually frequent combination in this
piece of striking sentiment with effective situation.

16. The _Iphigenia at Aulis_, like the _Bacchae_, was brought out only
after the death of Euripides. It is a very brilliant and beautiful
play,--probably left by the author in an unfinished state,--and has
suffered from interpolation more largely, perhaps, than any other of
his works. As regards its subject, it forms a prelude to the
_Iphigenia in Tauris_. Iphigenia has been doomed by her father
Agamemnon to die at Aulis, as Calchas declares that Artemis claims
such a sacrifice before the adverse winds can fall.

The genuine play, as we have it, breaks off at v. 1508, when Iphigenia
has been led to the sacrificial altar. A spurious epilogue, of
wretched workmanship (v. 1509-1628), relates, in the speech of a
messenger, how Artemis saved the maiden.