Another passage on Death, remarkable for the stately grandeur of its style, may be quoted from the Niobe:

The sublime speech of Aphrodite in the Danaides, imitated more than once by subsequent poets, must not be omitted:

Nor, lastly, the mystic couplet ascribed to both Æschylus and his son Euphorion:

The fragments of Sophocles are, perhaps, in even a stricter sense than those of Æschylus, a bare anthology, and the best way of dealing with them is to select those which illustrate the beauty of his style or the ripeness of his wisdom. Few, indeed, are full enough to afford materials for reconstructing the plot of a lost play. What, for instance, can be more tantalizing to the student of Greek manners and sentiments than to know that Sophocles wrote a drama with the title Lovers of Achilles, and yet to have no means of judging of its fable better than is given in this pretty simile?

A whole series of plays were written by Sophocles on the tale of Helen, and all of them have passed, "like shapes of clouds we form, to nothing." There was, again, a drama of the Epigoni, which might, perhaps, have carried the tale of Thebes still further than the climax reached in the Antigone. Yet Stobæus has only thought fit to treat us to two excerpts from it, whereof the following, spoken by Alcmæon to Eriphyle, is the fullest:

The sententious philosophy of life that endeared Euripides to the compilers of commonplace-books was expressed by Sophocles also, with sufficient independence of the context to make his speeches valuable as quarries for quotation. To this accident of his art is probably due the large number of fragments we possess upon general topics of morality and conduct. In the following fine passage the poet discusses the apparent injustice in the apportionment of good and evil fortune to virtuous and vicious men:

The same play furnished Stobæus with an excellent observation on garrulity:

Also with a good remark upon the value of sound common-sense:

The Aleadæ supplied this pungent diatribe upon the contrast between poverty and wealth:

In the Locrian Ajax we find two single lines worth preservation:

and

This charming description comes from the Ægeus, recalling Athens, where the poplars grow so large and leafy:

Some scattered utterances upon women and love may be collected from the Phædra, in which play Sophocles broke the ground trodden by Euripides:

The next fragment, extracted possibly from the Colchian Women, deserves to be compared with similar Euripidean passages, though in point of workmanship it is finer, and in profound suggestion more intense, than is the usual manner of Euripides:

While upon this topic of love and women, I may quote a considerable fragment of the Tereus, marked by more sympathy for women in the troubles of their married lives than the Greek poets commonly express:

The same play contains a fine choric passage upon the equality of human souls at birth, their after inequality through fortune:

Among the fragments that deal with the commonplaces of Greek tragedy, the following, from the Tyndareus, may be cited as a brilliant expression of the Solonian proverb:

A play called the Scyrian Women furnishes two excellent apothegmatic passages upon the misery of old age and the inutility of mourning:

Two lines from a lost play on the tale of Odysseus illustrate the celebrated pun of Ajax on his own name:

In conclusion, a few single lines or couplets may be strung together for their proverbial pithiness and verbal delicacy:

Whenever we compare Euripides with his predecessors, we are led to remark that he disintegrated the drama by destroying its artistic unity and revealing the modus operandi of the scientific analyst. All the elements of a great poem were given as it were in their totality by Æschylus. Sophocles, while conscious of the effect to be gained by resolving the drama into its component parts, was careful to recombine them by his art. It is difficult with either Æschylus or Sophocles to separate a passage from its context without injuring the whole, or to understand the drift of a sentence without considering both circumstance and person. With Euripides the case is somewhat different. Though he composed dramas supremely good in the aggregate impression left upon our mind, we feel that he employed his genius with delight in perfecting each separate part regarded by itself alone. So much of time and talent might be spent on the elaboration of the plot, so much on the accentuation of the characters, so much on lyric poetry, so much on moral maxims, so much on description, and so much on artificial argument. There is something over-strained in this crude statement; yet it serves to indicate the analytic method noticeable in Euripides. It consequently happened that his plays lent themselves admirably to the scissors and paste-box method of the compilers. He was a master of gnomes and sentences, and his tragedies were ready-made repertories of quotations. The good cause and the better were pleaded in his dialogues with impartial skill, because it was the poet's aim to set forth what might be said rhetorically—because he took a lively interest in casuistry for its own sake. These qualities, combined with so much that is attractive in his fables, radiant in his fancy, tender in his human sympathy, and romantic in his conduct of a play, endeared him to the Greeks of all succeeding ages. What they wanted in dramatic poetry he supplied better than any other playwright, except perhaps Menander, who, for similar reasons, shared a similar exceptionally lucky fate. The result is that, besides possessing at least eighteen of the plays of Euripides, as against seven of Sophocles and seven of Æschylus, our anthology of Euripidean excerpts is voluminous in the same ratio. The majority of these we owe to the industry of Stobæus, who always found something to his purpose in a drama of Euripides, while collecting wise precepts and descriptive passages to illustrate the nature of a vice or virtue. We must be careful, amid the medley of sentiments expressed with equal force and equal ease, to remember that they are not the poet's own, but put into the mouth of his dramatic personages. What is peculiar is the impartiality of rhetorical treatment they display—a quality which, though it may not justify, accounts for, the Aristophanic hostility to the Euripidean school of talkers on all subjects.

In addition to fragments, there remain detached portions of the Phaëthon, the Erechtheus, and the Antiope, sufficient, if nothing else had been preserved of the Euripidean drama, to suggest a better notion of this poet and his style than of Ion or Achæus, his lost compeers in the Alexandrian Canon. From the catastrophe of the Phaëthon, for example, it appears that Euripides contrived a truly striking contrast between the reception of the dead youth's corpse into the palace by his mother, and the advent, immediately following, of his father with a Chorus chanting bridal hymns. Lycurgus the orator, quoting the Erechtheus, has transmitted a characteristic speech by Praxithea, who deserves to be added to the list of courageous women painted with the virtues of εὐψυχία by Euripides. She maintains that, just as she would gladly send forth sons in the face of death to fight for their country, so, when the State requires of her the sacrifice of a daughter, she would be ashamed to refuse this much and far more. The outlines of the Antiope are more blurred; yet enough survives of a dialectical contention between Zethus and Amphion, the one arguing for a life of study and culture, the other for a life of arms and action, to illustrate this phase of the master's manner. With regard to the Phaëthon, it should be mentioned that Goethe attempted its restitution. His essay may be studied with interest by those who seek to understand the German poet's method of approaching the antique. The reverence with which he handles the precious relics may possibly astonish scholars, who, through fastidiousness of taste, have depreciated a dramatist they imperfectly comprehend.[38] English literature, since the beginning of this year, can boast its own Erechtheus, restored by Swinburne on the model of Æschylus rather than Euripides. While referring to the mutilated dramas of Euripides, the opening to the Danaë requires a passing word of comment. It consists of a prologue in the mouth of Hermes, a chorus, and a couple of lines spoken by Acrisius. The whole, however, is pretty clearly the work of some mediæval forger, and has, so far as it goes, the same kind of interest as the Χριστὸς πάσχων, because it illustrates the ascendency of Euripides during the later ages of Greek culture.

Irksome as it may be to both writer and reader, I know no better method of dealing with the fragments of Euripides than that already adopted with regard to those of Sophocles. The fragments themselves are precious, and deserve to be presented to the modern student with loving and reverential care. Yet there is no way of centralizing the interest of their miscellaneous topics; and to treat them as an anthology of quotations, selecting the most characteristic and translating these as far as possible into equivalent lines, is all that I can do.

A peculiarly interesting fragment in its bearing on Greek life shall be chosen for the first quotation. It comes from the satyric drama of Autolycus, and expresses the contempt felt by cultivated Athenians for young men who devoted all their energies to gymnastics. It is not easy to connect the idea of vulgarity with that of the Greek athletes whose portraits in marble, no less resplendent than the immortal Apoxyomenos of the Vatican, adorned the peristyles of Altis. Yet there can be little doubt from the following fragment, taken in connection with certain hints in Plato, that these muscular heroes of an hour, for whom wreaths were woven and breaches broken in the city walls, struck some green-eyed philosophers as the incarnation of rowdyism. Euripides, if we may trust his biographers, had been educated by his father as an athlete; and it is not improbable that his early distaste for an eminently uncongenial occupation, no less than his familiarity with the manners of its professors, embittered his style in this sarcastic passage. Such splendid beings as the Autolycus, before whom the distinguished guests in Xenophon's Symposium were silenced, seemed to our poet at best but sculptor's models, walking statues, πόλεως ἀγάλματα, and at worst mere slaves of jaws and belly, περισσαὶ σαρκές. Early in Greek literature the same relentless light of moral science, like the gaze of Apollonius undoing Lamia's charm, had been cast upon the athletes by Xenophanes of Colophon. While listening to Euripides, we can fancy that the Adikos Logos from the Clouds of Aristophanes is speaking through his lips to an Athenian audience, composed of would-be orators and assiduous dikasts:

Passing from the athletes to a cognate subject, the following fragment from the Dictys nobly expresses the ideal of friendship. The first two lines seem to need correction; I have let them stand, though inclined to propose κεἰ for καὶ, and to conjecture the loss of a line after the second:

About Eros and Aphrodite the poet has supplied us with a good store of contradictory sentiments. In one long and very remarkable fragment (No. 839, ed. Dindorf) from an unknown play, Euripides, if he be indeed the author of the verses, has imitated Æschylus, taking almost word for word the famous vaunt of Kupris, quoted above from the Danaides. The three next pieces may be also cited among the praises of Love:

Here, again, remembering how much the Greeks included in the term music, is a pretty compliment:

The next is a graceful expostulation on the lover's part with the god who can make or mar his happiness in life:

Nor is this without its tincture of respect:

But Euripides can turn round and rate Love for his encouragement of idleness. There is a stern perception of the facts of life in the following excerpt from the Danaë:

Concerning women he is no less impartial. However he may have chosen to paint their possibilities of heroism, and the force of their character in hours of passion or of need, no poet has certainly abused them in stronger terms. The following is an almost laughable example:

Nor can the group which I have classed together in the following extracts be considered as complimentary:

On marriage many pithy sayings might be cited. The one I take first is eminent for practical brutality combined with sound sense:

To the same category belongs the following, though its worldly wisdom conceals no bitterness:

It answers to our own proverb: "A young man married is a young man marred."

For the sanctities of domestic life, and for the pathetic beauty of maternal love, no poet had a deeper sense than Euripides. The following lines, spoken apparently by Danaë, makes us keenly regret the loss of the tragedy that bore her name; all the tenderness of the Simonidean elegy upon her fable seems to inspire the maiden's longing for a child to fill her arms and sport upon her knee:

And where was the charm of children ever painted with more feeling than in these verses from the same play?

In the next quotation, beautiful by reason of its plainness, a young man is reminded of the sweetness of a mother's love: