The sentiment here expressed seems to be contradicted by a fragment from an unknown play (No. 887), where a son tells his mother that he cannot be expected to cling to her as much as to his father. The Greeks, as we gather from the Oresteia of Æschylus, believed that the male offspring was specially related by sympathy, duty, and hereditary qualities to his father. The contrast between women and men in respect to the paternal home is well conveyed in the following four lines:

Some of the most remarkable excerpts from Euripides turn upon the thought of death—a doom accepted by him with magnanimous Greek stoicism. Those which appear to me the most important I have thrown together for convenience of comparison:

To these should be added the magnificent words of consolation addressed by Dictys, in the tragedy that bears his name, to Danaë:

Close to the thought of death lies that of endurance; and here is a fragment from the Hypsipyle, which might be placed for a motto on the title-page of Epictetus:

On Justice and the punishment of sins we may take the following passages, expressing, with dramatic energy, the intense moral conscience of the Greek race:

They stand, however, in somewhat curious opposition to a fragment from Bellerophon about Divine Justice:

In which of the fragments just quoted was the poet speaking in his own person? In neither, perhaps, fully; partly, perhaps, in both. About wealth he utters in like manner seemingly contradictory oracles:

In what he says of noble birth Euripides never wavers. The true democrat speaks through his verse, and yet no poet has spoken more emphatically of bravery and honor. We may take the following examples in their order:

Further to illustrate his conception of true nobility, using for this purpose in particular the fragments of the Antiope, would be easy. It appears throughout that Euripides was bent on contrasting the honor that is won by labor with the pleasures of a lazy life. Against the hedonism which lay so near at hand to pagans in the license of the flesh, the Greeks set up an ideal of glory attainable alone by toil. This morality found expression in the famous lines of Hesiod on ἀρετή, in the action of Achilles, in the proverb πάντα τὰ καλὰ χαλεπά, and in the fable of the choice of Hercules. Euripides varies the theme in his iambics by a hundred modulations:

The political morality deduced from this view of life is stern and noble:

Nor is the condemnation of mere pleasure-seeking less severe:

The indifference induced by satiety is well characterized in the following lines:

In the foregoing specimens no selection has been made of lines remarkable for their æsthetic beauty. This omission is due to Stobæus, who was more bent on extracting moral maxims than strains of poetry comparable with the invocation of Hippolytus to Artemis. Two, however, I have marked for translation on account of their artistic charm; the first for its pretty touch of picturesqueness, the second for its sympathy with sculpture:

Some passages, worthy of preservation, yet not easily classified, may wind up the series. Here is "Envy, eldest born of hell:"

The next couplet is pregnant with a home-truth which most men have had occasion to feel:

The value attached by Greek political philosophers to the ἦθος, or temperament, of states, and their dislike of demagogy, are accounted for in these four lines:

One single line, noticeable for its weighty meaning, and Euripidean by reason of its pathos, shall end the list:

The lasting title to fame of Euripides consists in his having dealt with the deeper problems of life in a spirit which became permanent among the Greeks, so that his poems, like those of Menander, never lost their value as expressions of current philosophy. Nothing strikes the student of later Greek literature more strongly than this prolongation of the Euripidean tone of thought and feeling. In the decline of tragic poetry the literary sceptre was transferred to comedy, and the comic playwrights may be described as the true successors of Euripides. The dialectic method, degenerating into sophistic quibbling, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy by Menander, when the Athenians, after passing through their disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides. Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said once and for all, and well said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon important matters, and his sensitive, susceptible temperament repeated itself over and over again among his literary successors. The exclamation of Philemon that, if he could believe in immortality, he would hang himself to see Euripides, is characteristic not only of Philemon, but also of the whole Macedonian period of Greek literature.