Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/276

252 death. The poet lived, so Philochorus says, on his own estate at Salamis, and worked in a cave facing the sea, which was shown to tourists down to Pliny's time. He avoided society and public life—as much, that is, as an Athenian of that day could avoid them. He served in the army. He had at least once to perform a 'liturgy' of some sort, perhaps fitting out a trireme; he was a 'Proxenus' of Magnesia, an office which resembled that of a modern consul, and involved some real political work. These expensive posts must have come to him early in his life; he was reduced to poverty, like all the landed proprietors, towards the end of the war. For the rest, he was the first Greek who collected a library, the writer and thinker, not the man of affairs.

At one time, indeed, we find him taking at least an indirect part in politics. About 420, at the end of the Ten Years' War, he wrote a play with a definite 'tendency.' The Suppliants not only advocates peace with Sparta—that was the case with the Cresphontes* and the Erechtheus* as well—it also advocates alliance with Argos, and proclaims the need in Athens of "a general young and noble." "A general young and noble" was at that moment coming to the front, and especially pressing forward the Argive alliance—Alcibiades. Next year he was appearing at Olympia with that train of four-horse chariots which made such a noise in Greece, and winning the Olympian victory for which Euripides wrote a Pindaric ode. This lets us see that the philosophic poet, like Socrates and most other people, had his period of Alcibiades-worship. We do not know how long it lasted. Euripides was for peace, and Alcibiades for war; and by the time of the Sicilian Expedition, it would seem, Euripides had lost faith in the 'dæmonic'