Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/705

Rh EURIPIDES 679 .mte s ention Euri- des. yof .ripides 16th 1 17th , iiiles. .ton. h cen- y re al of ing Greek ction list iilegel eck. author of the cento may not have been a good one, the value of the piece for the diplomatic criticism of Euripides is necessarily very considerable ; and it was diligently used both by Valckuar and by Porson. Dante, who does not mention ^Eschylus or Sophocles, places Euripides, with the tragic poets Autiphon and Agathon, and the lyrist Simoniles, in the first circle of Purgatory (xxii. 106), among those piue Greci, eke gia di lauro ornar la fronte. Casaubon, in a letter to Scaliger, salutes that scholar as worthy to have lived at Athens with Aristophanes and Euripides a compliment which certainly implies respect for his correspondent s powers as a peace-maker. In popular literature, too, where yEschylus and Sophocles were as yet little known, the 16th and 17th centuries testify to the favour bestowed upon Euripides. Gascoyne s Jocasta, played at Gray s Inn in 1566, was a free transcript from the Phoenissw. Among early French translations from Euripides, may be mentioned the version of the Iphigenia in Tauris by Sibilet in 1519, and that of the Hecuba by Bouchetel in 1550. About a century later Racine gave the world his Andromaquc, his Iphijenie, and his Phedre; and many have held that, at least in the last-named of these, &quot; the disciple of Euripides &quot; has excelled his master. Bernhardy notices that the performance of the Hippolytus at Berlin in 1851 seemed to show that, for the modern stage, the Phedre has the advantage of its Greek original. R icine s great English contemporary seems to have known and to have liked Euripides better than the other Greek tragedians. In the Reason of Church Government Milton certainly speaks of &quot; those dramatic constitutions in which Sophocles and Euripides reign j&quot; in the preface to his own driuia, again, he joins the names of zEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, &quot; the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any.&quot; But the Samson Agonistea itself clearly shows that Miltoa s chief model in this kind was the dramatist whom he himself has called as if to suggest the skill of Euripides in the delineation of pathetic women &quot;sad Electra s poet;&quot; anl the work bears a special mark of this preference in the use of Euripidean monodies. In the second half of the 18th century such men as Winckelmann (1717-1768) and Lessing (1729-1781) gave a new life to the study of the antique. Hitherto the art of the old world had been better known through Roman than through Greek interpreters. The basis of the revived classical taste had been Latin. But now men gained a finer perception of those characteris tics which belong to the Greek work of the great time, a fuller sense of the difference between the Greek and the Roman genius where each is at its best, and generally a clearer recognition of the qualities which distinguish ancient art in its highest purity from modern romantic types. Euripides now became the object of criticism from a new point of view. He was compared with ^Eschylus and Sophocles as representatives of that ideal Greek tragedy which ranges with the purest type of sculpture. Thus tried, he was found wanting ; and he was condemned with all the rigour of a newly illuminated zeal. Niebuhr (1776-1831) judged him harshly; but no critic approached Schlegel (1767-18-15) in severity of one-sided censure. Schlegel, in fact, will scarcely allow that Euripides is toler able except by comparison with Racine. Tieck (1773-1853) .showed truer appreciation for a brother artist, when he described the work of Euripides as the dawn of a romantic poetry haunted by dim yearnings and forebodings. Goethe who, according to Bernhardy, knows Euripides only &quot; at a great distance &quot; (der ihn aus weiter Feme kenut) certainly admired him highly, and has left an interesting memorial of Euripidean study in his attempted reconstruction of the lost PkaetJion. There are some passages in Goethe s conver sations with Eckermann wlfch form effective quotations against the Greek poet s real or supposed detractors. &quot; To feel and respect a great personality, one must be something oneself. All those who denied the sublime to Euripides, were either poor wretches incapable of comprehending such sublimity, or shameless charlatans, who, in their presump tion, wished to make more of themselves than they were.&quot; &quot; A poet whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle lauded, whom Alexander admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of Athens put on mourning on hearing of his death, must certainly have been some one. If a modern man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees.&quot; (Symonds, Greek Poets, i. 230.) We yield to no one in admiration of Goethe ; but we cannot think that these rather bullying utterances are favourable examples of his method in aesthetic discussion; nor have they any logical force except as against those if there be any such who deny that Euripides is a great poet. One of the most striking of recent criti cisms on Euripides is the sketch by Mommsen in his Momra history of Rome. It is, in our opinion, less than just to sen - Euripides as an artist. But it indicates, with true histori cal insight, his place in the development of his art, the operation of those external conditions which made him what he was, and the nature of his influence on succeeding ages. The manuscript tradition of Euripides has a very curious Manu- and instructive history. It throws a suggestive light on script the capricious nature of the process by which some of the greatest literary treasures have been saved or lost. Nine plays of Euripides were selected, probably in early Byzan tine times, for popular and educational use. These were, Alcestis, Andromache, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Medea, Orestes, The nii Phceni-isce, Rhesus, Troades. This list includes at least two plays, plays, the Andromache and the Troades, which, even in the small numbsr of the extant dramas, are universally allowed to be of very inferior merit to say nothing of the Rhesus, which is generally allowed to be spurious. On the other hand, the list omits at least three plays of first-rate beauty and excellence, the very flower, indeed, of the extant collec tion the Ion, the Iphigenia in Tauris, and the Bacchce the last certainly, in its own kind, by far the most splendid work of Euripides that we possess. Had these three plays been lost, it is not too much to say that the modern esti mate of Euripides must have been decidedly lower. But all the ten plays not included in the select list had a narrow escape of being lost, and, as it is, have come to us in a much less satisfactory condition. Kirchhoff has been the first, in his editions, thoroughly Kirch- to investigate the history and the affinities of the Euripideau hoflTs a&amp;lt; manuscripts. All our MSS. are, he thinks, derived from a lost archetype of the 9th or 10th century, which contained the nineteen plays (counting the Rhesus) now extant. From this archetype a copy, also lost, was made about 1100 A.D., containing only the nine select plays. This copy be- MSS. o came the source of all our best MSS. for those plays. They the nin&amp;lt; are, (1) Marcianus 471, in the library of St Mark at 1)la &amp;gt; s&amp;lt; Venice (1 2th century) : Andromache, Hecuba, Hipjwlytus (to v. 1234), Orestes, Phceniftce ; (2) Vaticanus 909, 12th century, nine plays ; (3) Parisinus 2712, 13th century, 7 plays (all but Troades and Rhesus), Of the same stock, but inferior, are (4) Marcianus 468, 13th century: Hecnba, Orestes, Medea (v. 1-42), Orestes, Phcenissce; (5) Havuiensis (from Hafniae, Copenhagen, according to Mr Paley), a late transcript from a MS. resembling Vat, 909, nine plays. A second family of MSS. for the nine plays, sprung from the same copy, but modified by a Byzantine recension of the 13th century, is greatly inferior. The other ten plays have come to us only through the MSS. o; preservation of two MSS., both of the 14th century, and both ultimately derived, as Kirchhotf thinks, from the