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Rh that rendered contact between poets and philosophers almost unavoidable. The rapid growth of speculative and rhetorical studies in the age, and perhaps with the sanction, of Pericles, has already been noticed. The understanding, hardly affected by the simple training of the young in the Æschylean period, had become, fifty years later, the primary aim of liberal education. He who could recite the whole Iliad or Odyssey was now looked upon, when compared with an acute rhetorician, as little better than a busy idler—all very well, perhaps, for enlivening the guests at a formal supper, or entertaining a loitering group in the streets. Even fools have sometimes portentous memories, but no fool could handle adroitly the weapons of a sound logician. Man was born to be something better than a parrot; he was meant to cultivate and to use "discourse of reason." To argue logically upon almost any premises,—to have words at command, to be ready in reply, fertile in objection, averse from granting propositions, to possess much general knowledge, were accomplishments which no well-educated young Athenian, aspiring to make a figure in public, could do without. The imaginative epoch of Æschylus was departing, the scientific epoch of Aristotle was approaching, and the analytical stamp of Euripides's mind, great as its poetical force was, complied with those tendencies of the time.

In thus reflecting the spirit of the age, Euripides only did what others before him had done, and what great poets will ever continue to do:—