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14 can find no parallel to the splendid education of the stage, which all the adult population derived from the growing and now paramount tragedy. All the deepest questions of religion and of morals were brought home to men's minds in a manner infinitely more striking than the best and ablest preaching in our Christian pulpits. Indeed there was more poetry of the first order already extant than any average man could master, and that too of every vein and temper, from the ideal pictures of Homer and the soaring flights of Pindar to the mean limping of the plebeian Hipponax and the unsavoury confessions of the ribald Archilochus.

12. This was the sort of society into which Euripides was born, and in which he spent his life. It was a society in many respects intensely modern, with its religious and philosophical scepticism, its publicity of debate, its rational inquiry, its advanced democracy. There was great simplicity of dress and frugality of life, combined with a splendid extravagance in public works and national undertakings. There was a good deal of coarseness and rudeness of manners, combined with a keen appreciation of artistic genius in conception and of beauty in form and colour. There was a great deal of wit and smartness, combined with a tedious taste for disputation and for verbal subtleties. There was a great deal of hard and vulgar selfishness, combined with enthusiastic patriotism and devotion to public interests. There was a great deal of intelligence and enlightenment without any large diffusion of learning; much intimacy with the national literature without many collections of books. And, if the forms of the men and women were not, as I believe, of any remarkable beauty (like those of the Spartans), yet artists had found an ideal canon of perfection unparalleled, save in rare exceptions, throughout the annals of the human race.

These are the more important general features of Periclean society at Athens, which clothe the mere lates of the poet's life and of his works with all their interest and proper meaning.