Page:Euripides (Mahaffy).djvu/49

III.] contended with four plays at a time, and though the titles of these quaternions are frequently preserved, we possess nothing but isolated pieces from different groups. This in a poet like Æschylus, whose dramas were bound together into a larger unity, would offer a capital difficulty in discussing the merits and defects of any single play; but there is good reason to think that with Sophocles the fashion came in of contending with disconnected plays, and that Euripides' tetralogies or quaternions were only connected by the accident of their performance. Not even the ingenuity of the Germans has been able to imagine any proper link between the Bacchæ and Iphigenia, which were brought out together; and the same seems the case—as far as titles can warrant—with the groups brought out by the poet himself.

We are indeed at a loss to know how the judges decided, and it seems to me, from the prominence and the preservation of isolated plays, that each poet pitted the best of his four against the best of his rival's four, leaving to the judges the selection. Thus the Hippolytus would be declared the winner in its group and attain special popularity, the others being only recorded in the didascaliæ, and read by students. If this was the principle of the competition, it would account for the dropping out of fashion of the satyric dramas, eight of which only were composed by Euripides, and the substitution of such melodramas as the Alcestis in their place, which were of sufficient importance to count in the competition, and perhaps to determine the prize. But this is only one more conjecture upon the meaning of the notice, that Sophocles introduced the fashion of contending, play against play—a statement simple enough, had not Euripides so constantly contended with tetralogies.