Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/416

386 gone, Sophocles dwells after all as much upon its baleful influence as upon its charm.

(B.C. 480–406), nearly contemporary with Sophocles, represents a different development of the drama. He is less confined to well-known and familiar subjects of mythology. His language is more careless of the conventional tragic style. He shows clearer signs of having been influenced by philosophical speculations in physics, religion, and morals, as well as by the fashionable study of rhetoric. His critics accused him of weakening the reverence for the gods, of dangerous moral teaching, of lowering the dignity of tragedy by representing heroic figures in mean or sordid circumstances, and particularly of maligning the character of women. Notably Aristophanes attacks him fiercely as a mere sophist, miserable as an artist, and harmful as a moralist, the apostle of modern scepticism, patron of quibbling and disingenuous arguments. Notwithstanding such attacks it seems certain that Euripides was the most popular of the three dramatists, that his plays and their choric songs were widely known and loved. Still Euripides was an innovator in many respects, and had to bear the fate of those who swerve from recognised paths. His heroes and heroines are human, their language is the language of common life, and the choruses in many cases do not form constituent parts of the play. They become as it were interludes between the scenes, and might sometimes be omitted without loss to the development of the plot. At one period of his life he was doubtless fond of putting in the mouth of his