Page:Masterpieces of Greek Literature (1902).djvu/221

EURIPIDES EURRPIDES, the last of the "tragic triad of immortal fames," was born on the island of Salamis in 480 B. c, the year of the famous battle there. Whether he was born, as tradition says, on the very day of the battle, is uncertain, but the story at least gives us a chain with which to bind together the three poets : Aeschylus fought at Marathon in 490 and at Salamis in 480 B. c, Sophocles led the paean of thanksgiving for the battle of Salamis, and in the year of that battle Euripides was born.

Unlike the other two, Euripides took no part in public affairs, but spent his life in seclusion and study. He died in 406 B. c. (the same year as Sophocles), in Macedonia, where he had lived some years at the court of King Archelaus.

" Euripides is the mediator between ancient and modern drama." During the fifth century a change had come over the spirit of the Athenian people which made natural a change in the dramas presented to them. Their faith in their national religion, which was the foundation of all their dramatic art, was undermined, and their interest in mythical stories thereby lessened. The heroes of the old tales no longer excited interest of themselves, and could be made to do it only by being endowed with more realism, having their joys and sorrows and human passions portrayed more vividly than ever before. Euripides saw this need, and supplied it by drawing men not as they should be, as Sophocles said he himself had done, but as they actually were. For this innovation, necessary and right as it was, he was severely criticised by the conservative among his contemporaries, notably by the poet Aristophanes, who be-