Page:Measuring Euripides.djvu/13

 tragedy, although Euripides is not so merciless a slaughterer of his cast as were the Elizabethan dramatists. But we are not prepared for so many allusions to politics, to family life, to social classes and problems, especially concerning women, and to intellectual interests, as we find in his tragedies.

These four categories of political, domestic, social, and intellectual life are then those to which after religion and ethics Euripides gives most space and attention. But it is very remarkable that of economic matters he says little or nothing. Business and industry pass practically unnoticed in all his eighteen plays and 1091 genuine fragments. Of ordinary daily life in the family he has something to say. He has many passages considering slavery from the social standpoint. He alludes occasionally to the fine arts and to athletics, once directly attacking athletes in a passage twenty-eight lines long, and he refers still more frequently to medicine and music. But of the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth in his time, of the different occupations and means of livelihood, he says very little, even incidentally. Yet he lived and wrote in the richest and busiest city, the greatest commercial and naval power of the Mediterranean. It is true that several allusions to men who sail the sea in an insatiate desire for wealth, and a number of metaphors drawn from maritime life; show that familarity with and love of the sea which runs through Greek literature from the Odyssey down. But such allusions to ships and sea trade make up most of his at all specific allusions to business pursuits. In two of his tragedies he speaks of the gods having caused wars between men to relieve over-population, but even this distant approach to assigning an economic cause for wars is introduced as if a rather novel idea, and illustrates the fact that men of the past attributed many things to divine interference which we trace to economic or natural causes.

Artisans are scarcely mentioned by him; only once or twice is there an allusion to a carpenter or some such workman. Nor is agricultural economy really discussed, though peasant and pastoral life occasionally appear in the background. There are, it is true, numerous passages about wealth, but all these discuss it from the moral, not the economic standpoint, arguing concerning the uses and limitations of riches, asking whether money is essential to happiness, and whether poverty or the possession of wealth is more conducive to the development of moral character. Wealth is often extolled, sometimes, however, cynically, while in many other passages it is scorned in comparison with other moral and social values.

It can scarcely be argued that it was regard for the dignity of the tragic stage which restrained Euripides from portraying