Page:Measuring Euripides.djvu/8

 study only those things and men of the past that have a connection with the present; for he always has been recognized as the most modern in spirit of the three great Greek tragedians, and in my opinion he has made contributions to our modern thought exceeded among extant Greek writers only by those of a few thinkers like Plato and Aristotle.

Eighteen out of perhaps a hundred plays by Euripides have come down to us as against seven each for his predecessor Aeschylus and his contemporary Sophocles. The fragments that have been preserved from his lost plays fill 260 pages in Nauck's edition as against 180 pages occupied by the fragments of Sophocles and only 98 taken up by those of Aeschylus. These statistics indicate that Euripides was more prized by posterity than his two fellows; and the greater bulk of his extant writings gives us a better notion of the range and character of his art and thought. At the same time, the recurrence of the same thoughts in the different plays, and again in the fragments, convinces us that what we do possess of his writings is enough from which to form a pretty correct idea of his writings as a whole. His fragments, I perhaps should say, have been preserved for us chiefly in the anthologies or florilegia of Byzantine writers, and in citations and quotations by authors of the Roman period like Cicero and Plutarch, or by the early church fathers.

I shall not consider Euripides' plays as artistic wholes, but shall tear them to pieces and classify the ideas that I find in them. For they are full of sententious utterances and of pithy sentences expressing opinions or conclusions concerning various problems of human life and interests of mankind. They give us then some measure of the number and kind of ideas and mental queries that a Greek mind harbored 2300 years ago,—some picture of the psychology of a Hellene. And for our purpose it does not much matter what Euripides' own convictions were, whether he agreed with this utterance of one of his characters, or did, not approve of that. Even if he is sarcastic, it must be at the expense of someone's thought; even if he be insincere, the conception stated is none the less clearly in existence. What we want to discover is what anybody and what everybody was thinking about then, what their social and moral standards were, what their prejudices and errors and superstitions were, too. Thus the advantage in making a dramatist the basis of our investigation becomes obvious. For we listen not to one past poet or philosopher, but to a stageful of different personalities. Thus we may hope to learn varied views and obtain something approaching a consensus of opinion.

We must of course bear in mind that there were great differences between the Greek drama and modern plays. A Greek tragedy was a sort of cross between a performance of Grand Opera, a medieval miracle play, and a modern church service,