Page:The Plays of Euripides Vol. 1- Edward P. Coleridge (1910).djvu/21



S with so many other authors of classical antiquity, considerable obscurity veils the details of Euripides' life; nor is it easy in the case of a dramatist, to gather from chance utterances, spoken in character, the real sentiments of the writer on any particular subject.

It is true that, apart from the numerous unfounded scandals and legends which invariably surround any person of eminence, certain broad facts regarding his life stand out with tolerable clearness; but, for the rest, we are thrown back upon conjecture based upon the weak evidence of later writers or the gossip and undisguised malice of contemporary opponents.

Taking, first, the few details which are regarded as tolerably certain, we are informed that he was born in B.C. 480, on the very day of the battle of Salamis, and in the island itself, though others place his birth five years earlier. His parents must have been wealthy people, and not improbably of some rank, for their son was not only able to attend the expensive lectures of Prodicus, Anaxagoras, and other famous sophists and teachers of the day, but also held in his youth certain offices, for which none but the nobly born seem to have been eligible. As for the scandalous attacks and ribald jests of the comic poets of the period regarding his mother and her antecedents, the evidence of their having any foundation in fact is so very slight that we may dismiss them without serious consideration. The legend, for