Page:The Plays of Euripides Vol. 1- Edward P. Coleridge (1910).djvu/22

xvi, which makes the poet's mother a seller of herbs and not a very honest women either, no doubt served Aristophanes for many a good joke at his enemy's expense; but it should be borne in mind that this brilliant caricaturist's avowed object was to depreciate Euripides, and he certainly was not very careful what use he made of current scandal and perverted truth, so long as he could raise a laugh and amuse his audience. Similarly, too, the stories which make Euripides a man of dissolute habits, given up to vice and pursuing it throughout his life till it led him to a violent end, will be found, on examination, to rest on the flimsiest evidence, and probably originated in the prurient imagination of his numerous enemies or of readers who either misunderstood their author or too rashly inferred that they had found a key to his character in some isolated passage, considered without reference to its context.

Passing to better authenticated facts, it is recorded that the poet's father had him trained with extreme care to contend in the footrace at Olympia, but that after winning two prizes at less important games, he was rejected at Olympia on account of some technical difficulty connected with his age. From his own bitter remarks on the subject of athletes and their habits in some interesting fragments of a play, entitled "Autolycus," we may fairly infer that he carried away no very pleasant memories of that epoch in his life. Further, we learn that he applied himself to painting and sculpture, in the first of which arts he must have attained considerable proficiency, for pictures of his were exhibited at Megara many years after his death, and there are frequent allusions in his plays pointing to an intimate and appreciative acquaintance with this subject.

He was twice married, each time, it is said, unhappily; some indeed have gone so far as to refer the constant diatribes and sneers in his plays against women to his own personal experiences, forgetting perhaps, in their eagerness to