Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/149

 CHAPTER I. SECTION IV. EURIPIDES. JEschjlus ruft Titaner herauf und Gotter heruvter ; Sophocles filhrt anmuihifj der Ileldinnen lieih'n und Ilcroen; Endlich Euripides schwatzt ein sophistischer Rhetor am Marlde. A. W. SCHLEGEL. 01 fxhv yap dpxcuoL ttoKltlkQs eirocovv Xiyovras, ol 5e vvu prjropiKQs. Aeistoteles. Lile as many substances in nature, which are solid, do putrify and corrupt into worms; so it is the property of a good and sound knowledge, to putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and, as I may term them, vermiculate questions, lohich have indeed a hind of quickness, and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality. Bacon. EURIPIDES, the son of Mnesarchus, was born in the island of Salamis, on the day of the glorious sea-fight (b. c. 480) ^ His mother, Clito, had been sent over to Salamis with the other Athe- nian women when Attica was given np to the invading army of Xerxes 2; and the name of the poet, which is formed like a patro- nymic from the Euripus, the scene of the first successful resistance to the Persian navy, shows that the minds of his parents were full ^ Diog. Laert. II. 45 : 'r]P-^P9- ko-^^ V^ ofEWrjves evavp^axovv ev 'ZaXajuTui. Plutarch. Sympos. Vlll. i : irex^V xaO' rjv ripipav ol "EXXrjves irpi-^avTo tovs Il^pcras. Suid. The Parian marble places bis birth five years earlier, and we shall see in the passage of A.ulus Gellius, quoted below, that his age was not known with certainty while he was yet alive. 2 He belonged properly to the deme Phlyse of the Cecropid tribe, but he, perhaps, had some land in Salamis, and sometimes resided there. " Philochorus refert," says Aulus Gellius, "in insula Salaraine speluncam esse tetram et horriJam, quam nos vidimus, in qua Euripides tragoedias scriptitarit." Noct. Ait. xv. 20. (Whenever we have quoted no other authority, it will be presumed that we refer either to the life of Euripides by Thomas Magister, or to the anonymous life published by Elmsley, from the Ambrosian MS., and printed at the end of his edition of the Bacchce.) 9—2