Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/154

 136 EURIPIDES. nitely better known than the two other great Tragedians ; for the more un-Greek and common-place and rhetorical and hair-splitting the former was, the more attractive was he likely to prove in an age when scholastic subtleties were mistaken for eloquence, minute distinctions for science, and verbal quibbles for sure evidences of proficiency in the ars artiuw}. We cannot wonder then that Dante, who calls his Latin Aristotle " the master of those that know'^," and an Italian version of Moralia " his own ethics^," should make no mention of ^schylus and Sophocles in his survey of the shades of departed poets, but should class the rhetorical Euripides, and the no less quibbling Agathon, among the greatest of the poets of Greece Bat if it be easy to explain how the quasi-philosophical character of Euripides gained him so much popularity among his less civilized contemporaries, the Sicilians and Macedonians, and among the semi-barbarous Europeans of the middle ages, we shall have still less difficulty in explaining how he came to be so unlike the two great writers who preceded him ; one of whom was in his later days the competitor of Euripides. We have already in- sisted at some length upon the connexion between the actors of Sophocles, jEschylus, and their predecessors, and the Homeric rhapsode. Now the rhapsodes were succeeded by a class of men whom, for want of a more definitive name, it has been customary to ^ In one form of verbal quibbling, the habit of punning on similar sounds, Euri- pides is not more responsible than ^schylus and Sophocles, and Shakspere has followed them in this respect. Valckenaer says {ad Phcen. p. 187) : " Amat Tragicus noster irvfioXoyeTp, atque ob earn insaniam merito quoque fuit a comicis irrisus." This exclusive censure of Euripides is answered by Lobeck (ad Soph. Aj. 430) ; see also Ehnsley on Eurip. Baccli. 508. And the practice is so common in all the trage- dians that it furnishes a constant problem for the ingenuity of translators, who are not always very happy in their substitutions of English for Greek in reproducing this play upon words. For instance, it is absurd in ^sch. Again. 671, to translate the play upon the name of Helen in the epithets kha.v<i, ^Xavdpos, eX^irToXis, by "a Hell to ships, a Hell to men, and a Hell to cities;" for this does not really recall the proper name: if we said "a knell to ships," &c. we should at any rate have a refer- ence to a common abbreviation of the name Helen (Nell). Similarly in Euripides, JBacchce, 367: Jlevdeiis S' ottws jult] ir^vdos elaoiaet dofiois rots o-otcri, might be rendered: "Take heed, lest Pentheus makes your mansion a pent-house of grief," instead of seeking a longer paraphrase. And a similar rendering might apply to v. 508. 2 Inf. IV. 131. ' Ivf. XI. 80, referring to Aristot. Eth. Vii, i. That Dante read Aristotle's Ethics in the Italian t.anslation of Taddeo d" Alderotto, surnamed Vljpjpocratista, may be inferred from the Convito, 1. 10, p. 39. 4 Pur gat. xxii. 106: Eurifide v' fe nosco e Anacreonte, Simonide, Agafone, e altri piile Greci che gik di lauro ornar la fronte.