Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/13

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The traditional day of Euripides' birth was of all days that which should have most appropriately given light to a Greek patriot-poet's eyes, the day whereon, in 480 B.C., the great sea-fight of Salamis rolled away for ever the nightmare-dread of enslavement to Asian despotism, and assured to Greece the right to live thenceforth her own life, and to achieve her high intelledtual destiny. The child's first cry mingled with the triumphant cheers of the victorious crews and the rapturous thanksgivings of those in whose defence they had fought—of the old fathers, the helpless women and children, huddled together in the little rugged isle of Salamis.

His father was named Mnesarchus (or Mnesarchides), his mother Kleito. They must have been wealthy, for their son possessed not only considerable property, which no man could have made by literature, but also, what was especially rare then, a valuable library. They must have been well-born, for it is on record that Euripides took a prominent part as a boy in certain festivals of Apollo for which anyone of mean birth would have been ineligible. But because, as it would seem, some of the surplus produce from their country property occasionally appeared in the Athenian market, what may have been a light jest at the time was by the malice of Aristophanes perverted (some forty or fifty years later) into a persistent allegation that Euripides' mother was a vegetable-hawker.

The poet's childhood was passed amid scenes which were in themselves an inspiration. He watched while, day by day, from the ruins of that Athens which the Persians had made a heap of ashes, there rose a new city, greater, stronger, and more beautiful by far than that for which the men of Marathon and Salamis had fought. Athens had by her warlike enterprise become the head of the confederacy which the Ionian seaboard states and islands formed for