Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/16

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aversion for the class, which breaks out now and again into scornful expression in his plays.

His father resigned himself to the inevitable, and for a while the son hovered unsettled between literature and art. He painted, and would seem to have painted well, since a picture by him was long exhibited at Megara. He attended the lectures of the philosophers. Anaxagoras introduced him to physical, and Protagoras to moral science; he heard Prodicus discourse on rhetoric; and under the guidance of these teachers collected a library, one of the best of his day. So the years passed over the scholar-poet: spring after spring found him witnessing the grandeurs of Aeschylus, the splendours of Sophocles, and the ephemeral brilliance of those rivals whose dramas, utterly forgotten now, were sometimes esteemed by judges and spectators worthy to be preferred to theirs. How early he tried the wings of his inspiration we cannot tell; but we do know that the first play of his that obtained the honour of being represented in the great theatre at the spring festival of Dionysus appeared in the year 455 B.C., when Euripides was twenty-five years old. It is interesting to note that Aeschylus and Sophocles commenced their dramatic career, the former at twenty-six, the latter at twenty-eight years of age.

It seems advisable at this point to give, for the information of the general reader, some explanation of the circumstances attending the representation of a drama in Athens, so wholly different as they were from anything in our own experience. There was but one theatre; but it was