That with Sophocles the dramatic art of Greece reached its culminating point of perfection, and that Euripides led, if he did not precipitate, its decadence, that he banished the ideal from his stage, that he was sensational, sophistical, sceptical, that he tried to compensate for poverty of construction by florid elaboration of detail—these are still almost the commonplaces, the preliminary axioms, of comparative dramatic criticism with certain Greek scholars. It is no part of my intention here to combat these views in detail. The translator who introduces an author to the English reader thereby invites him to judge for himself, but at the same time to bear in mind that the original is everywhere noble, felicitous, and musical to a degree to which no translator can hope to attain. The reader who has heard that Schlegel called the Electra "of all Euripides' plays the very vilest," may examine for himself the work, a few lines of which paralysed the hands uplifted to destroy conquered Athens. When Donaldson stigmatizes him as "a bad citizen and an unprincipled man, a dramatist who degraded the moral and religious dignity of his own sacred profession," it is sufficient to ask the reader to find, if he can, in the poet's own pages a justification for such a diatribe.
But, as the general reader can hardly be aware how very modern a thing is this revised estimate of Euripides, to how large an extent it is coeval with this age of emendation and philological study of classical texts, it seems not out of place, while giving a brief account of his life and work, to dwell a little on the view taken of him in times when spectators and readers had far more complete data for forming a correct judgment than we can ever hope to have, to show how widely this view extended and how long it prevailed, and to suggest some explanation of this latter-day tendency to reverse the verdict of the ages.
