νέος πόνοις δέ γ' οὐκ ἀγύμναστος φρένας.[69]
The lasting title to fame of Euripides consists in his having dealt with the deeper problems of life in a spirit which became permanent among the Greeks, so that his poems, like those of Menander, never lost their value as expressions of current philosophy. Nothing strikes the student of later Greek literature more strongly than this prolongation of the Euripidean tone of thought and feeling. In the decline of tragic poetry the literary sceptre was transferred to comedy, and the comic playwrights may be described as the true successors of Euripides. The dialectic method, degenerating into sophistic quibbling, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy by Menander, when the Athenians, after passing through their disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides. Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said once and for all, and well said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon important matters, and his sensitive, susceptible temperament repeated itself over and over again among his literary successors. The exclamation of Philemon that, if he could believe in immortality, he would hang himself to see Euripides, is characteristic not only of Philemon, but also of the whole Macedonian period of Greek literature.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Worsley's translation, Iliad, vol. i. p. 154.
[14] See vol. i. pp. 91-123.
Lo, if thou fain wouldst benefit the dead,
Or if thou seek to harm them, 'tis all one;
For they can feel no joy nor suffer pain,
Nathless high Nemesis is throned above us,
And Justice doth exact the dead man's due.
[16] See vol. i. pp. 372-435.
O Death, the savior, spurn me not, but come!
For thou alone of ills incurable
Art healer: no pain preyeth on the dead.