By this discourse, and others of the like nature, Socrates taught his friends that they were not only to forbear whatever was impious, unjust, or unbecoming before men; but even, when alone, they ought to have a regard to their actions; since the gods have their eyes continually upon us, and none of our designs can be concealed from them.
EURIPIDES.
Euripides flourished about 450 B.C.; was born 480 B.C. He spent his youth in the highest mental and physical training. He was a native of Athens, and enjoyed the most glorious days of her annals, being brought in direct connection with Æschylus and Sophocles, and in his older days was a pupil of Socrates.
In comparing Euripides and the other two masters in Grecian tragedy, it may be said that he ranks first in tragic representation and effect; Sophocles first in dramatic symmetry and ornament; Æschylus first in poetic vigor and grandeur. Æschylus was the most sublime; Sophocles the most beautiful; Euripides the most pathetic. The first displays the lofty intellect; the second exercises the cultivated taste; the third indulges the feeling heart. Each, as it were, shows a fine piece of sculpture. In Æschylus, it is a naked hero, with all the strength, boldness, and dignity of olden time. In Sophocles and Euripides, it may be perhaps the same hero; but with the former, he has put on the flowing robes, the elegant address, and the soft urbanity of a polished age; with the latter, he is yielding to some melancholy emotion, ever heedless of his posture or gait, and casting his unvalued drapery negligently about him. They have been compared by an illustration from another art: "The sublime and daring Æschylus resembles some strong and impregnable castle situated on a rock, whose martial grandeur awes the beholder—its battlements defended by heroes, and its gates proudly hung with trophies." Sophocles appears with splendid dignity, like some imperial palace of richest architecture; the symmetry of the parts and the chaste magnificence of the whole delight the eye and command the approbation of the judgment. The pathetic and moral Euripides has the solemnity of a Gothic temple, whose storied windows admit a dim religious light, enough to show its high embowed roof, and the monuments of the dead which rise in every part, impressing our minds with pity and terror as emblems of the uncertain and short duration of human greatness, and with an awful sense of our own mortality.
ARISTOPHANES.
Very little is known about the life of Aristophanes. He was born about 444 B.C., and devoted himself to comic poetry. He wrote fifty-four plays, of which eleven are extant.
The comedies of Aristophanes are universally regarded as the standard of Attic writing in its greatest purity. His genius was vast, versatile, and original, and his knowledge of human nature surpassed by Homer and Shakspeare alone.
The noble tone of morals, the elevated taste, the sound political wisdom, the boldness and acuteness of the satire, the grand object, which is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and improving the condition of his country—all these are features in Aristophanes, which, however disguised, as they intentionally are, by coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest respect from every reader of antiquity. He condescended, indeed, to play the part of jester to the Athenian tyrant. But his jests were the vehicles for telling to them the soundest truths. They were never without a far higher aim than to raise a momentary laugh. He was no farce writer, but a deep philosophical politician; grieved and ashamed at the condition of his country, and through the stage, the favorite amusement of Athenians, aiding to carry on the one great common work, which Plato proposed in his dialogues, and in which all the better and nobler spirits of the time seem to have concurred as by a confederacy—the reformation of an atrocious democracy. There is as much system in the comedies of Aristophanes as in the dialogues of Plato. Every part of a vitiated public mind is exposed in its turn. Its demagogues in the Knights, its courts of justice in the Wasps, its foreign policy in the Acharnians, its tyranny over the allies in the Birds, the state of female society in the Sysistrate and the Ecclesiazusæ, and its corrupt poetical taste in the Frogs. No one play is without its definite object; and the state of national education, as the greatest cause of all, is laid open in the Clouds. Whatever light is thrown, by that admirable play, upon the character of Socrates, and the position which he occupies in the Platonic Dialogues—a point, it may be remarked, on which the greatest mistakes are daily made—it is chiefly valuable as exhibiting, in a short but very complete analysis, and by a number of fine Rembrandt-like strokes, not any of which must be overlooked, all the features of that frightful school of sophistry, which at that time was engaged systematically in corrupting the Athenian youth, and against which the whole battery of Plato was pointedly directed.