As he possessed the powers for accomplishing this valuable purpose in an eminent degree, his writings became the subject of universal applause and admiration with his countrymen. Indeed the effects that are related to have been produced by his compositions, are so prodigious as almost to stagger belief. His verses were in the mouths of persons in all countries in which the Greek language was spoken; if prisoners pleaded their cause in his words, they were dismissed with freedom; and it is an historical fact that the unfortunate Greeks who had accompanied Nicias in his expedition against Syracuse, and were enslaved in Sicily, obtained their liberty by repeating some appropriate verses taken from one of his tragedies.
Sophocles was the great object first of his imitation, and then of his envy and jealousy. In order to enable himself to contest the palm of superiority with that great poet, Euripides frequently withdrew from the haunts of men, and confined himself in a solitary cave near Salamis, where he composed and finished some of the most excellent of his tragedies. The full vein of philosophy which pervaded his dramatic compositions, obtained for him the name of the philosophic poet, and so loudly did fame proclaim his extraordinary excellence, that Socrates, who never before visited the theatre, went constantly to attend the tragedies of Euripides. Alexander admired him beyond all other writers—Demosthenes confessed that he had learned declamation from his works, and when Cicero was assassinated, the works of Euripides were found clutched in his hands.
Together with this rare and felicitous genius, Euripides enjoyed the blessing of a firm undaunted spirit, a great and bold dignity, and a courage which nothing could shake. During the representation of one of his tragedies, the audience took offence at some lines in the composition and immediately ordered him to strike them out of the piece. Euripides took fire at their presumption, and indignantly advancing forward on the stage told the spectators that “he came there to instruct them, and not to receive instruction.” Another time on the first representation of a new play, the audience expressed great dissatisfaction at a speech in which he called “riches the summum bonum, and the admiration of gods and men.” The poet stepped forward, reproved the audience for their hasty conclusion, and magisterially desired them to listen to the play with the silent attention that was due to it, and they would in the end find their error, as the catastrophe would show them the just punishment which attended the lovers of wealth. The last of these anecdotes is a proof of the moral excellence and chastity, which the Grecian poets were constrained to observe in their public compositions.
Of seventy-five tragedies which this admirable poet wrote and had represented, nineteen only are in existence. The best of those are his Phœnissæ, his Orestes, Medea, Andromache, Electra, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris, Hercules, and the Troades.
Euripides is particularly happy in expressing the passion of love, especially when it is exalted to the most lively, ardent tenderness. His pieces are not so perfect as those of Sophocles, but they are more replete with those exquisite beauties which strike the heart with the electrical fire of poetry, and his language is more soft and persuasive. The drama is on the whole, however, much more indebted to Sophocles, to whom Aristotle, who is certainly the very highest authority, gives the precedence in point of general arrangement, disposition of parts, and characteristic manner, and indeed in style also.
The most obvious point of inferiority in Euripides is the choice of his subjects, which are charged with meanness and effeminacy; while Sophocles and Æschylus chose for theirs the most dignified and noble passions. He has moreover given very disgraceful pictures of the fair sex, making women the contrivers, the agents, and the instruments of the most impure and diabolical machinations. This unjust perversion was attributed to a hatred he had to women, which occasioned him to be called μισογυνης, or the woman-hater; but this he sturdily refuted by insisting that in those bad characters he had faithfully copied the nature of the sex. Notwithstanding this, he was married twice; but was so injudicious in his choice of wives, that he was compelled to divorce both. In his person Euripides was noble and majestic, and in his deportment grave and serious.
No poet ever took more pains than Euripides in polishing and perfecting his tragedies. He composed very slow, and laboured his periods with the greatest care and difficulty; anticipating the valuable instructions long afterwards given by Horace to poets. A wretched author, whose heart was as malicious as his poetry was miserable, once sarcastically observed that he had written a hundred verses in three days, while Euripides had written only three. “True,” replied Euripides, “but there is this difference between your poetry and mine; yours will expire in three days, but mine will live for ages.”
The disputes between Sophocles and our poet, the jealousy and envy of his great fame and endowments, and, as some say, the resentment of the female part of Athens, subjected him to a degree of ridicule and rancorous invective, which induced him to leave Athens; when he went into Macedonia, and lived at the court of king Archelaus, who considered it an honour to patronise such a great poet, bestowing upon him the most conspicuous marks of his friendship and munificence, and even carrying his esteem and admiration so far, as to make him his prime minister. This dignified office Euripides held when he lost his life, in a manner the most cruel and horrible that can be conceived.
In one of his solitary walks, in a wood to which he had been accustomed to repair every evening, for the purpose of uninterrupted contemplation, a pack of dogs belonging to the king set upon him and tore him to pieces in the seventy-eighth year of his age. So extraordinary and deplorable a death naturally gave rise to a multitude of conjectures, and, of course, not very charitable ones. By some, the creatures of Archelaus’s court who hated him as a successful rival, and envied him the high favours bestowed upon him by the king, were suspected of having purposely procured the dogs to be let loose upon, in order to destroy him: a conjecture not at all probable. By others again it has been suggested that he was torn to pieces by women in revenge for his black pictures of the sex: a still more improbable conjecture, and probably borrowed from the fate of Orpheus; but which still serves to show how little kindness he was thought to deserve from the women; while others more rationally concluded that his encountering the dogs and their attacking him, was purely an accidental circumstance; and that having in the abstraction and absence of mind, attendant upon very profound meditation, encroached upon some part of the palace grounds, which the dogs were appointed to guard, he found his mistake too late to escape from their fury.
Sophocles outlived Euripides about a year, leaving behind him no one capable of improving, or even of tolerably supporting the tragic stage of Greece. The hopes of the Grecian drama was buried in the grave along with him. Of those who succeeded him we know nothing; nor should we know that any did succeed, if the history of Aristophanes did not inform us, that there were such, who served only as butts for his malevolent wit.