(E. G.)
EUPION (Gr. εὖ, well, πίων, fat), a hydrocarbon of the paraffin series, probably a pentane, C5H12, discovered by K. Reichenbach in wood-tar. It is also formed in the destructive distillation of many substances, as wood, coal, caoutchouc, bones, resin and the fixed oils. It is a colourless highly volatile and inflammable liquid, having at 20° C. a specific gravity of 0.65.
EUPOLIS (c. 446-411 B.C.), Athenian poet of the Old Comedy, flourished in the time of the Peloponnesian War. Nothing whatever is known of his personal history. With regard to his death, he is said to have been thrown into the sea by Alcibiades, whom he had attacked in one of his plays, but it is more likely that he died fighting for his country. He is ranked by Horace (Sat. i. 4, 1), along with Cratinus and Aristophanes, as the greatest writer of his school. With a lively and fertile fancy Eupolis combined a sound practical judgment; he was reputed to equal Aristophanes in the elegance and purity of his diction, and Cratinus in his command of irony and sarcasm. Although he was at first on good terms with Aristophanes, their relations subsequently became strained, and they accused each other, in most virulent terms, of imitation and plagiarism. Of the 17 plays attributed to Eupolis, with which he obtained the first prize seven times, only fragments remain. Of these the best known were: the Kolakes, in which he pilloried the spendthrift Callias, who wasted his substance on sophists and parasites; Maricas, an attack on Hyperbolus, the successor of Cleon, under a fictitious name; the Baptae, against Alcibiades and his clubs, at which profligate foreign rites were practised. Other objects of his attack were Socrates and Cimon. The Demoi and Poleis were political, dealing with the desperate condition of the state and with the allied (or tributary) cities.
Fragments in T. Kock, Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta, i. (1880).
EUPOMPUS, the founder of the great school of painting which flourished in the 4th century at Sicyon in Greece. He was eclipsed by his successors, and is chiefly remembered for the advice which he is said to have given to Lysippus to follow nature rather than any master.
EURASIAN, a term originally confined to India, where for upwards of half a century it was used to denote children born of Hindu mothers and European (especially Portuguese) fathers. Following the geographical employment of the word Eurasia to describe the whole of the great land mass which is divided into the continents of Europe and Asia, Eurasian has come to be descriptive of any half-castes born of parents representing the races of the two continents. It has further an ethnological sense, A.H. Keane (Ethnology, 1896) proposing to find in the Eurasian Steppe the true home of the primitive Aryan groups. Joseph Deniker (Anthropology, 1900) makes a Eurasian group to include such peoples (Ugrians, Turko-Tatars, &c.) as are represented in both continents. Giuseppe Sergi, in his Mediterranean Race (London, 1901), uses Eurasiatic to denote that variety of man which “brought with it into Europe (from Asia in the later Neolithic period) flexional languages of Aryan or Indo-European type.”