837 



EUPOLIS. 



EURIPIDES. 



artists ; he was the contemporary of Apelles and Praxiteles, and 

 flourished during the second half of the 4th century before Christ, 

 from about B.C. 360 to 320. He was equally celebrated as painter and 

 as statuary, and, says Pliny, was in all things excellent, and at all times 

 equal to himself. Euphranor, continues Pliiiy, was the first to repre- 

 sent heroes with dignity ; and first used symmetry, where symmetry 

 probably means as much a general keeping of design as correctness of 

 proportions. One peculiarity of bis design was a large and muscular 

 limb in proportion to the body. It was this character of his figures 

 probably, as well as colour, that he alluded to, when he said, in 

 reference to two pictures of Theseus by Parrhasius and by himself, 

 that his own had fed upon beef, while that of Parrhasiua had been 

 fed upon roses : the picture of Euphranor probably resembling more 

 nearly the figure of a Qreek athlete, while that of Parrhasius was 

 more in accordance with the ideal form of a divinity, aa we find 

 them expressed in the Theseus of the Parthenon and the Apollo 

 Belvedere respectively, and in many other Qreek statues. [PARRHASIUS.] 

 There are notices of many of Eupbranor's works both in painting and 

 in sculpture. He painted in encaustic. There were three noble 

 picture* by him at Ephesua a group of philosophers in consultation, 

 clothed in the pallium; a general sheathing his sword, probably a 

 portrait ; and the feigued insanity of Ulysses. His most celebrated 

 works however were a picture of the ' Twelve Gods,' and a ' Battle 

 of Maotmea,' painted in the Ceramicus at Athens. The latter was 

 painted, according to Plutarch, with a degree of inspiration ; it repre- 

 sented Gryllus, the son of Xenophon, at the head of some Athenian 

 horse, defeating the Boeotians under Epaminondas, who is said to hare 

 been slain by Qryllug : Plutarch, Pliny, and Pausanias call it a cavalry 

 fight : it took place B.C. 362. Euphranor' a moat celebrated work iu 

 sculpture was a statue of Paris, which was praised, says Pliny, for 

 showing at the same time the judge of the goddesses, the lover of 

 Helen, and even the slayer of Achilles. Pliny mentions also several 

 statues by Euphranor, which were at Rome. He left writings on 

 symmetry and on colours. (Pliny, Hist. Nat., xxxiv. 8, 19 ; xxxv. ii. 

 40 ; Quintilian, Jail. Orator., xii. 10, 3; Plutarch, De Glor. At/un., 2 ; 

 Pausanias, i. 3; Eustathius, Ad Iliad., i. 529; Valerius Maximus, 

 viii. ii. 5.) 



EU'POLIS, a writer of the old comedy, was born at Athens about 

 the year B.C. 446 (Clinton's 'Fasti Hellenic!,' ii. p. 63), and was there- 

 fore a contemporary of Aristophanes, who was in all probability born 

 a year or two after. The time and manner of his death are involved 

 in great obscurity. It is generally said that he was thrown overboard 

 by the orders of Alcibiades, when that general waa on his way to 

 Sicily in B.C. 415, because Eupolis had ridiculed him iu his comedy 

 of the ' Bapta) ; ' but this story, which is sufficiently improbable in 

 itself, was refuted by Eratosthenes, who brought forward some 

 comedies which he had written subsequently to that period (Cicero, 

 'ad Attic.' vi. 1); besides, bis tomb was, according to Pausanias (ii. 

 7, 3), on the banks of the Asopus, in the territory of the Sicyonians. 

 Another account states that he fell in a sea-fight in the Hellespont, 

 and that he was buried in ^Egina. We have the names of twenty- 

 four of Displays, but no adequate specimens of them. To judge from 

 the titles, the object of Eupolis must have been, in almost every case, 

 mere personal satire. The ' Maricas,' which appeared in B.C., 421 was 

 an attack upon Hyperbolus, the demagogue ; the Autolycus (B.C. 420) 

 was intended to ridicule a handsome paucratiast of that name, who is 

 the hero of Xenophon's 'Symposium;' the 'Lacedaemonians' was 

 directed against the political opinions of Cimon ; and the object of 

 the ' Bapta! ' was to ridicule Alcibiades for taking part in the obscene 

 rites of Cotytto. (See Buttmann's ' Essay on tbe Cotyttia and the 

 Bapttc, Mythologus,' ii. p. 159, Ac.) Aristophanes and Eupolis were 

 not upon good terms. Aristophanes speaks very harshly of his 

 brother poet in the ' Clouds ' (551, 4c.), and charges him with having 

 pillaged from 'The Knights' the materials for his 'Maricas;' and 

 Eupolis in his turn made jokes on the baldness of the great comedian 

 (SchoL on ' The Clouds,' 532). Eupolis published his first play when 

 he was only seventeen years old (buidas). 



EURI'PIDES of Athens is said to have been born at Salamis in tbe 

 year B.C. 480, on the day of the great victory obtained over the fleet 

 of Xerxes. His father Mnesarchus and his mother Clito were among 

 the refugees driven to Salamis by the progress of the invading army. 

 They seem to have been Athenian citizens of the poorer class, as we 

 find that the mean occupation of this poet's mother was made by 

 Aristophanes one of the standing subjects of the ridicule which he so 

 peraeveringly heaped upon him. Philochorug, on the contrary, says 

 that he was of noble birth ; but still his parents might be poor. 

 (Suidas, EupnriSej). Euripides however found means to devote him- 

 self early and closely to the study of philosophy in the school of 

 Anaxagoras, as well as to that of eloquence unuer Prodicus. While 

 lie waa yet very young, the persecution and banishment of Anaxagoras 

 appear to have deterred him from the cultivation of philosophy as a 

 profession, and combined with the strong natural bent of his genius 

 to have directed his exertions chiefly to dramatic composition. He is 

 said to have commenced writing at the age of eighteen ; and in the 

 course of a long life he composed not fewer than seventy-five, or, 

 according to other authorities, ninety-two tragedies, which rivalled in 

 the public approbation the contemporary productions of Sophocles ; 

 a nd notwithstanding the constant and bitterly satirical attacks which 



in the author's own time, they sustained from such as were exclusively 

 and intolerantly attached to the elder tragic school, they secured him 

 for all succeeding ages a place beside its two great masters. When* 

 upwards of seventy years old, weary, it should seem, of the feverish 

 excitement in which he must have been kept alike by the petulant 

 criticism and the turbulent applause that attended him at Athens, he 

 accepted the invitation of Archelaus, king of Macedon, and went to 

 live in honoured and tranquil retirement at his court. Here however 

 a singular as well as tragical end awaited him. According to one 

 account (for, in this as in many other matters of ancient biography, 

 there are discrepancies), he had spent three years in this retreat, when 

 walking one day in a solitary spot, he was met by some of the king's 

 hounds, which, rushing furiously upon him, tore him so violently that 

 he died in consequence of the laceration. Aulus Gellius tells us that 

 the Athenians sent to Macedon to ask for the body of Euripides, but 

 that the Macedonians constantly refused it, in order that their own 

 country might retain the honour of the magnificent toinb which they 

 erected for him at Pella, and which, according to Ammianus Mar- 

 cellinus, was sanctified by the thunder-stroke, as Plutarch informs us 

 had been the case with Lycurgus. Thus Athens was obliged to con- 

 tent herself with engraving the name of Euripides upon an empty 

 monument, which in the time of Pausanias was yet standing beside 

 the road from the Pirteus to Athena (Pausan., ' Attic." 1, 2), near the 

 tomb of Menander. 



Of the numerous tragedies of Euripides, nineteen survive a much 

 larger proportion than has descended to us of the works of either of 

 the two elder tragic masters. We may point out his 'Electra' to the 

 reader's attention, not as a favourable specimen of the general powers 

 of Euripides for indeed, as a work of art it is decidedly one of the 

 east meritorious of his extant pieces but as affording the clearest 

 >oint of comparison between his most prominently distiuctive featurea 

 is a dramatist and those of his two great predecessors ; this being the 

 only instance in which we have a piece from each of the three com- 

 posed upon one and the same historical or mythological subject. 

 Orestes,' the subject of which, inasmuch as it relates to the persecu- 

 tion of that hero by the furies of his mother and his proscription as 

 a matricide, is the same as that of the ' Eumenides ' of yEschylus, 

 though in scene, incident, and character, excepting that of Orestes 

 limself, they are wholly different, is more vigorous and more affecting 

 than the ' Electra.' ' Iphigenia in Tauris ' and ' Andromache' follow 

 out still farther the fortunes of Orestes; both rank among those pieces 

 of the second order in which the highest praise can be given only to 

 certain portions. The same may be said of the six following pieces : 

 the ' Troades,' the mournfully grand conclusion of which exhibits the 

 captive Trojan women leaving Troy in flames behind them ; ' Hecuba,' 

 relating to the subsequent history of the captive queen ; the ' Hercules 

 Furens,' or 'Raging Hercules;' the ' Phoenissse,' having the same 

 historical groundwork aa the 'Seven against Thebes' of ^Escbylus; 

 the ' Heraclidse," which celebrates the Athenian protection of the 

 children of Hercules, ancestors of the Lacedcemonian kings, from the 

 persecution of Eurystheus; and the ' Supplices,' which in like manner 

 commemorates the interment of the Seven before Thebes and their 

 army, effected, on behalf of Adrastus king of Argos, by a victory of 

 the Athenians over the Thebans. 'Helen' is a very entertaining and 

 singular drama, full of marvellous adventures and appearances, being 

 founded on the assertion of the Egyptian priests that Helen had iu 

 fact remained concealed in Egypt, while Paris had merely carried off 

 an airy semblance of her. The genuineness of ' Rhesus,' taken from 

 the eleventh book of the ' Iliad,' has been much disputed, chiefly on 

 the ground of its great relative inferiority au argument which is 

 outweighed by certain internal characteristics of the piece itself, com- 

 bined with the external testimony of the ancient writers ascribing it 

 to Euripides. For beautiful morality and unaffected yet overpowering 

 pathos, his ' Ion,' his ' Iphigeuia in Aulis,' and above all, his ' Alcestis,' 

 are peculiarly distinguished. He found subjects especially suited to 

 the development of his finer powers in the purity and sanctity of the 

 youth from whom the first of these three tragedies is named, in the 

 unsuspecting innocence of the heroine of the second, and in the tender 

 yet resolute devoteduess of connubial affection portrayed in the third. 

 The ' Hippolytus ' and the ' Medea,' exhibiting all the romantic violence 

 of irregular and vehement feminine passions, are deservedly celebrated 

 among the greatest and most thoroughly successful achievements of 

 this dramatist. After the ' Hippolytus,' Schlegel is disposed to assign 

 the next place among all the remaining works of Euripides to tho 

 'Bacchse,' on account of its harmonious unity, its well-sustained 

 vigour, and of the appropriateness to the very peculiar subject here 

 treated, of that luxuriance of ornament which Euripides constantly 

 displays. This piece also merits especial attention as being the only 

 one remaining of the 'serious' dramas that were composed expressly 

 and immediately in honour of Bacchus himself, the patron deity of tho 

 theatre. In this instance the glory and the power of Bacchus are not 

 merely the occasion they form the subject of the tragedy ; and the 

 wildly picturesque chorus of Bacchantes, as Schlegel observes, " repre- 

 sent the infectious and tumultuous inspiration of the worship of 

 Bacchus with great sensual power and vividness of conception." 



An interest yet more peculiar attaches to the ' Cyclops,' as being 

 the sole remaining specimen of the 'satyric' tragedy, so called from the ' 

 chorus of satyrs, which formed an essential part of its composition. 



