The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]

It was not without reason that Aristophanes, in common with all Athenians who loved and regretted the ancient times, regarded the sophistical circles with abhorrence, not only as seminaries of demagogues and sycophants, but as schools of impiety and licentiousness. That the attention of the Athenian youth should be diverted from military and athletic exercises, from the sports of the field, and from the enjoyment of that leisure which had once been esteemed the most precious privilege of a Greek freeman, to sedentary studies, which at the best only inflated them with self-conceit, and stimulated them to lay aside the diffidence which befitted their age, and come forward prematurely in public, to exhibit their new acquirements and to supplant the elder and graver citizens on the bema, or to harass them before the popular tribunals: this in itself he deemed a great evil.

In the last scene of the Knights, one of the resolutions which Demos adopts is that he will bar the agora and the Pnyx against the beardless youths who now pass so much of their time in places of public resort, where they amuse themselves with discussing the merits of the orators in technical language, and will force them to go a-hunting, instead of making decrees. But it was a still more alarming evil, that, by way of preparation for this pernicious result, the religious belief of the young Athenians should be unsettled, their moral sentiments perverted, their reverence for the maxims and usages of antiquity extinguished; that subjects which had never before been contemplated but at an awful distance—the being and nature of the gods, the obligations arising from domestic and civil relations—should be submitted to close and irreverent inspection. It was according to the view of Aristophanes a matter of comparatively little moment, what turn such discussions happened to take, or what was the precise nature of the sophistical theories. The mischief was already done, when things so sacred had once been treated as subjects for inquiry and argument. But he perceived the evil much more clearly than the remedy. He would fain have carried his countrymen half a century backward, and have forced them to remain stationary at the stage which they had then reached in their intellectual progress; and it seems as if he wished to see the schools of the new philosophy forcibly suppressed, and with this view attempted to direct popular indignation against them. The only case in which this attempt succeeded was one in which the poet himself, if he had been better informed, must have desired it should fail.

EURIPIDES

Aristophanes closely watched all the workings of the sophistical spirit, and was sagacious enough to perceive that they were not confined to any particular sphere, but pervaded every province of thought and action. He was naturally led to observe its influence with peculiar attention in the branches of literature or art which were most nearly allied to his own. He was able to trace it in the innovations which had taken place in music and lyrical poetry, but above all in the tragic drama: and Euripides, the last of the three tragic poets who are known to us by their works, appeared to him as one of the most dangerous sophists, and was on this account among the foremost objects of his bitterest ridicule. The earnestness with which Aristophanes assailed him seems to have increased with the growth of his reputation; for of the three comedies in which he is introduced, the last, which was exhibited after his death, contains by far the most severe as well as elaborate censure of his poetry. It is not however quite certain that Euripides, even in the latter part of his career, was so popular as Sophocles. In answer to a question of Socrates, in a conversation which Xenophon probably heard during the latter part of the Peloponnesian War, Sophocles is mentioned as indisputably the most admirable in his art.

It has often been observed, that the success of Euripides, if it is measured by the prizes which he is said to have gained, would not seem to have been very great: and perhaps there may be reason to suspect, that he owed much of the applause which he obtained in his life-time to the favour of a party, which was strong rather in rank and fortune than in numbers; the same which is said to have been headed by Alcibiades, and to have deprived Aristophanes of the prize.

Alcibiades employed Euripides to celebrate his Olympic victories; and his patronage was sufficient to spread the poet’s fame at home and abroad. The anecdote about the celebrity which he had acquired in Sicily is perfectly consistent with this view; as is the invitation which he received a little before his death from Archelaus of Macedon, at whose court he ended his life; and the admiration which Dionysius of Syracuse expressed for him, by buying his tablets and pen at a high price, to dedicate them in the temple of the Muses.