The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry: Lectures Delivered in 1892 on the Percy Turnbull Memorial Foundation in the Johns Hopkins University

THE victory at Salamis, in which Aeschylus took part as a soldier, and which Sophocles, as leader of the boy-chorus, helped to celebrate, marks the birth-year of Euripides. Like Aeschylus, he competed for the tragic prize at the age of twenty-five, but had to wait many years before he gained it. His first success was in 441, when he was thirty-nine; and in a career of nearly half a century that success was only four times repeated. To the end of his days he was the butt of Attic Comedy, which, besides ridiculing his plays, propagated all manner of stories concerning his private life. He was a lonely man, a student and a thinker, who lived in seclusion, -- a strong contrast, here, to Aeschylus the soldier and Sophocles the man of affairs. It was an old tradition that he had fitted up a place of study in a cave on the shore of Salamis, where he used to work, looking out upon the sea; and much of his imagery is taken, not indeed from the sea itself, but from the life of seafarers. He was a friend of Anaxagoras, to whom he has paid a beautiful tribute (fr. 910, ολßιος κ.τ.λ.). His management of controversy bears the impress of Protagoras. No tradition associates him with the circle of

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