one of the most celebrated of the tragic poets of ancient Greece, was the son of Mnesarchus and Clito. The place, as well as the date, of his birth has been a subject of considerable dispute among scholars. By some authorities he is said to have been born at Athens, B.C. 485, and to have belonged to the Phylan demi of the Cecropid tribe; and in this opinion they are borne out by the testimony of the Arundel marbles. Others, again, maintain that in the second Persian invasion the parents of Euripides were in the number of those who, on the approach of Xerxes, fled from Athens and took refuge in Salamis; and that the future poet was born there on the very day that the great naval battle was fought and won by his countrymen, B.C. 480. This fact is pretty well authenticated, though it is somewhat suspicious that the Athenians were careful to identify their three great tragic poets with the most brilliant day in the annals of their history. Eschylus, they said, at this time in the vigour of manhood, took part in the engagement; Sophocles, a boy of fifteen, was one of the choir which celebrated the exploits of the victors at the festival given after the battle; and Euripides was born while the action was still undecided. If the authority of Eratos-thenes be admitted, who assigns the death of Euripides to the year 406 B.C., at which time he had reached his seventy-fifth year, the poet must have been born B.C. 481; and this date is adopted by Müller as the true one. It is almost equally difficult to discover the real social status of the poet's parents. It is said that his father Mnesarchus was an expatriated Theban; and Aristophanes, one of his bitterest enemies, asserts that his mother was a vendor of herbs, and a dishonest one, besides. These accounts may be safely rejected as false; but it is only inferentially that an approximation to the truth can be made. At the Thargalian festival he is known to have acted as cup-bearer to a chorus of noble Athenians engaged in its celebration; and as none but youths of good rank and family were admitted to this honour, it may be inferred that Euripides' origin was far from mean. His education also was entrusted to such masters as were highest in repute at that time in Athens; among others, it is said, to Prodicus, the fortune-hunting rhetorician of Ceos, who prided himself on having for his pupils none but the sons of noble families, or such at least as could afford to pay the exorbitant sums which he demanded for his instructions. In the gymnastic and other bodily exercises, then much in vogue in Greece, Euripides was at an early age trained with the greatest care. An oracle had declared that he would be crowned with sacred garlands, and much of the poet's youth was spent in the gymnasium with a view to distinction in athletic sports. At the early age of seventeen he offered himself as a competitor in the Olympic games, having already gained prizes at the Eleusinian and Thesean festivals. From some formal irregularity, however, he was not allowed to compete. To this early training is to be attributed that knowledge of athletic sports which the poet displays in his works, and which has been especially remarked (see Kehle's Academic Prelections, p. 605) in his account of the combat between Eteocles and Polynices. Abandoning these pursuits, he betook himself at the age of eighteen to the study of painting, in which he attained a respectable, though not a remarkable, proficiency. Soon finding, however, that pictorial art was not his sphere, he devoted himself to literature, continuing his philosophical studies under the guidance of Anaxagoras, the influence of whose doctrines is traceable in many portions of Euripides' works, and was especially apparent in the lost tragedy of Melanippus the Wise. While still in his eighteenth year he made his first essay as a tragic author, though it is not known with certainty either that the tragedy was one of those that have descended to us, or that it was played in the theatre at all. Hartung conjectures, though on insufficient grounds, that the drama in question was the Rhesus, and that it was publicly produced. The first that we know with certainty to have been played under the poet's own name was the Pelides, which appeared B.C. 455. Fourteen years after this date, B.C. 441, Euripides gained the first prize for the first time. Though persecuted with unrelenting bitterness during the whole period of his sojourn at Athens, and exposed to the merciless sarcasm and satire of the devotees of the elder tragic school, he contested the palm sometimes successfully with Sophocles, the greatest of its living representatives, till the year 408. Worn out at length by age, the rancour of the small wits of the day, and, it is said, the unhappiness of his domestic relations, he retired in that year to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, by whom he was treated during the remainder of his life with the utmost courtesy and kindness. He did not live long, however, to enjoy the honours paid him by his royal friend, as he died two years after leaving his native city, B.C. 406. No sooner had the poet breathed his last than his countrymen, obeying the usual law of nature so well propounded by Horace, that

Virtutem insolentum odimus Sublatae ex oculis queramus invidi,

instantly recognised the greatness of their loss, and sought to bestow upon the poet's ashes the honours which they had always denied to himself during his lifetime. They implored the Macedonians to restore his bones, that they might rest in his native land; but that people, who had already buried him with splendid obsequies, and erected a sumptuous monument in his honour at Pella, refused to comply, and the Athenians had to content themselves with a cenotaph. So great was the grief of his life-long rival Sophocles for his death, that at the representation of his next play he made his actors pay their parts uncrowned. The statue of the deceased poet was set up in the theatre, and a monument erected to his memory on the road leading from Athens to the Piraeus. His fame abroad was so great, that, as Xenophon records, many of his countrymen who fell into the hands of their enemies on the disastrous expedition against Sicily were released by their masters when it was discovered that they could repeat many of the verses of the illustrious tragedian. On another occasion a knowledge of Euripides stood some of his countrymen in good stead. An Athenian ship, pursued by pirates, had directed its course for Caunus; but the inhabitants of that town refused to admit it within its port, until it was discovered that some of the crew were familiar with the heart-reaching passages in the dramas of their newly deceased countryman.

Many stories are to be found in the ancient writers concerning the worthlessness of Euripides' moral character; but they rest on such doubtful authority, and are in their own nature so ridiculous, as to carry their refutation on their very face. It is said, for instance, that he was guilty of bigamy, though in his relations to the sex he is known to have been one of the most austere of men; and even the manner of his death has been distorted so as to countenance this slander. The received account is, that he was torn to pieces by the hounds of king Archelaus, which it is said were set upon him by two envious rivals whom he had eclipsed in the good opinion of that monarch. The scandal-mongers of the day, however, declared that he met his death at the hands of some women while on his way to a criminal assignation. He must have been vicious, indeed, if, at the age of seventy-five, he indulged in practices generally believed to characterize the Euripides. hot season of youth. It is not improbable that these reports owed their origin to the severity and even gloom of his disposition. These qualities were remarkably prominent in the character of his teacher Anaxagoras, and it is likely that, along with the doctrines of that philosopher, Euripides imbibed a good share of his moral attributes. The stories of his hatred of women are in reality as devoid of foundation as those which insist upon his personal profligacy. Certain it is, that whatever his personal predilections were in reference to the fair sex, his artistic tendencies led him to devote much time and minute observation to the study of female character. No poet of ancient or modern times, Shakspeare alone excepted, had a keener eye for the delicate and subtle phases of the female mind in all its moods; and it is hard to think that the author of such fine conceptions as Alcestis and Iphigenia should have been the victim either of unrequited love or (as has been alleged) of conjugal infidelity, while his native city abounded with the noblest archetypes of female character, which, under names supplied by the old mythology, he delighted to observe and portray.

Though it would be extremely unjust to rank Euripides among the atheists of antiquity, it is nevertheless true that in his ideas of the world and a future state he adopted the doctrines of his master, and superadded a tinge of pantheism. Disregarding the practice of his great predecessors, Eschylus and Sophocles, he not only evinced no sympathy with the religious system of his country, but sometimes ran so directly counter to it as to lay himself open to the charge of impiety. It is therefore in vain that we search the works of Euripides for those lofty aspirations and that noble faith which distinguish the tragedians of the early school, especially Eschylus, who, though as strongly convinced as Euripides of the historic worthlessness of the myths which made up the body of the popular religion, yet accepted them, and in so doing strove to develop their latent import, and thus indirectly elevate and refine the moral nature of the people. C. O. Müller, however, says truly concerning Euripides, "with respect to the mythical traditions which the tragic muse had selected as her subjects, he stands on an entirely different footing from Eschylus and from Sophocles. He could not bring his philosophical convictions, with regard to the nature of God and His relations to mankind, into harmony with the contents of these legends, nor could he pass over in silence their incongruities. Hence it is that he is driven to the strange necessity of carrying on a sort of polemical discussion with the very materials and subjects of which he had to treat."

Towards the close of his life Euripides acknowledged the inadequacy of his ethical creed, even for the requirements of his own moral nature, by renouncing it, and tacitly acquiescing in the established religion. Such was the only course open to him, and he adopted it as an escape from scepticism, just as some of the keenest and subtlest intellects of our own day have been obliged to seek refuge from rationalism, sometimes from utter unbelief, within the pale of the Roman Catholic communion. In this way he found rest for himself, but it was too late for him then to repair the injury he had done by unsettling the foundations of belief in the minds of his younger contemporaries. In a merely artistic point of view, moreover, the tragedies of Euripides afford a striking proof of the decay of the Athenian drama. The old mythology from which he drew his names and incidents is often altered and misapplied in the most arbitrary manner, and almost always so as to throw discredit or ridicule on ideas or persons invested by popular consent with all the respect and reverence willingly paid to old tradition. Thus in the Helena, one of the most entertaining of all his tragedies, he adopts the theory of Steichosorus, that the wife of Menelaus remained concealed in Egypt while Paris only carried off an airy phantom which bore a resemblance to her, and about which the Greeks and Trojans fought with each other for ten years. Menelaus himself is introduced upon the stage in rags (a favourite method with Euripides of treating his heroes, for which he was lashed by Aristophanes), and declaring himself perfectly satisfied. In the Alcestis, one of the most powerfully pathetic of ancient or modern plays, and to which Milton touchingly alludes in his famous sonnet—

Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, When Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, Reserved by force from death, though pale and faint—

"Jove's great son" is delineated more in the character of a glutton or a modern prize-fighter than as the son of Alcmena, whose life was spent in the service of the inhabitants of earth. Others of the plays exhibit still more glaring incongruities. In fact, as has been observed by Schlegel in his lecture on Euripides, "Though he frequently affects the singular and uncommon, he is at other times too familiar, and the tone of the discourse assumes a confidential appearance, and descends from the elevation of the cothurnus to the level ground. In this respect, as well as in the picture of several characteristic peculiarities bordering upon the ludicrous, Euripides was a precursor of the new comedy, to which he had an evident inclination, as he frequently paints the men and manners of his own times under the names of the heroic ages. Hence Menander expressed a most marked admiration for him, and proclaimed himself his scholar; and we have a fragment of Philemon, which displays such an extravagant admiration that it hardly appears to have been seriously meant. "If the dead," says he, "were still to have feeling, as some people suppose, I should hang myself for the sake of seeing Euripides." In a much-quoted passage, Aristotle declares that Euripides delineated men and manners as they are, and not as they ought to be. Though in this way the poet opened up to himself a much wider range, both of character and incident, than if he had limited himself to the old mythology, it is very questionable if he did not also lower the dignity of his art, the more especially as he chose for its vehicle the familiar parlance of everyday life. In thus bringing down his heroes to the level of his audience, he lost sight of the lofty aims to which tragedy had been directed by his predecessors. "How few of his pieces," says Schlegel, "turn on the constant struggle with the decrees of fate, or even on a heroic subjection to them. His characters generally suffer because they must, not because they will." Plato's dictum against tragic poets generally applies with peculiar force to Euripides. He said that they gave men too much up to the dominion of the passions, and rendered them effeminate by putting extravagant lamentations in the mouths of their heroes. It is not too much to say of Euripides, in particular, that the tendency of his plays is to seduce and corrupt the feelings by working on the more tender and susceptible emotions of the human breast. The excessive lengths to which he sometimes goes tend to produce a directly moral licentiousness. At other times he works out his catastrophes with such earnestness, and power, and pathos, that Aristotle pronounced him the most tragic of poets. He qualifies this judgment, however, by declaring in the next sentence that "he does not arrange other things well." Still the general impression of his pieces is sometimes extremely immoral. It may be that to this cause he owed part of his popularity; but he sometimes outstripped the modesty of nature, so far as to shock even his Athenian audience. This pandering to a depraved taste on more than one occasion involved him in serious trouble. An anecdote is told, that he introduced Bellerophon with a eulogium on wealth, in which he preferred it to all domestic happiness, and ended with observing, that if Aphrodite the Golden shone like gold, she was deserving the love of mortals; and that the spectators, taking umbrage at this, wished to stone both poet and actor. Euripides then sprang forward and called out, "Wait only Euripides till the end; he will be requited accordingly." In others of his pieces the demoralizing tendency is not to be so easily counteracted. Lies and other bad practices are not only freely used, but even openly defended; especially when the author believes himself to have an excuse in the motives which actuate the teller of the falsehood. The ancients themselves condemned him for the alluring colours in which he depicted sensual vice, and the ingenious sophistry with which he sought to defend these delineations. Indeed, this latter characteristic may be said to distinguish all his writings, and give a sort of colour to the charge (only partly true however) under which he labours of being the poet of the sophists.

It is impossible here to analyse minutely the tragedies of Euripides. The general tendencies of the poet's works have been already pointed out in some detail. One power alone which Euripides possessed in a higher degree than almost any other poet of ancient or modern times requires to be specially mentioned; his power, to wit, of delineating female character. The beautiful self-devotion of Alcestis is depicted with the most overpowering pathos; and the same may be said of the Iphigenia at Aulis, though the character of that heroine is not sustained to the end of the piece qualis ab incepto processit. Nor is the poet less successful in his terrible exhibitions of female passion. The unnatural love of Phaedra in the "Hippolytus," and the conflict of jarring passions in the mind of Medea, were first laid hold of by Euripides as affording materials for dramatic creations, and have been worked out by him with a subtlety (sometimes over-refined) and skill that no subsequent dramatist, Shakspeare excepted, has ever surpassed. In the last chorus of the "Troades," when the captive women, allotted to their respective masters, are leaving Troy in flames behind them, and proceed to the ships, the poet rises into the region of the sublime.

According to Varro, Euripides wrote seventy-five tragedies, of which only five were rewarded with the first prize; according to Thomas Magister, he wrote ninety-two, of which fifteen were thus successful. Of these tragedies eighteen (or, if the authenticity of the Rhesus be admitted, nineteen) have descended to our times. We subjoin a list of these, with the year in which they were first produced upon the stage—Alcestis, B.C. 438; Medea, B.C. 431; Hippolytus Coronatus, 428; Hecuba, 423; Heracleidae, (probably) 421; Supplices, Ion, Hercules Furens, Andromache, of doubtful date, but probably assignable to this period of the poet's life; Troades, 415; Electra, 413; Helena, 412; Iphigenia at Tauris, doubtful; Orestes, 408; Phoenissae, the last produced at Athens by the poet; Bacchae, brought out at the Macedonian Court; Iphigenia at Aulis, produced at Athens after the poet's death; Cyclops, of Euripides uncertain date. This play is interesting as the only extant specimen of the Greek satyric drama.

The editio princeps of Euripides, containing, however, only four of the plays, was published at Florence towards the close of the fifteenth century, under the editorial superintendence of J. Lascaris. In 1503 appeared the Aldine edition, in which the Rhesus was incorporated, and the Electra omitted. Of subsequent editions may be mentioned that of P. Stephens, Geneva, 1602; Barnes, Cambridge, 1694; Musgrave, Oxford, 1778; Beck, Leipzig, 1778-88; Matthiäe, Leipzig, 1813-29; and the variorum edition, Glasgow, 1821. Many of the separate plays have been edited by the greatest of modern scholars, as Porson, Elmsley, Walckenaer, Monk, Pfugk, and Hermann. There have been many translations, prose and poetical, of individual plays into several languages of modern Europe. The whole works have been translated into English verse by Potter, Oxford, 1814; and into German by Bothe, Berlin, 1800. There is also a complete English prose translation in Bohn's Classical Library. (Müller's History of Greek Literature; Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Literature; the essay on Euripides by the Rev. Edward Elder, M.A., in Smith's Dictionary, &c. &c.)

EURIPUS, now the strait of Egripo or Negropont, the narrowest part of the Euboean Sea, which at the town of Chalcis contracts to so small a breadth that a bridge has been thrown across, connecting the island of Euboea with the mainland. See EUBOEA.

the ancient amphitheatre, was a trench that separated the seats of the spectators from the arena. It was designed as a defence against the elephants and other beasts exhibited.