Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/19

or by the known sympathies of influential men, or by the pressure of the cliques, political and social, which swarmed in Athens. Such as it was, the award of the judges carried with it ivy wreaths for the victorious poet and his performers, and a tripod for the choregus, which he was expected to be at the expense of consecrating in a miniature temple or shrine in the Street of the Tripods. In the popular estimation, indeed, the choregus may sometimes have bulked as much larger than the author, as the manager does in our own day.

In the hundred years during which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides wrote for the stage, we find that these three carried off between them but thirty-six of the annual first prizes, the rest falling to authors of whom time has not deigned to preserve more than the bare names of some half-dozen, with the titles of a few of their plays. We should, however, be rash in inferring that these forgotten poets were as inferior as this oblivion might seem to suggest, and, even if they were, the patrons of the modern theatre have little right to cast a stone at those old Athenian audiences.

Into this arena, already crowded with a host of competitors, where Sophocles had first appeared twelve years before, and whence Aeschylus had just been removed by death, Euripides stepped down at the age of twenty-five. He was thirty-nine before a play of his won the first prize,^[1] and the success was repeated only four times afterwards.^[2] Since a poet had to present his dramas in sets of four, this means that, competing some twenty times in fifty years, he was adjudged first once out of four times. These official recog-