Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/26

Posthumous fame.In the year after his death, the Iphigeneia at Aulis, the Bacchanals, and the Alkmeon (a lost play) were brought out, and gained the first prize. Three months before,^[1] Aristophanes had made a last futile attempt to discredit him, in his comedy of the Frogs. Here he makes Aeschylus say, "My poetry has not died with me, but this man's has died with him." Never was literary judgment more shortsighted. Whatever popularity Euripides had enjoyed in life, it was as nothing to that which followed on his death. Athenians soon had cause to look upon him as the guardian-genius of his country. In the very next year, when Athens was taken, and the generals of the allies were considering the Thebans' proposal to destroy her, they were, Plutarch tells us, diverted from their purpose by listening to the declamation, "by a man of Phocis," of that choral passage in the Electra, beginning l. 167. Their quick perceptions were struck with the parallel between the forlorn state of the royal house and of the royal city.

As the years passed on, Euripides' hold upon heart and intellect became only the more assured. To quote the words of a great French critic^[2]:—"If Aeschylus had risen from Hades a hundred years after the representation of the Frogs, he would have found that his own poetry was, indeed, not forgotten on earth, but that it was eclipsed by that of Euripides. Sophocles himself, had he returned, would have had great reason to be astonished. It was no longer his tragedies, however perfect they were, which were oftenest played, and with most success; it was not he who was most read, most quoted, most admired of the tragic poets; it was Euripides.^[3] This poet who, in his lifetime, found such difficulty in