Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/27

pleasing the judges of the dramatic festivals, passes, immediately after his death, to the undisputed position of founder of a new school in literature." Dramatic authors of succeeding generations all formed their style on that of Euripides;^[1] artists turned from Homer and the cyclic poets, and came to Euripides for subjects. The vase-paintings to this day attest his influence on art. Philosophers quarried in him for doctrine and maxim, orators kindled their hearers to higher patriotism and nobler self-sacrifice by quotations from his pages. One of the longest fragments preserved from any of his lost plays is from the Erechtheus: it has come down to us in a speech (of date 330 B.C.) of the orator Lycurgus, who prefaces his quotation of it with the remark, "You will observe in these lines a heroism and nobleness worthy of our city," The dramatist Philemon wrote:

But no more striking instance of the power of a poet to play upon men as upon a musical instrument has ever been given than that which we find recorded by Lucian. He tells that, about a hundred years after Euripides' death, a travelling theatrical troupe represented one summer at Abdera his Andromeda.^[2] So thrilled by the art of the actor, so intoxicated by the charm of the poetry, were the audience (which, in a Greek city, implied the whole population), that they left the theatre in a state of impassioned exaltation, in a tragic frenzy. With pale cheeks and shining eyes they paced to and fro in street and square, declaiming and chanting" at