which the conquerors of Salamis and Marathon had been reared no longer satisfied the wants of the noble, wealthy, and aspiring part of the Athenian youth. Their learning had not gone beyond the rudiments of music, and such a knowledge of their own language as enabled them to enjoy the works of their writers, and to express their own thoughts with ease and propriety; and they bestowed at least as much care on the training of the body as on the cultivation of the mind. But in the next generation the speculations of the Ionian and Eleatic schools began to attract attention at Athens: the presence of several celebrated philosophers, and the example of Pericles, made them familiar to a gradually widening circle; and they furnished occasion for the discussion of a variety of questions intimately connected with subjects of the highest practical moment."[1] The latter half of Euripides's life was passed, as we may judge even from the sober Xenophon, as well as from the witty Aristophanes, among a generation of remarkable loquacity, in which the young aspired to know a little of every subject, thought themselves fit to hold the state-rudder, and justified in looking down upon their less learned or more modest elders. Every young man, indeed, who aspired to become a statesman, must be an adept in rhetorical arts, since no one could pretend to pilot the ship who could not persuade, or at least cajole, his fellow-citizens. If, on the other hand, he wished to be a public lecturer—that is to say, a philosopher—plain Pythagorean rules for the conduct of life, or Solon's
- ↑ Bishop Thirlwall's Hist. of Greece, iv. 268.
