fared so ill, it may have been worse with a heathen poet, at a time and in a country where a man's lawful wife was scarcely more than his cook and housekeeper.
There is no trace of Euripides having, at any period of his life, taken part in public affairs. He seems never to have been archon, or general, as Sophocles was, or priest, or ambassador, or foreman of a jury. Doubtless he paid some rates or taxes in his parish (deme), Phylæ of the Cecropid tribe. He was commonly accounted a morose and sulky fellow; and since he shunned general society, he was naturally charged with keeping low company.[1] He was indeed—far more than was usual in his time, and among a people passing most of their days in public—"a literary man," preferring solitude and his library to the hubbub of the market-place, or the crowding and noise of popular assemblies. According to a story preserved by a Roman anecdotist, Euripides pursued his studies in a grim and gloomy fashion. One Philochorus professed to have seen a "grotto shagged with horrid thorn,"[2] in which he composed his tragedies. He is said never to
- ↑ The spirits in Hades, that in "The Frogs" rejoice in the rhetorical tricks ascribed to Euripides, are supposed, while on earth, to have inhabited the bodies of cut-purses, highwaymen, burglars, and parricides—such "minions of the moon" being, in Aristophanes's opinion, the pupils of sophistical tutors; or, at least, their notions of property and filial piety, he thinks, were probable results of their education. There was a time when to be a Hobbist or a Benthamite was thought to tend to similar aberrations from virtue.
- ↑ Ben Jonson, certainly not an unsocial man (witness the
