Salamis and Mycale, he held to be the type of good Athenians. The new schools appeared to him in the same light as Greek philosophy in general appeared to the sturdy old Sabine Cato—schools of impudence and lying. Pericles himself he seems never to have really liked, but set him below Myronides and Thucydides, men of the good old time, for the return of which, as all reactionists must ever do, he yearned in vain. Euripides, on the other hand, was a man of the new time, perhaps a little beyond as well as of it. More cheerful views of humanity, ampler range of inquiry, greater freedom of thought, supplanted in his mind the gloomy superstition or the slavish faith of a past generation, with whom an eclipse was a token of the wrath of the gods, and by whom the sun was thought to be no bigger than a heavy-armed soldier's buckler. "Between the pass and fell incensed points" of two such opposites there could be nothing but collision; and the tragic poet laboured under this serious disadvantage, that he could not bring his antagonist on the stage.
Yet the most ardent admirer of Euripides is compelled to allow that this indefatigable writer of plays and laborious student can hardly be ranked among successful poets. "It has been observed," says an eminent judge of Greek literature, "that the success of Euripides, if it is measured by the prizes which he is said to have gained, would not seem to have been very great; and perhaps there may be reason to suspect that he owed much of the applause which he obtained in his lifetime to the favour of a party, which
