Eurybiades

“ The Persians overran the whole country, overcame the few who held out the Acropolis, and set Athens on fire. All the hope of Greece was now in the fleet, which lay in the strait between Attica and the isle of Salamis. Eurybiades, the Spartan commander, still wanted not to fight, but Themistocles was resolved on the battle. Eurybiades did all he could to silence him. “Those who begin a race before the signal are scourged,” said the Spartan. ”

“ Mnesiphilus, an Athenian, met Themistocles departing from the assembly, and having heard what was determined, observed, “Then you have no longer a country to fight for: the fleet will separate: neither Eurybiades nor any one else will have power to retain it together, and Greece is ruined by lack of counsel.” ”

“ Again, Eurybiades lifting up his staff as if he were going to strike, Themistocles said, "Strike if you will, but hear;" ”

“ As Themistocles was returning to his ship from the council, he was met by a friend who, in bygone years, had been his instructor in philosophy. The new-comer, on hearing the decision at which the council had arrived, denounced it most emphatically. "It means ruin for Greece," he said. "The fleet will not remain together to fight; every contingent will steal away, hoping to protect its own country. Go and persuade Eurybiades to reconsider the question." ”

“ Homer, Iliad, bk. 1, li. 32.—Ovid, Heroides, poem 3.――A warrior of Argos, often victorious at the Nemean games, &c. Pausanias, bk. 1, ch. 29.――One of the Argonauts.
Eurybia, the mother of Lucifer and all the stars. Hesiod.――A daughter of Pontus and Terra, mother of Astræus, Pallas, and Perses by Crius.――A daughter of Thespius. Apollodorus.
Eurybiădes, a Spartan general of the Grecian fleet, at the battles of Artemisium and Salamis against Xerxes. He has been charged with want of courage, and with ambition. ”

“ In the Electra and in Iphigenia in Tauris, [32] Euripides deals with the familiar tragedy of Orestes, pursued by the Furies after the murder of his mother, and in the Alcestis he tells the old tale of how a noble woman was willing to sacrifice her life for that of a selfish husband, and of how she was brought back from the gates of Hades by Heracles.
The strength of Euripides lies in his wonderful portrayal of character. He judges his characters by the standards of the men and women of his own day and not by those of the gods and heroes, and he is a merciless critic. ”

“ They fly to their spears. But Telephus has snatched up the baby prince, Orestes, from his cradle and stands at bay; if one of his enemies moves the child shall die. Eventually they accept his terms and make peace with him. A fine melodrama, one would guess, and a move in the direction of realism—a direction which Euripides only followed within certain strict limits. But we find two marks of Euripides the philosopher. The beggar who pleads for reasonable justice towards the national enemy strikes a note which Euripides himself often had to sound afterwards. ”

“ One looks in vain for any trace of her delivery from this wild people, until the latter part of Euripides’ life. Then it is that new light breaks in upon the old orthodox form of the myth: the mortal side of Iphigeneia is made to assume a new interest for the world, and she, who had been long lost amidst a wild, barbarous people, is suddenly restored to her only hope, Orestes. This is the work of ‘Euripides, the human, with his droppings of warm tears.’ With this tragedy the poet created at once a definite chapter in dramatic literature and furnished another impetus for ancient art. ”

“ Born, according to the legend, in exile and fated to die in exile, Euripides, in whatever light one regards him, is a man of curious and ironic history. As a poet he has lived through the ages in an atmosphere of controversy, generally—though by no means always—loved by poets and despised by critics. As a thinker he is even to this day treated almost as a personal enemy by scholars of orthodox and conformist minds ”

“ She is fighting tremulously, with all her flagging strength, against the thing she longs for. The whole point of the scene requires that one ray of hope after another should be shown to Electra, and that she should passionately, blindly, reject them all. That is what Euripides wanted the signs for.
But why, it may be asked, did he adopt Aeschylus' signs, and even his peculiar word? Because, whether invented by Aeschylus or not, these signs were a canonical part of the story by the time Euripides wrote. Every one who knew the story of Orestes' return at all, knew of the hair and the footprint. ”

“ Is there any improbability in supposing Euripides, a man of the new era, to have viewed the grim though picturesque stories of the old and waning times as inconsistent with the bright, free, and intelligent Athens in which he dwelt? The pupil of Anaxagoras and Prodicus might well regard a people as little beyond the verge of barbarism for whom the priest was the philosopher, whose heroes yet strove with wild beasts, who trembled at the phenomena of nature, and among whom ignorance generally prevailed. ”

“ It is conquest seen when the thrill of battle is over, and nothing remains but to wait and think. We feel in the background the presence of the conquerors, sinister and disappointed phantoms; of the conquered men, after long torment, now resting in death. But the living drama for Euripides lay in the conquered women. It is from them that he has named his play and built up his scheme of parts: four figures clearly lit and heroic, the others in varying grades of characterisation, nameless and barely articulate, mere half-heard voices of an eternal sorrow. ”

“ For sheer beauty of writing, for a kind of gorgeous dignity that at times reminds one of Aeschylus and yet is compatible with the subtlest clashes of mood and character, the Trojan Women stands perhaps first among all the works of Euripides. But that is not its most remarkable quality. The action works up first to a great empty scene where the child's body is brought back to his grandmother, Hecuba, for the funeral rites. A solitary old woman with a dead child in her arms; that, on the human side, is the result of these deeds of glory. ”

“ No wonder that one of Euripides' earliest plays, when he took to writing, was the story of Rhesus, the Thracian, and his rushing hordes of wild tribesmen.
But meantime Euripides had not found his work in life. We hear that he was a good athlete; there were records of his prize-winning in Athens and in Eleusis. Probably every ambitious boy in Greece did a good deal of running and boxing. More serious was his attempt at painting. Polygnôtus was at work in Athens, and the whole art advancing by leaps and bounds. ”

“ For since their father was removed from the earth, first Eurystheus wished to kill me, but I escaped; and my country indeed is no more, but my life is saved, and I wander in exile, migrating from one city to another. For, in addition to my other ills, Eurystheus has chosen to insult me with this insult; sending heralds whenever on earth he learns we are settled, he demands us, and drives us out of the land; alleging the city of Argos, one not paltry either to be friends with or to make an enemy, and himself too prospering as he is ”

“ All the year round the few thousand men and few score women—'one among many, not alien from the muse' [88] —who made Euripides' world, were going in and out of the same narrow streets and markets, gardens and colonnades, courts and quays, sitting-rooms and supper-rooms, crossing and conversing incessantly. ”

“ But they have come hither, either because they perceived some folly in thee, or, in their perplexity, staking all on one risky throw to win or lose; for surely they do not suppose that thou, if so thou hast thy senses still, and only thou, in all the breadth of Hellas they have traversed, wilt pity their foolish troubles. Come now, put argument against argument: what will be thy gain, suppose thou admit them to thy land, or let us take them hence? From us these benefits are thine to win: this city can secure as friends Argos, with its far-reaching arm, and Eurystheus' might complete ”

“ CHOR. Depart thou; and do not you touch him, O king!
COP. I go; for the struggle of a single hand is powerless. But I will come, bringing hither many a brazen spear of Argive war; and ten thousand shield-bearers await me, and Eurystheus, the king himself, as general. And he waits, expecting news from hence, on the extreme confines of Alcathus; and, having heard of your insolence, he will make himself too well known to you, and to the citizens, and to this land, and to the trees; for in vain should we have so much youth in Argos, if we did not chastise you. ”

“ A good Greek play moves almost always in a curve of steadily increasing tension—increasing up to the last scene but one and then, as a rule, sinking into a note of solemn calm. It often admits a quiet scene about the middle to let the play take breath; but it is very chary indeed of lifting and then dropping again, and never does so without definite reason. In pursuance of this plan, Euripides likes to have his opening as low-toned, as still, as slow in movement, as he can make it: its only tension is a feeling of foreboding or of mystery. ”

“ A young man might not dine at the men's tables till he had killed his first wild boar. He had to wear a leathern halter round his waist until he had killed his first man. We hear that when some Macedonian at the court made a rude remark to Euripides the King straightway handed him over to the Athenian to be scourged, a well-meant but embarrassing intervention. ”

“ Greek legend was full of stories of heroes born of the love of a god and a mortal woman. Such stories could be turned into high religious mysteries, as by Aeschylus in his Suppliant Women; into tender and reverent legends, as by Pindar in one or two odes. Euripides uses no such idealization. In play after play, Auge, Melanippe, Danae, Alope, he seems to have scarified such gods, as he does now in the Ion. Legend told that Ion, the hero-ancestor of the Ionians, was the son of the Athenian princess Creusa. ”

“ Less moving, because the slaying of Aegisthus has little moral interest; it is merely a daring and dangerous exploit. Less sympathetic, because even here, in the first and comparatively blameless step of the blood-vengeance, Euripides makes us feel the treacherous side of it. A [Greek: dolophonia] , a "slaying by guile," even at its best, remains rather an ugly thing.
P. 53, l. 793, Then quickly spake Orestes.] —If Orestes had washed with Aegisthus, he would have become his xenos, or guest, as much as if he had eaten his bread and salt. ”

“ It never in any single case holds good—not even in the Orestes. And there are some plays, like the Iphigenîa in Tauris, in which, so far from the god coming to clear up a tangled plot, the plot has to be diverted at the last moment so as to provide an excuse for the god's arrival. Euripides evidently liked a supernatural ending, and when he had to do without a real god—as in the Medea and the Hecuba—he was apt to end with winged chariots and prophecies. ”

“ The youth of Euripides fell in an age which saw perhaps the most extraordinary intellectual awakening known to human history. It had been preparing for about a century in certain cities of Ionian Greece, on the coast of Asia Minor, rich and cultivated states, subject for the most part to Lydian or Persian governors. The revolt of these cities and its suppression by Persia had sent numbers of Ionian "wise men," philosophers, poets, artists, historians, men of science, to seek for refuge in Greece, and especially in Athens. ”

“ In the main the judgment of the afterworld upon them will depend on the side we take in a never-ending battle: they fought for light and knowledge and freedom and the development of all man's powers. If we prefer blinkers and custom, subordination and the rod, we shall think them dangerous and shallow creatures. But, to see what the sophists were like, let us consider two of them who are recorded as having specially been the teachers of Euripides.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, in Ionia, was about fifteen years older than Euripides, and spent some thirty years of his life in Athens. ”

“ In every age the man who points to the disregarded, the dormant, hitherto supposed securely neutral and plastic, who cries “it is [320] alive, watching you and reflecting, waiting its time”—such a man is met in his degree with the reception given to Euripides by the elder generation of Athenians. The clamour of “crank!” “faddist!” “this is the thin end of the wedge,” and kindred watchwords, may be found translated into brilliant Attic by Aristophanes. But in virtue of these same interests Euripides became the Bible of later Greek civilization. ”

“ But to say the truth, in the particular case of Euripides, though the forms of concealment must have had their use and at times their necessity, we are not bound to suppose that practical security was the sole or the chief reason for maintaining them. From the Athenian point of view (and no man of candour, whatever his personal tastes, ought to have any difficulty in comprehending that point of view) Euripides as an artist had motive enough without the pressure of danger for 'keeping up the game', so to speak, when once it was fairly started. ”

“ In devoting the present volume to the study of a single writer, remote from us in time and civilization and scarcely known by more than name to many readers of the Library, I am moved by the belief that, quite apart from his disputed greatness as a poet and thinker, apart from his amazing and perhaps unparalleled success as a practical playwright, Euripides is a figure of high significance in the history of humanity and of special interest to our own generation. ”