Euripides and His Age

Most of the volumes of this series are occupied with large subjects and subjects commonly recognized as important to great masses of people at the present day. In devoting the p...

It is in one sense impossible to write a life of Euripides, for the simple reason that he lived too long ago. In his time people were only just beginning to write history at all...

To the public of the present day a play is merely an entertainment, and it was the same to the Elizabethans. Shakespeare can say to his audience "Our true intent is all for your...

The next play of which we have full knowledge must have staggered its audience. The _Medea_ was promptly put by the official judges at the bottom of the list of competing plays,...

Our Greek historians, with Thucydides at their head, are practically unanimous in associating with the Peloponnesian War a progressive degradation and embitterment in Greek publ...

Critics have used various words to describe the change of mood which followed the _Trojan Women_. They speak of a period of despair, pessimism, progressive bitterness, _Verzweif...

Thus we come round to the figure from which we started, the old sad man with the long beard, who seldom laughed and was not easy to speak to; who sat for long hours in his seawa...

Euripides was so much besides a poet that we sometimes tend to regard him exclusively as a great thinker or a great personality and forget that it is in his poetry that he lives...

And lastly there is the Chorus, at once the strangest and the most beautiful of all these ancient and remote conventions. If we can understand the Chorus we have got to the very...