PREFACE

Summary

Not one of the ancient Greek Poets, with the single exception of Homer, appears to have enjoyed a more general and a more lasting popularity than Euripides. By the common consent of mankind in every age Homer stands supreme. He alone me rited the glorious title of The Poet; he was the divine Homer, and from him the Tragic authors, not less than the rest of his more direct imitators, derived the themes which their art has invested as it were with a second immortality. Viewed in the aspect under which the Greeks themselves seem to have regarded him, he is (to use a simile not strictly in accordance with their physical theories,) as the sun in the centre of the system, round whom the other poets, little and great, and at very unequal distances, revolve, borrowing their own splendour from his unapproachable rays, and diffusing a milder radiance from the light of his eternal wisdom. Although Aeschylus and Sophocles have ever been the favourite study of the learned, and have been held by competent critics as second only to Homer, yet there are good reasons for believing that Euripides was the more familiar and cherished companion of the many in the Republic of ancient Literature, as he appears also to have been in the middle ages, wherever the Greek language was studied at all.