The History of Rome, Book III - Theodor Mommsen
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Construction of the Plot
The havoc, which the Roman editors were compelled in deference to
their audience to make in the originals, drove them inevitably into
methods of cancelling and amalgamating incompatible with any artistic
construction. It was usual not only to throw out whole character-
parts of the original, but also to insert others taken from other
comedies of the same or of another poet; a treatment indeed which,
owing to the outwardly methodical construction of the originals and
the recurrence of standing figures and incidents, was not quite so bad
as it might seem. Moreover the poets, at least in the earlier period,
allowed themselves the most singular liberties in the construction of
the plot. The plot of the -Stichus- (performed in 554) otherwise so
excellent turns upon the circumstance, that two sisters, whom their
father urges to abandon their absent husbands, play the part of
Penelopes, till the husbands return home with rich mercantile gains
and with a beautiful damsel as a present for their father-in-law.
In the -Casina-, which was received with quite special favour by the
public, the bride, from whom the piece is named and around whom the
plot revolves, does not make her appearance at all, and the denouement
is quite naively described by the epilogue as "to be enacted later
within." Very often the plot as it thickens is suddenly broken off,
the connecting thread is allowed to drop, and other similar signs of
an unfinished art appear. The reason of this is to be sought probably
far less in the unskilfulness of the Roman editors, than in the
indifference of the Roman public to aesthetic laws. Taste, however,
gradually formed itself. In the later pieces Plautus has evidently
bestowed more care on their construction, and the -Captivi- for
instance, the -Pseudolus-, and the -Bacchides- are executed in a
masterly manner after their kind. His successor Caecilius, none of
whose pieces are extant, is said to have especially distinguished
himself by the more artistic treatment of the subject.
Roman Barbarism
In the treatment of details the endeavour of the poet to bring matters
as far as possible home to his Roman hearers, and the rule of police
which required that the pieces should retain a foreign character,
produced the most singular contrasts. The Roman gods, the ritual,
military, and juristic terms of the Romans, present a strange
appearance amid the Greek world; Roman -aediles- and -tresviri- are
grotesquely mingled with -agoranomi- and -demarchi-; pieces whose
scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without
scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman
local tints distributed over the Greek ground is barbarism enough; but
interpolations of this nature, which are often in their naive way very
ludicrous, are far more tolerable than that thorough alteration of the
pieces into a ruder shape, which the editors deemed necessary to suit
the far from Attic culture of their audience. It is true that several
even of the new Attic poets probably needed no accession to their
coarseness; pieces like the -Asinaria- of Plautus cannot owe their
unsurpassed dulness and vulgarity solely to the translator.
Nevertheless coarse incidents so prevail in the Roman comedy, that the
translators must either have interpolated them or at least have made a
very one-sided selection. In the endless abundance of cudgelling and
in the lash ever suspended over the back of the slaves we recognize
very clearly the household-government inculcated by Cato, just as
we recognize the Catonian opposition to women in the never-ending
disparagement of wives. Among the jokes of their own invention, with
which the Roman editors deemed it proper to season the elegant Attic
dialogue, several are almost incredibly unmeaning and barbarous.(25)
Metrical Treatment
So far as concerns metrical treatment on the other hand, the flexible
and sounding verse on the whole does all honour to the composers. The
fact that the iambic trimeters, which predominated in the originals
and were alone suitable to their moderate conversational tone, were
very frequently replaced in the Latin edition by iambic or trochaic
tetrameters, is to be attributed not so much to any want of skill
on the part of the editors who knew well how to handle the trimeter,
as to the uncultivated taste of the Roman public which was pleased
with the sonorous magnificence of the long verse even where it was
not appropriate.
Scenic Arrangements
Lastly, the arrangements for the production of the pieces on the stage
bore the like stamp of indifference to aesthetic requirements on the
part of the managers and the public. The stage of the Greeks--which
on account of the extent of the theatre and from the performances
taking place by day made no pretension to acting properly so called,
employed men to represent female characters, and absolutely required
an artificial strengthening of the voice of the actor--was entirely
dependent, in a scenic as well as acoustic point of view, on the use
of facial and resonant masks. These were well known also in Rome; in
amateur performances the players appeared without exception masked.
But the actors who were to perform the Greek comedies in Rome were
not supplied with the masks--beyond doubt much more artificial--that
were necessary for them; a circumstance which, apart from all else in
connection with the defective acoustic arrangements of the stage,(26)
not only compelled the actor to exert his voice unduly, but drove
Livius to the highly inartistic but inevitable expedient of having
the portions which were to be sung performed by a singer not belonging
to the staff of actors, and accompanied by the mere dumb show of the
actor within whose part they fell. As little were the givers of the
Roman festivals disposed to put themselves to material expense for
decorations and machinery. The Attic stage regularly presented a
street with houses in the background, and had no shifting decorations;
but, besides various other apparatus, it possessed more especially
a contrivance for pushing forward on the chief stage a smaller one
representing the interior of a house. The Roman theatre, however, was
not provided with this; and we can hardly therefore throw the blame
on the poet, if everything, even childbirth, was represented on
the street.
Aesthetic Result
Such was the nature of the Roman comedy of the sixth century. The
mode in which the Greek dramas were transferred to Rome furnishes a
picture, historically invaluable, of the diversity in the culture
of the two nations; but in an aesthetic and a moral point of view the
original did not stand high, and the imitation stood still lower. The
world of beggarly rabble, to whatever extent the Roman editors might
take possession of it under the benefit of the inventory, presented
in Rome a forlorn and strange aspect, shorn as it were of its delicate
characteristics: comedy no longer rested on the basis of reality, but
persons and incidents seemed capriciously or carelessly mingled as in
a game of cards; in the original a picture from life, it became in the
reproduction a caricature. Under a management which could announce
a Greek agon with flute-playing, choirs of dancers, tragedians, and
athletes, and eventually convert it into a boxing-match;(27) and in
presence of a public which, as later poets complain, ran away en masse
from the play, if there were pugilists, or rope-dancers, or even
gladiators to be seen; poets such as the Roman composers were--workers
for hire and of inferior social position--were obliged even perhaps
against their own better judgment and their own better taste to
accommodate themselves more or less to the prevailing frivolity and
rudeness. It was quite possible, nevertheless, that there might arise
among them individuals of lively and vigorous talent, who were able at
least to repress the foreign and factitious element in poetry, and,
when they had found their fitting sphere, to produce pleasing and
even important creations.
Naevius
At the head of these stood Gnaeus Naevius, the first Roman who
deserves to be called a poet, and, so far as the accounts preserved
regarding him and the few fragments of his works allow us to form
an opinion, to all appearance as regards talent one of the most
remarkable and most important names in the whole range of Roman
literature. He was a younger contemporary of Andronicus--his poetical
activity began considerably before, and probably did not end till
after, the Hannibalic war--and felt in a general sense his influence;
he was, as is usually the case in artificial literatures, a worker in
all the forms of art produced by his predecessor, in epos, tragedy,
and comedy, and closely adhered to him in the matter of metres.
Nevertheless, an immense chasm separates the poets and their poems.
Naevius was neither freedman, schoolmaster, nor actor, but a citizen
of unstained character although not of rank, belonging probably to one
of the Latin communities of Campania, and a soldier in the first Punic
war.(28) In thorough contrast to the language of Livius, that of
Naevius is easy and clear, free from all stiffness and affectation,
and seems even in tragedy to avoid pathos as it were on purpose; his
verses, in spite of the not unfrequent -hiatus- and various other
licences afterwards disallowed, have a smooth and graceful flow.(29)
While the quasi-poetry of Livius proceeded, somewhat like that of
Gottsched in Germany, from purely external impulses and moved wholly
in the leading-strings of the Greeks, his successor emancipated Roman
poetry, and with the true divining-rod of the poet struck those
springs out of which alone in Italy a native poetry could well up
--national history and comedy. Epic poetry no longer merely
furnished the schoolmaster with a lesson-book, but addressed itself
independently to the hearing and reading public. Composing for the
stage had been hitherto, like the preparation of the stage costume, a
subsidiary employment of the actor or a mechanical service performed
for him; with Naevius the relation was inverted, and the actor now
became the servant of the composer. His poetical activity is marked
throughout by a national stamp. This stamp is most distinctly
impressed on his grave national drama and on his national epos, of
which we shall have to speak hereafter; but it also appears in his
comedies, which of all his poetic performances seem to have been the
best adapted to his talents and the most successful. It was probably,
as we have already said,(30) external considerations alone that
induced the poet to adhere in comedy so much as he did to the Greek
originals; and this did not prevent him from far outstripping his
successors and probably even the insipid originals in the freshness of
his mirth and in the fulness of his living interest in the present;
indeed in a certain sense he reverted to the paths of the Aristophanic
comedy. He felt full well, and in his epitaph expressed, what he had
been to his nation:
-Immortales mortales si foret fas fiere,
Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam;
Itaque, postquam est Orci traditus thesauro,
Obliti sunt Romae loquier lingua Latina.-
Such proud language on the part of the man and the poet well befitted
one who had witnessed and had personally taken part in the struggles
with Hamilcar and with Hannibal, and who had discovered for the
thoughts and feelings of that age--so deeply agitated and so
elevated by mighty joy--a poetical expression which, if not exactly
the highest, was sound, adroit, and national. We have already
mentioned(31) the troubles into which his licence brought him with
the authorities, and how, driven presumably by these troubles from
Rome, he ended his life at Utica. In his instance likewise the
individual life was sacrificed for the common weal, and the
beautiful for the useful.
Plautus
His younger contemporary, Titus Maccius Plautus (500?-570), appears to
have been far inferior to him both in outward position and in the
conception of his poetic calling. A native of the little town of
Sassina, which was originally Umbrian but was perhaps by this time
Latinized, he earned his livelihood in Rome at first as an actor, and
then--after he had lost in mercantile speculations what he had gained
by his acting--as a theatrical composer reproducing Greek comedies,
without occupying himself with any other department of literature and
probably without laying claim to authorship properly so called. There
seems to have been at that time a considerable number of persons who
made a trade of thus editing comedies in Rome; but their names,
especially as they did not perhaps in general publish their works,(32)
were virtually forgotten, and the pieces belonging to this stock of
plays, which were preserved, passed in after times under the name
of the most popular of them, Plautus. The -litteratores- of the
following century reckoned up as many as 130 such "Plautine pieces";
but of these a large portion at any rate were merely revised by
Plautus or had no connection with him at all; the best of them are
still extant. To form a proper judgment, however, regarding the
poetical character of the editor is very difficult, if not impossible,
since the originals have not been preserved. That the editors
reproduced good and bad pieces without selection; that they were
subject and subordinate both to the police and to the public; that
they were as indifferent to aesthetical requirements as their
audience, and to please the latter, lowered the originals to a
farcical and vulgar tone--are objections which apply rather to the
whole manufacture of translations than to the individual remodeller.
On the other hand we may regard as characteristic of Plautus, the
masterly handling of the language and of the varied rhythms, a rare
skill in adjusting and working the situation for dramatic effect,
the almost always clever and often excellent dialogue, and, above all,
a broad and fresh humour, which produces an irresistible comic effect
with its happy jokes, its rich vocabulary of nicknames, its whimsical
coinage of words, its pungent, often mimic, descriptions and
situations--excellences, in which we seem to recognize the former
actor. Undoubtedly the editor even in these respects retained what
was successful in the originals rather than furnished contributions
of his own. Those portions of the pieces which can with certainty
be traced to the translator are, to say the least, mediocre; but they
enable us to understand why Plautus became and remained the true
popular poet of Rome and the true centre of the Roman stage, and
why even after the passing away of the Roman world the theatre has
repeatedly reverted to his plays.
Caecilius
Still less are we able to form a special opinion as to the third
and last--for though Ennius wrote comedies, he did so altogether
unsuccessfully--comedian of note in this epoch, Statins Caecilius. He
resembled Plautus in his position in life and his profession. Born in
Cisalpine Gaul in the district of Mediolanum, he was brought among the
Insubrian prisoners of war(33) to Rome, and earned a livelihood, first
as a slave, afterwards as a freedman, by remodelling Greek comedies
for the theatre down to his probably early death (586). His language
was not pure, as was to be expected from his origin; on the other
hand, he directed his efforts, as we have already said,(34) to a more
artistic construction of the plot. His pieces experienced but a dull
reception from his contemporaries, and the public of later times laid
aside Caecilius for Plautus and Terence; and, if nevertheless the
critics of the true literary age of Rome--the Varronian and Augustan
epoch--assigned to Caecilius the first place among the Roman editors
of Greek comedies, this verdict appears due to the mediocrity of the
connoisseur gladly preferring a kindred spirit of mediocrity in the
poet to any special features of excellence. These art-critics
probably took Caecilius under their wing, simply because he was more
regular than Plautus and more vigorous than Terence; notwithstanding
which he may very well have been far inferior to both.
Moral Result
If therefore the literary historian, while fully acknowledging the
very respectable talents of the Roman comedians, cannot recognize
in their mere stock of translations a product either artistically
important or artistically pure, the judgment of history respecting its
moral aspects must necessarily be far more severe. The Greek comedy
which formed its basis was morally so far a matter of indifference, as
it was simply on the same level of corruption with its audience; but
the Roman drama was, at this epoch when men were wavering between the
old austerity and the new corruption, the academy at once of Hellenism
and of vice. This Attico-Roman comedy, with its prostitution of body
and soul usurping the name of love--equally immoral in shamelessness
and in sentimentality--with its offensive and unnatural generosity,
with its uniform glorification of a life of debauchery, with its
mixture of rustic coarseness and foreign refinement, was one
continuous lesson of Romano-Hellenic demoralization, and was felt
as such. A proof of this is preserved in the epilogue of the
-Captivi- of Plautus:--
-Spectators, ad pudicos mores facta haec fabulast.
Neque in hoc subigitationes sunt neque ulla amatio
Nec pueri suppositio nec argenti circumductio,
Neque ubi amans adulescens scortum liberet clam suum patrem.
Huius modi paucas poetae reperiunt comoedias,
Ubi boni meliores fiant. Nunc vos, si vobis placet,
Et si placuimus neque odio fuimus, signum hoc mittite;
Qui pudicitiae esse voltis praemium, plausum date!-
We see here the opinion entertained regarding the Greek comedy by
the party of moral reform; and it may be added, that even in those
rarities, moral comedies, the morality was of a character only adapted
to ridicule innocence more surely. Who can doubt that these dramas
gave a practical impulse to corruption? When Alexander the Great
derived no pleasure from a comedy of this sort which its author read
before him, the poet excused himself by saying that the fault lay not
with him, but with the king; that, in order to relish such a piece, a
man must be in the habit of holding revels and of giving and receiving
blows in an intrigue. The man knew his trade: if, therefore, the
Roman burgesses gradually acquired a taste for these Greek comedies,
we see at what a price it was bought. It is a reproach to the Roman
government not that it did so little in behalf of this poetry, but
that it tolerated it at all Vice no doubt is powerful even without a
pulpit; but that is no excuse for erecting a pulpit to proclaim it.
To debar the Hellenic comedy from immediate contact with the persons
and institutions of Rome, was a subterfuge rather than a serious means
of defence. In fact, comedy would probably have been much less
injurious morally, had they allowed it to have a more free course,
so that the calling of the poet might have been ennobled and a Roman
poetry in some measure independent might have been developed; for
poetry is also a moral power, and, if it inflicts deep wounds, it can
do much to heal them. As it was, in this field also the government
did too little and too much; the political neutrality and moral
hypocrisy of its stage-police contributed their part to the fearfully
rapid breaking up of the Roman nation.
National Comedy
Titinius
But, while the government did not allow the Roman comedian to depict
the state of things in his native city or to bring his fellow-citizens
on the stage, a national Latin comedy was not absolutely precluded
from springing up; for the Roman burgesses at this period were not yet
identified with the Latin nation, and the poet was at liberty to lay
the plot of his pieces in the Italian towns of Latin rights just as
in Athens or Massilia. In this way, in fact, the Latin original
comedy arose (-fabula togata- (35)): the earliest known composer
of such pieces, Titinius, flourished probably about the close of
this period.(36)
This comedy was also based on the new Attic intrigue-piece; it was
not translation, however, but imitation; the scene of the piece lay
in Italy, and the actors appeared in the national dress,(37) the
-toga-. Here the Latin life and doings were brought out with peculiar
freshness. The pieces delineate the civil life of the middle-sized
towns of Latium; the very titles, such as -Psaltria- or -Ferentinatis-
, -Tibicina-, -Iurisperita-, -Fullones-, indicate this; and many
particular incidents, such as that of the townsman who has his shoes
made after the model of the sandals of the Alban kings, tend to
confirm it. The female characters preponderate in a remarkable manner
over the male.(38) With genuine national pride the poet recalls
the great times of the Pyrrhic war, and looks down on his new
Latin neighbours,--
-Qui Obsce et Volsce fabulantur; nam Latine nesciunt.-
This comedy belongs to the stage of the capital quite as much as did
the Greek; but it was probably animated by something of that rustic
antagonism to the ways and the evils of a great town, which appeared
contemporaneously in Cato and afterwards in Varro. As in the German
comedy, which proceeded from the French in much the same way as the
Roman comedy from the Attic, the French Lisette was very soon
superseded by the -Frauenzimmerchen- Franziska, so the Latin national
comedy sprang up, if not with equal poetical power, at any rate with
the same tendency and perhaps with similar success, by the side of
the Hellenizing comedy of the capital.
Tragedies
Euripides
Greek tragedy as well as Greek comedy came in the course of this epoch
to Rome. It was a more valuable, and in a certain respect also an
easier, acquisition than comedy. The Greek and particularly the
Homeric epos, which was the basis of tragedy, was not unfamiliar
to the Romans, and was already interwoven with their own national
legends; and the susceptible foreigner found himself far more at home
in the ideal world of the heroic myths than in the fish-market of
Athens. Nevertheless tragedy also promoted, only with less abruptness
and less vulgarity, the anti-national and Hellenizing spirit; and in
this point of view it was a circumstance of the most decisive
importance, that the Greek tragic stage of this period was chiefly
under the sway of Euripides (274-348). This is not the place for a
thorough delineation of that remarkable man and of his still more
remarkable influence on his contemporaries and posterity; but the
intellectual movements of the later Greek and the Graeco-Roman epoch
were to so great an extent affected by him, that it is indispensable
to sketch at least the leading outlines of his character. Euripides
was one of those poets who raise poetry doubtless to a higher level,
but in this advance manifest far more the true sense of what ought to
be than the power of poetically creating it. The profound saying which
morally as well as poetically sums up all tragic art--that action is
passion--holds true no doubt also of ancient tragedy; it exhibits
man in action, but it makes no real attempt to individualize him.
The unsurpassed grandeur with which the struggle between man and
destiny fulfils its course in Aeschylus depends substantially on
the circumstance, that each of the contending powers is only conceived
broadly and generally; the essential humanity in Prometheus and
Agamemnon is but slightly tinged by poetic individualizing. Sophocles
seizes human nature under its general conditions, the king, the old
man, the sister; but not one of his figures displays the microcosm of
man in all his aspects--the features of individual character. A high
stage was here reached, but not the highest; the delineation of man
in his entireness and the entwining of these individual--in themselves
finished--figures into a higher poetical whole form a greater
achievement, and therefore, as compared with Shakespeare, Aeschylus
and Sophocles represent imperfect stages of development. But, when
Euripides undertook to present man as he is, the advance was logical
and in a certain sense historical rather than poetical. He was
able to destroy the ancient tragedy, but not to create the modern.
Everywhere he halted half-way. Masks, through which the expression
of the life of the soul is, as it were, translated from the particular
into the general, were as necessary for the typical tragedy of
antiquity as they are incompatible with the tragedy of character;
but Euripides retained them. With remarkably delicate tact the older
tragedy had never presented the dramatic element, to which it was
unable to allow free scope, unmixed, but had constantly fettered it
in some measure by epic subjects from the superhuman world of gods and
heroes and by the lyrical choruses. One feels that Euripides was
impatient under these fetters: with his subjects he came down at least
to semi-historic times, and his choral chants were of so subordinate
importance, that they were frequently omitted in subsequent
performance and hardly to the injury of the pieces; but yet he has
neither placed his figures wholly on the ground of reality, nor
entirely thrown aside the chorus. Throughout and on all sides he is
the full exponent of an age in which, on the one hand, the grandest
historical and philosophical movement was going forward, but in which,
on the other hand, the primitive fountain of all poetry--a pure and
homely national life--had become turbid. While the reverential piety
of the older tragedians sheds over their pieces as it were a reflected
radiance of heaven; while the limitation of the narrow horizon of the
older Hellenes exercises its satisfying power even over the hearer;
the world of Euripides appears in the pale glimmer of speculation as
much denuded of gods as it is spiritualised, and gloomy passions shoot
like lightnings athwart the gray clouds. The old deeply-rooted faith
in destiny has disappeared; fate governs as an outwardly despotic
power, and the slaves gnash their teeth as they wear its fetters.
That unbelief, which is despairing faith, speaks in this poet with
superhuman power. Of necessity therefore the poet never attains a
plastic conception overpowering himself, and never reaches a truly
poetic effect on the whole; for which reason he was in some measure
careless as to the construction of his tragedies, and indeed not
unfrequently altogether spoiled them in this respect by providing no
central interest either of plot or person--the slovenly fashion of
weaving the plot in the prologue, and of unravelling it by a -Deus ex
machina- or a similar platitude, was in reality brought into vogue by
Euripides. All the effect in his case lies in the details; and with
great art certainly every effort has in this respect been made to
conceal the irreparable want of poetic wholeness. Euripides is
a master in what are called effects; these, as a rule, have a
sensuously-sentimental colouring, and often moreover stimulate
the sensuous impression by a special high seasoning, such as the
interweaving of subjects relating to love with murder or incest.
The delineations of Polyxena willing to die and of Phaedra pining
away under the grief of secret love, above all the splendid picture
of the mystic ecstasies of the Bacchae, are of the greatest beauty
in their kind; but they are neither artistically nor morally pure,
and the reproach of Aristophanes, that the poet was unable to paint a
Penelope, was thoroughly well founded. Of a kindred character is the
introduction of common compassion into the tragedy of Euripides.
While his stunted heroes or heroines, such as Menelaus in the -Helena-,
Andromache, Electra as a poor peasant's wife, the sick and ruined
merchant Telephus, are repulsive or ridiculous and ordinarily both,
the pieces, on the other hand, which keep more to the atmosphere of
common reality and exchange the character of tragedy for that of the
touching family-piece or that almost of sentimental comedy, such as
the -Iphigenia in Aulis-, the -Ion-, the -Alcestis-, produce perhaps
the most pleasing effect of all his numerous works. With equal
frequency, but with less success, the poet attempts to bring into play
an intellectual interest. Hence springs the complicated plot, which
is calculated not like the older tragedy to move the feelings, but
rather to keep curiosity on the rack; hence the dialectically pointed
dialogue, to us non-Athenians often absolutely intolerable; hence the
apophthegms, which are scattered throughout the pieces of Euripides
like flowers in a pleasure-garden; hence above all the psychology of
Euripides, which rests by no means on direct reproduction of human
experience, but on rational reflection. His Medea is certainly in so
far painted from life, that she is before departure properly provided
with money for her voyage; but of the struggle in the soul between
maternal love and jealousy the unbiassed reader will not find much in
Euripides. But, above all, poetic effect is replaced in the tragedies
of Euripides by moral or political purpose. Without strictly or
directly entering on the questions of the day, and having in view
throughout social rather than political questions, Euripides in the
legitimate issues of his principles coincided with the contemporary
political and philosophical radicalism, and was the first and chief
apostle of that new cosmopolitan humanity which broke up the old Attic
national life. This was the ground at once of that opposition which
the ungodly and un-Attic poet encountered among his contemporaries,
and of that marvellous enthusiasm, with which the younger generation
and foreigners devoted themselves to the poet of emotion and of love,
of apophthegm and of tendency, of philosophy and of humanity. Greek
tragedy in the hands of Euripides stepped beyond its proper sphere and
consequently broke down; but the success of the cosmopolitan poet was
only promoted by this, since at the same time the nation also stepped
beyond its sphere and broke down likewise. The criticism of
Aristophanes probably hit the truth exactly both in a moral and in a
poetical point of view; but poetry influences the course of history
not in proportion to its absolute value, but in proportion as it is
able to forecast the spirit of the age, and in this respect Euripides
was unsurpassed. And thus it happened, that Alexander read him
diligently; that Aristotle developed the idea of the tragic poet with
special reference to him; that the latest poetic and plastic art in
Attica as it were originated from him (for the new Attic comedy did
nothing but transfer Euripides into a comic form, and the school of
painters which we meet with in the designs of the later vases derived
its subjects no longer from the old epics, but from the Euripidean
tragedy); and lastly that, the more the old Hellas gave place to the
new Hellenism, the more the fame and influence of the poet increased,
and Greek life abroad, in Egypt as well as in Rome, was directly or
indirectly moulded in the main by Euripides.