CHAPTER II
THE SOURCES FOR A LIFE OF EURIPEDES: THE MEMORIES REMAINING IN THE FOURTH CENTURY: HIS YOUTH AND ITS SURROUNDINGS: ATHENS AFTER THE PERSIAN WAR: THE GREAT SOPHISTS
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; Herodotus, the "father of history," was his close contemporary. They had begun to record really great events; but it had not occurred to them that the life of any individual was worth all the trouble of tracing out and writing down. Biography of a sort began about two generations afterwards, when the disciples of Aristotle and Epicurus exerted themselves to find out and record the lives of their masters. But biography in our sense—the complete writing of a life year by year with dates and documents—was never practised at all in antiquity. Think of the Gospels, of the Acts, even of Tacitus's Life of Agricola. They are different one from another, but they are all unlike any modern biography in their resolute indifference to anything like completeness. Ancient "Lives" as a rule select a few great deeds, a few great sayings or discourses; they concentrate upon the last years of their subject and often especially upon his death.
The dates at which various eminent men of antiquity died are well known. The man was then famous and his death was a memorable event. But—except in a few aristocratic states, like Cos, which records the actual birthday of the great physician Hippocrates—no baby was eminent and not many young men. Very few dates of birth are known; and in the case of almost all the famous men of antiquity their early histories are forgotten and their early works lost. So it is with Euripides.
History in later antiquity was chiefly a branch of belles lettres and made no great effort after exactness. As a rule it contented itself with the date at which a man "flourished," a very rough conception, conventionally fixed either by the time when he did his most memorable work or the year when he reached the age of forty. The year commonly assigned to Euripides' birth is a good instance of ancient method in these things. The system of chronology was badly confused. In the first place there was no generally accepted era from which to date; and even if there had been, the numerical system, before the invention of Arabic ciphers, was as confused as English spelling is at the present day, and made it hard to do the simplest sums. So the ordinary educational plan was to group events together in some scheme that might not be quite exact but was calculated to have some symbolic interest and to stay in the memory. For instance, the three great tragedians were grouped together round the Battle of Salamis, the great triumph of the Persian Wars in 480 B.C. Aeschylus fought among the heavy-armed infantry, Sophocles danced in a choir of boys to celebrate the victory, and Euripides was born in Salamis on the day of the battle. We do not know the origin of this pleasant fable; but we have another date given in a very ancient chronicle called the Parian Marble, which was found in the island of Paros in the seventeenth century and was composed in the year 264 B.C. It puts the birth of Euripides in 484 B.C., and since we cannot find any reason why this year should be invented, and since the Marble is the oldest witness now extant, we shall probably do well provisionally to accept its statement.
In some of the MSS. which preserve Euripides' plays there are "scholia" or ancient traditional commentaries written round the margin. A few of the oldest notes in them come from Alexandrian scholars who lived in the second century B.C. Others date from Roman times, in the first few centuries of the Christian era; others from the eleventh century and even later. And among them there is a quite ancient document called Life and Race of Euripides.
It is anonymous and shapeless. Sentences may have been added or omitted by the various people who at different times have owned or copied the MSS. But we can see that it is derived from early sources, and notably from a "Life" which was written by one Satyrus, a writer of the Peripatetic or Aristotelian school, towards the end of the third century B.C. Fragments from the same source have been detected in the Latin authors Varro and Gellius; and it has influenced the biographical notice in the ancient Greek lexicon of Suidas (tenth century A.D.). Suidas used also another earlier and better source, the Attic Chronicle of Philochorus.
Philochorus was a careful and systematic annalist of the early third century B.C., who used official documents and verified his statements. His main work was to record all that affected Athens—history, myths, festivals, and customs, but he also wrote various special treatises, one of which was On Euripides. Satyrus wrote a series of Lives of Famous Men, which was very popular, and we are now—since 1911—in a position to judge how undeserved its popularity was. For fragments of his Life of Euripides have been unearthed in Egypt by Drs. Grenfell and Hunt and published in their Oxyrrhyncus Papyri, vol. ix. The life takes the form of a dialogue—apparently a dialogue with a lady. It is a mass of quotations, anecdotes, bits of literary criticism, all run together with an air of culture and pleasantness, a spice of gallantry and a surprising indifference to historical fact. Evidently anecdotes amused Satyrus and facts, as such, did not. He cared about literary style, but he neither cared nor knew about history. The following considerations will make this clear.
Euripides was, more than any other figure in ancient history, a constant butt for the attacks of comedy. And we find, oddly enough, that most of the anecdotes about Euripides in Satyrus are simply the jokes of comedy treated as historical fact. For instance, in Aristophanes' play, The Women at the Thesmophoria, the women, while alone at this private festival, agree to murder Euripides because, by his penetrating study of female character on the stage, he has made life too difficult for them. Euripides, hearing of the plot, persuades his elderly father-in-law to go in disguise to the forbidden celebration and defend him—which he does in a ruinously tactless way. Some scenes of brilliant farce are succeeded by a solemn truce between Euripides and the women of Athens. It shows what our tradition is worth when we find that both the "Life and Race," and Gellius and Satyrus himself, give as sober fact this story which we know—and if we did not know could surely see—to be comic invention. There is another class of fabulous anecdote which plays an even larger part in the Satyrus tradition. In Aristophanes' Frogs (1.1048), in a scene where Euripides is defending his plays against the attacks of Aeschylus, there occurs the chance suggestion that Euripides had learnt from his own experience all the varied villanies of his wicked heroines. The idea took root, and he is represented in the anecdotes as a deceived husband, like his own Theseus or Proetus, and uttering lines suitable to the occasion out of his own tragedies; as having two wives at once, like his own Neoptolemus—one of them named Choirile, or "Piggy," and each of course worse than the other; as torn to pieces by hounds, like his own Actaeon, or by wild women, like his own Pentheus.
Something of this sort is possibly the origin of a famous joke about Euripides' mother, which runs through Aristophanes and is repeated as a fact in all the Lives. We know from Philochorus that it was not true. The joke is to connect her with chervil—a grassy vegetable which grew wild and was only eaten in time of famine—or with wild greenstuff in general, or simply to call her a greengrocer. It was also a joke to say anything about beet-root. (Acharn. 894, Frogs 942), A man begs Euripides to bring
"A new-born chervil from thy mother's breast."
(Acharn, 478.)
Or we hear that
"Wild wrongs he works on women,
Wild as the greens that waved about his cradle."
(Thesm, 455.)
When some one is about to quote Euripides his friend cries:
"Don't, don't, for God's sake! Don't be-chervil me!"
(Knights 19.)
Now a much-quoted line from Euripides' tragedy Melanippe the Wise runs: "It is not my word but my mother's word"; and we know that Melanippe, and still more her mother, was an authority on potent herbs and simples. Turn his heroine's mother into his own mother and the potent herbs into some absurd vegetable, and the fable is made.
Setting