Some of Euripides' older friends were by this time driven out from Athens. The great "Sophist," Protagoras, had read his famous book, On the Gods, in Euripides' own house. But he was now dead, drowned at sea, and the poet's master, Anaxagoras, had died long before. Some of the younger artists seem to have found a friend in Euripides. There was Timotheus, the young Ionian composer, who—like most musicians of any originality—was supposed to have corrupted the music of the day by his florid style and bold inventions. His first performance in Athens was a mortifying failure, and we are told that the passionate Ionian was on the point of killing himself when the old poet came and encouraged him. He had only to hold fast, and the people who now hissed would turn and applaud.

One fact is especially clear, the restless enmity of the comic writers. Of the eleven comedies of Aristophanes which have come down to us three are largely devoted to Euripides, and not one has managed altogether to avoid touching him. I know of no parallel to it in all the history of literature. Has there ever again been a tragic poet, or any poet, who so centred upon himself year after year till he was nearly eighty the mocking attention of all the popular wits? And how was it that the Athenian public never tired of this incessant poet-baiting, these incessant appeals to literary criticism in the midst of farce? The attacks are sometimes rough and vicious, sometimes acute and searching, often enough they hide a secret admiration. And the chief enemy, Aristophanes, must, to judge from his parodies, have known a large number of Euripides' ninety-two plays by heart, and been at least half fascinated by the object of his satire. However that may be, the hostility of the comic writers had evidently a general hostility behind it. Our tradition states this definitely and the persistency of the attacks proves it. You cannot go on constantly deriding on the stage a person whom your audience does not wish derided. And the unpopularity of Euripides, as we shall see later, is not hard to understand. The Satyrus tradition puts it down to his personal aloofness and austerity. He avoided society, and he "made no effort to please his audience." So that at least he did not soften by personal pleasantness the opposition they felt to his whole view of life. It was not only that he was utterly alienated from the War Party and the mob leaders: here he only agreed with Aristophanes. It was that he had pierced through to a deeper stratum of thought, in which most of the pursuits and ideals of the men about him stood condemned. Socrates reached the same plane, and they killed Socrates.

It is somewhat harder to understand the universal assumption of our authorities that Euripides was a notorious castigator of the female sex and that the women of Athens naturally hated him. To us he seems an aggressive champion of women; more aggressive, and certainly far more appreciative, than Plato. Songs and speeches from the Medea are recited to-day at suffragist meetings. His tragic heroines are famous and are almost always treated with greater interest and insight than his heroes. Yet not only the ancients, but all critics up to the last generation or so, have described him as a woman-hater. What does it mean? Is Aristophanes ironical, and are the scholiasts and grammarians merely stupid? Or is there some explanation for this extraordinary judgment?

I think the explanation is that the present age is the first, or almost the first, that has learned to treat its heroines in fiction as real human beings, with what are called "mixed characters." As lately as the time of Sir Walter Scott, perhaps as lately as Dickens, common convention demanded that a heroine, if sympathetic, should be so free from faults as to be almost without character. Ibsen's heroines, who were real human beings studied with sympathy but with profound sincerity, seemed to their generation shocking and even horrible. All through the ages the ideal of womanhood in conventional fiction has mostly been of the type praised by one great Athenian thinker: "the greatest glory for a woman is to be as little mentioned as possible among men." If that ideal was really predominant among the women of Athens, it is no wonder that they felt outraged by Euripides. They had not reached, and most of their husbands had not reached, the point of being interested in good study of character, much less the point of demanding a freer and more strenuous life. To the average stupid Athenian it was probably rather wicked for a woman to have any character, wicked for her to wish to take part in public life, wicked for her to acquire learning, or to doubt any part of the conventional religion, just as it was wicked for her to deceive her husband. Such women should not be spoken about; above all they should not be treated with understanding and sympathy. The understanding made it all infinitely worse. To people of this type the women of Euripides must have been simply shocking and the poet himself a cruel enemy of the sex. One only wonders that they could stand Sophocles' heroines, such as Antigone and Jocasta. To cleverer men, like Aristophanes, the case would, no doubt, seem rather more complicated. But Aristophanes, amid the many flashes of sympathy he shows for "advanced" women, was not the man to go against his solid conservative audience or to forgo such rich material for jokes.

In any case this is the kind of picture we have of Euripides in his last years; a figure solitary, austere, with a few close intimates, wrapped up in living for what he would call "the service of the Muses," in music, poetry and speculation; capable still of thrilling his audiences with an intensity of tragic emotion such as no other poet had ever reached; but bowed with age, somewhat friendless, and like other solitaries a little strange in his habits; uncomprehendingly admired and hated, and moving always through a mist of half-envious, half-derisive laughter. Calvus et calvinista—one is reminded, amid many differences, of the quaint words in which William the Silent describes his own passage from youth to age, till the brilliant Catholic prince, leader of courts and tourneys, sate at last in his lonely council chamber "bald and a Calvinist." Let us try to trace the path of life which led him to this end.

He was the son of Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides—such names often have alternative forms—who is said to have been a merchant. His mother, Cleito, the supposed greengrocer, was, according to Philochorus, "of very high birth." He was born at Phlya, a village in the centre of Attica. The neighbourhood is celebrated still for its pleasant trees and streams in the midst of a sunburnt land. In Euripides' time it was more famous for its temples. It was the seat of Demeter Anesidora (Earth, Upsender of Gifts), of Dionysus of the Blossom, and the Dread Virgins, old-world and mysterious names, not like the prevailing gods of the Homeric mythology. Most famous of all, it possessed the mystery temple of ErÔs, or Love. Owing to the researches of recent years, these mysteries can now be in their general nature understood. They are survivals of an old tribal society, in which all the boys as they reached maturity were made to pass through certain ordeals and initiations. They were connected both with vegetation and with re-birth after death, because they dated from a remote age in which the fruitfulness of the tribal fields was not differentiated from the fruitfulness of the flocks and the human families, and the new members born into the community were normally supposed to be the old ancestors returning to their homes. By Euripides' day such beliefs had faded into mystical doctrines, to be handled with speechless reverence, not to be questioned or understood, but they had their influence upon his mind. There were other temples too, belonging to the more aristocratic gods of heroic mythology, as embodied in Homer. Euripides was in his youth cup-bearer to a certain guild of Dancers—dancing in ancient times had always religious associations about it—who were chosen from the "first families in Athens" and danced round the altar of the Delian Apollo. He was also Fire-bearer to the Apollo of Cape ZÔstÊr; that is, it was his office to carry a torch in the procession which on a certain night of each year met the Delian Apollo at Cape ZÔstÊr, and escorted him on his mystic path from Delos to Athens.

When the child was four years old he had to be hurried away from his home and then from his country. The Persians were coming. The awful words lost none of their terror from the fact that in Greek the word "Persai," Persians, meant "to destroy." So later it added something to the dread inspired by Rome that her name, "Roma," meant "strength." The family must have crossed the narrow seas to Salamis or further, and seen the smoke of the Persian conflagrations rising daily from new towns and villages of Attica and at last from the Acropolis, or Citadel, itself. Then came the enormous desperate sea-battle; the incredible victory; the sight of the broken oriental fleet beating sullenly away for Asia and safety, and the solemn exclamation of the Athenian general, Themistocles, "It is not we who have done this!" The next year the Athenians could return to Attica and begin to build up their ruined farms. Then came the final defeat of the Persian land army at Plataea, and the whole atmosphere lifted. Athens felt that she had acted like a hero and was reaping a hero's reward. She had borne the full brunt of the war; she had voluntarily put herself under the orders of Sparta rather than risk a split in the Greek forces; and now she had come out as the undisputed mistress of the sea, the obvious champion round whom the eastern Greeks must rally. Sparta, not interested in matters outside her own borders, and not capable of any constructive policy, dropped sulkily out, and left her to carry on the offensive war for the liberation of the Greeks in Asia. The current of things was with her.

But this great result was not merely the triumph of a particular city; it was the triumph of an ideal and a way of life. Freedom had defeated despotism, democracy had defeated kings, hardy poverty had defeated all the gold of the East. The men who fought of their free will for home and country had proved more lasting fighters than the conscripts who were kept in the lines by fear of tortures and beheadings and impalements. Above all "virtue," as the Greeks called it, or "virtue" and "wisdom" together, had shown their power. The words raise a smile in us; indeed, our words do not properly correspond with the Greek, because we can not get our ideas simple enough. "Virtue" is what makes a man, or anything else, good; it is the quality of a good soldier, a good general, a good citizen, a good bootmaker, a good horse or almost a good sword. And "wisdom" is that by which a man knows how to do things—to use a spear, or a tool, to think and speak and write, to do figures and history and geometry, to advise and convince his fellow-citizens. All these great forces moved, or so it seemed at the time, in the same direction; and probably it was hardly felt as a dangerous difference when many people preferred to say that it was "piety" that had won in the war against "impiety," and that the Persians had been destroyed because, being monotheists, they had denied the Gods. No doubt "piety," properly understood, was a kind of "wisdom." Let us take a few passages from the old Ionian historian, Herodotus, to illustrate what the feeling for Athens was in Euripides' youth.

Athens represented Hellenism. (Hdt. I. 60.) "The Greek race was distinguished of old from the barbarian as more intelligent and more emancipated from silly nonsense (or 'savagery') ... And of all the Greeks the Athenians were counted first in Wisdom." Athens, as the old epigram put it, was "The Hellas of Hellas."

And this superior wisdom went with freedom and democracy. "So Athens grew. It is clear wherever you test it, what a good thing is equality among men. Athens under the tyrants was no better than her neighbours, even in war; when freed from the tyrants she was far the first of all." (V. 78.)

And what did this freedom and democracy mean? A speaker in Herodotus tells us (III. 80): "A tyrant disturbs ancient laws, violates women, kills men without trial. But a people ruling—first the very name of it is beautiful, and secondly a people does none of these things."

And the freedom is not mere licence. When Xerxes heard the small numbers of the Greeks who were opposed to him he asked why they did not all run away, "especially as you say they are free and there is no one to stop them?" And the Spartan answered: "They are free, O King, but not free to do everything. For there is a master over them named Law, whom they fear more than thy servants fear thee." (VII. 104. This refers specially to the Spartans, but the same tale is told by Aeschylus of the Athenians. It applies to any free Greeks as against the enslaved barbarian.)

The free Athenian must also have aretÊ, "virtue." He must be a better man in all senses than the common herd. As Themistocles put it; at every turn of life there is a choice between a higher and a lower, and they must choose the higher always. Especially there is one sense in which Athens must profess aretÊ; the sense of generosity or chivalry. When the various Greek states were contending for the leadership before the battle of Artemisium, the Athenians, though contributing much the largest fleet, "thought that the great thing was that Greece should be saved, and gave up their claims." (Hdt. VIII. 3.) In the similar dispute for the post of honour and danger, before the battle of Plataea, the Athenians did plead their cause and won it. But they pleaded promising to abide loyally by Sparta's decision if their claims were rejected, and their arguments show what ideal they had formed of themselves. They claim that in recent years they alone have met the Persians single-handed on behalf of all Greece; that in old times it was they who gave refuge to the children of Heracles when hunted through Greece by the tyrant Eurystheus; it was they who, at the cost of war, prevented the conquering Thebans from leaving their dead enemies to rot unburied and thus offending against the laws of Greece and humanity.

This is the light in which Athens conceived herself; the ideal up to which, amid much confused, hot-headed and self-deceiving patriotism, she strove to live. She was to be the Saviour of Hellas.

Euripides was about eight when the ruined walls of Athens were rebuilt and the city, no longer defenceless against her neighbours, could begin to rebuild the "House of Athena" on the Acropolis and restore the Temples and the Festivals throughout Attica. He can hardly have been present when the general Themistocles, then at the height of his fame, provided the Chorus for the earliest of the great tragedians, Phrynichus, in 476 b.c. But he must have watched the new paintings being put up by the same Themistocles in the temples at Phlya, with scenes from the Persian War. And through his early teens he must have watched the far more famous series of pictures with which PolygnÔtus, the first of the great Greek painters, was adorning the Acropolis; pictures that canonized scenes from the Siege of Troy and other legendary history. When he was ten he may probably have seen a curious procession which brought back from the island of Skyros the bones of Theseus, the mythical king of Athens and the accepted symbol, king though he was, of Athenian enlightenment and democracy. Athens was now too great and too self-conscious to allow Theseus to lie on foreign soil. When he was twelve he may have seen Aeschylus' Persae, "the one great play dealing with an historical event that exists in literature." When he was seventeen he pretty certainly saw the Seven against Thebes and was much influenced by it; but the Choregus this time was a new statesman, Pericles. Themistocles was in banishment; and the other great heroes of the Persian time, Aristides and Miltiades, dead.

Next year, 466 b.c. Euripides became officially an "EphÊbus," or "Youth." He was provided with a shield and spear, and set to garrison and police duty in the frontier forts of Attica. Full military service was to follow in two years. Meantime the current of his thoughts must have received a shock. For, while his shield and spear were still fresh, news came of one of the most stunning military disasters in Athenian history. A large colony which had been established on the river Strymon in Thrace had been lured into dangerous country by the Thracian tribes, then set upon by overwhelming numbers and massacred to the number of ten thousand. 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. He tried to find his true work there, and paintings by his hand were discovered by antiquarians of later times—or so they believed—in the town of Megara. His writings show a certain interest in painting here and there, and it is perhaps the painter in him that worked out in the construction of his dramas such fine and varied effects of grouping.

But there was more in the air than painting and sculpture. 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. Athens was held to be the mother-city of all the Ionian colonies, and had been their only champion in the revolt. She became now, as one of these Ionian exiles put it, "the hearth on which the fire of Hellas burned." It is difficult to describe this great movement in a few pages, but one can, perhaps, get some idea of it by an imaginary comparison. Imagine first the sort of life that was led in remote parts of Yorkshire or Somerset towards the end of the eighteenth century, a stagnant rustic life with no moving ideas, and unquestioning in its obedience to authority, in which hardly any one could read except the parson, and the parson's reading was not of a kind to stir a man's pulse. And next imagine the intellectual ferment which was then in progress in London or Paris; the philosophers, painters, historians and men of science, the voices proclaiming that all men were equal, that the laws of England were unjust to the poor, that slavery was a crime, and that monarchy was a false form of government, or that no action was morally wrong except what tended to produce human misery. Imagine then what would occur in the mind of a clever and high-thinking boy who was brought suddenly from the one society into the heart of the second, and made to realise that the battles and duties and prizes of life were tenfold more thrilling and important than he had ever dreamed. That is the kind of awakening that must have occurred in the minds of a large part of the Greek people in the early fifth century.

A thoroughly backward peasant in a Greek village—even an Attic village like Phlya—had probably as few ideas as other uneducated peasants. In Athens some fifty years later we hear that it was impossible, with the best will in the world, to find any one who could not read or write. (Ar. Knights 188 ff.) But the difference in time and place is cardinal. The countryman who voted for the banishment of Aristides the Just had to ask some one else to write the name for him. Such a man did not read nor yet think. He more or less hated the next village and regarded its misfortunes as his own advantage. He was sunk in superstition. His customs were rigid and not understood. He might worship a goddess with a horse's head or a hero with a snake's tail. He would perform for the welfare of his fields traditional sacrifices that were often filthy and sometimes cruel. On certain holy days he would tear small beasts to pieces or drive them into a fire; in very great extremities he would probably think no medicine so good as human blood. His rules of agriculture would be a mixture of rough common sense and stupid taboos: he would not reap till the Pleiades were rising, and he would carefully avoid sitting on a fixed stone. When he sought for learning, he would get it in old traditional books like Hesiod, which taught him how Ouranos had been mutilated by his son Cronos, and Cronos bound with chains by his son Zeus; how Zeus was king of gods and men, but had been cheated by Prometheus into accepting bones instead of meat in a sacrifice. He would believe that Tantalus had given the gods his son Pelops to eat, to see if they would know the difference, and some of them had eaten bits of him. He would perhaps be ready, with great hesitation, to tolerate certain timid attempts to expurgate the story, like Pindar's, for instance, which results, according to our judgment, in making it rather worse. And this man, rooted in his customs, his superstitions, his narrow-minded cruelties, will of course regard every departure from his own way of life as so much pure wickedness. In every contest that goes on between Intelligence and Stupidity, between Enlightenment and Obscurantism, the powers of the dark have this immense advantage: they never understand their opponents, and consequently represent them as always wrong, always wicked, whereas the intelligent party generally makes an effort to understand the stupid and to sympathize with anything that is good or fine in their attitude. Many of our Greek Histories still speak as if the great spiritual effort which created fifth century Hellenism was a mass of foolish chatter and intellectual trickery and personal self-indulgence.

It was not that, nor anything like that. Across the mind of our stupid peasant the great national struggle against Persia brought first the idea that perhaps really it was better to die than to be a slave; that it was well to face death not merely for his own home but actually—incredible as it seemed—for other people's homes, for the homes of those wretched people in the next village. Our own special customs and taboos, he would reflect with a shiver, do not really matter when they are brought into conflict with a common Hellenism or a common humanity. There are greater things about us than we knew. There are also greater men. These men who are in everybody's mouth: Themistocles above all, who has defeated the Persian and saved Greece: but crowds of others besides, Aristides the Just and Miltiades, the hero of Marathon; DemokÊdes, the learned physician, who was sought out by people in need of help from Italy to Susa; Hecataeus, who had made a picture of the whole earth, showing all the countries and cities and rivers and how far each is from the next, and who could have saved the Ionians if they had only listened to him; Pythagoras, who had discovered all about numbers and knew the wickedness of the world and had founded a society, bound by strict rules, to combat it. What is it about these men that has made them so different from you and me and the other farmers who meet in the agora on market-day? It is sophia, wisdom; it is aretÊ, virtue. They are not a bit stronger in the arm, not bigger, not richer, or more high-born: they are just wiser, and thus better men. Cannot we be made wise? We know we are stupid, we are very ignorant, but we can learn.

The word Sophistes means either "one who makes wise," or, possibly, as some scholars think, "one who deals in wisdom." The difference is slight. In any case it was in answer to this call for sophia that the Sophists arose. Doubtless they were of all kinds; great men and small, honest and dishonest; teachers of real wisdom and of pretence. Our tradition is rather bitter against them, because it dates from the bitter time of reaction and disappointment, when the hopes of the fifth century and the men who guided it seemed to have led Athens only to her fall. Plato in particular is against them as he is against Athens herself. 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. He discovered for the first time that the moon shines by the reflection of the sun's light; and he explained, in the main correctly, the cause of eclipses. The sun was not a god: it was a white-hot mass of stone or earth, in size perfectly enormous. In describing its probable size, language failed him; he only got as far as saying—what must have seemed almost a mad exaggeration—that it was many times larger than the Peloponnese. He held, if he did not invent, a particular form of the atomic theory which has played such a great rÔle in the history of modern science. He was emphatic on the indestructibility of matter. Things could be broken up into their elements and could grow together again, but nothing could be created or destroyed. There was order in the world and purpose, and this was the work of a conscious power which he called "Nous," or Mind. "All things were together in a mass, till Mind came and put order into them." Mind is outside things, not mixed with them, and some authorities say that Anaxagoras called it "God." Meantime, he showed by experiment the reality and substance of air, and disproved the common notion of "empty space." It will be seen that these ideas, if often crudely expressed, are essentially the same ideas which gave new life to modern science after the sleep of the Middle Ages. Almost every one of them is the subject of active dispute at the present day.

Apart from physical science, we learn that Anaxagoras was a close friend and adviser of the great Athenian statesman, Pericles; and we have by chance an account of a long discussion between the two men about the theory of punishment—whether the object of it is to do "justice" upon a wrong-doer apart from any result that may accrue, or simply to deter others from doing the same and thus make society better. The question is the subject of a vigorous correspondence in the Times while these words are writing. We can understand what an effect such a teacher as this would have on the eager young man from Phlya. One great word of liberation was already in the air and belongs to no one sophist or philosopher. This was the distinction between Nature on the one hand and Custom or Convention on the other. The historian Herodotus, who was no sophist but loved a good story, tells how the Persian king, Darius, called some Greeks and some Indian tribesmen together into his presence. He then asked the Greeks what payment would induce them to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. "Nothing in the world," they cried in indignation. "They would reverently burn them." He proceeded to ask the Indians what they would take to burn their fathers' bodies, and they repelled the bare thought with horror; they would do nothing but eat them with every mark of love and respect. "Fire burns in the same way both here and in Persia," the saying was, "but men's notions of right and wrong are not at all the same." The one is Nature; the other is man's Custom or Convention. This antithesis between "Phusis" and "Nomos" ran vividly through the whole of Greek philosophy, and awoke with renewed vigour in Rousseau and the radical writers of the eighteenth century. It is an antithesis against which conformist dialecticians have always turned their sharpest weapons. It has again and again been dissected and refuted and shown to be philosophically untenable: but it still lives and has still something of the old power to shatter and to set free. All the thinkers of Greece at the time we are treating were testing the laws and maxims of their day, and trying to find out what really rested on Nature and what was the mere embroidery of man. It is always a dangerous and exciting inquiry; especially because the most irrational conventions are apt also to be the most sacrosanct.

This whole spirit was specially incarnate in another of Euripides' teachers. We hear of Protagoras in his old age from that enemy of the sophists, Plato. But for this sophist even Plato's satire is kindly and almost reverent. Protagoras worked not at physical science, but at language and philosophy. He taught men to think and speak; he began the study of grammar by dividing sentences into four kinds, Optative, Interrogative, Indicative, Imperative. He taught rhetoric; he formulated the first theory of democracy. But it was as a sceptic that he struck men's imaginations most. "About the Gods, I have no means of knowing either that they are or are not. For the hindrances to knowledge are many, the darkness of the subject and the shortness of man's life." Numbers of people, no doubt, went as far as this, and without suffering for it as Protagoras did; but his scepticism cut deeper and raised questions still debated in modern thought. "Man is the measure of things"; there is no truth to be had beyond the impression made on a man's mind. When this given object seems one thing to A and another thing to B, it is to each one exactly what it seems; just as honey not only seems sweet but is sweet to a healthy man, and not only seems bitter but is bitter to a man with jaundice. Then you can not say, we may ask, that one or other impression is false, and will prove false on further inquiry? No: he answers; each impression is equally true. The only difference is that each state of mind is not equally good. You cannot prove to the jaundiced man that his honey is sweet, for it is not: or to the drunkard that he does not desire his drink, for he does: what you can do is to alter the men's state of mind, to cure the jaundice or the drunkenness. Our cognition flows and changes. It is the result of an active impact upon a passive percipient. And, resulting from this change, there are in practice always two things to be said, a pro and a con. about every possible proposition. There is no general statement that cannot be contradicted.

Other teachers also are represented as having influenced Euripides; Archelaus, who tried to conceive Anaxagoras's "Mind" in some material form, as air or spirit—for spiritus, of course, means "breath"; Prodicus, who, besides his discoveries in grammar, is the author of a popular and edifying fable which has served in many schoolrooms for many centuries. It tells how Heracles once came to some cross roads, one road open, broad, and smooth and leading a little downhill, the other narrow and uphill and rough: and on the first you gradually became a worse and worse man, on the second a better one. There was Diogenes of Apollonia, whose theories about air seem to have had some effect on Euripides' writings; and of course there was, among the younger men, Socrates. Socrates is too great and too enigmatic a teacher to be summed up in a few sentences, and though a verse of ancient comedy has come down to us, saying, "Socrates piles the faggots for Euripides' fire," his influence on his older friend is not very conspicuous. Euripides must have caught something from his scepticism, his indifference to worldly standards, his strong purpose, and something also from his resolute rejection of all philosophy except that which was concerned with the doings and feelings of men. "The fields and trees will not talk to me; it is only the human beings in the city that will." That saying of Socrates might be the motto of many a dramatist.

The greatness of these philosophers or sophists of the fifth century does not, of course, lie in the correctness of their scientific results. The dullest and most unilluminated text-book produced at the present day is far more correct than Anaxagoras. Their greatness lies partly in the pioneer quality of their work. They first struck out the roads by which later workers could advance further. Partly in the daring and felicity with which they hit upon great and fruitful ideas, ideas which have brought light and freedom with them whenever they have recurred to men's minds, and which, as we have seen, are to a great extent still, after more than two thousand years, living issues in philosophic thought. Partly it lies in the mere freedom of spirit with which they set to work, unhampered by fears and taboos, to seek the truth, to create beauty, and to improve human life. The difference of atmosphere between the sophists of the Periclean circle and the ordinary backward Attic farmer must have been visible to every observer. If more evidence of the great gulf was needed, it was supplied emphatically enough in the experience of Euripides. He was himself prosecuted by Cleon, the demagogue, for "impiety." The same charge had been levelled even against his far less destructive predecessor, Aeschylus. Of these three special friends whom we have mentioned, Euripides did not live to see Socrates condemned to death and executed. But he saw Anaxagoras, in spite of the protection of Pericles, accused of "impiety" and compelled to fly for his life. He saw Protagoras, for the book which he had read aloud in Euripides' own house, prosecuted and condemned. The book was publicly burned; the author escaped, it is said, only to be drowned at sea, a signal mark in the eyes of the orthodox of how the gods regarded such philosophy.

Thought was no doubt freer in ancient Athens than in any other city within two thousand years of it. Those who suffered for religious advance are exceedingly few. But it was not in human nature, especially in such early times, for individuals to do such great service to their fellow men and not occasionally be punished for it. They induced men for a time to set reason and high ideals above the instincts of the herd: and sooner or later the herd must turn and trample them.

One of the ancient lives says that it was this sense of the antagonism between Anaxagoras and the conservative masses that turned Euripides away from philosophy. One need scarcely believe that. The way he took was not the way to escape from danger or unpopularity. And when a man shows extraordinary genius for poetry one need not search for the reasons which induced him not to write prose. He followed in the wake not of Anaxagoras but of Aeschylus.