adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian
captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides. Where, in
later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other
two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens
of times. The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive,
to seven each of Aeschylus' and Sophocles', is proof of his
larger and longer popularity.

He had no certain message from the Gods, as Aeschylus had; his
intensely human heart and his mighty intellect kept him from
being the 'flawless artist' that Sophocles was. He questioned
all conventional ideas, and would not let the people rest in
comfortable fat acquiescence. He came to make men 'sit up and
think.' He did not solve problems, but raised them, and flung
them at the head of the world. He must stir and probe things to
the bottom; and his recurrent unease, perhaps, mars the
perfection of his poetry. Admetus is to die, unless someone will
die for him; recollect that for the Greekish mob, death was the
worst of all possible happenings. Alcestis his wife will die for
him; and he accepts her sacrifice. Now, that was the old saga;
and in Greek conventional eyes, it was all right. Woman was an
inferior being, anyhow; there was nothing more fitting that
Alcestis should die for her lord.--Here let me make a point
plain: you cannot look back through Greece to a Golden Age in
Greece; it is not like Egypt, where the farther you go into
the past, the greater things you come to;--although in Egypt,
too, there would have been rises and falls of civilization. In
Homer's days, in Euripides', they had these barbarous ideas about
women; and these foolish exoteric ideas about death; historic
Greece, like modern Europe from the Middle Ages, rises from a