Aristophanes. Yet he did not win many prizes. Perhaps the vast theatre
and the grand choric accompaniments harmonised ill with his unheroic
style. He is clearly connected with the Sophists, and with the
generation the morality of which had been unsettled by the violence of
faction and the fury of the Peloponnesian war. Still there is no
reason for saying that he preached moral scepticism or impiety.
Probably he did not intend to preach anything, but to please his
popular audience and to win the prize. The line quoted against him,
"My lips have sworn, but my mind is unsworn," read in its place, has
nothing in it immoral. Perhaps he had his moods: he was religious when
he wrote "The Bacchae." As little ground is there for dubbing him a
woman-hater. If he has his Phaedra and Medea, he has also his Alcestis
and Electra. He seems to have prided himself on his choric odes. Some
of them have beauty in themselves, but they are little relevant to the
play.

A full and critical account of the plays will not be expected in the
Preface to a series of extracts; it will be found in such literary
histories as that of Professor Mahaffy. Nor can it be necessary to
dilate on the merit of the pieces selected. The sublime agony of
Prometheus Bound, the majesty of wickedness in Clytaemnestra,
the martial grandeur of the siege of Thebes, or of the battle of
Salamis, in Aeschylus; the awful doom of Oedipus, his mysterious end,
the heroic despair of Ajax, the martyrdom of Antigone to duty, in
Sophocles; the passion of Phaedra and Medea, the conjugal
self-sacrifice of Alcestis, the narratives of the deaths of Polyxena
and the slaughter of Pentheus by the Bacchae, in Euripides, speak for
themselves, if the translation is at all faithful, and find their best
comment in the reader's natural appreciation.