ill-fitting tunic may have cost the peasant, or even the country gentleman, uncomfortable hours, and perhaps led him to break the heads of city wits, or to get his own head broken by them. Town amusements were never much to his liking. The music, vocal and instrumental, which he would hear at the Odeum—the Athenian opera-house—might be all very fine; but, for his part, give him the pipe and tabor, the ballads and minstrels, of his deserted village. Then as to the playhouse: the performances there were not to his taste. A farce at a wake, acted on boards and tressels, a well-known hymn sung to the rural deities, pleased him far more than comedies of which he did not catch the drift, or tragedies that scared him by their furies and ghosts, and perhaps gave him bad dreams. The sudden infusion of a new element into the mass of a people cannot fail to affect it materially, whether for good or ill; and such a wholesale migration as this reacted on the townsmen themselves. Some civic virtues they might easily exchange for some rural vices. Cooped as the Athenians, urban and rustic, were within the walls, ill-housed, and often idle, with few if any sanitary or police regulations, we need not history to inform us that Athens came forth from the pestilence the worse in some respects for its visitation.
And besides these changes from without, others of a less palpable but more subtle kind were, in the age of Euripides, affecting the national character, and with it also the spirit, and in a measure the form, of the national drama. "It was a period of great intellectual activity; and the simple course of education under
