EURIPIDES. 141 band's funeral pile, the sacrifice of a youth for his country, of a maiden for her family, — all these with Euripides are mere inci- dents of the action " Thanks to accident, or the corrupted taste of those to whom we owe all of ancient literature that we possess, the remaining plays of Euripides are more than all the extant dramas of ^s- chylus and Sophocles taken together. Of his many compositions, fifteen Tragedies^, two Tragi-comedies^, and a satyrical drama", have come down to us; and the fragments of the lost plays are very numerous. It appears that Euripides, like the other two great tragedians, exhibited his dramas in Tetralogies, and in more than one instance we have among his extant plays those which formed a portion of the same theatrical representation. We do not, however, derive much advantage from this. His Tetralogies were not, like those of jEschylus, bound together by a community of subject and treat- ment, and except as a chronological fact, the juxta-position of par- ticular dramas is quite unimportant to the reader of his works. The order, in which the extant plays of Euripides were pro- duced, may be ascertained to a certain extent either from direct statements resting on the didascalise or from internal evidence. In making a few remarks on the particular plays, we shall be content in the main with the results of the most recent and elaborate inves- tigation of the subjects The earliest extant play of Euripides is the Rhesus, which, as we have already mentioned, has been attributed to Sophocles, and regarded as one of his earliest dramas*^. On the other hand, it has been supposed that four actors are required in the scene in which Paris appears immediately after Diomedes and Ulysses have left the stage and while Athena is still there, and it has been suggested accordingly that it belongs to the later Athenian stage, perhaps to the school of Philocles*^. It must be confessed that there are ^ There is a severe criticism on Euripides in the Foreign Quarterly Review, No. XLVIII, Professor Blackie refers to this article as his own {^schyliis, I. p. xxxvii). Schlegel's comparison of the related plays of the three Tragedians is given in an Appendix to this chapter. 2 Or 1 6, if the Rhesus is reckoned one of his.
- The Orestes and the Alcestis. * The Cyclops.
^ J. A. Hartung, Euripides Restitutus, Vol. i. 1843; Vol, ii. 1844. ^ Gruppe, Ariadne, pp. 285 sqq. 7 MUller, Hist. Lit, Or. i. p. 501, note.
