there not the visits to the city that lay so near, with its many festivals and its constant markets? Were there not, above all, the great Dionysia, when the whole city poured into the spacious theatre, to sit long hours listening to dramas which had then all the charms of novelty, and were daily calling into play new powers, and becoming more and more the most important element of education? It was something to have grown up under that training in the golden days of its perfection. The change for the worse came rapidly after the conclusion of the Persian war Euripides, though but eleven years younger than Sophocles, suffered from the deterioration.
It is possible even to go one step further in individualising this general description. The name of the poet's instructor, Lampros, has come down to us; and while on the one hand, Plutarch,[1] following Aristoxenos, assigns to him a place with Pindar and other lyric poets of the highest order, the report of Athenæos,[2] on the other, that he was a water-drinker, and the sneers of the comic writer Phrynichos, taunting him with being a "long-winded talker, over-philosophical, a very skeleton of the Muses," point to his having had the repute of temperance and cultivated intellect. Of such men what Protagoras describes[3] as characteristic of the older school of teachers of
