Euripides

Most nobly, then, the tragic poet Euripides says in the Phoenician Women:

Truth, then, being one (for falsehood has ten thousand byways), the schools of philosophy, both the barbarian and the Greek, like the Bacchae tearing apart the limbs of Pentheus, each boasts of the part it has obtained as though it were the whole truth;

Euripides too bears witness concerning Hippo, somewhat thus:

to whose authority that of Euripides may be added, as may be seen in the verses of Helena:

“For God himself hates violence, and will not have us to grow rich by rapine, but by lawful gains.

Plato has established this in his laws, and the same rule prevailed in Greece, as appears from the following passage in Euripides, “our fathers of old did well in banishing from their intercourse and sight any one that had shed another’s blood;

as Euripides dares to say, is a god.

Which sentiment Euripides used in his Cresphontes:

And so among Euripides the words spoken by Theseus are praised;

For indeed Menelaus was not far removed from Tantalus and Pelops;

For this very thing Euripides says Heracles suffered when mad:

May I never cease mingling the Graces with the Muses, sweetest union;

for instance, we think it ridiculous that Alcmaeon in Euripides’ play is compelled by certain threats to murder his mother!

thus Euripides writes— Would that be prudent?

Euripides writes that Earth yearneth for the rain when dried up, And the majestic Heaven when filled with rain Yearneth to fall to Earth.

and again you will find Euripides declaring that this god is able not only to make known the living, revealing their true characters, but the dead as well, when he says, Common Report shows forth the good man, even though he be in the bowels of the earth;

It is right, therefore, that in judging Timarchus you follow the reasoning of Euripides.

Again, Euripides, a poet than whom none is wiser, considering chaste love to be one of the most beautiful things, says somewhere, making love a thing to be prayed for:

For who is so hostile, almost, to the very name of Rome as to scorn or reject the Medea of Ennius or the Antiopa of Pacuvius, on the ground that, though he delights in the same plays of Euripides, he hates Latin letters?

for you all know this Greek verse — 'Sweet is the memory of toils gone by.

these sacrifices of yours Euripides puts upon the stage as tragedy.

"For Zeus, slaying my son Asclepius, is the cause, hurling the flame into his breast.

Him who sees all things, while himself unseen," says Euripides.

Euripides distinctly states that in his day the universal physiological doctrine was that the child descended exclusively from the male parent, and Hippocrates (περὶ παιδίου), in energetically combating this opinion, and contending that the child descended from both parents, seems to admit that it was a prevalent heresy.

Euripides, Frag.

And he immediately sang a passage of Euripides, how a brother, O averter of ill!

Were you not therefore justly beaten, who do not praise Euripides, the wisest of poets?

But "the tongue has sworn, the mind is unsworn," he will say with Euripides, and will pursue the seeming good before the being good.

this is a saying of Euripides the tragedian.

Or is it because Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, and many others give delight, men who expressed not the words but the force of the Greek poets—how much more will the philosophers delight us, if, as those poets imitated Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, so these were to imitate Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus!

'You see the boundless ether spread on high, that with its tender embrace clasps the earth round about:

To prove that it is not in my case only that he failed to take over his ship, but that on a former occasion also, when he was the associate of Euripides in the trierarchy and there was an agreement between them that each should sail for six months, when Euripides had sailed and the term had expired, Polycles did not take over the ship from him,—to prove this, I say, the clerk shall read the deposition.

For those iambics come from the Phoenix of Euripides.

We have therefore good reason to thank Euripides, because, apart from his other merits as a poet, he chose this subject for a play, believing that in the conduct of those people the citizens would have a fine example which they could keep before them and so implant in their hearts a love of their country.

All women are by nature fond of children, but this one Euripides portrayed as loving her country more than her offspring and made it clear that, if women bring themselves to act like this, men should show towards their country a devotion which cannot be surpassed, not forsake it and flee, as Leocrates did, nor disgrace it before the whole of Greece.

Then, to quote Euripides, the result is, Alcibiades, that you may be said to have heard it from yourself, not me, and it is not I who say it, but you, and you tax me with it in vain.

And as Euripides has made Creon say when he sees Teiresias wearing his wreaths, and hears that he has obtained them, on account of his art, as first-fruits of the spoils of war:

And what if someone should go to Sophocles or Euripides and should say that he knew how to make very long speeches about a small matter, and very short ones about a great affair, and pitiful utterances, if he wished, and again terrible and threatening ones, and all that sort of thing, and that he thought by imparting those things he could teach the art of writing tragedies?

Because among other utterances of pregnant thought he said, Tyrants are wise by converse with the wise.

Piemen are wise by converse with the wise, and we had asked him, Wise in what?

Euripides, in what are these men wise, by whose converse you say that despots are wise?

Or again, if he had said Wrestlers are wise by converse with the wise, and we had asked him, Wise in what?

When these last verses had been pronounced in a tragedy of Euripides, the whole people rose up with one impulse to cast out both the actor and the play, until Euripides himself sprang forth into the midst, asking them to wait and to see what end this admirer of gold would make.