THIS title has been chosen in order to disclaim all thought of covering the whole subject. We shall discuss only those features of Euripidean dramaturgy that need fresh attention.

From what standpoint, in what mood, should we address ourselves to this study? Perhaps no other ancient poet's work forces these questions so urgently upon us. Compared in this respect with him Aeschylus and Persius, even Lycophron and Lucan, are easy: however we vary in promptness and depth of apprehension, we all agree about their methods and claims on our esteem. But Euripides has evoked astonishingly diverse judgements from critics consummate in learning, acumen, even poetic genius: Goethe himself urged any modern student who would censure our poet to do so on his knees; twenty-one centuries earlier Philemon the dramatist exclaimed that if there were a future life he would hang himself to see Euripides; Swinburne wrote venomously of this “botcher”, a word that Walter Headlam did not scruple to repeat as regards one aspect of his work; whereas Verrall looked upon him with the liveliest admiration, we are told that Jebb, Sophoclean as he was, “could not speak of Euripides without pain in his voice, and seldom, without necessity, spoke of him at all”. Something has uniquely gone wrong. Euripides, it seems, is no classic after all, a classic being a writer who, let mankind change its perspective as it may, retains unshaken and unequivocal repute. Concerning him we are no more agreed than were his Athenian contemporaries, and less agreed than later antiquity. Chaucer and Ronsard, to mention no greater names, are more firmly established. Why cannot the world make up its mind concerning Euripides? The fault may —let us face it—be his. But it may be ours, wholly or in part. Perhaps a fresh discussion will at least make clearer the reasons of our disagreement, possibly thus reducing their number and their power to disconcert or mislead.

Our point of view must be subjective. Accumulate as we will all the knowledge available concerning the Greeks and their literature dramatic and non-dramatic, concerning other peoples also and their writings, with whatever additional learning seems even possibly relevant, we must in the end voice our own minds. Anyone who airily asserts that it will never do to judge an ancient Greek by “our modern notions” relies on a mischievous half-truth.