Three Dramas of Euripides Author:William Cranston Lawton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MEDEA. It has been mentioned already that Euripides first contended for the prize at the Dionysiac festival in the year 455 B. c.; and it is interesting t... more »o notice that the title of his first tragedy, the " Daughters of Pelias," shows that his attention had even then been drawn to the tale of Medea. The series of dramas from which the Medea alone remains to us was brought out in 431 B. c., and " won third prize," i. e., was adjudged inferior to both the rival poets, Euphorion and Sophocles. Euphorion was yEschylos' son, and seems to have been deeply imbued with the paternal spirit. Indeed, tradition reports that he gained the prize four times with his father's posthumous works. The result of this contest may therefore be accepted as a valuable indication in regard to the comparative popularity of the three most illustrious tragic writers at the time when the Peloponnesian war began. Toward the close of his own life, however, and still more in later antiquity, the popularity and influence of Euripides were unrivaled. The legend of Medea is, to us at least, a peculiarly harrowing and painful one. Perhaps it is more distressing for us than to the original Athenian auditors. We fancy that children, as individuals, are nearer to us than to the ancients, who seem to have valued their offspring, after all, mainly as the means of perpetuating the unbroken life of the family. But apart from the desire to complete a definitely limited task, the Medea had another, and, on the whole, irresistible attraction. It illustrates, probably, better than any other play of our author, certain characteristics regularly found in good Greek work, which are rightly regarded as essential to any truly artistic creation. Now, no sensible man desires a resuscitation of Greek forms and Greek subj...« less