CHAPTER X.
THE HISTORY AND FORTUNES OF HIS WORKS.
105. I have already explained (above, p. 37) how the small number of Euripides' tragic victories is to be reconciled with his undoubted and immediate popularity. For it required no study of generations, no growth of new light and learning, to comprehend the clear and pointed utterances of the poet. He was recognised as a master of style even by Aristophanes, and we may thank Euripides, together with the orator Lysias, for overthrowing the hard crabbed conciseness of writing which we see in Thucydides and Antiphon, and which often mars even the dialogue of Sophocles. We know that the dithyrambic poets, on the other hand, indulged in such exuberance as was destructive of all clearness of thought and chastity of taste, and to this also the deep clear stream of his lyrical diction was the best antidote. For he purged his vocabulary of all obscure and recondite terms; and while the mediæval lexicons are full of such rare and uncouth words from the works of Sophocles, hardly a single stranger to the purest Attic speech can be brought home to our poet. But in other respects, we may see traces of admiration and even of imitation of our poet in Sophocles' later work.
106. In Aristophanes, with the exception of a single remark praising the smoothness of Euripides' diction, which is corroborated by a taunt of plagiarism from a rival comedian, we have nothing but the bitterest and most uncompromising hostility. If the tragedies of
