Euripides had been lost, we should have believed his opponent, that he was a degrader of his art, a panderer to the lowest taste for excitement in the mass of the people; that he sought to gain popularity by degrading gods and heroes, by detracting from ancient virtues, and setting up idle casuistry and flippant immorality in their place. We should have believed him the poet of the mob, the mouthpiece of the sophists on the stage, the corrupter of public morals and of public decency; and all this is put with such audacious assurance, and seasoned with such brilliant wit, that there are yet German students who profess to believe it.
The attacks of the comic poet are to be found in three of his plays, the Acharnians, the Thesmophoriazusæ, and the Frogs. In the first, an early play, he ridicules the ragged heroes so frequent in Euripides, and represents a man in distress going to seek Euripides, and borrow from him a pathetic garb of woe to soften the hearts of his judges. Euripides is represented as a recluse student, sitting in his study surrounded by his "properties," which consist of suits of rags which vie with one another in squalor. In the Thesmophoriazusæ, Euripides is first ridiculed as a woman-hater, whom the women in council are determined to punish. The poet is represented as dressing up a friend in woman's attire to attend their deliberations. In the sequel the various stage devices in his plays are parodied, not without suggestion of his immorality. From the scholia explaining this piece, we have many valuable quotations of lost plays of Euripides, such as the Antiope. In the Frogs, the most complete and systematic of all Aristophanes' attacks, the poet's whole moral and social tendencies are discussed in contrast to the tone of Æschylus, and he is represented as the mouthpiece of the vulgar and depraved mob, that ochlocracy which the Germans dislike so much. Thus we may say that no Greek poet ever received more constant and unsparing adverse criticism, and from the ablest possible critic.
