To have outlived, nay, to have conquered such attacks, is in my mind an astonishing proof of genius.
The caricatures of Aristophanes have this foundation, that our poet in his pictures of passion did not shrink from painful subjects; but have we no Œdipus and Thyestes in Sophocles? Morever, in his dramatic statements of intellectual difficulties of faith and dogma, he did not shrink from speaking the most daring heresies from the stage; but was it more disturbing than Aristophanes' own theological buffoonery? Such was no doubt the judgment of the Athenians, when the poet's political ambiguities were forgotten, and when they awarded to his posthumous plays the highest prize, in reply to the savage attack upon his memory in the Frogs of Aristophanes.
107. We have hardly a word of information about dramatic performances elsewhere than at Athens, but that the appreciation of the great tragic masterpieces must have been diffused all over Hellenic lands, is proved first, by the activity of Æschylus in Sicily, and of Euripides in Northern Greece; secondly, by the frequent and imposing remains of theatres on the same model as that of Athens, and which the traveller may yet find in the Peloponnesus, and in Asia Minor. Lastly, we hear so much of the popularity of actors over Greece, and even of their liberties in tampering with the great texts, that we may assume them to have been an important travelling profession, and to have gone about, like our comedians, "starring it" in the provinces.
108. In the following generation, we find Plato quoting Euripides more frequently than he quotes the older tragedians, though he records a distinct preference for Sophocles. In the orators, our poet is cited not only as an acknowledged master, but as a noble and patriotic citizen. The philosophers, and among them Aristotle, naturally found more to quote in Euripides than in other poets, but so far as we can trust the Poetics, Sophocles was still considered by the theorists the model of tragedy, and many faults of economy are
