abandons her character when she laments over the children she is about to slay. Iphigenia, they object, who enters as a weeping and tender maiden, ought not to become a heroine in courage and resolution as the play proceeds. Such were the hands into which Euripides passed from the loving appreciation of refined Athens.
110. But while these pedants were staining his pages with the mildew of their criticism, he was delighting the semi-Hellenised courts of the far East in their relaxations, and he was teaching the conquerors of the West to transfer him in a new language to their tamer stage. Andronicus, Nævius, Ennius translated many Greek plays, and Ennius did so chiefly from Euripides. The versions of Ennius, who brought out at least a dozen Euripidean plays, must have been as free as those of Racine, and like them, without a regular chorus. Pacuvius and Attius translated Greek plays likewise, though less exclusively from our poet; while we hear that after a banquet at the Parthian court, scenes from the Bacchæ were being recited, when the actor seized the gory head of Crassus, which had just been brought in, and gave a horrible realism to the affecting scene where the frantic mother parades the head of Pentheus in triumph, and with returning consciousness discovers that she has mangled her own son.
The rivals of the unfortunate Crassus at Rome were doubtless able to quote the text, when they heard the striking news, for Cæsar, we are told, constantly had lines of the Phœnissæ in his mouth, and Cicero often refers to Euripides, whom he judges not inferior to his great contemporaries, though all three differed so widely in style. Indeed the fashion of composing free versions of the tragedies without any intention of producing them on the stage, seems a perpetual amusement among literary Romans. But Ovid's, and even Mæcenas' reputed attempts at a Latin Medea, seem to show that the more cosmopolitan poet, as we might expect, was the best appreciated. The fourth
