book of the Æneid reflects a like interest in this wild picture of female passion.
111. The later Latin tragedies, handed down to us under the name of Seneca, show the same respect for Euripides as a tragic model, but the false taste of an artificial age adorned his purity with showy tinsel, and exaggerated his pathos with extravagant bombast. One great scene (in the Latin Troades), which we cannot identify, leaves us in doubt whether the Roman has followed some forgotten Greek model or struck out one fresh spark of genius amid the lurid glow of his diseased taste. But while this tragic school could not remain satisfied with his simplicity, the sober Quintilian warns every orator to study so admirable a master of persuasion. The so-called Longinus often quotes him for sublimity, and thus at the end of the classical days he is praised for the very qualities which he despised, at the risk of obloquy and of defeat. In the last days of the old world, the wretched days of centos, the unknown author of the Christus Patiens made up his poem on the death of Christ chiefly from the Bacchæ of Euripides—a strange but not unsuggestive borrowing, had the author sounded deeper than the mere words that suited his purpose.
112. We pass beyond the age of adaptation and imitation to that in which Euripides became an author of the study, or a handbook of education, and when his works came to struggle, not with too great celebrity and diffusion—a fruitful cause of corruption—but with the dangers of neglect and ignorance, of false transcription, of forgetfulness, and of decay. In the earlier Byzantine empire, indeed, a selection of his plays was diligently read and annotated for school use; but the selection seems gradually to have grown smaller and smaller, so that when we emerge from the Dark Ages into the Revival, we have only two MSS. (C and P) copied from a single book containing eighteen plays, and neither of them complete; thus for several—Hercules, Helena, Electra—we have but one MS.
