CHAPTER II.
THE POET'S LIFE AND STUDIES.
13. Euripides was born in the year of the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.), and apparently on the island, among the refugees. Later legends fixed the day of the battle as his birthday, with that love of coincidences and curious accidents which often takes far larger liberties with chronology. In after days the poet is said to have frequented his native island, and to have written his tragedies in a secluded spot, looking out upon the sea—from which he borrows so many striking metaphors—and within sight of the myriad traffic which passed in and out of the Piræus. His father Mnesarchus, or Mnesarchides,[1] was said to have once lived in Bœotia, apparently as an Attic citizen abroad; afterwards in the deme called Phlyia. Some of the Greek Lives of the poet call Mnesarchides a petty trader, and his wife Kleito a seller of pot-herbs; evidently a repetition of the random scandal of the comic poets, whose constant attacks on Kleito seem to rest on some anecdote, or coincidence of name now lost to us. The ample means and liberal education of the poet, as well as his holding of certain sinecure priestly offices, rather incline us to believe that his parents were of the better classes. He is said to have been trained with success by his father for athletic contests, a pursuit which is alluded to with contempt and aversion in his tragedies; so that he may have been
- ↑ I incline to the form Mnesarchides, as a son of Euripides was called by that name, no doubt after his grandfather.
