24. Such being our poet's character and aims, there seems no ground to wonder at the apparently curious combination in his long career of great, general, and immediate popularity, with few definite victories. He was precisely that sort of broad-minded sympathetic thinker who refuses to adopt the views of any party, but holds sometimes with the one and sometimes with the other. Thus in matters of education and of general enlightenment, he certainly stood with the advanced Radicals and Freethinkers, with Anaxagoras, with the sophists and rhetoricians, who were breaking down the old barriers of thought. But in politics his plays produce strong conviction that he opposed this very party, and held with the old Conservatives and the peace policy, represented by a section of the nobility and the stout farmers of Attica. For these latter, indeed, he shows a special preference, and his praise of them must have greatly annoyed the enlightened city wits, who looked down upon such rustic simplicity as clumsy and boorish. Here, then, he actually sides with Aristophanes, whose party hated him so bitterly for his intellectual tendencies.
Now we know that though the prizes for tragedies were awarded by judges chosen at the time by lot, their decisions must have been altogether guided by the public reception of the piece, by the applause or silence or disapprobation of the great audience in the theatre of Dionysus. And it need hardly be added that party feeling, that political cabals, that previous intrigues were as common at Athens as in the theatre of Louis XIV. Accordingly the decisions of this most competent of all audiences were not only commonly reversed by the verdict of posterity, but were even a marvel to men of succeeding generations. Before such an audience what chance could a half-way politician have of success—a man who offended both sides by exposing their weaknesses, who perhaps offended them still more because he puzzled them by advocating portions of their policy with extraordinary force and clearness? So the great outsider would
