27. This curious preservation of his inferior dramas has told greatly against the reputation of the poet as compared with that of his rivals. While the immediately succeeding public was almost unanimous upon his greater brilliancy and philosophic depth, moderns are always disparaging him as contrasted with either Æschylus or Sophocles, from whom we have but a very few plays, and these almost all their very best. Had half-a-dozen Æschylean plays of the rank of the Supplices, or Sophoclean of the rank of the Trachiniæ survived, the German and English censors might have been saved their comparisons. But it is always a dangerous thing to expose a large front to criticism, for the censor who finds a weak point anywhere, parades it to the general detriment of the author in the public mind; there being no class more unfair and even bigoted in their judgments than philologists, who differ only in degree from the public, and exhibit the same weaknesses often exaggerated in intensity.
I will add that as a larger survival of the rival Greek plays might have benefited Euripides, so also a more complete loss of them would certainly have had the same effect. If we suppose all our plays lost, and nothing extant but the fragments of the three poets, there would be no hesitation in declaring Euripides by far the greatest of the tragic poets; and learned men would doubtless have set themselves to explain away most satisfactorily those judgments of old art-critics which are now quoted to prove the superiority of his rivals. For there are no fragments in Greek literature more striking in thought or felicitous in diction, than those culled by moralists and philosophers, by orators and antiquarians, from his lost works.
28. Looking at the extant plays from a chronological point of view, as affording us evidence of the development of the poet's mind, we have been likewise fortunate in some respects, unfortunate in others. His earliest play, the Peliades, brought out in Ol. 81.2 (455 B.C.) would have been very valuable in showing
