Philochorus was a careful and systematic annalist of the early third century B.C., who used official documents and verified his statements. His main work was to record all that affected Athens--history, myths, festivals, and customs, but he also wrote various special treatises, one of which was _On Euripides_. Satyrus wrote a series of _Lives of Famous Men_, which was very popular, and we are now--since 1911--in a position to judge how undeserved its popularity was. For fragments of his _Life of Euripides_ have been unearthed in Egypt by Drs. Grenfell and Hunt and published in their _Oxyrrhyncus Papyri_, vol. ix. The life takes the form of a dialogue--apparently a dialogue with a lady. It is a mass of quotations, anecdotes, bits of literary criticism, all run together with an air of culture and pleasantness, a spice of gallantry and a surprising indifference to historical fact. Evidently anecdotes amused Satyrus and facts, as such, did not. He cared about literary style, but he neither cared nor knew about history. The following considerations will make this clear. Euripides was, more than any other figure in ancient history, a constant butt for the attacks of comedy. And we find, oddly enough, that most of the anecdotes about Euripides in Satyrus are simply the jokes of comedy treated as historical fact. For instance, in Aristophanes' play, _The Women at the Thesmophoria_, the women, while alone at this private festival, agree to murder Euripides because, by his penetrating study of female character on the stage, he has made life too difficult for them. Euripides, hearing of the plot, persuades his elderly father-in-law to go in disguise to the forbidden celebration and defend him--which he does in a ruinously tactless way. Some scenes of brilliant farce are succeeded by a solemn truce between Euripides and the women of Athens. It shows what our tradition is worth when we find that both the "_Life and Race_," and Gellius and Satyrus himself, give as sober fact this story which we know--and if we did not know could surely see--to be comic invention. There is another class of fabulous anecdote which plays an even larger part in the Satyrus tradition. In Aristophanes' _Frogs_ (1.1048), in a scene where Euripides is defending his plays against the attacks of Aeschylus, there occurs the chance suggestion that Euripides had learnt from his own experience all the varied villanies of his wicked heroines. The idea took root, and he is represented in the anecdotes as a deceived husband, like his own Theseus or Proetus, and uttering lines suitable to the occasion out of his own tragedies; as having two wives at once, like his own Neoptolemus--one of them named Choirile, or "Piggy," and each of course worse than the other; as torn to pieces by hounds, like his own Actaeon, or by wild women, like his own Pentheus.