Euripides was so much besides a poet that we sometimes tend to regard him exclusively as a great thinker or a great personality and forget that it is in his poetry that he lives. A biography like that which we have attempted to sketch is of little value except as a kind of clue to guide a reader through the paths of the poet's own work. It is only by reading his plays that we can know him; and unfortunately, owing to the two thousand odd years that have passed since his death, we must needs approach them through some distorting medium. We read them either in a foreign language, as a rule most imperfectly understood, or else in a translation. It is hard to say by which method a reader who is not a quite good Greek scholar will miss most. A further difficulty occurs about the translations. I need not perhaps apologize for assuming normally in the present volume the use of my own. There has been lately, since the work of Verrall in England and Wilamowitz in Germany, a far more successful effort made to understand the mind of Euripides, while the recent performances of his plays in London and elsewhere have considerably increased our insight into his stagecraft. Consequently we can now see that the older translations, even when verbally defensible and even skilful, are often seriously inadequate or misleading. A comparison of Dr. Verrall's English version of the _Ion_ with practically any of its predecessors will illustrate this point. The greatest change that has come over our study of Greek civilization and literature in the last two generations is this: that we now try to approach it historically, as a thing that moves and grows and has its place in the whole life-history of man. The old view, sometimes called classicist, was to regard the great classical books as eternal models; their style was simply the right style, and all the variations observable in modern literature were, in one degree or another, so many concessions to the weakness of human nature. There is in this view an element of truth. The fundamental ideals which have produced results so singularly and so permanently successful cannot be lightly disregarded. Books that are still read with delight after two thousand years are certainly, in some sense, models to imitate. But the great flaw in the classicist view, as regards the ancient literature itself, was that it concentrated attention on the external and accidental; on the mannerism, not the meaning; on the temporary fashion of a great age, not on the spirit which made that age great. A historical mind will always try, by active and critical use of the imagination, to see the Greek poet or philosopher in his real surroundings and against his proper background. Seen thus he will appear, not as a stationary "ancient" contrasted with a "modern," but as a moving and striving figure, a daring pioneer in the advance of the human spirit, fore-doomed to failure because his aims