The contrast of the third and latest of the trio, Euripides (480-406), is interesting. He was a cultivated man and clearly did not believe the old legends in their religious side. Skepticism was growing in Greece. But the mass of the people were religious, and Euripides was not generally popular, though eighteen of his seventy-five plays have survived. Technically he improves on his predecessors but he has not the same glow of inspiration. He took similar themes to those of his predecessors--crimes and tragedies on the royal scale--but he was a more self-conscious artist and an intellectual. If you want to see how he wrote Greek tragedy, read a translation of the _Medea_, which is based upon the appalling crimes and tragic adventures of that legendary queen; and, incidentally, it is one of the first pleas for a more just treatment of women. _Alcestis_, _Iphigenia_, _Orestes_, etc., are other masterpieces of Euripides. Comedy was the next form invented by the Greek poets, and Aristophanes (450-380), the greatest of the comedians, was a contemporary and (being very conservative) a bitter enemy of Euripides and all innovators. He satirized the growing woman-movement mercilessly in his _Lysistrate_ and _Ecclesiazusae_, the philosophers in his _Clouds_, the democrats in his _Knights_, the democratic judges in his _Wasps_, and so on. But his wit was irresistible, and the stubborn old conservative was an idol of the Athenian people for forty years. Of his fifty plays, of which eleven survive, the _Clouds_ (against the intellectuals and skeptics) is perhaps the best, though most mischievous. Translations of all these ancient classics can be got in the Bohn, “Everyman,” and other collections of great books. Aristophanes was as free of speech in regard to sex as he was zealous for old creeds. A refinement of comedy came after his time, and the ablest representative of this “New Comedy,” reflecting the real domestic life of the Greeks, was “the gentle Menander.” But we have only fragments of his comedies. Aristophanes, the loosest, is the only comedian of whom entire plays have been preserved, and we must now take their tone as typically Greek. The austere moralists Sophocles and Euripides, remember, lived at the same time and were played before the same audiences. History was a third line of development at the time, and two of the Greek historians, Herodotus (“the Father of History,” 484-425) and Thucydides (471-400) are classics. The former, who had traveled all over the civilized world, wrote mainly on the clash of the Greeks and the Persians, but he brings in the whole world which he has seen. The plan is imposing, but he is not critical, and not always reliable even about countries which he visited. Thucydides chiefly describes the Peloponnesian War (with Sparta) and is terser and more faithful to facts. His work is history in the modern sense and finely written.