For Jove doth teach men wisdom, sternly wins To virtue by the tutoring of their sins; Yea! drops of torturing recollection chill The sleeper’s heart; ’gainst man’s rebellious will Jove works the wise remorse: Dread Powers, on awful seats enthroned, compel Our hearts with gracious force.” And again (p. xlviii):-- “The lyrical tragedy of the Greeks presents, in a combination elsewhere unexampled, the best elements of our serious drama, our opera, our oratorio, our public worship, and our festal recreations. The people who prepared and enjoyed such an intellectual banquet were not base-minded. Had their stability been equal to their susceptibility, the world had never seen their equal.” The religious element is not so prominent in the poetry of Sophocles, who brought his compositions to the highest perfection of art; and the rationalising element is still more apparent in Euripides, with whom philosophy may be said to have gained the ascendency. In his hands the Athenian drama lost to a large extent its ideal and heroic character, becoming realistic in its mode of thought, and showing the same speculative tendencies as the Sophists had begun to indulge in. Euripides represents a period of decline; but for intellectual keenness and subtlety, for humane sentiment and tender pathos, he is generally regarded as the greatest of the three. It gives us some idea of the marvellous intellectual wealth of Athens at this period in her history when we remember that the great poets we have mentioned were sometimes defeated by competitors, whose writings have unfortunately perished.