As for the two dramatists, his contemporaries, mythology was their public business, and they accepted it genially because they were not, in the first place, moral teachers, but dramatists; it did not therefore occur to them to protest or violently to reform. But they might select, discard and reshape; they could take the great legends of the past, legends of Thebes, the story of the Niobids, of Prometheus, the death of Ajax, all of them irreconcilable in parts with higher morality and religion, and invest them with as much morality as the tradition admitted. This they did with force and subtlety. And generally the moral spirit and imagination of Æschylus and Sophocles must be counted among the spiritual facts of this period with which the history of Greek ethics and religion must {111} deal. Doubtless the older and robuster poet was the stronger moral and religious force; his protests against the non-moral doctrine of Nemesis, his profound utterances concerning moral responsibility and the moral continuity that links our lives and actions, his discovery that suffering brings moral wisdom--these are landmarks in the ethical story of Greece; while with Sophocles the conviction is no less deep of the eternity and divinity of the moral law. They were the last spokesmen of a civic-imperial system with a civic religion and morality that had not yet passed its zenith. _Euripides_.--The part played by Euripides in this spiritual history of Hellas was wholly different. Younger contemporary of Sophocles as he was, he seems to belong to a different age. In his work and thought is reflected far more vividly than in the older poets of the same century the new mental life which was fostered by the philosophers and the sophists. The influence of the physical speculations of the sixth century and of those of Demokritos and Anaxagoras of the fifth, which at some points advanced further in materialism, has had time to penetrate the more gifted minds and to compel the public to a certain attention. The paid ‘Sophist,’ the pioneer of modern education and the first champion of the critical spirit, was travelling around. And after 470 B.C. the imperial greatness of Athens had begun to attract the greatest teachers and thinkers of the age. It was of great moment for Euripides that such men as Anaxagoras and Protagoras were active in Athens for many years, and that he had enjoyed familiar intercourse with them {112} as he also enjoyed with Sokrates. It is clear that the poet imbibed deeply their teaching and their spirit; he was also learned in Orphism, antiquarianism and remote folklore. Being by nature a great poet, he has also something of the weakness of the ‘polymath’ or the ‘intellectual’; he had not the steadiness of brain or strong conviction enough to evolve a systematic philosophy or clear religious faith; his was, in fact, the stimulating, eager, critical spirit, not the constructive. His mental sympathies and interests shift and range from pole to pole.