Sculpture, the Greek Art _par excellence_.--Plastic Character of the Greek Genius.--Sterner Aspects of Greek Art.--Subordination of Pain and Discord to Harmony.--Stoic-Epicurean Acceptance of Life.--Sadness of Achilles in the _Odyssey_.--Endurance of Odysseus.--Myth of Prometheus.--Sir H. S. Maine on Progress.--The Essential Relation of all Spiritual Movement to Greek Culture.--Value of the Moral Attitude of the Greeks for us.--Three Points of Greek Ethical Inferiority.--The Conception of Nature.--The System of Marcus Aurelius.--Contrast with the _Imitatio Christi_.--The Modern Scientific Spirit.--Indestructible Elements in the Philosophy of Nature. Page 391 THE GREEK POETS. CHAPTER XIV. _GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES._ Two Conditions for the Development of a National Drama.--The Attic Audience.--The Persian War.--Nemesis the Cardinal Idea of Greek Tragedy.--Traces of the Doctrine of Nemesis in Early Greek Poetry.--The Fixed Material of Greek Tragedy.--Athens in the Age of Euripides.--Changes introduced by him in Dramatic Art.--Law of Progress in all Art.--Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.--The Treatment of #eupsychia# by Euripides.--Menoikeus.--Death of Polyneices and Eteocles.--Polyxena.--Iphigenia.--Medea.--Hippolytus.--Electra and Orestes.--Lustspiele.--The _Andromache_.--The Dramas of Orestes.--Friendship and Pylades.--Injustice done to Euripides by Recent Critics. The chapters on Æschylus and Sophocles have already introduced the reader to some of the principal questions regarding Attic tragedy in general. Yet the opening of a new volume justifies the resumption of this subject from the beginning, while the peculiar position of Euripides, in relation to his two great predecessors, suggests the systematic discussion of the religious ideas which underlay this supreme form of national art, as well as of the æsthetical rules which it obeyed in Greece.