"Numbers, weight of authority, and time, have conspired to place
Aristophanes on as high a literary pinnacle as any ancient writer,
with the exception perhaps of Homer, but he makes no secret of
heartily hating Euripides and Sophocles, and I strongly suspect only
praises AEschylus that he may run down the other two with greater
impunity. For after all there is no such difference between AEschylus
and his successors as will render the former very good and the latter
very bad; and the thrusts at AEschylus which Aristophanes puts into
the mouth of Euripides go home too well to have been written by an
admirer.
"It may be observed that while Euripides accuses AEschylus of being
'pomp-bundle-worded,' which I suppose means bombastic and given to
rodomontade, AEschylus retorts on Euripides that he is a 'gossip
gleaner, a describer of beggars, and a rag-stitcher,' from which it
may be inferred that he was truer to the life of his own times than
AEschylus was. It happens, however, that a faithful rendering of
contemporary life is the very quality which gives its most permanent
interest to any work of fiction, whether in literature or painting,
and it is a not unnatural consequence that while only seven plays by
AEschylus, and the same number by Sophocles, have come down to us, we
have no fewer than nineteen by Euripides.
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