"Numbers, weight of authority, and time, have conspired to place
Aristphanes 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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