Book 15
20
THEOPOMPUS says F.H. G. i. 294. that the mother of the poet Euripides made a living by selling country produce. Furthermore, when Euripides was born, his father was assured by the astrologers that the boy, when he grew up, would be victor in the games; for that was his destiny. His father, understanding this to mean that he ought to be an athlete, exercised and strengthened his son's body and took him to Olympia to contend among the wrestlers. And at first he was not admitted to the contest because of his time of life, He was too old for the boys' races. but afterwards he engaged in the Eleusinian Athletic games in connection with the Eleusinian mysteries. and Thesean A festival held at Athens in the autumn in the month Pyanepsion, in honour of Theseus. contests and won crowns. Later, turning from attention to bodily exercise to the desire of training his mind, he was a pupil of the natural philosopher Anaxagoras and the rhetorician Prodicus, and, in moral philosophy, of Socrates. At the age of eighteen he attempted to write a tragedy. Philochorus relates F.H. G. i. 412. that there is on the island of Salamis a grim and gloomy cavern, These words are probably not part of the quotation. which I myself have seen, in which Euripides wrote tragedies. He is said to have had an exceeding antipathy towards almost all women, either because he had a natural disinclination to their society, or because he had had two wives at the same time (since that was permitted by a decree passed by the Athenians) and they had made wedlock hateful to him. Aristophanes also notices his antipathy to women in the first edition of the Thesmophoriazousae in these verses: 453 ff. Now then I urge and call on all our sex This man to punish for his many crimes. For on us, women, he brings bitter woes, Himself brought up 'mid bitter garden plants. But Alexander the Aetolian composed the following lines about Euripides: Anal. Alex. p. 247, Meineke.
