Chapter 14, Euripides: The Modern Mind Summary and Analysis

Hamilton characterizes Euripides as the "great exponent of the ever recurring modern mind." She says his plays are too sad to be truly tragic. Yet Euripides has spoken for more than 2000 years to the deepest pain and sorrow of the human experience. Euripides is, she says, "the poet of the world's grief."

What Euripides offers is less a noble endurance of suffering and less an effort to gain knowledge from patient suffering and more a profound sympathy with suffering. This sympathy is new in Greek literature. It is accompanied by something else that is new - a conviction and a defense of the worth of every human being. These two characteristics are what Hamilton believes expresses the modern mind.

The modern mind is not necessarily the mind of the twentieth century, so much...