Euripides and his Age by Gilbert Murray

Thus we come round to the figure from which we started, the old sad man with the long beard, who seldom laughed and was not easy to speak to; who sat for long hours in his seaward cave on Salamis, meditating and perhaps writing one could not tell what, except indeed that it was "something great and high. " It was natural that he should be sad. His dreams were overthrown; his City, his Beloved, had turned worse than false. Public life was in every way tenfold more intimate and important to an ancient Greek than it is to us moderns who seldom eat a mutton-chop the less when our worst political enemies pass their most detested bills. And Athens had not only been false to her ideals; she had sinned for the sake of success and had then failed. And her failure probably made the daily life of her citizens a thing of anxiety and discomfort. You were never quite sure of your daily food. You were never quite safe from a triumphant raid of the enemy.

And the habitual bodily discomfort which is the central fact of old age must have had for Euripides much to aggravate and little to soften it.