Who is "Eurip." and where is this Greek extract from?

Question

Eἰς τὸν λειμῶνα καθίσας,
ἔδρεπεν ἕτερον ἐφ' ἑτέρῳ
αἰρόμενος ἄγρευμ' ἀνθέων
ἁδομένᾳ ψυχᾷ

[Eurip. frag. 754.] [sic]

['He sat in the meadow and plucked with glad heart the spoil of the flowers, gathering them one by one.']

This is the page before the preface of Palgrave's Golden Treasury: Palgrave, Francis Turner.

What is this Eurip. mentioned in the text? I found the Greek text here.

Answer 1

Hypsipyle is a lost or fragmentary play written around 410 BC by the Greek playwright Euripides. This particular fragment survived due to its being quoted in Book IV of Symposiacs by the Greek/Roman biographer and essayist Plutarch, who lived between AD 46 – AD 120:

Now if nothing is by its own nature hard to be digested, but it is the quantity that disturbs and corrupts, I think we have still greater reason to forbear that variety with which Philo’s cook, as it were in opposition to his master’s practice, would draw us on to surfeits and diseases. For, by the different sorts of food and new ways of dressing, he still keeps up the unwearied appetite, and leads it from one dish to another, till tasting of every thing we take more than is sufficient and enough; as Hypsipyle’s foster-child,

Who, in a garden placed, plucked up the flowers,
One after one, and spent delightful hours;
But still his greedy appetite goes on,
And still he plucked till all the flowers were gone.

_{Plutarch. Symposiacs, book IV. Translated by William Watson Goodwin (1870). Plutarch’s Morals, p. 291. London: Sampson Low, son, and Marston.}

So this is likely a fragment of Hypsipyle that we only know about because Plutarch quoted it in his book ~500 years after the play was written.