Euripides
Euripides the classical Greek tragedian of Athens (c. 480-406 BC), the youngest of the three great writers of Attic tragedy, whose sceptical, humane and psychologically searching plays have proved among the most enduring and most performed of all ancient dramas.
Life and Reputation
Euripides was born around 480 BC, the year of the battle of Salamis, probably at Phlya in Attica, the son of a family of moderate means. He received a good education and is said to have been a friend of the philosopher Socrates, whose critical spirit and questioning of conventional values left a deep mark on his work. He was a secluded and bookish man, more a thinker in his study than a man of public affairs, and ancient tradition paints him as a solitary figure who shunned the crowd.
He travelled to Macedonia late in life at the invitation of King Archelaus, and he died there around 406 BC, in the same year as Sophocles, before Athens finally fell. His relationship with the Athenian audience was difficult. He competed at the festival of Dionysus many times but won first prize on only a few occasions, and some of his finest plays were misunderstood or received with hostility. His reputation grew after his death, and by the fourth century he had become the most popular of the three tragedians.
Dramatic Innovation and Realism
Euripides broke with the heroic conventions of his predecessors and brought tragedy closer to ordinary human experience. He placed at the centre of his plays the suffering of women, slaves, foreigners and the defeated, treating them as serious subjects whose voices deserved to be heard, and he interrogated the moral assumptions of his society. He was a master of plot and of the surprise, using recognition, reversal and the intervention of the gods to expose the gap between appearance and reality.
His celebrated use of the deus ex machina, a god lowered onto the stage to resolve an entanglement, is often read as a comment on the limits of human agency, though whether ironic or devout remains debated. His music, his choral odes and his dialogue were admired for their beauty and emotional force, and he gave a new prominence to the chorus as a source of lyric reflection. He also expanded the range of the tragic register, allowing tenderness, humour and everyday detail into the genre.
Women, Gods and the Human Condition
Euripides returns again and again to the inner life of women. Medea portrays a wronged wife who takes a monstrous revenge on her husband, and its sympathetic handling of both her passion and her cruelty has made it one of the most discussed of all tragedies. The Trojan Women laments the fate of the captive wives of the defeated city and functions as a vivid protest against the cruelty of war. Phaedra in Hippolytus is a portrait of desire, shame and destructive misunderstanding.
The title figure of Alcestis offers a fable of self-sacrifice with strange and troubling undertones. In these plays the gods are often cruel, indifferent or morally compromised, and the human beings who suffer from their actions are drawn with insight and compassion. His sceptical treatment of the traditional gods and his sympathy for the weak reflect the intellectual ferment of fifth-century Athens, which saw the rise of rhetoric, philosophy and a critical attitude toward inherited myth.
The Bacchae and Later Work
The Bacchae, produced after his death, is his most strange and powerful play. Its subject is the arrival of the god Dionysus in Thebes and the resistance of King Pentheus, whose refusal to acknowledge the god leads to his destruction by the very women he forbids, including his own mother, in the grip of frenzy. The play explores the terrifying and irresistible power of irrational impulse, and in its ambiguity it resists easy interpretation.
It may be read as a warning against repressing the irrational, as an analysis of religious frenzy and political power, or as an unresolved meditation on the two forces that compose human nature, and it is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all Greek dramas. Other late works, such as Iphigenia in Aulis, Phoenician Women and Orestes, show a mature mastery of the familiar myths, handled with a human feeling and moral complexity that make them accessible to audiences far removed from the world in which they were written.
Reception and Legacy
In antiquity Euripides was enormously influential. His plays were studied, quoted and performed widely, and Greek vase paintings and later writers testify to their currency. Hellenistic scholars arranged and preserved his work, and many of his dramas survived while others of the tragedians were lost, a sign of his enduring popularity. His influence on later drama is deep, and the Roman playwrights Seneca and Plautus drew on his models.
Through them the whole tradition of European tragedy was shaped, and the notion of a tragedy centred on domestic passion and psychological realism descends in large part from him. Playwrights as different as Racine and modern adapters have returned to his plots. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries he has been revived more often than any other ancient tragedian, and he is recognised as the most subversive, the most humane and perhaps the most theatrically inventive of the three great tragedians of Athens.
See also
- Medea
- The Bacchae
- Hippolytus
- The Trojan Women
References
- ↑ Euripides, Medea, translated by Michael Collier and Georgia Machemer, Oxford University Press, 2006.
- ↑ Euripides, The Bacchae, translated by William Arrowsmith, University of Chicago Press, 1959.
- ↑ D. J. Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme and Structure, University of Toronto Press, 1967.
- ↑ Anne Pippin Burnett, Catastrophe Survived: Euripides' Plays of Mixed Reversal, Oxford University Press, 1971.