‘I portray men as they should be, but Euripides portrays them as they are.’
(Sophocles, quoted by Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 25, 1460b33–4)
‘Whatever other defects of organization he may have, Euripides is the most intensely tragic of all the poets.’
(Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 14, 1453a28–30)
‘I am really amazed that the scholarly nobility does not comprehend his virtues, that they rank him below his predecessors, in line with that high-toned tradition which the clown Aristophanes brought into currency… Has any nation ever produced a dramatist who would deserve to hand him his slippers?’
(Goethe, Diaries, 22 November 1831)
‘What were you thinking of, overweening Euripides, when you hoped to press myth, then in its last agony, into your service? It died under your violent hands… Though you hunted all the passions up from their couch and conjured them into your circle, though you pointed and burnished a sophistic dialectic for the speeches of your heroes, they have only counterfeit passions and speak counterfeit speeches.’
(Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ch. 10)
Already in his own lifetime Euripides was a controversial figure. Daring in his theatrical innovations, superbly eloquent and articulate in the rhetoric which he gave to his characters, closely in touch with the intellectual life of his time, he has stimulated and shocked audiences and readers not only through the unexpected twists and turns of his plots, but also by the alarming immorality of many of his characters. But before exploring these and other aspects of his work in more detail, we must briefly put him in context, by giving an outline of the earlier history of the Athenian genre of tragedy, and the work of Aeschylus, his great predecessor, and of Sophocles, his older contemporary.
Unlike epic poetry, which was a traditional form familiar throughout the Greek world, tragedy was a relatively new invention in the fifth century BC, and one which was particularly Athenian. Its origins and early development are obscure: if, as Aristotle believed, it originated in a form of choral song, the ‘dithyramb’, a song in honour of the god Dionysus, then it had already been transformed before the time of Aeschylus. Ancient tradition held that contests between tragic playwrights had become an established part of the festival known as the City Dionysia (held in March) some time in the 530s, and that the key figure of these early days was a dramatist called Thespis. Our earliest surviving tragedy is Aeschylus’ Persians, performed in 472, a full sixty years later. The dramas which have survived span the rest of the fifth century, a period of intense political activity and social and intellectual change. Hence generalizations even about the extant dramas will be dangerous, and we must always bear in mind that we have only the tip of the iceberg.
The Athenian tragedies were performed in the open air, in a theatre enormous by modern standards: some experts believe that it could have contained more than 14,000 people, as it certainly could after reconstruction in the fourth century.1 This large audience was probably composed mainly of men (it is likely that women could attend, but probable that not many did so). Those attending paid for admission, but the price was low, probably less than half a labourer’s daily wage; in the fourth century even this charge was paid for out of public subsidies. The stage-arrangements were sparse: a building set behind the main area where the actors moved would represent a palace or other such building according to the needs of the play. Perhaps on a lower level (though the layout is much disputed) was the open area called the orchestra (‘dancing-space’), in which the chorus stood or danced. The events were presented as happening out of doors, theatrically necessary but also more natural in Mediterranean life. Entrances along passages on either side of the theatre were loosely conceived as leading to different destinations – country or city, army camp or seashore, depending on the plot. Actors were all male (even for female parts), normally Athenian citizens; all wore masks and dignified formal dress; speaking actors were almost invariably limited to three in number, but could take on different roles during the play by changing costume and mask offstage. Stage equipment and props were few; the action was largely stylized, even static, with the more violent action conceived as taking place offstage, then being reported to the actors, often in a long narrative speech. All plays were in verse, partly spoken and partly sung; although Euripides made several strides towards more ‘realistic’ drama, the effect of a Greek tragedy in his time would still have been to move the audience to a distant world, where great figures of the mythical past fought and disputed over momentous issues.
Every Greek tragedy had a chorus, a team of twelve or fifteen singers representing the community or some other body concerned with the events of the drama. It may be that originally tragedy consisted wholly of choral songs; if so, the key innovation, whether Thespis or another was responsible, must have been the introduction of an actor who engaged in dialogue with the chorus, who could withdraw and take part in events offstage, then return to inform them of developments. Aeschylus is said to have introduced a second actor, Sophocles a third. There the tragedians stopped, though as the century passed the three actors were often expected to play more roles, and ‘mute’ actors (domestic slaves, attendants or soldiers) were permitted. In general, the importance of the actors and the size of their role in the play increased, while that of the chorus declined; but in the work of the three great tragedians the chorus was never unimportant, and their songs or ‘choral odes’ do far more than fill in time or allow an interval: these odes comment on the action, react to it and ponder its significance, placing it in a larger perspective, chronological and religious. Some of the finest poetry in Greek tragedy comes in the choral odes.
We tend to think of the theatre as a recreation, and one which is available more or less any night of the year. The position in ancient Athens was quite different. Drama was part of a civic occasion, the festival of Dionysus. Although the city held many religious festivals, tragedies were performed only at a few, and at fixed points in the year. It was not possible for a dramatist to stage anything he liked at any time; he had to apply to the proper authorities and be ‘granted a chorus’, given permission to compete and financial support. (It is true, however, that we also have evidence for theatrical activities in rural Attica, where procedure was perhaps less formal than at the great civic festivals.) In the earliest times the dramatist would also play a part in his plays, though Sophocles is said to have given this up because his voice was weak. Still more important, the author was also the producer, working together with his actors and choruses and training them. At the City Dionysia three tragedians would compete for the prize every year; each of them would present three tragedies – sometimes but not necessarily a connected ‘trilogy’. Aeschylus favoured these trilogies (as his masterpiece, the Oresteia, illustrates), but they seem to have gone out of fashion after his death, and the overwhelming majority of surviving tragedies are self-contained dramas. After that each competing dramatist would also put on a ‘satyr-play’. This last was a wild and fantastic tailpiece, usually shorter than a tragedy: it always had a chorus of satyrs, the bestial entourage of Dionysus, and usually treated mythological themes in a burlesque and bawdy way. The only complete example to survive is Euripides’ Cyclops, an amusing parody of the story told in Homer’s Odyssey about the hero’s encounter with the one-eyed monster.
What of the content of the tragedies? Perhaps the most significant fact is that the subjects are almost always mythological.2 The only surviving exception is Aeschylus’ Persians, though we know of a few others in the early period. The Persians commemorates the victory of the Greeks in the recent war against Xerxes, king of Persia, and in particular the battle of Salamis, which had taken place only eight years earlier. But this exception in a way proves the rule, for the play is not set in Greece, but at the Persian court, presenting the subject from the Persian viewpoint. Nor is it mere jingoism: the theme is almost mythologized, raised to a grander and more heroic plane. No individual Greek is named or singled out for praise: the emphasis falls rather on the arrogant folly of a deluded king, who has led his people to defeat. There is, as always in tragedy, a supernatural element: the ghost of Xerxes’ father, summoned back to earth, pronounces stern judgement on his son’s rash ambition. In the rest of the tragic corpus, the dramatists use myth to distance their stories in time, and so give them universality. Instead of setting their actors the task of impersonating living generals or politicians confronting contemporary crises, the tragedians, like Homer, show us men and women who are remote from us in their circumstances, yet vividly like us and real in their hopes, fears and desires.
Secondly, Greek tragedy is civic in emphasis: its plots, that is, deal with kings and rulers, disputes and dilemmas which have vital implications for the state as a whole. If Oedipus cannot find the murderer of Laius, the plague which is already devastating Thebes will destroy it. If Odysseus and Neoptolemus cannot recover Philoctetes and his bow, Troy will not fall. Consequently tragedy normally deals with men and women of high status – monarchs and royal families, tyrants and mighty heroes. Characters of lower rank generally have smaller parts. As we shall see, however, this is one area in which Euripides showed himself an innovator: ‘I made tragedy more democratic’, he is made to say in the satirical treatment of tragedy in Aristophanes’ Frogs, produced after his death.
Thirdly, complementing and often conflicting with the political dimension, the family is regularly the focus for tragic action. Part of the lasting power of Greek drama lies in the vividness with which it presents extreme love and (still more) intense hatred within the family: matricide, parricide, fratricide, adultery and jealousy, even incest and other forbidden passions. Duty to family and duty to the state may come into conflict: can Agamemnon bring himself to abandon the expedition against Troy, or must he take the terrible decision to sacrifice his daughter for a fair wind? Loyalty to kin is central to Antigone; conflicting obligations to different members of the family create many of the dilemmas in the Oresteia. The list could easily be extended.
Fourthly, there is the religious aspect. We know too little of early tragedy to confirm or deny the theory that it concentrated mainly on the myths of Dionysus, in whose honour the plays were performed; but by Aeschylus’ time the scope has obviously broadened. But no Greek tragedy is secular. Although the dramatists normally focus on the actions and sufferings of human beings, the gods are always present in the background. In early tragedy they figure quite frequently on stage as characters (as in Aeschylus’ Eumenides). Sophocles seems to have been much more restrained in this, while Euripides normally confines them to the prologue (where they do not usually meet any mortal characters), or to the conclusion of a play, where a god may appear on a higher level, above the stage-building. Sometimes this seems to be a matter of the god standing on the roof of the building, but more spectacular still was the use of a crane-like device to allow the divinity the power of flight. From this remote position of authority the god would declare his will, ex machina as the phrase has it, intervening to resolve or at least impose a conclusion upon the events on earth.
Even when gods do not appear, they are frequently invoked, addressed in prayer, called to witness an oath, sometimes questioned or challenged. With the awesome powers of Olympus watching and influencing events, human affairs gain a larger significance: these are not trivial wars or petty crimes if they attract divine attention and even retribution. Yet because the humans often seem helpless pawns or puppets in the divine game, the greatness of the heroes can seem sadly insignificant, and their proud boasts or ambitions may often be ironically overturned or frustrated. The wiser players on the tragic stage sometimes draw this pessimistic conclusion. ‘I see we are but phantoms, all we who live, or fleeting shadows,’ says Odysseus in Sophocles’ Ajax (125–6); or as the chorus sing in Oedipus the King, after the horrible truth is out:
Alas ye generations of men, how close to nothingness do I count your life. Where in the world is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the illusion, and after the semblance, the falling away? With your example, your fate before my eyes, yours, unhappy Oedipus, I count no man happy. (1186–96)
One last general point should be made. Greek tragedy was intended for performance: although texts undoubtedly circulated, the primary concern was production in the theatre.3 It is important to try to reconstruct the stage movements, the points at which characters enter and exit, observe one another, come into physical contact, pass objects to another person, and so forth. Major questions of interpretation may hinge on these seemingly small-scale puzzles: to take an example from the plays in the first volume of this series, does Hippolytus ever address Phaedra or not? It all depends on how we envisage the staging, and relate it to the words, of a particular scene (Hippolytus 601– 8, esp. 65 iff.). The case of Andromache is particularly striking: in the original performance, the character Andromache either appeared in the final scene or she did not. Since she speaks no words in that scene, the text gives us no guidance; but her mute appearance, recalling to the audience her previous suffering and the miseries of Troy, would modify the effect of the end of the play, in which so much is made of the death of Neoptolemus, one of the sackers of Troy.
Moreover, the tragic performance involved music and dancing by the chorus, of which we can recover next to nothing – a few descriptions in ancient prose authors, a handful of papyri with musical annotation, and pictures of dramatic productions on vases do not get us very far. To compare our situation with that of an opera-lover confined to studying a libretto would be unfair to the tragedians, for the spoken dialogue of tragedy is far richer and more significant, demands far more attention from the audience, than the interludes between songs in opera. But we should not forget that, particularly in the choruses and the other lyrics, we have lost what the original cast and audience would have regarded as a vital part of the production.4
To try to sum up the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles in a few paragraphs is to risk pure banality.5 The attempt must be made, however, if we are to see Euripides in relation to his great predecessors. Seven complete tragedies attributed to Aeschylus survive, including his monumental trilogy, the Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides). One of the others, Prometheus Bound, has recently been subject to close critical scrutiny, and on the basis of this analysis many authoritative judges think it spurious; but if so, its author shares something of Aeschylus’ grandeur of conception and magnificence of language. As already explained, Aeschylus tended to use the trilogy form, which permitted him, as in the Oresteia and in the series of which the Seven against Thebes is the third, to trace the history of a family through several generations, showing how the sins of the elders are re-enacted or paid for by their descendants. Inherited guilt, ancestral curses, persecuting Furies, vendetta and religious pollution – concepts such as these permeate the world of Aeschylean tragedy, a world of dark powers and evil crimes, in which humans must pray and hope for justice and retribution from the gods, but may pray in vain, or find that the gods are slow to respond. Austere in its characterization, eloquent yet exotic in its polysyllabic style, dominated by long and complex choral songs, his drama often seems to belong to a much older world. Yet this is only one side of a complex artist; Aeschylus, born in the sixth century BC, is also the poet of democratic Athens, deeply concerned with its ideals of reasoned discussion and decision-making. By the end of the fifth century he was established as a classic (his plays were re-performed in recognition of this), though he could also be regarded as remote and difficult. Aristophanes’ Frogs, which dramatizes Dionysus’ quest in the underworld for a great poet to bring back to life, presents Aeschylus as a symbol of the good old days, but also as a composer of grandiose and incomprehensible lyrics. In the next century, Aristotle in the Poetics uses examples from Sophocles and Euripides far more than from Aeschylus.
To sum up Aeschylus as a poet of archaic grandeur would, however, be quite misleading. He is capable of much lighter and even humorous passages: particularly memorable are the sentimental reminiscences of Orestes’ nurse in the Libation-Bearers, or the complaints of the herald in Agamemnon about the awful time the common soldiers had at Troy (it is significant that both of these are lower-class types; the great tragic figures are not allowed these more chatty interludes). More important, in his presentation of the doom-laden world of the heroic age he not only shows us horrific events and catastrophe, but also allows his characters to work towards a difficult resolution. In Aeschylean tragedy there is a strong emphasis on the power of the gods, particularly the will of Zeus, who oversees human lives and may bring blessings as well as destruction. Not all the dilemmas faced by Aeschylus’ characters are insoluble, although the final outcome may be preceded by further hard choices or disasters. The city of Thebes is saved from invasion, but only through the death of Eteocles, its king. Above all, in the Oresteia, the one trilogy which we can study as a magnificently unified whole, Aeschylus dramatizes the contrast between a darker world of vendetta and savage intrafamilial conflict and a society in which the rule of law has an important place, where argument and persuasion may prove superior to hatred and violence. It is a society which mirrors or idealizes his own: the refugee Argive Orestes, pursued by the monstrous Furies, finds sanctuary in a mythical Athens where Athena presides over an archetypal lawcourt. In this trilogy, although the suffering and crimes of the past are not forgotten, the final emphasis is on the enlightened justice of the present, and the reconciliation of opposed factions among the gods promises prosperity in the future. Aeschylus as a boy had seen the overthrow of the Athenian tyrants; he had fought at Marathon, and in his later years saw the transformation of his city into a democracy and the centre of an empire. It is no surprise that ideals of political debate and civic harmony are prominent in his work; but in view of the darker side discussed above, it would be facile to label him an optimist, either about human nature or about human society. The tragic power of his dramas is not diminished by his central recognition that something positive may, in the end, emerge after or out of suffering.
Whereas Aeschylus’ characters (Prometheus apart) are above all members of a family or of a larger community, Sophocles tends to focus on individuals set apart from their society or at odds with those who care for them: Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Philoctetes, the aged Oedipus. With him, more than with the other two tragedians, it makes sense to speak of tragic heroes and heroines. Again we have only seven plays, selected in late antiquity for school study, and we know that this represents less than a tenth of his output; moreover, those we have are mostly impossible to date. Obviously generalizations must be surrounded with cautious qualifications, but we can recognize a number of other differences from Aeschylus (to whom he nevertheless owed much). The abandonment of trilogy-form has already been mentioned. The role of the chorus is somewhat reduced, though some of the odes which reflect on human achievement and its smallness in relation to the timeless power of the gods have a poetic splendour to match almost anything in Aeschylus. The characters have more depth and subtlety: as an anonymous ancient biographer said of Sophocles, ‘He knows how to arrange the action with such a sense of timing that he creates an entire character out of a mere half-line or a single expression.’ Partly because he makes more varied use of the third actor, Sophocles constructs scenes which involve more shifts of attention, more realistic and sophisticated interplay between characters, than we can easily find in Aeschylus. Another difference is in the religious atmosphere. Aeschylus regularly brought the gods on stage and allowed them to converse with humans (the Furies, Athena and Apollo in Eumenides, Aphrodite in the lost third play of the Supplant Women trilogy); Sophocles does so only rarely, and even then the gap between man and god is emphasized: Athena is remote and haughty with Odysseus in Ajax, Heracles commanding and superhuman in Philoctetes; both are probably out of reach, above the human level. In general, the gods do not communicate plainly or unambiguously with mortals: oracles and prophecies offer mysterious and misleading insights, and even Oedipus, the most intelligent of men, can find that his whole life has been lived on completely false assumptions. The limitations of human knowledge allow ample scope for dramatic irony, where the audience understands the double meanings or the deeper truths behind the superficial sense of the words. Central to Sophoclean tragedy is the gap between reality and appearance, understanding and illusion; his characters often discern the truth about their circumstances, or themselves, only when it is too late to avert disaster.
Sophocles has sometimes been seen as a particularly ‘pious’ writer or thinker. In part this results from a very partial reading of certain selected passages which have been taken to express the poet’s own opinions (always a dangerous method); in part it derives from information about his involvement in Athenian religious life, for instance the cult of Asclepius. But within his plays, although the power of the gods is beyond question, and those who doubt that power or reject their oracles are swiftly refuted, it is hard to see any straightforward scheme of divine justice at work. Divine action is characterized as enigmatic and obscure. There is an order in the world, as is shown by the fulfilment of oracles; but the pattern is often too elusive for men to grasp. The gods are not indifferent to humanity: they punish Creon in Antigone, they grant a home and honour to Oedipus at the end of his life (Oedipus at Colonus).
But there are also mysteries which remain unanswered: why does Antigone have to die? Why did Philoctetes suffer agonies in isolation on Lemnos for nine years? Any open-minded reader of these plays will acknowledge that Sophocles does not give us a simple or uniform account of human life or of mankind’s relation to the gods and fate. Had he done so, the plays would probably not have remained so hauntingly powerful over two and a half millennia.
Sophocles is justly regarded as the greatest master of formal structure – no mere mechanical technique, but a vital aspect of his art. The development of each scene, in each play, is beautifully paced; the contrasts of style and mood between successive scenes, or between one scene and the choral song which follows, are achieved with seemingly effortless brilliance. These skills are combined with deep understanding of character in the scenes between Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, with mastery of tension and irony in the advancing quest which will lead Oedipus to self-discovery. On a more minute level of style, Oedipus the King also shows his subtlety of technique in the exchange which culminates in the revelation of the hero’s identity (1173–6): here each line is divided between Oedipus and the herdsman whom he is questioning, and as the truth becomes plainer, Oedipus’ questions become shorter and more faltering, the servant’s responses fuller and more desperate. This flexible handling of dialogue form is only one small example of the complete command Sophocles has over his medium. Appalling hatred and unbearable loss are expressed in formal verse of wonderful lucidity and sharpness; only rarely do the eloquent lines dissolve into incoherent cries of pain, as they do when Philoctetes is overcome by his repulsive wound.
We turn now to our main subject, the third of the great tragedians. It is far too commonly supposed that Euripides comes ‘after’ Sophocles, and this can easily lead to a simplifying formula which sees Aeschylus as primitive, Euripides as decadent, and Sophocles as the apex of perfection in between. In fact, although Euripides was clearly younger, he and Sophocles were competing together, often against one another, for most of their lives, and Sophocles died within a year of his rival. Both were very much younger than Aeschylus, though they will certainly have seen some of his later productions. Sophocles in fact competed against Aeschylus with his first production, in 468 BC, and won; Euripides first put on a tetralogy in 455 with a less satisfactory result, coming third. We do not know his competitors on that occasion. From that point on Euripides was constantly in the public eye, putting on a total of around ninety plays up to his death in 406 (his last plays, including the Bacchae, were produced posthumously).
We know very little about his life, and what comes down from antiquity is often unreliable (a great deal seems to be derived from the comic treatment of the dramatist by Aristophanes). There is a long-standing tradition that he was unpopular and unsuccessful in his career. We are told that he was melancholy, thoughtful and severe, that he hated laughter and women, that he lived in a cave looking out to the sea from Salamis, that he had a substantial library. None of this amounts to much more than doubtful anecdote. A more concrete statement, which probably rests on inscriptional evidence, is that he won the first prize four times (once posthumously) in his whole career. This sounds more dramatic than it is, since prizes would be awarded to the tetralogy of plays as a whole: in other words, sixteen out of about ninety plays were winners. Even with this reservation, however, there remains a contrast with the other two tragedians: Aeschylus and
Sophocles were each victorious with over half their plays. In the end Euripides is said to have emigrated to Macedonia, where King Archelaus was gathering a circle of poets and intellectuals to give tone to his court. It may be doubted whether he left Athens purely because he felt unappreciated; the hardships of life in a city engaged in a long war which she now looked likely to lose might be a more pragmatic explanation. He died in Macedonia, an event again elaborated in wild anecdotes (he was allegedly torn to pieces, like Actaeon in myth, by a pack of hunting-dogs). We should not attach too much importance to the figure about his victories, for it is clear that he was repeatedly granted a chorus, and that the Athenians enjoyed and were fascinated by his work. The constant parodies and references to his plays in
Aristophanes’ comedies are not only satirical criticism but a kind of tribute to a playwright whose work he obviously knew intimately and whose significance was beyond question.
We happen to have more plays by Euripides than by the other two tragedians put together: the complete total is nineteen, but that includes the satyr-play Cyclops and also Rhesus, a play widely thought to be a fourth-century imitation. This larger figure is partly accidental, the results of the hazards of transmission through the ages, but partly reflects the popularity of Euripides in the educational tradition – his language is easier, his speeches were more suitable for aspiring orators to study, and his plays, with their heady mixture of intellectual and emotional appeal, might be found more immediately accessible.6 We can also put fairly firm dates to a good many of the plays, because of information which survives in copies of the original inscriptions recording victories in the contests and citing the names of annual magistrates of Athens. Where external evidence for dating is lacking, the date of a play can be determined within limits by stylometry, that is, the statistical analysis of the poet’s changing linguistic and metrical habits, using the firmly dated plays as a framework.7 This means not only that we can say something about Euripides’ development as a poet, but also that it is possible to identify, or at least speculate about, passages which touch on or allude to Athenian politics and other contemporary events. This is naturally most tempting with plays such as the Children of Heracles and the Suppliant Women, which are set in Athens and present a mythological image of the Athenians as benefactors of others. But there are many other passages which, without naming Athens, use the language of contemporary politics or ideology. A good example comes in Orestes, in which a detailed account of a meeting of the assembly of Argive citizens includes lines which remind the reader of historical and rhetorical texts of the period – of the historian Thucydides’ portrayal of Athenian demagogues, for example (Orestes 866–952, esp. 902–16). Although the importance of this approach has sometimes been exaggerated, and the tragedies are not allegories of history, it is a mistake to rule out such allusions on principle.8
None of the plays we possess in entirety is from the earliest stage of Euripides’ career; the first, Alcestis, was produced in 438 BC, when he was already in his forties. The great majority of surviving plays come from.the last three decades of the fifth century, the period of the great war between Athens and Sparta, a time in which the cultural and political prominence of Athens was still conspicuous but no longer unchallenged, and by the end of the period increasingly under threat. Euripides did not live to see the defeat of Athens, but several of his later plays suggest growing pessimism about political and military leadership, about civic deliberation, and about the conduct of the victors in wartime. These are not novel themes, in poetry or in life, but they have an added resonance in the light of fifth-century history.
The sheer range and variety of Euripides’ plays is extraordinary. Perhaps if we had as many of Aeschylus’ or Sophocles’ plays they would seem equally difficult to categorize; but it is tempting to see Euripides as particularly innovative and trend-setting. Like Sophocles, he seems to have worked mainly on sequences of self-contained plays, though it looks as if the Trojan Women was the third of a trilogy concerning the Trojan war from its origins to its conclusion. Unlike Sophocles, he does not generally take a single heroic figure to form the focus of a play – only Medea easily fits this pattern. There is a strong tendency to divide the play between major characters: thus in Alcestis the heroine gives way to Heracles, the sufferer to the doer; in Hippolytus Phaedra dominates the first half of the play, Hippolytus the second; in the Bacchae the action is polarized, with the mortal Pentheus and the disguised god Dionysus in conflict throughout. Other plays extend this experimentation to the overall structure. Thus in Andromache we begin, as we might expect, with the widow of Hector in difficulties, but as the action advances Andromache is forgotten and other events follow, with different characters taking the limelight. In the Trojan Women the continuous presence of Hecabe, the grieving queen of Troy, seems to mark her out as the ‘heroine’, or at least the principal sufferer, but she is a figure who can achieve nothing. As the play unfolds we are shown a series of scenes which embody the suffering and ruin accompanying the fall of Troy, a sequence which adds up only to further misery. Other plays multiply characters and divide our attention still more: Helen has eight human characters with full speaking parts, Orestes nine, the Phoenician Women eleven.
The plays of Euripides, although they still work within the traditional range of myths, do not generally dramatize heroic initiatives and triumphant achievements. His are tragedies of suffering rather than of action (Medea again is a special case, a partial exception). Phaedra, Andromache, Hecabe, the Trojan women, the chorus of mothers in the Suppliant Women, the guilt-ravaged Orestes, are all presented as victims, whether of war or other persecution, human folly or divine antagonism. Even when they do attempt to take the initiative, to assert themselves through action, the consequences are rarely presented positively. Phaedra’s efforts to preserve her good name bring about Hippolytus’ death without achieving her objective; Electra and Orestes in Electra destroy their mother, but with psychologically devastating results for themselves; in Orestes, the young man’s matricide makes him an outcast, and his efforts to take revenge on his mother’s sister Helen are first frustrated, then turned to near-farce. Even when Euripides is reworking material which had been treated grimly enough by Aeschylus, he regularly gives his own version a new twist. The brutal sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis, so that the Greek fleet may sail for Troy, was presented by Aeschylus in an unforgettable choral song as a terrible necessity, an agonizing decision reluctantly taken by Agamemnon, and one which will have momentous consequences. In Euripides’ version, Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon and Menelaus chop and change, other members of the expedition seem to have more authority than the leaders have, Iphigenia herself changes her mind, and, most disturbing of all, there is the off-stage presence of the army, an uncontrollable mob of soldiers panting for blood. Iphigenia at Aulis is a fast-moving and constantly attention-grabbing play, but one in which the high seriousness of the Aeschylean ode is dissipated, and the tragic sacrifice becomes wasteful self-deception. As A. P. Burnett put it: ‘In these plays the poet shows men scaled for comedy trying to live in a world still ruled by the gods of tragedy.’9
Some of the ways in which Euripides made old subjects new have already been mentioned. This practice was not simply a perverse desire on his part to alter tradition. Between 480 and 430 BC some five hundred tragedies would have been staged; a middle-aged man in his audience might have seen over two hundred.10 The Athenians, like any audience, enjoyed innovation: indeed, originality and novelty were at a premium in the second half of the fifth century, as new ideas and new literary styles made their appearance in Athens. Euripides was in part responding to audience demand (though it is only fair to add that a sizeable portion of his audience would be more conservative, and that Sophocles clearly did not feel the need to innovate so ostentatiously). By the middle stage of Euripides’ career Aeschylus looked archaic: in his Electra, the younger tragedian unmistakably parodies a recognition-scene from Aeschylus’ Libation-Bearers, in which the discovery of a lock of hair at Agamemnon’s tomb was taken as evidence of Orestes’ return (513ff.). It is interesting to note that the grounds for criticism are improbability, lack of realism, violation of common sense. Aeschylus and his audience had been above such concerns; by Euripides’ time it was more natural to apply to tragedy at least some of the standards of everyday life.11 Nevertheless, the parody is two-edged: it turns out that the Euripidean Electra’s scepticism is misguided, and the deduction from the Aeschylean token remains valid. The allusion to Aeschylus need not be merely dismissive.
Innovation can also be observed in the composition of Euripides’ plots. It is natural for us to think of the myths as fixed and organized, as they are in the modern summaries which we find in handbooks; but in fact the fluidity of the legends is surprising, and the tragedians already found variations in the epic and lyric accounts which they inherited. Euripides often uses less familiar versions of myths, or combines stories normally kept apart. Although the loss of so much earlier literature makes firm assertions dangerous, it seems likely that he is modifying the legend in making Medea kill her own children deliberately (in an earlier version it was the Corinthians who took their revenge upon her offspring). In the legends of Heracles it was normally held that the hero’s labours were a kind of penance for killing his children in a fit of insanity. Euripides reverses the sequence, making Heracles return home to his family triumphant after his labours are ended – then, the crowning horror, madness and slaughter follow. In his Helen he adopts the bizarre version of the lyric poet Stesichorus, which made Helen a prisoner in Egypt throughout the Trojan war, while Greek and Trojan armies fought for ten years over a phantom. The unexpected becomes the rule, in both plot and characterization: women behave manfully, slaves show nobility and virtue, barbarians express civilized sentiments.
Even when he is closer to the traditional versions, he often introduces new characters or explores the implications of legends with a fresh eye: thus in Orestes, Menelaus, Tyndareus, Hermione and Orestes’ friend Pylades all have prominent roles, and the effect is quite different from earlier versions of this myth. Characterization can also be modified: in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, Eteocles, king of Thebes, is a noble figure, though labouring under a curse; in Euripides’ Phoenician Women, he becomes a power-crazed tyrant. In the Electra of Euripides it is even possible to sympathize with Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, the murderers of Agamemnon. Sharp changes of direction and unexpected shifts of personality are also common: in Andromache, Hermione at first seems a cruel and malicious princess, but later becomes a sympathetic victim. In Medea, the heroine vacillates throughout much of the play: loving mother or merciless avenger, which side of her character is to prevail? Aristotle in his Poetics (ch. 15) found fault with these startling reversals of character, singling out Iphigenia at Aulis for criticism: ‘the girl who pleads for her life is quite different from the later one’, he complains, referring to the scene where Iphigenia, after earlier begging for mercy, resolves to sacrifice herself in the name of Greece. Euripides also plays variations on his own earlier work: our extant Hippolytus is a second version, in which the portrayal of Phaedra is made more sympathetic and her character more complex.
In some ways Euripides can be seen as more self-consciously literary dramatist than his fellow-tragedians. It is not accidental that it was he who was said to have a large library. He seems regularly to modify the conventions of his genre and adapt the work of his predecessors, sometimes even drawing attention to the changes he has made. The parody of the Aeschylean recognition-scene has already been cited; similarly, later in Electra, the trapping and killing of Clytemnestra within the hovel in which Electra and her husband have their home is a re-enactment of the killing-scenes within the palace of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ trilogy: humbler setting, unheroic characters, dubious morality all work together. In Helen, the heroine proposes that they contrive an escape by pretending Menelaus is dead and mourning him. Is that the best you can do?, asks Menelaus; ‘Your plan is hardly very original’ (1056). The point is that the trick has been tried often before in tragedy: the character is given the critic’s fastidiousness. Aeschylus and Sophocles are also experienced in reshaping and adapting traditional motifs, but Euripides goes far beyond them in playing with conventions and exploiting the spectator’s awareness of the dramatic situation. While shocked and moved by the events on stage, we are nevertheless frequently reminded that this is ‘only’ a play.12
As the example from Helen just quoted suggests, Euripides’ plays are not devoid of lighter, humorous touches. Indeed, his wide repertoire includes not only starkly ‘tragic’ plays in the stricter sense, such as Medea, but also dramas which are harder to categorize. Alcestis, with its fairy-tale plot and happy resolution, seems to belong to a kinder and less threatening world than most tragedies. Later plays, notably Iphigenia among the Taurians and especially Helen, have often been classed as tragi-comedies. In both plays, after many misfortunes, the principal characters are reunited in a far-off setting (Helen is held captive in Egypt, Iphigenia in the Crimea), recognize one another after many false steps, and plan a successful escape back to Greece, outwitting their barbarian opponents. Hair-breadth escapes and cliff-hanging moments are common, as when Iphigenia is about to sacrifice her unrecognized brother to the goddess Artemis. We know that similar scenes occurred in lost plays by Euripides: in Cresphontes, a mother is on the point of killing her son with an axe, but the danger is averted, the potential tragedy dissipated.
There is much here which looks back to the Odyssey, with its complex plot full of deceptions and recognitions. Moreover, plays of this kind also look forward to later comedy, the types of plot favoured by Menander, Terence and eventually Shakespeare (not to mention Oscar Wilde).13 These plays are sometimes called escapist, misguidedly; there remains a strong sense of suffering and waste in the past, and they undoubtedly still qualify as tragedies. But they do show the versatile Euripides experimenting with new types of play, and these experiments are accompanied by a lighter and more ironic tone, providing a very different kind of pleasure from the cathartic experience provided by the Oresteia or Oedipus. Euripides is plainly interested in variations of tone, juxtaposing scenes of very different emotional intensity. A ‘comic’
element may be found even in much grimmer plays, but there it is often used to reinforce the seriousness of the rest of the action. The self-pity and bad temper of the downtrodden Electra, for example, provide some humour as we sympathize with her husband, the long-suffering farmer; but their conversation also contributes to our understanding of Electra’s tortured psyche. Far more macabre is the delusion of Heracles, who believes he is journeying to Mycenae, arriving there, punishing Eurystheus – when all the time he is in his own home, slaughtering his sons. The effect is intensely powerful: this madness would be funny if it were not so horrible.
In reading a plain text, and still more a translation, of Euripides it is easy to overlook the formal and musical aspects of the dramas. Here too we can see that he went beyond the earlier conventions of the genre, in ways which were exciting to the audiences, but also often controversial. Greek tragedy is broadly divisible into spoken verse and sung verse: the former is the medium in which the actors converse with one another or with the chorus-leader, the latter is most commonly found in the songs of the chorus. Already in Aeschylus there are plenty of exceptions: actors can sing solo parts or participate in lyric dialogue. In Agamemnon, the prophetess Cassandra voices her god-given insight in emotional song, to the bewilderment of the chorus; still more wild and agitated are the lyric utterances of Io, tormented by pain, in Prometheus. But Euripides seems to go further in giving his actors lyric passages, often highly emotional and linguistically rich (no doubt these were also striking in their musical accompaniment). The solo passages, arias or ‘monodies’, are often virtuoso pieces, and must have made huge demands on an actor: examples are rarer in the earlier plays, but there are several in Hippolytus. From the later plays the most memorable examples include Creusa’s lament for the child she exposed years ago and now believes dead, the ecstatic suicide-song of Evadne, and (as in Aeschylus) the prophetic raving of Cassandra (Ion 859–922, Suppliant Women 99off. and Trojan Women 308ff.). In Orestes of 408 BC we find the prize example, a tour-de-force narrative of the attempt on Helen’s life, sung by a Phrygian eunuch in a state of extreme panic, exotically foreign in its linguistic and rhythmical looseness, and no doubt accompanied by violent gestures and mime. The brilliant lyric parody in
Aristophanes’ Frogs (1309–63), which lifts lines from Orestes and elsewhere, shows how extraordinary audiences found his style in these arias. Other formal features of the drama would take too long to illustrate, but the general impression is of sharper and more prosaic or argumentative dialogue style combined with a more self-consciously ‘poetic’, decorative, image-laden, almost romantic style in lyrics.14
Several other aspects of Euripides’ work can be illuminated by Aristophanes’ Frogs, in which Aeschylus and Euripides compete against one another in the underworld. Although it is unsafe to use this play to establish Aristophanes’ own aesthetic position, it is first-rate evidence for at least some of the things in Euripidean drama which made most impression on contemporary audiences. In the Frogs, Euripides is made to boast that
as soon as the play began I had everyone hard at work: no one standing idle. Women and slaves, master, young woman, aged crone – they all talked… It was Democracy in action… I taught them subtle rules they could apply; how to turn a phrase neatly. I taught them to see, to observe, to interpret; to twist, to contrive; to suspect the worst, take nothing at its face value… I wrote about familiar things, things the audience knew about… The public have learnt from me how to think, how to run their own households, to ask ‘Why is this so? What do we mean by that?’ (948–79, tr. D. Barrett)
In Euripidean drama others besides kings and heroes play major roles; a large number of plays are named after, and focused on, female characters. Indeed, it has been pointed out that most of Euripides’ thinkers are women: certainly Creon, Jason and Aegeus are easily outclassed by Medea, and in both the Trojan Women and Helen Menelaus is inferior to his quick-witted wife.15 Lower-class characters are more prominent and more influential: the Nurse in Hippolytus is a perfect example. In Electra, the downtrodden princess is married to a mere farmer, who respects her in her adversity, and has not slept with her. The farmer comes from a noble family now impoverished; his low status is contrasted with his honourable behaviour, but the latter still has to be explained by his noble birth. In both Hecabe and the Trojan Women, the decent herald Talthybius is sympathetic to the captive women, and shocked at the misdeeds of his social superiors. Mention should also be made of the many messengers in Euripides, several of whom are vividly and sympathetically characterized.
The other point which the passage in the Frogs emphasizes is the way these characters talk. Here we come close to one of the central aspects of Euripides’ work, his fascination with argument, ideas and rhetoric. In the later fifth century BC professional teachers were instructing young men, in Athens and elsewhere, in the art of rhetoric, which in a small-scale democratic society could justly be seen as the key to political success. Types of argument were collected, methods of refutation categorized. It was possible, one of these experts claimed, ‘to make the worse case defeat the better’. Euripides gives his characters the inventiveness and articulacy which these teachers sought to impart. This is particularly clear in the so-called agon (‘contest’ or ‘debate’), at least one example of which can be found in most of his plays. The agon is a scene in which two (occasionally more) characters express their antagonism in long, highly argumentative and sometimes ingenious speeches: rhetorical skill is combined with energetic emotion. Examples are Jason versus Medea, Theseus versus Hippolytus, Helen versus Hecabe (in Medea, Hippolytus, Trojan Women respectively). These scenes sharpen our understanding of the issues, and often challenge us to adjudicate between the parties involved. There is rarely a clear winner, either on the arguments or under the prevailing circumstances in the play: often considerations of power and self-interest matter more than who is in the right. As a result, tragic conflict-scenes seldom lead to a resolution, but tend rather to heighten the antagonism of those involved.16
Perhaps all drama suggests larger issues beyond the particular experiences enacted on stage, but Euripides’ plays articulate these more abstract and universal concerns to an unusual degree. Although the characters on stage are not mere types – what could be called typical about Medea or Heracles? – their situations and dilemmas often suggest larger questions, more general themes and problems inherent in human life and society. When does justice become revenge, even savagery? Can human reason overcome passion? Should right and wrong be invoked in interstate politics, or is expediency the only realistic criterion? These questions are not left implicit: the characters themselves raise them, in generalizing comments which are often given special prominence at the opening of a speech. The audience, like the characters, must often have been uncertain which side was in the right, and their attitude would naturally change as the drama unfolded. Many, perhaps most, Athenian theatre-goers would also have served as jurors in the law-courts (Athenian juries were often very large, five hundred or more); many would also have voted on proposals in the democratic assembly. They were used to moral and verbal contests, real and fictional, public and private, forensic and literary. Indeed, Athenians were notorious for their addiction to debate: the contemporary historian Thucydides makes a politician call them ‘spectators at speeches’, a telling paradox.17 It is no coincidence that this agonistic aspect of Athenian society is so vividly reflected in the dramas. Euripides may have taught the audience to be glib and clever, but he was responding to a development already well advanced.
Perhaps no question has been as prominent in criticism as the nature of Euripides’ beliefs, his philosophy. This may seem strange: why should we expect a dramatist to adopt a philosophic position, still less to maintain it from play to play? The reason that this issue seems to many people particularly important is that Euripides frequently introduces abstract ideas or theoretical arguments, sometimes drawing attention to the oddity of his character’s language or thought. In the Suppliant Women, the Athenian Theseus and the Theban herald argue at length about the relative merits of democratic and monarchic government (399–456). Even if we allow that Theseus, the favourite hero of Athens, is no ordinary monarch, the anachronism involved in placing such a debate in the heroic age is obvious. In Hippolytus, Phaedra discourses on the power of passion and how it can overwhelm the mind’s good resolutions: her calmness and the abstract tone of her words seem strange after her earlier frenzy. More striking still are the many passages in which characters question the nature, or the very existence, of the Olympian gods. In the Trojan Women, Hecabe, in need of inspiration in the agon, prays as follows:
O you who give the earth support and are by it supported, whoever you are, power beyond our knowledge, Zeus, be you stern law of nature or intelligence in man, to you I make my prayers; for you direct in the way of justice all mortal affairs, moving with noiseless tread. (884–8)
These lines echo both traditional prayer-formulae and contemporary science; they involve contradictory conceptions of the supreme deity; they even hint at the theory that gods are merely externalizations of human impulses. Little wonder that Menelaus remarks in response, ‘What’s this? You have a novel way of praying to the gods!’
In passages of this kind Euripides plainly shows his familiarity with the philosophic or metaphysical teachings of a number of thinkers: Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Gorgias and other figures known to us particularly through the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Influence from philosophy or abstract prose has occasionally been detected in Aeschylus and Sophocles, but any such cases in their work are rare and unobtrusive; with Euripides we are dealing with something new. This introduction of modern ideas coheres with his general tendency to make the characters of myth less remote and majestic, more like ordinary mortals with human weaknesses. Unsettling and bizarre these passages may seem, but they are clearly meant (as in the plays of Ibsen and Shaw) to surprise and stimulate: it would be absurd to suppose that Euripides did not realize what he was doing, or that he was incapable of keeping his intellectual interests out of his tragedies.18
Ancient anecdote claimed that Protagoras, an agnostic thinker, gave readings from his work in Euripides’ house, and that Socrates helped him write his plays. Although these stories are rightly now recognized as fictions, the frequency with which Euripides introduces philosophic or religious reflections still needs explanation. An influential tradition of criticism has maintained that Euripides was a disciple of one or other of these thinkers, and that his dramas represent a concerted endeavour to open his countrymen’s eyes to the moral defects of men and gods as represented in the traditional myths. In the earlier part of the fifth century BC, the lyric poet Pindar had questioned a myth which told of divine cannibalism, and in the fourth century Plato was to censor epic and tragedy in the name of morality. The myths were also criticized by Euripides’ contemporaries on grounds of rationality and probability: how could sensible people take seriously stories of three-headed hounds of Hades, or other monstrous creatures? There is, then, no reason to doubt that Euripides could have seen reasons to be sceptical about some of the myths: he makes Helen doubt whether she was really born from a swan’s egg, and Iphigenia question whether any deity could conceivably demand human sacrifice (Helen 18, 259, Iphigenia among the Taurians 380–91).
It is much less plausible to suppose that he was urging total scepticism about the gods or the supernatural, and proposing some alternative philosophical or humanist view in their place. It is difficult for the modern student to appreciate how different Greek religious thought and practice were from the Judaeo-Christian tradition.19 There was no creed, no sacred books, no central priestly establishment. The city performed its sacrifices and paid honour to the gods, as had always been done; sometimes new gods were admitted to the pantheon; but cult was not the same as myth, and it was well known that myths contradicted one another and that poets made up many stories – many lies, as the Athenian Solon once said. To express doubts about one particular myth did not shake the foundations of religion. Outright atheism was rare and freakish. The more open-minded attitude of the great traveller Herodotus may have been commoner: he declared that all men were equally knowledgeable about the divine.20
Certainly there are serious difficulties in treating Euripides as an unbeliever on the evidence of his plays. This is not simply because, alongside the more questioning attitudes in the passages quoted, we find many speakers expressing profound faith and devotion, and choral odes which invoke the Olympians in magnificent poetry: one could always argue (though with some circularity) that these characters possessed only partial or erroneous insights into religion. More important is the fact that without the existence of the gods the plays simply do not work. How is Medea to escape if the sun-god, her grandfather, does not send his chariot to rescue her? How will Theseus’ curse destroy his son if Poseidon is a mere fiction? How will the plot of Alcestis even begin to work unless death is something more than natural, unless there is a personified being against whom Heracles can do battle? A full discussion would also have to consider the numerous scenes in which gods appear at the end of plays to bring events under control: here, rationalizing interpretations truncate the dramas.
But if Euripides the anti-clerical atheist cannot stand, neither can he simply be forced into the straitjacket of traditional piety, even if that piety is defined in terms flexible and sophisticated enough to include Aeschylus and Sophocles. There remains overwhelming evidence that Euripides, in this as in other respects, was an innovator: just as he introduces new and often unfamiliar characters into traditional myths, or views familiar tragic situations from unexpected angles, so he combines traditional mythical and theatrical conventions about the gods with disturbing new conceptions and challenging ideas. Sometimes the contradictions become acute and paradoxical, as in a notoriously baffling passage of Heracles. In this play Heracles, son of Zeus by the mortal woman Alcmena, has been brought to his knees by the goddess Hera, who persecutes him because she resents Zeus’ adulteries. Theseus, befriending Heracles and seeking to comfort him, refers at one point to the immorality of the gods, whereupon Heracles bursts into a passionate rejection of this concept:
I do not believe that the gods indulge themselves in illicit love or bind each other with chains. I have never thought such things worthy of belief and I never will; nor that one god treats another as his slave. A god, if he is truly a god, has no need of anything; these are the wicked tales of poets. (Heracles 1340–46)
This outburst comes near to rejecting the very premisses that underlie the play and Heracles’ own experiences within it. Is Euripides showing us something about Heracles’ psychology? Insisting, in Plato’s manner, on the moral inadequacy of the myths? Alluding to the poetic and fictional quality of his own play? Or all of these at once, and more? The passage, and the issues it raises, is likely to remain controversial.21
Although all such labels are bound to oversimplify a many-sided artist like Euripides, we may find more valuable than ‘atheist’ the term proposed by E. R. Dodds, one of the most gifted interpreters of Greek literature in the twentieth century, who dubbed Euripides ‘the irrationalist’. 22 By this Dodds meant that Euripides was interested and impressed by the achievements of human reason, not least in the fields of rhetorical argument and philosophic theory, but in the end felt that they were inadequate both as explanatory tools and as instruments to enable mankind to deal with the world. Reason versus passion, order versus chaos, persuasion versus violence – these antitheses are present in all Greek tragedy, but Euripides seems more pessimistic about the limits of man’s capacity to control either himself or society.23 The demoralizing and brutalizing effects of a prolonged war surely play a part in the development of his outlook: the Suppliant Women, Hecabe and the Trojan Women, or a decade later the Phoenician Women and Iphigenia at Aulis, all dramatize the suffering and callousness which war makes possible or inevitable. Even Helen, for all its playful irony and lightness of touch, implies a bleak and pessimistic view of human action: the Trojan war, far from being a glorious achievement, was fought for a phantom; and although Menelaus and Helen are finally reunited, that partial success cannot compensate for the countless lives thrown away on the plains of Troy.
On this reading, Euripides does not assert the independence of man from divine authority; he is neither an agnostic nor a humanist. Rather, he acknowledges that there are forces in the world which mankind cannot understand or control. They may sometimes be described in the language of traditional religion, or referred to by the names and titles of the Olympians, though even then he often suggests some new dimension: ‘she’s no goddess, then, the Cyprian, but something greater’, cries the nurse when she learns of Phaedra’s desire (Hippolytus 310). At other times he will make his characters speak of nature, or necessity, or chance: as Talthybius asks in Hecabe, ‘O Zeus, what am I to say? Do you watch over men or are we fools, blind fools to believe this, and is it chance that oversees all man’s endeavours?’ (489–91). Or again, a speaker may throw out the suggestion that ‘it is all in the mind’ ‘when you saw him your mind became the goddess. All the indiscretions of mortals pass for Aphrodite…’ (Trojan Women 988–9). The supernatural, however it is defined, embraces those things which are beyond human grasp. The author of the following speech, again from Hippolytus, may not have been a conventional Greek thinker, but he understood how to communicate religious longing.
It’s nothing but pain, this life of ours; we’re born to suffer and there’s no end to it. If anything more precious than life does exist, it’s wrapped in darkness, hidden behind clouds. We’re fools in love – it’s plain enough – clinging to this glitter here on earth because we don’t know any other life and haven’t seen what lies below. (Hippolytus 189–96)
No play of Euripides raises these questions more acutely than the Bacchae, surely his greatest tragedy. It is also his most controversial work: it has been read as evidence of a change of heart, a conversion of the ageing playwright to the truths of religion, while others have preferred to see it as a denunciation of ecstatic cult, expressing the tragedian’s deep distrust of irrational action.24 It would be quite impossible to do justice to the play here; what can be done is to sketch a few of the ways in which, for all its special qualities, it is quintessentially Euripidean.
The Bacchae describes the coming of Dionysus, still a new god in the mythical world of the play, to his native city of Thebes, accompanied by a chorus of loyal bacchantes. The god seeks recognition in his own land, but comes in disguise, as gods often do, to test the citizens; even the chorus suppose him to be a human priest. The youthful king Pentheus, ignoring good advice from older heads, proceeds to defy the god, little knowing the power he is confronting. At first Dionysus plays the part of an innocent captive in Pentheus’ power, answering his questions and leading him on; but he soon escapes from captivity and in a series of scenes gradually gains ascendancy over the king. In the end Pentheus is completely in his power (magic? hypnosis? or something in Pentheus’ own heart that answers the Dionysiac summons?). The god, still not revealing his identity, leads him to the mountains where the Theban women are running wild in bacchic frenzy. A messenger reports the horrifying outcome: Pentheus is dead, literally torn to pieces by the women, with his own mother Agave in the lead; in her madness she believes she has slain a wild beast. The bacchic chorus rejoice that their divine master has been vindicated; but even they feel some pity and distress when Pentheus’ mother brings on the head of her son and is slowly coaxed back to sanity and misery by her father Cadmus. The whole royal house is to be punished for their unbelief; Dionysus, appearing finally without disguise, ex machina, drives Cadmus and Agave into exile, and his pitiless speech contrasts with the tender parting of father and daughter. The cult of Dionysus will now be celebrated in Thebes, but its inauguration has been achieved through the slaughter of the opposing king.
The theme is traditional. Tragedy may have originally focused on Dionysiac subjects; in any case, we know that Aeschylus wrote a trilogy on how the god overcame his early opponents, which Euripides seems to have imitated. In this play Euripides to some extent abandons many of the stylistic and rhetorical features which made his late work so striking: there is no agon, for example, and the choral odes are more directly relevant to the play as a whole. Other aspects discussed above are well represented, however: the touches of sophistic argumentation (especially in the pompous lecture by the prophet Tiresias, who claims to know the ‘true’ nature of Dionysus); the brilliantly vivid and often gruesome narrative of the messenger; the macabre black humour of the scene in which Dionysus clothes Pentheus in female bacchic dress, and in which the king preens himself in his new outfit, unaware that he is being attired as a ritual victim.
Furthermore, the overall treatment of the theme is very different from anything we can imagine from Aeschylus’ hand. The play could have been a straightforward tale of hubris punished, an evil man struck down by a proud but just god. What is different in the Bacchae is the presentation of Pentheus as a weak and unstable young man, psychologically more interesting than the standard tyrant-figure. As already mentioned, the scenes between him and Dionysus are hard to interpret: on the one hand the god is playing with the foolish king like a cat with a mouse, but on the other Pentheus seems eager to fall in with Dionysus’ suggestions, pruriently keen to visit the maenads, perhaps even sexually attracted by the almost feminine beauty of the stranger. Euripides, as we have seen, is interested not only in the decisions and actions of his characters, but also in their inner psychology.
As for the god himself, unusually present on stage throughout, he too is hard to evaluate. The chorus sing beautifully of the delights of Dionysiac worship: ‘O blessed he who in happiness knowing the rituals of the gods makes holy his way of life and mingles his spirit with the sacred band, in the mountains serving Bacchus with reverent purifications’ (73–7). We recognize here the playwright’s understanding of religious devotion, just as we do in the lines in which Hippolytus prays to his beloved Artemis (73–87), or in the fragments of choral ecstasy from the lost Cretans (fragment 472). But the joy of union with nature is the inverse side of the madness that leads a mother to slay her own son – this, too, at Dionysus’ bidding. Dionysus values honour from mankind, and relishes his revenge: is this what a god is truly like? The broken Cadmus entreats the god for mercy at the end of the play, in terms which echo the words of earlier plays.25
CADMUS: Dionysus, we beseech you. We have done wrong!
DIONYSUS: You were late to understand us. When you should have, you did not know us.
CADMUS: This we have come to recognize; but your reprisals are too severe!
DIONYSUS: Yes, because I am a god, and you insulted me.
CADMUS: Gods should not resemble men in their anger!
DIONYSUS: Long ago Zeus my father approved these things.
(1344–9, tr. G. S. Kirk)
It is not the business of a tragedian to solve the riddles of the universe, but to dramatize human experience in such a way as to arouse his audience’s compassion and extend their imaginative understanding. This, and much else, is what Euripides offers to spectator and reader alike.
Of the plays in this volume only Helen is firmly dateable (to 412 BC); the others can be dated approximately, and probably range from about 415 to 409; Heracles is probably the earliest, but its chronological relation to the Trojan Women, firmly dated to 415, is unclear. Euripides in 410 would have been in his late fifties or older, and had been producing tragedies for over forty years. By the time of Helen he had only a few years to live, and would spend most of them at the court of Macedon, far from his native Athens. Yet his final decade was a period of extraordinary creativity and innovation in his tragic technique.
This was a bleak period for Athens. After the disintegration of the Peace of Nicias, war had been renewed with Sparta and her allies; in 413 the disastrous expedition to Sicily had failed, with immense loss of life and waste of resources. In 411 the democracy had been overthrown from within by a revolution which attempted to set up a more narrowly based government. Although the coup was shortlived, and the democratic constitution was swiftly restored, the episode left Athens full of distrust and divided as to the future of the war. There were setbacks overseas, with subject cities in revolt; there were repeated invasions of Athens’ territory from the north; there were problems in leadership, with Athens’ most charismatic general, the gifted Alcibiades, in exile and unscrupulously currying favour at Sparta and in Persia: even when he rejoined the Athenian side he was distrusted. The growing involvement of the Persian king and his subordinates in the war which Athens and Sparta were pursuing in Ionia would eventually lead to decisive intervention on the side of Sparta. By this stage no Athenian could have been cheerfully confident of victory; many may have doubted the wisdom of continuing the conflict while being reluctant to accept any diminution of Athens’ remaining naval and imperial power.
This grim background is not clearly reflected in any of the plays in this volume except Helen, and even there the connections are indirect: the play undoubtedly alludes to the wastefulness of war in general and the futility of the Trojan war in particular, but no passage necessitates an application of these judgements to the Athens–Sparta conflict. Athens is however a recurring presence in the plays, though without occupying centre stage. In Heracles, Theseus, Athens’ favourite hero, offers consolation and refuge to the broken Heracles. In Ion and Iphigenia, Athenian rituals and traditions are prominently mentioned; in both, the principal characters are setting out to Athens at the end of the play, and in both, Athena appears as deus ex machina, but in none of these plays is Athens actually the scene of the drama. This group of plays includes no case like The Children of Heracles and Suppliant Women, in which we saw Athens engaged in heroic warfare in defence of the innocent. There is a sense in which the characters are disengaged from politics: Theseus in Heracles is more important as friend than as king; the emotional and moral focus of Ion is on the relationship of parent and child, although the need of Athens for a legitimate heir is also genuine; in Helen, with the realization that the Trojan war was fought in vain, the reunion of husband and wife becomes all the more precious. When characters in these plays do talk politics, the note is one of disillusionment; even in Ion’s inexperienced view there is much to criticize in the Athenian way of life (Ion 585–647). In the later plays, especially the Phoenician Women and the Orestes, the bitter scepticism about political debate and the motives of politicians goes further.
Three of the plays grouped in this volume clearly have much in common: Ion, Iphigenia and Helen (Helen may indeed be composed as a piece of self-imitation, on the model of Iphigenia among the Taurians). The accident of survival may lead us to exaggerate the importance of this grouping: recognition and happy endings are not new in Euripides, or in tragedy as a genre. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to accept that these plays show a new, or a renewed, preoccupation with a particular type of ironic and complex plot, in which the emphasis is on deception and illusion, leading finally by devious means to recognition between those close to one another: in Ion, mother and son; in Iphigenia, brother and sister; in Helen, husband and wife. Euripides’ exploration of these relationships in Electra was darker and bleaker; in these plays more is made of the positive aspect. Misapprehension or failed recognition is combined with deliberate or malicious deception, in a variety of ways. In Ion, because Creusa is unaware of Ion’s real identity, she conspires to murder him. By contrast in the other two plays, the conspiracy is positive, involving deception as a means of escape: once accidental misunderstanding is over, trickery of one’s captor can lead to a happy homecoming. The escape-plot is shared also with the satyric Cyclops, in which the giant is deceived by comic means (Odysseus gets him drunk), and the subsequent violence is also treated as comic. In all of these respects Heracles stands apart: in its unrelieved presentation of undeserved suffering, in its horrific presentation of divine malignity, it belongs to a different tragic sphere. The other plays of this volume flirt with comedy and comic themes: Euripides’ tirelessly inventive mind seems in his later period to be ever more restless within the generic boundaries of Athenian drama.
The same innovative tendency can be seen in the formal and stylistic aspects of the plays. The intervention of the gods half-way through Heracles, though it seems to have a precedent in Sophocles’ Niobe, is almost certainly more abrupt and unexpected than in that lost play, and breaks with all Euripides’ own conventions. There is a general tendency to bold experiment and to extremes of style. The standard verse used by the characters, the iambic trimeter, is more freely handled, with a larger number of syllables being freely introduced; messenger speeches and sung lyrics by actors are multiplied; the choral odes become more purely lyrical, less easy to connect with the play’s main themes and plot. The style of the playwright’s lyrics becomes more exotic and extravagant, with long and loosely structured sentences, invocations, repetitions, novel words and rhythms. Some have attributed these changes to the influence of the little-known lyric genre of dithyramb, and especially to a contemporary poet called Timotheus; but where so much of fifth-century poetry is lost, little can be said with certainty. What is clear is that Euripides’ dramas in this period have a new quality: stylistically innovative, adventurous and even outrageous in plot, full of unexpected twists and changes of fortune. The mood of these dramas is impossible to characterize: they swing from lamentation to celebration, from tragic intensity through ironic misapprehension to tongue-in-cheek witticism. If we are to seek a concluding generalization, it can only be imperfect and in need of further qualification. Euripides portrays a world of inherent instability, which he invites us to view with scepticism that does not exclude compassion.
1. On the festivals and theatrical conditions, see above all Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals of Athens (2nd edn, Oxford 1968); E. Csapo and W. J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Michigan 1995); more briefly E. Simon, The Ancient Theatre (Eng. tr., London and New York 1982), pp. 1 – 33; O. Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (London 1978), ch. 2. A readable account of the theatrical context is provided by R. Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London 1992). See also J. R. Green, Theatre in Ancient Greek Society (London 1994).
2. For an excellent discussion of the types of myths favoured, see B. M. W. Knox, Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore and London 1979), ch. 1.
3. O. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977); D. Bain, Actors and Audience (Oxford 1977); D. Mastronarde, Contact and Discontinuity (London 1979); M. Halleran, Stagecraft in Euripides (London and Sydney 1985); Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre.
4. See M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford 1992). On dance, see Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals of Athens, ch. 5.
5. For fuller essays, see R. P. Winnington-Ingram and P. E. Easterling in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 1, ed. P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox (Cambridge 1985; paperback 1989); also the pamphlets by S. Ireland and R. Buxton in the Greece & Rome New Surveys series (Oxford).
6. Revivals of older tragedies became a regular feature at the festivals from 386 BC onwards: see Pickard-Cambridge, Dramatic Festivals of Athens, pp. 99–100. Euripides’ plays were frequently chosen. For the possibility ofperformances outside Athens already in the fifth century BC, see P. E. Easterling, Illinois Classical Studies 19 (1994), pp. 1–8.
7. This work is highly technical, but the essentials can be gleaned from A. M. Dale’s introduction to her commentary on Helen (Oxford 1967), pp. xxiv-xxviii.
8. See further G. Zuntz, The Political Plays of Euripides (Manchester 1955), chs. 1–3, esp. pp. 78–81. Some more recent approaches, which all seek in different ways to put tragedy in an Athenian context, can be found in the collection Nothing to do with Dionysus?, ed. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (Princeton 1990), and Greek Tragedy and the Historian, ed. C. B. R. Pelling (Oxford 1997).
9. From the jacket blurb of Anne P. Burnett, Catastrophe Survived (Oxford 1973).
10. I draw here on R. P. Winnington-Ingram, ‘Euripides, poietes sophos [intellectual poet]’, Arethusa 2 (1969), pp. 127–42. His points are further developed by W. G. Arnott, ‘Euripides and the Unexpected’, in I. McAuslan and P. Walcot (eds.), Greek Tragedy (Greece & Rome Studies 2, Oxford 1993), pp. 138–52.
11. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, originally produced in 423 BC, the rebellious Pheidippides is asked by his father to sing a passage of Aeschylus, and scoffs at the idea, dismissing the older poet as a bombastic and incoherent ranter. When asked to produce a modern alternative, he shocks his father by reciting a passage from Euripides’ Aeolus defending the merits of incest!
12. This aspect of Euripides has been emphasized, sometimes to excess: see e.g. S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1986), esp. ch. 10.
13. Knox, Word and Action, pp. 250–74 (‘Euripidean comedy’).
14. Good summary, with further references, in C. Collard, Euripides (Greece & Rome New Surveys 14, Oxford 1981), pp. 20–29.
15. The reference to Euripides’ thinkers comes from E. R. Dodds’ essay ‘Euripides the Irrationalist’, Classical Review 43 (1929), pp. 87–104, reprinted in his collection The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays (Oxford 1973), pp. 78–91. On women in Athenian literature and society, see further J. Gould, ‘Law, custom and myth: aspects of the social position of women in classical Athens’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980), pp. 38–59; Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, ch. 5; and the essays in A. Powell (ed.), Euripides, Women and Sexuality (London 1990).
16. For a very helpful essay on this side of Euripides, see C. Collard, ‘Formal Debates in Euripidean Drama’, in McAuslan and Walcot, Greek Tragedy, pp. 153–66; also M. Lloyd, The Agon in Euripides (Oxford 1992).
17. Thucydides iii. 38, 4. It is particularly striking that the word translated as ‘spectator’ is the regular term for a member of the theatrical audience.
18. A. N. Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (Madison, Wis. and London 1987), part 1, gives a well-documented history of the debate over Euripides’ views. A seminal work, still enjoyable and stimulating, is G. Murray’s short book Euripides and his Age (London 1913).
19. See the useful collection of essays edited by P. E. Easterling and J. V. Muir, Greek Religion and Society (Cambridge 1985), esp. J. Gould’s contribution, ‘On making sense of Greek religion’.
20. Herodotus 2.3, 2. On this subject in general, J. Mikalson, Athenian Popular Religion (Chapel Hill 1983) and Honor thy Gods (Chapel Hill and London 1991) are valuable collections of material, but tend to draw too firm a line between what happens in life and what appears in literature.
21.T. C. W. Stinton, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, Ns 22 (1976), pp. 60–89; reprinted in Stinton, Collected Papers on Greek Tragedy (Oxford 1990), pp. 236–64; H. Yunis, A New Creed: Fundamental Religious Beliefs in the Athenian Polis and Euripidean Drama (Göttingen 1988), esp. pp. 155–71.
22. Dodds, ‘Euripides the Irrationalist’.
23. Classic (over-) statement in K. Reinhardt, ‘Die Sinneskreise bei Euripides’, in Tradition und Geist (Göttingen 1960); also available in a French translation (K. Reinhardt, Éschyle; Euripide, Paris 1972).
24. E. R. Dodds’ commentary on the Greek text of this play, Euripides. Bacchae (2nd edn, Oxford 1960) remains essential for serious study; see also R. P. Winnington-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus (Cambridge 1948).
25. See esp. Hippolytus 114–20.