As explained in the Introduction, not all of the plays of Euripides (and fewer still of Sophocles) can be firmly dated. This table shows all of the extant Greek tragedies for which we have fairly certain dates, and also lists most of Aristophanes’ surviving comedies and some major historical events to put them in context. Conjectural dates are given with question-marks, and are usually fixed by analysis of metrical technique: they may well be three or four years out either way.
| Year BC | |||
| c. 535–2 |
Thespis competes in first tragic competition | ||
| 490 | Darius’ invasion of Greece | ||
|
480–79 |
Xerxes’ invasion | ||
|
472 |
Aeschylus’ Persians | ||
|
468 |
Sophocles’ first victory, on his first attempt | ||
| 467 |
Aesch. Laius, Oedipus, Seven against Thebes, Sphinx | ||
|
463? |
Aesch. Suppliant Women, Aigyptioi, Danaids, Amymone |
c. 462 |
Radical democracy established at Athens |
| 458 |
Aesch. Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Proteus | ||
|
456 |
Death of Aeschylus | ||
|
455 |
Euripides’ first competition: third prize | ||
|
438 |
Eur. Alcestis | ||
|
431 |
Eur. Medea |
431 |
War begins between Athens and Sparta |
|
c. 430? |
Eur. The Children of Heracles |
430 |
Great Plague of Athens |
|
429 |
Death of Pericles | ||
| 428 |
Eur. Hippolytus (surviving version) | ||
| 427 |
Aristophanes’ first play (now lost) | ||
|
425? |
Eur. Andromache |
425 |
Arist. Acharnians |
|
424 |
Arist. Knights | ||
|
pre-423? |
Eur. Hecabe | ||
|
423? |
Eur. Suppliant Women |
423 |
Arist. Clouds (original version) |
|
422 |
Arist. Wasps | ||
|
421 |
Arist. Peace; death of Cleon; peace of Nicias | ||
|
c. 417–415 |
Eur. Heracles, Electra | ||
|
416 |
Athenian massacre at Melos |
|
415 |
Eur. Trojan Women | ||
|
414 |
Arist. Birds | ||
|
413 |
Athenian expedition to Sicily ends in disaster | ||
|
pre-412? |
Eur. Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians | ||
|
412 |
Eur. Helen | ||
|
412 or later? |
Eur. Cyclops (satyr-play) | ||
|
411 |
Arist. Lysistrata, Women at the Thesmophoria Oligarchic revolution at Athens | ||
|
c. 409? |
Eur. Phoenician Women | ||
|
409 |
Soph. Philoctetes | ||
|
408 |
Eur. Orestes | ||
|
406–405 |
Death of Euripides in Macedonia; death of Sophocles | ||
|
after 406 |
Eur. Iphigenia at Aulis, Bacchae (posthumously produced) | ||
|
405 |
Arist. Frogs | ||
|
404 |
End of war, with Athens defeated | ||
|
401 |
Soph. Oedipus at Colonus (posthumously produced) | ||
|
399 |
Execution of Socrates |
We have no manuscripts in Euripides’ hand, or going back anywhere near his own time. If we had, they would be difficult to decipher, and would lack many aids which the modern reader takes for granted: stage directions, punctuation, clear indications of change of speaker, regular divisions between lines and even between words. In fact, although some parts of his plays, mostly short extracts, survive in papyri from the earliest centuries AD, no complete play is preserved in any manuscript earlier than the tenth century. Moreover, the textual evidence for the various plays differs greatly in quantity. Three plays were especially popular in later antiquity, namely Hecabe, the Phoenician Women and Orestes (the so-called ‘Byzantine triad’). These survive in more than 200 manuscripts. The plays in the present volume, however, all fall into a group which derives from a single fourteenth-century manuscript known as L, unaccompanied by ancient commentary. In a different category come the many quotations from Euripides in other classical authors, which sometimes preserve different readings from those in the direct tradition of Euripidean manuscripts.
This situation is not unusual in the history of classical authors. No ancient dramatist’s work survives in his own hand: in all cases we are dealing with a text transmitted by one route or several, and copied many times over. In an age which knew nothing of the printing-press, far less the Xerox machine, all copying had to be done by hand, every copy in a sense a new version. The opportunities for corruption of the text – that is, the introduction of error – were numerous. The reasons for such corruption include simple miscopying or misunderstanding by the scribe, omission or addition of passages by actors in later productions, efforts to improve the text by readers who felt, rightly or wrongly, that
it must be corrupt, accidental inclusion of marginal notes or quotations from other plays, and very occasionally bowdlerization of ‘unsuitable’ passages. Problems of this kind were already recognized in antiquity: efforts were made to stabilize the texts of the tragedians in fourth-century BC Athens, and the ancient commentaries or ‘scholia’ to some of Euripides’ plays make frequent comments on textual matters, for instance remarking that a line is ‘not to be found’ in some of their early manuscripts, now lost to us. In the same way, when a modern scholar produces an edition of a Euripidean play, there are many places where he or she must decide between different versions given in different manuscripts. Sometimes the choice will be easy: one version may be unmetrical, ungrammatical or meaningless. But often the decision may be more difficult, and in many cases it is clear that no manuscript preserves the lines in question in the correct form. Hence the editor must either reconstruct Euripides’ authentic text by ‘conjecture’, or indicate that the passage is insolubly corrupt.
A translator is in a slightly more fortunate position than an editor. The editor must make a decision what to print at every point, and uncertainty may prevail as to the exact wording even when the overall sense is fairly clear. In this translation James Diggle’s excellent Oxford Classical Text has normally been followed: when he has marked a word or phrase as probably or certainly corrupt, we have usually adopted a conjectural reading, whether made by him or a previous editor, even though we often agree that there can be no certainty that this is what Euripides actually wrote. In cases where the corruption is more extensive, we have tried to give a probable idea of the train of thought. These problems arise particularly in choral and other lyric passages, where the language is less close to everyday speech, and where unusual metre and dialect often misled copyists.
Many of the smaller problems involving variations of words or uncertainty over phrasing will be unlikely to cause difficulties to readers of this translation. More noticeable are the occasional places where it seems that something has dropped out of the text; usually this can be explained by the accidents of miscopying or by damage to some of the manuscripts from which our texts descend. The problem is not acute in the plays in this volume, but occasional gaps, mostly of no more than a line or two, are indicated in the text by daggers, and glossed in the notes. Where words are supplied to fill an apparent gap in the text, the additional matter is indicated by curly brackets thus: { }. Similarly, copyists sometimes misplaced and transposed passsages: an example of this is to be found at lines 860–70 of Heracles, where the text has been adjusted accordingly; hence the disruption of the marginal line-numbers (p. 29).
A much more serious problem which affects criticism of Euripides is that of interpolation. This is the term used to describe the inclusion of alien material in the original text, expanding and elaborating on the author’s words. Sometimes the new material betrays itself by its very unsuitability to the context, and we may suppose that it has been included by accident (for instance, parallels from other plays were sometimes copied out in the margin, then found their way into the text in subsequent copies). Sometimes lines may be present in one manuscript but omitted in others: if they seem superfluous in themselves, they may well be a later addition. Sometimes a speech may seem unnecessarily wordy, and we may suspect without feeling certain that it has been expanded; here textual criticism merges with literary judgement. It has often been suggested that some passages in the plays have been ‘padded out’ by actors seeking to improve their parts: although this phenomenon has probably been exaggerated, it would be a mistake to rule it out altogether. One speech which has fallen under suspicion on these grounds is Medea’s famous soliloquy as she wavers over the killing of her children (Medea 1019–80: the boldest critics would excise all of 1056–80). In the present volume there is no case of such central importance for the interpretation of a play, but interpolation has certainly been diagnosed in many places. In the translation our normal policy is to follow Diggle’s text, and consequently we omit passages which he brands as interpolated, but we have not accepted all of his judgements, and in particular we retain, though with cautionary comments in the notes, certain parts of Helen where his determination to excise the irrelevant may be thought to have gone too far. We also print the choral tail-piece which ends that play in the manuscripts, even though it also appears at the conclusion of several other Euripidean plays. It is customary for the chorus to have the final word, and to omit this moralizing conclusion brings the action to a rather abrupt halt. We are not convinced that it is impossible that Euripides should have ended several plays with the same choral tag. As with many such questions, there remains much room for argument; but Diggle’s intimate familiarity with the author and clear-headed judgement demand respect, and despite a few disagreements of this kind, our high opinion of his text has only been enhanced by closer study.
W. S. Barrett, Euripides: Hippolytus (Oxford 1964), pp. 45–84: a detailed account, requiring some knowledge of Greek and technical terms.
C. Collard, Euripides (Greece& Rome New Surveys 14, 1981), p. 3: a good one-page summary with bibliography.
L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (3rd edn, Oxford 1991).
D. Roberts, ‘Parting words: final lines in Sophocles and Euripides’, Classical
Quarterly 37 (1987), pp. 51–64. M. L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (Stuttgart 1973), part 1.
A new translation of an author as great as Euripides needs little justification, perhaps, but it may be useful to point out certain respects in which this translation differs from those of the late Philip Vellacott which Penguin published in four volumes between 1953 and 1972. In these, for the most part, the translation was deliberately broken up into verse-like lines, creating a certain stateliness that reflected the dignity of the original but often resulted in the kind of English which could only exist on the printed page. My aim has been to produce a version that conforms far more to how people speak, and for this the medium of continuous prose was essential.
A further consequence of the earlier approach is that all the characters speak the same form of stylized English, whether they are princes or slaves. By adopting continuous prose I have tried to achieve a tone that is more relaxed, less stylized and less close to the Greek word-order, while remaining true to the original. There is a wider range of tones and moods in recognition of the fact that, for all the uniformity of the Greek, not every character maintains a wholly dignified register of speech. Some employ a more colloquial and fast-moving style, even verging on the humorous (for example the Old Woman in Helen), others require a more dignified style because they are arrogant or demented or divine.
In the lyric passages, especially the choral odes, I have aimed at a certain archaic formality of language in recognition of their emotional or religious content, but the overriding concern has been to let the freshness and beauty of the poetry come through to the reader as directly as possible. These elements of song in Euripides’ work were much admired by his contemporaries and by later generations, and here, if anywhere, the translator’s responsibility weighs particularly heavily.
There is a change of presentation from the first and second volumes. In order to mark more clearly the distinction between spoken and sung parts in the plays, all lyric sections have been put in italics and where appropriate separated more distinctly from what was spoken. The areas chiefly affected are the choral odes.
Euripides is intensely interested in human nature in all its different forms and a modern translation must therefore try to take some account of the richness of his character portrayal and psychological insight. It is this belief that underpins my attempt throughout these plays to find and express variety of tone; I have tried to think of the words as being spoken by real persons rather than literary creations, remembering the remark attributed to Sophocles that, whereas in his plays he showed men ‘as they should be’, Euripides showed them ‘as they are’.
This said, it remains true that the language of Attic tragedy, even in the case of the modernizing Euripides, was never that spoken in the streets of Athens in the poet’s day. As with Homeric epic, it is essentially a literary creation that aims predominantly at a certain grandeur in keeping with the dignity of its subject-matter. This inevitability imposes limits on how natural a style should be attempted by a translator. However modern Euripidean tragedy may seem compared with that of Aeschylus and Sophocles, its language was still sufficiently grand for Aristophanes to parody it relentlessly in his comedies as high flown and pompous.
As with the first and second volumes, I have not attempted to produce an entirely modern idiom in these translations (except in the special case of the satyr-play Cyclops, which contains considerably more colloquialisms per spoken line than any Euripidean tragedy); the overall tone remains, I hope, essentially dignified, as Greek tragedy demands, and I have tried hard to be faithful to the original both in letter and in spirit, taking heart from the excellent prose translation of Virgil’s Aeneid for Penguin Classics by Professor David West, and the sensible remarks he makes on translating poetry into prose in his own introduction to that book.
No dramatist of any age can be content to live solely within the confines of the printed page, and it is gratifying that my translation of Trojan Women has been used for a performance on the London stage. I hope that other plays in these versions may catch the eye of modern producers and that the reader who comes fresh to Euripides in this volume may feel that his voice deserves to be heard more in the modern theatre.
My warmest thanks go, once again, to my collaborator Dr Richard Rutherford of Christ Church, Oxford, not only for his introductory essay, prefaces and notes, but also for his generosity in casting a scholarly eye over my manuscripts and rescuing me several times from ‘trans-lationese’. Any remaining infelicities are to be laid firmly at my door. I am also grateful to Professor David Kovacs, translator of Euripides for the Loeb Classical Library, for sharing his thoughts with me on the problems and pleasures of translating this elusive author; to Professor Robert Fagles of Princeton, translator of Aeschylus and Sophocles for Penguin Classics, whose generous remarks on the first volume were much appreciated by a comparative novice in the art of translation; and to Pat Easterling, Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek at Cambridge, for her encouragement and advice in the early stages. I must not forget my students at St Paul’s School, who have played their part in sharpening my focus on the plays and several times made me think again. Five plays remain to be translated out of a total of nineteen, in a project that began in 1994 – kamatos eukamatos.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book, as ever, to my children, Lorna and Andrew, and to Gill.
J.N.D.