Euripides

Euripides (ca. 484–406 B.C.) playwright Euripides was born on the Greek island of Salamis near Athens into a reasonably prosperous family. He made his home there, most likely on an estate owned by his father, and it is said he penned many of his dramas in a seaside cave. He was married twice, both times unhappily, and had three sons. A scholar and an intellectual, Euripides counted among his friends some of the leading philosophers of the day, including SOCRATES, an admirer of his plays; and the Sophist Protagoras, who debuted his agnostic work “Of the Gods” at Euripides’ home. Euripides saw roughly 88 of his plays produced, but he was honored at the Greek drama festivals only four times.Visionary and avant-garde, Euripides’ plays reflected his unorthodox views, which were not shared by the general public during his lifetime. He was soundly ridiculed, and the comic playwright ARISTOPHANES parodied his plays in The Thesmophoriazousai (411 B.C.), which includes a Euripides 101

group of women conspiring to punish Euripides for his depiction of deranged female characters. Around 408 B.C., Euripides, an embittered, dispirited old man, went into self-imposed exile at the court of Archelaus of Macedon, where he wrote his masterpiece The Bacchae. There he died. His son Euripides the Younger produced the dramatist’s final plays posthumously in Athens, where they won the prizes that had proven so elusive when their author was alive. It is said that the tragedian SOPHOCLES clad his own actors in mourning upon learning of his great rival’s death. Euripides was an iconoclast from the outset.He did not treat with the traditional reverence the legends that were a playwright’s source material. Instead, he manipulated and reinterpreted them and introduced within that context the conflict between fate and free will. The “bad boy of Athenian drama,” as Euripidean scholar Daniel Mendelsohn calls him, Euripides “questioned the established Olympian pantheon,” slyly rearranging “traditional mythic material in bitter fables” and deconstructing tragic conventions. He also attacked traditional Greek customs and ideas, such as the treatment of women as inferior, the shaming of illegitimate children, the practice of slavery, and the glory of war. Euripides’ greatest contribution to dramatic art is his penetrating character studies, psychological analyses that investigate how human beings behave when they are subjected to sudden ill fortune. He creates pathos without descending to the maudlin or sentimental. The philosopher ARISTOTLE called Euripides the most tragic of the tragedians.

Improbably enough, Euripides’ oldest surviving work, Alcestis (438 B.C.), is a comic drama. In this play, as in Electra (413 B.C.) and Medea (431 B.C.), Euripides uses DEUS EX MACHINA, a literary device in which the gods appear or an unexpected event occurs to resolve the conflict. Other tragedies by Euripides include Children of Heracles (ca. 429 B.C.), which follows Heracles’ disinherited family, who are persecuted by the king of Argos; Hippolytus (428 B.C.), in which a vengeful god causes a queen to fall in love with her stepson; Hecuba (ca. 424 B.C.), in which the Queen of Troy is driven mad by the brutality and injustice of the Trojan War and exacts violent revenge; and Suppliant Women (422 B.C.), which dramatizes the pleas of the mothers of fallen soldiers to bury their sons’ bodies. Euripides’ later plays include The Trojan Women (415 B.C.), another compelling indictment of war. According to writer Erich Segal, “The ruthless tyrant Alexander of Pharae was so ashamed to be crying at the sorrows of Hecuba that he had to leave the theater before The Trojan Women was over.”

Critical Analysis The Bacchae (also The Bacchants, 408–406 B.C.) features a well-constructed plot in which the title characters are the priestesses and female worshipers of Bacchus, also known as Dionysis. Dionysis is the offspring of Zeus and of Semele, the deceased daughter of Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who founded Thebes. Dionysis is a young and new god.When the play opens, he has returned to Thebes from his travels in the Orient. Slander against Semele is rife in the land of Dionysis’ birth; the Thebans say that Zeus is not the father of Dionysis, that Cadmus perpetrated that rumor to save his daughter’s good name, and that Dionysis is therefore not of divine birth. To teach the city a lesson and assert his mystical powers, Dionysis has bewitched the women of Thebes, and the city “shrills and echoes to [their] cries”: I bound the fawn-skin to the women’s flesh and armed their hands with shafts of ivy. . . . I have stung them with a frenzy, hounded them from home up to the mountains where they wander, crazed of mind and compelled to wear my orgies’ livery. . . .

Dionysis, disguised, appears in the city, where he is ill-treated by the young king Pentheus. Pentheus refuses to recognize Dionysis as a god, failing to realize that the stranger he repeatedly attempts to shackle and imprison, whose “girlish curls” he has forcibly shorn, is indeed the deity. After repeated confrontations, Dionysis finally

hypnotizes Pentheus into donning the outlandish attire of the Bacchae, complete with a blond wig, and a possessed Pentheus flees to the mountains to join the revelers. There, as a messenger later recounts in garish detail, Pentheus’s own mother, Agave, “foaming at the mouth and her crazed eyes rolling with frenzy,” leads a pack of madwomen who rip him limb from limb. In a ghoulish climax, Agave picks up her dead son’s disembodied head and impales it on her staff. As she is released from the Dionysian spell and recognizes her trophy, Agave sees “the greatest grief there is,” and the wretched woman is banished from Thebes. The play demonstrates that the irrational, amoral, ferocious, chaotic forces of nature, as symbolized by Dionysis, can wreak hideous destruction if they are denied. Pentheus is a callow youth and vulnerable to the dangers of his own lack of selfknowledge. He rejects the god instead of embracing the primitive part of himself. According to translator William Arrowsmith, when Pentheus becomes a parody of Dionysis, “we see in his costume and madness not merely his complete humiliation but the total loss of identity the change implies.” Arrowsmith pronounces The Bacchae “a masterpiece: a play which, for dramatic turbulence and comprehensiveness and the sheer power of its poetry, is unmatched by any except the very greatest among ancient and modern tragedies.” Euripides’ plays are frequently produced. His contemporary attitudes, social criticism, psychological insights, and especially his humanity make his work timeless. English Versions of Works by Euripides Euripides. Translated by Anne Marie Albertazzi. Edited by Harold Bloom. Langhorne, Pa.: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. Euripides I. Translated by Richmond Lattimore et al. Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Euripides’ Alcestis. Notes by H. M. Roisman and C. A. Luschnig.Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Medea and Other Plays. Translated by John Davie. Introduction by Richard Rutherford. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Works about Euripides

Conacher, D. J. Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme, and Structure. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. Mendelsohn, Daniel. Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Zacharia, Katerina. Converging Truths: Euripides’ Ion and the Athenian Quest for Self-Definition. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003.

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