Of the three poets of Greek tragedy whose work endures, Euripides is the one whose plays survive in the largest number (eighteen, in contrast to seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles). His plays are notable for containing both tragic pathos and the nimble play of ideas. In antiquity, at least from the time shortly after his death about 407 or 406 BCE, Euripides was immensely popular and his dramas were performed wherever theaters existed. His influence continued through later antiquity and into the Renaissance and beyond, shaping French, German, Italian, and English literature until well into the twentieth century.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
A Child of Privilege Euripides was born in 484 BCE to parents who appear to have been affluent (a number of sources report that he was born on his father’s estate on the island of Salamis). Several facts corroborate the assumption that he was of at least middle-class origin and means: A pupil of Aristotle’s recalled that, as a boy, Euripides was allowed to participate in two religious ceremonies, and he is known to have received a good education. At a time when most literature was transmitted orally, Euripides allegedly possessed an extensive library comprising many philosophical works. His interest in philosophy also manifested itself in his friendships with many of the era’s leading thinkers, including Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Protagoras, who was said to have first recited his inflammatory treatise Concerning the Gods at Euripides’ home. Many readers have inferred that the vicious women depicted in Euripides’ plays represent his experiences with and reprisals against several unfaithful wives, but scholars have found evidence of only one marriage that produced three sons.
Athenian Heyday Euripides spent most of his life in Athens, which enjoyed one of its most fruitful and influential periods during his youth and early adulthood. Funded by silver from rich regional mines and the tribute of subordinate allies, Athenian culture flourished in the form of democratic statecraft, architecture, painting, sculpture, oratory, poetry, history, and tragedy, the city’s particular pride. Every year the Athenian archon, or chief magistrate, selected three playwrights to compete in the dramatic festival, at that time changing from a religious ceremony honoring the god Dionysus into a more secular artistic competition. Each playwright produced a tetralogy consisting of three tragedies and a lighter ‘‘satyr’’ (or satirical) play; a first prize represented one of Athens’s highest honors.
The peace that prevailed during Euripides’ youth, however, ended when Athenian territorial ambitions inflamed the city’s long-standing rivalry with Sparta over who should be the dominant power in Greece; these tensions, culminating in the Peloponnesian War (431– 404 BCE), drained the coffers and the spirit of Athens. Although Euripides is known to have produced his first tetralogy in 455 BCE, only nineteen of the ninety-two Euripidean plays referred to in ancient commentaries exist today, and all but the first date from after the start of the war.
Invited to produce tetralogies for at least twenty-two Dionysian festivals, Euripides was not notably popular. Whereas his elder competitor Sophocles won about twenty-four first prizes, Euripides garnered only four or five, the last posthumously. Aristotle and several biographers report that, outraged by Euripides’ disrespectful treatment of the immortals, the archon Kleon prosecuted him for blasphemy, but no record indicates the trial’s outcome. Late in his career, Euripides sought to leave Athens, frustrated, scholars have speculated, by his relative lack of success at the dramatic festivals, the ongoing devastation of the war, and the city’s war-related decline. He eventually left in 408 BCE at the invitation of the Macedonian king Archelaus, who hoped to establish a cultural center rivaling Athens. Continuing to compose at Archelaus’s court, Euripides was working on Iphigenia in Aulis when he died there in 406 BCE.
Works in Literary Context
Euripides was one of three playwrights whose works represent the dynamics of Athenian thought at the height of classical drama in the city-state during the fifth century BCE. Euripides, younger than Aeschylus and Sophocles, was more notably affected by the Peloponnesian War. This bitter and protracted conflict ended Athens’s Golden Age and contributed to the sense of uncertainty, injustice, and suffering that permeates Euripidean tragedy. Euripides was also more influenced by a contemporary philosophical trend toward skeptical inquiry that accelerated the erosion of belief in traditional religion. The role of the gods in his plays remains controversial. While some critics concede only that Euripides questioned divine benevolence, others argue that he was an aggressive atheist who depicted the immortals’ cruelty in order to stir up religious discontent.
Euripides’ stylistic and technical modifications further place him as a significant influence on the developing art of theater. Still operating within the structural conventions that governed classical Greek drama, he: adapted the traditional chorus, prologue, and epilogue; simplified word use; increased the representation of female characters; blurred the traditional distinction between comedy and tragedy; and refined psychological realism. Renowned for these innovations, Euripides is perhaps best known for the tragic sensibility—responsive to the decline of Athens and the nature of the human condition—that has rendered him relevant to readers of the modern age.
Female Protagonists Of Euripides’ nineteen known works, eighteen are tragedies, and all take as their subject matter the divine myths, martial narratives, and noble family histories that literary and religious tradition had established as the requisite subject matter for fifth-century dramatists (Aeschylus and Sophocles often treated the same materials).
Among the most noted of his concerns is the thematic depiction of the conflict between reason and passion; the latter force invariably prevails. This insistence upon the power of irrational emotion, many critics contend, constituted Euripides’ rebuttal of the contemporary philosopher Socrates’ contention that knowing good is sufficient to doing it. The Euripidean view is particularly evident in Medea (431 BCE), whose eponymous heroine anguishes before punishing her unfaithful husband by killing their children and her rival: ‘‘I feel the enormity of the act I am about to commit; but passion overcomes my better resolve.’’ It is also shown in Hippolytus (428 BCE), in which Phaedra struggles against a divinely induced lust for her stepson: ‘‘We know what goodness is, and we recognize it, but we do not practice it.’’ These two dramas also suggest Euripides’ interest in female protagonists, a then unconventional affinity that Aristophanes mocked in his comedy The Frogs. In plays such as Medea, Hippolytus, many of his other known plays, Euripides focused upon the conflicts and the suffering of women.
Innovations Known as a stylistic innovator, Euripides is often praised for his psychologically realistic characterizations. Sophocles commented that, while he himself made men as they ought to be, Euripides made men as they are. Although his characters are immortals and leaders, Euripides offered sustained and detailed depictions of their struggles with the emotions of ordinary people. His portrayals of Medea deciding between preserving her children and murdering them to smite her husband and Phaedra struggling between honor and lust for Hippo-lytus are often cited as the most sophisticated and evocative representations of emotional dynamics in classical drama. Euripides is also noted for rejecting the lofty language previously considered appropriate for characters of high birth, and his use of simple, working-class language further enhanced his characters’ accessibility.
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Euripides
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