Why was Euripides a favorite target of Aristophanic humor? Was it because he was a well-known and respected playwright, or a notorious and scandalous one? Either conclusion is possible from the evidence. Euripides is a central figure in Acharnians and Women at the Thesmophoria and the butt of scattered jokes in other plays. In 405 BCE, the year after Euripides’ death, Aristophanes won first prize at the festival of the Lenaea with his Frogs. As the play begins the god Dionysus has descended to Hades with the aim of bringing Euripides back with him to Athens. Once arrived in the underworld Dionysus adjudicates a debate between Aeschylus, the current occupant of the throne of tragedy, and the recently deceased Euripides, who has wasted no time in lodging a rival claim. Since Sophocles too is now dead, this ‘‘great event among the dead, and terrific conflict’’ (759-60) might have taken shape as a threeway contest; Sophocles, however, has graciously withdrawn from the competition. The contest mingles disparate criteria from different realms (see Halliwell, chapter 25 in this volume), all exploited for maximum comic effect. Dionysus’ choice remains in doubt until the last possible moment. In the end he reverses his original intention and opts to rescue Aeschylus, the playwright most likely to ‘‘give useful advice to the city’’ (1420-21).
Both the contest and its outcome draw attention to their own arbitrariness. By excluding Sophocles Aristophanes is able to caricature Euripides as the anti-Aeschylus, sharpening the ‘‘grand antithesis’’ (Halliwell 2003, 105) that drives his plot but obscuring the complex relationships that actually prevailed among the three tragedians. Dionysus’ decision provides a political resolution to the context, but hardly a literary one (Willi 2002). Nevertheless, Aristophanes’ comic portrayal became the basis for serious nineteenth-century characterizations of Euripides (Silk and Stern 1981, 36-37) as a decadent rationalist who subverted the tragic genre - a view that with modifications is still widely held today.
In the twenty-first century Euripides remains a contested figure. The sharpest disagreements concern his relationship to Aeschylus and Sophocles, and, indeed, to the genre of tragedy as a whole. Many critics broadly adhere to the nineteenth-century assessment, even though it depends on a prescriptive rather than a descriptive
Definition of Greek tragedy. Others maintain that Euripides’ differences from the other tragedians are a matter of degree rather than of kind, that Euripides developed rather than destroyed the tragic genre, and that there is more that unites the three dramatists than sets them apart (for the debate see Mitchell-Boyask 2002, xii). Readers should be forewarned that the following account of Euripidean drama reflects the revisionist point of view (more traditional assessments can be found in the essays of Roberts and Seidensticker, chapters 9 and 3 in this volume). I begin with a brief and selective survey of Euripides’ reputation from the fifth century to the modern era, and then address some aspects of continuity and innovation in his plays.
World History
