Certain qualities transcend both age and gender. Men and women alike display a passionate, protective love for their children; this universal characteristic, implicit in the words of Aeschylean and Sophoclean characters (e. g., Agamemnon 1417-18; Oedipus at Colonus 1617-19), is both recognized (e. g., Heracles 633-36) and acted on by Euripidean speakers. Amphitryon in Heracles and Cadmus in Bacchae tenderly and cautiously guide their deranged offspring back to sanity; Andromache and Hecuba in their name-plays are willing to give up their own lives to save their children. Precisely because parental love is universal and predictable it is subject to manipulation, as when Medea convinces Creon to postpone sending her into exile by appealing to his fellow feeling as a parent, and subsequently recognizes that murdering her and Jason’s two sons will constitute her most effective revenge.
A distinctive intellectualism of response also characterizes Euripidean characters of various ages and both genders. In all of Greek tragedy, characters and choruses relate specific events to general patterns by appealing either to mythical paradigms or gnomic wisdom (on the complementarity of the two modes see Gould 1999). In an updated variation on this response, Euripidean speakers attempt to locate their situation in a broader context through allusion to intellectual topics of the day. Such interests (which are not in fact unique to Euripidean characters; see Allan, chapter 5 in this volume) led Euripides to be commended as the ‘‘philosopher of the stage’’ by Athenaeus (561a) and condemned for irrelevant philosophizing by Friedrich Schlegel (1979, 61 [1794]).
Schlegel’s censure depends on the anachronistic assumption that poetry and philosophy have nothing in common. The question is not whether the plays include passages that strike a philosophical note, but whether such passages detract from the action. When, for example, Adrastus in Suppliants asks Theseus to help the Argives recover their war dead, the king prefaces his rejection by passing in review the stages by which human beings have advanced, always with divine aid, from savagery to civilization (201-13). The idea of progress is a topos of both the Sophists and tragedy (see Collard 1975a ad loc), but by stressing the role of divinity Theseus reinforces his main point: Adrastus has tried to be ‘‘wiser than the gods’’ (218), has ignored warning oracles, and accordingly bears responsibility for his own misfortunes. When Phaedra explains that she has devoted many nights to pondering why human beings know and recognize what is good but cannot put their understanding into practice (Hippolytus 375-80), the topic is recognizably Socratic (Irwin 1983), but there is nothing gratuitous about its introduction here, in a play where all the human characters mean well but make ruinous choices. After Hecuba in her name-play has learned of her daughter Polyxena’s noble death, she ponders the relative roles of nature and education in forming character - another topic of debate in fifth-century intellectual circles. Although Hecuba herself dismisses her musings as ‘‘arrows shot in vain’’ (603), they are relevant to a play in which two of the principals, Polyxena and
Polymestor, exemplify natures inherently good and inherently evil. Euripides is able, in short, to ‘‘contribute to theoretical disputes without taking time off from being a dramatist’’ (Irwin 1983, 197).
Euripides’ characters are more inclined than Aeschylus’ or Sophocles’ to challenge the order of things, and this critical attitude extends to the gods. Some few protest the Olympians’ cruelty: thus Cadmus acknowledges that his family deserved punishment for resisting Dionysus, but adds that the god has ‘‘gone too far’’ (Bacchae 1346). More commonly it is divine indifference that elicits bewilderment or reproach. The spectacle of the erstwhile queen of Troy prostrate on the ground prompts Talthybius to wonder whether the gods watch over mortals or whether chance is operative in human affairs (Hecuba 488-91). The female captives who comprise the chorus of Trojan Women address themselves to Zeus as they contemplate the ruined city of Troy, asking ‘‘whether you have any thought for this, as you sit on your heavenly throne’’ (1077-78).
Accusations of divine cruelty or carelessness serve less to indict the gods - often they cast light on the ignorance or naivete of the accusers, as Mastronarde (chapter 20 this volume) observes - than to point to the human community as the place where help should be sought and found. The importance of friendship, especially in dark times, is a recurrent Euripidean theme. The exile Polynices notes bitterly that friendship counts for nothing once someone has encountered misfortune ( Phoenician Women 403). And in a concluding gnomic statement, Amphitryon advises that ‘‘whoever wishes to acquire wealth or power rather than friends does not reason well’’ (Heracles 1425-27; cf. Orestes 804-6, 1155-57).
Euripidean speakers also turn their scrutiny on human institutions. That the playwright incorporates references to Athenian democracy into plays set in the mythical past would not have surprised the spectators; Aeschylus had done the same in his Suppliants and Eumenides. Euripides’ allusions are less obvious but also more controversial, for Euripidean speakers express a range of opinions about the democracy. Thus Theseus in Suppliants extols the rule of the demos (common people), the authority of written law, and the opportunity for free debate (403-8, 429-41). But he is speaking in the context of an agon where the Theban herald has just taken the opposite view, stressing the vulnerability of the dOmos to manipulation by glib politicians (409-25). One such politician is the ‘‘agile-minded, sweet-talking, dOmos-pleasing’’ Odysseus of Hecuba (131-32). Another is Agamemnon, whose trawling for popular favor as he campaigned for leadership of the Trojan expedition is recalled with contempt by his brother Menelaus (Iphigenia at Aulis 337-45). No more than the other tragedians does Euripides make overt references to current events. Nevertheless, it is hard to miss the contemporary resonance of such descriptions: Agamemnon resembles the demagogues who came after Pericles and who, as Thucydides describes it (2.65.7-10), catered disastrously to the dOmos in furthering their own ambitions.
Social issues, a recurrent concern of tragedy, are canvassed most pointedly by Euripidean characters. Aeschylean and Sophoclean speakers observe that slaves in name are not necessarily slaves in mind, but Euripidean speakers go further, suggesting that where there is a discrepancy between an individual's physical and mental condition, the latter is the true index of worth (Gregory 2002, 153-55). Women are prominent in Euripidean drama as in all of Greek tragedy - in fact more prominent, to judge by the number of plays with female choruses (Mastronarde 1998, 63). Euripides may appear unique in developing a theoretical analysis of women’s situation, but here as elsewhere he remains within the literary tradition. As part of her bid to win over the female chorus, Medea describes the hardships and restrictions of women’s lot (Medea 230-51). The rhetorical device whereby a child-murderess forges bonds of sympathy with other women by speaking of ‘‘our’’ plight, as well as the critique of virilocal marriage and of the dowry-system, has parallels in Procne’s speech from Sophocles’ Tereus (fr. 583). A speaker in Wise Melanippe protests the prejudice against women in terms that simultaneously evoke the reflexive misogyny of Athenian culture and recall Agamemnon’s remarks in the Odyssey on Clytemnestra’s damaging legacy: ‘‘The hatred for women is very harmful. Women who have stumbled are a reproach to those who have not; the wicked ones share the blame with the good’’ (fr. 493.1-4; cf. Odyssey 12.430-34 and 24.199-202). Aeschylus had already complicated the stereotypical contrast between noble Greeks and savage barbarians in Persians (see Ebbott, chapter 23 in this volume), but Euripides provocatively inverts it, as when Andromache, upon learning that the Greeks intend to cast her little son Astyanax to his death from the walls of Troy, denounces the ‘‘Greeks who have devised barbarian atrocities’’ (Trojan Women 764).
Related to the critique of institutions and attitudes is the utopian desire that the conditions of life might be altered for the better. A recurrent wish is for transparency in human beings, so that exterior and interior, appearance and reality, words and deeds could be clearly differentiated (cf. Scodel, chapter 15 in this volume, on deceptive speech in Sophocles; and contrast Said, chapter 14 in this volume, on how ‘‘appearances never deceive’’ in Aeschylean drama). Thus Medea regrets that there is no visible stamp (character, 519; she employs the imagery of coinage) on human beings that can distinguish the good from the bad. Misogynist characters would prefer that propagation could take place without women: Hippolytus wishes that men could go to the temples, lay down an amount of bronze, iron, or gold, and purchase a child commensurate to their economic status (Hippolytus 618-24; cf. Medea 573-75).
Euripidean choruses express the same desire for different conditions to apply, often responding to the anguish of the protagonist’s situation with a wistful wish to be somewhere or something else; their impulse is not irrelevant to the action but ‘‘a reassertion of the themes and problems of the play in a different and distant context’’ (Padel 1974, 227). Thus after Pentheus’ angry confrontation with Tiresias and Cadmus the chorus of Asian bacchants wish themselves in Cyprus - sacred to Aphrodite, whose connection with Dionysus is central to the play - or Pieria, seat of the Muses, who like Dionysus are patrons of the arts ( Bacchae 402-16; for similar wishes cf. Hippolytus 732-34, Helen 1478-86).
World History
