It was only in the nineteenth century that invidious distinctions began to be drawn between Euripides and the two other tragedians. In the evolutionary assessments of the brothers Schlegel, Aeschylus represented the dawn of tragedy, Sophocles the zenith, and Euripides the decline. In this schema Euripides was not so much the anti-Aeschylus as the anti-Sophocles, disorganized where Sophocles was harmonious and self-indulgent where Sophocles was disciplined (Behler 1986, 350-51). Nietzsche carried this account even further. Following the lead of Aristophanes (Frogs 1491-92), he linked Euripides to Socrates and ascribed to both a rationalism and an optimism inimical to tragedy (see Henrichs, chapter 28 in this volume). As noted, these attitudes took root in twentieth-century Euripidean criticism.
Euripides also found his champions. Wilamowitz’s sympathy for the playwright rested in part on an idiosyncratic identification with the Euripidean heroes Hippoly-tus and Heracles and even with the poet himself (Calder 1986, 417-19), but also on a lucid appreciation of the difference between ancient and modern understandings of tragedy: ‘‘A [Greek] tragedy does not have to end ‘tragically’ or be ‘tragic.’ The only requirement is a serious treatment’’ (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1959, 1: 113).
In the English-speaking world Gilbert Murray played a crucial role in popularizing Euripides through his translations and through his Euripides and His Age, first published in 1913 in that idealistic venture in popular education, the Home University Library, and repeatedly reprinted thereafter. Murray’s account of the playwright, like Wilamowitz’s, was skewed by identification - in his case a tendency to conflate his ‘‘own stance on social and political issues and the picture he draws of Euripides’’ (Easterling 1997c, 118). A lifelong pacifist, Murray interpreted Trojan Women as making a statement about the hollowness of military glory (1946, 83); but while the play (like Homer’s Iliad) unsparingly conveys war’s horrors, it never proposes an end or an alternative to war, and indeed (in another Homeric reminiscence) finds consolation in the thought that the Trojan conflict will be a theme of song for later generations (Trojan Women 1245, cf. Iliad 6.357-58). Furthermore, Murray had a tendency to identify certain aspects of Euripides’ era with his own. Murray opens his book by cautioning, ‘‘It is fatal to fly straight at [Euripides] with modern ready-made analogies’’ (5-6). Yet a page later he comments, ‘‘The Victorian Age had, amid enormous differences, a certain similarity with the Periclean in its lack of selfexamination, its rush and chivalry and optimism, its unconscious hypocrisy, its failure to think out its problems to the bitter end.... Euripides, like ourselves, comes in an age of criticism following upon an age of movement and action.’’
The analogy is misleading, not only because of the chronological distortion involved in consigning Euripides to the post-Periclean world, but also because it fails to recognize that throughout the fifth century the Athenians designated an official time, set aside a civic space, and allocated financial resources to an institution that - precisely - encouraged them to ‘‘think out.. .problems to the bitter end’’ by subjecting their values and assumptions to intense examination. Meier argues that tragedy provided the spectators with a ‘‘platform for an utterly unique form of institutionalized ‘discussion’ ’’ (1993, 42). By addressing political and ethical issues of the day (not specifically and directly as in the assembly and legislature, but more generally and at a mythical remove), the tragedians helped the spectators find their bearings in an era of rapid and unprecedented political and intellectual change. Halliwell and Croally (chapters 25 and 4 in this volume) remind us that poets were traditionally viewed as teachers, and that the playwrights too were expected to instruct. If these scholars are correct, then the ethical complexity and the persistent questioning that characterize Euripides’ plays are not only not at odds with the tragic enterprise but fundamental to it.
In the second half of the twentieth century Euripides was still being defined as the anti-Sophocles - the Sophocles of the strong, steadfast hero (Knox 1964, 8-11, 45-50) and the smooth, ‘‘organic’’ style (Michelini 1987, 60). With critical understandings of Sophocles now shifting (see Scodel, chapter 15 in this volume), it is time to reevaluate Euripides as well. In the following section I offer a selective sketch of Euripides’ relationship with his tradition under the headings of language, style, and meter; structure and design; consistency and realism in characterization; age classes; shared characteristics; genre and humor; and theatrical and literary references. Eur-ipidean drama is no less tragic, I will suggest, for distinctively combining innovation with tradition.
World History
