In view of this purposeful stylization it seems more fruitful to discuss Euripidean characters in terms of classes - age classes in particular - than in terms of individuals. Euripidean characters are sharply demarcated by age, even more so than by gender or social status. The other tragedians seem readier to let the masks convey this category. Aeschylus’ Xerxes, for example, is described as young and headstrong (cf. Persians 744), but when he finally appears on stage his stylized lamentations convey little sense that he is a youthful character; Sophocles’ aged Oedipus says that age and suffering have taught him tolerance ( Oedipus at Colonus 7-8), but his responses throughout the play do not bear out this claim. Pathos and vulnerability are dominant notes in Euripides’ characterizations of young people; he tends to view the middle-aged and the old with a colder eye.
Euripides was not the only dramatist to exploit the dramatic potential of children - Sophocles brings Eurysaces on stage (Ajax 545-95) in a scene that alludes to the meeting of Hector, Andromache, and Astyanax in Iliad 6 - but he may well have been the first to give them singing parts. The children do not have lengthy roles, presumably on account of the challenges of staging such scenes: perhaps the lyrics were sung by inexperienced boy actors, perhaps the boy actors mimed the appropriate emotions while an adult actor sang their lyrics (for the possibilities see Sifakis 1979, 73).
The brief songs function to enhance the pathos inherent in the children’s small stature and youthful masks, and to underscore their situations of loss or danger. Alcestis’ son and daughter are on stage as their mother breathes her last, and the boy then bewails their orphaned state; in Andromache Molossus mourns his impending death at the hands of Menelaus; in Suppliants the sons of the seven dead Argive heroes participate in the funeral lamentation. And in a traditional representation of murder by means of shouts within (a convention first attested in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon), Medea’s two boys cry out (not in lyrics, but in trimeters) from inside the skene.
Euripides’ adolescents are often high-minded and idealistic - particularly those who embrace a sacrificial death for the sake either of their community (Heracles’ daughter in Children of Heracles, Menoeceus in Phoenician Women, Iphigenia in Iphigenia at Aulis) or of their own honor (Polyxena in Hecuba). The nobility displayed by these young people makes their deaths all the more affecting. A less attractive aspect of youth, to which Euripides is equally attentive, is its arrogance and intransigence. Conspicuous examples are Hippolytus in his name-play and Pentheus in Bacchae. Hippolytus’ fate is already sealed as the play begins, and he pays with his life for his rejection of Aphrodite; Pentheus receives repeated warnings and is given the chance to change his ways, but he too is destroyed in the end for his resistance to Dionysus. The gods use their fates to point a lesson (Hippolytus 5-6, Bacchae 1345), but what stays with the audience is a sense of divine vindictiveness and of the waste of young lives.
Characters in the prime of life have left youthful idealism behind them. Some few (such as Lycus in Heracles) are evil through and through, with no explanation provided for how they got that way. More typically Euripides’ adult characters are flawed but uncomfortably aware of their shortcomings, at once conflicted and apologetic. Thus Agamemnon in Hecuba explains that he pities Hecuba, understands the justice of her cause, and would like nothing more than to come to her aid, if only helping her did not endanger his standing with the Greek army (Hecuba 850-63). Clytemnestra in Electra comes to visit her daughter when summoned, allows Electra to pour out her grievances, and admits that she herself‘‘does not rejoice too much at what [she] has done’’ (1105-6).
Euripides’ older characters tend to be survivors whom the passage of time has hardly ennobled. Cadmus in Bacchae advises his grandson Pentheus that even if Dionysus is not divine, he should ‘‘say that he is and tell a lie in a good cause, so that Semele will seem to have given birth to a god, and honor will accrue to our whole family’’ (334-36). The aged Alcmene of Children of Heracles gloats over her captured enemy Eurystheus, then insists on having him put to death in defiance of the normal Athenian policy for prisoners of war. Euripides, like the other tragedians, makes much of the feebleness of old age (de Romilly 1968, 143-66); in fact, as we will see, their debility becomes the occasion for humor.
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