Euripides

The third great tragic poet of fifth-century Athens is Euripides (484-406). Although Euripides was only a few years younger than Sophocles, they seem to come from different worlds. While Sophocles looks back to a pre-democratic age, Euripides is relentlessly contemporary, at home with the uncertainties and restlessness of late fifth-century Athens. His reputation is as a moody and withdrawn genius (one legend relates how he wrote his plays in a cave on Salamis) with little interest in public life. Eighteen of his plays survive from over eighty that he wrote. Although picked many times to present tragedies, he was never as successful as Sophocles, winning only five first prizes, against Sophocles’ twenty. (See the lively Euripides, our Contemporary by J. Michael Walton, London and Berkeley, 2009.)

It is in his treatment of the gods that Euripides shows that he is in tune with his times. This was a period where their relevance, even their existence, was questioned. Even if they exist, what is their nature? Why do they allow evil to occur? Why is the tyrant able to become wealthy and the pious man suffer? Despite the apparent implacability of the gods Euripides does not allow his characters to be burdened by divine power in the way Sophocles’ are. In what is an important moment in European drama they actually answer back. ‘You are a god full of madness or an unjust god,’ is one cry in the play Heracles. If, as Euripides suggests, the gods might actually abandon human beings to their fate, they should not be allowed to do so unquestioned.

The result is a sharper focus on the characters themselves and their relationships with each other. They stand alone, the victims of their own emotions. In Medea, Medea has been abandoned by her husband, the cold and calculating Jason. She conceives of a plan to kill him and her children, partly to save them from being killed by others. Within her the conflicting forces of reason and emotion battle it out until the dreadful murders are finally committed. Here is the birth of domestic drama. The issues are on a completely different level from those public ones explored by Sophocles and Aeschylus. Medea differs from the characters of Sophocles—Antigone who is convinced she is doing right, despite the consequences of her actions, or Oedipus who suffers fate in spite of himself. Medea knows she is doing wrong but is impelled by her feelings to commit her crimes. As strong as the desire for revenge seen in Medea is that of obsessive love. In Hippolytus, Hippolytus is that rare figure in Greek life, a man who prefers celibacy. Phaedra, his stepmother, is overcome with desire for him but is angrily rejected. She kills herself, but just before she dies her distorted feelings make her declare that Hippolytus has shown incestuous love for her. Hippoly-tus dies after his father Theseus passes a curse on him and his chariot is smashed to pieces.

Euripides’ plays break through the conventions of tragedy by showing human beings alone and responsible for their own actions, however strongly they are controlled by emotional forces they cannot understand. Euripides’ concerns were not confined to private emotions. With a war raging around Athens he also meditated on the nature and use of power and political violence. In The Trojan Women, for instance, the brutalities of war are portrayed at a time when the Athenians had captured the city-state of Melos and butchered its inhabitants. In his Helen (412) Euripides suggests that it was not really Helen but a phantom of her that was taken to Troy and thus the war was fought for an illusion—a telling point when Athens had just suffered appalling losses in the Sicilian expedition (see below, p. 299). Euripides is continually probing below the surface with insight and imagination in an attempt to challenge the motives that drive men and women to act the way they do.

A major part of Euripides’ genius, however, is his ability to switch from the most tortuous display of personal passions to pastoral beauty and lyricism. In his last play, The Bacchae, written in his final years when he had left Athens for Macedonia, the entire action is set in the hills and mountains. It is the choruses of The Bacchae that are most memorable, long and beautiful evocations of life in the woodlands and fields. The theme is the nature of the passions unleashed by religious ecstasy. A mother and her companions are caught up in the rituals of Dionysus so passionately that they prove able to turn on her son and tear him to pieces.

Euripides remained popular. In the Oxyrhynchus papyri he is by far the most widely read of the Athenian tragedians and it is interesting that in the very earliest account that survives of a man reading to himself the text is one of Euripides’ plays.