To move beyond the classical era is to recognize that accidents of transmission have played no small role in shaping Euripides’ reputation. The extraordinary variety of Euripides’ work is often discussed as if it were a consequence of the poet’s restless temperament (e. g., Whitman 1974, v). But our perception of this variety is due at least in part to the circumstance that eighteen of Euripides’ plays have come down to us in their entirety, as opposed to seven for Aeschylus (six, if we discount Prometheus Bound) and seven for Sophocles. The numerical discrepancy is the result of pure chance. In addition to the ten tragedies selected from Euripides’ complete works (as edited by the scholars of Alexandria) during the Roman period,2 an additional cache survived, which was rediscovered, copied, and edited by the fourteenth-century Byzantine savant Demetrius Triclinius (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 76-77). These are the so-called alphabetic plays: eight tragedies plus a satyr-play, Cyclops, whose Greek titles begin with epsilon, eta, iota, or kappa. (For discussion of Cyclops see Seidensticker, chapter 3 in this volume.)
It is not the case that the alphabetic plays alone are responsible for Euripides’ reputation as a restless experimenter. The problematic Orestes, for example, was part of the canonical selection; conversely, Heracles and Iphigenia at Aulis, tragedies by any measure, are alphabetic plays. Still, many of the plays that have seemed to pose challenges to the tragic genre as prescriptively defined belong to the alphabetic group: the ‘‘romantic tragedies’’ (Conacher 1967, 15), Iphigenia among the Taur-ians, Helen, and Ion; the patriotic and political dramas, Children of Heracles and Suppliants; and Electra, which engages so pointedly - to some critics, so antitragically - with other versions of the myth.
The good fortune that allowed so many plays of Euripides to survive has also worked against him. If more plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles were extant, they would in all likelihood display a range of mythical subject matter, characterization, and theatrical effects comparable to Euripides’, and we would recognize that Euripides’ productions were not unique in their variety. For example, the fragments of Sophocles’ Tereus and of his two Tyro plays reveal that filicidal mothers and seduced and abandoned heroines were a feature of Sophoclean as well as Euripidean drama. We know that Aeschylus’ Lycurgeia trilogy prefigured Euripides’ Bacchae in portraying an effeminate Dionysus (cf. fr. 61.1). And it is probable that Sophocles’ Polyxena, like Euripides’ Hecuba, opened sensationally with a prologue spoken by a ghost (cf. fr. 523; on the fragmentary plays see Cropp, chapter 17 in this volume).
Although Byzantine scholars played an important role in preserving Euripidean tragedy, their appreciation of its qualities remained ‘‘superficial in the extreme’’ (N. G. Wilson 1983, 179). Michael Psellus, for example, saw fit to compare Euripides’ iambics to those of George the Pisidian, a seventh-century Byzantine author (N. G. Wilson 1983, 178), while Thomas Magister’s summary biography commends Euripides’ skillful use of rhetoric and his plentiful aphorisms (Kovacs 1994, 13). In the thirteenth century a further winnowing took place to select titles for the school syllabus, resulting in the production of hundreds of copies of three chosen plays. The tragedies in question (known as the Byzantine triad) are Hecuba, Orestes, and Phoenician Women - a salutary reminder of the different literary estimations of different historical eras. (The triads chosen for Aeschylus - Persians, Seven against Thebes, Prometheus Bound - and Sophocles - Ajax, Electra, Oedipus the King - are equally surprising from a modern point of view.)
The aesthetics of a tragedy such as Hecuba struck a responsive chord with sixteenth-century critics who appreciated the play’s complex structure, horrific subject matter, and (implicit) moral instruction (Heath 1987a, 43-48). In the seventeenth century Racine reserved his greatest admiration for Sophocles but was most influenced by Euripides (Philippo 2003, 22): he used Iphigenia atAulis and Hippolytusas direct models for two plays (Iphigenie and Ph'dre), while drawing on Euripidean material for others.
World History
