or intellectual unity within the Euripidean corpus. Perhaps if as many plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles had survived, more variety would be found in those dramatists as well, but one has the impression after reading Euripides that for this playwright, at least, variety is almost an organizing feature. Most often, generalizations about Euripides have centered on his portrayal of the gods and his apparent disbelief in Greek deities and traditional myths, but then one is forced byThe Bacchae, with its intense religious mood, either to see the play as an end-of-life palinode, a refutation of the earlier works, or to put aside the generalization entirely. Variety within the Euripidean corpus is caused, to a great extent, by the playwright’s focus on the particular psychology of each character.

Like the Sophists of his age, who operated on an ethical system of amoral pragmatism, Euripides is a practical stage manager who is willing to thwart theatrical convention and traditional beliefs for dramatic effect. In general, the goal of Euripidean drama is not the development of a theological system or an ideal code of conduct, but rather the depiction of human emotions under strain. The dramas of Euripides are thus not really concerned with the gods or superheroes, but with ordinary people trying to deal, in their own personal ways, with real-life situations including love, jealousy, divorce, and death. This is the source of Euripides’ diversity and of his appeal. His psychological studies, as diverse and as complex as the human mind itself, are at the heart of his plays, which fluctuate in form, mood, and tone to suit particular dramatic and psychological situations. Unlike Sophocles, who depicted people as they ought to be, Euripides depicted people as they are (according to Aristotle’s Poetics). This Euripidean realism accounts for the differences among Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Ion, The Bacchae, and his other plays. Euripidean tragedy is, above all, a drama of life itself.

Alcestis

In Alcestis, Euripides presents a study of the loyal, self-sacrificing wife. That Alcestis would die for her husband, Admetus, is easy to accept after Alcestis’s touching and revealing speech in the second episode, but the character of Admetus is more difficult to understand and easier to condemn as selfish and self-centered. Interpretation of his character and of the play as a whole is widely debated, but Admetus’s salvation, if it occurs at all, must be sought in xenia, the ancient Greek custom of guestfriendship. Xenia is Admetus’s chief—and perhaps his only—virtue.

In the typically Euripidean expository prologue, the god Apollo explains how he will save Admetus’s life because the latter was a good host to him while he, Apollo, was on earth, and, in the central portion of the fourth episode, Heracles is willing to get Alcestis back from Death because of the hospitality his friend Admetus has shown to him even at a time of deep mourning. The Third Choral Ode is filled with glowing praise for Admetus’s xenia. On the other hand, Admetus comes off quite badly both in an agon with his father Pheres, in which the aged father explains his refusal to die for his selfish son, and in the exodos, in which Admetus accepts in marriage an unidentified woman from Heracles, despite his earlier promise to the dying Alcestis never to remarry, even before it becomes clear that the veiled woman might be Alcestis. Perhaps some of this play’s difficulty is attributable to its position as a pro-satyr play, a fact that helps explain the pathetic comedy of the drunken scene with Heracles and especially the tragicomic ambiguity of the exodos. Through it all, however, Euripides’ depiction of Alcestis as a loving wife and mother is a constant on which the variables of Admetus’s character and the play’s denouement are based. Whether Admetus in the exodos is rewarded for his virtuous xenia or punished for his selfishness, neither could have occurred without the remarkable and loving selflessness of his wife. Euripides’ emphasis on a human situation and human emotion is paramount.

Medea

Medea is one of the few extant plays of Euripides that function without the gods. Instead, Euripides has taken two superhuman figures from Greek mythology, Medea and Jason, and placed them in a very human situation: the breakdown of a marriage. Especially in their bitter agon in the second episode, Medea is clearly the wronged woman who has sacrificed everything for her husband and does not want the divorce, and Jason is shown to be heartless, calculating, and ambitious. Euripides achieves his most brilliant dramatic stroke, however, by complicating his psychological study of Medea with an emphasis on the exotic side of her character. Not only is she depicted in her traditional role as a witch and as a foreigner and therefore a barbarian, but there is an implicit suggestion that Medea is also unnatural because of her love for Jason, because of her uncontrollable passion. Medea’s emotional imbalance, caused by Jason’s desertion, is therefore the heart of the play and leads inevitably to her murder of Jason’s intended second wife and then of her own children, whose death, she realizes, will wound Jason more than would any other act of revenge.

Yet Medea is not completely unnatural; she is rather a woman caught between her jealous passion for Jason and her maternal instincts. That she does not lose all her sympathy by yielding in the end to her passion speaks highly of Euripides’ character development of his heroine. The chorus is particularly significant in the play for this reason. From their arrival, the women of the chorus are sympathetic to Medea and convinced that she has been wronged by Jason. Their First Ode is a bitter condemnation of the perfidy of men toward women, and during Medea’s intrigue, the chorus actually serve as Medea’s confidante. The Fifth Choral Ode is about the sorrows of childbearing, and the chorus’s last song is a terrified prayer to the Sun, Medea’s grandfather, to stop Medea’s unnatural act. The chorus members therefore are an important dramatic foil to Medea. As women, they are sympathetic to Medea, but they cannot understand or condone the murder of her own children. The chorus are a psychological scale by which Medea’s passion is measured and found imbalanced.

Compared to the tragicomedy Alcestis, the dramatic effect of Medea can be nothing less than complete emotional exhaustion. In a memorable section of Poetics, Aristotle criticizes the emotional effect of Medea as miaron, moral revulsion, which inhibits the development of a true tragic feeling for Medea, who, fully conscious of the horrors of her act, murders her children. Yet this awareness that she is caught between Jason and her children is the emotional key to Medea’s psychology and enables her to construe her act as both revenge against Jason and protection against further harm for her children. In Medea, Euripides has developed the illogical conclusions of a mind crazed by spurned love.

Hippolytus

Passion is also the subject of Hippolytus, but here, the heroine Phaedra struggles in vain to control her illicit love for her stepson Hippolytus. The gods play a much a greater role in this play. In the prologue, Aphrodite announces that she has caused Phaedra’s love in vengeance against Hippolytus, who scorns her worship, and Artemis appears in the exodos to restore the good name of her dying devotee Hippolytus. This drama, often praised for its structural and thematic balance between Aphrodite and Artemis, between Phaedra and Hippolytus, between passion and chastity, is another brilliant Euripidean study of emotional stress, of Phaedra striving desperately to maintain her good name, first by keeping secret her uncontrollable love and then by accusing Hippolytus of rape and committing suicide, and of Hippolytus, at first horrified when he learns of Phaedra’s infatuation and then nobly faithful to his oaths of secrecy even when falsely accused of violating his stepmother. The tension between the two sides is maintained by well-developed hunting and sea imagery, which Euripides manipulates for meaningful character development. For example, Hippolytus’s “untouched meadows” can be applied not only to nature and to the speaker’s virtuous chastity but also to a sense of spiritual smugness, a holier-than-thou attitude against which Hippolytus is warned by his own servant. Phaedra’s wish to “drink fresh water from a running spring” is a repressed sexual desire, especially when she couples this desire with one to “lie in the grassy meadow.”

It would have been a useful guide for an interpretation of this play to know exactly how these characterizations of Hippolytus and Phaedra compared with those in Euripides’ unsuccessful first version of the theme. How much less virtuous was the first Phaedra? Was the first Hippolytus as spiritually superior or as bitterly misogynistic? Satisfactory answers to these questions can probably never be found, however, and the extant Hippolytus must be interpreted on its own evidence. As such, Hippolytus can be seen to depict a passion that neither Phaedra nor Hippolytus is able to control. Both are engulfed in a powerful force, which, in this play at least, with its appearance of Aphrodite in the prologue, is more than human; it is divine. The Second Choral Ode, poised dramatically between Phaedra’s accidental confession of love to the nurse in the second episode and the nurse’s disastrous conversation with Hippolytus in the third episode, is a lyric statement of love’s power in which the chorus describe love’s destructive force and add the stories of Deianira and Semele as mythological exempla. Although violent passions are the subjects of both Medea and Hippolytus, the former play is perhaps more devoted to the depiction of the horrible effects of Medea’s passion. Hippolytus places more emphasis on the inevitability not only of Phaedra’s love, which Euripides expresses in theological, mythological, and, above all, human terms, but also of Hippolytus’s intractable, passionless nature, which is developed in the same powerful terms as Phaedra’s. In Hippolytus, Euripides thus demonstrates an astute awareness of the complexities of human psychology.

Ion

Ion is one of several Euripidean dramas that revolve around anagnorisis, or recognition. This play, in fact, has two recognitions: a false recognition by Xuthus, king of Athens, that Ion is his son, and a true recognition by Creusa, Xuthus’s wife, that Ion is really her son, conceived by the god Apollo and abandoned in infancy. Ion was reared as an orphan at Apollo’s temple at Delphi, where the action of the drama takes place. Although the major dramatis personae are all illustrious figures from the Athenian past, the events that they experience were not that extraordinary in fifth century b.c.e. Greece. Many Athenians would have gone to Delphi, as Xuthus and Creusa did, to consult the oracle and to visit Apollo’s temple, which the chorus as sightseers describe in the parodos. The rituals preceding a request for a Delphic oracle would also have been familiar to Euripides’ audience. Further, the reliability of Apollo’s shrine as an oracular seat is an issue that haunts Ion and that very much concerned Euripides’ contemporaries. Apollo’s reputation in this play is especially tarnished by Creusa’s claim that the god raped and then abandoned her to deal alone with an unwanted pregnancy. These concerns about Apollo are directed toward the character of Ion, whose idealistic view of Apollo at the beginning of the play is repeatedly challenged, first by Creusa’s story of Apollo’s rape and later by the story of his true identity.

The inevitable result of these intellectual challenges is Ion’s transformation from a simpleminded boy into an intelligent, questioning adult. In the end, Ion accepts Apollo’s story on trust, but this leap of faith, Ion’s statement of implicit faith and trust in the god, can also be interpreted as ironic, as a cynical acceptance of his fate to be the son of Xuthus “by gift” and of Creusa “by Apollo.” On an understanding of Ion’s intent hinges the interpretation not only of Ion’s character development but also an understanding of the play itself. On the one hand, if Ion is transformed into a skeptic, the play becomes a serious condemnation of Apollo. On the other hand, if Ion’s belief in Apollo matures from childlike acceptance into the faith of an adult, the play is a more optimistic statement concerning the role of deity in human life. There is no answer to this ambiguity, just as there is none for the ambiguity of Alcestis. It is perhaps significant, however, that Athena’s appearance in the mechane occurs, not at the very tense dramatic moment when Ion nearly kills Creusa without knowing that she is his real mother, but rather at the point when Ion turns to ask the truth of his identity from Apollo in an oracle. Athena prevents Ion from querying the oracle because Ion is searching for a direct answer to a question that cannot be answered directly. Rather, he must be content with the ambiguity of the situation, with the contradiction that he is the son both of Xuthus and of Apollo. The dramatic emphasis is thus on Ion’s intellectual growth rather than on the veracity of Apollo.

The dramatic tone of Ion is in strong contrast to that of Medea or Hippolytus. The horrid deaths of the earlier plays are avoided in this drama. Both Creusa and Ion are brought in the play to the point of committing the crime of Oedipus—that of unwittingly killing a blood relation—but both murders are thwarted by the dramatic circumstances. This is a tragicomedy, a tyche drama, in which Euripides has approached the human situation and human psychology from a completely different, and less serious, direction.

The Bacchae

The Bacchae is, in several ways, Euripides’ most unusual work. It is the only extant Greek tragedy based on a Dionysian story, despite the cultic association of Greek tragedy with that god. Unlike many of Euripides’ works, The Bacchae displays a religious intensity that complicates any discussion of the gods in Euripides. Further, this religious fervor is most completely developed by the chorus of bacchants, who achieve in this play a dramatic centrality lacking in other choruses, even those, such as the chorus in Euripides’ The Suppliants, which are meant to be main characters. Even more than Dionysus himself, who is one of the dramatis personae, his chorus of female followers project the meaning of the Dionysian religion and its complete psychological dependence on the god. The parodos is an especially vivid example of such Dionysiac ecstasy.

However, there are important points of intersection between The Bacchae and Euripides’ earlier plays. Most notable are the expository prologue, spoken by Dionysus, with its deceptive features; the bawdy scene between Teiresias and Cadmus in the first episode; the vivid messenger speeches; and the appearance of Dionysus in the mechane in the exodos.

The Bacchae is not simply about Dionysus and his religion; it also concerns Pentheus, king of Thebes, and his opposition to the new religion. The conflict between Dionysus and Pentheus and the eventual death of Pentheus at the hands of the gods’ followers make possible another superb Euripidean psychological study, this one of a human mind in deterioration. Dramatic events depict the progressive insanity of Pentheus, which, on a religious level, is imposed as a punishment for opposing Dionysus. On the level of imagery, the chorus emphasize Pentheus’s irrationality by describing the king as a “wild beast” in the Second Choral Ode.