SOURCE: John Ferguson, "Euripides," in A Companion to Greek Tragedy, University of Texas Press, 1972, pp. 235-46.

[In this essay, Ferguson discusses the intellectual climate in Greece during Euripides's life and assesses the elements of his dramas.]

In the early days of the Persian invasion, while the Spartan troops were fighting their brave defensive action at Thermopylae, the Greek fleet was similarly engaged off the coast of Euboea. The strait between Euboea and the mainland is called Euripus, and it was no doubt in honor of this not unsuccessful action that two Athenian parents called their son born at this time Euripides. Later legend placed his birth on the very day of Salamis, but that is too schematic to be true. There remains something ironic that the great antiwar propagandist should be named after a battle. The parents were named Mnesarchides and Clito; they seem to have been respectable tradespeople, perhaps owning a farm on the island of Salamis and selling the produce; there are continual references in the comic dramatists to Clito's operations as a greengrocer, which would be pointless without some basis in fact.

Euripides grew up in an age of intellectual ferment. Aeschylus and Sophocles also reflect this age, but as members of an older generation sensitive to contemporary trends of thought. For Euripides it was the air he breathed. It became a part of him, as it did not of them. Further, it was an age of intellectual change, in some ways of breakdown. The century-long investigations set off by Thales of Miletus, seeking a simple explanation of ultimate matter and a coherent account of its changes, had broken down. To Heraclitus the material world was in flux (a modern attempt to deny this is misguided), held in stability by a principle of balance or proportion or tension; this led Euripides's younger contemporary Cratylus to the view that we cannot name anything, since a name implies a degree of permanence, we can only point. Parmenides asserted on intellectual grounds that flux is impossible and nothing changes, and his disciple Zeno, ten years older than Euripides, argued with notable acumen that it is impossible to accept the evidence of the senses. It became clear that a simple explanation could not account for the facts, and Empedocles in Sicily and Anaxagoras, who came to Athens as a friend of Pericles, offered an explanation in terms of pluralism.

The basis of Ionian science, though there were residual pockets of superstition, was to explain the universe in terms of an analysis of physical force rather than a myth of divine action. The rational approach to medicine by Hippocrates and his school toward the end of the century is one of many results of the change.

Epilepsy, "the sacred disease," was thought to be directly caused by divine visitation, but the Hippocratic treatise on the subject dismisses this view with good-humored raillery in favor of natural causes. Anaxagoras, the great rationalist of the middle of the century, was, we are told, a direct influence on Euripides's thinking. He it was who dared to assert that the sun was not a god, but a red-hot stone bigger than the Peloponnese, and to interpret the crumpled horn of a ram in terms of a rational malformation rather than a supernatural omen.

Alongside these were the sophists. Cicero said that Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven and planted her on earth, meaning that he diverted philosophy from cosmology to man. In fact the sophists, men like Protagoras and Prodicus, had done this long before Socrates turned from an inconclusive pursuit of natural philosophy to concentrate on ethics and politics. Aeschines called him "Socrates the sophist," and he was following where they had pioneered. They cashed in on the new situation in mid-century: leisure at least among the wealthy, prosperity, and extrovert optimism, the pushing back of the frontiers of knowledge, travel, and curiosity, and a form of government (whether democratic or oligarchic hardly mattered, save that democracy offered more clients) in which leadership depended on a combination of expertise and persuasive power. The sophists offered training in both, for a fee; Socrates differed from them in not claiming fees, and in using the question rather than the lecture as the means to education, educere not educare. The sophists shared and spread the scepticism of the age. Protagoras was an agnostic in religion, and a subjectivist in epistemology, and Gorgias, the great teacher of rhetoric, put the famous case that nothing exists; if it did, we could not know it; and if we could know it, we could not communicate our knowledge. Our sources tell us that Euripides studied not only with Anaxagoras, but also with Protagoras, the ablest of the sophists and one of the most versatile, and with Prodicus, an expert in the precise use of words, a trait which Plato delightfully parodies in his Protagoras. They also record him as an associate of Socrates, but this is impossible: Euripides was an established figure while Socrates was still a schoolboy. There were affinities between the two men in their challenge to conventional society, and the story that Socrates never missed a play by Euripides is a more likely truth.

It seems that there were problems in his education. His father wanted to make an athlete out of him, and Euripides combined considerable promise with a whole-hearted loathing of the cult of games, which came out later in a famous attack on athletes in his satyric Autolycus. He turned to painting as a profession, but by the age of eighteen was writing plays, and was only twenty-four when his plays were first accepted for performance in 455, though not surprisingly they only received third prize; one of these was The Daughter of Pelias. He had to wait fourteen years before he won first prize.

His plays were popular with the masses, but not with the judges. The number he wrote is uncertain. The records later give either 98 or 92, of which 78, 77 or 75 survived at that point, but some of these were not genuine. It has been suggested that the figure of 92 is based on official records and represents 23 tetralogies. The problem is that we know of only seven satyr plays. There is however some indication that he used romantic melodrama with a humorous twist in place of the satyr play. Alcestis was certainly one such play, and Orestes probably another. Despite his great reputation he won the first prize only five times, and one of those was posthumously with Iphigeneia at Aulis, Alcmaeon at Corinth, The Bacchants and presumably one other play. Of his major surviving plays only Hippolytus is known to have belonged to a prize-winning sequence.

We are fortunate in that his popularity led to the survival often of his plays in the general curriculum; one of these, Rhesus, is clearly not authentic; in addition nine others survived by accident from some library. It is a sobering thought that in the later Byzantine period the selection was whittled down to three, Hecabe, The Women of Phoenicia, and Orestes, none of which many would today account among the supreme masterpieces. It is important to realize that apart from the pro-satyric Alcestis, all the surviving plays date from the last twenty-five years of his life, and all were written under the shadow of war. He was almost fifty when he wrote Medea, the earliest surviving tragedy. He loved Athens but loathed her arrogant exclusiveness, loathed her subjection of women, loathed her imperialist ambitions, loathed war. All his plays must be seen against the backcloth and in the context of war. His plays are plays of protest; we are told that his vision of peace in the lost Erechtheus was instrumental in helping to produce the willingness to negotiate the Peace of Nicias in 421.

Euripides is by far the most contemporary of the ancient dramatists; he seems strangely akin to the crisis of conscience that took place in the United States in the 1960s. He was a restless modernist, a propagandist with a genius for poetry and drama. He has been compared with Bernard Shaw; there is the same iconoclasm, the same dramatic genius, the same dedicated revolt. But Euripides uses poetry where Shaw uses wit, and time has not blunted his weapons.

He made considerable innovations in his approach to drama. The most obviously influential of these was the diversion of tragedy along the path of romantic melodrama, with a degree of invention in the plot that the earlier dramatists do not seem to have permitted.

He at first felt that this mood, with its happy ending, fitted more closely the satyr play than the tragedy, and in 438 substituted the romantic Alcestis for the satyr play. It seems likely that this was not a success, and it may have been some time before he repeated it, though the shortage of satyr plays in his recorded works suggests that he preferred pro-satyric to satyric plays. In the mid-410s he turned again to plays of this kind, now substituting them for tragedies. The most notable of those surviving is Iphigeneia among the Taurians; the lost Andromeda seems also to have been outstanding. In Helen he seems almost to be parodying himself. These plays of rescue are psychologically of great interest; they point forward to New Comedy and to much later European drama.

Of more immediate impact was his realism. This extended back to the early days of his career. Telephus in 438 introduced the hero as a beggar in rags. In The Acharnians Aristophanes girds at such low realism, and speaks of a whole succession of Euripidean beggar-heroes: Oeneus, Phoenix, Philoctetes, Bellerophon (lame as well, another feature of strong theatrical realism), Thyestes, and Ino; we may add from later plays Electra and Orestes. Euripides had a beggar for every myth. More important still was his psychological realism, his treatment of those who wear rags in their souls, like Jason, his reduction of heroes to human stature (which led Sophocles to say that he himself portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides portrayed them as they are), his interest in the minds of women (Sophocles's Electra is fine, but Euripides's Electra is true), his awareness of abnormal or obsessional psychology (in Hippolytus, Phaedra, Heracles, Electra, or Pentheus), his good people who are naturally, humanly, unaffectedly good without being larger than life, priggish or namby-pamby (Alcestis, Macaria, Theseus, Peleus, and Iphigeneia at Aulis), his wide understanding of different kinds of weakness that are not wickedness (Creon in Medea, Menelaus in Helen, Agamemnon in Iphigeneia at Aulis, Cadmus in The Bacchants).

His characterization is superb: only Shakespeare and Ibsen stand beside him. The author of On the Sublime says that he excels at the representation of passion and madness, but he is no mere Scopas of the theater, his palette is much richer. Of particular human interest is his use of children. In five of the plays children are the central motif: Medea, Heracles's Children, The Suppliant Women, Heracles, and Ion. In five more they are a strong factor in one or more scenes: Alcestis, Andromache, Hecabe, The Women of Troy, and Iphigeneia at Aulis.

He brought to the theater a splendid clarity of language. There is occasional bathos but there is also inescapable challenge. Apart altogether from his theatrical sense, he is magnificently readable. Norwood once said that the only Greek authors one would lay on a guest's bedroom table were Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, and Plutarch; I would add Sappho and Theophrastus, but the point is taken. He has been criticized for faulty construction without overmuch justification. He is not a dramatic architect like Sophocles, but who outside the study wants him to be? There is a revealing passage in Norwood. He gives a technical analysis of faulty construction in Andromache, and then asks rhetorically, "Who has ever read the play without zest for each brisk scene, without eagerness to know what comes next?"

Five aspects of Euripidean drama call for special assessment. The first is the prologue. It is used to set the scene; since Sophocles changed from the trilogy to the unit of the single play, some such introduction was needed. It offers a quiet start on which to build. Aristophanes in The Frogs accuses him of loose rhythms and casual falling into an easy formula, by fitting "lost his little oil bottle" onto each prologue Euripides quotes. If a dramatist uses the prologue, as Euripides does, to establish a situation, he is liable to write something like, "Hamlet, prince of Denmark, who is a young man of academic interests, in love with a girl named Ophelia, and inwardly disturbed about his father's unexpected death and his mother's subsequent behavior—lost his little oil bottle." This is exactly what Euripides is careful not to do, and Aristophanes picks almost the only plays where the formula works. In fact Euripides's prologues are by no means formulaic, or undramatic: witness Alcestis, Medea, The Women of Troy, the lost Andromeda, and Iphigeneia at Aulis.

Second, Euripides was famed for his rhetorical debates, and Aristophanes, though he does not choose to use these in The Frogs, except in that the whole confrontation of Aeschylus and Euripides is something such, has a capital parody in The Clouds where the Just Argument and the Unjust Argument meet in headon collision with occasional quotations from Telephus to point the reference. It is not necessary to list such debates, from Jason and Medea in Medea through Hecabe and Helen in The Women of Troy to Menelaus and Helen in Iphigeneia at Aulis. They are dramatic, like the court scenes of modern drama, and they had an immediate appeal to an Athenian audience used to acting as arbiters in the law courts and the political assembly. They are also intellectually exciting; they reflect the intellectual excitement of the discovery that the gathered wisdom of the fathers is not the whole or only truth, the discovery that has a rather trivial outcome at the end of the century in the document called Dissoi Logoi or Pros and Cons. Euripides is not trivial. He may acknowledge that there are two sides to a question, and he does not give one an easy victory over the other, but he also believes passionately in the supremacy of truth. The scenes of debate sometimes pall in the reading, though not in the theater, and in them Euripides with his dialectical approach appears most modern.

Third, his messenger's speeches are the vehicles for brilliant rhetoric. They are carefully prepared. In Sophocles's King Oedipus the messenger simply comes out and speaks. In Medea, Hippolytus, and Electra, to name three outstanding examples, Euripides skillfully builds up the tension before letting the full flood of the narrative gush out. The messenger's speeches contain more consciously fine writing than the dialogue, but the rhetoric is seldom exaggerated or offensive, and the variety of pace comes from a master of the theater. Where so much is fine it is hard to single out any, but he never wrote anything finer than the messenger's speech in The Bacchants, with the unparalleled description of the god drawing the tree down, down, down, and the evocation of a numinous silence.

The fourth aspect is the song. The music is lost, but Euripides was famed for his marvellous avant-garde musical effects that Aristophanes parodied in The Frogs. One of his devices is the trilling of a syllable, and his use of repetition is probably for musical effect; in general his musical structure is much freer, more Wagnerian and less Handelian, so to say. Aristotle suggests that the chorus is less relevant in Euripides than in Sophocles. This is hard to sustain. It is true that choral odes in Euripides can be detached from the action and treated as songs in their own right to a far greater extent than those of Aeschylus or Sophocles; they are not mere comments on the action as they sometimes are in Sophocles. But they are also relevant in context. In The Women of Troy, Ion, Helen, and Orestes (where of all the plays the choral lyric occupies the smallest proportion) the choral odes are Sophoclean in their integration with the action. But, rightly understood, the escape odes of Hippolytus (732) and Iphigeneia among the Taurians (1089) have full dramatic relevance. There are very few odes in which the dramatic relevance is not clear, so few that we must attribute their seeming irrelevance to our blindness or ignorance. In Ion the handling of the chorus is particularly effective; in The Suppliant Women and The Bacchants they are in the center of things. Apart from lyric, as these remind us, Euripides's choruses are involved in the action; in Medea, Heracles, and perhaps Helen, they virtually intervene. Furthermore, he is flexible in his effects, and produces on occasion a second chorus, as in Hippolytus or Iphigeneia at Aulis. And his solor arias are varied, exacting, superb. Decharme called him "the master of monody."

Fifth, from various sources we have indications of an elaborate technique of presentation. Thus a scholiast tells us of the extraordinary visual beauty of setting in The Women of Phoenicia. Iphigeneia among the Taurians and Helen may well have had exotic scenery. In Hippolytus and Helen, a pack of hounds is introduced on stage. Whatever happens in the Palace Miracle in The Bacchants there must be some startling effect with fire on Semele's tomb. The appearance of Euripides in The Acharnians, where he is rolled out on the moving-platform (ekkuklema) at first-floor level on the distegia, suggests a fondness for two-level scenes and an elaboration of mechanical devices. Certainly the distegia is strikingly used in The Suppliant Women and in Orestes, and there are some startling epiphanies as at the beginning of The Women of Troy, in the middle of Heracles, and at the beginning and end of Hippolytus and The Bacchants. In the extant plays Euripides does not make great use of the ekkuklema; it is a powerful device in Heracles. But he was famed for his employment of the crane in introducing a deus ex machina, though in some instances the appearance may be on the theologeion. The effect is especially bold in Medea where the appearance is not even of a divinity. He has been criticized for using the god to cut a hopelessly ravelled knot, and when Horace wrote his Science of Composition centuries later he assumed that this was the only reason for the deus ex machina. With Euripides the contrary is almost true. In Iphigeneia among the Taurians he ravels his plot in order to introduce the goddess. The device had a number of advantages: the chief was spectacular and theatrical; Euripides was interested in contemporary cult and ritual and it enabled him prophetically to link his story with these; it introduces a cosmic dimension, of destruction in Medea, of beauty in Hippolytus, of judgment in Electra, of power in The Bacchants.

This is important, for Euripides was a dramatist of ideas. His was an age of scepticism, free-thinking, and the tumbling of the idols. He rejects the established gods and their ministers; he rejects the legends about anthropomorphic deities (Hcld. 1341, I. T. 386); in particular, he rejects the Delphic Oracle, which time and again he attacks as Apollo. Sometimes he seems overtly agnostic. "We are slaves of the gods—whatever the gods are" (Or. 418). One of his characters suggests that perhaps chance rather than the gods holds sway (Hec. 488). Sometimes he is speculative. There is a remarkable prayer in The Women of Troy (884):

Sustainer of the earth, throned on the earth,
whoever you are, hard to discern,
Zeus, whether natural law or human
 intellect,
I call on you; for moving on a noiseless
 path
you guide all things human along ways of
 justice.

Elsewhere he writes, "The mind within us—that is our god" (fr. 1018). Sometimes he speaks of the ether as god, the fiery upper air that is the immanent appearance, within our universe, of the transcendent divine mind-stuff (fr. 340, 941). He is certain that there are powers at work in the universe, greater than man, powers that we defy or ignore at our peril. These, for dramatic convenience he personifies as gods. We meet them in Hippolytus, they lurk in the background of Heracles, and burst through in final glory in The Bacchants.

One of those powers, which he does not personify, is morality. Euripides is a moralist. The Women of Troy is a mighty antiwar play; but the same mood recurs in The Suppliant Women,

But if death stood before our eyes, when
 votes
were cast, war-maddened Greece would not
 have perished.
(484)

in Helen, and in Orestes. This is but one aspect of his moralism. In Electra he is strong against the actions of Electra and Orestes. There is a revealing exchange in Orestes:

MENELAUS: What's wrong with you? What illness is wearing you out?

ORESTES: My conscience. I know what crimes I've committed.

(395)

Orestes is here illuminating. In Electra Apollo is blamed, and the two humans are his weak and vicious instruments. In Orestes the whole blame is on human crookedness. Man is the cause:

Heaven is not unjust, but evil men
cause sickness and confusion.
(fr. 606)

Euripides is full of a high moralism. He was attacked for immoralism on the strength of a line in Hippolytus: "My tongue swore—but not my mind" (612). The line is dramatic; Hippolytus in fact keeps his oath and dies for it. Euripides is in fact deeply concerned for righteousness.

Socially he is on the side of the underdog, and it is this that adds fervor to his plays. It is told of Socrates—or Plato—that on rising every morning he gave thanks that he was born a Greek and not a barbarian foreigner, a freeman and not a slave, a man and not a woman. It was exactly this intolerable attitude of superiority that Euripides set himself to attack. In Medea we see the foreigner's point of view; we also see the woman's. Euripides presents us with an unsurpassed constellation of strong women. Inevitably in tragedy some of them are criminal, like Medea and Electra; hence the accusations of misogyny. But what of Alcestis, Macaria, Andromache, Hecabe, Iphigeneia? Euripides presents us with a whole range of womanhood, loathsome and lovely, but always with power. He is on the side of the slaves. In the lost Alexander a slave is the hero; in Ion and Helen it is asserted that it is the name not the actuality of being a slave that is shameful; the relation between Alcestis and her slaves in the earliest surviving play is noteworthy. In Electra the only decent character is a peasant farmer. In The Women of Troy Euripides sides with the victims of war.

His life is in his plays. We know something of his appearance in old age, with a long beard and moles on his face. A portrait bust shows him sensitive, thoughtful, worried. He lived on Salamis in a cave with two openings and a beautiful view; it would have been more comfortable than many houses. There he sat, meditated, wrote, "all day long thinking to himself and writing, for he simply despised anything that was not great and high." He wrote slowly. An anecdote tells of him rebuking a facile writer: the speed of the other's production was matched by the durability of his own. His associates were few. "I have skill," says his Medea. "Some are jealous of me; others think me unsociable" (303). One of his associates was his father-in-law Mnesilochus, who is guyed in Aristophanes's Festival of Women, and who need not have been much older than the poet. Yet Euripides was not completely aloof. Timotheus was a musician of genius: his first performance was a failure. He was contemplating suicide when the old poet sought him out and told him to hold on, and those who hissed him now would cheer him. Euripides had been hissed, but Athenian prisoners-of-war from Sicily came home to say that they had been released because they could recite his plays.

Then in his seventies something broke inside him. We do not know what; there was hatred, jealousy, lawsuits, perhaps a good-humored allusion in Philoctetes misinterpreted, and he left Athens with the jeers of the people. He went first to Magnesia in Asia Minor; then to the court of Archelaus in Macedon. Timotheus was there and the dramatist Agathon, the painter Zeuxis, and the exiled historian Thucydides. It was a strange, wild country where someone who insulted Euripides was handed over to him by the king for flogging, where a man was not a man until he had killed a boar, where an old man out walking might be torn to death by hounds. Here for just over a year he lived. Here in the winter of 407-406 he died, and among his papers were found the fruits of his retirement, three great plays: Iphigeneia at Aulis, unfinished but superb in power; Alcmaeon at Corinth, a romantic melodrama with a happy ending; and The Bacchants, which some account the finest of all his plays. They were produced post-humously, as we have seen, and won one of his only five prizes. Thucydides—or Timotheus—wrote his epitaph:

All Greece is headstone to Euripides,
  His bones let Macedon his death-place
   claim,
Athens his home—the very Greece of
 Greece,
The world his plays delighted owns his
 fame.
(tr. W. Leaf)

On Nov. 22, 1831, Goethe wrote, "Have all the nations of the world since his time produced one dramatist who was worthy to hand him his slippers?" Even more delicate is Browning's tribute in Bishop Bloughram's Apology:

Just when we're safest, there's a sunsettouch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, someone's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,—
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self.