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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
Euripides (484? 480? BCE – 406 BCE)
Ευριπίδης
I realised after I'd been working on this
for a while that I don't have much to say, nothing startlingly original, about
Euripides' plays. That's not really a surprise, since I've never played with
blackened shreds of papyrus, don't know any Greek and have never even seen a
performance of a Greek tragedy. Accordingly, there are very few references to
poetry or theatre here. Instead I became interested in trying to grasp the
totality of his work so far as that is known, so this article has transformed
into a sort of list of plays, with a few very brief comments on some of the
ones that survive complete. As usual, references are not given; I will have
repeated the errors of others as well as adding some of my own, in the best
traditions of medieval scholarship. So check everything! If you really want to
know about the Euripidean canon you need such works as the Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Vol 5 (ed. Richard Kannicht, 2004),
a snip from Göttingen at €368. T.B.L. Webster's The Tragedies of Euripides (
I suppose most people will find this article boring - an endless list of lost plays and compressed summaries of confusingly similar legends. Setting the famous survivals back into this context has changed my view of Euripides, though. In a way I see the surviving plays less reverently. The broader context emphasizes, for example, how the characters who appear on stage had a familiarity for their audience and are almost like the stock characters in a Commedia dell'arte troupe: Agamemnon, Heracles, Clytemnestra, etc - check the plot summary of e.g. the Telephus, or the unexpected appearance of Orestes in the Andromache; also how prevalent certain motifs are, in tragedy just as much as comedy: that parents are always killing or trying to kill their children, scorned females falsely accuse their scorners, etc. The idea that the conception of Greek tragedy progressively declines from nobly austere beginnnings into tragicomedy and melodrama feels less secure.* One begins to see Victorian admiration for the Alcestis, Ion, and Iphigenia among the Taurians as perhaps only one way of looking at Euripides. But whichever you cut it, the Bacchae remains unique and astonishing.
[* There are vague
hints that the earliest tragedies (i.e. in the obscure half-century before the Persians) were more like satyr-plays.
Whatever else tragedy implied, it did not imply a compulsory "unhappy
ending" involving the death of a leading character. Indeed Aristotle seems
to suggest that Euripides' penchant for "unhappy endings" received
some criticism.]
As an introduction, here are some remarks about the instability of character portrayal in the plays, something that's given me a lot of trouble as a reader...
Victorian readers of that most amazing Victorian novel, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, tended to blame Shakespeare for inconsistency of character treatment across different plays: for example, it was unpleasing to come to the Merry Wives and to discover a Falstaff who is such a stiff pantomime parody compared with the uniquely beguiling old rogue of Henry IV. (The remarkable thing is that Shakespeare's plays could support such a novelistic reading at all - at some level Shakespeare did indeed invent the novel...)
But reading Euripides, the jolt-effect of
character-inconsistency is everywhere. Though all his plays, so far as we know,
dramatize scenes from the same vast body of legendary material, the
"matter of
Euripides' plays tend to sidestep the most
central stories of that body of legend: by a kind of natural process of
avoiding well-trodden ground that audiences were too familiar with and that
invited unwelcome comparison with other canonical treatments, they drift out to
the edges of the legends. Thus, although the Trojan War is a background to so
many Euripidean plays, the plays are actually concerned with dramatising events
taking place just before, or just after, or aside from, the main action. These
edges of the legendary body can be characterized as giving a different
perspective: not wholly submerged in the heroic or pious values they
necessarily glance at, they are apt to cast an ironic or anti-heroic or
critical or questioning "slant".
Also, legend is more flexible at the edges. Euripides could invent new
content (e.g. perhaps Medea's slaying of her children, Clytemnestra's first
marriage...) or take up obscure minority traditions (e.g. Helen was never in
And yet, to say there is no consistency of character conception is inadequate. One is naggingly aware that behind the different treatments of Helen, for example, there is a discernible and distinctive Euripidean trend: a tendency, while acknowledging the strongly anti-Helen rhetoric typical of the tragic period (though not of Homer), to infiltrate a more positive view of Helen - a fascinated one anyhow. Euripides is building a myth that goes way beyond classical boundaries - Chaucer and Shakespeare understood it very well - the structuralist rule that sustains the myth is that whatever bad things are said about Helen without response, she is never portrayed actually doing anything bad.
Similarly, there is clearly some kind of relationship, submerged but not totally indiscernible, between the various treatments of formidable Odysseus, or shallow Menelaus, or tortured Orestes... Thus a multiple vision is uncomfortably necessary. When we listen to a speech by Achilles in Iphigenia at Aulis, for example, we must both recall and set aside other treatments of the hero: in Homer, in other tragedians, in other plays by Euripides and even in other parts of the same play. We must recall them since the current image is in a kind of dialogue with them, sometimes feeding off them and sometimes glancing at them critically; but we must also set them aside in order to attend to what is happening in front of our eyes, in order not to unwittingly substitute legendary stereotype for what is actually being done or said. That's an awkward stance to hold for very long.
One must also view the legendary action as having a shifting, heuristic, relative kind of status. For example, that first marriage of Clytemnestra's is mentioned only in Iphigenia at Aulis, where it emerges that Agamemnon slew her first husband and her baby and then abducted her forcibly. This story (presumably a sensational Euripidean invention) must be deemed to be true so far as this play is concerned, but it must not be imported into our view of Clytemnestra in other plays (which it would modify rather radically). At the same time, there is an underlying trend in Euripides of presenting a more positive view of Clytemnestra - as per her sister Helen - which in turn has a negative impact on his views of Orestes and Electra (Clytemnestra, barely mentioned by Homer, seems to have emerged as a powerful dramatic figure in the Agamemnon, though there might be lost precedents). There is no single authorized Euripidean version of the legendary events, only a series of variations and their resultant play of forces.
The point I'm labouring to get at is that a
dislocation in the treatment of legendary material is fundamental to these
plays, and it leads to a challenging and dissatisfying failure to resolve into
a stable image; somewhat analogous to the syntactical dislocations of modern
poetry. The Euripidean dislocations are a jagged faultline that expose, among
other things, political and social issues relevant to fifth century
*
Another way of looking at this is to deny a
clear distinction between making myth and making a play. We tend to make this
distinction: between myths that somehow unattributably come into existence and
literary works that may play with mythical material but whose production does
not affect myth. In the unusual situation of 5th century
It's a fact that many of Euripides' alterations or additions to mythical stories did become part of the inherited corpus of myth. But this raises the question: what is this mythology? What is its function, if it was not something the tragedians or their audience themselves believed? Is belief in fact a useful notion here, or are we importing it anachronistically from our own Christian heritage?
Some thoughts on this inspired by that later mythology, the medieval "Matter of Britain". Perhaps Greek mythology is more akin to this than we tend to imagine?
1. Foundation mythology is politically important to an institution, supplying a common vision that crosses specialist boundaries and to some extent class boundaries, themes for ceremonial, legitimisation of current authority.
2. At the same time, since the foundation myth avoids speaking directly about the current institution and its power-centres, it opens a safe channel for the non-empowered to publically discuss the institution critically, e.g. commending and enforcing ideals and lessons of history.
3. Mythology is initially made up, but its origins quickly become blurred and since it becomes common material for communication is then credited (some personal belief combined with some social consent). Thus Geoffrey of Monmouth's History though largely made up was within a very few years generally believed; the materials for possible disbelief were not accessible to future generations in the same way as the mythology itself.
4. The theological element in mythological stories is apt to be over-stated. Religious material is eagerly seized on by the makers of myth, but the function of the myth is not religious or philosophical. Thus Arthurian legends e.g. of the Holy Grail do not originate in response to urgent theological dialogue within medieval Christendom and they only accidentally contribute to future theological debates.
It may be that Greek myth is unique in character, as Greek tragedy is.
*
Thomas Magister (Byzantine, late 13th century CE) in his summary of Euripides' life says: "He wrote ninety-two plays in all, and in their number only eight were satyr-plays." i.e 84 serious plays and 8 satyr plays. The list below of known plays, excluding the doubtful "Critias" plays, but not the Rhesus (since Euripides probably did write a Rhesus), gives 72 serious plays and 7 (or 8) satyr plays, totals that are consistent with Thomas' figures. But perhaps this only means that the figures recorded by Thomas were someone's intelligent guess. Given the traditional idea that Euripides' plays were presented and judged in groups of four at the City Dionysia (held annually in March), this obviously raises a question about the small number of satyr plays - though we know, because of the Alcestis group, that the fourth play was not always a satyr play.
There are 17 serious plays surviving in full, plus the Cyclops satyr play, plus the doubtful Rhesus. Most of the survivals are late works; none are early.
Ten plays owe their survival to a selection put together perhaps mainly for school use: in its earliest traceable form (2nd century CE) this comprised Medea, Hippolytus, Hecabe, Women of Troy, Phoenician Women, Bacchae, Andromache, Alcestis, Orestes, Rhesus. This is sometimes called the "Byzantine Selection" (note that it contains the "Byzantine Triad"). This selection is analogous to the seven-play selections of Aeschylus and Sophocles that have survived into modern times, and arguably embodies an ancient consensus about the plays that constituted Euripides' major achievement; in other words, a canon - though how the Rhesus crept in there is unclear. In Euripides' case, however, this selection is not all we have. A further eight plays survive:
Helen - Ελένη
Electra - Ηλέκτρα
Children of Heracles - Ηρακλείδαι
Heracles - Ηρακλής μαινόμενος
Suppliant Women - Ικέτιδες
Iphigeneia
at
Iphigeneia among the Taurians - Ιφιγένεια εν Αυλίδι
Ion - Ίων
Cyclops
- Κύκλωψ
Τhese survivals may possibly represent an extract from some more substantial compilation in alphabetical order of title (Greek letters epsilon to kappa). If so, it wasn't a complete one as there are plenty of titles of now-lost plays that would also fall within this part of the alphabet. The common assertion that this group of plays is more statistically representative of Euripides' work as a whole is unsustainable - it is even more skewed towards late plays than the Byzantine Selection.
An odd thing is that no two of the surviving plays are known to belong to the same group of four (the Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis were indeed first produced together, but this was after Euripides' death and the plays were not connected). But most likely some of them did belong to the same groups (certainly if we believe that the plays predominantly were grouped and if we take seriously the total of ninety-two plays - just do the maths); Helen and Cyclops is one suggestion that I favour.
The following list suggests what some of
the groups were like: there's a complete list of the plays for 415 BCE - The Trojan Women being the third -
making up a group (winning second prize) with a clear structure of
"before", "during", and "after" the Trojan War.
The lost Andromeda is known to have
been part of the same group as Helen;
the connections are both topographical (Nilotic) and thematic (rescue from
captivity). On the other hand, the Alcestis
and Medea groups look like pure
miscellanies (Webster hypothesised changes in competition prodedure resulting
in unlinked trilogies from around 450 BCE, and a reinstitution of linked
trilogies shortly before 415 BCE).
[If all 92 plays
were produced for the annual contest at the City Dionysia, and if they were
always presented in groups of four, then this would imply that Euripides was
invited to compete approximately every other year between 455 and 409. It's
often implied that the hapless entrants had to write four complete plays and
put them forward to the archon in the mere hope of them being selected for
production; surely this is unlikely. "We do not know the criteria on which
[the archon] made his selection, though he perhaps asked the prospective
playwrights to recite passages to him" (P. Cartledge). But even if it was
not compulsory, nothing would preclude an established author from writing plays
in advance, in the reasonable hope of eventually getting them performed. After
Euripides' death it was possible to put together a group of four plays for
performance - was this his stockpile? If dramatists did build up a stock then
some of those plays might end up being used elsewhere (
CHRONOLOGY and KNOWN PLAYS BY EURIPIDES
SURVIVAL KEY:
C=The play survives more or less complete.
F=Substantial
fragments of the play survive.
T=the play survives
as little more than a title.
There are a great
many Euripidean fragments surviving, many more discovered on papyri since
Nauck's 1889 collection, which has now been replaced (in Euripides' case) by
Richard Kannicht's 2004 collection (Vol 5 of Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta).
Titles are a
problem. The main titles given here are Anglicized versions of Greek names
employing a Latinate spelling! (i.e. Heracles not
Herakles nor Hercules, Electra not
Elektra, Hecabe not Hecuba). I've
tried to mention alternative titles where these are likely to cause confusion.
For the surviving plays these are usually the traditional Latin titles that
were in standard use by older commentators but are less often used today, e.g. Hercules Furens. For the lost plays they
tend to be transliterated Greek, e.g. Melanippe
Desmotis.
This
listing, though perhaps more complete than any currently on the Internet, is
not comprehensive. What
I would like to have produced is essentially what has been done for the
Aeschylus corpus here: http://www.theoi.com/Text/AeschylusFragments.html.
Euripides and Sophocles are due to follow in the next year or so. Some of the
plot summaries in what follows are more or less cut and pasted from other
internet sources that I don't acknowledge individually - but thanks and please
excuse the liberty...
455 BCE Euripides' first competition (third prize)
1. Peliades
(455 BCE) F - aka Daughters of Pelias. said
to have been Euripides' first play. The play presumably told the story of
Medea's conspiracy to have Pelias killed by his own daughters.
2. Licymnius (before
449 BCE?) F - obscure. Apparently
about a ship that is struck by a thunderbolt; may tell the story of Argeius son
of Licymnius and may have featured Heracles. It may be referred to in
Aristophanes' Birds. Dating depends on possible parody in Kratinos' Archilochoi.
3. Aegeus F (c. 450 BCE) F - probably
told the story of Medea persuading Aegeus to try and kill his son Theseus.
441 BCE Euripides' first victory
The following 31
lost plays (4-34) are of unknown date.
4. Auge
F - became pregnant by
Heracles (the son was Telephus). Heracles, returning at a later date,
recognized a ring and saved Auge, who had been sentenced to be drowned by her
incensed father. [I have generally not mentioned Zielinski's metrical arguments
for dating - they place Auge as a
very late play.]
5. Thyestes
T - dealt with some part
of the extensive Thyestes legends; the only thing that seems to be certain is
that in it Thyestes appeared in rags. Thyestes was the brother of Atreus. They
quarrelled, and Thyestes slept with Atreus' wife. Atreus in revenge killed
Thyestes' children and served them to him at a banquet. Later Thyestes raped
his own daughter Pelopia and she gave birth to Aegisthus. Atreus brought up
Aegisthus, believing him to be his own son, and ordered him to kill Thyestes;
but recognition of father, mother and son followed and Pelopia killed herself.
(Sophocles dramatized parts of this story in three Thyestes plays, an Atreus,
and The Mycenaean Women.)
6. Aeolus F - Ovid's tale of
Canace in Heroides 11 is thought to
follow this play. Canace (one of the daughters of Aeolus and Aenarete) gave
birth to a son fathered by her brother Macareus. Her nurse was preparing to
remove the child from the palace pretending that she was going out merely to
offer a sacrifice, but the child cried out and disclosed its presence to
Aeolus. He threw the child to the dogs and sent a sword to his daughter, ordering
her to kill herself. Canace and Macareus took their own lives. [The play seems
to have been thought sensational or extreme - along with Peleus, Meleager and Telephus, it's
singled out for special ridicule in the Frogs.
Before 423 BCE, says Webster, but does not say why.]
7. Theseus
F - set in
8. Hippolytus the Veiled T - Euripides' earlier version of the story. The scene in which Phaedra propositioned Hippolytus is said to have shocked the audience. In the later version Phaedra is presented less negatively and the play revolves more around the power of the gods; Phaedra and Hippolytus do not converse during the course of the action, though in one scene Phaedra is present when Hippolytus berates her nurse.
9. Alcmene F - told the story of Alcmene (the mother of Heracles)
being accused of unfaithfulness by Amphitryon and saved from death by Zeus. Alcmene
also appears in The Children of Heracles, and Amphitryon in Heracles.
10. Alope F aka Cercyon - made pregnant by Poseidon, she
is starved to death by her father Cercyon. Theseus kills Cercyon and asserts
the child Hippothoös's rights. Alope is transformed into a spring.
11.
12. Phrixus I F - there were two Phrixus plays and it's difficult to allocate most of
the fragments to one or the other. The plot concerned Ino's attempt to kill
Phrixus, the son of Athamas' first wife Nephele, by arranging a false report
that the Delphic oracle required him to be sacrificed. The plot is revealed and
Phrixus escapes. Athamas' plan to put Ino and their son to death is prevented
by either Heracles or Dionysos. (Sophocles wrote an Athamas that covered
similar ground; see also Ino (18))
13. Phrixus II F - see above.
14. Temenidae F aka Temenidai. Hyrnetho is
urged by her brothers to leave her husband Deiphontes. But too little survives
to be sure of the plot. [Metrical considerations place this late - Zielinski
proposed Temenos, Temenidae and Archelaus as a linked trilogy.]
15. Temenos T
- Too little survives to be sure what the play was about
16. Antigone
(date later than Sophocles' play which was performed in 442 or 441) F - apparently a lighter piece in which Haemon
assists Antigone in the burial and the lovers are later married.
17. Danae
F - Danae was the mother of Perseus.
18. Ino
F - in which Ino (see also
12-13), secretly returning to Athamas' palace in disguise as a servant, thwarts
the new wife Themisto's attempt to murder her sons by a change of clothing, so
that Themisto murders her own children instead (plot summary according to
Hyginus).
19. Protesilaus
F aka Laodamia - in which the widowed Laodamia kept an image of her
husband in her bedchamber. (Compare Admetus' words in Alcestis - a Thessalian motif, perhaps?) When the image is burnt by
her father, she throws herself into the flames too.
20. Pleisthenes
F - may have been based on
this Thyestean legend (see also 4): Thyestes, exiled by his brother Atreus,
brings up Atreus' son Pleisthenes as his own. He sends Pleisthenes to kill
Atreus, but instead Atreus kills Pleisthenes (assuming him to be the son of
Thyestes). (Quoted in Birds, 414 BCE)
21. Ixion
F - Ixion was said to be
the first person to kill a relative (his father-in-law, to avoid paying a
bride-price). He eventually received purification from Zeus, but then tried to
rape Hera. Euripides' play ended with his punishment for this. [According to
Philochoros, refers to the death of Protagoras around 420 BCE.]
22. Oineus
F aka Oeneus - King of Calydon in
23. Peleus
F - plot uncertain - Peleus, who appears in the
Andromache, was the father of
Achilles. The play may have dealt with Peleus' old age or with his enmity with
Acastos following false accusation by Acastos' wife, one of a series of
misfortunes in his earlier life. (Quoted in second edition of Clouds, 421-417 BCE)
24. Polyidos
F - Glaukos, son of Minos
and Pasiphae, drowns in a jar of honey. His body was found by the seer
Polyidos. Minos imprisons Polyidos in the tomb with the body, ordering him to
bring it back to life, which with the help of a magic herb he does.
25. Scyriae F aka The
Men of
26. Mysoi
F - doubtful attribution
to Euripides. The play dealt with the mobilization phase of the Trojan
expedition, on analogy with plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus with the same
title.
27. Epeus
T - only the name of the
play survives. Probably the Epeus who constructed the Trojan Horse.
28. Cadmus
T - only the name of the
play survives. Cadmus and his wife Harmonia are changed into
serpents.
29.
30. Skiron F - satyr play.
31. Syleus F - satyr play.
32. Autolycus F - satyr play. (Possibly two plays of this title.)
33. Busiris
F - satyr play. See also
34. Eurystheus F - satyr play.
The following three
plays are almost certainly spurious - they may be by Critias (460 BCE - 403
BCE), Plato's uncle and later a leading figure among the hated Thirty Tyrants
who imposed a reign of terror on Athens in 404 BCE (see also Sisyphus).
35. Pirithous
F - possibly by Critias. Friend of Theseus, who
joined him in trying to carry off Persephone from Hades.
Traditionally only Theseus escaped, but Euripides (or Critias) had Heracles
rescue both of them.
36. Rhadamanthys
- F - possibly by Critias.
37. Tennes - F - possibly by Critias.
The following
group of four plays won second prize in 438 BCE. (The winner that year was
Sophocles.) The Alcestis was the
fourth play in the group, taking the place of a satyr play (though Heracles'
drunkenness may allude to the satyr genre); this is the only known example of
such a substitution, but of course so few records remain that it may have been
fairly common practice - and see note to Orestes.
38. Cretan
Women (438 BCE) T aka Cressae - said to remain "aggravatingly
obscure", it's not even clear if the location was Crete or
39. Alcmaeon
in Psophis (438 BCE) F -
Alcmaeon, needing purification after matricide, ends up at Psophis. He receives
purification from Phegeus and marries his daughter Arsinoe, but the land
becomes barren and he has to move on.
40. Telephus
(438 BCE) F - Telephus was
king of the Mysians (though in fact a Greek); they successfully repelled the
Greek army but he was wounded by Achilles. The play concerns his arrival as a
disguised beggar in
41. Alcestis (438 BCE) C - A surprising and brilliant play. Hints of satyr-play
surround the opening dialogue between Apollo and Death, and also the comedy
that Heracles brings with him. Yet this only makes the scenes with Alcestis and
Admetus more powerfully serious.
42. Cretans (c. 435 BC) F - Pasiphae tries to hide the birth of the Minotaur from Minos (whom, in one fragment, she also holds responsible for her having had sex with a bull). Fr. 472 witnesses to an interest in ecstatic religious ritual that foreshadows the Bacchae.
The following
group won third prize in 431 (The winner was Euphorion, with Sophocles second):
43. Philoctetes
(431 BCE, third prize) F - Sophocles'
Philoctetes came later, in 409 BCE.
44. Dictys
(431 BCE, third prize) F -
Dictys was the fisherman who rescued Danae and her infant son Perseus from the
sea.
45. Medea (431 BCE, third prize) C
46. The Reapers/Theristae (431 BCE, third prize - satyr play) T
Medea is one of Euripides' masterpieces and perhaps now his most-read play, because
of the aptness of its themes for school use. Like Alcestis but unlike later plays it allows only two speakers (plus
the chorus) within a scene. It's also unusual in the extent to which the lead
character takes the initiative. What Medea does is of course horrible and
doesn't really make sense in rational terms, but it's impossible not to
sympathise with her, so much more intelligent than her husband. Jason claims
that his new marriage is not motivated by sexual desire but by prudence;
immediately after he says this, however, the Chorus continue to interpret his
behaviour in terms of blind desire. Medea doesn’t, but she doesn’t accept his
rationalization either. She sees his behaviour as a blind and selfish pursuit
of royalty. She, a foreigner now made doubly and explicitly aware of what a
social encumbrance she is, has been insulted and shamed. What’s more, Jason has
betrayed and insulted their children. (When their relationship implodes, both
partners end up slighting the children of that union.) Jason accuses Medea of
sexual jealousy, but this is a complacent error; Medea expresses no
disappointed sexual longing. It’s the minor characters, the Chorus in
particular but also the Nurse, who sentimentalize what is happening here into a
love-triangle, who
define what is happening in erotic terms, who lay stress on Medea’s
once-overwhelming passion for Jason and on Jason’s raging desire for Glauce.
The central pair do not use this kind of language.
Both middle-aged, for them the key issues are pride, control, social position,
competition. Jason's speech of self-justification tries to do two things:
first, to soothe his own uneasiness at having possibly not acted quite as
sensibly and prudently as he’d like to believe, and secondly, to calm his
wife’s supposed sexual jealousy. Both efforts are irrelevant to the real sore
points. What he completely overlooks (and thus continuously exacerbates) is
Medea’s wounded pride, her acute consciousness of being a second-class citizen.
Guilelessly, Jason betrays his own feelings; that their life together has
utterly failed him, is unworthy of him. He claims to be satisfied with his sons
yet immediately argues that they need to be subsumed into a royal family in
order to prosper – on their own they cannot. He talks of his sons having an
“equal place”, yet even without the awkward fact that Creon has just exiled them,
what he describes is clearly not an "equal place", but a tolerated
place. Thus Jason seeking to exonerate himself actually presses all Medea’s
buttons.
47. The Children of Heracles (c. 430
BCE) C - aka Heracleidae.
It survives because of a single manuscript and it's tempting to infer that on
its own merits it was not bound to survive - perhaps many of the lost plays
were like this. It is episodic and
after the scene with the unnamed maiden (Macaria on the basis of other sources)
she is not referred to again; Alcmene, who now appears for the first time and
dominates the rest of the play, never mentions the death of her grand-daughter
when justifying her hatred of Eurystheus. As William Allan has argued for the Andromache, this lack of continuity is
not necessarily to be conceived as a problem. Considered as a play about
asylum-seekers, both from their own point of view and from that of the host
nation, this seems like a play with modern relevance; they deserve protection,
they are innocent, heroic, troublesome, toughened by persecution and in the
long view not necessarily on your own side. Suppliant plays like this one are a
sort of sub-genre of Greek tragedy; more often than not, the host is
48. Bellerophon
(c. 430 BCE) F - aka Bellerophontes. Concerned the tragic
outcome of Bellerophon's attempt to storm
49. Stheneboea
(before 429 BCE) F - the woman
who falsely accused Bellerophon of attempted rape after he repulsed her advances;
the play apparently concerned Bellerophon's return to Tyrins after killing the
Chimera, and his punishment of Stheneboea. (Quoted in Wasps, 422 BCE)
Hippolytus was from a group of plays that won first prize for
Euripides in 428BCE. The other competitors were Iophon (second) and Ion
(third).
50. Hippolytus (428 BCE, first prize) C - aka Stephanephorus
(the Wreath-Bearer) to distinguish it from the earlier Hippolytus the Veiled. Hippolytus goes into exile because of a
woman's unjust accusation, like many another male hero of folktale. But a couple of issues modify the parallel
with Joseph when accused by Potiphar's wife, or Bellerophon accused by
Stheneboea (see previous two plays!), or Phoenix accused by Phthia, or Prince
Seyavash accused by his step-mother Sudabeh in the Shahnameh. Phaedra is
portrayed as possessed rather than wicked, and she takes her own life. Hippolytus
is brashly fanatical, apparently quite unaware of the situation developing
around him. Yet at the same time (that dislocation, again) the superb account
of his appalling death forces us to concede his absolute innocence.
51. Andromache (c. 425 BCE) C - It has much in common with Orestes - not merely the characters Orestes, Menelaus and Hermione,
but the proposal of an outrageous and barely motivated murder which at the last
minute comes to nothing - as if part of the thrill is seeing how the dramatist
flirts with breaking the rules about how far you can go in embroidering on the
received body of legend. Andromache,
long neglected because of its lack of Aristotelian unity, has gained recent
prominence because of William Allan's book-length study - he argues persuasively
that the play's linear procession, how it keeps going and keeps our interest,
is what is relevant here. With Andromache our sympathies are clear, but as the
play moves into its later phases they become increasingly disturbed - we make a
wrenching adjustment to admit Hermione (who has been hateful up to the midway
point, but must now be let off), then are briefly pleased with her friendship
with Orestes, then are displeased to discover that Orestes is in a killing mood
and has orchestrated the death of Neoptolemus (hardly a figure we expected to
end up sympathising with). It's a bracing moral switchback. By this time Peleus
is the centre of our interests, though he has a few skeletons in his own past
too, as Menelaus had enjoyed pointing out.
52. Cresphontes
(ca. 425 BCE) F aka Kresphontes. Mentioned in Aristotle's Poetics, talking about the affecting
motif of kin-recognition in tragedy: "In
the Cresphontes, for instance, Merope intends to kill her son and does
not kill him but discovers..." Plutarch admired this scene, too. The plot
can be constructed by combining Apollodorus and Hyginus: "Cresphontes had
not reigned long in
53. Hecabe (c. 424 BCE) C - aka Hecuba. Along with the Phoenician Women and Orestes, the most popular of Euripides' plays in Byzantine times (they are sometimes termed the "Byzantine triad"). The Chorus are Trojan slaves, but there develops a sort of accord between the captive Trojans and the victorious Hellenes. At first this accord is made between Odysseus and Polyxena. The Odysseus of the plays is wily, unscrupulous, and a spokesman for behaviour that the Athenians no longer accepted, e.g. human sacrifice (see also Iphigenia at Aulis). Nevertheless he seems to me an upright character. Later Hecabe and Agamemnon form a different kind of bond. But at the end of the play Polymestor's prophecies disturb what might otherwise seem an equanimity.
54. The Suppliant Women (c. 423 BCE) C This is another play whose progressions are
teasing - is it just episodic? Daniel A. Mendelsohn has pressed the political
aspect of the play -
55. Erechtheus
(422 BCE) F King Erechtheus learns
from Delphi that
56. Phaethon (c. 420 BCE) F - reconstructed by Goethe and more recently in a scholarly edition by James Diggle, 1970. Substantial fragments survive. It's about Phaethon's attempt to prove that his true father was Helios, the sun, and his ill-fated idea of taking the reins of the sun's chariot.
57. Wise
Melanippe (c. 420 BCE) F - Compare
Captive Melanippe (67). The children
are apparently exposed closer to home and discovered by Melanippe's father, who
is reconciled to them by divine intervention.
58. Electra (c. 417? BCE) C On the disconcerting murder of Aegisthus
while sacrificing, compare Cresphontes (52). [The date is quite uncertain -
anything between 424 and 410 is possible; 413 has been proposed because of those references
near the end to the unorthodox story of Helen
(a "Forthcoming Attractions" trailer?) and to a fleet in the Sicilian
sea. The question of whether this play preceded or followed Sophocles' Electra has been endlessly debated; that
the two plays are not independent is clear, yet surprisingly no definite
conclusion has been reached. The theory that Sophocles' play was written later
seems to have a slight edge at the moment. Both plays may have been inspired by
a fairly recent revival of Aeschylus' Oresteia,
which took place shortly before Aristophanes' Clouds.]
59. Heracles (c. 416 BCE) C - aka Hercules
Furens. This is how the strutting Lycus, a simple-minded tyrant, meets his
doom (Velacott's translation):
A shriek is heard from inside
the palace.
CHORUS:
Listen – the opening note of a song I long to hear!
Death is close; and the king
Knows, and greets it with a groan of terror.
LYCUS [within]:
O
(I suppose the
shriek is only an inference from the Chorus’ words, but was actually sounded in
performance.) The comparison of the shriek to the opening note of a song is a
powerful and grim idea (cf. the Chorus-leader's remark to the blinded
Polyphemus in Cyclops). No-one on
stage or in the audience desires any other fate for Lycus. Still, it makes an
effect. Lycus, after all, is ambushed; so was he perhaps right to claim that
the great Heracles was a coward to use a bow, and that he never met his enemy
face to face? Is it also right, as the play seems to imply, that Heracles is a
bit casual about the welfare of his family? Heracles we perceive to be someone
who reaches too easily for his weapons. It's what he's good at:
my hand has work to do...
this club,
Veteran of many victories...
This upright man
becomes a danger to others when he loses his sanity. In fact we will not see
Heracles again until after his mad fit. And then..
this bow
Is anguish to me, yet I cannot part with it. ]
60. Meleager (416
BCE) F - dealt with Meleager's love for
Atalanta (possibly a Euripidean addition to the legend of the Calydonian boar)
and his death. (Quoted in Birds, 414 BCE)
The following
group won second prize (the winner was Xenocles):
61. Alexander (415 BCE) F - aka Alexandros. This
was another name for
62. Palamedes
(415 BCE) F - stoned to death
during siege of
63. Trojan Women (415 BCE) C aka Troades, The Women of
64. Sisyphus
(415 BCE - satyr play) F A
42-line fragment (arguing that stories about the gods were first invented to
strike fear into wrongdoers) quoted by the 2nd century CE skeptic Sextus
Empiricus and attributed by him to Critias (who was a tragedian as well as a
violent leader of the "30 Tyrants" and a friend of Socrates) is now
widely thought to be by Euripides and to come from this play; it is the
oldest-known naturalistic account of religion. English translation here: http://www.wku.edu/~jan.garrett/302/critias.htm.
65. Iphigenia among the Taurians (c. 414
BCE) C aka Iphigenia in
Tauris, a Latin title that is often assumed to be English and hence
misconstrued. How much of this "counterfactual" story of a
still-living Iphigenia was Euripides' own invention is uncertain; the only
thing that is definite is that Iphigenia was worshipped in Tauris (Herodotus).
66. Ion (c. 414 BCE) C After so many, so similar, kinds of plot, Ion comes as a welcome relief - and of
course one of the best plays. It seems that the Attic foundation myths were
somewhat vague (see also Erechtheus (55)),
and Ion is persistently
meta-mythological, i.e. it is about myth-making.
67. Captive Melanippe (412 BCE) F - aka Melanippe Desmotis.
The argument for the date is
controversial and this might in fact be an earlier play than Wise Melanippe (57). Melanippe is the
daughter of Aeolus and Hippe. She gives birth to twins by Poseidon. She is sent
into exile at the home of the king of Metapontos, where her sons are born and
exposed. Reared by shepherds, they overcome a plot against them by the queen,
Theano, who commits suicide. They are restored to their mother, who marries the
king.
The following two
plays were part of the same group. [Matthew Wright has recently proposed that Iphigenia among the Taurians was the third play in the Helen trilogy of 412 BCE - with Helen
the first and Andromeda (unchronologically
in terms of the mythical events) the second.]
68. Andromeda
(412 BCE) F - apparently began
with Andromeda chained to the rock (prior to her rescue by Perseus). The play
seems to have been a favourite in the Hellenistic period - and reading the Andromeda is what sends Dionysus off on
his mission to bring Euripides back from Hades in the Frogs (405 BCE).
69. Helen
(412 BC) C aka Helena. Its plot
turns on an escape from alien captivity whose details are very similar to the
escape in Iphigenia in Tauris. In this
play Helen is deemed not to have been in
70. Cyclops (412 BCE or later, satyr
play) C - This is the only satyr play by any author to survive
complete. Satyric humour is often funny, but the roughness can also be
disconcerting (as, in this play, the remarks about gang-raping Helen). The play
is also often beautiful; Shelley translated it with a minimum of prudishness,
perhaps taking as a challenge his own complaint that no-one ever showed the
Greeks as they really were. [If it were ever justified on thematic grounds
alone, I would be strongly tempted to link this play with the two foregoing - and
I'm delighted to find that Colin Austin and S. Douglas Olson, in their edition
of the Thesmophoriazusae, think the
same. I also agree with them about the weakness of arguments for a later dating
of Cyclops based on supposed
allusions to Aristophanes' play (411 BCE) and to Sophocles' Philoctetes (409 BCE).]
The following were
traditionally said to be a group, though the tradition is doubtful. Another
tradition (supported by Kannicht) links the Phoenician
Women with Antiope and Hypsipyle. Mastronarde (the 1994 editor
of Phoenician Women) is sceptical of
both. (The obvious connection, I would have thought, is with the Oedipus.) If tradition is wrong, then Oenomaus and Chrysippus might be much earlier plays, since the arguments for the
date concern Phoenician Women alone. William
Poole proposes linking Oenomaus and Chrysippus with Thyestes to form a Tantalid trilogy. Whatever the make-up of the Phoenician Women group, it is known to
have won second prize.
71. Oenomaus
(c. 410 BCE) T - Oenomaus was
killed at Pelops' instigation, resulting in Pelops being cursed by Myrtilus,
hence the successive misfortunes of the house of Atreus (Agamemnon, Orestes,
etc). The actor-turned-orator Aeschines (b. 390 BCE) is known to have played
the part of Oenomaus in a 4th century performance of this play.
72. Chrysippus (c. 410
BCE) F - Chrysippus
was the bastard son of Pelops; he was loved and forcibly seized by Laius, who
was showing him how to drive a chariot. The boy later committed suicide out of
shame over his violation, and Pelops cursed Laius with childlessness, as one
unworthy to come into contact with children. (Laius subsequently did bear the
son Oedipus, but was warned by the oracle of Apollo that the child would kill
him.)
73. Phoenician Women (c. 410 BCE) C - aka Phoenissae,
Phoinissai.
The Phoenician Women seems
to have been a popular play in late antiquity, and it's one of my favourites
too. It's spacious and a little bizarre. Euripedes had written other Theban
plays but the emphasis in this one is on painting an enormous and inclusive
canvas. The tragic focus is diffused by the scale; crowds of characters scurry.
The play begins with the usual "I am" scene-setting prologue, this
one by Jocasta. Then it has a second prologue, this time Antigone on the walls
with her old tutor to view the besieging army: this is a thrilling scene. The
Chorus arrive, this crowd of exiles in whom no-one else seems very interested -
they dance their own story, placing
74. Antiope (c. 410 BCE) F - Antiope made pregnant by Zeus; her dying father Nycteus wishes to punish her and made his brother and successor Lycus promise to carry this out. Antiope is later rescued by her sons when Dirce, wife of Lycus, is trying to kill her (plot summary according to Hyginus). [This Lycus is the father of the tyrannical Lycus in Heracles, a character Euripides probably invented.]
75. Hypsipyle
(c. 410 BCE) F Recently
reconstructed from around 400 lines in the Oxyrhinchus fragments discovered in
1906. The
play concerns the later part of Hyspipyle's colourful legend, when she has been
sold to king Lycurgus of Nemeae and is put in charge of his young son, whose
death she inadvertently causes.
76. Oedipus (c. 410 BCE) F - "If
you write an Electra, then I'm
writing an Oedipus!" - that was
probably how the conversation went. We may think it surprising, that Euripides
should have chosen to work on a story given such classic expression by Sophocles
(the date of Sophocles' play is not known, but it's presumed to come from his
middle period, say around 425 BCE). But long before that, Aeschylus had written
an Oedipus, too (in the same group as
the Seven against Thebes), and
perhaps the canonization of Sophocles' play awaited Aristotle - after all, it
only won second prize. In Euripides' play Oedipus was blinded by "the
servants of Laius", according to the scholiast.
About 409
BCE, Euripides leaves
77. Archelaus
(c. 410 BCE) F aka Archelaos, Arkhelaos - about a Temenid ancestor, founder of
Aegae; the play perhaps seeking to demonstrate the Hellenicity (and not,
therefore, barbarianism) of the Macedonians by connecting their mythical
origins to Greek divinities; as also the Molossians in Andromache.
78. Orestes (408 BCE) C - Orestes and his gang have an intense hatred of Helen, as can also be seen in Iphigenia among the Taurians. Most people find the murder plot in Orestes unpleasant but this is because they are seeking for moral rectitude in Orestes, Pylades and Electra and that isn't how Euripides sees the story - in fact he rarely attributes anything as simple as moral rectitude to his legendary characters. Politically, Euripides seeks to pull the traditional stories in certain directions. At this stage he sees the Trojan War in utterly negative terms: futile, destructive, a catastrophe. This is also the conception of Orestes, etc. Though they were not involved in the war they directly implicate it as prime cause of their own disasters. The most tangible connection, in this case, is the sacrifice of Iphigenia - a story unknown to Homer, or suppressed by him - which takes on immense significance. Euripides, however, doesn't share their mob-hatred of Helen. Even when he is not claiming (as in Helen) that she was not even involved, it's clear that narrowing the cause of the war down to a single "wicked woman" doesn't impress him (cf. Herodotus). Not that other causes are put forward instead. The true causes of events (in the plays) will always turn out to be the gods. But in reality - and here the Peloponnesian war is the real subject, - scapegoat-hunting is not the way. Tyndareos has already criticized Orestes' earlier matricide convincingly. There, he made the point that Orestes and Pylades ignored any legal processes. They formed their own judgments and proceeded straight to execution. That's exactly what they now attempt to do with Helen.
Pylades' role in
this and in other plays about the Orestes legend is curious. He apparently has
no important function, yet Greek drama, so limited to essentials by the number
of actors, nevertheless found him indispensable. In the Choephori of Aeschylus he is almost a mute, but at the very climax
delivers one 3-line speech:
Where then are
Apollo's words,
His Pythian oracles?
What becomes of men's sworn oaths?
Make all men living your enemies, but not
the gods. (trans.
Velacott)
- a speech that
feels like Clytemnestra's death-warrant, and all the more impressive since it
can't be voiced by either of the two regular actors. Perhaps the idea was to
legitimize Orestes' matricide by showing that, at any rate, he did take
independent advice. Pylades' one-scene role in Orestes is almost a parody of this: Pylades once again casts his
vote for slaughter, but this time his words seem not principled, considered and
weighty; on the contrary, frivolous, automatic, senselessly violent. In the Electras of Euripides and Sophocles,
Pylades never speaks at all. He has a
larger speaking role in the Iphigenia
among the Taurians, where Euripides develops what was implicit before, the
romantic adventure-story potential of the steadfast pal - something else that is
bitterly parodied in Orestes
. [According to an anonymous late work On Comedy, Alcestis, Orestes and
Sophocles' Electra were pro-satyric
plays, i.e. they took the place of a satyr-play. This surprising claim (though
we know it was actually true of Alcestis)
has encouraged some, including Kannicht, to propose Orestes as the fourth play in the Phoenician Women group.]
406
BCE - Death of Euripides in
The following plays
were performed together in 405 BCE, comprising a posthumous group that won
first prize. The producer was Euripides' son and the sequence was as given
below, according to the Scholiast on Frogs
67.
79. Iphigenia at Aulis (405 BCE,
posthumous) C, but the play may not have have been
completed by Euripedes and the surviving text is composite with parts
(especially near the beginning and the ending) that look much later. It takes to
something of an extreme the tendency to dislocation described in my headnote.
As the play draws to a close a strident, barbarian-thrashing patriotism becomes
airborne and this is authorized by Iphigenia's unexpected and heroic change of
attitude; yet how can our endorsement of this be squared with the largely
anti-heroic ditherings of Agamemnon, Menelaus and Achilles, or the presentation
of the army as a violent mob? The Iphigenia myth already had pacifist
implications in Aeschylus' Agamemnon -
a comparison that doesn't really favour Euripides, who gives comparatively
little sense of how desperately the expedition against
80. Alcmaeon
in Corinth (405 BCE, posthumous) F The following addition to the Alcmaeon legend is
attributed to Euripides by Apollodorus and probably derives from this play: While driven mad by the
Furies, he had two children with Manto, the daughter of Teiresias. These were
Amphilocus and Tisiphone. Alcmaeon entrusted them to Creon, the king of
81. Bacchae (405 BCE, posthumous) C - Aeschylus had written quite a number of (lost) plays
on Bacchic themes. The Bacchae seems
to have retold the same story as Aeschylus' Pentheus;
the Edonoi tetralogy
(dealing with Lycurgus) seems also an important analogue - and see the
comparison in Longinus' On the Sublime,
where Euripides is said to have toned down Aeschylus' crude power. These older
plays are of course all lost, so the Bacchae
now seems an even more unique performance than it really is. In certain
respects it is recognized as looking back to an older style of drama i.e.
compared with other late plays by Euripides. Nevertheless, I suppose the
presentation of Dionysus is an innovation. It is common enough in Greek tragedy
for persons to withhold (or not know) their true identity, but disguise is not
often employed like it is in later drama (though see Ino (18)). The development that has Pentheus go to spy on the
maenads, instead of leading a force against them, may also be Euripides'
invention.
And finally...
82. Rhesus (date unknown) C -
If this is by Euripides at
all, it must be early. In fact nearly all scholars agree that it's a 4th
century composition written after Euripides' death. That Euripides did write a Rhesus seems certain. Two fragments of
prologue also survive; they are not part of the surviving play, but they may
not be part of the original Euripidean drama either. The handling of the
chorus, the epiphanies, and the agon are
different from what we know of Euripides' practice elsewhere. The midway shift
of interest from the Trojans to Odysseus and Diomedes seems to me particularly
un-Euripidean (though cf. the switch of attention from Trojan to Greek in Andromache). Not so the prevalent
anti-heroics, dropping almost into comedy at times - but you can see why these
would impress most readers as a development likely to post-date Euripides'
later plays. The motif (early in the play) of "don't attack, send a spy
instead", may have been suggested by the Bacchae.
(2007)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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