Euripides

Euripides
Euripidean, adj.
/yoo rip"i deez', yeuh-/, n.
c480-406? B.C., Greek dramatist.

* * *

born с 484, Athens
died 406 BC, Macedonia

Greek playwright.

With Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is recognized as one of Athens's three great tragic dramatists. An associate of the philosopher Anaxagoras, he expressed his questions about Greek religion in his plays. Beginning in 455, he was repeatedly chosen to compete in the dramatic festival of Dionysus; he won his first victory in 441. He competed 22 times, writing four plays for each occasion. Of his 92 plays, about 19 survive, including Medea (431), Hippolytus (428), Electra (418), The Trojan Women (415), Ion (413), Iphigenia at Aulis (406), and The Bacchae (406). Many of his plays include prologues and rely on a deus ex machina. Unlike Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides made his characters' tragic fates stem almost entirely from their own flawed natures and uncontrolled passions. In his plays chance, disorder, and human irrationality and immorality frequently result in apparently meaningless suffering that is looked on with indifference by the gods.

* * *

▪ Greek dramatist
Introduction
born c. 484 BC, Athens [Greece]
died 406, Macedonia

      last of classical Athens' three great tragic dramatists, following Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Life and career
      It is possible to reconstruct only the sketchiest biography of Euripides. His mother's name was Cleito; his father's name was Mnesarchus or Mnesarchides. One tradition states that his mother was a greengrocer who sold herbs in the marketplace. Aristophanes joked about this in comedy after comedy; but there is better indirect evidence that Euripides came of a well-off family. Euripides first received the honour of being chosen to compete in the dramatic festival in 455, and he won his first victory in 441. Euripides left Athens for good in 408, accepting an invitation from Archelaus, king of Macedonia. He died in Macedonia in 406.

      Euripides' only known public activity was his service on a diplomatic mission to Syracuse in Sicily. He was passionately interested in ideas, however, and owned a large library. He is said to have associated with Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and other Sophists and philosopher-scientists. His acquaintance with new ideas brought him restlessness rather than conviction, however, and his questioning attitude toward traditional Greek religion is reflected in some of his plays. Of Euripides' private life, little can be said. Later tradition invented for him a spectacularly disastrous married life. It is known that he had a wife called Melito and produced three sons. One of these was something of a poet and produced the Bacchants after his father's death. He may also have completed his father's unfinished play Iphigenia at Aulis.

      The ancients knew of 92 plays composed by Euripides. Nineteen plays are extant, if one of disputed authorship is included. At only four festivals was Euripides awarded the first prize—the fourth posthumously, for the tetralogy that included Bacchants and Iphigenia at Aulis. As Sophocles won perhaps as many as 24 victories, it is clear that Euripides was comparatively unsuccessful. More to the point is that on more than 20 occasions Euripides was chosen, out of all contestants, to be one of the three laureates of the year. Furthermore, the regularity with which Aristophanes parodied him is proof enough that Euripides' work commanded attention. It is often said that disappointment at his plays' reception in Athens was one of the reasons for his leaving his native city in his old age; but there are other reasons why an old poet might have left Athens in the 23rd year of the Peloponnesian War.

Dramatic and literary achievements
      Euripides' plays exhibit his iconoclastic, rationalizing attitude toward both religious belief and the ancient legends and myths that formed the traditional subject matter for Greek drama. These legends seem to have been for him a mere collection of stories without any particular authority. He also apparently rejected the gods of Homeric theology, whom he frequently depicts as irrational, petulant, and singularly uninterested in meting out “divine justice.” That the gods are so often presented on the stage by Euripides is partly due to their convenience as a source of information that could not otherwise be made available to the audience.

      Given this attitude of sophisticated doubt on his part, Euripides invents protagonists who are quite different from the larger-than-life characters drawn with such conviction by Aeschylus and Sophocles. They are, for the most part, commonplace, down-to-earth men and women who have all the flaws and vulnerabilities ordinarily associated with human beings. Furthermore, Euripides makes his characters express the doubts, the problems and controversies, and in general the ideas and feelings of his own time. They sometimes even take time off from the dramatic action to debate each other on matters of current philosophical or social interest.

      Euripides differed from Aeschylus and Sophocles in making his characters' tragic fates stem almost entirely from their own flawed natures and uncontrolled passions. Chance, disorder, and human irrationality and immorality frequently result not in an eventual reconciliation or moral resolution but in apparently meaningless suffering that is looked upon with indifference by the gods. The power of this type of drama lies in the frightening and ghastly situations it creates and in the melodramatic, even sensational, emotional effects of its characters' tragic crises.

      Given this strong strain of psychological realism, Euripides shows moments of brilliant insight into his characters, especially in scenes of love and madness. His depictions of women deserve particular attention; it is easy to extract from his plays a long list of heroines who are fierce, treacherous, or adulterous, or all three at once. Misogyny is altogether too simple an explanation here, although Euripides' reputation in his own day was that of a woman hater, and a play by Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria, comically depicts the indignation of the Athenian women at their portrayal by Euripides.

      The chief structural peculiarities of Euripides' plays are his use of prologues and of the providential appearance of a god (deus ex machina) at the play's end. Almost all of the plays start with a monologue that is in effect a bare chronicle explaining the situation and characters with which the action begins. Similarly, the god's epilogue at the end of the play serves to reveal the future fortunes of the characters. This latter device has been criticized as clumsy or artificial by modern authorities, but it was presumably more palatable to the audiences of Euripides' own time. Another striking feature of his plays is that over time Euripides found less and less use for the chorus; in his successive works it tends to grow detached from the dramatic action.

      The word habitually used in antiquity to describe Euripides' ordinary style of dramatic speech is lalia (“chatter”), alluding probably both to its comparatively light weight and to the volubility of his characters of all classes. Notwithstanding this, Euripides' lyrics at times have considerable charm and sweetness. In the works written after 415 BC his lyrics underwent a change, becoming more emotional and luxuriant. At its worst this style is hardly distinguishable from Aristophanes' parody of it in his comedy Frogs, but where frenzied emotion is appropriate, as in the tragedy Bacchants, Euripides' songs are unsurpassed in their power and beauty.

      During the last decade of his career Euripides began to write “tragedies” that might actually be called romantic dramas, or tragicomedies with happy endings. These plays have a highly organized structure leading to a recognition scene in which the discovery of a character's true identity produces a complete change in the situation, and in general a happy one. Extant plays in this style include Ion, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, and Helen. Plays of the tragicomedy type seem to anticipate the New Comedy of the 4th century BC.

      The fame and popularity of Euripides eclipsed that of Aeschylus and Sophocles in the cosmopolitan Hellenistic period. The austere, lofty, essentially political and “religious” tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles had less appeal than that of Euripides, with its more accessible realism and its obviously emotional, even sensational, effects. Euripides thus became the most popular of the three for revivals of his plays in later antiquity; this is probably why at least 18 of his plays have survived compared to seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles, and why the extant fragmentary quotations from his works are more numerous than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles put together.

The plays
      The dates of production of nine of Euripides' plays are known with some certainty from evidence that goes back to the official Athenian records. Those plays whose dates are prefixed by c. can be dated to within a few years by the internal evidence of Euripides' changing metrical techniques.

Alcestis
      Though tragic in form, Alcestis (438 BC; Greek Alkēstis) ends happily and took the place of the satyr play that normally followed the three tragedies. King Admetus is doomed to die shortly, but he will be allowed a second life if he can find someone willing to die in his place. His wife, Alcestis, voluntarily dies in place of her husband, who sees too late that the fact and manner of her dying will blight his life. But Admetus' old friend Heracles shows up and rescues Alcestis from the clutches of Death, restoring her to her happy and relieved husband.

Medea
      One of Euripides' most powerful and best known plays, Medea (431 BC; Greek Mēdeia) is a remarkable study of the mistreatment of a woman and of her ruthless revenge. The Colchian princess Medea has been taken by the hero Jason to be his wife. They have lived happily for some years at Corinth and have two sons. But then Jason casts Medea off and decides to marry the Princess of Corinth. Medea is determined on revenge, and after a dreadful mental struggle between her passionate sense of injury and her love for her children, she decides to punish her husband by murdering both the Corinthian princess and their own sons, thereby leaving her husband to grow old with neither wife nor child. She steels herself to commit these deeds and then escapes in the chariot of her grandfather, the sun-god Helios, leaving Jason without even the satisfaction of punishing her for her crimes. Euripides succeeds in evoking sympathy for the figure of Medea, who becomes to some extent a representative of women's oppression in general.

Children of Heracles
      The plot of Children of Heracles (430 BC; Greek Hērakleidai) concerns the Athenians' defense of the young children of the dead Heracles from the murderous intentions of King Eurystheus of Argos. The play is basically a simple glorification of Athens.

Hippolytus
      In Hippolytus (428 BC; Greek Hippolytos) Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sexual desire, destroys Hippolytus, a lover of outdoor sports who is repelled by sexual passion and who is instead devoted to the virgin huntress Artemis. Aphrodite makes Phaedra, wife of Theseus, the king of Athens, fall violently in love with her stepson Hippolytus. Phaedra is deeply ashamed of her illicit passion, but when Hippolytus angrily rejects her love she is so mortified by his denunciation that she cannot forbear from falsely accusing him of rape before she kills herself. Her accusation provokes Theseus into pronouncing a curse on his son that eventually leads to Hippolytus' death. But Artemis reveals Hippolytus' innocence before he dies, and the young man is able to forgive his father, thus freeing Theseus from the dreadful stain of bloodguilt. Given the nature of its plot, the play is remarkable for its propriety.

      This play is set in the aftermath of the Trojan War. After an exciting beginning marked by strong anti-Spartan feeling, most of the original characters in Andromache (c. 426 BC) disappear and the interest is dissipated.

Hecuba
      Also set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, Hecuba (c. 425 BC; Greek Hekabē) shows the double disaster that reduces the aged Trojan queen Hecuba, now a widowed slave, by sheer weight of hatred and misery to a mere animal ferocity. Hecuba first loses her daughter Polyxena, who is taken off to be sacrificed to the ghost of Achilles. Hecuba then discovers the corpse of her last son, Polydorus, who has been murdered by his Thracian host, Polymestor. Hecuba eventually persuades the Greek commander Agamemnon to allow her to take vengeance; she and her women then blind Polymestor and murder his two young sons. Such is the power of misery to deprave, and the play's closing prophecy of Hecuba's future transformation into a bitch seems appropriate.

Suppliants
      The title figures of Suppliants (c. 423 BC; Greek Hiketides; Latin Supplices) are the mothers of the Argive leaders who have been killed while attacking Thebes. The bodies of their sons have been left unburied by the Thebans, and they eventually persuade the Athenians to recover them. It is disputed whether the play is a straightforward eulogy of Athens and its democracy, or whether its sentiments are being expressed ironically.

Electra
      The title character of Electra (c. 418 BC; Greek Ēlektra) and her brother Orestes murder their mother, Clytemnestra, in retribution for her murder of their father, Agamemnon. Electra herself is portrayed as a frustrated and resentful woman who finally lures her mother to her death by appealing to her maternal instincts. After the horrible murder both Electra and her reluctant accomplice Orestes are consumed by remorse. This is a bitterly realistic and antiheroic play that draws a disturbingly convincing portrait of both Electra's sufferings and her unattractive personality.

Madness of Heracles
      The title character of Madness of Heracles (c. 416 BC; Greek Hēraklēs mainomenos; Latin Hercules furens) is temporarily driven mad by the goddess Hera and kills his wife and children. Subsequently Heracles recovers his reason and, after recovering from suicidal despair, is taken to spend an honourable retirement at Athens.

Trojan Women
      The setting of Trojan Women (415 BC; Greek Trōades) is the time immediately after the taking of Troy, and the play treats the sufferings of the wives and children of the city's defeated leaders, in particular the old Trojan queen Hecuba and her children. Hecuba's daughter Cassandra is taken off to be the concubine of Agamemnon, and then her daughter-in-law Andromache is led off to be the slave of Neoptolemus. Andromache's son Astyanax is taken from her to be hurled to his death from the walls of Troy. Finally, as Troy goes up in flames, Hecuba and the other Trojan women are taken off to the ships to face slavery in Greece. This play is a famous and powerful indictment of the barbarous cruelties of war. It was first produced only months after the Athenians captured the city-state of Melos, butchering its men and reducing its women to slavery, and the Trojan Women's mood may well have been influenced by the Athenians' atrocities and the Melians' fate, which are both mirrored in the play.

Ion
      This tragicomedy's sombre action is reversed by a recognition scene. In Ion (c. 413 BC), Creusa, the queen of Athens, is married to an immigrant king, Xuthus, but the couple do not have any children. Years before, the Queen was raped by the god Apollo but abandoned the subsequent child. The boy Ion has grown up as a temple slave at Delphi, where the play is set. When they meet, mother and son feel a strong affinity, but when the Delphic oracle says the boy is the son of Xuthus, the Queen in her despairing childlessness plots to kill the young stranger who threatens to take over her inheritance. At the last minute they recognize each other by means of the cradle Creusa had long ago left with her baby. The play has a superficially satisfactory ending, but its portrayal of human suffering and of divine carelessness and mendacity is tinged with darker feelings.

Iphigenia Among the Taurians
      This is another tragicomedy, composed chiefly of a recognition scene followed by a clever escape. The title character of Iphigenia Among the Taurians (c. 413 BC; Greek Iphigeneia en Taurois; Latin Iphigenia in Tauris) has been saved by the goddess Artemis from sacrifice by her father and now serves the goddess' temple at Tauris in Thrace. Iphigenia's brother Orestes is captured by the local tyrant and is delivered to her for sacrifice. She recognizes him, however, and after some exciting mishaps they manage to escape from Tauris with the help of Athena.

Helen
      In this frankly light play, Euripides deflates one of the best known “facts” of Greek mythology, that Helen ran off adulterously with Paris to Troy. In Helen (412 BC; Greek Helenē) only a phantom went with Paris to Troy, and the real Helen pines faithfully in Egypt. When Menelaus on his way home from Troy is shipwrecked in Egypt, he is baffled by the duplicate Helen until the evaporation of the phantom allows his reunion with the real one. The pair then escape from the King of Egypt, who is keen to marry Helen, by an amusing artifice.

Phoenician Women
      This is a diverse, many-charactered play whose original version has been tampered with. Phoenician Women (c. 409 BC; Greek Phoinissai) is set at Thebes and concerns the mutual slaughter of the two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polyneices.

Orestes
      In this play Euripides makes nonsense of the old story of Orestes' murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, by setting the play in a world where courts of law already exist. In Orestes (408 BC), the main character, his sister Electra, and his cousin and friend Pylades are condemned to death by the men of Argos for the murder. Their uncle Menelaus is too spineless to defend them, and they are finally reduced to plotting to kill Menelaus' wife, Helen, and abduct her innocent daughter. This chaos of violence and attempted murder is only resolved by the deus ex machina Apollo, who appears and restores harmony at the end of the play.

Iphigenia at Aulis
      The Greek fleet is becalmed at Aulis and is thus unable to convey the expeditionary force against Troy. Agamemnon learns that he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia as a means of appeasing the goddess Artemis, who has caused the unfavourable weather. Agamemnon lures his daughter into coming to Aulis to be sacrificed by pretending that she will marry Achilles. Once the truth is out, Iphigenia, after begging pathetically for her life, goes willingly to her death. Though incomplete and corrupted by later adapters, Iphigenia at Aulis (c. 406 BC; Greek Iphigeneia en Aulidi) is a fine tragedy whose realistic atmosphere is heightened by several subtle and poignant scenes between its main characters.

Bacchants
      This play is regarded by many as Euripides' masterpiece. In Bacchants (c. 406 BC; Greek Bakchai; Latin Bacchae) the god Dionysus arrives in Greece from Asia intending to introduce his orgiastic worship there. He is disguised as a charismatic young Asian holy man and is accompanied by his women votaries, who make up the play's chorus. He expects to be accepted first in Thebes, but the Thebans reject his divinity and refuse to worship him, and the city's young king, Pentheus, tries to arrest him. In the end Dionysus drives Pentheus insane and leads him to the mountains, where Pentheus' own mother, Agave, and the women of Thebes in a bacchic frenzy tear him to pieces. Agave returns to Thebes triumphant carrying Pentheus' head, and her father, Cadmus, has to lead her back to sanity and recognition. The play shows how the liberating and ecstatic side of the Dionysiac religion must be balanced against the dangerous irresponsibility that goes with the Dionysiac loss of reason and self-consciousness.

Cyclops
      Cyclops (Greek Kyklōps) is the only complete surviving satyr play. The play's cowardly, lazy satyrs with their disgraceful old father Silenus are slaves of the man-eating one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus in Sicily. Odysseus arrives, driven to Sicily by adverse weather, and eventually succeeds (as in Homer's Odyssey) in blinding the Cyclops. He thus enables the Cyclops' victims to escape.

Additional Reading
Critical works on Euripides' plays include G.M.A. Grube, The Drama of Euripides (1941, reprinted 1973); D.J. Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme, and Structure (1967); Gilbert Murray, Euripides and His Age, 2nd ed. (1946, reissued 1979); T.B.L. Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides (1967); G. Zuntz, The Political Plays of Euripides (1955, reprinted with corrections, 1963); Ann Norris Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (1987); Justina Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (1991); and Francis M. Dunn, Tragedy's End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama (1996).Treatments of groups of plays or individual works include R.P. Winnington-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus: An Interpretation of the Bacchae (1948, reprinted 1969); Anne Pippin Burnett, Catastrophe Survived: Euripides Plays of Mixed Reversal (1971, reprinted 1985); Pietro Pucci, The Violence of Pity in Euripides' “Medea” (1980); Irene J.F. de Jong, Narrative in Drama: The Art of the Euripidean Messenger-Speech (1991); Michael Lloyd, The Agon in Euripides (1992); Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae, expanded ed. (1997); William Allan, The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy (2000); and Katerina Zacharia, Converging Truths: Euripides' Ion and the Athenian Quest for Self-Definition (2003).Works on the poetry and language include Shirley A. Barlow, The Imagery of Euripides: A Study in the Dramatic Use of Pictorial Language (1971); and Helene P. Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifices in Euripides (1985). Practical considerations for staging are the focus of N.C. Hourmouziades, Production and Imagination in Euripides (1965); and Michael R. Halleran, Stagecraft in Euripides (1985).H.D.F. Kitto Oliver Taplin Ed.

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать реферат

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Euripides — (Ancient Greek: polytonic|Εὐριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles). Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety five plays, although …   Wikipedia

  • Euripides — (griech. Εὐριπίδης) (* 480 v. Chr. oder 485/484 v. Chr. in Salamis; † 406 v. Chr. in Pella; begraben in Makedonien) ist einer der großen klassischen griechischen Dramatiker. Euripides …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Eurípides — Saltar a navegación, búsqueda Eurípides Nombre Eurípides (Ευριπίδης) …   Wikipedia Español

  • Euripides — Euripides, Der Zeit und dem dichterischen Range nach der dritte unter den drei großen griechischen Tragikern. An dem Tage, wo Euripides geboren, 480 vor Chr., focht Aeschylus bei Salamis, und der Jüngling Sophokles tanzte um die Trophäen. In… …   Damen Conversations Lexikon

  • Euripides — Euripides,   griechisch Euripịdes, der jüngste der drei großen athenischen Tragiker, * 485/84 oder um 480 v. Chr. (Schlacht bei Salamis), ✝ Pella (Makedonien) Anfang 406 v. Chr., vermutlich am Hof von König Archelaos. Euripides wirkte seit 455.… …   Universal-Lexikon

  • Eurípides — (485 a.C. 406 a. C.). En 485 a.C. nace en Salamina el poeta trágico que el dramaturgo cómico Aristófanes satirizó en su obra Las Ranas. Se basó en la idea de que Atenas no tenía ningún gran poeta trágico. Estaba en lo cierto. Eurípides había… …   Enciclopedia Universal

  • Euripĭdes — Euripĭdes, 1) E., neben Sophokles u. Äschylos der berühmteste griechische Tragiker, geb. 5. October 480 v. Chr. auf der Insel Salamis, sein Vater Mnesarchos war ein Schenkwirth, seine Mutter hieß Kleito. Er erhielt in Athen eine sorgfältige… …   Pierer's Universal-Lexikon

  • Euripĭdes — Euripĭdes, einer der drei großen griech. Tragiker, auf Salamis angeblich 480 v. Chr. am Tage der berühmten Seeschlacht geboren, gest. 406 in Arethusa bei Amphipolis, Sohn des Mnesarchos, trat, nachdem er im Verkehr mit Anaxagoras und den… …   Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon

  • Euripides — Euripĭdes, der jüngste der drei großen griech. Tragiker, geb. 480 v. Chr. zu Salamis, gest. 406 v. Chr. am Hofe des Königs Archelaos von Mazedonien. Von seinen dramat. Stücken sind nur 19 auf uns gekommen: »Alkestis«, »Medeia«, »Hippolytos«, »Die …   Kleines Konversations-Lexikon

  • Euripides — Euripides, griech. Tragiker, geb. 480 v. Cyr. am Tage der Schlacht von Salamis, Athener, Freund des Sokrates, st. 407 in Macedonien, wohin er der Einladung des Königs Archelaus gefolgt war. Von vielen dramat. Arbeiten sind erhalten: Alcestis,… …   Herders Conversations-Lexikon

  • Euripides — [yoo rip′ə dēz΄] 480 406 B.C.; Gr. writer of tragedies Euripidean [yoo rip′ədē′ən] adj …   English World dictionary

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”