A
Glimpse of Theater History
EURIPIDES,
(ca. 484BC-ca 406BC)
Biographical facts are difficult to separate from malicious gossip about Euripides. Since he was personally unpopular. there was plenty to go around. Succeeding generations, and lands later conquered by Alexander the Great, lionized him so that it is difficult to be objective. Certainly, his free-thinking philosophy and his seemingly very modern, nearly psychological approach to character makes his work appeal to modern audiences.
Euripides was born ca 484 BC on Salamis, the island where the Greeks defeated Xerxes. Tradition has it, he was born on the very day of the great naval battle. Euripides' father, Mnesarchus (or Mnesarchides) was supposed to have been told that his son would be a victor in contests and he therefore had his son trained to be an athlete. Euripides hated both athletes and oracles at his maturity. His mother, Cleito, was of high birth from Phyla, in central Attica, but legend held she was a green grocer--a source of considerable derisive abuse to the physically unattractive Euripides. His birthplace was very near Eleusis, famous for its temples, renowned as the object of pilgrimages, and home of the dramatic Eleusinian mysteries. Euripides took part in the local religious festivals as cup-bearer and fire-bearer as a lad. At 18, he became officially an "Ephebus" or "Youth" and was given a spear and a shield and sent to guard duty. In his youth, Euripides was influenced by the then current philosophers: Socrates, Thucydides, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, Diogenes...
Euripides wrote approx. 92 plays, of which 18 are extant along with a major fragment of a 19th. He won first place only four times, but it is a measure of his popularity in later generations that so many of his plays were preserved. The extant plays are:
| Alcestis (438BC), Medea (431BC), Hippolytus (428BC) The Children of Heracles (ca 427BC) Andromache (ca 426BC) Hecuba (ca 425BC) Heracles (ca 427BC), The Suppliants (ca 421BC) Mad Heracles (ca 422BC) Ion, (dates unknown, probably between 430BC and 415BC) The Trojan Women (415BC) Elektra (413BC) Iphigenia in Tauris (dates unknown, probably between 417BC and 408BC) Helen (412BC, regarded by some modern critics ever on the lookout for such things, as a "dark comedy") The Phoenecian Women (c. 409BC), Orestes (408)BC; The Bacchae (405BC); Iphigenia in Aulis (produced posthumously by Euripides' son, Euripides), and Cyclops, a satyr play (date unknown, perhaps ca 423BC). |
Euripides died ca 406BC traditionally killed by the hunting dogs of the King of Macedonia at whose court a number of literary figures had gathered. One version has it that he was given to the dogs for his general subversiveness. He was apparently in Pella at the court of King Archelaos, where the king was trying to establish a center of Hellenic culture. It was here that he wrote the Bacchae.
Innovations attributed to Euripides:
*He changed the prologue so that it deals with antecedent material,
not the opening of the action. Often the Prologue is a speech by a single
god.
*He also gave us the deus ex machina for the ending. Margarete
Bieber explains:
| Educated as a free-thinker and a sophist, [Euripides] handled the traditional myths as so much raw material, to be changed and shaped at will. He could not, however, do away with certain filed and established features of the heroic saga. Hence he was obliged, by means of the prologue, to indicate the alterations to his audience. and at the end, by supernatural intervention, to bring into harmony with tradition the action which had run along different lines. |
But Pickard-Cambridge/Haigh disagree:
| Euripides has generally been regarded as the chief offender against his rule, and as the author of the custom which he condemns. But it will be found, on examining his plays, that there are very few of them in which the god is really used as a last resort. There are only two instances in which he can be said to solve the problems of the situation. In the other cases he is introduced, not so much to set matters right, as to inform the characters of the destiny which awaits them. His function is confined to announcing the future course of events.1 These, therefore, are what Aristotle would call permissible uses of the deus ex machina. |
The Medea is viewed by scholars as a patriotic support for the war against the Spartans. (See especially Arnott: Introduction to the Greek Theatre pp. 90-93) But after Athens captured and slaughtered the entire population of the tiny island of Melos, which had wanted to remain neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta, Euripides wrote his anti-war The Trojan Women.