1/2/07 - Classical Literature - Euripides

Eighteen of Euripides' plays have survived, although he won the Great Dionysia the least number of times out of the great Greek dramatists. After his death, he became the most popular dramatist. He was the most influential on later Greek comedy.

He was a latecomer to the Great Dionysia, and his was the last drama to be performed. He was experimental and he changed the rules of drama. Helen is his most experimental tragedy.

He was born into a different world to other dramatists: the Peloponnesian war was ongoing at the time of 15 out of his 18 plays - the Helen came after the most crushing time of the war; a group of intellectuals called the Sophists rose in the late fifth century, asking questions about rhetoric, especially important in a world of democracy and public speaking - they reflected on what words really mean and how they should be used, and questioned truth and reality.

"Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence."
[Thucydides, 'The Peloponnesian War' 3.82.4f]

Euripides is sometimes considered by scholars as a Sophist, but this is not strictly true; he did have some Sophist beliefs but the way in which he expresses these is different to the Sophists.

In his play Frogs, written during the dark days of war, Aristophanes suggests how the city should be saved. In the play, a poet is sent for to save them; poets were thought to be teachers. Dramas were treated as public debates. Aeschylus and Eurpides are both suggested to be the poet that can save them, but they are both dead. Dionysus travels to the underworld to bring one of them back from the dead and eventually Aeschylus is chosen. Interestingly, they criticise each other's works.

Aeschylus: "And what are your tragedies but a concatenation of commonplaces, as threadbare as the tattered characters who utter them?"

"Not only do you clutter your stage with cripples and beggars, but you allow your heroes to sing and dance like Cretans. You build your plots round unsavoury topics like incest and ..."

"And then look how you have encouraged people to babble and prate. The wrestling schools are empty, and where have all the young men gone? Off to these infamous establishments where they practise the art of debating ... and now event he sailors argue with their officers."

"Hasn't he shown us pimps and profligates, women giving birth in temples and sleeping with their brothers and saying that life is not life? Isn't that why the city is full of lawyers' clerks and scrounging mountebanks, swindling the community right and left?"

Euripides: "When I took over tragedy from you, the poor creature was in a dreadful state. Fatty degeneration of the art. All swollen up with high-falutin' diction. I soon got her weight down, though: put her on a diet of particles, with a little finely chopped logic (taken peropatetically), and a special decoction of dialectic, cooked up from books and strained to facilitate digestion."

"At least I didn't keep rambling on about the first thing that came to my head; or plunge right into the middle of the story and leave everybody guessing. The first character to come on explained the background and origin of the play, straight away."

"Then again as soon as the play began I had everyone hard at work: no one standing idle. Women and slaves, master, young maiden, old crone - they all talked ... It was democracy in action."

"And then you see I taught these people to talk ... I taught them subtle rules they could apply; how to turn a phrase neatly. I taught them to see, to observe, to interpret; to wist, to contrive; to suspect the worst, take nothing at its face value."

"I wrote about familiar things, things the audience knew about, and could take me up on if necessary. I didn't try to bludgeon them into unconscious with long words ... What I did was to teach the audience to use its brains, introduce a bit of logic into the drama. The public have learnt from me how to think, how to run their households, to ask, 'Why is this so? What do we mean by that?'"

Euripides often experimented with what mythical heroes would be like if they were around today, and so modernised them, which he was criticised for. Euripides treats humble characters sympathetically, but not the great heroes. At the time of Sophists greatness in terms of goodness and morality was more attributable to humble people, which was previously unheard of.

Euripides gave singing lines to actors. He used complex meters and long songs, which was revolutionary. In Frogs, Aeschylus argues that Euripides uses incest, but this theme appeared in many Greek tragedies long before Euripides. It appears in Euripides' Hyppolitus.

Euripides let his characters speak in modern rhetorical ways. Arguing appears often in his plays, e.g. see the agons and stichomythia. This structure was modelled on court cases, as was the language and the type of argumentation. Euripides was famous for his agons as central features.

He frequently used unsavoury topics, such as Helen of Troy, and incest.

Euripides, in Frogs, criticises Aeschylus' weighty, metaphorical, concentrated words. Euripides does not use such poetic diction, but everyday speaking language.

"The best concealment of Art is to compose selecting words from everyday speech, as Euripides does, who was the first to show the way."
[Aristotle, Rhetoric. 1404b5]

Euripides' prologues were criticised for not being dramatic. One character tells the audience what has happened, matter-of-factly.

Euripides wanted to challenge the audience intellectually and to teach them and present to them the problems of daily life. Euripides asked questions that the audience might want to know the answer to, someone mocking previous dramatists like Aeschylus.

Euripides liked to play with the audience's expectations by using an obscure version of the myth he wanted to write about, e.g. Helen. One little-known version of the Helen was that she was taken to Egypt for protection from the Trojan war and a phantom was created by the gods and left in Troy to take her place. Euripides used this version for his tragedy.

The suppliant play was a genre of tragedy: a character seeks suppliancy and cannot overcome the obstacles in the way, so the tragedy ends in death. However, the Helen does not end tragically like other suppliant tragedies, but happily.

Euripides experiments with structure, using depictions of the gods, women and slaves: this was topical in antiquity.

Helen is anomalous in many ways: it is Euripides' most experimental play. Meanwhile, the Bacchae is his most conventional.