Euripides

Euripides (484–406 BC), ancient Greek tragic dramatist, born probably on the Athenian island of Salamis. Little is known of his life, but tradition represents him as a recluse living in a cave on Salamis; this may have arisen from his reluctance to take an active part in civic life. Unlike his contemporaries Aeschylus and Sophocles he seems to have given all his time to writing plays, and he stands out as an individualist in an age which still venerated the ideal of duty towards one's fellow citizens. He was also labelled a misogynist, in spite of the obvious sympathy with women's rights and problems displayed, for example, in his Medea.

Euripides is said to have written 92 plays, of which there survive 16 tragedies, one satyr-drama (the Cyclops, a burlesque version of Odysseus's adventures in Sicily), and a large number of fragments, testimony to his later popularity. The extant tragedies, with dates where known or conjectured, are: Medea (431), Hippolytus (428), the Children of Heracles (?also 428), Hecuba (?426), the Trojan Women (415), Iphigenia in Tauris (?414), Helen (412), the Phoenician Women (411), Orestes (408), and, of unknown date, the Madness of Heracles, the Suppliant Women (with a plot different from that of Aeschylus' tragedy of the same name), Ion, and Electra. The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were both produced posthumously. One other play, Alcestis (438), though usually classed among the tragedies, contains pronounced satyric elements. The plays fall into two clearly marked categories—tragedies in the modern sense, and plays which may be variously called tragi-comedies, black comedies, romantic dramas, melodramas, or even high comedies. The tragedies have often been much misunderstood and criticized because of their apparently episodic plot structure. Sometimes (as in Hecuba and the Madness of Heracles) the play is based on two stories which seem to have little in common except the leading characters. The first half of the play illuminates a set of incidents from one point of view, the second from a different point of view; and the audience is asked to judge between the two.

In his lifetime Euripides aroused great interest and great opposition with his realism, his interest in abnormal psychology, his portraits of women in love, his new and emotional music, his unorthodoxy, and his argumentativeness. He was critical, sceptical, interested less in the community than in the individual, dealing less with broad questions of morality and religion than with personal emotions and passions—love, hate, revenge—and with specific social questions such as the suffering of the individual in war. He tried to bring tragedy down to earth by using more colloquial language, popular forms of music, and characters who, though still drawn from myth and legend, had recognizable counterparts in 5th-century Athens.

Euripides was described by Aristotle as ‘the most tragic of the poets’, and it is in such tragedies as Medea, Hippolytus, the Bacchae, the Trojan Women, and Hecuba that his best work is probably to be found. Electra and Orestes, in which some critics have found a shrewish heroine and a pusillanimous hero, are powerful studies in morbidity and insanity; Alcestis, Ion, and Iphigenia in Tauris are excellent tragi-comedy or romantic drama; Helen is delightful high comedy; and the Phoenician Women is perhaps best described as a pageant-play. All except the last show Euripides as a master of non-tragic dramatic writing.

Euripides continued to use the three actors and chorus as finally established by Sophocles, with one important innovation. The opening song of the chorus as used by Aeschylus, or the scene in dialogue with which all the extant plays of Sophocles begin, were replaced by a formal prologos spoken sometimes by a character in the play, sometimes by an external god, which summarizes the story up to the point at which the action begins. Together with the progressive detachment of the chorus from the main action, inevitable once the play was concerned with private rather than public issues, this eventually, via Seneca, gave rise to the Elizabethan idea of an extraneous person called the Chorus speaking a prologue.