Euripides, a famous Greek playwright from the fifth century BC, was probably born on the Greek island of Salamis around 480 BC, when Aeschylus (525 BC - 456 BC) was around forty-five years old. According to tradition, his birth date dates to the day of the famous Battle of Salamis, which shows a line of continuity between the three main Greek tragedians: Aeschylus fought in Salamis while Sophocles led the victory hymn.
He was born into an Athenian family who took refuge on the island to escape the Persians and his name comes from Euripe, the channel where the battle took place. Another hypothesis is that he was born in Phlia, a village in the center of Attica, an administrative and historical region that encompasses the city of Athens.
He was the son of the merchant Cleito or Mnesarchus or even Mnesarchides. One of the greatest authors of Greek tragedy, he was a contemporary of Sophocles (c. 497/6 – 406/5 BC) about fifteen years apart. Aristophanes, in his comedies, repeatedly suggests Euripides' low social origin, confirmed by Theophrastus. However, his culture demonstrates a refined education, acquired through study with sophists such as Protagoras, which would not have been possible without a good social condition. Furthermore, the fact that he built a rich library contradicts Aristophanes' insinuations.
Fascinated by gods and monsters, Euripides could be called the first modern playwright. Although he avoided politics – unlike his older contemporaries and his rival Sophocles – he made clear his disillusionment with Athenian culture by dressing his heroes in rags.
His classic works established his reputation for intelligent dialogue, beautiful choral lyrics, and gritty realism in both text and stage performances. In his youth he also performed as an actor, but as his voice was not strong enough to reach the back of a typical 14,000-seat Greek theater, he concentrated on his role as a playwright.
The last Greek tragedian, he ended the era of Greek tragedy with a deft attention to human drama, appreciated even after his death. He stood out for his innovation in the treatment of myths, for the complexity of the situations and humanization of the characters and for his rationalist criticism of the traditional concept of divinity.
Coexistence with Greek philosophers
Euripides was a contemporary and friend of Socrates. He was a student of several thinkers, such as Anaxagoras of Clazomene, Protagoras, Archelaus, Prodicus and Diogenes of Apollonia, including sophists such as Protagoras and natural philosophers such as Anaxagoras. He was often attentive to everything that was happening in society, and this was reflected in his work. This same attentiveness and critical mindset developed his apparent misanthropy, that is, the hatred, antipathy, distrust, or general contempt for the human species, human behavior, or human nature.
Euripides' Cave
Perhaps the most famous legend, like the turtle fall that killed Aeschylus, is the Cave of Euripides. It is said that this was the place where he retired to write his work, according to Satyr and Philochorus. In fact, there is an actual Cave of Euripides, found on the south coast of the island of Salamis, containing clay fragments named after him, but there is no solid evidence that it is the cave where he retreated, or even that such cave exists.
A controversial figure
Euripides was also famous for asking awkward questions, unsettling audiences with thought-provoking treatment of common themes, and peppering the story with wildly immoral characters. This is probably why he only won a few festival competitions, compared to his great tragic rivals Aeschylus and Sophocles, although he was tremendously popular with the public.
Contemporary reviews
Aristophanes was free with his jokes about Euripides. Scholars, however, note that this was not disrespectful. Aristophanes mocked him in his play The Frogs, performed in the City Dionysia a year after Euripides' death. During the era of comedy that followed his death and that of other great Greek tragic playwrights, there was a profusion of criticism of his writing style, his supposed lower-class upbringing, his morality, or lack thereof, and often to their own criticisms.
Critics such as Aristophanes simply commented on the fundamental staying power of Euripides' work. Aeschylus proclaims, in the play The Frogs, by Aristophanes: “My poetry did not die with me, but that of [Euripides] died when he died.” This is ironic. In fact, Aristophanes may even have intended it to be read as such.
Of all the tragedians of Ancient Greece, it can be argued that the staying power of Euripides' work is the strongest, as can be seen by its posthumous rise in popularity during the Hellenistic Period. He walked among giants. In The Frogs this is highlighted by Aristophanes' preferential treatment of Aeschylus, but many of Euripides' unique strengths shine even brighter when he is confronted with other tragedians; just as Sophocles is best understood in dialogue with his predecessor, Aeschylus, Euripides is best appreciated in conjunction with both.
Although Aeschylus was also interested in criticism and rebellion, evident in his works such as Prometheus Bound. Edith Hamilton, a German historian who lived in the United States, declared that Euripides “possessed the temperament of a soldier.” In diverse ways he intensifies and develops the themes and opinions of Aeschylus, who did not lament atrocities like Euripides. While Aeschylus is haunted by the horror of war but submits to the necessity of it, Euripides is blunt in his rejection of it. While Aeschylus is agnostic regarding the religion of the time, Euripides is an atheist.
When Euripides begins writing, many stories have already been written, which does not frustrate him, as he has more to say about the common myths. Electra is a play that he wrote close to the writing of Sophocles' play of the same name, although scholars do not know exactly how close, due to dating difficulties. Electra is Euripides' representation and addition to the bloody cycle of the House of Atreus.
In Greek mythology, House of Atreus refers to the offspring of Atreus and the curse that accompanied it. Atreus was king of Mycenae, son of Pelops and Hippodamia, grandson of Tantalus, twin brother of Thyestes and father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. There are variants on the sons of Atreus: in Pseudo-Apollodorus, Agamemnon and Menelaus are sons of Plistene and Érope, daughter of Catreus. Euripides writes three other works, all located along the chronology of Atreus' lineages: Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Orestes.
Both plays follow parallel plots: after the murder of Agamemnon, Electra and her brother Orestes plot and kill their mother and her lover to avenge their father. Notably, the main character in Sophocles' Electra often appears to be Orestes while in Euripides' play, it is clearly Electra. Thus, in Sophocles' Electra, it is Orestes who deals the mortal blow to his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. In Euripides's story, it is Electra herself who kills her mother.
Sophocles shows Orestes and Electra towed towards the murder of Clytemnestra and her lover by the chorus, by the very honorable will of the gods, and by fate - “In difficult times we are forcibly compelled to act in evil ways,” says Sophocles' Electra.
Euripides' Electra is never forced, but always forces. “Orestes is still young and had a great father – can’t he kill a man?” In Euripides' version, it provokes a surprising tonal change in relation to Sophocles' Electra. Later, she says bluntly, “I will claim my mother’s murder myself.”
Euripides was not interested in the divine justifications for tragedy but rather in the mortal ramifications. He found drama in the inner lives of his characters, while other tragedians found it in external conflicts. A tragedy, in Euripides, is often manufactured or even self-made, while inevitable fate itself seems to condemn the plays of other tragedians.
Hippolytus is a classic example of the sad, self-condemning drama in which Euripides often seems interested, as are The Bacchae and Medea. In these plays, his characters seem to step off the edge of their own cliff. His Hercules dialogues directly with the belief that the gods may be responsible for the actions of men, and not the men themselves.
Hercules vehemently refuses to agree that the gods drove him to kill his wife and children, despite the explicitly divine madness sent upon him that drove him to do just that. He argues, however, that he is entirely responsible, and completely refutes the commonly held belief that gods can exist as described by the writers and clergy of the time. For Euripides, men are the reason for suffering, as well as the sufferers, and he regrets this.
Tragic Greek atheist
Given to examination and introspection, probably due to his association with contemporary thinkers, Euripides writes with a critical eye towards religion. He is now known as a Greek atheist writer and tragedian. In many cases he openly rejects the Olympian gods who appear in his plays as petty and petulant devices of convenience, with little reverence long given to the gods by poets and playwrights.
Famously, he writes in Bellerophon, his lost work: “If the gods do shameful things, they are not gods.” He removed the previously prominent roles of the Greek gods and restricted their appearance to the beginning or end of his plays.
Theatrical competitions
Greek tragedies were typically performed at important religious festivals, such as the Dionysus of the City, where each of the three playwrights wrote three tragic plays and one satirical play to compete for a prize. Tragedy plays had to follow the following conventions:
Mythological theme with elements of religion and family matters;
maximum of three actors with speaking roles (although they could play several characters);
choir with twelve or fifteen singers;
all male actors wearing masks.
Euripides won first place only four times. Sophocles received first prize almost twenty-five times. Euripides' first trilogy, written in 455 BC, came in third and last place. Perhaps a more telling statistic is the fact that Athenians have funded his productions approximately ninety times and clearly consider his work to be of merit, regardless of its placement in the festival.
Euripides' tragic style
Euripides was not precisely the last Greek tragedian, but he is the last of the three most acclaimed tragedians of ancient Greek theater and the last about whom anyone says anything noteworthy. This age of tragedy, begun by Euripides' sunset, is quickly followed by an age of comedy. Much of Greek comedy is simply playing with the themes of tragedy and mocking the tragedians who came before.
Euripides' theater stands out for its unconventional style and natural dialogues. His works are known for their independence from traditional moral and religious values. Euripides was a reformer of the formal structure of Attic tragedy. He introduced characters such as strong women and intelligent slaves and ridiculed many heroes of mythology. This is reflected in a comment that Aristophanes attributed to him in his comic play The Frogs: “I made tragedy more democratic.”
By presenting universally relevant arguments, he managed to formulate themes such as justice versus revenge, the rule of law against the will of the gods and the struggle between reason and passion. The characters in Greek tragedy were usually elite and the story often dealt with matters of state.
His predecessors used tragedy to explore the nobility in suffering and the satisfaction of acquired wisdom, but Euripides ignored this great debate. With a jeweler's eye, he examines in a new light the plots of destiny and submission to it and studies the reciprocal tragedy of humanity. It illuminates for the audience the depth and scope of human pain and our own culpability in creating it. This human pain is the great equalizer.
He portrays in detail, with equal meaning, the pain of slaves, even war captives, all those at the bottom of the Greek hierarchy. This is what gives his work such staying power. Aeschylus filters his tragedy through the lens of wisdom, Sophocles through the lens of nobility, but Euripides only looks at his tragedies with true sadness. It is incredibly sad that humans, precisely because they are human, suffer so deeply.
Technical and stylistic innovations
The peculiarities that distinguish Euripides' tragedies from those of the other two playwrights are, on the one hand, the search for technical experimentation carried out in almost all of his works and, on the other, the greater attention he gives to the description of feelings, of which he analyzes the evolution that follows changes in the events narrated.
The structure of the tragedy is much more varied and fuller of novelties, mainly because of new dramatic solutions, a greater use of god ex machina, particularly in later tragedies, and the progressive devaluation of the dramatic role of the chorus, which tends to assume an action pause function.
God ex machina is an expression in Latin with origins in Greek that means "God emerged from the machine", and is used to indicate an unexpected, improbable, and far-fetched solution to end a fictional work. His style is also affected by the search for a break with tradition, through the insertion of dialectical pieces to loosen the dramatic tension and the alternation of narrative modes.
Character investigation
If the contemporary public had struggled to accept some aspects of Euripides' break with tradition, the public of the following century already greatly appreciated the investigation of characters, at a time when the fourth century, even in philosophy, proposed the investigation of character. And this makes Euripides perceived as a trailblazer.
Euripides explored the inner lives and motivations of characters in a way that was innovative for Greek audiences. His style was simple and elegant, full of phrases related to practical philosophy of life. In his works he also questioned the religious, moral, and social values of his time.
In the psychological investigation of his characters, he pays great attention to the most excluded groups: women, almost absent in Aeschylus' tragedy if we do not consider the character Clytemnestra in Agamemnon. Women already had a significant presence in Sophocles, but not yet at the level that Euripides would attribute to them. Other groups of excluded people, such as foreigners or servants of various levels, even the defeated, receive attention unknown to previous authors.
The hero in Euripides' plays
The absolute novelty of Euripides' theater is represented by the realism with which the playwright outlines the psychological dynamics of his characters. The hero described in his tragedies is no longer the resolute protagonist of the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, but often a problematic and insecure person, not exempt from internal conflicts, whose unconscious motivations are brought to light and analyzed.
The collapse of the traditional heroic model brings female figures to the foreground of Euripides' theater. However, he gives negative connotations to these women, in fact many scholars of his works defined him as "misogynistic", while others thought that he considered women to be perfect, and with these texts he wanted to be able to discover that there is a little sinful in them. The protagonists, such as Andromache, Phaedra, and Medea, are Euripides' new tragic figures, who masterfully outlines their tormented sensitivity and the irrational impulses that clash with the world of reason.
Euripides expressed the contradictions of a changing society: in his tragedies personal motivations often come into profound conflict with the needs of power and the ancient founding values of the polis. The character Medea, for example, even kills her own children to avoid submitting to Jason's marriage of convenience with Glauce, daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. Aristophanes, the recognized expert in comedy, offers us in The Frogs the chronicle of the time about the dispute between the tragedians, and the public that sided with one or the other, presenting Euripides as a rude bearer of new customs.
Euripides' theater must therefore be considered a true political laboratory, not closed in on itself, but, on the contrary, close to the changes in history until the final acceptance of the kingdom of Macedonia.
There is a relationship between the thought of Euripides and the philosophers of sophistication, especially with regard to the themes dealt with in the plays: the education of citizens, the relationship between nomos (law) and physis (nature), but also due to a certain intellectualism present in the characters' dialogues, which sometimes discuss general themes that do not seem relevant to the plot.
The aristocratic code of ethics is subverted. His production includes a first phase of so-called citizen nationalism, in which the author shows confidence in Pericles' expansionist policy, and a second phase of ethical nationalism, in which the comparison between Greece and the barbarian world emerges.
Works of Euripides
Of the approximately ninety plays, only eighteen complete tragedies and one satyr play survive, the latter being a genre of bawdy comedy that covered stories from Greek mythology and that had a chorus of satyrs, the followers of Dionysus, god of wine and revelry.
Rhesus is disputed by scholars as having been written by him. Several fragments, some substantial, survive from nine other pieces. Without a doubt the most famous play is Medea, while critics most esteem his Bacchae. Most of the time, the tragic element of the plays derives from the main character's suffering and his inability, no matter how hard he tries, to improve his situation. In the words of Aristotle:
“Euripides is the most intensely tragic of all poets.” (Poetics, chapter 14).
Hippolytus (428 BC) - Hippolytus, son of Theseus, rejects the amorous advances of his stepmother Phaedra, which triggers a series of tragedies. Desperate for rejection, Fedra decides to take her own life. Theseus, upon discovering the truth, expels Hippolytus, who ends up paying a high price for the mistakes of others.
The Trojan Women (415 BC) - set after the Trojan War, shows the fates and sufferings of the city's women, especially Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen. Euripides portrays the atrocities of war, and the pain women experience after the fall of Troy.
Phoenician women, also known as Phoenissae (409 BC) - diverse piece with many characteristics, whose original version was tampered with. It takes place in Thebes and deals with the mutual massacre of Oedipus' two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices.
Alcestis (438 BC) - Alcestis sacrifices herself to save her husband but is saved by Hercules from the supernatural figure of Death. It is the eternal conflict between power and justice as the central theme.
Andromache (c. 425 BC) - after the Trojan War and now a slave, Andromache fights with Hermione, her master's wife.
Hecabe (c. 423 BC) - the queen of Troy seeks revenge for the death of her son .
Suppliants (c. 423 BC) - the mothers of the Seven Against Thebes appeal to Athens for the Thebans to allow their children to be properly buried.
Hercules (c. 417 BC) - dealing with the madness that led Hercules to kill his wife and children.
Electra (c. 417 BC or 414 BC) - Electra and Orestes conspire to destroy their mother.
Incomplete plays, often only fragments of which survive: Telephus, Cretans, Cresphontes, Erechtheus, Phaeton, Alexander, Oedipus, Hypsipyla and .
Posthumous pieces
Euripides spent his last years at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia. The great playwright died there in c. 406 BC, but not before writing the now-lost play Archelaos, which dealt with the mythical founding of the royal dynasty. Several plays by Euripides were performed posthumously, including the Bacchae. The fact that the celebrated comedy playwright Aristophanes constantly references Euripides illustrates his fame when he was alive. Furthermore, the selection of several of his plays as study material as part of a complete Greek education demonstrates that Euripides's tragedies have survived the centuries.
Euripides' contributions to theater, literature and even cinema
Euripides was one of the greatest authors of Greek tragedy and his impact continues to this day. His classical works established his reputation thanks to intelligent dialogue and powerful choral lyrics. Furthermore, his harsh realism, both in the text and in the staging, left an indelible mark on the theatrical world.
What really sets Euripides apart is his ability to ask uncomfortable and disturbing questions. His stories often feature completely immoral characters, defying social conventions and exploring taboo topics. This provocative and subversive approach has made his works eternally relevant.
Euripides left a profound mark on contemporary theater. His genius places him as one of the three great tragic poets of Attica, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles. His work, enormously popular in its time, continued to exert a notable influence on the theatrical world throughout the centuries.
He was revolutionary in his tragic approach, representing the new moral, social and political movements in the Athens of his time. Unlike his contemporaries, he was interested in the thoughts and experiences of ordinary human beings. His characters were portrayed realistically, reflecting the daily lives of Athenians at the time.
The dramatic structure of his works has been the target of criticism and praise. Despite the lack of coherent unity in the development of the plot, in works like Medea the story unfolds without obstacles until reaching a devastating climax. Euripides also used resources such as the explanatory prologue and the intervention of the gods to give dynamism to his tragedies. Furthermore, he dared to alter classic legends to adapt them to the needs of his plot.
As a protest the Vietnam War, filmmaker Michael Cacoyannes filmed The Trojan Women using a translation made by Edith Hamilton in 1937, which saw Euripides as a pacifist living in a belligerent era. Certainly, his other plays about the founding heroic myths of Greece – Helena, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Hecuba – ask “War? What is it for?” Plays such as Bacchae satirize the founders of Greece and reveal the author as an iconoclast. Their gods, like the wild and charismatic Bacchus, are monsters. More than that, they are politicians.
Iconoclasm or iconoclasm is a rejection of religious images. It was also a political-religious movement against the veneration of icons and religious images in the Byzantine Empire that began at the beginning of the eighth century and lasted until the ninth century.
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