Euripides

Intro

Euripides was a playwright who lived during the golden age of Athenian culture. He is one of the most well-known tragedians of Ancient Greece, having written dozens of highly-regarded tragic plays. An eccentric artist and a student of some of the greatest philosophers of his age, Euripides wrote plays that challenged the expectations of his Athenian audience and stirred them to rethink traditional values. He was never particularly popular during his lifetime, but his innovative approach to tragedy made him highly influential with later generations. Today he is considered to be one of the three great Greek tragedians, alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Bio

Euripides was born on the island of Salamis in 480 BC. During that same year, the island witnessed a massive naval battle between Greek and Persian forces – a follow-up to the famous battle of Thermopylae a year earlier. In the Battle of Salamis, Greek forces used similar tactics to those used by the Spartan-led forces at Thermopylae: they funneled the more numerous Persians into a narrow channel of water where they were unable to take advantage of their superiority in numbers. The smaller, more maneuverable Greek ships destroyed the disorganized Persian fleet and ended the threat of Persian invasion.

It’s fitting that Euripides was born in the same year as the decisive battle against the Persians. It was this battle, taking place near his home island, that ensured Euripides would grow up in a society dominated by Greek, rather than Persian, culture. And Euripides would become one of the most prominent innovators in the Greek performing arts.

Euripides was acquainted with prominent pre-Socratic philosophers Protagoras and Anaxagoras. Both men were a decade or two older than Euripides, so it’s possible that they were his tutors in childhood. Alternatively, it may be that their acquaintance began later in life. Either way, the influence of prominent philosophers sparked an interest in new ideas and rational analysis of difficult questions, which became an important theme in Euripides’ plays.

At a time when the theater was of central importance in Athenian culture, Euripides was one of the most well-known playwrights. He wrote dozens of plays, perhaps as many as 92, and other playwrights frequently made reference to his life and work. But his plays were not always particularly successful: he only won four prizes in his lifetime, compared with someone like Sophocles who won 24. A modern equivalent might be someone like Stanley Kubrick (director of A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey): a thoughtful and highly influential storyteller who never made big blockbusters or won a lot of Oscars.

For reasons we don’t fully understand, Euripides left Athens late in life and retired to Macedonia. It’s possible that his plays proved too controversial for Athenian audiences. Alternatively, he may simply have wanted to escape the violent tensions that were starting to flare into war between Athens and Sparta.

Euripides’ Themes

Tragic Realism

Euripides had a powerful interest in the subtleties human psychology. Earlier tragedians had presented their audiences with sweeping narratives, larger-than-life drama, and exaggerated characters. Euripides was different. For him, the characters on stage were real people, people who struggled with internal conflicts and ambiguities, not mythic paragons of good and evil. His plays don’t just deal with the events on stage, but with the characters’ emotional reactions to those events.

Inversion of Social Norms

From the time he spent among philosophers, Euripides gained a skeptical attitude toward traditional Greek religion and values. Combine that with his interest in psychology, and you get a potent mixture: a psychological exploration of his own culture’s spiritual underside. Euripides was interested in the people his culture disdained: women, slaves, and barbarians. It’s not exactly that he exalted these downtrodden characters or challenged the structures of power that held them down – he was not what we would now call a feminist or an abolitionist. But he was interested in exploring their humanity and the psychological consequences of their diminished social status.

Many of Euripides’ plays featured women as protagonists. The most famous example is Medea, the story of a powerful sorceress who takes revenge on an unfaithful husband by killing their children. Medea is an outsider: in addition to being a woman, she comes from a land far to the East and would be considered a “barbarian” by Athenian audiences. She also has supernatural powers inherited from her grandfather, the sun god Helios. More pointedly, she violates all the expectations of Athenian women. She is brash, assertive, and firm in her demands of loyalty from her husband. When the husband betrays her and marries another woman, she flies into a rage and commits the worst act imaginable for an Athenian woman: she kills her own children.

In Euripides’ telling, Medea is not a simple villain. The playwright does not present her as a one-dimensional murderous barbarian, as many tragedians might have done. Instead, she is a complex human being who is ruled by powerful emotions. Some of those emotions are admirable, such as her strength of will and her (ultimately unrewarded) faith in her husband. Others are less admirable, particularly her jealous rage. But Euripides’ point is to muddy the distinction between villain and victim and to show the moral and psychological ambiguity of human action. In the end, the gods grant Medea a chariot and help her escape, showing that they support her in spite of her heinous murder.

It’s also important to point out that Medea’s children were headed for a grim fate already. As the children of a foreigner, they would have most likely been sold into slavery if their father remarried. Greek audiences may have interpreted Medea’s actions as more than simple murder: she was saving her children from a life of bondage, refusing to sacrifice their freedom to save their lives. So the murder is ambiguous – justifiable from one perspective, but still horrible.

Quotes

I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.

This is one of Medea’s most famous lines. She is directly challenging the cultural expectation that women should give birth while men go to war. The line reinforces her status as an outsider. At the same time, Euripides makes Medea a three-dimensional human character with fears and ambitions. We can imagine that she is attracted to the glory and excitement of war, and also that she may be apprehensive about the dangers of childbirth.

In Pop Culture

Ever since Medea, the wrath of scorned women has been a trope in pop culture from Shakespeare to Carrie Underwood. In Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” the singer of doesn’t go as far as murdering children, but instead destroys her boyfriend’s car, which he seems to care about almost as if it were his child.

One of the most popular recent examples is Kill Bill. At first, the audience may suspect that The Bride is out for revenge on a lover who betrayed her, but in fact it’s just the reverse: Bill himself is the scorned, murderous lover, and The Bride is paying him back for his violent retribution. It’s a nice inversion of a cultural trope, just the sort of thing Euripides would have appreciated (though he would have found all the on-screen killing pretty distasteful; deaths in Greek tragedy always took place offstage).