The Poet and the Record
Euripides lived from roughly 480 to 406 BCE and wrote for the Athenian stage during the Peloponnesian War. Ancient sources credit him with about ninety plays. Eighteen tragedies survive under his name, plus a satyr play, the Cyclops, and a disputed tragedy, Rhesus. That is far more than survives for any other tragic poet, partly because his work became very popular in schools and libraries after his death.
In his own lifetime, he was less successful. According to the usual tradition he won first prize only a handful of times, and one victory came after his death. Ancient comedians, especially Aristophanes, mocked him as a clever, modern and sometimes disrespectful writer.
What Makes Euripides Different
Compared with Sophocles, Euripides is often described as more questioning and more focused on individual psychology. Aristotle’s Poetics reports a remark attributed to Sophocles that he portrayed people as they ought to be and Euripides as they are. Whether or not Sophocles said it, it captures a common impression. Typical features of Euripides include:
- Characters under emotional pressure, speaking with striking realism about anger, grief, jealousy or fear.
- Prologues in which a character or god sets out the background of the story, followed by a surprising turn.
- Sharp, rhetorical debates between characters that resemble arguments in the courts and assembly of Athenian democracy.
- Intense interest in women, slaves and outsiders, though modern readers disagree about whether he was sympathetic to them or simply found them dramatically powerful.
- Late-stage resolutions in which a god appears above the stage, using a crane called the mechane. The phrase deus ex machina comes from this device.
His treatment of the gods also differs. In several plays the gods appear cruel or indifferent, or human characters challenge them. Scholars debate how far this reflects personal scepticism and how far it is a dramatic exploration of difficult myths.
Medea
Medea was produced in 431 BCE, the year the Peloponnesian War began, and reportedly placed third in the contest. It is set in Corinth. Medea, a foreign woman with knowledge of magic, has helped her husband Jason win the Golden Fleece and has left her homeland for him. When Jason abandons her to marry the daughter of the Corinthian king, Medea plans revenge, which includes the deaths of her own children.
The play is remembered for the power of its title character. Medea speaks about the vulnerable position of women in marriage, and then chooses an act that horrifies both the audience and herself. The play does not settle whether she is a victim, a monster or both. Scholars also note that earlier versions of the myth may not have had Medea kill her children, and that Euripides’ version became the standard one.
Other Major Plays
- Alcestis (438 BCE) is a tragicomic play in which a wife agrees to die in place of her husband, the king, and is eventually brought back.
- Hippolytus (428 BCE) shows how the goddess Aphrodite destroys a young man who rejects her, and the stepmother, Phaedra, whose family is entangled with the story of the Minotaur and Labyrinth. It won first prize.
- Trojan Women (415 BCE) follows the captive women of Troy after the city has fallen. It was produced shortly after Athens’ harsh treatment of the island of Melos, and many readers see an anti-war message, although the play’s relationship to events is a matter of interpretation.
- Ion is set at Delphi and plays with ideas of birth and divine responsibility around the Delphi sanctuary and its god Apollo.
- Electra and Orestes revisit the family stories also treated by Aeschylus and Sophocles, but with a more uncomfortable view of revenge.
The Bacchae
Bacchae was produced after Euripides’ death, around 405 BCE, and is thought to have been written late in his life while he was living in Macedonia. It tells how the god Dionysus comes to Thebes in disguise, because the city’s ruler, Pentheus, refuses to accept his worship. Dionysus drives the women of Thebes, including Pentheus’ own mother, into a frenzy, and Pentheus is torn apart.
The play has been read as a warning against denying powerful forces in human nature, as a critique of rigid authority, or as a portrait of a ruthless god. It is worth noticing that the story concerns the god in whose honour the festival itself was held, which gives the play an unusual double meaning when staged before a Dionysian audience. It draws on the same traditions of Olympian gods and monsters that fed the rest of Greek myth, but its tone is far from that of a simple religious story.
Euripides and Sophocles Compared
The two poets overlapped for decades, and it would be wrong to treat them as opposites. Sophocles’ plays often centre on a single towering figure whose character is tested by fate. Euripides’ plays often range wider, placing ordinary human weakness against extraordinary situations. Sophocles generally keeps the chorus integrated into the action, while Euripides’ choral songs sometimes feel more separate, with striking lyric passages. Both questioned inherited ideas about justice, and both wrote for an audience that knew the stories well.
Later Influence
After his death, Euripides became the most widely read and performed tragedian across the Greek world. Roman writers, including Seneca, used his plays as models, and Renaissance and modern writers returned to Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae again and again. Aristotle, one of the two thinkers usually grouped as Plato and Aristotle and an admirer of Sophocles’ construction, still called Euripides “the most tragic” of the poets, a phrase often quoted as praise for his emotional effect. Modern productions often emphasise the political or psychological sides of his plays, which suggests why he continues to be staged.