Nobody Likes Euripides

7/30/2019 Nobody Likes Euripides

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Nobody likes Euripides.Well, perhaps this is an exaggeration; he was married twice, and

presumably his wives liked him a bit.And he is of course one of the most famous dramatists in history.But what I mean by this is, starting with Aristophanes, he has been

denounced by nearly everybody--he is seen basically as causing and

exemplifying the decline of Greek drama. He mixed tragedy and

comedy, seemingly, for instance providing happy endings in several of

his plays such as Alcestis(my personal favorite) and Iphigenia in Tauris.

(It is interesting that in this respect he anticipates Shakespeare, in boththe 'problem plays such as Measure for Measureand the 'late

romances' such as The Winters Tale.). Some of the scenes in his plays

are funny, and are supposed to be funny-indeed, I, personally, laugh

much more at Euripides than at Aristophanes. And Euripides, like

Socrates, was unafraid to be irreverent to the gods-not so much by

denying their power, but by using them as convenient plot devices to

get out of tragic dilemmas, as if divine power was but a but if narrativefurniture--this is what is called (to use the Latin term) the dus ex

machina, the god coming out of a machine to solve everything. The

deus ex machina is now a time-honored and much-used literary device-

not perhaps these days literally a god, but an external invention that

comes to save the day-but it is always referred to with a slight bit of

scorn.Even Nietzsche, the great iconoclast, was straight in the tradition of

classicists when he denounced Euripides as being the enemy of

Dionysus, of killing tragedy--Euripides, who wrote the greatest play

about Dionysus, who in many ways made the idea available to modern

man.


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Part of Euripides' problem is his lateness--which he was late in the

cycle, and there has always been this cultural prejudice about lateness;

it is seen as equivalent to decadence and sloth. This is true whether of

lateness in a cultural cycle or even of works produced late in life. (Thelate) Edward Said is famous for having discussed the idea of 'late style,'

of artists' styles becoming different later in life--part of the reason this

idea has so much currency is that it was a way to speak of lateness in

life and culture non-pejoratively.Cultural lateness is also associated in the decline of the social and

political fortunes of a culture. And this is another of Euripides'

problems--he wrote while Athens was losing the Peloponnesian War. It

is somewhat like Alex Rodriguez with the Yankees--he arrived late in the

cycle, after the Yankees had stopped wining pennants, when other

teams became as good or better. And, despite having superb individual

seasons, he is held to account for this by Yankee fans. With Tampa bay

and Boston having young, highly proficient teams, the Yankees may

have to seriously retool to be good during A-Rod's playing career. And

so Yankee fans hold this decline against A-Rod as a symptom of a

decline of which, in what Aristotle would call an 'efficient' sense, he is

not the cause.Nietzsche was highly conscious of the link between culture and politics,

and at this point in his career he saw the opera of Richard Wagner as a

manifestation of the rise of German power represented by the

unification of Germany under Bismarck, (later, he despised Wagner forprecisely the same reasons). Euripides was the anti-Wagner--he was

present while Athens lost its military predominance and became a

cultural and intellectual power without any political strength. For a

Germany which saw its cultural and political preeminence going hand-


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in-hand, Euripides was not a good example, although it is not as if he

was the losing general at Aegospotami, the decisive last battle when

Sparta beat the pants off the Athenians, (he was dead by then anyway).Euripides is also resented by a lot of classicists because more of his

plays have survived than Aeschylus and Sophocles-eighteen to seven

each by the older playwrights--and among these are plays preserved

accidentally and not, as in the case of all the plays by Aeschylus and

Sophocles, because they were frequently taught in the ancient world,

were among what the Greeks called 'the included' and we now call 'the

canon'. Scholars who yearn for more of their beloved earlier playwrights

resent Euripides for having more of his work survive.We owe our ability to look at Euripides today not to Nietzsche but to a

very different man--Gilbert Murray, the Australian-born classicist who

taught for many years at Oxford in the first half of the twentieth

century, Murray was among the scholars who brought to the fore the

connection between ancient drama and ritual that we discussed before

and of course will be very key in our study ofThe Bacchae. Murraytranslated Euripides and saw his plays as embodying what we might

today call a 'multimedia' aspect, including song and dance as well as

language and ideas. It is perhaps no coincidence that Murray was a

liberal humanist who saw the classical era as in continuity with

modernity rather than serving as a brake on or rebuke to it.Murray also is responsible for my favorite academic joke

Are you interested in incest, Professor Murray?

Well, only in a very general kind of way.


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The joke being that incest is being treated here, as an academic topic,

not an actual practice, and that in Greek drama there is so much of it.Feminists have also revalued Euripides. The translation of four of his

plays, with a long preamble,Womenon theEdge, presentedby four leading feminist scholars, Ruby Blondell, Mary-Kay Gamel , Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, and Bella Zweig,demonstrates that the recent reconceptualization ofGreek drama as dealing with gender perhaps more thanany other subject has largely to do with a rehabilitation ofEuripides.

Interestingly, Euripides' on-the-ground political views, what we know of

them (again from scraps pieced together from scholars such as

Wilamowitz) are not dissimilar to Socrates: he was also apposed to the

Peloponnesian War, and it does not seem like he was an incredible

rabble-rouser, calling for women and slaves to have actual political

power. But his willingness to portray women as psychologically complex

beings capable of exercising agency did, I think, fire the outrage of

misogynists from antiquity to modernity, and, for lack of an alternative

seems to me the reason why he has been the object of such obloquy

from Aristophanes to nearly the present. We see this, though not so

much in The Bacchae, which indeed could be said to have, putting it

mildly, a rather negative view of femininity, but will see this very overtly

and prominently in Iphigenia.

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Nobody Likes Euripides