A Colchian princess, abandoned in Corinth for a younger bride, kills her rival, her rival's father and her own two sons, then escapes in a chariot drawn by dragons (431 BC)
Medea — it came third of three at the festival.
Literature · Playwrights
Euripides
c. 480–406 BC · Greek (Athenian)
Attic tragedy — the last and most modern of the three great tragedians
Euripides is the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians and by far the best preserved: eighteen or nineteen of his plays survive, more than Aeschylus and Sophocles combined. He put sceptics, slaves, foreigners and above all dangerous, articulate women at the centre of tragedy, brought the language down towards ordinary speech, and let gods arrive by crane to cut short plots they had ruined. Unpopular with the judges in his lifetime, he became the most read and performed of the three.
How to spot them
- ▸More surviving plays than the other two tragedians put together
- ▸Formidable, dangerous female protagonists — and sympathy for the defeated
- ▸The deus ex machina: a god lowered in to resolve what humans cannot
- ▸Repeatedly mocked on stage by the comic poet Aristophanes
- ▸Left Athens for the court of Macedon and died there in 406 BC
Key works
Women of Thebes in ecstatic frenzy tear a young king apart on a mountain, and his mother carries his head home thinking it is a lion's (405 BC)
The Bacchae — produced posthumously by his son, and awarded first prize.
A queen's false accusation destroys her chaste stepson, who is dragged to death by his own horses when a bull comes out of the sea (428 BC)
Hippolytus — one of his four victories.
After a city is sacked, its captive royal women wait on the shore to be allotted to their new masters, and a baby is thrown from the walls (415 BC)
The Trojan Women — staged the year after Athens massacred the people of Melos.
A wife agrees to die in her husband's place and is wrestled back from Death by a drunken house guest (438 BC)
Alcestis — his earliest surviving play, performed in the slot normally given to a satyr play.
A commander becalmed at a harbour lures his daughter there with a false marriage and sacrifices her for a favourable wind (405 BC)
Iphigenia in Aulis — also produced after his death.
A brother and a sister meet at a poor farmer's cottage and plot the killing of their mother and her lover (c. 413 BC)
Electra — the same story Aeschylus and Sophocles each told, deliberately domesticated.
A widowed queen, given the corpse of her last surviving son, blinds the man who murdered him and kills his children (c. 424 BC)
Hecuba.
Key ideas
- Scepticism about the gods: divine beings behave worse than the humans they torment
- War seen from the side of the losers, and especially of captured women
- Psychological realism — motive, rationalisation and self-deception given long speeches
- Rhetoric and the agon: characters argue cases as if before an Athenian jury
Quick-fire facts
- •Born about 480 BC, traditionally on Salamis and even on the day of the battle
- •Wrote around ninety plays; eighteen tragedies and one satyr play, the Cyclops, survive complete
- •Won only four victories at the City Dionysia in his lifetime, and a fifth after his death
- •His prologues, which simply explain the situation to the audience, were parodied by Aristophanes
- •Aristophanes made him a character in The Frogs, losing a weighing contest against Aeschylus
- •Spent his last years at the court of King Archelaus of Macedon, where he died in 406 BC
- •The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were staged posthumously by his son and won first prize
- •Aristotle called him 'the most tragic of the poets' in the Poetics
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- World History Encyclopedia — Euripides
- Anne Pippin Burnett — Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth