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Euripides and the Athenians1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

P. T. Stevens
P. T. Stevens
Affiliation:
Bedford College London
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Extract

The general view of the relationship between Euripides and his fellow citizens which seems at present to hold the field received its most recent, most extreme, and most eloquent expression in the Introduction to Professor D. L. Page's edition of the Medea. Here we read: ‘Foreshadowed, too, already in Medea is that great burden of unpopularity which was to oppress the poet throughout his life. The sequel was the ridicule and hatred which Aristophanes reflects: the climax was his voluntary exile to Macedonia in sorrow and disillusion. Euripides was not the only teacher whom the Athenians persecuted, though they returned to him again and again, admiring while they hated, moved while they mocked and slandered.’ After quoting vv. 292 ff., where Medea speaks of the φθόνος incurred by those with a reputation for σοφία, Page continues, ‘History traces a single undeviating line from this passage of Medea through the bitter pages of Aristophanes to the final scene of an old man wandering out into the world friendless and embittered.’ A similar picture had already been presented by Wilamowitz and Murray; though Wilamowitz, in his critical account of the life of Euripides published in 1899, thinks that it was chiefly in the last period of his life in Athens, from the production of the Troades in 415, that the tension between Euripides and his countrymen became acute, and Murray similarly notes as a significant point the production of the Troades, which ‘set a flame of discord for ever between his people and himself’. Of his last years in Athens Murray writes, ‘Whatever the cause, shortly after the production of the Orestes in 408 the old poet's endurance snapped, and at the age apparently of seventy-six, he struck off into voluntary exile.’ The general picture, then, is of Euripides spending the last twenty-five years of his life in Athens, especially from 415 onwards, in an atmosphere of increasing isolation, unpopularity, and persecution, shot through with occasional gleams of approbation, until in 408 the tension became unendurable and he left Athens in voluntary exile.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 76 , November 1956 , pp. 87 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1956

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References

2 Euripides and his Age, p. 130.

3 Op. cit., p. 168.

4 I do not here discuss the possibility of obtaining any light on our problem from examination of the plays themselves. Euripides, or any other dramatist, could hardly write plays without betraying something of his own inner life and, in the special conditions of Attic tragedy, perhaps something of his relations with the δῆμος but the question when and how he does so is too complicated and controversial to be dealt with in this paper. In general, it seems to me that critics, modern as well as ancient, are too ready to assume that passages in Euripides have not only an extra-dramatic contemporary reference (which is often clear enough) but also a direct autobiographical significance. Thus Wilamowitz (Einleitung, p. 15) has no doubt that Fr. 495, by an unknown speaker in an unknown context, is Euripides' own answer ‘mit bittrem worte’ to the comic dramatists.

5 On the ancient biographical tradition, especially on Satyros, see Delcourt, M., Les Biographies Anciennes d'Euripide, L'Antiquité Classique II (1933), pp. 271–90.Google Scholar To the articles on Satyros mentioned by her and by Schmid-Stählin, (Gr. Lit. I. 3. 1, p. 309)Google Scholar may be added Lewis, L. C. St. A., New Chapters in Greek Lit. (1921), pp. 144–52.Google Scholar

6 It is, however, important to remember the dialogue form of the work as well as the gaps in our text. Thus M. Delcourt (op. cit., p. 285) is unfair to Satyros in her remarks on the passage (Col. xviii 1) where the speaker cites a few lines of Euripides with the explanation that when the poet says Zeus he means Archelaus, so that the departure to Macedon is presumably fore shadowed; for she does not take account of the next speaker, who observes: ‘What you say seems to me to be ingenious rather than true.’ Some other similar corrections may be lostto us.

7 He mentions, for instance, as a fact that Euripides' mother was a greengrocer, though, according to Aulus Gellius, the improbability of this story had already been demonstrated by Philochorus.

8 Cf. below p. 89 n. 15.

9 See Gerstinger, , Wiener Studien, 38 (1916), pp. 54 ff.Google Scholar

10 There is a further reference to a charge of impiety brought against Euripides in an unpublished papyrus fragment of the second century A.D. from Oxyrhynchus, which I have seen by courtesy of Prof. E. G. Turner; but there is good reason to think that this fragment describes themes for rhetorical exercises, so that events referred to may be purely imaginary.

11 It was inevitable that points of contrast and comparison between two such notable contemporaries and rivals should be noted, if not invented; for example, for a contrast on quite different lines, compare the saying recorded by Athenaeus (xiii 603e) that Sophocles was φιλομῖραξ, Euripides φιλογύνης.

12 De vitiis X 20

13 Sophocles was probably invited (Vit. 10) but did not go. The occasion of the invitation to the three distinguished Attic dramatists, was perhaps the inauguration by Archelaus at this time of in honour of Zeus and the Muses at Dion in Pieria (Diodorus xvii 16).

14 Cf. Stuart, , Epochs of Greek and Roman Biography, pp. 147–54.Google Scholar

15 In one passage (Fr. 37 Col. 1) where Euripides is described as there is perhaps a slight reminiscence of the Aristotelian of whom we are again reminded in γένος 2 in the words and which recalls in the Aristotelian description (E.N. 1123b–1124a).

16 Schmid, (Gr. Lit. I 3. 1. p. 325Google Scholar) is thus incorrect in remarking that all biographies agree on the ill-feeling against Euripides.

17 Timotheos, , Die Perser (1903), pp. 64 ff.Google Scholar

18 Class. Phil. xxvi (1931), pp. 153 ff.

19 Mor. 795 D.

20 Murray, op. cit., p. 169, seems to assume that this was so.

21 To say, however, that he ‘had fought in scores of hand-to-hand battles’ (Murray, op. cit., p. 104) seems to be going beyond facts or probabilities.

22 He does not give the words of the answer, apparently assuming that it was a well-known retort.

23 Hermes 34 (1899), p. 617 and 61 (1926), p. 303; cf. IG II i 73. Yet another candidate is a Euripides, father of Xenophon, mentioned in Thuc. ii 70, 79, and proposed with hesitation by Sauppe; see Cope, , Rhetoric of Aristotle, vol. ii, p. 83.Google Scholar

24 This is the most that can be said on such slight evidence, and I am merely arguing that to dismiss the possibility on the ground that Euripides was ἀπράγμων is to beg the question. Apart from this particular mission, it is perhaps rash to assume that E. remained entirely aloof from all public affairs. The absence of evidence only proves a negative where evidence is to be expected. It may be safe to conclude that E. never held any important post; but if, for example, he served uneventfully as a δικαστής, is there any reason why Aristophanes or anybody else should have mentioned this? We hear of Socrates as a βουλευτής only because his spell of duty was not uneventful.

25 Alcestis (Arg. Inc.), Troades (Arg. Arist. ap. Aelian), Phoenissae (Arg. Arist.).

26 Peliades (γένος 1), Medea (Arg. Arist.). There is ako a reference in Suidas to another 3rd prize, without mention of play or date.

27 The Argument of Aristophanes says of the Orestes but we cannot safely infer fromthis its fate at the first production.

28 That is, after his first production. Before their first production most dramatists must have sent in some plays which were returned with the Archon's compliments.

29 Euripides, Teubner Ed. Vol. I xxv.

30 Ar. Pax 801–2.

31 Sikes, E. E., The Greek View of Poetry, p. 60.Google Scholar

32 Roberts, W. Rhys, Greek Rhetoric and Literary Criticism, p. 18.Google Scholar

33 Not, of course, by all scholars; cf. Wycherley, R. E., Greece and Rome XV (1946), pp. 98–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 In the verse-weighing scene, for example, he comes to a right conclusion for absurd reasons.

35 E.g. Ra. 86 (Xenocles); Ach. 138, Thesm. 170 (Theognis); Pax 802–17 (Morsimos and Melanthios); Thesm. 168–70 (Philocles, Xenocles, Theognis).

36 Similarly I believe Murray is right in regarding the Clouds as a dramatic picture of a clash of humours rather than an attack on Socrates.

37 Nub. 1365–72, 1376–7.