The nostalgia expressed by Euripidean characters is also the drama's own, insofar as the plays offer themselves as an answer to the longing of Athenian society for a simple, single “word of truth.” But Euripidean drama undoes this claim even as it makes it, in that it reveals itself as requiring the “clever medicine” of theatrical artifice to make its case. This implicit failure lends at times poignancy and pathos, at times tragicomic irony to the drama's attempt to heal contemporary divisions and revive lost glories.

We share the Euripidean nostalgia for an originary, autonomous, and authoritative voice of truth that speaks clearly to all. As with Athens' shift from a “song culture” to a “book culture,” our shift from the age of the book to the information age renders our own nostalgia for a simple voice of truth both urgent and problematic. We, too, live in an age beset by revolutionary changes – political, social, and moral – and our “intellectual revolution” has much in common with theirs: “ … the relativism, the abandonment or reversal of previously accepted standards, the permissiveness, the widespread diversity of opinion.” Like the Athenians of Euripides' age, we pride ourselves on our rationality and inventiveness, even as we fear relying on these powers too much. In postmodern America as in ancient Athens, a great chasm divides an elite corps of scientists and intellectuals from the masses of people who reject science and logic in favor of mystic practices and traditional religion.

As we have seen, Polyneices' “word of truth” evokes an idealized age in which the gods served as the ultimate arbiters and dispensers of truth and justice. Nostalgia for an earlier period is not a new phenomenon when it appears in the texts of Euripides and his contemporaries, but is already present at the beginnings of Greek literature, in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod (ca. eighth century b.c.). The idealized nature of this yearning is perhaps implicit in the original Greek meaning of the word “nostalgia.” Derived from the Greek words nostos, meaning “return,” and algos, meaning “pain,” “nostalgia” literally means “a painful yearning for a return home,” as we have seen. Homer's Odyssey, the archetypal epic of return, vividly illustrates “nostalgia” in its colloquial sense of “homesickness.” Early on in the epic, Athena paints a vivid picture of its hero, detained far from home by the nymph Calypso: “ … Odysseus, / straining to get sight of the very smoke uprising / from his own country, longs to die” (1.57–9). And, when we first meet Odysseus himself, Hermes finds him “sitting out on the beach, crying, as before now / he had done, breaking his heart in tears, lamentation, and sorrow, / as weeping tears he looked out over the barren water” (5.82–4).

Odysseus' heartsick longing for home qualifies him as the archetypal nostalgic hero in Western literature.

If the Hecuba presents us with an apparently godless world run on the basis of people's greed and lust for power, the Ion (ca. 413 b.c.) lays the charges of corruption squarely at the feet of one of the most important gods in the Greek pantheon, Apollo. In the course of the play Apollo is charged with raping a woman, abandoning his own child, lying through his oracle, and hiding from his misdeeds behind intermediaries. Other plays of Euripides contain passing criticisms or condemnations of the gods and the Delphic oracle, but the Ion conducts a sustained, frontal assault not only on the reliability of the oracle but also on the motives and character of its patron god. In questioning the truthfulness of Apollo's oracle at Delphi, the play questions the whole mythic worldview of the Greeks and the metaphysical assumptions upon which it is based. It is, therefore, the fullest and most direct examination of the problem of the lost voice of truth in Euripidean drama.

The play's protagonist, Ion, crystallizes the play's pervasive concern with this problem when he asks, “… does Apollo tell the truth, / Or is the oracle false?” (1537–8). Ion's questioning of the truthfulness of the archetypal voice of truth in the ancient Greek world marks both the dramatic and the metaphysical crisis of the play.

In the Helen (412 b.c.), Euripides returns to the mythic subject matter of the Trojan War that he treated so movingly not only in the Hecuba (ca. 424 b.c.) but also in the Trojan Women (415 b.c.). Like the Hecuba, the Trojan Women concerns the fate suffered by Hecuba and other women taken as slaves by the Greeks after they sacked and burned Troy and killed its defenders; it was produced about the time of the Athenian reduction of Melos. Just two years after Melos, the Athenians themselves suffered a catastrophic defeat, as the expedition they launched against Sicily with great fanfare was mercilessly crushed in 413 b.c.

Produced only a year after the destruction of the Sicilian Expedition, the Helen treats the Trojan War not as the source of the grievous suffering depicted in Euripides' antiwar plays but as the background for a spectacular, escapist plot worthy of a Hollywood director. In Euripides' version of the Trojan War, Paris abducts not Helen but a clone of her made by Hera, so lifelike as to fool her own husband. Also reminiscent of Hollywood is the play's grand finale, when Helen, reportedly urging the Greek troops to rescue her from her Egyptian foes, shouts, “Where is the glory of Troy [to Trôikon kleos]? Show it to these barbarians” (1603–4). Helen's rallying cry, which results in her rescue from her Egyptian captors, apparently leads to the recovery both of her good name and of the glory of Troy.

The Hecuba transposes Theseus' question – how is the “just voice” to prevail against the voice of self-interest, sophistry, and deceit? – from a private domestic setting to a politicized, wartime context. In the years that intervened between the Hippolytus (428 b.c.) and the Hecuba (ca. 424 b.c.), this question acquired greater urgency for the Athenians, because of the atrocities that occurred early in the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, the Hecuba echoes concerns about the brutalizing effects of war that are also voiced in Thucydides' narrative. Both works portray the violation of civilized norms by the Greeks in war, their sophistic attempts to rationalize barbaric conduct, and the failure of any voice of justice, reason, or moderation to make its own case. Both the play and the history present us with a world that fails to respect any transcendent principle of justice, asking: upon what authority, moral or political, can humanity rely to preserve civilized norms, in the absence of a divine “word of truth” that is both heard and heeded?

Euripides' Hecuba poses this question with particular power and pathos. In the play, the character who expresses nostalgia for a transcendent “just voice” is not the powerful king of Athens but a powerless victim of Greek aggression, Hecuba, formerly queen of Troy, now Agamemnon's slave. On their way home after winning the Trojan War, the Greeks have stopped in Thrace, where Hecuba learns that her daughter, Polyxena, is to be sacrificed as an offering at Achilles' tomb.

Written in the early phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Hippolytus (428 b.c.) serves as a powerful introduction to the theme of the longing for the “just voice,” a theme whose political, philosophical, and dramatic implications resonate throughout the playwright's corpus. Euripides uses a mythic story of passion, betrayal, and deception to dramatize the dangers of placing too much confidence in the tools of critical inquiry so prevalent in the young Athenian democracy. The drama demonstrates that such tools as forensic speeches, cross-examination, and the evaluation of evidence by inference and probability are highly subject to cynical manipulation. The plot of the Hippolytus seems to confirm the Thucydidean warning that passion, prejudice, and self-interest can all too easily prevail over justice and truth. Though all of the play's leading characters express longing for a single, plain form of truth and justice, the play casts doubt on whether a democracy that relies so heavily on “two-sided verbal strife” can ever recover such simplicity – a question with great relevance for our own historical moment, characterized as it is by a yearning for clear distinctions between friend and foe, truth and lies, good and evil.

It is Theseus, “a powerful yet gullible man who is the embodiment of Athenian democracy,” who most clearly articulates this yearning in Euripides' play. Theseus is wrongly convinced that his wife, Phaedra, has been raped by his son, Hippolytus.

Reviled by critics from Aristophanes to Nietzsche as sophistic, iconoclastic, and sensationalistic, Euripides has long been held responsible for the decline of Greek tragedy – and, to some degree, of Athenian culture. Yet the author of such wrenching and disturbing plays as the Medea and the Bacchae has a fundamentally conservative side: his drama conveys longing for an idealized, pre-sophistic age that still respected the gods and traditional codes of right conduct. The Euripidean nostalgia for a lost voice of transcendent truth that would speak clearly to all, combined with his proclivity for skeptical analysis, epitomizes the discursive practice of his era, as exemplified by Thucydidean history, Aristophanic comedy, and Platonic philosophy. In fact, this book grounds its interpretation of the plays in key passages from the “scientific” historian Thucydides, who also expresses yearning for a bygone “simplicity” or “singleness of heart.” But the unstable mix of nostalgia and skepticism gives particular power and pathos to Euripidean tragedy, which consistently calls attention to the unbridgeable distance between a mythical past and the playwright's own world. The fact that Euripides explicitly addresses this distance in his drama also sets him apart from his fellow tragedians, helping explain Aristotle's assessment of him as “the most tragic of the tragic poets” (Aristotle, Poetics 1453a29–30; translation).

The combination of romantic longing for a simple, clear voice of truth with cynicism and scientific detachment speaks to our own postmodern condition.