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Euripides: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Euripides
Euripides was born on the very day that the Athenian fleet defeated the Persian army at the Battle of Salamis, in 480 BC. This coincidence became the cornerstone of a legend that claimed his destiny was written in the stars, yet his father, Mnesarchus, a retailer from the deme of Phlya, interpreted the oracle differently. The oracle had promised that his son would win crowns of victory, so Mnesarchus insisted the boy train for a career in athletics. The boy was destined for a career on the stage, where he was to win only five victories, one of these posthumously. He served for a short time as both dancer and torch-bearer at the rites of Apollo Zosterius, but his true education was not confined to athletics. He studied painting and philosophy under the masters Prodicus and Anaxagoras, a combination of artistic and intellectual training that would later define his unique approach to tragedy. He became a recluse, making a home for himself in a cave on Salamis, known today as the Cave of Euripides, where a cult of the playwright developed after his death. There he built an impressive library and pursued daily communion with the sea and sky. The details of his death are uncertain. It was traditionally held that he retired to the rustic court of King Archelaus in Macedonia, where he died in 406 BC. Some modern scholars however claim that in reality Euripides may have never visited Macedonia at all, or if he did, he might have been drawn there by King Archelaus with incentives that were also offered to other artists. Such biographical details derive almost entirely from three unreliable sources: folklore, employed by the ancients to lend colour to the lives of celebrated authors; parody, employed by the comic poets to ridicule the tragic poets; and 'autobiographical' clues gleaned from his extant plays, a mere fraction of his total output.
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His plays, and those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, indicate a difference in outlook between the three, a generation gap probably due to the Sophistic enlightenment in the middle decades of the 5th century. When Euripides's plays are sequenced in time, they also reveal that his outlook might have changed, providing a 'spiritual biography'. An early period of high tragedy included Medea and Hippolytus. A patriotic period at the outset of the Peloponnesian War included Children of Heracles and The Suppliants. A middle period of disillusionment at the senselessness of war included Hecuba and The Trojan Women. An escapist period with a focus on romantic intrigue included Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Helen. A final period of tragic despair included Orestes, Phoenician Women, and The Bacchae. The Trojan Women, for example, is a powerfully disturbing play on the theme of war's horrors, apparently critical of Athenian imperialism. It was composed in the aftermath of the Melian massacre and during the preparations for the Sicilian Expedition, yet it features the comic exchange between Menelaus and Hecuba quoted above, and the chorus considers Athens, the 'blessed land of Theus', to be a desirable refuge. Such complexity and ambiguity are typical both of his 'patriotic' and 'anti-war' plays. In the Bacchae, he restores the chorus and messenger speech to their traditional role in the tragic plot, and the play appears to be the culmination of a regressive or archaizing tendency in his later works. Believed to have been composed in the wilds of Macedonia, Bacchae also dramatizes a primitive side to Greek religion, and some modern scholars have interpreted this particular play biographically, therefore, as a kind of death-bed conversion or renunciation of atheism, the poet's attempt to ward off the charge of impiety that was later to overtake his friend Socrates, or evidence of a new belief that religion cannot be analysed rationally. The Bacchae, however, shows a reversion to old forms, possibly as a deliberate archaic effect, or because there were no virtuoso choristers in Macedonia, where it is said to have been written.
The textual transmission of the plays, from the 5th century BC, when they were first written, until the era of the printing press, was a largely haphazard process. Much of Euripides's work
Common questions
When was Euripides born and what historical event coincided with his birth?
Euripides was born in 480 BC on the very day that the Athenian fleet defeated the Persian army at the Battle of Salamis. This coincidence became the cornerstone of a legend that claimed his destiny was written in the stars.
Where did Euripides live as a recluse and what cult developed after his death?
Euripides made a home for himself in a cave on Salamis known today as the Cave of Euripides. A cult of the playwright developed after his death at this location where he built an impressive library.
When did Euripides die and where did he retire according to tradition?
Euripides died in 406 BC after retiring to the rustic court of King Archelaus in Macedonia. Some modern scholars claim that in reality Euripides may have never visited Macedonia at all.
Which plays of Euripides are included in the nineteen plays that survive today?
The nineteen plays that survive today were combined from select and alphabetical editions by an unknown Byzantine scholar. These include The Trojan Women, The Bacchae, The Phoenician Women, and Iphigenia in Aulis among others.
When were new fragments of Euripides's Ino and Polyidus discovered and published?
A papyrus containing previously unknown fragments of Euripides's Ino and Polyidus was discovered at the Egyptian archaeological site of Philadelphia in 2022. The first scholarly edition providing the Greek text and an English translation was published in August 2024.
was lost or corrupted, but the period also included triumphs by scholars and copyists, thanks to whom much was recovered and preserved. The plays of Euripides, like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, circulated in written form. But literary conventions that we take for granted today had not been invented: there was no spacing between words, no consistency in punctuation, nor elisions, no marks for breathings and accents, no convention to denote change of speaker, no stage directions, and verse was written straight across the page, like prose. Possibly, those who bought texts supplied their own interpretative markings. Papyri discoveries have indicated, for example, that a change in speakers was loosely denoted with a variety of signs, such as equivalents of the modern dash, colon, and full-stop. The absence of modern literary conventions, which aid comprehension, was an early and persistent source of errors, affecting transmission. Errors were also introduced when Athens replaced its old Attic alphabet with the Ionian alphabet, a change sanctioned by law in 403, 402 BC, adding a new complication to the task of copying. Many more errors came from the tendency of actors to interpolate words and sentences, producing so many corruptions and variations that a law was proposed by Lycurgus of Athens in 330 BC 'that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be written down and preserved in a public office; and that the town clerk should read the text over with the actors; and that all performances which did not comply with this regulation should be illegal.' The law was soon disregarded, and actors continued to make changes until about 200 BC, after which the habit ceased. It was about then that Aristophanes of Byzantium compiled an edition of all the extant plays of Euripides, collated from pre-Alexandrian texts, furnished with introductions and accompanied by a commentary that was 'published' separately. This became the 'standard edition' for the future, and it featured some of the literary conventions that modern readers expect: there was still no spacing between words, little or no punctuation, and no stage directions, but abbreviated names denoted changes of speaker, lyrics were broken into 'cola' and 'strophai', or lines and stanzas, and a system of accentuation was introduced. After this creation of a standard edition, the text was fairly safe from errors, besides slight and gradual corruption introduced with tedious copying. Many of
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these trivial errors occurred in the Byzantine period, following a change in script from uncial to minuscule. Many of these errors were 'homophonic' errors, the equivalent, for instance, of substituting 'right' for 'write' in English: there were many opportunities for Byzantine scribes to make errors of this sort, since eta, iota, omicron-iota and epsilon-iota were pronounced similarly in the Byzantine period. Around 200 AD, ten of the plays of Euripides began to be circulated in a select edition, possibly for use in schools, with some commentaries or scholia recorded in the margins. Similar editions had appeared for Aeschylus and Sophocles, the only plays of theirs that survive today. In Euripides's case, however, a further nine plays have also survived, compiled in alphabetical order as if from a set of his collected works, without any scholia attached. These 'alphabetical' plays were combined with the 'select' edition by some unknown Byzantine scholar, bringing together the nineteen plays that survive today. The 'select' plays are found in many medieval manuscripts, but only two manuscripts preserve the 'Alphabetical' plays. These two manuscripts are usually denoted as L and P, after the Laurentian Library at Florence, and the Bibliotheca Palatina in the Vatican, where they are stored. It is believed that P derived its texts of all the 'alphabetical' plays and of some, but not all, 'select' plays from copies of an ancestor of L. P contains all the extant plays of Euripides, but Trojan Woman and the latter part of Bacchae are missing from L. In addition to the medieval manuscripts, there are some papyri preserving fragments from Euripides's work. These papyrus fragments are often recovered only with modern technology. In June 2005, for example, classicists at the University of Oxford worked on a joint project with Brigham Young University, using multi-spectral imaging technology to retrieve previously illegible writing. Some of this work employed infrared technology, previously used for satellite imaging, to detect previously unknown material by Euripides, in fragments of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, a collection of ancient manuscripts held by the university. It is from
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such materials that modern scholars try to piece together copies of the original plays. Sometimes the picture is almost lost. Thus, for example, two extant plays, The Phoenician Women and Iphigenia in Aulis, are significantly corrupted by interpolations, the latter possibly being completed post mortem by the poet's son, and the very authorship of Rhesus is a matter of dispute. In fact, the very existence of the Alphabet plays, or rather the absence of an equivalent edition for Sophocles and Aeschylus, could distort our notions of distinctive Euripidean qualities, most of his least 'tragic' plays are in the Alphabet edition, and, possibly, the other two tragedians would appear just as genre-bending as this 'restless experimenter', if we possessed more than their 'select' editions. In 2022, a papyrus was discovered at the Egyptian archaeological site of Philadelphia, containing previously unknown fragments of Euripides's Ino and Polyidus, which were publicized in August 2024. The first scholarly edition of the new fragments, providing the Greek text and an English translation, was published the same year in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.