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EURIPIDES OUR CONTEMPORARY

J. Michael Walton is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the

University of Hull. He studied Greek under Kenneth Dover
and Douglas Young at the University of St Andrews, where he
directed the first of over fifty subsequent productions with
professional or student casts. At Hull he was founder-director
of the Performance Translation Centre and he has been a
Getty Visiting Scholar. He was General Editor of the sixteen
volumes of Methuen Drama’s Classical Greek Dramatists
series, to which he also contributed nine translations. His
books include Greek Theatre Practice, The Greek Sense of
Theatre: Tragedy Reviewed, Living Greek Theatre: A
Handbook of Classical Performance and Modern Production,
Menander and the Making of Comedy (with Peter D. Arnott)
and Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English. He edited
Craig on Theatre and, with Marianne McDonald, Amid Our
Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy and The
Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre.
 by the same author

Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy

(edited with Marianne McDonald)
The Greek Sense of Theatre: Tragedy Reviewed
Greek Theatre Practice
EURIPIDES OUR
CONTEMPORARY
J. Michael Walton

Methuen Drama
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by

Methuen Drama
A & C Black Publishers Ltd
36 Soho Square
London W1D 3QY
www.methuendrama.com

Copyright © 2009 by J. Michael Walton

The right of J. Michael Walton to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 40811 2045

Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

Printed by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this
condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Contents

Introduction 1

I. Domesticating Tragedy
1. Playmaker and Image-Breaker 11
2. The Family Saga 29
Phoenician Women, Bacchae, Iphigeneia at Aulis
3. Women and Men 44
Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus
4. The Comic Touch 62
Cyclops, Ion, Orestes, Electra, Bacchae, Children of Heracles,
Helen

II. Powerful Forces: The Grand Passions

5. War and the Military 81
Rhesus, Trojan Women, Suppliants, Iphigeneia at Aulis
6. Revenge 97
Electra, Hecuba, Children of Heracles, Andromache, Medea
7. Immortals and Mortals 115
Alcestis, Iphigeneia Among the Taurians, Electra, Rhesus,
Ion, Hippolytus, Bacchae
8. Sanity, Madness and Responsibility 131
Orestes, Heracles, Bacchae, Electra

III. Theatre Theatrical

9. Playing the Game: Illusion and Reality 151
Hecuba, Suppliants, Ion, Rhesus, Helen, Bacchae
10. Great Roles 168
Medea, Alcestis, Heracles, Hippolytus, Iphigeneia at Aulis,
Hecuba, Electra, Helen, Bacchae
11. Heirs to the Legacy 192
Shaw, Strindberg, Brecht, Pirandello, Anouilh, Sondheim,
Frisch

Appendix: A plot summary of all nineteen surviving plays 213

Select Bibliography 235
Index 245
Acknowledgments

I should like to take this opportunity to convey my enormous gratitude to

Methuen Drama publishers and the various umbrella companies under
which they have flourished. Over the last twenty-five years individual
commissioning and copy-editors, collaborators and readers too
numerous to mention have nursed me through diverse volumes, saving me
from countless errors of style or taste with notable tact and baffling
tolerance. Among the copy-editors, however, I must single out by name
Georgina Allen for her unflagging eye and ear, as well as her good
humour and patience over many volumes including the present one. This
I realise is my twenty-third publication under the Methuen Drama
imprint as editor or author. To all my deep thanks.
For this particular book, I have greatly appreciated the constructive
criticism of readers of the manuscript, among them Mary-Kay Gamel and
Herbert Golder. I also wish to thank my frequent co-translator and co-
editor Marianne McDonald for her always valuable and supportive
suggestions at every stage. I exonerate her completely from any
responsibility for the more idiosyncratic interpretations of individual
plays.

vi
Introduction

In 1964, the Polish critic Jan Kott’s book on Shakespeare was published
in England as Shakespeare Our Contemporary.1 It was in the form of a
series of essays, eight on various of Shakespeare’s tragedies, three on his
comedies. Peter Brook wrote a brief foreword in which he described
meeting Kott at a nightclub in Warsaw and spending half the night with
him trying to secure the release of one of Kott’s students who had been
arrested by the police. Brook was surprised that, at the police station, the
police called Kott ‘Professor’ and asked him what he was a professor of.
‘Of drama,’ replied Kott. This seemed a revelation to Brook and not
without reason. In 1964 there were only three independent Drama
departments in British universities, at Bristol, Manchester and Hull – a
fourth was about to open at Birmingham – and only two professors of
Drama.
Kott’s book was greeted with enthusiasm by numerous critics and
practitioners for combining serious study of the texts with an awareness,
derived from his own political situation and circumstances, of the
historical and social climate that spawned them – ‘scholarly without what
we associate with scholarship’ was Brook’s verdict. The essays were
accessible and informative to actors and directors as well as to students
and teachers. To put it another way, this was an academic book with a
minimum of footnotes. The other factor that made Kott’s study unusual
among books on Shakespeare was that it looked forwards as well as
backwards, the index including references to the major European
theatrical influences of the 1960s, Adamov, Artaud, Brecht, Dürrenmatt,
Genet, Ionesco, Sartre and, above all, Beckett, as well Camus, Kafka and
Malraux.
Two years later, in 1966, Kott began work on a further volume, this
time about Greek tragedy, which was published in 1970 as The Eating of
the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy.2 This second book, a
series of essays on Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Sophocles’ Ajax and
Philoctetes and Euripides’ Alcestis, Bacchae and related topics, proved
less influential than the first, perhaps because Kott needed recourse to
1
Jan Kott, szekspirze wspólczesny (1965), trans. Bolesaw Taborski, published as
Shakespeare Our Contemporary, London: Methuen, 1964, revised 1967.
2
Published by Random House (1973) and subsequently in Great Britain by Eyre Methuen
(1974). Taborski was again the translator, this time in collaboration with Edward J.
Czerwinski.

1
 EURIPIDES OUR CONTEMPORARY

scholars of ancient Greek. Though he turned to the work of major

luminaries in the field, among them Richard Jebb, A. W. Verrall, Gilbert
Murray, George D. Thomson, Maurice Bowra, T. B. L. Webster, E. R.
Dodds, Humphrey Kitto, Bernard Knox and Peter D. Arnott, never mind
philosophers and anthropologists, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Graves and
Auerbach, the work of such giants on the classical world is not always
compatible. The resultant essays vary from provocative insight, worthy
of the author of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, to awkward
generalisation1 and actual inaccuracy.2 Nonetheless, it is in appreciation
of Kott that the present book acquired its title. Euripides Our
Contemporary is intended both as an acknowledgment of the need for
Drama professors from time to time to re-investigate the earliest
manifestations of the world’s theatre repertoire and a strong belief that
the kind of interrogation that has been applied to Shakespeare may be just
as appropriate for Euripides.
As far as Greek tragedy is concerned, a far greater influence than Kott
has been William Arrowsmith, a formidable scholar and translator of
Greek drama. His ‘Euripides and the Dramaturgy of Crisis’ was initially
a lecture delivered at Columbia University in 1984.3 This reassessment of
Euripides as a playmaker, in the light of his conglomeration of styles, his
scepticism and sheer theatricality, went a long way to identifying
Euripides’ significance for a twentieth-century world. This is not to
suggest that there has been any dearth, either before or after 1984, of
books and articles on Euripides and his nineteen plays which have
survived, in close to six hundred English translations since Lady Jane
Lumley’s Elizabethan Iphigeneia. Two thousand four hundred years after
his death, it might not be unreasonable to wonder what sort of book can
any longer be written about Euripides. The linguistic details and textual
peculiarities which formed the basis of school and university study for
longer than bear thinking about are surely an exhausted seam; too little
is known for a biography; individual plays have received the closest and

1
For example ‘Alcestis is a heroine of tragedy, but has a husband taken from comedy’,
p. 83; ‘Of all Greek plays, The Bacchae seems to be most pervaded by eroticism’, p. 224.
What of Hippolytus?
2
‘Prometheus Bound is the only Greek tragedy in which the Chorus perishes with the hero’,
p. 36 – neither dies; ‘Medea does not address the gods. They do not exist for her, just as the
world does not exist, as her children do not exist’, p. 237 – she invokes Hecate, Themis,
Artemis, Hera and Zeus, never mind her grandfather, Helios.
3
Arrowsmith delivered the four Bampton lectures at Columbia in 1984, in the first of which
he explored the notion of ‘anachronization’ in Euripides. This first lecture was published
posthumously in 1999, but at the time of writing the other three remain unpublished, his
premature death in 1992 having prevented revision.

2
 INTRODUCTION

most ingenious of scrutinies; locating the playwright within the social and
political context of his time is a well-trodden path, if still a contentious
one. Less explored has been Euripides’ impact on later generations. It is
in this kind of territory that the present study is to be located. The aim is
specific. What Euripides was in his own time is less important here than
why he should still have something to say about our hectic contemporary
world when concerns such as global warming, nuclear proliferation,
terrorist infiltration and bank failures dominate the headlines. How, in
short, and why may Euripides still resonate?
If this were to be simply a book listing topics to show how
‘contemporary’ the plays of Euripides may prove, it could be short
indeed. What are the subjects of this ancient Greek playwright? War, its
causes and conduct; morality and power; the influence of oligarchy in a
notional democracy; domestic strife; old age, illness and bereavement;
sickness within society; personal responsibility; refugees and immi-
gration; religion and ideology; sacrifice and self-sacrifice. No difficulty
finding comment on such themes in Euripides. His plays are filled with
people who constantly fiddle with the truth, gods, heroes, soldiers,
politicians, even messengers. At a symposium on ‘Contemporary
Performance of Greek and Roman Drama’ held at the J. Paul Getty
Museum in June, 2002, the American director, Peter Sellars, told his
audience he had just returned to America after two years away: ‘and I’m
shocked at the absence of dissent in this country. The absence of public
voice over things that absolutely must be spoken of. So, of course, I am
now working with Euripides. That’s simple . . . and the reason I’m
working on The Children of Heracles, it’s about refugees and
immigration.’ To give his words their full political context, they were
delivered almost exactly at midpoint between the destruction of the Twin
Towers and the second invasion of Iraq.
This book takes Sellars’ position as a starting point and aims further.
Comment on their own time was filtered by the Greek tragedians in a way
that transcends period. Euripides may have no knowledge of the specific
problems of our age, but any comment on his own age was strictly
deflected. He and his contemporaries set their tragedies, with minor
exceptions, in the world of myth. The advantage of myth is that its stories
are basic but malleable. Entrenched in an unspecific Greek past as
nebulous as that of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens
or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the plots of all three Greek tragedians
engaged topical issues from an oblique perspective. The Trojan War
served as a means of viewing any war, its avoidability or unavoidability,
its heroics and mock-heroics, its consequences, its futility and its misery.

3
 EURIPIDES OUR CONTEMPORARY

It still can. Euripides wrote most of his plays during the Peloponnesian
War between Athens and Sparta (431–04 BC). His investigations of the
causes, conduct and aftermath of that war must all have reverberated at
a dramatic festival, one of whose opening ceremonies included a parade
of the sons of those who had died in battle during the previous year. There
have still been few more potent statements in any age about the effect of
war on winners, never mind losers, than Trojan Women and Hecuba,
both of which have received major productions in recent years: English-
language Hecubas were performed in at least four new translations, all
published, in 2004–5 alone.
Euripides’ comparative lack of tangible success in his own time – only
four competitive victories at the Great Dionysia in a career that lasted
fifty years – reflected both the novelty of his approach and the challenges,
often seemingly ironic, jaundiced or simply flippant, that he offered to
received wisdom on all manner of topics. Like the innovative artist in any
era he risked derision and gossip. Undependable later biographies say he
worked in a cave on Salamis; could not control his wife or wives; had
funny foreign friends, several of whom were dangerous. There was
Protagoras, for instance, deported from Athens after reading a book at
Euripides’ house which was then publicly burnt, and the natural
philosopher (scientist), Anaxagoras, who suggested that the sun was not
a god but a large mass of hot stone, as big as the Peloponnese. Euripides
was a freethinker. His plays were full of popular music and unpopular
opinions. Remarks made by his characters were taken, perhaps
inevitably, as representing his own attitudes.
At the same time we have tales like the one about the Athenian
survivors of the Sicilian expedition, seven thousand of whom were
condemned to working in the Syracusan stone quarries. Some of these,
the story goes, secured their freedom by being able to recite (or sing?)
Euripidean choruses, this making them a desirable after-dinner cabaret at
Syracusan soirées. The reasons for the playwright’s leaving Athens for
Macedon in the final years of his life are uncertain and contradictory. If
Aristophanes knew the true version, he chose to ignore it in his Frogs (405
BC, the year after Euripides’ death) where Euripides and Aeschylus
compete for the right to return from the dead to save Athens.
In the century after his death Euripides’ popularity grew, but subse-
quently has gone up and down like a yo-yo, varying from ecstatic
endorsement to rank dismissal. Many of the most distinguished scholars
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rated him a poor third after
Aeschylus and Sophocles. Aristotle had not been over-keen on him either,
but rigid formulae for what constitutes ‘tragedy’, debated as they have

4
 INTRODUCTION

been over centuries, tend to fracture and collapse when faced with the
realities of a playwright of genius. Shakespeare simply refuses to submit
to any kind of literary rules or single interpretations. The same is true of
Euripides, as I hope this study of all his surviving dramas may show. The
word ‘drama’ rather than ‘tragedy’ is used advisedly. Though in his
nineteen surviving plays we have enough to recognise Aristotle’s
description of him as tragikôtatos, we probably have too few to work out
precisely what meaning ‘most tragic’ may have had, either for Aristotle or
for Euripides himself. Among that nineteen, we have one farcical satyr
play, at least four without the death of one of the characters, and two
more where an apparent death is put in doubt. Nearly half have what may
seem like a happy ending and the range of sentiment and mood is far
greater than in any other ancient playwright.
It was tempting to look at the plays in some sort of chronological order,
despite the glaring objection of there being firm dates for only eight of the
nineteen and its being anyone’s guess for most of the others. An
alternative might have been to group them by genres, pointing to the
different moods they parade from deepest despair to unforeseen
jauntiness; by recurrent characters in comparison with their Aeschylean
and Sophoclean counterparts (Electra, Clytemnestra, Menelaus,
Heracles, Theseus); or again by broad political sentiment, whether the
politics be theological, military, gender or domestic. It would be feasible
to sort them into premier league (Medea, Hippolytus, Trojan Women,
Bacchae) and lower division (Suppliants, Children of Heracles, Rhesus,
Iphigeneia Among the Taurians).
In the end it seemed more important to pick themes for each chapter
and range across the whole canon, if appropriate, with certain plays
accentuated.1 It has been a priority that every surviving play should
feature in at least one chapter: several crop up more than once.
Fragmentary plays are for the most part discounted, their overall
structure being largely conjectural. Some plays are discussed with which
many readers may be unfamiliar, the price to pay if Euripides’ place in the
contemporary repertoire is to be fully espoused and celebrated.
Accordingly, though commentary is accompanied by the immediate
context, there is a reference Appendix at the end, with a short summary
of the plots of all nineteen plays.
The biggest difficulty has been whittling down the possible approaches
to the compass of a single book when subjects as diverse as ‘Euripides and
1
This is the favoured method of several of the whole-book studies of Euripides to which I
am indebted for the insights of their authors, including Bates (1930); Grube (1941);
Conacher (1967); Barlow (1971); Vellacott (1975).

5
 EURIPIDES OUR CONTEMPORARY

the Afterlife’, ‘Euripides and Discrimination’ or ‘Euripides and

Democracy’ might all claim a place. Thematic links tend to be inflicted by
critic rather than by playwright, but organisation of some sort is
unavoidable. My interest here is less in interpreting the plays of Euripides
than suggesting how and why they are still amenable to interpretation.
The chapter on ‘The Family Saga’, for example, does not consider the
family in classical Athens, only what still recognisable aspects of family
relationships surface within certain plays. A similar approach is taken to
his treatment of women, the comic, war and the military, revenge, the
gods, sanity, madness and responsibility, and theatre and illusion. The
first chapter is an introduction to Euripides and his working method
which those familiar with his work can skip with equanimity. The final
chapters involve Euripides’ approach to theatre and how this relates to
individual roles within his plays. This serves as a bridge to identifying a
selection of playwrights from the last hundred or so years who might
most seem to have returned Euripides to the modern theatre through
dramatic and theatrical approaches, first found in his work, which they
have chosen to develop and transcend.
This is not, in other words, except incidentally, any sort of con-
sideration of ancient Greek life or of Greek plays within the context of
their own time. There are already numbers of fine studies to which the
reader may turn if that is what they are looking for. Too many others, I
fear, have been written by those determined to make Euripides conform
with their personal idea of Greek tragedy and who have taken it as
a personal affront when he insists on proving himself a playwright first, a
poet second and a theorist last.
Still less is this book an evaluation of contemporary reception of
Euripides’ plays or a reflection on the nature of adaptation and its
relationship to translation.1 The history of the production of Euripides’
plays belongs in another and different book, written with the authority of
someone who has spent more time as a member of an audience than in
the rehearsal room. Least of all is Euripides Our Contemporary intended
as advice to would-be directors on how to handle a chorus or digest the
nature of a masked drama. If it proves helpful in informing such
decisions, well and good. What I do hope is that any director who wishes
to take on the challenge of Greek tragedy, and even those who have
previously considered Euripides as mired in the deep past, may find a
stimulus in these pages: actors too and anyone with a broad interest in the

1
This is a subject that I have already dealt with in some detail elsewhere (Walton 2006 and
2007 b).

6
 INTRODUCTION

history of the drama who may have been wary of searching any further
back than Shakespeare.
Many of my interpretations and explanations have been absorbed from
previous scholars – and indeed practitioners – or stimulated by them. For
their not always being given due acknowledgment I offer apologies, under
the defence that this was to be more a book for the theatre professional
and the general reader than the classical scholar for whom chapter, verse
and cross-reference are de rigueur. The select bibliography points to
previous studies which have been influential in encouraging or forming
my own sense of the playwright and his plays, though for the most part
that has been inspired by my work as director, actor and translator. If all
the ideas are not necessarily new, I hope they are presented in a fresh kind
of way. The job here, as I see it, is less to dictate parallels than to invite
them.
Greek words have been reduced to a minimum and are transliterated in
italics, bearing in mind that the Greek alphabet differs considerably from
the Roman. The titles of the Greek plays are in their most familiar form
to the modern reader, accessibility triumphing over the preferences of
many current classical scholars. Plays written in French, Italian or
German referred to in Chapter 11 are under their translated title unless
they have not been performed in English. Translation of various passages,
unless otherwise acknowledged, is my own. Some examples can be found
in published translations from the Methuen Drama series ‘Classical Greek
Dramatists’ (Alcestis, Bacchae, Cyclops, Medea, Rhesus); others were
prepared in collaboration with Marianne McDonald for publication
and/or performance (Andromache and Electra for Nick Hern Books,
Helen, Iphigeneia Among the Taurians and Frogs). Lyric passages have
an initial capital for each line; iambic dialogue in the Greek is in a much
freer verse, or prose, form. I have tried to suit the English versions to the
mood of scenes in the original, which may vary from the savage to the
farcical. Line-numberings refer to the Greek text, usually the Oxford text
of James Diggle.

7
This page intentionally left blank
I. Domesticating Tragedy
This page intentionally left blank
1 Playmaker and Image-
Breaker

In 1913, as the First World War was looming, but still seemed
preventable, Gilbert Murray published his Euripides and His Age.1 It
quickly became a classic study which sealed his reputation; and so it
remains, with some reservations over his enthusiasm for the ritual nature
of tragedy. Not that Murray’s reputation needed much cementing by
1913. Twenty-four years earlier, at the absurdly young age of twenty-
three, he had accepted the Chair of Greek at the University of Glasgow.
Before long he was a major, if occasionally erratic, editor of Euripides,
and a produced playwright who had become closely associated with the
innovative Court Theatre in London. By the time he was appointed as
Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford in 1908, he was a
theatrical celebrity, a translator whose versions of Euripides’ Hippolytus,
The Trojan Women, Electra and Medea had introduced Euripides to the
West End stage for the first time since Hecuba was booed off at Drury
Lane in 1726.2 He was a friend and associate of playwright and director
Harley Granville Barker and had featured, in affectionate caricature, as
Professor Adolphus Cusins in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara of
1905. He was to become one of the founders of the League of Nations at
the conclusion of the First World War and a Joint President of the United
Nations Association after the Second until his death in 1955.
Within the bounds of such a remarkable career, one modest volume
might seem but another small feather in an extravagantly large cap.
Euripides and His Age was more than that. It was an account which
helped to liberate the most versatile of the Athenian tragedians from
the exclusive enclave of classical scholarship and place him in the
consciousness of those with no background in Greek and Latin. More
significantly, while still considering the plays within the context of their
own time, Murray made a powerful case for treating them as

1
Euripides and His Age is still a seminal assessment of the background to the playwright’s
career. Murray’s translations may have gone out of fashion and, indeed, seem at this remove
to merit the derision heaped upon them by critics from Edith Hamilton to T. S. Eliot to Peter
Green, but his insights into the classical world and its writers can be as cogent as ever.
2
Translator Richard West had anticipated a hostile reception from the audience at Drury
Lane, if not the ‘rout of vandals in the gallerie’ which put paid to his enterprise.

11
 EURIPIDES OUR CONTEMPORARY

performance, rather than simply literary, pieces. He may not have been
the first to attempt this, as the history of nineteenth-century scholarship
shows: he was the first to have much real understanding of the
requirements of the stage. Murray’s translations of the Greeks, comedy as
well as tragedy, are indeed dated, but he laid the foundation of all more
recent studies when he pronounced in his Presidential Address to the
Classical Association in January 1918 that, ‘The Scholar’s special duty is
to turn the written signs in which old poetry or philosophy is now
enshrined back into living thought or feeling. He must so understand as
to relive.’ For Murray, as E. R. Dodds wrote in his Introduction to Gilbert
Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography, ‘A play was first and foremost a
piece of theatre to be enjoyed and criticised as such, and only secondarily
a document to be analysed in the study.’1
Artists are a product of their own time, culture and environment.
Whatever case may be made for ignoring this in the novelist, to deny its
significance for the playwright reveals a serious confusion over how
drama functions. The extent to which that should affect an appreciation
of a play is more equivocal. The focus of this book is not on the Athens
in which Euripides lived and worked, but how and why he can ‘relive’, to
use Murray’s word, in today’s theatre. One factor is especially helpful in
this, if not always fully appreciated: the plays that the first audiences in
Athens witnessed in the Theatre of Dionysus did not offer, except
covertly, a picture of life in Euripides’ Athens. If theatre offered a mirror
to nature for the Athenians it was a distorting mirror and hence an
oblique one. The political systems on which the plays are structured are
hardly Athenian. It is this quality that Arrowsmith identified as
‘anachronization’. The notion of kingship in classical Athens had been
swept away with the removal of Hippias in 510 BC. The democracy that
took its place had its flaws, being based on slavery and on an exclusively
male participation in the decision-making process. It was nevertheless
more enlightened than anything in other Greek cities and, as George
McDonald Fraser wrote in a slightly different context, ‘You cannot, you
must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own
terms, if you are to have any inkling of it.’2
The aristocratic families survived in Athens and from time to time
made a bid for power, but that democracy was never seriously
undermined in Euripides’ lifetime. In tragedy, decisions are made by
kings, though they are frequently guided by, or sensibly take note of,
1
Smith and Toynbee, eds. (1960), p. 16. See also Stray (2007).
2
George McDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, first pb. London: HarperCollins,
2000, p. xxiv.

12
 PLAYMAKER AND IMAGE-BREAKER

public opinion as revealed in state assemblies. What Euripides’ own

political preferences were is hard to gauge, especially so when he resets
his regime according to each play. Individual characters may reveal
serious doubts on the influence of the rabble-rouser, but it is rash to look
for Euripides himself in his own characters.1 All that can be suggested
with any confidence is that he became more cynical about the nature of
heroes the longer he wrote, though telltale signs of such an attitude can
be found in all his surviving plays.
Murray chose to scrutinise Euripides’ life and work more or less
chronologically, insofar as that is possible. Properly, in a full study of
Euripides as a playwright, he considered the major political and social
changes of fifth-century BC Athens as influential on what Euripides
wrote. Most of Euripides’ work was produced when Athens was engaged
in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta which continued, if sporadically,
from 431 BC until 404 BC, two years after his death in Macedon where
he spent his last years at the court of King Archelaus. The gradual decline
that the war signalled for his home city seems reflected by a growing
disillusion in the playwright. Classical Athens was at the centre of an
intellectual ferment, matched by extraordinary developments in the arts,
art, architecture, sculpture, pottery, dance and music: and theatre in
which all these manifestations became crystallised. Euripides was a
dramatic and theatrical innovator. Of that we can be sure, if only through
the comedies of Aristophanes, where he is pilloried for his advanced
music, his realistic effects and stage mechanics, his situations and his
characters.
Aristophanes’ Frogs opens in the contemporary Athens of 405 BC,
after the death of both Euripides and Sophocles in the previous year. So
upset is Dionysus that he finds his way down to Hades to try and resurrect
Euripides without whom he, as god of the theatre, feels utterly desolate.
When he gets to Hades he discovers that Pluto, god of the underworld,
has instituted a competition between Euripides and Aeschylus who is
upset at finding his position as dramatist laureate threatened. Each will
be given the opportunity to extol his own virtues and criticise the
dramatic skills of his rival. Though distilled through the requirements of
a stage fantasy-comedy, Frogs proves to be an illuminating insight into
the working and dramatic structures of the two tragedians. It is the

1
Aristophanes exercises his comedian’s prerogative by using the sentiments of Euripides’
characters in his own comedies on a number of occasions. One of the more celebrated was
Hippolytus’ ‘It was my tongue that swore: my heart remained unsworn’ (Hippolytus,
l. 612), turned against the playwright by the stage Dionysus as an excuse for rejecting the
stage Euripides’ claims to victory in the dramatic contest with Aeschylus in Frogs (l. 1471).

13
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