About 409 B.C. Euripides left Athens, and after a residence in the Thessalian Magnesia repaired, on the invitation of King Archelaus, to the Macedonian court, where Greeks of distinction were always welcome. In his Archelaus Euripides celebrated that legendary son of Temenus, and head of the Temenid dynasty, who had founded Aegae; and in one of the meagre fragments he evidently alludes to the beneficent energy of his royal host in opening up the wild land of the North. It was at Pella, too, that Euripides composed or completed, and perhaps produced, the Bacchae. Jealous courtiers, we are told, contrived to have him attacked and killed by savage dogs. It is odd that the fate of Actaeon should be ascribed, by legend, to two distinguished Greek writers, Euripides and Lucian; though in the former case at least the fate has not such appropriateness as the Byzantine biographer discovers in the latter, on the ground that its victim “had waxed rabid against the truth.” The death of Euripides, whatever its manner, occurred in 406 B.C., when he was seventy-four. Sophocles followed him in a few months, but not before he had been able to honour the memory of his younger rival by causing his actors to appear with less than the full costume of the Dionysiac festival. Soon afterwards, in the Frogs, Aristophanes pronounced the epitaph of Attic comedy on Attic tragedy.
The historical interest of such a life as that of Euripides consists in the very fact that its external record is so scanty—that, unlike Aeschylus or Sophocles, he had no place in the public action of his time, but dwelt apart as a student and a thinker. He has made his Medea speak of those who, through following quiet paths, have incurred the reproach of apathy (ῥᾳθυμίαν). Undoubtedly enough of the old feeling for civic life remained to create a prejudice against one who held aloof from the affairs of the city. Quietness (ἀπραγμοσύνη), in this sense, was still regarded as akin to indolence (ἀργία). Yet here we see how truly Euripides was the precursor of that near future which, at Athens, saw the more complete divergence of society from the state.
In an age which is not yet ripe for reflection or for the subtle analysis of character, people are content to express in general types those primary facts of human nature which strike every one. Achilles will stand well enough for the young chivalrous warrior, Odysseus for the man of resource and endurance. In the case of the Greeks, these types had not merely an artistic and a moral interest; they had, further, a religious interest, because the Greeks believed that the epic heroes, sprung from the gods, were their own ancestors. Greek tragedy arose when the choral worship of Dionysus, the god of physical rapture, had engrafted upon it a dialogue between actors who represented some persons of the legends consecrated by this faith. The dramatist was accordingly obliged to refrain from multiplying those minute touches which, by individualizing the characters too highly, would detract from their general value as types in which all Hellenic humanity could recognize its own image glorified and raised a step nearer to the immortal gods. This necessity was further enforced by the existence of the chorus, the original element of the drama, and the very essence of its nature as an act of Dionysiac worship. Those utterances of the chorus, which to the modern sense are so often platitudes, were not so to the Greeks, just because the moral issues of tragedy were felt to have the same typical generality as these comments themselves.
An unerring instinct keeps both Aeschylus and Sophocles within the limits imposed by this law. Euripides was only fifteen years younger than Sophocles. But, when Euripides began to write, it must have been clear to any man of his genius and culture that, though an established prestige might be maintained, a new poet who sought to construct tragedy on the old basis would be building on sand. For, first, the popular religion itself—the very foundation of tragedy—had been undermined. Secondly, scepticism had begun to be busy with the legends which that religion consecrated. Neither gods nor heroes commanded all the old unquestioning faith. Lastly, an increasing number of the audience in the theatre began to be destitute of the training, musical and poetical, which had prepared an earlier generation to enjoy the chaste and placid grandeur of ideal tragedy.
Euripides made a splendid effort to maintain the place of tragedy in the spiritual life of Athens by modifying its interests in the sense which his own generation required. Could not the heroic persons still excite interest if they were made more real,—if, in them, the passions and sorrows of every-day life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness? And might not the less cultivated part of the audience at least enjoy a thrilling plot, especially if taken from the home-legends of Attica? Euripides became the virtual founder of the romantic drama. In so far as his work fails, the failure is one which probably no artistic tact could then have wholly avoided. The frame within which he had to work was one which could not be stretched to his plan. The chorus, the masks, the narrow stage, the conventional costumes, the slender opportunities for change of scenery, were so many fixed obstacles to the free development of tragedy in the new direction. But no man of his time could have broken free from these traditions; in attempting to do so he must have wrecked either his fame or his art. It is not the fault of Euripides if in so much of his work we feel the want of harmony between matter and form. Art abhors compromise; and it was the misfortune of Attic tragedy in his generation that nothing but a compromise could save it. Two devices have become common phrases of reproach against him—the prologue and the deus ex machina. Doubtless the prologue is a slipshod and sometimes ludicrous expedient. But the audiences of his days were far from being so well versed as their fathers in the mythic lore, and, on the other hand, a dramatist who wished to avoid trite themes had now to go into the byways of mythology. A prologue was often perhaps desirable or necessary for the instruction of the audience. As regards the deus ex machina, a distinction should be observed between those cases in which the solution is really mechanical, as in the Andromache and perhaps the Orestes, and those in which it is warranted or required by the plot, as in the Hippolytus and the Bacchae. The choral songs in Euripides, it may be granted, have often nothing to do with the action. But the chorus was the greatest of difficulties for a poet who was seeking to present drama of romantic tendency in the plastic form consecrated by tradition. So far from censuring Euripides on this score, we should be disposed to regard his management of the chorus as a signal proof of his genius, originality and skill.
Euripides is said to have written 92 dramas, including 8 satyr-plays. The best critics of antiquity allowed 75 as genuine. Nauck has collected 1117 Euripidean fragments. Among these, numbers 1092-1117 are doubtful or spurious; numbers Works. 842-1091 are from plays of uncertain title; numbers 1-841 represent fifty-five lost pieces, among which some of the best known are the Andromeda, Antiope,[1] Bellerophon, Cresphontes, Erechtheus, Oedipus, Phaëthon, and Telephus.
1. The Alcestis, as the didascaliae tell us, was brought out in Ol. 85. 2, i.e. at the Dionysia in the spring of 438 B.C., as the fourth play of a tetralogy comprising the Cretan Women, the Alcmaeon at Psophis, and the Telephus. The Alcestis is altogether removed from the character, essentially grotesque, of a mere satyric drama. On the other hand, it has features which distinctly separate it from a Greek tragedy of the normal type. First, the subject belongs to none of the great cycles, but to a byway of mythology, and involves such strange elements as the servitude of Apollo in a mortal household, the decree of the fates that Admetus must die on a fixed day, and the restoration of the dead Alcestis to life. Secondly, the treatment of the subject is romantic and even fantastic,—strikingly so in the passage where Apollo is directly confronted with the daemonic figure of Thanatos. Lastly, the boisterous, remorseful, and generous Heracles makes, not, indeed, a satyric drama, but a distinctly satyric scene—a scene which, in the frank original, hardly bears the subtle interpretation which in Balaustion is hinted by the genius of Browning, that Heracles got drunk in order to keep up other people’s spirits. When the happy ending is taken into account, it is not surprising that some should have called the Alcestis a tragi-comedy. But we cannot so regard it. The slight and purely incidental strain of comedy is but a moment of relief between the tragic sorrow and
- ↑ A considerable fragment of the Antiope was discovered in Egypt in the latter part of the 19th century; ed. J. P. Mahaffy in vol. viii. of the Cunningham Memoirs (Dublin, 1891); and quite recently fragments, probably from the Hypsipyle, the Phaëthon, and the Cretans (see Berliner Klassikertexte, v. 2, 1907).
