The Bacchae was always an exceptionally popular play—partly because its opportunities as a spectacle fitted it for gorgeous representation, and so recommended it for performance at courts and on great public occasions. “Demetrius the Cynic” (says Lucian, Adv. Indoctum, 19) “saw an illiterate person at Corinth reading a very beautiful poem—the Bacchae of Euripides, I think it was; he was at the place where the messenger narrates the doom of Pentheus and the deed of Agave. Demetrius snatched the book from him and tore it up, saying, ‘It is better for Pentheus to be torn up at once by me than to be mangled over and over again by you.’ ”
18. The Cyclops, of uncertain date, is the only extant example of a satyric drama. The plot is taken mainly from the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus in the 9th book of the Odyssey. In order to be really successful in farce of this kind, a poet should have a fresh feeling for the nature of the art parodied. It is because Euripides was not in accord with the spirit of the heroic myths that he is not strong in mythic travesty. His own tragedies—such as the Helen, the Electra and the Orestes—had, in their several ways, contributed to destroy the meaning of satyric drama. They had done gravely very much what satyric drama aimed at doing grotesquely. They had made the heroic persons act and talk like ordinary men and women. The finer side of such parody had lost its edge; only broad comedy remained.
19. The Rhesus is still held by some to be what the didascaliae and the grammarians call it—a work of Euripides; and Paley has ably supported this view. But the scepticism first declared by Valcknaer has gained ground, and the Rhesus is now almost universally recognized as spurious. The art and the style, still more evidently the feeling and the mind, of Euripides are absent. If it cannot be ascribed to a disciple of his matured school, it is still less like the work of an Alexandrian. The most probable view seems to be that which assigns it to a versifier of small dramatic power in the latest days of Attic tragedy. It has this literary interest, that it is the only extant play of which the subject is directly taken from our Iliad, of which the tenth book—the Δολώνεια—has been followed by the playwright with a closeness which is sometimes mechanical.
When the first protests of the comic poets were over, Euripides was secure of a wide and lasting renown. As the old life of Athens passed away, as the old faiths lost their meaning and the peculiarly Greek instincts in art lost their truth and freshness, Aeschylus and Sophocles might Literary history
of Euripides.cease to be fully enjoyed save by a few; but Euripides could still charm by qualities more readily and more universally recognized. The comparative nearness of his diction to the idiom of ordinary life rendered him less attractive to the grammarians of Alexandria than authors whose erudite form afforded a better scope for the display of learning or the exercise of ingenuity. But there were two aspects in which he engaged their attention. They loved to trace the variations which he had introduced into the standard legends. And they sought to free his text from the numerous interpolations which even then had resulted from his popularity on the stage. Philochorus (about 306–260 B.C.), best known for his Atthis, dealt, in his treatise on Euripides, especially with the mythology of the plays. From 300 B.C. to the age of Augustus a long series of critics busied themselves with this poet. The first systematic arrangement of his reputed works is ascribed to Dicaearchus and Callimachus in the early part of the 3rd century B.C. Among those who furthered the exact study of his text, and of whose work some traces remain in the extant scholia, were Aristophanes of Byzantium, Callistratus, Apollodorus of Tarsus, Timachidas, and pre-eminently Didymus; probably also Crates of Pergamum and Aristarchus. At Rome Euripides was early made known through the translations of Ennius and the freer adaptations of Pacuvius. When Hellenic civilization was spread through the East, the mixed populations of the new settlements welcomed a dramatic poet whose taste and whose sentiment were not too severely or exclusively Attic. The Parthian Orodes and his court were witnessing the Bacchae of Euripides when the Agave of the hour was suddenly enabled to lend a ghastly reality to the terrible scene of frenzied triumph by displaying the gory head of the Roman Crassus. Mommsen has noted the moment as one in which the power of Rome and the genius of Greece were simultaneously abased in the presence of sultanism. So far as Euripides is concerned, the incident may suggest another and a more pleasing reflection; it may remind us how the charm of his humane genius had penetrated the recesses of the barbarian East, and had brought to rude and fierce peoples at least some dim and distant apprehension of that gracious world in which the great spirits of ancient Hellas had moved. A quaintly significant testimony to the popularity of Euripides is afforded by the Byzantine Χριστὸς πάσχων. This drama, narrating the events which preceded and attended the Passion, is a cento of no less than 2610 verses, taken from the plays of Euripides, principally from the Bacchae, the Troades and the Rhesus. The traditional ascription of the authorship to Gregory of Nazianzus is now generally rejected; another conjecture assigns it to Apollinaris of Laodicea, and places the date of composition at about A.D. 330.[1] Although the text used by the author of the cento may not have been a good one, the value of the piece for the diplomatic criticism of Euripides is necessarily very considerable; and it was diligently used both by Valcknaer and by Porson.
Dante, who does not mention Aeschylus or Sophocles, places Euripides, with the tragic poets Antiphon and Agathon, and the lyrist Simonides, in the first circle of Purgatory (xxii. 106), among those
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Casaubon, in a letter to Scaliger, salutes that scholar as worthy to have lived at Athens with Aristophanes and Euripides—a compliment which certainly implies respect for his correspondent’s powers as a peacemaker. In popular literature, too, where Aeschylus and Sophocles were as yet little known, the 16th and 17th centuries testify to the favour bestowed upon Euripides. G. Gascoigne’s and Francis Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta, played at Gray’s Inn in 1566, is a literal translation of Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta, which derives from the Phoenissae, probably through the Latin translation of R. Winter (Basel, 1541). Among early French translations from Euripides may be mentioned the version of the Iphigenia in Tauris by Thomas Sibilet in 1549, and that of the Hecuba by Bouchetel in 1550. About a century later Racine gave the world his Andromaque, his Iphigénie and his Phèdre; and many have held that, at least in the last-named of these, “the disciple of Euripides” has excelled his master. Bernhardy notices that the performance of the Hippolytus at Berlin in 1851 seemed to show that, for the modern stage, the Phèdre has the advantage of its Greek original. Racine’s great English contemporary seems to have known and to have liked Euripides better than the other Greek tragedians. In the Reason of Church Government Milton certainly speaks of “those dramatic constitutions in which Sophocles and Euripides reign”; in the preface to his own drama, again, he joins the names of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,—“the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any.” But the Samson Agonistes itself clearly shows that Milton’s chief model in this kind was the dramatist whom he himself has called—as if to suggest the skill of Euripides in the delineation of pathetic women—“sad Electra’s poet”; and the work bears a special mark of this preference in the use of Euripidean monodies. In the second half of the 18th century such men as J. J. Winckelmann (1717–1768) and G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) gave a new life to the study of the antique. Hitherto the art of the old world had been better known through Roman than through Greek interpreters. The basis of the revived classical taste had been Latin. But now men gained a finer perception of those characteristics which belong to the Greek work of the great time, a fuller sense of the difference between the Greek and the Roman genius where each is at its best, and generally a clearer recognition of the qualities which distinguish ancient art in its highest purity from modern romantic types. Euripides now became the object of criticism from a new point of view. He was compared with Aeschylus and Sophocles as representatives of that ideal Greek tragedy which ranges with the purest type of sculpture. Thus tried, he was found wanting; and he was condemned with all the rigour of a newly illuminated zeal. B. G. Niebuhr (1776–1831) judged him harshly; but no critic approached A. W. Schlegel (1767–1845) in severity of one-sided censure. Schlegel, in fact, will scarcely allow that Euripides is tolerable except by comparison with Racine. L. Tieck (1773–1853) showed truer appreciation for a brother artist when he
- ↑ (According to Karl Krumbacher, Gesch. der byz. Lit., it is an 11th-century production of unknown authorship.)
