Born about 480
B.C., somewhere in the vicinity of Athens, Euripides, the son
of Mnesarchides, was destined from the beginning to be a misunderstood
poet. He presented his first set of tragedies at the Great Dionysia
in 455 B.C., but did not win his first victory until 441. In
fact, he won only five awards--and the fifth of these was not
awarded until after his death. This lack of recognition might
seem a bit odd when one considers that Euripides wrote about
92 plays and was compared, even during his lifetime, to the likes
of Aeschylus and Sophocles. But Euripides was ignored by the
judges of the Greek festival because he did not cater to the
the fancies of the Athenian crowd. He did not approve of their
superstitions and refused to condone their moral hypocrisy. He
was a pacifist, a free thinker, and a humanitarian in an age
when such qualities were increasingly overshadowed by intolerance
and violence. Perhaps that is why he chose to live much of his
life alone with his books in a cave on the island of Salamis.
Euripides was exposed early to the religion he would so stubbornly
question as an adult. As a child, he served as cup-bearer to
the guild of dancers who performed at the altar of Apollo. The
son of an influential family, he was also exposed to the great
thinkers of the day--including Anaxagoras, the Ionian philosopher
who maintained that the sun was not a golden chariot steered
across the sky by some elusive god, but rather a fiery mass of
earth or stone. The radical philosopher had a profound effect
on the young poet, and left with him a passionate love of truth
and a curious, questioning spirit.
Always a lover of truth, Euripides forced his characters to
confront personal issues, not just questions of State. In many
ways, he is the forerunner of the modern psychological dramatist.
In Hippolytus and The
Bacchae, he explores the psyche of men attempting to
deny a natural life-force such as sexuality or emotional release.
In another timeless classic, Medea,
he takes a penetrating look at the frenzied jealousy of a woman
who has lost the interest of her middle-aged husband. Perhaps
his finest contribution to world drama, however, was the introduction
of the common man to the stage. Even his traditional nobles such
as Agamemnon and Menelaus were anti-heroic, almost as if he wanted
to show the Athenian people what their beloved military heroes
were really like.
Although many of Euripides' plays dealt with personal issues,
he did not shy away from the social issues of the time. His Trojan
Women was written in response to an Athenian expedition in
416 B.C. which destroyed the city of Melos and slaughtered its
men. As the play begins, Troy has fallen, its men have been murdered,
its shrines desecrated, and its women bound and enslaved. Ten
years earlier, he had written another stinging indictment of
war in Hecuba which documents the cruelty of Greek warriors
who enslave the Trojan queen and sacrifice her daughter at the
tomb of Achilles.
However, while Euripides was busy exposing the evils of his
society, others were having a good laugh at his expense. The
strange, secluded little man was an easy target, and thus was
the continual butt of the comic poets, especially Aristophanes.
Meanwhile, the playwright's life was beginning to fall apart
around him. It was public knowledge that his wife had cuckolded
him. One by one, his closest friends were banished and murdered
by the State for their liberal views. The only thing that saved
Euripides from the same fate was the fact that it was his characters
who spoke heresy, not he. In the end, however, he was finally
tried for impiety and left Athens in a cloud of controversy.
Although he found a temporary respite at the court of King Archelaus
in Macedonia, he could not escape the Fates. In less than eighteen
months, the tragic playwright was torn to pieces by the King's
hounds in a tragic accident.
Euripides' outlook was not a cheerful one. He insisted on
emphasizing the uncertanties of life and the fact that "many
things we thought could never be, yet the gods contrive."
His final play, Iphigenia at Aulis, an attack on superstition
and cowardice, tells the story of Agamemnon's unfortunate daughter
Iphigenia who was lured to the Greek camp under the pretext of
marrying the hero Achilles only to find that, instead, she was
to be sacrificed by her father and his fleet in order to appease
Not all of Euripides plays, however, are so heavy. The
Cyclops, the only complete satyr play in existence, was written
early in Euripides' career and exudes the hopeful spirit of a
young poet. It is a grotesquely funny account of Odysseus' encounter
with the one-eyed cannibal Polyphemus. And although this spirit
of hopefulness is difficult to perceive in many of Euripides'
later plays, it never entirely disappears. A few of his dramas,
such as Helena, come surprisingly close to being comedies
of character. Even in The Bacchae, he mixes comedy with
the tragic form as Dionysus coaxes Pentheus into women's garments.
Thus, by dissolving the rigid structure of tragedy, Euripides
opened the door for new forms of drama, as well as hybrids of