1. Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths (New York 1964) xviii.Google Scholar

2. On the issue of modernism and its range of various meanings, see, for example, the excellent discussion of Spears, Monroe K., Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth Century Poetry (Oxford 1970) 3–33Google Scholar. On ‘modernism’ in Euripides (of which the Orestes is an extreme example) see especially Arrowsmith, William, ‘A Greek Theater of Ideas,’ Arion 2 (1963) 32–56Google Scholar. On connections of the Orestes with the modern drama of the absurd, see Parry, Hugh, ‘ Euripides’ Orestes: the Quest for Salvation,’ TAPA 100 (1969) 337–53Google Scholar.

3. I use here the distinction drawn by Kermode, Frank, The Sense of An Ending (Oxford 1966) 39Google Scholar, although his polarities are far too simple. Myths are open to transformation and change, while fictions are often pervaded with mythic patterns.

4. The Phoenissae displays similar ambitions for the Theban saga, but the techniques used are less disruptive.

5. See especially the important study of Christian|Wolff, ‘Orestes,’ in Segal, E., ed., Euripides: A Collection of Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1968) 132–49Google Scholar, who best formulates the ironic balance in the play between tradition and innovation. See also the excellent analysis of the Oresteian echoes in Burnett, Ann, Catastrophe Survived (Oxford 1971) 205–22Google Scholar. For earlier treatments of literary allusions see Steiger, H., ‘Wie Entstand der Orestes des Euripides?,’ Progr. Augsburg (1898) 20Google Scholar ff., Krausse, O., De Euripide Aeschyli Instauratore (Jena 1905), Perotta, G., ‘Studi Euripidei II,’ Studi Ital. di Phil. Class. 6 (1928) 102Google Scholar ff., and Krieg, V., De Euripidis Oreste (Diss. Halle 1934Google Scholar). Other scholars who have made more recent contributions include Reinhardt, Karl, ‘Die Sinnekrise bei Euripides,’ Eranos Jahrbuch 26 (1958) 279–313Google Scholar [ = Tradition und Geist (Göttingen 1960) 227–56], Chapouthier, F., Euripide, Oreste, vol. 6., Coll. Budé (Paris 1959) 14–16Google Scholar, Greenberg, Nathan, ‘Euripides’ Orestes: An Interpretation,’ HSCP 66 (1962) 157–92Google Scholar, Rawson, Elizabeth, ‘Aspects of Euripides’ Orestes,’ Arethusa 5(1972) 155–67Google Scholar, Burkert, Walter,‘ Die Absurdität der Gewalt und das Ende der Tragödie: Euripides Orestes,’ Antike und Abendland 20 (1974) 97–109Google Scholar, and Erbse, H., ‘Zum ‘Orestes’ des Euripides,’ Hermes 103 (1975) 453–59.Google Scholar

6. Diller, H., ‘Umwelt und Masse als dramatische Faktoren,’ in Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique, vol. 6., Euripide (Fondation Hardt; Geneva 1958) 95Google Scholar, picked up by Steidle, Wolf, Studien zum Antiken Drama (Munich 1968) 109, n. 70 and 110, n. 81.Google Scholar See also Strohm, Hans, Euripides: Interpretationen zur dramatischen Form, Zetemata 15 (Munich 1957) 126Google Scholar, picked up by Arnott, Geoffrey, ‘Euripides and the Unexpected,’ Greece and Rome n.s. 20 (1973) 60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. The Proteus, the lost satyr play, that formed a pendant to the Oresteia, may well have been important to our drama, but we have no idea of its contents or its treatment.

8. Richard Gordon has now drawn my attention to Genette’s, G. piece, ‘Proust palimpseste’ in Figures 1 (Paris 1966) 39–67Google Scholar. His use of the term to describe the Proustian vision (‘ce palimpseste du temps et de l’espace, ces vues discordantes sans cesse contrariées et sans cesse rapprochées par un inlassable mouvement de dissociation douloureuse et de synthèse impossible,’ 51) is far more metaphorical than mine since I am speaking of the superpositions of literary texts and motifs. Yet Genette ends too by recommending to the reader to approach the work of Proust as a palimpsest ‘où se confondent et s’enchevêtrent plusieurs figures et plusieurs sens, toujours présents tous à la fois, et qui ne se laissent déhiffrer que tous ensemble, dans leur inextricable totalité’ (67).

9. See Burnett’s (above, note 5) remarks, 202, but I disagree with her interpretation that the bow is ‘a visible proof … of his [Apollo’s] readiness to aid this miserable Orestes’ and that his [Orestes’] relinquishment of it is a sign of ‘blind faithlessness’ (203).

10. The scholiast comments that a real bow was once used on stage but was later abandoned in favor of pantomimed action.

11. The Philoctetes too is a play whose praxis tends towards the negation of its mythos, namely, that Neoptolemus and Philoctetes might not go to Troy. But the device of Heracles as deus ex machina redirects the mythos to its fulfillment. Despite its ambiguities, it corroborates and rescues the heroic image. In the Orestes, on the other hand, the deus ex machina negates and overturns the praxis in its arbitrary confirmation of the mythos.

12. See Smith, Wesley, ‘Disease in Euripides’ Orestes,’ Hermes 95 (1967) 302–03.Google Scholar

13. Erbse (above, note 5) 443–45.

14. O’Brien, M. J., ‘Orestes and the Gorgon: Euripides’ Electra,’ AJP 85 (1964) 13–39.Google Scholar

15. Cf. the Ion where the Gorgon theme undergoes a more complex development in connection with the archetype of the murderous mother.

16. Hartman, Geoffrey, ‘Literary Criticism and its Discontents,’ Critical Inquiry 3 (1976) 276CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Hartman, Geoffrey, ‘History Writing as an Answerable Style,’ in R. Cohen, ed., New Directions in Literary History (Baltimore 1974) 95–105Google Scholar. He is speaking of our modern predicament, but with a suitable reduction in scale, his formulations are adaptable to the age of Euripidean theater. In fact, what he says of one aspect of our current history is precisely applicable to the literary play, the Orestes: ‘There is no “mystery of form” [Emerson’s phrase] when forms lose their representativeness or mediational virtue: when men, distorting rather than exploring art’s common-wealth, its link with an interpretable fund of roles, fall back on narrow concepts of manliness and reenact those tragedies of revenge which society was founded to control’ (100).

18. An examination of the Orestes from this point of view would require separate and lengthy treatment. The whole play can, on one level, be read as an inquiry into the breakdown of language, speech, semantics, and communication signalled from the beginning by Tantalus’ punishment for his unbridled tongue (akolaston glōssan, 10). The major symbol of this process is the Phrygian slave’s rendition of Greek as he plays the role of the messenger (see Wolff’s [above, note 5] analysis, 140–42). The deconstructive impulse is manifested in other ways as well. Things may not be as one says they are (hōs legousi used three times in Electra’s prologue as a commentary on the mythical history of the house). Things are what one says they are (the perversion of vital social words like dikē, the dissonance of heroic vocabulary in the latter part of the play). Rhetoric is translated into action, wish fulfillment into reality (see p. 27 and n. 44 below). Things are and are not what one says they are (hypocrisy, self contradiction). (On Orestes’ double-speak, see also Burnett [above, note 5] 216, n. 12). To these larger rubrics add the pervasive technique of literary allusiveness which self-consciously transposes, distorts, and perverts language.

19. ‘Only the Orestes makes outright failure its subject, imitating it with a series of actions that one after another go astray or simply disintegrate.’ Burnett (above, note 5) 184. See her whole analysis, 183–95.

20. States, Bert, Irony and Drama: A Poetics (Ithaca, N. Y. and London 1971) 119.Google Scholar

21. Burnett (above, note 5) 208.

22. Perotta (above, note 5) 102 ff. draws attention to the repetition of ‘matricide’ in the assault on Helen, but the theme is more fully developed in Greenberg (above, note 5) 160, 184, 186, and passim. This parallelism of action forms the basis of his entire interpretation.

23. The scene recalls too Sophocles’ Electra with Hermione now taking the role of the sister Chrysothemis as bearer of libations from mother and foil to Electra.

24. Burnett (above, note 5) 210–11.

25. Burnett (above, note 5) 216, n. 11.

26. With one exception, sacrificial language is applied to all the family murders or threats of murder alluded to in this play: the literal sacrifice of Iphigenia (658–59), the murder of Thyestes’ children (814–18 cf. 1107–10), and that of Clytemnestra (842–13; 291; cf. 1236, 562–63). The attempt on Helen at the hearth of the house (1284–85; cf. 1107; 1493–94) even includes the gesture of pulling back the neck of the victim for the fatal blow (1471–73; cf. 1513) and Menelaus himself in his lament over her uses the same technical term (sphagiori) as the other characters (1614). Hermione too is drawn into the same semantic sphere (1199, cf. 1193–94, 1596; 1345–56, 1349–50, 1575, 1671). Orestes terms his Furies priestesses of the underworld who are ready to kill him (260–61) and in the oddest metaphorical use of all, Electra claims that Apollo has sacrificed (exethyse) them as vengeance for the matricide (191–93). In the Agamemnon, it was Clytemnestra who used sacrifical imagery for the slaying of her husband (see Zeitlin, F. I., ‘The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia,’ TAPA 96 [1965] 463–508Google Scholar). Here in the Orestes his death is the only one that is not imaged in these terms, a fact that increases the dissonance of their language even as they overecho and almost parody Clytemnestra’s Aeschylean terminology.

27. For Orestes, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia was only further proof of the debt Menelaus owed to his brother and surviving children; he will not demand exact reparation: Menelaus need not kill Hermione (658–59), he declares, in wonderful ironic innocence of the act he will shortly agree to perform. That repetition will, in fact, apply not only to the obvious parallel between Hermione and Iphigenia, but it will be reduplicated in the attack upon Helen who will disappear at the crucial moment as in the variant version of the myth of Iphigenia (used before by Euripides in the Iphigenia in Tauris and soon to be used again in the Iphigenia inAulis). Burnett (above, note 5) 199–200, n. 15, comments that ‘both Helen and Hermione are … associated with Iphigenia as being likewise innocent victims, for the poet calls them skymnoi (1387; 1493; cf. Agam. 141–43 of Artemis and her love of young animals, i.e., Iphigenia).’

28. Beye, Charles, Ancient Greek Literature and Society (New York 1975) 295–96Google Scholar, goes still further: ‘Orestes’ defense before the people of Argos turns on the symbolic value of his act (565 ff.), really his worth as living theater and symbol. His very act of defense is indeed theater. Pylades’ arguments for murdering Helen (1132–34) … reinforce the idea of Orestes as emblematic. And ironically … Orestes is the first significant paradigmatic figure in extant Greek tragedy.’

29. ‘His [Euripides’] Medea left a deep and lasting impression in the minds of his Athenian audience; comic parodies, literary imitations and representations in the visual arts reflect its immediate impact …’ Knox, Bernard, ‘The “Medea” of Euripides,’ in Greek Tragedy, YCS 25 (1977) 193Google Scholar and notes 2, 3, 4.

30. See Reckford’s, Kenneth excellent essay, ‘Medea’s First Exit,’ TAPA 99 (1968) 329–59.Google Scholar

31. Strictly speaking, the body Menelaus demands is that of Helen, while he has hopes of saving his daughter. But in each case there is a request for the corpse in order to give it burial that will not be granted (Or. 1585, cf. 1564–65; Med. 1377, cf. 1402–03). Both scenes begin with a command to open the doors of the house and that too is refused (Or. 1560–61, 1567–68; Med. 1314–16). Arnott (above, n. 6) 59–60 also remarks on the parallelism of the theatrical device in both plays that misleads the audience by first drawing their attention to the doors in the usual anticipation of witnessing the results of an act of violence and then raises their eyes upward to the unexpected appearance of the character on the roof. But Arnott attributes the same shock value to the repetition in the Orestes on the grounds that twenty years later ‘memories of its original impact would have faded enough for its effective exploitation,’ while my point, of course, is precisely the opposite.

32. An inversion too of Euripides’ other Helen in the play of that name in which the malevolent phantom disappears and the rightful innocent Helen is restored. Here the guilty real Helen is absolved and katasterized as a reward.

33. On the heroic vocabulary used in the intrigue scene, see Reinhardt (above, n. 5) 252, Burkert (above, n. 5) 102.

34. ‘The Helen of the prologue is a figure that repeats that of Orestes. Both are tools the gods seem to have laid aside, and both in consequence are unpopular among mortals, etc’ Burnett (above, n. 5) 201. Beyond the obvious affinities between Electra and Orestes, marked by the emphasis on their devotion to one another, there are also structural similarities: each meets the collateral family member, female confronts female and male male. Smith (above, n. 12) 302 notes that ‘Helen and Menelaus produce the same effect on the children and as Menelaus exits, Orestes ridicules him behind his back as Electra does to Helen (125 ff. 717 ff.).’ In still more general terms, it is the old, the very young and the women who find themselves in situations of ‘no exit’ like Orestes.

35. ‘This brief scene recapitulates the play. Orestes plays viciously at an indecision with which he is himself really afflicted. The slave in turn is a distorted reflection of the Orestes who had cried out for his life (644 ff., 677 ff.), and whatever pathos those cries had expressed is now grotesque ridicule. And the cause of that ridicule is Orestes himself. He taunts the slave, dangling the lure of life before him, as he himself has been taunted, bedeviled, and harassed — by circumstances, gods, men, and the impulses of his own mind. Orestes in his dejection had said to Menelaus that “we are enslaved to the gods, whatever the gods are” (418). He now acts out divine arbitrariness upon another slave, his image.’ Wolff (above, n. 5) 137. See also Parry (above, n. 2) 345. The Phrygian slave is also the doublet of Electra. Each has an unusual monody framed by choral passages, itself astrophic (1369–1502; 982–1012). Each is faced with imminent death, one by the decree of the assembly, the other by the violent pursuit of Orestes. Each yearns for escape to the upper air (1376–77; 982–83). The sea-air dichotomy is maintained, although in a different way (1377–79; 990–94), etc. See also Biehl, Werner, Euripides: Orestes (Berlin 1965) 150Google Scholar, but he sees the two as antithetical rather than parallel.

36. The farmer, of course, recalls the setting of the Electra. There Orestes has come to win the crown for slaying Aegisthus (614; cf. 581, 591, 675). On the importance of the kallinikos and the crown, see Zeitlin, F. I., ‘The Argive Festival of Hera and Euripides’ Electra,’ TAPA 101 (1970) 656–57Google Scholar.

37. On the symbolic value of impotence in another example of anomic literature, see Arrowsmith, William, ‘Luxury and Death in the Satyricon,’ Arion 5 (1966) 309Google Scholar, and Zeitlin, F. I., ‘Petronius as Paradox: Anarchy and Artistic Integrity,’ TAPA 102 (1971) 673.Google Scholar The latter article makes some general comparisons between Petronius and Euripides, 678–80.

38. Lichtenstein, Heinz, ‘Identity and Sexuality,’ Journal of the American Psycho-analytical Association 9 (1961) 235Google ScholarPubMed. See also Caldwell, Richard, ‘Primal Identity,’ International Review of Psycho-analysis 3 (1976) 417–18.Google Scholar

39. The maintenance of identity through repetition of real or symbolic action is a characteristic feature Of the economy of tragic representation. Cf, for example, Agamemnon’s trampling on the sacra of Troy and his treading on the carpet before the palace in Argos, Oedipus’ repeated role as riddle solver and interpreter of oracles and his double trespass on forbidden female territory, once through incest and once in the grove of the Erinyes, and Medea’s career as a user of children as destructive instruments against fathers. Orestes’ mythic role, however, does not span a lifetime of events but is normally centered around the single non-repeatable act of matricide.

40. From another point of view, I agree with Burnett’s (above, n. 5) assessment that ‘Helen is … the exact opposite of her father Tyndareus, who argues, like Creon, that principles must override the ties of blood,’ while she displays ‘sisterly devotion’ and ‘thoughtless familial sympathy’ (200–01).

41. N. Wedd, The Orestes of Euripides (Cambridge 1895), Introduction xxvii, remarks ‘that Talthybius, whom he [Euripides] represents as leading the attack on Orestes, was not only regarded by a general tradition as having rescued him at the time of his father’s murder, but was in all probability represented by Stesichorus as actually helping him in the murder of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.’ If these resonances are alive in the play, Talthybius might serve as still another surrogate father figure who fails him.

42. Grube, George, The Drama of Euripides (London 1941) 384.Google Scholar

43. Reinhardt (above, n. 5) 245–47. See also Wolff (above, n. 5) 143. The best that can be said for Tyndareus is that he himself is unaware of his hypocrisies, of the feebleness of his arguments, and his own inconsistencies. In this reading, the spokesman for society has not succeeded in grasping its principles beyond the most superficial level of mechanical enunciation. But his rage at Orestes seems to me to suggest a more conscious corruption.

44. On the negative portrait of Helen in Euripidean drama, see the collection of the evidence and the discussion of Vellacott, P., Ironic Drama: A Study of Euripides’ Method and Meaning (Cambridge 1975) 127–52Google Scholar. Helen in the Orestes still arouses strong and contradictory reactions from her literary critics. The pendulum swings widely from one extreme to the other — from Vellacott’s view that ‘the killing of Helen is the destruction of gentleness, warmth, and beauty, experienced by a people [the Athenians] who have suffered and inflicted a generation of ferocious war,’ 73, to Erbe’s (above, n. 5) equally astounding justification of the murder of Helen on the grounds of her guilt and of the imperatives of the heroic code, 445–47. Burnett (above, n. 5) gives the best assessment of her positive and negative characteristics, 199–201. The motif of longing for escape through ascent is actually very prominent in this play which is not surprising in view of the claustrophobic environment of the city. Electra feels herself already bound up with her race sprung of nobility and wishes to fly to the rock of Tantalus (982 ff.). The Phrygian slave also yearns to fly into the sky (1373–74). But these adynata, whose element of fantasy is even more conspicous in the realistic world of the polis (cf, 1593), ironically find their fulfillment in Helen’s miraculous deliverance (1498, 1580, 1631, 1633, 1636).

45. The Electra is particularly relevant to this theme. There the young man in search of an adequate male image is beset on the one hand by Electra’s fantasies and inflated ideas of masculinity (the recognition scene, often read only as a parody of Aeschylus, makes clear her denial that she could ever fill Orestes’ shoes; her speech over the dead Aegisthus is equally instructive) and, on the other hand, by a trivialized model — that of the standard war hero and of the athletic victor in the games. The identity Orestes assumes, that of a Thessalian, makes him a master butcher, and his putative destination, Olympia, suggests an athletic context which the later references to kallinikoi confirm. Yet earlier he expressed only scorn for displays of physical prowess in athletics (386–90) and he yearns, like other Euripidean characters, for an objective touchstone by which to judge his fellow men (367–77).

46. Mitscherlich, Alexander, Society Without the Father (New York 1970) 14Google Scholar, 285, 53, 82, 186, 49, 300–01, and passim.

47. A cult of Artemis/Iphigenia in Taurus can be attested, but it is generally accepted that the rescue plot was Euripides’ own invention. For discussion see Burnett (above n. 5) 73–75.

48. See, e.g., Neumann, Erich, The Origins of Human Consciousness (Princeton 1954) 195–219Google Scholar, on the pattern of the captive and the treasure. (Even the dragon combat motif which comprises the first act of this scenario is present in the I. T. through the choral ode on Apollo’s slaying of the Pytho [I. T. 1235–82]). See also Guépin, J-P, The Tragic Paradox (Amsterdam 1968) 120–46Google Scholar, on the specifically Greek material — the ‘Kore Drama’ and the ‘Theft of the Palladium,’ especially in relation to the Iphigenia in Tauris.

49. Oddly enough, no one seems to have noticed this crucial symmetry.

50. On the various correspondences in plot and themes between the I.T. and the siblings’ earlier experiences, see Christian Wolff, Aspects of the Later Plays of Euripides, unpublished diss, Harvard University, 1965, 90–107, Burnett (above, n. 5) 47–75, Caldwell, Richard, ‘Tragedy Romanticized: the Iphigenia Taurica,’ CJ (1974) 23–40Google Scholar, and Sansone, David, ‘The Sacrifice Motif in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris,’ TAPA 105 (1975) 283–95.Google Scholar

51. See especially Wolff (above, n. 50) 94, and Sansone (above, n. 50) 286, 287, who notes that ‘what Orestes undergoes in the land of the Taurians is, in effect, a ritual reenactment of his sister’s fate at Aulis;’ … it is ‘not merely an aition but a paradigm.’

52. Guēpin (above, n. 48) 123–33.

53. ‘A purely human and spontaneous sacrifice is offered within the framework of the irrational and necessary ritual one … The ritual has been a test of human character, and once passed, it can be put to other use … It suggested the deception and limitation of human knowledge. It underlined, as it required, a capacity for sacrifice. Having shown themselves capable of sacrifice, finally, the actors themselves, as though having understood the ritual, make of it an instrument of deception and their salvation.’ Wolff (above, n. 50) 101–02.

54. Greenberg (above, n. 5) 183.

55. It is tempting here to see a conflation of the two females in Hecuba: Polyxena and her voluntary sacrifice, Hecuba and her project of revenge (again directed in part towards the progeny of the offender who has betrayed his duty towards a child to whom, as xenos, he stands in the fictive relationship of kin). Only in the Phoenissae does Euripides give the sacrifical role to a young male in an act of the poet’s own invention, but he is there clearly adapting the typical female gesture for the specific purposes of the play.

56. On the theatrical effects of the ambiguity surrounding Helen’s supposed death, see Arnott (above, n. 6) 56–59 and B. Gredley, ‘Is Orestes 1503–36 an Interpolation?,’ GRBS 9 (1968) 415–19, both of whom, in the interests of maintaining a consistent mystification as to Helen’s fate, would excise 1503–36 as an interpolation, thereby losing the most significant moments of the encounter between Orestes and the Phrygian slave. Moreover, the juxtaposition and even alternation of two conflicting versions of Helen’s end promotes a confusion that is equally essential to Euripidean dramaturgy (cf., e.g., the device of double fathers in the Heracles and the Ion).

57. Kiremidjian, David, ‘The Aesthetics of Parody,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (1970) 238Google Scholar, 239, 240. (I have slightly rearranged the order of the quotations).

58. States (above, n. 20) 126–27.

59. States (above, n. 20) 130.

60. ‘The fulfillment of form is, paradoxically, also its exhaustion and limit: an acknowledgment, namely, that it is these objects and these alone that the form will accommodate. Ultimately, the objects victimize the form, stamp it, as it were, with fixed associations, and remove it from legitimate artistic circulation. This is another way in which art shows its relation to nature, in the same way that Aristotle acknowledges it when he establishes the object of imitation as one of the distinctive marks of the genres themselves.’ Kiremidjian (above, n. 57) 240.

61. Cf. also Beye (above, n. 28) 296 who suggests that the house is ‘the incarnation of the myth of the House of Atreus, more still the symbol of the myth.’

62. Hourmouziades, N. C., Production and Imagination in Euripides (Athens 1965) 168Google Scholar (echoed by Webster, T. B. L., ‘Euripides: Traditionalist and Innovator,’ in Allen, D. C. and Rowell, H. T., eds., The Poetic Tradition [Baltimore 1968] 29Google Scholar, and Arnott [above, n. 6] 60) remarks that at the end of the Orestes ‘the arrangement of persons is unique in that all the possible levels of performance are exploited to the full: the chorus are in the orchestra, Menelaus on the logeion, Orestes, Pylades, and Hermione on the roof, Apollo and Helen in the air.’ Apollo’s appearance above Orestes signals, of course, the reestablishment of the hierarchical distinction between men and gods (as also between author and actor), but the visual effect of the multi-level presentation might also serve as the perfect spatial analogue to the palimpsestic text.

63. Smith (above, n. 12) 307. Theparrhēsia might well be related to the akolaston glōssan of Tantalus, that most shameful disease (aischistēn noson, 10), and to the demagogue in the assembly who speaks with a brutish parrhēsia that is athyroglōssos (903–05; literally, possessed of a tongue without a door), and might well serve as an emblem of the general logorrhea which afflicts this play, one of the longest in Greek tragedy. Burnett (above, n. 5) 184, 185–86, points to the unusual length of the introductory material and to the ‘monumental scene of confrontation and persuasion’ which is 450 lines long, almost double those in the Heracleidae and the Suppliants (of Euripides).

64. E.g., romance, pastoral, new comedy, mime, melodrama, and satyr play. See, for example, Burnett (above, n. 5) on satyr play elements in the I. T., Knox, Bernard, ‘Euripidean Comedy,’ in Cheuse, A. and Koffler, R., eds., The Rarer Action (New Brunswick, New Jersey 1970) 68–96Google Scholar, and Arrowsmith (above, n. 2) on the mixture of genres.

65. Fowler, Alistair, ‘The Life and Death of Literary Forms,’ in Cohen, R., ed., New Directions in Literary History (Baltimore 1974) 92.Google Scholar

66. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at a conference, Directions in Euripidean Criticism, which took place at Duke University, March 1977. A later version served as the first Procope Costas Memorial Lecture at Brooklyn College, May 1977.