In some fourth-century tragedies the choral parts had apparently become mere interludes dividing the “acts” (eventually the canonical “five acts”) in which the named characters performed their scenes without any interaction with a chorus, and such unrelated songs or embolima (as Aristotle termed them) had, so far as we know, no relation in content to the actors' scenes. Aristotle ascribed the origin of this practice to the poet Agathon, who was active from about 420 to 399. Embolima, according to the same evidence in the Poetics, were unknown in the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. Nevertheless, there is evidence in both authors for the gradual reduction of the importance of the chorus, indicated by the smaller proportion of their lines to the total length of the drama, their subordination to particular characters, and other features such as the expansion of actors' songs. Despite this trend, the chorus was still for them an essential part of the performance and of the generation of meaning, as it had been from the conjectured beginnings of the genre. Under the influence of a different remark by Aristotle and some comments in the scholia, Euripides' choral technique has usually been viewed as one aspect of decline from the “true” tragedy of Sophocles, and indeed as preparing the way for the embolimon by admitting a distinct looseness of connection and relevance in the content of his choral songs.

PRE-MODERN RECEPTION

Modern reception and interpretation of the major authors and literary texts of ancient Greece are heavily conditioned, and often distorted, by the long history of anecdote, criticism, pedagogy, and scholarship that has accreted around them, and there are few authors to whom this applies more forcefully than to Euripides. It is indispensable, therefore, as a preliminary step in approaching the works of Euripides, to take account of the long tradition of reception and judgment to which the plays have been subjected. Such an accounting will reveal several important potentialities inherent in his dramas as well as the agendas and preferences of the various readers and audiences, and it ought to help us move beyond some of the commonplaces that continue to influence the appreciation of his work.

A thorough treatment of the reception of Euripides would require a whole volume to itself. For the purposes of this book, some highlights will have to suffice. We may begin with the earliest stages of that reception, those from antiquity, which have had the longest span of direct and indirect influence: the judgments about Euripides' themes and styles conveyed in comic form in the plays of Aristophanes; the strictures on his dramatic technique that emerge as obiter dicta in Aristotle's Poetics; the biographical tradition about the poet himself; and the scholia and prefatory material transmitted with select plays in the medieval tradition of the extant plays.

In previous chapters, we have seen how various techniques and patterns related to structural strategies, the chorus, the gods, and rhetorical speeches serve to draw the audience of Euripidean drama into a dynamic process of inference and interpretation, frequently resulting in reversals of sympathy or destabilization of judgment, inviting exploration of routine assumptions and recognition of complexity and indeterminacy. The representations of women in Euripidean tragedy also contribute to this process in an important way. Women in tragedy have been a fruitful topic for research in recent decades because of the strong impetus toward greater equality of the sexes in Western societies as well as because of the significant shifts in the faculties and student bodies of academic institutions and in the critical theories prevalent in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, this interest is not merely a sign of our own concerns in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Greek culture in general was frequently self-analytic and produced many normative statements on the roles of the sexes as well as on other matters of social and political organization. Euripidean plays in particular (both surviving and lost) contain a greater number of major female roles, they more frequently explore domestic and personal themes, and they show a pervasive engagement with contemporary intellectual trends, among which was the provocative analysis of nature and culture and the questioning of accepted norms, including those pertaining to gender.

GENRE: EXPECTATIONS, VARIETY, AND CHANGE

From the humorous perspective of Aristophanes' Frogs, a critic might say that Euripides changed tragedy in various ways: among them, he put tragedy on a diet (939–44), democratized tragedy (948–51), eroticized tragedy (849–50, 1043–51, 1078–81, 1301–2, 1327–8), feminized tragedy (949–50, 1043–52), trivialized tragedy (976–91, 1203, 1331–63), rhetoricized tragedy (841, 892, 954, 1069–71, 1084–6), sophisticized tragedy (892–4, 1471–8, 1491–9). These claims address the ways that Euripides stretched and deformed traditional aspects of language, tone, structure, and content in the tragic genre, and these aspects are often the same ones targeted from postclassical antiquity to the present by critics who exploit the concept of literary genres either to complain that Euripides has often failed to write “genuine tragedy” or to gain, in a less judgmental fashion, a fuller appreciation of the variety of Euripides' work. The present chapter is intended to explore some of the problems of definition and perspective that bedevil criticism of this kind and to point out the difficulty, and occasional futility, of trying to apply strict genre terms to the ancient plays.

Before embarking on this topic, it is necessary to consider briefly a prior question, whether the whole enterprise of genre-criticism is outmoded and misleading, a relic of an approach that isolates the literary product from the social, political, and ideological contexts in which it is embedded.

Since it has been one of the major aims of the preceding chapters to argue for the great variety of Euripides' oeuvre and of his techniques, for the divergent and shifting positions represented within the dramatic world of each play and the associated split or shifting judgments made by an interpreting viewer, and for the indeterminacy and uncertainty (aporia) frequently induced by the plays, it is slightly antithetical to present final conclusions. Nevertheless, some sort of coda is desirable for such a long enterprise, and it may suitably begin with the point made in the preface, that this book gathers together some topics that struck the author as important and challenging, but does not aim to be exhaustive or definitive. Among the topics omitted, Euripides' treatment of the mythographic tradition is surely a fascinating one, both in individual details and in general, but the huge gaps in the evidence make it both difficult and highly speculative to develop any arguments. Just as we have extant an infinitesimal portion of the fifth-century tragedies and dithyrambs in which Euripides and his audience regularly heard a very wide range of mythological stories repeated or modified, so too the earlier sources of myth (non-Homeric epic, archaic choral poetry, the oral traditions that each community had in connection with its local cults and festivals and its foundation and genealogies) can no longer be recovered adequately.

It is over twenty-five years since I first contemplated writing (eventually) a general book on Euripides (at the time I had in mind the somewhat perverse title The Unity of Euripides). It is over ten years since I began trying to write this book, for which I had by then tentatively adopted the title The Art of Euripides, in tribute to the example of my senior colleague Tom Rosenmeyer's The Art of Aeschylus. I wanted to write a book that dealt with topics that span most or all of the extant plays rather than one with a chapter on each play; and I hoped to find a middle ground between the formalist studies that I have admired and the social and political approaches that have been so successful and influential in the past thirty years. As things turned out, Tom Rosenmeyer died not many months before I was finally far enough along in my work to seek the reactions of some readers (had he lived, he would have been one), and I began to doubt whether I should keep the allusive title, being all too aware that I could not match the breadth of his reading in the history of drama and dramatic theory or the elegance of his writing. In the end, I kept the title but added a subtitle, “dramatic technique and social context,” to declare the two types of concerns that I have attempted to combine (with what success or utility it is left to each reader to decide).

From Aristophanes to modern times, the role and presentation of the gods in Euripidean tragedy have been the topic of intense discussion and disagreement. At one pole of interpretation, critics suggest that Euripidean tragedy had outgrown the Greek theological tradition and retained the received elements of divine participation in myth either as a separable adjunct, to be dismissed when attention is focused on the real issues of human psychology, or as an ironic exposure of the absurdity or immorality of everyday religious beliefs. At the other pole, Euripidean gods are viewed as provident and potentially merciful in interactions complicated by the blindness and failings of faith of imperfect humans. In between these extremes are many possible gradations. The questions related to this discussion are literary, cultural, and religious, and they include, among others, the following: what is the relationship of a framing divine prologue and epilogue to the dramatic scenes within the frame? To what degree are these framing scenes integrated into the play, or to what degree are they openly marked as distinct from the other scenes? What effect do they have on the audience's interpretation of the actions, behavior, and decisions of the human characters between these frames, and on the audience's assessment of the order or disorder, morality or amorality, of the represented tragic world? Does tragedy's representation of the gods belong, as some argue, to a poetic tradition that really has little to tell us about actual Greek religious practice or belief?

In discussing the topics related to women characters in the previous chapter, it was frequently necessary to refer to male characters for comparison, since in ancient Greece (as in other cultures) the prevalent thinking about women featured so many polarities contrasting the two genders, and women were often defined by their lack of or deficiency in qualities ascribed to (free, Greek, adult) men. One of the commonplaces in discussions of the normative discourse about women and men is that the true man has a high degree of autonomy (controlling his own body and actions) while a woman lacks autonomy. This can also be expressed by the claim that males can be “subjects” while women are normally “objects.” Recent scholarship has made good progress in moving beyond such a sharp contrast and exploring possible areas of subjectivity and more autonomous agency in the women represented in Greek drama and in the women of Attic society. My purpose in this chapter is to examine the other side of the gender contrast by exploring how the autonomy and agency of male figures are portrayed in Euripidean tragedy. Tragedy in general is frequently about failure, frustrated intentions, and destruction; and tragedy routinely questions the efficacy of all human intention and agency, setting it against a background of fate and divine will and thus following in the footsteps of Homer and other earlier poets who presuppose in their story-telling traditional religious beliefs about man's inferiority to the gods in power and understanding.

In the same way that a narrow and prescriptive concept of genre can do a disservice to our understanding of Euripidean drama, so, too, some prevalent assumptions about structure and unity have tended to encourage a devaluation of Euripides' achievements as a dramatist. The strongest influence, of course, has been exercised by the Aristotelian model of “organic” unity with a tight linear connection by “probability or necessity” from beginning to end of a plot. Aristotle's interest in a hierarchical ranking of artistic possibilities has also played a role, as has his backhanded compliment at Poetics 13.1453a29–30: “Euripides, even if he does not manage other aspects well, yet appears to be the most tragic of the poets” (emphasis added). In defending tragedy against Plato's strictures, which attack the emotional seductiveness of mimetic poetry and condemn the mimetic artist as lacking true knowledge, Aristotle has a vested interest in emphasizing the intelligibility of tragic plotting in terms of cause and effect and in terms of consistency and appropriateness of character. Aristotle's approach privileges the author of the plot as the creator of a readily readable structure that evokes certain properly tragic responses (pity, fear; also ekplēxis, “astonishment”), but at the same time restricts the freedom of such artists. What such an approach tends to underestimate is the opaqueness and difficulty (and at times playfulness) of most Greek tragedies, qualities that present a challenge to the audience and invite a more open-ended process of reception.

In Aristophanes' Frogs, a recurrent motif in the contrast between the old style of Aeschylus and the new style of Euripides is the connection of Euripides with glib chatter and overrefined logic. The chorus' final assessment associates Euripides with Socrates, in a generalized rejection of the newfangled thought and speech associated, with comic oversimplification, with the intellectual showmen and teachers known as the sophists. The aim of this chapter is to come to terms with some of the issues raised by the obvious pervasiveness of “rhetoric” in Euripidean drama.

Following Aristophanes' lead, a long history of criticism has been concerned with the degree to which the prominence of rhetorical elements affects the notion of character and modifies or inhibits emotional involvement of the audience in the persons and events of tragedy. For some critics it has been a given that rhetoric undermines tragedy or tragic effects because it reduces the element of “spontaneity” and “sincerity” in a character's utterances. Here it will be argued that rhetoric is intrinsic to Euripides' conception of tragedy and that is it often the source of “tragic” effects, in the sense that it exposes to scrutiny the contingency of values and illusory quality of human skills. After some preliminary remarks on what “rhetoric” means in relation to Greek tragedy and how Euripides' uses of rhetoric may be distinctive, this chapter will consider the well-attested Greek ambivalence about rhetorical skill and how that ambivalence is reflected and played out in tragedy.

Authenticity of 1056–80

Long before anyone suggested that Medea 1056–80 were interpolated, that is, added by an actor/director other than Eur. in a performance later than 431 bce, there had been scholarly speculation about two recensions of the play by Eur. himself. This theory derived from Paolo Manuzio's observation of the absence in our text of a line of Ennius' Medea (fr. CV Jocelyn: qui ipse sibi sapiens prodesse non quit nequiquam sapit) that he wrongly identified as an exact version of Eur. fr. 905 (Cicero, ad Fam. 13.15.2: μισῶ σοϕιστὴν ὅστις οὐχ αὑτῶι σοϕός), and it received some support from remarks by Porson, Boeckh, and others, but by 1875 most of the passages referred to this Euripidean revision were satisfactorily explained in other ways. Already in the first edition of his school commentary Wecklein had developed the theory that Eur., some years earlier than 431, wrote a version of Medea fundamentally similar in conception to the play of 431, and that this earlier version inspired Neophron's imitation, produced before 431 as well (and thus in the festival records as earlier than Eur.'s play, misleading Aristotle and Dicaearchus: see Introd. 5). It was in the context of such theories that Bergk proposed that lines 1056–80 were to be regarded as a (Euripidean) doublet of 1040–55.