Greek Tragedy III
Euripides
In my History 121 classes, I
tell students that Euripides reminds me of the Old Testament
prophets, particularly the prophet Jeremiah. Like the
prophets, Euripides constantly speaks out agains the evils of
his society. Like the prophets, he is frequently a
champion of the weak and oppressed against the rich and the
powerful. Like the prophets, he condemns the evil
of his own people as strongly as the evils does by their
enemies. One example: the play Trojan Women, a
play produced in 416 BC, the year the Athenians voted to kill
all the men of Melos and sell all the woman and children into
slavery. Euripides uses an event from the Trojan war to
elicit sympathy for victims of conquest. Who is it that
would treat defenseless people in such a despicable way?
Like Nathan the prophet with King David, Euripides gets his
point across and then turns on his Athenian audience: you
are the men. The Greeks themselves believed the tragedies
to be "theopneutos," god-breathed.
In one respect, though, Euripides differs sharply from the Old
Testament prophets. With the prophets, God himself is
always vindicated. Euripides (and often the other Greek
playwrights) use the religious festival honoring the gods to
criticize the gods themselves! Sometimes the criticisms
are relatively minor, but sometimes there's a thorough-going
horror at what the gods might do (as in the Bacchae).
And we're often left with a question. Does Euripides
believe in the gods at all? Is he that strange thing
some of the 19th century critics said, a prophet without
gods? Or is something entirely different going on here?
Euripides often focuses on relationships that are badly out of
joint, e.g., the relationship between men and the gods and the
relationships between men and women. That latter we see
in Alcestis, and, even more, in Andromache.
[In class, we review plot, character,
theme, setting and tone, focusing mostly on the motivations
and relationships of the different characters (Hermione,
Andomache, Peleus, Menelaus, and Orestes. We look at the odd
ending of the play and the abrupt change in Peleus'
words. We talk also about why the human/divine
conflict gets tied to husband/wife and family conflicts.]
The themes of human/divine breakdown and family breakdown run
through other Euripides plays as well:
Medea
In this play, the foreign woman is in a desperate
situation. Her husband Jason is deserting her to marry a
Greek girl. We're sympathetic: Jason is heartless and
condescending. You should be grateful, woman, that you
got to live among the Greeks rather than the barbarians.
But Medea gets a horrible revenge. The robe she gives as
a gift to the new bride is poisoned and consumes her flesh,
while her father tries to save her and ends up essentially
melted alive along with his daughter. The she
kills her two sons to get revenge on Jason their father.
Jason wants revenge--but the gods have given Medea a dragon
chariot--and she lives happily ever after. Or not.
Ion
Xuthus, king of Athens, goes to Delphi to inquire
about his childlessness. The oracle tells him he has a
son--and that the first person he meets on leaving the temple
is that son. Turns about to be Ion, a young man who
knows nothing of his parentage. Xuthus thinks he must
have begotten the boy sometime before his marriage at a
drunken party. The childless Creusa, afraid that she'll
be cast aside, is going to murder Ion. But it turns out Ion
was actually her son. She had been raped and impregnated
by Apollo while a young girl in her parents home. The
baby was abandoned, only to be picked up and raised by the
temple personnel. Xuthus is supposed to think the child
is his, even though it's not. Apollo had arranged all
things well, says Athena of the god who hadn't even dared
appear through all this.
Hippolytus
I've mentioned this story to you before in
connection with the Theseus legend. Theseus had had an
Amazon bride Hippolyta, by whom he had gotten his son
Hippolytus. A constant womanizer, and now a much older
man, Theseus took a new bride, Phaedra. Phaedra didn't
much care for her old man husband, and Aphrodite inclined her
to seek the affections of her step-son Hippolytus. But
Hippolytus was devoted to the virgin goddess Artemis, and
determined to serve her as a virgin himself. He wasn't
going to succumb to step-moms temptations. Phaedra, now
worried that Hippolytus will expose her for her attempted
adultery, decides to act first. She tells Theseus
Hippolytus tried to rape her. The furious Theseus calls
on the favor Poseidon owes him, asking the god to destroy his
son. A sea monster mangles Hippolytus, but the guilty
Phaedra commits suicide and Theseus learns the truth--too
late. Artemis comes to comfort the dying
Hippolytus...but what she says is anything but true
consolation.
The Bacchae
A play about the god the Dionysia is all
about--Dionysius. Dionysius is a new god, the son of
Zeus by a mortal woman named Semele. His worship
involves maddened revelry, and Pentheus, King of Thebes has
both questioned the story that Dionysius is really Zeus son
and banned the worship of Dionysius in Thebes. The
disguised Dionysius drives the women of Thebes mad. He
convinces Pentheus to spy on the women, but the crazed women,
including Pentheus mother, think Pentheus a mountain
lion. They tear him apart with their bare hands, and
Pentheus' mother (thinking she has a lion-head as a trophy)
brings the head back home, proudly displaying it to her
horrified husband. Dionysius breaks the illusion spell,
and leave the women in horror at the work of their own
hands. What a wonderful god we worship at this festival!