The New International Encyclopædia/Euripides

EURIPIDES, ū-rĭp′ǐ-dēz (Lat., from Gk. Εὐριπίδης) (c.480–406 B.C.). The latest of the three great Greek tragic poets. He was born, tradition said, in Salamis on the day of the great sea-fight with the Persians. His parents, Mnesarchides and Clito, were of humble station; they lived at one time in banishment in Bœotia and on their return to Athens are said to have engaged in petty retail trade. Their son, however, had a good education. He produced his first play, The Daughters of Peleus, at the age of twenty-five. From that time he devoted himself to the tragic stage. His first play won but the third place, and he gained the first prize only after fourteen years of disappointment. This distinction he enjoyed but five (or, as one authority says, fifteen) times in all. Euripides was of a studious and speculative nature, and was a friend and disciple of Anaxagoras, Prodicus, Protagoras, Socrates, and others, although he attached himself to no particular philosophic school. He possessed a gloomy temperament, was morbidly sensitive, and apparently felt himself misunderstood by his fellow Athenians. He took no part in politics, but lived in his library. The latter part of his life he spent away from Athens, first in Magnesia, then at the Court of Archelaus at Pella in Macedonia. He died in the spring of B.C. 400 at Arethusa, near Amphipolis, and was buried not far from that city. At Athens a cenotaph was erected to him, the epitaph of which declared that all Greece was his monument, and that the earth of Macedon covered only his bones.

In sharp contrast to his two great predecessors, Æschylus and Sophocles, Euripides represents the new moral, social, and political movements which were transforming Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C. He is also distinguished from the earlier tragedians by the fact that his interest lay in the thought and experience of the ordinary individual far more than in the sufferings of legendary beings belonging to the heroic past; so that while he drew characters from the old mythology, he treated them in a thoroughly realistic fashion; they were no longer ideal personages far removed from every-day life, but contemporary Athenians representing every grade of society to be found in Athens at his time. In fact, Euripides shifted the tragic situation from a conflict between man and the divine laws of the universe to man's inner soul, where the struggle is between his better impulses and the evil suggestions of his baser self. He is furthermore the most modern of all the Greek dramatists in his tenderness and sentimentality; in some plays he appears as the precursor of the modern romantic school. In his lost Andromeda, of which the theme was Perseus's affection for the princess whose life he had saved, he produced the only known example among the tragedies of antiquity of a plot based on the favorite motive of the modern novel.

Euripides shared in the current skepticism of the day as to the older religious beliefs, and many passages in his tragedies betray his doubts. His attitude not unnaturally brought down upon his head the wrath of the conservatives, of whom Aristophanes was the chief literary representative. In Euripides's language the speech of common life had a considerable part, and his style shows a remarkable smoothness and dexterity; Aristophanes actually imitated it, Aristotle praised it, so that it was the model for the writers of the later comedy. The structure of his plays, however, is often dramatically defective, as many of them are made up of brilliant detached episodes and do not form coherent units through which the plots are gradually developed. On the other hand, in other plays, as, for example, in the Medea, the plot is steadily developed from beginning to end. Euripides has been blamed for his use of the explanatory prologue, in which he makes known to the spectators the events which precede the opening of the play and oftentimes outlines coming events. But he deserves censure, not for his employment of such prologues, but for the manner in which he managed them, for many of them are mechanical and ten are burdened with long genealogies which deserve the ridicule that Aristophanes heaped upon them. He also resorts too often to the 'deus ex machina' (q.v.) to solve his tragic situations, and the choral songs have frequently nothing to do with his play. Yet with all allowances for his defects, Euripides remains a great tragic poet. His greatest strength lay, as was pointed out in antiquity, in the representation of human passion and in his recognition scenes. After the beginning of the Peloponnesian War Euripides enjoyed great popularity, and his fame was not confined to Attica alone. In the fourth century he was read and presented almost to the exclusion of the two older poets. The vases from southern Italy which have representations of scenes from his work attest his fame there in the fourth and third centuries B.C., and in the Roman and Byzantine periods he was highly esteemed and imitated. In modern times he has influenced English, German, and especially French dramatists.

Euripides took his plots from the same general sources as previous poets. A considerable number of plays are based on the legends of Thebes, Argos, and the stories of Heracles; the Trojan cycle had less charm for him, so that only about a fifth of his plots can be traced to that source, although ten of the extant plays, including the Rhesus, which popular taste has preserved to us, belong to this cycle. The myths of his native Attica, however, had a strong attraction for him, and he took pleasure in celebrating the Athenian heroes, Ægeus, Theseus, and Erechtheus. He also sought subjects in new fields, especially for themes which exhibited violent passion or romantic adventures. Such were the stories of Bellerophon, Cresphontes, and Phaëthon, which he handled for the first time. He also treated his mythology with great freedom, sometimes varying it in different plays, or enlarging and developing a myth until it was practically his own invention.

Tradition says that he left ninety-two plays in all. Of these we possess but eighteen, and the Rhesus, which is almost universally regarded as spurious. The genuine plays are: Alcestis (438); Andromache; Bacchæ; Hecuba; Helena (412); Electra; Heraclidæ; Hercules Furens; Supplices; Hippolytus (428); Iphigenia Aulidensis; Iphigenia Taurica; Ion; Cyclops (the single satyr drama extant); Medea (431); Orestes (408) ; Troades (415) ; and Phœnissæ. Only the dates given are known with certainty; but the Bacchæ and Iphigenia Aulidensis were produced after the poet's death. Besides the above complete plays, over 1100 fragments of the other dramas have been preserved. Of the extant plays, the Medea, Hippolytus, Bacchæ, and Iphigenia Among the Taurians are the best.

The best critical editions are by Kirchhoff (Berlin, 1855); Nauck (Leipzig, 1871); Prinz and Wecklein (Leipzig, 1878 et seq.), and a complete edition with English commentary by Paley (London, 1858–60, 3 vols.; vols. i. and ii. in 2d ed., 1872–75). Commentated editions of single plays are very numerous; only a few of the best English editions can be named here: Alcestis, Earle (New York, 1894); Haley (Boston, 1898); Bacchæ, Sandys (2d ed., Cambridge, 1885); Tyrrell (London, 1892); Helena, Jerram (Oxford, 1881); Heracleidæ, Beck (Cambridge, 1882); Hippolytus, Harry (Boston, 1809); Ion, Verrall (Cambridge, 1890); Iphigenia at Aulis, England (London, 1891); Iphigenia Among the Taurians, England (London, 1880); Jerram (Oxford, 1885); Medea, Verrall (London, 1881); Allen-Moore (Boston, 1901); Troades, Tyrrell (London. 1897). The Scholia are best edited by Schwartz (Berlin, 1887–91). There is an excellent English translation in verse by Way (London, 1894–98); prose translation by Coleridge (London, 1885).

Consult: Mahaffy, Introduction to the Study of Euripides (London, 1879); Decharme, Euripide et l'esprit de son théâtre (Paris, 1893); Verall, Euripides the Rationalist (Cambridge, 1895); Haigh, Tragic Drama of the Greeks (Oxford, 1890); England, Euripides and the Attic Orators (London, 1898); Nestle, Euripides, der Dichter der griechischen Aufklärung (Stuttgart, 1901); Huddilston, Greek Tragedy in the Light of Vase Paintings (New York, 1898).