Download Biography of Euripides

Biography of Euripides
Euripides
The youngest of the three great tragedians, Euripides was probably born between
485 and 480 BCE, although some classicists propose a later date. Athens was in its
Golden Age during his lifetime. The campaigns of 480-79 BCE saw the Athenians
destroy the invading force of the powerful Persian Empire, solidifying Athens' position
as the leader of the independent Greek city-states. The decisive victory came at the
Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, in which the Athenian navy routed the Persian fleet.
Aeschylus, the first-born of the three great tragedians, served as a hoplite at the
great battle. Sophocles, second of the three, danced in the victory celebrations
afterward. And a popular legend holds that Euripides was born at Salamis, on the
very day of the victory. In his own lifetime, he was the least successful of the three
men, winning first prize at the Dionysia only four times. Yet more of his plays have
survived than those written by Aeschylus and Sophocles combined. As with many
brilliant men whose vision is less than comforting, it was only after Euripides' death
that his genius was appreciated.
He was not a consistent or tidy artist. His plays sometimes suffer from weak
structure, overpacked plots, and a wandering focus. But discomfort with his medium
can also be seen as one of Euripides' great strengths. And sometimes, his innovation
and uniqueness are mistaken for weaknesses. His Orestes can be seen as a brilliant
anti-tragedy, a work that questions the aesthetic assumptions of Greek drama. But
for the unimaginative reader who uses pat theories to evaluate Greek tragedy, it is
far easier to dismiss the play as simply bad. Like Orestes, many of Euripides' plays
have suffered at the hands of critics incapable of understanding his vision.
He was undoubtedly the bad boy of Greek tragedy, and he is modern in a way that
Aeschylus and Sophocles are not. The vision of Aeschylus' Oresteia, though brilliant
and beautiful, can seem more like a hopeful dream than a representation of the
world we know. And to modern audiences, Sophocles' heroes often seem removed
from flesh-and-blood men and women. But Euripides' characters are always
immediately recognizable. He is the father of the psychological drama, and he is an
acute observer of human nature. Using the myths of Greece as his source, he
transformed epic heroes into men of flesh and blood. Sophocles supposedly said that
while he himself depicted men as they ought to be, Euripides depicted them as they
really are.
He was a great questioner, and Socrates reputedly was among his most ardent
admirers. A characteristically Euripidean move is to take a myth and focus on some
problematic element, some event or action that calls the rest of the myth's ideology
into question. In Alcestis, he takes a story of a wife's goodness and transforms it into
an indictment of her husband, and, by extension, an indictment of the patriarchal
values the old legend upheld. In Orestes, he gives the characters the happy ending
that myth provides for them, but leaves us knowing that they don't deserve it.
Failure unquestionably hurt him; in Medea, the outcast barbarian sorceress speaks of
the hatred people have for the clever. Euripides knew he was a great artist, and in
the thousands of years since his death, generations of readers, critics and
theatergoers have revered him. But the judges of the Dionysia favored others. Most
of the men who beat him are now only footnotes in history. Euripides knew that he
was better than they, and the endless defeats must have been maddening. But this
frustration became part of his art, and his work would not be the same without the
sense of loss and injustice.
Euripides is arguably the darkest and most disturbing of the Greek playwrights. He
questions authority, and he is fascinated by the oppressed: women, barbarians, and
slaves are more than just background on the Euripidean stage. He allows them to
speak, and speak well. For his complex representations of "bad women," he earned
the censure of critics and judges. He depicts the position of the oppressed without
romanticizing them, and his plays make war against the gods of Olympus. The
universe in which Euripides believed was not benevolent, or just. Hardship falls on
all, the wicked and the good, and the gods are powerful but often capricious and
cruel. He questioned social structures and hollow or hypocritical ideals. Needless to
say, these positions made Euripides unpopular. He was the unwanted voice of
conscience in his age, a man unafraid to point out the lies with which a civilization
comforts itself. Sophocles gives us heroes, and Aeschylus gives us a vision of history
and teleology; Euripides gives us real men with all-too human weaknesses, and his
visions are often nightmares. In the end, the frenzied descent into chaos so often
imagined by Euripides was truest to Athens' fate. Infighting and dirty politics
compromised Athens' good name, and Athens fell to her hated enemy, Sparta, just a
few years after Euripides' death.
Possibly because he faced danger at home for his ideas, Euripides left Athens in 408
BCE. He went to the court of King Archelaus of Macedon; it was there that he wrote,
among other works, The Bacchae. This play shows Euripides at the height of his
genius. The Bacchae is a terrifying, powerful, and complex play, one that leaves its
audience with more questions than answers. It is an extremely difficult play to
produce well, but when it is performed right, few plays, from any time or place, can
hope to match The Bacchae in its capacity to instill terror and awe into its audience.
It is arguably Euripides' masterpiece, and it has a secure place as one of the greatest
plays ever written. But Euripides never lived to see it performed in Athens. He died
in 406 BCE, bitter and unsure of his place in history. Shortly afterward, his son
brought Euripides' last three plays, including The Bacchae, back to Athens for
production. There, at the same festival where Euripides had lost to now-forgotten
playwrights so many times, The Bacchae and its companion pieces won first prize.