Euripides by Edna O'Brien

EURIPIDES

Euripides was the scourge of his native Athens, his plays regarded as seditious and corrupting. Born in exile, on the island of Salamis, in 480 BC, he died in exile in Macedonia in his mid-seventies. Accounts differ as to the nature of his death, but chief among them is the hearsay that he was set upon and torn to death, by mad dogs or mad women who could not tolerate his depiction of them as passionate, avenging and murderous. His plays shocked public opinion, offended the critics and ensured that he was overlooked year after year in the state competitions, with Sophocles and Aeschylus sharing the laurels. Sophocles was a distinguished figure who enjoyed public prestige and Aeschylus could boast of his prowess in the war against the invading Persians. Euripides, however, was marginalised, even though as an able-bodied young man he would have had to serve in army and fleet since Athens was vulnerable to marauders from east and west.

His crimes were legion. He had questioned the prestige of the state, of pious honour and ancient injunctions, had portrayed the gods as vicious, merciless, sparring creatures who gave rein to violent, even insane passions. Medea, who sent a robe of burning poison to her rival and subsequently butchered her children, was a heroine whose deeds were a blight on enlightened Athens, and the official judges of the annual prize put it at the bottom of the list. Three and a half centuries later, the historian Aelian said the judges “were either ignorant, imbecilic philistines or else bribed.” Euripides’ depiction of women led to scatological rumours such as that he had learned their abnormal tendencies and sexual misconduct from everyday experience, that his mother Clito was an illiterate quack dabbling in herbs, potions and fortune telling, moreover he was a cuckold, a bigamist and a misogynist who lived in rancorous isolation in a cave. It says much for his inward spirit and his dedication to his calling that he wrote over a hundred plays – eighteen of which are in existence – and that when he died in Macedonia, Sophocles, out of a mark of delayed homage for his great rival, made his chorus wear mourning for the evening performance.

Euripides is the dramatist, along with Shakespeare, who delved most deeply into the doings and passions of men and women. His dramas, while being political, religious and philosophic are also lasting myths in which the beauty and lamentation of his choruses are in direct contrast with the barbarity of his subjects. As with Shakespeare he found the existing stories and legends too good, too primal, to be abandoned and so appropriated tales from Homeric times, rewrote them, transformed them and made them a foil for his prodigious imagination so that they serve as staple and forerunners for all drama that came after him. Sophocles’ characters can seem stiff, their language elaborate, but Euripides’ - vacillating, egotistical, unbridled and warring - are as timely now as when they were conceived in the fifth century before Christ.

Iphigenia in Aulis is the least performed of his plays, having been described by ongoing scholars as being picturesque, burlesque and in the vein of ‘New Comedy’. Nothing could be further from the truth. The story is glaringly stark – Agamemnon, head of an oligarchic army, who has lived for power and conquest, is asked to sacrifice that which he loves most, his daughter Iphigenia. He demurs but we know that the lust for glory will prevail and yet in Euripides’ drama, each voice, each need, each nuance is beautifully and thoroughly rendered. Iphigenia is for the chop but at the moment when her little universe is shattered, when she realises that she is being betrayed by both God and man, she pitches herself into an exalted mental realm, the realm of the martyr-mystic who is prepared to die but not to kill for her country. It is of course, as probably in the myth surrounding Joan of Arc, a heightened, histrionic moment which pitches its heroine in the ranks of the immortals. If one of the prerogatives of art is to catapult an audience from the base to the sublime, from the rotten to the unrotten, from the hating to the non-hating, then Iphigenia does that, but her sacrifice prefigures a more hideous fate. The catharsis is brief, as the grand mechanism of war and slaughter has been set in place. Clytemnestra, the mother, helpless to avert her daughter’s death, becomes an avenging fiend and ten years hence, when Agamemnon, victorious from Troy, will return with his Trojan concubine, the crazed prophetess Cassandra, he will meet a gory end at the hands of Clytemnestra and her paramour Aeghisthus.

After his death in 408 BC three plays by Euripides were found – Iphigenia in Aulis, Alcmaeon and The Bacchanals and were put on the stage by his son, Euripides III. Iphigenia was incomplete and finished by another hand. The other hand is what gives the play as we know it a false and substanceless ending. At the very last moment the sacrifice is aborted, Iphigenia whisked away and a deer put lying on the ground, the altar sprinkled with the necessary blood. It seems unthinkable that an artist of Euripides’ unflinching integrity, with a depth and mercilessness of sensibility, would soften his powerful story for public palliation.

History has righted his standing. The Latin poets Virgil, Horace and Ovid all acknowledged their debt to him, Plutarch would boast that he knew the plays by heart and Goethe devoted himself to reconstructing several of his plays from fragments. He now is recognised as the greatest of that triad of Athenian giants and even his fellow countryman Aristotle, after much carping, crowned him “that most tragic of poets.”

Edna O’Brien - January 2003 - printed in the Sheffield Theatres' programme.