Euripides
Euripides was a Greek writer who wrote about women and mythological themes like Madea and Helen troy. He was considered to have a great contribution to the Greek creation of new comedies.
Life and Career
Euripides was born in or about 484. He was well educated, attending the lectures of Anaxagoras, Prodicus and Protagoras, to whom he owes many of his sophisticated rhetorical mannerisms. As Philochorus relates, most of his tragedies were composed in the Isle of Salamis, which was an object of curiosity many years after his death.
Euripides wrote many books of great volumes, and many of his works have been lost, and many suffered plagiarism, but his legacy still lingers on.
He started his career at the age of 24 years but won his first price when he was almost twice that age. He won the first price only four times in his life and once when he was already dead. He was renowned not only in Athens but throughout ancient Greek.
His first wife Melito divorced him for adultery so did his second wife, Chaerila. He wrote a play in Macedonia to honour the monarch and to inscribe it with his patron’s name, who was so pleased with his abilities.
He died in 406/407 in Macedonia at the king’s court of Archelaus, either where he was in exile or invited by the king. He is said to have been killed by hunting dogs let loose on him.
Reputation
Euripides was the absolute model and pattern of the new comedy. He was called “Golden Euripides” by Diphilus while Philemon went further to say, “if the dead, as some assert have really consciousness, then will I hang myself to see Euripides”. Alexandra the great was one of his admirers and quoted his work while Rome held him in high esteem.
Most pupils and friends of eminent sophists who succeeded the music of the heroic age were well familiar with his work.
In his work Anaxagoras, he glares at his audience some of the physical doctrines going out of his way to show that the sun is nothing but a great ignited stone and that the Nile is due to the melting of the snow in Ethiopia.
He is said to have been the first one to introduce women on stage, not as heroines but as they are in actual life, despite the fact that he was far from the compliment of the opposite sex due to the failure of his two marriages.
On the three great poets of Greece, Euripides was by far the most modern. He being realism, brought realism in clothes conversations and characters on the Greek stage.
He pioneered in Alcestis the first example of dramatic history and Andromeda, which was the only play of ancient times based on the romantic afflictions on the youth of a girl.
Contributions
During his lifetime, innovation came with hostility. To him, the moral standards of the gods were portrayed by the traditional legends.
Aristophanes, a poet, criticised Euripides for the following;
- That he put beggars in rags on stage
- Determined to make tragedy less frosty
- Decadent poet innovator
- Subverted of receiving morality
- Unorthodox religious view
Some of the surviving tragedies of Euripides include;
- Phoenician women
- Helen
- Electra
- Hecuba
- Trojan women
- Cyclops
- Orestes
- Ion
- Iphigenia
- Heraclites
- Suppliant Women
- Bacchae
- Medea
- Electra
- Alcestis
- Andromache
Some of his famous quotes stated;
“There are three classes of citizens, the first are the rich who are indolent and yet always crave more, the second are the poor who have nothing, and are filled of envy and hate of the rich and are easily led by demagogues. Between the two lie those who make the state secure and uphold the law.”
Euripides Thoughts
Euripides took his plots as the other Greek writers. He interpreted and modified the traditional legend that the heroic figure lost their heroic quality and are often driven by violent emotions. Euripides always showed people of lower status in ancient Greece {women, peasants and slaves} were able to rise above the ordinary in courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice.
He gets then suffering from the tragedy that befalls human beings. He continues that the cause of human suffering was largely due to ignorant and foolishness, ambition and cruelty.
Plays by Euripides
Of the many plays Euripides wrote, only eighteen survive today. Seventeen of them were tragedies, while the other was a comic play with satire and tragedy. In each of his plays, he altered the traditions and made each of his plays unique. He used the same character but could appear extremely different in nature.
Examples
Alcestis
This is a fairy tale with a happy ending rather than a serious tragedy. In the play, Admetus, king of Pherae, is doomed to die unless someone else dies on his behalf. The only person who is willing to die on his behalf is his wife, who dies and is buried.
Soon after her burial Hercules arrive on his way to somewhere else to spend the night as the guest of Admetus. After hearing about the sad news of the death of Admetus’s wife, he goes to the tomb, wrestles with the god of death and brings Admetus, who is then restored back to life.
Madea
This is a story of a woman in such of revenge. The hero Jason brings the princess with him when he returns to Greece in triumph with the Golden Fleece.
Though Madea is not Jason’s legal wife, they settle together in Corinth and live for many years happy. Jason then decides to marry the princess of Corinth, claiming that his marriage will mean security to Madea and their children as well as for herself.
To Madea, this is deceit to their relationship, and she does not take this easily and decides to take revenge on him. She then plots to kill the princess, which she succeeds very well by the gift of a poisonous robe.
After struggling with her marital love, she decides to hurt Jason more by killing his children and finally, she is taken away by a winged chariot sent by her grandfather and Jason is denied the satisfaction of punishing her for her crimes.
Euripides Hippolytus
The characters and the actions contained in the play are both simple and complicated. Hippolytus, the bastard son of Theseus and the queen of the Amazons, honours only the goddess ARTEMIS and refuse to worship APHRODITE, so the latter goddess causes his stepmother Phaedra to fall in love with him. A woman of high morals, Phaedra wastes away in silence until the nurse coaxes the truth out of her and tells Hippolytus, who is not impressed, but still, he swears on oath that he will not tell his father. Phaedra, having overheard his anger denunciating her, commits suicide, leaving a note accusing Hippolytus of rape.
Backgrounds of the Myths
Theseus, who resembles Harades in having a mortal father, Aegeus, and his immortal father, Poseidon, went to Crete twice. The first time he went to kill Minotaur, and then he ran off with Ariadne. After abandoning her, he neglected to change his sect from black to white, as he had promised. Aegeus, as a sign of his salvation, believing that his son is dead, threw himself off a cliff. Theseus then defeated the Amazon and married their queen. Hippolyta, also called Antiope, on his second trip to Crete, met Phaedra, who ends up killing Hippolyta at their wedding. He left his bastard son in Troezene, on the coast nears Athens, to be raised by another.
This is the first story we have read that the Olympia gods conflict with each other. How do they affect the action? Are they really act, or just expressions of human emotion?
Where is Theseus during the first half of the play? Why aren’t he and Phaedra living in Trozen instead of Athens?
Consider Hyppolytus’s behaviour and attitude, especially in his first appearance, his scene with the nurse and his debate with Theseus he a virtuous young man or a self-righteous misogynistic prig? Notice how under pressure, his real thoughts emerge. From what you know of the Greek culture, he is really an admirable figure?
Phaedra comes from Crete and the house of Minos. Remember Minotaur was her half brother. Does his past affect her at all? She is ashamed not of her action, but thoughts have you seen such an interiorised mortality before?
Euripides expresses his feeling to womankind on his writing as;
Ooh Zeus, why hast thou brought into the world?
To plague us such a tricky thing as woman?
If thou didst wish to propagate mankind,
Couldst thou not find any better way than this?
We to the temples might have brought our price
In gold or weight of iron or of brass,
And purchased offspring, each to the amount
Of that which he has paid and so have dwelt
In quiet homes unvexed of womankind.
Now, to import a plague into our homes,
First of our substance we make sacrifice,
And here at once we see what woman is.
The father that begot her gladly pays
A dowry that he might be rid of her,
While he may bring this slip of evil home.
Fond man adorns with costly ornament
A worthless idol and his living wastes
To trick her out in costly finery.
Ha has no choice. Are his connections good,
To keep them he must keep a hated wife;
Are his connections bad, he can but weigh
Against that evil a good bedfellow.
His is the easiest lot who has to wife
A cipher, a good-natured simpleton;
Quick wits are hateful. Ne’er may wife of mine
Be wiser than consorts with womanhood.
In your quick-witted dames the power of love
More wickedness engenders; while the dull
Are by their dullness saved from going wrong.
This is sufficiently butter but no more so than the words that Euripides is accustomed to using when he is speaking of women.
Features of Euripides Work That Make Him Popular Today
Euripides has portrayed some characteristics that make him today compared to other ancient writers that have lived in the history of Greece. The way he presents his work makes it so unique some of this includes;
Psychology
Euripides has a great interest in the effect of continued injustice that befalls the people in society today, especially those he terms as the weak in the society i.e. women, peasants and children who are simply displaying their will and desires.
He also raises concerns and represents passive voices who suffer because they are trapped under the oppression of the rich often in Phaedra’s case, these victims will only fight for their rights when they find their backs pinned on the wall, and they have no one to defend them where they also lash out with deadly effect.
He also focuses on human weakness and, more often, the failure to make himself a more focused and modern approach to tragedy.
Phaedra’s plights illustrate the division between the cognitive and the emotional self and suggest that the source of human suffering is not subject to some inscrutable eternal force but a more troubling division among us.
Social Issues
Euripides had suffered some social problems, especially when his two marriages broke. He identifies society failing in man’s injustice falling within man’s character.
Euripides Dramatist
To differ from Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides represented the new oral, social and political movement that was taking place in Athens towards the end of the 15th century. This was a period of erroneous intellectual discovery, in which wisdom lay as the highest intellectual earthly accomplishment. A new kind of truth was being established in all branches of knowledge, and Euripides reacting to the brought a new kind of consciousness to the writing of tragedies.
His interest lay in the thought and experience of ordinary citizens rather than in the experience of legendary figures.
Although Euripides concentrated on Greek legends, he treated its characteristic in a realistic manner. They were no longer idealised symbols remote from commonplace life but contemporary Athenians. His attitude shifted between extremes, sometimes with boundaries of the same play. He had the capability of bitter realistic observation of human weakness and corruption, and yet just as often, his work reflected human heroism, dignity and feelings.
Dramatic Structures of Euripides
Although Euripides’s structure differs in some remarkable ways from those of other Greek writers, their plays have many common features.
The structure is much the same, scenes of spoken dialogue between two or three actors alternating in a lyric by the chorus. Dramatic characters are the members of the chorus in the drama, but in effect, they are often somewhere between the actor and the audience, especially when they act as witnesses and comment upon the action.
To reinforce the leading theme, Euripides often uses choral odes than the audience. Euripides’s plays have been criticised in their structure. His use of the prologue and epilogue comes under attack as dramatic and clumsy. He was ridiculed by Aristophanes for the exaggerated mechanical use of the explanatory prologue, which was frequently burdened with long histories of the character. His use of the chorus as independent of the chief action of the drama was also controversial.
His loose structure in his play was also criticised. Some of his work contained brilliant detached episodes that do not form coherent units through which the plot gradually develops.
To bring a play to a conclusion, he relied on the unexpected introduction of a god to solve the dilemma of the character.
Seneca
The only surviving specimen of Latin tragedy by Seneca includes the eight tragedies and one praetexta.
He was born in Cordova, Spain, in the third year of our era.
He studied law and geek poets. He was a remarkable lawyer, and his remarkable oratory in the roman court caused jealousy from the emperor Caligula who threatened that the philosopher could be safer away from Rome.
After the remark, he went into exile, where he was recalled after the death of Caligula by Agrippa and who made him a tutor of his son. The heir apparent it was in this post that Seneca gained fame and wealth.
Seneca, being a learned and able person, did writings that had an excellent quality of being conversational in tone even when they were touching on sensitive topics.
Most of the tragedies were written when he was in exile, and it is not known if they were ever acted on stage or they were mere paper writes.
He had more interest in dialogue form, but he was more interested in his theories than in drama, and he knew more of law platforms than he knew about the stage.
During his stage, there were no open stages open to writers like him; thus, the ordinary popular play of his day, indescribably indecent and coarse, was highly distasteful to him.
In most of his plays, he maintained Greek names and plot, making slight changes in The arrangement on scenes or shifting the action in order to bring a difference in character.
The Seneca gave the chores do not advance the plot or intensify with the action; they merely served for rhetorical display and seemed therefore doubly redundant and artificial.
Seneca’s Reputation
Seneca is one of the few popular Roman philosophers from the period. His works were celebrated by Erasmus and many others. He was important in making the Greek philosopher presentable and intelligible.
Although he had the admiration of such intellectual stalwarts, Seneca is not without his detractors. In his own tomes, he was widely considered to be a hypocrite or, at least less than stannic in his lifestyle. His tendency to engage in illicit affairs with married women and close ties to Nero test the limits of his teaching on restraint and self-discipline. While burnished to Corsica, he wrote pleadings for restoration rather incomputable with his advocacy of a simple life and the acceptance of fate.
Seneca’s Works
Following the ideas of the nineteenth century Leo, many scholars have thought that Seneca’s tragedies were written for recitation only. Other scholars think that they were written for performance and that it is possible that actual performance had taken place in Seneca’s lifetime.
The tragedies of Seneca have been successfully staged in modern times. The dating of the tragedies is highly problematic in the absence of any ancient reference. A relating chronology has been suggested on metrical grounds, but scholars remain divided.
It is inconceivable that they were written in the same year. They are not all based on Greek tragedies. They differ in many ways.
Seneca as a Humanist Saint
The early Christian church was very favourably disposed towards Seneca and his writing, and the church leader Tertullian called him “our Seneca”.
Medieval writers and work believed that Seneca had been converted to the Christian faith by Saint Paul and early humanists regarded his fatal birth as a kind of distinguished baptism. However, this seems unlikely as Seneca always professed to be Stonic.
Dent placed Seneca in the first circle of hell, or limbo, a place of perfect natural happiness where good non Christians like the ancient philosopher had to stay for eternity. Their lack of justifying grace given only by Christ required them to go to heaven.
Seneca’s Importance In Dramatical History
Through Seneca, the European world first became aware of classic tragedy. A transaction of his poem was published in London when the Elizabeth poets were most strongly attracted to the theatre.
In France, Seneca was more renowned than in England due to his compositions. They sprang a neo-classic which dominated the French stages for many years.
His influence on early modern tragedy is pervasive and wide ranging. Playwrights copied his rhetorical tricks and his formal structure, but more importantly, the sensibility of Seneca tragedy translated itself readily into the idiom of the Elizabeth and Jacobean theatre.
The love excess of metatheatricicalism the determination of imagines the unimaginable and represents it on stage; these are all qualities that may rightly be called Seneca in early modern drama, and through it, all stalk the ghosts. Renaissance ghosts, as we will see, are more active, plot bound creations than Seneca’s, but they do the work. They are metonyms for the past, the pressure and weight of past evil, which drags the living character down into the murky chaos of revenge.
Difference Between Seneca and Euripides in Other Books
In The Trojan woman of Euripides and The Trojan woman of Seneca, some differences have come up.
Seneca’s is the contamination of Hecuba and the Trojan woman of Euripides.
Euripides, on the other hand, has brought out some differences like the change of scene is not usual in the Greek plays, and only one three speaking actors are required to be on stage at the same time the plays are placed much lower than the Greek dramas. Seneca’s artificial lack of sincerity proved fatal when it came to passion.
In Medea, Euripides sets with Medea wailing from inside her home. She cries out to her god about the injustice done to her. Medea’s entire plight is presented to the audience by her nurse. Without having to see and hear Medea directly, she is distanced from the viewers making her vengeance more thoughtful and planned. Seneca, on the other hand, uses his characterisation of Medea to move the entire tragedy quickly.
She states her hatred of Jason without hesitation. Her mind is set for revenge from the very beginning. Seneca’s Medea does not see herself as just a woman to who tragedy will happen, but vibrant and will punish those who wrong her. In short, Euripides’s characterisation of Medea gives an impression she is just a pain of god, and she is willing to be such. She commits her crime, and then she awaits her ramification. Seneca’s
The characterisation of Medea makes her godlier, like she is in control of her destiny and at one point even rebukes the gods for what they have done. More than likely, the results of the two eras in which the two versions were written, there is a definite discrepancy in the power and motivation of the gods, seen through the eyes of Medea.
Diffrence in the Hyppolytus
The distinct quality of Seneca is almost recent since there has been no other roman example via comparison with the Greek playwright most similar to him is Euripides. In Hippolytus, which has the same version as Euripides, Seneca’s sensibility emerges unmistakably at the end of the play.
In Euripides, Hippolytus is brought back on stage, still alive still participating in the tragedy which he is able to experience and enact closer with his death. Seneca’s Hippolytus is literally none closed a jig sow of body parts {carried on stage in a box} whose collection and arrangement makes the witness of his tragedy agents in an attempt to achieve closure.
When the box is brought on stage, this coercion is extended to Theseus, to Phaedra, and to the audience as we are presented directly with the messy remnants of what is no longer in any sense a private downfall. We are all implicated in the ultimately hopeless task of piecing Hippolytus together again, of training to regain the classic restraint and dignity with Euripides and Seneca annihilates.
At the same time, the other side of Seneca’s extravagance is the undeniable fact that his strategies always, deliberately, got failing over into the ludicrous camp tragedy and comedy, being another category distinction refused by Seneca. While bringing pieces of Hippolytus back on stage in a box is horrifying, it is also a black comic which in turn feeds the sense of horror.
Bibliography
Seneca and Euripides by David Hayes.
Study Guideline by Euripides Hippolytus by Robin Mitchell.