The Phoenician Women by Euripides - Oedipus, Antigone, et. al. - It would be no grace I would do the gods

Now I see why I did not remember The Phoenician Women (c. 410 BCE) by Euripides too well, or at all.  It is not one of his messes, but is rather too relentlessly efficient, condensing several plays into one, marching through the entire Theban cycle of stories with special emphasis on a rewrite of Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes and Sophocles’s Antigone, with bits of other plays thrown in.  An anti-climatic Antigone in ten pages, for example.

I’m fascinated by the late revisionary project of Euripides, but this time I do not understand the point of his revisions.  The text of the play is, it seems, a disaster, with entire episodes added by later writers.  It seems likely that Euripides already overstuffed play was further stuffed by later pedagogues, perhaps in order to have the Theban story complete in one handy play.  There is even a theory that the whole thing is a later imitation of Euripides, which I do not believe, but it is not crazy.

The body of surviving Greek plays was for some reason greatly compressed during a short period circa 250 CE; The Phoenician Women is the kind of play that convinces me that at least part of the narrowing was pedagogical.  We lost the plays that were not taught, and this one was useful for teaching.

The Phoenician Women does have the late-Euripides features.  An utterly pointless human sacrifice is part of the plot – “and bloody was the god / who brought these things about” (p. 113 , vol. V of the Chicago edition, tr. Elizabeth Wyckoff).  Antigone, at the end, imagines returning to her role as a priestess of Bacchus: “It would be no grace I would do the gods” (p. 140).  She has become disillusioned.

Now this is new.  Jocasta (alive, in this version, after the events of Oedipus the King) interrogates her son Polyneices about a curious subject: what it is like to be an exile.

So now I ask what first I wish to know.

What is it to lose your country – a great suffering?  (85)

Yes, says Polyneices, it is, in a number of ways.  The curious thing about this is that in 408 BCE, finally disgusted with Athens, Euripides will go into voluntary exile, at the age of seventy, in Macedonia, as far from his home as he can get.  We will soon see an expression of this disgust in Orestes.  Here, several years earlier, he is thinking about it.

I went looking for a performance again, and found a good-looking 2008 staging in Athens.  Here’s the chorus of Phoenician women, just passing through.  “[O]nly rarely performed,” says the press material.  A current performance would likely turn the chorus into Syrian refugees, fleeing one war only to be trapped by another.

The Phoenician Women  is our last Euripides dud, if that is not too strong.  How lucky we are that enough Euripides plays survived that some of them are not so good.

Next week’s play is The Cyclops by Euripides, dated who knows when, the only surviving satyr play, worth reading for that fact alone.  It is quite short, less than half the length of The Phoenician Women, for example.

And a reminder: Plato's Symposium at the end of the month.