Thanks and praise to celebrate the happiness of this great event – the end of the Greek play readalong

I am quoting the end of Alcestis by Euripides, his early whatever it is, not a tragedy, not a satyr play, not a comedy.  Admetos has won back his wife and the play is at its end, so he declares “a feast of thanks and praise” (tr. Arrowsmith), which is what I want to do.  If we had done all this in a real-life book group I would take you all out for gyros.  But Admetos ends the play with this:

From this day forth we must remake our lives,

And make them better than they were before.

We can only try.

So, first, many thanks to anyone who participated in any way, on your own, in the comments section, or otherwise.  Anyone who wanders around in the comments of my posts will find some superb responses and insights; anyone who follows the links to posts people wrote will find the same.  Intellectually, this exercise was very good for me.  I hope for you, too.  Endless thanks to everyone.

I had read all of the plays, except Menander’s Dyskolos, about 25 years ago, and had reread a few since then.  Antigone I knew from much earlier, from Western Civ in college.  The core stories and myths and characters I knew from childhood, and they are as familiar to me as another set of stories and characters I was absorbing at the same time, “Bible stories.”

What did I learn this time?

First, there was my epistemological crisis, visible in my earlier posts before I got over it.  The evidentiary base for what we know about classical Greek plays was much weaker than I had previously understood.  For example, we all know that each playwright directed three tragic plays and a satyr play, like the Cyclops of Euripides, full of booze and nonsense.  But Alcestis was presented in the “satyr” spot, and thus the evidence is actually half satyr and half not-satyr.  What was the real ratio?  How often did writers use the satyr spot for something more unusual and innovative?  Alcestis is unique among the surviving plays, but what does that tell us.

So, second, this time I understood how we were reading these extraordinary plays in a massive void of lost plays. Nine tragedies a year, plus three satyr plays, and an indeterminate number of comedies (four to six?) every year, and we have almost none of them, even by the most famous playwrights.  For the first twenty-eight years of Sophocles’s extraordinarily long career, we have Ajax.  He did not necessarily submit plays every year, but we could easily be missing eighty or ninety early Sophocles plays, pre-Antigone.  How I would like to get to know young Sophocles.

The remarkable thing, and I think everyone saw this, was how easy it was, after a couple of plays, to get a sense of the personality and sensibility of the author: rough, mythic Aeschylus; methodical, pious Sophocles, the perfect candidate to invent the detective story; turbulent, to use William Arrowsmith’s favorite word, Euripides.  With Euripides, we are lucky to have enough plays to even see his progression, to watch him become angrier with Athenian wartime politics until he becomes disgusted with the entire Athenian, or possibly human, experiment, culminating in his astounding late works of pessimism like Orestes and Bacchae.

But this is all a construction, the reader inferring the author from the available evidence, when most of the evidence is missing.  Who knows what Aeschylus or Sophocles would look like if we had seven more plays.  It is hard to believe that there are too many more masterpieces at the level of Agamemnon or Oedipus the King among the lost plays.

Given how much we have lost, the twenty-seven year or so stretch between the Medea of Euripides (431 BCE) and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles (say 404 BCE) where we have a play, sometimes two, almost every year, takes on enormous meaning, especially when these plays are contemporary with the Athenian history described in detail by Thucydides.  The narrative is very strong.  Honestly, this is why I got so excited by reading the plays in chronological order, which I had not done before.  Just watching the hilarious one-sided duel between Aristophanes and Euripides.

Then, in a coda, Menander and the New Comedy come along, thinner but less alien, leading to Roman comedy, Shakespearean comedy, and television comedy.

Favorite (or favourite, I don't care) classical Greek playwright. Menander and Agathon fans will have to leave a comment.

— Amateur Reader (Tom) (@AmateurReader) November 25, 2022

Sophocles won solidly.  My favorite, easily, is Euripides, the huge screwball, the messy one.  What innovators they all were.

Prmoetheus chained to the rock, Cassandra declaiming her own death, Oedipus learning the truth, Antigone arguing ethics with her uncle, the entrance of the chorus of the birds, Dionysus outsinging the chorus of the frogs, Medea murdering her children, Orestes burning it all to the ground, Dionysus dressing up Pentheus.  What things we saw.  The chorus in Agamemnon claims that Zeus “las it down as law / that we must suffer, suffer into truth” (tr. Fagles), but I feel we found a great deal of truth without much suffering, which is how great literature usually works.

I am thinking of writing a longer essay on our experience this year, and sending it – who knows – somewhere – so if you have any ideas you do not mind me stealing, please let me know.  Another debt.  My deepest thanks, as it is.

The Frogs by Aristophanes - Brilliant! Brilliant! Wish I knew what you were talking about!

The Frogs by Aristophanes is this week’s play.  It was performed in what now look like the waning days of Athens, just before their conquest by Sparta, and in particular the last days of Athenian tragedy, with Euripides and Sophocles both recently dead.  In what may be the most outrageous conceit of Aristophanes, Dionysus, understandably worried about the quality of the plays at his festivals, travels to Hades to retrieve Euripides to save his festival, and to save Athens.  “I need a poet who can write,” Dionysus says (tr. David Barrett, p. 159).  But once he gets to Hades, it turns out there are options.

The first half of the play is the journey to Hades by Dionysus and his servant.  Here we find the famous chorus of the frogs:

FROGS:  Brekeke-kex, ko-ax, ko-ax,

      Ko-ax, ko-ax, ko-ax!

Oh we are the musical Frogs!

We live in the marshes and bogs!

Sweet, sweet is the hymn

That we sing as we swim,

And our voices are known

For their beautiful tone…  (164)

I cannot guess how often I have seen writers, modern writers, quote those frogs.

The second half of the play contains a duel between Euripides and Aeschylus over who is the better poet.  Sophocles if of course above all this nonsense.  The debate, whatever ridiculous turns it takes, is genuine, a real contrast of the aesthetic ideas of the two poets.  It is the invention of Western literary criticism, perhaps a hundred years before Aristotle’s Poetics, which, by the way, I invite you to read along with me next week.  Some of the terms of the debate are obscure for us, and not just us:

DIONYSUS: Brilliant!  Brilliant!  Wish I knew what you were talking about!  (198)

But many are clear enough from the plays we have.  A surprising number of the plays mentioned are ones we have, which may say something, although I do not know what, about which plays survived;

AESCHYLUS:  Then I put on The Persians: an effective sermon on the will to win.  Best thing I ever wrote.

DIONYSUS:  I loved that bit where they sang about the days of the great Darius, and the Chorus went like this with their hands and cried ‘Wah! Wah!’  (194)

Dionysus is perhaps not the most sophisticated theater-goer.

If The Frogs were some poor reader’s first Greek play it would likely be gibberish.  Too inside.  I mean,  the first line of the play is literally a joke about jokes:

XANTHIAS: [surveying the audience unenthusiastically]: What about one of the old gags, sir?  I can always get a laugh with those.  (156)

But for those of us who have made it to this point in the readalong, The Frogs is like a reward.

I illustrated this post with two performance stills of the weighing of the poetry of Euripides and Aeschylus, one from 1947 and one from 2013, both from the Cambridge Greek Play site.

Next week is the last surviving tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, performed posthumously in 404 BCE, or perhaps 401 BCE, or perhaps some other time.  It makes a fine ending to this great tradition.

Iphigeneia in Aulis by Euripides - even babies sense the dread of evil to come

The final Euripides play is Iphigeneia in Aulis, performed with The Bacchae in 405 BCE.  I normally write “Iphigenia,” but I read the 1978 W. S. Merwin and George E. Dimock, Jr. translation titled which goes with “Iphigeneia,” so I will switch to that spelling for this post.

The united might of Greece, assembled to retrieve Helen and sack Troy, is paralyzed by a lack of wind.  The remedy, says a psychotic prophet, is for Agamemnon, the host’s general, to allow said prophet slit the throat of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia as a human sacrifice to Artemis.  What a sicko, that prophet!

AGAMEMNON: The tribe of prophets wants only to be important,

          the whole rotten crowd of them.

MENELAOS:    When they don’t prophesy

          they’re useless, and when they do

          it does no good.  (p. 45, Merwin and Dimock)

But by the end everyone, including Iphigeneia, is convinced that her sacrifice is justified, and she is either murdered on an altar, as depicted in a drawing owned by the British Museum either copied from or imitating Rembrandt, or whisked off to distant, barbaric Tauris to eventually be rescued by her brother Orestes, just a baby in this play, an extraordinarily ironic baby.

As she speaks the following lines IPHIGENEIA takes ORESTES from CLYTEMNESTRA and holds him up to AGAMEMNON.

My brother, you are so small

to have to help your friends. But cry

with me, cry to your father, beg him

not to kill your sister.  See,

even babies sense the dread of evil to come.  (78)

The sacrifice of Iphigeneia is the ur-crime of Greek tragedy, even among the many stores of the sacrifice of teenage girls that fascinated Euripides.  Without her death there is no Oresteia.  Maybe there is no Trojan War.  Perhaps that is why Euripides saved the story for last.

Part of the horror of the play is that, scene by scene, it is the story of how Iphigeneia is saved.  Each major character in turn is convinced, by some combination of persuasion and conscience, not to murder a teenager to prosecute a war, and then reverts due to fear and expediency, culminating in a farcical utilitarianism, the trolley problem: we must sacrifice one life to save many.  In fact, of course, the first death causes the deaths of many.

The modern Athenians, watching the play, had long abandoned human sacrifice at the altar, but had spent almost thirty years, urged on by politicians arguing much like those in the play, sacrificing their young men in a pointless war.  The sacrifice would end soon enough, though, the very next year, not because the Athenians were finally convinced by Euripides but because of a crushing, final defeat by the Spartans.

Iphigeneia in Aulis was our final Euripides play, but this is not our farewell to Euripides.  Next week: it’s The Frogs by Aristophanes, where we will find the most famous chorus in Greek literature and, decades before Aristotle, the invention of Western literary criticism, or at least the important part, the Top 3 list.  If you have been reading all, or most, or even a decent random sample, of the tragedies than you are the perfect reader for The Frogs.  You have earned The Frogs.

The Bacchae by Euripides - O gods, I see the greatest grief there is.

Reading Euripides chronologically, it would be fair to think that however ingenious and inventive Euripides was, he did not write a play quite at the level of Agamemnon or Oedipus the King, at least until his brief exile in Macedon, where he wrote The Bacchae just before his death.  It’s a deep one, and approaches the unbearable in a way few plays do.  It is the King Lear of Euripides.

I find it curious that given the plays were written for the Dionysian Festival, The Bacchae is the only play about Dionysus to survive.  We know there were others – Aeschylus wrote a trilogy about young king Pentheus, torn to pieces by his god-crazed mother – but I take Euripides as writing, in a farewell gesture, about the source of things.  The source of religion; the source of drama.

Dionysus, god of wine and madness, after a tour of Asia has returned to his birthplace of Thebes (the first words of Robert Bagg’s amusing translation are “I’m back!”), to the very spot where his mother was incinerated by Hera’s lightning while pregnant with Dionysus.  The play is in effect a duel between the teenage god and his teenage cousin Pentheus, King of Thebes, both plausibly psychologically teenage.  One kind of unreason against another.  The more powerful wins, and Pentheus is torn to pieces by his mother and aunts in their religious frenzy.  The old men of the city, who humiliate themselves before Dionysus on purely rational, Pascal’s wager-like grounds, escape with their heads.

The extraordinary recognition scene, where Agave gradually realizes not just that she has savagely murdered her own son but is holding his head, is what I was thinking of when I mentioned King Lear.

AGAVE: What is it?  What am I holding in my hands?

CADMUS: Look more closely still.  Study it carefully.

AGAVE: No! O gods, I see the greatest grief there is.

CADMUS:  Does it look like a lion now?  (212, tr. Arrowsmith, as are all other quotations)

I beg you, someone, rewrite that ending so Cordelia does not die!

The Bacchae is set in the deep past, among the origin myths, and contains a complex presentation of the human religious drive, both our attraction to religious explanations of the world around us and our resistance to them.  But I also wonder if the play is a commentary on drama itself.  As Aristotle would ask decades later – please join me in reading Aristotle’s Poetics, with a post at the end of October – why do we sit through these horrible plays?  What, exactly, are we celebrating, Euripides is perhaps asking, at a Dionysian Festival?  What do these tragedies do?

It is the costumes that caught my attention, the ones within the play.  To worship Dionysus, you have to dress like a worshipper:

TIRESIAS:            He will know what errand

brings me, that agreement, age with age, we made

to deck our wands, to dress in skins of fawn

and crown our heads with ivy.  (p. 161)

Tiresias believes in Dionysus because he believes in everything, while Cadmus believes in nothing, but both old men join in the performance of worship.  Meanwhile the chorus of Asian Bacchantes are the mature worshippers, there beautiful songs and dances (I’m guessing about the dances) more integral to the play than ever before.  Why does the chorus sing and dance, after all – because they – we, the audience – are worshipping Dionysus or per Nietzsche allowing our Dionysian side to at least peak out for a few hours.

The culmination is the cross-dressing scene, when Pentheus disguises himself as a woman in order to spy on their frenzied orgies – such a teenager – and what begins as a costume becomes a performance:

DIONYSUS:                             But look:

one of your curls has come loose from under the snood

where I tucked it.

PENTHEUS:       It must have worked loose

when I was dancing for joy and shaking my head.

DIONYSUS:  Then let me be your maid and tuck it back.

Hold still.  (196)

Pentheus and Dionysus; The Bacchae has the strangest pair of protagonists.  But almost everything in the play is strange and disturbing, an exemplar of the sublime in literature.

I picked a marble relief of a Bacchante in part so I could get a good look at her fennel stalk, the thyrsus, that is so important to the play.  The relief is a Roman copy of a Greek original contemporary with The Bacchae.  It is on display at the Met.

Next week is our last Euripides play, although not our farewell to Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, performed in the same set as The Bacchae.  It effectively wraps up an ongoing Euripidean project.

Orestes by Euripides - And what had seemed so right, / as soon as done, became / evil, monstrous, wrong!

I want to invite anyone interested to join me in reading Aristotle’s Poetics, the foundation of Western literary criticism, influential to the present day and bizarrely dominant, almost sacred, for centuries.  I hope to write about it at the end of the month, having just reread all of the Greek tragedies.  Anyone who has been reading along this year will find Poetics easy going.  It will raise many curious questions.

This week, the play at hand is Euripides’s late masterpiece of despair and nihilism, Orestes (408 BCE).  I had forgotten how long it was, likely the longest of the surviving Greek plays.  Euripides makes room for the story we know from other plays, with the Furies tormenting Orestes soon after he murders his mother:

And what had seemed so right,

as soon as done, became

evil, monstrous, wrong!  (162)

New parts of the story include a major new plotline featuring cowardly Uncle Menelaus and shallow Aunt Helen.  I have included a photo from a 2018 Greek production of Orestes that must be the meeting of Electra and Helen.

I want to include some quotes from William Arrowsmith’s introduction to the play:

What we get in the Orestes is, in fact, very much like what we get in Troilus and Cressida: tragedy utterly without affirmation, an image of heroic action seen as botched disfigured, and sick, carried along by the machinery and slogans of heroic action in a steady crescendo of biting irony and the rage of exposure.  (106)

It is that crescendo that requires the greater length.  Like Ravel’s Bolero, for the effect to work the thing has to keep going.  It takes time, plus the big swerve in the plot when Pylades convinces Orestes and Electra that their lives will be saved if they murder Helen and perhaps her daughter, too, why not, after murdering your mother why not your aunt and cousin.  If we have learned anything from the myths of the house of Atreus it is that more murders, “murder displacing murder” (162), is always the answer. 

ELECTRA:            If then, seeing Helen

lying in a pool of blood, he decides he wants

his daughter’s life at least and agrees to spare you,

let the girl go.  On the other hand,

if he tries to kill you in a frantic burst of rage,

you slit the girl’s throat.   (180)

Electra is as nuts as any of them.  The characters all start out bad and become so much worse.

Arrowsmith calls Orestes “a kind of negative tragedy of total turbulence” where “nothing but the sense of bitterness and alienation survives the corrosive effect of the action” (106).  The deus ex machina that ends the play is similar to yet opposite of the one that ends Sophocles’s Philoctetes.  The set, the palace, is on fire, the characters doomed; Orestes has his sword to the throat of his cousin, on the verge of murdering her when Apollo drops from the sky and ends the apocalypse.  Orestes and Hermione will marry! 

I imagine Apollo as one of those articulated artist’s dummies, dangling from a rope, or some other kind of bizarre puppet, delivering his lines through a tinny loudspeaker.  “Go and honor Peace, / loveliest of goddesses,” Apollo says as he escorts Helen to the stars.

ORESTES:   And yet, when I hear you speak,

I thought I heard the whispers of some fiend

speaking through your mouth.

                                                         But all is well

and I obey.  (206)

After the performance of Orestes, Euripides went into voluntary exile in Macedonia, about as far as he could get from Athens while staying in Greece.  He only lived for a couple more years.  He wrote at least three more plays before his death in 406 BCE.  They were directed at the 405 Dionysian festival by his son, or perhaps nephew.  Two of them have survived.  Next week, the greatest of them all: The Bacchae.

The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis are also, I should note, now that I am paying attention, long plays, although I think not as long as Orestes.

The Cyclops by Euripides - the only satyr play - the greatest god of all, / this belly of mine!

It’s The Cyclops by Euripides, the only surviving satyr play and the greatest mistake in my chronology of the Greek plays.  No one really knows the date on this one, so I arbitrarily placed it late, and reading it again I am convinced it likely is a late Euripides play, but still I should have scheduled it much earlier just so we could all read a satyr play earlier.

Every set of three tragedies was followed by a short comedy starring a chorus of hybrid man-horses with prominent phalluses.  The most Dionysian part of the Festival of Dionysus, some part of the action would be about wine and drunkenness.

CYCLOPS: Whoosh! I can scarcely swim out of this flood.

Pure pleasure! Ohhh. Earth and sky whirling around,

all jumbled up together!  Look: I can see

the throne of Zeus and the holy glory

of the gods.   (The satyrs dance around him suggestively.) (p. 34, tr. Arrowsmith)

Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote such things.  The Oresteia and Oedipus the King were followed by such creatures.  Three playwrights per festival, so three satyr plays per year for how long?  No one knows, but there have to have been hundreds of satyr plays.

Or, given that Euripides’s tragicomedy Alcestis was performed in the position of the satyr play, perhaps not.  Maybe only half the plays that capped the tragedies were satyr plays, and half were something else.  Who knows.  There would still be at least a couple hundred satyr plays.  It sounds like such a narrow genre. 

Yet The Cyclops is clearly a Euripides play, hitting some of his usual themes from a different direction.  Adapting the Cyclops episode form The Odyssey, and arbitrarily adding Silenus and the satyrs and a bottomless wine flask, Euripides pits the barbaric savagery of the Cyclops against the civilized savagery of Odysseus, as much of a Machiavellian here as in his villainous roles in other Euripides plays (we have one more ahead of us in Iphigenia in Aulis).

Odysseus tries to save himself and his men with a terrific, disingenuous, speech extolling the virtues of Greece and their defense of peace – the recent war was of course entirely the fault of the Trojans  – virtue and the gods; Cyclops is all appetite and does not care:

And as for sacrifices, I make mine,

not to the gods, but the greatest god of all,

this belly of mine! (25)

But both turn to violence in the end.  The Cyclops has a lot of murder and gore for a comedy.  It is a different kind of comedy, anyway, than that of Aristophanes.

The British Museum has a beautiful bowl depicting the moment before the blinding of the Cyclops.  Please note the two Euripidean horse-satyrs on the right.  The bowl is likely a close contemporary of the play.

Next week: Odysseus returns in Philoctetes by Sophocles (409 BCE), a calming relief from the hysterics and turbulence of Aristophanes and Euripides.  Philoctetes, too, was likely followed by a play about dancing, singing, drunken, horny horse-men.

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.

Helen by Euripides - What is god, what is not god, what is between man and god, who shall say?

Helen (412 BCE) is Euripides’s romantic comedy about the survival of middle-aged love.  We know it was performed with the lost Andromeda, a romantic comedy about young love, our culture’s favorite subject but something the Greeks did not care about at all.  Why did Euripides write such things under the preposterous guise of “tragedy”?

In his last decade, Euripides was making a broad, complex critique of Athenian and Greek culture, alongside a more specific protest against the imperial war with Sparta.  Helen was performed soon after the destruction of the Sicilian expedition, the catastrophe that provides the astounding climax of The Peloponnesian War of Thucydides.  I think of it as the climax, since it is all downhill for Athens from there.  Euripides responds to this disastrous news by staging light, witty love stories.

He had, based on the surviving plays, two structures available.  One is cynical, violent, and perhaps nihilistic: Herakles, The Trojan Women, Elektra.  The other is full of fairy tale devices and happy endings: Iphigenia at Tauris, Ion, Helen.  We will see more examples of both types.  Both are openly revisionist: maybe the story went a little differently than we usually tell it.

For example, maybe Helen was innocent and never ran off with Paris, but was carried way to Egypt while a savage war was fought over “a Helen-image” that was “dispatched… to Ilium so men might die in hate and blood.”  I am quoting from Electra – from the end of my previous post – and I still find it curious that Euripides previewed Helen in Electra.  Euripides did not invent this revisionist story of Helen’s innocence, by the way.  It is almost as old as Homer.

So, happy endings, for Helen, for Iphigenia, but not for the thousands slaughtered on the battlefield, not for Clytemnestra.  Her reason for murdering her husband was a fake.  The entire reason for the Trojan War was a fake.  The background of the “happy endings” are violent, spiraling catastrophes cause by cabals of capricious, or insane, or evil gods.  The romances are nearly as nihilistic as the violent plays.

I have been puzzling over this bit sung by the chorus, which comes just after a direct statement about the human costs of the Trojan War, surely standing in for the Peloponnesian War.  Euripides is not afraid to be direct at this point, but he moves into a more abstract idea:

What is god, what is not god, what is between man

and god, who shall say?  Say he has found

the remote way to the absolute,

that he has seen god, and come

back to us, and returned there, and come

back again, reason’s feet leaping

The void?  Who can hope for such fortune?  (237, tr. Lattimore)

Having said all this, I think Helen, on its own, is a marvelous little thing.  Since it is almost identical to Iphigenia in Tauris – discovery and reunion, a Greek-hating barbarian king, a trick allowing escape – I wonder if the that is in fact the third play in the trilogy. Perhaps Andromeda also had the same structure.  My sense is that Euripides was perverse – postmodernist – enough to present three almost identical plays.

For an illustration, I chose a crater owned by the Louvre that depicts Menelaus encountering Helen, but in the traditional story, after the sack of Troy, so in our sense it is Menelaus encountering the false Helen, which perhaps explains the presence of the cute little Eros flying above them.  This piece is famous enough that the artist is now “the Menelaus painter.”

Our next play is Lysistrata by Aristophanes, a landmark, a must-read if there were such a thing  We have read anti-war Aristophanes before, but nothing like this.

Electra by Euripides - Thus it is always told

A screwball, the Electra of Euripides (c. 413 BCE), but at this point his plays are all screwballs.  Electra is perhaps more subtly screwy.  It is not just his "version" of the story we already know from Aeschylus and Sophocles, but an attack on the story.

Many critics have wondered if it is a pure parody.  Some of it is a parody, most famously the mockery of the recognition scene in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers, which Euripides dismantles piece by piece.  “Besides, how could a lock of his hair match with mine?” (30, tr. Emily Townsend Vermeule) and so on, the rationalist side of Euripides making fun of the classics. 

The removal of the setting from the palace and tomb of Agamemnon to a rustic farm cottage is itself a deflation of the story.  But the subtle changes are in the characters, and the approach to the central problem of the play, by which I mean that Electra and Orestes reveal themselves as awful, and their desire for revenge more personal, more pathological, than divine.  Meanwhile neither Clytemnestra or even Aegisthus look so bad.

The murder of Aegisthus is a sick farce.  Why is he out in the country?

He happened to be walking in the water-meadow,

Scything young green shoots of myrtle for his hair.  (44)

I love that.  Hippie Aegisthus is a welcoming host, and his reward is to be stabbed in the back, with a knife that he himself gave to Orestes.  Clytemnestra is lured to the countryside to be killed by telling her that she is finally a grandma.  Even for Greek plays, these are cruel, odd killings.  Euripides is revising, perhaps undermining, the famous old stories.  Maybe he did not think he went far enough in this one, since he returns to the story in Orestes, a nihilistic masterpiece.

I will note one of the curious songs of the chorus (of peasants, also curious).  Just after Orestes and Electra are reunited, the chorus sings about, surprisingly, an episode in the terrible life of Thyestes, the great-uncle of Orestes and Electra, who wins the throne of Argos with a trick involving a magic golden lamb that results in Zeus reversing the sun’s course in protest.  As they finish the story:

Thus it is always told.

I am won only to light belief

that the sun would swerve or change his gold

chamber of fire, moved in pain

at sorrow and sin in the mortal world

       To judge or punish man.  (42)

Not disbelief, but “light belief.”  Euripides is working towards something.

I chose an image of an 18th century actress playing the role of Electra, not in a Greek play, I assume, but perhaps Crebillon’s 1708 Electre.  The print is from a 1772 book owned by the British Museum.  This is not the Electra of Euripides – all that hair, all that fabric, where his Electra has a shaved head and wears rags.

Unusually, we get a preview of next week’s play embedded in this week’s play.

CASTOR:     She never went to Troy.

Zeus fashioned and dispatched a Helen-image there

to Ilium so men might die in hate and blood.  (62-3)

What?  What?  Next week: the Helen of Euripides.

Ion by Euripides and H.D. - but why have you hidden this?

Ion by Euripides, one of the plays that survived by chance.  Among Euripides’s “romances” I think of it as the most Shakespearian, the purest fairy tale.  A foundling, a prophecy, a mistaken identity where first the mother tries to murder her son and then the son his mother, and finally a classic recognition scene:

KREOUSA:  there’s a blanket,

                    my own embroidery ---  (113)

That kind of fairy tale, the healing and reconciliation type.

KREOUSA:  I had thought you lost,

                     long ago,

                     with the ghosts

                      in death --- (115)

Euripides is reaching back to one of the old stories here – Ion, the foundling, is the reasons some Greeks are Ionian.  His grandfather was literally born from the earth, although since this is mythology the earth is Gaia, a goddess.  Euripides is working with one of the foundational stories of Athens.  What is he doing with it?

I note that Ion is the only surviving play set at the Delphic shrine of Apollo, curious given how important Delphic oracles are in so many other stories.  Euripides seems to be critiquing the oracles. Well, “critique,” he thinks they’re nonsense.  Even in the fairy tale context, they are simply arbitrary.  Pythia here is the Pythian priestess, at the time of performance the most important religious figure in Greece.  It is a bit like having the Pope as a character.

PYTHIA: I reveal things, long secret:

ION:       but why have you hidden this?

PYTHIA: it was the god’s wish:

Yes, yes, yes, but why was it the god’s wish?  We’re never going to get an answer to that.  Since Apollo is the father of Ion, the god who abandoned (and later rescued) his child from his brief affair with Queen Kreusa, I cannot help think about his more human motives.  Euripides is thinking about them.

The translator of the lines I have quoted is the poet H.D., a deep Classicist and an unusual Modernist.  Her translation is certainly an H.D. poem.

The broken, exclamatory or evocative vers-libre which I have chosen to translate the two-line dialogue, throughout the play, is the exact antithesis of the original.  Though concentrating and translating sometimes, ten words, with two, I have endeavoured, in no way, to depart from the meaning.  (32)

H.D.’s Ion is a book that leads, and not so gently, its readers to her interpretation of the poem.  I will include a photo of the above page.  It is not an introduction or foreword; the commentary is embedded in the paly:

I love this and think H.D.’s Ion is gorgeous, but I can imagine the reader who begs H.D. to get out of the way of Euripides.

The poetry rises clean cut to-day, as it did at the time of its writing.  And to-day, for the abstract welded with human implication, is in its way, ultra-modern.  (30)

Well, yes, it is now, but there are other ways to translate, I know.

The play’s chorus is superb, but I will mention another example of the play’s “[i]ndestructible beauty” (H.D. commenting again, p. 30).  One of Ion’s jobs as temple attendant is to keep the birds out of the gardens – but he loves birds!  A bird theme runs through the play, even, in a fairy tale, moment, turning the plot at one point.  Here is a bit of Ion’s Song of the Birds, warning them to stay away so he does not have to shoot them:

for this,

O, this, I would not kill,

your song

that tells to men,

God’s will.  (21)

The birds are the authentic oracles.  The human ones are trouble-makers.

I have included a photo of an actual Pythian tripod and cauldron, which can be seen at the Archeological Museum of Delphi.

Next week: Electra.  Didn’t we just read this?  No, that was Sophocles; this is the Electra of Euripides.  It will be different.

"Iphigenia in Tauris" by Euripides - Have I not seen enough of blood?

I do not have much do say about Iphigenia in Tauris specifically, but it is an exemplar of many tendencies of Euripides in the extraordinary last decade of his life, so I will write a few notes about those.

As for the date – I used 414 BCE – it is a matter of guesswork and affinity, and as I have thought about it I now believe the play was performed in 412 BCE with Helen and the lost Andromeda, but I will defer that idea to when we get to Helen.  Regardless, it belongs somewhere in this period.

Euripides, in his last decade, became interested in plays that were only semi-tragic, or barely tragic at all, what we call in Shakespeare’s context “romances.”  A number of the late Euripides plays resemble the Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline.  They are certainly not classic Aristotelian tragedies, with tragic flaws and hubris and all of that.  I have no idea if the audience thought Euripides was breaking any rules.  Aristotle’s Poetics is still off in the future.

Orestes, still pursued by the Furies despite the events of The Eumenides, is driven to the far eastern side of the Black Sea, where he discovers his sister Iphigenia, now a barbarian priestess who makes human sacrifices to Artemis.  The murder of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon is one of the key crimes of Greek tragedy, but here she was saved by Artemis at the last minute, whisked off to the ends of the earth.  The great crime of Agamemnon that leads to his murder by his wife, and her murder by her son, was a big fake, a divine hoax.  Now, a decade later, we see things put right.  Not everything, but the remaining things, the lost sister melodramatically reunited with her tormented brother.

My understanding is that Euripides did not invent this strange alternative version of the (non-)death of Iphigenia.  Many versions of the old stories were floating around.   I guess I want to wait until I have read a few more before I interpret them too much.  There will be more, soon.  “Have I not seen enough of blood?” asks Orestes (p. 126, tr. Bynner).  Good question.

Euripides is revising the stories of the House of Atreides, The Oresteia and its adjuncts, and the Trojan War more broadly.

It was a wicked war for a wicked woman,

And all the waste that has come from it is wicked.  (145)

That’s Orestes again, and the “wicked woman” is Helen, but let’s see, in four weeks, what Euripides has to say in Helen.

Iphigenia in Tauris, like Heracles and five of the eight last Euripides plays, is among the “alphabetical” plays, which survived by chance in a single manuscript, and which I take as a random survival, although who know what the 11th century Byzantine scribe was thinking.  My idea of what Euripides was doing is radically changed by the randomly surviving plays.  But who knows what I would think if I had a few more randomly chosen plays (or one more random Sophocles play).  I wish I did.  Maybe the scholars X-raying charred scrolls form the lava-buried library of Herculaneum will find one someday.

Speaking of which, I chose as an illustration a mural from Pompeii, with the priestess Iphigenia on the left and that must be Orestes with the harp, one of many interesting images on the play’s Wikipedia page.

Next week is The Birds by Aristophanes, one of the greatest comedies ever written, in my opinion Aristophanes’s best play.  In two weeks, the play is Ion by Euripides, and I mention it early because it is worth tracking down a copy of the 1937 translation by H. D., a masterpiece in its own way, and something different than what most us of have been reading most of the time.

The Trojan Women by Euripides - The epitaph of Greek shame.

The Trojan Women (c. 415 BCE) is a special case for Euripides.  What I think he is doing is inventing the protest play.  The Athenians had recently committed a true atrocity, when it besieged and destroyed the neutral island state of Melos in 416; the Athenians exterminated the men and enslaved the women.  Meanwhile, plans were underway for the eventually disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily, “[t]he epitaph of Greek shame” (tr, Lattimore, l. 1191, p. 289) to borrow Hecuba’s line about another war crime. 

Euripides responds to all of this, presumably collaborating with his producer, with a long howl of pain, a play about the suffering of the victims of war, especially the women who are enslaved and raped amidst the murder of their families.  The climatic crime, the brutal, graphic murder of Hecuba’s last grandson, not onstage but as close as Euripides could get, is like Heracles almost too much to bear – “too horrible to say more” (1177, 288). That’s Hecuba – grandma – again.

The warning to the Athenians is clear enough, from Athena’s glee about the upcoming destruction of most of the Greeks on their return journey to Cassandra’s lament for the Greek soldiers:

                     Those the War God caught

never saw their sons again, nor were they laid to rest

decently in winding sheets by their wives’ hands, but lie

buried in alien ground…  (376-9, 261)

That sure sounds like a warning about the Sicilian expedition.  The idea of a protest play may all be in my imagination, but not only in mine.  Dating at least to the Vietnam War, The Trojan Women has now become a protest play.  Please see The Trojan Women Project for part of the now long history of the play as a statement about war and refugees.  I included an image from a 2013 performance in Jordan by Syrian refugees.  A London performance of The Trojan Women by a mix of Ukrainian, Afghan, and Syrian refugees is scheduled for August.  I wish I could see it.

I read Women of Owu (2006) by Femi Osofisan, who moved the play to early nineteenth century Nigeria while simultaneously commenting on the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the invaders who fight in the name of “freedom” and “human rights”:

Bless the kindness which has rescued us

From tyranny in order to plunge us into slavery! (13)

I wish I could see this one, too.

One more aesthetic note: I had not remembered how The Trojan Women is so full of story.  Large parts of the Trojan War are included – the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the Trojan Horse, and more  – and the play is also revisiting Euripides’s own Hecuba and Andromache, as well as Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.   Six of the surviving plays of the last decade of Euripides’s life, a significant fraction of the total he could have written, are about aspects of the Trojan War, deeply engaged with Homer and Aeschylus and likely other plays we have lost, retelling the familiar stories in unfamiliar ways.  What did Euripides think he was doing?

Typically when I have been quoting from the old University of Chicago translations I have been referring to the volumes devoted to individual writers, but this time I used volume 2 of Greek Tragedies, the series that randomly scrambles the writers.  Maybe there is some logic, I don’t know.  Anyway, that is why I included line numbers along with page numbers.  Richmond Lattimore’s Euripides sure sounds a lot like Lattimore’s Homer.

The next play is Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides, c. 414 BCE, perhaps the year after The Trojan Women.  The retelling of the old stories continues.

Heracles by Euripides - These are poets' wretched lies.

With Heracles (c. 416 BCE) we move to a new period for Euripides, or at least, given the limits of the plays that survive, the illusion of a new period.  Like the mature Shakespeare, Euripides, in his sixties at this point, becomes attracted to screwy, revisionist “romances,” as un-tragic tragedies as we’ll read, and also stories as violent and horrific as any.  Heracles is one of the latter.

We begin with suppliants, threatened by violence, around an altar to Zeus.  How many plays have we read, now, that begin this way?  The action moves along the familiar lines.  The chorus of old men are sympathetic but useless.  The usurping king is a savage cartoon villain.  The half-divine hero Heracles arrives just in time, saving the suppliants, who happen to be his father, wife, and three children, with the expected offstage bloodbath.  The usual thing, except the play has only reached its exact center.  What is left?

With no warning, a pure sucker punch, Heracles goes mad and murders his wife and children.  The murders are offstage but described with great goriness.  Heracles recovers to find that his “last worst labor has been done.”  He will now live in order to grieve.  Curiously, and I believe this is where Euripides is aiming, Heracles effectively renounces his divinity.  His berserk madness is not, to him, the fault of Hera, but rather something within himself.

Ah, all this has no bearing on my grief;

but I do not believe the gods commit adultery, or bind each other in chains.

I never did believe it; I never shall;

nor that one god is tyrant of the rest.

If god is truly god, he is perfect,

lacking nothing.  These are poets’ wretched lies.  (111)

This is Heracles, the greatest Greek hero, the son of Zeus.  “I never did believe it.”

The first half of the play is effectively a parody of Greek drama, set up to be annihilated in the second half, where even the function of the chorus is destroyed:

CHORUS:  What dirge, what song

shall I sing for the dead?

What dance shall I dance for death?  (97)

And in fact they stop dancing, or singing, or doing anything except, like us, watching.  Earlier, while the first slaughter was going on, they celebrated: “Turn to the dances!” (88)  Maybe the gods can still dance:

HERACLES: Let the noble wife of Zeus begin the dance,

pounding with her feet Olympus’ gleaming floors!  (110)

The two halves of Heracles are full of parallels and linked imagery.  This radically disjointed play is tightly constructed.  I will look at a sample passage, full of interesting things.

HERACLES:  I have no wings to fly from those I love.

Look:

They will not let me go, but clutch my clothes

more tightly.  How close you came to death!

                                   (He sets down his bow and club and takes his children by the hands.)

Here, I’ll take your hands and lead you in my wake,

Like a ship that tows its little boats behind…

…  All mankind loves it children.  (83)

First, this is one of several points where Euripides humanizes the otherwise silent and abstract children, in order to make their murder as painful as possible. 

Second, that alliteration, clutch / clothes / close, appears several times but only in Heracles’s speech.  I have been quoting entirely from William Arrowsmith’s superb version of Heracles, but I also read the weirder translation of Anne Carson in Grief Lessons, and she also alliterates in the same places.  In the Greek, I guess.

Third, those boats – at the end of the play it is Heracles who is towed way “like some little boat.” 

Fourth, the wings, part of the bird imagery that runs through the play.

Heracles is, textually, a rich play.  But some of that is hard to see under the smash job Euripides does on Greek tragedy.

The image of mad Heracles is from a New York Times review of a 2013 Brooklyn Academy of Music performance.  Heracles is not performed much.

The next play will not lift the mood.  It is The Trojan Women (c. 415 BCE), with which Euripides more or less invents protest literature.  Along with a straight translation, I hope to read one of its descendants, Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu (2004), where the Trojan War is moved to 19th century Nigeria.

The Suppliants by Euripides - O grief, O grief!

The Suppliants, or The Suppliant Women, by Euripides, c. 423 BCE, or perhaps a few years later depending on how certain passages link to specific incidents in the Peloponnesian War.  A curious play, hardly one of Euripides’s best.

The story is familiar.  It is Seven Against Thebes and Antigone on the other side of the wall, with the grieving mothers of the soldiers lost fighting Thebes petitioning Athens to help them recover and bury the bodies of their sons.  The victorious Thebans, forbidding burial, are committing what we would call war crimes.  Virtuous Athens, led by Theseus, is willing to go to war in the name of human rights.

THESEUS:  By my many noble deeds

I have made myself a byword to the Greeks:

They count on me to punish wickedness.  (71)

You can hardly say The Suppliants is not relevant.  My impression, which is why I prefer the earlier date, making a Trilogy of Grief with Andromache and Hecuba, is that Euripides is working on dramatizing the costs of war but has not yet rejected, in disgust, the Athenian experiment.  Or whatever happened.  The Trojan Women is eight year or so in the future.  I should save some of these thoughts for The Trojan Women.

ADRASTUS:  Cities!  You might use

Reason to end your troubles; but with blood,

Not words, you ruin your affairs. – Enough!  (84)

What strikes me about both of the passages I have quoted is that they do not seem, in the context of the play, ironic.  Up above I placed a stereoscopic photograph of the Temple of Theseus,, taken circa 1870, owned by the Getty Museum.  One strange aspect of The Suppliants is that it is, for Euripides, a pious play, telling a religious story.  Why does Athens have a Temple of Theseus?  Why, down that road, is there a shrine to Capaneus, who is not even Athenian?  Well, there is a story about that – and here is the story.  We have stepped back to the Greek drama as origin story.

I have wondered about the role of the producer, to use our word, the money man, in the plays we have been reading.  Different wealthy citizens acted a producer of the Dionysian plays in different years.  Some apparently sent over the minimum funds while others spent lavishly; some were hands off while others were more involved.  Really just like Hollywood producers.  I wonder if the Suppliants was something like a commissioned play.  The producer sacrificed at the Shrine of Capaneus, got what he wanted, and now owes Capaneus a favor.  Euripides is then juggling his own concerns with those of his money guy.  I don’t know any of this, but I wonder.

Regardless, the emotional core of the play, the thing that makes it some kind of tragedy, is the mourning of the mothers and children for the fallen soldiers.  “O grief, O grief!” (87) as Adrastus says.  A god drops in at the end to wrap things up, but until then the action, and the sorrow, has been utterly human.

I’m reading the Frank William Jones translation.

The play next week is The Clouds by Aristophanes (423 BCE).  This one is unmissable.  Aristophanes sets aside his feud against Cleon for a year to instead go after a very special guest star.  Do not miss The Clouds!

Hecuba by Euripides - Good words should get their goodness from our lives

So what is Hecuba to him, exactly?  Shakespeare would have meant the Hecuba from Seneca’s gruesome Troades (1st century CE), not the Hecuba of Euripides (c. 424 BCE), and from Ovid.  Maybe I should revisit Seneca and Ovid soon.  The image below, borrowed from the Met, is a 1606 Italian illustration of Ovid showing Hecuba and her servants murdering Polymestor.  The Romans preferred the murders to be onstage, so to speak.

Hecuba, famous for having fifty children, or more, if she had fifty sons, lost all but three of them in the Trojan War.  In this play, she loses two more. Only Cassandra outlives her mother, and not for long.  Euripides tells a story of suffering, of grief piled on grief until the poor mother loses her humanity.

A lot of Hecuba should look familiar by now: the two-part structure, one part for the cruelly sacrificed daughter and another for the crassly murdered son; the pointless religious sacrifice of a young woman, like she is just a kind of sheep; the double-talking, self-interested heroes who are cowardly politicians, not heroic in any way.  The gods are replaced by ghosts this time.  “There is none but goddess Suffering herelf” Hecuba laments, plausibly (43, Arrowsmith).

At least one thing is close to new.  Euripides begins what will be an extended argument, over many plays, linking the corruption of the leaders, the heroes, to the decline of civilization.  I have no doubt the argument is political, a response that is still perhaps mere disquiet at this point to the suffering of the Peloponnesian War.  The Athenians know they are the good guys, fighting for the right reasons, yet they end up sounding like “that crowdpleasing, honeytalking, wordchopping” (106, Carson) Odysseus:

ODYSSEUS: You barbarians don’t know how to treat your friends as friends,

how to venerate men who die beautiful deaths.

The result is: Greece on top!

And your fate matches your policy.  (114, Carson)

This speech is the justification of a human sacrifice.  Athens on top!

Hecuba, in a couple of curious places, makes an argument about the source of good and evil, and connects the concepts to the playw0right’s, and politician’s, great instrument, words:

Good words should get their goodness from our lives

and nowhere else; the evil we do should show,

a rottenness that festers in our speech

and what we say, incapable of being glozed

with a film of pretty words.

                                                    There are men, I know,

sophists who make a science of persuasion,

glozing evil with a slick of loveliness;

but in the end a speciousness will show.

The impostors are punished; not one escapes

his death.  (62, Arrowsmith)

Some of this may be true, some false.  These ideas will return.  Agamemnon, with whom she is arguing here, certainly gets his punishment soon enough.  Like the Greek audience, we can enjoy the sinister irony when Agamemon just doubts that women are capable of revenge.

                                            But women?

Women overpower men?  (47, Arrowsmith)

I read, and am using, both the William Arrowsmith and the Anne Carson translations.  I liked them both.

Next week’s play is The Knights (425 BCE) by Aristophanes, which I remember as being much like The Acharnians but with new jokes.