THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES
By E. M. BLAIKLOCK LITT.D.
Professor of Classics
Auckland University College, New Zealand
WELLINGTON NEW ZEALAND UNIVERSITY PRESS
1952
IN MEMORIAM OF
ALFRED CROOM PATERSON
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Chapter
One THE ATHENIAN HUSBAND
Two THE HERO THAT WAS
Three THE AMAZON'S SON
Four SONS OF ERECHTHEUS
Five HELEN'S HUSBAND
Six KING OF MEN
Seven THE EPILEPTIC
Eight THE TEMPLE BOY .
Nine AGAMEMNON'S SON
Ten HOUSE- OF CADMUS
Eleven THE NATURAL MAN
APPENDIX
AUTHORITIES QUOTED
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
So has he triumphed you Euripides
Oh, I concede, he rarely gained a prize:
That’s quite another matter!
BROWNING, Aristophanes’ Apology.
WRITING from Calcutta to Thomas Flower Ellis, on 8 February 1835, Macaulay spoke of the passion, quite astonishing to himself, with which he had returned
to Greek literature. At the age of thirty-five he had made two discoveries. Thucydides, for whom ten years before he had entertained no great regard, now appeared to him, in the light of his own historical studies and political experience, a writer of surpassing excellence. 'I am astonished', he confessed,
'at my former blindness.' His second discovery was equally interesting. 'I could not bear Euripides at College', the letter continued.
'I now read my recantation. He has faults un-
doubtedly. But what a poet! The Medea, the Alcestis, the Troades and the Bacchae are alone sufficient to place him in the very first rank. Instead of depreciating him, I may, for aught I know end by editing him."1
Macaulay's edition, such were his preoccupations, unfortunately never saw the light, but the experience Macaulay describes is of interest in more ways than one. By and large Macaulay's Victorian contemporaries were appreciative enough, as good historians, of the virtues of Thucydides.
Over Euripides they were far from unanimous. Like not dissimilar Athenians, twenty-three centuries earlier in time, they fell to quarrelling over him. Swinburne was bitterly
critical. Goethe and Browning stood with the converted Macaulay. In the world of scholarship Jowett was luke-warm and Munro sufficiently partisan to lose his academic calm over
'that coxcomb' Schlegel. What, it may be asked, accounts for Macaulay's experience? He had gone to India, fortified, like Arthur Wellesley before him, with a considerable library of solid texts. In Calcutta, far from commentaries, controversy and professors, he 'found' the great historian and the great dramatist of the Athenian Time of Troubles. He evidently sensed in both writers, and the fact says much for Macaulay's insight, a common attitude towards lite and truth. Both were, in point of fact, realists, if realism is to be correctly defined as that element in art which aims at conveying a truthful expression of actuality as it appears to the normal observer. Such, mutatis mutandis, was the common aim of historian and dramatist. Such a spirit made Thucydides the most truly dramatic of Greek writers of history, and Euripides the most historically significant of Greek dramatists.
The ruthless seeker after truth stirs only love or dislike.
Socrates and Euripides stood together there. Both Athenians were, indeed, the destroyers of illusions. Probing the bases of truth Socrates earned unpopularity, and finally a cup of hem-lock. In the world of drama Euripides was conducting a similar Euripides was only fiften years younger than Sophocles but a gulf stood between them. A golden age was passing and a fever of restlessness was in the air. 'When Euripides began to write,' said Jebb, 'it must have been clear to any man of his genius and culture that, though an established prestige might be maintained, a new poet who sought to construct tragedy on the old basis would be building on sand. For first the
popular religion itself-the very foundation of tragedy-had
been undermined. Secondly scepticism had begun to be busy with the legends which that religion consecrated.' There was new wine in the old bottles, the vintage of an unhappy age which has often burst that which contains it. Mythologies are shaken in an unstable society. The pure Sophoclean marble demands a background of tranquil things. The onset of trouble had ushered in the age which ended with Philip of Macedon and Rome. The air was heavy with new preoccupations, and you, Euripides, in Jaeger’s phrase, “applying the new critical standards, to old problems’ must have felt as if all that had previously been written must now be rewritten.' A body of traditional material lay to his hand, consecrated by half a century of usage, which had its roots deep in religion. A few bold tragedies, notably the Persae, had departed from that tradition, but Euripides rightly sensed that a policy based on such innovation was foredoomed to failure. Revolutionary though he undoubtedly was in his chosen medium of self-expression, he subjected his work to the limitations of the tragic mythology, feeling doubtless that the familiar background disarmed one prejudice. Others he knew he would certainly arouse, for, to continue the quotation trom Jaeger,
'Euripides did not think to write mythology alone. He was cut off from it now by the realities of life as they were known by his age. Euripides deliberately worked on the principle that poetry should depict reality.' Reality? In the framework of a shaken mythology? Why not? Dead marble had 'imitated' more than one scene of vigorous life on the Acropolis. Why should the dead legends not render truth? Thus it was that the myths, in which people generally no longer believed, became for the third, and in many ways the most remarkable of the Greek tragic poets, the vehicle for a new mode of art, 'less strong and perfect, although in some directions more genial and penetrative.
The last word of the quotation is apt enough. Telling the truth or unearthing it, as Socrates found, is not always the most appreciated of human activities. Hence the age-old unpopularity of the realist. The romanticist, ever escaping from an uncongenial spiritual environment, tends away from actuality.