The Male Characters Of Euripides by
Professor E M Blaiklock
Cette soif de régner que rien ne peut éteindre, L'orgueil de voir vingt rois vous servir et vous craindre,
Tous les droits de l'empire en vos mains confiés,
Cruel, c'est à ces dieux que vous sacrifiez.
RACINE, Iphigénie.
REALISM, which did not spare Menelaus, had no more mercy for Agamemnon. Atreus' greater son appears first in the Hecuba. This strange play, produced about 425 B.C. became, in Roman, Byzantine and Medieval times a favourite among Euripides' tragedies. It shared this honour with the Orestes and the Phoenissa, and something more than
'comparatively easy Greek' seems required for an explanation.
There is no doubt that the high levels of dramatic excitement reached by all three plays had weight with both Roman translators and Byzantine schoolmen. For modern readers there are other sources of interest. In Hecuba, for instance, it seems clear enough that Euripides was rationalising a myth. Legend had it that Priam's queen never saw the servitude of Ithaca. She was changed miraculously into a dog. Like Horace conning Homer, Euripides imagined a parable in the curious tale, and proceeded to show the hammering of fate reduce nobility to bestiality.
The same play develops further that line of satiric characterisation which, if the Andromache precedes the Hecuba, was already taking shape as a novel feature of Euripides' war-time theatre. It is Agamemnon who now appears before Athens, stripped like his brother of Homeric glamour, and of Aeschylus' tragic dignity, robbed of Sophocles' cubit of ideal stature, and reduced, to the grand disgust of good conservatives, to the common level of man.
Such light of day was, as we have already seen, Euripides standard treatment for the heroes of legend. Sophocles
meant as much in his epigrammatic criticism. The poet must, as Aristotle remarks in the chapter in which Sophocles is thus quoted, imitate one of three objects — things as they are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. There are those who regard the last clause as the prime duty of art, and who, finding spiritual sustenance in the idealisation of the past, resent the reduction of imagined greatness to the levels of the present, of common humanity and experience. By these people Euripides was disliked. Such unpopularity he could do nothing to allay, for the iconoclasm which aroused it sprang from fundamental qualities of his mind. He understood human nature with that deep insight which often accompanies or arises from a vivid imagination.
His dramatic art was forced to move within the traditional boundaries, but it was quite inevitable that he should approach the raw material of legend in other mood than that of Sophocles. The present, in days like ours, bulks abnormally. It colours past and future, and no generation should understand better than ours what goes on in the minds of thoughtful men in such a day. As Euripides watched the Great War do sorry work upon the characters of his contemporaries and the spirit of his age, it was natural enough that he should consider the ancient stories in à critical manner. His eyes were open to the tangle of old sin. He saw in the sharp colours provided by his century the wickedness, the pettiness, the sordid ambition, the selfishness and vice which made the shape of ancient tales.
Facit indignatio versum. His generation, like our own, was a swarming time for evil things. Hence the emergence in his drama of what Miss L. Matthaei calls 'the vast problem of utter wickedness', and the consequent impossibility of aligning many of Euripides plays with the Aristotelian formula.
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