Bis heute fesseln die Werke des Euripides, der zu den drei großen Tragödiendichtern des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. gehörte, Leser wie Theaterbesucher aufs Neue. Kraftvoll charakterisierte er Frauengestalten wie Medea, Elektra, Helena und Iphigenie. Von Euripides' Themen, der Kluft zwischen Gott und Mensch, dem Ausgeliefertsein an eine sinnlose Welt, geht eine anhaltende Anziehungskraft aus. Für diese zwei Bände wurden die zehn bedeutendsten Tragödien des Euripides in mustergültiger Übersetzung ausgewählt.

This passage is interpreted by all commentators and translators as follows: ‘Or how shall we call it glorious that I went out to fight the hydra and the lion at the command of Eurystheus—and shall I not labour to shield off death from my own children ?’ The purpose of my note1 is to suggest that we have here a very remarkable use of the verb , and that Euripides used it here with a precise and subtle intention.

Euripides and the Boundaries of the Human offers the first single-volume detailed reading of the nineteen canonical Euripidean plays in nearly fifty years. The dramas are examined not only in their diversity but also for the themes and ideas that bind them together as the work of a single remarkable playwright.

This article re-examines the scholium on Euripides, Andromache 445, which several scholars have used to support the claim that Andromache premiered outside Athens, and concludes that both the scholium itself and a remark in the play's hypothesis rather suggest that the play was produced in Athens as part of a dramatic competition.

All are agreed that towards the end of his long life Euripides leff Athens and went to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon. From Plato 1 and many other sources we know that Archelaus was the illegitimate son of Perdiccas II., by Simiche, a slave girl, and had succeeded to his father by murdering his uncle Alcetas, his half-brother, and his cousin. As these events occurred in 413 or 412 B.C., the poet's visit must have been later than (...) that date, and has with probability been placed soon after the production of his Orestes at Athens in Ol. 92. 4. (shrink)

This paper raises objections to the constitution of these lines in the OCT. The lines are gnomic but they generalize based on an actual sequence of events just described and should contain an allusion to the offence that will cause the Greeks to perish, the outrage against Athena's temple. This, it is argued, stood in a lacuna best marked after 95. The article has three theses: (1) sacking ‘cities, temples, and tombs’ is implausible because the latter two are parts of (...) the first; (2) plundering tombs refers to nothing in the play, nor was this thought of as an offence against the gods; (3) 96–7 do not refer to the offence that causes the fool's death but are a description of his success, the destruction of the hated enemy population. That success stands in ironic contrast with his subsequent death. (shrink)

It seems surprising that this text—or others similar— has been accepted without any serious search for a more meaningful alternative. Even if it be thought that Euripides was capable of adding , in an unusual sense producing an awkward tautology, to , surely this should only be accepted in the absence ofa more credible emendation which departs no further from the manuscripts? Is there such an alternative? In the corresponding last line of the strophe we have : the first (...) syllable of is doubtful; there seems to be no convincing metrical objection to its being a long syllable here. This atonce suggests the maintenance of the manuscripts' to maintain the metrical balance. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

This passage has caused much discussion and much variety of opinion, and it still remains doubtful whether the later commentators in their efforts at exact interpretation have been more successful than the earlier ones. The general sense is sufficiently clear. Medea is making an apology to the Chorus of sympathizing Corinthian ladies for her delay in appearing before them. So far all are agreed. The difficulties, real or unreal, arise when we begin to inquire what form the apology actually takes. (...) First of all there are doubts as to the meaning of το ς μ μᾂπο. in the Scholia. we have a gloss μῂ όρώμνο είνα. and the explanation το Xωρίςεσθα καì ᾂτν ποθεν μμάτων είνα. Many scholars have taken exception to this view on two grounds, as stated by Verrall ad loc, because ‘the sense of motion is not there, and there is no reference to any eyes in particular.’ He requires either authority or analogy for this. As far as the absence of motion is concerned, it is sufficient to refer to Thuc. 1, 7 αί δ παλααί ᾀπθαλσσης μλλον ῲκίσθησαν id I, 99ναμῄ ᾀπ οκου σ,γ. Il. B 292 μένεν ᾀπ ᾑς ᾀλòΧοο. Then there is the analogous expression αί γàρ δῂ μοᾀπ οὒατος ώδε γένοτο . As to the second objection, why is it necessary that the eyes of anyone in particular should be referred to ? There is no more ambiguity here than there is in Il Ψ 53 θâσσον ᾀπ θαλμν, where the meaning is ‘so as to be out of sight, not of me or you, but of everybody.’ In fact, it could not be maintained with any show of reason that ᾀπθαλμνand ᾀποὒατς could not mean ‘out of sight’ and ‘out of hearing’. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the role of Heracles' famous body in the representation of madness and its aftermath in Euripides' Heracles. Unlike studies of Trachiniae, interpretations of Heracles have neglected the hero's body in Euripides. This reading examines the eruption of that body midway through the tragedy as a part of Heracles that is daemonic and strange, but also integral to his identity. Central to my reading is the figure of the symptom, through which madness materializes onstage. (...) Symptoms were contested sites of interpretation in the late fifth century, supporting both conventional narratives about human suffering and new stories advanced by contemporary medicine and ethics. In exploring the imaginative possibilities of these new stories, I do not privilege a “secular” over a “divine” reading. Rather I aim to offer a model of interaction between medicine and tragedy that sees the cross-breeding of worldviews as productive of innovative drama. (shrink)

The following is excerpted from Sean Gurd’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus published with Uitgeverij this year. Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate, and to him his career may have felt more like a failure. He was regularly selected (...) to have his plays performed in the annual festival of Dionysus at Athens. But the plays were performed in a competition, and in the competitions he lost and lost, winning first place only five times in a career that spanned more than forty years. His corpus reads like the remains of a life spent trying to get a few things right and never being quite satisfied: scenes and schematized combinations of elements recur again and again, each time slightly changed. Hippolytus itself is an example: it contains two scenes in which a sick or dying character lies on a couch or a stretcher and is surrounded by silence and grief; he had experimented with such scenes in Alcestis, and would work with them again in Herakles and Orestes. Nor, judging from appearances, was he immune to the desire to score a hit, or to satisfy the audiences and the judges at the competition. Hippolytus is a rewrite of another Hippolytus, performed several years earlier, which scandalized the audience and certainly did not take first place. In that earlier Hippolytus (called by later writers Hippolytus Veiled), Euripides fashioned a Phaedra who was neither ashamed of loving her stepson nor incapable of taking steps to satisfy her desire. The forwardness of her approach to Hippolytus so outraged him that he covered his head with a robe (hence the play’s later title). Euripides liked to write energetic and self-confident women like this. He staged his Medea in 431, just three years before he revised Hippolytus, and in it the jilted title character murders her children in revenge for Jason’s new marriage to a more politically advantageous wife. Another flop: the play came in third of three. Evidently the judges did not like their women showing agency, especially when the consequences were transgressive. “The ornament of women,” wrote another great Athenian a little earlier, “is silence.”i Euripides’ Medea and his first Phaedra had other decorations. So three years after Medea crashed and burned and some time after the first Hippolytus suffered the same fate, he produced another Hippolytus play with a different setting and story. How could this one not have been a reaction to the failure of the first? “Second thoughts are always better,” he has one of his characters say, as though he were offering an apology for his first thoughts on the same story. In this new version, Phaedra is suicidally ashamed of her love, choosing to die rather than have it discovered, and willing to bring down her beloved Hippolytus in the service of the same end. Now it is Phaedra herself who covers her head in shock and horror at her desire. Only an intermediary, a slave of the house and an old crone with her fingers in all sorts of illicit pots, communicates Phaedra’s secret – against orders – and in consequence brings about the demise of two resolutely moral figures. It worked. For his tale of two well-born nobles with an unswerving commitment to moral action, destroyed by the meddling of a slave (and by the hostility of some particularly uncaring divinities), the judges crowned Euripides winner. It was the first time he had won, after almost thirty years of work. *** What Hippolytus wants more than anything else, as he protests with outrage just before leaving Trozen for the last time, is the benefit of due process – oaths, witnesses, an investigation that would reveal who really lusted after whom. Ironic, given that in the first Hippolytus, as far as we can make out, he did get a trial – but too late, and Theseus’ successful processing of Hippolytus failed to prevent his death. I cannot help hearing in the second Hippolytus’ complaints the anger of his authorial semblable who lost year after year by a process of judging that might have seemed brutal to him. Judges took no cognizance of how he worked, how long or hard or why; they just voted, and Euripides lost. But then I hear, in the fate of the first Hippolytus, an even grimmer commentary. Processed or not, we lose. We run aground. At the very least, this might cast a darker shadow on the business of watching or reading a play: in that twilight, things move too fast to make a fair assessment and, in any case, the reasonably high definition of what you see and hear belies the truth of indistinction, the multiplicities just below the surface. Watching is a constrained activity, a form of captivity, but reading is plastic. This translation was begun to supply the script for an audio version of the play, recorded in the spring of 2012, and here and there it sacrifices literalness for sayability and the voices and passions of the actors on that occasion. But it was finished to be read, and engineered to create a reading caught between the poles of specificity and non-specificity that the play itself conjures and relies on at its generative core. Thus two texts: the one clear, perhaps overprecise, respectably modern in its presentation, and the other ancient, a reasonable approximation of the classical reading process, and indistinct in vital ways. Like early modern dramatic texts, the exact provenance and original function of the scripts that have made it down to us are unknown. We do know that the ultimate survival of Hippolytus was thanks to its wide-spread use as a school text. But its relation to the first performance in 428 BCE is a matter only of speculation. Euripides presumably had a fair copy before production began; it was probably modified during rehearsals. The actors may have had copies, too (probably the young men who served in the chorus did not). The chor?gos, a wealthy Athenian who paid for the production, might have been presented with or just made sure to get his hands on a high-quality text, to commemorate the play’s success. Fans might have been able to buy copies. Any one of these sources might have provided the ultimate progenitor of our text. Several of them might have, in fact, if later editors compared and conflated traditions. The plays toured extensively in the Greek-speaking world, and were restaged as repertoire for centuries afterwards. In the process they were subjected to enough modifications by producers and actors that in the later fourth century the Athenian statesman Lycurgus had a law passed prohibiting performances at Athens from deviating from the official “city” text of the tragedies (which he had commissioned). It is unlikely that the city text was the last word; but it marks an important moment in Athens’ role in their dissemination, since after this the major sites of textual curatorship moved overseas, to Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, Antioch, Constantinople. Any single text of any single play is thus no more than a moment of clarity and stability, crossed and subtended by multiple vectors of change, including that of textual flux (from Euripides’ first drafts to the latest printed text) and that of Euripides’ life work as a writer, in the light of which the Hippolytus is just one attempt to produce something exactly right, to win the prize or finally satisfy himself or prove to himself that all this longing for perfection was a waste of time. I am intrigued by the possibility that a single text might somehow serve as a lens onto this wider zone of indistinction, representing a small region clearly but nonetheless containing a blurred image of the whole, like a Leibnizian monad. After all, no text is a witness: it is, rather, a perception and a performance, and what every Hippolytus must perform is the awkward overlay of singular and plural, social practise and subliminal drive, that structures the tragedy. Modern critical editions can do this by juxtaposing a (relatively) clean and simple text with a textual apparatus reporting variants and theorizing the relationship between textual instantiations. A translation lacks the resolution to catch the fine variations which feed into the construction of an apparatus. But there are other means to hand. Guessing at the exact words of the original text is always just that – guessing – though Hippolytus is less problematic than plays like Iphigenia at Aulis. But we can make a pretty secure guess at what such a text looked like. Texts read by fifth-century readers were fundamentally different from what is presented in the best medieval MSS and printed in modern publications. The texts of Euripides’ time and for many centuries afterwards did not indicate word division with spaces (or by any other means) and were extremely sparing in punctuation, often avoiding it altogether. There was only one “case” of letters – what we call “capitals.” Musical sections were inscribed as though they were prose, without line endings to reflect their rhythm or their rhetorical structure. There was no indication of the speakers within a dramatic text, either. The earliest surviving dramatic texts, which come from over a century after Euripides’ death and a time which was much more elaborate and precise in its textual culture, indicated speaker-change with a little line or paragraphos below the line and a double-point [:] at its end. This convention almost certainly does not date back to Euripides’ own time; it may not even date to Lycurgus. In any case, such indications were understood to be readers’ marks: they did not have the same authority as the text and they were subject to readers’ revisions. At least ideationally, if not in concrete and distinguishable fact, a dramatic text was understood as containing no indication of speaker-change (and certainly none of who was saying what). The reader had to figure that out for him-/herself. The clear, legible, easy texts we are accustomed to reading are the fabrications of medieval and modern reading cultures. The first text, then, presents the translation as the text would have been in the mid-fourth century, perhaps decades after Euripides’ death. The second text processes Hippolytus, makes sense of it and makes it “readable.” That is: too distinct, dangerously so. It gets in your way, conjures fantoms, tries to make you see. Fragments of the Hippolytus Veiled, otherwise almost entirely lost, are juxtaposed with similar passages in the text – not to suggest a reconstruction, but a dialogue and a complex set of reassessments. I have not tried to represent the full variety of textual variants, but I have signalled where, for one reason or another, the text is soft and different editions propose excisions or changes. The two texts must be read together: you, reader, form the bridge between the distinctly seen and the indistinct invisible. You, in the end, will be its mask. *** illsandhateddiseaseswhatcanidoforyouwhatshouldinotdohereisthelightandthebrightairyoursickbedisnowout s idethehouseyoureverywordwastocomeherebutyouwillrushbacktoyourbedroomagainyoufadequicklyyoudelig htinnothingyoudislikewhatyouhaveyoulovewhatyoudontitsbettertobesickthantendthesickthefirstissimpleto the secondattachesheartspainandhandsworkeveryhumanlifeispainfulthereisnoendtotoildarknesshidesbehindclo udswhateverisdearerthanlifeweproveunhappyloversofwhatshineshereforlackofknowledgeofanotherlifethere isnoproofforthingsbeneaththeearthonlystoriessustainus liftmybodystraightenmyheadthebondsofmylimbsareloosenedtakemyhandsandmypalearmsthishatistooheavy formyheadtoweartakeitoffspreadmyhairovermyshoulders couragechilddonttossandturnsoviolentlyyouwillbearyoursicknessmoreeasilywithpeaceandanoblemindallmort alssuffer aiaiiwanttodrinkpurewaterfromadewyspringiwanttoliebackandrestunderthetreesinsomegrassymeadowchildw hycrydontsaythesethingsnearthecrowdhurlingwordsmountedonmadness sendmetothemountainiwillgototheforestwherebeastkillingdogspressthespotteddeergodsilongtoshouttothedo gstoshootthethessalianjavelinpastmyblondhairtoholdthebarbeddartinmyhandwhythisanxietychildwhatdoyouc areabouthuntingwhydoyoulustforflowingspringstheresahillwithwaterjustnexttothetowerwecangetyouadrinkt h ereartemismistressofthesaltlakeandthecoursethunderingwithhorseshoovesiwishiwereonyourplainsbreakings t uds whythrowthesefrenziedwordsaboutjustnowyouweresettingoutforthemountaintohuntandnowyoulongforhorses onthewavelesssand thesethingsneedanoracletotellwhichgodreinsyouinanddrivesyoufromyoursenseschild whathaveidonehowfarhaveibeendrivenfromgoodthoughtsiwascrazyiwascursedbysomepowerpheupheualasn ursecovermyheadagainimashamedofwhativesaidcovermeatearmovesdownfrommyeyeanditembarrassesm eithurtstostraightenourmindanditisterribletobeinsanebesttodiebeforeyoubecomelucidagain illcoveryoubutwhenwilldeathcovermeimoldivelearnedalotmortalsshoulddrinkoffriendshipmoderatelynotfrom th edeepestmarrowofthesoulamindslovecharmsshouldbeeasytoundoorthrustawayortiemoretightlyitisaverydiffic ultweightforonesoultolaborovertwopeopleasiamwrackedbypainforhertoomuchdisciplinecausesmoreharmthan pleasureandwarswithhealthipraisetoomuchlessthannothinginexcessandthewiseagreewithme *** Scene 1 Enter Phaedra and the Nurse; the former is recumbent on a couch while the latter bustles about her with gestures that might be those of a caregiver or a guard. NURSE Ills and hated diseases! What can I do for you? What should I not do? Here is the light, and the bright air; your sick bed is now outside the house. Your every word was to come here, but you will rush back to your bedroom again. You fade quickly. You delight in nothing. You dislike what you have. You love what you don’t. It’s better to be sick than tend the sick – the first is simple. To the second attaches heart’s pain and hand’s work. Every human life is painful. There is no end to toil. Darkness hides behind clouds whatever is dearer than life. We prove unhappy lovers of what shines here for lack of knowledge of another life. There is no proof for things beneath the earth. Only stories sustain us. PHAEDRA Lift my body, straighten my head: the bonds of my limbs are loosened. Take my hands and my pale arms. This hat is too heavy for my head to wear. Take it off, spread my hair over my shoulders. NURSE Courage, child; don’t toss and turn so violently. You will bear your sickness more easily with peace and a noble mind. All mortals suffer. PHAEDRA Aiai. I want to drink pure water from a dewy spring. I want to lie back and rest under the trees in some grassy meadow. NURSE Child, why cry? Don’t say these things near the crowd, hurling words mounted on madness. PHAEDRA Send me to the mountain. I will go to the forest where beast-killing dogs press the spotted deer. Gods! I long to shout to the dogs, to shoot the Thessalian javelin past my blond hair, to hold the barbed dart in my hand. NURSE Why this anxiety, child? What do you care about hunting? Why do you lust for flowing springs? There’s a hill with water just next to the tower; we can get you a drink there. PHAEDRA Artemis, mistress of the salt lake and the course thundering with horse’s hooves: I wish I were on your plains breaking studs! NURSE Why throw these frenzied words about? Just now you were setting out for the mountain to hunt – and now you long for horses on the waveless sand. These things need an oracle to tell which god reins you in and drives you from your senses, child. PHAEDRA What have I done? How far have I been driven from good thoughts? I was crazy, I was cursed by some power. Pheu pheu. Alas. Nurse, cover my head again. I’m ashamed of what I’ve said. Cover me – a tear moves down from my eye and it embarrasses me. It hurts to straighten your mind and it is terrible to be insane. Best to die before you become lucid again. NURSE I’ll cover you. But when will death cover me? I’m old; I’ve learned a lot. Mortals should drink of friendship moderately, not from the deepest marrow of the soul. A mind’s love-charms should be easy to undo, or thrust away, or tie more tightly. It is a very difficult weight for one soul to labor over two people, as I am wracked by pain for her. Too much discipline causes more harm than pleasure and wars with health. I praise “too much” less than “nothing in excess,” and the wise agree with me. ***. (shrink)

Menelaus' question in 1050 has puzzled interpreters. Why would Euripides put a joke at the end of this scene? It is true that of all the scenes in this play, the Helen scene is the only one that could admit a joke without terrible discomfort. And there is already humour in it. Hecuba employs scornful laughter and an amusing reductio ad absurdum in her arguments against Helen. So a joke here is not as utterly ruinous as it would be, (...) for example, in the scene where Astyanax is buried. (shrink)

In some cases discussed below, the present form of the Septuagint is not representative of how Ancient Greek Tragedies were received by the LXX translators, but of how Old Testament traditions in Greek form were received by the tragedians.

ResumenLa tragedia griega sigue siendo un gran referente de reflexión filosófica. En este artículo nos centraremos en la figura de Eurípides, concretamente en el tema de los juicios morales que trasmiten sus obras trágicas. La cuestión es que si en Esquilo la razón triunfaba sobre el dilema trágico, en Eurípides no se ve claro ese triunfo si viene impuesto desde fuera y no ha arraigado en el corazón de los ciudadanos. La razón tiene muchas dificultades para ejercer su control sobre (...) la acción y orientarla hacia el bien común. Eurípides planteará que es la persona, su conciencia interior, la que debe de estar convencida de que algo le obligue moralmente. El paso de una moral pensada a una moral vivida.Palabras claveRazón, pasión, conciencia interior, obligación moral, moral pensada, moral vividaAbstractThe Greek tragedy is still an important reference for philosophical reflection. In this article we will focus on the figure of Euripides, specifically on the issue of moral judgments his tragic plays transmit. The issue is that if in Aeschylus reason prevailed over the tragic dilemma, in Euripides it is not clear if that triumph is imposed from outside and has not rooted in the heart of the citizens. Reason faces much difficulty to exercise its control over action and go for the common good. Euripides proposes that it is the person, their inner consciousness, which must be convinced that something should oblige them morally. It’s the passage from a thought morality to a lived morality.KeywordsReason, passion, inner consciousness, moral obligation, thought morality, lived morality. (shrink)

This article expands upon the range of options and methods of some of my earlier studies on Euripides and the Old Testament. These studies have sought to discover similar linguistic features and concepts in the texts of Euripides and the Old Testament, and to discuss how Euripidean tragedies can be read as Greek responses to Hebrew anthropological beliefs, more specifically as poetic-philosophical approaches to the anthropo-theological narratives of Genesis 2–4 and related biblical texts. These biblical texts probably transmitted (...) through improvised oral or written Greek translations preceding the Septuagint (LXX), reorganise and transform the meaning of Hebrew expressions. This article presents the basic problems and aspects of a cultural-critical and comparative analysis and illustrates them with shared motifs from Medea, one of the eight Euripidean tragedies named after a female protagonist, and the Old Testament, thus expanding the boundaries of the traditional historic-critical exegesis.Contribution: The article contributes to the investigation of the background of the Septuagint from a cultural critical perspective with special reference to the Euripidean tragedies. (shrink)

The Messenger is relating how Menelaus and Helen escape from Egypt in a royal Egyptian ship, under pretext that they are going to carry out a ritual ‘sea burial’ of the supposedly drowned Menelaus. Helen's husband, whose identity was as yet unknown to the Egyptian crew, induced them to let his own shipwrecked crew come on board, and as the bull intended for sacrifice resisted being embarked he here cries to his men to manhandle it—in fact to carry it—on board.

Justina Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians, University of Michigan Press, ISBN - 9780472102303Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba, Duke University Press, ISBN - 9780822313601Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides’ Traffic in Women, Cornell University Press, ISBN - 9780801428456.