What Thucydides says about the total tergiversation of the Greek
ethos in the course of the Peloponnesian War remains the best
introduction to the late, bleak, crazy plays of Euripides:
Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot
against an enemy behind
his back was perfectly legitimate
self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be
trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To
plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still
cleverer to see that a plot was hatching… . Revenge was more
important than self-preservation… . Love of power, operating
through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all
these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which
came into play once the struggle had broken out… . [T]here was a
general deterioration
of character through the Greek world. The
simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a
noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon
ceased to exist.
David Kovacs has
done a splendid job editing all six volumes of the new Loeb
Euripides. The final two volumes contain
Helen, Phoenician Women, and Orestes (volume 5);
The Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Rhesus (volume 6).
Kovacs has provided for each
play a crisp introduction, a learned text, a clear translation,
and a useful bibliography. All his volumes have a spacious, airy
feel. In this, as in much else, they differ from
Arthur S. Way’s cramped four volumes (1904), which
were full of locutions like “Thou hast done—what?
Thou thrillest me with fear” and breathed the chipper spirit of
Edwardian certainty. Neverthless, although Kovacs has given us
the best text,
the best translations—lively, bold, and spirited—continue to be
in the Chicago version, especially those of William Arrowsmith,
which include those late masterworks, Orestes (408 B.C.) and The
Bacchae (407)—plays that I will look at here after a brief
survey.
In his early years the facile young dramatist used myth
to investigate the psyches of women; he called them Alcestis, Medea, and
Phaedra. Such plays were to earn Euripides the comic scrutiny of
Aristophanes—a mockery that could not hide a likeness, a
fondness for extreme situations that both men shared. The comic
writer Cratinus noticed this in his coinage,
euripidaristophanizein, to write in the style of both men.
Around 412, toward the end of both his career and the war, came
two plays—
Iphigenia among the Taurians and
Helen—that consciously sought to offer an alternate, a
differing, a happy version of the most familiar Greek stories.
(The Ion of 414 is similarly euphoric.)
Iphigenia, secreted off in Eurasia, and Helen, hidden down in
Africa, offer Orestes and Menelaus, respectively, joyful rescue
from a nasty world. It is difficult not to see in these plays
the vocabulary of tragedy used as a dreamlike, fantasy escape
from what was now an increasingly somber world.
The Orestes has not been appreciated for what it is. It amounts
to nothing less than a thorough and lawless rewriting of Athens’
great founding play, Aeschylus’ Oresteia (458), particularly
the last member of the trilogy, The Eumenides, which presented
the suffering and redemption of Orestes,
the Apollo-driven killer
of his killer mother. Out of Orestes’s trial, presided over by Athena,
came the founding legal institutions of Athenian civilization and
the peaceful domestication of the previously hostile Eumenides.
Intelligence and goodwill reign.
In Euripides’ wartime
revision, Electra is tending her delirious brother Orestes after
the matricide. Orestes sleeps. “And why repeat the old charges
against Apollo?” mutters the young woman sarcastically. “The
world knows all too well how he pushed Orestes to murder the
mother who gave him birth, the act of matricide which wins, it
seems, something less than approval in men’s eyes.” Menelaus,
whose wife Helen and daughter Hermione are hiding in the palace,
will be the solution to all problems when he arrives. A
half-crazed Orestes awakes and begs Menelaus for help against the
people, who are about to order
his death by stoning. Menelaus
dithers. Orestes’ bosom pal Pylades suggests: “We’ll murder
Helen. That will touch Menelaus where it hurts.” But, when they
try to grab Helen, she escapes by flying through the roof to
heaven, as reported by an excitedly incoherent Phrygian slave.
Orestes decides to murder, if not the wife, at least the daughter
of Menelaus on the grounds that “I can never have my fill of
killing whores.” Menelaus is very upset. He and Orestes insult
each other first in stichomythia (the exchange of whole single
lines) and then in antilabe (the exchange of parts of lines).
Apollo suddenly pops by on the machine and glibly solves the
quarrel, pairing off unlikely types.
What is amazing about this play is the way it ingeniously uses
the vocabulary of mythology to display the collapse of the same world
that mythology supported and explained. Euripides was a very
clever writer—a genius, if you will—who painted feckless people
adrift in a savage society—and painted them often with a dark,
strangely modern comedy.
According to tradition, Euripides
wrote The Bacchae in wild Macedon after leaving
a doomed Athens in 408, a few years before the disastrous end of
the Peloponnesian War. (Kovacs buys this colorful story.) It was produced
posthumously in Athens by a son or nephew. In it the dialectic
between a god’s fierce power and any human’s silly impotence is
taken to a point where a pious mother tears apart an impious son,
thinking him a young, delicate calf she caught in a Dionysiac
orgy. There are passages of rapt beauty: “The upper air was
still, the leaves of the wooded glade kept silence, and no sound
of beast could be heard.” There is also humor, of the ridiculing
kind: “Your girdle is slack,” Dionysus tells Pentheus, as the god
dresses up the king as a woman for his mountain foray.
The Bacchae strikes me as neither defaming nor exalting
religion. Rather it sees the world as empty of meaning but not of
energy. It is a bitter but amused old man’s play, crammed with
stratagems but endorsing none. The artist he most reminds me of
is Buñuel.
