Medea/Hippolytus/Electra/Helen [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Edith Hall EURIPIDES AND HIS TRADITION Many of Euripides' most striking dramas have not even survived. The most scandalous, perhaps, was his Aeolus, notoriously portraying brother-sister incest leading to childbirth and suicide. The most bizarre may have been his Cretans, featuring Queen Pasiphae's adulterous affair with a bull. But the most beautiful was held to be Andromeda, in which the Ethiopian princess, chained to a rock as a meal for a sea-monster, was rescued by the aerial epiphany of the winged hero Perseus. According to the comic playwright Aristophanes, Andromeda was so delightful that it was the preferred holiday reading of Dionysus, the god of theatre himself (Frogs 53), and its fragments reveal an appealing concoction not unlike Euripides' Helen: it added the theatricality of exotic spectacle and song to emotive pathos and suspense, and distinctively 'novehstic' elements such as adventure, intrigue, a barbarian setting, and a romantic liaison. Yet Alexander the Great, no professional actor, is supposed to have been able to perform a whole episode of Andromeda off by heart, and did so at his last supper (Athenaeus, Deipnosophists I2.537d-e.); the single most significant reason for Euripides' astonishing ancient popularity was really the accessible and memorable poetry in which his characters expressed themselves. Princesses and paupers, demi-gods and warriors, practitioners of incest, bestiality, and murder: he made them all 'speak like human beings' (see Aristophanes, Frogs 1058). The Greeks and Romans were passionate about Euripides. A character in a comedy announced that he would be prepared to hang himself for the sake of seeing this (dead) tragedian (Philemon fr. Ii8).i Aristotle's formalist discussion of tragedy complains about Euripides' use of the deux ex machina, his unintegrated choruses, and the 'unnecessary' villainy of some of his characters. Yet even 1 R. Kassel and C. Austin (eds.), Poetae Comici Graeci (Berlin, 1983-95)-