Euripides was country-born as Aeschylus was, quite early in the fifth century, in about 485 B.C.; that means he
was no more than ten years younger than Sophocles, and was eighty when he died in 406. It is tempting to think of
his work as a third chapter, a new generation, and it is true that he entered the theatre when Aeschylus was already
dead; his first success was in 441 B.C., when he was forty-four. We have seventeen complete tragedies by him,
one satyr play, which is worth a separate discussion, and one, the Rhesus, wrongly attributed to him. It is as well to
remember that this comparatively huge mass of poetry represents his popularity among poets, professional
scholars, and teachers of the late Greek world, long after the collapse of Athens. He wrote something like ninety-
two plays, but in his lifetime he won only four theatrical competitions. All the same, he is wonderful as a
dramatist, full of originality at every stage of his development. His plays are remarkable for their range of tones
and the gleeful inventiveness, which morose critics call cynical artificiality, of their construction. He is the master
of the unexpected, and the building-blocks he uses are not so much characters as set scenes like the recognition
scene, the scene of self-sacrifice, the furious quarrel, and so on. In his last plays the surprises are often hectic and
elaborate, although the greatest of all his plays, the Bacchae, is the last or one of the last he ever wrote, and its
construction is bold and simple, its colouring here and there Aeschylean.
The Hippolytus (428 B.C.) is dramatically exciting, very beautiful and harmonious, and tragical. It is one of his
most satisfying plays, and one of his few successful ones with the contemporary audience. The hero is acceptably
naive.
O Goddess, I bring you what I have made:
a twisted wreath picked from pure meadow ground,
where no shepherd ever pastures his flock,
no steel has come, only the bee in spring
passes across the untrodden meadows,
Virginity keeps them with sprinkling streams.The last of these lines I find untranslatable in verse. It means really that Shame, or Respect, the personified quality
of youthful respect and restraint, which carries strong implications of virginity, is the gardener of the meadow,
sprinkling it with the dew of rivers or streams. Maybe the lack of a precise English equivalent for the Greek Aidos
debars us from the world of Hippolytus. Here he is paying his tribute to virginal Artemis, and neglecting
Aphrodite, who contrives his downfall through the hot passion of his stepmother, and then his death through his
father's curse. In its terrible and effective alterations of tone, this play remains in tension with itself until the final
scenes, one between Artemis and Hippolytus, in which the goddess speaks for the first time, and then a death scene
which occurs uniquely in Greek tragedy on the stage.
I shall be firm, I am dying, father,
Cover my face up swiftly in your robe.Euripides' other great masterwork about women's passion is his Medea, a tragedy so terrible that it can end only
with the famous sorceress flying away in a chariot drawn by dragons. She has murdered her children out of a
passionate hatred which is the dark side of rejected love, and out of insulted honour. The verses of this play are so
convincing that it becomes easy to enter into these scenes even today; for whatever reason, the murderess and
sorceress is more alive than the unhappy male characters in the play. Some of her speeches have that curious ring
of modernity with which Euripides is sometimes rather mistakenly credited. It is only an uninhibited and
passionate reasoning, but the passion, not the argument, is fundamental. Euripides picks the arguments and the
point of view of each character with cool deliberation, and carries them through with great dramatic power. The