some justification, we are bound to feel – on the husband who has cast her aside. We watch in horror as
Medea’s vengeance takes the form, first of killing the innocent princess to whom Jason is engaged, and
then butchering her own children as a way of depriving Jason of the heirs that his ambition craves.
Euripides has skillfully constructed his play so that the audience is carried along with Medea, sharing her
anguish and, what is particularly troubling, fully understanding her desire for revenge, until the point is
reached where the audience is shocked as much by its own responses as by the actions on the stage.
“His mother was the first to fall upon him and serve as officiant of the bloodshed. He threw the
headband off from his head, so that his poor mother might recognize him and spare him. Reaching out
to touch her cheek he said, ‘It is I, mother, Pentheus, your son! You bore me in the halls of Echion.
Have pity on me, mother, and do not kill your own son! I have done wrong!’ But she was foaming at
the mouth and her eyes had a crazed look. She could not think straight, being in the grip of bacchic
power, so she paid no attention to his words.” (Euripides, Bacchae 1114–24, a messenger reporting
Pentheus’ last moments)This pattern, in which the audience initially sympathizes with a character who, by the end of the play, has
done things that no audience member would condone, can be seen in a number of Euripides’ tragedies. In
the Bacchae, composed at the very end of Euripides’ life and only performed posthumously, the character
in question is, remarkably, the god Dionysus himself. Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, a
member of the ruling house of Thebes, but his divinity is denied by the current king of Thebes, the young
and impetuous Pentheus. As a god, Dionysus is of course entitled to recognition and worship, particularly
in the eyes of the audience at the dramatic competition held in Dionysus’ honor, while Pentheus deserves
punishment for his impious behavior. But the punishment takes a form that any sensible person would find
revolting: Pentheus is lured by the god into dressing in women’s clothes so he can observe the Dionysiac
rites in the mountains, where he is savagely torn apart by the women of Thebes, including most
prominently his own mother, whose minds have been unhinged by the god. The effect of all this is to call
into question, not only the actions of the characters on stage, but the reactions of the audience as well,
which is what makes Euripidean drama even today so unsettling and so “modern.”
Plays by Euripides seemed modern to their original audiences as well, both because they often reflected
the latest intellectual trends and because they challenged, sometimes quite directly, the works of older,
more established dramatists. Like Sophocles, Euripides too composed an Electra, dramatizing the same
events Aeschylus had made the subject of his The Libation Bearers. (It is not known which version, that
of Euripides or that of Sophocles, is the earlier, but both are certainly later than Aeschylus’ play.) In The
Libation Bearers, Electra discovers at Agamemnon’s tomb a lock of hair left as an offering by someone
whose footprints are visible. The hair and footprints match her own, but, since she knows that they are not
her own, she reasons that they must be those of Orestes, who has apparently returned surreptitiously. In his
own play, Euripides tweaks the older dramatist by having an elderly servant rush onto the stage to tell
Electra excitedly that he has found a lock of hair and footprints at Agamemnon’s tomb and to urge her to
go and compare them with her own, hoping that they will turn out to be those of Orestes. Instead, Electra
ridicules the old man for his naïveté, pointing out that men and women, even if they are sister and brother,
have hair of different textures and feet of different sizes. (The hair and footprints, of course, turn out to be
those of Orestes, who has in fact returned surreptitiously; Euripides thus manages to tweak his own
audience, as well as Aeschylus and Aeschylus’ audience.) Electra also illustrates, although not so clearly
as Medea and Bacchae, the characteristic Euripidean shift in sympathy: Electra and Orestes reveal
themselves to be considerably less “heroic” than their situation and their pedigree would lead us to
expect, while their victims, Clytemestra and her lover, turn out not to be quite the odious villains that