Euripides and Menander: Epitrepontes, Act IV (1999-2000)

2000

Begin by reviewing my handout, "Greek and Roman Comedy-A Brief Overview" and the introduction in Balme's translation.) Athenian comedy has undergone a radical transformation by the time we reach the age of Menander in the latter half of the fourth century BC. 1 In contrast to the highly topical subject-matter of Aristophanic Old Comedy, Menander's plays focus on the domestic travails of what are presented as typical Greek households, with a particular focus on disputes between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, the plight of young lovers, and so forth. Gone are the bawdy jokes and outlandish costumes of Old Comedy: instead, we find ourselves in the prosaic, day-today world of the Athenian bourgeoisie, with characters who seem to interact with one another much as would their real-life counterparts. The plays are still composed in verse, but the bulk of the lines are in spoken iambic trimeter or chanted trochaic tetrameter. 2 Sung passages are rare, and the choruswhich was showing signs of atrophying already in the later plays of Aristophanesis now virtually gone. The first act of the typical Menandrian play concludes with someone noting the (quite artificial) arrival of a band of tipsy revelers, which serves as a cue for all of the on-stage characters to depart. But our manuscripts contain no indication of just what kind of song those "revelers" might have sung, or that the song had any relevance whatsoever to the play. Subsequent act-breaks are also marked by choral performances, but the only indication of this in our manuscripts is the single word ΧΟΡΟΥ: "choral bit." 3 Things have clearly changed. On the one hand, drama has now become something much closer to "theater." Thus, while plays are still put on at the City Dionysia, the cultic associations of the dramatic performances have virtually disappeared. Not only the chorus, with its elaborate costumes as birds, or wasps, or clouds, or horseman, but the grotesquely padded costumes of the actors, the phalloi, the bawdy humor, the short bits of song and danceall the various items that had encoded the comic performances as belonging to the world of Dionysiac ritualare no longer to be found. Instead, we are in a world very like that presented by the late Euripidean stageminus the mythological content, the exotic locales, the chorus, and the monodies. The latter is no accident: tragedy had more or less died with the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles at the end of the fifth century. The genre continued, but in an attenuated form; 4 already in the 380s people were looking back at the fifth century as the period when the "classics" were produced, by the grand masters Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. 5 With the decline of tragedy, comedy rose to the fore as "the" dramatic genre, but, through a process that is difficult to reconstruct, in a form that saw it in effect reconstitute the essential elements of late Euripidean romantic melodrama. 6 "Euripides" and "tragedy" became, in effect, onean aesthetic and cultural icon that Menander appropriated in producing something that was at the same time both familiar and new. What he produces might be termed a philosophical comedy of mannersa more genial form of Euripidean drama that employs the twists and turns of plot, the misperceptions and misidentifications, the mechanemata [cunning

The Classical World, 2012

2017

The thesis explores the way in which character is represented in Menander's comedies and in the revival, translation, and reception of Menandrean comedy in the modern Greek theatre. Although modern translators and directors may have sought to reproduce the ancient dramas faithfully, they inevitably reshaped and reinterpreted them to conform to audience expectations and the new cultural context. Comparing aspects of character in Part I CHAPTER 1: The Conceptual World of Menander's Comedies .

Philo of Alexandria speaks with fondness of his experience in the audience at ap erformance of Euripides, and throughout his corpus he quotes from this playwright on 21 occasions and from 10 different plays.Asawriter whose driving interest was the exposition of Jewish scriptures in conjunction with Hellenistic philosophy, Philo'sr epeatedr ecourset otragedy is noteworthya nd illustrative of his intellectual milieu. This studyw ill consider whya nd how Philo deploys Euripides. Most often, his quotations are gnomic sayingsand philosophicalproof texts which werecommon currencyamong contemporary writers.With respect to at least one drama, however, the satyr-play Syleus,P hilo engagesi namore extensive discussion of its context, producing astring of five fragments, four of which are unattested elsewhere. By surveying his use of Euripides, Iaim to make evident the extent to which Philo was dependent upon receivedp hilosophical and literary sources, along with moments of his own innovation as he reads Attic drama in connection with his distinctive Jewish religious commitments. At first glance, Philo of Alexandria and Euripides appeart oh avel ittle in common. They wered ivided by four centuries, inhabited separate continents,a nd identified with different religious traditions. Euripides' works wereperformed at Dionysiac festivals;h is plays both celebrate and interrogate the ideals of Greek religion and society;bycontrast,Philo'sprosetreatisesare steeped in Jewish thought and frequently engagei nt he exposition of authoritative scriptural texts.I ns ome other respects, however,the intellectual projects of Philo and Euripides converge. Both inherited established generic and literarym odels-dramatic conventions for Euripides, and accepted modes of biblical exegesis for Philo. Each adopted these, respectively,while at the sametime transformingthem in numerous and, at times, unexpected directions. And while their remarkable literary outputs had profound influences, the trajectory of their innovations werenot directlyrealized: Euripides is the lastofthe celebrated Attic playwrights, and Philo'sd istinctive approach to the Bible would largely not be taken up by his fellow Jews, though manye arlyC hristians would appropriate it. Additional similarities are evident.E uripides and Philo inheritedc orporao fl iterature consistingo fh eroic legends, whose meanings they probed and tested; for both, culturalo rm ythological heroes become, on occasion, vehicles for expressing contemporaryp hilosophical problems. Fori nstance,i nafragmento fE uripides' Chrysippus (fr.839 Kannicht), the chorus relatethe cosmological views of the philos

The “Iphigenia in Aulis“” unfolds a very exciting plotline, full of suspenseful arcs of action, surprising twists and abrupt volte-faces, sensational confrontations and revelation of secrets, incessant making and unmaking of intrigues, and cumulative thwarting of the audience’s expectations. From beginning to end, the spectators rarely experience a moment of tranquility. This play is probably the closest that Classical Greek art has reached to the structure of the modern adventure thriller, in which everything is subservient to the forward movement of the story and the creation of serial surprise. To achieve this memorable sequence of unabated suspense, the author has had to make some sacrifices regarding the verisimilitude of events, the lifelikeness of the personages’ reactions, and the psychological realism of their attitudes. It is worth wondering whether Euripides has moved beyond the Aristotelian principles of “eikos” and “anankaion”, plausibility and necessity in plot development, to approach rather the Brechtian perspective of “Jede Szene für sich”. Similarly to other plays of Euripides’ later period, the “Iphigenia” may be read as a parable on the historical circumstances and civic conflicts of Athens during the final years of the Peloponnesian War. Two major constituents of the plot lend themselves par excellence to the detection of allusions to contemporary reality: on one hand, the great war which the Greeks are about to start, and in particular the explanations offered about its causes, purposes, and the desires of the parties involved; on the other hand, the sacrifice of young Iphigenia, which programmatically epitomises the high human cost of the military enterprise. These two capital events of the storyline seem to entail wide-ranging meditations on the recent history of the embattled Greece. Especially in the years of the Decelean War, after about 410 BCE, Euripides seems to have been preoccupied with the fate of the younger generation of Athens: those youths that had been born and grown up in the harsh conditions of the long conflict, those who had never known the time of peace and the golden age of Athens. One further aspect of the “Iphigenia in Aulis” deserves comment; namely, the open and extensible concept of historical experience that emerges from the construction of the plot and the arrangement of the story materials. The finale of the “Iphigenia” contains the germs of further storylines that will run their course in the post-drama world. The end of the story of this tragedy is only the beginning of several other stories, which will be of equally violent, catastrophic, and tragic nature. This peculiarly Euripidean view of human experience as an open-ended process brings the Euripidean dramaturgy particularly close to the Shakespearian concept of the human condition, clearly discerned in Shakespeare’s historical plays. In the conception of history as an open process of unending evil, Euripides and Shakespeare come together.

The ancient Athenian tragedians stand at a specific point between our age and the unfathomable dark matter of humanity’s first efforts to create viable institutions and social bonds aimed at keeping balance in society. Several of Euripides’ extant plays deal with the betrayal of philia – which, in his time, was the bond between people which kept them in a balance of expectations. As Medea proclaims, the husband and wife in a marriage may not have equal rights and duties, but the bond between them is such that each knows what to expect of the other. When this bond is violated, when expectations are thwarted, one party is cast adrift, losing the protection and honor that came with the bond. In Euripides’ world, the victim turns avenger and destroys the violator of the bond. This paper focuses on Medea, whose protagonist responds to her husband’s betrayal by murdering their children; on Hippolytos, in which, through her suicide, Phaedra destroys the object of her unrequited love; on Alcestis, in which a wife gives in to her husband’s pleas to die in his place, and, in her sacrifice, he loses all that was of value to him; on Hecuba, in which the defeated queen of Troy destroys the murderer of her youngest son, metamorphosing into an avenging bitch to do so. Through these plays and the thinking of the time, we examine a bond that maintains a balance in human relations – and the destructive forces unleashed by frustration and defeat.