Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth PDF
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Loeb Classical Monographs in memory of lames C. Loeb Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth Cediic H. Whitman Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1974 © Copyright 1974 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved The Loeb Classical Monographs are published with assistance from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-81676 ISBN 0-674-26920-9 Printed in the United States of America Preface The art of Euripides is so varied, so given to the un- expected, that it is no wonder that all attempts at a con- sistent, general theory of his work have failed to carry conviction. It is almost a commentary on himself, as well as on human life, that he closed no less than five plays with identical choral lines stressing the unforeseeable, as if even he was not quite sure what he would do next. Euripides has had more labels attached to him than any other dramatist who ever lived, none in the least helpful save insofar as their sum provides an index to the pov- erty of one-sided critical views of a poet capable of every- thing except one-sidedness. The ambivalence of his earliest critic, Aristophanes, is clear throughout the com- edies,· and the purport of his earliest extant tragedy, the Alcestis, is still, after nearly two and a half millennia, highly debatable. It was natural, perhaps, for his contem- poraries to be astonished, shocked, or even enchanted by Euripides, and then give Sophocles the prize. It was natural too, though not a sign of heightened critical acuity, for the fourth and later centuries to adopt Eu- ripides to their special liking; presumably he seemed at once more accessible and more philosophic. But from the time when Aristotle called him the most tragic of the poets to the present, when it is becoming fashionable to search out his affinities with the comic, there has ap- peared no broad interpretive scheme competent to con- tain the full range of his labyrinthine imagination. Certainly this essay offers nothing of the sort. It was written primarily out of the wish to formulate a some- vi Preface what personal reading of three plays that have always aroused controversy as well as admiration. The Iphi- geneia in Tauris, a long-standing favorite, the Ion, a little neglected until lately, and above all the "bewundert viel und viel gescholten" Helen have undergone widely divergent interpretations. Yet, by contrast with what was said above about the diversity of Euripides' work, these three dramas have much in common with each other, though little that is obvious with the rest of the corpus. On internal grounds all seem to have been written around the year 412 B.C., the fixed date of the Helen·, all have striking similarities in dramatic form and content, including the so-called happy endings which account for such designations as "romance," "tragicomedy," and "melodrama." In addition, they possess a certain com- munity of theme, less often noticed, but crucial to the meaning of that final act of salvation by which the endings are called happy. This theme is the quest for purity, or wholeness. It finds itself through a complex of intricately woven poetic motifs, the sea, music, a branch of olive; but it is the struggle for wholeness, for spiritual, not merely physical, redemption that gives these plays their relative coherence as a special segment of Euripides' work. In order to make the book available to all those in- terested in Greek tragedy, I have translated extracts, and transliterated certain key words, leaving only a few necessarily in Greek. Also, there are no notes. Some scholars might consider a book without notes quite as useless as one without pictures and conversations, but they seemed burdensome, since classicists at work on Euripides will know what they might have said, while others would probably skip them. It seemed sufficient to compile a brief list of selected books and articles that I found relevant. One of these, Charles Segal's "The Two vii Preface Worlds of Euripides' Helen," was written simultaneously with my chapter, and quite independently of it. Our views about this difficult play have a great deal in com- mon, even to the comparison with Cymbeline; but for the sake of the total argument I have let my chapter stand as written, while earnestly referring the reader to the more detailed treatment in Segal's article. This book was begun under a grant from the James C. Loeb Foundation during the year 1969-70, while I was on sabbatical leave from Harvard; I am more than usually indebted also to friends, students, and fellow scholars for their encouragement and help in bringing it to com- pletion. From the beginning, my wife, Anne, listened with patience and reassuring support to the entire book, as its various parts were written. Maud Wilcox and Mar- gareta Fulton, of the Harvard University Press, also read the manuscript even before it was officially submitted for publication. Among students with whom I have worked directly on Euripides, I should name Rowland Hazard and Justina Gregory, whose respective studies of the Hecuba and of madness in the Heracles, Oiestes, and Bacchae have considerably furthered my own thinking about those plays. Also, I extend warm thanks to Laura Slatkin and David Kovacs for their careful critical read- ings and many valuable suggestions, both scholarly and stylistic. Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to Anne Pippin Burnett who generously, and despite our differing outlooks, offered many helpful comments; and to C. J. Herington, whose compelling critical imperium not only eliminated a number of lapses from the first three of these essays, but also effectively brought about, inopinata vi, the existence of the fourth. Greensboro, Vermont C.H.W. August 1973 Contents ι Iphigeneia in Tauris ι 2 Helen 35 3 Ion 69 4 The Scope of Myth 104 Selected Bibliography 151
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