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Euripides
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Euripides’ Hecuba is one of the few tragedies that evoke a sense of utter desolation and destruction in the audience. The drama focuses on the status of women, those who are out of power and at the margins of society, by enacting the sufferings of Hecuba. With the city of Troy fallen, Hecuba and Polyxena, her daughter, are enslaved to Agamemnon. Hecuba is despondent with the news that Polyxena is chosen to be sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. After the sacrifice, the body of her son Polydorus, already a ghost at the start of the drama, is discovered. Polymestor, a king in Thrace who Hecuba sent Polydorus to for safety reasons, murdered Polydorus for his gold.
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Euripides was the son of Mnesarchus. The family owned property on the island of Salamis, and Euripides was twice married (Melito and Choirile) and had three sons (Mnesarchides, Mnesilochus, and Euripides). Euripides was raised in a cultured family, was witness to the rebuilding of the Athenian walls after the Persian Wars (wars fought between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire during the first half of the fifth century B.C.E.), but above all belonged to the period of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.; a war fought between two ancient Greek city-states—Athens and Sparta). Euripides has been described as the most intellectual poet of his time. He has been called the philosopher (a person who studies for and seeks knowledge and wisdom) of the theater. In addition to his literary talents, he is said to have been an excellent athlete and painter.
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Euripides (485-406 bce), unlike Aeschylus and Sophocles, had no significant official public life in 5th-century bce Athens. The size of his library suggests instead a private intellectual life. He won first prize at the annual dramatic contests less often than the other two because, probably, of what Aristotle later would call "irregularities" -- actually his nonconformist and iconoclastic attitude regarding Greek religion and Athenian politics. He was the target of comic poets (as in Aristophanes' Frogs), and, when 73 years old and apparently disgusted with his treatment, he accepted an invitation from King Archelaus to live in Macedonia, where he wrote a few more plays. Among these last was The Bacchae, which won first prize in Athens when presented after his death.
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The manuscript tradition of Euripides has a very curious and instructive history. It throws a suggestive light on the capricious nature of the process by which some of the greatest literary treasures have been saved or lost. Nine plays of Euripides were selected, probably in early Byzantine times, for popular and educational use. These were-Alcestis, Andromache, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Medea, Orestes, Phoenissae, Rhesus, Troades. This list includes at least two plays, the Andromache and the Troades, which, even in the small number of the extant dramas, are universally allowed to be of very inferior merit-to say nothing of the Rhesus, which is generally allowed to be spurious. On the other hand, the list omits at least three plays of firstrate beauly and excellence, the very flower indeed, of the extant collection-the Ion, the Iphigenia in Tauris, and the Bacchae-the last certainly, in its own kmd, by far the most splendid work Of Euripides that we possess.
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Euripides's Electra beautifully illustrates Euripidean realism and rationalism. In this play Electra is married off to a peasant who does not consummate the marriage but who is noble in heart and respectful of his princess wife. Clytemnestra, the adulterous wife of Agamemnon who is fighting in the Trojan War, is lured to the mean hut of her daughter Electra on the pretense that Electra is having a baby. Aegisthus, Clytemnestra's lover, is killed first, and Electra prepares for her mother's arrival with his corpse in the hut. Though Clytemnestra is moved to remorse over her past treatment of Electra, it does not save her from being killed by Electra and the brother, Orestes, who are overwhelmed by their actions and are bewildered. A deus ex machina in the form of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) is needed to bridge the dilemma between an excusable murder and a mandatory punishment.
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Some time after 408, the year of the Orestes, Euripides went to Macedon to the court of King Archelaus. Some have called this self-imposed exile, but it may not have been, since a number of artists accepted invitations from Archelaus at about this time. He died and was buried in Macedon in 407/6. He is said to have been killed by hunting dogs, either accidentally let loose on him or deliberately set on him by enemies or rivals, or torn apart by women. Such a death is possible but cannot be deemed very likely. When the news of Euripides' death was brought to Athens, Sophocles donned mourning and introduced his chorus without the customary garlands.
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Euripides