Drammaturgo greco di Euripide

Euripide (nato nel 484 a.C. circa, Atene [Grecia], morì nel 406, in Macedonia), ultimo dei tre grandi tragici drammatici drammatici di Atene classica, dopo Eschilo e Sofocle.

Vita e carriera

È possibile ricostruire solo la biografia più sketchiest di Euripide. Sua madre si chiamava Cleito; suo padre si chiamava Mnesarchus o Mnesarchides. Una tradizione afferma che sua madre era un fruttivendolo che vendeva erbe sul mercato. Aristofane ne scherzava in commedia dopo commedia; ma ci sono prove indirette migliori che Euripide provenisse da una famiglia benestante. Euripide ricevette per la prima volta l'onore di essere stato scelto per competere nel festival drammatico del 455, e vinse la sua prima vittoria nel 441. Euripide lasciò definitivamente Atene nel 408, accettando un invito da Archelao, re di Macedonia. Morì in Macedonia nel 406.

L'unica attività pubblica nota di Euripide fu il suo servizio in una missione diplomatica a Siracusa in Sicilia. Tuttavia, era appassionato di idee e possedeva una grande biblioteca. Si dice che si sia associato con Protagora, Anaxagora e altri sofisti e filosofi-scienziati. La sua conoscenza di nuove idee gli ha portato irrequietezza piuttosto che convinzione, e il suo atteggiamento interrogativo nei confronti della tradizionale religione greca si riflette in alcune delle sue opere teatrali. Della vita privata di Euripide, si può dire poco. La tradizione successiva ha inventato per lui una vita matrimoniale straordinariamente disastrosa. È noto che aveva una moglie chiamata Melito e generò tre figli. Uno di questi era una specie di poeta e produsse i Baccanti dopo la morte di suo padre. Potrebbe anche aver completato l'opera incompiuta di suo padre Ifigenia ad Aulis.

The ancients knew of 92 plays composed by Euripides. Nineteen plays are extant, if one of disputed authorship is included. At only four festivals was Euripides awarded the first prize—the fourth posthumously, for the tetralogy that included Bacchants and Iphigenia at Aulis. As Sophocles won perhaps as many as 24 victories, it is clear that Euripides was comparatively unsuccessful. More to the point is that on more than 20 occasions Euripides was chosen, out of all contestants, to be one of the three laureates of the year. Furthermore, the regularity with which Aristophanes parodied him is proof enough that Euripides’ work commanded attention. It is often said that disappointment at his plays’ reception in Athens was one of the reasons for his leaving his native city in his old age; but there are other reasons why an old poet might have left Athens in the 23rd year of the Peloponnesian War.

Dramatic and literary achievements

Euripides’ plays exhibit his iconoclastic, rationalizing attitude toward both religious belief and the ancient legends and myths that formed the traditional subject matter for Greek drama. These legends seem to have been for him a mere collection of stories without any particular authority. He also apparently rejected the gods of Homeric theology, whom he frequently depicts as irrational, petulant, and singularly uninterested in meting out “divine justice.” That the gods are so often presented on the stage by Euripides is partly due to their convenience as a source of information that could not otherwise be made available to the audience.

Given this attitude of sophisticated doubt on his part, Euripides invents protagonists who are quite different from the larger-than-life characters drawn with such conviction by Aeschylus and Sophocles. They are, for the most part, commonplace, down-to-earth men and women who have all the flaws and vulnerabilities ordinarily associated with human beings. Furthermore, Euripides makes his characters express the doubts, the problems and controversies, and in general the ideas and feelings of his own time. They sometimes even take time off from the dramatic action to debate each other on matters of current philosophical or social interest.

Euripides differed from Aeschylus and Sophocles in making his characters’ tragic fates stem almost entirely from their own flawed natures and uncontrolled passions. Chance, disorder, and human irrationality and immorality frequently result not in an eventual reconciliation or moral resolution but in apparently meaningless suffering that is looked upon with indifference by the gods. The power of this type of drama lies in the frightening and ghastly situations it creates and in the melodramatic, even sensational, emotional effects of its characters’ tragic crises.

Given this strong strain of psychological realism, Euripides shows moments of brilliant insight into his characters, especially in scenes of love and madness. His depictions of women deserve particular attention; it is easy to extract from his plays a long list of heroines who are fierce, treacherous, or adulterous, or all three at once. Misogyny is altogether too simple an explanation here, although Euripides’ reputation in his own day was that of a woman hater, and a play by Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria, comically depicts the indignation of the Athenian women at their portrayal by Euripides.

The chief structural peculiarities of Euripides’ plays are his use of prologues and of the providential appearance of a god (deus ex machina) at the play’s end. Almost all of the plays start with a monologue that is in effect a bare chronicle explaining the situation and characters with which the action begins. Similarly, the god’s epilogue at the end of the play serves to reveal the future fortunes of the characters. This latter device has been criticized as clumsy or artificial by modern authorities, but it was presumably more palatable to the audiences of Euripides’ own time. Another striking feature of his plays is that over time Euripides found less and less use for the chorus; in his successive works it tends to grow detached from the dramatic action.

The word habitually used in antiquity to describe Euripides’ ordinary style of dramatic speech is lalia (“chatter”), alluding probably both to its comparatively light weight and to the volubility of his characters of all classes. Notwithstanding this, Euripides’ lyrics at times have considerable charm and sweetness. In the works written after 415 bc his lyrics underwent a change, becoming more emotional and luxuriant. At its worst this style is hardly distinguishable from Aristophanes’ parody of it in his comedy Frogs, but where frenzied emotion is appropriate, as in the tragedy Bacchants, Euripides’ songs are unsurpassed in their power and beauty.

During the last decade of his career Euripides began to write “tragedies” that might actually be called romantic dramas, or tragicomedies with happy endings. These plays have a highly organized structure leading to a recognition scene in which the discovery of a character’s true identity produces a complete change in the situation, and in general a happy one. Extant plays in this style include Ion, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, and Helen. Plays of the tragicomedy type seem to anticipate the New Comedy of the 4th century bc.

The fame and popularity of Euripides eclipsed that of Aeschylus and Sophocles in the cosmopolitan Hellenistic period. The austere, lofty, essentially political and “religious” tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles had less appeal than that of Euripides, with its more accessible realism and its obviously emotional, even sensational, effects. Euripides thus became the most popular of the three for revivals of his plays in later antiquity; this is probably why at least 18 of his plays have survived compared to seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles, and why the extant fragmentary quotations from his works are more numerous than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles put together.