§ 1. Introduction.
It has already been made clear that Euripides enjoyed an enormous popularity among Greek and Italian artists, and that he was the chief inspiration for works of art based on tragedy. This latter feature assumes a new interest when studied with the Greek vases. The great majority of these paintings, as has been pointed out, is to be placed within the fourth cent. B.C., and through them one approaches very near to the poet’s own time. They are to be valued, therefore, as most direct and reliable testimony concerning Greek tragedy and the place it occupied in the life of Lower Italy. Not a few of the paintings published in the following pages may have been seen by people who had known the Athenian society in which Euripides himself had moved. This proximity of the vases to the poet’s own day is an important point, and should be thoroughly comprehended in order to bring the true value of the paintings before one. The text of a classical Greek author, exposed to the emendatory zeal of the ancient grammarians and the ignorance and carelessness of scribes, had a precarious sort of existence before it was microscopically dissected and violently revised by modern philologists. Our oldest manuscript hardly goes back more than one-third of the way to the original. Between 1000 A.D. and 340 B.C., when the archetype of the three tragedians was ordered by Lykurgos, how long was the line of copies! It is vastly different with the edition of the Medeia, for example, on the amphora, p. [145]. The vase relates the tragedy at first hand, and furnishes the student with an exhibition of the play that is more than twenty-two hundred years old. The original work and no copy carries one into the century succeeding the first production of the play. Such facts impress one with the importance of this class of monuments.
Before taking up the discussion of the vase paintings that are under the influence of Euripides, it may be well to examine for a moment the ancient testimony touching the poet. It is well known that he did not follow the orthodox form of tragic composition established by Aischylos and adhered to by Sophokles. He was less religious than either of the other two and, in the same degree, more a man of the world. He was interested in politics, rhetoric, and philosophy, and these elements accordingly found room in his plays. For introducing the common, ordinary affairs of daily life he was stoutly condemned by Aristophanes. His policy continued the same in spite of the virulent attacks of his enemies, and the individual appealed to him more strongly than the body politic; where the former poets had preached ἦθος and directed their messages to the world καθ’ ὅλον, Euripides disclosed for the first time the power of πάθος, and that of itself was specific and applied to the community καθ’ ἕκαστον. Herein lay Aristotle’s unfavourable criticism. The philosopher admired Homer, Aischylos, and Sophokles more than Euripides simply because he considered ἦθος to be a more potent factor than πάθος, and so he complains that none of the younger poets have the former[[155]]. By νέοι he evidently meant post-Euripidean writers, and yet there is no trace of the Aristotelian conception of ἦθος in Euripides. We may imagine that the great thinker looked for something more stable than πάθος. But this was all cold, calculating criticism, and Aristotle appears, for the most part, alone in placing Euripides below Aischylos and Sophokles. The Alexandrian grammarians were his chief followers. Plato found in Euripides an authority of great pre-eminence[[156]]. The immediate success that he enjoyed in his own time is well illustrated by the anecdote related in Plutarch’s Life of Nikias[[157]]. The fugitives from the Athenian army in the Sicilian expedition are said to have maintained themselves by reciting from Euripides’ works, and captives were able to gain their freedom by teaching their masters new selections from the Euripidean plays. The element of truth in this remarkable story enables one to understand something of the place held by this poet in the West. It is related of Alexander that he was particularly fond of Euripides, and that he performed the feat of reciting a whole scene from the Andromeda at his fatal banquet[[158]]. A certain Axionikos wrote a comedy called the ‘Lover of Euripides,’ in which he represented the people as suffering from the Euripides-fad to such an extent that they counted all other poetry worthless[[159]]. A fitting finale to all this is reached in the story told in the vita of Euripides to the effect that Philemon would have been willing to hang himself if thereby he might have seen Euripides. That he was always in men’s mouths is attested by the large number of fragments from the lost plays. It is instructive to see that he was quoted in the Hellenistic period to the exclusion of Aischylos and Sophokles. Wisdom and state-craft were found in Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Euripides[[160]]. One is not surprised, therefore, to learn that his tragedies were the only ones produced at certain Dionysia[[161]]. This was the period in which most of the vase paintings in the following pages belong, and it is only these numerous traditions of the unparalleled popularity of this poet, east and west, north and south, that makes it possible to appreciate his wide-spread influence over art. The vases have to be studied in this light, and only then does their importance as a Euripidean commentary become sufficiently clear.
A glance at the conditions in Magna Graecia is necessary before leaving this topic. The theatre-going propensities of the Tarentines has been mentioned above, and one has now to ask himself who their favourite poet was. There can be but one answer. Here, as in Africa, Asia Minor, and Sicily, the public was sure to find the greatest satisfaction in a Euripidean répertoire. The travelling troops of actors performed in all the towns of Apulia, Campania, and Lucania, and the tragic forms of the myths were widely published. Euripides was, in short, more than ever the people’s poet, and he became later, with the rise of Latin tragedy, the poet of the Republic. Roman tragedy was Greek in everything but the language. The 166 years between the death of Euripides and the production of Livius Andronicus’ first play in Rome were a seed-time for the works of the Greek poet. The titles of Livius’ ten tragedies include two from Euripides—the Andromeda and the Danaë—and the father of Latin poetry was a native of Tarentum. Ennius, born in Rudiae, which Strabo calls a πόλις Ἑλληνίς[[162]], was educated at Tarentum, and became the first national poet of the Romans. Among his twenty-two plays the following are either translations of Euripides or adaptations from him: Alexandrus, Andromacha, Andromeda, Erechtheus, Medea, Medea exul, Melanippa, Phoenix, Telephus, and perhaps Alcumena. Pacuvius, a nephew of Ennius, and the third one of the Latin tragedians, also followed Euripides more than Aischylos or Sophokles. He was born in Brundusium 268 B.C. and died in Tarentum 140 B.C. These three poets who come first in the history of Latin literature are peculiarly indebted to Euripides and likewise have a special relation to Magna Graecia and Tarentum. More than half of the whole number of works produced by them would appear to have been Euripidean. Whether it was the rhetorical or pathetic element that appealed to the Romans more strongly, the fact that Euripides was the primary force in Latin tragedy is very important.
In this attempt to indicate the wider influence of the Attic drama upon the Latins I have been carried beyond the time of the vase industry, but the Latin literature of the third and second century B.C. was the legitimate product of the conditions that had prevailed in the preceding period. The Greek literary and artistic genius blossomed into an Italian flower and flourished in the soil that had been fertilized by centuries of Hellenic influences. It is to a small section of this wonderful life in Magna Graecia that the present work is devoted. The vase paintings that follow can best tell their own story of the wide-spread Hellenization of Lower Italy in the fourth century and of the place held by Euripides in the onward march of Hellenism.