Dante, who does not mention Aeschylus or Sophocles, places Euripides, with the tragic poets Antiphon and Agathon, and the lyrist Simonides, in the first circle of Purgatory (xxii. 106), among those
| “piùe Greci, che già di lauro ornar la fronte.” |
Casaubon, in a letter to Scaliger, salutes that scholar as worthy to have lived at Athens with Aristophanes and Euripides—a compliment which certainly implies respect for his correspondent’s powers as a peacemaker. In popular literature, too, where Aeschylus and Sophocles were as yet little known, the 16th and 17th centuries testify to the favour bestowed upon Euripides. G. Gascoigne’s and Francis Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta, played at Gray’s Inn in 1566, is a literal translation of Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta, which derives from the Phoenissae, probably through the Latin translation of R. Winter (Basel, 1541). Among early French translations from Euripides may be mentioned the version of the Iphigenia in Tauris by Thomas Sibilet in 1549, and that of the Hecuba by Bouchetel in 1550. About a century later Racine gave the world his Andromaque, his Iphigénie and his Phèdre; and many have held that, at least in the last-named of these, “the disciple of Euripides” has excelled his master. Bernhardy notices that the performance of the Hippolytus at Berlin in 1851 seemed to show that, for the modern stage, the Phèdre has the advantage of its Greek original. Racine’s great English contemporary seems to have known and to have liked Euripides better than the other Greek tragedians. In the Reason of Church Government Milton certainly speaks of “those dramatic constitutions in which Sophocles and Euripides reign”; in the preface to his own drama, again, he joins the names of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,—“the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any.” But the Samson Agonistes itself clearly shows that Milton’s chief model in this kind was the dramatist whom he himself has called—as if to suggest the skill of Euripides in the delineation of pathetic women—“sad Electra’s poet”; and the work bears a special mark of this preference in the use of Euripidean monodies. In the second half of the 18th century such men as J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768) and G.E. Lessing (1729-1781) gave a new life to the study of the antique. Hitherto the art of the old world had been better known through Roman than through Greek interpreters. The basis of the revived classical taste had been Latin. But now men gained a finer perception of those characteristics which belong to the Greek work of the great time, a fuller sense of the difference between the Greek and the Roman genius where each is at its best, and generally a clearer recognition of the qualities which distinguish ancient art in its highest purity from modern romantic types. Euripides now became the object of criticism from a new point of view. He was compared with Aeschylus and Sophocles as representatives of that ideal Greek tragedy which ranges with the purest type of sculpture. Thus tried, he was found wanting; and he was condemned with all the rigour of a newly illuminated zeal. B.G. Niebuhr (1776-1831) judged him harshly; but no critic approached A.W. Schlegel (1767-1845) in severity of one-sided censure. Schlegel, in fact, will scarcely allow that Euripides is tolerable except by comparison with Racine. L. Tieck (1773-1853) showed truer appreciation for a brother artist when he described the work of Euripides as the dawn of a romantic poetry haunted by dim yearnings and forebodings. Goethe—who, according to Bernhardy, knew Euripides only “at a great distance”—certainly admired him highly, and left an interesting memorial of Euripidean study in his attempted reconstruction of the lost Phaëthon. There are some passages in Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann which form effective quotations against the Greek poet’s real or supposed detractors. “To feel and respect a great personality, one must be something oneself. All those who denied the sublime to Euripides were either poor wretches incapable of comprehending such sublimity or shameless charlatans who, in their presumption, wished to make more of themselves than they were.” “A poet whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle lauded, whom Alexander admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of Athens put on mourning on hearing of his death, must certainly have been some one. If a modern man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees” (J.A. Symonds, Greek Poets, i. 230). We yield to no one in admiration of Goethe; but we cannot think that these rather bullying utterances are favourable examples of his method in aesthetic discussion; nor have they any logical force except as against those—if there be any such—who deny that Euripides is a great poet. One of the most striking of modern criticisms on Euripides is the sketch by Mommsen in his history of Rome (bk. iii. ch. 14). It is, in our opinion, less than just to Euripides as an artist. But it indicates, with true historical insight, his place in the development of his art, the operation of those external conditions which made him what he was, and the nature of his influence on succeeding ages.
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 Manuscript tradition of Euripides. 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 first-rate beauty 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 kind, by far the most splendid work of Euripides that we possess. Had these three plays been lost, it is not too much to say that the modern estimate of Euripides must have been decidedly lower. But all the ten plays not included in the select list had a narrow escape of being lost, and, as it is, have come to us in a much less satisfactory condition.
A. Kirchhoff was the first, in his editions, thoroughly to investigate the history and the affinities of the Euripidean manuscripts.[5] All our MSS. are, he thinks, derived from a lost archetype of the 9th or 10th century, which contained the nineteen plays (counting the Rhesus) now extant. From this archetype a copy, also lost, was made about A.D. 1100, containing only the nine select plays. This copy became the source of all our best MSS. for those plays. They are—(1) Marcianus 471, in the library of St Mark at Venice (12th century): Andromache, Hecuba, Hippolytus (to v. 1234), Orestes, Phoenissae; (2) Vaticanus 909, 12th century, nine plays; (3) Parisinus 2712, 13th century, 7 plays (all but Troades and Rhesus). Of the same stock, but inferior, are (4) Marcianus 468, 13th century: Hecuba, Orestes, Medea (v. 1-42), Orestes, Phoenissae; (5) Havniensis (from Hafnia, Copenhagen, according to Paley), a late transcript from a MS. resembling Vat. 909, nine plays. A second family of MSS. for the nine plays, sprung from the same copy, but modified by a Byzantine recension of the 13th century, is greatly inferior.
The other ten plays have come to us only through the preservation of two MSS., both of the 14th century, and both ultimately derived, as Kirchhoff thinks, from the archetype of the 9th or 10th century. These are (1) Palatinus 287, Kirchhoff’s B, usually called Rom. C., thirteen plays, viz. six of the select plays (Androm., Med., Rhes., Hipp., Alc., Troad.), and seven others—Bacchae, Cyclops, Heracleidae, Supplices, Ion, Iphigenia in Aulide, Iphigenia in Tauris; and (2) Flor. 2, Elmsley’s C., eighteen plays, viz. all but the Troades. This MS. is thus the only one for the Helena, the Electra, and the Hercules Furens. By far the greatest number of Euripidean MSS. contain only three plays,—the Hecuba, Orestes and Phoenissae,—these having been chosen out of the select nine for school use—probably in the 14th century.
It is to be remembered that, as a selection, the nine chosen plays of Euripides correspond to those seven of Aeschylus and those seven of Sophocles which alone remain to us. If, then, these nine did not include the Iphigenia in Tauris, the Ion or the Bacchae, may we not fairly infer that the lost plays of the other two dramatists comprised works at least equal to any that have been preserved? May we not even reasonably doubt whether we have received those masterpieces by which their highest excellence should have been judged?
The extant scholia on Euripides are for the nine select plays only. The first edition of the scholia on seven of these plays (all but the Troades and Rhesus) was published by Arsenius—a Cretan whom the Venetians had named as bishop of Scholia. Monemvasia, but whom the Greeks had refused to recognize—at Venice in 1534. The scholia on the Troades and Rhesus were first published by L. Dindorf, from Vat. 909, in 1821. The best complete edition is that of W. Dindorf (1863).[6] The collection, though loaded with rubbish—including worthless analyses of the lyric metres by Demetrius Triclinius—includes some invaluable comments derived from the Alexandrian critics and their followers.
Editiones Principes.—1496. J. Lascaris (Florence), Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, Andromache. 1503. M. Musurus (Aldus, Venice), Eur. Tragg. XVII., to which in vol. ii. the Hercules Furens was added as an 18th; i.e. this edition contained all the extant plays except the Electra, which was first given to the world by P. Victorius from Florentinus C. in 1545. The Aldine edition was reprinted at Basel in 1537.
The complete edition of Joshua Barnes (1694) is no longer of any critical value. The first thorough work done on Euripides was by L.C. Valcknaer in his edition of the Phoenissae (1755), and his Diatribe in Eur. perditorum dramatum relliquias (1767), in which he argued against the authenticity of the Rhesus.