Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The thing about Euripides is he was the asshole of ancient Athens. The asshole. The guy who showed up to the theater festival with a safety pin through the sacred conventions and said, look, our gods are basically drunken frat boys with better PR, our heroes are basically war criminals with good lighting, and our democracy is eating itself alive while we sit in the Theater of Dionysus pretending none of this is happening. Our culture is on fire, and I'm not gonna keep pretending it isn't.
While Aeschylus and Sophocles were still genuflecting before divine order and tragic nobility, doing the work of making sense of suffering through proper mythological channels, Euripides was in the back alley with Medea, letting a woman rage and murder her way through every comfortable assumption the audience brought through the door. Every assumption. The assumption that women were peripheral. The assumption that foreigners were lesser. The assumption that suffering had meaning. The assumption that the gods were on anybody's side. He understood something vital and raw: that tragedy isn't about falling from greatness. It's about discovering you were never that fucking great to begin with, that the cosmic joke is on you right from the start, that the universe never had your back, never even knew your name, never gave a shit whether you lived or died beautifully or pissed yourself screaming for your mommy.
His characters don't just suffer. They unravel. They argue, rationalize, seduce, betray, justify themselves at length and out loud while doing the most monstrous things imaginable. They do this all with a psychological precision that must have felt like a knife between the ribs to an audiences expecting mythological comfort food. Medea explaining her reasons for killing her children. Phaedra writing the letter that will destroy Hippolytus. Agave waking up holding her son's head. These aren't characters who suffer with dignity. These are characters who suffer accurately, who suffer the way people actually suffer, with all the rationalization and self-deception and ugly intelligence intact.
The establishment hated him, naturally. Only won first prize at the Dionysia four times in a career that produced something like ninety-two plays. Four. Sophocles won eighteen. Aeschylus won thirteen. Athens basically told Euripides to fuck off with his modernist interrogations, his uncomfortable women, his complicated slaves, his refusal to give the audience the catharsis they paid for and the moral resolution they expected. Too dark. Too questioning. Too willing to let women speak uncomfortable truths and slaves show more dignity than kings. Too willing to suggest, in front of an audience of citizens who were also voters, that maybe their imperial democracy was built on a pile of corpses they preferred not to count. He had the audacity to suggest that maybe heroism was a convenient myth Athenians told themselves while doing monstrous things in places like Melos, where the men were killed and the women and children were enslaved and the whole thing was reported back home as a successful military operation.
Here's what I'm actually interested in. Not the complete plays. Not the nineteen that survived intact through the manuscript tradition because somebody copied them, then somebody else copied that copy, then somebody else copied that one, all the way down to us. Those plays are great. Read Medea. Read Bacchae. Read Trojan Women. But what I'm interested in is the fragments. The shards. The seventy-three plays that didn't survive whole. The Andromeda we have eighty lines of. The Antiope that exists in papyrus scraps pulled out of Egyptian rubbish heaps in the late nineteenth century by archaeologists who half the time didn't know what they were finding. The Cresphontes that exists only because some later writer quoted a few lines of it in a treatise about something else. The Phaethon. The Hypsipyle. The Stheneboea. Plays Euripides considered worth writing, worth staging, worth investing months of his life in, and which the world then proceeded to lose almost entirely. We have the titles. We have the rumors. We have scattered lines preserved in the writings of grammarians and philosophers and anthologists who needed an example of a Euripidean phrase to illustrate something else. That's where I want to live.
Because the fragments do something the complete plays can't quite do. The fragments arrive without the scaffolding of narrative resolution. A single line floating loose, who knows if life is death, and death is life? from the lost Polyidus, quoted by Plato centuries later in the Gorgias because Plato thought it was worth keeping, arrives free of the play that contained it. It floats. It hangs in the air. You don't know what character said it or what happened next or what the line was being deployed against. You just have the line. And the line is doing the same goddamn work Euripides' whole project was doing, which is naming the disorientation and refusing to fix it.
This is the move. The fragments are formally what the complete plays are about. The complete plays depict the breakdown of meaning systems. The fragments enact that breakdown by being themselves broken. Reading Medea, you watch a system collapse from inside a frame that holds the collapse together. Reading the fragment from the lost Cresphontes, you don't get the frame. You just get the beautiful wreckage. And the wreckage is closer to what Euripides was actually trying to convey. The fragments are the modernist Euripides. The fragments are the Euripides that didn't make it past the manuscript-copying bottleneck of late antiquity, the Euripides the medieval monks didn't think was worth preserving, the Euripides who survived by accident in other people's footnotes. And the accident of his survival is itself the perfect form for what he was writing about.
What's miraculous is how alive this work still feels, complete plays and fragments alike. How alive. Two thousand four hundred years later and the plays still vibrate with a kind of desperate intelligence, a kind of unfinished urgency, a kind of I cannot believe what I am watching horror at human behavior that reads like it was written last week by somebody who hasn't slept. The surviving plays, the canonical ones, the ones we get to teach in classrooms and stage in regional theaters, are doing the work at full scale. Bacchae is essentially a horror film about the violence lurking beneath civilization's surface, repression meeting ecstasy in an explosion of torn flesh and divine indifference, a mother carrying her son's head back to the city in triumph because the god told her to and she couldn't see straight. Trojan Women is every war ever fought, seen from the rubble through the eyes of the people history usually doesn't bother mentioning, Hecuba and Andromache and Cassandra waiting to be parceled out to the men who killed their husbands, the camera (so to speak) refusing to leave the women's perspective for the comfortable battlefield long shots. Iphigenia at Aulis is the original the cause justifies any sacrifice essay, a teenage girl being murdered by her father so the fleet can sail, and Euripides makes you sit with what that actually means rather than letting the patriotic narrative carry you past it.
But the fragments are doing the same work in concentrated form. A line. A scrap. A name of a lost play. The Bellerophon we know almost nothing about except that the protagonist apparently questioned whether the gods exist, which was the kind of thing that got you in trouble in fifth-century Athens. The Melanippe the Wise that featured a woman delivering a philosophical defense of women's intelligence, fragments of which survive in later anthologies because somebody thought the speech was worth preserving even after the play was lost. The work that didn't make it. The work that almost didn't make it. The work that exists now as the trace of itself.
He was writing for a democratic society eating itself alive, watching Athens stumble through the Peloponnesian War, watching the city that had invented democracy slowly demolish democracy in the name of imperial survival, and you can feel that political exhaustion seeping through every line.
Does this sound familiar?
The cynicism isn't empty posturing. The cynicism isn't a pose. It's earned, hard-won through watching humans repeatedly choose the worst possible version of themselves, through watching Athens vote for the Sicilian Expedition that destroyed it, through watching the demagogues replace the statesmen, through watching the long democratic experiment turn into the long democratic suicide. Euripides was writing in the wreckage. The wreckage is in the plays. The wreckage is in the fragments. The wreckage is the whole goddamn point.
Ancient critics called him "the most tragic of the poets," and whether Aristotle meant that as compliment or insult, it nails something essential. Euripides didn't offer catharsis. He didn't offer easy answers. He didn't offer the dignified suffering of heroes whose pain meant something within the larger cosmic order. What he offered instead was the cold comfort of recognition, the savage pleasure of seeing human nature stripped down to its bones and still somehow worth the price of admission, the dark satisfaction of watching somebody finally tell the truth about what people do to each other when nobody's keeping score and the gods aren't watching and the polis is busy applauding the next war.
He told the truth. He paid for it. Most of what he wrote got lost. What survived, the nineteen complete plays and the scattered fragments of the other seventy-three, is still here, still doing the work, still naming what we still won't admit, twenty-four centuries later, about ourselves.
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