Life of Euripides

chapter 1 Life of Euripides William Blake Tyrrell In writing On Euripides, Philochorus, a scholar living in the late fourth and early third centuries, consulted temple inscriptions, official records, and oral tradition.1 His treatise was available to Theophrastus (370–288/5BC), student and successor of Aristotle, but sometime afterwards was lost, to be preserved in quotations passed from one author to another. Other biographers with methods and ideas of composition more in common with the times took over writing Euripides’ life. These writers looked for evidence to Euripides’ plays and those of the comedians, especially Aristophanes’ Frogs and Thesmo- phoriazusae.2They regarded these texts not as products of their poet’s imagina- tion but as testimony to Euripides’ character.3 Aristophanes himself expressed this tenet of ancient critics: ‘As he [Euripides] writes for his characters to speak, so such is he’.4 Accordingly, Euripides could not have written about women like Phaedra and Medea unless he despised women and thought them treacher- ous. Such evidence for the life of Euripides suited the ancient reader but fails modern historians in their quest for factual information. At the same time, the 1 For the fragments of Philochorus, see Jacoby (1950) s.v. Philochorus 328 F 218–221; (1954) 585– 588 and (1954a) 481–482. 2 Evidence for Euripides’ life consists of fragments of Satyros’ third-century Peripatetic biography (Oxyrhynchus/POxy 1176), a much-abbreviated Vita entitled Γένος καὶ Βίος (Lineage and Life) attached to some manuscripts of his plays, an entry in Suda and a chapter in Aulus Gel- lius’ Attic Nights (15.20), a biography by Thomas Magister (I 1–13) as well as tidbits found in mostly postclassical sources. For a Greek text of the fragments of Satyros’Life of Euripides and translations of the longer fragments, see Hunt (1912) 170–182 passim, Arrighetti (1964) 85–90, and Kovacs (1994) 10–13. For all the fragments, see Kannicht (2004) 39–145. For the Greek text of Life and Lineage, see Schwartz (1887) and Nauck (1895) v–x. Lefkowitz (1981) 163–169 and (2012) 152–155, and Novacks (1994) 3–10 (with Greek text) have provided a translation of Life and Lineage. A translation of the Suda and Attic Nights may be found in Kovacs (1994) 10– 13, 26–29. For the biography of Euripides, see Nauck (1895) x–xxiv; Wilamowitz (1895) 1–17; Dieterich (1907) 1242–1281; Murray 1913; Decharme (1906) 1–14; Schmid/Stählin (1959) 309– 328; Lesky (1966) 360–363; Lefkowitz (1981) 88–104 and 87–103; Kovacs (1994/2001) 1–22. All translations are my own. 3 Stuart (1931) 301–304; Delcourt (1933); Fairweather (1974) 242–247; Lefkowitz (2012) 87–103. 4 Aristophanes in: Satyros 1176 fr. 39.ix; see also Ar. Thesm. 149–150: ‘The poet must be a man who has the character for the dramas he’s writing’. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004435353_003 12 tyrrell reduction by the biographers of their subjects’ lives to conventional themes opens a methodology in that what seems singular may be historical. As Sher- lock Holmes observed, ‘Singularity is almost invariably a clue’.5 Two facts, however, remain unimpeachable: Euripides was an Athenian citizen, and he produced tragedies in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens during the fifth century. He spent his adult life in the theatre as a playwright whom the people’s archon never, at least to our knowledge, denied a chorus and as the butt of abuse in the comic theatre. In his Nachleben, however, he leads two lives: the meagre one eked out by modern scholars and the rich one elaborated by ancient biographers. The sources place the birth of Euripides during the archonship of Philocrates (485/4BC) or that of Calliades (480/79). The earlier date is owed to the Par- ian Marble, a stele set up on the Cycladic island of Paros.6 Its dating suffers from its sources, the suppositions of the biographers, as well as from its desire to make connections between famous men, in this instance linking Euripides’ birth with Aeschylus’ first victory, his birth, so-to-speak, as a major tragedian. The later date derives from the Vita and is consistent with its assertion that the poet was twenty-six when he produced his first tragedies in 455/4BC.7 Both dates draw support from Philochorus’ statement that Euripides was older than seventy when he died in 406BC.8 The Vita places Euripides’ birth on Salamis off the coast of Attica. His family may have had an estate on the island or fled there pursuant to the Athenians’ decree that those who had the means should send their children and family members to Troezen, Aegina, or Salamis to escape the ravages of the Persians.9 At any rate, the nearness of the poet’s date and the famous victory of Greeks over the Persian navy in 480BC drew the attention of the biographers. They devised a mnemonic, a synchronism that the mature Aeschylus fought in the battle, Sophocles as a youth danced in celebration of the victory,and the infant Euripides had to learn of both victory and celebration from others.10The lack of precision in Philochorus’ remarks forewarns his modern counterparts against the search for greater accuracy.The Greeks themselves paid little heed to a person’s time of birth, so we must settle with assigning Euripides’ date to the years between 484 and 480BC. 5 Doyle (1930) 227. 6 Jacoby, FGrH 239 A 50. 7 The Vita’s dating (section 2) is repeated by Plutarch (Mor. 717 C) and Diogenes Laertius (2.45). 8 Jacoby, FGrH 328 F 220 (Vita 17). 9 Hdt. 8.41.1. 10 Vita Aesch. 11; Vita Soph. 3; Lefkowitz (1981) 157, 160..

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