chapter 42 Euripides and Ancient Greek Philosophy
Ruth Scodel
1 Euripides and Philosophy before Philosophy
The works of all the surviving Greek tragedians reveal their engagement with contemporary thought, but Euripides reflects more than any other. ‘Philoso- phy’ in Euripides’ time must include much that now belongs to other fields. In archaic and early classical Greece various men claimed wisdom, poets among them, and they criticized each other freely. Some thinkers whom we now call ‘Presocratic philosophers’ composed in poetry (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles). Euripides’ contemporary Gorgias speaks of the debates of ‘phi- losophers’ in which ‘speed of thought is shown to make belief in an opinion easy to change’ (Encomium of Helen 13). Plato used the word ‘philosophy’ to identify what he did (φιλοσοφία appears 147 times, in the Platonic corpus, the verb φιλοσοφέω 66), while he rejected poetry’s claims to wisdom, establishing the boundaries between poetry and philosophy.1 Even later, however, ancient ‘philosophy’ could include far more than the modern discipline—not only metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, but natural science and psychology. So when Euripides looked at contemporary science, ethics, psychology, or metaphysical speculation, philosophers in the modern sense were not dis- tinguished from others who claimed special wisdom. Even fields with clear disciplinary boundaries, like medicine, were part of this broader intellectual world—Hippocratic medicine has a philosophical basis. Euripides could adapt whatever he chose. So, from a modern perspective, Euripides’ fascination with mystical religion (see Semenzato in this volume) seems quite distinct from his interests in contemporary science or Socratic ethics. Yet the same dissat- isfaction with the answers to basic questions about human experience pro- vided by Greek civic religion—the problem of suffering and divine justice, for example—could lead a thinker to a materialist view of the universe or to a belief in metempsychosis. Again, while sophists speculated about how human beings had developed culture and technologies, Euripides shows a deep inter- est in technologies themselves, including architecture, sculpture, textiles, and
1 See Nightingale (1995) 14–20.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004435353_044 euripides and ancient greek philosophy 967 navigation, as well as medicine—but the sophist Hippias displayed his self- sufficiency at the Olympic Games with clothing, shoes, oil-flask and seal-ring he had made himself (Plato, Hippias Minor 368b–e). An interest in crafts could also be ‘philosophical’.2 Euripides, then, was not interested in ‘philosophy’ as such; he was interested in the ethical, scientific, theological, and political issues of his time (he adapts most often the philosophical arguments and specula- tions of his approximate contemporaries). The later biographical tradition, however, assimilates Euripides to a philoso- pher, by then a recognized type. While the ancient biographies of poets are not at all reliable, being based on folklore, inferences from the poetry, and comedy, they are revealing about how poets were perceived. In some of the biographies, Euripides is not initiated by the Muses (as poets would be) but converted to the pursuit of wisdom. Satyrus’ biography from the third century BC says that he [something] Anaxagoras (37. col. 1.25) ‘amazingly’, and in one branch of the biographical tradition, Euripides actually becomes a poet precisely in order to avoid the dangers to philosophers who too openly challenged conventional ideas. Satyrus in fr. 6 (39. col. 4.30) speaks of his admiration for Socrates, inter- preting a passage of Danae as praise of Socrates. In Euripides’ own lifetime, comedy associated him with Socrates. Diogenes Laertius cites three comic frag- ments joking that Euripides’ plays were co-authored by Socrates (Teleclides fr. 41, Callias fr. 15, Aristophanes fr. 393, cf. Frogs 1491–1499), and in Aristophanes’ Clouds the young man who has studied with Socrates becomes an admirer of Euripides, performing after dinner a passage about incest (1371, from Euripides’ Aeolus). The comic poets treated Euripides as an innovator and challenger of everyday beliefs, like Socrates and scientists. It is worth asking why Euripides, alone among the dramatists, was received this way. It is also worth remember- ing that Socrates and Euripides surely knew each other, and that Euripides must also have known many of the sophists and scientists who visited or lived in Athens.3 Euripides is not a preachy dramatist; characters are not spokesmen for the poet’s own views. Amphion in the lost Antiope was probably the closest, and in debate with his practical-minded brother, he defended a poetic-philosophical- quietist way of life, not a specific doctrine.4 It is difficult to extract a coher-
2 Stieber (2011). 3 Egli (2003) 34, on the likelihood that Euripides personally knew leading intellectuals. Egli’s study is a full treatment of the topic. This chapter is less concerned than Egli with identi- fying the particular sources of Euripidean passages, and more on Euripides’ syncretism and popularization. 4 On the debate, see Collard/Cropp/Gibert (2004) 266–268.