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chapter 42 and

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’ must include much that now belongs to other fields. In archaic and early classical various men claimed , poets among them, and they criticized each other freely. Some thinkers whom we now call ‘Presocratic ’ composed in (, , ). Euripides’ contemporary speaks of the debates of ‘phi- losophers’ in which ‘speed of thought is shown to make in an opinion easy to change’ (Encomium of Helen 13). used the word ‘philosophy’ to identify what he did (φιλοσοφία appears 147 , 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 , , and , but natural 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 (see Semenzato in this volume) seems quite distinct from his in contemporary science or Socratic ethics. Yet the same dissat- isfaction with the answers to basic questions about human pro- vided by Greek civic religion—the problem of suffering and divine , for example—could lead a thinker to a materialist view of the or to a belief in . Again, while speculated about how human 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 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 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, based on folklore, 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] (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 , inter- preting a passage of Danae as praise of Socrates. In Euripides’ own lifetime, comedy associated him with Socrates. Laertius cites three comic frag- ments joking that Euripides’ plays were co-authored by Socrates (Teleclides fr. 41, Callias fr. 15, 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 .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’ and popularization. 4 On the debate, see Collard/Cropp/Gibert (2004) 266–268.