Silent Roles
132-544: The Acharnians or Acharnians ( Ancient Greek : Ἀχαρνεῖς Akharneîs ; Attic : Ἀχαρνῆς ) is the third play — and the earliest of the eleven surviving plays — by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes . It was produced in 425 BC on behalf of the young dramatist by an associate, Callistratus, and it won first place at the Lenaia festival. The Acharnians is about an Athenian citizen, Dikaiopolis, who miraculously obtains
264-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in
396-528: A "spiritual biography", along these lines: However, about 80% of his plays have been lost, and even the extant plays do not present a fully consistent picture of his 'spiritual' development (for example, Iphigenia in Aulis is dated with the 'despairing' Bacchae , yet it contains elements that became typical of New Comedy). In the Bacchae , he restores the chorus and messenger speech to their traditional role in
528-431: A barbarous act to annihilate a city which produced such men" ( Life of Lysander ). Tragic poets were often mocked by comic poets during the dramatic festivals Dionysia and Lenaia , and Euripides was travestied more than most. Aristophanes scripted him as a character in at least three plays: The Acharnians , Thesmophoriazusae and The Frogs . But Aristophanes also borrowed, rather than merely satirized, some of
660-490: A bewildering variety of labels. He has been described as 'the poet of the Greek enlightenment' and also as 'Euripides the irrationalist'; as a religious sceptic if not an atheist, but on the other hand, as a believer in divine providence and the ultimate justice of divine dispensation. He has been seen as a profound explorer of human psychology and also a rhetorical poet who subordinated consistency of character to verbal effect; as
792-467: A change in speakers was loosely denoted with a variety of signs, such as equivalents of the modern dash, colon, and full-stop. The absence of modern literary conventions (which aid comprehension), was an early and persistent source of errors, affecting transmission. Errors were also introduced when Athens replaced its old Attic alphabet with the Ionian alphabet, a change sanctioned by law in 403–402 BC, adding
924-484: A costume from one of his tragedies, Telephus , in which the hero disguises himself as a beggar. Thus attired as a tragic hero disguised as a beggar, and with his head on the chopping block, Dikaiopolis/ Telephus /the beggar/Aristophanes explains to the Chorus his reasons for opposing the war. The war all started, he argues, because of the abduction of three courtesans, and it is continued by profiteers for personal gain. Half
1056-463: A dancing girl on each arm. Dikaiopolis clamors cheerfully for a wine skin – a prize awarded to him in a drinking competition – and then everyone exits in general celebrations (except Lamachus, who exits in pain). The Peloponnesian War was already into its sixth year when The Acharnians was produced. The Spartans and their allies had been invading Attica every year, burning, looting and vandalizing farm property with unusual ferocity in order to provoke
1188-476: A debate between the shades of Aeschylus and Euripides, the god brings Aeschylus back to life, as more useful to Athens, for his wisdom, rejecting Euripides as merely clever. Such comic 'evidence' suggests that Athenians admired Euripides even while they mistrusted his intellectualism, at least during the long war with Sparta. Aeschylus had written his own epitaph commemorating his life as a warrior fighting for Athens against Persia, without any mention of his success as
1320-485: A difference in outlook between the three—a generation gap probably due to the Sophistic enlightenment in the middle decades of the 5th century: Aeschylus still looked back to the archaic period , Sophocles was in transition between periods, and Euripides was fully imbued with the new spirit of the classical age . When Euripides' plays are sequenced in time, they also reveal that his outlook might have changed, providing
1452-532: A joint project with Brigham Young University , using multi-spectral imaging technology to retrieve previously illegible writing (see References). Some of this work employed infrared technology—previously used for satellite imaging—to detect previously unknown material by Euripides, in fragments of the Oxyrhynchus papyri , a collection of ancient manuscripts held by the university. It is from such materials that modern scholars try to piece together copies of
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#17327718186141584-477: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and
1716-510: A leader of a decadent intellectualism . Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes . Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia , but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources. Traditional accounts of the author's life are found in many commentaries, and include details such as these: He
1848-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in
1980-534: A loosely structured, simple, and jovial form of entertainment. But in Cyclops (the only complete satyr-play that survives), Euripides structured the entertainment more like a tragedy and introduced a note of critical irony typical of his other work. His genre-bending inventiveness is shown above all in Alcestis , a blend of tragic and satyric elements. This fourth play in his tetralogy for 438 BC (i.e., it occupied
2112-433: A misogynist and a feminist; as a realist who brought tragic action down to the level of everyday life and as a romantic poet who chose unusual myths and exotic settings. He wrote plays which have been widely understood as patriotic pieces supporting Athens' war against Sparta and others which many have taken as the work of the anti-war dramatist par excellence, even as attacks on Athenian imperialism. He has been recognized as
2244-506: A new complication to the task of copying. Many more errors came from the tendency of actors to interpolate words and sentences, producing so many corruptions and variations that a law was proposed by Lycurgus of Athens in 330 BC "that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be written down and preserved in a public office; and that the town clerk should read the text over with the actors; and that all performances which did not comply with this regulation should be illegal." The law
2376-562: A personal yet very public battle with Cleon. His earlier play, The Babylonians , had depicted the cities of the Athenian League as slaves grinding at a mill and it had been performed at the City Dionysia in the presence of foreigners. Cleon had subsequently prosecuted him for slandering the polis — or possibly the producer, Callistratus, was prosecuted instead. Aristophanes was already planning his revenge when The Acharnians
2508-442: A play indicates that Dikaiopolis represents Aristophanes (or possibly his producer, Callistratus), and maybe the author is in fact the actor behind the mask. After gaining the chorus's permission for an anti-war speech, Dikaiopolis/Aristophanes decides he needs some special help with it, and he goes next door to the house of Euripides , an author renowned for his clever arguments. As it turns out, however, he merely goes there to borrow
2640-468: A playwright; and Sophocles was celebrated by his contemporaries for his social gifts, and contributions to public life as a state official; but there are no records of Euripides' public life except as a dramatist—he could well have been "a brooding and bookish recluse". He is presented as such in The Acharnians , where Aristophanes shows him to be living morosely in a precarious house, surrounded by
2772-527: A position in the "ever-changing genre" where he could easily move between tragic, comic, romantic, and political effects. This versatility appears in individual plays and also over the course of his career. Potential for comedy lay in his use of 'contemporary' characters, in his sophisticated tone, his relatively informal Greek (see In Greek below), and in his ingenious use of plots centred on motifs that later became standard in Menander's New Comedy (for example
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#17327718186142904-498: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment
3036-420: A preoccupation with individual psychology and its irrational aspects is evident....In his hands tragedy for the first time probed the inner recesses of the human soul and let passions spin the plot ." The tension between reason and passion is symbolized by his characters' relationship with the gods: For example, Hecuba's prayer is answered not by Zeus, nor by the law of reason, but by Menelaus, as if speaking for
3168-531: A private celebration of the Rural Dionysia , beginning with a small parade outside his own house. He and his household, however, are immediately set upon by a mob of aged farmers and charcoal burners from Acharnae – tough veterans of past wars who hate the Spartans for destroying their farms and who hate anyone who talks peace. They are not amenable to rational argument, so Dikaiopolis grabs a hostage and
3300-472: A private peace treaty with the Spartans and enjoys the benefits of peace in spite of opposition from some of his fellow Athenians. The play is notable for its absurd humour, its imaginative appeal for an end to the Peloponnesian War , and for the author's spirited response to condemnations of his previous play, The Babylonians , by politicians such as Cleon , who had reviled it as a slander against
3432-410: A radical change of direction". Euripides is also known for his use of irony. Many Greek tragedians make use of dramatic irony to bring out the emotion and realism of their characters or plays, but Euripides uses irony to foreshadow events and occasionally amuse his audience. For example, in his play Heracles , Heracles comments that all men love their children and wish to see them grow. The irony here
3564-537: A rationalized cosmos, but the speech is ill-suited to her audience, the unsophisticated listener Menelaus, and is found to not suit the cosmos either (her grandson is murdered by the Greeks). In Hippolytus , speeches appear verbose and ungainly, as if to underscore the limitations of language. Like Euripides, both Aeschylus and Sophocles created comic effects, contrasting the heroic with the mundane, but they employed minor supporting characters for that purpose. Euripides
3696-451: A select edition, possibly for use in schools, with some commentaries or scholia recorded in the margins. Similar editions had appeared for Aeschylus and Sophocles—the only plays of theirs that survive today. Euripides, however, was more fortunate than the other tragedians, with a second edition of his work surviving, compiled in alphabetical order as if from a set of his collect works; but without scholia attached. This "Alphabetical" edition
3828-608: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek
3960-405: A short time as both dancer and torch-bearer at the rites of Apollo Zosterius. His education was not confined to athletics, studying also painting and philosophy under the masters Prodicus and Anaxagoras . He had two disastrous marriages, and both his wives—Melite and Choerine (the latter bearing him three sons)—were unfaithful. He became a recluse, making a home for himself in a cave on Salamis (
4092-443: A skill worth prizes, requiring a long apprenticeship in the chorus. Euripides and other playwrights accordingly composed more and more arias for accomplished actors to sing, and this tendency became more marked in his later plays: tragedy was a "living and ever-changing genre" (cf. previous section, and Chronology ; a list of his plays is below ). The comic poet Aristophanes is the earliest known critic to characterize Euripides as
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4224-415: A speech that he seems to have written in defence of himself as an intellectual ahead of his time (spoken by Medea): σκαιοῖσι μὲν γὰρ καινὰ προσφέρων σοφὰ δόξεις ἀχρεῖος κοὐ σοφὸς πεφυκέναι· τῶν δ᾿ αὖ δοκούντων εἰδέναι τι ποικίλον κρείσσων νομισθεὶς ἐν πόλει λυπρὸς φανῇ. ἐγὼ δὲ καὐτὴ τῆσδε κοινωνῶ τύχης [298–302]. If you bring novel wisdom to fools, you will be regarded as useless, not wise; and if
4356-454: A spokesman for destructive, new ideas associated with declining standards in both society and tragedy (see Reception for more). But fifth-century tragedy was a social gathering for "carrying out quite publicly the maintenance and development of mental infrastructure", and it offered spectators a "platform for an utterly unique form of institutionalized discussion". The dramatist's role was not only to entertain but also educate fellow citizens—he
4488-630: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c. 300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as
4620-404: A sword and demands the old men leave him alone. The hostage is a basket of Acharnian charcoal, but the old men have a sentimental spot for anything from Acharnia (or maybe they are simply caught up in the drama of the moment), and they agree to leave Dikaiopolis in peace if only he will spare the charcoal. The importance of both the charcoal and the tool that Dikaiopolis holds hostage is that one of
4752-498: A true indication of worth. For example, in Hippolytus , a love-sick queen rationalizes her position and, reflecting on adultery, arrives at this comment on intrinsic merit: ἐκ δὲ γενναίων δόμων τόδ᾿ ἦρξε θηλείαισι γίγνεσθαι κακόν· ὅταν γὰρ αἰσχρὰ τοῖσιν ἐσθλοῖσιν δοκῇ, ἦ κάρτα δόξει τοῖς κακοῖς γ᾿ εἶναι καλά. [...] μόνον δὲ τοῦτό φασ᾿ ἁμιλλᾶσθαι βίῳ, γνώμην δικαίαν κἀγαθὴν ὅτῳ παρῇ [409–427]. This contagion began for
4884-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and
5016-533: A war theme, so that his plays are an extraordinary mix of elements. The Trojan Women , for example, is a powerfully disturbing play on the theme of war's horrors, apparently critical of Athenian imperialism (it was composed in the aftermath of the Melian massacre and during the preparations for the Sicilian Expedition ), yet it features the comic exchange between Menelaus and Hecuba quoted above, and
5148-570: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of
5280-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected
5412-498: Is an issue for many critics, such as Aristotle, who cited Iphigenia in Aulis as an example ( Poetics 1454a32). For others, psychological inconsistency is not a stumbling block to good drama: "Euripides is in pursuit of a larger insight: he aims to set forth the two modes, emotional and rational, with which human beings confront their own mortality." Some think unpredictable behaviour realistic in tragedy: "everywhere in Euripides
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5544-666: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to
5676-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in
5808-409: Is middle-aged, he looks bored and frustrated and soon he begins to vent his thoughts and feelings to the audience. He reveals his weariness with the Peloponnesian War , his longing to go home to his village, his impatience with the ecclesia for its failure to start on time and his resolve to heckle speakers who won't debate an end to the war. Soon some citizens do arrive, all pushing and shoving to get
5940-436: Is not to sit beside Socrates and chatter, casting the arts aside and ignoring the best of the tragedian’s craft. To hang around killing time in pretentious conversation and hairsplitting twaddle is the mark of a man who's lost his mind In The Frogs , written when Euripides and Aeschylus were dead, Aristophanes has the god Dionysus venturing down to Hades in search of a good poet to bring back to Athens. After
6072-565: Is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete ( Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined —he became, in
6204-409: Is shown to be flawed, as if Euripides were exploring the problematical nature of language and communication: "For speech points in three different directions at once, to the speaker, to the person addressed, to the features in the world it describes, and each of these directions can be felt as skewed". For example, in the quotation above, Hecuba presents herself as a sophisticated intellectual describing
6336-472: Is that Heracles will be driven into madness by Hera and will kill his children. Similarly, in Helen , Theoclymenus remarks how happy he is that his sister has the gift of prophecy and will warn him of any plots or tricks against him (the audience already knows that she has betrayed him). In this instance, Euripides uses irony not only for foreshadowing but also for comic effect—which few tragedians did. Likewise, in
6468-609: Is the Persian grandee, The Eye of the Great King , Pseudartabas, sporting a gigantic eye and mumbling gibberish, accompanied by some eunuchs who turn out to be a disreputable pair of effete Athenians in disguise; next is the ambassador recently returned from Thrace, blaming the icy conditions in the north for his long stay there at the public's expense; and lastly there is the rabble of Odomantians who are presented as elite mercenaries willing to fight for Athens but who hungrily steal
6600-607: Is the man <who> is roasting a new play for Euripides, and Socrates is laying down the kindling. [...] Euripides bolted together with Socrates Aristophanes alleged that the co-author was a celebrated actor, Cephisophon, who also shared the tragedian's house and his wife, while Socrates taught an entire school of quibblers like Euripides: χαρίεν οὖν μὴ Σωκράτει παρακαθήμενον λαλεῖν ἀποβαλόντα μουσικὴν τά τε μέγιστα παραλιπόντα τῆς τραγῳδικῆς τέχνης. τὸ δ᾿ ἐπὶ σεμνοῖσιν λόγοισι καὶ σκαριφησμοῖσι λήρων διατριβὴν ἀργὸν ποιεῖσθαι, παραφρονοῦντος ἀνδρός So what's stylish
6732-493: The conventions of Old Comedy . The following dramatic elements contain variations from convention: Other points of interest: The standard scholarly edition of the play is S. Douglas Olson (ed.), Aristophanes: Acharnians (Oxford University Press, 2002). Ancient Greek Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and
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#17327718186146864-626: The Bacchae , Pentheus's first threat to the god Dionysus is that if Pentheus catches him in his city, he will 'chop off his head', whereas it is Pentheus who is beheaded at the end of the play. The spoken language of the Euripidean plays is not fundamentally different in style from that of Aeschylus or Sophocles—it employs poetic meters , a rarefied vocabulary, fullness of expression, complex syntax, and ornamental figures, all aimed at representing an elevated style. But its rhythms are somewhat freer, and more natural, than that of his predecessors, and
6996-522: The City Dionysia , the famous Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BC, one year after the death of Aeschylus ; and did not win first prize until 441 BC. His final competition in Athens was in 408 BC. The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were performed in 405 BC, and first prize was awarded posthumously. He won first prize only five times. His plays, and those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, indicate
7128-708: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect
7260-606: The Hellenistic Age , a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer , Demosthenes , and Menander . Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy , some of which are characteristic of romance . He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on
7392-565: The Pnyx , Dikaiopolis gazes longingly at the countryside and expresses his wish to return to his village. Similarly, the old Acharnians sing lovingly of their farms, they express hatred of the enemy for destroying their vines, and they regard the Athenian agora as a place crowded with people that are best avoided. Athens was the dominant maritime power in the Mediterranean however and its citizens could travel by sea with relative ease. Thus,
7524-471: The Sicilian expedition led Athenians to trade renditions of Euripides' lyrics to their enemies in return for food and drink ( Life of Nicias 29). Plutarch also provides the story that the victorious Spartan generals, having planned the demolition of Athens and the enslavement of its people, grew merciful after being entertained at a banquet by lyrics from Euripides' play Electra : "they felt that it would be
7656-610: The ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c. 800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c. 500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been
7788-420: The chorus could dance, a space for actors (three speaking actors in Euripides' time), a backdrop or skene , and some special effects: an ekkyklema (used to bring the skene's "indoors" outdoors) and a mechane (used to lift actors in the air, as in deus ex machina ). With the introduction of the third actor (attributed to Aeschylus by Themistius; to Sophocles by Aristotle), acting also began to be regarded as
7920-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)
8052-554: The 'recognition scene'). Other tragedians also used recognition scenes, but they were heroic in emphasis, as in Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers , which Euripides parodied in Electra (Euripides was unique among the tragedians in incorporating theatrical criticism in his plays). Traditional myth with its exotic settings, heroic adventures, and epic battles offered potential for romantic melodrama as well as for political comments on
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#17327718186148184-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):
8316-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from
8448-548: The Athenian polis . In The Acharnians , Aristophanes reveals his resolve not to yield to attempts at political intimidation. Along with the other surviving plays of Aristophanes, The Acharnians is one of the few – and oldest – surviving examples of a highly satirical genre of drama known as Old Comedy . The play begins with Dikaiopolis sitting all alone on the Pnyx (the hill where the Athenian Assembly or ecclesia regularly meets to discuss matters of state). He
8580-595: The Athenians into a land battle that they couldn't win. The Athenians always remained behind their city walls until the enemy returned home, whereupon they would march out to wreak revenge on their pro-Spartan neighbours – Megara in particular. It was a war of attrition, it had already resulted in daily privations, in starvation and plague, and yet democratic Athens continued to be guided by the pro-war faction led by Cleon and exemplified by tough-minded militarists such as Lamachus . Meanwhile, Aristophanes had been engaged in
8712-524: The Byzantine period, following a change in script (from uncial to minuscule ), and many were "homophonic" errors—equivalent, in English, to substituting "right" for "write"; except that there were more opportunities for Byzantine scribes to make these errors, because η, ι, οι and ει, were pronounced similarly in the Byzantine period. Around 200 AD, ten of the plays of Euripides began to be circulated in
8844-787: The Cave of Euripides , where a cult of the playwright developed after his death). "There he built an impressive library and pursued daily communion with the sea and sky". The details of his death are uncertain. It was traditionally held that he retired to the "rustic court" of King Archelaus in Macedonia , where he died in 406 BC. Some modern scholars however claim that in reality Euripides may have never visited Macedonia at all, or if he did, he might have been drawn there by King Archelaus with incentives that were also offered to other artists. Such biographical details derive almost entirely from three unreliable sources: The next three sections expand on
8976-409: The Chorus is won over by this argument, the other half isn't. A fight breaks out between Acharnians for and Acharnians against Dikaiopolis/Telephus/the beggar/Aristophanes, and it only ends when the Athenian general Lamachus (who also happens to live next door) emerges from his house and imposes himself vaingloriously on the fray. Order is restored, and the general is then questioned by the hero about
9108-586: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs, Euripides Euripides ( c. 480 – c. 406 BC ) was a Greek tragedian of classical Athens . Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles , he
9240-536: The Hellenistic period (as mentioned in the introduction) and, due to Seneca's adaptation of his work for Roman audiences, "it was Euripides, not Aeschylus or Sophocles, whose tragic muse presided over the rebirth of tragedy in Renaissance Europe." In the seventeenth century, Racine expressed admiration for Sophocles, but was more influenced by Euripides ( Iphigenia in Aulis and Hippolytus were
9372-561: The Megarian and Boeotian farmers, with whom Dikaiopolis is happy to trade, nor even the Spartans, who were simply acting to protect their Megarian allies. Instead, the real enemies are the "wicked little men of a counterfeit kind" who have forced Dikaiopolis into an overcrowded urban existence. The causes of the war are explained by Dikaiopolis in a manner that is partly comic and partly serious. His criticisms of Pericles and The Megarian Decree appear to be genuine, but he seems to be satirizing
9504-415: The ambassadors who return from Persia and Thrace are resented by Dikaiopolis because he has been living roughly as a sentry on the battlements while they have been enjoying themselves abroad. Privileged individuals such as Lamachas and Coesura are able to get out of Athens when times become difficult, and in this they are likened to slops that are emptied from an urban household. Thus, the real enemies are not
9636-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has
9768-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in
9900-429: The best seats, and then the day's business begins. A series of important speakers addresses the assembly but the subject is not peace and, true to his earlier promise, Dikaiopolis comments loudly on their appearance and probable motives. First of all there is the ambassador who has returned from the Persian court after many years, complaining of the lavish hospitality he has had to endure from his Persian hosts; then there
10032-501: The birds and eels, but instead he is packed in straw like a piece of pottery and carried off back home by the Boeotian. Some other visitors come and go before two heralds arrive, one calling Lamachus to war, the other calling Dikaiopolis to a dinner party. The two men go as summoned and return soon after: Lamachus, in pain from injuries sustained in battle and with a soldier at each arm propping him up; Dikaiopolis, merrily drunk and with
10164-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West
10296-426: The chorus considers Athens, the "blessed land of Theus", to be a desirable refuge—such complexity and ambiguity are typical both of his "patriotic" and "anti-war" plays. Tragic poets in the fifth century competed against one another at the City Dionysia , each with a tetralogy of three tragedies and a satyr play . The few extant fragments of satyr plays attributed to Aeschylus and Sophocles indicate that these were
10428-402: The city regards you as greater than those with a reputation for cleverness, you will be thought vexatious. I myself am a sharer in this lot. Athenian tragedy in performance during Euripides' lifetime was a public contest between playwrights. The state funded it and awarded prizes. The language was metrical, spoken and sung. The performance area included a circular floor (called orchestra ) where
10560-504: The claims of each of these sources, respectively. Euripides was the youngest in a group of three great tragedians, who were almost contemporaries: his first play was staged thirteen years after Sophocles' debut, and three years after Aeschylus's Oresteia . The identity of the trio is neatly underscored by a patriotic account of their roles during Greece's great victory over Persia at the Battle of Salamis —Aeschylus fought there, Sophocles
10692-553: The democratic order. Thus, for example, Odysseus is represented in Hecuba (lines 131–32) as "agile-minded, sweet-talking, demos-pleasing", i.e. similar to the war-time demagogues that were active in Athens during the Peloponnesian War . Speakers in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles sometimes distinguish between slaves who are servile by nature and those servile by circumstance, but Euripides' speakers go further, positing an individual's mental, rather than social or physical, state as
10824-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of
10956-678: The extent that after the failure of the Sicilian Expedition , many Athenian captives were released, simply for being able to teach their captors whatever fragments they could remember of his work. Less than a hundred years later, Aristotle developed an almost "biological' theory of the development of tragedy in Athens: the art form grew under the influence of Aeschylus, matured in the hands of Sophocles, then began its precipitous decline with Euripides. However, "his plays continued to be applauded even after those of Aeschylus and Sophocles had come to seem remote and irrelevant"; they became school classics in
11088-556: The external order of tragedy but missed its entire meaning". This view influenced Friedrich Nietzsche , who seems, however, not to have known the Euripidean plays well. But literary figures, such as the poet Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning , could study and admire the Schlegels, while still appreciating Euripides as "our Euripides the human" ( Wine of Cyprus stanza 12). Classicists such as Arthur Verrall and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff reacted against
11220-423: The female sex with the nobility. For when those of noble station resolve on base acts, surely the base-born will regard such acts as good. [...] One thing only, they say, competes in value with life, the possession of a heart blameless and good. Euripides' characters resembled contemporary Athenians rather than heroic figures of myth. For achieving his end Euripides' regular strategy is a very simple one: retaining
11352-468: The final defeat of his city. It is said that he died in Macedonia after being attacked by the Molossian hounds of King Archelaus, and that his cenotaph near Piraeus was struck by lightning—signs of his unique powers, whether for good or ill (according to one modern scholar, his death might have been caused instead by the harsh Macedonian winter). In an account by Plutarch , the catastrophic failure of
11484-438: The hands of slick lawyers in these fast times. Dikaiopolis returns to the stage and sets up a private market where he and the enemies of Athens can trade peacefully. Various minor characters come and go in farcical circumstances. A starving Megarian trades his famished daughters, disguised as piglets, for garlic and salt (products in which Megara had abounded in pre-war days). Then an informer or sycophant tries to confiscate
11616-520: The historian Herodotus when he blames the war on the kidnapping of three prostitutes (Herodotus cites the kidnappings of Io , Europa , Medea and Helen as the cause of hostilities between Greeks and Asiatics). The Acharnians in fact features two passages that allude to the work of Herodotus: Dikaiopolis' account of the kidnapping of three women, and the Athenian ambassador's account of his travels in Persia. Aristophanes, or his producer Callistratus,
11748-561: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from
11880-476: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to
12012-478: The inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello , Racine's Phèdre , of Ibsen and Strindberg ," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw . His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as
12144-504: The literary conventions that modern readers expect: there was still no spacing between words; little or no punctuation; and no stage directions; but abbreviated names denoted changes of speaker; lyrics were broken into "cola" and "strophai", or lines and stanzas; and a system of accentuation was introduced. After this creation of a standard edition, the text was fairly safe from errors, besides slight and gradual corruption introduced with tedious copying. Many of these trivial errors occurred in
12276-427: The lyrics often seem dislocated from the action, but the extent and significance of this is "a matter of scholarly debate". See Chronology for details about his style. Euripides has aroused, and continues to arouse, strong opinions for and against his work: He was a problem to his contemporaries and he is one still; over the course of centuries since his plays were first produced he has been hailed or indicted under
12408-563: The main criterion for success (the system of selecting judges appears to have been flawed), and merely being chosen to compete was a mark of distinction. Moreover, to have been singled out by Aristophanes for so much comic attention is proof of popular interest in his work. Sophocles was appreciative enough of the younger poet to be influenced by him, as is evident in his later plays Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus . According to Plutarch, Euripides had been very well received in Sicily, to
12540-514: The models for his plays Iphigénie and Phèdre ). Euripides' reputation was to take a beating in the early 19th century, when Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel championed Aristotle's 'biological' model of theatre history, identifying Euripides with the moral, political, and artistic degeneration of Athens. August Wilhelm's Vienna lectures on dramatic art and literature went through four editions between 1809 and 1846; and, in them, he opined that Euripides "not only destroyed
12672-428: The mouths of characters, such as these words of his heroine Medea : [...] ὡς τρὶς ἂν παρ᾿ ἀσπίδα στῆναι θέλοιμ᾿ ἂν μᾶλλον ἢ τεκεῖν ἅπαξ [250–251]. I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once. The textual transmission of the plays, from the 5th century BC, when they were first written, until the era of the printing press, was a largely haphazard process. Much of Euripides' work
12804-491: The mythical and heroic setting that it can seem like Euripides aimed at parody. For example, in The Trojan Women , the heroine's rationalized prayer elicits comment from Menelaus: ΕΚΑΒΗ: [...] Ζεύς, εἴτ᾿ ἀνάγκη φύσεος εἴτε νοῦς βροτῶν, προσηυξάμην σε· πάντα γὰρ δι᾿ ἀψόφου βαίνων κελεύθου κατὰ δίκην τὰ θνήτ᾿ ἄγεις. ΜΕΝΕΛΑΟΣ: τί δ᾿ ἔστιν; εὐχὰς ὡς ἐκαίνισας θεῶν [886–889]. Hecuba : [...] Zeus, whether you are
12936-536: The necessity of nature or the mind of mortal men, I address you in prayer! For proceeding on a silent path you direct all mortal affairs toward justice! Menelaus : What does this mean? How strange your prayer to the gods is! Athenian citizens were familiar with rhetoric in the assembly and law courts, and some scholars believe that Euripides was more interested in his characters as speakers with cases to argue than as characters with lifelike personalities. They are self-conscious about speaking formally, and their rhetoric
13068-428: The old gods. And the perhaps most famous example is in Bacchae where the god Dionysus savages his own converts. When the gods do appear (in eight of the extant plays), they appear "lifeless and mechanical". Sometimes condemned by critics as an unimaginative way to end a story, the spectacle of a "god" making a judgement or announcement from a theatrical crane might actually have been intended to provoke scepticism about
13200-421: The old stories and the great names, as his theatre required, he imagines his people as contemporaries subjected to contemporary kinds of pressures, and examines their motivations, conduct and fate in the light of contemporary problems, usages and ideals. As mouthpieces for contemporary issues, they "all seem to have had at least an elementary course in public speaking". The dialogue often contrasts so strongly with
13332-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which
13464-605: The original plays. Sometimes the picture is almost lost. Thus, for example, two extant plays, The Phoenician Women and Iphigenia in Aulis , are significantly corrupted by interpolations (the latter possibly being completed post mortem by the poet's son); and the very authorship of Rhesus is a matter of dispute. In fact, the very existence of the Alphabet plays, or rather the absence of an equivalent edition for Sophocles and Aeschylus, could distort our notions of distinctive Euripidean qualities—most of his least "tragic" plays are in
13596-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c. 1450 BC ) are in
13728-482: The piglets as enemy contraband before he is driven off by Dikaiopolis. (Note that piglets meant also female genitals). Next, a Boeotian arrives with birds and eels for sale. Dikaiopolis has nothing to trade that the Boeotian could want, but he cleverly manages to interest him in a commodity that is rare in Boeotia – an Athenian sycophant . Another sycophant happens to arrive at that very moment, and he tries to confiscate
13860-464: The position conventionally reserved for satyr plays) is a "tragedy", featuring Heracles as a satyric hero in conventional satyr-play scenes: an arrival, a banquet, a victory over an ogre (in this case, death), a happy ending, a feast, and a departure for new adventures. Most of the big innovations in tragedy were made by Aeschylus and Sophocles, but "Euripides made innovations on a smaller scale that have impressed some critics as cumulatively leading to
13992-411: The precursor of New Comedy and also what Aristotle called him: 'the most tragic of poets' ( Poetics 1453a30). And not one of these descriptions is entirely false. — Bernard Knox Aeschylus gained thirteen victories as a dramatist; Sophocles at least twenty; Euripides only four in his lifetime; and this has often been taken as indication of the latter's unpopularity. But a first place might not have been
14124-624: The primary sources of revenue for that region was the manufacturing and selling of charcoal. This is further justification for the dissenters' exaggerated response. He surrenders the hostage, but he now wants more than just to be left alone in peace: he desperately wants the old men to believe in the justice of his cause. He even says that he is willing to speak with his head on a chopping block, if only they will hear him out, and yet he knows how unpredictable his fellow citizens can be: he says he hasn't forgotten how Cleon dragged him into court over "last year's play." This mention of trouble with Cleon over
14256-421: The pro-war populist, Cleon , are the two most important issues that underlie the play. The Spartans were the dominant military power on the Greek mainland, and consequently Athenians were reluctant to venture on foot far from the safety of their own city walls. Most Athenians had lived in rural settlements up until then. The Acharnians reflects this reluctant transition from rural to urban life. While sitting on
14388-466: The protagonist's lunch. Peace is not discussed. It is in the ecclesia, however, that Dikaiopolis meets Amphitheus, a man who claims to be the immortal great-great-grandson of Triptolemus and Demeter and who claims, moreover, that he can obtain peace with the Spartans privately . Dikaiopolis accepts his claims, and he pays him eight drachmas to bring him a private peace, which in fact Amphitheus manages to do. Dikaiopolis celebrates his private peace with
14520-463: The real target of this play is not the polis but rather "wicked little men of a counterfeit kind". These scruples are enunciated by Dikaiopolis as if he were the author or producer. He subsequently presents the anti-war argument with his head on a chopping block, a humorous reference to the danger that the satirist puts himself in when he impugns the motives of influential men like Cleon. Like other plays by Aristophanes, The Acharnians generally obeys
14652-429: The reason why he personally supports the war against Sparta. Is it out of his sense of duty, or because he gets paid? This time the whole Chorus is won over by the arguments of Dikaiopolis. Dikaiopolis and Lamachus retire to their separate houses, and there then follows a parabasis in which the Chorus first lavishes exaggerated praise upon the author and next laments the ill treatment that old men like themselves suffer at
14784-457: The religious and heroic dimension of his plays. Similarly, his plays often begin in a banal manner that undermines theatrical illusion. Unlike Sophocles, who established the setting and background of his plays in the introductory dialogue, Euripides used a monologue in which a divinity or human character simply tells the audience all it needs to know to understand what follows. Aeschylus and Sophocles were innovative, but Euripides had arrived at
14916-463: The remainder is derived from elsewhere. P contains all the extant plays of Euripides, L is missing The Trojan Women and latter part of The Bacchae . In addition to L, P, and many other medieval manuscripts, there are fragments of plays on papyrus. These papyrus fragments are often recovered only with modern technology. In June 2005, for example, classicists at the University of Oxford worked on
15048-422: The sake of rhetorical display"; and one spring to the defence: "His plays are remarkable for their range of tones and the gleeful inventiveness, which morose critics call cynical artificiality, of their construction." Unique among writers of ancient Athens, Euripides demonstrated sympathy towards the underrepresented members of society. His male contemporaries were frequently shocked by the heresies he put into
15180-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies
15312-405: The tattered costumes of his disreputable characters (and yet Agathon , another tragic poet, is discovered in a later play, Thesmophoriazusae , to be living in circumstances almost as bizarre). Euripides' mother was a humble vendor of vegetables, according to the comic tradition, yet his plays indicate that he had a liberal education and hence a privileged background. Euripides first competed in
15444-524: The time of Euripides, traditional assumptions are constantly under challenge, and audiences therefore have a natural affinity with the Euripidean outlook, which seems nearer to ours, for example, than the Elizabethan. As stated above, however, opinions continue to diverge, so that modern readers might actually "seem to feel a special affinity with Sophocles"; one recent critic might dismiss the debates in Euripides' plays as "self-indulgent digression for
15576-487: The tragedian's methods; he was himself ridiculed by Cratinus , another comic poet, as: ὑπολεπτολόγος, γνωμιδιώτης, εὐριπιδαριστοφανίζων a quibbler of words, a maker of maxims, a Euripidaristophaniser According to another comic poet, Teleclides , the plays of Euripides were co-authored by the philosopher Socrates: Μνησίλοχός ἐστ᾿ ἐκεῖνος, <ὃς> φρύγει τι δρᾶμα καινόν Εὐριπίδῃ, καὶ Σωκράτης τὰ φρύγαν᾿ ὑποτίθησιν. [...] Εὐριπίδης σωκρατογόμφους. Mnesilochus
15708-421: The tragic plot, and the play appears to be the culmination of a regressive or archaizing tendency in his later works (for which see Chronology below). Believed to have been composed in the wilds of Macedonia, Bacchae also dramatizes a primitive side to Greek religion, and some modern scholars have interpreted this particular play biographically, therefore, as: One of his earliest extant plays, Medea , includes
15840-518: The views of the Schlegels and Nietzsche, constructing arguments sympathetic to Euripides, which involved Wilamowitz in this restatement of Greek tragedy as a genre: "A [Greek] tragedy does not have to end 'tragically' or be 'tragic'. The only requirement is a serious treatment." In the English-speaking world, the pacifist Gilbert Murray played an important role in popularizing Euripides, influenced perhaps by his anti-war plays. Today, as in
15972-438: The vocabulary has been expanded to allow for intellectual and psychological subtleties. Euripides has been hailed as a great lyric poet. In Medea , for example, he composed for his city, Athens, "the noblest of her songs of praise". His lyrical skills are not just confined to individual poems: "A play of Euripides is a musical whole...one song echoes motifs from the preceding song, while introducing new ones." For some critics,
16104-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,
16236-417: Was born on Salamis Island around 480 BC, with parents Cleito (mother) and Mnesarchus (father), a retailer from the deme of Phlya . On receiving an oracle that his son was fated to win "crowns of victory", Mnesarchus insisted that the boy should train for a career in athletics. But the boy was destined for a career on the stage (where he was to win only five victories, one of these posthumously). He served for
16368-691: Was combined with the "Select" edition by some unknown Byzantine scholar, bringing together all the nineteen plays that survive today. The "Select" plays are found in many medieval manuscripts, but only two manuscripts preserve the "Alphabetical" plays—often denoted L and P, after the Laurentian Library at Florence, and the Bibliotheca Palatina in the Vatican, where they are stored. It is believed that P derived its Alphabet plays and some Select plays from copies of an ancestor of L, but
16500-469: Was expected to have a message. Traditional myth provided the subject matter, but the dramatist was meant to be innovative, which led to novel characterizations of heroic figures and use of the mythical past as a tool for discussing present issues. The difference between Euripides and his older colleagues was one of degree: his characters talked about the present more controversially and pointedly than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, sometimes even challenging
16632-492: Was just old enough to celebrate the victory in a boys' chorus, and Euripides was born on the very day of the battle. The apocryphal account, that he composed his works in a cave on Salamis island, was a late tradition, probably symbolizing the isolation of an intellectual ahead of his time. Much of his life, and his whole career, coincided with the struggle between Athens and Sparta for hegemony in Greece, but he did not live to see
16764-445: Was lost or corrupted; but the period also included triumphs by scholars and copyists, thanks to whom much was recovered and preserved. Summaries of the transmission are often found in modern editions of the plays, three of which are used as sources for this summary. The plays of Euripides, like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, circulated in written form. But literary conventions that we take for granted today had not been invented—there
16896-424: Was more insistent, using major characters as well. His comic touches can be thought to intensify the overall tragic effect, and his realism, which often threatens to make his heroes look ridiculous, marks a world of debased heroism: "The loss of intellectual and moral substance becomes a central tragic statement". Psychological reversals are common and sometimes happen so suddenly that inconsistency in characterization
17028-413: Was no spacing between words; no consistency in punctuation, nor elisions; no marks for breathings and accents (guides to pronunciation, and word recognition); no convention to denote change of speaker; no stage directions; and verse was written straight across the page, like prose. Possibly, those who bought texts supplied their own interpretative markings. Papyri discoveries have indicated, for example, that
17160-428: Was produced and it includes hints that he would carve Cleon up in his next play, The Knights . Some significant events leading up to the play: Old Comedy was a highly topical form of drama and the audience was expected to be familiar with the various people named or alluded to in the play. Here is a short, selective list of identities named in the play: The Peloponnesian War and Aristophanes' personal battle with
17292-445: Was prosecuted by Cleon for slandering the polis with his previous play, The Babylonians . That play had been produced for the City Dionysia , a festival held early in spring when the seas were navigable and the city was crowded with foreigners. The audience of The Acharnians however is reminded that this particular play has been produced for the Lenaia , a winter festival which few foreigners attend. The author moreover assures us that
17424-423: Was soon disregarded, and actors continued to make changes until about 200 BC, after which the habit ceased. It was about then that Aristophanes of Byzantium compiled an edition of all the extant plays of Euripides, collated from pre-Alexandrian texts, furnished with introductions and accompanied by a commentary that was "published" separately. This became the "standard edition" for the future, and it featured some of
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