Table Of ContentLoeb Classical Monographs
in memory of lames C. Loeb
Euripides
and the
Full Circle
of Myth
Cediic H. Whitman
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
1974
© Copyright 1974 by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
The Loeb Classical Monographs
are published with assistance
from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-81676
ISBN 0-674-26920-9
Printed in the United States of America
Preface
The art of Euripides is so varied, so given to the un-
expected, that it is no wonder that all attempts at a con-
sistent, general theory of his work have failed to carry
conviction. It is almost a commentary on himself, as well
as on human life, that he closed no less than five plays
with identical choral lines stressing the unforeseeable,
as if even he was not quite sure what he would do next.
Euripides has had more labels attached to him than any
other dramatist who ever lived, none in the least helpful
save insofar as their sum provides an index to the pov-
erty of one-sided critical views of a poet capable of every-
thing except one-sidedness. The ambivalence of his
earliest critic, Aristophanes, is clear throughout the com-
edies,· and the purport of his earliest extant tragedy, the
Alcestis, is still, after nearly two and a half millennia,
highly debatable. It was natural, perhaps, for his contem-
poraries to be astonished, shocked, or even enchanted by
Euripides, and then give Sophocles the prize. It was
natural too, though not a sign of heightened critical
acuity, for the fourth and later centuries to adopt Eu-
ripides to their special liking; presumably he seemed at
once more accessible and more philosophic. But from the
time when Aristotle called him the most tragic of the
poets to the present, when it is becoming fashionable to
search out his affinities with the comic, there has ap-
peared no broad interpretive scheme competent to con-
tain the full range of his labyrinthine imagination.
Certainly this essay offers nothing of the sort. It was
written primarily out of the wish to formulate a some-
vi Preface
what personal reading of three plays that have always
aroused controversy as well as admiration. The Iphi-
geneia in Tauris, a long-standing favorite, the Ion, a little
neglected until lately, and above all the "bewundert viel
und viel gescholten" Helen have undergone widely
divergent interpretations. Yet, by contrast with what was
said above about the diversity of Euripides' work, these
three dramas have much in common with each other,
though little that is obvious with the rest of the corpus.
On internal grounds all seem to have been written
around the year 412 B.C., the fixed date of the Helen·, all
have striking similarities in dramatic form and content,
including the so-called happy endings which account
for such designations as "romance," "tragicomedy," and
"melodrama." In addition, they possess a certain com-
munity of theme, less often noticed, but crucial to the
meaning of that final act of salvation by which the
endings are called happy. This theme is the quest for
purity, or wholeness. It finds itself through a complex
of intricately woven poetic motifs, the sea, music, a
branch of olive; but it is the struggle for wholeness, for
spiritual, not merely physical, redemption that gives
these plays their relative coherence as a special segment
of Euripides' work.
In order to make the book available to all those in-
terested in Greek tragedy, I have translated extracts, and
transliterated certain key words, leaving only a few
necessarily in Greek. Also, there are no notes. Some
scholars might consider a book without notes quite as
useless as one without pictures and conversations, but
they seemed burdensome, since classicists at work on
Euripides will know what they might have said, while
others would probably skip them. It seemed sufficient to
compile a brief list of selected books and articles that I
found relevant. One of these, Charles Segal's "The Two
vii Preface
Worlds of Euripides' Helen," was written simultaneously
with my chapter, and quite independently of it. Our
views about this difficult play have a great deal in com-
mon, even to the comparison with Cymbeline; but for
the sake of the total argument I have let my chapter
stand as written, while earnestly referring the reader to
the more detailed treatment in Segal's article.
This book was begun under a grant from the James C.
Loeb Foundation during the year 1969-70, while I was on
sabbatical leave from Harvard; I am more than usually
indebted also to friends, students, and fellow scholars for
their encouragement and help in bringing it to com-
pletion. From the beginning, my wife, Anne, listened
with patience and reassuring support to the entire book,
as its various parts were written. Maud Wilcox and Mar-
gareta Fulton, of the Harvard University Press, also read
the manuscript even before it was officially submitted for
publication. Among students with whom I have worked
directly on Euripides, I should name Rowland Hazard
and Justina Gregory, whose respective studies of the
Hecuba and of madness in the Heracles, Oiestes, and
Bacchae have considerably furthered my own thinking
about those plays. Also, I extend warm thanks to Laura
Slatkin and David Kovacs for their careful critical read-
ings and many valuable suggestions, both scholarly and
stylistic. Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to Anne
Pippin Burnett who generously, and despite our differing
outlooks, offered many helpful comments; and to C. J.
Herington, whose compelling critical imperium not only
eliminated a number of lapses from the first three of
these essays, but also effectively brought about, inopinata
vi, the existence of the fourth.
Greensboro, Vermont C.H.W.
August 1973
Contents
ι Iphigeneia in Tauris ι
2 Helen 35
3 Ion 69
4 The Scope of Myth 104
Selected Bibliography 151
