Euripides Irreverence Toward The Gods

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Euripides provides a comprehensive account of the influence and appropriation of all extant Euripidean plays since their inception: from antiquity to modernity, across cultures and civilizations, from multiple perspectives and within a broad range of human experience and cultural trends, namely literature, intellectual history, visual arts, music, opera and dance, stage and cinematography. A concerted work by an international team of specialists in the field, the volume is addressed to a wide and multidisciplinary readership of classical reception studies, from experts to non-experts. Contributors engage in a vividly and lively interactive dialogue with the Ancient and the Modern which, while illuminating aspects of ancient drama and highlighting their ever-lasting relevance, offers a thoughtful and layered guide of the human condition.

What were the ideas which Euripides entertained in regard to the divine government of the universe and an over ruling deity and what attitude did he sustain toward the gods of Greece as commonly accepted in his time? This inquiry forms the substance of the following investigations based primarily on the poet's extant works. While we are confronted at times by the difficulty of discriminating between what was clearly his own individual opinion and what the sentiment of his characters there are numerous inferences that may be safely made regarding his views of religion. The chorus is commonly supposed to represent the poet's moralizings and reflections but certainly is not here alone that these are found. Frequently, as will be seen, there are statements made by the dramatis personal which coincide most probably with the opinions of the tragedian himself.

Ritual Irony is a critical study of four problematic later plays of Euripides: the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Phoenissae, the Heracles, and the Bacchae. Examining Euripides' representation of sacrificial ritual against the background of late fifth-century Athens, Helene P. Foley shows that each of these plays confronts directly the difficulty of making an archaic poetic tradition relevant to a democratic society. She explores the important mediating role played by choral poetry and ritual in the plays, asserting that Euripides' sacrificial metaphors and ritual performances link an anachronistic mythic ideal with a world dominated by "chance" or an incomprehensible divinity. Foley utilizes the ideas and methodology of contemporary literary theory and symbolic anthropology, addressing issues central to the emerging dialogue between the two fields. Her conclusions have important implications for the study of Greek tragedy as a whole and for our understanding of Euripides' tragic irony, his conception of religion, and the role of his choral odes. Assuming no specialized knowledge, Ritual Irony is aimed at all readers of Euripidean tragedy. It will prove particularly valuable to students and scholars of classics, comparative literature, and symbolic anthropology.

Euripides' Danae and Dictys are two of the most important and influential treatments of a popular tragic myth-cycle, which is unrepresented among extant plays. Moreover, they are early treatments of major Euripidean plot-patterns that anticipate and illuminate more familiar works in the corpus, both extant and fragmentary. This is the first full-scale study of the two plays, which sheds light on plot-patterns, key themes and aspects of Euripidean dramatic technique (e.g. his rhetoric, imagery, stagecraft), as well as matters of reception and transmission of both tragedies, by taking into account newly related evidence. The cautious recovery of the two lost plays based on the available evidence and the detailed commentary on their fragments seek to complement our knowledge of Euripidean drama by contributing to an overview and more comprehensive picture of the dramatist's technique, as the extant corpus represents only a small portion of his oeuvre.