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Wretched tales of poets: Euripides, Heracles 1340-6

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

A. L. Brown
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Extract

Like everything else that Mr. T.C.W. Stinton writes, his recent article ‘“Si credere dignum est”: some expressions of disbelief in Euripides and others’ displays a range of learning and a subtlety of argument with which few of us could attempt to compete. If I now take issue with his interpretation of one particular passage, I am certainly not doing so in any spirit of rivalry or depreciation of his achievements. I am, however, emboldened to write this article by his frank admission, concerning his account of HF 1340-6, ‘I am not sure that I now believe it myself’ (p. 89, n. 56). Where Stinton is in doubt about his own interpretation, it may not be presumptuous for a lesser mortal to advocate another.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 24 , 1978 , pp. 22 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

NOTES

1. PCPS n.s. 22 (1976) 60ffGoogle Scholar.

2. Grube, G.M.A., The drama of Euripides (London, 1941) 58fGoogle Scholar.

3. Burnett, A.P., Catastrophe survived (Oxford, 1971) 174ff.Google Scholar; Rivier, A., Essai sur le tragique d'Euripide2 (Paris, 1975) 177ffGoogle Scholar.

4. Lesky, A., Die tragische Dichtung der Hellenen3 (Gottingen, 1972) 380Google Scholar.

5. My account is similar in some respects to those of Greenwood, L.H.G., Aspects of Euripidean tragedy (Cambridge, 1953) 59ff.Google Scholar, and Conacher, D.J., Euripidean drama (Toronto, 1967) 78ffGoogle Scholar. But I would not myself describe the plot of the Heracles as fantasy (Greenwood) or as a reductio ad absurdum of the myth (Conacher). Within the conventions of Greek tragedy there is nothing fantastic or absurd about it.

6. Poet. 1460 a 20ff.

7. It is true that one can also find expressions condemning the gods, a few of which go beyond the requirements of the dramatic context; an example is HF 655ff., which Stinton quotes (p. 81). But these seem easier to explain away. I should guess that Euripides in fact believed the gods (or god) to be more or less unconcerned with human affairs; but if we want to say that the world is badly ordered in some way, a striking and effective way of doing so is to accept for the moment the traditional belief that divine beings have ordered it, and to complain that they have done a bad job (why can't the Almighty provide better weather on Sundays?).

8. Admittedly this is not quite consistent with 35–41, where Iphigeneia disapprovingly accepts that Artemis takes pleasure in the sacrifices; but this merely means that she has not yet reached the conclusion that she reaches at 385ff. (Euripides has clearly been placed in some difficulty by the requirement of the plot that a virtuous Greek maiden should deign to be a party to these barbaric rites.) And by the end of the play it is fairly clear that Artemis does not in fact condone human sacrifice among the Taurians any more than at Aulis.

9. Exceptions to this are the passages from Pindar, , Callimachus, , and Euripides, ' Troades (pp. 67–71)Google Scholar. But it would not be difficult to show that these passages, like those on Leda and the Swan which I discuss in the text, are in fact explained by Stinton in terms which could not be applied to the Heracles passage.