Bakkhai Variations:
Villanova Theatre
Euripides Bio
In 480 BCE on the island of Salamis, Euripides was born as the fateful Battle of Salamis that ended Persia’s campaign into Greece had reached its fever pitch on the waters of the Mediterranean. His father, Mnesarchus, was not present at the battle as he was a merchant who operated a retail shop somewhere in the 15 miles between Salamis and Athens. From these humble beginnings, Euripides was told by a local prophet that was destined to “win crowns of victory.” Mnesarchus seemed to interpret this to mean that his son had the makings of a great athlete because Euripides trained to become one at a young age. The boy rejected this path and became a dancer, first for Apollo’s temple and then in the choruses at the Great Dionysia.
Euripides then earned state sponsorship to compose his own entries into the tragic contests starting in 455 BCE. Despite prophetic promises, Euridipes failed to win a contest over the living Sophocles or restaged plays from the deceased Aeschylus until he was almost forty-years-old in 441 BCE. Euripides was therefore the most junior playwright entering the competition and his stylistic choices often clashed with what the aristocratic judges were looking for. He received flak on several occasions for his open defiance of Greek religiosity, often painting deities as cruel or uncaring. He also gained an association with Sophocles and the Sophist movement that further alienated him from Athenian society.
Roman recreation of Greek bust of Euripides from c.330 BCE
Greek sketch of four dithyrambic chorus members dancing c.4th century BCE
Some of Euripides’ extant plays that have become the most beloved in modern times were reviled by the playwright’s contemporaries. Medea (431 BCE), for example, was part of a trilogy that earned him last place. It is unknown if this placement resulted from painting a mother killing her own children in an empathetic light, from altering the myth to conclude with Medea fleeing on a dragon-pulled chariot, from humanizing a non-Greek in a society built on Athenian supremacy, or some combination of all these factors. Regardless, less than 80% of Euripides’ scripts have survived and the rationale for a particular year’s judgment has been lost to time. He only won four times in the forty-nine years he competed, receiving a fifth posthumus victory a year after his death for a trilogy that included Bakkhai and another well-known play Iphigenia at Aulis (both 405 BCE).
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Famous Greek vase depicting Euripides’ version of Medea’s escape c.400 BCE
Distilling Euripides’ canon and style into a cohesive narrative remains difficult since so little has weathered the centuries, but what we can extract is a knack for evolution. Throughout his career, Athens suffered through a grueling conflict with Sparta (the Peloponnesian War), a plague, several political upheavals, and changes in artistic taste. Some plays, like Hecuba (424 BCE), depict war as senseless and destructive during the worst years of Athens’ conflict while others, such as Children of Heracles (430 BCE), still have the patriotic bravado of a city-state just starting on the warpath. Euripides also had no compunction altering a play’s dramatic format, in some cases eschewing messenger speeches altogether as in Trojan Women (415 BCE) or mixing the tragic with romance found in Helen (412 BCE). In some ways, Euripides paved the way for playwrights and other artists to be responsive to their communities rather than to dictate how people should feel. Whether he always succeeded in that endeavour during his life is up for debate, but his impact reverberates all the way into the 21st century.