目录:
欧里庇得斯（生于公元前484年，雅典，希腊，死于马其顿，死于406年），是古典雅典三大悲剧戏剧家中的最后一位，紧随埃斯库罗斯和索福克勒斯之后。
生活与事业
可以仅重建欧里庇得斯最粗略的传记。他母亲的名字叫克莱托（Cleito）。他父亲的名字叫Mnesarchus或Mnesarchides。一种传统的说法是，他的母亲是一位蔬菜水果商，在市场上出售草药。亚里士多德一家在喜剧片中对此开玩笑。但是有更好的间接证据表明欧里庇得斯来自一个小康家庭。欧里庇得斯（Euripides）第一次获得被选为参加455戏剧节的荣誉，他在441赢得了自己的首场胜利。欧里庇得斯（Euripides）于408永久离开了雅典，接受了马其顿国王阿奇劳斯的邀请。他于406年在马其顿去世。
欧里庇得斯唯一已知的公共活动是他对西西里岛锡拉库扎的外交使团服务。但是，他对创意非常感兴趣，并拥有一个大型图书馆。据说他与Protagoras，Anaxagoras和其他哲学家和哲学家科学家有联系。他对新思想的了解使他变得躁动而不是坚定信念，他对传统希腊宗教的质疑态度也反映在他的一些戏剧作品中。在欧里庇得斯的私生活中，无话可说。后来的传统为他发明了一场灾难性的婚姻生活。众所周知，他有一个叫Melito的妻子，并育有三个儿子。其中之一是一位诗人，在他父亲去世后产生了巴坎特人。他可能还已经完成了他父亲在奥利斯（Aulis）的未完戏Iphigenia。
The ancients knew of 92 plays composed by Euripides. Nineteen plays are extant, if one of disputed authorship is included. At only four festivals was Euripides awarded the first prize—the fourth posthumously, for the tetralogy that included Bacchants and Iphigenia at Aulis. As Sophocles won perhaps as many as 24 victories, it is clear that Euripides was comparatively unsuccessful. More to the point is that on more than 20 occasions Euripides was chosen, out of all contestants, to be one of the three laureates of the year. Furthermore, the regularity with which Aristophanes parodied him is proof enough that Euripides’ work commanded attention. It is often said that disappointment at his plays’ reception in Athens was one of the reasons for his leaving his native city in his old age; but there are other reasons why an old poet might have left Athens in the 23rd year of the Peloponnesian War.
Dramatic and literary achievements
Euripides’ plays exhibit his iconoclastic, rationalizing attitude toward both religious belief and the ancient legends and myths that formed the traditional subject matter for Greek drama. These legends seem to have been for him a mere collection of stories without any particular authority. He also apparently rejected the gods of Homeric theology, whom he frequently depicts as irrational, petulant, and singularly uninterested in meting out “divine justice.” That the gods are so often presented on the stage by Euripides is partly due to their convenience as a source of information that could not otherwise be made available to the audience.
Given this attitude of sophisticated doubt on his part, Euripides invents protagonists who are quite different from the larger-than-life characters drawn with such conviction by Aeschylus and Sophocles. They are, for the most part, commonplace, down-to-earth men and women who have all the flaws and vulnerabilities ordinarily associated with human beings. Furthermore, Euripides makes his characters express the doubts, the problems and controversies, and in general the ideas and feelings of his own time. They sometimes even take time off from the dramatic action to debate each other on matters of current philosophical or social interest.
Euripides differed from Aeschylus and Sophocles in making his characters’ tragic fates stem almost entirely from their own flawed natures and uncontrolled passions. Chance, disorder, and human irrationality and immorality frequently result not in an eventual reconciliation or moral resolution but in apparently meaningless suffering that is looked upon with indifference by the gods. The power of this type of drama lies in the frightening and ghastly situations it creates and in the melodramatic, even sensational, emotional effects of its characters’ tragic crises.
Given this strong strain of psychological realism, Euripides shows moments of brilliant insight into his characters, especially in scenes of love and madness. His depictions of women deserve particular attention; it is easy to extract from his plays a long list of heroines who are fierce, treacherous, or adulterous, or all three at once. Misogyny is altogether too simple an explanation here, although Euripides’ reputation in his own day was that of a woman hater, and a play by Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria, comically depicts the indignation of the Athenian women at their portrayal by Euripides.
The chief structural peculiarities of Euripides’ plays are his use of prologues and of the providential appearance of a god (deus ex machina) at the play’s end. Almost all of the plays start with a monologue that is in effect a bare chronicle explaining the situation and characters with which the action begins. Similarly, the god’s epilogue at the end of the play serves to reveal the future fortunes of the characters. This latter device has been criticized as clumsy or artificial by modern authorities, but it was presumably more palatable to the audiences of Euripides’ own time. Another striking feature of his plays is that over time Euripides found less and less use for the chorus; in his successive works it tends to grow detached from the dramatic action.
The word habitually used in antiquity to describe Euripides’ ordinary style of dramatic speech is lalia (“chatter”), alluding probably both to its comparatively light weight and to the volubility of his characters of all classes. Notwithstanding this, Euripides’ lyrics at times have considerable charm and sweetness. In the works written after 415 bc his lyrics underwent a change, becoming more emotional and luxuriant. At its worst this style is hardly distinguishable from Aristophanes’ parody of it in his comedy Frogs, but where frenzied emotion is appropriate, as in the tragedy Bacchants, Euripides’ songs are unsurpassed in their power and beauty.
During the last decade of his career Euripides began to write “tragedies” that might actually be called romantic dramas, or tragicomedies with happy endings. These plays have a highly organized structure leading to a recognition scene in which the discovery of a character’s true identity produces a complete change in the situation, and in general a happy one. Extant plays in this style include Ion, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, and Helen. Plays of the tragicomedy type seem to anticipate the New Comedy of the 4th century bc.
The fame and popularity of Euripides eclipsed that of Aeschylus and Sophocles in the cosmopolitan Hellenistic period. The austere, lofty, essentially political and “religious” tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles had less appeal than that of Euripides, with its more accessible realism and its obviously emotional, even sensational, effects. Euripides thus became the most popular of the three for revivals of his plays in later antiquity; this is probably why at least 18 of his plays have survived compared to seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles, and why the extant fragmentary quotations from his works are more numerous than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles put together.
