HIPPOLYTUS/THE BACCHAE ***
Produced by Ted Garvin, Charles Bidwell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
NINE GREEK DRAMAS
By AESCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES and ARISTOPHANES
Translations by E.D.A. MORSHEAD E.H. PLUMPTRE GILBERT MURRAY and B.B. ROGERS
HIPPOLYTUS
and
THE BACCHAE
of
EURIPIDES
Translated by GILBERT MURRAY
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Euripides, the youngest of the trio of great Greek tragedians was born at Salamis in 480 B.C., on the day when the Greeks won their momentous naval victory there over the fleet of the Persians. The precise social status of his parents is not clear but he received a good education, was early distinguished as an athlete, and showed talent in painting and oratory. He was a fellow student of Pericles, and his dramas show the influence of the philosophical ideas of Anaxagoras and of Socrates, with whom he was personally intimate. Like Socrates, he was accused of impiety, and this, along with domestic infelicity, has been supposed to afford a motive for his withdrawal from Athens, first to Magnesia and later to the court of Anchelaüs in Macedonia where he died in 406 B.C.
The first tragedy of Euripides was produced when he was about twenty-five, and he was several times a victor in the tragic contests. In spite of the antagonisms which he aroused and the criticisms which were hurled upon him in, for example, the comedies of Aristophanes, he attained a very great popularity; and Plutarch tells that those Athenians who were taken captive in the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 413 B.C. were offered freedom by their captors if they could recite from the works of Euripides. Of the hundred and twenty dramas ascribed to Euripides, there have come down to us complete eighteen tragedies and one satyric drama, "Cyclops," beside numerous fragments.
The works of Euripides are generally regarded as showing the beginning of the decline of Greek tragedy. The idea of Fate hitherto dominant in the plays of his predecessors, tends to be degraded by him into mere chance; the characters lose much of their ideal quality; and even gods and heroes are represented as moved by the petty motives of ordinary humanity. The chorus is often quite detached from the action; the poetry is florid; and the action is frequently tinged with sensationalism. In spite of all this, Euripides remains a great poet; and his picturesqueness and tendencies to what are now called realism and romanticism, while marking his inferiority to the chaste classicism of Sophocles, bring him more easily within the sympathetic interest of the modern reader.
HIPPOLYTUS
OF EURIPIDES
DRAMATIS PERSONAE THE GODDESS APHRODITE THESEUS, _King of Athens and Trozên_ PHAEDRA, _daughter of Minos, King of Crete, wife to Theseus_ HIPPOLYTUS, _bastard son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyte_ THE NURSE OF PHAEDRA A HENCHMAN OF HIPPOLYTUS THE GODDESS ARTEMIS AN OLD HUNTSMAN A CHORUS OF HUNTSMEN ATTENDANTS ON THE THREE ROYAL PERSONS A CHORUS OF TROZENIAN WOMEN, WITH THEIR LEADER
_The scene is laid in Trozên. The play was first acted when Epameinon was Archon, Olympiad 87, year 4 (B.C. 429). Euripides was first, Iophon second, Ion third._
APHRODITE Great among men, and not unnamed am I, The Cyprian, in God's inmost halls on high. And wheresoe'er from Pontus to the far Red West men dwell, and see the glad day-star, And worship Me, the pious heart I bless, And wreck that life that lives in stubbornness. For that there is, even in a great God's mind, That hungereth for the praise of human kind.
