The Athenian tragedian Euripides (480–406 b.c.e.) produced nearly 100 plays over the course of a career that spanned half a century. For each of the two dozen or so competitions he presumably entered with sets of four plays, cohorts of actors and lay choruses had to be trained and choreographed, a huge effort expended in the pursuit of a single goal: to win the crown at the city Dionysia of Athens. This elaborate dramatic contest, flanked by processions and symposiastic festivities, was also a lavish display of panhellenic self-representation with massive political overtones bordering on propaganda. In such a context, drama had to rouse a citizen body with a sense of purpose and patriotism; magistrates and judges, among them the high priest of Dionysus himself, needed to be impressed with style and decorum, and the gods had to receive their due honour and respect. There was little room for fine-tuning and revision: once the appointed day had come, all depended on the tragedy's first and only performance, a singular event. In that context, no member of the elite collegium of competing playwrights could afford to give offence. One may doubt that this was the sort of environment that invited any would-be public intellectual to step forward and criticise the gods the city believed in, let alone proclaim atheism or stoke impious disbelief in traditional religion.
And yet, this is just what many a modern scholar supposes Euripides did. It is now a matter of vigorous debate whether Euripides was a covert sympathiser with sophistic rationalism, a psychologising irrationalist, a surly atheist or rather a (more or less) straightforward traditionalist. There is an obvious answer to this question suggested by the historical background, but beyond that the question is inherently unanswerable. No amount of parsing of the tragic lines that survive will ever reveal the Euripidean mind of the man who wrote them. Still, L. aims to show that Euripides’ treatment of the gods is thoroughly in line with the Homeric tradition and, as such, is far less countercultural than commonly imagined. The question is: how could so many scholars who would fashion Euripides into a caustic critic of polytheism sail along on such a misguided tack at all? L. would identify hermeneutic circularity (aka prejudice) as the general diagnosis.
It is one of the virtues of this study that it devotes an entire chapter, the first after the introduction, to the question of why scholarship has been so preoccupied with the precise nature of Euripides’ religious beliefs. And the plausible answer is, essentially, that scholars have been hoodwinked into debating the issue of Euripides’ alleged impiety by ancient comedy, above all Aristophanes. L. shows how ancient scholarship turned irresponsible slander on the comic stage into biographical conjecture and, eventually, into ostensible reports of historical fact. Late antiquity sealed the verdict: ‘Jewish and Christian readers in particular were able to regard Euripides as a poet who shared their own negative attitude towards traditional Greek religion, and came to suppose that he was as deeply troubled by it as they were themselves’ (p. 48). There is a good chance that anyone who seeks to uncover just how much Euripides was at odds with the religion of his polis (but would not dream to ask the same question in the case of Sophocles or Aeschylus) is merely looking at the matter through the prefabricated lens of Late Antiquity. Scholarly commitments to enlightenment ideas did not help in this regard either: in the context of Whiggish ‘from-mythos-to-logos’ trajectories, it seemed apt and desirable to let the dialectic of Attic drama culminate in a rationalist ‘philosopher of the stage’.
What L. does not tell us is where and how precisely so many scholars misinterpreted the text. Throughout the book there is hardly any engagement with the rich secondary literature on the subject, except on a general and superficial level. This is a serious shortcoming. The volume's bibliography is useful and copious, but the vast majority of scholarship listed there is mentioned nowhere else in the book. If at all, the discussion confines itself to a select group of anglophone authors, and almost exclusively in a spirit of disapproval.
As is the case with most monographs on drama, there is much inevitable recounting of plots. L. does this well and in measure. Refreshingly, the chapters are not organised diachronically around plays in their historical sequence, but rather focus thematically on individual gods. Thus, Chapter 3 deals with Athena and Chapter 4 with Apollo, but Dionysus in the Bacchae receives only about ten pages in Chapter 5 entitled ‘Other Gods’. In any case, the recurrent verdict is: Euripides ‘does not try to glorify the gods, but presents them as what they are’ (p. 23). What this sentence must mean is that Euripides’ characterisation of the gods was of a piece with the common cultural conception of them in the religious and literary community of ancient Greece. And so, the presumed religious presuppositions of the audience carries a lot of weight in L.’s argument.
For instance, anyone who tries to make positive sense of the meaning and function of the gods in Euripides will find that the most difficult tragedy in this regard is the Heracles, performed around the time when the Athenians were busy with genocide on the island of Melos. This drama receives a lengthy treatment in Chapter 2. In what sense is the Heracles (which incidentally did not win first prize) a play that confirms, or at least does not militate against, traditional polis religion? For when Heracles realises that he was driven by Hera and Lyssa to slaughter his family, he makes some memorable remarks against the gods: who is Zeus anyway (1263)? How could one even pray to a goddess like Hera (1307–8)? Real gods cannot possibly behave the way poets have described them (1345–6). It seems as if the magnitude of human suffering has turned even the son of Zeus into a scoffing critic of the Olympian mythology and cult.
According to L., nothing much is out of order here. Euripides’ drama simply tells a terrifying truth about the gods: the welfare of human beings is not one of their concerns. This is what Greek gods are like. Besides, Heracles’ impious outbursts of frustration are mitigated by the motif, well known to the audience at the time but nowhere hinted at in the drama, that Heracles will eventually be redeemed and enjoy immortality. And so, ‘[t]here is no reason to suppose that anyone in the original audience would have been persuaded by Heracles’ outburst to abandon traditional religious beliefs or practices’ (p. 54). Really? To be sure, Plato was a mere teenager at the time of the first performance, but what about Socrates and other sophists steeped in the rational theologies of Presocratic philosophy?
The appeal to how Euripides’ contemporary audience would have reacted to a given plotline plays a repeated role in L.’s argument. The trouble is, of course, that we know next to nothing about how the ‘average Athenian’ might have felt about this sort of harrowing staging of divine agency and human suffering. One unknown is elucidated by the light of another. And yet, it must be true that from Euripides’ drama we can learn a great deal about what the Olympian mythos meant to contemporary Athenians – not so much about what the common man may have thought when he prayed and sacrificed, but rather about how a serious intellectual would have tried to make sense of (and re-enact) their prehistoric tales of gods and men. And this ‘making sense of’ has a lot to do with imagining the possibility of contact between the human and the divine, with reflection on the practical consequences of beliefs as well as the mechanisms of reciprocity in the realm of the spirit. And it has something to do with canvassing models of human conduct in the face of cosmic forces that simultaneously sustain and destroy us. In this book, the gods so vividly brought on stage by Euripides mostly come across as bigoted, narcissistic and egocentric psychopaths who nevertheless and on rare occasions ‘could reward pious mortals and see that they received the recognition and support they deserved’ (p. 94). If L. is right, then perhaps this is what Greco-Roman polytheism was mostly about: the worship of unconscionable demons.
