The book opens with an introduction by the editors, Brillet-Dubois, Nikolsky and Noel, which situates the volume’s aims within several decades of Euripidean scholarship. Taking as their point of departure the neo-historicist turn associated with Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet – who understood tragedy as a ‘broken mirror’ of democratic ideology and emphasised social context, institutions and audiences –, the editors shift the focus towards Euripides’ poetic innovation and dramaturgical complexity. Originating from a colloquium held in Lyon in 2019, the volume brings together contributions in English, French and Italian, organised into three thematic sections.
The first section gathers a series of studies that examine how Euripidean drama engages contemporary political realities through poetic form, dramaturgy and performance. A. Beltrametti’s quasi-programmatic essay focuses on the poet’s engagement with Aeschylus and the reworking of the myth of the Atreids, with provocative connections to Medea and Ion. She frames rewriting as a dramaturgical mode emerging from within the theatre, involving a heightened critical reflection by the poet on his own art. E. Irwin’s contribution offers a bold, historicised reading of Medea, arguing that its plot innovations – especially Aegeus’ unexpected entrance and his collaboration with Medea – function as a mythical analogue to Athens’ controversial alliance with Corcyra in 433 bce. Through close analysis of diplomatic language and oaths, Irwin demonstrates how Euripides embeds contemporary interstate politics in tragic narrative.
The next two chapters deepen the connection between dramatic structure and political context in Euripides’ later works. Nikolsky interprets Iphigenia in Tauris as a symbolic resolution of internal Greek conflict, linking its narrative of rescue and reconciliation to the Argos–Athens alliance of 416 bce. By contrast, N.P. Grintser turns to the non-connected trilogy of 406 bce (Iphigenia in Aulis, Bacchae and Alcmaeon in Corinth), exploring whether thematic unity can emerge without narrative continuity. He identifies recurring motifs of broken or preserved philia and loyalty to kin, which resonate ambivalently with debates over the return of exiles after the oligarchic coup of 411 bce.
C. Lattmann reassesses Euripides’ tetralogy of 438 bce, challenging assumptions about the incoherence of post-Aeschylean tragic sets. He argues that Cretan Women, Alcmaeon in Psophis, Telephus and Alcestis are unified by shared ethical concerns surrounding philia and xenia, explored through parallel narrative structures. Performed at the Great Dionysia, this tetralogy could have served a reflective or deliberative political function within Athenian democracy. J. Radding’s study of the fragments of Alexandros (415 bce) reads Euripides’ dramatisation of the story of Paris through the lens of epinician performance. He argues that the choral celebration of Alexandros’ victory can be seen as generating resentment and exacerbating social and political tensions, a dynamic that parallels the hostility directed at Alcibiades following his Olympic victory in 416 bce. S. Ceccarelli examines Euripidean realism through the figure of the farmer in Electra and Orestes. Drawing on affinities with Aristophanic comedy, he shows how rural characters – often marked as pacifist in comic contexts – function in tragedy as political signifiers, evoking ideals of peace and democratic stability.
The next section shifts from immediate political realities to a more conceptual and transhistorical exploration of politics through myth, language and dramaturgy. M. Fartzoff examines Euripides’ use of the vocabulary of sovereignty, showing how political language is displaced from the civic sphere into intimate and domestic contexts. In Alcestis and Hippolytus such diction intensifies private suffering, while in Medea it interrogates authority within the family. Fartzoff characterises these shifts as ‘metamorphoses of the political’, through which political discourse is absorbed into tragic poetics and redirected towards distinct dramatic ends. A. Boschi focuses on the fragmentary Archelaos to reassess Euripides’ political outlook in the context of his departure from Athens and subsequent stay in Macedonia. By comparing the play with the rest of Euripides’ corpus, he argues that the poet’s encounter with a different institutional framework marked a rupture in the development of Euripidean political thought, revealing tensions between autocratic models and lingering democratic resonances.
T. Hill offers an analysis of stasis in Athenian tragedy, comparing its treatment in Aeschylus’ Oresteia with that in Euripides’ Phoenician Women and Orestes. He argues that the Euripidean plays articulate a distinctly human understanding of civil strife, revealing not only its destructive consequences but also the complex motivations – fear, persuasion and competing claims to justice and authority – that motivate individuals to participate in internal conflict. T. Suaria analyses Euripides’ political characterisation of Atreus and Thyestes across Electra, Iphigenia in Tauris, Orestes and a fragment of Thyestes, focusing on the transformation of the symbolic motif of the sun’s reversed course. He shows how Euripides reinterprets this cosmic inversion, thereby placing political power in dialogue with contemporary astronomical theory.
Adopting a carefully developed interpretative paradigm, F. Scrofani analyses Phoenician Women through the interplay of political concepts and dramatic form. Tracing the tension between equality (to ison) and pleonexia, she shows that, while equality fails in political action, it is paradoxically realised through the symmetry of the agōn and the balance of opposing speeches, making form itself a medium of political reflection. E. Medda examines how Euripides weaves contemporary political elements into the dramatic fabric of Phoenician Women and Orestes, integrating allusions to Athenian political reality, carefully selected for their dramatic functionality. Written shortly after the fall of the regime of the Four Hundred, these nearly contemporary plays mobilise the political experience of their audiences to confer broader significance on the tragic conflict.
Turning to reception history, A. Dedieu examines late sixteenth-century humanist readings of Euripides, showing how political tensions in early modern Europe led editors and translators to privilege tragedies such as Phoenician Women and Andromache. Through Latin translations and paratextual framing, Euripides was recast as a poeta optimo genio politico, whose work was mobilised for moral and political instruction, thereby shaping a new Euripidean tragic canon.
R. Saetta Cottone’s piece focuses on Tiresias in Bacchae, who is presented as articulating an outlook with affinities to Orphic writings. Referring primarily to the Derveni Papyrus, she argues that Tiresias embodies a learned practice of myth interpretation that contrasts with Pentheus’ instrumental use of language and calls into question his discourse and actions against Dionysus. Through this opposition Euripides develops a tragic poetics that draws subtle political implications from contemporary religious and intellectual currents.
The closing section of the volume converges on a shared insight: Euripidean tragedy functions as a locus where poetic invention and civic negotiation are inseparable. C. Mauduit’s study of Orestes advances the provocative idea of a tragedy without a king. Avoiding historicist readings, Mauduit offers a mythopoetic and dramaturgical analysis, showing how Euripides uses popular sovereignty as a formal device – by construing the assembly scene as the central peripeteia – to probe mythic history and expose the instability of collective decision-making.
C. Plichon argues that in Alcestis and Helen, both performed during the Peloponnesian War, the forgetting of suffering and conflict is presented as a necessary condition for renewal. In Heracles, by contrast, Euripides thematises the tension between the desire to forget and the impossibility of doing so, using this conflict to interrogate the politics of civic memory. J. Moore examines the houses of Bacchae – Pentheus’ palace and Semele’s ruined home – as active sites of political meaning. These structures mediate spectators’ experience of trauma and reflect Athenian anxieties about the oikos as the foundation of civic identity. Domestic destruction and displacement become lenses through which Euripides explores the fragility of authority and political order. Building on a suggestive connection, A. Giannotti reads Heracles through the honorific economy of the Dionysia, arguing that Theseus’ public honouring of the hero reflects contemporary practices of reciprocal benefaction (charis). In doing so, the play anticipates later euergetic rhetoric, transforming tragedy into a space where political gratitude and civic generosity are symbolically enacted.
É. Ruch examines Ion as a work of civic mythmaking, showing how Euripides uses recognition scenes, choral framing and material objects to involve spectators in constructing a new Athenian foundation myth. By mobilising familiar rituals and visual culture, the play fosters a shared cultural identity, inviting audiences to reflect critically on Athens’ origins and political imagination. R. Viccei complements this perspective by examining Euripides’ political deployment of art and architecture in Trojan Women and Ion. Sculpture, buildings and visual artefacts are recontextualised onstage to reveal their ideological weight, as Euripides exposes the way in which aesthetic forms memorialise conquest, suffering and prestige. Both contributions point to promising avenues for future research.
The final essay is by S. Mills, who highlights Euripidean tragedy’s balance between emotional involvement and critical distance, explaining both its lasting appeal and its openness to political and ethical reinterpretation. This dynamic allows the plays to be reshaped across historical contexts, enabling works such as Medea or Bacchae to address modern concerns while preserving aesthetic distance. The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography, along with indexes of names and key concepts. The placement of the individual chapter abstracts at the end of the volume appears redundant and adds little of value for readers.
Viewed as a whole, the volume marks the latest stage in a broader reconfiguration of tragic politics, exemplified by Why Athens? A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics (2011), edited by D.M. Carter, which argues that the politics of Greek tragedy must be understood through the diverse ways in which tragic performance – shaped by Athenian institutions yet responsive to Panhellenic contexts – engaged audiences in reflecting on deliberation, authority and collective identity. V. Wohl’s Euripides and the Politics of Form (2015) further advanced this critical trajectory by foregrounding aesthetic form and affect in Euripides as central vehicles of political meaning.
Engaging with this perspective, Poétique et politique chez Euripide shows how political meaning emerges from concrete dramaturgical practices – mythic rewriting, symbolic motifs, institutional scenes, spatial dynamics, memory, ritual and reception – by translating insights about form and performance into politically inflected interpretations. While the volume consistently foregrounds poetic form and dramaturgy, some contributions focus more closely on concrete historical circumstances and on patterns of audience response. This diversity captures the multivalence of Euripides’ political engagement while avoiding reductive readings. It also entails certain limitations: the balance between formal analysis and historical contextualisation remains uneven, with some plays and issues receiving more sustained attention than others, and the absence of a synthetic conclusion leaves connections between chapters implicit. Such limitations are largely unavoidable, given the volume’s origin as conference proceedings and the breadth of its thematic scope.
Overall, Poétique et politique chez Euripide stands as a substantial and stimulating contribution to the study of Greek tragedy. By demonstrating how Euripidean drama articulates political meaning through its poetic and theatrical forms, the volume opens productive directions for future research while offering a nuanced and compelling account of tragedy’s political resonance.
