Euripides

Music (including dance, instrumentation and poetry) constitutes a major theme in Euripides’ Troades, and the play itself is predominantly musical in its performance. The ratio of lyric to spoken trimeters and recitative anapaests confirms this impression, as lyric makes up approximately half of the drama. A handful of scholars have observed this quality of the play. For instance, Murnaghan  (2011) understands the chorus’ references to choral celebrations prior to the fall of Troy as emphasizing the social breakdown evident in the play’s dramatic present.

Euripides’ Helen is a bold experiment in the flexibility of tragedy, one that features a number of elements (e.g., humor, metatheater, a happy ending) more akin to comedy than to tragedy. Direct influence of comedy on tragedy has been difficult to identify, but this paper suggests that such influence is found in the Helen. Specifically, I argue that Euripides has woven into the play’s mythological framework Cratinus’ treatment of Helen’s conception and birth in his comedy Nemesis.

The mythology of the primordial king Erechtheus was critical to the self-definition of fifth and fourth century BCE Athenians. Its most comprehensive retelling is the Erechtheus of Euripides which, although fragmentary, is now receiving scholarly attention (Calame, Collard-Cropp, Kannicht, Sonnino). Euripides does not passively record mythology though, and, in order to understand the play, it is critical to first understand how he interacts with the competing mythological traditions of his era.

It has long been recognized that the debate between Helen and Hecuba in Euripides’ Troades (915-1048) imitates the basic framework of an Athenian criminal trial. Moreover it has often been argued that the two speeches reflect the kind of sophistic rhetoric exemplified by Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen (e.g., Scodel 99-100, Goldhill 236-38, Conacher 51-58).  I argue that both sides of the debate imitate sophistic rhetorical experiments, but also rhetorical training pieces in general.