Euripides

A playwright of Athens

Euripides was an Athenian who wrote tragedies, serious plays performed in competition before an audience. His works were first performed in the Sanctuary and Theatre of Dionysus in Athens. A sanctuary is holy ground set aside for a god. There the City Dionysia, a festival for the god Dionysus, was celebrated, and the drama contests began.

This matters because the evidence Euripides gives us is drama. Actors played his versions of myth before an audience. He built them around what is revealed, who is recognised and what can be shown on stage.

His surviving plays are therefore sources for particular versions of Greek myth. They are not evidence for one settled Greek tradition. Two plays show this clearly: Medea and Helen.

When Jason can no longer reach Medea

Jason and Medea have had children together, but Jason has taken a new bride. In Medea, the children carry a poisoned gown and crown to her. They come back to their mother, and she kills them inside the house. The audience hears their cries before it sees their bodies.

Jason beats at the doors of the house, looking for his children and for the woman who killed them. Medea then appears above him in a winged chariot, with the children’s bodies beside her. She tells Jason that he will never touch her. Helios, her father’s father, has given her the chariot that carries her out of her enemies’ reach. In the last exchange, Medea will not let Jason bury the children. She keeps that act for herself before she leaves.

The play was produced in 431 BC and placed third in the drama competition. The ending makes her guilt clear. But it keeps one version of the children’s deaths, not an account that every ancient source shares.

Who kills the children in Pausanias

Pausanias, who wrote a description of Greece, records a different fate for the children. Medea’s sons, Mermerus and Pheres, carry the deadly gifts to Glauce. The people of Corinth blame the boys for what those gifts have done and stone them to death. Pausanias links this unlawful killing with an oracle, a message from the gods. He also links it with yearly sacrifices, mourning clothes and children cutting their hair for the dead.

So Euripides and Pausanias disagree about who kills Medea’s children. In the play, their mother kills them on purpose and uses their bodies to deny Jason a burial and a farewell. In the account from Corinth, the Corinthians kill them after they deliver the gifts. The two cannot be joined into one sequence without erasing the central act in each. Their disagreement also gives no reason to claim that Euripides invented the version where Medea kills them. It shows why his play must be named whenever that version is repeated.

Why the real Helen is in Egypt

Helen opens with a woman in Egypt who says she is Helen. Yet Greeks and Trojans have fought over another Helen at Troy. She explains how this happened. Paris had judged in favour of the goddess Aphrodite, and this angered the goddess Hera. Hera made a breathing phantom, a likeness of Helen made from cloud, and gave that image to Paris. The god Hermes carried the real Helen to Egypt.

The swap separates how Helen looks from who she is, but the copy is not lifeless. The phantom breathes and can pass for Helen. Helen herself is far from the city blamed for sheltering her. Paris believes he has the woman he wanted, but he holds only her likeness. Euripides has the real Helen tell this, so the audience meets the person the familiar war story has misplaced before the play goes on.

Helen was produced in 412 BC, but this version did not begin with the play. It is older. Modern scholars see Euripides reshaping earlier strands of literature and myth. He stages this version with particular force, but he did not invent it. As with Medea, the surviving play is evidence for a version, not proof that the playwright created every part of it.

What the staging shows

Staging one account does not make it the common Greek version. It makes the playwright’s choice easy to see.

In Helen, the first sight of the real Helen in Egypt makes sense of the absent phantom at Troy. In Medea, the final scene settles the disputed action through what the audience sees of power. Jason stays below, beating at doors that will not open. Medea stands above him with the bodies. She speaks from the chariot given by Helios, refuses Jason the dead and leaves where he cannot follow.