ABSTRACT
A rounded picture of Racine's reactions to Euripides must include a considerable element of the conventional: an exceptional reader of the Greek dramatists Racine may have been, but he remains in many respects the product of his time and of his schooling. Racine would have acquired at school the habit of mining Euripides—and the other classical authors—for moralizing maxims and quotable apophthegms on the world and the human condition, and he does not shed the habit in his adult annotations. Knight's assessment that Racine, unexpectedly, neglects his usual 'chasse aux lieux communs' in the Euripides notes only takes into account the verbal notes and does not accurately represent the whole picture. Nonetheless, although Racine's attention as a reader of Euripides does in many respects follow the channels into which his schooling would mostly have directed it, equally clearly he both extends and wanders well beyond those channels.
