ABSTRACT
IN T R O D U C T IO N The great age of Athenian tragedy ended at the close of the fifth century with the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Like the nearly simultaneous end of the Athenian empire with the loss of the Peloponnesian W ar, the fall of the curtain comes at a com prehensible point: death and defeat in battle are among the most reliable and acceptable historical punctuation marks. There is always a tem ptation to seek, in the final act, signs of the approaching end; in the m atter of allusion there seem to be none. The plays of this period carry no sets of allusions which focus on the troubles of Athens or the profession of poets. In fact, when, for once, in Euripides’ Ion, Athens is im portant to the play itself, fewer literary echoes are identifiable than in any other extant tragedy.1However, although there are no signs, at least in poetic echoes, that Sophocles and Euripides were brooding over the fate of Athens or were increasingly anxious about the influence of earlier verse, the practice of allusion and imitation in these late plays differs from that in earlier ones. Particularly notable is the paucity of Sophoclean m aterial. Oedipus at Colonus arouses the same suspicions as Oedipus Tyrannus: the apparent differences may be partly due to lost sources. Still, little use is made of the opportunities in the latter play for allusion to Aeschylus’ Seven. And while the discovery of Aeschylus' or even of Euripides’ Philoctetes might reveal a certain am ount of im itation in Sophocles’ play of this title, the contrast it provides with Ajax in its relation to the Iliad could hardly be greater: opportunity has been deliberately neglected.By default, then, this final chapter becomes largely an exam ination of late Euripidean practice. His plays here considered span the decade from 415 to his death in 406. For once, tradition
has been kind. We have, apparently, two plays produced immediately after Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the Orestes and Cyclops, and they allow yet another glimpse at the younger poet closely following the older. In addition, there is a range of plays dealing with the House of Atreus and with the beginning and end of the story of the Trojan W ar, making it possible to see further how the Hom eric poems and Aeschylus’ Oresteia continued to exert their influence right up to the death of Euripides.Two Euripidean practices can be dealt with at the outset: in the first, one old habit seems merely continued; in the second, another seems to show further development. The simpler phenom enon is the steady appearance of unm istakable echoes of Aeschylus’ Persae. Twice in the Cyclops and once each in Iphigeneia in Tauris, Orestes, and the Bacchae Euripides has incorporated phrases which, considered singly, are generally taken as echoes from the Persae.2 T he case for each seems strengthened by the existence of all the others, including those noted earlier in Alcestis, Hecuba, Heracleidae, and Hercules. Although none of these later instances seems more than a reuse of w hat has been m ade the poet’s compositional stock, one m ight ask why the Persae was im portant enough to be used so repeatedly in Euripides’ (and sometimes Sophocles’) lines. The answer may simply be the historic im portance of the Aeschylean play and the event it had com m em orated for the A thenian empire. Poetry of such political interest may have been learned especially thoroughly by Euripides and indeed other A thenians as well.A thenian political pride also seems the most likely factor to help explain a more im portant feature common to a num ber of Euripidean plays - his use of Bacchylides. M ost of the Bacchyli-dean odes used by Euripides are echoed not once but twice in the extant plays: Euripides had m ade a speech of Apollo’s from Bacchylides’ third ode one of the central elements of Alcestis, and then used the lines again in Andromache; Hippolytus hints at acquaintance with the ninth ode at two different points; the simile of the gamboling fawn from Ode 13 used in Electra seems to make another appearance in the Bacchae (862-72).3 Finally, the longnecked birds of Helen 1487 and the long-necked swan of Iphigeneia at Aulis 793 may well both be derived from Bacchylides 16.6. For one thing, the adjective 5oXixonJXT|V occurs only in these three passages. M oreoever, as we shall im m ediately see, Euripides was otherwise concerned with Bacchylides in the Helen. And last, the 142
Iphigeneia passage is particularly bookish: the chorus refers to the story of the swan in poems which it calls “the tablets of Pieria” (IA 797), and Pieria, in Ode 16, is the stated source of Bacchylides’ store of songs (Bacchyl. 16.3). The Bacchylidean ode is a tearful tale of the captive Iole, and the chorus of Iphigeneia mentions in this song that they are tearful captive maidens too (IA 790-1).There is one exception to this set of twice-echoed odes: Bacchylides 17 figures in three plays from this last decade. While the Bacchylidean imitation does not rest in the heart of these plays as it does in Alcestis, in two of them - Helen and the Iphigeneia in Tauris - it is perhaps even more extensive, and its explanation has implications for A thenian politics and Athenian education from the 470s to the end of the century. The seventeenth ode tells the story of Theseus’ miraculous dive to the bottom of the sea. This outrageous act was required by the tyrannical Minos, who had been enraged when Theseus saved the maiden Eriboia from his rude advances. The argum ent takes place aboard the ship which is speeding Theseus and a group of Athenians to Crete where the young men and women are to become victims for the M inotaur. Not a small part of the miracle of Theseus' trip is that he resurfaces precisely at the spot the ship has reached even though, as Bacchylides emphasizes, the winds have sped it swiftly along the whole time that the great A thenian has been under the thundering waves. The rescue of women threatened by foreign tyrants, and exciting scenes aboard ship - and speeding ships at that - were all used by Euripides for Iphigeneia Taurica: Orestes saves Iphigeneia from the barbarian Thoas with a plan to speed away by sail. And the scheme, which there dram atically threatens to fail, goes without a hitch in Helen when M enelaus rescues his wife from the villainous Egyptian prince Theoclymenos. The same charming optimism informs all three rom antic incidents, making lusty adventure glow with playfulness and wonder and, ultimately, a sense of divine protection.Bacchylides’ brilliant creation, the miracles which take place on and under the speeding ship, directly inspired Euripides: the proof of this immediate influence lies not in the rem arkable similarities in plot and tone outlined above, but rather in the words and phrases Euripides has taken from the ode to use in his two plays. One of the critical moments in Bacchylides occurs at the moment of the dive when Minos orders the ship to continue on what he believes
will be a fatally distancing course. Fortunately for Theseus, divine forces are with him: H-oTpa 6’ exepav ejtopauv’ 66ov.
