The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Of the three great Attic tragedians, Euripides is the most interesting in the sense that his mental world is least alien to our own. A son of the all-questioning Sophists, swayed by the irony of Sуcrates, he, like us, felt the uncertainty of ali moral and religious values. His later career contemporary with the suicidai Peloponnesian War, he, too, lived in a crisis period marked by fear, pessimism, and political confusion. The devel- opment of his genius was irregular and his thought is not con- sistent, but we can say that his outlook was rationalistic, skepti- cal, and, even if not in the exalted Sophoclean pattern, tragic. He would understand without difficulty certain existentialist and vanguard writers of today.

His plays are generally, though not always, marked by the- atricality, even an operatic luridness; by exaggerated coinci- dence; by the employment of a knot-resolving "god from the machine"; by dialogue that is often debate and oration rather than impassioned speech; by a mixture of tones (Is Alcestis a serious or a comic play?); by unconventional, even radical

ideas—The Trojan Women empties war of its glory, the Medea can be taken as a feminist tract, other plays portray the gods as either delusive or unlovely; by a remarkable talent for the depiction of women—the portraits of Phaedra and Medea are miracles of feminine psychology; and finally by a pervading interest, not in the relations between human beings and some supernal force, but in the weaknesses and passions of our own natures. As a psychologist and vendor of ideas, Euripides is the ancestor of Ibsen [89] and Shaw [99].

And yet he eludes formulas. His plays at times seem to be the broken record of a search for certainties that were never found. He can write realistic, even down-to-earth dialogue but also choruses and speeches of rare beauty. Plutarch tells us that certain Athenians, taken prisoner at Syracuse, were freed because they recited so enchantingly some passages from Euripides. He seems often to be a skeptic, almost a village atheist; yet in his masterpiece, his last play, the Bacchae, he delves profoundly and with strange sympathy into humanity^ recurrent need for irrationality, even for frenzy. Euripides is not of a piece. Perhaps therein lies part of his fascination for a time that, like ours, specializes in damaged souls.

I have suggested six plays. They are arranged in the probable order of their composition or at least representation. But many oth- ers repay study, among them Heracles, Hecuba and Andromache.

As you read Euripides, see whether you can understand why Aristotle [13] called him "the most tragic of the poets."

C.F.

8

HERODOTUS

ca. 484-ca. 425 B.C.E. The Histories

Of Herodotus we know mainly that he was born of good family in Halicarnassus, a city in Asia Minor, originally a Greek colony, but under Persian control for half his life. We know also that he traveled widely throughout the entire Mediterranean world, presumably amassing the materiais that went into his Histories, a word that in the original Greek means inquiries or investigations. His work was famous during his lifetime and has never ceased to be so.

Herodotus states his purpose: to preserve "from decay the remembrance of what men have done" and to prevent "the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory." The latter part of his book fulfills his purpose. It gives us as full and objective an account of the titanic struggle between Pйrsia and Greece as was possible for this pioneer historian. With these "actions" we associate such glorious names as Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis, battles in a war in possible consequence of which we are today a part of Western rather than Asiatic culture.

But the earlier portions of the book, while ali leading up to this grand climax, are really a kind of universal cultural history, mingling fact, anecdote, and myth, of the entire known world during the time immediately preceding and contemporary with Herodotus's own period.

In a manner sometimes confusing, sometimes enchanting, he mixes journalism, geography, ethnography, anthropology, fables, travelers' tales, and marketplace philosophy and moral- izing. Though he writes in prose and about real rather than legendary events, he is nearer to Homer [2, 3] and to art than to the modern historian and so-called scientific history. The later Roman critic Quintilian said he was "pleasant, lucid, dif- fuse." Ali three adjectives are precise.