Euripides: ‘The Phoenician Women’

 Capaneus, one of the seven Argive champions who tried to storm the gates of Thebes, boasted that even the god’s terrifying fire couldn’t stop him.

He was on a ladder, scaling the wall, when lightning struck. The armored corpse was burning when it hit the ground.

The Argives, who were storming the city in overwhelming force, couldn’t help taking Capaneus’ end as an omen. Zeus didn’t seem to be onboard with the team effort. The Thebans, who had been worried about being massacred, read the same message and took heart.

Euripides turned the traditional story of Seven Against Thebes on end in The Phoenician Women. He made Capaneus’ end the turning point in the battle.

In the traditional telling, the focus was on Oedipus’ sons, Eteocles and Polyneices. Oedipus had cursed both sons, prophesying they would kill each other. The sons were so afraid of their father’s curses they wouldn’t stay in the same polis together. They agreed to a power sharing arrangement: one would be king for a year, and the other would go into exile. At the end of each year, they’d switch roles.

That was the deal. But Eteocles went first. After a year in power, he wouldn’t let go.

In the traditional telling, fate rules. Seven champions on each side met at the gates. By fate, Eteocles and Polyneices met at the final gate and — as Oedipus predicted — killed each other.

In Euripides’ reworking of the material, it’s not fate. The two decide to settle their quarrel in single combat.

In the traditional telling, their mother, Jocasta, killed herself when the truth about Oedipus was revealed — when her sons were just boys. In Euripides’ version, she is alive and tries to mediate the quarrel between her grown sons.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto says The Phoenician Women is yet another type of drama developed by the inventive Euripides. The old conception of tragedy was gone. With no need to make a moral point that conveyed the human tragedy, Euripides experimented with making art for art’s sake: he just wanted to make a good show.

He moved to tragicomedies, such as Ion, and then to melodramas, such as Orestes. The Phoenician Woman and Iphigenia at Aulis are something else. Kitto said they don’t rely heavily on either plot or character-drawing but instead are a kind of pageant: one dramatic scene after another, working through all the material of a myth. In this case, Euripides packs all the material about the doomed house of Cadmus, the royal house of Thebes, into one play.

The play is almost like a contemporary movie: the form is one scene after another. As long as members of the audience are on the edge of their seats, the playwright doesn’t worry about cohesion between the scenes.

The Phoenician Woman has a lot of wonderful poetry. The so-called “Sphinx Ode,” a kind of aria sung by the chorus, is justly famous. It includes these lines:

 

You who snatched the youths from Dirce’s plain,

crying your Fury’s shriek,

the song that knows no music,

you brought, you brought sorrows upon our land,

bloody ones — and bloody was the god

who brought these things about.

 

The Greek text of this play is notoriously thorny. Maybe that’s worth a short note tomorrow.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Phoenician Women is on pp. 371-83. The Phoenician Women, translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, is in Euripides V in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 67-140. The quotation is on p. 113.