Political Discourse in the Tragedies of Euripides

Политический дискурс в трагедиях Еврипида

Nikolskiy, Boris (Никольский, Борис) ()
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Nikolskiy, Boris (Никольский, Борис): Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)

Working Papers from Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration

Abstract: The work proposes a new description of the relationship between Euripides’ tragedies and the political life of the period, combining a formalist approach with historicism and stressing connections between their dramatic and poetic form and their political meaning. It argues for the thematic coherence of Euripides’ tragedies, and for their relation to particular events in the life of the polis. The work consists of two parts. The first part concerns Euripides’ Hecuba. This tragedy stresses the relativity of ordinary views on friendship and enmity, as well as on freedom and slavery, it suggests virtue as a new and absolute criteria of friendship and freedom, it contraposes the nobleness of the Trojans to the baseness of the Thracians, and it shows how the virtue generates friendship, while the outrage causes enmity. All those themes must have reflected the change of Athens’ relationships with two barbaric peoples, the Persians and the Thracians, that happened in the mid-420s. The tragedy might have been connected to the alliance with Persia in 423 BC. In the second part a new interpretation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris is proposed. The main motif of the tragedy, the motif of barbarian human sacrifices, is constantly associated with intrafamilial murders in the house of Agamemnon, and the sacrifice of Orestes by Iphigenia is to join together the barbarian ritual and the tribulations of the Argos royal dynasty. The problem of human sacrifices in the barbarian land is in itself hardly of interest to Euripides; their constant comparison and drawing together with the events in Agamemnon’s family enables us to assume that this motif serves for symbolic expression of internal discords in the Hellenic world itself, that is, of the civil war in Argos solved with the help of Athens. It is possible to suppose that the tragedy celebrated an alliance between Athens and Argos made after the war in spring 416.

Pages: 68 pages
Date: 2018-03
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