Tragédias III

by Euripides

Juntamente com os dois nomes mais destacados da tragédia grega que, em geração, o precediam, Eurípides vinha completar uma tríade de glória, em que lhe cabia um lugar pró o de remodelar um género que, por suas mãos, avançou para ousadias surpreendentes, em consonância com uma Atenas igualmente insaciável de mudança e novidade. Da permanente atualidade da tragédia de Eurípides, fruto da perspicácia e atualização de um espírito aberto e atento, resultou, no imediato, uma oscilação do sentir do poeta perante a cidade dos contrastes em que Atenas se tinha transformado. Capaz ainda de se deixar seduzir pelo fascínio de uma comunidade, que os deuses agraciaram com a suavidade de uma paisagem doce e de uma luz brilhante, animada pela elevação dos ideais e pela superioridade do espírito, Eurípides sofreu, como os melhores Atenienses do seu tempo, o golpe pungente da decadência. Coordenação de Maria de Fátima Sousa e Silva Introdução, tradução e notas Frederico Lourenço, Maria Helena Rocha Pereira, Nuno Simões Rodrigues, Maria Fernanda Brasete, Alessandra Oliveira e Sofia Frade

449 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2017

About the author

Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.