Tragédies. Tome II: Hippolyte - Andromaque - Hécube

by Euripides, Louis Méridier (Translator)

L'Antiquité grecque était prolixe en légende, même à propos de ses poètes. Ainsi on racontait qu’Euripide était né le jour même où Eschyle combattait à Salamine et que Sophocle triomphait au péan. Pourtant, à la différence de ces deux illustres prédécesseurs, l’auteur d’Hippolyte ne connut guère la faveur populaire. Il n’obtint à Athènes que quelques fois le premier prix et s’exila, à la fin de sa vie, à Pella, auprès du roi Archélaos, en partie pour fuir les quolibets de ses concitoyens, notamment d’Aristophane. Sa gloire fut en grande partie posthume, grâce à son fils Euripide le jeune, qui consacra la majorité de son talent à faire jouer les pièces de son père. Si Euripide a écrit plus de 90 pièces ainsi que des poèmes lyriques et des élégies, seules 19 de ses pièces nous sont parvenues, en comptant l’énigmatique Rhésos.

L’édition de Louis Méridier rassemble en deux volumes Le Cyclope, Alceste, Médée, Les Héraclides, Hippolyte, Andromaque et Hécube. La riche introduction du tome I fournit une biographie commentée et mise en question, de l’auteur, ainsi qu’une présentation minutieuse de l’histoire, complexe, des manuscrits. Chaque œuvre est en outre précédée d’une notice proposant de judicieuses pistes de lecture, notamment quant au genre de la pièce ainsi que de son argument. Enfin, des notes accompagnent et éclairent la lecture.

466 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

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.