Euripides' Revolution Under Cover: An Essay

Description

In this provocative book, Pietro Pucci explores what he sees as Euripides's revolutionary literary art. While scholars have long pointed to subversive elements in Euripides's plays, Pucci goes a step further in identifying a Euripidean program of enlightened thought enacted through carefully wrought textual strategies. The driving force behind this program is Euripides's desire to subvert the traditional anthropomorphic view of the Greek gods--a belief system that in his view strips human beings of their independence and ability to act wisely and justly. Instead of fatuous religious beliefs, Athenians need the wisdom and the strength to navigate the challenges and difficulties of life.Throughout his lifetime, Euripides found himself the target of intense criticism and ridicule. He was accused of promoting new ideas that were considered destructive. Like his contemporary, Socrates, he was considered a corrupting influence. No wonder, then, that Euripides had to carry out his revolution under cover. Pucci lays out the various ways the playwright skillfully inserted his philosophical principles into the text through innovative strategies of plot development, language and composition, and production techniques that subverted the traditionally staged anthropomorphic gods. Euripides’s Revolution under Cover Contents Acknowledgments 1. Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition 2. Anthropomorphism 3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of Sophia 4. Some Connotations of Sophia 5. Polyneices’s Truth 6. Hecuba’s Rhetoric 7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War 8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye 9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite? 10. Phaedra 11. Hermione: The Andromache 12. Female Victims of War: The Troades 13. The Survival in Poetry 14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature” 15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the Suppliant Women 16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress 17. How to Deliberate a War 18. Democracy and Monarchy 19. The Battle 20. The Rescue of the Corpses 21. Return to Arms 22. The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority 23. The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City 24. Pentheus and Teiresias 25. Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round 26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon 27. Initiation and Sacrifice 28. Victory and Defeat 29. Euripides’s Poetry Bibliography Subject Index Index Locorum