Euripides Lives
Ancient stories unearthed.
Ancient Greek drama is the cornerstone of all literature. Despite the paucity of these works, the timeless creations of three great tragic playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—continue to captivate and motivate us. Euripides, in particular, is believed to have authored at least ninety-five plays, of which only nineteen have survived intact. Yet, hope for more endures, with fragments and possibly more complete plays that could expand and enhance the legacy of these ancient masterpieces.
The Man Himself
Born in Athens around 484 BCE to a well-to-do family, Euripides was the youngest of the great playwrights of his era. His plays have endured for myriad reasons, primarily because they deal with now-universal story archetypes: justice versus revenge, the rule of law against the will of the gods, and the struggle between reason and passion.
Today's Good News
An exhilarating development has brought new life to Euripides's oeuvre. On August 1st, 2024, two classics professors from the University of Colorado Boulder unveiled a groundbreaking discovery: unknown sections from two of Euripides’s lost tragedies found on a papyrus recently unearthed in Egypt.
The Journey of Discovery
The story tracks back to 2022, when archaeologist Basem Gehad, working with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, discovered a papyrus at the site of Philadelphia in Egypt. This document, containing ninety-eight lines of Greek text, was sent to Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder specializing in literary papyrology.
In August 2024, Trnka-Amrhein and her colleague John Gilbert, an expert in Greek tragic fragments, announced their identification of the text as excerpts from Euripides’s lost tragedies, Polyidos and Ino. Among the ninety-eight lines, twenty-two were already known, but the remaining seventy-six were entirely new—an extraordinary addition to Euripides’s canon.
These are the longest new fragments of Euripides’s work found in fifty years—a rare and wonderful treasure, sparking hope that more undiscovered fragments may still lie hidden.
What Has Been Found?
Polyidos recounts the bizarre myth of Glaucus, the son of King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë of Crete, who drowns in a vat of honey. The seer Polyidos is then tasked with resurrecting him. The new fragment features a captivating debate between Minos and Polyidos on the ethics of resurrection.
As for Ino, it was one of Euripides’s most celebrated plays in antiquity, paralleling the themes of Medea and The Bacchae. The story of Ino was first encountered inscribed on cliffs in Armenia. Though those cliffs were destroyed by conflict, Russian scholars preserved the inscriptions through drawings.
Ino deals with the character who is both the aunt of the Greek god Dionysus and an evil stepmother intent on killing her husband's children from a previous marriage. The new fragment introduces a twist, as Trnka-Amrhein explains:
“Another woman is the evil stepmother, and Ino is the victim… The third wife of the king is trying to eliminate Ino’s children. But Ino turns the tables on her, causing her to kill her own children and commit suicide. It’s a more traditional tragedy: death, mayhem, suicide.”
Our lives and civilizations are defined by the stories we tell and believe. Discovering the formative stories that underpin the earliest of our modern world is indeed miraculous.
Miraculous is good.
More information can be found here, courtesy of the University of Colorado.