Euripides Notes: Day One

One still very influential paradigm of Euripides' relation to tragic myth runs as follows: encountering a fixed body of heroic tales, he exposed their intellectual absurdity and hollow morality, and so heralded the end of tragedy as a viable form of mythic discourse. I used to think this. But after many years of spending time with these texts, I am seeing how “Euripides the debunking iconoclast” is not only reductive but cannot be right. The persistent notion of a static body of myth as a free-standing icon is absolutely false. In reality myths are multiform. The absence of any orthodox (scriptural?) form of any Greek myth underlies their suitability for adaptation. Gregory Nagy said in a lecture that he felt Euripides was not just inventive, but knew more and different versions of more myths than his contemporary poets. He was no debunker, but rather a collector of myths.