Euripides’ Tragedies in Greek - With Early Annotations

Euripides (484-406 B.C.)

[Title in Greek]: Τραγωιδιαι Οκτωκαιδεκα [followed by Latin]: Euripidis Tragoediae Octodecim, Hecuba Orestes Phoenissae Medea Hippolytus Alcestis [etc]...

Basel: Joannes Herwagen, March, 1537.

Price: $10,500.00

Octavo: 18.2 x 12.2 cm. [444] ff., including four blanks. Collation: [alpha]8, a-z8, aa-ii8, Aa-Zz8 (with blanks [alpha]7-8 and Ii6-7; lacking blanks Zz5-7)

SECOND EDITION IN GREEK (1st 1503).

An excellent copy in contemporary in German blind-stamped pigskin over beveled wooden boards, complete with the original brass clasps. The binding is a little soiled, but in excellent condition. The text is fresh and clean.

Second edition of the tragedies of Euripides in Greek, following the 1503 Aldine edition. The text is printed entirely in Greek, with a brief Latin letter by the publisher, Johann Herwagen; five Greek Epigrams, lives of Euripides by the Byzantine grammarians Manuel Moschopoulos (late 13th- early 14th c.) and Thomas Magister (active 1310–1327), and Moschopoulos' brief monograph on Euripides' use of the "eidolon"(phantom, simulachrum) as a dramatic device. This essay precedes the "Hecuba", in which the disembodied spirit of Polydoros sings the prologue.

With a contemporary inscription at the foot of the title, in a neat hand: ‘Bernhardii Lindorner[?] Ex dono inclyti Collegii Canonicorum Tiguri. 1538.", possibly indicating that it was a school prize awarded by the collegiate chapter of the Grossmünster at Zurich, where students were taught Greek, Latin and Hebrew.

On the rear paste-down Lindorner has written another inscription, a Greek maxim on human flourishing attributed to Solon (recorded by Herodotus, I.32): μηδένα τῶν εὐτυχούντων εἰπεῖν εὐδαιμόνων, πρὶν ἂν θάνῃ ("Do not call any of those who prosper to be among the blessed, before he dies.")

Lindorner is very likely the person who has heavily annotated the Trojan Women (Troades), and less heavily plays such as Heraclidae and Bacchae. By the late 17th century, the book belonged to Bernhard Bodmer, whose inscription (dated 1661) is on the upper paste-down.

The book contains eighteen plays, as announced on the title. Seventeen of them are tragedies, including Hecuba, the Bacchae, and Medea. The eighteenth is the satyr play Cyclops, the only intact play of its genre to survive from antiquity.

"Euripides was the youngest of the three principal fifth-century tragic poets [the others being Aeschylus and Sophocles]. From shortly after his death his plays were the most popular of any tragic poet and were repeatedly re-performed throughout antiquity wherever there were theaters. Aristotle seems to have regarded him as a close second to Sophocles and cites him again and again as a model for tragic writers, as well as occasionally criticizing him. He does not seem to have been nearly so successful during his lifetime, however, winning the first prize only five times in some twenty-two appearances in the tragic competitions...

"Euripides began his career in the tragic competitions in 455, when he came in third. He won a first prize for the first time in 442. When the scholars of Alexandria in the third to second century collected his plays and titles, they found that 92 plays were attributed to him. Four of these were regarded as spurious. The remainder represent some 22 entries in the tragic competitions. Of these plays, 78 survived to Alexandria to be gathered into the Collected Works.

"The plays we possess come down in two different streams. Sometime after ca. A.D. 250 a group of ten plays, which we call 'the select plays,' were chosen, perhaps for school use, and increasingly only these were copied. By fortunate chance, however, one or two volumes of the Collected Works, containing nine plays beginning with the letters epsilon, eta, iota, and kappa, survived into the Byzantine period and were copied onto a single manuscript now in the Laurentian Library in Florence. The 'alphabetic' plays, as they are called, are thus a chance cross-section of Euripides' work, and the fact that many of them, like the Heracles, the Ion, and the Iphigenia among the Taurians, are so good suggests that the general level of Euripides' writing must have been high. The extant plays with their dates are: Alcestis (438, second prize), Medea (431, third prize), Children of Heracles (ca. 430), Hippolytus (428, first prize), Andromache (ca. 425, not produced in Athens), Hecuba (ca. 424), Suppliant Women (ca. 423), Electra (ca. 420), Heracles (ca. 416), Trojan Women (415, second prize), Iphigenia among the Taurians (ca. 414), Ion (ca. 413), Helen (412), Phoenician Women (ca. 410), Orestes (408), Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis (after 406, posthumous first prize), Cyclops (date unknown, possibly ca. 410). The Rhesus transmitted under Euripides' name is probably a fourth-century play by a now nameless poet...

"Most of the plays contain passages that owe something to contemporary philosophical speculation, though it is often the unsympathetic characters who sound like the Sophists. The style of the plays is -comparatively- bare of ornament, and there is a large rhetorical element, particularly the pairing of effective speeches on both sides of a question. In the later plays especially, the lyric passages, both choral and solo, exhibit metrical (and presumably musical) innovation that owes a great deal to the lyric poet Timotheus and other contemporary artists. But just as it is better to assess Euripides' portrayal of women from the plays themselves rather than accept Old Comedy's unsupported word that Euripides was a misogynist, so it is reasonable to form our own judgment from the plays themselves about the extent to which Euripides' views on religion, morality, and art are sharply at variance with those of Sophocles or his audience. There is plenty in the plays themselves to suggest a high degree of continuity with earlier Greek poetry. In particular, both in plays that end in disaster and in those that end happily, the action and words, of characters and chorus alike, draw attention -it is Greek poetry's most venerable theme- to the precariousness of human existence, the limits of mortality, and the unpredictability of the future especially in view of the power of the gods. In the 'tragicomic' plays, disaster is usually avoided by the narrowest of escapes, and often the escape owes something both to human piety and virtue and to divine intervention. In the plays that are tragic in our sense, blameless sufferers come to terms with the mortal condition and derive what solace they can from such justice of the gods as is visible. The divine order is often inscrutable or even repellent -as it is in Sophocles as well- but its reality is arguably affirmed rather than denied. The preponderance of this and related themes explains why Aristotle, who regards swift change of fortune as the life-blood of tragedy, gives Euripides full marks as 'the most tragic of the poets.' In addition to his manifest charm as a writer of elegant verse, he is a poet of incident and juxtaposition. These reveal most clearly the face (grim or smiling, as it may turn out) of the world in which human beings must live."(Kovacs, Perseus Encyclopedia).

VD16 E4213; Adams E1031; BMC German p. 289; Brunet II 1096; Schweiger p. 115; Dibdin (2nd ed.) p.138; Hoffmann II, 68