Ideas about language in Euripides include, among many others, the claim that “honourable speech is a medicine for man’s fear”; the observation that “no one can judge a case... before having learned... Show moreIdeas about language in Euripides include, among many others, the claim that “honourable speech is a medicine for man’s fear”; the observation that “no one can judge a case... before having learned both sides’ story”; and the notion that “a name may be in many places, but not a body”. It is among the commonplaces of modern Euripidean scholarship that such ideas straddle the chronological gap that separates the remote mythical era in which the dramas take place from the high classical period in which they were produced. As Euripides’ characters speak with sophistication about dissoi logoi, or about onomata and pragmata, they reinforce the image, familiar to us from the ancient biographies, of Euripides as a writer who is less inhibited by tradition than the other tragedians, and more ready than they to confront his audience with novel concepts and ideas. This dissertation seeks to complicate that image, by showing how Euripides uses his characters’ reflections about language to engage more or less critically, as the occasion demanded, with the thought of his intellectual contemporaries, the ‘sophists’, and with the embedding of that thought in Athenian socio-political practice. Show less
