Family and Fatherland in Euripides’ Phoenissae

O ALL Euripides' plays, phoenissae is the one that, since antiquity, has been most diversely judged. It was much admired in some quarters in ancient times, but the hypothesis complains of its overcrowded and episodic character, and the scholiast of an irreconcilable confusion of themes at the end. Since then it has been praised as a masterpiece and abused without moderation. In this century it has been described as an incoherent work lacking all unity of tone or construction, as a lively but wholly unserious pageant or dramatic fantasia, as a conscious variation on a well-known subject, and as a sombre, highly organised drama. Scholars in recent years have mostly attempted to defend its coherence,! either by excising large parts as interpolations, as Friedrich and Fraenkel have done, without however gaining general adherence for their views;2 or else by seeking unity of theme either in the play's pessimistic religious attitude, with its denial of all divine care and justice, as P. Treves did;3 or in the fate of Thebes itself as the heroine of the play, as was most notably done by W. Riemschneider;4 or, as A. J. Podlecki recently, in the pattern of images in the work.5 Certainly there are allusions to earlier plays in Phoenissae; certainly Treves' view of the divine background of the play appears to be largely just-the daemon responsible for the woes of the House of Labdacus is not a moral force, and the only greater god to intervene,