“Fragments” have come to play an increasingly prominent role in scholarship on ancient Greek drama. This is particularly true in the case of Euripides, whose substantial corpus of fragments uniquely fills a two-part volume of Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. In this book, Matthew Wright offers a new perspective on this material by focusing on the book-fragments of Euripides––those preserved as excerpts in the texts of subsequent authors––not as pieces of larger dramatic wholes, but as “quotations,” a mode of speech that has an inherent doubleness “both as part of a text and as an independent short text on its own” (3). Interpreting these excised texts as such, Wright suggests, can help us better understand not only the reception of Euripides from the 5th century BCE onward, but also Euripidean tragedy itself.
Wright studies Euripides in relation to what he calls “ancient quotation culture” (2). The term reflects his interest in quotation both as a literary practice––how and why authors incorporate the words of Euripides into their own works––and as a locus to explore the cultural attitudes, reading practices, authorial mentalities, and material conditions that conduced to the prominence of this practice. Euripides is the book’s central author for two reasons. The first, practical reason is that he is the most quoted tragedian and the second most quoted Greek author after Homer. The second, more interesting reason is that, according to Wright, Euripides’ verses display a heightened level of “quotationality” (20), that is, special qualities that make them stand out as particularly quotable.
Wright’s most provocative argument emerges over Chapters 1-2: the quotationality of Euripides’ plays, he argues, is an intentional authorial strategy meant to encourage the audience and readers to pluck out passages of his poetry for quotation. This claim has important implications for our understanding of Euripidean tragedy. I will thus focus in some detail on the development of this central argument before offering an outline of the remaining chapters.
Following a very brief introduction to and an overview of the book, Chapter 1 establishes themes and questions that will recur by examining later quotations of the gnomic first verse of Euripides’ Stheneboea: οὐκ ἔστιν ὅστις πάντ’ ἀνὴρ εὐδαιμονεῖ (“No man exists who is fortunate in every respect,” fr. 661.1 TrGF). Wright considers quotations from Aristophanes’ Frogs (1215–19); from comic fragments of Philippides (fr. 18 PCG), Nicostratus (fr. 29 PCG), and Menander’s Shield (407–8); from Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1394b–5a); and from Plutarch’s Letter of Consolation to Apollonius (103a–b). This survey successfully shows that soon after the performance of Stheneboea, the maxim took on a life of its own as a quotation, that is, as a text that circulated independently of its original dramatic context. The quoting authors manipulate the Euripidean verses for their own purposes, not a single one mentioning the original speaker, the dramatic situation, or even the play Stheneboea.
Modern scholars are careful to interpret each line from a play as the utterance of a character playing a part in a larger dramatic whole. Such scrupulousness, Wright emphasizes, was simply not a concern for most ancient readers. They were rather “eclectic readers” (14), happy to excise, collect, and interpret isolated verses as the authoritative statements of the wise poet who penned them. Such discontinuous or “non-linear” reading habits were part of an “anthologizing mentality” (17) that, as Wright’s overview of the relevant evidence demonstrates, had already emerged in Classical Athens. Wright suggests that, setting aside staged (re)performances, collections of excerpts may have been the most common medium through which readers encountered tragedy.
Wright’s survey of the reception of Stheneboea and of non-linear reading practices set up the book’s central claim about Euripides and his tragedies. Given that Euripides was producing plays for a public steeped in quotation culture, for anthologizing audience members and readers who hoped to encounter easily excerptible wisdom attributable to the poet himself, is it not reasonable that he would be responsive to this reception in producing his plays? Wright thinks so: on his account, Euripidean tragedy is so frequently quoted because Euripides, well attuned to contemporary quotation culture, intentionally crafted his verses in order that they would be continuously quoted by his immediate audience and subsequent readership. Wright acknowledges that for some, this interpretive move from the texts and their reception to the intentionality of the poet will be a step too far. In response, he points to a variety of formal features of Euripidean poetry that he interprets as evidence for an authorial strategy to encourage quotation.
These are, in fact, the formal features associated with highly quotable and often quoted Euripidean gnomai, or maxims, which are discussed in detail in Chapter 2. Stylistic and rhythmic features of gnomic verses make them immediately stand out for excerption. Additional attention is drawn to them by their placement (at the opening or closing of the play, at the beginning or end of a speech or song), by certain introductory language (the interjection φεῦ, an apostrophe, an injunction to “listen” or “pay attention”), by labelling language (e.g., use of verbs like φασίν, λέγουσιν, νομίζεται or nouns such as αἶνος, λόγος, μῦθος), by their universality of perspective (e.g., use of nouns such as βροτοί, θνητοί, or ἄνθρωποι), or by their inclusion in a chain of multiple gnomai. These formal features, Wright suggests, are functional equivalents of quotation marks, indicating to the audience or reader that this is suitable material to be excised and quoted.
This is a useful study of the formal features of gnomai in Euripides. But Wright’s argument that these indicate an authorial strategy to increase quotability is not so straightforward. We also, of course, find many gnomai in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. And their gnomai, too, show many, if not all, of the formal features discussed above. On Wright’s account, then, all the tragedians highlight their use of gnomai in order to be taken seriously as inheritors of the poetic wisdom tradition and to increase their poetry’s quotationality. Thus Euripides’ particular “preoccupation with quotability” would seem to be indicated solely by the proportionally higher number of gnomai in his plays compared to those of Aeschylus and Sophocles (20-1, 29-30).
Yet Wright’s emphasis on external, socio-cultural reasons that the tragedians used gnomai downplays the internal, dramatic reasons they do so. Given that tragedy stages characters deliberating and debating complex ethical situations, of course those characters would speak in gnomai. For these are primarily a rhetorical tool for securing an interlocutor’s or listener’s assent to the position for which the speaker is advocating. As such, the function of gnomai in tragedy is highly dependent on their immediate dialogic context within the play, whether that be, for example, an agon between two speakers or a single speaker’s appeal to the chorus.[1]
The context-dependent rhetorical function of gnomai need not diminish the inherent doubleness attributed to gnomai by Wright––they clearly can be and are excerpted from and used independently of their original context. But it does complicate Wright’s argument for intentionality. For from this perspective, the proportionally higher number of gnomai in Euripides compared to Aeschylus and Sophocles could simply be an incidental outcome of his prominent engagement with contemporary rhetorical practice rather than an intentional effort to increase his poetry’s quotationality. Indeed, the presence of gnomai in tragedy, an inherently hybrid genre that incorporates many modes of speech and poetry, need not be attributed to a desire for quotability at all.
Wright’s suggestion that Euripides was responsive to contemporary quotation culture remains attractive. It convincingly takes into account not only the manifest quotationality of Euripidean poetry itself, but also the intellectual-cultural milieu in which that poetry was composed and the earliest reception of its composer. But inasmuch as Euripides’ use of highly quotable gnomai is central to this argument, a more thorough examination of the role of gnomai on the tragic stage seems necessary.
Chapter 3 turns to the question of whether later authors who quote Euripides were quoting directly from the full plays or were consulting secondary sources containing already excised quotations. Wright implicitly argues for what he calls a “minimalist” approach: we should be skeptical that any quoting author had a complete text at hand. Gnomic material, opening lines, and lexicographic materials, Wright reasonably suggests, are more likely to have been transmitted through secondary sources. But the minimalist approach comes under more pressure in the face of certain categories of citation that suggest the possibility of direct access: quotes with accompanying testimonia, obscure or recondite quotations, repeated citation and discussion of a single play, verses cited for specific factual information, longer quotations, and dialogue between two speakers. A survey of the book-fragments of Euripides’ Aeolus confirms Wright in his minimalism: all of the quoting writers, he insists, could have done so without access to the full plays.
Chapters 4-7 offer surveys of the use of Euripidean quotations in certain contexts. Chapter 4 considers a variety of fifth- and fourth- century comic scenes in which Euripides’ plays are quoted. Wright also looks at the instances, useful for understanding quotation culture more generally, in which the comic poets thematize contemporary Athenians’ penchant for quoting Euripides.
Chapter 5 begins by studying a fragmentary papyrus book (P. Cairo 65445) in order to demonstrate the central role of Euripidean quotations even at the elementary level of education. This serves as a useful contrast for the role that they play in the more specialized educational aims of Plutarch’s How the Young Man Should Study Poetry, Longinus’s On the Sublime, and Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis.
Chapter 6 discusses the role of quotation in the Athenian lawcourts (Aeschines and Demosthenes) and at Greek and Roman symposia (Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae). Wright suggests that in both contexts, Euripidean quotation functions as a type of social performance, allowing the speaker to, e.g., project an advantageous personality or articulate a shared set of cultural values to the audience.
Chapter 7, sweepingly titled “Quotations and Life,” examines the use of Euripidean quotations in Euripidean biography (Satyrus’s Life of Euripides), in the biographies of other men (Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers), in the personal correspondence of Cicero, and in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Wright makes many interesting observations about these works individually, but the chapter never convincingly coheres into a conceptually insightful whole.
As this overview surely indicates, the book is impressive for its scope: Wright has worked through a prodigious amount of material from the fifth century BCE to the third century AD. In reducing his study to a slim 171-page volume (minus notes, bibliography, and index), the author has necessarily been selective and brief in his treatment of individual passages. While Wright nimbly ranges across texts and contexts with great finesse, individual readers will surely find pages on which they wish the discussion could be slowed down. In two treatments of an anecdote about Antisthenes’ reaction to Aeolus in Plutarch (p. 67, 102-3), for example, Wright runs with the assumption that this has to do with the critical practices of the relatively obscure Peripatetic scholar Antisthenes of Rhodes. But the Antisthenes in question is almost certainly the Socratic, and this misidentification has significant interpretive implications.[2]
Overall, though, Wright has succeeded admirably in producing a concise, accessible, and insightful treatment of Euripides as a poet who is eminently quotable and was thus continuously quoted. Chapters 1-3 are, in my opinion, essential reading for scholars of Euripidean tragedy and its reception, especially those whose work engages with the fragments. Not all scholars will accept Wright’s argument about the authorial intent behind quotationality of Euripidean drama. But his work opens the way for further research on this quality of his poetry, as well as on how ancient audiences and readers engaged with and repurposed the words of the tragedians.
Notes
[1] This aspect of gnomai has been emphasized in recent scholarship; Wright cites (e.g., p.11n.24, p.20n.50) but does not engage much with this body of literature.
[2] Wright cites only Hunter and Russell (eds.), Plutarch: How the Young Man Should Study Poetry (Cambridge, 2011), 187, but they identify Antisthenes as the Socratic.