The ‘Antipoet of the Greeks’, or, how Euripides became a modernist

Abstract

This essay pursues the history of the widespread and influential claim that the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides anticipates the social concerns of modernity and the formal strategies of modernism. The claim originated at the same time as the development of the canon of German tragic criticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Building on but importantly altering the ancient criticism of Euripides from Aristophanes and Aristotle, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller each understood Euripides in close and uncomfortable proximity to their own political moment. The criticism that developed out of this canon both identified Euripides as an untimely modern and produced a series of hostile appraisals of his work. In the conjuncture of modernism in the early twentieth century, professional classicists and modernist poets both accepted the claim of Euripides’ untimely modernity and transvalued its terms: the projection of a ruptural, anticipatory modernity onto Euripides allowed the tragedian to assume the cast of a fellow-traveler of the literary projects of modernism itself. Following the modernist conjuncture, the untimely modernity claim has thoroughly influenced, and frequently dominated, the translation, adaptation, and interpretation of Euripides both inside and outside the professional study of Classics.