Their joint progeny, however - pathos as a literary form - is the only thing they share. Their views on Tragedy's most fundamental principles are contrary; in fact, during their own time they were probably fierce rivals. Exemplary of their conflicting opinions, are their best-know plays: "Medea" and "Oedipus the King."
Fate is perhaps the greatest theme in tragic literature; and, therefore, the most wrangled over. In Oedipus, Sophocles represents fate as an unchangeable, inexorable force; compelling people to its arbitrary will in the form of the Furies. No man is exempt from fate; and all his struggles will do as much good as those of a butterfly skewered on cardboard. Oedipus seeks to escape the fate predicted by a Delphian Oracle at his birth; but in seeking this, he only brings it to pass. In Medea, Euripides represents a sort of �reactionary fate.' Man seeks to thwart it, and in return it gives him a wallop. Medea, refusing to submit to the inevitable marriage of Jason, attempts to clog the wheels of the thing by killing off his bride, and Jason's children. Jason's children, however, are also her children, so inflicting a blow on him, she breaks her own heart by murdering her babies.
These contradicting opinions of fate - that it is induced by man or despite him - have an interesting effect. Sophocles characters, in their struggle to thwart an evil fate - rather than bring it about - retain a sort of nobility even in their tragic circumstances; whereas, in Medea, all one can do is despise all parties, wrapped in their own deadly coils. For this reason, Sophocles has sometimes been called the Noble, and Euripides the Dark Tragedian.
Another interesting division in our subjects' thinking is their view of morality. Sophocles fate is directed by set, if foolish, moral laws; if a man murders his father, the Furies pursue him; if a man marries his mother, the Furies pursue him; and if a man is wronged, the Furies become Eumenidies to him, and right his wrongs. Euripides, on the other hand, has a curious ambiguity in his opinions of morality. When Medea is finished you cannot decide whether Jason or Medea is at fault; most likely, of course, they both are - but even the distinction between protagonist and antagonist is obscured. It seems as if Euripides, himself, did not have a very clear idea of the thing.
Finally, I cannot but observe that Sophocles appears to be the greater tragedian: his sort of tragedy has purer air - Unclouded by human passions, merely man against the inevitable - and it comes from a set of definite principles, unusual then as now. But Euripides reminds me more of the modern psychological novelist, exploring the darkest side of human nature, at the expensive of even a glimmer of hope.
©Copyright, 2003, Robert Quiller