Literature and history.

Episode 34, The Traditions of Our Forefathers.

This show is on Euripides' play, The Buckeye, first performed in the City of Athens in 405 BCE,

about a year after the playwright's death.

The Backeye is often proclaimed Euripides' masterpiece. It is the eighth

and final work of ancient Greek tragedy that will cover, and it's possibly the darkest and most

enigmatic of all of them. Euripides has long been understood as the black sheep of ancient Greek theater.

Athenians appreciated his work enough to repeatedly let him compete alongside the less controversial and more orthodox Sophocles,

but only very rarely awarded him first prize.

There are many reasons that this might have been the case.

But in the pages of Euripides' plays that have come down to us from antiquity,

we see more chaos, more lack of human agency,

and more religious heterodoxy than in the pages of either Escalis or Sophocles.

Euripides asked questions and said things and depicted situations that were evidently too bleak and too controversial for mainstream Athenian society.

To begin the story of the Backeye, very likely the last too controversial for mainstream Athenian society.

To begin the story of the Backeye, very likely the last play that Euripides ever wrote, we need

to talk about its central character.

The central character is an ancient Greek god.

He may be familiar to you. You've probably heard of him and seen a painting of him.

He was one of the oldest Greek deities possibly worshipped even before Zeus himself.

Let's talk about how old. A thousand years before Euripides lived and far away on the other side of Greece in the

southwestern Peloponnese, there was a settlement that we call Pylos. Before the Bronze Age

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