Hello and welcome back to Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about the Barcai by Euripides, which is one of

the plays in this book that I've got here on Greek tragedies. Now, why have I chosen to talk about

this? Well, we have actually covered Euripides, one of Euripides plays once before. It feels like

quite a long time ago, to be honest, at this point. But some of those

original chronicles that I did, we did something of a trilogy, we did Agamemnon with Stelios

looking at a really famous ancient Greek tragedy, and then I covered Lissistrata, and then we did

the Cyclops, which was a satire play by Euripides. It being written by Euripides

was almost incidental because I wasn't really focusing on the fact that this was a Euripidian play.

I was focusing on the fact that it was a satir play because it was the only complete satire play

that we actually had surviving from antiquity.

So now I just wanted to go through a proper Euripedean tragedy, talk about some of the characteristics that make it up,

and also as well the Barcai is such a fantastic story.

One of the interesting things about Euripides is that in Nietzsche's very, very famous work,

his original, his first book in The Birth of Tragedy,

he squarely points a finger at Euripides and accuses Euripides of being the man who brought about

the death of tragedy. So I want to interrogate some of those ideas as well whilst we discuss

Abakai here, though it is a little bit more atypical as a Euripedean work, which is why I don't think that when

Nietzsche basically comes along and says, oh yeah, the problem with Euripides is he took all of

the Dionysian aspects out of theatre or certainly, you know, minimise them and force the

Apollonian forward.

And then there is just, there

does happen to be that one play right at the end of his career where he did the exact

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