La tragedia, il 'realismo quotidiano', la commedia. Euripide, Oreste, 71-131 nella critica antica e moderna

Tragedy, “Realism of Everyday life”, and Comedy. Euripides, Orestes, 71-131 in Ancient and Modern Criticism · While modern scholars believe that in Euripides’ Orestes the character of Helen is faithfully modelled on Homer’s portrayal of Helen, ancient scholars saw in the Euripidean Helen the typical defects of ordinary people. Having to choose between these two interpretations, we have to admit that only through the ancient one can we recover those domestic situations of everyday life (oikeia pragmata) regarded by Aristophanes (Ran. 959-961) as a typical feature of Euripidean theatre. According to Aristotle the domestic situations present in Euripides’ plays are due to a distortion of the ethos of the characters. For later Aristotelian scholars, however, the same domestic situations should be regarded as comic traits. Such a shift of positions can be explained by the fact that Greek Comedy, in the fourth and third century BC, had turned to the representation of private situations of everyday life (idiotika pragmata), similar to the domestic situ ations (oikeia pragmata) of Euripidean tragedy