There are a couple of works in the Great Books canon, Frogs by the ancient comic dramatist Aristophanes, and The Birth of Tragedy by the 19th-century philosopher Nietzsche, that get one thinking about Greek Tragedy in a comparative and developmental sense.
Frogs sets up a mock-contest which pits Aeschylus against Euripides, and awards the crown to the former. The reader might have expected the whip-smart, dirty-jokes-telling, and often gods-mocking Aristophanes to have preferred the latter’s more questioning and down-to-earth treatment of Greek mythic material to the grandly mysterious and apparently more pious manner of the former, but no.
Nietzsche’s book, his earliest, can be thought of as a philosophic account of Greek cultural development, which whatever else it is up to, provides a deepening of Aristophanes’ judgment in favor of Aeschylus; he argues that Euripides’ “sophist-tication” (my term) sickened Greek tragedy--this despite his mastery of dramatic technique and of the mythic material, which did result in several great plays—and he traces the illness to the influence of Socratic philosophy. Socrates and his stubborn questions, worked upon the soul of Euripides, who then worked as a kind of super-Sophist upon the Athenian drama. The decline is evident from the fact that few full plays from after Euripides’ time were preserved, but most of all from the second-hand reports of, and the few plays and fragments which were preserved of, the dominant style from around 340 B.C. on, that of the “New Comedy.” One might describe that fall as one from high-aristocratic/mythic drama down to plain-folks/un-mythic melodrama. The surviving plays and fragments of Menander, the top New Comedy dramatist, are the primary evidence, but one can arguably see the origins of the style in a few of the Euripides plays, especially Helen.1
If you want to mock the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, and in a way he would smile at too, you might picture him downcast upon a floor strewn with dusty Greek manuscripts, tearfully singing Where have all the Aeschylus-es gone?
Even without the push from Nietzsche and Aristophanes, the questions of “which, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, was best?” and “what are the main differences between them?” naturally occur to anyone captivated by classical Greek tragedy.
And one procedure for investigating those questions is to read the three tragedies relating the same Electra story: Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Electra. (One might also bring Euripides’ Orestes into the comparison, since Euripides takes two plays to provide his version of the story laid out in the other tragedians’ Libation Bearers and Electra.)
Hence, the soon-to-be-published book by Michael Davis, Electras:
Now as Davis points out, because we lost so many of the tragedies, there may have been other myths which more than one of three top tragedians wrote upon. Thus, one should not assume that Sophocles and Euripides thought the Electra story was the key one they had to explore if they were to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Aeschylus, and to converse/compete with his ideas.
I will report that some years back, when I read the three tragedies together with an eye to comparison, I felt that the Aristophanic/Nietzschean account of Euripides and his democratic and sophist-like innovations mainly held true, and seemed particularly vindicated by the Orestes, in which both Electra and Orestes behave in shockingly Machiavellian ways. However, I felt a certain nervousness about that judgment, about that “mainly.” One source of my nervousness was my difficulty in pinning down much that was decisively different in feel when comparing Sophocles’ Electra to Euripides’.
Another was my appreciation of Michael Cacoyannis’ 1962 film version of the Euripides play, which among its other innovations which tended to make the play feel more Aeschylean and Sophoclean, excised the oft-derided recourse to the Deus ex machina at its end. That is, I thought Cacoyannis brought out the strengths of play, and in a way that made it harder to endorse the general criticism of Euripides by Aristophanes and Nietzsche.
Since Davis’s book isn’t out yet, we cannot say much about his approach, but in the video he indicates, around 13-ish forward, that one main distinction he makes in considering the passivity or activity of Electra in the three plays: he titles his first part, which is about Aesychlus’ version, “Electra Bound,” the second, about Sophocles’, “Electra” simply, and the third, about Euripides’, “Electra Unbound.” His classification is related to one of his main interpretative points, which is that all three playwrights use to the story to reflect on the relation of the female to the male, and in a rather philosophic manner.
That doesn’t strike me as obviously the best approach to a comparison, but we’ll see how Davis executes it. And I should note that his brief discussion of the Sophocles version, earlier in the interview, is already helping me better understand that play, which has to myself at least, has felt uniquely difficult to interpret.
Davis has a full lecture series on Greek tragedy which I do warmly recommend—especially the sessions on Oedipus Rex (Tyrannos) and Oedipus at Colonus—and here is the opening lecture, which explains why the entire series is titled “The Philosophy of Tragedy.”
Davis was one of four influential teachers I had during my doctoral studies at Fordham University: in political philosophy, 1) himself, 2) Mary Nichols, who has a promising new Aristotle book out, and 3) Paul Seaton, the world’s top Pierre Manent expert and tireless translator of books in the French political philosophic tradition, and in American politics, 4) Mary’s husband David Nichols.2
Among these teachers, Seaton and M. Nichols were the most important to my development. I learned a ton from Davis, especially on Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, but I have certain reservations about and disagreements with his overall philosophy and approach, several of which trace to his teacher, the great Straussian classicist Seth Benardete; i.e., in terms of political philosophy, I am not “Davis-ian,” whereas I am very much the student of Nichols and Seaton.
But despite my differences with Davis, among philosophic scholars he is the real deal, and particularly shines, I think, when discussing aspects of the “quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” He and Benardete provided the best text (with essential notes) of Aristotle’s Poetics; he penned a very good commentary on the same, and the “Philosophy of Tragedy” series is stellar. Consider for example, towards the end of the Electras video, his rich discussion of how the best philosophy & poetry tend to bleed beyond those categories, making the categories impossible to maintain. Notice what he says about “the cave” in particular!
All in all, plenty of reasons to have high expectations for Davis's new book, which will be out November 1st from St. Augustine’s Press.
I have several issues with The Birth of Tragedy: its presumption of a chaotic oneness of things, its attack on Socrates/Plato, and the fact that its theory of tragedy’s birth, one adopted/adjusted from other scholars, is probably wrong (cf. Gerald Else), but I fully share Nietzsche’s suspicious feeling towards Euripides and his being just outright stunned by the later popularity of drama as mediocre as Menander’s. I should add, however, that our impression of a precipitous shift downward when we move suddenly from Euripides & Aristophanes of the late 5th century, right to the Menander of the late 4th/early 3rd, is likely too heightened by accidents of what was preserved. New dramas, both tragedies and comedies, were written and staged throughout the 4th and 3rd centuries at Athens, and I suspect that a number of the lost tragedies had a “second-rate version of Euripides” or perhaps an “Apollonius Rhodius” level of quality, i.e., a level still able to convey the richness of Greek myth.
I also had a fine course from William Baumgarth, whom, to Fordham’s everlasting shame, became viciously persecuted by them despite his decades of service as both professor and administrator, for refusing the Covid-19 vaccinations. Do not have any illusions about Fordham—among Catholic-identified institutions, I would suspect it is now among the most corrupt of these, and in the long-term sense, I know it is an aggregate enemy of genuine liberal education, genuine liberal rights, and orthodox Christian doctrine. I am pained to say that, given the many good scholars still stuck in its coils. FWIW, Davis never had a permanent post there—he works at nearby Sarah Lawrence College—, and Mary and David Nichols felt compelled to finish their careers—also to Fordham’s shame—at Baylor University.
three afterthoughts:
1) I haven't kept up with Davis's work for the last ten or so years, and I hear many good things from wise persons about one book he's done in particular, The Soul of the Greeks.
2) On most issues that "are issues to most of academia and the public" concerning political philosophers, and the Greek thinkers generally, Davis and I are on the same side. We both think that Greek thought really matters, for one! I hope I did not give the impression that we are at some kind of loggerheads. I took just about every class from him I could when at Fordham, he was on my dissertation committee, and during-class and after-class conversation between us was always friendly, respectful, and free.
3) That said, when you go deeper, there cannot but be issues between any student of political philosophy that while Strauss-influenced, remains committed to Biblical religion (such as people like myself, Lawler, P. Seaton, D. Mahoney, M. Nichols, Titus, CJ, etc.) and ones which follow the path from Strauss that leads through Benardete and Davis. No getting around that. There is also some tension, I would guess, b/t Benardete/Davis (R. Burger too?) and more typical atheist-leaning Straussians on the front of--here is a gross simplification--how "Hyper-Dialectical" the right process of philosophizing and interpreting is according to Benardete/Davis. There's really no explaining this further unless you've read some of their books or listened to their lectures, and it is connected to the difficulty of the writing style, esp. in Benardete.
Rumor has it that near the end of the Davis Electras video there is a book discount offer...