SOURCE: Helene P. Foley, "Drama and Sacrifice," in Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 17-64.

In the excerpt that follows, Foley contends that in his dramas Euripides uses ritual to bridge the gaps between public and private, past and present, divine and human, and myth and secular communication in "response to poetic, social, and intellectual tensions within Attic culture."

Euripidean scholarship has been grappling for centuries with the supposed structural imperfections of his dramas, the supposed irrelevance of his choral odes, and the supposed rationality, not to say irreverence, of Euripides himself. Aristotle complains that Euripides' inadequate plots ignore the necessary and the probable and require the intervention of a deus ex machina to straighten them out. He hints that Euripides' choruses had begun to approach the decorative interludes that they became in later tragedy. The poet's characters are inconsistent, changing their minds...