Euripides and the Language of Craft. by Mary Stieber. (review)

Many will be familiar with the story from antiquity that Euripides first tried his hand at painting before settling into the art of playwriting. The anecdote has spurred critics of the past to locate in his poetry signs of a painterly sensibility; perhaps most notably Shirley Barlow, The Imagery of Euripides. But no scholar has gone as far as Mary Stieber in tracking down evidence of Euripides’ fluency with the actual techniques of building, sculpting, painting, and weaving. In its focused attention on the role in Euripides’ writing of art as process. this well researched book makes a unique and important contribution.

The first chapter, devoted to architectural terminology, is illustrative of Stieber’s general approach. Privileging the material over the metaphorical, Stieber aims to reconstruct the skilled practices and artisanal contexts in which technical terms such as κρηπίς, βάθρον, ὀρθοστάτης, στῦλος, σταθμός, θριγκός, τρίγλυφος, κρήδεμνον, τοῖχος, and others were embedded. From Stieber’s extensive survey, the reader comes away with a strong sense of Euripides’ serious interest in the reali. of the built landscape, the language of whose construction proves to be an “efficient tool for the generation of effective imagery throughout the plays” (90).

The next three chapters, which cover sculpture, painting, and textiles, substantiate with impressive detail the claim that for this playwright “archaeological plausibility” was an abiding concern (103). The fifty-six appearances of ἄγαλμα in his corpus turn Euripides, in chapter 2, into a chief witness to the Greeks’ “statue habit” (115). Proceeding from the assumption that poetry and sculpture are “truly sister arts” (115), Stieber argues that the actual crafting of statues as material artifacts informs their dramatic uses in Euripidean drama, thus attesting to “the playwright’s deft touch with the realistic details” (135). More often than not, commentators whose concerns are primarily philological have been perplexed by the playwright’s use of terms whose properly understood technical sense proves key to their context.

This becomes particularly clear in the third chapter. For instance, Stieber rejects the usual interpretation of ὑπογράφῃ at H. 1118 as a synonym for ὁρίζειν (“sketch”), preferring instead to take the word at face value, and as harkening back to its artisanal roots: she reads it as “underdraw,” i.e., make a sketch that will serve as an outline for further drawing. With this sense of the verb restored, we may understand Heracles as imploring Amphitryon “at least to begi. to tell him those things about which the father intimates, that is, exactly what he [Heracles] has done [he has murdered his children], and that Amphitryon should fill in the details later, just as a wall painter makes his beginning. by sketching out his entire composition on the surface before he paints it in” (239, sic). At Andromach. 267 Hermione threatens to have Andromache removed from Thetis’ sanctuary even if the latter should be “soldered to a masonry base like a statue,” an expression that prompts Stieber to observe that Hermione speaks of “molten lead,” which was poured around the plinth of the statue to secure it; this is a mundane detail one might think would be of interest only to the “craftsmen who were responsible” (128).

The fourth chapter, devoted to the craft of weaving, focuses solely on Euripides’ Ion. As elsewhere, Stieber’s focus is not so much on the artifacts themselves as on the creative process and artistic techniques that have led to their production. The tent iconography, Stieber readily admits, has already been the subject of numerous interpretations, but not so the “role of the craftsman in the production of such splendid artifacts” (310). Of a difficult passage at Io. 887–890, Stieber suggests the infinitive ἀνθίζειν, epexegetical with φάρεσιν, actually “refers to the use of flowers for dyeing clothes,” an interpretation that would remove the need for obelization (323).

Stieber’s exhaustive coverage and her detail-driven rhetorical style make it difficult to summarize her book’s achievement. This is not a book for the novice, as familiarity with both the plots of plays and their textual issues...