REVISITING ARISTOTELIAN CRITICISM OF EURIPIDES’ DEUS EX MACHINA

Abstract

In assessing Euripides and his tragedies, Aristotle, in his Poetics, as well as his modern apologists, generally portrays Euripides as
irrational, anachronistic, iconoclastic and anti-traditional. Euripides’s use of deus ex machina as a tragic device is particularly condemned on the ground that it serves as a feeble means to resolve complicated plot, thereby rendering the internal economy of his tragedies defective and dramatically disunified. This paper frowns at such condemnation by arguing that Aristotle and his corroborators have been critically unfair to Euripides. To defend Euripides, the paper, through a qualitative content analysis of three Euripidean tragedies: Medea, Hippolytus and Ion, establishes that his deus ex machina was not a contrivance that
only resolves complicated and knotty plot; rather, the device was part and parcel of a rational, organic and internal whole plot.
From the plots and analyses of the three plays, the paper points out that Euripides intends, among others, that his deus ex machina would always serve as an ironic and satiric device in resolving matters concerning mortals and immortals, especially where no witnesses could arbitrate or testify between them.