Contingency and Providence: The Relationship between God and Man in the Late Tragedies of Euripides and the Athenian Crisis

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Euripides was often seen as a critic of the gods and an enlightener, since in his plays, more often than among the other tragic playwrights, criticism of the action or non-action of the gods is expressed, resembling the criticism of the gods by philosophers and contemporary sophists. It is not uncommon for statements about the gods to be made in one and the same piece in harmony with the traditional myth and criticism of these gods, often also by one and the same figure. The project understands the staging of these contradictory images of gods as a dramaturgical problematization of contemporary concepts of gods. It focuses in particular on the experiences of contingency and providence staged in the late tragedies, analyzes these with the methods of Classical Philology and Literary Criticism and with a view to contemporary philosophical discourses, and asks whether Euripides' dramatization of the interplay of contingency and providence can be understood as an artistic reflection on the political crisis in Athens, which manifested itself around 415, the beginning of the Sicilian expedition. Through this novel methodological approach, the investigation leads to a reformulation of the question of the function and meaning of the gods in Euripides, which is much discussed in Euripides research, and at the same time contributes to ancient historical research on the relationship between religion and politics and the religious history of mentality at the end of the 5th century.