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

欧里庇得斯经常被视为神的批评者和启蒙者，因为在他的戏剧中，比其他悲剧剧作家更多地表达了对神的行动或不行动的批评，类似于哲学家和当代诡辩家对神的批评。与传统神话和对这些神的批评相一致的关于众神的声明并不少见，通常也是由同一个人物做出的。该项目将这些相互矛盾的神形象的上演理解为对当代神的概念的戏剧性问题化。它特别关注晚期悲剧中的偶然性和天意的经历，用古典文献学和文学批评的方法进行分析，着眼于当代哲学话语，并询问欧里庇得斯对偶然性和天意相互作用的戏剧化是否可以理解为对雅典政治危机的艺术反思，这场危机表现在西西里远征开始的415年左右。通过这种新的方法论途径，对欧里庇得斯研究中讨论较多的《欧里庇得斯》中的神的功能和意义问题进行了重新表述，同时也为5世纪末宗教与政治关系和宗教心理学史的古代历史研究做出了贡献。

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.