INTRODUCTION TO CYCLOPS*

Interest in Euripides' Cyclops is generally justified historically:
other than a chunk of Sophocles' Ichneutae, it is the only ex-
ample of a satyr-play, that ribald piece which in the dramatic
festivals crowned a group of three tragedies or a tragic trilogy.
But the Cyclops is more than historically interesting; it is, by
modern standards, good fast farce, clearly stageworthy, with a
fine dramatic intelligence behind it. The movement is typ-
ically Euripidean, not merely in the sharp reversal of roles
and sympathies, the crisp dialogue and the consistent anach-
ronization, but in formal structure and underlying idea as
well. Moreover, despite the play's sportive obscenity and
knockabout humor, its underlying idea is essentially serious.
The Cyclops, that is, may be clearly a farce, but it is primarily
a farce of ideas, a gay and ironic flirtation with the problem
of civilized brutality. As such, it lies within the main stream
of Euripides' tragic thought, and, if its treatment and tone
differ from that of tragedy, the difference is less a difference
of dramatic quality or genius than a difference of genre.
We should like to know a great deal more about satyr-drama
as a genre than we do, and we should especially like to know
what in fifth-century practice was the formal connection be-
tween a satyr-play and the three tragedies which preceded it.
But unfortunately the Cyclops is undated and cannot, with
any degree of certainty, be assigned to one of the extant
tragedies.1 In the absence of that crucial information, it be-
* This play first appeared in the Hudson Review (Spring, 1952),
Vol. I, No. i, and is reprinted here by permission.
i. The most tempting suggestion has been, I think, that the
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