Using Your Memory to get out of Jail!

In the Book of Genius, Tony Buzan tells the story of Euripides, one of the most famous writers of Greek tragedy. In the 5th century BC Euripides won no less than five laurels for drama at the festival of Dionysus, the Greek god of Wine and Creativity.

He wrote his dramas late in the age of Pericles, a time when the traditional values and beliefs of the Greek world were being eroded. Euripides' works reflected this growing uncertainty.

The Gods as reconcilers, as represented by Aeschylus, were losing their hold on the minds of the Greeks, and attention was turning towards purely human concerns, rife with doubt, questioning, and complexity. Sophocles, who admired Euripides' work, as did Socrates, said: 'I paint men as they ought to be. Euripides paints men as they are.'

Euripides' most famous play is The Bacchae. This is an extraordinary and terrifying tale of the power of religious hysteria, mob rule, madness and irrationality destroying human life. The play represented a caustic commentary on the manifold evils of the Peloponnesian War, then raging between Athens and Sparta. As it approached the end of its golden age, Athens suffered terribly in the 30-year-war against Sparta; plague hit the city, and faith was weakened in Athenian institutions. The fierce themes of this play represented the disillusionment that the inhabitants of democratic Athens experienced during the war.

Euripides earned the title 'Philosopher of the Stage'. He held a prominent position in Athens, acted politically as the consul for Magnesia and possessed an enormous library, a rare thing for a private Greek citizen. In his youth he trained as a professional athlete and then turned from boxing to painting as a career. Several paintings attributed to him were exhibited publicly in later times.

Euripides was a friend of the philosophers. We know that Socrates relished his writing; it is said that Socrates never even deigned to visit the theatre unless the performance was by Euripides, whose total output was between 80 and 90 plays.

Such was the beauty of Euripides' verse that Athenian prisoners, held captive in Syracuse after the disastrous campaign by Athens against the city in 415 BC, escaped death and received their freedom if they could recite from memory passages from his works to their captors.

Towards the end of his life, Euripides was invited to Macedonia by King Archelaus, and he spent his final years at the Macedonian court. So highly valued was he, that, at this death, the king cut off his own hair as an expression of grief.

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