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What do Euripides's plays tell us about his view of divine sovereignty, i.e. the control of the gods over the world in general and human beings in...

Questions of divine agency and free will lie at the heart of many of Euripides' plays. His plays, in general, often emphasize the role of the incalculable to affect human plans by causing reversals of fortune; the "incalculable" is usually some kind of divine control or intervention. Euripides' plays tell us a lot about his view of "tychē" – which can be translated as 'chance', 'fortune', or 'luck'. While the gods are responsible for much, chance and human nature sometimes thwart divine plans. The Ion is an excellent case study for Euripides' views on divine sovereignty and human agency. 

In this play, Apollo is the father of Ion, who was born to Creusa after the god had raped her. Both Creusa's husband and Ion himself,  an adolescent when the play starts, are ignorant of Ion's true identity. The play shows Ion performing religious duties at Apollo's shrine in Delphi without any knowledge of what the god has in store for him. It is only at the very end that Athena reveals Apollo's far-reaching perspective. Apollo's plan was that Ion should go to Athens, meet his mother there and, finally, become the progenitor of the Ionian race. However, chance and human agency derails this plan. While Euripides depicted the gods as controlling a great deal within the realm of humans, plays such as the Ion show that he did not regard the gods as omniscient and omnipotent. 


Plays such as the Ion depict not only divine intervention and power but also divine weaknesses. For instance, both Hermes and Apollo are shown to be fallible. Unlike Homer, Euripides depicted the gods as directing the action, but within constraints and without uninterrupted efficacy. 


Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis is another play that is informative about Euripides' views on human responsibility. First, humans are depicted as responsible for the war and the sacrifice of Iphigenia is said to be for the glory of a Panhellenic Greece, according to Agamemnon. However, it is to appease the gods that Iphigenia needs to be sacrificed in the first place, even if fair winds for sailing to Troy are needed by humans for their own purposes. However, all of this can be seen as a result of the judgment of Paris and the subsequent actions of Aphrodite. The actions of gods and the actions of humans cannot be as neatly separated as one would like. One way of thinking about this is that, while gods determine the overall structure and set the grander wheels in motion, humans are ultimately responsible for individual courses of actions. 

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