Euripides’ Lost Play: Suitors in Hell
The Odyssey is a crescendo of dramatic scenes. I find it hard to believe that such dramatists as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides didn’t turn some of those scenes into plays. It’s easier for me to believe that such plays were lost.
In particular, it’s easy to imagine Euripides portraying the suitors after their slaughter, in Hades.
It could start like Sartre’s No Exit. Suitors don’t know that they are dead. It happened quickly, unexpectedly. They don’t understand where they are or why. They are still plotting, singly and in small teams, how they can outwit the others, how they can do away with Telemachus, how they can outwit Penelope and win her. Then they gradually realize that this is Hell, or, as in Sartre, that the others are Hell.
Finally, they rehearse together one alternative scenario after another. What could they have done to turn the tables on Odysseus?
