"There is just one life for each of us: our own"
About this Quote
A line that sounds like a comfort blanket until you notice the trapdoor: Euripides isn’t offering soothing self-help, he’s tightening the moral frame. “Just one life” carries the chill of Greek tragedy’s accounting system. You don’t get a rehearsal, you don’t get to outsource consequences, and you don’t get to hide behind the idea that fate, the gods, or the crowd made you do it. The sentence is deceptively plain; its force comes from how it narrows the world to a single, nontransferable ledger.
As a tragedian, Euripides wrote in a culture obsessed with reputation, civic duty, and the public story of a person. His plays keep puncturing the heroic myth: characters try to live through other people (through children, lovers, armies, dynasties), or attempt to launder their desires through divine permission. The subtext here is a rebuke to those evasions. Even in a universe crowded with gods, the burden of living still lands on the human spine.
The phrasing matters. “For each of us” universalizes the rule, then “our own” snaps it into intimacy, almost accusatory. It’s not romantic individualism; it’s existential responsibility before the term existed. Read against Athenian democracy and war, it also hints at political ethics: the polis can demand sacrifice, but it cannot hand you a second life when the costs come due. This is tragedy’s quiet modernity: freedom and limitation arriving as the same fact.
As a tragedian, Euripides wrote in a culture obsessed with reputation, civic duty, and the public story of a person. His plays keep puncturing the heroic myth: characters try to live through other people (through children, lovers, armies, dynasties), or attempt to launder their desires through divine permission. The subtext here is a rebuke to those evasions. Even in a universe crowded with gods, the burden of living still lands on the human spine.
The phrasing matters. “For each of us” universalizes the rule, then “our own” snaps it into intimacy, almost accusatory. It’s not romantic individualism; it’s existential responsibility before the term existed. Read against Athenian democracy and war, it also hints at political ethics: the polis can demand sacrifice, but it cannot hand you a second life when the costs come due. This is tragedy’s quiet modernity: freedom and limitation arriving as the same fact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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