Modern reception and interpretation of Euripides’ works are heavily conditioned by Aristophanes’ and Aristotle’s judgments about Euripides, by the biographical tradition about the poet and the scholia transmitted with select plays. Following the lead of Aristophanes and Aristotle, Hellenistic and modern scholars found fault with various Euripidean strategies and techniques, especially on the grounds of deviation from proper tragic decorum. In this paper I hope to demonstrate that the various strategies and techniques (for example the deus ex machina) used by Euripides in Bacchae do not confirm the often repeated charges of the defects of his dramaturgy. In substance in this particular play Euripides is moving beyond all the interpretative commonplaces and evaluative comments about faulty dramatic construction by managing all matters well (εὖ οἰκονομεῖν).
