Project Report. Euripides and Interpersonal Trust

When I began my year-long research fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies in DC, my goal was to explore how trust, deception, and the breakdown of trust are portrayed in the fragmentary plays of the ancient Greek tragedian, Euripides. I was interested in examining how the historical emotion of trust is constructed and subsequently broken. Drawing on literary criticism and research on social cognition, my project aimed to fill a critical gap in the historical study of emotions, offering new insights into trust’s role in ancient Greek culture. That is, my project aimed to enhance our understanding of interpersonal trust in classical literature and its influence on both personal relationships and societal structures within the context of the Athenian city-state during the Peloponnesian War.

As I worked on this new project and read all of Euripides’ fragmentary plays, I noticed that the written word was frequently used as a medium of deception. In many of his plays, the written word becomes a crucial site where trust is activated, negotiated, and ultimately exploited. As I show, these texts do not merely communicate information; they actively shape epistemic conditions, determining what dramatic characters take to be true and whom they choose to believe. More specifically, the surviving Hippolytus and the fragmentary Hippolytus Veiled, Palamedes, and Stheneboea are of particular interest in this regard, since in these plays written messages serve as authoritative substitutes for direct speech. In these works, the written word carries a heightened persuasive force precisely because it appears detached from the contingencies of performance and emotion. This detachment, however, proves illusory. As the audience of these tragedies soon realizes, letters can be forged, manipulated, or strategically framed, allowing dramatic characters—human or divine—to engineer trust at a distance. The example of the forged letter in Euripides’ Palamedes, through which Odysseus deceives the Greeks into executing an innocent man, illustrates how writing can override judgment and past knowledge, redirecting trust toward an artefact rather than an otherwise and previously trustworthy person. By foregrounding such examples, my research argues that Euripides exposes a fundamental tension between relational trust and textual authority. Trust, as an interpretive and situational process, typically depends on assessments of character, prior behaviour, and shared experience. In Euripides’ oeuvre, however, the written word introduces an alternative mode of validation that appears more stable but is in fact more vulnerable to manipulation. When characters rely on written evidence under conditions of limited knowledge or emotional vulnerability, their trust becomes a high-risk investment—one that can be easily exploited, often with catastrophic consequences. The analysis further considers how the evaluation of such deception depends on contextual factors already central to Euripides’ treatment of trust: the intentionality of the deceiver, the nature of the relationship involved, the epistemic limitations of the trusting subject, and the outcome of the action. In some cases, the manipulation of written communication may serve purposes aligned with survival or justice, introducing ethical ambiguity; in others, it leads to destruction, reinforcing the tragic cost of misplaced trust. By integrating the study of written deception into the broader emotional and relational framework of trust, this study contributes to ongoing discussions of how Euripidean drama constructs and interrogates belief, knowledge, and human vulnerability. It shows that the written word—far from guaranteeing truth—functions as a powerful dramatic device through which trust is both created and undone.

This research project is still in progress, as I would like to extend its scope to explore four types of relationships (heterosexual couples, blood relatives, male companions, and relationships between women). Nevertheless, I have already disseminated some of its results at important academic venues, including the CHS fellows’ talk series and the Bryn Mawr Research Seminar. At the forthcoming 2027 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Boston I will present one strand of this research in a paper entitled “Trust and the Written Word in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Hippolytus Veiled, Palamedes, and Stheneboea”.

In closing this short report, I would like to point out how valuable it was for me to have year-long access to CHS’s (and Harvard’s) unique resources, which helped me develop and enrich my research project. Additionally, it was a real pleasure to meet and connect with so many colleagues in Washington, including the former Director, Professor Mark Schiefsky; the new Director, Professor Naomi Weiss; the residential fellows; the Early Career fellows who visited the Center; and the CHS staff, all of whom helped me think more deeply about my project and/or offered valuable support and companionship both to me and my family during our stay in the United States. Finally, during my year-long appointment as a CHS Fellow in Hellenic Studies, I was very fortunate to participate in The Lyceum Project 2026, which took place in Athens in affiliation with the Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece, and to explore other new avenues of research at the intersection of Euripides and artificial intelligence that I am very eager to pursue further in the future.