are also more central to the drama and tend to be more memorable. In Euripides’ view of the world, human tragedy affects everyone; it is not merely the province of the aristocracy.

Euripides also was less constrained by traditional myths than were Aeschylus or Sophocles. He was free to change details of the plot, add characters, or incorporate elements from another story. This freedom often gives the Euripidean version of a myth a sense of greater realism. It also allows the author to criticize details of a myth that he regards as foolish or inconsistent.

Medea

First produced: Mdeia, 431 b.c.e. (English translation, 1781)

Type of work: Play

A witch whose husband is about to leave her for another woman takes vengeance against him by killing his children.

The Medea illustrates many characteristic features of Euripidean tragedy. The play begins with a prologue in which the central conflict of the tragedy is revealed to the audience. This prologue is not delivered by a god or by any member of the nobility, but by a nurse, a character of relatively humble status. Yet the story that the nurse relates contains many fantastic elements and supernatural details: For example, she speaks of the Symplegades (the Clashing Rocks that destroyed ships attempting to sail through them), the Golden Fleece, and Jason’s legendary ship, the Argo. Nevertheless, these mythological details will not be Euripides’ central concern in this play. The poet will devote far more attention to human psychology and ordinary emotions (jealousy, anger, and pride) than to the marvels of legend. Euripides’ answer to the central question of this tragedy—What could lead a mother to kill her own children?—will not be the Golden Fleece or even a tragic curse, but a combination of spurned love, the desperate plight of women and exiles, and the individual nature of this particular mother.

Euripides quickly shifts attention away from the wonders of the prologue to the troubles that exist in Medea’s marriage. For Medea, the predicament of a husband who intends to leave her is compounded by the low status of women in Greek society generally and by her further isolation as an exile. Medea speaks at length about the difficulties of women in ancient Greece (lines 231-251) and about the ill treatment accorded to foreigners (lines 252-258, 511-515). The audience observes that Medea has relatively few choices available to her. If Jason abandons her, Medea’s life will be little better than that of a slave.

Furthermore, in Medea’s debate with Jason (lines 465-519), the audience is reminded that Medea has used violence before when doing what she felt to be necessary. She had killed her brother, Apsyrtus, in order that Jason might escape from her father, Aeëtes. She had killed Jason’s uncle, Pelias, in order that Jason’s father might regain his throne. Thus, the audience begins to understand that Medea is a person who kills whenever she believes that she has no other choice. Because she is a woman and an exile in a world that is hostile to both, Medea’s choices gradually diminish as the play continues.

In this way, Euripides has rewritten a traditional Greek fairy tale as a psychological study. He has brought his mythic characters down to the level of ordinary human beings and has shown that what motivated them were emotions that the audience could readily understand. By so doing, Euripides is able to make Medea seem a sympathetic character, despite her violent actions and the elements of fantasy traditionally found in her story.

Hippolytus

First produced: Hippolytos, 428 b.c.e. (revised version of an earlier play; English translation, 1781)

Type of work: Play

Phaedra, rejected by her son-in-law, Hippolytus, accuses him of rape.

The Hippolytus was part of only five trilogies for which Euripides was awarded first prize. One of the reasons for the success of this play may be that the Hippolytus is far more traditional in structure than many other Euripidean tragedies. For example, both Theseus and Hippolytus himself follow the pattern of the tragic hero described by Aristotle in Poetics: They are neither perfectly good nor purely evil but, while generally virtuous, suffer because of a flaw in character or by committing some mistake. Moreover, the play’s emphasis upon the need for restraint in all human endeavor echoes the sentiment of the widely quoted Greek proverb, “Nothing too much.” Theseus and Hippolytus are thus guilty of hubris (usually defined as excessive pride, insolence, and self-righteousness), which would have been regarded, even by the most conservative of Euripides’ critics, as a fatal flaw of character.

Nevertheless, Euripides has made several important innovations in this work. First, his view of the gods is not at all the same as that found in traditional Greek religion. Aphrodite and Artemis, although they appear on stage in human form, are largely personifications of lust and chastity. It is the conflict between these competing forces that brings about the tragedy of Phaedra and Hippolytus; the inability of these characters to find a balance between the desires represented by Aphrodite and the goals represented by Artemis destroys them.

This image of the gods is not at all flattering. Aphrodite uses Phaedra as a pawn to achieve the vengeance that she desires against Hippolytus. Humankind is seen to be the plaything of the gods, subject to their whims and unable to escape the destiny that they have imposed. Yet since the gods are presented as human emotions in this drama, Euripides is not being fatalistic in the traditional sense. Rather, the poet is implying, even as the philosophers of his day had suggested, that humanity is the victim of its own passions and conflicting desires. In the end, it is human emotion, not destiny, which brings about suffering in the Hippolytus.

Phaedra’s act of vengeance against Hippolytus, coupled with Medea’s act of vengeance against Jason, helps to explain why Euripides so often was seen in antiquity as a hater of women. Yet Euripides added little to the depictions of these characters that could not be found elsewhere in their stories. Moreover, his depiction of men such as Jason and even, to a certain extent, Theseus is similarly unflattering, and he casts other women, such as Alcestis and Iphigenia, in a more positive light. For this reason, the violent acts of revenge committed by Phaedra and Medea result not from the author’s misogyny but from his interpretation of their individual characters.

The Trojan Women

First produced: Triades, 415 b.c.e. (English translation, 1782)

Type of work: Play

Shortly after the fall of Troy, Hecuba learns the fate of her children and grandchildren.

In 416 b.c.e., the Athenian empire, at war against Sparta, captured the neutral island of Melos in the Aegean Sea. Punishing the Melians for their resistance, the Athenians killed all the men who remained on the island and reduced the women and children to slavery. This act of unprovoked aggression turned Euripides against the Athenian cause in the Peloponnesian War, a cause that he had earlier supported. For example, his negative depiction of the Corinthians in the Medea, written during the first year of the war, may be traced in large part to the alliance that existed between Corinth and Sparta. Fifteen years later, however, Euripides has shifted from seeing the Spartans and their allies as the enemy to seeing war itself as the enemy.

The structure of The Trojan Women is episodic. That is to say, it does not so much tell a continuous story as depict a series of individual and discrete scenes. The sum total of the episodes is not a plot, as in standard narrative tragedy, but an impression. The impression that Euripides sought to convey in The Trojan Women is that war is unspeakably horrible. The author attempted in the various scenes of this tragedy to depict the suffering that war causes even for those innocents who do not fight in it, innocents such as women, children, and the elderly.

Unity is provided in the drama by the continual presence of Hecuba. In her person are represented all wives who have lost their husbands in war and all mothers who have lost their children. Each successive episode brings word of new sorrows to Hecuba. When she first appears to the audience, she is aware that she has lost her city, her position, and most members of her family. That seems tragic enough, but Euripides wanted to illustrate that war spares nothing for the innocent, not even their hopes. Hecuba must also endure seeing her daughter Cassandra apparently afflicted with madness. (The audience, however, which knew that the curse of Cassandra was to prophesy the truth but never to be believed, would have realized that her “madness” was really an accurate prediction of the future.) In the following episode, Hecuba learns that another daughter, Polyxena, had been sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles. Finally, Hecuba must endure the slaughter of Andromache’s infant son, Astyanax, who is flung from the walls of Troy. Hecuba concludes (lines 1280-1283) that it is futile even to call upon the gods for help; the prayers of the innocent go unanswered.

The only consolation available to Hecuba is that her sufferings, and those of the other Trojans, were so severe that they will always be remembered (lines 1240-1250). Hecuba knows that, if it were not for their many sorrows, the Trojans would not become the subject of songs for generations yet unborn. This realization is cold comfort, indeed, but it is the only consolation that Euripides was willing to admit in this play. His goal was to see that later ages never forgot what the Trojans, like the Meians, had endured.

The Bacchae

First produced: Bakchai, 405 b.c.e. (English translation, 1781)

Type of work: Play

A king of Thebes is punished for resisting the cult of the god Dionysus.

In about 408 b.c.e., Euripides left Athens to accept the invitation of King Archelaus to write works for his court in Macedon. There Euripides died in 406 b.c.e. His final trilogy of plays, including both The Bacchae and Iphigeneia en Taurois (c. 414 b.c.e.; Iphigenia in Tauris, 1782), was produced in Athens by his son. Posthumously, he was awarded first prize for this trilogy, the fifth time that the poet had been so honored.

One of the reasons why The Bacchae may have been popular with its original audience was that it reflects a far more traditional view of humankind and the gods than do many of Euripides’ plays. Dionysus in The Bacchae is still seen as a psychological force or as a state of mind (in this case, irrationality), like Aphrodite and Artemis in the Hippolytus. In this play, however, it is Pentheus, the “modern man” who uses reason to challenge the authority of the gods, who suffers most. At the end of the tragedy, Cadmus cites the fate of Pentheus as proof that the gods exist and that they punish those who resist them (lines 1325-1326).

The final words of The Bacchae are a restatement of the traditional Greek view that the gods act in ways that humankind does not expect and that human knowledge is therefore limited (lines 1388-1392). It is a conclusion that would be appropriate for nearly any Greek tragedy, and, indeed, it strongly resembles the endings of both Sophocles’ Antigon (441 b.c.e.; Antigone, 1729) and Oidipous epi Kolni (401 b.c.e.; Oedipus at Colonus, 1729). This traditional Greek belief that moderation is best because humankind’s knowledge is limited is central to the entire structure of The Bacchae. While Pentheus is punished for his stubborn resistance to the god Dionysus, his mother, Agave, who accepted the god, also suffers. For modern readers, this development is one of the most troubling aspects of the work; at the end of the play, Dionysus seems to be punishing both his enemies and his own followers. Yet it must be remembered that, for Euripides, Dionysus symbolizes irrationality. Those who exclude irrationality totally from their lives become stolid, unimaginative, and dull; when their carefully reasoned worlds collapse, they may be “torn apart” by irrationality, as literally happens to Pentheus in this play. Yet those who succumb to irrationality entirely are playing with madness, and they may eventually destroy what is most dear to them. With irrationality, as with everything, Euripides is saying, the middle way is best.

In dramatic terms, Euripides accomplishes a difficult task in The Bacchae. He manages to change the audience’s opinion about both Dionysus and Pentheus as the drama unfolds. When Dionysus first appears, he wins the audience’s favor: They are told that Pentheus is resisting the god unjustly and that Dionysus has come to Thebes in person to reward the just and to punish the guilty. By the end of the drama, however, Dionysus seems a fearful figure whose penalties are extreme and whose power destroys even those who embrace his cult. Pentheus, on the other hand, first appears as a brash, skeptical, and thoroughly unlikable individual. Yet by the end of the drama, the audience is likely to pity him because of the degree to which he has been punished. This ability to change an audience’s perspective in such a short time is one of Euripides’ finest accomplishments in this play.