Euripides was the youngest of the three great dramatic playwrights of Greek antiquity. An outspoken social critic and artistic innovator, he wrote plays that were considerably less popular with Athenian audiences of the fifth century b.c.e. than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, his older theatrical peers. His disenchantment with official Athenian policy led him to forsake his native city late in life, and he spent his last years as a voluntary exile in the court of King Archelaus of Macedonia. Succeeding generations, however, found Euripides’ unique blend of intense emotion, psychological realism, and lush poetic dialogue more congenial than the relatively austere dramas of his rivals, and his plays were frequently revived and produced in late Hellenic and Hellenistic times. The fact that nineteen complete plays by Euripides exist while only seven each by Sophocles and Aeschylus survive is evidence of Euripides’ preeminence as dramatic poet in later antiquity.

Written late in his career, The Phoenician Women is remarkable in several respects. It is the longest of Euripides’ surviving plays, and it boasts the largest cast of characters in any Greek drama. Moreover, it is the most innovative and original retelling of the story of the royal house of Thebes, a tale that had already served as the basis for some of the earlier dramas of Euripides’ peers. The broad mythic resonance, exceptional range of emotional and melodramatic material, and linguistic richness of The Phoenician Women made it a favorite with actors, audiences, and scholars, and it became one of the most widely read, performed, and studied of the great Greek dramas for nearly one thousand years after its first performance. Knowledge of Greek language and literature, however, died out in Western Europe in the years following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and when it was revived during the Renaissance the prevailing taste for more tightly constructed dramas, such as Sophocles’ Antigon (441 b.c.e.; Antigone, 1729), caused The Phoenician Women to suffer a loss of reputation and popularity from which it has not yet fully emerged.

Verbally ornate, artistically ambitious, simultaneously intellectual and emotional, and bitingly ironic, The Phoenician Women is a brilliant product of Euripides’ late style. Despite the absence of a main character to provide dramatic focus, the logic of its thematic development and the powerful coherence of its imagery transcend the work’s limitations to create a superbly crafted poetic drama.

The ostensible theme of the play is war; however, the treatment of this theme is so complex that in the end warfare becomes a metaphor for the tragic vicissitudes of the human condition. No single character dominates the play’s action, but as the members of the Theban royal family—Jocasta, Antigone, Creon, Polynices, Eteocles, Creon, and Oedipus—interact with one another in various ways, their encounters bring different facets of family life, politics, and statecraft into conjunction with the problem of war. Interlinked images of blood and bloodshed permeate the language of the text, providing a constant reminder that the blood ties that bind the family (and the state) together cannot prevent—indeed all too frequently cause—the shedding of blood.

Looming over the entire action of the play is the changeable, and finally inimical, presence of the gods. This presence makes itself felt not through the actual presence or appearance of a divine character but rather through a complex pattern of shifting references to the gods, which takes on life in the language of the play. In the play’s closing moments the remorseless operation of divine compulsion in human affairs is recapitulated in Oedipus’s final speech. He recalls that his victory over the Sphinx was divinely ordained...