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Orestes and Other Plays
Spanning the last twenty-four years of Euripides’s career, this volume includes The Children of Heracles , Andromache , The Suppliant Women , The Phoenician Women , Orestes , and Iphigenia in Aulis .
452 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 409
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Euripides
2,822 books1,973 followersEuripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.
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March 13, 2016
Athens and the children of Heracles
20 March 2011
The only reason I got this volume was because it contained the one Euripidean play that I did not have: the Heraklidae (or, the Children of Heracles). Herakles, otherwise known in Latin as Hercules (which is the term we generally use) was an ancient Greek hero and demigod. He is most famous for the twelve labours, but he appears elsewhere, notably as one of the Argonauts who sailed with Jason to search for the golden fleece (though he is left behind halfway there and goes his own way). Heracles is also well known for his strength, and in Greek Mythology he does seem to come out as a 'strong man' in the same sense that Samson of the Bible does. To me he is simply a hero in the same sense as Achilles.
Heracles is also known for having over 700 children, and as such creating a race who eventually invaded and conquered the Peloponesian peninsula. The play is set before their rise to power (though it needs be remembered that there was an awful lot of them). Heracles' offspring come to blows with the King of Mycenae and flee to Athens for protection. While there the king raises an army, but the Athenians warn him that the Heraclidae are under his protection. However an oracle says that unless a woman is sacrificed then they will lose the war. One Athenian (no doubt in love with one of the Heraclidae) offers herself up, and thus they go to war and win, and capture the King of Mycenae alive. They are reluctant to execute him, but he prophesies that if they kill him then his spirit will become a defender of Athens.
Euripides wrote this play during the Peloponesian war, and while we have a lot of his plays, he was always second best to his contemporary Sophocles. Initially only seven of his plays were to survive (in the same sense that we have seven each of the other two great tragedians), however an entire volume of plays also managed to survive and as such he have a much larger collection than normal. The Heraclidae would be one of those plays.
This play, obviously written during the war, is designed as a patriotic piece to inspire the Athenians during a dark period of their history. As mentioned, the Heraclidae became the Peloponesians, of which Sparta is one of the many cities. Thus the audience is reminded of a time when they were the protectors of those who are now enemies, and is a way to justify their current actions. Further, the sacrifice of the former enemy of the Heraclidae is a reminder of a promise that Athens will be protected.
Greek myth is very fluid and tends to change depending on the location and the events. Perseus is considered to be the father of the Persians and Media is the mother of the Medes. Both characters where betrayed by Greek kings, which is why their respective countries became enemies. Of course it is highly unlikely that either of these characters were to ancestors of these races, but in a Greco-centric world, one does not accept that there is any explanation beyond your own borders (which is very true of what is happening today).
20 March 2011
The only reason I got this volume was because it contained the one Euripidean play that I did not have: the Heraklidae (or, the Children of Heracles). Herakles, otherwise known in Latin as Hercules (which is the term we generally use) was an ancient Greek hero and demigod. He is most famous for the twelve labours, but he appears elsewhere, notably as one of the Argonauts who sailed with Jason to search for the golden fleece (though he is left behind halfway there and goes his own way). Heracles is also well known for his strength, and in Greek Mythology he does seem to come out as a 'strong man' in the same sense that Samson of the Bible does. To me he is simply a hero in the same sense as Achilles.
Heracles is also known for having over 700 children, and as such creating a race who eventually invaded and conquered the Peloponesian peninsula. The play is set before their rise to power (though it needs be remembered that there was an awful lot of them). Heracles' offspring come to blows with the King of Mycenae and flee to Athens for protection. While there the king raises an army, but the Athenians warn him that the Heraclidae are under his protection. However an oracle says that unless a woman is sacrificed then they will lose the war. One Athenian (no doubt in love with one of the Heraclidae) offers herself up, and thus they go to war and win, and capture the King of Mycenae alive. They are reluctant to execute him, but he prophesies that if they kill him then his spirit will become a defender of Athens.
Euripides wrote this play during the Peloponesian war, and while we have a lot of his plays, he was always second best to his contemporary Sophocles. Initially only seven of his plays were to survive (in the same sense that we have seven each of the other two great tragedians), however an entire volume of plays also managed to survive and as such he have a much larger collection than normal. The Heraclidae would be one of those plays.
This play, obviously written during the war, is designed as a patriotic piece to inspire the Athenians during a dark period of their history. As mentioned, the Heraclidae became the Peloponesians, of which Sparta is one of the many cities. Thus the audience is reminded of a time when they were the protectors of those who are now enemies, and is a way to justify their current actions. Further, the sacrifice of the former enemy of the Heraclidae is a reminder of a promise that Athens will be protected.
Greek myth is very fluid and tends to change depending on the location and the events. Perseus is considered to be the father of the Persians and Media is the mother of the Medes. Both characters where betrayed by Greek kings, which is why their respective countries became enemies. Of course it is highly unlikely that either of these characters were to ancestors of these races, but in a Greco-centric world, one does not accept that there is any explanation beyond your own borders (which is very true of what is happening today).
November 27, 2017
Orestes was the most notorious matricide in the history of literary creation – before Norman Bates, at least. The story of the Mycenaean prince who murdered his mother Clytemnestra in revenge for Clytemnestra’s murder of his father Agamemnon was told by all three of Athens’ great dramatists – Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In this collection of plays from late in his career, Euripides applies to the story of Orestes, and to other tales from classical mythology, a particularly grim and pessimistic worldview.
As the great translator Philip Vellacott explains in a helpful foreword, the six plays brought together for this Penguin Books collection were all written late in Euripides’ career, during the Peloponnesian War. Some were written early in the war; Andromache, for example, was probably first staged around 427 B.C., when the war was “only” four years old. By the time Euripides wrote Iphigenia in Aulis, by contrast, he had already left Athens for a voluntary Macedonian exile; it was around 407 B.C., just before the playwright’s death, and Athens, beleaguered by one military disaster after another, was reeling toward final defeat. Perhaps Euripides, as an Athenian who loved his city, just couldn’t bear to be there for a Spartan-administered coup de grâce.
The Children of Heracles are suppliants; indeed, it is remarkable to see how many of these plays involve people who have been forced by some reversal of circumstances to seek sanctuary at one divine site or another. The central problem of the play is simple: Heracles has died, and his longtime enemy Eurystheus wants to kill off Heracles’ children as well. Iolaus, Heracles’ old friend, is an old man now, but spiritedly wants to protect the children; and the Athenian king Demophon, to whose city the children and Iolaus have come for protection, at first seems willing to oblige them. Yet Demophon learns that the only way his Athenian army can hold back the hostile forces of Eurystheus is if a child is sacrificed; and all seems lost until a child of Heracles – his daughter Macaria – expresses a willingness to serve as the sacrifice, sounding much like her father when she says, “Readily, not reluctantly,/This life is offered; here I pledge myself to death./Because I did not count my life dear, I have won/This dearest prize of all – to meet death gloriously” (121). One senses Euripides’ bitterness at the manner in which war takes the lives of the young and leaves the old still living – a violation and reversal of the natural order.
Andromache places the reader or theatergoer back in the company of a woman who was already well-known in the ancient Greek world as a personification of how cruel fate – or the Greek gods – could be. After all, Andromache not only witnessed the death of her beloved husband Hector, and the dishonoring of his body by Achilles, but also the sacking of her city by the Greeks and the Greeks’ murder of her infant son Astyanax. By the time of this play, all those tragic actions are past history, and Andromache is now a slave in the household of Neoptolemus, king of Phthia. Yet Andromache’s troubles are not over: as Neoptolemus’ concubine, she has borne him a son, Molossus, while Neoptolemus’ wife Hermione remains barren. Hermione and her father, the Spartan king Menelaus, plan to kill both Andromache and Molossus, and therefore Andromache takes refuge (another suppliant) at a shrine of Thetis, the sea-goddess who was the mother of Achilles. Andromache’s denunciation of Menelaus – “Spartans! The whole world hates you above all other men!/Lies are your policy, treachery your accomplishment,/Your craft is crime and cruelty…” (p. 159) – no doubt sums up how many people in the play’s Athenian audience were feeling about Spartans just then, as the Peloponnesian War was already well in progress by that time.
Suppliants take center stage once again in The Suppliant Women. In this case, the suppliants are women of Argos, the mothers of the seven Argive chieftains who became the “Seven Against Thebes.” Now that the war of the Seven Against Thebes is over, and the feuding royal brothers Eteocles and Polyneices are dead by one another’s hands, the Theban tyrant Creon has ordained that the bodies of the Seven Against Thebes are to be left unburied on the plains outside the city, dishonored as scavenger animals tear at their dead flesh and bones.
Aethra, mother of the legendary Athenian king Theseus, has symbolically bound herself to the altar of the goddess Demeter’s temple at Eleusis, and hopes to persuade her son to recover the bodies of the Seven Against Thebes – by force, if necessary – so that the grieving mothers may give their sons an honorable burial. While Adrastus, the Argive king who acceded to the war, bemoans his lot, Theseus defies the Argive herald of the tyrant Creon, proclaiming Athens’ democratic values in a manner that no doubt pleased the people of an Athenian city-state at war: “This state is not/Subject to one man’s will, but is a free city./The king here is the people, who by yearly office/Govern in turn” (p. 206).
The Phoenician Women reintroduces us to the ill-fated house of Oedipus, with some definite shifts from the way the story is portrayed in Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle. In this play, the Phoenician women of the title are the proverbial innocent bystanders, neutral parties caught up in the horror and waste of war. These Phoenician women, en route from their home in the eastern Mediterranean to serve at the shrine of the oracle at Delphi, unhappily happened to be at Thebes when the Theban civil war between the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices broke out. Once again, the prospective sacrifice of an innocent person is placed at center stage, as Creon, brother of Jocasta, is told that he must sacrifice his son Menoeceus if Thebes is to be spared the horrors of destruction. Creon wants Menoeceus to run away to safety; but Menoeceus, in stark contrast with the selfishness of the warring brothers Eteocles and Polyneices, says, “How can I betray the city of my birth?...I will go and save the city,/Giving my life for Thebes” (p. 271). It is hard, when reading all these plays about the innocent sacrificing themselves to save the guilty, not to think that Euripides is drawing a parallel with the Athenian state willingly sacrificing ever more young lives for the prosecution of a stupid, futile, immoral, irrational, decades-long war.
Orestes, as mentioned above, made me think of Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); and the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the parallel is warranted. This final chapter in the grim story of the house of Atreus would already have been quite familiar to an Athenian audience; what seems different here is the single-mindedness with which Euripides sets himself to the task of proving to anyone within viewing or listening range that Orestes is fundamentally deranged.
By the time the play begins, Orestes, aided by his sister Electra and his loyal friend Pylades, has already carried out the murder of Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes and Electra are under arrest at the royal palace of Argos, and an Argive jury is to decide whether the matricidal brother and sister are to be stoned to death! Once again, Menelaus of Sparta comes off badly, refusing to help Orestes even though Orestes is the son of Menelaus’ old comrade-in-arms Agamemnon; Orestes denounces him harshly: “You coward! Did you once command an army? Yes –/ To win a woman – not to help your friends. Traitor!” (p. 324)
Once the Argive verdict comes down – Orestes and Electra will not be stoned to death, but they are expected to kill themselves – Orestes and Pylades come up with what can only be described as a delusional plan to gain the favor of the Argives who have condemned them, with a bit of sweet revenge into the bargain; as Helen of Troy is in town, Pylades suggests, “Let’s kill Helen – and send Menelaus raving mad” (p. 339). Aside from the way Orestes, Electra, and Pylades seem ever ready to shed more blood, there is also a troublingly incestuous element in the way Orestes and Electra, brother and sister, address one another. Electra calls Orestes “My dearest!” and says “Our two hearts are one”; Orestes calls for Electra to embrace him and asks, “Why should I feel shame?/Body to body – thus, let us be close in love” (p. 337). Hello? Really? I would not be surprised to learn that, long before the deus ex machina resolution that ends this play, its original Athenian audience was ready to see Orestes and Electra leave the stage, by any means necessary. Kill them, don’t kill them – just get them out of our sight.
Iphigenia in Aulis, of all these plays, may be the one that is best known to modern audiences – or at least to international film buffs, as this is one of the plays that Greek director Michael Cacoyannis chose to adapt for the big screen in 1977. Cacoyannis chose well, for of all these plays it is the one that would be most immediately accessible to a modern audience. Its premise is horribly simple: Agamemnon’s Greek fleet has assembled at the port of Aulis, ready to sail for Troy; but the winds are calm, denying the fleet the opportunity to sail, and the priests have decreed that Agamemnon must lift the curse by offering his own daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis. Agamemnon therefore sends to his wife Clytemnestra a message directing her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis to be married to the hero Achilles. What awaits Iphigenia, of course, is not a magical wedding day but rather the knife of priestly sacrifice.
In this, possibly Euripides’ last play, the irony seems especially bitter. Once again, someone innocent and young is called upon to pay a bloody price for the follies and weaknesses of the old. Agamemnon and Menelaus dither about what to do, and their lack of resolution means that the entire Greek camp is ready to mutiny if Iphigenia is not sacrificed. It is left to a conscience-stricken elderly slave of Agamemnon to tell Clytemnestra the truth, and Clytemnestra begs Achilles to save her daughter, saying, “See, I throw away all pride and fall before you” (p. 400). Achilles puts on the heroic pose, saying, “I feel my proud heart stirred to noble action” (p. 401); but it is left to Iphigenia to carry out the central action of the drama.
At first, Iphigenia asks (understandably) to be spared: “Don’t kill me, so young! It is good to see the light;/Don’t make me gaze at darkness in the world below” (p. 411). Gradually, however, she comes to feel that she can help her fellow Greeks by giving herself up for sacrifice, and says, “Mother, I have thought this over; I know now what I must do./I am resolved to die. Above all things, I want to act nobly/And renounce all cowardly feelings” (p. 418). The conflict between the brave princess and her feckless father could not be more apparent.
We see in these plays how the real-life, slow-motion, long-lasting tragedy of the Peloponnesian War influenced and intensified Euripides’ already-tragic consciousness. These plays about supplication, loss, and sacrifice still hold all of their grim power, and speak to the people of the modern world as they did to the Athenians of old.
As the great translator Philip Vellacott explains in a helpful foreword, the six plays brought together for this Penguin Books collection were all written late in Euripides’ career, during the Peloponnesian War. Some were written early in the war; Andromache, for example, was probably first staged around 427 B.C., when the war was “only” four years old. By the time Euripides wrote Iphigenia in Aulis, by contrast, he had already left Athens for a voluntary Macedonian exile; it was around 407 B.C., just before the playwright’s death, and Athens, beleaguered by one military disaster after another, was reeling toward final defeat. Perhaps Euripides, as an Athenian who loved his city, just couldn’t bear to be there for a Spartan-administered coup de grâce.
The Children of Heracles are suppliants; indeed, it is remarkable to see how many of these plays involve people who have been forced by some reversal of circumstances to seek sanctuary at one divine site or another. The central problem of the play is simple: Heracles has died, and his longtime enemy Eurystheus wants to kill off Heracles’ children as well. Iolaus, Heracles’ old friend, is an old man now, but spiritedly wants to protect the children; and the Athenian king Demophon, to whose city the children and Iolaus have come for protection, at first seems willing to oblige them. Yet Demophon learns that the only way his Athenian army can hold back the hostile forces of Eurystheus is if a child is sacrificed; and all seems lost until a child of Heracles – his daughter Macaria – expresses a willingness to serve as the sacrifice, sounding much like her father when she says, “Readily, not reluctantly,/This life is offered; here I pledge myself to death./Because I did not count my life dear, I have won/This dearest prize of all – to meet death gloriously” (121). One senses Euripides’ bitterness at the manner in which war takes the lives of the young and leaves the old still living – a violation and reversal of the natural order.
Andromache places the reader or theatergoer back in the company of a woman who was already well-known in the ancient Greek world as a personification of how cruel fate – or the Greek gods – could be. After all, Andromache not only witnessed the death of her beloved husband Hector, and the dishonoring of his body by Achilles, but also the sacking of her city by the Greeks and the Greeks’ murder of her infant son Astyanax. By the time of this play, all those tragic actions are past history, and Andromache is now a slave in the household of Neoptolemus, king of Phthia. Yet Andromache’s troubles are not over: as Neoptolemus’ concubine, she has borne him a son, Molossus, while Neoptolemus’ wife Hermione remains barren. Hermione and her father, the Spartan king Menelaus, plan to kill both Andromache and Molossus, and therefore Andromache takes refuge (another suppliant) at a shrine of Thetis, the sea-goddess who was the mother of Achilles. Andromache’s denunciation of Menelaus – “Spartans! The whole world hates you above all other men!/Lies are your policy, treachery your accomplishment,/Your craft is crime and cruelty…” (p. 159) – no doubt sums up how many people in the play’s Athenian audience were feeling about Spartans just then, as the Peloponnesian War was already well in progress by that time.
Suppliants take center stage once again in The Suppliant Women. In this case, the suppliants are women of Argos, the mothers of the seven Argive chieftains who became the “Seven Against Thebes.” Now that the war of the Seven Against Thebes is over, and the feuding royal brothers Eteocles and Polyneices are dead by one another’s hands, the Theban tyrant Creon has ordained that the bodies of the Seven Against Thebes are to be left unburied on the plains outside the city, dishonored as scavenger animals tear at their dead flesh and bones.
Aethra, mother of the legendary Athenian king Theseus, has symbolically bound herself to the altar of the goddess Demeter’s temple at Eleusis, and hopes to persuade her son to recover the bodies of the Seven Against Thebes – by force, if necessary – so that the grieving mothers may give their sons an honorable burial. While Adrastus, the Argive king who acceded to the war, bemoans his lot, Theseus defies the Argive herald of the tyrant Creon, proclaiming Athens’ democratic values in a manner that no doubt pleased the people of an Athenian city-state at war: “This state is not/Subject to one man’s will, but is a free city./The king here is the people, who by yearly office/Govern in turn” (p. 206).
The Phoenician Women reintroduces us to the ill-fated house of Oedipus, with some definite shifts from the way the story is portrayed in Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle. In this play, the Phoenician women of the title are the proverbial innocent bystanders, neutral parties caught up in the horror and waste of war. These Phoenician women, en route from their home in the eastern Mediterranean to serve at the shrine of the oracle at Delphi, unhappily happened to be at Thebes when the Theban civil war between the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices broke out. Once again, the prospective sacrifice of an innocent person is placed at center stage, as Creon, brother of Jocasta, is told that he must sacrifice his son Menoeceus if Thebes is to be spared the horrors of destruction. Creon wants Menoeceus to run away to safety; but Menoeceus, in stark contrast with the selfishness of the warring brothers Eteocles and Polyneices, says, “How can I betray the city of my birth?...I will go and save the city,/Giving my life for Thebes” (p. 271). It is hard, when reading all these plays about the innocent sacrificing themselves to save the guilty, not to think that Euripides is drawing a parallel with the Athenian state willingly sacrificing ever more young lives for the prosecution of a stupid, futile, immoral, irrational, decades-long war.
Orestes, as mentioned above, made me think of Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); and the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the parallel is warranted. This final chapter in the grim story of the house of Atreus would already have been quite familiar to an Athenian audience; what seems different here is the single-mindedness with which Euripides sets himself to the task of proving to anyone within viewing or listening range that Orestes is fundamentally deranged.
By the time the play begins, Orestes, aided by his sister Electra and his loyal friend Pylades, has already carried out the murder of Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes and Electra are under arrest at the royal palace of Argos, and an Argive jury is to decide whether the matricidal brother and sister are to be stoned to death! Once again, Menelaus of Sparta comes off badly, refusing to help Orestes even though Orestes is the son of Menelaus’ old comrade-in-arms Agamemnon; Orestes denounces him harshly: “You coward! Did you once command an army? Yes –/ To win a woman – not to help your friends. Traitor!” (p. 324)
Once the Argive verdict comes down – Orestes and Electra will not be stoned to death, but they are expected to kill themselves – Orestes and Pylades come up with what can only be described as a delusional plan to gain the favor of the Argives who have condemned them, with a bit of sweet revenge into the bargain; as Helen of Troy is in town, Pylades suggests, “Let’s kill Helen – and send Menelaus raving mad” (p. 339). Aside from the way Orestes, Electra, and Pylades seem ever ready to shed more blood, there is also a troublingly incestuous element in the way Orestes and Electra, brother and sister, address one another. Electra calls Orestes “My dearest!” and says “Our two hearts are one”; Orestes calls for Electra to embrace him and asks, “Why should I feel shame?/Body to body – thus, let us be close in love” (p. 337). Hello? Really? I would not be surprised to learn that, long before the deus ex machina resolution that ends this play, its original Athenian audience was ready to see Orestes and Electra leave the stage, by any means necessary. Kill them, don’t kill them – just get them out of our sight.
Iphigenia in Aulis, of all these plays, may be the one that is best known to modern audiences – or at least to international film buffs, as this is one of the plays that Greek director Michael Cacoyannis chose to adapt for the big screen in 1977. Cacoyannis chose well, for of all these plays it is the one that would be most immediately accessible to a modern audience. Its premise is horribly simple: Agamemnon’s Greek fleet has assembled at the port of Aulis, ready to sail for Troy; but the winds are calm, denying the fleet the opportunity to sail, and the priests have decreed that Agamemnon must lift the curse by offering his own daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis. Agamemnon therefore sends to his wife Clytemnestra a message directing her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis to be married to the hero Achilles. What awaits Iphigenia, of course, is not a magical wedding day but rather the knife of priestly sacrifice.
In this, possibly Euripides’ last play, the irony seems especially bitter. Once again, someone innocent and young is called upon to pay a bloody price for the follies and weaknesses of the old. Agamemnon and Menelaus dither about what to do, and their lack of resolution means that the entire Greek camp is ready to mutiny if Iphigenia is not sacrificed. It is left to a conscience-stricken elderly slave of Agamemnon to tell Clytemnestra the truth, and Clytemnestra begs Achilles to save her daughter, saying, “See, I throw away all pride and fall before you” (p. 400). Achilles puts on the heroic pose, saying, “I feel my proud heart stirred to noble action” (p. 401); but it is left to Iphigenia to carry out the central action of the drama.
At first, Iphigenia asks (understandably) to be spared: “Don’t kill me, so young! It is good to see the light;/Don’t make me gaze at darkness in the world below” (p. 411). Gradually, however, she comes to feel that she can help her fellow Greeks by giving herself up for sacrifice, and says, “Mother, I have thought this over; I know now what I must do./I am resolved to die. Above all things, I want to act nobly/And renounce all cowardly feelings” (p. 418). The conflict between the brave princess and her feckless father could not be more apparent.
We see in these plays how the real-life, slow-motion, long-lasting tragedy of the Peloponnesian War influenced and intensified Euripides’ already-tragic consciousness. These plays about supplication, loss, and sacrifice still hold all of their grim power, and speak to the people of the modern world as they did to the Athenians of old.
March 11, 2020
to be fair i only read orestes but anyways
@madeline miller i dare you to write your next book on orestes and pylades because i would read that in a heartbeat
@madeline miller i dare you to write your next book on orestes and pylades because i would read that in a heartbeat
July 31, 2021
I didn't know the story of any of these before reading them, which definitely made for an exciting experience. It was also my first prose translation which unfortunately slowed my reading of this down, sometimes to the point where I grew frustrated - although I'm aware this is a more likely a problem with me than the text, it still affected my overall experience.
If I try to remain objective however, these are amazing works. I especially love his characterisation and the voice he often gives his female characters, often so lacking in works from this time. More specifically, I think Ion is my favourite, with Suppliant Women coming second (I loved the debate of politics).
If I try to remain objective however, these are amazing works. I especially love his characterisation and the voice he often gives his female characters, often so lacking in works from this time. More specifically, I think Ion is my favourite, with Suppliant Women coming second (I loved the debate of politics).
Read
February 25, 2025Not gonna give this a star rating since it’s a bunch of different plays and it would be unfair, but I thought for the most part they were good and enjoyable!! I didn’t like Suppliant Women as much as the others but that might be more to do with the environment I read it in as opposed to the actual content
Apollo gets SO much air time in these plays
Apollo gets SO much air time in these plays
January 27, 2025
“When one with honeyed words but evil mind Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.”
October 23, 2025
🎭 The Children of Hercules (Heracleidae, 430 BCE)
The Children of Hercules is an incomplete play, with passages missing in its second half. It has as its background context the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), and before that the victory of the Athenians against the Persians at Marathon (490), where the play is set, in which the small city of Plataea aided the victors. Afraid of the domination of them by neighbouring Thebes, Plataea had been a close ally of Athens since 520 BCE. The Peloponnesian War was started by such a takeover attempt by Thebes, where Plataea slaughtered 180 Theban prisoners, and in reprisal the Thebans slaughtered 200 Plataeans. Athens took in hundreds of its surviving women and children, plus 200 soldiers who had managed to escape. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Children of Heracles’, p.17).
The play’s action commences when Iolaus, former friend of the departed Heracles, now protector of his children, seeks refuge with the Athenians at Marathon because of the vendetta of the king Eurystheus of Argos (Mycenae) against the children of Heracles for the enmity he bore to Heracles as the result of a disagreement between Hera (Eurystheus’s champion) and Zeus (Heracles’s champion) (Graves, The Greek Myths: 2, ‘118: The Birth of Heracles’, pp.84-119).
It deals with 5 main elements:
• ‘the moral question of the obligations of a city towards refugees’;
• ‘the moral question of the treatment of prisoners of war’;
• ‘the concept of sacrifice in relation to war’;
• ‘the question of a city’s obedience to [an] oracle’;
• ‘the unwisdom and unworthiness of revenge as a motive for action’. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Children of Heracles', pp.16-17).
🎭 Andromache (425 BCE)
Andromache follows the events of Trojan Women (415 BCE, though written 10 or more years before), where we saw Andromache, wife of the dead Hector, becoming the slave of Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son, where she universalised that fate of women bereft by war and pulled away from home in slavery; as were Cassandra and Hecuba. Neoptolemus, absent from the play, but always present in the background, already has a wife, Hermione, daughter of Menelaus, and the running plot is her jealousy for Andromache, and the machinations of Menelaus and his nephew Orestes, who, it transpires, has murdered Neoptolemus, or caused him to be killed at Delphi, because he was promised the hand of Hermione, Menelaus’s daughter, who instead gave her away to Neoptolemus for his support in the Trojan Wars (ll.964-9). Its themes, therefore, are the status of women—‘the unjust position of helpless women in a world organized by men [is] inevitable when men’s lives and thoughts are dominated by war’—and a criticism of war—‘the men who build and dominate it regard warfare and mutual slaughter as their paramount function’—and the theme of revenge—‘it was for revenge that Achilles killed Andromache’s husband, that Menelaus burnt Troy, that Orestes killed Neoptolemus, and that Hermione wanted to have Andromache killed’ (Euripides, Orestes and Other Plays, Penguin Classics, 1972, Vellacott, Philip (trans.), ‘Introduction: Andromache’, pp.26-43, pp.26-7, 41). Andromache has a plot complicated by the motives of Menelaus and Orestes, and further to this, we must decide which meaning to take from several sections where it may be ambiguous. It is useful to turn to the criticism of Vellacott to discover its warp and weft:
All Greek tragedies are unorthodox, and it is possible to say that this one is more unorthodox than most. The total disappearance of Andromache, the want of any tragic hero or heroine in the accepted sense, the apparent break in continuity after the departure of Menelaus [...]—all these things make it difficult to describe a tidy structure for the piece. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Andromache’, p.43).
🎭 The Suppliants (The Suppliant Women, 423 BCE)
The Suppliants follows the events of Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (467), with its central concern over the lack of burial rites given to the seven Argive allied champions against each gate of the city, the subject of Sophocles’s Antigone (441 BCE), who defied Creon to give her brother Polynices due burial rites. Adrastus, king of Argos, who led the allied attack, has come with seven suppliant women and seven sons of the dead, the two Choruses, to the temple of Demeter to solicit help from Aethra, mother of Theseus, king of Athens, for help in bringing home the bodies of the seven champions. ‘Its style is formal, its drama symbolic or schematic; its use of plot so abstract [...] as to suggest the structure of a ballet.’ (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Suppliant Women’, p.44).
The play’s action is in three parts: the request for aid by the suppliants; Theseus’s obtaining support from the people and his rejection of Creon’s herald in his attempt to prevent their action; and the battle against Thebes to collect the fallen. Its theme is the constant anti-war message against the background of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, posited by a series of contrasts:
The message [...] is conveyed partly with a subtle irony, partly with a pathetic directness; and this contrast is accompanied by a series of other contrasts, which are static rather than dramatic: democracy, ideal and practical; war, moral and immoral; the communal and private aspects of folly and suffering; the logical revolt of maturity against war, and the subservience of the young to primitive emotion. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Suppliant Women’, p.44).
Much of this is expounded by Theseus in a series of interchanges with Adrastus, Aethra, and the Theban Herald, deployed first in a series of stichomythic exchanges, then theses. At times contradictory, Theseus, a young ruler, first denigrates the rashness of youth, who ‘multiply wars unscrupulously’ (l.231), and then ‘values its young men as the city’s greatest resource’ (443). He defines the ideal democracy (431-454), while representing the practical one: this moment the people are being moved by a suppliant plea, which could well mean war, even while the ideal response would be not to go to war for the sake of foreigners’ misfortunes. But a general principle applies: the Hellene traditional law of appropriate burial rites. Creon, who stands for an absolute monarch, refuses to obey this law, and Theseus, who stands for the elected democratic leader, though still king, stands for upholding these rites. The arguments are finely balanced. But the Theban Herald states the main message, even while offering war as rebuttal:
For when an issue of war hangs on the people’s vote,
Then no one reckons that his own death may be involved;
This mournful prospect he assigns to someone else.
If Death stood there in person while men cast their votes,
Hellas would be dying from war-mania. (ll.482-6).
The question of what is a just war is prevalent, if varyingly answered. The play appeared in the tenth year of the Peloponnesian War (431-404), and in 425, six years into a war which lasted 27 years, and led to the utter defeat of Athens, the Spartans had offered peace.
But perhaps the ultimate irony lies in its epilogue. As the climax, an elegy for the fallen seven sons by their mothers and their sons in poetic laments, brings an oath from the sons that they will one day avenge their fallen fathers, the Chorus objects: ‘This wrong sleeps not yet. / Why must we always weep?’ (ll.1147-8). Finally Athena appears and demands an oath from Adrastus that Argos will never march on Athens, in return for this honour done for them—a reasonable injunction. But the second oath she demands is that one day the sons of the fallen will march on Thebes and lay it to waste. Considering the question of the entire play to this point is whether continual wars amongst the Greek states are good for anybody, this is a strange ending—and can only be construed in terms of the irony that Euripides employs to emphasise his salient meaning.
🎭 The Phoenician Women (412 BCE)
The Phoenician Women is a play with not a few seeming anomalies. It depicts the same events as Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (467), where the seven champions of Thebes meet those of the Argive alliance against it, in the context of the last decade of the Peloponnesian War (431-404), but it does so by conflating the central myth of Oedipus—and Eteocles, Polynices, Jocasta and Antigone—into its doomed atmosphere. It deploys a running theme of two beasts fighting one another, the Lion and the Boar, from the obscure prophecy of the oracle at Delphi which recommended that Adrastus ‘Yoke to a two-wheeled chariot the boar and lion which fight in your palace’, or marry each of his daughters to these beasts, the lion being the emblem of Thebes, the boar that of Calydon; Polynices married Aegeia, Tydeus of Calydon, Deipyla. Both suitors had been banished from their lands, and Adrastus promised both, in return for fulfilling this prophecy, to aid them in recovering their thrones, and first to march on Thebes (Graves, The Greek Myths: 2, ‘106: The Seven Against Thebes’, pp.15-21, 106.a,b,c). The general plot is well known, and was to the Athenians of 412 BCE, as was the central myth of Oedipus. Even while they may well have identified themselves with Eteocles and Thebes, they could not have been blind to the dooms of both famous narratives, nor the dooms pronounced by Teiresias.
The play offers manifold ironies in its presentation of the myths and its characters, and perhaps the central one is the Chorus of Phoenician Women themselves, only vaguely identified, brought to Thebes by Eteocles from some military campaign to be ensconced at Delphi, that neutral Hellenic site of prophecy; thus ‘their function in the play is that of uncommitted and impartial observers’ (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Phoenician Women’, p.58). Through stasimon, ode and parados, the Chorus contrast Dionysus with Ares, the ravages of the Sphinx with those of the Spartan invaders, and the other myths with the contemporary context.
In a militant play, the only counterbalances of softness come from the reconciliation meeting of Jocasta and Polynices and in the increasing woes—of the women, particularly—as the battle and the prophecy unfolds, and the sons kill each other, Jocasta commits suicide in grief—delivered through two messenger reports—and Oedipus is banished by Creon for the city’s further safety. But one more tally to the personal loss is added, that of Menoeceus, Creon’s son, who must sacrifice himself to save Thebes according to the prophecy of Teiresias. The constant reminders by the Chorus of the founding of Thebes by Cadmus and its rise to greatness, standing now at the gates of doom, drenched in the fateful curse of Oedipus, colour the entire play in the inescapable conclusion that even more woe is to befall it—a prescient mood, when the play was first performed (412-409 BCE, depending upon the authority), but a few years before the fall of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War.
🎭 Orestes (408 BCE)
Orestes deals with the period of the Oresteian myth after the killing of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers (Choephoroe, 458), where Orestes is held to account in the trial by the Assembly of Argos, along with his sister Electra. This trial is reported off-stage by messenger; Orestes and Electra are to be killed. We see the return of Menelaus, king of Sparta, coming to Argos on hearing the news of the deaths of Agamemnon and now Clytemnestra; he adopts a neutral, unemotional position, neither condemning nor condoning Orestes’s actions—but does not speak for his nephew at the Assembly. The Chorus, however, is that of the women of Argos, ‘the ordinary people, good-hearted but uncritical’, who are easily swayed by Orestes’s continual thirst for blood-for-blood revenge—something he will only be exonerated for by the intervention for justice by Athena in Aeschylus’s Eumenides (458), intimated in its ending (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Orestes’, pp.68-80, p.72).
It is clear that in this phase of the Oresteian myth, Orestes is mad; he is intent on blaming Helen for the curse on the house of Atreus, and on killing her and her daughter Hermione, by Menelaus, for the fate which has befallen his family. Euripides’s discussion of continual blood-for-blood revenge highlights the insanity of Orestes and the Chorus’s position as the leaders and the people of Argos in contrast with those of Athens in the last years of the Peloponnesian War—but he offers no suitable rectifying solution. The play ends with the appearance of Apollo, in a confused interim resolution, who bids Orestes cease his violent revenges in promise of Hermione for his wife, Argos for his kingdom, and for Menelaus to relinquish Helen, now made immortal, snatched by Apollo from the vengeance of Orestes, and Orestes to remain one year in exile until his trial in Athens. Such a jumbled outcome, pending a future trial, and removing Helen from all blame for the Trojan War which she is subject to in many of the plays of Euripides, seems to make a mockery of both the perverse actions of the mortal leaders and people of the state, as well as the motives and schemes of the gods. It is unsurprising that this chaos and the moral degradation of its leaders and the willingness of the people to go along with their unwise schemes is a sideways comment on the position of Athens at the time.
Yet Orestes leaves questions, specifically questions of style. The stichomythia, particularly between Orestes and Pylades (ll.732-98) and between Electra and the split Chorus (ll. 1246-98) is at best pedestrian, at times even slightly ludicrous. Whether this can be put down to the play coming late in Euripides’s lifetime or that a need for some humour amidst the grim plots of murder was required—though that is supplied by the vernacular of the Phrygian slave (ll.1372-1527)—cannot be sufficiently answered. We might borrow a phrase from Kitto when he referred to another late play of Euripides: Orestes ‘is a thoroughly second-rate play’ (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, p.81).
🎭 Iphigenia in Aulis (406 BCE)
Iphigenia in Aulis rarely suffers from the same questions of style as does Orestes, but rather from another aspect, that of provenance, since it was incomplete at the time of the death of Euripides (406 BCE), and probably completed—and interpolated, as is likely the opening passage of the prologue and the scene of the Old Man—by his son. Yet, Vellacott assures us, these interpolations are in themselves well-crafted scenes, even while they may not fit the overall structure perfectly, but well enough conform to the playwright’s style, with the probable exception of Achilles’s speech (ll.920-72) (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, pp.84-5, 92).
As a tragedy, it proffers the following problems, because it ultimately does not end in tragedy, which we know anyway from Euripides’s earlier play, Iphigenia in Tauris:
There is no tragic hero or heroine, no pattern of crime and retribution; and we are not invited to take divinity seriously. The play is about human suffering, its modes and its causes; and the fact that none of the three sufferers is of heroic stature—Agamemnon a moral coward, Clytemnestra a selfish and foolish woman, Iphigenia a brave child—this fact cannot possibly make the play a comedy, whatever ending the author intended for it. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, p.84).
These issues aside, our principal concern with the play is neither its style nor its themes—the insanity of war, and the characters of those who prosecute it, and whether anyone is free, or a slave to the demands of others—it is with its central heroic figure. We might superficially assume that its shining cast of characters from legend—Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, Odysseus and so on—would be presented as such heroic figures out of heroic epic, but this is not so. None of these figures comes out well as character sketches in a play where they are posited as fundamentally erring in all that they do: the cause of the war, the means by which to get there, the aims of its success, the rape, sacking, massacre, and slavery of Troy. None of these reasons is creditable, and as the play progresses, the character assassinations of these figures of heroic legend and their objectives mount a scathing attack on the phase Athens faced towards the end of a generation-long war which they were about to lose in the utter humiliation of defeat.
♀ The principal concern of the play is the brave fortitude of its only heroine, Iphigenia, probably only about fourteen years of age (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, p.89). She emerges from the events with the same appeal as do Antigone (Sophocles), Alcestis (Euripides) and Phaedra (Euripides, Hippolytus)—brave female heroines, appealing in their purity of spirit, bravely facing death under the exigence of war prosecuted by warmongering males in a patriarchal society where the women and the slaves suffer the most—a common theme throughout Euripides’s work (Alcestis’s fate is different in detail, but with the same overall message). Iphigenia’s fate is as sacrificial offering to appease dubious motives: whether a mutinous navy or a hostile god—Poseidon was a champion of Ilium, and may well have brought calm seas to beleaguer the Greek host (Hadas, Greek Drama, Euripides, Trojan Women, ll.1-6, p.289)—she must die, according to the prophecy of Calchas. Knowing the overall plotline from Iphigenia in Tauris, the play cannot then connote a full-blown tragedy, for we know Iphigenia will be saved by Artemis on the altar by the substitution of a deer; but it is the knife-edge of events which lead up to this fate which is the harrowing of Hell. It engenders a tenderness for Iphigenia which is the tragic effect of those other heroines and their narratives and the residing impact of this play; that the male ‘heroes’ come off with tarnished reputations and worse is a telling residual effect and adjunct to Euripides’s residing themes. It is unsurprising that the ruse to bring her from her home to this island of slaughter, the promise of marriage to Achilles, is a lie perpetrated by men to prosecute their war.
What Euripides is showing in this play is the pretence and falsity inseparable from war: the commanders who cannot command, the alleged reasons which are not real reasons, the loyalty which is expedient, the resolves which are provisional. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, p.91).
The ironic comparison with Athens a couple of years before capitulation (404 BCE), from which Euripides has fled into exile (Macedon), where he could continue writing, to die in a foreign land (406 BCE), is inevitable.
The Children of Hercules is an incomplete play, with passages missing in its second half. It has as its background context the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), and before that the victory of the Athenians against the Persians at Marathon (490), where the play is set, in which the small city of Plataea aided the victors. Afraid of the domination of them by neighbouring Thebes, Plataea had been a close ally of Athens since 520 BCE. The Peloponnesian War was started by such a takeover attempt by Thebes, where Plataea slaughtered 180 Theban prisoners, and in reprisal the Thebans slaughtered 200 Plataeans. Athens took in hundreds of its surviving women and children, plus 200 soldiers who had managed to escape. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Children of Heracles’, p.17).
The play’s action commences when Iolaus, former friend of the departed Heracles, now protector of his children, seeks refuge with the Athenians at Marathon because of the vendetta of the king Eurystheus of Argos (Mycenae) against the children of Heracles for the enmity he bore to Heracles as the result of a disagreement between Hera (Eurystheus’s champion) and Zeus (Heracles’s champion) (Graves, The Greek Myths: 2, ‘118: The Birth of Heracles’, pp.84-119).
It deals with 5 main elements:
• ‘the moral question of the obligations of a city towards refugees’;
• ‘the moral question of the treatment of prisoners of war’;
• ‘the concept of sacrifice in relation to war’;
• ‘the question of a city’s obedience to [an] oracle’;
• ‘the unwisdom and unworthiness of revenge as a motive for action’. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Children of Heracles', pp.16-17).
🎭 Andromache (425 BCE)
Andromache follows the events of Trojan Women (415 BCE, though written 10 or more years before), where we saw Andromache, wife of the dead Hector, becoming the slave of Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son, where she universalised that fate of women bereft by war and pulled away from home in slavery; as were Cassandra and Hecuba. Neoptolemus, absent from the play, but always present in the background, already has a wife, Hermione, daughter of Menelaus, and the running plot is her jealousy for Andromache, and the machinations of Menelaus and his nephew Orestes, who, it transpires, has murdered Neoptolemus, or caused him to be killed at Delphi, because he was promised the hand of Hermione, Menelaus’s daughter, who instead gave her away to Neoptolemus for his support in the Trojan Wars (ll.964-9). Its themes, therefore, are the status of women—‘the unjust position of helpless women in a world organized by men [is] inevitable when men’s lives and thoughts are dominated by war’—and a criticism of war—‘the men who build and dominate it regard warfare and mutual slaughter as their paramount function’—and the theme of revenge—‘it was for revenge that Achilles killed Andromache’s husband, that Menelaus burnt Troy, that Orestes killed Neoptolemus, and that Hermione wanted to have Andromache killed’ (Euripides, Orestes and Other Plays, Penguin Classics, 1972, Vellacott, Philip (trans.), ‘Introduction: Andromache’, pp.26-43, pp.26-7, 41). Andromache has a plot complicated by the motives of Menelaus and Orestes, and further to this, we must decide which meaning to take from several sections where it may be ambiguous. It is useful to turn to the criticism of Vellacott to discover its warp and weft:
All Greek tragedies are unorthodox, and it is possible to say that this one is more unorthodox than most. The total disappearance of Andromache, the want of any tragic hero or heroine in the accepted sense, the apparent break in continuity after the departure of Menelaus [...]—all these things make it difficult to describe a tidy structure for the piece. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Andromache’, p.43).
🎭 The Suppliants (The Suppliant Women, 423 BCE)
The Suppliants follows the events of Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (467), with its central concern over the lack of burial rites given to the seven Argive allied champions against each gate of the city, the subject of Sophocles’s Antigone (441 BCE), who defied Creon to give her brother Polynices due burial rites. Adrastus, king of Argos, who led the allied attack, has come with seven suppliant women and seven sons of the dead, the two Choruses, to the temple of Demeter to solicit help from Aethra, mother of Theseus, king of Athens, for help in bringing home the bodies of the seven champions. ‘Its style is formal, its drama symbolic or schematic; its use of plot so abstract [...] as to suggest the structure of a ballet.’ (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Suppliant Women’, p.44).
The play’s action is in three parts: the request for aid by the suppliants; Theseus’s obtaining support from the people and his rejection of Creon’s herald in his attempt to prevent their action; and the battle against Thebes to collect the fallen. Its theme is the constant anti-war message against the background of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, posited by a series of contrasts:
The message [...] is conveyed partly with a subtle irony, partly with a pathetic directness; and this contrast is accompanied by a series of other contrasts, which are static rather than dramatic: democracy, ideal and practical; war, moral and immoral; the communal and private aspects of folly and suffering; the logical revolt of maturity against war, and the subservience of the young to primitive emotion. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Suppliant Women’, p.44).
Much of this is expounded by Theseus in a series of interchanges with Adrastus, Aethra, and the Theban Herald, deployed first in a series of stichomythic exchanges, then theses. At times contradictory, Theseus, a young ruler, first denigrates the rashness of youth, who ‘multiply wars unscrupulously’ (l.231), and then ‘values its young men as the city’s greatest resource’ (443). He defines the ideal democracy (431-454), while representing the practical one: this moment the people are being moved by a suppliant plea, which could well mean war, even while the ideal response would be not to go to war for the sake of foreigners’ misfortunes. But a general principle applies: the Hellene traditional law of appropriate burial rites. Creon, who stands for an absolute monarch, refuses to obey this law, and Theseus, who stands for the elected democratic leader, though still king, stands for upholding these rites. The arguments are finely balanced. But the Theban Herald states the main message, even while offering war as rebuttal:
For when an issue of war hangs on the people’s vote,
Then no one reckons that his own death may be involved;
This mournful prospect he assigns to someone else.
If Death stood there in person while men cast their votes,
Hellas would be dying from war-mania. (ll.482-6).
The question of what is a just war is prevalent, if varyingly answered. The play appeared in the tenth year of the Peloponnesian War (431-404), and in 425, six years into a war which lasted 27 years, and led to the utter defeat of Athens, the Spartans had offered peace.
But perhaps the ultimate irony lies in its epilogue. As the climax, an elegy for the fallen seven sons by their mothers and their sons in poetic laments, brings an oath from the sons that they will one day avenge their fallen fathers, the Chorus objects: ‘This wrong sleeps not yet. / Why must we always weep?’ (ll.1147-8). Finally Athena appears and demands an oath from Adrastus that Argos will never march on Athens, in return for this honour done for them—a reasonable injunction. But the second oath she demands is that one day the sons of the fallen will march on Thebes and lay it to waste. Considering the question of the entire play to this point is whether continual wars amongst the Greek states are good for anybody, this is a strange ending—and can only be construed in terms of the irony that Euripides employs to emphasise his salient meaning.
🎭 The Phoenician Women (412 BCE)
The Phoenician Women is a play with not a few seeming anomalies. It depicts the same events as Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (467), where the seven champions of Thebes meet those of the Argive alliance against it, in the context of the last decade of the Peloponnesian War (431-404), but it does so by conflating the central myth of Oedipus—and Eteocles, Polynices, Jocasta and Antigone—into its doomed atmosphere. It deploys a running theme of two beasts fighting one another, the Lion and the Boar, from the obscure prophecy of the oracle at Delphi which recommended that Adrastus ‘Yoke to a two-wheeled chariot the boar and lion which fight in your palace’, or marry each of his daughters to these beasts, the lion being the emblem of Thebes, the boar that of Calydon; Polynices married Aegeia, Tydeus of Calydon, Deipyla. Both suitors had been banished from their lands, and Adrastus promised both, in return for fulfilling this prophecy, to aid them in recovering their thrones, and first to march on Thebes (Graves, The Greek Myths: 2, ‘106: The Seven Against Thebes’, pp.15-21, 106.a,b,c). The general plot is well known, and was to the Athenians of 412 BCE, as was the central myth of Oedipus. Even while they may well have identified themselves with Eteocles and Thebes, they could not have been blind to the dooms of both famous narratives, nor the dooms pronounced by Teiresias.
The play offers manifold ironies in its presentation of the myths and its characters, and perhaps the central one is the Chorus of Phoenician Women themselves, only vaguely identified, brought to Thebes by Eteocles from some military campaign to be ensconced at Delphi, that neutral Hellenic site of prophecy; thus ‘their function in the play is that of uncommitted and impartial observers’ (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: The Phoenician Women’, p.58). Through stasimon, ode and parados, the Chorus contrast Dionysus with Ares, the ravages of the Sphinx with those of the Spartan invaders, and the other myths with the contemporary context.
In a militant play, the only counterbalances of softness come from the reconciliation meeting of Jocasta and Polynices and in the increasing woes—of the women, particularly—as the battle and the prophecy unfolds, and the sons kill each other, Jocasta commits suicide in grief—delivered through two messenger reports—and Oedipus is banished by Creon for the city’s further safety. But one more tally to the personal loss is added, that of Menoeceus, Creon’s son, who must sacrifice himself to save Thebes according to the prophecy of Teiresias. The constant reminders by the Chorus of the founding of Thebes by Cadmus and its rise to greatness, standing now at the gates of doom, drenched in the fateful curse of Oedipus, colour the entire play in the inescapable conclusion that even more woe is to befall it—a prescient mood, when the play was first performed (412-409 BCE, depending upon the authority), but a few years before the fall of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War.
🎭 Orestes (408 BCE)
Orestes deals with the period of the Oresteian myth after the killing of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers (Choephoroe, 458), where Orestes is held to account in the trial by the Assembly of Argos, along with his sister Electra. This trial is reported off-stage by messenger; Orestes and Electra are to be killed. We see the return of Menelaus, king of Sparta, coming to Argos on hearing the news of the deaths of Agamemnon and now Clytemnestra; he adopts a neutral, unemotional position, neither condemning nor condoning Orestes’s actions—but does not speak for his nephew at the Assembly. The Chorus, however, is that of the women of Argos, ‘the ordinary people, good-hearted but uncritical’, who are easily swayed by Orestes’s continual thirst for blood-for-blood revenge—something he will only be exonerated for by the intervention for justice by Athena in Aeschylus’s Eumenides (458), intimated in its ending (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Orestes’, pp.68-80, p.72).
It is clear that in this phase of the Oresteian myth, Orestes is mad; he is intent on blaming Helen for the curse on the house of Atreus, and on killing her and her daughter Hermione, by Menelaus, for the fate which has befallen his family. Euripides’s discussion of continual blood-for-blood revenge highlights the insanity of Orestes and the Chorus’s position as the leaders and the people of Argos in contrast with those of Athens in the last years of the Peloponnesian War—but he offers no suitable rectifying solution. The play ends with the appearance of Apollo, in a confused interim resolution, who bids Orestes cease his violent revenges in promise of Hermione for his wife, Argos for his kingdom, and for Menelaus to relinquish Helen, now made immortal, snatched by Apollo from the vengeance of Orestes, and Orestes to remain one year in exile until his trial in Athens. Such a jumbled outcome, pending a future trial, and removing Helen from all blame for the Trojan War which she is subject to in many of the plays of Euripides, seems to make a mockery of both the perverse actions of the mortal leaders and people of the state, as well as the motives and schemes of the gods. It is unsurprising that this chaos and the moral degradation of its leaders and the willingness of the people to go along with their unwise schemes is a sideways comment on the position of Athens at the time.
Yet Orestes leaves questions, specifically questions of style. The stichomythia, particularly between Orestes and Pylades (ll.732-98) and between Electra and the split Chorus (ll. 1246-98) is at best pedestrian, at times even slightly ludicrous. Whether this can be put down to the play coming late in Euripides’s lifetime or that a need for some humour amidst the grim plots of murder was required—though that is supplied by the vernacular of the Phrygian slave (ll.1372-1527)—cannot be sufficiently answered. We might borrow a phrase from Kitto when he referred to another late play of Euripides: Orestes ‘is a thoroughly second-rate play’ (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, p.81).
🎭 Iphigenia in Aulis (406 BCE)
Iphigenia in Aulis rarely suffers from the same questions of style as does Orestes, but rather from another aspect, that of provenance, since it was incomplete at the time of the death of Euripides (406 BCE), and probably completed—and interpolated, as is likely the opening passage of the prologue and the scene of the Old Man—by his son. Yet, Vellacott assures us, these interpolations are in themselves well-crafted scenes, even while they may not fit the overall structure perfectly, but well enough conform to the playwright’s style, with the probable exception of Achilles’s speech (ll.920-72) (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, pp.84-5, 92).
As a tragedy, it proffers the following problems, because it ultimately does not end in tragedy, which we know anyway from Euripides’s earlier play, Iphigenia in Tauris:
There is no tragic hero or heroine, no pattern of crime and retribution; and we are not invited to take divinity seriously. The play is about human suffering, its modes and its causes; and the fact that none of the three sufferers is of heroic stature—Agamemnon a moral coward, Clytemnestra a selfish and foolish woman, Iphigenia a brave child—this fact cannot possibly make the play a comedy, whatever ending the author intended for it. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, p.84).
These issues aside, our principal concern with the play is neither its style nor its themes—the insanity of war, and the characters of those who prosecute it, and whether anyone is free, or a slave to the demands of others—it is with its central heroic figure. We might superficially assume that its shining cast of characters from legend—Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, Odysseus and so on—would be presented as such heroic figures out of heroic epic, but this is not so. None of these figures comes out well as character sketches in a play where they are posited as fundamentally erring in all that they do: the cause of the war, the means by which to get there, the aims of its success, the rape, sacking, massacre, and slavery of Troy. None of these reasons is creditable, and as the play progresses, the character assassinations of these figures of heroic legend and their objectives mount a scathing attack on the phase Athens faced towards the end of a generation-long war which they were about to lose in the utter humiliation of defeat.
♀ The principal concern of the play is the brave fortitude of its only heroine, Iphigenia, probably only about fourteen years of age (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, p.89). She emerges from the events with the same appeal as do Antigone (Sophocles), Alcestis (Euripides) and Phaedra (Euripides, Hippolytus)—brave female heroines, appealing in their purity of spirit, bravely facing death under the exigence of war prosecuted by warmongering males in a patriarchal society where the women and the slaves suffer the most—a common theme throughout Euripides’s work (Alcestis’s fate is different in detail, but with the same overall message). Iphigenia’s fate is as sacrificial offering to appease dubious motives: whether a mutinous navy or a hostile god—Poseidon was a champion of Ilium, and may well have brought calm seas to beleaguer the Greek host (Hadas, Greek Drama, Euripides, Trojan Women, ll.1-6, p.289)—she must die, according to the prophecy of Calchas. Knowing the overall plotline from Iphigenia in Tauris, the play cannot then connote a full-blown tragedy, for we know Iphigenia will be saved by Artemis on the altar by the substitution of a deer; but it is the knife-edge of events which lead up to this fate which is the harrowing of Hell. It engenders a tenderness for Iphigenia which is the tragic effect of those other heroines and their narratives and the residing impact of this play; that the male ‘heroes’ come off with tarnished reputations and worse is a telling residual effect and adjunct to Euripides’s residing themes. It is unsurprising that the ruse to bring her from her home to this island of slaughter, the promise of marriage to Achilles, is a lie perpetrated by men to prosecute their war.
What Euripides is showing in this play is the pretence and falsity inseparable from war: the commanders who cannot command, the alleged reasons which are not real reasons, the loyalty which is expedient, the resolves which are provisional. (Vellacott, ‘Introduction: Iphigenia in Aulis, p.91).
The ironic comparison with Athens a couple of years before capitulation (404 BCE), from which Euripides has fled into exile (Macedon), where he could continue writing, to die in a foreign land (406 BCE), is inevitable.
February 26, 2023
fuck the atreides and helen too 💅🏻
April 6, 2025
I have reached the last of Euripides' (surviving) plays. This book contained six!
The Children of Heracles: This play has only partially survived and unfortunately too much is missing to get a coherent idea of what Euripides is aiming for. The play focuses on the aftermath of Heracles' death (by poison shirt as we saw in Heracles), with his children, mother, and now-elderly companion Aeolus being pursued and persecuted across all of Greece. We once again have the moral question of the sacrifice of a maiden for political/military gain, which I didn't realise was such a popular trope. Macaria resolves to die to save her brothers, and walks off-stage never to be mentioned again. With Alcmene (Heracles' mother) taking the stage I expected every moment for the reveal that her daughter was dead (or had been saved??) but alas Macaria's ultimate fate is unknown.
Andromache: This was one I'd been waiting for, being another play in which Euripides focuses on a female character who might otherwise be overlooked. We saw Andromache taken into slavery in The Women of Troy, her infant son torn from her arms and murdered. Now the concubine of Achilles' son Neoptolemus, she finds herself the target of his lawful wife Hermione and Hermione's scheming father Menelaus. They are upset that Andromache has borne a son to her captor, while Hermione remains childless. Menelaus really embraces the villain role here, gloating and threatening almost like a modern movie villain. Then Orestes (Menelaus's nephew) arrives fresh with Neoptolemus's blood on his hands, to claim Hermione for himself. A tangled web indeed. For my own part, I am simply satisfied that poor Andromache survives to later become a queen.
The Suppliant Women: This was a bit of a miss for me. Basically the losers of the Seven Against Thebes battle (in which Oedipus's sons off each other and effectively end his family line) come crawling to Athens to beg Theseus's help to recover the bodies of their dead. Theseus, being a super good and noble guy, intervenes to retrieve the bodies but otherwise refuses to interfere, although from a modern perspective he is a huge asshole to Adrastus (the foreign king) in the process. From the ancient Greek perspective I expect he would be considered justified in talking down to the defeated king - after all, the defeat shows that he did not have the favour of the gods on his side. In the end the breaved wives and mothers are able to mourn the men they pointlessly lost in that failure of a war, but their young sons vow to seek vengeance once they come of age - sowing the seeds for yet another pointless loss of life.
The Phoenician Women: We return to the siege of Thebes as Oedipus's sons face off against each other. Somehow, Jocasta is still alive and provides the central figure for this drama. Creon, one of my favourite characters, is back again, still dealing with his family's nonsense. We have another "maiden" sacrifice, but this time the "maiden" is a young boy - one of Creon's sons. The debate between Polynieces and Eteocles is probably the best part. Polynieces is concerned with fairness while Eteocles believes that might is right. As always, they are drawn toward mutual annihilation by either stubbornness or fate. Unlike the house of Atreus, which gets a second chance through Orestes' purification, there is no hope for Oedipus's family.
Orestes: Takes place directly after Orestes murders his mother, before his cleansing by trial. The furies in this case take the form of a deadly illness and hallucinations that plague the matricidal hero. The tension steadily increases as it becomes clear that Orestes and Electra will be judged guilty by the citizens, who wish to stone them to death. Tyndareos raises a very pertinent question - why jump to murder when the rule of law exists? Couldn't Orestes have avoided all of this blood guilt simply by bringing a case against his mother? It's sort of funny, this intrusion of realism into this epic cycle of revenge. Orestes, still convicted of his righteousness despite the condemnation of the court, plunges increasingly into madness, and the climax sees Orestes shut up in his burning ancestral home, having murdered Helen, knife now at Hermione's throat, threatening to murder her unless Menelaus does something to absolve him. At this point, kind of hilariously, Apollo turns up and tells everyone to chill out. The speed at which Menelaus switches from desperate fear for his only child to reassured that everything will work out is completely out of place against the high drama of a moment ago. And poor Hermione - we never get to hear what she thinks of Apollo's pronouncement that her "happy ending" is that she will marry the man who is currently holding her hostage.
Iphigenia in Aulis: Another I was really eager for. The sacrifice of Iphigenia has such massive impact on the fates of so many, and now we get to see it for ourselves. The young girl is brought to Aulis by the promise of a marriage to Achilles, escorted by her mother Clytamnestra who brings the infant Orestes along too. There's a lot of irony in Clytamnestra's interactions with her husband - he knows she has come to die, while she thinks a wedding is soon to take place. Achilles comes off as a blustering buffoon, and that's probably intentional - he talks a good talk about saving Iphigenia but I imagine he's relieved when she goes willingly to her death. The most heartbreaking moment for me was when Iphigenia expresses her humiliation over the marriage-ruse. Among all the grandstanding, that's a really human moment. Clytamnestra's anger is understandable, but even now she expresses her fatal flaw - her habit of clinging to bitter grudges interferes with her ability to truly reason with her husband.
I liked Euripides. I liked his focus on women and how the structure of the patriarchal society they live in impacts their lives. They are tools, slaves, sacrifices and child-bearers. They lack true agency of their own, and if they try to seize it by some act of rage or rebellion, they are villainised.
The Children of Heracles: This play has only partially survived and unfortunately too much is missing to get a coherent idea of what Euripides is aiming for. The play focuses on the aftermath of Heracles' death (by poison shirt as we saw in Heracles), with his children, mother, and now-elderly companion Aeolus being pursued and persecuted across all of Greece. We once again have the moral question of the sacrifice of a maiden for political/military gain, which I didn't realise was such a popular trope. Macaria resolves to die to save her brothers, and walks off-stage never to be mentioned again. With Alcmene (Heracles' mother) taking the stage I expected every moment for the reveal that her daughter was dead (or had been saved??) but alas Macaria's ultimate fate is unknown.
Andromache: This was one I'd been waiting for, being another play in which Euripides focuses on a female character who might otherwise be overlooked. We saw Andromache taken into slavery in The Women of Troy, her infant son torn from her arms and murdered. Now the concubine of Achilles' son Neoptolemus, she finds herself the target of his lawful wife Hermione and Hermione's scheming father Menelaus. They are upset that Andromache has borne a son to her captor, while Hermione remains childless. Menelaus really embraces the villain role here, gloating and threatening almost like a modern movie villain. Then Orestes (Menelaus's nephew) arrives fresh with Neoptolemus's blood on his hands, to claim Hermione for himself. A tangled web indeed. For my own part, I am simply satisfied that poor Andromache survives to later become a queen.
The Suppliant Women: This was a bit of a miss for me. Basically the losers of the Seven Against Thebes battle (in which Oedipus's sons off each other and effectively end his family line) come crawling to Athens to beg Theseus's help to recover the bodies of their dead. Theseus, being a super good and noble guy, intervenes to retrieve the bodies but otherwise refuses to interfere, although from a modern perspective he is a huge asshole to Adrastus (the foreign king) in the process. From the ancient Greek perspective I expect he would be considered justified in talking down to the defeated king - after all, the defeat shows that he did not have the favour of the gods on his side. In the end the breaved wives and mothers are able to mourn the men they pointlessly lost in that failure of a war, but their young sons vow to seek vengeance once they come of age - sowing the seeds for yet another pointless loss of life.
The Phoenician Women: We return to the siege of Thebes as Oedipus's sons face off against each other. Somehow, Jocasta is still alive and provides the central figure for this drama. Creon, one of my favourite characters, is back again, still dealing with his family's nonsense. We have another "maiden" sacrifice, but this time the "maiden" is a young boy - one of Creon's sons. The debate between Polynieces and Eteocles is probably the best part. Polynieces is concerned with fairness while Eteocles believes that might is right. As always, they are drawn toward mutual annihilation by either stubbornness or fate. Unlike the house of Atreus, which gets a second chance through Orestes' purification, there is no hope for Oedipus's family.
Orestes: Takes place directly after Orestes murders his mother, before his cleansing by trial. The furies in this case take the form of a deadly illness and hallucinations that plague the matricidal hero. The tension steadily increases as it becomes clear that Orestes and Electra will be judged guilty by the citizens, who wish to stone them to death. Tyndareos raises a very pertinent question - why jump to murder when the rule of law exists? Couldn't Orestes have avoided all of this blood guilt simply by bringing a case against his mother? It's sort of funny, this intrusion of realism into this epic cycle of revenge. Orestes, still convicted of his righteousness despite the condemnation of the court, plunges increasingly into madness, and the climax sees Orestes shut up in his burning ancestral home, having murdered Helen, knife now at Hermione's throat, threatening to murder her unless Menelaus does something to absolve him. At this point, kind of hilariously, Apollo turns up and tells everyone to chill out. The speed at which Menelaus switches from desperate fear for his only child to reassured that everything will work out is completely out of place against the high drama of a moment ago. And poor Hermione - we never get to hear what she thinks of Apollo's pronouncement that her "happy ending" is that she will marry the man who is currently holding her hostage.
Iphigenia in Aulis: Another I was really eager for. The sacrifice of Iphigenia has such massive impact on the fates of so many, and now we get to see it for ourselves. The young girl is brought to Aulis by the promise of a marriage to Achilles, escorted by her mother Clytamnestra who brings the infant Orestes along too. There's a lot of irony in Clytamnestra's interactions with her husband - he knows she has come to die, while she thinks a wedding is soon to take place. Achilles comes off as a blustering buffoon, and that's probably intentional - he talks a good talk about saving Iphigenia but I imagine he's relieved when she goes willingly to her death. The most heartbreaking moment for me was when Iphigenia expresses her humiliation over the marriage-ruse. Among all the grandstanding, that's a really human moment. Clytamnestra's anger is understandable, but even now she expresses her fatal flaw - her habit of clinging to bitter grudges interferes with her ability to truly reason with her husband.
I liked Euripides. I liked his focus on women and how the structure of the patriarchal society they live in impacts their lives. They are tools, slaves, sacrifices and child-bearers. They lack true agency of their own, and if they try to seize it by some act of rage or rebellion, they are villainised.
January 1, 2015
The plays gathered in this book all deal with greek women. The plays depicts the place that women have in this environment. They are either free women or slaves, and they impose their presence and try with al their power to reach their goals (which is either to be saved or save someone dear to them).
August 9, 2019
Vellacott's lengthy introduction sees these plays as related to the moral and, eventually, existential problems posed to Athens by the Peloponnesian War, citing specific incidents and developments in the war as motivation for the action and emphasis of the plays. This makes them seem items of primarily historical interest rather than universal works of art. As far as I can tell, however, his interpretative approach did not influence his translations, which seem to attempt, as they should, a direct presentation of the meaning of the playwright's words in their immediate dramatic context. Thus, although Vellacott reads intentional authorial irony into a large number of the speeches in these works, given the words on the page the reader seems under no obligation to do so - Vellacott indicates, in fact, that a number of modern commentators accept such a straightforward reading of the words.
The Children of Heracles - An incomplete play involving human sacrifice and the question of putting prisoners of war to death. The realistic tone in treating these elements contrasts with the fantastic reported rejuvenation of Iolaus.
Andromache Set years after the Trojan War Andromache is slave and concubine to Achilles' son Neoptolemus, and has borne him a son, arousing the murderous hatred of Neoptolemus' wife Hermione who is barren. Unlike Medea, to which it has superficial similarities, the women's rivalry does not turn fatal; rather, Orestes, after killing Neoptolemus (who never appears in the play) takes Hermione away as his wife. Vellacott sees the play's action as the unfolding of a plot between Menelaus, Hermione's father, and Orestes to eliminate Neoptolemus and make Hermione the wife of Orestes.
The Suppliant Women The mothers of the seven who fell against Thebes supplicate Theseus and the Athenians to go to war against Thebes to recover the bodies of their sons, to whom Creon blasphemously refuses to grant burial. Before referring the matter to the Athenians, Theseus persuades the Argive king Adrastus to admit that the war against Thebes was unjustified. Theseus defeats Thebes but refuses to attack the city once the bodies are recovered. The sons of the seven swear vengeance once they come of age, an oath with Athena, the deus ex machina endorses.
The Phoenician Women The dispute and mutual killing of Oedipus' sons Eteocles and Polyneices, bringing on stage most of the characters from Sophocles Oedipus, including Iocasta, who has not committed suicide in this version. Unlike the previous play in this collection, the cause of Polyneices and his Argive allies is seen as justified in the name of equity and oath keeping, while Eteocles is shown to be fighting to preserve his own tyranny.
Orestes In the aftermath of his killing of Clytemnestra, Orestes is condemned to death with his sister Electra. Resentful that Menelaus was present but did nothing to prevent the Argives from passing their death sentence, Orestes, Electra, and Pylades, who has sworn to share their fate, plan to kill Helen and take Hermione hostage to force Menelaus to do their bidding. Through a concluding deus ex machina, Apollo improbably resolves all and brings the play's conclusion into conformity with the events of Andromache.
Iphigenia in Aulis opens with Agamemnon sending a messenger to carry a letter to Clytemnestra rescinding his former order to send Iphigenia to Aulis, supposedly for her wedding to Achilles. Since his messenger is a slow-moving elder slave and, as subsequent events show, he has waited until almost literally the last minute to express this change of heart, Vellacott's ironic understanding of his intent seems, in this case, fairly certain. Clytemnestra arrives with her daughter and has a darkly comic encounter with Achilles, treating him as her potential son-in-law, while he knows nothing of Agamemnon's plans or subterfuge. When the old slave enlightens the two, Achilles promises to save Iphigenia if at all possible. Agamemnon, as Menelaus did earlier, expresses his change of heart, but, like his brother, claims to be helpless to prevent the sacrifice in the face of the army's insistence on moving on toward Troy. Achilles has encountered similar resistance among his Myrmidons, though he holds to his promise. Iphigenia, however, now agrees to the sacrifice, seeing her death as a patriotic act to further the glory, honor, and survival of Hellas. The play ends with a messenger telling of the miraculous substitution of a deer for Iphigenia, who has disappeared - an ending consistent with the earlier play Iphigenia in Tauris.
In the Chicago Euripides:
The Children of Heracles - Vol. 1
Andromache - Vol. 3
The Suppliant Women - Vol. 4
The Phoenician Women - Vol. 5
Orestes - Vol. 4
Iphigenia in Aulis - Vol. 4
The Children of Heracles - An incomplete play involving human sacrifice and the question of putting prisoners of war to death. The realistic tone in treating these elements contrasts with the fantastic reported rejuvenation of Iolaus.
Andromache Set years after the Trojan War Andromache is slave and concubine to Achilles' son Neoptolemus, and has borne him a son, arousing the murderous hatred of Neoptolemus' wife Hermione who is barren. Unlike Medea, to which it has superficial similarities, the women's rivalry does not turn fatal; rather, Orestes, after killing Neoptolemus (who never appears in the play) takes Hermione away as his wife. Vellacott sees the play's action as the unfolding of a plot between Menelaus, Hermione's father, and Orestes to eliminate Neoptolemus and make Hermione the wife of Orestes.
The Suppliant Women The mothers of the seven who fell against Thebes supplicate Theseus and the Athenians to go to war against Thebes to recover the bodies of their sons, to whom Creon blasphemously refuses to grant burial. Before referring the matter to the Athenians, Theseus persuades the Argive king Adrastus to admit that the war against Thebes was unjustified. Theseus defeats Thebes but refuses to attack the city once the bodies are recovered. The sons of the seven swear vengeance once they come of age, an oath with Athena, the deus ex machina endorses.
The Phoenician Women The dispute and mutual killing of Oedipus' sons Eteocles and Polyneices, bringing on stage most of the characters from Sophocles Oedipus, including Iocasta, who has not committed suicide in this version. Unlike the previous play in this collection, the cause of Polyneices and his Argive allies is seen as justified in the name of equity and oath keeping, while Eteocles is shown to be fighting to preserve his own tyranny.
Orestes In the aftermath of his killing of Clytemnestra, Orestes is condemned to death with his sister Electra. Resentful that Menelaus was present but did nothing to prevent the Argives from passing their death sentence, Orestes, Electra, and Pylades, who has sworn to share their fate, plan to kill Helen and take Hermione hostage to force Menelaus to do their bidding. Through a concluding deus ex machina, Apollo improbably resolves all and brings the play's conclusion into conformity with the events of Andromache.
Iphigenia in Aulis opens with Agamemnon sending a messenger to carry a letter to Clytemnestra rescinding his former order to send Iphigenia to Aulis, supposedly for her wedding to Achilles. Since his messenger is a slow-moving elder slave and, as subsequent events show, he has waited until almost literally the last minute to express this change of heart, Vellacott's ironic understanding of his intent seems, in this case, fairly certain. Clytemnestra arrives with her daughter and has a darkly comic encounter with Achilles, treating him as her potential son-in-law, while he knows nothing of Agamemnon's plans or subterfuge. When the old slave enlightens the two, Achilles promises to save Iphigenia if at all possible. Agamemnon, as Menelaus did earlier, expresses his change of heart, but, like his brother, claims to be helpless to prevent the sacrifice in the face of the army's insistence on moving on toward Troy. Achilles has encountered similar resistance among his Myrmidons, though he holds to his promise. Iphigenia, however, now agrees to the sacrifice, seeing her death as a patriotic act to further the glory, honor, and survival of Hellas. The play ends with a messenger telling of the miraculous substitution of a deer for Iphigenia, who has disappeared - an ending consistent with the earlier play Iphigenia in Tauris.
In the Chicago Euripides:
The Children of Heracles - Vol. 1
Andromache - Vol. 3
The Suppliant Women - Vol. 4
The Phoenician Women - Vol. 5
Orestes - Vol. 4
Iphigenia in Aulis - Vol. 4
November 12, 2024
I'm making good progress on finishing all of Euripides plays. Only 3 to go!
For me this collection was just fine. It's far and away better than the other Euripides collection I read this year (Heracles and Other Plays), but... eh.
I didn't actively dislike any of the plays in this collection, and I really did enjoy The Phoenician Women, so all in all, that's not too bad.
Ion:
★★★☆☆
Apollo spins the most convoluted plan possible to reunite Ion with his birth mother, a woman that he raped and impregnated years ago. This needlessly convoluted plan unsurprisingly almost ends in multiple murders before the deus ex machina comes to the rescue.
I did appreciate how this play rightfully calls out Apollo and really shows how traumatizing the assault was for Creusa. This point was somewhat weakened by the ending where she’s suddenly totally cool with Apollo, but still.
The “reunion” between Ion and his “father” Xuthus was also really funny.
A solid play, not a new favourite. Needed more tragedy.
Orestes:
★★★☆☆
This one’s genuinely difficult for me to rate, because it started out so well!
All the characters are written in a nuanced and sympathetic way (even Electra who I usually find insufferable). Clytemnestra’s murder is treated with real weight, Helen is portrayed in a very humanizing way, the situation the characters find themselves in is genuinely tragic and they have a lot of complicated feelings about it.
Then the second half of the play comes along and the story devolves into a violent display of virulent misogyny. Fun times.
As usual, Helen is unfairly blamed for everything wrong with the world, which clashes weirdly with how she’s portrayed at the beginning of the play. Nothing about how she’s portrayed in this play justifies the vitriol thrown her way.
Also, Electra, unsurprisingly, is firmly on the side of the patriarchy and loves enacting violence on other women. Poor Hermione deserves so much better. Can’t imagine she’s thrilled about having to marry the dude who just threatened to murder her right after witnessing his attempted murder of her mother.
Oh, and Apollo is once again the source of strife in the story (are we sensing a theme?) and gets rightfully called out, but hey, it’s all fine in the end because he comes along and fixes everything at the last second! Yay!
The Phoenician Women:
★★★★☆
Now we’re talking!
The Phoenician Women is set roughly after the events that went down in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, only here Oedipus still remains in Thebes and Jocasta hasn’t killed herself.
Unlike the first two plays in this collection, the tragedy is not directly the fault of a god (no gods feature in this play), but rather because a greedy, power-hungry man would rather see his kingdom burn than share his inheritance with his brother as agreed to. Are we fucking surprised 🙄
What really made this play for me was the portrayal of the agonized love Jocasta and Antigone have for both of Eteocles and Polynices (even though Eteocles is clearly an immature ass and, although his response is disproportionate, Polynices is clearly in the right). Leave it to the female characters to be the only sensible ones.
This was really enjoyable, and I think more people should read it in tandem with the Theban plays, even if they don’t line up perfectly.
The Suppliant Women:
★★☆☆☆
I honestly don’t have a lot to say about this play.
It's not that it’s without merit, I think it has some things going for it in terms of themes and emotional resonance, but my god was I bored reading this. I think this might be one of the most forgettable plays I’ve read from Euripides.
For me this collection was just fine. It's far and away better than the other Euripides collection I read this year (Heracles and Other Plays), but... eh.
I didn't actively dislike any of the plays in this collection, and I really did enjoy The Phoenician Women, so all in all, that's not too bad.
Ion:
★★★☆☆
Apollo spins the most convoluted plan possible to reunite Ion with his birth mother, a woman that he raped and impregnated years ago. This needlessly convoluted plan unsurprisingly almost ends in multiple murders before the deus ex machina comes to the rescue.
I did appreciate how this play rightfully calls out Apollo and really shows how traumatizing the assault was for Creusa. This point was somewhat weakened by the ending where she’s suddenly totally cool with Apollo, but still.
The “reunion” between Ion and his “father” Xuthus was also really funny.
A solid play, not a new favourite. Needed more tragedy.
Orestes:
★★★☆☆
This one’s genuinely difficult for me to rate, because it started out so well!
All the characters are written in a nuanced and sympathetic way (even Electra who I usually find insufferable). Clytemnestra’s murder is treated with real weight, Helen is portrayed in a very humanizing way, the situation the characters find themselves in is genuinely tragic and they have a lot of complicated feelings about it.
Then the second half of the play comes along and the story devolves into a violent display of virulent misogyny. Fun times.
As usual, Helen is unfairly blamed for everything wrong with the world, which clashes weirdly with how she’s portrayed at the beginning of the play. Nothing about how she’s portrayed in this play justifies the vitriol thrown her way.
Also, Electra, unsurprisingly, is firmly on the side of the patriarchy and loves enacting violence on other women. Poor Hermione deserves so much better. Can’t imagine she’s thrilled about having to marry the dude who just threatened to murder her right after witnessing his attempted murder of her mother.
Oh, and Apollo is once again the source of strife in the story (are we sensing a theme?) and gets rightfully called out, but hey, it’s all fine in the end because he comes along and fixes everything at the last second! Yay!
The Phoenician Women:
★★★★☆
Now we’re talking!
The Phoenician Women is set roughly after the events that went down in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, only here Oedipus still remains in Thebes and Jocasta hasn’t killed herself.
Unlike the first two plays in this collection, the tragedy is not directly the fault of a god (no gods feature in this play), but rather because a greedy, power-hungry man would rather see his kingdom burn than share his inheritance with his brother as agreed to. Are we fucking surprised 🙄
What really made this play for me was the portrayal of the agonized love Jocasta and Antigone have for both of Eteocles and Polynices (even though Eteocles is clearly an immature ass and, although his response is disproportionate, Polynices is clearly in the right). Leave it to the female characters to be the only sensible ones.
This was really enjoyable, and I think more people should read it in tandem with the Theban plays, even if they don’t line up perfectly.
The Suppliant Women:
★★☆☆☆
I honestly don’t have a lot to say about this play.
It's not that it’s without merit, I think it has some things going for it in terms of themes and emotional resonance, but my god was I bored reading this. I think this might be one of the most forgettable plays I’ve read from Euripides.
March 1, 2020
Philip Vellacott's introduction whisks you back to the politicised passion of 1972, and reads as quaintly (sometimes eye-rollingly) opinionated by today's standards. I frequently found myself unpersuaded by his elitist and totalizing framework (the people who GET Euripedes versus the unschooled masses and critics whom he disagreed with) and also his assertions that the characters know much more of the plot than they seem to and so have various ulterior motives that invariably make them more cynical than they appear on the page/stage. That said Vellacott offers plural readings of characters and situations, so even if he insists only one of these is "correct" he does his readers the service of providing historical knowledge and interpretations that allow us to form our own disagreements with him. "Here are the tools you'll need to challenge me" - the mark of a great teacher.
As a series of plays tracing the evolution of Euripedes's anti-war thought, together the works reveal an interesting progression which makes them valuable as a set, although I didn't read them quite in order. Really wonderful. The notes are sometimes useful but only numbering one line a page made it really hard to track down lines referred to, which interrupted the reading experience considerably.
Vellacott: "A play can be both a tract and a tragedy, and everyone who goes to a theatre has the right to say what he finds there." <3
As a series of plays tracing the evolution of Euripedes's anti-war thought, together the works reveal an interesting progression which makes them valuable as a set, although I didn't read them quite in order. Really wonderful. The notes are sometimes useful but only numbering one line a page made it really hard to track down lines referred to, which interrupted the reading experience considerably.
Vellacott: "A play can be both a tract and a tragedy, and everyone who goes to a theatre has the right to say what he finds there." <3
October 19, 2023
This is an interesting collection of Euripides’ later plays. He had an eye for choosing interesting characters at emotional moments from the canon of myth, some of it probably based on history, available to him.
Iphigenia In Aulis is unfinished and partly written by his son. It’s an interesting footnote, and looks like it would have made another good play if he had lived to complete it.
Orestes is fascinating, awful and yet in Euripides’ hands not entirely unsympathetic. His play is a study in mental illness stemming from trauma which leads to evil acts. (Spoiler warning but making Hermione marry him at the end after he’s tried to kill her is a horrific idea. Like what Clytemnestra tells us in Iphigenia about how Agamemnon killed her husband, and smashed her baby’s brains out, before her father agreed to let him marry her. Generational trauma continuing to be handed down).
Hermione is the victim in Orestes, and the villain in Andromache, but then Euripides shows his humanity and does something very interesting by having us feel sorry for her, without ever losing sympathy for Andromache, her victim.
The theme of these plays is the inhumanity of war, very relevant when written, and sadly still relevant now.
Iphigenia In Aulis is unfinished and partly written by his son. It’s an interesting footnote, and looks like it would have made another good play if he had lived to complete it.
Orestes is fascinating, awful and yet in Euripides’ hands not entirely unsympathetic. His play is a study in mental illness stemming from trauma which leads to evil acts. (Spoiler warning but making Hermione marry him at the end after he’s tried to kill her is a horrific idea. Like what Clytemnestra tells us in Iphigenia about how Agamemnon killed her husband, and smashed her baby’s brains out, before her father agreed to let him marry her. Generational trauma continuing to be handed down).
Hermione is the victim in Orestes, and the villain in Andromache, but then Euripides shows his humanity and does something very interesting by having us feel sorry for her, without ever losing sympathy for Andromache, her victim.
The theme of these plays is the inhumanity of war, very relevant when written, and sadly still relevant now.
May 10, 2017
This volume contains a selection of six of Euripides dramas spanning the last twenty-four years of his career.
The principal theme is war, its ideals and its redemption, and the values that it destroys. These play s are considered to be some of Euripides finest poetic and dramatic writing. They form a moral and political statement encapsulating the corrosive nature of warfare on societies and their inhabitants, and relevant today as they were when they were written.
The principal theme is war, its ideals and its redemption, and the values that it destroys. These play s are considered to be some of Euripides finest poetic and dramatic writing. They form a moral and political statement encapsulating the corrosive nature of warfare on societies and their inhabitants, and relevant today as they were when they were written.
April 23, 2019
Interesting stuff
November 4, 2023
The best of Euripides' plays.
December 26, 2025
such great plays! i really loved them!
February 26, 2023
Updated Review: I deleted the blog where my reviews were originally posted, but I'm doing a project where I'm discussing each of the surviving Greek plays in a Youtube video (at https://www.youtube.com/c/TheatreofPhil). I'll be rereading these plays as I move through making the videos, and I'll write new reviews here with the links to the videos beneath them. My overview video about Euripides is at: https://youtu.be/Z-352-0g6ZQ
The Children of Heracles: https://youtu.be/vkYDkNTLUVM
Andromache: https://youtu.be/6PyM08J-sXQ
The Suppliant Women: https://youtu.be/UrcqiIQGdWA
The Phoenician Women: https://youtu.be/7i26trrrw_U
Orestes: https://youtu.be/unRlNl7nAKk
Iphigenia in Aulis: https://youtu.be/RaMrFq_50QA
The Children of Heracles: https://youtu.be/vkYDkNTLUVM
Andromache: https://youtu.be/6PyM08J-sXQ
The Suppliant Women: https://youtu.be/UrcqiIQGdWA
The Phoenician Women: https://youtu.be/7i26trrrw_U
Orestes: https://youtu.be/unRlNl7nAKk
Iphigenia in Aulis: https://youtu.be/RaMrFq_50QA
Read
December 15, 2025Jan 29-30, 2001, The Suppliant Women
Sept 17-30, 2001, The Children of Heracles
Oct 2-3, 2001, Andromache
Oct 9-11, The Phoenician Women
Oct 23-23, 2001, Orestes
Oct 16-17, 2001, Iphogenia in Aulis
Sept 17-30, 2001, The Children of Heracles
Oct 2-3, 2001, Andromache
Oct 9-11, The Phoenician Women
Oct 23-23, 2001, Orestes
Oct 16-17, 2001, Iphogenia in Aulis
July 9, 2022
Acquired 1989
Cheap Thrills, Montreal, Quebec
Cheap Thrills, Montreal, Quebec
Read
July 27, 2011No one behaves decently in this one.
September 3, 2016
The plays:
Orestes - *****
The Children of Heracles - ***1/2
Andromache - ****
The Suppliant Women - *****
The Phoenician Women - *****
Iphigenia in Aulis - ****
Orestes - *****
The Children of Heracles - ***1/2
Andromache - ****
The Suppliant Women - *****
The Phoenician Women - *****
Iphigenia in Aulis - ****
December 12, 2016
Why are the language and message so similar to portions of the old testament? Iphigenia's sacrifice replacement of a deer vs. the goat that took the place to Abraham's son Issac, for instance..
November 7, 2024
The themes of fate, revenge, and family drama are chef’s kiss 👩🏼🍳💋. I'm all for the Greek tragedies and the emotional rollercoaster 🎢 ✨that comes with it.
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