Three Greek Tragedies: "Medea", "Antigone" and "Agamemnon"

by Euripides

"Medea" by Euripides; "Antigone" by Sophocles; "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus Blood, gore, thrills, chills and romance abound in these plays by three of the great Greek authors.

4 pages, Audio CD

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Euripides (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.

Reviews

[Chungsoo Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of three Greek tragedies by three great authors: Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, read by Flo Gibson in her dramatic, a bit heavy handed, voice.

These great Greek tragedies do not tell the stories drown from the old legends and myths with which the audience would have been well familiar. So, let me summarize the background historical legends, which were kept alive by these and other great Greek poets. These stories, though certainly exaggerated, tell the truth about the harsh and brutal reality of human life and civilization - without salvation or redemption. There is no redemption in Greek tragedy but only, as Aristotle said, catharsis.

Euripides’s (480-406 BCE) Medea features the heroin Medea, a non-Greek “barbarian,” who kills her own children at the outset of the play to revenge her husband, Jason’s plan to marry Glauce, the daughter of Creon (king of Corinth).  Jason wanted the marriage to boost his family’s social and economic standing, as such was the customary method, while Media would take the role of a concubine.  But Medea would have none of it.  Before killing her own children to cause the maximum possible suffering for Jason, she manages to kill his bride-to-be as well (this part is not mentioned but assumed in this play) by sending her a poisoned but beautiful golden bridal gown, a family heirloom and gift from the sun god Helios.  Medea’s children delivers the poisoned gown to Glauce who put it on immediately only to die.  Witnessing his daughter’s death, King Creon embraces her, trying to save her; but the poison gets to him as well to his death.  

Sophocles’ (497-406 BCE) Antigone features the heroin by that name, a daughter of Oedipus, born of his incestuous marriage to his own mother. Antigone defies King Creon’s rule and buries her brother, Polyneices.  As result she is locked underground and eventually kills herself by hanging (the play ends here), causing grief to her fiancé and Creon’s son, Haemon, who in turn stabs himself to death to join Antigone, the death of which in turn causes his mother, Creon’s wife, Eurydice to kill herself.  Creon suffers in agony, knowing that it was he who had cause all these death.   


Aeschylus’ (525-456 BCE) Agamemnon features Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra who kills the great Greek warrior and her husband Agamemnon. She kills him for his murder of her own daughter, Iphigenia, who in turn was born of a rape by Agamemnon, who after killing her first husband, Tantalus the King of Pisa, also murdered their infant son.  (Clytemnestra was a daughter of Spartan king, Tyndareus).  Their daughter, Iphigenia, was sacrifice to the gods for speedy sails to Troy, as the gods sent the counter current winds against the Greek ships headed for the Spartan city of Troy. Iphigenia’s death came about as Agamemnon deceived Clytemnestra, telling her that he was taking Iphigenia to marry her off to Achilles when in fact he was taking her to be sacrificed to appease the gods to stop the wind for the speedy sail to Troy. Enraged by her daughter’s sacrifice and by Agamemnon’s past deeds (and his coming home with his Trojan war trophy, Cassandra, did not help), Clytemnestra kills him during his bath, aided by her lover and his cousin, Aegisthus.  

Life is tragic. Its glory is embedded in the heart wrenching murders and treachery compiled on the years of deceits and betrayals (or incests, in the case of Antigone). The Greeks do not shy away from it. They face it head on, as it is.

No doubt, Shakespeare had read all the Greek tragedies and adopted the tragic plots to his own world, legends, and folk tales. But in Shakespeare there is resolution and the possibility of redemption at the end—a clear Christian influence. Christianity, influenced by Judaism, is the only religion that believes in the Resurrection, the Redemption, and the ultimate happy ending or the divine comedy (Dante). But, what if there is no salvation? What if the New Jerusalem never comes and the coming of the Messiah is forever deferred (Kafka)? How then can we bear the tragedy of life? How then do we face evil?

Art graces the harsh reality. Poet’s duty is to tell the truth of life without diminishing its harshness but telling it as it is, though eloquently and gracefully, thus endowing dignity to suffering and human fate. For it is not only through one’s error or pride that brought the evil in the world. But rather the mixture of good and evil is the very human condition that makes up the world into which we are thrown in and try to make better. That ‘the gods make games of our lives’ or, Gloucester’s cry in King Lear: that “[t]he gods play around with us as cruelly as schoolboys who pull the wings off flies” is not only an quaint wisdom of pessimism but a profound truth about evil: that evil lies beyond one’s freedom and responsibility. Just as we are at bottom good (Plato and Levinas) and rational (Kant), we are also evil, hubris, frivolous, and in vain.

The fact of evil is inexplicable. This fact is attested by the sudden appearance of the snake in the Garden of Eden. It is this brutal fact of which the ancient Greek poets also speak. It is also this fact by which Hinduism and Buddhism were born. Judaism and Christianity, too I submit, are also born out of this irremissible fact. But, thank God that the good overcomes evil. This is the great hope without which we cannot live and face the reality. Thank God that there is the Good beyond being. But, by saying this, have we abandoned the Greek tragedies and moved into the divine comedy?

Just because there is evil, inexplicable and irremissible, we must poetize. Lamentation is perhaps the first art, as it is perhaps the first religious utterance. Yet, the good is beyond being that language houses (Heidegger). We are called to be good, therefore, beyond language and poetry.

[Niki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't listen to these all at once, very depressing.