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Alcestis and Other Plays
Includes Alcestis, Hippolytus and Iphigenia in Tauris.
Euripides' tragedies proved highly controversial even in his own lifetime, presenting his audience with unexpected twists of plot and violently extreme emotions; for many of today's readers and spectators, he seems almost uncannily modern in his insights. Euripides was the key figure in transforming the familiar figures of Greek mythology from awe-inspiring but remote heroes into recognizable, fallible human beings. His characters, all superbly eloquent, draw on fierce contemporary debates about the nature of justice, politics and religion. His women are perhaps the most sympathetically and powerfully presented in ancient literature. Alcestis, the dramatist's first surviving work, is less harrowing than the others, almost a tragicomedy. The Children of Heracles examines the conflict between might and right, while Hippolytus and Medea, two of his greatest plays, reveal his profound understanding of destructive passion. This new translation into dignified English prose makes one of the greatest of Greek writers accessible once again to a wide public.
Euripides' tragedies proved highly controversial even in his own lifetime, presenting his audience with unexpected twists of plot and violently extreme emotions; for many of today's readers and spectators, he seems almost uncannily modern in his insights. Euripides was the key figure in transforming the familiar figures of Greek mythology from awe-inspiring but remote heroes into recognizable, fallible human beings. His characters, all superbly eloquent, draw on fierce contemporary debates about the nature of justice, politics and religion. His women are perhaps the most sympathetically and powerfully presented in ancient literature. Alcestis, the dramatist's first surviving work, is less harrowing than the others, almost a tragicomedy. The Children of Heracles examines the conflict between might and right, while Hippolytus and Medea, two of his greatest plays, reveal his profound understanding of destructive passion. This new translation into dignified English prose makes one of the greatest of Greek writers accessible once again to a wide public.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 439
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About the author
Euripides
2,836 books1,984 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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April 4, 2022
Picked this up because bookclub had read The Silent Patient and it referenced Alcestis, which was fantastic. I'm a sucker for a personification of death and . I was a little confused by there being so much made by
I also thought of L'Esprit de L'Escalier, a retelling of the Eurydice myth where Eurydice is recovered from the underworld and
I thought that the Introduction about Alcestis was excellent as well: "In the first scene the serving-maid reports Alcestis’ words spoken with tears to her marriage bed: “I am dying because I cannot bear to fail in my duty to you and my husband.” The view of a wife’s duty the chorus recognize as being an ideal which is generally accepted and thought honorable; which in principle every husband with regard as his do, without ever expecting to see it fulfilled. The ideal of marriage, in fact, carries to its conclusion the universal assumption that a woman’s life is a rational price for a man’s life, being of less value; that the women of a family are expendable, their lives at the disposal of men’s lives. Admetus has never questioned this principal and is there for hardly aware of it. Alcestis did not set this ideal for herself, but finding it already part of the fabric of society she embraced it with a thoroughness which was her own rare and heroic achievement. We see, then, that even if it was theoretically possible for Adetus to decline, yet when his wife made the offer it would actually seem to be above all things right – right in a degree above the achievement of most men’s wives. To refuse it would seem to flout an order of nature and to enroll adjuster of unique beauty."
I also enjoyed Hippolytus; the chaos that Aphrodite inflicts, the double meaning of chastity (pure, but also of sound mind, modesty and forbearance in social behavior), and the way consequences unfold.
Iphigenia in Tauris felt oddly familiar...did I come across this - or some excerpt or summary of it- in my school days? Regardless, I love the Furies and a good trick that is then forgiven.
I also thought of L'Esprit de L'Escalier, a retelling of the Eurydice myth where Eurydice is recovered from the underworld and
I thought that the Introduction about Alcestis was excellent as well: "In the first scene the serving-maid reports Alcestis’ words spoken with tears to her marriage bed: “I am dying because I cannot bear to fail in my duty to you and my husband.” The view of a wife’s duty the chorus recognize as being an ideal which is generally accepted and thought honorable; which in principle every husband with regard as his do, without ever expecting to see it fulfilled. The ideal of marriage, in fact, carries to its conclusion the universal assumption that a woman’s life is a rational price for a man’s life, being of less value; that the women of a family are expendable, their lives at the disposal of men’s lives. Admetus has never questioned this principal and is there for hardly aware of it. Alcestis did not set this ideal for herself, but finding it already part of the fabric of society she embraced it with a thoroughness which was her own rare and heroic achievement. We see, then, that even if it was theoretically possible for Adetus to decline, yet when his wife made the offer it would actually seem to be above all things right – right in a degree above the achievement of most men’s wives. To refuse it would seem to flout an order of nature and to enroll adjuster of unique beauty."
I also enjoyed Hippolytus; the chaos that Aphrodite inflicts, the double meaning of chastity (pure, but also of sound mind, modesty and forbearance in social behavior), and the way consequences unfold.
Iphigenia in Tauris felt oddly familiar...did I come across this - or some excerpt or summary of it- in my school days? Regardless, I love the Furies and a good trick that is then forgiven.
November 12, 2016
Alcestis, a princess from Thessaly, willingly offered to die so that her husband could live. Hippolytus, a son of King Theseus of Athens, dedicated himself to sexual purity and scorned the love goddess Aphrodite, who responded by seeking revenge. And Iphigenia, a princess of Argos, escaped being sacrificed to the gods by her own father, only to find herself in the “barbarian” land of Tauris, forced to preside over the human sacrifice of unfortunate travellers. Such are these three basic mythological stories that would have been familiar to many of the people of classical Greece. And the great playwright Euripides gives these familiar stories life and colour and psychological depth in this collection of plays from Penguin Books.
Translator Philip Vellacott of Dulwich College suggests in a thoughtful introduction that “the greater theme which [Euripides] pursued throughout his whole life” was “the relationship of man to woman” (p. 10), a suggestion that helpfully lends itself to one’s reading of all three of these plays. Of the great triumvirate of Athenian dramatists, Euripides is widely seen as more modern in comparison with his predecessors Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that modernity of spirit certainly emerges in these three plays.
Alcestis opens with a bit of exposition from the god Apollo, who suffered a period of exile from Olympus, but was taken in by Admetus, the king of the Thessalian city of Pherae. In return for Admetus’ hospitality, Apollo has secured a great gift for the king: Admetus can avoid the early demise that a personified Death has planned for him, but only if someone else will agree to die in Admetus’ place. Admetus’ aging parents have refused to give their lives on their son’s behalf; only Admetus’ wife Alcestis is willing to make this ultimate sacrifice. I have not seen this play live, but I would think that it would be most moving to watch Alcestis express her fear of death, her reluctance to leave this world – “I feel a hand grasping my hand,/Leading me – don’t you see him? – leading me/To the home of the dead” (p. 51) – while at the same time steeling herself to what she sees as her duty toward her husband.
Hippolytus reminds the reader of the Greek dedication to the values of balance and proportion in human life -- μηδὲν ἄγαν, mêden agan, “nothing in excess,” as the inscription above the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi read. Hippolytus has dedicated himself to Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, and scorns Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sexual desire. When one of Hippolytus’ servants gently tries to remind his prince that all of the gods must be worshipped and placated, Hippolytus scornfully replies, “Since gods may choose whom they will honor, so may men” (p. 92). The people of classical Greece would have seen this statement by Hippolytus as immoderate, irrational, and downright dangerous. The principle embodied by Artemis – sexual purity before marriage (at least for women) – is important, they would have said, but so is the principle represented by Aphrodite: that sexual desire brings men and women together in marriage and conjugal love, from which come children that continue the human race.
Small wonder that Aphrodite, who opens the play the way Apollo introduces Alcestis, declares that “for his insults, his contempt of me, I shall/Punish Hippolytus this very day” (p. 83). That punishment occurs when Aphrodite causes Hippolytus’ stepmother Phaedra to fall passionately in love with Hippolytus. Phaedra, though tempted by her Nurse to use a potion to make Hippolytus fall in love with Phaedra and thereby achieve the fulfillment of her passion, decides instead that “for me/The best of all decisions was to end my life. I would not wish my right action to rest unknown,/Any more than to display my sin before the world” (p. 95). And Phaedra leaves for her husband Theseus a suicide note that has fateful consequences.
Iphigenia in Tauris serves as a sort of de facto sequel to the more familiar story of Iphigenia at Aulis. Iphigenia was saved at the last moment from being sacrificed by her father Agamemnon; the goddess Artemis snatched Iphigenia from beneath Agamemnon’s knife, put a deer in Iphigenia’s place, and carried Iphigenia off to Tauris on the Crimean Peninsula, in what the Greeks of Euripides’ time would have regarded as “barbarian” territory. There, Iphigenia, who longs to return home to Argos, is compelled to conduct, on behalf of the Taurian king Thoas, human sacrifices of any travellers unlucky enough to find their way to Tauris.
This dramatic situation intensifies when Iphigenia’s brother Orestes arrives in Tauris, sent with his friend by the god Apollo to wipe out the blood-guilt of Orestes’ killing of his own mother Clytemnestra by seizing the Taurian statue of Artemis and taking it home to Greece. Captured by the Taurians, Orestes faces the prospect of being sacrificed by his own sister, with neither killer nor victim ever knowing that they are related. Euripides takes full advantage of the potentially tragic irony inherent in this dramatic situation, as when Iphigenia says to the captured Orestes and Pylades, “You were once little children: who was your mother then?/Your father? Had you a sister? It is sad for her/To lose so fine a pair of brothers” (p. 144).
Hippolytus follows in a very direct manner the tragic trajectory that will be familiar to readers of other Euripidean tragedies like Medea and Hecabe. By contrast, Alcestis and Iphigenia in Tauris take what might be seen as a more surprising path. One is reminded here, as Vellacott mentions in his foreword, that classical Greek dramatists customarily presented their plays to the dramatic competition at Athens’ Theatre of Dionysus in the form of a tragic trilogy accompanied by a “satyr play” that might provide a more optmistic counterweight to all that tragedy. Be prepared, therefore, to be surprised by the way in which two of the three plays in this great collection turn out.
Translator Philip Vellacott of Dulwich College suggests in a thoughtful introduction that “the greater theme which [Euripides] pursued throughout his whole life” was “the relationship of man to woman” (p. 10), a suggestion that helpfully lends itself to one’s reading of all three of these plays. Of the great triumvirate of Athenian dramatists, Euripides is widely seen as more modern in comparison with his predecessors Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that modernity of spirit certainly emerges in these three plays.
Alcestis opens with a bit of exposition from the god Apollo, who suffered a period of exile from Olympus, but was taken in by Admetus, the king of the Thessalian city of Pherae. In return for Admetus’ hospitality, Apollo has secured a great gift for the king: Admetus can avoid the early demise that a personified Death has planned for him, but only if someone else will agree to die in Admetus’ place. Admetus’ aging parents have refused to give their lives on their son’s behalf; only Admetus’ wife Alcestis is willing to make this ultimate sacrifice. I have not seen this play live, but I would think that it would be most moving to watch Alcestis express her fear of death, her reluctance to leave this world – “I feel a hand grasping my hand,/Leading me – don’t you see him? – leading me/To the home of the dead” (p. 51) – while at the same time steeling herself to what she sees as her duty toward her husband.
Hippolytus reminds the reader of the Greek dedication to the values of balance and proportion in human life -- μηδὲν ἄγαν, mêden agan, “nothing in excess,” as the inscription above the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi read. Hippolytus has dedicated himself to Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, and scorns Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sexual desire. When one of Hippolytus’ servants gently tries to remind his prince that all of the gods must be worshipped and placated, Hippolytus scornfully replies, “Since gods may choose whom they will honor, so may men” (p. 92). The people of classical Greece would have seen this statement by Hippolytus as immoderate, irrational, and downright dangerous. The principle embodied by Artemis – sexual purity before marriage (at least for women) – is important, they would have said, but so is the principle represented by Aphrodite: that sexual desire brings men and women together in marriage and conjugal love, from which come children that continue the human race.
Small wonder that Aphrodite, who opens the play the way Apollo introduces Alcestis, declares that “for his insults, his contempt of me, I shall/Punish Hippolytus this very day” (p. 83). That punishment occurs when Aphrodite causes Hippolytus’ stepmother Phaedra to fall passionately in love with Hippolytus. Phaedra, though tempted by her Nurse to use a potion to make Hippolytus fall in love with Phaedra and thereby achieve the fulfillment of her passion, decides instead that “for me/The best of all decisions was to end my life. I would not wish my right action to rest unknown,/Any more than to display my sin before the world” (p. 95). And Phaedra leaves for her husband Theseus a suicide note that has fateful consequences.
Iphigenia in Tauris serves as a sort of de facto sequel to the more familiar story of Iphigenia at Aulis. Iphigenia was saved at the last moment from being sacrificed by her father Agamemnon; the goddess Artemis snatched Iphigenia from beneath Agamemnon’s knife, put a deer in Iphigenia’s place, and carried Iphigenia off to Tauris on the Crimean Peninsula, in what the Greeks of Euripides’ time would have regarded as “barbarian” territory. There, Iphigenia, who longs to return home to Argos, is compelled to conduct, on behalf of the Taurian king Thoas, human sacrifices of any travellers unlucky enough to find their way to Tauris.
This dramatic situation intensifies when Iphigenia’s brother Orestes arrives in Tauris, sent with his friend by the god Apollo to wipe out the blood-guilt of Orestes’ killing of his own mother Clytemnestra by seizing the Taurian statue of Artemis and taking it home to Greece. Captured by the Taurians, Orestes faces the prospect of being sacrificed by his own sister, with neither killer nor victim ever knowing that they are related. Euripides takes full advantage of the potentially tragic irony inherent in this dramatic situation, as when Iphigenia says to the captured Orestes and Pylades, “You were once little children: who was your mother then?/Your father? Had you a sister? It is sad for her/To lose so fine a pair of brothers” (p. 144).
Hippolytus follows in a very direct manner the tragic trajectory that will be familiar to readers of other Euripidean tragedies like Medea and Hecabe. By contrast, Alcestis and Iphigenia in Tauris take what might be seen as a more surprising path. One is reminded here, as Vellacott mentions in his foreword, that classical Greek dramatists customarily presented their plays to the dramatic competition at Athens’ Theatre of Dionysus in the form of a tragic trilogy accompanied by a “satyr play” that might provide a more optmistic counterweight to all that tragedy. Be prepared, therefore, to be surprised by the way in which two of the three plays in this great collection turn out.
February 14, 2025
3.5 ⭐️ — I really liked alcestis and hippolytus, but iphigeneia in tauris had such long monologues. It was tedious to read them. it was interesting to read the myth on which the opera I saw last October was based.
July 27, 2016
Alcestis, an early play by Euripides in which a queen agrees to die to save her husband's life. It is cast in tragic vein although it contains passages of satire and even comedy, culminating in Herakles wrestling Death to return her to life and his friend Admetus.
Ipheginia in Tauris has an apparently happy ending which melodramatically reunites the ill-fated children of Agamemnon with unforeseen consequences.
Hippolytus is a tragedy which chronicles the fatal impact of Phaedra's unreasoning passion for her chaste stepson Hippolytus the bastard son on Theseus.
In all three plays the chorus seems to get the best lines...
Ipheginia in Tauris has an apparently happy ending which melodramatically reunites the ill-fated children of Agamemnon with unforeseen consequences.
Hippolytus is a tragedy which chronicles the fatal impact of Phaedra's unreasoning passion for her chaste stepson Hippolytus the bastard son on Theseus.
In all three plays the chorus seems to get the best lines...
March 18, 2025
The intro to this was interesting and kinda confirmed some of my observations from my first Euripides compilation (Medea and Other Plays) - I had observed that the primary theme of that collection appeared to be female rage. What was interesting to learn is that Euripides has historically been viewed as a misogynist due to his depiction of deeply flawed women. As the translator, Philip Vellacot, noted, this interpretation only holds on a shallow reading of his plays. While this collection seems to go easier on the female rage, Euripides still takes a great interest in the problems facing women in patriarchal Greek society, and their suffering at the hands of powerful men.
Alcestis is the story of a loyal wife who has given her life for her husband's. The choice was made years ago, and now the debt has come due. Much of the play consists of mourning and hand-wringing on the part of herself and her husband. The mood changes suddenly with the arrival of a tipsy Heracles, who beats up Death (Thanatos) and returns Alcestis (albeit mute) to her husband. It's quite the whiplash moment, but apparently this was supposed to be a comedy in spite of the tragic mood that prevails during most of the play, and a good performance crew could probably make the inappropriate arrival of Heracles hilarious. My favourite part was the conversation between Thanatos and Apollo at the start of the play.
Once of the mistakes modern dabblers in Greek mythology often seem to make is the idea that Aphrodite is a nice goddes. Hippolytus, on the other hand, really drives home how terrifying she can really be. Hippolytus is a young man who makes the mistake of shunning Aphrodite, and for that, she destroys not only his life, but his step-mother Phaedra's as well. He's not really a sympathetic victim - although it's understandable he might have some issues around sex stemming from his conception via rape, he dives into misogyny head-first despite worshipping Artemis, and his holier-than-though attitude is grating. In comparison, Phaedra, often seen as the villain, seems sympathetic until the point at which she unjustly accuses her step-son of assaulting her. Otherwise she is at the mercy of other people's actions or being used as a tool by a goddess to harm the men around her.
In Iphegenia in Tauris, it was fun to see a woman in a commanding role. This play belongs to an alternate timeline in which Iphegenia was rescued by Artemis from sacrifice at the last moment and brought to Tauris to serve as a priestess. Except everyone else considers her dead. We meet our old friends Orestes and Pylades as they almost get sacrificed. The main characters escape, leaving behind the chorus, who are all captured slave-women and fellow Greeks. They do make a vague promise to come back one day to free them, but it could be argued that the three main characters are selfishly focused only on their own safety.
Alcestis is the story of a loyal wife who has given her life for her husband's. The choice was made years ago, and now the debt has come due. Much of the play consists of mourning and hand-wringing on the part of herself and her husband. The mood changes suddenly with the arrival of a tipsy Heracles, who beats up Death (Thanatos) and returns Alcestis (albeit mute) to her husband. It's quite the whiplash moment, but apparently this was supposed to be a comedy in spite of the tragic mood that prevails during most of the play, and a good performance crew could probably make the inappropriate arrival of Heracles hilarious. My favourite part was the conversation between Thanatos and Apollo at the start of the play.
Once of the mistakes modern dabblers in Greek mythology often seem to make is the idea that Aphrodite is a nice goddes. Hippolytus, on the other hand, really drives home how terrifying she can really be. Hippolytus is a young man who makes the mistake of shunning Aphrodite, and for that, she destroys not only his life, but his step-mother Phaedra's as well. He's not really a sympathetic victim - although it's understandable he might have some issues around sex stemming from his conception via rape, he dives into misogyny head-first despite worshipping Artemis, and his holier-than-though attitude is grating. In comparison, Phaedra, often seen as the villain, seems sympathetic until the point at which she unjustly accuses her step-son of assaulting her. Otherwise she is at the mercy of other people's actions or being used as a tool by a goddess to harm the men around her.
In Iphegenia in Tauris, it was fun to see a woman in a commanding role. This play belongs to an alternate timeline in which Iphegenia was rescued by Artemis from sacrifice at the last moment and brought to Tauris to serve as a priestess. Except everyone else considers her dead. We meet our old friends Orestes and Pylades as they almost get sacrificed. The main characters escape, leaving behind the chorus, who are all captured slave-women and fellow Greeks. They do make a vague promise to come back one day to free them, but it could be argued that the three main characters are selfishly focused only on their own safety.
February 18, 2017
When I was a young undergraduate and studying classics, I remember thinking that ancient Greek plays should ideally be read in summer on a beach somewhere. The culture that produced them, after all, was addicted to life, to sunlight, and to personal wholeness. Reading this selection of Euripides’ plays I’m even more persuaded that this is the case.
The theme that seems to link these plays is the theme of personal strength. That is, the strength that comes with self-mastery. The collection begins with Alcestis. The play begins on the day on which Alcestis, wife of Admetus, is to die. She had previously agreed to meet death to save the life of her husband. Admetus is inconsolable and refuses to set any bounds to his grief (p.71) despite the chorus offering a rebuke (p.55):
The day is saved (somewhat improbably) by the arrival of Heracles en route to one of his labours. Heracles – physically powerful, unsophisticated and earthy – treats the matter simply as a problem to be solved (p.70)
This he does, leading to a mildly comic happy ending. The contrast the play stresses is between Admetus’ inability to master his own grief, and Heracles’ literally Death-defying confidence in his own strength.
Hippolytus covers another aspect of self-knowledge. The hero (if that is the word) in the title is a young man whose life is dedicated to honouring Artemis, virginal goddess of the hunt (pp.84-5). He shows little respect – even contempt – for Aphrodite, the goddess of love (in this case, sexual love): “My body is pure … I have no liking for a god worshipped at night” (p.86). Aphrodite, in revenge, causes his stepmother Phaedra to become infatuated with him. Phaedra’s secret is revealed to Hippolytus by a servant. He is incensed and excoriates them both (pp.102-3). Phaedra, in despair, hangs herself. She leaves a note accusing Hippolytus of raping her. This provokes Theseus (her husband) to curse him in a fit of rage, causing Hippolytus to be killed by a bull - that is, a breeding animal. The play ultimately works as a lesson on self-control, and the lack of it. Phaedra kills herself to break the grip of an uncontrollable passion. Hippolytus’ almost fanatical self-control makes it impossible for him to understand the pain his rejection and vituperation causes her. And Theseus’ loss of self-control leads him to kill his own son.
The collection ends with Iphigenia in Tauris, which shows us the end-stage of self-mastery. Iphigenia was the daughter of King Agamemnon. She was to be sacrificed by him to induce Artemis to allow his fleet to leave harbour and sail to the Trojan War. At the last moment, however, she was taken by Artemis to Tauris where she would serve as the goddess’ priestess, preparing foreigners as human sacrifices on the orders of King Thoas (pp.131-2). She pines to return to Greece and to see her brother Orestes again. Iphigenia and Orestes are descendants of Atreus and the nth generation of a family wrapped in a cycle of crime and revenge which has involved cannibalism, incest, curses and more homicides than a season of Midsomer Murders. Orestes arrives in Tauris, having recently murdered their mother Clytemnestra. He and Iphigenia recognise each other before he is to be sacrificed. Through a ruse they escape from Tauris with a sacred statue of Artemis, which Orestes has been tasked with stealing in recompense for the murder of Clytemnestra.
The setting in Tauris and the escape seem to be included for the sake of dramatic completeness. What is more interesting is the decision of the key participants to renounce vengeance. Iphigenia helps Orestes to steal the statue (and so free himself of bloodguiltiness for the murder of his mother) when it is within her power to kill him. She also renounces vengeance of Agamemnon and his posterity for attempting to sacrifice her (p.161):
This action ceases the long cycle of violence and ends the curse in which “anger grimly returns, cunningly haunting the house, never forgetting its due” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon (trans. Louis McNiece)). The end of the curse is made possible by Iphigenia’s innate self-control which allows her to renounce vengeance.
The modern West lives a long way from faith. Scanning the death notices of most newspapers shows recollections of times spent together and a vague notion that people will ‘meet again’ someday. Our world may be one from which gods have either been banished or upon which they have given up in disgust. If the heavens are no longer able to suggest how a person can honourably live their life, then Euripides would be a good place to start seeking a replacement.
The theme that seems to link these plays is the theme of personal strength. That is, the strength that comes with self-mastery. The collection begins with Alcestis. The play begins on the day on which Alcestis, wife of Admetus, is to die. She had previously agreed to meet death to save the life of her husband. Admetus is inconsolable and refuses to set any bounds to his grief (p.71) despite the chorus offering a rebuke (p.55):
Her death, Admetus, is a blow which you must bear.
You are not the first of mortal men – no, nor the last –
To lose a noble-hearted wife. Consider this:
Death is a debt which every one of us must pay
The day is saved (somewhat improbably) by the arrival of Heracles en route to one of his labours. Heracles – physically powerful, unsophisticated and earthy – treats the matter simply as a problem to be solved (p.70)
The woman’s newly dead; and I
Must save her, and pay my debt of kindness to Admetus,
Setting Alcestis safe again in her own home.
The black robed king of the dead will come to drink the blood
Of Victims offered at her tomb. I’ll go there, hide,
And watch for him, and so leap out and spring on him,
And once I have my arms locked round his writhing ribs,
There is no power that can release him, till he yields
Alcestis to me. And if I miss my prey this time,
If death does not go to the bait of blood, I’ll go
Down to the sunless palace of Persephone
And Pluto, and I’ll ask for her. And, by my soul,
I’ll bring Alcestis up again, and deliver her
Into Admetus’ hands
This he does, leading to a mildly comic happy ending. The contrast the play stresses is between Admetus’ inability to master his own grief, and Heracles’ literally Death-defying confidence in his own strength.
Hippolytus covers another aspect of self-knowledge. The hero (if that is the word) in the title is a young man whose life is dedicated to honouring Artemis, virginal goddess of the hunt (pp.84-5). He shows little respect – even contempt – for Aphrodite, the goddess of love (in this case, sexual love): “My body is pure … I have no liking for a god worshipped at night” (p.86). Aphrodite, in revenge, causes his stepmother Phaedra to become infatuated with him. Phaedra’s secret is revealed to Hippolytus by a servant. He is incensed and excoriates them both (pp.102-3). Phaedra, in despair, hangs herself. She leaves a note accusing Hippolytus of raping her. This provokes Theseus (her husband) to curse him in a fit of rage, causing Hippolytus to be killed by a bull - that is, a breeding animal. The play ultimately works as a lesson on self-control, and the lack of it. Phaedra kills herself to break the grip of an uncontrollable passion. Hippolytus’ almost fanatical self-control makes it impossible for him to understand the pain his rejection and vituperation causes her. And Theseus’ loss of self-control leads him to kill his own son.
The collection ends with Iphigenia in Tauris, which shows us the end-stage of self-mastery. Iphigenia was the daughter of King Agamemnon. She was to be sacrificed by him to induce Artemis to allow his fleet to leave harbour and sail to the Trojan War. At the last moment, however, she was taken by Artemis to Tauris where she would serve as the goddess’ priestess, preparing foreigners as human sacrifices on the orders of King Thoas (pp.131-2). She pines to return to Greece and to see her brother Orestes again. Iphigenia and Orestes are descendants of Atreus and the nth generation of a family wrapped in a cycle of crime and revenge which has involved cannibalism, incest, curses and more homicides than a season of Midsomer Murders. Orestes arrives in Tauris, having recently murdered their mother Clytemnestra. He and Iphigenia recognise each other before he is to be sacrificed. Through a ruse they escape from Tauris with a sacred statue of Artemis, which Orestes has been tasked with stealing in recompense for the murder of Clytemnestra.
The setting in Tauris and the escape seem to be included for the sake of dramatic completeness. What is more interesting is the decision of the key participants to renounce vengeance. Iphigenia helps Orestes to steal the statue (and so free himself of bloodguiltiness for the murder of his mother) when it is within her power to kill him. She also renounces vengeance of Agamemnon and his posterity for attempting to sacrifice her (p.161):
now my wish is matched with yours – first, to release
You from your torments; next, renouncing bitterness
Against the hand that offered me in sacrifice,
To restore the shattered fortunes of my father’s house.
So my hand would be guiltless of your blood, and we
Could all be saved.
This action ceases the long cycle of violence and ends the curse in which “anger grimly returns, cunningly haunting the house, never forgetting its due” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon (trans. Louis McNiece)). The end of the curse is made possible by Iphigenia’s innate self-control which allows her to renounce vengeance.
The modern West lives a long way from faith. Scanning the death notices of most newspapers shows recollections of times spent together and a vague notion that people will ‘meet again’ someday. Our world may be one from which gods have either been banished or upon which they have given up in disgust. If the heavens are no longer able to suggest how a person can honourably live their life, then Euripides would be a good place to start seeking a replacement.
November 12, 2021
-----------Alcestis------------
2 estrellas
Una tragedia innecesaria con un personaje masculino de lo mas "dejado" osea inepto...pero bueno.
----------- Hipólito------------
3 estrellas
Un gran malentendido resultado de la más caprichosa de las diosaa griegas. Una tragedia con sabor a reconciliación y familia.
------------- Ifigenia en Aulide --------------
2 estrellas
Nada muy novedoso, solo un punto de vista donde Agamenón es un poquito menos culpable del sacrificio de su hija.
2 estrellas
Una tragedia innecesaria con un personaje masculino de lo mas "dejado" osea inepto...pero bueno.
----------- Hipólito------------
3 estrellas
Un gran malentendido resultado de la más caprichosa de las diosaa griegas. Una tragedia con sabor a reconciliación y familia.
------------- Ifigenia en Aulide --------------
2 estrellas
Nada muy novedoso, solo un punto de vista donde Agamenón es un poquito menos culpable del sacrificio de su hija.
December 28, 2024
My first proper foray into the plays of Euripides. All three were entertaining in their own right, although the highlight was Alcestis which I have read before in a modified version by Ted Hughes.
September 29, 2025
🎭 Alcestis (438 BCE) - 7.02.
♀ Alcestis is about woman’s part in the patriarchal system of marriage and society (in ancient Greece).
⏳ Euripides modifies the time scheme of the legend: in it, Admetus is offered the bargain on his and Alcestis’s wedding day; in the play, the couple have been happily married for a long time, with a promising family, and the action takes place on the day of Alcestis’s death.
🧱 Structurally, the play is in three parts. The first, the protasis, also serves as the catastasis (the climax preceding the catastrophe) and tragic catastrophe (the concluding resolution), the death of Alcestis, since the change in time scheme has allowed us to imagine the prehistory of a happy marriage which is referred to in Alcestis and Admetus’s parting farewell. Where we would expect the ‘catastrophe’ is the dénouement, a peripety—a generic turn, with a comic outcome, and thus not a catastrophe, but a salvation.
🎶 The Chorus, citizens of Pherae, reflect in this play the conservative moral standards of Greek citizenry, accepting the self-sacrifice of Alcestis as part of the natural order of things, a duty which is generally accepted and thought honourable, and which in principle every husband would regard as his due, without ever expecting it to be fulfilled:
Admetus, while agreeing to this bargain, nonetheless increasingly suffers for it.
⯢ The problem is resolved by the intervention of Heracles, demi-god, son of Zeus and friend of Admetus, who battles with Death at the gates of the Underworld to win back the interred Alcestis. Heracles’s attendance introduces a raucous comedy to mix in with the tragic tone and theme, one which tempers the reversal of the catastrophe at the end. The figure of Heracles is both noble and honourable, and bullish and comical, representing the figure of a satyr in his Bacchanalian revelry. The play was presented as the satyr play after a tragic trilogy, and such scenes were expected in such a genre.
Alcestis ends with a deus ex machina, a ‘god out of the machine’, with a redeeming instead of tragic ending, which signals the birth of the tragicomedy (a proleptic generic classification, but that syncretic genre nonetheless), with its mix of tragic and comic episodes, and the redemption of the ‘hero’ by divine restoration. There are precedents to such happy endings by divine intervention, in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (458), and Euripides’ own Prometheus trilogy (463), but in the former, restoration is of civic order, and in the latter, divine reprieve is of the divine. In Alcestis, the restoration is truly miraculous by divine restoration.
🧵♀ Vellacott identifies one material thing as symbolic of the play’s discursive theme, the marital bed:
🪜 It is ironic that such a piece of furniture, which intimates rest, healing, love and birth, represents, in this time, in this society, not also death, but the inequity of patriarchy. Irony figures throughout the play:
• Chorus’s stasimons (strophe/antistrophe)—irony: lauding Alcestis, yet not questioning their acceptance of the convention that a wife’s life is worth less than the husband’s (ll.78-151, 200-242, 435-474, 571-605, 742-9, 963-1000);
• Ademetus’s growth to self-knowledge—he accepts his wife’s replacement of him, but will suffer for it: ‘He does not know how good she is; but suffering / Will teach him’ (ll.145-6), to his final test, when Heracles asks him to take the woman he has won in (ll.1039-1011)—equates to the gods sending trials to man who must learn by them wisdom;
• Admetus’s kommos—ironic lamentations in 4 stanzas, 1 and 3 envies the dead, 2 and 4 envies the unmarried and childless (ll.859-920), against a formerly happy married life and family;
• Admetus’s parents’ position—aged, yet refused to die in Admetus’s place v. rightful claim to their own lives with no duty to replace their son’s (ll.614-733);
• Heracles—both honourable (ll.508-546; 826-858, 1003-1153) and a buffoon (747-803), is Janus-like, reconciling the past happiness, present suffering and future misery;
• Marital bed—symbolism of rest, healing, love, conjugal sharing and birth, is a metaphor for death and a metonym the inequity of patriarchy (1.175-89);
• Alcestis—both heroic and passive female: accepts the place of her husband, but does not question her submissiveness to the expectations of male-dominated society;
• Alcestis’s final silence—this dramatic ellipsis, explained as a requisite of 3 days of purification on returning from the Dead, is pertinent to Euripides’s theme of women’s place as secondary citizens in the patriarchal system of marriage and society.
Thus we see how Euripides transforms the conventions of Greek tragedy, via his championing of women’s narratives, his generic turns, his use of irony, and his positioning of the Chorus, while still immersing his moral argument in the conventions of mythology (Apollo, Zeus, Hestia, Hades, Pluto, Persephone, Ares, Hermes, Heracles, Necessity, Fate, the Fates, Death, Charon, Cerberus) and dramatic and poetic construction.
🎭 Hippolytus (428 BCE) - 6.6
🎨 Euripides’s theme of the subjugation of women in a patriarchal society, and the motif of ‘pardon’ (syngnōmē), which was an undercurrent of Alcestis, continue through his other works. In Hippolytus (428), it is the ‘deep gulf of misunderstanding which divides men from women’, where ‘every mortal character is concerned with pardon—with bestowing, receiving, withholding, or urging it’ (Vellacott, p.22).
Vellacott differentiates ‘pardon’ (syngnōmē) as different from ‘forgiveness’ (aphesis): forgiveness is a two-way transaction, dependent upon having learned from being forgiven for one’s own sins, and thus able oneself to forgive another. ‘Pardon’, however, is the relinquishment of anger and the renouncement of reprisal; it requires no reciprocity from the other. Man’s belief that gods should be wiser than mortals is belied by their seeming incomprehension of this difference, and they are not prone to pardon: ‘Therefore the notion of pardon in Euripides is simple and without religious implications, operating between one mortal and another’ (Vellacott, p.23).
The matter of Hippolytus is the issue between reprisal and pardon.
The miscommunication between men and women is the other major theme of Hippolytus:
This two-sided world is also found in Medea (431) and Helen (412).
🧱 The play is in three parts, with a prologue and protasis, the epistasis, and the catastasis and catastrophe forming the last third:
• prologue—Aphrodite’s scheme;
• protasis—Phaedra’s sickness and suicide;
• epitasis—Phaedra’s letter incriminating Hippolytus, Theseus’s accusations;
• catastasis—banishment of Hippolytus by Theseus;
• catastrophe—Hippolytus, assaulted by Poseidon, dies.
🎨 The tragedy is not merely Phaedra’s enforced suicide, but the place that women hold in the patriarchal society. The misogyny which Hippolytus projects is an extreme statement of the place as secondary citizens of women in Greek society; even while loved as wives, they bear either the titles of ‘wickedness’ (l.635) and ‘lasciviousness’ (962) due to lack of chastity, or whose statuses are little better than their slaves when men are roused to vengeance (666-79). Had Phaedra had faith in a just society, whether or not their fates were decreed by the gods, she would not have committed suicide for shame, fearing she would not be believed.
👸 🎨 But Hippolytus does not learn such humility, he sees himself in the end as ‘guilty of no wrong’ (1382). His fatal flaw, his hamartia, is hubris, overbearing pride, presumption or arrogance, the Aristotelian measure of the tragic ‘hero’. Phaedra’s incriminating action (the letter) may equally have been an erroneous excess of pride, but it was born of a nobility, ‘contriving to bring honour out of shame’ (331); and Theseus’s, born of grief; but Hippolytus’s is inscrutable.
🧱 Thus Hippolytus maintains the conventions of Greek drama structurally—prologue, protasis, epistasis, catastasis, catastrophe; Chorus, strophe, antistrophe, epode; three principal characters; gods of mythology; violence off-stage by messenger report—but Euripides makes alterations which loosen those conventions, in placing a catastrophe at the end of the first third of the play, in balancing the fates of the three principals with like folly—pride—by interpolating a fourth with like failing, the Nurse; in having two Choruses, one male, one female; in having two halves dominated by women and then men; in bringing on two contending gods to instigate and resolve the contention as prologue and effective epilogue; but within this structure irony is its central leitmotif, in the miscommunication between the sexes, resolvable only through pardon, after the damage is done.
🎭 Iphigenia in Tauris (413/412 BCE) - 6.87
📜 Iphigenia in Tauris is a tragicomedy. It is useful to examine because it picks up the story of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BCE) and—through divine intervention—delivers them from their trials. At the time of its writing, Athens had been involved in the (Second) Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) for nearly 20 years, and was 10 years away from total defeat—perhaps this play offered a hope implicit in its criticism of war? For one issue which recurs is the blame of Helen for the Greek-Trojan war, and all that it set in motion, from the moment of Iphigenia’s ‘sacrifice’ at Aulis.
🎨 Vellacott identifies 4 main themes of Iphigenia in Tauris:
• the story of the cursed House of Atreus, where Iphigenia’s sacrifice starts a series of betrayals and revenges;
• Iphigenia’s character development;
• the misery of exile and the sorrow of severed families;
• the accepted view of the difference between Greeks and barbarians (Vellacott, p.28).
After 20 years, Iphigenia’s brother, Orestes, seeks her out. Orestes is in a frantic state, having lived through the family curse of vengeance, instigated by Apollo. Both have suffered, Iphigenia as priestess to a barbaric ritual, hateful of her father’s betrayal, Orestes forced to kill his mother for her betrayal. The juxtaposition of these two fates questions the accepted conventions that Greek civilisation was more enlightened than the barbaric one represented by the Taurians. In Iphigenia in Tauris, Euripides uses sacrifice to enunciate the theme of the distinction between barbarian and Greek—and shows that there is little between them (Vellacott, pp.35-7).
👸 To Iphigenia, her role as priestess to human sacrifice by the king of Taurica, Thoas, is abhorrent, and she is full of resentment. She is resentful of her father, Agamemnon, of the betrayal of Hellas, of her captive, Thoas, and of the goddess, Artemis.
The arrival of the two Hellene strangers at Tauris, Orestes and Pylades, only fuels her thirst for revenge, for they too are to be sacrificed. But their arrival triggers memories of home, and this transforms her mood to tenderness; she acquits Artemis and forgets her thirst for revenge, recognises that murder is evil, and ‘concludes that sacrifice merely reflects the barbarity of those who practice it’—she comes ‘at last to true piety because its spiritual basis is not any received tradition but a human judgement reached through the experience of suffering’ (Vellacott, pp.29-30).
But this is only one stage of her transformation. She is in touch with her love of family again, and her reconciliation with Orestes, on hearing the news of the death of her father, strengthens it in pity for him, and even the news of her brother’s murder of their mother drowns all censure in compassion. Thus she is reunited with her family. But hitherto, she has been dependent socially upon the support of the captive Greek women attending her, the Chorus. Yet her plot of escape with her brother does not include these women, who also long for home and freedom, and this moment, which champions family over community, ironically highlights the suffering of the female community in times of war, loss and exile.
⯢ Iphigenia, on Orestes’s ship, realises that family love transcends piety.
🧱 Iphigenia in Tauris is a play with complex themes, using that of sacrifice to ironically highlight the essential lack of difference between the enlightenment of the Greeks over the ‘barbarians’, and the wars that they believe they honourably pursue out of justice, and offsetting family love against the sorrows of women generally.
♀ Alcestis is about woman’s part in the patriarchal system of marriage and society (in ancient Greece).
The theme of Alcestis is the inexorable power of Necessity (anankē); and the story presents this theme in two aspects: the absolute impact of death, and the insoluble dilemma of marriage. The marriage here presented is [...] a particularly successful one, in which husband and wife, each as loving and as virtuous as the other, [...] are confronted with Necessity in the form of a sickness which threatens the life of Admetus. [...] The theme of the play is bigger than the story of Admetus; it is the whole unequal relationship of man to woman, shown in the most common and characteristic institution, marriage—and marriage at its best (Penguin Classics, 1953; 1974, Vellacott, Philip (trans.): ‘Introduction’, p.16).
⏳ Euripides modifies the time scheme of the legend: in it, Admetus is offered the bargain on his and Alcestis’s wedding day; in the play, the couple have been happily married for a long time, with a promising family, and the action takes place on the day of Alcestis’s death.
🧱 Structurally, the play is in three parts. The first, the protasis, also serves as the catastasis (the climax preceding the catastrophe) and tragic catastrophe (the concluding resolution), the death of Alcestis, since the change in time scheme has allowed us to imagine the prehistory of a happy marriage which is referred to in Alcestis and Admetus’s parting farewell. Where we would expect the ‘catastrophe’ is the dénouement, a peripety—a generic turn, with a comic outcome, and thus not a catastrophe, but a salvation.
🎶 The Chorus, citizens of Pherae, reflect in this play the conservative moral standards of Greek citizenry, accepting the self-sacrifice of Alcestis as part of the natural order of things, a duty which is generally accepted and thought honourable, and which in principle every husband would regard as his due, without ever expecting it to be fulfilled:
The ideal of marriage, in fact, carries to its conclusion the universal assumption that a woman’s life is a rational price for a man’s life, being of less value; that the women of a family are expendable, their lives at the disposal of the men’s lives (see e.g. Iph. Taur. 1005-6). Admetus has never questioned this principle and is therefore hardly aware of it. Alcestis did not set this ideal for herself, but finding it already part of the fabric of society she embraced it with a thoroughness which was her own rare and heroic achievement (Vellacott, p.17).
Admetus, while agreeing to this bargain, nonetheless increasingly suffers for it.
It is often remarked that this play is more concerned with Admetus than it is with his wife. This is true; Alcestis is simply a queen who accepts heroically the final implication of marriage. The choice she has to make is hard but simple, and is already made when the play opens. Admetus too has made a choice, and because he made it too easily, the action confronts him with a succession of further choices, each more complex than the last. His motives in choosing also vary, but one element is constant: the sense of guilt which becomes more articulate and more comprehensive as the play proceeds (Vellacott, p.18).
⯢ The problem is resolved by the intervention of Heracles, demi-god, son of Zeus and friend of Admetus, who battles with Death at the gates of the Underworld to win back the interred Alcestis. Heracles’s attendance introduces a raucous comedy to mix in with the tragic tone and theme, one which tempers the reversal of the catastrophe at the end. The figure of Heracles is both noble and honourable, and bullish and comical, representing the figure of a satyr in his Bacchanalian revelry. The play was presented as the satyr play after a tragic trilogy, and such scenes were expected in such a genre.
Euripides’ ability to convey serious meaning through comedy is not confined to Alcestis; it may be seen in Andromache, Ion, The Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis. This poet understood, like Shakespeare did, the nervous link that joins laughing with crying (Vellacott, pp.21-2).
Alcestis ends with a deus ex machina, a ‘god out of the machine’, with a redeeming instead of tragic ending, which signals the birth of the tragicomedy (a proleptic generic classification, but that syncretic genre nonetheless), with its mix of tragic and comic episodes, and the redemption of the ‘hero’ by divine restoration. There are precedents to such happy endings by divine intervention, in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (458), and Euripides’ own Prometheus trilogy (463), but in the former, restoration is of civic order, and in the latter, divine reprieve is of the divine. In Alcestis, the restoration is truly miraculous by divine restoration.
🧵♀ Vellacott identifies one material thing as symbolic of the play’s discursive theme, the marital bed:
The bed symbolizes the essential relationship of man and woman; and at the heart of that relationship is an acknowledged inequality. [...] In marriage, Alcestis entered the central institution of a male society; and because her nature is heroic her destiny lies not in its fortunate surface but in its underlying essence (Vellacott, p.18).
🪜 It is ironic that such a piece of furniture, which intimates rest, healing, love and birth, represents, in this time, in this society, not also death, but the inequity of patriarchy. Irony figures throughout the play:
• Chorus’s stasimons (strophe/antistrophe)—irony: lauding Alcestis, yet not questioning their acceptance of the convention that a wife’s life is worth less than the husband’s (ll.78-151, 200-242, 435-474, 571-605, 742-9, 963-1000);
• Ademetus’s growth to self-knowledge—he accepts his wife’s replacement of him, but will suffer for it: ‘He does not know how good she is; but suffering / Will teach him’ (ll.145-6), to his final test, when Heracles asks him to take the woman he has won in (ll.1039-1011)—equates to the gods sending trials to man who must learn by them wisdom;
• Admetus’s kommos—ironic lamentations in 4 stanzas, 1 and 3 envies the dead, 2 and 4 envies the unmarried and childless (ll.859-920), against a formerly happy married life and family;
• Admetus’s parents’ position—aged, yet refused to die in Admetus’s place v. rightful claim to their own lives with no duty to replace their son’s (ll.614-733);
• Heracles—both honourable (ll.508-546; 826-858, 1003-1153) and a buffoon (747-803), is Janus-like, reconciling the past happiness, present suffering and future misery;
• Marital bed—symbolism of rest, healing, love, conjugal sharing and birth, is a metaphor for death and a metonym the inequity of patriarchy (1.175-89);
• Alcestis—both heroic and passive female: accepts the place of her husband, but does not question her submissiveness to the expectations of male-dominated society;
• Alcestis’s final silence—this dramatic ellipsis, explained as a requisite of 3 days of purification on returning from the Dead, is pertinent to Euripides’s theme of women’s place as secondary citizens in the patriarchal system of marriage and society.
Thus we see how Euripides transforms the conventions of Greek tragedy, via his championing of women’s narratives, his generic turns, his use of irony, and his positioning of the Chorus, while still immersing his moral argument in the conventions of mythology (Apollo, Zeus, Hestia, Hades, Pluto, Persephone, Ares, Hermes, Heracles, Necessity, Fate, the Fates, Death, Charon, Cerberus) and dramatic and poetic construction.
Realism and fantasy, irony and tenderness, complement each other. This play cannot be classified; its design is faultless and unique (Vellacott, p.22).
🎭 Hippolytus (428 BCE) - 6.6
🎨 Euripides’s theme of the subjugation of women in a patriarchal society, and the motif of ‘pardon’ (syngnōmē), which was an undercurrent of Alcestis, continue through his other works. In Hippolytus (428), it is the ‘deep gulf of misunderstanding which divides men from women’, where ‘every mortal character is concerned with pardon—with bestowing, receiving, withholding, or urging it’ (Vellacott, p.22).
Vellacott differentiates ‘pardon’ (syngnōmē) as different from ‘forgiveness’ (aphesis): forgiveness is a two-way transaction, dependent upon having learned from being forgiven for one’s own sins, and thus able oneself to forgive another. ‘Pardon’, however, is the relinquishment of anger and the renouncement of reprisal; it requires no reciprocity from the other. Man’s belief that gods should be wiser than mortals is belied by their seeming incomprehension of this difference, and they are not prone to pardon: ‘Therefore the notion of pardon in Euripides is simple and without religious implications, operating between one mortal and another’ (Vellacott, p.23).
The matter of Hippolytus is the issue between reprisal and pardon.
This play shows a self-repeating cycle of anger, reprisal, suffering, and more anger; the one sadly limited, but genuine, act of pardon shown is achieved in the last scene by two mortals after divinity has departed (Vellacott, p.24).
The miscommunication between men and women is the other major theme of Hippolytus:
At the end of the prologue of Hippolytus the old slave[’s] words introduce the women’s world which then enters. [...] From then on, for fully half of the play, the stage is occupied by women. [...] The courage and honesty of this world are admirable, its error excusable, its wickedness grossly provoked. When Phaedra is dead, we are in a male world until the end of the play. By comparison it is a shallow world. Again excusable error leads to disaster—but here the excuse is given divine recognition. [...] In this male world there is less truth, less response to truth, less universal interest, than in the world of women (Vellacott, pp.23-4).
This two-sided world is also found in Medea (431) and Helen (412).
It is, for Euripides, the one fact of human life which above all others needs to be presented repeatedly and in all its aspects to the consideration of its citizens. In the world of women the notion of pardon finds little place [...]; in the male world it finds real though limited scope; between the two worlds, where it is most needed, it cannot operate at all (Vellacott, p.26).
🧱 The play is in three parts, with a prologue and protasis, the epistasis, and the catastasis and catastrophe forming the last third:
• prologue—Aphrodite’s scheme;
• protasis—Phaedra’s sickness and suicide;
• epitasis—Phaedra’s letter incriminating Hippolytus, Theseus’s accusations;
• catastasis—banishment of Hippolytus by Theseus;
• catastrophe—Hippolytus, assaulted by Poseidon, dies.
🎨 The tragedy is not merely Phaedra’s enforced suicide, but the place that women hold in the patriarchal society. The misogyny which Hippolytus projects is an extreme statement of the place as secondary citizens of women in Greek society; even while loved as wives, they bear either the titles of ‘wickedness’ (l.635) and ‘lasciviousness’ (962) due to lack of chastity, or whose statuses are little better than their slaves when men are roused to vengeance (666-79). Had Phaedra had faith in a just society, whether or not their fates were decreed by the gods, she would not have committed suicide for shame, fearing she would not be believed.
Today I shall be rid of life, and so shall give
Pleasure to Aphrodite, who is my destroyer;
And I shall be defeated; love is merciless.
Yet my death shall prove fatal to another’s life
And teach him to ride roughshod on my misery.
He shall share equally in my sickness, and learn
That chastity is humility and gentleness. (727-33).
👸 🎨 But Hippolytus does not learn such humility, he sees himself in the end as ‘guilty of no wrong’ (1382). His fatal flaw, his hamartia, is hubris, overbearing pride, presumption or arrogance, the Aristotelian measure of the tragic ‘hero’. Phaedra’s incriminating action (the letter) may equally have been an erroneous excess of pride, but it was born of a nobility, ‘contriving to bring honour out of shame’ (331); and Theseus’s, born of grief; but Hippolytus’s is inscrutable.
🧱 Thus Hippolytus maintains the conventions of Greek drama structurally—prologue, protasis, epistasis, catastasis, catastrophe; Chorus, strophe, antistrophe, epode; three principal characters; gods of mythology; violence off-stage by messenger report—but Euripides makes alterations which loosen those conventions, in placing a catastrophe at the end of the first third of the play, in balancing the fates of the three principals with like folly—pride—by interpolating a fourth with like failing, the Nurse; in having two Choruses, one male, one female; in having two halves dominated by women and then men; in bringing on two contending gods to instigate and resolve the contention as prologue and effective epilogue; but within this structure irony is its central leitmotif, in the miscommunication between the sexes, resolvable only through pardon, after the damage is done.
🎭 Iphigenia in Tauris (413/412 BCE) - 6.87
Sometimes, somehow, extraordinary misfortune seems
To take, by pure chance, some extraordinary turn. (720-21).
📜 Iphigenia in Tauris is a tragicomedy. It is useful to examine because it picks up the story of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BCE) and—through divine intervention—delivers them from their trials. At the time of its writing, Athens had been involved in the (Second) Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) for nearly 20 years, and was 10 years away from total defeat—perhaps this play offered a hope implicit in its criticism of war? For one issue which recurs is the blame of Helen for the Greek-Trojan war, and all that it set in motion, from the moment of Iphigenia’s ‘sacrifice’ at Aulis.
🎨 Vellacott identifies 4 main themes of Iphigenia in Tauris:
• the story of the cursed House of Atreus, where Iphigenia’s sacrifice starts a series of betrayals and revenges;
• Iphigenia’s character development;
• the misery of exile and the sorrow of severed families;
• the accepted view of the difference between Greeks and barbarians (Vellacott, p.28).
After 20 years, Iphigenia’s brother, Orestes, seeks her out. Orestes is in a frantic state, having lived through the family curse of vengeance, instigated by Apollo. Both have suffered, Iphigenia as priestess to a barbaric ritual, hateful of her father’s betrayal, Orestes forced to kill his mother for her betrayal. The juxtaposition of these two fates questions the accepted conventions that Greek civilisation was more enlightened than the barbaric one represented by the Taurians. In Iphigenia in Tauris, Euripides uses sacrifice to enunciate the theme of the distinction between barbarian and Greek—and shows that there is little between them (Vellacott, pp.35-7).
👸 To Iphigenia, her role as priestess to human sacrifice by the king of Taurica, Thoas, is abhorrent, and she is full of resentment. She is resentful of her father, Agamemnon, of the betrayal of Hellas, of her captive, Thoas, and of the goddess, Artemis.
[T]he character of Iphigenia [...] is developed with the kind of fullness and precision exemplified already in at least half-a-dozen female characters from Alcestis to Electra. Iphigenia is pictured for us in three relationships—to Artemis, to Agamemnon, and to other people in general. Each of these show a complexity which is contrasted with the one simple and pure element in her composition—the love and devotion she feels to Orestes (Vellacott, p.28).
The arrival of the two Hellene strangers at Tauris, Orestes and Pylades, only fuels her thirst for revenge, for they too are to be sacrificed. But their arrival triggers memories of home, and this transforms her mood to tenderness; she acquits Artemis and forgets her thirst for revenge, recognises that murder is evil, and ‘concludes that sacrifice merely reflects the barbarity of those who practice it’—she comes ‘at last to true piety because its spiritual basis is not any received tradition but a human judgement reached through the experience of suffering’ (Vellacott, pp.29-30).
But this is only one stage of her transformation. She is in touch with her love of family again, and her reconciliation with Orestes, on hearing the news of the death of her father, strengthens it in pity for him, and even the news of her brother’s murder of their mother drowns all censure in compassion. Thus she is reunited with her family. But hitherto, she has been dependent socially upon the support of the captive Greek women attending her, the Chorus. Yet her plot of escape with her brother does not include these women, who also long for home and freedom, and this moment, which champions family over community, ironically highlights the suffering of the female community in times of war, loss and exile.
Iphigenia, then, is a complex character drawn in great detail. She embodies, first, a comment on religion; secondly, a comment on the family bond; thirdly, a comment on the effects of suffering. Above all, she is, in these three aspects, one of her author’s clearest comments on woman, who bears the major portion of the world’s suffering, whose constancy is the heart of home and family love, and whose honourable place in religious ceremonial includes the function of sacrificial victim (Vellacott, p.34).
⯢ Iphigenia, on Orestes’s ship, realises that family love transcends piety.
🧱 Iphigenia in Tauris is a play with complex themes, using that of sacrifice to ironically highlight the essential lack of difference between the enlightenment of the Greeks over the ‘barbarians’, and the wars that they believe they honourably pursue out of justice, and offsetting family love against the sorrows of women generally.
This play, then, not only presents with some elaboration the two principal themes of Euripides’ life’s work, but illustrates at many points the power of his ironic method, the deep insight of his psychological portraiture, and his intense concern with living human issues. In addition to this, the poetic beauty of the lyrical portions, from the anguish of the first lament to the playfulness of the last stasimon, places this drama among the most satisfying and complete of the author’s works (Vellacott, p.38-9).
April 4, 2019
Comments
A more successful version of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Let at least a demigod (Heracles) venture down to Hades to retrieve your wife instead.
Summary
Admetus marries King Pelias's daughter Alcestis, but in a sacrifice after the wedding, Admetus forgot to make the required offering to Artemis, and when he opened the marriage chamber he found his bed full of snakes.
Apollo helped the newlywed king, by making the Fates drunk, extracting from them a promise that if anyone would want to die instead of Admetus, they would allow it. And when the day of his death came near, no one volunteered not even his elderly parents, but Alcestis stepped forth to die in his stead. Shortly after fighting with Hades, Heracles rescued Alcestis from the underworld as a token of appreciation for Admetus' hospitality.
Quotes
MAID.
Alive. No, dead…. Oh, read it either way.
LEADER.
Nay, daughter, can the same soul live and die?
MAID.
Her life is broken; death is in her eye.
ADMETUS
O God, if Orpheus' voice were mine, to sing
To Death's high Virgin and the Virgin's King,
Till their hearts failed them, down would I my path
Cleave, and naught stay me, not the Hound of Wrath,
Not the grey oarsman of the ghostly tide,
Till back to sunlight I had borne my bride.
PHERES
I got thee to succeed me in my hall,
I have fed thee, clad thee. But I have no call
To die for thee. Not in our family,
Not in all Greece, doth law bid fathers die
To save their sons. Thy road of life is thine
None other's, to rejoice at or repine.
All that was owed to thee by us is paid.
PHERES
Go forward; woo more wives that more may die. [😅]
HERACLES
Death is a debt all mortal men must pay [👍🏼]
...
Life is not life, but just unhappiness.
ADMETUS
My mother bore me under an evil star.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 12, 2020
Continuing my mission of reading all the surviving Ancient Greek plays.
May 11, 2020
Quite a fun read, even for someone with no particular knowledge of Greek myths and tragedies (except for what I read from time to time).
Alcestis seems like a Greek tragedy, but actually has a happy ending (although quite frankly the husband deserved to be punished imho)
Medea was the juicy, scandalous and ultimately tragic one. Although Jason totally deserved it, but not his children.
The Children of Heracles was just ok. Also, I'm not sure about the timeline. Heracles's brother is an old man, but his mother is still around and kicking, and his kids are young, although his son who appears toward the end is grown. This confused me a tad.
Hippolytus was probably the most tragic (Medea was more evil). Although, once again here, when he started badmouthing aphrodite you could almost hear the ominous soundtrack of foreboding in the background.
Alcestis seems like a Greek tragedy, but actually has a happy ending (although quite frankly the husband deserved to be punished imho)
Medea was the juicy, scandalous and ultimately tragic one. Although Jason totally deserved it, but not his children.
The Children of Heracles was just ok. Also, I'm not sure about the timeline. Heracles's brother is an old man, but his mother is still around and kicking, and his kids are young, although his son who appears toward the end is grown. This confused me a tad.
Hippolytus was probably the most tragic (Medea was more evil). Although, once again here, when he started badmouthing aphrodite you could almost hear the ominous soundtrack of foreboding in the background.
April 3, 2021
John Davie translation in penguin classics
Fine collection, Medea & Hippolytus are masterpieces of revenge/ betrayal and hubris respectively. Alcestis an odd but engaging tragi-comedy and the melodrama of children of Heracles.
Overall good collection, well translated
Fine collection, Medea & Hippolytus are masterpieces of revenge/ betrayal and hubris respectively. Alcestis an odd but engaging tragi-comedy and the melodrama of children of Heracles.
Overall good collection, well translated
February 3, 2023
I enjoyed reading 'Hippolytus' in an older version of this translation, ahead of seeing 'Phaedra' at the National Theatre next week. I continue to marvel how a play written 2,500 still has resonance today.
September 26, 2023
technically i’ve cheated adding this but i have fully read all three of these plays over this year so it totally counts (shout out to when i assigned myself homework n read hippolytus before going to see phaedra) rip my dissertation, how am i supposed to read for fun under these conditions,
May 8, 2022
Wonderful, thought-provoking plays.
October 20, 2023
Greek tragedies are the ancient day Succession send tweet.
February 18, 2024
Less tragic than I was expecting. Euripides also seems to have a more sympathetic view of women than you expect from an Ancient Greek.
February 24, 2024
Another classic of Greek tragic plays.
August 5, 2019
Alcestis
presents the modern reader with a strange sequence of emotions. Alcestis herself presents a moving lamentation on her early death, focusing on how the absence of a mother will impoverish their lives. This is followed by the farcical mourning of her husband Admetus who concentrates on how her death will affect him, the further irony of his grieving being that it is because he himself needed someone to die in his place that is the cause Alcestis' immanent death. Finally in a nominally happy ending Herakles reunites Admetus and Alcestis, having ventured into the underworld to rescue the latter. In my vision of the play, however, as the drama closes the shrouded and silent Alcestis, forbidden to speak for three days after her return, seems more like a revenant than a woman restored to full life.
Hippolytus is reminiscent of the story of Joseph and Pophitar's wife, though in the end things turn out even worse for the Greek youth than for his Hebrew counterpart. Though translator Phillip Vellacott rejects the idea as inadequate in his introduction, it is hard not to see Hippolytus as an earlier version of Pentheus in The Bacchae, done to death by the female principle for his one-sidedness. The issue of male chastity, a masculine devotee of Artemis, is one which I have not encountered elsewhere in Greek literature, and I am not sure whether to take the practice as "unnatural" or a form of virtue. Certainly the closing scenes evoke pity for Hippolytus, who seems crushed in the irreconcilable contest between Aphrodite and Artemis. Phaedra's suicide letter which effectively condemns Hippolytus seems excessively cruel, though it is given dual determinants, both as an act of vengeance for her stepson's rejection of her advances and as a way of eliminating him as a rival to her own children's inheritance.
The concept of Iphigenia in Tauris seems similar to that of Helen: Artemis rescued Iphigenia from her sacrifice in Aulis and carried her away to distant and uncivilized Tauris - another tragic figure of the Trojan War narrative is redeemed. This play is a bit more serious than Helen; Iphigenia almost sacrifices her brother Orestes and his friend (and now brother-in-law, having married Electra) Pylades before learning their identities. The guilt and horror of matricide is also dwelt upon, though Iphigenia sympathizes with the reason for her brother's crime; she is strangely un-vindictive toward her father who put a knife to her throat, and rejects the idea of Clytemnestra as her avenger. All blame for her sacrifice is heaped on Helen who, as translator Philip Vellacott points out in his notes, bears no responsibility in the matter but acts as a kind of universal scapegoat for all the bloodshed associated with the Trojan War. Nevertheless, the ending, with the children of Agamemnon reunited, is a happy one, like that of Helen.
The play also contains something of a revision to The Oresteia as well: it seems not all the Furies were satisfied by the trial depicted in The Eumenides, and some of them still haunt Orestes. To placate these holdouts, he has been instructed by Apollo's oracle to steal a sky-fallen image of Artemis from Tauris and take it to Athens. An idea that the Furies are never fully nor finally satisfied is perhaps an implication of the play, but far from explicit.
In the Chicago Euripides:
Alcestis - Vol. 1
Iphigenia in Tauris - Vol. 2
Hippolytus - Vol. 1
Hippolytus is reminiscent of the story of Joseph and Pophitar's wife, though in the end things turn out even worse for the Greek youth than for his Hebrew counterpart. Though translator Phillip Vellacott rejects the idea as inadequate in his introduction, it is hard not to see Hippolytus as an earlier version of Pentheus in The Bacchae, done to death by the female principle for his one-sidedness. The issue of male chastity, a masculine devotee of Artemis, is one which I have not encountered elsewhere in Greek literature, and I am not sure whether to take the practice as "unnatural" or a form of virtue. Certainly the closing scenes evoke pity for Hippolytus, who seems crushed in the irreconcilable contest between Aphrodite and Artemis. Phaedra's suicide letter which effectively condemns Hippolytus seems excessively cruel, though it is given dual determinants, both as an act of vengeance for her stepson's rejection of her advances and as a way of eliminating him as a rival to her own children's inheritance.
The concept of Iphigenia in Tauris seems similar to that of Helen: Artemis rescued Iphigenia from her sacrifice in Aulis and carried her away to distant and uncivilized Tauris - another tragic figure of the Trojan War narrative is redeemed. This play is a bit more serious than Helen; Iphigenia almost sacrifices her brother Orestes and his friend (and now brother-in-law, having married Electra) Pylades before learning their identities. The guilt and horror of matricide is also dwelt upon, though Iphigenia sympathizes with the reason for her brother's crime; she is strangely un-vindictive toward her father who put a knife to her throat, and rejects the idea of Clytemnestra as her avenger. All blame for her sacrifice is heaped on Helen who, as translator Philip Vellacott points out in his notes, bears no responsibility in the matter but acts as a kind of universal scapegoat for all the bloodshed associated with the Trojan War. Nevertheless, the ending, with the children of Agamemnon reunited, is a happy one, like that of Helen.
The play also contains something of a revision to The Oresteia as well: it seems not all the Furies were satisfied by the trial depicted in The Eumenides, and some of them still haunt Orestes. To placate these holdouts, he has been instructed by Apollo's oracle to steal a sky-fallen image of Artemis from Tauris and take it to Athens. An idea that the Furies are never fully nor finally satisfied is perhaps an implication of the play, but far from explicit.
In the Chicago Euripides:
Alcestis - Vol. 1
Iphigenia in Tauris - Vol. 2
Hippolytus - Vol. 1
April 21, 2024
First read: 1 star
"I'm tired of this grandpa!!" "Well, It's too damn bad!" * gets hit with abominable amounts of sexism *
Not doing this today, thank you.
Dnf four pages in.
Yes, I know I didn't give Euripides a chance at all, but I know what to expect from Greek playwriters. What you get from the first four pages you read is what you'll go through for the rest of the play, even for the rest of any other plays you read. And I do not want to read about Aphrodite being a bitch and her and other women being considered scum. I don't care for it, I don't want it, thank you very much.
Second read: 3 stars.
... fine. I enjoyed the book. It was fun, although I hate Alcestis' story more than I hate almost anything else in Greek mythology.
"I'm tired of this grandpa!!" "Well, It's too damn bad!" * gets hit with abominable amounts of sexism *
Not doing this today, thank you.
Dnf four pages in.
Yes, I know I didn't give Euripides a chance at all, but I know what to expect from Greek playwriters. What you get from the first four pages you read is what you'll go through for the rest of the play, even for the rest of any other plays you read. And I do not want to read about Aphrodite being a bitch and her and other women being considered scum. I don't care for it, I don't want it, thank you very much.
Second read: 3 stars.
... fine. I enjoyed the book. It was fun, although I hate Alcestis' story more than I hate almost anything else in Greek mythology.
May 27, 2016
Alcestis: An interesting work in that it is perhaps one of the only depictions in (known) Greek mythology of a return from Hades of a mortal. Contains various meditations on life and death. Does not have a strictly tragic ending, leading to confusion over its genre.
Hippolytus: I studied this one for Greek A-level. It is easily the strongest work in this collection, covering themes of bastardy, gender, virginity, male and female sexuality, and above all, the powerless and desperate situation of humans in the face of the painless gods.
Iphigenia in Tauris: More of a brief and thrilling adventure story than anything else. Lacks much value outside of its original context as part of a trilogy, which has sadly now been lost.
Hippolytus: I studied this one for Greek A-level. It is easily the strongest work in this collection, covering themes of bastardy, gender, virginity, male and female sexuality, and above all, the powerless and desperate situation of humans in the face of the painless gods.
Iphigenia in Tauris: More of a brief and thrilling adventure story than anything else. Lacks much value outside of its original context as part of a trilogy, which has sadly now been lost.
September 12, 2016
I have to say that this was really just okay. As a play, "Alcestis" is fairly two-dimensional and pales in comparison to many of the other surviving Greek festival dramas. "Medea", of course, is a terrific wild ride but I much preferred the translation by Robin Robertson to this one by John Davie. In fact the best part of this edition is the solid introduction, in which Richard Rutherford discusses the development of Athenian stage works running from Aeschylus through Sophocles to Euripides. That was time well spent!
March 25, 2007
Not Euripides's best work, but still interesting in its semicanonical way - Alcestis is particularly odd for its ambiguous combination of elements of both comedy and tragedy.
June 5, 2008
I've only read Hippolytus, of these. Not my favourite tragedy, but not a bad one either.
July 29, 2009
only read hippolytus, which is full of typically euripidean caterwauling leading up to the inevitable deus ex machina. who cares?
April 5, 2017
Great stuff.
September 10, 2016
These old plays just nail their characters.
September 19, 2016
The plays:
Alcestis ***1/2
Hippolytus ****
Iphigenia in Tauris *****
Alcestis ***1/2
Hippolytus ****
Iphigenia in Tauris *****
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