Collection includes Medea, Hecabe, Electra and Heracles. There are some obvious flaws in each of these plays, yet found myself enjoying them more than those I've read recently by Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Most enjoyable to least enjoyable:
1. Hecabe
2. Medea
3. Electra
4. Heracles

Yet I still very much liked Heracles, and found it the most interesting with its apparent scepticism towards the gods and their actions, and its consideration of human friendship. Partly for these reasons, also found it more emotionally affecting than the other plays in this collection. Only comes bottom of the list because Iris doing the whole 'oh I'm going to make Heracles temporarily out of his mind and make him kill his family' thing didn't really make sense to me.

my favourite thing ive had to read for school so far

-reminder men dont deserve rights

MEDEA!
Daughter of a King. Niece of nymph. Granddaughter of a god. Wife of a hero.
How many women have you known in any literary piece ever written, in all history of humanity, who incarnate all of these blessings together in one?
A fistful, maybe?
Killer of her own children! ( Ok. Now you are definitely left with ONE only.)
MEDEA!
A symbol. A metaphor. A precedent. A uniqueness. ONE and only in millennia. What else can one say.

4.5⭐️ I would kill to see these performed

“oh, I am a woman born to sorrow!”

OH. MY. GOD. MEDEA.

Alcestis, the oldest preserved piece of Euripides, is not such a high flyer: it's weak on action and has no psychological depth, though it contains a beautiful father-son dialogue.
In Medea the psychological deepness, of course, goes much further. A real tragedy, Medea is a woman who is driven by evil (not the gods), she is a helpless victim of it, and she knows that, but in spite of this, she goes on. Jason is a lamentable man, but in fact he is responsible for his own fate.

i support women’s rights but more importantly i support women’s wrongs <3

(as a collective i give this a four but Medea’s story is a FIVE!)

This is Euripides I, from the University of Chicago Press, which published "The Complete Greek Tragedies." I have a soft spot in my heart for these, regardless of how well or ill one judges the translations -- and you'd have to be a better scholar than I to have a serious opinion on that score. My soft spot owes to recollections of my undergraduate days, when I read this same edition as a freshman. What a great awakening -- no, that's a bit too pat; what an intriguing alternative to the Ozzie & Harriet/Abbie-and-Jerry-and-Allen Americas that were warring at that time.

"Alcestis" is the story of a wife who volunteers to the gods to die instead of her husband. "The Medea" is the original for "Fatal Attraction," and, like so much Greek thought which we inevitably return to, does it all on a bigger stage. A vindictive King of Argos gets his comeuppance in "The Heracleidae." And "Hippolytus" is a gender-reversed mirror image of Butterfield 8, 2,400 years earlier. Phaedra is obsessed with her handsome young stepson, but knows the scandal her passion would engender. What happens? Trouble -- what else?

"With Euripides.... his faults are obvious. Equally obvious is his genius. He is the father of the romantic comedy, the problem play. He has given us a series of unforgettable characters [women]. There has never been anyone else like him." The summary of editor and Bryn Mawr professor Richmond Lattimore.

P.S., a subsequent thought: "Hippolytus" ends with Hippolytus and his father Theseus having it out. When they've vented their anger, resentments, and contrary views of the world, father and son try to make a little nice with each other. They blame the behaviors on the gods; it was Aphrodite who drove Phaedra into her craziness; it was Artemis who made Hippolytus so contrary. It must have been a relief to be able to shift some of the responsibility for one's actions onto the perversities of the gods. "Alas, I know the goddess who destroyed me!" exclaims Hippolytus. And his father, Theseus, laments how terrible his losses have been and how much he contributed to them -- but it was (partly) Poseidon's fault. "A god tripped up my judgment." Rejoins Hippolytus, in agreement: "O, if only men might be a curse to Gods!" It's a strange mechanism to our ears today, but a good one -- it gives the characters a way to get past their own sins and destructiveness.

Hippolytus - the story felt rushed, to the point I kept thinking, "Does Euripides have a hot date after the show and he wants to wrap things up early?" Anyway, as was the custom, this is only one part of what would have been a four-play work of related themes... I don't know the accompanying plays, so perhaps this one is exactly the right speed and length for his purposes.

This short Greek tragedy leaves me breathless and pained. Since the beginning we face the moral dilemma of Medea — the desire to bring avenge to Jason’s betrayal of oath and her children’s lives. Medea in an extreme situation, facing exile and homelessness without friend, has enormous pressure to make a decision. Medea, the alien in Corinth, has to be her own agency. The chorus in the play are as if the voice in the audience’s head, commenting on Medea’s decision, switching from sympathizing with Medea to appalled warning against her killing of her own children. Children, especially sons, are especially crucial to the Greeks as they claim heritage to the household. As important as sons to their fathers, the chorus makes a comment on how children could be burdens for women, which is quite a radical position at that age. But Medea, the “barbarian” in words of Jason and the Greeks, struggles against the moral expectation on women. (My heart bleed in grief as the reader even though I anticipated the ending.) In Greek mythology, there’s a inclination of sons killing father, yet fewer instance there is for infanticides. Euripides uses drama as a media to present with the unconventional and stretch the audience morality into an inquiry, and violence is what brings the audience close to the matter.
The ending closes with Medea in the gold chariots, unpunished, and even more glorified as if emancipated from her suffering. She breaks the chain upon moral conduct and yet has not received punishment. Where is the role of gods in this story? Zeus and the gods are often mentioned for praying justice, yet they seemed aloof. The chaos of the social morality attributes to the wars and social change in Euripides time.
I’m still trying to catch a breath and take a step back from the play that leaves me gasping for air. But that probably means Euripides did a great job. :-)

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!