I love women and their schemes!!!!

I’ve been feeling the ancient Greeks calling to me and when I heard Natalie Haynes say that Medea by Euripides was her favorite play of all time I couldn’t resist so I took a break from the International Booker and Desmond Elliott Prize lists and read the four plays in this volume: Medea, which is as good as Natalie Haynes said it is, in which Jason explains why he married a princess after Medea sacrificed everything for him and helped or rather won the challenges to set to him, and Medea explains why she committed the unthinkable crime for which she is famous; Hecabe which features Agamemnon and Odysseus dealing with a mother’s justified grief and anger; Electra, in which the question of revenge and justice is weighed when Electra and her brother Orestes discuss killing their mother to avenge their father; and Heracles (aka Hercules) which was surprisingly to me about faith in the existence of the gods.
All plays were brilliant and again I see why they are classics and why my dad loved them so much.

Highly recommended

Masterpieces!! Euripides is great!! I really enjoyed rereading these gems.

It's always surprising how brutal and bloody Greek tragedies are
(but: never nihilistic! The one who wrongs will be pursued by the Gods, and usually the entire bloodline is cursed)

Medea:
Medea is angry that her husband Jason is taking a new wife, he wants to ban her from the city as she's dangerous, she plans revenge and murders the new wife as well as her own children - since that will hurt her husband more. She survives and escapes the city with the bodies of the children.

Hecabe:
Ex-queen of Troy, now slave, has to watch as her daughter is sacrificed by the Greeks looking for good omens to return; she also learns that her son was murdered earlier by a trusted friend, so she plots revenge on Polymestor, and traps him with her friends - they stab out his eyes and murder his children. Agamemnon sends the blind Polymestor away without more bloodshed: after all, he murdered his guest, it was his fault.

O stately royal palace! O once happy home!
O Priam, famed for boundless treasures; famed as father,
And I as aged mother, of children without peer! How we have come to nothing, stripped of our old pride!
And we – we paltry humans – swell with arrogance,
One for the wealth and luxury of his house, another
Because the citizens all call him a great man!
Such things mean nothing; careful schemes, the eloquence
Of boasters – all nothing! The man who day by day
Lives on, escaping misery – he is happiest.

Electra:
Former princess, now married away to a commoner after an usurper conspired with her mother to kill the king Agamemnon and take over the throne (it's also revenge of the mother for the earlier sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon at the start of the Trojan War - the same Iphigenia who survived in Goethe's play Iphigenia in Tauris, a Tragedy). Electra waits for her brother Orestes (the one who later shows up in The Oresteia), who traps the king and murders him, and both murder their mother. They suffer from their great crime of matricide, Orestes is instructed to leave and purge his soul (in a few sentences the story of the Oresteia is foretold).

Heracles:
Yet another usurper, yet another family in peril while the man (here Heracles) is away on adventures. Before the new king can murder the family (after all, young kids are future usurpers!) Heracles appears and kills the king. Since this is a Greek tragedy happy endings are not a good thing - so Madness personified has to appear (some old bloodlines curse or whatevs), Heracles turns mad and kills his sons and wife in a frenzy. His mind returns, and Theseus leads the broken man away.

I need to read more Greek tragedies!

love vengeful, murderous women !


-tess

Euripides I: Alcestis, Medea, The Children of Heracles, Hippolytus

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I read this as part of the Online Great Books program. I found the five plays in this text to be quite accessible and quite interesting. The book has a glossary of names that is useful for keeping track of persons, places, and relationships.

What was fundamentally interesting to me was the fleshing out of Greek mythology. I know some of these myths up to the point where we assume "and they all lived happily ever after." Apparently, Greeks did not put much stock in happy endings and loved putting their protagonists into no win situations.

Take "Medea," for example. We knew that Medea fell in love with Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts) and saved his bacon on numerous occasions. She cuts her ties with her family and homeland with extreme prejudice. She marries Jason and they have two sons.

So, does she get her happy ending? Not after Jason decides to marry the King's daughter and cut her and their sons off from his support. She naturally, but, perhaps, disproportionately, plots revenge against the king and Jason's new wife. When Jason proposes to take his sons to live with him because he loves them, Medea extends her revenge to include them, from which we get the term "Medean" for mothers who kill their children.

In Hippolytus, Aphrodite decides to get revenge on Theseus's son, Hippolytus, who favors Artemis, by stirring up passion in Theseus's wife, Hippolytus's step-mother, for Hippolytus. When her passion is rejected by Hyppolytus, in order to save herself from a disgrace that might result in her children being disinherited by Theseus, she kills herself in a way that frames Hippolytus. An enraged Theseus uses one of his three curses from his father, Poseidon, on his innocent son. After Hippolytus is killed, then and only then does Artemis share the truth with Theseus.

In Alcestis, King Admetus has been blessed by Appollo with the boon of putting off his death if, and only if, someone else is willing to take his place. Naturally, no one is willing to do this, except his wife, Alcestis, who recognizes that a dead King will mean that her children will be at risk.

Alcestis actually has what may pass for a happy ending in Greek theater as Heracles intervenes to manhandle Death into coughing up Alcestis for a happy if mysterious re-union with her louse of a husband. (She may not speak for three days....three days after her return from death!)

Finally, the Children of Heracles has a lot of drama and its own questionable happy ending. After Heracles is taken to heaven, his children are left defenseless against King Eurystheus, who fears that they will seek revenge against him for his tormenting their father. The children and their guardian, Iolaus, seek refuge in Athens. Athenians being good and noble, and where the plays were staged, agree, but the wrinkle is that a virgin sacrifice is required, which one daughter of Heracles nobly agrees to provide. There is a battle. Eurystheus is captured, and despite an agreement to spare him, Heracles's wife is delighted to obtain revenge against Eurystheus, proving that his insight about the wisdom of ending the line of Heracles was accurate all along.

There was a whole bunch here for ancient Greeks to chew over on long Greek nights. I can imagine them turning over and over the issues of fate, destiny, conflicting duties for which there is no answer, and the machinations of the gods who always seem to be somewhere behind these conundra.

the girls are revenge killing again

Medea: Anything for Revenge. Reading progress update: I've read 138 out of 206 pages.
 
Medea: You will regret what you did to me, Jason!
Jason: I regretted it alright
 
How great can your anger be? To what extent are you ready to hurt those who hurt you? Would you kill your own children to appease a great offense?
Medea is ready to do anything it takes to hurt Jason. She takes his wife, his children, and his happiness.
 
What I find fascinating in this play is that I am still sympathetic to Medea after all she did. It feels wrong to be on her side as much as Jason’s side, but she advances reasons to her actions that makes one wonder if she is right (except of course for killing her children since that is unforgivable). She is clever with words, and she manipulates the others the way she pleases. One is tempted to think that she went through a lot and that she was not thinking right, and even that she was in the verge of insanity. But the truth is she was not. She knew what she was doing, and she carried her plan from A to Z for one reason and one only: Revenge.
So is revenge a valid reason to go to extremes to hurt Jason? She argues that letting these children live would doom them. She believes that nothing was right anymore the moment Jason decided to share the bed of another woman. At some point, she was about to cancel her plan, but she realized it was too late. It’s like if fate was working against her, but she managed to have it her own way at the end. She got what she wanted: Revenge.

I have mixed reactions to these plays. Medea was superb - I was astonished at how modern the themes were. But Electra was such a disappointment in contrast - the characters never really leapt off the page.

Here are my reviews of the two I have read so far:
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3.5

greek mythology is the best thing ever and nobody can convince me otherwise. these plays were thoroughly enjoyable and humorous while also packed with interesting knowledge about the surrounding myths. medea is an absolute badass and people do not give her enough credit!

One of the best plays ever made