I gave this four stars, but Not because I really Liked it. It was well done and moving. Wrenching, actually. I didn't really read the whole book, only The Trojan Women. I thought I might read the others, but I peeked at Hecuba and realized that the subject matter, mothers facing the slaughter of their children, would be too tough for me to handle much of. Aescylus's Agamemnon is next on our roster, and I think that will be more my cup of tea.

I saw a contemporary play called "Trojan Barbie" that echoed themes of the Trojan Women and found it really interesting, in a depressing way. This inpsired me to go back to Euripides, who I remembered actually liking in high school when we read "Medea" in 10th grade. There's something about a woman's hurt and sorrow that he understands to the point that it transcends centuries, and that's the only way I can describe it.

Good--

This collection includes Hecuba, Andromache, The Trojan women, and Ion, the first three of which deal with, well, the Trojan women after the war, and it does get a bit repetitive to read The Trojan Women after the first two. I think Hecuba is the finest of the three. The figure of Hecuba is just fascinating as a subject for the psychological vivisection that Euripides performs so well, what with all the compound grief of losing her husband, palace, status, wealth, and all her 19 children including Hector being killed and dragged around the palace for 9 unwholesome days and Polydorus being murdered like a dog by who she thought was a dear friend, Polymester, and Polyxena being sacrificed to the never-satisfied Achilles (who I think killed like a lot of her kids, e.g., Hector and Troilus) plus at least one grandchild. She loses, in a word, everything you can possibly imagine in a pretty horrible way. So how to present her grief on stage is more of a formidable challenge than anything else, and Euripides does a pretty good job of meeting it and handling it even by modern standards (I won't say it was amazing or excellent b/c if it were, I would've bawled my eyes out), and that mere accomplishment deserves praise.

Andromache is a weaker play but still interesting enough to carry you through to the end without getting bored. It's just that Hermione and Menelaus are so evil that they represent awesome villains, and anything with awesome villains is interesting. So Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen, is wedded to the son of Achilles Neoptolemus, who took Andromache (the widowed wife of Hector) as a mistress and begets a child by her. If you think this is already fucked up enough (would you take the wife of a man your father killed in battle?), listen to this: Hermione, because she's not getting knocked up, blames everything on Andromache and accuses her of witchery and evil intentions, and tags up with her daddy and decides to kill her and her son (who is her husband's illegitimate son). So it's all pretty messed up and hence fun.

The Trojan Women is a rather mediocre, haphazard play without much of a plot. It's just Hecuba cursing her fate and grieving the losses of Cassandra, Andromache, and Astyanax, and whimpering about her bleak future. Hecuba presented a much, much more compelling portrayal of this uber-schlimazel of a woman, and I also don't think it does anything different or better...

Finally, Ion is a bit of a random play which can very well be classified as a romance play along with Iphigenia in Tauris and Helen. It's basically the same plot of the lost one found on the verge of being lost forever and some divinity wrapping it up at the end. So it was mildly interesting (definitely more so than The Trojan Women), and it's good to have a happy ending once in a while.

I didn't really mean to read this. I meant to read Plato. But I didn't have Plato. And I had two days to wait before it was to arrive. That meant I could read Euripides or Odyssey. Odyssey was clearly going to be a greater investment of time that I didn't really want to spend, but this was Euripides III and I suspected it might not be the best collection of plays for the Euripides noob. Still, I wasn't really prepared to take on Odyssey. I wanted to get to Plato.

I liked these plays just fine. I don't think they were particularly remarkable. The translations were easy and varied as each play had a different translator. The introductions were brief. The notes were non-existent.

Someday I will revisit the more important extant works of Euripides but this was a very enjoyable placeholder until that time.