I did. enjoy it but the characters were all kinda the worst?

Medea: Overdramatic and needs to sort out her life priorities. Yes she’s a woman in an oppressive society and whatnot so yes i feel a certain amount of sympathy but there’s a point at which one has to say actually no, no i do not believe it is okay to kill your children when your husband marries someone else. Neither do i believe that killing your husband’s new wife is acceptable. I think i could sum up my thoughts in a simple : kill = bad

Jason: So to start with i pity him because imagine having married this gal, realised she’s batshit crazy, and then when you marry a gal you actually love she comes out and kills her and your children. But then he started going all sexist on her… lost a few brownie points there. Then lost many more when he claimed his motives were to help the children, yet he did not bring them with him. And he cannot claim that his wife wouldn’t have liked it because in his words, he can persuade her of anything. All in all, not a swaggy guy.

Creon: I feel we can call this idiot the trigger for all the problems in the play. if he’d exiled medea immediately, nothing bad could have happened… but then again, can we really blame him for seeing the best in medea and having that little bit of human compassion? No not really. okay so never mind it’s all medea’s fault

overall… i don’t know… what an odd story… a little unrealistic…

the girls are revenge killing again

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

The translation was nice, though I would have appreciated more substantial introduction/notes sections. Then again, I definitely got my money’s worth ($3 for a very old paperback that looks like it went through a toaster oven)

Great but a bit depressing.

Medea is a QUEEN

Hippolytus

Those Greeks and their myths. It started with Euripides in the fifth century. Hippolytus loved nothing better than to ride his horse (his name: the breaker of the horse).

Love, he had no interest, and jealous Aphrodite was so angry that she needed to teach him a lesson: she made his step mother Phaedra fall in love with Hippolytus.

The poor woman was beside herself. Phaedra was driven to her to own tragedy. When her husband, noble Theseus learned what happened, he turned on his own son. No questions asked. The weakness of humans: lust, anger, pride, resentment, treachery.

Double tragedy; more blood is spilled. The goddess Artemis intervenes. Humans be dammed because the gods can toy with them. Silly humans.

Great collection with excellent translations.

I picked this book of plays by Euripides primarily for Medea, so that will earn the brunt of my review.

Medea is one kick-ass, crazy bitch. Period. Having read Jason and the Golden Fleece  and thoroughly enjoyed it I was excited to read more about Medea, particularly her story after helping Jason find the Golden Fleece. Talk about one spurned lover! After Jason leaves Medea for a Greek princess, Medea goes a little bye-bye and decides the best way for her to express her distaste is to kill off her children. Someone get that lady a diary or a canvas or something! Girl, there are better ways of creatively expressing your feelings than going straight for the spawn. I'm just sayin'.

Really though, she's not a woman to be trifled with and while I love her story I'm a little peeved with Euripides for portraying yet another woman on the crazy side of things. The Big E had a habit of being somewhat misogynistic and that's obvious here, even in his attempt to be a big boy and tell the story from the woman's point of view.

In contemporary stories Medea might be referred to as Emily Valentine from the early seasons of Beverly Hills, 90210. She had no children, so she went all firebug instead. But the premise is the same. Mostly.

The other plays in this small collection were pretty okay. The second best is Aclestis where the title character spends a great deal of time dying, her husband mourning, and Death being duped. All in all, good times. The other plays did not hold up in my opinion, but really it's hard to compete with Medea, both the woman and the play. I'm digging this girl. Though not someone I wish to aspire to become, her psychosis is incredibly fascinating. (And if during this fascination I cut my hair short, dye it blond so my roots are always showing and start driving a motorcycle and getting all cow-eyed for Brandon Walsh after slipping drugs into his drink, please intervene. Thanks.)

Each story has its own charm and uniqueness but, Alcestis is definitely my favorite

woooo ancient greek theater classsss

gaslight gatekeep girlboss

43. Euripides I : Alcestis, The Medea, The Heracleidae, Hippolytus (The Complete Greek Tragedies)
published: 1955 (my copy is a 26th printing from 1993)
format: 224 page Paperback
acquired: May 30 from a Half-Price Books
read: July 5-9
rating: 4 stars

Each play had a different translator

Alcestis (481 bce) - translated by Lattimore, Richard c1955
The Medea (431 bce) - translated by David Grene c1944
The Heracleidae (circa 430 bce) - translated by Rex Warner c1955
Hippolytus (by 428 bce) - translated by Ralph Gladstone c1942

“Perhaps the most significant remark about Euripides and Sophocles is that supposed to have been made by Sophocles, that he himself showed men as they ought to be (or as one ought to show them) but Euripides showed them as they actually were.” - from Lattimore's introduction.

That is a bit of silly comment because no one stands and delivers long, uninterrupted dialogues about private thoughts which they don't actually want anyone to know about. But the statement does have some logic. Sophocles characters are higher, more heroic in statement and action. Euripides characters aren't. Even his heroes and gods speak very regularly. In translation, the works come in long inexorable monologues that don't appear to translate well to poetry, and that don't really strike the reader, or at least didn't strike this reader, until later on when you realize how terrible everything turned out and how terrible it was what they thought, said and did. They create what I like to think of as the build up of a quiet hidden energy, of a very dark sort. They also end almost suddenly, and certainly not in any satisfying manner.

These are the four oldest of Euripides plays. Each seems interesting in taking a very dark happening in the mythology, and dragging it out, putting words to these terrible things.

n  Alcestisn

Before the opening of the play: Apollo was sentenced to serve Admetus, a king in Thessaly, for a year. Treated well, he rewards Admetus. He helps Admetus to do some impossible tasks to win the hand of Acestis as his wife. But, in the process, Admetus forget a critical sacrifice to Artemus, who plans to have him killed by snakes. Apollo miraculously negotiates with the Fates and gets Admetus's life an extension - but someone must volunteer to die in his place. No one would agree to this, not even his aging parents. Finally Alcestus agrees (making her, apparently, an ideal Ancient Greek wife.)

That all happens off the stage, and is never explained within the play. The play opens with Alcestic about to die, and Apollo negotiating for her life with death himself, Thanatos. Apollo, fails, but promises to send Heracles to make things right. Meanwhile, Alcestis has to die, and her husband, and children and servants must witness it. This tragedy is the heart of the play.

Heracles shows up, unaware of anything. The mourning is hid from Heracles, who proceeds to get drunk and happy and then get confused about why no one will join him. But, what is strange to me, is that even though Heracles does create a happy ending, the tragedy is what hangs around.

This was not Euripides first play. He had been writing for years. But this is the oldest we still have.

n  Medean

This seems to be Euripides most important play(??). Medea, a conflicted hero from Jason and the Argonauts, is, here, a fascinating character. She is the barbarian from the east (from the Black Sea), unstable, uncivilized, a ruthless personality and a sorceress. When she falls for Jason, part of how she saves him is till kill her own brother in a boat chase, cut him up into pieces and scatter the pieces, forcing her own kingdom's boats to stall and pick up the pieces. That was not her most brutal action. And her story is long.

Here in the play, Jason has spurned her and their children and become engaged to a princess of Corinth. He does this for political advantage (he's in a bad spot because of Medea's latest crimes). Medea explodes in a spectrum of emotions of anger, jealously, etc. And then she plots, and she acts, concealing her true emotions from the other actors, but not from the audience. She will manipulate a safe haven for herself in Athens, gift the princess with a poisoned dress, kill her own children to thoroughly ruin Jason, and then flee in her magic chariot of sorts. As Jason, who is thoroughly ruined, tries to confront her. But she, still fresh from killing her own children, rails at him with a prolonged bitter speech that has not even the slightest hint of remorse. Medea will carry on.

n  Heracleidaen

This is apparently something of a rushed drama with a political point. In the real world context, Athens recently caught five foreign diplomats on a mission dangerous to Athens. They were summarily executed, without even being given a promised chance to make a public statement.

Here Heracles has died, and his sons are on the run under a protector. Their king, Eurystheus, treated Heracles so badly, that he feels he must kill the children to prevent their vengeance. The city of Athens agrees to protect the children and a war ensues. Later, Eurystheus is captured, and confronted with the mother of Heracles, Alcmene. She demands his death, immediately. But, in the process, loses her dignity in her rage, while the bad Eurystheus oddly establishes a dignity we didn't know he had.

Another key oddity here is the voluntary sacrifice of Macaria, a daughter of Heracles. For battle success, human sacrifice was considered essential, and she volunteers for the sake of her brothers.

Much to be uncomfortable with here. But, really, that is also true of the previous two plays too.

n  Hippolytusn

This was my favorite because it didn't leave me so uncomfortable. But, still, it's tragic. Phaedra, wife of Theseus, king of Athens, has fallen in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. She collapses into a self-destructive depression. Her not-so-bright maid tries to help her, and finally pulls out of her this very private and terrible thing that is bothering her. Then the maid tells Hippolytus(!!)...and the tragedies ensues (in far excess of reason).

Phaedra is the main interest here, making a psychological study that is really interesting. But I also found it interesting to read an Ancient Greek playwright's description of an earthquake and consequence Tsunami.

overall

Euripides so far strives at making the viewer/reader uncomfortable. He is interesting, but he's not fun like Sophocles was. The reward is, well, unclear. The art is in the complexity of our response, one that seems fully molded, intentionally, by the playwright. I'll read more, but I won't anticipate them so much as brace myself for them.