I recommend the translation by William Arrowsmith. His interpretation is brilliant, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. Read the play, which is powerful despite its apparent slightness.
Medea and Hippolytus also present theses about women, although different ones. (Euripides was fascinated by women, which partly explains why the comic poets mocked him.) Medea has arrived in Athens as the wife of Jason, who led his Argonauts into the wilds of Thrace and there found and wooed her. She fell in love with him and helped him escape from her savage father, killing the latter in order to save her lover. But now, as the play begins, Jason has received an offer he can’t refuse. The king has promised that if Jason frees himself from his marriage to Medea he can marry his daughter and become the heir of the kingdom.
Jason tells Medea of the king’s promise and is astonished that she doesn’t view it as a great opportunity for the family, as he does. A divorce will be easy and painless, he explains, because Medea, as a foreigner, is not a citizen. Nevertheless she needn’t worry, because he will always care for her and the children.
He has reckoned without her fury. Medea is a sorceress—this is always a danger when you bring back a woman from a wild country, says Jason. Apparently mollified, she presents him with a gift for the prospective bride. It is a lovely cloak, but when the princess dons it she dies a horrible death. Jason returns home in a fury. “Look, you’ve spoiled everything!” he shouts.
“You do not know the half of it,” Medea says. She stands on the balcony of their house with Jason in the street below. “I have a gift for you, too,” she says, and shows him the bodies of their children, whom she has slain. Maddened, Jason seeks to destroy her, but she escapes in a chariot drawn by dragons. Jason is left to mourn the loss of his kingdom, his beautiful new bride, and his young sons.
The pusillanimity of Jason and the magnanimity of Medea, despite her savagery, present a remarkable contrast. The civilized man is the villain of this piece despite the appearances; equally villainous are the laws of Athens, which view foreigners as having no rights. This is a dark and disturbing play.
Hippolytus is the son of Theseus, who is married to Phaedra, the young man’s stepmother. (When Racine rewrote this play in the seventeenth century, he changed the name from Hippolytus to Phèdre.) Hippolytus is obsessively chaste. He has sacrificed his sexuality to the goddess Artemis and is therefore shocked when he learns his stepmother has fallen in love with him. Phaedra, devastated when she realizes she has been refused, commits suicide, leaving a note accusing Hippolytus of having seduced her. Hippolytus flees his father’s revenge in vain, neither understanding the other until it is too late. Theseus kills the boy, who lives long enough to die in his father’s arms after Artemis has explained everything. Theseus survives, but he has lost both his wife and his son.
The play is about chastity and the dangers of tempting and then refusing the advances of the great and powerful. (The Biblical Joseph, tempted by Potiphar’s wife, manages to survive in a similar situation.) Hippolytus is caught in a net of fate, but Euripides doesn’t leave the audience in any doubt that he has placed himself there. His fervent devotion to Artemis is at the expense of what should be an equal devotion to another goddess, Aphrodite. Humans should live moderately and avoid excess, even excess of virtue.
Bacchantes is the play in which Euripides surprised his audience and showed them he was a devout believer after all, despite his mockery of the gods. Pentheus, king of Thebes, is a rationalist, as Euripides was thought to be. A person claiming to be the god Dionysus comes to his city demanding homage. “Nonsense,” says Pentheus. “We can’t admit your frenzies, your abandoned singing and dancing, your illegal celebrations here. This is a law-abiding town!” Dionysus departs. His revenge is terrible. A messenger comes to Pentheus: Bacchantes, or followers of Dionysus, are engaging in an orgy in a nearby forest and—horror of horrors—his mother is among them. In high rationalist dudgeon, the king rushes off to put a stop to this, but the Bacchantes, led by his mother, attack him and tear him to pieces. They eat the shreds of his body—his mother among them. Only when he is dead and their terrifying passion is spent do the celebrants realize what they have done—his mother among them.
A strange play, this. Rationalists have often wondered whether Euripides really wrote it. But certainly he did write it: It is pure Euripides. Dionysus is only the symbol, he is saying to us, of something that is in us, all of us, that we mustn’t deny. To deny the wild, orgiastic element in our being, to give it no outlet, to dam it up, is to create a force so great it will destroy men and cities. Better—more rational because more human—to allow Dionysus his due.
The Trojan Women is Euripides’ great anti-war statement. Written toward the end of the glorious fifth century, when Athens was falling to pieces, it reminds us about war’s consequences. The Achaeans have won and sacked Troy. Now the captured Trojan women are lined up and counted off prior to being placed on board the ships, where they will begin their slave existence. Andromache, widow of Hector, holds her little boy in her arms. She and her mother-in-law, Hecuba, the widow of King Priam, bewail their fate.
A messenger arrives to inform Andromache that the Greeks have decreed her son must be killed, thrown from the battlements—whether in punishment or in fear of what he may become when he grows up is not made clear. After a heartbreaking farewell, the boy is snatched from his mother’s arms.
Menelaus next appears, ordering his servants to go to the tent where Helen, herself one of the captives, is hiding. She is dragged forth, in all her astonishing beauty, so that he may decide whether he will kill her now or later. Hecuba urges him to kill her immediately but, already beginning to feel the strength of “the ancient flame,” he spares her and allows her to speak for herself. She argues that she has really done well instead of ill and, besides, the whole thing was not at all her fault. Hecuba is infuriated but can do nothing against such beauty and willfulness.
Hecuba has all the more reason to weep as soldiers appear on the battlements of her city and set it on fire. The play ends with the citadel crashing down in ruins and the line of enslaved women weeping as they move toward the ships.
Because of such scenes as these, the play is hard to stage. For the reader, however, this masterly playwright tightens the screws with each successive scene, each successive revelation: there is no limit to the hatred and fear the winners feel toward the losers in this war, and the losers toward the winners. So it is with all wars, Euripides is telling us. War brings out the worst in us, and its glory is a cheat and a fraud. In war, pitiless, indomitable force is the only reality, for victor and vanquished alike. His message predates Simone Weil’s by more than two millennia.
Iphigenia was the eldest daughter of Agamemnon. After Paris has taken Helen to Troy, Agamemnon and Menelaus together raise an army to get her back. They reach Aulis, a harbor on the eastern coast of Boeotia, but there, for weeks, the weather hinders their future progress. Agamemnon, his army melting away before his eyes, is at his wit’s end. He asks the seer for advice. ”If you will sacrifice your daughter to Artemis,” the seer tells him, “the wind will change and you will be able to go on.” Agamemnon struggles against his better nature but the worse wins out, and he tricks his wife Clytemnestra and his friend Achilles to get the girl, then kills her on the altar of the gods.