"The Works of Euripids"

Euripides wrote at least eighty-eight dramas and probably more. Most of them were produced at public festivals at Athens in groups of four plays, trilogies of tragedies plus single satyr play. Although Euripides’ first production was in 455 B.C., he was prolific in the latter part of his life. He won only five first prizes in all, four during his life and one posthumously. The extant plays of Euripides are: Alcestis; Medea, Hippolytus, Hecuba, Andromache, Ion, The Suppliants, Heracleidae, The Mad Heracles, Iphigehia in Tauris, The Trojan Woman, Helen, Phoenissae, Electro, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, Bacchae, Cyclops, the last being the only extant specimen of a satiric drama, of the extant plays, Rehesus is the earliest; it has been considerd spurious by many scholars because of its inferior technique. However there is no dubt that Euripides wrote a Rhesus early in his career, and its quality may be due to inexperience.

Alcestis is notable for its exquisite delineation of woman’s devotion; Medea is presented with horrifying realism, the fury of a woman scorned – an Asiatic sorceress in whom primitive passion mingles with maternal tenderness for the child she murders; in the same play, and in Trojan Woman, the poet displays a delicate feeling for the innocence and physical sweetness of children and their helplessness in the midst of the overpowering drama of event in a world of primitive adults; his description of Hecuba, widowed queen of troy and a prisoner of the Greeks after the sack of the city, gives us an incomparable picture of the majesty, pride, forbearance, and courage of a great lady rising above the successive blows of Dionysus Or Bacchus . Iphigenia in Tauris is an exciting adventure-play of an escape from the Crimea; Electra is an attack on the folly of vendetta, though based by Apollo’s oracle; and Orestes is a realistic melodrama, where most of the characters are either bad or mad. Euripides, insight into the misery and brutality of war is clearly seen in The Suppliants. His original and distinctive treatment of tradition material is found in Ion, Helen, and the Phoenissae, the latter a compact portrayal of the fate of the house Oedipus.

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