Where to Start with Euripides: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Euripides — how to approach Medea, his radical 431 BCE tragedy in which Jason's abandoned wife chooses infanticide as the ultimate revenge, featuring the first depiction of internal moral conflict in Western literature. A complete reading guide.
Euripides (c.480–406 BCE) was the last of the three great Athenian tragedians — Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides — and the most psychologically modern. He wrote approximately ninety-two plays, of which eighteen survive, and was known in antiquity for his willingness to challenge mythological convention and to portray women, slaves, and foreigners with greater complexity and sympathy than his predecessors. He was also the most controversial: his plays were frequently satirised by Aristophanes and were said to have made Athenian audiences uncomfortable in ways that Sophocles did not. Medea (431 BCE) is his most radical surviving play and the one most frequently performed and adapted in the contemporary theatre.
Where to Start: Medea (431 BCE)
Euripides wrote Medea in 431 BCE and lost the prize at the Dionysia — the Athenian judges apparently found it too disturbing. The play he created was so far ahead of psychological convention that it waited two and a half millennia to be fully understood. Medea opens with a scene that establishes its dramatic situation with unusual directness: Jason has abandoned his wife and the mother of his children for a more advantageous marriage, and Medea — a foreign woman far from home with no legal or social standing in Corinth — is to be exiled. The Nurse who opens the play tells us immediately that Medea is dangerous when she feels wronged.
The infanticide innovation is Euripides’s most radical contribution to the myth. In earlier versions of the story, Medea’s children were killed accidentally or by the Corinthians as retribution for Medea’s murder of the princess. Euripides made the killing deliberate — Medea chooses it — which changes everything. The play is no longer about divine punishment or tragic accident; it is about a human being making the most extreme available choice, for reasons that are, within the terrible logic of the situation, comprehensible.
The famous soliloquy before the killing — in which Medea argues with herself, feels maternal love assert itself against her resolution, and then reasserts the revenge that she has determined on — is the first sustained depiction of internal psychological conflict in Western literature. Modern readers will recognise it as the voice of someone aware of the moral weight of what they are about to do and doing it anyway. It is simultaneously the play’s most disturbing passage and its most psychologically precise.
The sympathy Euripides extends to Medea was scandalous in its context and remains the play’s most demanding quality. Medea is a foreigner, a sorceress, a woman without male protection in a society that defined women primarily by their relationship to men. Her grievances are legitimate; Jason’s treatment of her is genuine betrayal. Euripides does not resolve the tension between this legitimate grievance and the atrocity of Medea’s response — he holds both, which is what makes the play endure across two and a half millennia.
Reading Euripides
Medea is the ideal first Euripides. The Bacchae is his other most discussed and most performed play — the god Dionysus takes revenge on the city of Thebes, covering comparable territory of divine power and human extremity from a very different angle.
For the full Euripides bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Euripides author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Euripides?
Medea (431 BCE) is Euripides's most radical and most discussed play — the tragedy of a woman abandoned by her husband Jason for a more advantageous marriage who takes revenge by poisoning the Corinthian princess and killing her own children. Euripides made Medea's infanticide deliberate — in earlier mythological versions it was accidental — which transforms the play from a story of divine punishment to an investigation of autonomous human choice at its most extreme. The famous soliloquy in which Medea debates herself before acting is the first sustained depiction of internal psychological conflict in Western literature.
What is Medea about?
Medea opens in Corinth, where Medea — a foreign sorceress who helped Jason obtain the Golden Fleece at great personal cost — has been abandoned. Jason has agreed to marry the princess Glauce to secure a better social position; Medea, as a foreign woman with no family or legal standing in Corinth, is to be exiled. Her revenge is total: she poisons the princess and her father, and then kills her own children — not in madness or accident, but deliberately, to deprive Jason of everything she has given him. The play works because Euripides forces the audience to hold two incompatible things simultaneously: genuine sympathy for Medea's grievances and genuine horror at her response to them.
Which translation of Medea should I read?
The Penguin Classics translation by Philip Vellacott is reliable and standard. For readers who want to experience the play's poetic power, David Kovacs's Loeb Classical Library translation is close to the original. Rex Warner's translation in the University of Chicago Complete Greek Tragedies series is another strong option. The play is short enough — under two hours to read — that reading two translations is practical. Avoid translations that aim for stage-speakable English at the expense of accuracy; the language is as important as the plot. The Chorus sections in particular vary significantly in quality across translations.
What should I read after Medea?
After Medea, Euripides's Electra and The Bacchae cover comparable territory — women at the extremes of autonomy and passion — with different mythological frameworks. Sophocles's Antigone is the essential comparison piece: another woman who chooses an absolute over survival, but in a political rather than personal register. Aeschylus's Oresteia covers the larger mythological cycle that contains Medea's world — the aftermath of the Trojan War and the establishment of law over blood vengeance. For the contemporary theatrical reception of Medea, Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes and Anne Carson's versions of Euripides represent the tradition of literary translation as creative reimagining.
