The only reason I got this volume was because it contained the one Euripidean play that I did not have: the Heraklidae (or, the Children of Heracles). Herakles, otherwise known in Latin as Hercules (which is the term we generally use) was an ancient Greek hero and demigod. He is most famous for the twelve labours, but he appears elsewhere, notably as one of the Argonauts who sailed with Jason to search for the golden fleece (though he is left behind halfway there and goes his own way). Heracles is also well known for his strength, and in Greek Mythology he does seem to come out as a 'strong man' in the same sense that Samson of the Bible does. To me he is simply a hero in the same sense as Achilles.

Heracles is also known for having over 700 children, and as such creating a race who eventually invaded and conquered the Peloponesian peninsula. The play is set before their rise to power (though it needs be remembered that there was an awful lot of them). Heracles' offspring come to blows with the King of Mycenae and flee to Athens for protection. While there the king raises an army, but the Athenians warn him that the Heraclidae are under his protection. However an oracle says that unless a woman is sacrificed then they will lose the war. One Athenian (no doubt in love with one of the Heraclidae) offers herself up, and thus they go to war and win, and capture the King of Mycenae alive. They are reluctant to execute him, but he prophesies that if they kill him then his spirit will become a defender of Athens.

Euripides wrote this play during the Peloponesian war, and while we have a lot of his plays, he was always second best to his contemporary Sophocles. Initially only seven of his plays were to survive (in the same sense that we have seven each of the other two great tragedians), however an entire volume of plays also managed to survive and as such he have a much larger collection than normal. The Heraclidae would be one of those plays.

This play, obviously written during the war, is designed as a patriotic piece to inspire the Athenians during a dark period of their history. As mentioned, the Heraclidae became the Peloponesians, of which Sparta is one of the many cities. Thus the audience is reminded of a time when they were the protectors of those who are now enemies, and is a way to justify their current actions. Further, the sacrifice of the former enemy of the Heraclidae is a reminder of a promise that Athens will be protected.

Greek myth is very fluid and tends to change depending on the location and the events. Perseus is considered to be the father of the Persians and Media is the mother of the Medes. Both characters where betrayed by Greek kings, which is why their respective countries became enemies. Of course it is highly unlikely that either of these characters were to ancestors of these races, but in a Greco-centric world, one does not accept that there is any explanation beyond your own borders (which is very true of what is happening today).

This play is so messed up that a part of me says that it has to be based on true events. It is sort of like one of the arguments that people use regarding the authenticity of the Bible: every character (with the exception of Jesus Christ) is so flawed that one cannot consider that the stories have been made up. In particular we see the heroes of the Israelite nation, that being Abraham, Moses, and David, warts and all. However when us consider the Grecian myths we suddenly discover similar things here.

The story of Oedipus is that his parents received a prophecy that their child would kill his father and marry his mother, Laius, Oedipus' dad, and king of Thebes, pinned the child's legs together and left him to die on Mount Cithaeron. However, unbeknownst to him a shepherd found the boy, took him into his care, and then sent him to the city of Corinth to be raised by the king and queen there. However, years later when Oedipus had come of age, during a feast a man got too drunk and blurted out that Oedipus' parents weren't his true parents. Despite their pleading Oedipus left Corinth and travelled to Delphi to ask the oracle the truth. The Pythian Oracle, as usual, did not give him a straight answer and simply repeated the prophecy to Oedipus. As such, he decided not to return to Corith but to flee so as not to kill whom he believed where his parents.

However on his way out of Delphi he is confronted by a rather arrogant man who demanded that Oedipus move out of the way. Oedipus tells him to bugger off and a fight ensures resulting in Oedipus' victory. He then arrives at Thebes while the city is being tormented by a sphinx who has a riddle that nobody knows the answer, but Oedipus correctly guesses it, kills the sphinx, and when word is brought about Laius' death Oedipus marries Jocastra, and lives happily ever after.

Actually they don't because without realising it the prophecy has been fulfilled. Further a great crime has been committed, and since a father murderer is living in Thebes the entire city is struck with a plague. Oedipus, who has become king, and is the hero of the city, decides to investigate. However his investigations quickly uncover a truth that is hidden from him and upon learning of this truth, namely that he killed Laius, who turns out to be his father, and married his wife, Jocastra, who turns out to be his mother, he is struck with the guilt of what has come about, Jocastra kills herself and Oedipus rips out his eyes and exiles himself from Thebes.

Well, I have just told you the plot of the play without actually saying anything about the themes in the play. Well, there are two reasons why I outlined the plot, one being that it is a very complicated plot, and secondly to demonstrate how messed up everything is. This is not a simple Hollywood plot where everything is resolved in the end and everybody goes away happy. In fact it does not seem that there was really anything that Oedipus could have done to get himself out of the mess that he found himself in. In fact it seems that the more he attempts to get out of it the deeper the hole that he digs for himself, but it is not as if he could avoid doing it. He flees because he doesn't want the prophecy to come true, but there is a lot that he does not know and a lot that he is not being told. His step parents are not telling him the truth, and in hiding the truth, they are also making the prophecy come true. As for Laius, once again, everything that he does only serves to make the prophecy come true. While he attempts to kill his son, this fails because of the compassionate nature of humanity. It is the shepherd's compassion that prevents him from leaving Oedipus alone on Cithaeron.

The essay question that I answered on this play involved the question of fate and freewill. However there really does not seem to be any freewill here. Every decision that Oedipus makes only brings the revelation closer to being revealed. As a good king he simply cannot ignore the plague, and as a good king, he cannot do anything but seek justice and cleanse the city, despite the fact that he is the root cause of the problem. Despite the curse that he calls on the perpetrator, he must suffer the punishment himself, despite the pleas to the contrary. Oedipus is a just king, but despite his actions it is only when the fog is cleared and the truth comes out that he discovers that he is the perpetrator. Hey, he didn't even realise that the guy that he encountered at the crossroads was the king of Thebes, and his father.

Aristotle in his Poetics writes that characters in a drama should have a fatal flaw, but nobody seemed to have told Sophocles that. Granted Ajax may have had a fatal flaw, but Ajax is not Shakespeare, and is dealing with an issue that has nothing to do with his character. Ajax is dealing with PTSD (though not by that name) and Oedipus does not seem to have that fatal flaw. In reality, other than killing Laius at the crossroads (though some could argue that he did so in self-defense), Oedipus has done nothing wrong. In fact, if he had not investigated the cause of the plague then he would have been negligent. No, it is not Oedipus that has done anything wrong, but rather his ancestors. Laius is cursed and I believe that going up the ancestral chain further we come to a situation where an ancestor fed human flesh to another human, mostly as payback (I can't remember off hand who it was, it could have been Thyestes, but it could have been somebody else - one of Agamemnon's line is also guilty of a similar offense). In a sense then it is not the actions of Oedipus that brings about his suffering and downfall, but that of his father, and of his father's father. Poor Oedipus is only caught in the middle.

One might wonder what was so appealing about a story that everybody knows. Well, it is the same with us. When we look through the video store at all the movies available we discover that the plots of each and every one of those movies are pretty much the same. It is not the question of the plot, but how we get to the ending, and how the movie ends. We pretty much know that in around 90% of the movies available the good guys win and the hero gets the girl. We know that so we don't watch the movie for that, but rather how they get there, and how the good guys win. This was the same for the Greeks, and it is fortunate that we have versions of the Electra from the three great playwrights. In this we can see how the actual event differs and how each of the playwrights treated the subject. No doubt with Oedipus, both Aeschylus and Euripides would have explored different themes, and painted Oedipus in a different light, so that despite knowing the outcome, we arrive there through a different method.

Ignoring the crudeness of the play (and remember that Shakespeare himself was quite crude) and the naked men running around with giant erect peni (is that the plural of penis?) what this play seems to be about is the empowerment of women (which is probably why the feminists love it so much). Mind you the only woman in this play that seems to have the willpower to see it through to the end is Lysistrata herself, but then that is probably why she is the leader. In a way it says something about a characteristic of leadership, and that is to remain firm on your convictions because you are the one that people look up to, and you are the one who holds everything together.

The play was first produced in 411 bc, not necessarily Athen's darkest day (since the final defeat to the Spartans was still a few years away) but it was one of them. Basically the Athenians had sent their entire navy off on a little adventure to capture Sicily, and in doing so pretty much lost all of her ships and a bulk of her fighting men. Now Athens was basically defenceless, the Spartans were on her doorstep, and most of her allies had deserted her. It was not a question of victory at any cost any more, but it was a question of trying to bring the war to an end so that Athens would suffer an honourable defeat (not that she had been honourable to any of the cities that she had sacked). Mind you, just like the Athenians not pressing her advantage when she was on top, Sparta did not press the advantage here either.

The play takes the view that the women are as essential to the functioning of the city as are the men, and in fact Lysistrata pretty much says that it is the women who build the city and the men who then go about destroying it. The reference here is to the fact that the women give birth to the warriors and the men then pretty much send them out to get killed. In another sense there is also a reference to how the workers work hard to produce the money for the city and the politicians then go and waste it. I guess this is a reference to the failed Sicilian expedition where most of Athen's fighting power was wiped out on a quest in which the success was dubious at best.

This is not a play where the women hold the men hostage (by going on a sex strike) until the surrender, this is not what was wanted. As mentioned above it was not a quick end to the war that was desired, that could have been arranged by waving the white flag, but an honourable defeat. This is why Lysistrata brings the Spartan and Theban women into the plan as well, because the idea was to not just starve the Athenian men of sex, but all of the men on both sides of the conflict, in the hope that this would bring them to the negotiating table.

There are a few interesting things that come out of this play, and one of them is the idea that the woman is obsessed with sex. There are a number of references in this play that suggest that this is the case, but then the fact that we have men running around with erect peni also indicates that men are just as obsessed with sex as are the women. However the other odd thing is the idea that a sex strike with the Athenians would work. I was under the impression that to the Athenians (in particular) that sex with women was simply to reproduce where as pleasurable sex was with another man. I guess this is why this play, to the Athenians, would have been so funny, because in reality such a sex strike, at least to the Athenians, would not have worked.

This does not really sit at the top of the list of Euripides' great plays, but then I suspect that this appeared in the volume of other playes (that is plays that weren't the seven great plays) that ended up surviving. In a way it seemed similar to some of the other plays of Euripides that I have read, particularly Helen. It appears that the plot and the theme in this play and in Helen are almost identical. Both plays are set in a foreign land, both involve a drastic change in accepted mythology (Helen was never kidnapped by Paris, she was only a apparition, whereas here Iphigenia was never sacrified at Aulis but spirited away by Artemis). They also both involve a hostile king that endeavours to prevent the Greeks from escaping.

I should mention about the concept of tragedy from the Greek view, though I must admit that this comes from the blurb on the Internet. I believe that tragedy, when applied to Greek plays, is a misnomer. In a way it is like the difference between a comedy and an action movie (though it is possible for both styles to overlap, such as with Quentin Tarrantino). A Greek tragedy is not the same as a Shakespearian tragedy, but rather is based on how the audience would react to the play. It is suggested that the meter and the actors that participate in a tragedy differs from that of a comedy. I am not going to dispute that, however I am more inclined to look at it from an audience's point of view. A comedy is designed to interact with the audience to make them laugh whereas a tragedy is designed to evoke a completely different reaction, and in a sense I would probably move it from that of an action movie to more of a suspense, sort of like one of our spy thrillers.

This play has a happy ending, namely Orestes and Iphigenia escape, however once again there are elements of another Euripidean play – Electra. When Orestes arrives in Taurus a game is played between the two characters where they interact and drop hints as to who they are, but never actually reveal their identity until later on in the play. In fact, both this play and Electra involve children of Agamemnon reuniting. One could consider that Agamemnon's family is quite dysfunctional: the father kills the daughter, and the mother kills the father, and then the son kills the mother. Not only that, but the family is divided and scattered across the known world. It seems that a lot of the plays that focus on Agamemnon's family seem to revolve around reunion even though not all of the reunions have a happy ending.

I'm not going to knock this play namely because I do enjoy the work of Euripides. Once again the familiar theme of the plight of women comes to the forefront. Iphigenia is looked upon with sympathy and we mourn her plight. Not only was she sacrificed by her father (great guy he was) but she is also imprisoned in a foreign land at the whim of an alien king who pretty much hates the Greeks. Oh, I will also finish off by indicating that the play is set in the Crimean Peninsula, where I suspect the Greeks did have a colony.

The other thing about this play is the problem that arises with the story of the Trojan war and its aftermath. We must remember that the play is set after the death of Agamemnon, though I suspect before the murder of Clytemnestra (since it does not appear that Orestes is being pursued by the Furies). Maybe it is because of this, suggests Euripides, that the act of Clytemnestra killing her husband had no unselfish (or revenge motivated) basis, and was really only an attempt by her lover to gain power - in particular control of Agamemnon's empire. By bringing Iphigeneia back from the dead Eurpides puts paid to any motivation of revenge (however misguided the motivation was) and exposes Clytemnestra, and her lover, as the evil schemers that they really are.

This is actually quite an unusual Greek play in that it does not deal with a mythological event. Granted Aristophanes deals with historical events, but he wrote comedy as opposed to tragedy (and I have explained elsewhere what is meant by Greek Tragedy). Excluding Aristophanes, The Persians is the only historical play that we have, and it is possible that it is the only historical play that was ever written during the classical period of Ancient Greece.

The play is about the Persian defeat at Salamis and is set entirely within the palace in Susa. Once again (as we always see) the unities of time and place are obeyed. While many seem to point to Aristotle as being the one who developed the unities, we must remember that Aristotle lived at least two generations after the great dramatists. Aristotle was the pupil of Plato who in turn was the pupil of Socrates, who was alive when Euripides and Sophocles were producing their plays.

This play is pretty much a pat on the back for the Athenians for winning what was considered to be the unwinnable war. It is also the second of the two sources that we have regarding the Battle of Salamis, however we need to remember that this was written from the Athenian viewpoint and in turn was written by Aeschylus' viewpoint, so it will automatically be biased in favour of the Athenians. However, it is a very useful source as numerous generals on the Persian side were named, and the play also outlines the Achameid Dynasty (the line of kings from whom Darius and Xerxes' were descended).

I won't go into too much detail regarding the battle of Salamis as this is discussed extensively in other places (by me as well as others). However the Battle of Salamis (which was a naval battle) is considered to be one of those points upon which of history swings. I am not entirely convinced by this argument, namely because I also believe in divine influence (as we can see from the Battle of Jerusalem when Sennacerib's army was completely destroy by something during the night) but then as we read through this play we can also see numerous references to the gods. However Aeschylus is theologically wrong when dealing with Persian religion. He seems to think that they had a polytheistic religion when in reality, by Xerxes' time, Persia had become Duotheistic, where two gods, equal and opposite, are forever slugging it out with each other (this is Xorastrianism in a really small nutshell).

One thing we must remember though is that Xerxes' survived. This is actually quite unusual for a king who is defeated in battle. Senacerib was killed by his sons upon his return to Ninevah, namely because his defeat was evidence that he no longer had the support of the gods. However, there are two possible answers to why he was no deposed. The first, and the more unlikely, is that Xorastrianism did not allow for this and that defeat is not necessarily the disapproval of the gods, but rather just bad luck. However, this, as far as I am concerned, is not a hugely satisfying answer.

The second answer to this question, I suspect, comes from the Bible, namely from the Book of Esther. Now the events in Esther occur during the reign of Xerxes (though there is debate as to whether it is Xerxes or not, however, for the purpose of my argument, I will take it as it stands) and deals with the festival of Purim. Here the Jews were marked for death, and it was only the intervention of Esther that enable them to be saved. Now, we ask the question of why were they marked for death, and what swayed Xerxes to listen to Haman (boo, hiss). It is clear from the book that Haman (boo, hiss) hated Mordechai (Yay) and the Jews, but I doubt he could have gone to Xerxes and said 'I hate these people, please wipe them out' (by the way, the 'yays' and the 'boo hisses' apparently come from the Jewish tradition when this book is read).

Okay, the Bible indicates that the events in Esther occurred in the twelfth year of the reign of Xerxes, which put it around 474 BC, where as the Persian Wars occurred in 480 to 479 BC, which is about 5 years afterwards. So when I think about it, it is unlikely the the attempted genocide of the Jews could have been related to the Persian Wars. The reason I suggested this is because it is common for a minority group to be blamed for an empire's failure, as we saw in Nazi Germany. So, I guess my thoughts about this pomgrom would be incorrect. However, let us further consider more evidence from the Bible. The feast at which Xerxes' first wife, Vashti, is set in the third year of his reign, which is before the Persian wars. However, it also appears that Esther was married to him probably a few months after, and was queen while Xerxes was away in Greece. This suggests that Amestris (the Greek name of Xerxes' wife) is in fact Esther. Now, I checked Wikipedia and they indicate that she was actually Vashti, but it then goes on to expound the Akkadian root of both words and this seems to indicate that Amestris is Esther as opposed to Vashti. I believe that that is the case, based on the biblical record (if it is correct that Ahasuerus and Xerxes are in fact the same person).

So, I guess my point is that the reason that Xerxes' was not deposed was because he was persuaded by Haman to blame the Jews for his defeat at Salamis, however through the intervention of Esther, this blame was then shifted back onto Haman, who was then subsequently executed. Anyway, this is all speculation, however I do enjoy speculating about ancient historical events, which is why I wrote this in the first place.