Medea, The Bacchae, The Trojan Women

Introduction

This volume gathers Euripides' three most famous tragedies. In Medea the foreign princess, abandoned by her husband Jason, takes revenge by killing his new bride and then, with her own hand, her children: the most shattering female figure in ancient drama. In The Bacchae the god Dionysus returns to his native Thebes to punish King Pentheus, who denies him, revealing a power of ecstasy that reason cannot suppress. The Trojan Women follows the captive queen and princesses of Troy after the city's fall and is one of the most anguished anti-war works in Western literature.