In many respects Euripides' Medea is not a problematic play. It is a singularly bold, clear-cut, assured piece of writing, the concentration and dramatic intensity of which are readily felt by reader or audience and command the respect even of those who find the subject matter repellent or who cavil at the Aegeus scene and the dragon chariot. But its starkness makes it deeply disturbing; and this unease is reflected in the critical literature on the play. The language, though consistently powerful, lacks the rich expansiveness of Hippolytus or Bacchae, almost never allowing us to range in imagination away from the immediate painful situation; it is typical that one of the most prominent of the recurring images is of Medea as a wild beast. Then there is the striking absence of a cosmic frame of reference: we are given no sense of divine motivation or sanction or control. Medea is admittedly grand-daughter of the Sun, but the fact has no theological significance: its function is to symbolize her sense of her heroic identity and – at a different level – to motivate the final scene. The most uncompromising feature of all is Euripides' handling of the story, his design which makes the murder of the children the centrepiece of the play.

The articles in this volume are all literary studies of Greek tragedy.

As the best scholars of earlier generations have seen – Wilamowitz above them all – the full understanding of Greek tragedy by a modern demands the concerted techniques not merely of the literary critic, but also of the linguist, the metrician, the palaeographer, the philosopher, the historian, and the archaeologist. With this principle we agree entirely, adding only that perhaps there is yet another desirable qualification: to have lived a little; to have contemplated not books only, but also men and women, moral dilemmas, spiritual crises, and both the richness and the cruelty of life. Yet the conditions of human existence as such are unresearchable, at any rate by the techniques of professional scholarship; and there are plenty of classical journals available for the publication of articles on linguistics, metrics, and so forth. A volume on tragedy which was both to possess a certain unity and to interest a fairly wide circle of readers, classical and non-classical, had therefore best confine itself to the most commonly understood and easily communicable of those many approaches, literary criticism. Accordingly, on being asked by the Yale Department of Classics to edit this volume, we decided to invite contributions from a number of scholars whom we knew to be working on the literary criticism of Greek tragedy. As the project became known, several other scholars also submitted contributions.

In 431 b.c. Euripides competed against Sophocles and Euphorion with three tragedies, Medea, Philoctetes and Dictys, followed by a satyr play, Theristae; he was awarded the third prize.

But his Medea left a deep and lasting impression in the minds of his Athenian audience; comic parodies, literary imitations and representations in the visual arts reflect its immediate impact and show that the play lost none of its power to fascinate and repel as the centuries went by. It struck the age as new, but like all innovative masterpieces, it had its deep roots in tradition; it looks back to the past while it gropes for the future. In it we can see what Euripides took over from his predecessors and contemporaries, how he transformed what he learned from them, and what he invented and was to refine and develop as his own unique tragic vision in the last twenty years of his long dramatic career.

He had been fascinated by this story from the very beginning. His first offering in the Dionysiac contest (in 455 b.c., only three years after the staging of Aeschylus' Oresteia) included the Peliades, the story of Medea at Iolcos, her deceitful promise to rejuvenate old Pelias, its king, and the king's death at her hands.

Euripides' narrative choral odes continue to trouble the critics. The hymn to the Mountain Mother in the Helen, the hymn to Apollo in Iphigenia among the Taurians, the song of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis in Iphigenia in Aulis, and the song of Achilles' armor in the Electra were once generally regarded as having little or nothing to do with the plays in which they appear. They were thought to be dithyrambic, essentially non-dramatic compositions, or embolima of the type Agathon is supposed to have written. These odes are now better appreciated, and we have learned to look in them for clues to the meaning of his plays, but we still condemn or defend their dramatic relevance according to an Aeschylean or Sophoclean model. We want a larger definition of the function of choral song in drama, and a critical approach to Euripides' odes that will reveal their meaning without obscuring their peculiar complexity.

Euripides' narrative songs may be better understood if we compare them with another more familiar type of Euripidean lyric, which we may call the escape ode. In an escape ode the chorus sings of its own or of someone else's escape from the present dramatic situation, with great elaboration and emphasis.

This speech of Ajax (646–92) has been a controversial issue for a little more than a hundred years. As a controversial issue the speech has proved very satisfactory: first because of its crucial importance to the play; and then because so far it has never failed upon re-examination to reveal new intricacies and ambushes. At first the critics naively supposed that only one question existed, namely, whether Ajax spoke with intention to deceive; but a discussion of that point disclosed very soon that other difficulties were present, and indeed the critics have divided sharply over at least one point without apparently realizing that any difference of opinion exists. In order to make the issues as explicit as possible, I shall summarize the leading interpretations.

The speech itself is loaded with verbal ambiguity. In the preceding scene Ajax had made it clear that he intended to kill himself; when Tecmessa begged him to pity her in the name of the gods, he answered brutally and blasphemously, that he was their debtor no longer. Now he comes forth and says quietly, that – even the most steadfast things are overcome … he who was stern before, now feels pity for his wife and child. He will go down to the seashore, wash away his stains, and escape the wrath of the goddess. He will hide his sword, most hateful of weapons, digging in the ground, where no one shall find it.

TheSeptem carries the stamp of greatness: in the entrance-song of the chorus (for instance) and in the sombre rhetoric of the so-called Redepaare. Indeed, throughout we catch what Longinus called ‘the resonance of a great mind’. It has, moreover, a feature which was not to be found in the Persae and will not be found in the Supplices: the dramatic issues are focused upon an arresting individual figure. Eteocles has been called ‘the first Man of the European stage’, and the play ‘our earliest tragedy of character’. Yet what is the character of Eteocles? The question has fascinated recent writers, but no agreement has been reached upon the answer. This great play and this great dramatic figure continue to baffle us.

There are difficulties. The Persae is complete as a single play; the Oresteia is a complete trilogy. The remaining extant plays of Aeschylus are truncated works of art which cannot be fully under-stood in isolation from their lost companions. The Septem was the last play of a trilogy; it was preceded by the Laius and the Oedipus, and of these plays we know little. As though this were not obstacle enough, there is grave suspicion – amounting in the view of many to virtual certainty – that the ending of the play, as we find it in the manuscripts, is not genuine.