This chapter addresses the extensive fragment attributed to Aeschylus’ Carians/Europa, in which the speaker Europa describes her rape by Zeus, the births of her three children, and her fear for the safety of her son Sarpedon; this speech allows the audience ‘to contemplate the sufferings of Europa over a woman’s full lifecycle, culminating in her role as aged mother awaiting her only surviving son’s return’. Considering issues of lexicon and dramatic technique, the chapter supports a date for the play in the 420s, noting with sympathy Martin West’s argument this play’s author was Aeschylus’ son Euphorion.

Usually marking moments of elevated emotion, tragic song is used to powerful effect in the characterisation of both male and female (non-choral) characters, but is more strongly associated with the latter, in part owing to the associations of ritual lament as a women’s genre. This chapter analyses a notable instance of female song in Euripides, the titular figure’s monody in Hypsipyle. This character’s song came to be viewed as so representative of the playwright’s New Musical tendencies that she was parodied in Aristophanes’ Frogs as ‘the Muse of Euripides’. A detailed reading of both the monody itself and Hypsipyle’s Aristophanic reception blends the study of mousikē, aesthetics, synaesthesia, and cult to show how Euripides’ singing heroine absorbs the audience into her desire for a form of music marked as Asian, Orphic, and citharodic, and which forges a continuous chain between the musical culture of Lemnos and Euripides’ contemporary Athens. In this interpretation, Hypsipyle’s song showcases not just the playwright’s skill in the creation of a virtuosic female voice, but also his use of female song to create a link to the political realities of the world of the audience.

The influence of the extant plays has been so immense and far-reaching that it is easy to forget that other tragic versions of these characters existed. This is true above all in the case of Euripides’ Medea, whose terrible, tortured act of infanticide is to many modern readers and audiences the single defining aspect of her tragic characterisation. The final chapter destabilises this preconception by drawing together evidence for the full range of tragic Medeas, including a play in which she is not guilty of the act that has come to define her, the killing of her own children. Wright recovers a more accurate picture of Medea on the tragic stage, and suggests that what ‘made Medea Medea’ for the ancient audiences was not her infanticide, but rather the sheer range and malleability of stories in which she featured. This survey offers an important corrective to widespread conceptions of this iconic figure, and powerfully demonstrates how the legacy of a single surviving version has distorted our understanding of the kinds of female characters with which ancient tragic audiences would have been familiar.

This chapter introduces the book by examining the place of fragments within tragic scholarship as well as scholarly trends in the tragic representation of women, and by surveying the contents of the different chapters and suggesting pathways for future work.

This chapter analyses the particularly complex representation of responsibility and selfhood present in the speech of Pasiphae in Euripides’ Cretans, in which the queen defends her act of falling in love with the bull. The chapter shows how Pasiphae is able to dissociate herself completely from her past actions by appealing to divine intervention, the role of her husband Minos, and an understanding of human morality and motivation that is rooted in hedonistic principles. Pasiphae’s defence thus relies on a concept of the fragmentation of the self that reveals her as one of Euripides’ most philosophically sophisticated female speakers.

This chapter restores the play Hypsipyle to a central place in discussions of female agency in tragedy by demonstrating how the intricacies of its plot result from a series of interconnected decisions made by women. At critical junctures both before and within the timeframe of the play itself, it is the female characters Hypsipyle, Eurydice and Eriphyle whose actions determine the course of the plot and have far-reaching implications for each other. The analysis in this chapter shows how the play’s happy ending – which sees Hypsipyle finally re-united with her twin sons – is made possible only because of a long series of choices enacted by these three women. In particular, Eurydice’s decision to exercise forgiveness and spare Hypsipyle, whose neglect of her son Opheltes has led to his death, marks a powerful departure from the vengeful mothers that we find in other tragedies. Through these characters, Euripides articulates a view of women’s experience and subjectivity that is no less rich and engaging than the male world of the unfolding expedition against Thebes, which forms this play’s backdrop.

The characterisation of theatrical space as gendered and the roles that female characters are able to play in creating, inhabiting, manipulating, and traversing that space have continued to receive sophisticated analysis. This chapter expands this discussion to encompass the relationship of non-human female characters to theatrical space, and considers how the matrix of gender and topography might have played out across the full span of a tragic production in the case of the conjectured Aeschylean trilogy of Myrmidons, Nereids and Phrygians/The Ransoming of Hector. The chapter argues that the chorus of sea-goddess Nereids provided a contrasting female presence within the trilogy, usurping the roles of the male voices central to the plays’ Iliadic source material, and demonstrates how their presence would have rendered the theatrical space unusually fluid, in both senses of the word. The suggestion is made that other Aeschylean plays with female choruses may have been similarly imaginative in their manipulation of the representation of theatrical space, often involving configurations that move beyond the oikos/polis opposition.

This chapter draws attention to a familial relationship that has been treated as all but invisible: that between sisters. Although we find examples of this bond in our surviving tragedies, it has long been overshadowed by a focus on male/female relations. This discussion, prompted by the recent productive debate between the fields of classics and political theory over the sisterhood of Antigone, employs close readings of Sophocles’ Tereus and Euripides’ Erechtheus to bring out a feminist interpretation of these texts that places sisterhood front and centre. The chapter shows not only that sisterhood was a more prevalent theme in Greek tragedy than is visible from the extant plays alone, but also that the fragments can be a rich source for scholars working in the area of feminist political theory.

This chapter provides a thorough survey of the theme of heterosexual love in the fragments of Euripides, demonstrating how many of these plays – particularly Andromeda, Oedipus, Protesilaus and Antigone – offer glimpses of a different permutation of tragic marriage. These plays dramatise marital or premarital relationships in which the female partner could play an active and sometimes assertive role, and which, even when placed within dramatic contexts that render the union itself problematic, may be termed reciprocal and even romantic.The widening of the scope of enquiry demonstrates that the more positive portrayal of spousal bonds that we find in Euripides’ Helen is not an anomaly within the genre: tragic marriage did not always have to be portrayed a site of friction and disaster, and in fact it was some of Euripides’ most overtly erotic and romantic plays that left a distinctive mark on their original and later audiences.

In the extant plays we find examples of wives who react intensely and/or with violence to the introduction of a sexual rival into the household or to their abandonment by their partner for that rival. This chapter fills in the gaps in our understanding of this pattern by taking into account the fragmentary plays in which women enact violence upon other women and girls. This most often occurs in the case of married women who perceive the introduction of a (younger) rival into their household as a threat to their own position and status, and it frequently takes the form of an attack upon this rival’s physical beauty. The chapter shows that we should place less recognised figures such as Sidero, Dirce, and the wife of Creon alongside the widely cited examples of Clytemnestra and Medea as tragic wives whose desire to maintain or restore their status leads them to violently target other women.

This chapter focuses on women who have themselves been the object of violence and who are linked by the theme of silence. The episode in Trachiniae in which Deianira is struck by the appearance of Iole has long been compared to the scene between Clytemnestra and Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: in both cases, a silent woman, a target of male sexual lust, arrives at the home of her new master and is met by his wife. The chapter highlights the relevance of a third play for this pattern: Sophocles’ Tereus, in which the mutilated Philomela, her tongue cut out, will have arrived at the palace of Tereus and his wife, her sister Procne. The chapter draws out the structural and thematic parallels between these three tragedies, showing how each offers a related but distinct configuration of the connection between female voice and voicelessness, suffering, and power.

In Sophocles’Eurypylus, known to us from extensive but lacunose papyrus fragments, the Mysian queen Astyoche receives news of the death at the hands of Neoptolemus of her son Eurypylus, whom she had sent to fight at Troy. Extant tragedy provides us with examples of ‘bad’ mothers, whose actions with regard to their children range from neglect to the extreme of murder. This chapter reads Astyoche through the intersection of maternal and patriotic values in what Cowan terms the ‘martial mother ideal’, whereby women send the sons whom they have nurtured off to battle for the sake of the city. In Eurypylus the mother’s motivation is perverted – she sends her son not out of civic duty, but as the result of a bribe – and the outcome is inverted, as Eurypylus’ resulting death does nothing to avert the fall of Troy. In drawing out the complex portrayal of Astyoche in relation to her role as mother, her manipulation of the categories of natal and marital family, and her violent self-condemnation, this chapter sheds new light on what must have been one of Sophocles’ most compelling female characters.

Euripides was lampooned in Aristophanes’ comedies for creating characters such as Phaedra and Stheneboea, married women driven by desire for a man who is not their husband. By contrast, the picture of Sophocles that we glean from the extant tragedies seems to characterise him as a playwright comparatively less interested in depicting female erotic expression and its consequences. This chapter shows that this picture is flawed: in at least three plays – Phaedra, Oenomaus and Women of Colchis – Sophocles did portray ‘women in love’ who experienced sexual desire for a male character and whose actions in pursuit of that desire resulted in the deaths of others. The chapter draws attention to this overlooked aspect of Sophoclean characterisation, and deftly exposes the main differences between the typical Sophoclean and Euripidean models of such women: in Sophocles, none is deliberately betraying a husband, and this may be one reason as to why the playwright appears to have escaped the accusations of immorality and misogyny that comedy heaped upon Euripides.