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When Admeto is dying, his wife Alceste sacrifices herself to save him; Hercules descends to Hades and brings her back. Meanwhile, the abandoned Trojan princess Antigona returns in disguise, while jealousy and rival claims to Admeto complicate the household until Antigona reunites him with Alceste.
King Admetus is spared death only if another takes his place. His wife Alcestis agrees to die for him; after her death, their guest Heracles confronts Death and returns her to the palace, veiled, where Admetus recognizes her.
In the surviving plot summary, Alcmaeon leaves his children Tisiphone and Amphilochus to be raised in Corinth. Queen Merope sells Tisiphone into slavery; Alcmaeon unknowingly buys her and returns to Corinth, where he reunites with Amphilochus and Tisiphone's identity is revealed. The ancient tragedy is lost, and its plot is reconstructed from a later summary and fragments.
This lost tragedy follows the mythic hero Alcmaeon in Psophis; the surviving account says its story is believed to have incorporated his death.
After ominous dreams, Queen Hecuba’s infant Paris is exposed on Mount Ida and raised by a herdsman. Years later, Paris wins games held in his honor despite being treated as a slave; when Prince Deiphobus plots against him, Cassandra and the herdsman reveal his identity and Hecuba is reunited with her son.
Andromache, enslaved after the Trojan War, takes sanctuary with her son Molossus when her master's wife Hermione and Menelaus threaten them. Peleus saves them; Orestes takes Hermione and arranges Neoptolemus's death, while Thetis reveals the survivors' futures.
After the Trojan War, Andromache is held captive by Pyrrhus, who desires her. He reveals her son Skamander survived and offers her responsibility for his upbringing, but Andromache remains devoted to her dead husband Hector and resists Pyrrhus. Hermione seeks to become queen, while her cousin Orest arrives with Greek demands that she marry Pyrrhus and that Skamander be killed. When Pyrrhus offers Andromache the crown, Hermione asks Orest to kill her rivals. Pyrrhus and his warriors pledge to protect Skamander if Andromache accepts Pyrrhus; she closes by declaring Ilion defeated.
Chained to a rock as a sacrifice to appease Poseidon, Andromeda laments her fate to the responding echo. Perseus arrives after defeating Medusa, falls in love with her and defeats the sea monster; after further conflict with her father, the story likely ends with Athena announcing their marriage and future as constellations.
In this lost tragedy, Antigone and Haemon’s participation in the burial of Polynices appears to lead to a different ending from Sophocles’ version: the pair marry and have a son, Maeon. The surviving fragments provide little plot detail, and scholars dispute how much can be reconstructed, including whether Dionysus intervened to save them.
Exiled by his brothers, Archelaus reaches King Cisseus and helps defend him. When Cisseus plots against him instead of honoring his promise, Archelaus turns the plot back on the king, escapes to Macedonia and founds Aegae, guided by a goat and an oracle.
Scenes from Greek tragedies trace the violence within the House of Atreus: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra’s revenge, and the retaliatory killing by Orestes and Electra. The sequence follows Orestes through his pursuit by the Furies to his eventual reunion with Iphigenia.
A fragmentary tragedy of Bellerophon’s challenge to the gods, including his fall from Pegasus.
The children of Heracles seek refuge from Eurystheus at Marathon. Athenian king Demophon agrees to protect them, but an oracle demands a noble maiden's sacrifice; Macaria volunteers. Iolaus joins the battle, captures Eurystheus, and the play ends with his execution and prophecy.
In Minos’s palace, the king discovers Pasiphaë has borne the Minotaur and condemns her after a debate in which she argues that divine madness, not voluntary desire, caused her actions. Fragments also indicate the Cretan chorus’s rites and Icarus’s bold monody before his fatal flight.
On Sicily, Odysseus and his crew encounter the enslaved satyrs and Silenus, who serve Polyphemus. Odysseus argues with the Cyclops, then gets him drunk and blinds him; using the name 'Nobody' to foil rescue, Odysseus escapes with the satyrs.
Daphne, devoted to nature, rejects the love of her childhood friend Leukippos and of a mysterious herdsman, who is Apollo. At a Dionysian festival, Apollo reveals Leukippos’s disguise and kills him with an arrow. Grieving Daphne, Apollo asks Zeus to transform her into a tree, and she rejoices in her union with nature.
Edward Thomas’s American folk opera adapts Eugene O’Neill’s drama Desire Under the Elms, which in turn draws on Euripides’ Hippolytus.
The sorceress Aithra shipwrecks Helen and Menelaus to save Helen from her husband’s murderous jealousy. She tells Menelaus that the real Helen was hidden away years earlier and that his wife had been a phantom, then uses magic and a potion to reunite them. Menelaus later kills Da-ud while hunting and believes he has killed Paris; Aithra helps restore the couple, and their daughter Hermione is reunited with them.
The Performance Group’s environmental adaptation of The Bacchae deconstructs Euripides’ text with performer-devised material and draws spectators into the action, using a flexible shared space and participatory ritual staging.
Electra and her returned brother Orestes plot revenge for Agamemnon's murder by killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. After they kill their mother, the siblings are overcome by grief and guilt; Castor and Pollux instruct them on atonement.
After the fall of Troy, captive queen Hecuba learns that the Greeks will sacrifice her daughter Polyxena at Achilles' tomb. When the body of her youngest son Polydorus washes ashore, she discovers that Polymestor murdered him for his treasure. With Agamemnon's reluctant support, Hecuba lures Polymestor and his sons into a tent, kills the sons and blinds Polymestor. Agamemnon rules her revenge justified.
In Euripides' version of the myth, the real Helen has been kept in Egypt while a phantom went to Troy. When Menelaus arrives, they recognize one another and devise a ritual burial as a pretext to escape by sea from King Theoclymenus, who intends to marry Helen.
While Heracles is in the Underworld, the usurper Lycus threatens his family in Thebes. Heracles returns and kills Lycus, but Hera sends Madness, causing him to kill his wife and children. Theseus helps him choose exile and a future in Athens over suicide.
Aphrodite punishes Hippolytus for honoring Artemis and rejecting her by causing his stepmother Phaedra to desire him. When Phaedra's nurse reveals her feelings, Hippolytus reacts with outrage; Phaedra kills herself and leaves a false accusation. Theseus curses Hippolytus, who is fatally injured in a chariot crash. Artemis reveals the truth, and father and son reconcile before Hippolytus dies.
Former queen Hypsipyle, enslaved and serving as nurse to the infant Opheltes, accidentally causes his death while guiding the Seven against Thebes to a spring. Amphiaraus persuades Eurydice to spare her; funeral games bring Hypsipyle’s twin sons to her and lead to her release.
Italian opera seria based on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris.
At Delphi, temple servant Ion and childless Athenian noblewoman Creusa meet while seeking answers about their origins. Creusa's attempt to poison Ion fails; the pair recognize each other as mother and son, and Athena reveals Apollo's role in their reunion.
Esperanza Spalding retells the Iphigenia myth through five manifestations of the heroine, each with a separate story. In Euripides’ account, Iphigenia’s father Agamemnon sacrifices her to secure favorable winds for the Greek fleet bound for Troy; Spalding’s version reimagines the myth.
The Greek fleet is stranded at Aulis, where Agamemnon is told he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to obtain favourable winds. Her family and Achilles resist, but she ultimately offers herself for Greece. The authenticity of the surviving ending, in which a deer replaces her, is disputed.
Iphigenia, a Greek priestess forced to sacrifice foreigners in Taurica, learns that her brother Orestes has arrived with Pylades to steal Artemis’s statue. The siblings recognize one another and devise an escape by deceiving King Thoas; Athena intervenes to secure their departure.
Iphigenia, serving as Diana's priestess in Tauris, longs to return to Greece. When her brother Orestes and his companion Pylades are captured, she must choose between escaping with them through deception or appealing to King Thoas's humanity; she finally tells him the truth and wins their release.
At Aulis, Agamemnon faces pressure to sacrifice his daughter Iphigénie so the Greek fleet can sail against Troy. As Iphigénie accepts her fate and Achille tries to save her, Ériphile is revealed as the intended sacrificial victim and dies in her place.
Iphigenia, a priestess of Diana in Tauris, learns that two shipwrecked Greeks are to be sacrificed. They are her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades, who have come to retrieve Diana’s statue. Iphigenia recognizes Orestes only as she is about to sacrifice him. King Thoas arrives intending to kill the siblings, but Pylades returns with Greeks who kill Thoas. Diana appears, pardons Orestes for killing his mother, and orders the statue returned to Greece.
A four-act French tragédie lyrique based on Claude Guimond de La Touche’s play and ultimately Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris. In Piccinni’s version, King Thoas is in love with Iphigénie and is less barbaric than in Gluck’s opera.
Eteocles and Polynices fight for control of Thebes despite the pleas of their mother Jocasta, sister Antigone, and their relatives. The conflict ends in the deaths of the principal characters.
In Corinth, Medea takes revenge after Jason abandons her to marry Creon's daughter. She secures refuge in Athens, arranges the deaths of Creon and his daughter through poisoned gifts, then kills her own sons and escapes in a chariot sent by Helios.
Jason plans to leave Medea and marry Glauca, daughter of King Creon. In revenge, Medea kills their two children and then takes her own life.
Jason rejects Medea, his former wife, for Creusa, daughter of King Creon, who banishes Medea. King Aegeus of Athens arrives, having also been promised Creusa as a bride. He and Medea form an alliance and attack Creusa and Jason at their wedding, but are defeated. Imprisoned, Medea summons demons, kills Creusa with a poisoned robe and stabs her own children, then escapes in a chariot drawn by flying dragons. Jason attempts suicide in despair.
Farnace usurps the throne of Pontus, kills the king, and marries his widow, Stratonica. The king’s daughter Laodice is married to Nicomede, while her brother Mitridate has taken refuge in Egypt. Mitridate and his wife Issicratea return disguised as Egyptian ambassadors. After revealing his identity to Laodice, Mitridate and Issicratea kill Farnace and Stratonica, and Nicomede announces the rightful king’s return.
At Corinth, Dircé prepares to marry Jason, who had taken the Golden Fleece with Médée’s help before abandoning her. Médée returns and demands that Jason return to her; he refuses, and she vows vengeance. Ordered to leave Corinth, she asks for one more day with her children and sends wedding gifts to Dircé. One gift poisons Dircé. Médée, Néris and the children take refuge in a temple; Médée emerges with a bloodied knife after killing her children, curses Jason and disappears as the temple burns.
In Euripides’ lost tragedy, fragments describe Oedipus defeating the Sphinx and being blinded by a servant of Laius. As the truth about his parentage emerges, Jocasta supports him and accompanies him into exile.
Haunted by the Furies after killing his mother, Oreste is shipwrecked in Tauris, where his sister Ifigenia serves as a priestess. She does not initially recognize him and must sacrifice foreigners; his wife Ermione and friend Pilade are also captured. When the king refuses mercy, Ifigenia and Filotete turn against him, ending the sacrifices and reuniting the family.
After killing his mother Clytemnestra, Orestes is tormented by the Furies and faces execution. With Electra and Pylades, he plots revenge against Menelaus, but Apollo intervenes and orders a trial in Athens.
At Medea's direction, the daughters of Pelias kill their father, believing Medea's claim that she can restore his youth. The play is lost.
Phaedra confesses her desire for her stepson Hippolytus, who rejects her. With her nurse, she falsely accuses him of assault; Theseus condemns his son to die, then learns the truth. Phaedra admits the falsehood and kills herself.
In a mortal setting in Aethiopia, Clymene tells Phaethon that he is the son of Helios, not Merops, and urges him to seek confirmation from his divine father. Phaethon drives Helios’s chariot and dies; Clymene hides his body from Merops, who discovers the truth and appears to threaten her. The surviving fragments leave the bride’s identity and the ending uncertain.
On Lemnos, Odysseus disguises himself to persuade the wounded Philoctetes, abandoned by the Greeks years earlier, to return with his bow to the Trojan War. A Trojan embassy also tries to win Philoctetes to its cause, and Diomedes joins the effort to bring him back to the Greeks. The surviving fragments leave the final persuasion uncertain.
After the Trojan War, Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, wants to marry the Trojan princess Polyxena. Juno and Polyxena’s mother, Hecuba, oppose the match, and Hecuba urges Pyrrhus’s rival Telephus to kill him. Telephus refuses, so Hecuba has him killed instead. She is eventually reconciled to Pyrrhus and consents to the marriage.
In Tiryns, Stheneboea’s advances are rejected by Bellerophon, whom she falsely accuses to her husband Proetus. Sent to kill the Chimera, Bellerophon survives, returns, feigns love to learn of another plot, then takes Stheneboea on Pegasus and throws her to her death before confessing to Proetus.
Three-act opera based on Thornton Wilder’s play of the same name, itself based on Euripides’ Alcestis. Roles include Alkestis, her husband Admettos, their son Epimenes, Tiresias, Herkules, and Apollo; no plot summary is supplied.
The god Dionysus returns to Thebes to establish his worship and punish the royal family for denying his divinity. King Pentheus tries to suppress the rites, but Dionysus drives him to spy on the Bacchae; the women, led by Pentheus's mother Agave in a frenzy, tear him apart before she recognizes what she has done.
Soyinka's adaptation adds an enslaved chorus that reflects civil unrest in Nigeria and transforms Pentheus's sacrifice into a communion rite: his blood becomes wine, and the community drinks it to share his power and be renewed.
In Thebes, Pentheus tries to suppress the cult of Dionysus, whose followers embrace ecstatic revelry. A stranger—Dionysus in disguise—draws the city into the cult and entrances Pentheus, who goes to the mountain dressed as a woman. Dionysus’s spell reaches Pentheus’s mother Agave and sister Autonoë; Pentheus is torn apart, and Agave unknowingly cradles his head as the city falls.
At a 1960s holiday camp, respectable campers turn against the rigid, moralizing manager Erpingham. The farce is loosely based on Euripides' The Bacchae.
Jocasta tries to reconcile her sons Eteocles and Polynices, who dispute the throne of Thebes. As war approaches, Teiresias says Creon must sacrifice his son Menoeceus to save the city. Menoeceus does so, but the brothers kill each other in a duel and Jocasta takes her life. Antigone defies Creon's burial order and accompanies her exiled father Oedipus.
Mothers of Argive warriors killed outside Thebes seek burial for their sons, whose bodies Creon has forbidden them to recover. Theseus leads Athens against Thebes to reclaim the dead; after victory, the play ends with funeral rites, Evadne's suicide and Athena's prophecy of future vengeance.
After Troy falls, Queen Hecuba and the other captive Trojan women learn their fates: Cassandra and Andromache are assigned to Greek victors, Polyxena and Astyanax are killed, and Helen faces Menelaus. The women mourn their losses as they are taken into slavery.
A lost satyr play titled Reapers or Harvesters, performed by Euripides at the Dionysia in Athens as part of a tetralogy that included Medea, Philoctetes, and Dictys.
A lost Latin tragedy concerning Thyestes, presumed to draw on Euripides’ lost play of the same title.
As the Greek fleet waits to sail for Troy, Agamemnon faces a demand to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. The promise of a wedding draws her into a conflict between military ambition, family loyalty, and the cost of war.
After a nineteenth-century invasion destroys Owu's male population, the surviving women face grief, trauma, and resistance under the conquering forces. Osofisan reworks Euripides' Trojan Women in the history of the Owu kingdom.
When Admeto is dying, his wife Alceste sacrifices herself to save him; Hercules descends to Hades and brings her back. Meanwhile, the abandoned Trojan princess Antigona returns in disguise, while jealousy and rival claims to Admeto complicate the household until Antigona reunites him with Alceste.
King Admetus is spared death only if another takes his place. His wife Alcestis agrees to die for him; after her death, their guest Heracles confronts Death and returns her to the palace, veiled, where Admetus recognizes her.
In the surviving plot summary, Alcmaeon leaves his children Tisiphone and Amphilochus to be raised in Corinth. Queen Merope sells Tisiphone into slavery; Alcmaeon unknowingly buys her and returns to Corinth, where he reunites with Amphilochus and Tisiphone's identity is revealed. The ancient tragedy is lost, and its plot is reconstructed from a later summary and fragments.
This lost tragedy follows the mythic hero Alcmaeon in Psophis; the surviving account says its story is believed to have incorporated his death.
After ominous dreams, Queen Hecuba’s infant Paris is exposed on Mount Ida and raised by a herdsman. Years later, Paris wins games held in his honor despite being treated as a slave; when Prince Deiphobus plots against him, Cassandra and the herdsman reveal his identity and Hecuba is reunited with her son.
Andromache, enslaved after the Trojan War, takes sanctuary with her son Molossus when her master's wife Hermione and Menelaus threaten them. Peleus saves them; Orestes takes Hermione and arranges Neoptolemus's death, while Thetis reveals the survivors' futures.
After the Trojan War, Andromache is held captive by Pyrrhus, who desires her. He reveals her son Skamander survived and offers her responsibility for his upbringing, but Andromache remains devoted to her dead husband Hector and resists Pyrrhus. Hermione seeks to become queen, while her cousin Orest arrives with Greek demands that she marry Pyrrhus and that Skamander be killed. When Pyrrhus offers Andromache the crown, Hermione asks Orest to kill her rivals. Pyrrhus and his warriors pledge to protect Skamander if Andromache accepts Pyrrhus; she closes by declaring Ilion defeated.
Chained to a rock as a sacrifice to appease Poseidon, Andromeda laments her fate to the responding echo. Perseus arrives after defeating Medusa, falls in love with her and defeats the sea monster; after further conflict with her father, the story likely ends with Athena announcing their marriage and future as constellations.
In this lost tragedy, Antigone and Haemon’s participation in the burial of Polynices appears to lead to a different ending from Sophocles’ version: the pair marry and have a son, Maeon. The surviving fragments provide little plot detail, and scholars dispute how much can be reconstructed, including whether Dionysus intervened to save them.
Exiled by his brothers, Archelaus reaches King Cisseus and helps defend him. When Cisseus plots against him instead of honoring his promise, Archelaus turns the plot back on the king, escapes to Macedonia and founds Aegae, guided by a goat and an oracle.
Scenes from Greek tragedies trace the violence within the House of Atreus: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra’s revenge, and the retaliatory killing by Orestes and Electra. The sequence follows Orestes through his pursuit by the Furies to his eventual reunion with Iphigenia.
A fragmentary tragedy of Bellerophon’s challenge to the gods, including his fall from Pegasus.
The children of Heracles seek refuge from Eurystheus at Marathon. Athenian king Demophon agrees to protect them, but an oracle demands a noble maiden's sacrifice; Macaria volunteers. Iolaus joins the battle, captures Eurystheus, and the play ends with his execution and prophecy.
In Minos’s palace, the king discovers Pasiphaë has borne the Minotaur and condemns her after a debate in which she argues that divine madness, not voluntary desire, caused her actions. Fragments also indicate the Cretan chorus’s rites and Icarus’s bold monody before his fatal flight.
On Sicily, Odysseus and his crew encounter the enslaved satyrs and Silenus, who serve Polyphemus. Odysseus argues with the Cyclops, then gets him drunk and blinds him; using the name 'Nobody' to foil rescue, Odysseus escapes with the satyrs.
Daphne, devoted to nature, rejects the love of her childhood friend Leukippos and of a mysterious herdsman, who is Apollo. At a Dionysian festival, Apollo reveals Leukippos’s disguise and kills him with an arrow. Grieving Daphne, Apollo asks Zeus to transform her into a tree, and she rejoices in her union with nature.
Edward Thomas’s American folk opera adapts Eugene O’Neill’s drama Desire Under the Elms, which in turn draws on Euripides’ Hippolytus.
The sorceress Aithra shipwrecks Helen and Menelaus to save Helen from her husband’s murderous jealousy. She tells Menelaus that the real Helen was hidden away years earlier and that his wife had been a phantom, then uses magic and a potion to reunite them. Menelaus later kills Da-ud while hunting and believes he has killed Paris; Aithra helps restore the couple, and their daughter Hermione is reunited with them.
The Performance Group’s environmental adaptation of The Bacchae deconstructs Euripides’ text with performer-devised material and draws spectators into the action, using a flexible shared space and participatory ritual staging.
Electra and her returned brother Orestes plot revenge for Agamemnon's murder by killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. After they kill their mother, the siblings are overcome by grief and guilt; Castor and Pollux instruct them on atonement.
After the fall of Troy, captive queen Hecuba learns that the Greeks will sacrifice her daughter Polyxena at Achilles' tomb. When the body of her youngest son Polydorus washes ashore, she discovers that Polymestor murdered him for his treasure. With Agamemnon's reluctant support, Hecuba lures Polymestor and his sons into a tent, kills the sons and blinds Polymestor. Agamemnon rules her revenge justified.
In Euripides' version of the myth, the real Helen has been kept in Egypt while a phantom went to Troy. When Menelaus arrives, they recognize one another and devise a ritual burial as a pretext to escape by sea from King Theoclymenus, who intends to marry Helen.
While Heracles is in the Underworld, the usurper Lycus threatens his family in Thebes. Heracles returns and kills Lycus, but Hera sends Madness, causing him to kill his wife and children. Theseus helps him choose exile and a future in Athens over suicide.
Aphrodite punishes Hippolytus for honoring Artemis and rejecting her by causing his stepmother Phaedra to desire him. When Phaedra's nurse reveals her feelings, Hippolytus reacts with outrage; Phaedra kills herself and leaves a false accusation. Theseus curses Hippolytus, who is fatally injured in a chariot crash. Artemis reveals the truth, and father and son reconcile before Hippolytus dies.
Former queen Hypsipyle, enslaved and serving as nurse to the infant Opheltes, accidentally causes his death while guiding the Seven against Thebes to a spring. Amphiaraus persuades Eurydice to spare her; funeral games bring Hypsipyle’s twin sons to her and lead to her release.
Italian opera seria based on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris.
At Delphi, temple servant Ion and childless Athenian noblewoman Creusa meet while seeking answers about their origins. Creusa's attempt to poison Ion fails; the pair recognize each other as mother and son, and Athena reveals Apollo's role in their reunion.
Esperanza Spalding retells the Iphigenia myth through five manifestations of the heroine, each with a separate story. In Euripides’ account, Iphigenia’s father Agamemnon sacrifices her to secure favorable winds for the Greek fleet bound for Troy; Spalding’s version reimagines the myth.
The Greek fleet is stranded at Aulis, where Agamemnon is told he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to obtain favourable winds. Her family and Achilles resist, but she ultimately offers herself for Greece. The authenticity of the surviving ending, in which a deer replaces her, is disputed.
Iphigenia, a Greek priestess forced to sacrifice foreigners in Taurica, learns that her brother Orestes has arrived with Pylades to steal Artemis’s statue. The siblings recognize one another and devise an escape by deceiving King Thoas; Athena intervenes to secure their departure.
Iphigenia, serving as Diana's priestess in Tauris, longs to return to Greece. When her brother Orestes and his companion Pylades are captured, she must choose between escaping with them through deception or appealing to King Thoas's humanity; she finally tells him the truth and wins their release.
At Aulis, Agamemnon faces pressure to sacrifice his daughter Iphigénie so the Greek fleet can sail against Troy. As Iphigénie accepts her fate and Achille tries to save her, Ériphile is revealed as the intended sacrificial victim and dies in her place.
Iphigenia, a priestess of Diana in Tauris, learns that two shipwrecked Greeks are to be sacrificed. They are her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades, who have come to retrieve Diana’s statue. Iphigenia recognizes Orestes only as she is about to sacrifice him. King Thoas arrives intending to kill the siblings, but Pylades returns with Greeks who kill Thoas. Diana appears, pardons Orestes for killing his mother, and orders the statue returned to Greece.
A four-act French tragédie lyrique based on Claude Guimond de La Touche’s play and ultimately Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris. In Piccinni’s version, King Thoas is in love with Iphigénie and is less barbaric than in Gluck’s opera.
Eteocles and Polynices fight for control of Thebes despite the pleas of their mother Jocasta, sister Antigone, and their relatives. The conflict ends in the deaths of the principal characters.
In Corinth, Medea takes revenge after Jason abandons her to marry Creon's daughter. She secures refuge in Athens, arranges the deaths of Creon and his daughter through poisoned gifts, then kills her own sons and escapes in a chariot sent by Helios.
Jason plans to leave Medea and marry Glauca, daughter of King Creon. In revenge, Medea kills their two children and then takes her own life.
Jason rejects Medea, his former wife, for Creusa, daughter of King Creon, who banishes Medea. King Aegeus of Athens arrives, having also been promised Creusa as a bride. He and Medea form an alliance and attack Creusa and Jason at their wedding, but are defeated. Imprisoned, Medea summons demons, kills Creusa with a poisoned robe and stabs her own children, then escapes in a chariot drawn by flying dragons. Jason attempts suicide in despair.
Farnace usurps the throne of Pontus, kills the king, and marries his widow, Stratonica. The king’s daughter Laodice is married to Nicomede, while her brother Mitridate has taken refuge in Egypt. Mitridate and his wife Issicratea return disguised as Egyptian ambassadors. After revealing his identity to Laodice, Mitridate and Issicratea kill Farnace and Stratonica, and Nicomede announces the rightful king’s return.
At Corinth, Dircé prepares to marry Jason, who had taken the Golden Fleece with Médée’s help before abandoning her. Médée returns and demands that Jason return to her; he refuses, and she vows vengeance. Ordered to leave Corinth, she asks for one more day with her children and sends wedding gifts to Dircé. One gift poisons Dircé. Médée, Néris and the children take refuge in a temple; Médée emerges with a bloodied knife after killing her children, curses Jason and disappears as the temple burns.
In Euripides’ lost tragedy, fragments describe Oedipus defeating the Sphinx and being blinded by a servant of Laius. As the truth about his parentage emerges, Jocasta supports him and accompanies him into exile.
Haunted by the Furies after killing his mother, Oreste is shipwrecked in Tauris, where his sister Ifigenia serves as a priestess. She does not initially recognize him and must sacrifice foreigners; his wife Ermione and friend Pilade are also captured. When the king refuses mercy, Ifigenia and Filotete turn against him, ending the sacrifices and reuniting the family.
After killing his mother Clytemnestra, Orestes is tormented by the Furies and faces execution. With Electra and Pylades, he plots revenge against Menelaus, but Apollo intervenes and orders a trial in Athens.
At Medea's direction, the daughters of Pelias kill their father, believing Medea's claim that she can restore his youth. The play is lost.
Phaedra confesses her desire for her stepson Hippolytus, who rejects her. With her nurse, she falsely accuses him of assault; Theseus condemns his son to die, then learns the truth. Phaedra admits the falsehood and kills herself.
In a mortal setting in Aethiopia, Clymene tells Phaethon that he is the son of Helios, not Merops, and urges him to seek confirmation from his divine father. Phaethon drives Helios’s chariot and dies; Clymene hides his body from Merops, who discovers the truth and appears to threaten her. The surviving fragments leave the bride’s identity and the ending uncertain.
On Lemnos, Odysseus disguises himself to persuade the wounded Philoctetes, abandoned by the Greeks years earlier, to return with his bow to the Trojan War. A Trojan embassy also tries to win Philoctetes to its cause, and Diomedes joins the effort to bring him back to the Greeks. The surviving fragments leave the final persuasion uncertain.
After the Trojan War, Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, wants to marry the Trojan princess Polyxena. Juno and Polyxena’s mother, Hecuba, oppose the match, and Hecuba urges Pyrrhus’s rival Telephus to kill him. Telephus refuses, so Hecuba has him killed instead. She is eventually reconciled to Pyrrhus and consents to the marriage.
In Tiryns, Stheneboea’s advances are rejected by Bellerophon, whom she falsely accuses to her husband Proetus. Sent to kill the Chimera, Bellerophon survives, returns, feigns love to learn of another plot, then takes Stheneboea on Pegasus and throws her to her death before confessing to Proetus.
Three-act opera based on Thornton Wilder’s play of the same name, itself based on Euripides’ Alcestis. Roles include Alkestis, her husband Admettos, their son Epimenes, Tiresias, Herkules, and Apollo; no plot summary is supplied.
The god Dionysus returns to Thebes to establish his worship and punish the royal family for denying his divinity. King Pentheus tries to suppress the rites, but Dionysus drives him to spy on the Bacchae; the women, led by Pentheus's mother Agave in a frenzy, tear him apart before she recognizes what she has done.
Soyinka's adaptation adds an enslaved chorus that reflects civil unrest in Nigeria and transforms Pentheus's sacrifice into a communion rite: his blood becomes wine, and the community drinks it to share his power and be renewed.
In Thebes, Pentheus tries to suppress the cult of Dionysus, whose followers embrace ecstatic revelry. A stranger—Dionysus in disguise—draws the city into the cult and entrances Pentheus, who goes to the mountain dressed as a woman. Dionysus’s spell reaches Pentheus’s mother Agave and sister Autonoë; Pentheus is torn apart, and Agave unknowingly cradles his head as the city falls.
At a 1960s holiday camp, respectable campers turn against the rigid, moralizing manager Erpingham. The farce is loosely based on Euripides' The Bacchae.
Jocasta tries to reconcile her sons Eteocles and Polynices, who dispute the throne of Thebes. As war approaches, Teiresias says Creon must sacrifice his son Menoeceus to save the city. Menoeceus does so, but the brothers kill each other in a duel and Jocasta takes her life. Antigone defies Creon's burial order and accompanies her exiled father Oedipus.
Mothers of Argive warriors killed outside Thebes seek burial for their sons, whose bodies Creon has forbidden them to recover. Theseus leads Athens against Thebes to reclaim the dead; after victory, the play ends with funeral rites, Evadne's suicide and Athena's prophecy of future vengeance.
After Troy falls, Queen Hecuba and the other captive Trojan women learn their fates: Cassandra and Andromache are assigned to Greek victors, Polyxena and Astyanax are killed, and Helen faces Menelaus. The women mourn their losses as they are taken into slavery.
A lost satyr play titled Reapers or Harvesters, performed by Euripides at the Dionysia in Athens as part of a tetralogy that included Medea, Philoctetes, and Dictys.
A lost Latin tragedy concerning Thyestes, presumed to draw on Euripides’ lost play of the same title.
As the Greek fleet waits to sail for Troy, Agamemnon faces a demand to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. The promise of a wedding draws her into a conflict between military ambition, family loyalty, and the cost of war.
After a nineteenth-century invasion destroys Owu's male population, the surviving women face grief, trauma, and resistance under the conquering forces. Osofisan reworks Euripides' Trojan Women in the history of the Owu kingdom.