Medea, Hecabe, Electra, Heracles

An incredible set of four tragedy plays by Euripides. He wrote over 90 and seventeen survive. My favorite of this set was Medea. My main thought while reading these is just how incredible it is that all of these stories connect. In Heracles, we read about about the bow and arrow that Heracles unknowingly uses to kill his own wife and sons. It will later be that same bow that Philoctetes uses to kill Paris in the Trojan War. This bow that brought such pain and sorrow in the life of Heracles will one day kill the person most at fault for the entire war. Hecabe, the widowed wife of Priam, experiences similar devastation in her own family, though she is not the cause. And Electra is another telling of a part of the Orestes story, taken up by both Aeschylus and Sophocles as well.