Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays

Presenting a study of "Children of Herakles" and "Suppliant Women", this book uses different insights into the Greek conception of gender and the Athenian ideology of civic identity. It demonstrates the formal elegance and intellectual complexity of two works that have been dismissed as artistic failures within the poet's oeuvre.

This book is the first book-length study of Euripides'' so-called ''political plays (Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women) to appear in half a century. Still disdained as the anomalously patriotic or propagandistic works of a playwright elsewhere famous for his subversive, ironic artistic ethos, the two works in question, notorious for their uncomfortable juxtaposition of political speeches and scenes of extreme feminine emotion, continue to be dismissed by scholars of tragedy as artistic failures unworthy of the author of Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae. The present study makes use of recent insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender (in real life and on stage) and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the political plays are, in fact, intellectually subtle and structurally coherent exercises in political theorizing - works that use complex interactions between female and male characters to explore the advantages, and costs, of being a member of the polis.