2. The _Medea_ was brought out in 431 B.C. with the _Philoctetes_, the _Dictys_, and a lost satyr-play called the _Reapers_ (_Theristae_). Euripides gained the third prize, the first falling to Euphorion, the son of Aeschylus, and the second to Sophocles. If it is true that Euripides modelled his Medea on the work of an obscure predecessor, Neophron, at least he made the subject thoroughly his own. Hardly any play was more popular in antiquity with readers and spectators, with actors, or with sculptors. Ennius is said to have translated and adopted it. We do not know how far it may have been used by Ovid in his lost tragedy of the same name; but it certainly inspired the rhetorical performance of Seneca, which may be regarded as bridging the interval between Euripides and modern adaptations. We may grant at once that the _Medea_ of Euripides is not a faultless play; that the dialogue between the heroine and Aegeus is not happily conceived; that the murder of the children lacks an adequate dramatic motive; that there is something of a moral anti-climax in the arrangements of Medea, before the deed, for her personal safety. But the _Medea_ remains a tragedy of first-rate power. It is admirable for the splendid force with which the character of the strange and strong-hearted woman, a barbarian friendless among Hellenes, is thrown out against the background of Hellenic life in Corinth.
3. The extant _Hippolytus_ (429 B.C.)--sometimes called _Stephanephoros_, the "wreath-bearer," from the garland of flowers which, in the opening scene, the hero offers to Artemis--was not the first drama of Euripides on this theme. In an earlier play of the same name, we are told, he had shocked both the moral and the aesthetic sense of Athens. In this earlier _Hippolytus_, Phaedra herself had confessed her love to her step-son, and, when repulsed, had falsely accused him to Theseus, who doomed him to death; at the sight of the corpse, she had been moved to confess her crime, and had atoned for it by a voluntary death. This first _Hippolytus_ is cited as _Hippolytus the Veiled_ ([Greek: kaluptomenos]), either, as Toup and Welcker thought, from Hippolytus covering his face in horror, or, as Bentley with more likelihood suggested, because the youth's shrouded corpse was brought upon the scene. It can scarcely be doubted that the chief dramatic defect of our _Hippolytus_ is connected with the unfavourable reception of its predecessor. Euripides had been warned that limits must be observed in the dramatic portrayal of a morally repulsive theme. In the later play, accordingly, the whole action is made to turn on the jealous feud between Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Artemis, the goddess of chastity. Phaedra not only shrinks from breathing her secret to Hippolytus, but destroys herself when she learns that she is rejected. But the natural agency of human passion is now replaced by a supernatural machinery; the slain son and the bereaved father are no longer the martyrs of sin, the tragic witnesses of an inexorable law; rather they and Phaedra are alike the puppets of a divine caprice, the scapegoats of an Olympian quarrel in which they have no concern. But if the dramatic effect of the whole is thus weakened, the character of Phaedra is a fine psychological study; and, as regards form, the play is one of the most brilliant. Boeckh (_De tragoediae Graecae principiis_, p. 180 f.) is perhaps too ingenious in finding an allusion to the plague at Athens (430 B.C.) in the [Greek: ô kaka thnêtôn stugerai te nosoi] of v. 177, and in v. 209 f.; but it can scarcely be doubted that he is right in suggesting that the closing words of Theseus (v. 1460)