I’ve previously read and reviewed via Notes a number of Euripides’ plays - Ion, The Women of Troy, Helen, and the amazing Bacchae - and am back reading more. I read his Medea, which was stomach churning in how difficult it was to get through - not because it was written poorly, it was plotted pretty well and held my attention, but because it dealt with a scorned woman who murders her sons to get revenge on her ex-husband. I really, really didn’t like this topic - I see such news articles on the Daily Mail about parents breaching their filial duties to their minor children, and it’s one of the things that forced me to abandon the notion of an all-good God (because if one believes one has free will to choose to get closer to God via goodness or fall farther from him via evil, minor children do not have such choice). One could make the argument that Medea was torn between competing forces, and she was, but I was viscerally repulsed by the particular opposites that she was torn between, and even at the start I found myself quasi-sympathetic to the ex-husband; Medea’s former crimes where she betrayed her family, her father and her brother put her plight, to me, to be not sympathetic despite the deep precariousness of her situation. Another aspect that I appreciate more about Sophocles than Euripides is that Sophocles treats the Gods as real, that humans are subject to the whims and prophecies of Gods and humans do not have the knowledge or power to escape their designs, whereas for Euripides the Gods are named but it is a human drama; the Gods by and large might as well just be excuses for human behavior (except for the deus ex machine at the end, which does implicate the Gods in supporting immoral horror). So it is a much more secular approach in general (except in the Bacchae). Nietzsche criticized Euripides precisely for this “fall” toward rationalism in his Birth of Tragedy. Here, the tale does end in horror - and a non-redemptive horror, because she escapes to further adventures - but because of its lack of legible cosmic order, the horror did not quite really land to me as a satisfying conclusion with a statement about the human condition under totality; yes, it had lots of statements to make about women’s inferior role in Greek society, about how important saving face was to these people, and the like, but these themes are inferior to me versus ones which grapple with higher mysteries.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5894728&forum_id=2)#50077750)