My next Euripides play, The Phonecian Women, was one I was prepared to be much worse than it actually was. Reading about it in articles, as well as in an introduction by William Arrowsmith, I had heard about this play’s problematic textual history. The Phonecian Women is a play with many parts believed to be much later insertions by other authors, which naturally would meddle with Euripides’ original vision for his play, and would make its unity of structure much more convoluted and anfractuous than intended. In short, I intended The Phonecian Women to be, more or less, a disaster. However, that is not the kind of play I was met with. The Phonecian Women is a play centered around the chorus, a group of Phonecian women in Troy, which is uncommon for Euripides. The titular Phoenicians serve as the axis which the plot revolves around, seeing characters in the Seven Against Thebes such as Polynices, Jocasta, Creon, and Antigone wander in and out of the narrative. Thus, due to the many hands working and reworking this play, the play as a whole begins to feel more like a short story collection centered around tragedy through the eyes of these impoverished, migratory women, and from that perspective, the play as a whole actually becomes quite successful. The overall emotions which are stirred in this play still pack a punch, from Creon’s son committing suicide for the good of the doomed and guilty kingdom of Thebes and Jocasta’s woe at her two sons’ strife against each other. There are also some noticeable comparisons to Euripides’ The Women of Troy in regards to Euripides’ fascination in basing tragedies in the suffering of women and lower-class members of Athenian society, rather than kings and heroes. Overall, the uniqueness of The Phonecian Women makes it a fascinating stand alone text in the corpus of Greek texts, and I highly recommend checking it out!