Jason Furman's Reviews > Ion

I found Ion, the title character of the play, the most emotionally complex and modern of the characters I have read in Greek tragedy. He was an abandoned child left for dead but rescued and raised at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. When we meet him he is an earnest and sincere young man with more normal yearnings like knowing his parents than anything grandiose. He then gets adopted by the King of Athens (who unbeknownst to either of them is his step father) who heeds an oracle telling him the first child he will see is his son. This leads to a combination of joy, worry about what it means for his political future to be the son of a foreign-born king (yes, he shifts to somewhat grandiose pretty quickly), to sadness and betrayal about his mother’s (again, unbeknownst to either of them) plot to kill him out of jealousy for what she perceives to be her husband’s betrayal. In all of these Ion is imperfect—not virtuous but not deeply flawed and if anything seems young, confused, and changing in his attitudes. In this sense he is nothing like Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea or many of the other grand figures of Greek tragedy—although possibly Orestes has some of this complexity too.

I should say the plot was a bit ridiculous with coincidences and deus ex machina's but what do you expect from Euripides?

I read the Ronald Frederick Willetts in the The Complete Greek Tragedies.