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Chapter 6 considers writing tablets as metatheatrical props that symbolize and embody the process of composing tragedy out of competing possible plotlines. Trachiniae’s oracular deltos (writing tablet) serves as a mise-en-abîme refraction of the entire play. Phaedra’s writing tablet is more akin to a defixio (a curse tablet) than a letter and is used by the heroine preemptively to silence her stepson in Euripides’ Hippolytus. The letter Iphigenia reads aloud in Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians provokes a playful scene of recognition, while Agamemnon’s revised letter, revoking his earlier decision to sacrifice his daughter, becomes the catalyst for a burlesque tug-of-war in the Iphigenia at Aulis; in that play, it is particularly clear that control of the girl—and consequently of the plot—is what is at issue. But because of their general tendency to thematize plotting as a tragic concern, these props more than others solicit metatheatrical interpretations.

The script approach given trial runs in the previous chapters is unleashed here in lengthy analyses of Medea’s, Deianeira’s, and Hermione’s emotions at their husband’s relationships with other women. The chapter argues in a nuanced way for sexual jealousy to be considered a separate motivation alongside pride and rage in Medea. The emotion is more straightforwardly the motivation for actual or attempted murder in Trachiniae and Andromache. The three plays suggest that erôs (sexual love) combines with orgê (anger) and phthonos when a wife fears losing to a rival her triple status as homekeeper, bedmate, and bearer of legitimate children to her husband. A related scenario in Attic oratory leads to an exploration of male sexual jealousy in oratory and New Comedy. This is shown to be aroused—in contrast to female sexual jealousy—by the (female or male) sexual partner having sex elsewhere. The chapter ends with a discussion of the emotion term zêlotupia, sometimes wrongly translated as jealousy.

At the end of dramas the gods may not have solved all problems, that does not mean that Euripides sought to have his original audiences cease to honor them. On the contrary, it reminds us that the gods exist to please themselves, not in order to make humans happy. The codas to five dramas (even though they were probably not written by Euripides) state explicitly and without any hedging that the gods do what they choose to do and that humans only understand what has happened after the fact, by which time it is too late to prevent further suffering and loss. This outlook is shared by the other dramatists. Theatrical performance gives the audience a fleeting opportunity to look down upon human life with all its limitations from a distance, as a god might see it, without the usual mist of partial understanding that clouds mortal eyes.