Euripides

This stunning translation by award-winning poet, Robin Robertson reinvigorates Euripides' masterpiece. Updated for contemporary readers, Robertson brings the ancient verse to fervid, brutal life, revealing a work of art as devastating and relevant today as it was in the fifth century BC.

In his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music. Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of the tragic....

Provides translations of four plays along with a general introduction and prefaces to each play.

Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him; of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived complete. Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances....

"Ion" interprets the legend of the orphan Ion, who was conceived from the rape of Creusa by the god Apollo. Creusa is determined to keep the rape secret, and leaves the baby for dead. The baby is rescued by Hermes, and raised by a Pythian Priestess in Delphi. Many years later, when Creusa and her husband Xuthus visit the oracles at Delphi, the mother and son are reunited under false pretenses. The ensuing story of betrayal, revenge and reconciliation...

"Through their sheer range, daring innovation, flawed but eloquent characters and intriguing plots, the plays of Euripides have shocked and stimulated audiences since the fifth century BC. Phoenician Women portrays the rival sons of King Oedipus and their mother's doomed attempts at reconciliation, while Orestes shows a son ravaged with guilt after the vengeful murder of his mother. In The Bacchae, a king mistreats a newcomer to his land, little knowing...

Euripides, the youngest of the trio of great Greek tragedians was born at Salamis in 480 B.C., on the day when the Greeks won their momentous naval victory there over the fleet of the Persians. The precise social status of his parents is not clear but he received a good education, was early distinguished as an athlete, and showed talent in painting and oratory. He was a fellow student of Pericles, and his dramas show the influence of the philosophical...

"Helen" is a drama which follows an alternative myth of Helen of Sparta after the fall of Troy. It begins with the premise that Helen did not run off to Troy with Paris, but was actually stolen away to Egypt by the gods and replaced by a phantom look-alike in Troy.

Of Euripides' roughly ninety-two plays, only seventeen tragedies survive. Both ridiculed and lauded during his life, Euripides now stands as one of the greatest innovators of Greek drama. Collected here are ten of Euripides' most important tragedies in prose translation by Edward P. Coleridge. In the first play in this collection, "The Alcestis", Euripides expands upon the myth of Princess Alcestis at the time of her death. "Medea", tells the horrific...

Clinging to the altar of the sea-goddess Thetis for sanctuary, Andromache delivers the play's prologue, in which she mourns her misfortune (the destruction of Troy, the deaths of her husband Hector and their child Astyanax, and her enslavement to Neoptolemos) and her persecution at the hands of Neoptolemos' new wife Hermione and her father Menelaus, King of Sparta. She reveals that Neoptolemos has left for the oracle at Delphi and that she has hidden...