Euripides

Euripides turned to playwriting at a young age, achieving his first victory in the Athens' City Dionysia dramatic competitions in 441 BC. He would be awarded this honor three more times in his life, and once more posthumously. His plays are often ironic, pessimistic, and display radical rejection of classical decorum and rules. In 408 BC, Euripides left war-torn Athens for Macedonia, upon the invitation of King Archelaus, and there he spent his last...

Euripides, along was Sophocles, and Aeschylus, is largely responsible for the rise of Greek tragedy. It was in the 5th Century BC, during the height of Greece's cultural bloom, that Euripides lived and worked. Of his roughly ninety-two plays, only seventeen tragedies survive. Both ridiculed and lauded during his life, Euripides now stands as an innovator of the Greek drama. Collected here are six of Euripides' tragedies in prose translation by Edward...

Euripides I contains the plays Alcestis, translated by Richmond Lattimore; Medea, translated by Oliver Taplin; The Children of Heracles, translated by Mark Griffith; and Hippolytus, translated by David Grene. Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent...

In "Electra and Other Plays" we have a collection of five of the classical dramatist Euripides' best plays. In the title work "Electra," before the events of this play, the Greek general Agamemnon sacrificed a daughter to appease the gods and gain permission to sail for Troy. His wife Clytemnestra never forgave him, and upon his return she and her lover murder him. Euripides picks up the story with the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, the young...

One of the greatest Greek tragedians, Euripides gives dramatic articulacy to his remorseless view of human nature, and a world in which the gods are malevolent, impotent, or simply absent. With extraordinary psychological insight he portrays a child-killing and vengeful mother, a stepmother's passion for her stepson, and a heroine who helps to murder her mother in an act blurring the boundaries between justice and sin. The satyr drama 'Helen', although...