Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes (The Complete Greek Tragedies)

Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes (The Complete Greek Tragedies)

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 0226308960

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Euripides IV contains the plays “Helen,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; “The Phoenician Women,” translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff; and “Orestes,” translated by William Arrowsmith.
 
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 classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.
 
In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.
 
In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

shamed your divine brothers, nor did what you were rumored to. It all comes back to me, your marriage long ago, and I remember the torch I carried as I ran beside your four-horse chariot, where you, a bride, 725      rode from your noble house beside the master here. He is a poor thing who does not feel as his masters do, grieve in their grief, be happy in their happiness. I, though I wear the name of servant, yet aspire° to be counted in the number of the generous 730      slaves,

to wait by the seashore, follow from there 740      the progress of those trials of strength I see in store for me, and if we can steal my wife out of this place they must see to it that, joining our fortunes all in one, we get clear of these barbarians, if we have the strength. SERVANT It shall be done, my lord. Only, now I am sure 745      how rotten this business of prophets is, how full of lies. There never was any good in burning things on fires° nor in the voices of fowl. It is

pictorial art, with the exception of a striking wall painting in Ephesus from the second century CE, depicting two actors playing the roles of Electra and Orestes in the opening scene of the play, with Orestes lying on his sickbed. The popularity of Orestes in the Greek Middle Ages continued during the Renaissance in the West. But by the end of the eighteenth century its fortunes had already begun to decline. The increasing popularity of Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ Electra meant that for

other cities, built by the Cyclopes according to legend. Cypris: Aphrodite; according to some accounts she was born in the Mediterranean Sea near Cyprus and came first to land on that island; she was worshipped in an especially strong cult there. Cyprus: an important Greek and Phoenician island in the southeast Mediterranean off the south coast of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). Danaans: descendants of Danaus, a hero who was one of the legendary founders of Argos; in general, Argives and, more

west of mainland Greece and southeast of Italy. Iphigenia: daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; when adverse winds blocked the Greek fleet at Aulis from sailing to Troy, Agamemnon had her brought there and was thought to have sacrificed her to Artemis (but in some versions Artemis spirited her away and put a deer in her place). Island of the Blest: a legendary, utopian island where a few heroes enjoyed a blissful life after death. Ismene: daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta; sister of Antigone

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