The Children of Heracles is a powerful and challenging tragedy of exile and supplication. Driven from their homeland by Eurystheus, king of Argos, the children of Heracles flee as fugitives throughout Greece until they are granted protection in Athens. However, their acceptance as political refugees threatens to cause civil revolt among the Athenians and hostile invasion from the Argives. The self-sacrifice of Heracles' daughter ensures a victory for Athens and the Heraclidae, but Heracles' mother Alcmene refuses to spare the life of Eurystheus, although he is a prisoner of war protected by Athenian law. The play shows the amorality of the powerful and the vulnerability of refugees in the most disturbing terms, making for a drama of continuing moral and political relevance to the modern world. Greek text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

The old songs will have to change.
No more hymns to our faithlessness and deceit.
Apollo, god of song, lord of the lyre,
never passed on the flame of poetry to us.
But if we had that voice, what songs
we'd sing of men's failings, and their blame. History is made by women, just as much as men.
Medea has been betrayed. Her husband, Jason, has left her for a younger woman. He has forgotten all the promises he made and is even prepared to abandon their two sons. But Medea is not a woman to accept such disrespect passively. Strong-willed and fiercely intelligent, she turns her formidable energies to working out the greatest, and most horrifying, revenge possible.
Euripides' devastating tragedy is shockingly modern in the sharp psychological exploration of the characters and the gripping interactions between them. Award-winning poet Robin Robertson has captured both the vitality of Euripides' drama and the beauty of his phrasing, reinvigorating this masterpiece for the twenty-first century.

This is the Medea we have been waiting for. It offers clarity without banality, eloquence without pretension, meter without doggerel, accuracy without clumsiness. No English Medea can ever be Euripides', but this is as close as anyone has come so far, and a good deal closer than I thought anyone would ever come. Arnson Svarlien has shown herself exceedingly skillful in making Euripides sound Euripidean.--David M. Schaps, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Renowned poet and acclaimed translator Charles Martin faithfully captures Euripides's dramatic tone and style in this searing tale of revenge and sacrifice. The Medea of Euripides is one of the greatest of all Greek tragedies and arguably the one with the most significance today. A barbarian woman brought to Corinth and there abandoned by her Greek husband, Medea seeks vengeance on Jason and is willing to strike out against his new wife and family-even slaughtering the sons she has born him. At its center is Medea herself, a character who refuses definition: Is she a hero, a witch, a psychopath, a goddess? All that can be said for certain is that she is a woman who has loved, has suffered, and will stop at nothing for vengeance. In this stunning translation, poet Charles Martin captures the rhythms of Euripides' original text through contemporary rhyme and meter that speak directly to modern readers. An introduction by classicist and poet A.E. Stallings examines the complex and multifaceted Medea in patriarchal ancient Greece. Perfect in and out of the classroom as well as for theatrical performance, this faithful translation succeeds like no other.

This book analyzes the philosophical origins of dualism in portraiture in Western culture during the Classical period, through to contemporary modes of portraiture. Dualism - the separation of mind from body - plays a central part in portraiture, given that it supplies the fundamental framework for portraiture's determining problem and justification: the visual construction of the subjectivity of the sitter, which is invariably accounted for as ineffable entity or spirit, that the artist magically captures. Every artist that has engaged with portraiture has had to deal with these issues and, therefore, with the question of being and identity.

Diane Arnson Svarlien's translation of Euripides' Andromache , Hecuba , and Trojan Women exhibits the same scholarly and poetic standards that have won praise for her Alcestis , Medea , Hippolytus . Ruth Scodel's Introduction examines the cultural and political context in which Euripides wrote, and provides analysis of the themes, structure, and characters of the plays included. Her notes offer expert guidance to readers encountering these works for the first time.

A collection of Euripides' most important plays in one volume. Translations are taken in full text from other single volumes in the Focus Classical Library, by authors Michael Halleran, Anthony Podlecki, and Stephen Esposito, with notes and a new introduction. As with all Focus Classical Library titles, this anthology has been designed with the student of Ancient Drama in mind, including modern translations close to the original, informed by the latest scholarship, and with an extensive introduction, interpretive essay, and footnotes -- all to the purpose of allowing the student to understand Greek drama, Greek mythology, and the context of Greek culture. This book is useful for courses in ancient drama, classical civilization, Greek tragedy, Classical mythology, etc.

Satyric is the most thinly attested genre of Greek drama, but it appears to have been the oldest and according to Aristotle formative for tragedy. By the 5th Century BC at Athens it shared most of its compositional elements with tragedy, to which it became an adjunct; for at the annual great dramatic festivals, it was performed only together with, and after, the three tragedies which each poet was required to present in competition. It was in contrast with them, aesthetically and emotionally, its plays being considerably shorter and simpler; coarse and half-way to comedy, it burlesqued heroic and tragic myth, frequently that just dramatised and performed in the tragedies. Euripides'Cyclops is the only satyr-play which survives complete. It is generally held to be the poet's late work, but its companion tragedies are not identifiable. Its title alone signals its content, Odysseus' escape from the one-eyed, man-eating monster, familiar from Book 9 of Homer's Odyssey. Because of its uniqueness, Cyclops could afford only a limited idea of satyric drama's range, which the many but brief quotations from other authors and plays barely coloured. Our knowledge and appreciation of the genre have been greatly enlarged, however, by recovery since the early 20th Century of considerable fragments of Aeschylus, Euripides' predecessor, and of Sophocles, his contemporary - but not, so far, of Euripides himself. This volume provides English readers for the first time with all the most important texts of satyric drama, with facing-page translation, substantial introduction and detailed commentary. It includes not only the major papyri, but very many shorter fragments of importance, both on papyrus and in quotation, from the 5th to the 3rd Centuries; there are also one or two texts whose interest lies in their problematic ascription to the genre at all. The intention is to illustrate it as fully as practicable.

Eighteen of the ninety or so plays composed by Euripides between 455 and 406 bce survive in a complete form and are included in the preceding six volumes of the Loeb Euripides. A further fifty-two tragedies and eleven satyr plays, including a few of disputed authorship, are known from ancient quotations and references and from numerous papyri discovered since 1880. No more than one-fifth of any play is represented, but many can be reconstructed with some accuracy in outline, and many of the fragments are striking in themselves. The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians.

This edition, in a projected two volumes, offers the first complete English translation of the fragments together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. The texts are based on the recent comprehensive edition of R. Kannicht. A general Introduction discusses the evidence for the lost plays. Each play is prefaced by a select bibliography and an introductory discussion of its mythical background, plot, and location of the fragments, general character, chronology, and impact on subsequent literary and artistic traditions.

World premiere of a new version of Euripides' classic Medea. Plays in London as part of the Almeida's Greek Season. Medea's marriage is breaking up. And so is everything else. Testing the limits of revenge and liberty, Euripides' seminal play cuts to the heart of gender politics and asks what it means to be a woman and a wife. One of world drama's most infamous characters is brought to controversial new life by Almeida Artistic Director Rupert Goold (The Merchant of Venice, King Charles III, American Psycho) and award-winning writer Rachel Cusk (Outline, Aftermath).

The fragmentary plays of Euripides are a body of texts still regularly increasing in number and extent. They are of very great interest in themselves, apart from the significant aid they give to the fuller appreciation of the surviving complete plays. This two-volume edition brings together for the first time for English readers the more substantial and important of the plays, about fifteen in all. Each play is introduced by a summary bibliography and an appreciative essay which analyses the mythic background and plot: reconstructs the play as far as the fragmentary text and secondary evidence allow; and discusses themes, characterisation, staging, date, reflections of the story in art and other dramatisations. For each play the fragmentary texts are presented as conveniently and succinctly as possible, together with a brief critical apparatus of sources and readings. An English translation stands on the facing page. The text and translation of each play are followed by a short, primarily interpretative commentary. Text with facing translation, commentary and notes.

Iphigenia in Tauris tells the story of the princess Iphigenia who was sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to expedite his campaign against Troy but was rescued by the goddess Artemis and transported to the land of the Taurians. There she herself must perform human sacrifices as a priestess of Artemis in the local cult. Troy has now been sacked, and Agamemnon murdered by his wife and avenged by his son Orestes. With his motherAes blood on his hands, Orestes is guided by Apollo to seek purification through bringing the image of the Tauric Artemis to Greece, and so is reunited with his sister. The drama centers on IphigeniaAes near-sacrifice at OrestesAe hands, their recognition in the nick of time, and their ingenious and thrilling escape to bring the cult of Artemis to Halae and Brauron near Athens.

In most versions of the Hippolytos myth, Phaidra is depicted as an utterly debauched character, a woman reduced to shamelessness by the power of Aphrodite. In Euripides' Hippolytos, however--informed by the playwright's moral and religious fascination--we find a Phaidra resisting the goddess of love with all her strength, though in the end unsuccessfully. Phaidra becomes a tragic foil for Hippolytos, making his superhuman virtue at once believable and understandable.

Robert Bagg's profound translation of this Euripidean masterpiece is idiomatic, natural, and intensely lyrical, designed not only to be read but performed. Unlike most versions, Bagg's Hippolytos sustains the dramatic tome and dynamics to the very end--even after Phaidra's death--and the moving scenes between Hippolytos and Theseus, and later Hippolytos' death-scene with Artemis, receive here unprecedented plausibility and power.

The four late plays of Euripides collected here, in beautifully crafted translations by Cecelia Eaton Luschnig and Paul Woodruff, offer a faithful and dynamic representation of the playwright's mature vision.

[Woodruff's translation] is clear, fluent, and vigorous, well thought out, readable and forceful. The rhythms are right, ever-present but not too insistent or obvious. It can be spoken instead of read and so is viable as an acting version; and it keeps the lines of the plot well focused. The Introduction offers a good survey of critical approaches. The notes at the foot of the page are suitably brief and nonintrusive and give basic information for the non-specialist. --Charles Segal, Harvard University

First published in 1939, this book presents R. C. Trevelyan's English metrical translation of Euripides' Medea. The aim of the text was to reproduce the form, phrasing and movement of the original for the benefit of readers without knowledge of Greek. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in English translations of ancient Greek drama and the works of Euripides.

This up-to-date edition offers a detailed literary and cultural analysis of Euripides' Helen, a work which arguably embodies the variety and dynamism of fifth-century Athenian tragedy more than any other surviving play. The story of an exemplary wife (not an adulteress) who went to Egypt (not to Troy), Euripides' 'new Helen' skilfully transforms and supplants earlier currents of literature and myth. The Introduction elucidates Euripides' treatment of Helen and sets the play in its wider intellectual context. It also discusses questions of genre and reception, rejecting such descriptions as 'tragicomedy' or 'romantic tragedy', and showing how later artists have responded to Euripides' unorthodox heroine and her phantom double. The Commentary's notes on language and style are intended to make Helen fully accessible to readers of Greek at all levels, while the edition as a whole is designed for use by anyone with an interest in Greek tragedy.

This up-to-date edition offers a detailed literary and cultural analysis of Euripides' Helen, a work which arguably embodies the variety and dynamism of fifth-century Athenian tragedy more than any other surviving play. The story of an exemplary wife (not an adulteress) who went to Egypt (not to Troy), Euripides' 'new Helen' skilfully transforms and supplants earlier currents of literature and myth. The Introduction elucidates Euripides' treatment of Helen and sets the play in its wider intellectual context. It also discusses questions of genre and reception, rejecting such descriptions as 'tragicomedy' or 'romantic tragedy', and showing how later artists have responded to Euripides' unorthodox heroine and her phantom double. The Commentary's notes on language and style are intended to make Helen fully accessible to readers of Greek at all levels, while the edition as a whole is designed for use by anyone with an interest in Greek tragedy.

The surviving text of the fragmentary Phaethon of Euripides depends chiefly on two sources: two pages from a Euripidean manuscript, written about A.D. 500, and a papyrus of the third century B.C., which contains a substantial part of the parodos. These sources are supplemented by a number of citations in classical authors and by a recently published fragmentary hypothesis. Professor Diggle has examined all the manuscript evidence and offers many decipherments. He gives a text of the play and of the hypothesis, an exegetical commentary, prolegomena and appendices, in which he discusses the treatment of the Phaethon myth in classical literature and attempts a reconstruction of the plot of the play.

This volume provides a thorough philological and dramatic commentary on Euripides' Phoenissae, the first detailed commentary in English since 1911. Phoenissae is of special interest both as a specimen of late Euripidean dramaturgy, and as the subject of longstanding disputes over the extent of interpolation and rewriting to be detected in it. This commentary aims to offer a balanced treatment of issues of language, style, structure, and dramatic technique as well as to explain the reasons for and uncertainties of the constitution of the text. The introduction treats the play's structure and themes, the possible date, the features of the original production, the varied background of Theban myth against which Euripides' choices and innovations may be judged, and general issues relevant to the problem of interpolation. The Greek text is that of the author's 1988 Teubner edition.

This volume provides a thorough philological and dramatic commentary on Euripides' Phoenissae, the first detailed commentary in English since 1911. Phoenissae is of special interest both as a specimen of late Euripidean dramaturgy, and as the subject of longstanding disputes over the extent of interpolation and rewriting to be detected in it. This commentary aims to offer a balanced treatment of issues of language, style, structure, and dramatic technique as well as to explain the reasons for and uncertainties of the constitution of the text. The introduction treats the play's structure and themes, the possible date, the features of the original production, the varied background of Theban myth against which Euripides' choices and innovations may be judged, and general issues relevant to the problem of interpolation. The Greek text is that of the author's 1988 Teubner edition.

'She's chucked out like an old coat that nae langer fits him…' Medea and Jason, clinging together as refugees in Corinth, have struggled to bring up their beloved offspring in this alien and unsympathetic society. Now Jason has a plan to better integrate himself. Unfortunately, this involves abandoning his wife, the mother of his children… Spurned, destitute, desperate, Medea exacts her terrible retribution. Liz Lochhead's Scots-inflected version of Euripides' classic revenge tragedy was first performed by Theatre Babel in 2000 and won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. It was revived by the National Theatre of Scotland as part of the 2022 Edinburgh International Festival, with Adura Onashile as Medea, directed by Michael Boyd.

Euripides has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, surprising plot twists, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. In this fifth volume of the new Loeb Classical Library Euripides, David Kovacs presents a freshly edited Greek text and a faithful and deftly worded translation of three plays.

For his Helen the poet employs an alternative history in which a virtuous Helen never went to Troy but spent the war years in Egypt, falsely blamed for the adulterous behavior of her divinely created double in Troy. This volume also includes "Phoenician Women," Euripides' treatment of the battle between the sons of Oedipus for control of Thebes; and "Orestes," a novel retelling of Orestes' lot after he murdered his mother, Clytaemestra. Each play is annotated and prefaced by a helpful introduction.