Now in paperback.
Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens,
reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian
War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized
ambitions. "Euripides," the classicist Bernard Knox has written, "was
born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of
mankind from doing so." His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes,
revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the
powerless-women and children, slaves and barbarians-for whom tragedy was
not so much exceptional as unending. Euripides' plays rarely won first
prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their
combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences
throughout the Greek world. In the last days of the Peloponnesian War,
Athenian prisoners held captive in far-off Sicily were said to have won
their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides' latest tragedies.
Four of those tragedies are presented here in new translations by the
contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. They are Herakles, in
which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set
after the Trojan War, in which Hektor's widow takes vengeance on her
Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the
strange tragic-comedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who
arranges for his wife to die in his place. The volume also contains
brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays along with two
remarkable framing essays: "Tragedy: A Curious Art Form" and "Why I
Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra."
