Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (Classics)

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.

This volume presents four of Euripides' tragedies in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family, is the first play included. Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor's widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors, follows. Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love, is the third play. The volume concludes with 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." These essays provide valuable context and insight into Euripides' work and Carson's approach to translating and interpreting these ancient tragedies.

Euripides' plays, though rarely winning first prize in the democratic competitions of ancient Athens, fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world with their combustible mixture of realism and extremism. The four plays presented here, in Carson's new translations, offer a powerful and thought-provoking exploration of the human condition, unmasking heroes and giving voice to the powerless. The volume is a must-read for anyone interested in the enduring impact of ancient Greek tragedy.

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