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. In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

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. 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.

He argues that this tradition has often furnished the unacknowledged starting point for interpretation, and that the way is now clear for an unprejudiced consideration of the plays themselves.EURIPIDES I: ALCESTIS, MEDEA, CHILDREN OF HERACLES, HIPPOLYTUS (DAVID GRENE TRANSLATION)Įuripides 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. In a general introduction Kovacs demonstrates that the biographical tradition about Euripides-parts of which view him as a subverter of morality, religion, and art-cannot be relied on. Each play is preceded by an introduction. The volume begins with Cyclops, a satyr play-the only complete example of this genre to survive. Medea is a tragedy of revenge in which Medea kills her own children, as well as their father's new wife, to punish him for his desertion.

In this first volume of a new Loeb edition of Euripides David Kovacs gives us a freshly edited Greek text of three plays and an accurate and graceful translation with explanatory notes.Īlcestis is the story of a woman who agrees, in order to save her husband's life, to die in his place. Of these, eighteen (plus a play of unknown authorship mistakenly included with his works) have come down to us from antiquity. 485?406 BCE), famous in every age for the pathos, terror, surprising plot twists, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations, wrote nearly ninety plays. Medea (1st Ed.) by Euripides & Kovacs.Įuripides of Athens (ca.

Alcestis and medea