Euripides V

Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Cyclops, Rhesus

Euripides, Mark Griffith, Glenn W. Most, David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, Glenn W. Most, David Grene, Richmond Lattimore

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226309330
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

Euripides V includes the plays "The Bacchae, " translated by William Arrowsmith; "Iphigenia in Aulis, " translated by Charles R. Walker; "The Cyclops, " translated by William Arrowsmith; and "Rhesus, " translated by Richmond Lattimore. 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.

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS

Translated by CHARLES R. WALKER

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS: INTRODUCTION

The Play: Date and Composition

Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis was first produced posthumously by his son (also named Euripides) at the Great Dionysian festival in 405 BCE, together with The Bacchae (preserved) and Alcmaeon in Corinth (lost). Euripides had died the year before while visiting King Archelaus in Macedonia. His trilogy won the first prize; we do not know the names of the other tragedians competing that year, nor the titles of their plays. Presumably Euripides originally entitled this play simply Iphigenia, and the further specification was added later, perhaps by the librarians in Alexandria during the Hellenistic period who collected and catalogued the plays by the three great tragedians, in order to distinguish it from his Iphigenia among the Taurians.

The play as transmitted presents a number of anomalous features. Its opening scene contains both a spoken explanatory prologue by Agamemnon of the usual Euripidean type and an unparalleled (but very effective)...