Euripides I

Alcestis, Medea, The Children of Heracles, Hippolytus

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:
  9780226309347
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie

Euripides 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. 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.

MEDEA

Translated by OLIVER TAPLIN

MEDEA: INTRODUCTION

The Play: Date and Composition

Euripides’ Medea was produced in 431 BCE as the first of his four plays entered in the annual dramatic competition. The other plays have been lost: Philoctetes, Dictys, and the satyr-play Theristae (The Mowers). Euripides took the third prize. Although Medea is one of his earliest securely dated plays to survive, he was probably over fifty years old when he wrote it and had already been competing in the dramatic contests for more than twenty years.

Some ancient scholars report that, according to Aristotle and his student Dicaearchus (fourth century BCE), Euripides revised a play called Medea by a certain Neophron (a prolific and successful rival Athenian dramatist) and passed it off as his own; a few even claimed that Euripides’ Medea was in fact completely the work of Neophron and should be attributed to him. Various ancient commentaries cite passages from Neophron’s Medea adding up to about twenty-four lines; these do not coincide exactly with Euripides’ play, but they are very similar in content. Modern scholars are divided about what to make of all this: some think that Neophron’s Medea did indeed precede and influence Euripides’;...