Greek Tragedies 3: Aeschylus: The Eumenides; Sophocles: Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus; Euripides

The Bacchae, Alcestis

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

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226036090
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro

Greek Tragedies, Volume III contains Aeschylus's "The Eumenides, " translated by Richmond Lattimore; Sophocles's "Philoctetes, " translated by David Grene; Sophocles's "Oedipus at Colonus, " translated by Robert Fitzgerald; Euripides's "The Bacchae, " translated by William Arrowsmith; and Euripides's "Alecestis, " 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.

OEDIPUS AT COLONUS

SOPHOCLES

Translated by Robert Fitzgerald

INTRODUCTION TO SOPHOCLES’ OEDIPUS AT COLONUS

This play is to be dated about 408 or 407 BCE: Sophocles was almost ninety years old when he wrote it, and it was first produced after his death, by his son. The legendary action of the play would fall between the end of Oedipus the King and the beginning of Antigone, but in a sense it is a sequel to both, for Sophocles seems to have drawn on his own characterization of Oedipus in the former and of Antigone, Ismene, and, in part, Creon in the latter.

The myth follows one variant of Oedipus’ end, according to which, after being outcast from all other countries and his own, he was at last received by Theseus, king of Athens, at Sophocles’ own birthplace, Colonus, in the territory of Attica. After an oracle had announced that Oedipus’ spirit after his death would bring special protection to the land that harbored his corpse, Creon...