The Complete Euripides

Euripides

• Publisher: Pandora's Box Classics
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9789897782664
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

During the Hellenistic Age, the great tragedian Euripides became a cornerstone of ancient literary education, his plays exhibiting an iconoclastic, rationalising attitude toward both religious belief and the ancient myths that formed the traditional subject matter of Greek drama.

Ion

Characters in the Play

Mercury

Ion

Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus

Xuthus, husband of Creusa

Tutor

Attendant

Priestess of Apollo

Minerva

Chorus of handmaidens of Creusa

Attendants of the Temple of Apollo

[Scene: Before the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The sun is about to rise. Mercury enters.]

Mercury

Atlas, that on his brazen shoulders rolls

Yon heaven, the ancient mansion of the gods,

Was by a goddess sire to Maia; she

To supreme Jove bore me, and call’d me Hermes;

Attendant on the king, his high behests

I execute. To Delphi am I come,

This land where Phoebus from his central throne

Utters to mortals his high strain, declaring

The present and the future; this is the cause;

Greece hath a city of distinguish’d glory,

Which from the goddess of the golden lance

Received its name; Erechtheus was its king;

His daughter, call’d Creusa, to the embrace

Of nuptial love Apollo strain’d perforce,

Where northward points the rock beneath the heights

Crown’d with the Athenian citadel of Pallas,

Call’d Macrai by the lords of Attica.

Her growing burden, to her sire unknown

(Such was the pleasure of the god), she bore,

Till in her secret chamber to a son

The rolling months gave birth: to the same cave,

Where by the enamour’d god she was compress’d,

Creusa bore the infant: there for death

Exposed him in a well-compacted ark

Of circular form, observant of the...