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Euripides V: Electra / The Phoenician Women / The Bacchae

euripides emily townsend vermeule elizabeth wyckoff william arrowsmith david grene

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In nine paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer the most comprehensive selection of the Greek tragedies available in English. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of over three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

228 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1922
Places
greece, 

This edition

Format
228 pages, Paperback
Published
January 15, 1969 by University of Chicago Press
ISBN
9780226307848
ASIN
0226307840
Language
English

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euripides

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Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.

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Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 71 votes)
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sentiarii
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Reading the Bacchae. Recently read an article in the New York Review of Books positing that, unlike most comedies that have their genesis as a response to a tragedy, this tragedy actually has its genesis in response to a comedy, The Thesmophoriasuzae by Aristophanes. Interesting.....
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What I wouldn't give to see a production of this play, a GOOD production of this play. It could be the most harrowing theatrical experience.
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PDouma
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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THE PHONECIAN WOMEN
This play fills in the back story behind the ‘Seven Against Thebes’ war between the two sons of Oedipus. We learn that one son, Eteocles, is in the wrong because he will not relinquish the throne to his brother (they agreed to take turns ruling every other year). The other son, Polyneices, is also in the wrong because he brought a foreign army to forcibly take Thebes. These two wrongs constitute the downfall and ruin of the family of Oedipus. Which crime is worse: to love power, ambition and tyranny or to betray your country? This is the argument between the two brothers and neither will relent.

Historically, this play has been ‘tampered’ with and is not purely Euripides. There are problems with storyline. Oedipus has not yet been ejected from Thebes. Antigone is betrothed to Haemon, but still has her long journey with Oedipus before she defies the state in burying her brother Polyneices. “the Creon-Odeipus-Antigone scene we have is certainly not the one Euripides wrote. Note, for one thing, that Antigone is apparently planning both to go into exile, at once, with Oedipus and, in defiance of Creon, to bury Polyneices. This is impossible, but the author is simply assimilating his figure to both Sophoclean Antigones.” (Euripides V, Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, pg. 68-69)

In every play of the three tragedians, there is a chorus. The chorus unfailingly uses allusion to refer to past events and draw similarities to present events. As I have been reading mythology I have increasingly understood these allusions. For example, the words “unmothered Pallas’”(see below) refers to Athena, sometimes called Pallas, who sprang from the forehead of Zeus. Zeus is her only parent and so she has no mother.

The following lines tell the tale of Cadmus sowing the dragon’s teeth. “By the instructions of Athena, he sowed the dragon's teeth in the ground, from which there sprang a race of fierce armed men, called the Spartoí ("sown"). By throwing a stone among them, Cadmus caused them to fall upon one another until only five survived, who assisted him to build the Cadmeia or citadel of Thebes, and became the founders of the noblest families of that city.” (Wikipedia) The allusion is beautifully written and I am always amazed how much information these tragedians can convey with so few words.

CHORUS: “sowing its teeth in the furrows deep, at unmothered Pallas’ bidding.
Then earth sent up armed terror over its surface.
Iron-hearted slaughter sent them back again,
And their blood bedewed the land which had briefly showed them to the shining winds of heaven.”

THE BACCHAE – See my review in ‘Euripides: Ten Plays’
ELECTRA - See my review in ‘Electra and Other Plays’
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leroiminato
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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4/5 stars

I read this for school but nonetheless it is still really good.

It was really good but I liked Antigone more. Antigone was the comparative text for this Greek Tragedy. Greek tragedies are nonetheless amazing. Electra was a bit of a weirdo...no offence but I love loved loved the character dynamics of Orestes. The exploration of guilt and responsibility is explored throughout...I might post my essay later because I expressed it better but more on that later lol
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ilovelolicons
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Read for school. Great translation. The longest of Euripides plays in the series, so be prepared to focus on the main plots (try not to get trapped by the minor details throughout these plays).
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Yakimy
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Electra: 4/5
The Phoenician Women: 3/5
The Bacchae: 5/5.
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Ani_Love
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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This version of Elektra is really interesting in that Euripedes comments on a number of things that relate to modern day Greek society as he knows it. Elektrais forcibly is married to a farmer with whom she won't sleep because he's too low born for her, even though both she and Orestes agree that the farmer is almost an aristocrat in sentiment even without money. Historically, Euripedes can be commenting on the first democracy in Athens, when kleisthenes abandoned the aristocratic system in favor of an assembly that didn't just allow members of old noble families.
Orestes " at times I have seen descendants of the noblest family grow worthless though the cowards had courageous sons; inside the souls of wealthy men bleak famine lives while minds of stature struggle trapped in starving bodies. How then can man distinguish man, what test can he use the test of wealth?..." He says that the farmer is truly noble "such men of manners can control our cities best, and homes, but the well born sportsman, long on muscle, short on brains, is only good for a statue in the park," but then concludes that he'd rather be a guest in town at some rich man's than at the poor farmers. But inherent is the argument that the Greeks were starting to live and experience that a noble upbringing meant nothing.
Also interesting are Clytemnestra's lines, similar to those of Medea about the double standard that women face "...when our husbands choose to despise the bed they, a woman is quite willing to imitate her man and find another friend. But then the dirty gossip puts us in the spotlight; the guilty ones, the men, are never blamed at all."

The Phoenician Women is mostly a story about oedipus's sons Eteocles who tricks his brother into leaving Thebes for a year but then when Polyneices comes back won't relinquish the power or split it with him. The two end up killing each other and Jocasta kills herself. Creon their uncle won't sacrifice his son Menoeceus to pacify the gods, but Menoeceus exemplifies the Greek love of the polis and kills himself in order to save Thebes, he is the true Greek in the story. Polyneices talks about the horror of exile, and that is a theme familiar to Greek literature to the Medea and the odyssey.

The Bacchae also takes place in Thebes, Dionysus (also known as Bacchus or bromius) is the son of Zeus and Semele ( the daughter of Cadmus) he punishes the people of Thebes but especially his aunt, cousin, and grandfather for not believing that Zeus is his father. Dionysus drives agave and other Theban women mad, and agave tears her son pentheus limb from limb. It is similar to the Medea in that a mother murders her child, but here it is done because of a madness induced by a god and the mother repents. The maenads are the same ones who year Orpheus limb from limb.
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