All 3 great tragedians are amazing, but I especially like Euripides.

The Bacchae: Brutal, oh my! Moral is: Do not cross Dionysus.


More Euripides not in this volume (WARNING: SPOILERS TO STORIES THAT ARE 2500 YEAR OLD BELOW...)








Hippolytus: He's an odd boy. Mums is an Amazon; pops is Theseus. Step-mums Phaedra.
Tragedy ensues.

Heracles: Heracles goes NUTS & kills the kids.

Hecuba: Sweet revenge! This is a good one! End of the Trojan War.

The Trojan Women: Same story as Hecuba, but not as good for me. Less satisfying.

Iphegenia in Tauris: A happy-ever-after tragedy. Orestes comes and they escape!

Orestes: These are mean, violent, horrible people on a very dismal trajectory…when voila! Dues ex machina turns everything 180 around. Odd that. Ya, Orestes is going to drop the sword from Hermoine's throat and ask her to marry him? I don't think so!

Ion: I thought either a) Ion would kill his mama before he found out who she was, or b) mama would kill him before. Alas…neither. This isn't tragedy! It's Happy-Ever-After. I want my money back :-)

Iphegenia at Aulis: Totally new view of Clytemnestra (poor woman). No wonder she turns "evil". Very realistic dialog between Agamemnon and Menalaus.

Electra: 3.5
Phoenician Women: 4
Bacchae: 5

This translation seemed to lack the right sort of energy, or at least, the right sort of energy based on what I infer the right sort of energy to be from this translation.

The action of the play begins with Dionysus's return to Thebes years later. He arrives in town disguised as the stranger, accompanied by a band of bacchants, to punish the family for their treatment of his mother and their refusal to offer him sacrifices.

The three plays presented in "Euripides V" are all important works: Electra, The Phoenician Women, and The Bacchae.

The editors are David Grene (who translated and provided the Introduction to "The History" by Herodotus) and Richmond Lattimore. Both are well reputed scholars of the classics. Before each play, they provide useful context and critical evaluations of the work. Emily Townsend Vermeule provides a competent translation.

The works stand or fall on the basis of the original quality of the plays and the competence of the translation. As such, each of the plays is worthwhile. The editors do a nice job of providing critical analysis (note some of the comparisons between Sophocles and Euripides).

In the end, this is a useful version of the three plays and a nice entree to the work of one of the great Greek tragedians. The work closes with a nice chronology of the plays of Euripides. In the final analysis, well done.

I don't really like doing brief blurbs to clarify my ratings since I don't take ratings that seriously, but these three plays are so different that it's almost a mistake to not rate them separately.
Electra is good if somewhat flawed. It downplays the scope of the tragedy which makes it stand in stark contrast to Aeschylus, but it also neuters it in a way that hurts the play a little. Again, characteristic of Euripides, it emphasizes its gray morality which also works against it a little bit in that it alienates the audience. It's an interesting play but not his best.
The Phoenician Women is a bit of a mess. It has nothing quite original going for it besides being a fanfiction of the exposition between Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. Worst of all, other unknown playwrights got their hands all over it so its an overlong mess of conflicting styles. I'd recommend skipping it.
The Bacchae is what saves this collection, it's brilliant. Euripides departs from his central tenets of grounded realism slightly, and as a result pumps out something of higher art with the same vividness and power of Aeschylus. It's in the very language of the play. So it's a greater tragedy than any greek play has to offer that the end of The Bacchae is a giant lacuna. The lines aren't completely lost, editors have managed to humpty-dumpty the fragments together into a workable conclusion, and the main action of the play had generally concluded before the break, but oh if we could just have those lines back.

Read for a university level Mythology and Literature course.

The Bacchae was very good. It is so far my favorite Euripidean play. Not so Phoenician Women or Electra, though the foreword to Electra was wonderful. Hmm. Four for Bacchae, three for Electra and Phoenician. (Phoenician was almost two, but for Menoeceus.)

Read: The Bacchae trans. William Arrowsmith

A great collection of three plays by Euripides. The Bacchae definitely holds a special place with its examination of sex, violence, and cult.

Can I just say that the picture on the cover of this book is awkward? Because it is. For one thing, whenever you carry it around, people give you funny looks. And the lady on the front doesn't even look proportional. It's just...yeah, I didn't really get over it. Probably should've, but didn't. Anyway.

Admittedly, I have only read the Bacchae. But I really liked it. I would actually give it 4.5 stars.

For whatever reason, I think people are under the false impression that ancient literature is...boring? Because there are big words sometimes or cultural/historical context points that need to be addressed?

But then there are plays like the Bacchae, and it was really really exciting. There are all these crazy people running around, and there's singing and dancing and strange costumes (like hippies), and then all of a sudden, there's something like a zombie apocalypse attack and there's blood everywhere and mass hysteria and yes this is ancient literature, not a 21st century slasher film.

(I don't remember, did all of that count as spoilers? I don't feel like it does. I'll mark it anyway. But just know that crazy stuff happens.)

Perhaps this reflects poorly on my character, but I thought the Bacchae was really fun. Really. There's discussion value for sure, but I'm still in a "They did what???" state of mind.

Because there is nothing I like better in a book than live victim dismemberment.

The Bacchae

Dionysus, the god of wine, prophecy, religious ecstasy, and fertility return to his birthplace in Thebes in order to clear his mother's name and to punish the insolent city-state for refusing to allow people to worship him. The background to his return is presented in the prologue, in which Dionysus tells the story of his mother, Semele, once a princess in the royal Theban house of Cadmus. She had an affair with Zeus, the king of the gods, and became pregnant.

As revenge, Zeus's jealous wife Hera tricked Semele into asking Zeus to appear in his divine form. Zeus, too powerful for a mortal to behold, emerged from the sky as a bolt of lightning and burnt Semele to a cinder. He managed, however, to rescue his unborn son Dionysus and stitched the baby into his thigh. Semele's family claimed that she had been struck by lightning for lying about Zeus and that her child, the product of an illicit human affair, had died with her, maligning her name and rejecting the young god Dionysus.