Now in paperback.Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. Euripides, the classicist Bernard Knox has written, was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so. His plays were shockers he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerlesswomen and children, slaves and barbariansfor whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Euripides plays rarely won first prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world. In the last days of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian prisoners held captive in faroff Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides latest tragedies.Four of those tragedies are presented here in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektors widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love and the strange tragiccomedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place. The volume also contains brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays...

Binding: Paperback;312 pages; Publisher: New York Review of Books - IWUK; Classification: DD; Weight: 454 g; Dimensions: 203 x 137 x 18

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