EURIPIDES, FOUR TRAGEDIES

Alcestis, The Medea, The Heracleidae, Hippolytus, Chicago Press 1955, introduced by Richmond Lattimore.

This volume, the third in Chicago’s The Complete Greek Tragedies, presents a selection of four plays by the last of the great Greek tragedians, Euripides. Here, freshly and brilliantly translated into contemporary poetry, are Alcestis, The Medea, The Heracleidae, and Hippolytus. Euripides was basically a realist; he believed in a world he disliked. The only materials available for his tragedies were the old heroic sagas, and he used them as though they told the story not of characters heroic in all dimensions but of real, everyday people.

From the high legends of Jason and Hercules he chose to enact the moments of the heroes’ decay and disintegration. What, he asks, does it feel like to have your wife die for you, and what kind of man will let her do it? These are not happy people, nor was Euripides himself a happy man. His tragedies are peopled by the weak and oppressed, the despised and misunderstood, reflecting his own sense of defeat and disappointment.

Often they are running away from something; an insistent, recurrent motive is the drive for escape. An obvious genius, with obvious faults, Euripides was in his lifetime the most ridiculed literary man in Athens. Because the judges of Dionysus disapproved of his plays, he seldom won the dramatic competitions. Yet his audiences were fascinated by the same qualities of high dramatic art which have been left intact in these modern translations of Euripides’ plays into English.

Apart from the jacket having been price clipped the spine is faded and the rear is sunned at the top and down the spine side. There are a few light stains on the rear also. The extremes are a little worn and there is a 1cm vertical split, at the top, close to the leading edge of the book. The book itself has a tiny amount of sunning, just on the top and bottom edges.

On the fep is a Brasenose College Oxford ‘Library Extension label ’, which has been crossed out in biro, but the pages are clean and tightly bound and don’t look as though they have ever seen a library.

There is a very small, rather attractive, blue and gold rectangular bookshop strip inside the front cover at the base. A nice find for the classicist