We’ve lost a man of greatest merit, / truly a devil of spirit, / our greatest, our most legendary friend. even if medea had never talked to aegeus, had no assurance of a place to go after leaving corinth, what happens at the end of medea can pretty much still happen.

In the last days of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian prisoners held captive in far-off Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides’ latest tragedies.

Death arrives in many more forms in this version of the myth—not only fire and swords but also melting glaciers and nuclear catastrophes. Loved this entire collection, though I was a bit bored by Herakles (even though she warned me that I would be in her introduction). Phaedra, daughter to Pasiphae, is in love with the impossible and impossibly ashamed; Theseus, son of Aegeus, takes on his stubbornness. This might explain why I'm filled with extra rage after watching a banal "we're okay, you're okay, la la la" American movie.

While the Greek word theos is commonly used to describe the appearance of a god in person, in this play it is fitting that Euripides often refers to Dionysus as a daimon, a much more nebulous word to define or translate. Instead, they tend to be a place for the translator to discuss the theme of grief, among other things.

The ancient Greek playwright and Athenian wrote Bakkhai in the last few years of his life in Macedonia, where he had fled after becoming disillusioned with his native city-state.

H of H” opens on Amphitryon exiting an Airstream trailer, and the Theban general delivers a monologue that makes plain right away that we aren’t in Athens anymore: “By a thread hangs our fate. The volume also contains brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays along with two remarkable framing essays: "Tragedy: A Curious Art Form" and "Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra. Carson is a masterful translator and these 4 plays come with very short essays that give you some thoughts to ponder as you read.

Rather than regarding this silence as an obstacle, she uses it to her advantage in The Bakkhai; by leaving it untranslated, the furtive nature of a multifaceted god is heightened within her text. Drove his hand straight up through heaven in Atlas' place and held the starry houses of the gods aloft all by himself. But the more troubling implication of his logic is that there are no gods at all—that the entire Olympic pantheon is merely an imaginary embodiment of all the awful and wonderful things humans can do. And having changed my form from god to mortal, I am here at the streams of Dirke and the water of Ismenos. Meanwhile, on the stage itself, a troupe of three actors performed all the roles: the hero, his wife, his father, his friend, and the usurper of his throne.

His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless-women and children, slaves and barbarians-for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. He was rich and big and boasted of his power, long spears leaping around it, boasted of his children. When he arrives at the mountain he is viciously attacked, and the woman who tears his head from his shoulders turns out to be his own mother, Agave, whom the god forced into his female cult.His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless—women and children, slaves and barbarians—for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Here, I think Euripides chooses a different route, and while he still argues that the only way to combat grief is to continue living, here he adds that to continue living is to spurn fate and destiny itself.