The four plays newly translated in this volume are among Euripides' most exciting works. Iphigenia among the Taurians is a story of escape and contrasting Greek and barbarian civilization, set on the Black Sea at the edge of the known world. Bacchae, a profound exploration of the human psyche, deals with the appalling consequences of resistance to Dionysus, god of wine and unfettered emotion. This tragedy, which above all others speaks to our post-Freudian era, is one of Euripides' two last surviving plays. The second, Iphigenia at Aulis, centres on the ultimate dysfunctional family as natural emotion is tested in the tragic crucible of the Greek expedition against Troy. Lastly, Rhesus, probably the work of another playwright, is a thrilling, action-packed Iliad in miniature, dealing with a grisly event in the Trojan War.

Collected here for the first time in the series are three major plays by Euripides: Bacchae, translated by Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal, a powerful examination of the horror and beauty of Dionysiac ecstasy; Herakles, translated by Tom Sleigh and Christian Wolff, a violent dramatization of the madness and exile of one of the most celebrated mythical figures; and The Phoenician Women, translated by Peter Burian and Brian Swamm, a disturbing interpretation of the fate of the House of Laios following the tragic fall of Oedipus. These three tragedies were originally available as single volumes. This volume retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions and adds a single combined glossary and Greek line numbers.

The plays of Euripides have stimulated audiences since the fifth century BC. This volume, containing Phoenician Women, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Orestes, and Rhesus completes the new editions of Euripides in Penguin Classics. Features a general introduction, individual prefaces to each play, chronology, notes, bibliography, and glossary

This book is the second of three volumes of a new prose translation, with introduction and notes, of Euripides' most popular plays. The first three tragedies translated in this volume illustrate Euripides' extraordinary dramatic range. Iphigenia among the Taurians, set on the Black Sea at the edge of the known world, is much more than an exciting story of escape. It is remarkable for its sensitive delineation of character as it weighs Greek against barbarian civilization. Bacchae, a profound exploration of the human psyche, deals with the appalling consequences of resistance to Dionysus, god of wine and unfettered emotion. This tragedy, which above all others speaks to our post-Freudian era, is one of Euripides' two last surviving plays. The second, Iphigenia at Aulis, so vastly different as to highlight the playwright's Protean invention, centres on the ultimate dysfunctional family, that of Agamemnon, as natural emotion is tested in the tragic crucible of the Greek expedition against Troy. Rhesus, probably the work of another playwright, deals with a grisly event in the Trojan War. Like Iphigenia at Aulis, its `subject is war and the pity of war', but it is also an exciting, action-packed theatrical Iliad in miniature.

A new translation by Colin Teevan.

Alcestis/Medea/The Children of Heracles/Hippolytus 'One of the best prose translations of Euripides I have seen' Robert Fagles This selection of plays shows Euripides transforming the titanic figures of Greek myths into recognizable, fallible human beings. Medea, in which a spurned woman takes revenge upon her lover by killing her children, is one of the most shocking of all the Greek tragedies. Medea is a towering figure who demonstrates Euripides' unusual willingness to give voice to a woman's case. Alcestis is based on a magical myth in which Death is overcome, and The Children of Heracles examines conflict between might and right, while Hippolytus deals with self-destructive integrity. Translated by JOHN DAVIE

The purpose of this book is to investigate what it was Euripides intended to convey to the theatre-going public of his day when he wrote his most exciting and most gruesome play, the Bacchae. The meanings which are to be attached to the action of a play are woven by an audience, both during and after the performance, into a single dramatic experience, labelled in this book as 'audience response'. After some introductory chapters dealing with the history of the interpretation of the Bacchae and with the theory of audience response, the main part of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of the action of the play (chapters 4 and 5), and to a study of Dionysus in his various apects in Athenian life and in his appearances in earlier literature and on the tragic stage. The discussion of the choruses concentrates on the choruses' repeated utterances about cleverness and wisdom, which form the core of the Dionysian propaganda of the play. The most immediate results of this new interpretation of the Bacchae are that the widely-accepted view of Pentheus as a dark puritan, a man possessed by the Dionysian qualities of his divine opponent, proves to be untenable, and that that which in the past has been rightly called the overriding theme of the play - the god's epiphany - also contains the poet's most serious and ironical discussion of divinity and of man's treatment of it. The problems of the Greek text are given full discussion, mainly in the nots and appendices. In many cases new solutions are proposed; some new problems are however added.