Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (New York Review Books

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (New York Review Books Classics)

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. â€œEuripides,â€ the classicist Bernard Knox has written, â€œwas born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so.â€ His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerlessâ€“women and children, slaves and barbariansâ€“for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Euripidesâ€™ 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 far-off Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripidesâ€™ 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 Hektorâ€™s widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy 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 along with two remarkable framing essays: â€œTragedy: A Curious Art Formâ€ and â€œWhy I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra.â€
Country USA
Brand New York Review Books
Manufacturer NYRB Classics
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9781590172537
Color Grey
ReleaseDate 2008-09-16
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781590172537

Country	USA
Brand	New York Review Books
Manufacturer	NYRB Classics
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9781590172537
Color	Grey
ReleaseDate	2008-09-16
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781590172537

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (New York Review Books Classics)

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