Euripides: Greek Tragedies (Alcestis, Medea, The Children of Heracles, Hippolytus)

Euripides I comprises the plays “Alcestis,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; “Medea,” translated by Oliver Taplin; “The Children of Heracles,” translated by Mark Griffith; and “Hippolytus,” translated by David Grene. Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press embarked on a significant project: a fresh translation of the Greek tragedies that would serve as the ultimate resource for educators, students, and readers. They achieved their goal. With the skilled guidance of distinguished classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, these translations combined precision, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to bring to life the enduring masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in English so vibrant and captivating that they continue to be the standard translations. Today, Chicago is making every effort to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the premier English-language versions well into the twenty-first century.

In this eagerly awaited third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most meticulously updated the translations to make them even more faithful to the original Greek while preserving the dynamism for which our English versions are renowned. This edition also includes fresh translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play provide essential information about their initial production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. Additionally, each volume features an introduction to the life and works of its playwright, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

Aside from the new content, the volumes have been restructured both within and across volumes to reflect the most current scholarship regarding the chronological order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a collection of elegant paperbacks poised to introduce new generations of readers to these seminal works of Western drama, art, and life.

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