Euripides II: The Cyclops / Heracles / Iphigenia in Tauris / Helen

by Euripides, David Grene (Editor), Richmond Lattimore (Editor, Introduction)

This volume contains the following tragedies by Euripides:

1. The Cyclops, translated and with an introduction by William Arrowsmith
2. Heracles, translated and with an introduction by William Arrowsmith
3. Iphigenia in Tauris, translated by Witter Bynner and with an introduction by Richmond Lattimore
4. Helen, translated and with an introduction by William Arrowsmith

In nine paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer the most comprehensive selection of the Greek tragedies available in English. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of over three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

Genres: Classics, Plays, Drama, Fiction, Mythology, Poetry, Tragedy

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.

Reviews

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of oddities elbowed its way into the queue because I was getting ready for another excellent Theater of War production, Hercules in Pennsylvania . Bryan Doerries, the Theater of War director and translator, made choices in his translation of this wrenching drama about how the greatest Greek hero saves his family and then destroys it in fit of madness in order to make us think about gun violence. Heracles is undone by what we would call mental illness (it's a lot more personal than that in the Greek mindscape, to be certain, a madness inflicted by Hera, H's implacable divine namesake and foe), but also by the deadly ease and power of the can't-miss bow that Doerries' translates as his "invincible weapon." Some of the Theater of War productions have been hit and miss, but this, like their Oedipus, was extremely powerful. The play itself is very evocative of Ajax: both are bifurcated narratives in which a physically indomitable but slightly simple hero is destroyed by delusions and a childlike inability to reign in ordinary frustration and disappointment. I very much liked the value placed on friendship and loyalty by this play, and I have already found the speech by Theseus about despair being for cowards to be personally useful.

Heracles was the only real tragedy on offer in this volume. The Cyclops, which depicts the blinding of Polyphemus by Odysseus and his crew, is the only extant "satyr play. Every poet competing in the Dionysia would submit a trilogy complemented by a thematically-linked, bawdy comedy performed by horse-men wearing tails and exaggerated phalluses. The Cyclops is legitimately funny, which is far more than I can say for any of the Aristophanes that I've read. The incident in the Odyssey, while pathetic, is also funny. Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie certainly didn't invent black comedy.

Helen and Iphigenia at Tauris are almost identical plays with the premise that a key figure in the Trojan War saga is actually whisked away from danger to safety in an exotic locale and is magical substitute is inserted in her place. An entirely guiltless Helen whiles away the war at a temple in Egypt and, after losing a decade of his life and putting lofty Ilion to the torch to get her back, Menelaus accepts her crazy story without a blink. It does kinda explain (well that, and the fact that she plies everyone with dope) the oddly convivial scene in the Odyssey when pseudo-Mentor and Telemachus visit Sparta. The Atreides brothers are clearly grudge-holders. I always wondered what Helen could possibly have said on the trip back to make Menelaus so well-disposed to her again.

[Drazen · Rating 4 out of 5]

satyrs be h*rny

[Sky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for school/Master's Program. The Cyclops feels more like an Astrophanes play, and Iphigenia in Tauris and Helen are practically the same story. Heracles, out of all these plays, was the best.

These plays are part of the Comolete Greek Tragedies, abd can also be found in the Great Books of the Western World.

[Χρύσα Ράπτου · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very important tragedies, best translation, although I prefer the original one in ancient Greek!

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cyclops - William Arrowsmith - 3 stars
Heracles - William Arrowsmith - 4 stars
Iphigenia in Tauris - Witter Bynner - 4 stars
Helen - Richard Lattimore - 3 stars

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Solveig Asplund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially enjoyed Iphigenia in Tauris -- what does it mean to be "dead"?

[Ij Losito · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cyclops was really funny.

Heracles is definitely my favorite here ♥️

and Iphigenia, boi, 😎

[Ния Иванова · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heracles and Iphigenia slay, fuck Agamemnon

[Sasha]

The most complete rundown of which Euripides plays I've read can be found here. There's also a thing I wrote called Greek Playwrights 101 or something like that.

Below are notes from when I was just starting to learn about this stuff, so my enthusiasm was great but my knowledge...well honestly it hasn't gotten much better.

BEST EURIPIDES PLAYS

That I've Read
Medea
Hippolytos

That I'm Guessing About
Iphigenia (wtf, there are two of these? I think Tauris is supposed to be better?)
Alcestis
Heracles (and Children Of?)
Hecabe
Elektra
Helen
Bacchae

TOP TEN according to one collection:
"Alcestis," "Medea," "Hippolytus," "Andromache," "Ion," "Trojan Women," "Electra," "Iphigenia Among the Taurians," "The Bacchants," and "Iphigenia at Aulis."
TOP TEN according to Signet:
Alcestis, Hippolytus, Ion, Electra, Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Medea, The Bacchae, The Trojan Women, and The Cyclops.
TOP X according to fuckin' Harold Bloom:
Cyclops, Heracles, Alcestis, Hecuba, Bacchae, Orestes, Andromache, Medea, Ion, Hippolytus, Helen, Iphigenia at Aulis

On all three:
Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytos, Bacchae, Iphigenia (Aulis)

Two votes out of three: Ion, Trojan Women, Elektra, Iphigenia (Taurians), and Cyclops, which is the only surviving satyr play and therefore I'm totally reading it.

Okay, here's some fuckin' fascinating info from this syllabus at some college or other:

Besides being greater in number, the surviving plays of Euripides provide some of the most important information known about Greek tragedy in general. The nineteen dramas extant come down to us via two very different paths. One group, called the select plays (Alcestis, Andromache, Bacchae, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Medea, Orestes, Phoenician Women, Rhesus and Trojan Women), were the ten prescribed as required reading in the late Greek and Byzantine school system—all fourteen of the tragedies we have by Sophocles and Aeschylus belong to the same category—which is to say, all of these plays are acknowledged classics.

The other group are called the alphabetic plays (Electra, Helen, Heracles, Heracles' Children, Hiketes [The Suppliants], Ion, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Kyklops [Cyclops]), because they come most likely from one part (volume two?) of a complete set of Euripides' work, originally organized in roughly alphabetical order. These are all dramas having titles that begin with the letters E to K—in Greek, eta to kappa—or roughly the second fourth or fifth of the alphabet. From this alone it seems safe to assume that they were preserved not because literature teachers saw them as the most effective drama to read in the classroom but by chance when, no doubt, a lone volume from a complete edition of Euripides turned up at some point in history and was integrated into the ten "select plays."

Awesome, right? Super interesting. The rest of that essay-thing is probably worth reading at some point too.

On all three above lists and also "select" list:
Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytos, Bacchae

Three out of four: Iphigenia (Aulis), Trojan Women

Basically there's no fuckin' consensus at all about any of this. Who woulda thought it'd be so, like, controversial? I even started a Listopia list to try to crowdsource an answer. (Of course, idiots will fuck that list up in like a day.)

I own Alcestis and Cyclops (the satyr play) in Volume Five. Volume One (the other one I own) kinda doesn't look to have anything else important in it.

[Taka · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good but--

This collection contains the only satyr play apparently surviving, Cyclopes, a non-Aristotelian tragedy, Heracles, and two romance plays, Iphigenia in Tauris and Helen, which share an almost identical plot, where a woman who thought was dead is actually alive in a foreign land farm from Greece, is then reunited with her brother/husband, escapes the foreign land by trickery, and divinity coming to their aid at the end à la deus ex machina.

Cyclopes is short and vulgar, and could be funny (depending on your sense of humor), which is what satyr plays are supposed to be. I thought it was okay. The two romance plays are, ipso facto not tragedies, but are nonetheless enjoyable in their own way (e.g., I really didn't want anything bad to happen to Iphigenia and Helen, though if it were a tragedy, it would've happened mercilessly to my further paradoxical schadenfreud, but which contradictory wishes kept me on my toes throughout the plays almost like a drug addict trying to quit the evil habit only to be confronted with numerous temptations of the panacean withdrawal-ending shot that is dangling just out of his reach).

So it turns out that Heracles is the only real tragedy (if we can concede that tragedy is something really sad) included in this book. But the plot is a bit too immature, making children-loving Heracles go mad by a too-easy supernatural cause and for really no reason (well, I don't know if Hera's insane jealousy over her almighty husband's one-night-stand (or one long night the length of usual three, if you want to be picky about it) affair with Alcmene who bore Heracles constitutes a legit reason to 1)try to kill Heracles with a snake when he was an infant; 2)make Heracles and not Zeus or Alcmene do twelve missions impossible; and 3)make Heracles, as opposed to, again, not Zeus or Alcmene, kill his wife and three children who really had absolutely nothing to do with Zeus's romping affair). So basically, Heracles saves his children and wife, and suddenly go mad out of the blue (well Madness - duh - the goddess is "responsible") and kill them all. It's just a bit too naive and coerced to be even plausible. But hey, gods were as real as humans in those days, so what can we say?

So though it was a fun read, this collection lacks the juicy meat of breast-beating, hand-wringing, and hair-tearing tragedy (like Medea or Hecuba), and so it gets a 2.5.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I might fill in more stuff later but:

The Cyclops - 4 Stars
Heracles - 5 Stars
Iphigenia in Tauris - 5 Stars
Helen - 4 Stars

I felt that Helen suffered by being included directly after Iphigenia, mostly because in many ways they are the same play, in that they share a lot of plot points. Even with that being said though, I do feel Iphigenia is stronger in terms of composition.

[Humphrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only read Helen in this one. It operates based on a different version of the myth in which Helen isn't a villain but was rather whisked away to Egypt. The rest of the play is equally fanciful, making for one of the least tragic tragedies of all time. (Though not exactly for that reason,) it didn't really do much for me.

[Mandrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ancient Greek Drama is always spectacular. This being said, this particular set of plays covers more niche, obscure events in mythology. The stories are well told, but you can see Euripides experimenting with dramatic styles and patterns throughout. Euripides has better works, but no one could question the value of any of his plays.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Iphagenia in Taurus was worth reading, and it makes an interesting melodrama, not really a tragedy. This volume does contain the only Satyr play to survive complete from the three great Athenian tragedians.

[Mark Woodland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Repeating myself, I know, but.... What can I say? All of the well-known Greek playwrights are important reading, both for their historical significance as well as the fact that they're excellent plays. They haven't remained famous for 2,400 years because they're not worthy of it.

[mleung · Rating 2 out of 5]

*the only thing that i've read from this is Helen, though i've also read The Bacchae & Trojan Women as well, but i can't remember in what book.

[Liana · Rating 4 out of 5]

These plays are cool. Iphegenia in Tauris is pretty neat. But I love the Helen drama.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's an interesting read, don't get me wrong, but I was not what I was expecting nor hoping for in this book. Although, I did find his interpretation of Helen quite refreshing.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cyclopes: 3/5
Heracles: 4/5
Iphigenia In Tauris: 4.5/5
Helen: 4.5/5