Euripides, Vol VII: Fragments, Aegeus-Meleager

by Euripides, Martin Cropp (Translator)

18 of the 90 or so plays composed by Euripides between 455 & 406 bce survive in a complete form & are included in the preceding six volumes of the Loeb Euripides. A further 52 tragedies & 11 satyr plays, including a few of disputed authorship, are known from ancient quotations & references & from numerous papyri discovered since 1880. No more than 1/5th of any play is represented, but many can be reconstructed with some accuracy in outline, & many of the fragments are striking in themselves. The extant plays & the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians.
This edition, in a projected two volumes, offers the 1st complete English translation of the fragments together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. The texts are based on the recent comprehensive edition of R. Kannicht. A general Introduction discusses the evidence for the lost plays. Each play is prefaced by a select bibliography & an introductory discussion of its mythical background, plot, & location of the fragments, general character, chronology, & impact on subsequent literary & artistic traditions.

Genres: Classics

688 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2008

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

[Erik Rostad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 1 of 2 containing fragments from Euripides. These are the tragedy plays Euripides wrote that have not survived. The fragments are pulled from references by other authors (Aristotle, Ovid, Apollonius, etc.) and actual surviving papyrus fragments. Vase paintings are also referenced to understand the mythological story being referenced in each tragedy play. I love reading through these fragments. At times, they read like wisdom literature as some of the best statements from each play were recorded in other works.