Euripides’ Ion is a highly complex and elusive play and thus poses considerable difficulties to any interpreter. On the basis of a new recension of the text, this commentary offers explanations of the language, literary technique, and realia of the play and discusses the main issues of interpretation. In this way the reader is provided with the material required for an appreciation of this entertaining as well as provocative dramatic composition.
This book is a study of Euripides’ Ion, produced in 412 BC at a period of political crisis in Athens. Through careful analysis of its political, psychological, religious and poetic aspects and use of modern critical theory and recent scholarship on Athenian ethnicity, the Ion emerges as a polyphonic work expressing different and converging truths.
Tells the story of a young man's search for his identity, and a woman's attempt to come to terms with her past. This study outlines the pre-history and later reception of the Ion myth, and provides a literary interpretation of the play's main themes, aiming to combine analysis of the text with a consideration of its cultural contexts.
One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides (ca. 485-406 BCE) has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, surprising plot twists, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. Here, in the third volume of a new edition that is receiving much praise, is the text and translation of three of his plays. Trojan Women, a play about the causes and consequences of war, develops the theme of the tragic unpredictability of life. Iphigenia among the Taurians and Ion exhibit tragic themes and situations (the murder of close relatives). Each ends happily with a joyful reunion. As in the first three volumes of this edition, David Kovacs gives us a freshly edited Greek text and an admired new translation that, in the words of Greece and Rome, is "close to the Greek and reads fluently and well;" his introduction to each play and explanatory notes offer readers judicious guidance.
An acclaimed translator of Euripidean tragedy in its earlier and more familiar modes, Diane Arnson Svarlien now turns to three plays that showcase the special qualities of Euripides’ late dramatic art. Like her earlier volumes, Ion, Helen, Orestes offers modern, accurate, accessible, and stageworthy versions that preserve the metrical and musical form of the originals. Matthew Wright’s Introduction and notes offer illuminating guidance to first-time readers of Euripides, while pointing up the appeal of this distinctive grouping of plays.
How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only be properly answered together. Providing a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, Victoria Wohl argues that the poetic form of Euripides' drama constitutes a mode of political thought. Through readings of select plays, she explores the politics of Euripides' radical aesthetics, showing how formal innovation generates political passions with real-world consequences. Euripides' plays have long perplexed readers. With their disjointed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the boundaries of tragedy. But the plays' formal traits—from their exorbitantly beautiful lyrics to their arousal and resolution of suspense—shape the audience's political sensibilities and ideological attachments. Engendering civic passions, the plays enact as well as express political ideas. Wohl draws out the political implications of Euripidean aesthetics by exploring such topics as narrative and ideological desire, the politics of pathos, realism and its utopian possibilities, the logic of political allegory, and tragedy's relation to its historical moment. Breaking through the impasse between formalist and historicist interpretations of Greek tragedy, Euripides and the Politics of Form demonstrates that aesthetic structure and political meaning are mutually implicated—and that to read the plays poetically is necessarily to read them politically.
