Helen (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

Among the legends of ancient Greece, there is perhaps no story more compelling than that of Helen. Her surpassing beauty was said to have launched the Greek fleet of a thousand ships to Troy. No woman was so adored and so hated. She was seen as both prize and scapegoat, the promise of bliss and the assurance of doom.

Ion (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, The Greek Tragedies in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the editorship of Herbert Golder and the late William Arrowsmith, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the plays.

Iphigeneia in Tauris (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

The modern reader may have difficulty conceiving of Iphigeneia in Tauris as tragedy, for the term in our sense is associated with downfall, death, and disaster. But to the ancient Greeks, the use of heroic legend, the tragic diction and meters, and the tragic actors would have defined it as pure tragedy, the happy ending notwithstanding. While not one of his "deep" dramatic works, the play is Euripidean in many respects, above all in its recurrent theme of escape, symbolized in the rescue of Iphigeneia by Artemis, to whom she was about to be sacrificed.

Herakles (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

In Herakles, Euripides reveals with great subtlety and complexity the often brutal underpinnings of our social arrangements. The play enacts a thoroughly contemporary dilemma about the relationship between personal and state violence to civic order. Of all of Euripides' plays, this is his most skeptically subversive examination of myth, morality, and power.

Orestes (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, The Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the editorship of Herbert Golder and the late William Arrowsmith, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the plays.