Customer Reviews

The Greek Classics: Euripides - Nineteen Plays

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Unfortunately in terms of greek plays, history has left us with a cruel joke. The magnificent plays crafted by Sophocles and Aeschylus suffered the ravages of time, and a brutal fire in the monastery in which they were kept. Only 7 plays remain for each author.

While Euripides holds his place in Greek drama, he was not considered to be equal to either Sophocles, Aeschylus or Aristophanes. The texts which contained the plays of Euripides were preserved while those of the other 3 were not, because E falls closer to the middle of the alphabet, and was thus in the middle of the manuscript. Other, greater plays were lost by authors whose name fell between A-D, and H-Z were fragmented, and most were utterly lost. Of Euripides work, scholars were able to preserve 19, barely.

Since we have so little of the other authors we should be greatful to have any, I suppose... but this bitter irony is one of the cruel jokes that time plays on our idea of what is immmortal.

IGNORE the wretched (obviously publisher-promoting) 5-star bombastic reviews (I can't imagine how these texts deserve even a single star, and it's a pity Amazon doesn't allow no-star reviews), and be warned against the whole GREEK CLASSICS series: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and this Euripides edition. For a start, many lines have disappeared: eg some of those occurring in the scene between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon in Aeschylus; in spite of the uninterrupted pagination, more than half of Euripides' ORESTES is missing (I ask if this incomplete text made sense at all to those who boast of and insist on the book's 'completeness'); lines from CYCLOPS have also gone missing obviously for reasons of decorum; this, of course, is also true of the bowdlerized Aristophanes edition, where everyone behaves according to Victorian morality (I don't understand how this series' Aristophanes - according to a reviewer - is 'bawdy' and 'rude'). The absence of annotations and the presence of countless typos is nothing, compared to the translations themselves. Made between the 18th and early 20th centuries, these out-of-copyright translations have long been past their sell-by dates. The verse quality is so poor that it insults Greek drama (talk of 'Greek' when particular characters are 'translated' into their 'Roman' counterparts): written in embarrassingly tortuous syntax, the stilted lines read like some cheap and desperate attempt at reproducing 'mythical' versions of the Bible and Shakespeare. The whole effect is 'tragically' hilarious: if those (especially 20th-Century) translators had incorporated innumerable thee's and thou's into their texts in the hope of evoking the original Greek, they were laughably mistaken. According to one reviewer, the Euripides edition 'is a book you can be proud to own'; another, having finished the 'entire set' (ie all four volumes), is 'looking forward to re-reading them': misled by the previous infantile reviews into purchasing this series, I am ashamed of making a donation of it to any library, though a reviewer considers this to be '[a]n excellent addition to any classical library'. Did I mention that almost all of these translations are available online for free? Mould is, indeed, gold.

This book contains the complete 19 surviving works of the great playwright Euripides. Here is a collection that virtually every writer in the history of the world could rightfully envy - and it is just the tip of the iceberg. We can only imagine the treasures Euripides wrote that are now lost forever.

This is a book you can be proud to own, to read and to share with your intellectual soul mates. This is a really big book, in every sense of the word. How many actors and actresses throughout the centuries have relished playing the roles Euripides laid out? How many actresses would have given everything to have had the opportunity to play Helen, Electra, or Medea?

Euripides' many admirers claim that he is the most tragic of the Greek tragedians, the most pathetic of the Attic poets, the most humane in his social philosophy and the most skillful in psychological insight. Several centuries more of discussion and debate will probably be required to do him and his work justice.

I am ordering for a library and almost ordered this book. I was stopped by the review stating that there are missing lines. I've been in theater all my life and I hate that. Especially if the lines are unseemly, rude or possibly sexual. Thank you for treating me alike an adult - NOT! But also, could there be a list of the plays included? I would also caution people to find out more about the translations. Some are clumsy and about as poetic as soap and others are terrific. It makes a difference. And, yes, these plays are great. Euripides was the first playwright - that we know about - God only knows what went up in the fire of the Library at Alexandria - but he was interested in the psychological reasons behind behavior. And this a 1000 years before Freud.