Euripides I contains the plays “Alcestis,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; “Medea,” translated by Oliver Taplin; “The Children of Heracles,” translated by Mark Griffith; and “Hippolytus,” translated by David Grene.

 

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

 

In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

 

In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

In the centuries since it was first performed, Euripides’s Medea has established itself as one of the most influential of the Greek tragedies. The story of the wronged wife who seeks revenge against her unfaithful husband by murdering their children is lodged securely in the popular imagination, a touchstone for politics, law, and psychoanalysis and the subject of constant retellings and reinterpretations.

This new translation of Medea by classicist Oliver Taplin, originally published as part of the acclaimed third edition of Chicago’s Complete Greek Tragedies, brilliantly replicates the musicality and strength of Euripides’s verse while retaining the play’s dramatic and emotional impact. Taplin has created an edition of Medea that is particularly suited to performance, while not losing any of the power it has long held as an object of reading or study. This edition is poised to become the new standard, and to introduce a new generation of readers to the heights and depths of Greek tragedy.