The Children of Heracles is a powerful and challenging tragedy of exile and supplication. Driven from their homeland by Eurystheus, king of Argos, the children of Heracles flee as fugitives throughout Greece until they are granted protection in Athens.

This book is an accessible guide through the many twists and turns of Euripides' Children of Heracles, providing several frameworks through which to understand and appreciate the play. Children of Heracles follows the fortunes of Heracles' family after his death. Euripides confronts characters and audience alike with an extraordinary series of plot twists and ethical challenges as the persecuted family of refugees struggles to find asylum in Athens before taking revenge on its enemy Eurystheus. It is a fast-paced story that explores the nature of power and its abuse, focusing on the appropriate treatment and behaviour of the powerless and the obligations and limitations of asylum. The audience must continually re-evaluate the play's moral dimensions as the characters respond to complications that range from the fantastic to the frighteningly realistic. Yoon situates Children of Heracles in its literary context, showing how Euripides constructs a unique kind of tragic plot from a wide range of conventions. It also explores the centrality of the dead Heracles and the leading role given to the socially powerless and the dramatically marginal. Finally, it discusses the historical contexts of the play's original performance and its political resonance both then and now.

This volume explores the significance of old age in Greek and Latin poetry and dramatic literature, not just in relation to other textual and historical concerns, but as a cultural and intellectual reality of central importance to understanding the works themselves. The book discusses a wide range of authors, from Homer to Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides; from Horace to Vergil, Ovid, and beyond. Classical scholarship on these texts is enriched by a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from such fields as anthropology, social history, literary theory, psychology, and gerontology. The contributions examine the many and complex representations of old age in classical literature: their relation to the social and psychological realities of old age, their connection with the author’s own place in the human life course, their metaphorical and symbolic capacity as poetic vehicles for social and ethical values.

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.

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 Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, 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. Already tested in performance on the stage, this translation shows for the first time in English the striking interplay of voices in Euripides' Suppliant Women. Torn between the mothers' lament over the dead and proud civic eulogy, between calls for a just war and grief for the fallen, the play captures with unremitting force the competing poles of the human psyche. The translators, Rosanna Warren and Stephen Scully, accentuate the contrast between female lament and male reasoned discourse in this play where the silent dead hold, finally, center stage.