This anthology collects some of the most important plays by Ancient Greek tragedians, in updated translations with new introductions. Greek Tragedies, Volume III presents some of the finest and most fundamental works of Western dramatic literature. It draws together plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from Chicago’s acclaimed nine-volume series, Complete Greek Tragedies. This third edition updates the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which they are famous. New introductions for each play provide essential information about the production histories and the stories themselves. This volume contains Aeschylus’s “The Eumenides,” translated by Richmond Lattimore; Sophocles’s “Philoctetes,” translated by David Grene; Sophocles’s “Oedipus at Colonus,” translated by Robert Fitzgerald; Euripides’s “The Bacchae,” translated by William Arrowsmith; and Euripides’s “Alecestis,” translated by Richmond Lattimore.

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Agememnon is the first part of the Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy in which the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan war to be murdered by his treacherous wife Clytemnestra. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex the king sets out to uncover the cause of the plague that has struck his city, only to disover the devastating truth about his relationship with his mother and his father. Medea is the terrible story of a woman's bloody revenge on her adulterous husband through the murder of her own children.

The Tragedies of Euripides - Euripides - With Critical and Explanatory Notes - Complete New Edition. Includes: Hecuba. Orestes. The Phoenician Virgins. Medea. Hippolytus. Alcestis. The Bacchae. The Heraclidae. Iphigenia in aulis. Iphigenia in tauris. Euripides (c. 480 - 406 BC) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived complete (there has been debate about his authorship of Rhesus, largely on stylistic grounds) and there are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined-he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. Yet he also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of...that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "...imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates", and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.