The Trojan Women - Helen - The Bacchae

by Euripides, Neil Curry (Translator)

English, Greek (translation)

176 pages, Paperback

Published October 30, 1981

About the author

Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, 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. 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 William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.

Reviews

[charlie shaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

(only read the bacchae)
"They have learned to worship me / And know me for what I am: / A god"
"we slept, and in our sleep we forgot / Our cares, and in our dreams we were gods"
"Darkness is more fitting for devotion"
"A god terrible to man, / And yet, most gentle"
"-It is a shameful thing / The Lord Dionysus has done. / -It is a shameful thing he suffered."

[David Fermín]

Creo que Eurípides tenía una cualidad que lo hacía sobresalir por encima de los dos autores posthoméricos de la escena griega del siglo IV a. C. y es el aspecto que más me sorprende: su intransigente tratamiento del culto a las deidades y el planteamiento de la duda sobre el poder de los dioses. Veo en Eurípides un claro antecedente del pensamiento de Nietzsche, a pesar de sus criticas en El nacimiento de la tragedia a su tratamiento intelectual de la tragedia: su obra pone en jaque la concepción de los dioses y la libertad del individuo que cae siempre donde los dioses deciden.

En Las troyanas, aunque es bastante evidente el carácter misógino de Eurípides (el papel de Helena), muestra una enorme sensibilidad por el destino de las mujeres de Troya y cómo son tratadas (así como los niños) en lao conflictos bélicos. Me produce terror que esta obra tenga tanto símiles con conflictos actuales.

Las bacantes es otra historia: es un relato de terror sobre sectas y el destino que aquellos que rechazan a los dioses. Es escalofriante y terrible.

Matizo que he leído la traducción de Germán Gómez de la Mata según la versión francesa de Leconte de Lisle de la Editorial Fontana (1997).

[Joni Greenwell Bycroft · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOL - Those zany Greeks. Tricking everyone everywhere. First the Trojan Horse, then the king of Egypt. Helen and Menelaus trick him into setting them up with a ship and 50 orsmen to get them back to Greece to live happily ever after.