Read Online Helen / Phoenician Women / Orestes Engineered By Euripides Text

reading volume IV offirst simply because it arrived first in the mail, It pains me too. This was my first foray into Greek tragedy since high school so, a while and it was a fun ride,

First, Helen love that the tragedy is really more a love story, with the most reviled Helen presented sympathetically for one,

The Phoenician Women: The events preceding Sophocles Antigone, anchored by dual matriarch Jocasta, Fairly standard, interesting in the varying perspectives of the assault on Thebes to come,

Orestes: The best of the bunch, by far, This story was nearly new to me having read only recently the Natalie Haynes novel A Thousand Ships, which offered a chapter of Clytemnestras plot against Agamemnon.
What a ride! Several times I guffawed at the plight of the characters as well as some of the dialogue, that while surely valuable on the stage would be hilarious in reality.
Great deus ex machina in this playotherwise there is no way for it to resolve, A rare treat of a “happy” ending,

A name may be in many places, though a body in only one,

As I have read the other two plays previously in other editions, I only read “Helen” from this book,

This play by Euripides follows the story of Helen as a phantom/illusion sent to Troy, while the real physical Helen was sent to King Proteus of Egypt, to be taken care of.


At this point it has beenyears I believe since the start of the Trojan war,years since the war at Troy ended, and Menelaus and Helen have not seen, nor heard from each other in all this time,

Of course, during theseyears King Proteus has died, and his tyrannical son wants Helen as his wife instead,

In this play we get to see Helens perspective from having been made to stay in Egypt, her absence from Menelaus, and hear about all the Greek hate she is getting aimed at her for something she had no control over.
It was so interesting to see Helen depicted in this way and not villainous,

We also get to see, again, a more cunning female character that is apparent in some of Euripides plays example: Elektra, Medea.
I also enjoyed how we got to see both Menelaus and Helen plotting together to get out of a dangerous situation and be together, to sail, finally, home.


I also really enjoyed the use of prophecy in this one and the introduction of Theonoe as priestess with divination, An unusual batch of three works, the last of which 'Orestes' is the most interesting at least until the absurd deus ex, the device that is now approaching comedic and tiresome in use.
Euripides gets frustratingly close to pushing outside the limits of myth, I am sure the climax of 'Orestes' must have been very interesting when initially performed,

That being said, I felt this volume could easily be glossed over, but I feel like if

you've already invested in five volumes of Euripides, like I have, and you want to garner as much information as you can about this time frame, it wouldn't hurt to read these.


Otherwise: meh. The Revised editions of the Greek plays are fabulous, I especially enjoyed this one because I was unfamiliar with the plays themselves, though I do know the players from other plays and literature.
As always, the historical notes are helpful, and do lend the reader to seeking out other plays and ancient texts to fill out the stories.
Another book to add to my library in the future, This was the first time I've read a Loeb classic edition and I have to say, even though the dual text was lost on me, I really liked them.
The size was perfect for reading, The edition I had also had the Phonecian Women and Orestes but I'd already read both of those so I only read Helen, I can't help think that there was some huge cultural context missing while reading this book, While I could appreciate the impact of totally making the whole Trojan war pointless, and making Helen good and a devout wife, it just didn't seem as emotional to me as it probably did to the ancient Greeks.
The closest analogy I can think of is the books that try to make Satan out as the good guy, What this reminded me of the most was "fix it fic", when someone just can't stand the ending that was given and needs to make it so the characters don't do the awful things they are supposed to do and end up living happily ever after.
What I thought was interesting was the fact that in this play most of the parts were female, and it was the women who had all the brains and important descisions to make, Helen came up with their plan to escape, Theonoe had the gift of prophecy and was the one who decided if Helen and her husband could escape.
And yet according to the introduction Euripides still got into lots of trouble by the women of Greece for the way he portrayed them.
The play itself was alright, not as interesting as Aschelyus, as not much happened and there were no surprises, But it was still quite good, It's being put on at King's this week as their Greek play and I'm looking forward to watching it, The Phoenician Women is not, to my mind, one of Euripides' towering masterpieces and doesn't stand comparison with the Medea or Trojan Women, but it is a great exploration of fraternal rivalry and ambition and of transgenerational consequences.
I'm going to use this as part of the Alevel course on Oedipus and Antigens as a way of exploring the immense flexibility Attic playwrights had in crafting plays based in known myths through contrast with the Sophoclean narratives of the same cycle, which have different characters alive or dead, present or exiled.
Maybe my least favorite volume of the tragedy collection, Helen would probably be the favorite, I enjoyed seeing her struggle with the fact that two people groups fought foryears because of her, Powerful stuff.

The "Phoenician Women" and "Orestes" dealt with myths I had already read in other tragedies so I was getting fatigued, Read:
HELEN
ORESTES Wow, . I knew Euripides was unorthodox, but what a fresh way to look at the same story, Some of the plays are even better than the more reknowned counterparts by the old masters! This are the crazy plays at least to modern sensibilities.
Readers who have only read the "major" Greek plays will be surprised, The end of Orestes sounds like something from Tarentino with of course a deus ex machina, Euripides has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, surprising plot twists, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations, In this fifth volume of the new Loeb Classical Library Euripides, David Kovacs presents a freshly edited Greek text and a faithful and deftly worded translation of three plays.


For his Helen the poet employs an alternative history in which a virtuous Helen never went to Troy but spent the war years in Egypt, falsely blamed for the adulterous behavior of her divinely created double in Troy.
This volume also includes Phoenician Women, Euripides' treatment of the battle between the sons of Oedipus for control of Thebes and Orestes, a novel retelling of Orestes' lot after he murdered his mother, Clytaemestra.
Each play is annotated and prefaced by a helpful introduction, Greek: sitelink Ευριπίδης Euripides Ancient Greek: Εὐριπίδης ca,BCBC was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles, Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety five plays, although four of those were probably written by Critias, Eighteen of Euripides plays have survived complete, It is now widely believed that what was thought to be a nineteenth, Rhesus, was probably not by Euripides, Fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays also survive, More of his plays have survived than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because of the chance preservation of a manuscript that was probably part of a complete collection of his works in alp Greek: sitelink Ευριπίδης Euripides Ancient Greek: Εὐριπίδης ca.
BCBC was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles, Ancient scholars thought that Euripides had written ninety five plays, although four of those were probably written by Critias, Eighteen of Euripides' plays have survived complete, It is now widely believed that what was thought to be a nineteenth, Rhesus, was probably not by Euripides, Fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays also survive, More of his plays have survived than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because of the chance preservation of a manuscript that was probably part of a complete collection of his works in alphabetical order.
sitelink sitelink.