Olympus beside Zeus—who, in the myth, fathered Herakles with a mortal, Alcmene, the wife of a Theban general, Amphitryon—seems like a mashup of “Survivor” and “American Idol. And while Hippolytos himself is flawed given his obsessive abstinence, it would be hard not to see Phaidra as the heroine, who struggles between what she knows is best for everyone, and what she wants most of all. Amphitryon’s sixty lines of woe are followed by another twenty-five or so from his daughter-in-law, Megara. Ive read and taught it so many times, I don't think I have anything new to say about it, but its an old friend and like the Hekabe features great social commentary. I do wish that the introduction and prefaces to each play gave more context, especially for Alkestis.

that the comedy in a tragedy wields considerable influence on the direction and action of the whole play, i mean. A sample from her translations of tragedian demonstrates how Carson makes their sentences conform to her own tendency towards candid, unambiguous and humorous language. Person of the week in every Greek opinion poll,” Disney’s Motown-style muses sing, capturing the contemporary image of the mythical figure.Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. And in for the most part, Herakles really is guilty of nothing and did not ask to be born a demigod with powerful enemies. This fate is horrifying, but what I found most horrifying about it was its ambiguity: she has received a prophecy about her fate, but we shall never really see the truth of it. They include Medea, Andromache, Cyclops, Electra, The Trojan Women, Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes, and The Bacchae. Euripides," the classicist Bernard Knox has written, was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so.

The descriptions of Dionysos’s mysterious and multilayered workings as a deity continue in the choruses of The Bakkhai, where the strength of Carson’s translation lies. i began with silence and secrecy - there’s no trusting the tongue, it loved to punish others and draw disaster in itself.Although “H of H” at times seems impossibly bleak, it is the story of a man who decides to live despite fearing that he deserves to die—a man, that is, who chooses to believe he will someday have an identity beyond that of the murderer of his own wife and children.

They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor’s widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place.Again, I was surprised at how modern his voice, which may be attributed more to the translator, Anne Carson, but his humor again was evident.

The rest of his lines spill across a few pages, tiny scraps of pasted text that seem to slow down, as if the words were pacing the way the actor might onstage.Herakles has left them alone, vulnerable to the whims of the new king of Thebes, Lykos, who has sentenced the hero’s family to death.