Euripides: Orestes (Aris and Phillips Classical Texts)

Text with facing translation, commentary and notes. If not the profoundest of Greek tragedies, "Orestes" is certainly one of the most exuberant and entertaining. Euripides stands traditional legend on its head to forge a melodrama full of varied action, emotion, and novel theatrical effects, with a succession of crises crowned by a spectacular happy ending. Produced in 400 B.C., the play marks the culmination of Euripides' development, and in antiquity it surpassed all other tragedies in popular. No study of Greek drama should neglect it. For this volume, Professor West has prepared a new edition of the Greek text with a selective apparatus. -- From publisher's description Produced more frequently on the ancient stage than any other tragedy, Orestes retells with striking innovations the story of the young man who kills his mother to avenge her murder of his father. Though eventually exonerated, Orestes becomes a fugitive from the Furies (avenging spirits) of his mother's blood. On the brink of destruction, he is saved in the end by Apollo, who had commanded the matricide. Powerful and gripping, Orestes sweeps us along with a momentum that, starting slowly, builds inevitably to one of the most spectacular climaxes in all Greek tragedy.