Helen. Phoenician Women. Orestes

Edited and translated by David Kovacs

Hardcover

ISBN 9780674996007

Publication date: 06/15/2002

Three plays by ancient Greece’s third great tragedian.

One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. The new Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays is in six volumes.

Helen, in Volume V, employs an alternative history in which a virtuous and faithful Helen was falsely blamed for the actions of her divinely created double in Troy. Here too are Phoenician Women, the battle between the sons of Oedipus for control of Thebes; and Orestes, recasting Orestes' lot after he murdered his mother.

Praise

Kovacs’s translation is a tour de force… In general, the notes accompanying the translation, explaining such things as geographical and mythological names, are judiciously chosen, concise, and crystal clear… I have nothing but praise for [Kovacs’s] scholarship, and the lucidity of his writing, both as translator and commentator. [This volume] should be [the] standard translation for many years to come.

—John Davidson, Scholia Reviews