The Greek Plays Read online

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  2016 Modern Library Edition

  Preface, general introduction, play introductions, and compilation copyright © 2016 by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm

  “ ‘Saving the City’: Tragedy in Its Civic Context” copyright © 2016 by Daniel Mendelsohn

  “Material Elements and Visual Meaning” copyright © 2016 by David Rosenbloom

  “Plato and Tragedy” copyright © 2016 by Joshua Billings

  “Aristotle’s Poetics and Greek Tragedy” copyright © 2016 by Gregory Hays

  “The Postclassical Reception of Greek Tragedy” copyright © 2016 by Mary-Kay Gamel

  Copyright information for the individual play translations can be found on this page.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lefkowitz, Mary R., | Romm, James S. | Aeschylus. Plays. English. Selections. 2016. | Sophocles. Plays. English. Selections. 2016. | Euripides. Plays. English. Selections. 2016.

  Title: The Greek plays: sixteen plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides / new translations edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm.

  Description: New York: The Modern Library, 2016. | Plays include: Aeschylus: the Persians, Oresteia, Prometheus bound; Sophocles: Oedipus the king, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus at Colonus; Euripides: Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Trojan women, Helen, Bacchae.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037031| ISBN 9780812993004 | ISBN 9780679644484 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Greek drama. | Greek drama—History and criticism. | Aeschylus. | Sophocles. | Euripides.

  Classification: LCC PA3463 .G74 2016 | DDC 882/.0108—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2015037031

  ebook ISBN 9780679644484

  randomhousebooks.com

  modernlibrary.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover image: Hellenistic funeral crown, early third century (National Museum, Baghdad; Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.)

  Maps by Kelly Sandefer of Beehive Mapping

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  CONTENTS

  Time Line (Life Spans of the Three Leading Greek Tragedians)

  Maps

  Preface

  General Introduction

  AESCHYLUS

  Biographical Note

  Introduction to Aeschylus’ Persians

  Persians, translated by James Romm

  General Introduction to Aeschylus’ Oresteia

  Introduction to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon

  The Oresteia: Agamemnon, translated by Sarah Ruden

  Introduction to Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers

  The Oresteia: Libation Bearers, translated by Sarah Ruden

  Introduction to Aeschylus’ Eumenides

  The Oresteia: Eumenides, translated by Sarah Ruden

  Introduction to Prometheus Bound (Possibly by Aeschylus)

  Prometheus Bound, translated by James Romm

  SOPHOCLES

  Biographical Note

  Introduction to Sophocles’ Oedipus the King

  Oedipus the King, translated by Frank Nisetich

  Introduction to Sophocles’ Antigone

  Antigone, translated by Frank Nisetich

  Introduction to Sophocles’ Electra

  Electra, translated by Mary Lefkowitz

  Introduction to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus

  Oedipus at Colonus, translated by Frank Nisetich

  EURIPIDES

  Biographical Note

  Introduction to Euripides’ Alcestis

  Alcestis, translated by Rachel Kitzinger

  Introduction to Euripides’ Medea

  Medea, translated by Rachel Kitzinger

  Introduction to Euripides’ Hippolytus

  Hippolytus, translated by Rachel Kitzinger

  Introduction to Euripides’ Electra

  Electra, translated by Emily Wilson

  Introduction to Euripides’ Trojan Women

  Trojan Women, translated by Emily Wilson

  Introduction to Euripides’ Helen

  Helen, translated by Emily Wilson

  Introduction to Euripides’ Bacchae

  Bacchae, translated by Emily Wilson

  APPENDICES

  A: “Saving the City”: Tragedy in Its Civic Context

  by Daniel Mendelsohn

  B: Material Elements and Visual Meaning

  by David Rosenbloom

  C: Plato and Tragedy

  by Joshua Billings

  D: Aristotle’s Poetics and Greek Tragedy

  by Gregory Hays

  E: The Postclassical Reception of Greek Tragedy

  by Mary-Kay Gamel

  About the Contributors

  Copyrights for Play Translations

  Athens and Attica in the Fifth Century B.C.

  Mainland Greece and Asia Minor

  The Black Sea and the Persian Empire

  Possible reconstruction of the theater of Dionysus in the early fifth century.

  Possible reconstruction of the theater of Dionysus in the second half of the fifth century, with wooden seats and wooden stage buildings.

  PREFACE

  Almost half a century ago, Robert F. Kennedy, announcing to a crowd of followers the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., and speaking without a written text, recited words from a tragedy of Aeschylus (here quoted in Sarah Ruden’s translation):

  In the heart is no sleep; there drips instead

  pain that remembers wounds…

  The fact that at such a moment of crisis his mind went out to verses spoken in Athens on an early spring day in 458 B.C. demonstrates the enduring power of Greek tragedy to move us, comfort our sorrows, and help us explore the deepest levels of human experience. In the modern age, when Greco-Roman antiquity is often asked to prove its relevance, the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides continue to speak with an urgent voice to readers, playgoers, and spectators of opera, dance, and film. In the U.S. educational curriculum, these plays are often the first works of premodern literature read by high school and college students, and their encounter with a mythic world millennia old, yet compellingly alive, is often a memorable one.

  Readers of today who seek to understand these plays are faced with a paradox. Their themes are timeless and universal, yet they belong to a very precise and circumscribed historical context, the city of Athens in the fifth century B.C. In this volume we strive to retain an awareness of that context, while also acknowledging the ways in which the dramas transcend it.

  To that end, the general introduction, the first two appendices, and many of the notes are designed to illuminate the original productions of these plays and the concerns (as far as can be judged from contemporary sources) of the Athenians who attended them. The short introductions that precede each play deal in part with these historical issues but also discuss the characters, themes, and poetic motifs in which the broader meanings of these works reside. Three further appendices treat the late- or postclassical reception of Greek tragedy, and many of t
he short introductions highlight important recent productions, adaptations, and responses to individual plays.

  Our volume also includes several maps, as well as a time line showing how the life spans and careers of the playwrights correlate with the events of their times. These resources, too, are designed to allow, but not insist on, a historically contextualized reading of the plays, and to permit readers to familiarize themselves with the geography in which they are set. Orestes’ journey in the Oresteia, for example, which takes him from Phocis to Argos to Delphi and finally to Athens, will make better sense to those who can imagine the relative distance of these places and the ruggedness of the landscape in between. Likewise, the great expanse that separates Susa—the scene of Aeschylus’ Persians—from Athens can only be understood by way of a map of the entire Near East. An inset map of Athens is designed to show the location of the Theater of Dionysus, the site at which all these plays were originally performed, on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis.

  Of the thirty-three dramas that have survived into modern times, we have selected sixteen—approximately half—for this volume: five from the work of Aeschylus, four from Sophocles, and seven from Euripides. No collection of this kind will escape criticism that one work or another ought to have been included, but we have given priority to works that are most often taught in college classes (including our own) or are otherwise deemed most current or most resonant in the modern world.

  Translations of Greek tragedy have proliferated in recent years, and many styles are available today, some of which depart far from the Greek originals in an effort to avoid foreignness or to capture the feel of modern poetry. Our translators, by contrast, have tried to preserve some of the foreignness of the original, without making the texts opaque or obscure. They avoid colloquialism, using instead a more formal style to give some impression of the elevated, non-natural feel of the Greek. As editors we have also tried to make this volume reflect the distinctions between the styles of the three tragedians, so far as English will allow us to do so. Thus each translator, including the two editors, has worked on only one ancient playwright.

  To judge from the many lines in our surviving plays that are quoted by Greek or Roman authors, who had access to more definitive versions of the texts, it seems probable that our printed editions of these plays largely represent what was written, on perishable papyrus, by the original authors. But we do not want our readers to suppose that we can always be sure of this. Lines that, to judge by their content, are either garbled or inserted by later hands appear in all surviving manuscripts of any particular play, indicating that they must have been introduced quite early in the process of transmission. Other mistakes and additions, because they occurred further on in that process, survive only in certain “families” of manuscripts but not in others. In the footnotes to the plays we have let readers know why we have chosen among several possible readings in the various surviving manuscripts, or why on occasion we believe a line or lines to be inauthentic. Suspect lines have been included in the text, with or without brackets, or relegated to the footnotes, at the discretion of the translator, based on how likely it is that these are insertions by a later hand. Gaps in the text, where words or lines have evidently fallen out, are indicated by bracketed ellipses.

  In addition to staying close to the diction of the original plays, we have tried, both visually and metrically, to give our readers some idea of their variations in rhythm, even though we can at best offer only an approximation. Lines that, in Greek, use the standard meter of speech and dialogue, iambic trimeter, are here rendered as iambic pentameter and run out to the farthest edge of the left-hand margin. The more complex lyric meters, typically used for choral odes and highly emotional “arias” by individual characters, are in this volume set off by an indent and rendered with various non-iambic rhythms. It has not been possible to correlate English meters with Greek ones, and the lack of such correlation is a serious loss to students of Greek tragedy, but in the footnotes the translators have tried to give some sense of metrical variations and the shifts in mood or changes of dance step they indicate. (The general introduction offers further insight into Greek poetic meter and its role in the tragic dramas.)

  A word should be said about this volume’s use of an iambic pentameter line for most passages of speech and dialogue set in Greek iambic trimeter. Aristotle, in the Poetics, said that Athenian dramatists used iambic trimeter for dialogue because it was closest of all meters to natural speech. But it is poetry nonetheless, the mark of the elevation of mythic figures and the distance that separates their world from that of the audience. Similarly, Shakespeare and his contemporaries made noble, aristocratic characters speak in verse, in iambic pentameter (while sometimes giving prose lines to more ordinary people, such as commoners and clowns). We have adopted iambic pentameter wherever the Greek plays have iambic trimeter, in part because it has Aristotle’s “speechlike” feel, but also because the familiarity of English readers with Shakespearean verse makes this meter a natural way to evoke the grandeur and solemnity of mythic drama.

  The translators have used various approaches to solve one of the most intractable of all translation problems: the inarticulate sounds, groans, and cries found in the original texts of the tragedies. We can usually tell from context what these exclamations meant. The cry oimoi (literally “oh me”) expresses sorrow and despair on the part of the speaker, or sometimes outraged anger; it can represent a protracted wail, or an exclamation that fits into the metrical pattern of the line that is being spoken, like “alas” in Shakespeare. Pheu (pronounced “feh-ooh” but in one syllable) seems to represent a sigh or expression of regret not quite as powerful as oimoi. Then there are strings of vowels or vowel-consonant combinations such as aiai, popoi, or a repeated eā and ē (pronounced “eh-ah” and “ay” as in hay) for emotions so intense that they could not be expressed in words or gestures. There are no equivalents for these exclamations in modern English; in this volume our translators have in some cases simply transliterated them, in others they have used stage directions or linguistic emphasis to convey their tone.

  Finally, we have given our translators, and ourselves, the stern task of keeping to the lineation of the Greek texts in these English versions, rather than expanding them as most recent editions have done. It is always our hope that those who connect to Greek drama will feel inspired to learn Greek, or that those who already know some Greek will use it to better understand these plays. We want such readers to be able to easily find their way to a corresponding Greek passage when using this volume, or, better still, to find the corresponding English while reading the Greek. Readers not familiar with the conventions of Greek texts should note that the line numberings their editors have added are not always regular; in places where lines have been deleted from or added to the text, or (especially) where the lineation of choral passages has been revised, there may be more than ten lines, or fewer, between line numbers spaced ten digits apart. Line numbers in our translations follow those of the Greek and therefore preserve these occasional irregularities.

  We would like to thank Glen Hartley of Writers’ Representatives, our agent, as well as our editors at Random House, Sam Nicholson, Vincent La Scala, and Emily DeHuff. Among the friends, family, and colleagues who have lent their help and advice, we want to especially acknowledge Steve Coates, Lauren Curtis, Wyatt Mason, and Eve Romm.

  GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  Human beings have always sought to be something other than themselves, informally when they are young, in formal rituals as adults. But it was the ancient Athenians who gave to posterity the idea of role playing before a large audience, with trained actors reciting and singing written texts to musical accompaniment. Their words for such performances have become part of our ordinary vocabulary; tragedy, drama, theater. Tragōidia originally meant a song (ōidē) performed in a singing competition in which the winner took home a goat (tragos)—a significant prize in an agricultural society. Drama meant “something
done,” an action. A theater (theatron) was a place where one viewed a drama or a tragōidia. Those words have a wide range of meanings today, but in the fifth century B.C. they were connected to an annual festival in one particular place: the City, or Great, Dionysia in Athens. The festival was sacred to the god Dionysus and filled with processions and feasts, but its most distinctive features were the dramatic competitions held in the Theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis. The winners took home prizes that were much more substantial than the goat that originally gave the dramatic performances their name. The Athenians regarded the tragedies as something more than entertainments. The dramas were staged and actors and choruses trained at considerable public expense, along with private contributions from the wealthiest citizens. The festival took place at the beginning of the sailing season, when the ships were launched that helped to bring Athens her wealth and enforce her military power. The citizens appear to have thought that the performances were essential for the welfare of everyone who saw them, and for the life of the city itself.

  Even after Athens had been defeated by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century B.C., dramas continued to be performed in the Theater of Dionysus. Some were revivals of the plays by the fifth-century dramatists whose works survive to this day; others were newly composed. Starting in the fourth century, theaters were constructed and dramas were staged throughout the Mediterranean world, wherever Greek was spoken. Some plays were even written by authors for whom Greek was a second language. The Romans translated Greek dramas into Latin and used them as models for new dramas of their own, and those works in turn influenced and inspired dramas throughout Europe and the European diaspora.