Greek Tragedies, Volume 1

The first of the three-volume Chicago selection from the Complete Greek Tragedies, the translation series that has been the American teaching standard since the 1950s. This volume holds Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Antigone, and Euripides’s Hippolytus — the five plays most likely to be assigned first, and among them the two founding texts on obedience to an unjust law and on inherited blood-guilt.

The third edition, which is the one linked here, keeps the Grene and Lattimore translations but adds per-play introductions and textual notes.

Context: The list cards all three volumes of this set separately, each at Lexile 1130.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — the three tragedians the set collects.
• David Grene — co-editor and a principal translator of the series; the list credited him as author.
• Greek Tragedies, Volume 2 and Greek Tragedies, Volume 3 — the rest of the set, both on the list.