Greek Tragedies, Volume 2

The middle volume of the Chicago selection, and the one that reads as a single argument: Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers, Sophocles’s Electra and Euripides’s Electra put the same act of vengeance on stage three times, by three playwrights, to three different verdicts. Euripides’s Iphigenia among the Taurians and The Trojan Women complete it, the latter being the bluntest anti-war play to survive from antiquity.

Reading them together is the point — it is the closest thing the ancient theatre offers to a controlled experiment in how a story’s moral changes with who is telling it.

Context: Volume 2 of three, all carded separately on the list at Lexile 1130.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — all three appear in this volume on the same story.
• David Grene — co-editor and translator; credited as author by the list.
• Greek Tragedies, Volume 1 and Greek Tragedies, Volume 3 — the rest of the set.