Greek Tragedies, Volume 3

The closing volume: Aeschylus’s The Eumenides, where the cycle of blood revenge is finally handed to an Athenian jury and the law replaces the feud; Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus; and Euripides’s The Bacchae and Alcestis. The Eumenides is the reason a list about citizenship would want this volume in particular — it is the founding myth of the court as the institution that ends private vengeance.

Oedipus at Colonus also appears, in a different translation, in the Fagles Three Theban Plays that the same list cards separately.

Context: Volume 3 of three, all carded separately at Lexile 1130; its Oedipus at Colonus overlaps with the Theban Plays entry.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — the three tragedians.
• David Grene — co-editor and translator; credited as author by the list.
• Greek Tragedies, Volume 1 and Greek Tragedies, Volume 2 — the rest of the set.
• The Three Theban Plays — overlaps on Oedipus at Colonus, in Fagles’s translation.