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Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus Euripides; tr. Diane Arnson Svarlien Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007. 205 pp $34.95 cloth; $9.95 paper
Many scholars translate the works of Euripides as they should be, but Diane Arnson Svarlien translates them as they are. Euripides loves women, but his heroes often hate them. Filtered through two and a half millennia it becomes an iffy proposition to try to discover when a character's speech is intended to elicit agreement from the authence and when it is intended to be manifestly ironic and provoke disagreement. Euripides has been criticized for his formal imperfections, such as the tangentially related choral ode, overuse of the deus ex machina, and the abandonment of a theological focus in favor of psychological insight. But within those lapses in formal rigor and forays into psychology that fracture the unity of his compositions, we find the very thing that in Euripides most resembles contemporary literature.
All three plays in this book are intimately tied to the struggles of motherhood, domesticity, and betrayal. Each play is about the love, responsibility, and sacrifices required of married life. Each is centered on a woman. (No matter that the title is Hippolytus; the drama is about Phaedra.) In Medea the dutiful wife who has abandoned her father's family and committed unspeakable crimes on her husband's behalf destroys herself and everyone within reach when her husband abandons her. In Hippolytus the wife is besotted with passion for her stepson. She is torn between the concupiscence inspired by him and...