Euripides

"The Bacchae" was part of a trilogy that won first place at the Athens City Dionysia. In addition to "The Bacchae" this edition includes "Ion," "The Trojan Women" and "Helen."

In his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music. Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of the tragic....

In "Electra and Other Plays" we have a collection of five of the classical dramatist Euripides' best plays. In the title work "Electra," before the events of this play, the Greek general Agamemnon sacrificed a daughter to appease the gods and gain permission to sail for Troy. His wife Clytemnestra never forgave him, and upon his return she and her lover murder him. Euripides picks up the story with the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, the young...

"Desolation and despair reign supreme in the kingdom of Mycenae. The great Agamemnon has been brutally murdered; his son Orestes has fled and his daughter Electra has been imprisoned within the walls of the castle. All hope seems lost until the sacred oracle speaks and replaces Electra's broken spirit with an unquenchable desire for justice and bloody vengeance."