Description: Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, The Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the editorship of Peter Burian and Charles Segal, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the plays.

In Herakles, Euripides reveals with great subtlety and complexity the often brutal underpinnings of our social arrangements. The play enacts a thoroughly contemporary dilemma about the relationship between personal and state violence to civic order.

Of all of Euripides' plays, this is his most skeptically subversive examination of myth, morality, and power. Depicting Herakles slowly going mad by Hera, the wife of Zeus, this play continues to haunt and inspire readers. Hera hates Herakles because he is one of Zeus's children born of adultery, and in his madness, Herakles is driven to murder his own wife and children and is eventually exiled, by his own accord, to Athens.

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