Iphigeneia in Tauris

Euripides

Jan. 1992 · Oxford University Press

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The modern reader may have difficulty conceiving of Iphigeneia in Tauris as tragedy, for the term in our sense is associated with downfall, death, and disaster. But to the ancient Greeks, the use of heroic legend, the tragic diction and meters, and the tragic actors would have defined it as pure tragedy, the happy ending notwithstanding. While not one of his "deep" dramatic works, the play is Euripidean in many respects, above all in its recurrent theme of escape, symbolized in the rescue of Iphigeneia by Artemis, to whom she was about to be sacrificed. Richmond Lattimore--who has been called the dean of American translators--has translated Iphigeneia in Tauris with skill and subtlety, revealing it as one of the most delicately written and beautifully contrived of the Euripidean "romances."

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The late Richmond Lattimore translated a vast corpus of classical verse, including Homer's Iliad, the odes of Pindar, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, a number of plays by Euripides, and Aristophanes' Frogs--for which he received the Bollingen Translation Prize in 1962. He was also the author of numerous critical works, and was a well-known poet whom James Dickey called "the finest and most sympathetic craftsman of his time."