Grief Lessons
by Anne Carson
Buy on Amazon"Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless - women and children, slaves and barbarians - for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Euripides' plays rarely won first prize in the great dramatic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world." "Four of those tragedies are here presented in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson.…