Euripides - Troades ― Edited With Introduction and Commentary

This volume presents a newly edited text of Euripides' Troades, with a scene-by-scene and line-by-line commentary that brings centuries of classical scholarship to bear on a wide variety of questions. These include the interpretation of the play as part of a trilogy (its companion plays were Alexandros and Palamedes, of which we have only fragments), the contribution of the various scenes, speeches, and choral odes to the play, the style and usage of Euripides, and the stage action of the original performance. Since the play was performed in 415, shortly after the Athenian subjugation of Melos, it has frequently been interpreted as a criticism of Athenian foreign policy. The Introduction provides numerous converging arguments against this view and also sshows that those who hold it are forced to ignore a great deal of the text and cannot account for the Helen episode. The commentary, in addition to discussing the topics named above, interrogates the play's intellectual content, topics such as the nature of human success, vicissitude in mortal life, and the workings of the gods in the world, and re-evaluates the way the play's first audience were meant to react to the worldviews of Hecuba and others. It also examines carefully all the places where the text is insecure, places where there are significant variants or where what is transmitted is open to challenge. The book is written with the needs of both comparative beginners and seasoned classical scholars in mind.

David Kovacs, Hugh H. Obear Professor of Classics (Emeritus), University of Virginia

After receiving his doctorate from Harvard University in 1976, David Kovacs joined the classics faculty at the University of Virginia, where he taught Greek and Latin language and literature for forty years. His principal body of work is the six-volume Loeb edition of Euripides' plays and three companion volumes on the text. In matters of interpretation he claims credit, along with a number of other scholars, for a new view of Euripides, which takes its point of departure not from the biographical tradition, parts of which view him as an advanced thinker who is ill-at-ease with the gods, but from the plays themselves: these show Euripides' first-order engagement with such great tragic themes as the fragility of mortal life in the face of the gods.