EURIPIDES II.

Translated with introductionsby William Arrowsmith, Witter Bynner,and Richmond Lattimore '26. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1956. 263 pp.$3.75

This reviewer has long fondled the hope that those who prate of Modern Man might read Euripides. Such a hope is made less forlorn by the present book, for in it Euripides speaks the authentic idiom of modern poetry in a way brilliantly designed to captivate the modem reader. Moreover, these translations again demonstrate the axiom that in the development of our civilization there has never been a surer way for a new generation to prove its newness than by demanding new versions of the classics.

Fourth in a series called Complete GreekTragedies, this volume includes four plays of Euripides, each unique in some particular and each accompanied by a lucid introduction: Cyclops, our only extant satyr-play; Heracles, apparently intended to outrage all Aristotelians; Iphigenia in Tauris, a somewhat un-Euripidean statement of Panhellenism; and Helen, a surprising reshaping of the legend of Helen of Troy.

The Helen, to single out this for comment, informs us that Helen did not forsake her home and elope; instead it was only her wraith which went to Troy with Paris, while the real Helen demurely waited out the Trojan war in Egypt and in the climax of the play was rescued from dishonor by her true lord, Menelaus. Richmond Lattimore's deft version of the drama reveals the experience gained in his superb translations of the Iliad,Pindar, Greek Lyrics, and the Oresteia of Aeschylus. His Helen is another scholarly and human accomplishment. The reader of this review should read the Helen instead, thus following the good counsel of Euripides:

"Go then rejoicing for the great and noble heart in her. There are not many women such as she."