Bacchae

A stand-alone edition of Euripides’s The Bacchae taken from Chicago’s renowned translations of the Greek tragedies.

Dionysus, son of Zeus, has journeyed to the land of his birth expecting to be received as a god. After being rejected by his kin, he turns to the women of Thebes, driving them into a delirious frenzy. Dressed in animal skins and crowned with leaves, they roam wild in the hills as the king tries to restore order—with horrifying results.

Written in the final years of Euripides’s life and first staged posthumously, The Bacchae is presented here in William Arrowsmith’s energetic translation, drawn from the authoritative third edition of the University of Chicago Press’s Complete Greek Tragedies series. An introduction by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most provides essential information about The Bacchae’s first production, plot, and reception in antiquity, and an appendix presents Arrowsmith’s hypothetical reconstruction of fifty lines missing from the denouement of the play.

Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE) wrote some ninety plays, nineteen of which have survived. William Arrowsmith (1924–92) was an American classicist, academic, and translator. Among his translations are works by Petronius, Aristophanes, and Euripides. Glenn W. Most is a visiting member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Mark Griffith is the Klio Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Classical Languages and Literature and professor of classics and of theater, dance, and performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley.