Jason Furman's Reviews > Heracles and Other Plays

And I've now finished all of the Greek tragedies. And it ended with a completist whimper not a bang.

Heracles: Heracles kills his wife and three children halfway through the play for reasons that are not clear--Hera was mad at Zeus for fathering him so she sent a goddess to drive him mad. No real tragic buildup, punishment for choices, misunderstandings, or anything. Just driven into a homicidal rage. Then you need to read the second half of play when you would have thought it was over you get a little interesting self reflection and desire for suicide by Heracles but mostly you get a long dialogue with his pal Theseus.

Heracles' Children: Now Heracles is dead and his children are alive. They're seeking protection from the tyrant Eurystheus. He ends up dead. Overall feels like a bit of a mess of plot, characters, and a bit repetitive from other plays.

Cyclops: The only surviving of hundreds (?) of "Satyr" plays which played at the end of tragic trilogies, this made me think maybe we were not missing much. It is basically the cyclops episode from the Odyssey but with satyrs, more bawdy humor (some of it quite explicitly translated in this volume, like "bonk" for sex), and all of the characters either more humorous or more ridiculous depending on your taste.

I should also note that this is a prose translation so the speeches all appear as full paragraphs not lines of verse. I have mixed feelings about that approach, I don't really "hear" the poetry in most translations (a comment more about me than the translations), but still did not like all of the dense text in this version either.

Finally, I have often wondered if the Greek works we have are the best works or if there were things that were even better than the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia and Medea. These plays and some of the other Euripides plays I was less excited about suggest maybe we do have the best works because they were more actively preserved with more copies made etc. In particular, most of the Greek tragedy we have is from "best of" or instructional collections. The one exception is the random preservation of one volume of Euripides that is part of the alphabet (so part of a fuller collection in alphabetical order). And all of these plays were from the random preservation. And more generally just about everything from the greatest hits volume seems better than the randomly preserved ones. So maybe there was more intentionality than accident in what we have today--although I would still love to have much, much more.

(Note, this collection also includes Alcetis but I had read it already and did not re-read it.)