okay a day or two later i am ~still~ thinking about alcestis//some stuff i think i forgot to mention that i'd intended to, but another thing that makes alcestis so weird and cool is how integral the more comedic elements are to the plot, to the tragedy.

The issue of such a union can take a reader's breath away because it just seems so right—a work that stands firmly on its own but is somehow contented to be the sum of its parts. Theories have ranged widely, from a claim that the drama mirrors a deathbed conversion of a poet who had previously rejected the pantheon of gods to an assertion that it is a commentary on religious fanaticism. Hippolytos] seems to want to place Artemis, and himself, in a special third gender—the translucent gender—unpolluted by flesh or change.

Drove his hand straight up through heaven in Atlas' place and held the starry houses of the gods aloft all by himself. The old heroes killed monsters, but we use monsters to kill, like the drones in her prose poem “Fate, Federal Court, Moon,” which memorializes the murder of a Yemeni engineer’s family. Together, Iris and Lyssa drive Herakles mad, prompting him to kill the family he has just protected. When Theseus finally arrives, he sounds alternately like Harold Bloom and Andy Warhol, quoting Melville on the sperm whale and then trying to convince Herakles that his penance can take the form of a lion-print T-shirt: “You wear it, you shoot yourself, I sell it, say Sotheby’s, bullet hole and all. They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor's widow takes

What do you get when you cross Euripides’ classic tragedy, the artistic stylings of Rosanna Bruno, and the poetic touch of Anne Carson? In Grief Lessons, the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson's spare and beautiful new translation of four of Euripides' lesser known tragedies, we have a kind of primer on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to ideology. This fate is horrifying, but what I found most horrifying about it was its ambiguity: she has received a prophecy about her fate, but we shall never really see the truth of it. At the sight of him she is instantly incinerated and Zeus puts the fetus in his thigh to finish gestating, from which appendage of his father Dionysus is eventually born. And having changed my form from god to mortal, I am here at the streams of Dirke and the water of Ismenos.

Seeing “the ground covered in corpses” and learning, from Amphitryon, that Herakles is responsible, he concludes, “This agony comes from Hera. lots of people claim to ‘love the translation’ of a text of which they don't speak the original language and I'm always feeling stupid and wondering, like, if you don’t speak the original how can you judge the translation? Then Iris, a messenger of the gods, and Lyssa, the goddess of madness, appear, supposedly at the behest of Hera, Zeus’ wife, who is still sore at her husband over the affair that produced Herakles. There is a sense of inevitable death that pervades this play: taking place during a mythical war, it serves on some level as a reflection of the destruction of society that Euripides himself would have feared during the Peloponnesian Wars. But it is also because her work is unfailingly emotionally astute, the references, like those overalls, resonant rather than arbitrary.