Euripides. Bacchae

Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1996. - 290 p.ISBN10: 0-85668-609-3
ISBN13: 9780856686092
Classical Texts.
With an Introduction, Translation and Commentary by Richard Seaford.Greek Text Oxford University Press. Reproduced from the Oxford Classical Texts.
Edition of Euripides Fabulae by James Diggle by permission of Oxford University Press.Euripides’s remarkable variety of subject, ideas and methods challenges each generation of readers - and audiences - to fresh appraisal and closer definition. This Series of his plays is in the general style of Aris and Phillips’.
Classical Texts: it offers university students and, we hope, sixth-formers, as well as teachers of Classics and Classical Civilization at all levels, new editions which emphasise analytical and literary appreciation. In each volume there is an editor’s introduction which sets the play in its original context, discusses its dramatic and poetic resources, and assesses its meaning. The Greek text is faced on the opposite page by a new English translation which attempts to be both accurate and idiomatic. The Commentary, which is keyed wherever possible to the translation rather than to the Greek, pursues the aims of the Introduction in analyzing structure and development, in annotating and appreciating poetic style, and in explaining the ideas; since the translation itself reveals the editor’s detailed understanding of the Greek, philological comment is confined to special phenomena or problems which affect interpretation. Those are the guidelines within which individual contributors to the Series have been asked to work, but they are free to handle or emphasise whatever they judge important in their particular play, and to choose their own manner of doing so. It is natural that commentaries and commentators on Euripides should reflect his variety as a poet.
These last points are being borne out by the volumes as they appear, all of them different in emphasis and style. Reviewers in a very wide range of journals have been generally sympathetic to the purpose of the Series and appreciative of what it offers. Some of the wannest welcomes have come from countries where English is not the first language. The publisher and I are strongly encouraged and intend if we can to include eventually all the complete plays and a selection of the fragmentary ones.
Bacchae is the ninth complete play in the Series. The General Introduction, by Shirley Barlow, is once again reprinted (pp. 1-23), as is the General Bibliography (pp. 259-64). The Greek text is based (with several changes) on the Oxford Classical Text of Dr. James Diggle, to whom, and to the Clarendon Press, the publisher and I once more express our thanks.