To cite a random example, here are two lines from the opening of Alcestis' speech to her husband at vv.

Those dozen labors have inspired countless playwrights, poets, and philosophers throughout the centuries, not to mention Walt Disney Pictures. Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet. i began with silence and secrecy - there’s no trusting the tongue, it loved to punish others and draw disaster in itself. We’ve lost a man of greatest merit, / truly a devil of spirit, / our greatest, our most legendary friend. Two interesting characters that also make an appearance in the play and whose presence lends to the mystery of its interpretation are the seer Tiresias and Pentheus’s grandfather, Kadmos.

E. Housman's "Fragment of A Greek Tragedy," a hilarious parody of a brutally literal translation of a segment of a hypothetical Greek tragedy. Rather than regarding this silence as an obstacle, she uses it to her advantage in The Bakkhai; by leaving it untranslated, the furtive nature of a multifaceted god is heightened within her text. Catharsis, by his definition, is a type of cleaning: "we experience, then expurgate these emotions". He is also the patron god of Athenian music and drama, a fertility god represented by the phallus, and a god who comforts the dying by freeing them from fear of death.

The fact that Euripides himself was critical of the traditional Greek gods adds to the problems of interpretation. Euripides’ plays rarely won first prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world. To be mortal is to go only forward, and both demigods go that way together, walking out of mythology into mortality.Admetos loves his wife and yet is okay to watch her die for him: either way, however, he gets her back.