Alcestis by Euripides

featuring William H. Race, George L. Paddison Professor of Classics Emeritus

Euripides’ earliest surviving classic is a profound meditation on human mortality

—Alcestis is a rarity, a tragedy reversed. With typical Euripidean irony, a superman triumphs where a god fails. —Booklist

—The theme of Euripides’ Alcestis blends the primitive folk-tale of the self-sacrificing bride, Alcestis, and of Heracles’ heroic struggles with the ogre Death, with a morality tale of “virtue rewarded,” in this case twice rewarded. —Liverpool University Press

—One of Euripides’ most subtle and witty plays, Alcestis compellingly argues that, for Euripides, suffering humanizes, that exemption makes a man selfish and childish, and that only the courage to accept both life and death leads to the realization of one’s humanity, and, in the case of Alcestis, to heroism. —Goodreads

—Euripides was “the creator of…that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare’s Othello, Racine’s Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg,” in which “imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates.”  —The Cambridge History of Classical Literature

Meeting Date: Tuesday, March 1

Cost: $25, includes a copy of the book shipped to your home

Register online or call 919.962.1544