Ion is one of Euripides' most appealing and inventive plays. With its story of an anonymous temple slave discovered to be the son of Apollo and Creusa, an Athenian princess, it is a rare example of Athenian myth dramatized for the Athenian stage. It explores the Delphic Oracle and Greek piety; the Athenian ideology of autochthony and empire; and the tragic suffering and longing of the mythical foundling and his mother, whose experiences are represented uniquely in surviving Greek literature. The plot anticipates later Greek comedy, while the recognition scene builds on a tradition founded by Homer's Odyssey and Aeschylus' Oresteia. The introduction sets out the main issues in interpretation and discusses the play's contexts in myth, religion, law, politics, and society. By attending to language, style, meter, and dramatic technique, this edition with its detailed commentary makes Ion accessible to students, scholars, and readers of Greek at all levels.

Euripides’ Ion is a highly complex and elusive play and thus poses considerable difficulties to any interpreter. On the basis of a new recension of the text, this commentary offers explanations of the language, literary technique, and realia of the play and discusses the main issues of interpretation. In this way the reader is provided with the material required for an appreciation of this entertaining as well as provocative dramatic composition.

Ancient Greek play from circa 414-412 BC about the orphan, Ion, in his search for his origins.

One of Euripides' late plays, Ion tells the story of Kreousa, queen of Athens, and her son by the god Apollo. Apollo raped Kreousa; she secretly abandoned their child, assuming thereafter that the god had allowed him to die. Ion, however, is saved to become a ward of Apollo's temple at Delphi. In the play, Kreousa and her husband Xouthos go to Delphi to seek a remedy for their childlessness; Apollo, speaking through his oracle, gives Ion to Xouthos as a son, enraging the apparently still childless Kreousa. Mother tries to kill son, son traps mother at an altar and is about to do her violence; just then, Apollo's priestess appears to reveal the birth tokens that permit Kreousa to recognize and embrace the child she thought she had lost forever. Ion must accept Apollo's duplicity along with his benevolence toward his son. Disturbing riptides of thought and feeling run just below the often shimmering surface of this masterpiece of Euripidean melodrama. Despite Ion's "happy ending", the concatenation of mistaken identities, failed intrigues, and misdirected violence enacts a gripping and serious drama. Euripides leaves the audience to come to terms with the shifting relations of god and mortals in his complex and equivocal interpretation of myth.