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.

This book is a study of Euripides’ Ion, produced in 412 BC at a period of political crisis in Athens. Through careful analysis of its political, psychological, religious and poetic aspects and use of modern critical theory and recent scholarship on Athenian ethnicity, the Ion emerges as a polyphonic work expressing different and converging truths.

Tells the story of a young man's search for his identity, and a woman's attempt to come to terms with her past. This study outlines the pre-history and later reception of the Ion myth, and provides a literary interpretation of the play's main themes, aiming to combine analysis of the text with a consideration of its cultural contexts.

One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides (ca. 485-406 BCE) has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, surprising plot twists, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. Here, in the third volume of a new edition that is receiving much praise, is the text and translation of three of his plays. Trojan Women, a play about the causes and consequences of war, develops the theme of the tragic unpredictability of life. Iphigenia among the Taurians and Ion exhibit tragic themes and situations (the murder of close relatives). Each ends happily with a joyful reunion. As in the first three volumes of this edition, David Kovacs gives us a freshly edited Greek text and an admired new translation that, in the words of Greece and Rome, is "close to the Greek and reads fluently and well;" his introduction to each play and explanatory notes offer readers judicious guidance.