Ion

By Euripides

Book Overview

Series Copy
Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, The Greek Tragedies in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the editorship of Herbert Golder and the late William Arrowsmith, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the plays.
One of Euripides' late plays, Ion is a complex enactment of the changing relations between the human and divine orders and the way in which our understanding of the gods is mediated and re-visioned by myths. The story begins years before the play begins, with the rape of the mortal Kreousa, queen of Athens, by Apollo. Kreousa bears Apollos' child in secret then abandons it. Unbeknownst to her, Apollo has the child brought to his temple at Delphi to be reared by the priestess as ward of the shrine. Many years later, Kreousa, now married to the foreigner Xouthos but childless, comes to Delphi seeking prophecy about children. Apollo, however, speaking through the oracle, bestows the temple ward, Ion, on Xouthos as his child. Enraged, Kreousa conspires to kill as an interloper the very son she has despaired of finding. After mother and son both try to kill each other, the priestess reveals the birth tokens that permit Kreousa to recognize and embrace the child she thought was dead. Ion discovers the truth of his parentage and departs for Athens, as a mixed blood of humanity and divinity, to participate in the life of the polis.
In Ion, disturbing riptides of thought and feeling run just below the often shimmering surfaces of Euripidean melodrama. Although the play contains some of Euripides' most beautiful lyrical writing, it quivers throughout with near disasters, poorly informed actions and misdirected intentions that almost result in catastrophe. Kreousa says at one point that good and evil do not mix, but Euripides' argument, and what the youthful Ion strives to understand, is that human beings are not only compounded of good and evil, but that the two are often the same thing differently experienced, differently understood, just as beauty and violence are mixed both in the gods and in the mortal world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195094514
• ISBN13: 9780195094510
• Release Date: June 1996
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Euripides exposes Apollo, the god of truth, as a liar

"Ion" is one of many plays by Euripides in which he tried to show his Athenian audience that when judged by ordinary human standards the gods themselves would fall short. In this play, Apollo, the god of truth, brutally rapes a helpless young girl, Creusa, and then abandons her, which is not exactly something new for one of the Olympian deities. Creusa has a son (Ion), whom she abandons in a cave; when she goes back to find the child, he is gone. Years later she marries Xuthus, a solider of fortune who becomes king of Athens, which is where Euripides picks up the story. At the start of the play Xuthus and Creusa are childless and go to Delphi for aid. There they are told that Ion, a young temple servant who has been raised from infancy, is the son of Xuthus. Creusa, outraged that Apollo let their own son die but preserved the life of a child begotten by Xuthus on some Delphian woman, tries to have Ion killed. Of course, in reality, Ion is her own child, abandoned in that cave. Condemned to death by the Delphians, Creusa escapes Ion's vengeance by taking refuge at Apollo's altar. There the priestess presents the tokens that allow Creusa to recognize Ion as her own son. Telling him the truth about his father, Ion tries to enter the temple to demand of Apollo the truth. There is some academic debate over how much "Ion" reflects the noted religious skepticism of Euripides. After all, we can certainly believe that Creusa was raped by a human and that he child died in that cave and that the priestess who bore Ion was simply setting up a convenient fiction that would make her son the prince of Athens. Apollo is the subject of the indictment, but the gods who introduce and end the play are Hermes and Athena. However, I do consider "Ion" to be one of the best examples of Euripides's cynical view of the gods the Greeks were supposed to be worshipping. Athena forestalls a confrontation between Ion and Apollo, but this particular example of deus ex machina certainly rings hollow. After all, Delphi is Apollo's holy place and if Athena's words are true, he should be there to reveal the truth to his son instead. Ultimately, "Ion" is one of the more provocative of the extant plays of Euripides.