From schuster@sinewave.com Fri Jan 8 11:07:29 1999 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.1+UW98.09/8.9.1+UW98.09) with ESMTP id LAA09520 for ; Fri, 8 Jan 1999 11:07:25 -0800 Received: from surfa.SineWave.com (surfa.SineWave.com [209.144.164.4]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.1+UW98.09/8.9.1+UW98.09) with ESMTP id LAA10500 for ; Fri, 8 Jan 1999 11:07:24 -0800 Received: from 209.144.165.21 (d-0021.SineWave.com [209.144.165.21]) by surfa.SineWave.com (8.9.0/8.8.7) with SMTP id LAA10156; Fri, 8 Jan 1999 11:07:35 -0800 Message-ID: <369657D3.52E4@sinewave.com> Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1999 11:09:09 -0800 From: Steve Schuster Reply-To: schuster@sinewave.com X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Macintosh; I; PPC) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: happiness and Sophocles References: <36951910.4184@cloud9.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > Actually there are a number of tragedies with happy endings, e.g., > Euripides' Helena, but I suspect they are not among those most often > taught in surveys in translation. > > J.F. Gannon The Helena is so odd in every way, it seems sui generis. If it is indeed tragedy, it is very bad tragedy. I hated reading it, thinking it tragedy, until midway through when its farcical aspects became impossible to take seriously. As some kind of satire it became quite enjoyable. Is this play just laughably bad tragedy, or some sort of humorous exercise? Steve Schuster .