Is Euripides Dead?

The Coffee and Concepts Series begins the new year with a talk by Hallie Marshall, a theatre and classics scholar from the University of British Columbia. Her talk, “Is Euripides Dead?” takes inspiration from T. S. Eliot’s essay “Euripides and Professor Murray”, a scathing attack on Gilbert Murray’s translations of ancient Greek tragedy. At the time Eliot was a relatively unknown poet working in a bank, while Murray was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and had a significant public profile as a translator and political activist. This talk explores the extent to which Eliot’s essay has come to shape Murray’s posthumous reputation, but also poses questions about how scholars read decades-old criticism across the shifting tides of individual reputations and the larger cultural and socio-political context.