A landmark anthology of the masterpieces of Greek drama, featuring all-new, highly accessible translations of some of the world’s most beloved plays, including Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Bacchae, Electra, Medea, Antigone, and Oedipus the King Featuring translations by Emily Wilson, Frank Nisetich, Sarah Ruden, Rachel Kitzinger, Mary Lefkowitz, and James Romm The great plays of Ancient Greece are among the most enduring and important legacies of the Western world. Not only is the influence of Greek drama palpable in everything from Shakespeare to modern television, the insights contained in Greek tragedy have shaped our perceptions of the nature of human life. Poets, philosophers, and politicians have long borrowed and adapted the ideas and language of Greek drama to help them make sense of their own times. This exciting curated anthology features a cross section of the most popular--and most widely taught--plays in the Greek canon . Fresh translations into contemporary English breathe new life into the texts while capturing, as faithfully as possible, their original meaning. This outstanding collection also offers short biographies of the playwrights, enlightening and clarifying introductions to the plays, and helpful annotations at the bottom of each page. Appendices by prominent classicists on such topics as “Greek Drama and Politics,” “The Theater of Dionysus,” and “Plato and Aristotle on Tragedy” give the reader a rich contextual background. A detailed time line of the dramas, as well as a list of adaptations of Greek drama to literature, stage, and film from the time of Seneca to the present, helps chart the history of Greek tragedy and illustrate its influence on our culture from the Roman Empire to the present day. With a veritable who’s who of today’s most renowned and distinguished classical translators, The Greek Plays is certain to be the definitive text for years to come. Praise for The Greek Plays “Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm deftly have gathered strong new translations from Frank Nisetich, Sarah Ruden, Rachel Kitzinger, Emily Wilson, as well as from Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm themselves. There is a freshness and pungency in these new translations that should last a long time. I admire also the introductions to the plays and the biographies and annotations provided. Closing essays by five distinguished classicists--the brilliant Daniel Mendelsohn and the equally skilled David Rosenbloom, Joshua Billings, Mary-Kay Gamel, and Gregory Hays--all enlightened me. This seems to me a helpful light into our gathering darkness.” --Harold Bloom ...

ldquo;Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm deftly have gathered strong new translations from Frank Nisetich, Sarah Ruden, Rachel Kitzinger, Emily Wilson, as well as from Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm themselves. There is a freshness and pungency in these new translations that should last a long time. I admire also the introductions to the plays and the biographies and annotations provided. Closing essays by five distinguished classicists—the brilliant Daniel Mendelsohn and the equally skilled David Rosenbloom, Joshua Billings, Mary-Kay Gamel, and Gregory Hays—all enlightened me. This seems to me a helpful light into our gathering darkness.”—Harold Bloom
 
“The reception of Ancient Greek theater is as lively as it’s ever been in its 2,500-year history, both on the stage and on the page. Thanks to these sixteen brilliant new renditions by five leading scholar-translators, the three great Athenian masters of tragic drama, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, speak to us once again in powerfully contemporary accents on such fundamental issues as gender, religion, and democratic politics.”—Paul Cartledge, author Democracy: A Life
 
“The Greek Plays is destined to become a perennial collection, essential reading for students, scholars, and lovers of Greek tragedy alike. This engaging compilation imbues all the ancient plays within its pages with new life by offering rich, informative historical, literary, and cultural context and fresh, accessible translations by some of the most talented classicists working in the field today.”—Bryan Doerries, author of The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today

Autorentext
Mary Lefkowitz is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities emerita at Wellesley College. A recipient of the National Humanities Award, Lefkowitz is the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History; Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths; and Euripides & the Gods.
 
James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and the author of several books, including Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero and Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire. He has edited numerous translations of ancient Greek texts, including the Anabasis of Arrian for the volume The Campaigns of Alexander in the distinguished Landmark Series of Ancient Historians.

Leseprobe
Aeschylus

Aeschylus (c.525–456 b.c.) came from a propertied family in Eleusis. His first tragedies were performed in the early 490s, but it was not until 484 that he won his first victory in the competition at the City Dionysia. He fought against the Persians at Marathon in 490 and probably also at Salamis in 480. In 472 he described the battle at Salamis in his Persians, the earliest of his surviving tragedies. In 470, Hieron, the tyrant of the Greek city of Syracuse, invited Aeschylus to Sicily to stage a performance of his Women of Aetna (now lost). After returning to Athens, Aeschylus won first prize at the Great Dionysia with five of his other extant tragedies, the Seven Against Thebes (467), the Suppliants (463), and the trilogy, translated in this volume, known as the Oresteia (458), consisting of the Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides.

Although Aristophanes, in his comedy the Frogs (405 b.c.), satirizes Aeschylus’ style as pompous, bombastic, and sententious, in his extant dramas Aeschylus writes in a variety of modes, ranging from straightforward exposition to densely poetic language characterized by distinctive combinations of words and metaphors. The old men in the choruses of Persians and the Agamemnon use sonorous words and speak in complex rhythms that bring profundity and emotional depth to their reflections on the human condition and the inscrutability of the gods. Metrical motifs carried over from the Agamemnon reappear in the terrifying songs of the Furies in the final play of the Oresteia trilogy, the Eumenides.

In 456, Aeschylus was invited back to Sicily, and he died there. But the Athenians did not forget about him. Half a century later his dramas were so well remembered that even while making fun of his writing style, Aristophanes endorsed his work for its ethical and patriotic values, wishing that Aeschylus could be brought back to life.

Introduction to Aeschylus’ Persians

So far as we know, only three Greek tragedies dealt with recent history rather than age-old myths, and all three portrayed episodes from what we now call the Persian Wars: the twenty-year stretch of armed conflict (499–479 b.c.) that pitted various coalitions of Greek cities against the vast, wealthy, monarchic Persian Empire. The first two of these dramatic experiments were the work of Phrynichus, but both are now lost; Aeschylus’ Persians came third, in 472 b.c. It follows by only eight years the event at its core, the surprising, seemingly miraculous Greek victory over the Persian navy at the island of Salamis, off the west coast of Attica. That victory, achieved …