Produced in 421 B.C., Peace is, in one respect, unique among Aristophanes' plays. The typical Aristophanic plot takes its start from something that is wrong with the current state of Athenian life and which, while it may be capable in principle of being corrected, stands next to no chance of ever being put right in practice except by the methods of comic fantasy. Peace likewise takes its start from something that is wrong with the current situation - namely, as in Acharnians and Lysistrata, the continuing war against the Peloponnesians; but on this occasion the wrong was one that was actually on the point of being set right in the hard world of reality. Aristophanes celebrates in anticipation of the conclusion of the great war with Sparta. Peace, we are made to see, is within the grasp of the Greek peoples; let them make one final effort, and all difficulties and dangers will evaporate in the joys of feasting and rustic leisure. This volume presents the Greek text with facing-page translation, commentary and notes. The second edition has been substantially updated with extensive addenda to the Notes and Bibliography.

Knights was the first play to be produced by Aristophanes on his own behalf. In it, he launched a violent attack on Cleon, the leading politician of the day, on the whole style of leadership that he represented and on a system which seemed to guarantee that a bad leader could be displaced by a worse. This edition presents the Greek text with facing-page translation, introduction, commentary and notes.

The history of European drama began at the festivals of Dionysus in ancient Athens, where tragedy, satyr-drama and comedy were performed. Understanding this background is vital for students of classical, literary and theatrical subjects, and Alan H. Sommerstein's accessible study is the ideal introduction.
The book begins by looking at the social and theatrical contexts and different characteristics of the three genres of ancient Greek drama. It then examines the five main dramatists whose works survive - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander - discussing their styles, techniques and ideas, and giving short synopses of all their extant plays.

The comedies of the Athenian dramatist Menander (c. 342-291 BC) and his contemporaries were the ultimate source of a Western tradition of light drama that has continued to the present day. Yet for over a millennium, Menander's own plays were thought to have been completely lost. Thanks to a long and continuing series of papyrus discoveries, Menander has now been able to take his place among the major surviving ancient Greek dramatists alongside Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. In this book, sixteen contributors examine and explore the Menander we know today in light of the various literary, intellectual, and social contexts in which his plays can be viewed. Topics covered include: the society, culture, and politics of his generation; the intellectual currents of the period; the literary precursors who inspired Menander (or whom he expected his audiences to recall); and responses to Menander, from his own time to ours. As the first wide-ranging collective study of Menander in English, this book is essential reading for those interested in ancient comedy the world over.

The comedies of the Athenian dramatist Menander (c. 342-291 BC) and his contemporaries were the ultimate source of a Western tradition of light drama that has continued to the present day. Yet for over a millennium, Menander's own plays were thought to have been completely lost. Thanks to a long and continuing series of papyrus discoveries, Menander has now been able to take his place among the major surviving ancient Greek dramatists alongside Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. In this book, sixteen contributors examine and explore the Menander we know today in light of the various literary, intellectual, and social contexts in which his plays can be viewed. Topics covered include: the society, culture, and politics of his generation; the intellectual currents of the period; the literary precursors who inspired Menander (or whom he expected his audiences to recall); and responses to Menander, from his own time to ours. As the first wide-ranging collective study of Menander in English, this book is essential reading for those interested in ancient comedy the world over.

Aristophanes' Frogs was produced in 405 BC, shortly after the deaths of the two great veteran Athenian tragic dramatists, Euripides and Sophocles. It was restaged a year later, a few weeks before starving Athens at last accepted defeat in the long Peloponnesian War. Dionysus, the god of drama, wine and joyful celebration, goes down to the underworld to bring his favourite poet, Euripides, back from the dead, and surprises both himself and the audience by bringing back instead Aeschylus, who had died fifty years before, with the mission of saving both Athens and Tragedy from ruin. The contest for the throne of tragedy between Euripides and Aeschylus is the earliest sustained piece of literary criticism in the Western tradition. This edition is the first to combine a reliable English translation of Frogs with a full explanatory commentary; it also includes a freshly constituted Greek text. [Greek text with facing-page translation, commentary and notes.]

This volume is the first edition with commentary since 1907 of AristophanesAe last surviving play, in which, as so often before, an audacious and imaginative hero finds a miraculous remedy for the all-too-real ills of the contemporary worlduin this case the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who donAet deserve it at the expense of those who do. To achieve this he needs the aid of no less than three gods, and the play contains the fullest single surviving account of a visit to a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius. This volume will include the ADDENDA to all previous plays, but the INDEXES proved far more extensive than anticipated and will now be published as a separate volume 12 to complete the Aristophanes series.

The importance of oaths to ancient Greek culture can hardly be overstated, especially in the political and judicial fields; but they have never been the object of a comprehensive, systematic study. This volume derives from a research project on the oath in ancient Greece, and comprises seventeen chapters by experts in law, in political and social history, in literary criticism, and in cross-cultural studies, exploring a wide range of aspects of the subject. Topics covered include the nature of ancient Greek oaths; the functions they performed within communities and in relations between them; their exploitation in literary texts and at critical moments in history; and connections between Greek oath phenomena and those of other cultures with which Greeks came into contact, from the Hittites to the Romans. It is an important phenomenon of ancient society that has never before been systematically and comprehensively studied.

Ecclesiazusae, probably produced in 391 BC, is at once a typically Aristophanic fantasy of gender inversion, obscenity and farce, the earliest surviving work in the western Utopian tradition, and the source of a blueprint for a communist society on which Plato may well have drawn in his Republic. This edition attempts to set the play, more closely than has usually been done, against the political background at the time of its production, when Athens has just spurned what proved to be the last opportunity to escape from a war it did not have the resources to fight, and to define the details of staging as precisely as the text will allow. [Greek text with facing-page translation, commentary and notes.]

This volume completes the twelve-volume series The Comedies of Aristophanes, begun in 1980, and is comprised of comprehensive indexes to the preceding eleven volumes. The book is divided into three parts: I. Texts and Passages, II. Persons, and III. General. Alan H Sommerstein is Professor of Greek and Director of the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception, University of Nottingham.

This volume completes the twelve-volume series The Comedies of Aristophanes, begun in 1980, and is comprised of comprehensive indexes to the preceding eleven volumes. The book is divided into three parts: I. Texts and Passages, II. Persons, and III. General. Alan H Sommerstein is Professor of Greek and Director of the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception, University of Nottingham.

Thesmophoriazusae is perhaps the funniest of all Aristophanes' comedies, in which gender inversion and transvestism run riot as the tragic dramatist Euripides is made to take part in a hilarious spoof on some of his own favourite plot lines, with his own life at stake as well as that of his loyal and much-put-upon old relative. This edition offers a freshly constituted text making use of recently published papyri, together with the first fully annotated English translation there has been of this play. The volume presents the original Greek text with facing-page translation, commentary and notes.

Aeschylus (ca. 525-456 BCE), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world's great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens and fought against the Persians at Marathon. He won the tragic prize at the City Dionysia thirteen times between ca. 499 and 458, and in his later years was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once.

Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy, comprising "Agamemnon," "Libation-Bearers," and "Eumenides," presenting the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, the revenge taken by their son Orestes, the pursuit of Orestes by his mother's avenging Furies, his trial and acquittal at Athens, Athena's pacification of the Furies, and the blessings they both invoke upon the Athenian people.

The earliest comic drama to survive, Acharnians is a highly committed play, its message being that Athens war with the Peloponnesians can and should be ended, and that peace will mean the restoration of normal life after six years' separation of the country people from their land. First published in 1980, this scholarly edition has been continuously updated, and presents the Greek text with facing-page English translation, commentary and notes. This volume also contains the general introduction to the complete set of Aristophanes comedies in the Aris & Phillips Classical Texts series.

Many of the themes of Aeschylus' Suppliants - the treatment of refugees, forced marriage, ethnic and cultural clashes, decisions on war and peace, political deception - resonate strongly in the world of today. The play was, however, for many years neglected in comparison to Aeschylus' other works, probably in part because it was wrongly believed to be very early and hence 'primitive', and this edition, aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students, is the first since 1889 to offer an accessible English commentary based on the Greek text. This provides particular help with the peculiarities of tragic, especially Aeschylean, Greek. An extensive introduction discusses the Danaid myth and its many variations, the four-play production (tetralogy) of which Suppliants formed part, the underlying social and religious issues and presuppositions, the conditions of performance, and the place of Suppliants in Aeschylus' work, among other topics.

For eight centuries after his death Menander was the third most popular poet in the Greek-speaking world, and his plays, through Roman imitations and adaptations, engendered a tradition of European light drama that extends to our own day. But it is only since 1844 that some of the actual texts of Menander's plays have been rediscovered, mostly in Egyptian papyri. Two of these have given us four-fifths of the script of Samia (The Woman from Samos), a play of deception and misunderstanding in which a marriage that everyone desires almost fails to happen, two women and a baby are almost ruined, and a loving father almost loses his only son, because the people at home and the people abroad have both been doing things behind each other's backs - but somehow everything ends happily after all. This is the first full-scale edition with English commentary and is suitable for upper-level students.

For eight centuries after his death Menander was the third most popular poet in the Greek-speaking world, and his plays, through Roman imitations and adaptations, engendered a tradition of European light drama that extends to our own day. But it is only since 1844 that some of the actual texts of Menander's plays have been rediscovered, mostly in Egyptian papyri. Two of these have given us four-fifths of the script of Samia (The Woman from Samos), a play of deception and misunderstanding in which a marriage that everyone desires almost fails to happen, two women and a baby are almost ruined, and a loving father almost loses his only son, because the people at home and the people abroad have both been doing things behind each other's backs - but somehow everything ends happily after all. This is the first full-scale edition with English commentary and is suitable for upper-level students.

The oath was an institution of fundamental importance across a wide range of social interactions throughout the ancient Greek world, making a crucial contribution to social stability and harmony; yet there has been no comprehensive, dedicated scholarly study of the subject for over a century. This volume of a two-volume study explores the nature of oaths as Greeks perceived it, the ways in which they were used (and sometimes abused) in Greek life and literature, and their inherent binding power.

The oath was an institution of fundamental importance across a wide range of social interactions throughout the ancient Greek world, making a crucial contribution to social stability and harmony; yet there has been no comprehensive, dedicated scholarly study of the subject for over a century. This volume of a two-volume study explores how oaths functioned in the working of the Greek city-state (polis) and in relations between different states as well as between Greeks and non-Greeks.

Following the volume of six fragmentary Sophoclean tragedies published in this series in 2006, Alan Sommerstein and Thomas Talboy now present seven more. Three of these dramatise successive phases of the story of how a jealous and treacherous Odysseus brought about the judicial murder of the culture-hero Palamedes and of the terrible revenge taken by Palamedes' father Nauplius. The volume also includes dramas about the first day's fighting of the Trojan War ( The Shepherds ), about the foundation of the mystery-cult of Eleusis and the birth of agriculture ( Triptolemus , one of Sophocles' earliest plays), about a young woman who contrived the death of her father in order to save her beloved ( Oenomaus ) and about a young man who killed his mother in obedience to the last injunctions of his father ( The Epigoni or Eriphyle ). The volume includes the text and translation of all the surviving fragments (and of a selection of other texts that give us information about these plays), with full commentary and an introduction to each play discussing, among other things, the development of the myth and the likely content of the play so far as it can be reconstructed. The plays included are The Epigoni , Oenomaus , Palamedes , The Arrival of Nauplius , Nauplius and the Beacon , The Shepherds and Triptolemus . Greek text with facing-page translation.

Aeschylus (ca. 525-456 BCE), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world's great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens and fought against the Persians at Marathon. He won the tragic prize at the City Dionysia thirteen times between ca. 499 and 458, and in his later years was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once.

Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The third volume of this edition collects all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays.

Many of the themes of Aeschylus' Suppliants - the treatment of refugees, forced marriage, ethnic and cultural clashes, decisions on war and peace, political deception - resonate strongly in the world of today. The play was, however, for many years neglected in comparison to Aeschylus' other works, probably in part because it was wrongly believed to be very early and hence 'primitive', and this edition, aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students, is the first since 1889 to offer an accessible English commentary based on the Greek text. This provides particular help with the peculiarities of tragic, especially Aeschylean, Greek. An extensive introduction discusses the Danaid myth and its many variations, the four-play production (tetralogy) of which Suppliants formed part, the underlying social and religious issues and presuppositions, the conditions of performance, and the place of Suppliants in Aeschylus' work, among other topics.

The Athenian tragic dramatist Sophocles wrote over 120 plays in his sixty-year career, of which only seven have survived complete. This volume presents what is known, or can be inferred or conjectured, about half a dozen plays known to us only from quotations, indirect references, and occasionally a papyrus. The selection includes four plays about the Trojan War and its aftermath, all concerned with Achilles or his son Neoptolemus (The Diners, Troilus, Polyxene, and Hermione), and two presenting episodes from Athenian legend (Tereus and Phaedra). The editors have taken a special interest in the history of the myths that Sophocles dramatised and the often startling modifications he made to them; several of the plays also throw important light on parallel dramas of Euripides such as Hippolytus, Andromache, and Hecuba. A second volume of Fragmentary Plays is now available. Greek text with facing-page translation.

The history of European drama began at the festivals of Dionysus in ancient Athens, where tragedy, satyr-drama and comedy were performed. Understanding this background is vital for students of classical, literary and theatrical subjects, and Alan H. Sommerstein's accessible study is the ideal introduction.
The book begins by looking at the social and theatrical contexts and different characteristics of the three genres of ancient Greek drama. It then examines the five main dramatists whose works survive - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander - discussing their styles, techniques and ideas, and giving short synopses of all their extant plays.

Following the volume of six fragmentary Sophoclean tragedies published in this series in 2006, Alan Sommerstein and Thomas Talboy now present seven more. Three of these dramatise successive phases of the story of how a jealous and treacherous Odysseus brought about the judicial murder of the culture-hero Palamedes and of the terrible revenge taken by Palamedes' father Nauplius. The volume also includes dramas about the first day's fighting of the Trojan War ( The Shepherds ), about the foundation of the mystery-cult of Eleusis and the birth of agriculture ( Triptolemus , one of Sophocles' earliest plays), about a young woman who contrived the death of her father in order to save her beloved ( Oenomaus ) and about a young man who killed his mother in obedience to the last injunctions of his father ( The Epigoni or Eriphyle ). The volume includes the text and translation of all the surviving fragments (and of a selection of other texts that give us information about these plays), with full commentary and an introduction to each play discussing, among other things, the development of the myth and the likely content of the play so far as it can be reconstructed. The plays included are The Epigoni , Oenomaus , Palamedes , The Arrival of Nauplius , Nauplius and the Beacon , The Shepherds and Triptolemus . Greek text with facing-page translation.