This book introduces readers who may have no previous knowledge of Menander's comedies to Epitrepontes (The Arbitration), arguably the most exquisitely crafted of his better-preserved plays. It explains what we know about the play, how we know it, and how far we can tentatively fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Sommerstein analyses the nature of the dramatic genre (Athenian New Comedy) to which Epitrepontes belongs. He assesses the plot and the characters, every one of whom makes an essential contribution to the uplifting outcome, and the social and ethical assumptions that dramatist and audience shared. As well as looking at the influences of earlier drama and of contemporary philosophical and popular thought, he considers the afterlife of Menandrian comedy in general and of Epitrepontes in particular, both in antiquity and in modern times, but also in the long period in between, when Menander was the great dramatist whose plays were thought to have been irrevocably lost.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Tangled Ways of Zeus is a collection of studies written over the last twenty years by the distinguished classicist Alan Sommerstein about various aspects of ancient Greek tragedy (and, in some cases, other related genres). It complements his recent collection of studies in Greek comedy, Talking about Laughter (OUP, 2009). Some of the essays have not been published previously, others have appeared in books or journals hard to find outside major academic libraries. Each chapter deals with its own topic, but between them they build up a multifaceted picture of the dramatists (especially Aeschylus and Sophocles), the genre, and its interactions with the society, culture, and religion of classical Athens.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘But he who would provoke me should remember
That those who rifle wasps’ nests will be stung!’

Writing at a time of political and social crisis in Athens, Aristophanes (c.447–c.385 BC) was an eloquent, yet bawdy, challenger to the demagogue and the sophist. In Lysistrata and The Acharnians, two pleas for an end to the long war between Athens and Sparta, a band of women and a lone peasant respectively defeat the political establishment. The darker comedy of The Clouds satirizes Athenian philosophers, Socrates in particular, and reflects the uncertainties of a generation in which all traditional religious and ethical beliefs were being challenged.

For this edition Alan Sommerstein has completely revised his translation of these three plays, bringing out the full nuances of Aristophanes’ ribald humour and intricate word play, with a new introduction explaining the historical and cultural background to the plays.

This book introduces readers who may have no previous knowledge of Menander's comedies to Epitrepontes (The Arbitration), arguably the most exquisitely crafted of his better-preserved plays. It explains what we know about the play, how we know it, and how far we can tentatively fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Sommerstein analyses the nature of the dramatic genre (Athenian New Comedy) to which Epitrepontes belongs. He assesses the plot and the characters, every one of whom makes an essential contribution to the uplifting outcome, and the social and ethical assumptions that dramatist and audience shared. As well as looking at the influences of earlier drama and of contemporary philosophical and popular thought, he considers the afterlife of Menandrian comedy in general and of Epitrepontes in particular, both in antiquity and in modern times, but also in the long period in between, when Menander was the great dramatist whose plays were thought to have been irrevocably lost.

Professor Sommerstein here presents a freshly constituted text, with introduction and commentary, of Eumenides, the climactic play of the only surviving complete Greek tragic trilogy, the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Eumenides is of all Athenian tragic dramas the one most consciously designed to be relevant to the situation of the Athenian state at the time of its performance (458 BC), and seems to have contained daring innovations both in technique and in ideas. The introduction and commentary to this edition seek to bring out how Aeschylus shaped to his purpose the legends he inherited, and ended the tragic story of Agamemnon's family in a celebration of Athenian civic unity and justice. The commentary also pays detailed attention to the linguistic, metrical and textual problems to be encountered by the reader.

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 book brings together fourteen studies by Alan Sommerstein on Aristophanes and his fellow comic dramatists, some of which have not previously appeared in print. The studies cover almost all the major topics of Sommerstein's work - the nature and functions of comedy in Aristophanes' time, its connections with the society and politics of its day, the question of Aristophanes' own political stances, the light comedy can throw on classical Athenians' perception of basic social divisions (age, gender, citizen/alien, free/slave), comedy's exploitation of the expressive resources of the Greek language, the composition and production history of individual plays, and the history of the genre as a whole.

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.]

Clouds is a partly revised version of a play that failed when it was first produced. It has always fascinated (and usually shocked) students of philosophy because of its portrayal of Socrates as an atheist and a teacher of dishonest rhetoric, justly punished by the agents of the gods whom he refuses to recognise. This third edition was published in 1991, and has been reprinted in 2007 with addenda and a new bibliography. [Greek text with facing-page translation, commentary and notes.]

Wasps was first produced at the Lenaea festival of 422 BC. The play is at once a political satire and also, like Clouds and the lost Banqueters, a comedy on the theme of the conflict of generations. The play follows the efforts of a mischievous and mercurial old man to escape the control of a stern and heavy son. In its political aspect it attacks the leading Athenian politician Cleon, as Knights had. But Wasps represents a departure as it concentrates less on Cleon personally, and more on his and his associates' alleged domination of the law courts and the men who served in them as jurors. First published in 1983, this edition contains addenda and a new bibliography. Greek text with facing-page English translation, commentary and notes.

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.