Nominee! Lucille Lortel Award - Outstanding Play, 2015Nominee! 2015 Drama Desk Award, Best Play Nominee! 2015 Outer Critics Circle Award, John Gassner Award for New American Play Just beyond the elegant dining room of an Upper East Side restaurant, four busboys angle for shifts, pray for tips, and cling to dreams of life beyond their dingy back-of-house grind. Expertly juggling delicate entrees, fussy customers and beer-swilling line cooks, the young men face off with management an

The poetry of archaic Greece gives voice to the history and politics of the culture of that age. This book examines the interaction between poetics and politics in the archaic period, with particular attention being paid to the work of Solon. It explores the types of history that have been, and can be, written from archaic Greek elegy, and the role poetry had in articulating social realities and ideologies. The book argues that, in general, the political expressions of martial exhortation elegy were aristocratic in nature and that the symposiasts attempted to assert a heroic identity on the wider polis community. The remainder of the study demonstrates how Solon's poetry subverts this practice, using the poetic traditions of epic and Hesiod to further different political aims. It concludes by looking outside the confines of Solon's poetic appropriations to argue for other influences on his poetry, in particular that of tyranny.

Reading Herodotus is a 2007 text which represented a departure in Herodotean scholarship: it was the first multi-authored collection of scholarly essays to focus on a single book of Herodotus' Histories. Each chapter studies a separate logos in Book 5 and pursues two closely related lines of inquiry: first, to propose an individual thesis about the political, historical, and cultural significance of the subjects that Herodotus treats in Book 5, and second, to analyze the connections and continuities between its logos and the overarching structure of Herodotus' narrative. This collection of twelve essays by internationally renowned scholars represents an important contribution to scholarship on Herodotus and will serve as an essential research tool for all those interested in Book 5 of the Histories, the interpretation of Herodotean narrative, and the historiography of the Ionian Revolt.

Der griechische Geschichtsschreiber Herodot (5. Jh. v. Chr.) hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten aus einem Protohistoriker, der "zahllose Lugengeschichten" erzahlt (so noch Ciceros Diktum), uber einen geachteten, doch etwas naiven Vorlaufer des Thukydides zu einem der wichtigsten antiken Autoren uberhaupt entwickelt. Er geniesst daher zu Recht die Aufmerksamkeit von Forschern aus den unterschiedlichsten Disziplinen. Trotzdem sind viele Aspekte der Herodot-Forschung umstritten, und von einer verbindlichen Sichtweise uber den pater historiae, den "Vater der Geschichtsschreibung", scheint man weiter entfernt als jemals zuvor. Dieser Sammelband bildet das weite Spektrum moderner Perspektiven auf Herodot ab, ohne sich einer einzigen Forschungstendenz als Dogma zu verschreiben.

Charles W. Fornara's Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay (Oxford, 1971) was a landmark publication in the study of the great Greek historian. Well-known in particular for its main thesis that the Histories should be read against the background of the Atheno-Peloponnesian Wars during which it was written, its insight and penetrating discussion extend to a range of other issues, from the relative unity of Herodotus' work and the relationship between his ethnographies and historical narrative, to the themes and motifs that criss-cross the Histories - how 'history became moral and Herodotus didactic'. Interpreting Herodotus brings together a team of leading Herodotean scholars to look afresh at the themes of Fornara's seminal Essay in the light of the explosion of scholarship on the Histories in the intervening years, focusing particularly on how we can interpret Herodotus' work in terms of the context in which he wrote. What does it mean to talk of the unity of the Histories, or Herodotus' 'moral' purpose? How can we reconstruct the context in which the Histories were written and published? And in what sense might the Histories constitute a 'warning' for his own, or for subsequent, generations? In developing and interrogating Fornara's influential ideas for a new generation of scholars, the volume also offers a wealth of insights and new perspectives on the 'Father of History' that attests to the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary engagement with Herodotus.

Reading Herodotus is a 2007 text which represented a departure in Herodotean scholarship: it was the first multi-authored collection of scholarly essays to focus on a single book of Herodotus' Histories. Each chapter studies a separate logos in Book 5 and pursues two closely related lines of inquiry: first, to propose an individual thesis about the political, historical, and cultural significance of the subjects that Herodotus treats in Book 5, and second, to analyze the connections and continuities between its logos and the overarching structure of Herodotus' narrative. This collection of twelve essays by internationally renowned scholars represents an important contribution to scholarship on Herodotus and will serve as an essential research tool for all those interested in Book 5 of the Histories, the interpretation of Herodotean narrative, and the historiography of the Ionian Revolt.

The poetry of archaic Greece gives voice to the history and politics of the culture of that age. This 2005 book explores the types of history that have been, and can be, written from archaic Greek poetry, and the role this poetry had in articulating the social and political realities and ideologies of that period. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the stance of exhortation adopted in early Greek elegy, and to the political poetry of Solon. Part I of this study argues that the singing of elegiac paraenesis in the elite symposium reflects the attempt of symposiasts to assert a heroic identity for themselves within this wider polis community. Part II demonstrates how the elegy of Solon both confirms the existence of this elite practice, and subverts it; Part III looks beyond Solon's appropriations of poetic traditions to argue for another influence on Solon's political poetry, that of tyranny.