The ways in which literary works begin have proved fascinating to readers and critics at least since Aristophanes. This collection of essays gives life to a topic of perennial interest by presenting a variety of original readings in nearly all the major genres of Greek and Latin literature. The subjects of these essays range from narrative voices in the opening of the Odyssey to ideological reasons for Tacitus' choice of a beginning in the Histories, and from a survey of opening devices in Greek poetry to the playwright's negotiations with the audience in Roman comedy. Other papers discuss 'false starts' in Gorgias and Herodotus, the prologues of Greek tragedy, Plato's 'frame' dialogues, delayed proems in Virgil, the role of the patron in Horace, aristocratic beginnings in Seneca, and 'inappropriate' prefaces in Plutarch. By embracing a variety of authors and a broad range of approaches, from formal analysis of opening devices to post-structural interpretation, these twelve contributions by both younger and established scholars offer an exciting new perspective on beginnings in classical literature.

Euripides is a notoriously problematic and controversial playwright whose innovations, according to Nietzsche, brought Greek tragedy to an early death. Francis Dunn here argues that the infamous and artificial endings in Euripides deny the viewer access to a stable or authoritative reading of the play, while innovations in plot and ending opened tragedy up to a medley of comic, parodic, and narrative impulses. Part One explores the dramatic and metadramatic uses of novel closing gestures, such as aetiology, closing prophecy, exit lines of the chorus, and deus ex machina. Part Two shows how experimentation in plot and ending reinforce one another in Hippolytus, Trojan Women, and Heracles. Part Three argues that in three late plays, Helen, Orestes, and Phoenician Women, Euripides devises radically new and untragic ways of representing and understanding human experience. Tragedy's End is the first comprehensive study of closure in classical tragedy, and will be of interest to students and scholars of classical literature, drama, and comparative literature.