In this often neglected play, Euripides explores the contrast between myth and reality by portraying the story of Heracles' murder of his wife and children. In treating this act the dramatist explores the boundaries of madness and Heracles' painful emergence from this state to a bitter realisation of what he has done. A further contrast is drawn between the callous gods who cause the madness and the caring and loving support of human friends and remaining family (Theseus and Amphitryon). This edition attempts to bring out the human and psychological qualities in the play and to defend its structure and dramatic power, arguing that it is neither "a grotesque abortion" (Swinburne) nor "broken-backed" (Murray) but a coherent and exciting work. Greek text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

Trojan Women is very much a play for our times. Strongly against war, it shows its aftermath through the eyes of a group of women, members of the Trojan royal household. They have experienced displacement, degradation and deprivation as their city has been sacked by the Greeks. The play expresses their protest, their articulation of grief, their reflection upon the world they now find themselves in, one in which the more they suffer the more their love for each other and for the family they have lost is strengthened. Trojan Women is concentrated in its emotive power and its uniquely lyric quality and it is not without the irony either that the positions of victors and vanquished are not always as fixed or as irreversible as they seem. Greek text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

These are paperback editions of important works on Greek and Roman literature, history, philosophy and archaeology. New introductions bring the works up to date in the light of more recent scholarship. In "The Imagery of Euripides," Shirley Barlow demonstrates, by a close analysis of Euripides' use of language and of imagery in particular, that his imaginative powers differ in kind, not just in quality, from those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that they serve a different purpose in the structure of the plays. This third edition includes a substantial new foreword by the eminent classical scholar Froma I. Zeitlin and substantial new introduction by the author. This classic study should have a place on the shelf of every student of Greek tragedy.