This up-to-date edition makes Euripides' most famous and influential play accessible to students of Greek reading their first tragedy as well as to more advanced students. The introduction analyzes Medea as a revenge-plot, evaluates the strands of motivation that lead to her tragic insistence on killing her own children, and assesses the potential sympathy of a Greek audience for a character triply marked as other (barbarian, witch, woman). A unique feature of this book is the introduction to tragic language and style. The text, revised for this edition, is accompanied by an abbreviated critical apparatus. The commentary provides morphological and syntactic help for inexperienced students and more advanced observations on vocabulary, rhetoric, dramatic techniques, stage action, and details of interpretation, from the famous debate of Medea and Jason to the 'unmotivated' entrance of Aegeus and the controversial monologue of Medea.
Sophocles' Philoctetes is one of the most widely read Greek tragedies today but is a complex and challenging play to interpret. Its representation of Philoctetes as a sufferer of physical and emotional pain gives it remarkable power and intensity. It juxtaposes Homeric and fifth-century institutions and values, explores honor, power and expediency as principles of personal and political life, and represents contrasts and conflicts between innocence and experience, ends and means, and the needs and demands of the individual and those of society. This edition with commentary makes the play accessible to students, teachers, and other readers of Greek literature at all levels. The introduction discusses the main problems of interpretation and gives an account of its reception from antiquity to the present day.
Sophocles' Ajax describes the fall of a mighty warrior denied the honour which he believed was his due. This edition of the play presents a text and critical apparatus which take full advantage of advances in our understanding of Sophoclean manuscripts and scholarship. The introduction and commentary scrutinise all important aspects of the drama - from detailed analysis of style, language, and metre to consideration of wider issues such as ethics, rhetoric, and characterisation. Notorious dramaturgical problems, including the staging of Ajax's suicide, receive particular attention; so too do questions of literary history, such as the date of the play and Sophocles' creative interaction with previous accounts of the myth. The translation which accompanies the commentary ensures that this edition will be accessible to Hellenists of all levels of experience, as well as to readers with a general interest in the history of drama.
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