Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) is part of a notable literary cohort, American poets who came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. Wilbur's verse is esteemed for its fluency, wit, and optimism; his ingeniously rhymed translations of French drama by Molière, Racine, and Corneille remain the most often staged in the English-speaking world; his essays possess a scope and acumen equal to the era's best criticism. This biography examines the philosophical and vision...

The most celebrated plays of ancient Athens in vivid, dynamic new translations by award-winning poets Robert Bagg & James Scully.The dominant Athenian playwright in fifth-century BCE Athens, Sophocles left us seven powerful dramas that still shock as they render the violence that erupts within divinity and humankind. Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Kolonos, and Antigone trace three generations of a family manipulated by the inscrutably vindic...

Award–winning poet Robert Bagg presents a dynamic translation of Sophocles's celebrated play of ancient Athens, Oedipus the King.Praised by Aristotle as the pinnacle of Greek drama, Oedipus the King is one of seven surviving dramas by the great Greek playwright, Sophocles. The ancient world's most shocking and memorable tragedy, it is the story of Thebes's resilient hero and his royal family brought to hellish ruin by fate, manipulation of the Olym...

Endymion, Pelops, Daedalus, Pygmalion – what are the stories behind these and the hundreds of other familiar names from Greek mythology – names that recur throughout the history of European culture?In a two-volume work that has become a classic reference book for both the serious scholar and the casual inquirer, Robert Graves retells the adventures of the important gods and heroes worshipped by the ancient Greeks.Drawing on an enormous range of sources, he has brought toget...

The heroic Greek dramas that have moved theatergoers and readers since the fifth century B.C.Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, the three plays that tell the story of the fated Theban royal family—Antigone, Oedipus the King and *Oedipus at Colonus—*are among the most enduring and timeless dramas ever written. Robert Fagles's authoritative and acclaimed translation conveys all of Sophocles's lucidity and power: the cut and thrust of his dialogue, his ...

Alcestis/Medea/The Children of Heracles/Hippolytus'One of the best prose translations of Euripides I have seen' Robert FaglesThis selection of plays shows Euripides transforming the titanic figures of Greek myths into recognizable, fallible human beings. Medea, in which a spurned woman takes revenge upon her lover by killing her children, is one of the most shocking of all the Greek tragedies. Medea is a towering figure who demonstrates Euripides' ...

One of the founding documents of Western culture and the only surviving ancient Greek trilogy, the Oresteia of Aeschylus is one of the great tragedies of all time.In the Oresteia, Aeschylus addressed the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of...

"Spectacular and constantly surprising."-Ken BurnsWritten with the authority of a scholar and the vigor of a bestselling narrative historian, The War That Killed Achilles is a superb and utterly timely presentation of one of the timeless stories of Western civilization. As she did in The Endurance and The Bounty, New York Times bestselling author Caroline Alexander has taken apart a narrative we think we know and put it ba...

Commissioned to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney's new verse translation of Sophocles' great tragedy, Antigone - whose eponymous heroine is one of the most sharply individualized and compelling figures in Western drama. Faithful to the 'local row' and to the fierce specificity of the play's time and place, The Burial at Thebes honours the separate and irreconcilable claims of ...

Agememnon is the first part of the Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy in which the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan war to be murdered by his treacherous wife Clytemnestra. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex the king sets out to uncover the cause of the plague that has struck his city, only to disover the devastating truth about his relationship with his mother and his father.Medea is the terrible story of a woman's bloody revenge on her adulterous husband through the murder of her...

This anthology collects some of the most important plays by Ancient Greek tragedians, in updated translations with new introductions.Greek Tragedies, Volume III presents some of the finest and most fundamental works of Western dramatic literature. It draws together plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from Chicago's acclaimed nine-volume series, Complete Greek Tragedies. This third edition updates the translations to bring them even closer ...