From a corpus of Greek epics known in antiquity as the "Epic Cycle," six poems dealt with the same Trojan War mythology as the Homeric poems. Though they are now lost, these poems were much read and much discussed in ancient times, not only for their content but for their mysterious relationship with the more famous works attributed to Homer. In Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle, Benjamin Sammons shows that these lost poems belonged, compositionally, to essentially the same tr...

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' ...

The famed Athenian tragedy in which Oedipus’s own faults contribute to his tragic downfall.A great masterpiece on which Aristotle based his aesthetic theory of drama in the Poetics and from which Freud derived the Oedipus complex, King Oedipus puts out a sentence on the unknown murderer of his father Laius. By a gradual unfolding of incidents, Oedipus learns that he was the assassin and that Jocasta, his wife, is also his mother.This Enriched Classic Editio...

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...

Sophocles I contains the plays “Antigone,” translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff; “Oedipus the King,” translated by David Grene; and “Oedipus at Colonus,” translated by Robert Fitzgerald.Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore,...

Love and loyalty, hatred and revenge, fear, deprivation, and political ambition: these are the motives which thrust the characters portrayed in these three Sophoclean masterpieces on to their collision course with catastrophe. Recognized in his own day as perhaps the greatest of the Greek tragedians, Sophocles's reputation has remained undimmed for two and a half thousand years. His greatest innovation in the tragic medium was his development of a central tragic figure, faced with a test o...

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the sense of poetry evident in the originals. Under the editorship of Peter Burian and Alan Shaprio, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on difficult passages, ampl...

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge George Berkeley - With the publication of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (hereinafter referred to as A Treatise), George Berkeley took the then astounding claim that the material world that we think is real, tangible, and visual was nothing of the sort. The vast majority of all human beings took the understandable position that what they could see, hear, touch, smell, and taste was so obviously undeniable that...

Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE) is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory.Aristotle's Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written. A founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism, from it stems much of our modern understanding of the creation and impact of imaginative writing, including poetry, drama, and fiction.In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "po...

Hecuba The Trojan Women Andromache In the three great war plays contained in this volume Euripides subjects the sufferings of Troy's survivors to a harrowing examination. The horrific brutality which both women and children undergo evokes a response of unparalleled intensity in the playwright whom Aristotle called the most tragic of the poets. Yet the new battleground of the aftermath of war is one in which the women of Troy evince an overwhelming greatness of spirit. We weep for the aged ...

A vivid, contemporary translation of the greatest Greek love poet—with a wealth of materials for understanding her work—by a prize-winning poet and translatorSappho’s thrilling lyric verse has been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years—certainly a record for poetry of any kind—and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete po...