Aeschylean Tragedy [Paperback]

Aeschylus was the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world's great art-forms. In this completely revised and updated edition of his book Alan H. Sommerstein, analysing the seven extant plays of the Aeschylean corpus (one of them probably in fact the work of another author) and utilising the knowledge we have of the seventy or more whose scripts have not survived, explores Aeschylus' poetic, dramatic, theatrical and musical techniques, his social, political and religious ideas, and the significance of his drama for our own day. Special attention is paid to the Oresteia trilogy, and the other surviving plays are viewed against the background of the four-play productions of which they formed part. There are chapters on Aeschylus' theatre, on his satyr-dramas, and on his dramatisations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey , and a detailed chapter-by-chapter guide to further reading. No knowledge of Greek is assumed, and all texts are quoted in translation.

Covers all aspects of Aeschylean drama in one volume, making this the ideal first book on the subject for any student studying Aeschylean tragedy.

Alan H. Sommerstein is Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of many works, including most recently Sophocles: Selected Fragmentary Plays I (with D.G. Fitzpatrick & T.H. Talboy, 2006); Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (ed. with J. Fletcher, 2007); The Oath in Archaic and Classical Greece (database) (with A.J. Bayliss & I.C. Torrance, 2007); Aeschylus (3 vols) (Loeb Classical Library, 2008); Talking about Laughter and Other Studies in Greek Comedy (Oxford, 2009).