Eumenides

Professor Sommerstein presents here a freshly constituted text, with introduction and commentary, of Eumenides, the final play in Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy.

This is the first book-length analysis of Shakespeare s depiction of specula (mirrors) to reveal the literal and allegorical functions of mirrors in the playwright s art and thought. Adding a new dimension to the plays Troilus and Cressida, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Henry the Fifth, Love s Labor s Lost, A Midsummer Night s Dream, and All s Well That Ends Well, Maurice A. Hunt also references mirrors in a wide range of external sources, from the Bible to demonic practices. Looking at the concept of speculation through its multiple meanings - cognitive, philosophical, hypothetical, and provisional - this original reading suggests Shakespeare as a craftsman so prescient and careful in his art that he was able to criticize the queen and a former patron with such impunity that he could still live as a gentleman.

Modern Greek national and cultural identities consist, to a considerable extent, of clusters of cultural memory, shaped by an ongoing dialogue with the classical past. Within this dialogue between modern Greece and classical antiquity, Greek tragedy takes pride of place. In this volume, ten scholars from Cyprus, Greece, the United Kingdom and the United States explore the various ways in which Greek tragedy and tragic myth have been reimagined and rewritten in modern Greek drama and poetry. The book’s extensive coverage includes major modern Greek authors, such as Cavafy, Seferis, and Ritsos, as well as less well-known, but equally rich and rewarding, 20th- and 21st-century texts.

A collection of 18 plays.

Why the Greeks? How did it happen that these people--out of all Mediterranean societies--developed democratic systems of government? The outstanding German historian of the ancient world, Christian Meier, reconstructs the process of political thinking in Greek culture that led to democracy. He demonstrates that the civic identity of the Athenians was a direct precondition for the practical reality of this form of government. Meier shows how the structure of Greek communal life gave individuals a civic role and discusses a crucial reform that institutionalized the idea of equality before the law. In Greek drama--specifically Aeschylus' Oresteia--he finds reflections of the ascendancy of civil law and of a politicizing of life in the city-state. He examines the role of the leader as well as citizen participation in Athenian democracy and describes an ancient equivalent of the idea of social progress. He also contrasts the fifth-century Greek political world with today's world, drawing revealing comparisons. The Greek Discovery of Politics is important reading for ancient historians, classicists, political scientists, and anyone interested in the history of political thought or in the culture of ancient Greece.