Overview

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.

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9780715638248

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Reviews

Sommerstein builds his interpretations carefully from exemplary command of detail, and offers admirably clear positions with which one can grapple. * BMCR *

Sommerstein offers a guide to the surviving tragedies by Greek playwright Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BC) for students and other readers who do not read classical Greek, so renders all quotations in English. His perspectives are the life and times of Aeschylus, the tetrology, 'The Persians', the Theban plays, the Danaid plays, the 'Oresteia', the Prometheus plays, satyr-drama, slices from Homeric feasts, the gods and the world, Aeschylean drama and the political moment, and whether he wrote for his age or for all time. He incorporates scholarship and changes in his own ideas since the 1996 first edition, and provides references to modern scholarship to augment his bibliographical essay.

Author Information

Alan H. Sommerstein is Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include Sophocles: Selected Fragmentary Plays I (2006); Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (2007); Aeschylus (3 volumes in the Loeb Classical Library, 2008); Talking about Laughter and Other Studies in Greek Comedy (2009).

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