- Aeschylus, I, Persians. Seven against Thebes. Suppliants. Prometheus Bound
- Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The first volume of this new Loeb Classical Library edition offers fresh texts and translations by Alan H. Sommerstein of Persians, the only surviving Greek historical drama.
- Hardcover 2009
- Aeschylus, II, Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides
- Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy.
- Hardcover 2009
- Aeschylus, III, Fragments
- Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE) is the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms. Seven of his eighty or so plays survive complete. The third volume of this edition collects all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays.
- Hardcover 2009
- Aristophanes, I, Acharnians. Knights
- The general introduction that begins Volume I brings current scholarly insights to bear on the intriguing question of the comic poet as a political force. In Acharnians a small landowner, tired of the Peloponnesian War, magically arranges a personal peace treaty and demonstrates the injustice of war in a contest with the bellicose Acharnians. Also in this volume is Knights, perhaps the most biting satire of a political figure.
- Hardcover 1998
- Aristophanes, II, Clouds. Wasps. Peace
- Socrates' "Thinkery" is at the center of Clouds, which spoofs untraditional techniques for educating young men. Wasps satirizes Athenian enthusiasm for jury service and the law courts as well as the city's susceptibility to demagogues. And Peace, celebrating the end of hostilities between Athens and Sparta, is a rollicking attack on the war-makers.
- Hardcover 1998
- Aristophanes, III, Birds. Lysistrata. Women at the Thesmophoria
- In Birds Aristophanes turns from the pointed political satire characteristic of earlier plays to a fantasy that soars literally into the air and creates a utopian counter-Athens, called Cloudcuckooland, ruled by birds. Lysistrata blends rambunctious comedy and an earnest call for peace. Lysistrata, our first comic heroine, organizes a panhellenic conjugal strike of young wives until their husbands end the war between Athens and Sparta. Athenian women again take center stage in Women at the Thesmophoria, this time to punish Euripides for portraying them as wicked. Parody of Euripides' plots enlivens this witty confrontation of the sexes.
- Hardcover 2000
- Aristophanes, IV, Frogs. Assemblywomen. Wealth
- Frogswas produced in 405 BCE, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides. Dionysus, on a journey to the underworld to retrieve Euripides, is recruited to judge a contest between the traditional Aeschylus and the modern Euripides, a contest that yields both comedy and insight on ancient literary taste. In Assemblywomen Athenian women plot to save Athens from male misgovernance. They institute a new social order in which all inequalities based on wealth, age, and beauty are eliminated--with raucously comical results. The gentle humor and straightforward morality of Wealth made it the most popular of Aristophanes' plays from classical times to the Renaissance. Here the god Wealth, cured of his blindness, is newly able to distinguish good people from bad.
- Hardcover 2002
- Aristophanes, V, Fragments
- Over forty plays by Aristophanes were read in antiquity, of which nearly a thousand fragments survive. These provide a fuller picture of the poet's ever astonishing comic vitality and a wealth of information and insights about his world. Henderson's latest volume contains what survives from, and about, his lost plays. Each fragmentary play is prefaced by a summary. Also included in this edition are ancient reports about Aristophanes' life, works, and influence on the later comic tradition.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Death of Comedy
- In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries, Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its early origins in a misogynistic quip by the sixth-century B.C. Susarion, through countless weddings and happy endings, to the exasperated monosyllables of Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
- Demons and Dancers
- Compared to the wealth of information available to us about classical tragedy and comedy, not much is known about the culture of pantomime, mime, and dance in late antiquity. Webb fills this gap in our knowledge of the ancient world and provides us with a detailed look at social life in the late antique period through an investigation of its performance culture.
- Hardcover 2009
- Euripides, I, Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea
One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides (ca. 485-406 BCE) has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, surprising plot twists, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. He wrote nearly ninety plays, of which eighteen have come down to us (plus a play of unknown authorship long included with his works). In this new Loeb Classical Library edition of Euripides, David Kovacs presents a freshly edited Greek text and an accurate and graceful translation with explanatory notes.
Cyclops is a satyr play, the only complete example of this genre to survive. Alcestis tells the story of a woman who agrees--in order to save her husband's life--to die in his place. Medea is the quintessential tragedy of revenge: Medea kills her own children, as well as their father's new wife, to punish him for desertion.
- Hardcover 1994
- Euripides, II, Children of Heracles. Hippolytus. Andromache. Hecuba
- Hippolytus has been judged to be one of Euripides' masterpieces. Hecuba and Andromache recreate the tragic stories of two noble Trojan women after their city's fall. Children of Heracles celebrates an incident long a source of Athenian pride: the city's protection of the sons and daughters of the dead Heracles.
- Hardcover 1995
- Euripides, III, Suppliant Women. Electra. Heracles
- Centering on the right of proper burial for those fallen in battle, Suppliant Women reflects on war and on the rule of law. In Electra Euripides gives us his version of the famous legend of the murder of Clytaemestra by her children in revenge for her killing their father--a portrayal interestingly different from that in Sophocles' Electra. Narrating sudden reversals in the hero's fortunes, Heracles testifies to the fragility of human happiness.
- Hardcover 1998
- Euripides, IV, Trojan Women. Iphigenia among the Taurians. Ion
- Trojan Women, a play about the causes and consequences of war, develops the theme of the tragic unpredictability of life. Iphigenia among the Taurians and Ion exhibit tragic themes and situations (the murder of close relatives); each ends happily with a joyful reunion.
- Hardcover 1999
- Euripides, V, Helen. Phoenician Women. Orestes
- In this fifth volume of the new Loeb Classical Library Euripides, in Helen the poet employs an alternative history in which a virtuous Helen never went to Troy but spent the war years in Egypt, falsely blamed for the adulterous behavior of her divinely created double in Troy. This volume also includes Phoenician Women, Euripides' treatment of the battle between the sons of Oedipus for control of Thebes; and Orestes, a novel retelling of Orestes' lot after he murdered his mother, Clytaemestra. Each play is annotated and prefaced by a helpful introduction.
- Hardcover 2002
- Euripides, VI, Bacchae. Iphigenia at Aulis. Rhesus
- This volume completes the new six-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Euripides's plays. David Kovacs presents a faithful and skillfully worded translation of the three plays, facing a freshly edited Greek text.
- Hardcover 2003
- Euripides, VII, Fragments
- The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians. This edition offers the first complete English translation of the fragments together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. Each play is prefaced by a select bibliography and an introductory discussion of its mythical background, plot, and location of the fragments, general character, chronology, and impact on subsequent literary and artistic traditions.
- Hardcover 2008
- Euripides, VIII, Fragments
- The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians. This edition of the fragments, concluded in this second volume, offers the first complete English translation together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. The texts are based on the recent comprehensive edition of R. Kannicht.
- Hardcover 2009
- The Feast of Poetry
- Situated at the intersection of various approaches to the comic genre, this book adopts a synchronic viewpoint to focus on comedy within the dramatic festival of Dionysus. By inscribing Aristophanes's plays in the poetic and ritual traditions of Greece, it attempts to reconstruct a fifth-century view of the performance of comedy as a sacrificial offering that both honors the god and is shared by the assembled citizen body.
- Paperback
- Menander, I, Aspis. Georgos. Dis Exapaton. Dyskolos. Encheiridion. Epitrepontes
- Menander, the dominant figure in New Comedy, wrote over 100 plays. By the Middle Ages they had all been lost. Happily papyrus finds in Egypt during the past century have recovered one complete play, substantial portions of six others, and smaller but still interesting fragments. Geoffrey Arnott's new Loeb edition is in three volumes. Volume I contains six plays, including the only complete one extant, Dyskolos (The Peevish Fellow), which won first prize in Athens in 317 BCE, and Dis Expaton (Twice a Swindler), the original of Plautus' Two Bacchises.
- Hardcover 1979
- Menander, II, Heros. Theophoroumene. Karchedonios. Kitharistes. Kolax. Koneiazomenai. Leukadia. Misoumenos. Perikeiromene. Perinthia
- Volume II contains the surviving portions of ten Menander plays. Among these are the recently published fragments of Misoumenos ("The Man She Hated"), which sympathetically presents the flawed relationship of a soldier and a captive girl; and the surviving half of Perikeiromene ("The Girl with Her Hair Cut Short"), a comedy of mistaken identity and lovers' quarrel.
- Hardcover 1997
- Menander, III, Samia. Sikyonioi. Synaristosai. Phasma. Unidentified Fragments
- Volume III begins with Samia (The Woman from Samos), which has come down to us nearly complete. Here too are the very substantial extant portions of Sikyonioi (The Sicyonians) and Phasma (The Apparition) as well as Synaristosai (Women Lunching Together), on which Plautus's Cistellaria was based. Arnott's edition of the great Hellenistic playwright has been garnering wide praise for making these fragmentary texts more accesible, elucidating their dramatic movement.
- Hardcover 2000
- Miles Gloriosus
- Miles Gloriosus or "Braggart Warrior" is one of the best-known and liveliest Roman comedies. It shows Plautus at his ablest in ingenious plot construction, vivid characterization, fast-moving action, and humorous dialogue.
- Paperback 1997
- Plautus, I, Amphitryon. The Comedy of Asses. The Pot of Gold. The Two Bacchises. The Captives
- Plautus made the Romans laugh. This highly successful playwright transformed the mild-mannered Greek New Comedy written more than a century earlier into a more playful and ribald style. Unlike Terence, whose plays were thoroughly Hellenic, Plautus introduces into his borrowings Roman characters, customs, and objects. Plautus is the earliest Latin author of whom we have more than fragments; twenty-one of his plays are extant.
- Hardcover 1916
- Plautus, IV, The Carthaginian. Pseudolus. The Rope
- Hardcover 1932
- Seneca, IX, Tragedies II
- Seneca is a figure of first importance in both Roman politics and literature: a leading adviser to Nero who attempted to restrain the emperor's megalomania; a prolific moral philosopher; and the author of verse tragedies that strongly influenced Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists. This volume completes the Loeb Classical Library's new two-volume edition of Seneca's tragedies. John Fitch's annotated translation conveys the force of Seneca's dramatic language and the lyric quality of his choral odes.
- Hardcover 2004
- Seneca, VIII, Tragedies I
- Here is the first of a new two-volume edition of Seneca's tragedies, with a fully annotated translation facing the Latin text. Seneca's plays depict intense passions and interactions in an appropriately strong rhetoric. Their perspective is much bleaker than that of his prose writings. In this new translation John Fitch conveys the force of Seneca's dramatic language and the lyric quality of his choral odes.
- Hardcover 2002
- Sophocles' Tragic World
- In a series of interconnected essays, Charles Segal studies five of Sophocles' seven extant plays: Ajax, Oedipus Tyrannus, Philoctetes, Antigone, and the often neglected Trachinian Women.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1998
- Sophocles, I, Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus
- Hugh Lloyd-Jones gives us a new translation of the seven surviving plays of Sophocles. The facing Greek is the corrected version of the Oxford Classical Text edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Nigel Wilson (1990). Volume I contains Oedipus Tyrannus, Ajax, and Electra.
- Hardcover 1994
- Sophocles, II, Antigone. The Women of Trachis. Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus
- Volume II contains Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes, and The Women of Trachis.
- Hardcover 1994
- Sophocles, III, Fragments
- Sophocles, by common consent one of the world's greatest poets, wrote more than 120 plays. Only seven of these survive complete, but we have a wealth of fragments, from which much can be learned about Sophocles' language and dramatic art. This volume presents, in Greek and facing English translation, a collection of all the major fragments, ranging in length from two lines to a very substantial portion of the satyr play The Searchers. Prefatory notes provide frameworks for the fragments of the known plays. Among the lost plays of which we have large fragments, The Searchers shows the god Hermes, soon after his birth, playing an amusing trick on his brother Apollo; Inachus portrays Zeus coming to Argos to seduce Io, the daughter of its king; and Niobe tells how Apollo and his sister Artemis punish Niobe for a slight upon their mother by killing her twelve children. Throughout the volume, as in the extant plays, we see Sophocles drawing his subjects from heroic legend.
- Hardcover 1996
- Written Voices, Spoken Signs
- Written Voices, Spoken Signs is a stimulating introduction to new perspectives on Homer and other traditional epics. Taking advantage of recent research on language and social exchange, the nine innovative essays in this volume--by leading scholars of Homer, oral poetics, and epic--focus on performance and audience reception of oral poetry.
- Hardcover 1997