Search results for ""Author Alan H. Sommerstein""

Available online or as a 3-volume print set, The Encyclopedia of Greek Comedy is a comprehensive and accessible reference covering all of Greek comedy and its reception from antiquity to the present. Features the work of nearly 200 established and rising scholars from around the world Contains more than 1300 entries, organized in A-Z format, with helpful cross-references and an index of authors and plays Provides extensive and detailed coverage of the work of those dramatists who have no complete plays extant Explores a wide range of topics, including the varieties and phases of the genre; the authors and their major plays; composition and technique; the relationship between comedy and society; the preservation and transmission of comic texts; responses to Greek comedy by artists from Plato to Picasso and beyond; and modern methods of literary analysis and criticism

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Lysistrata is the third and last of Aristophanes' peace plays. It is a dream of peace, of how the women could help to achieve an honourable settlement, conceived when Athens was going through its blackest, most desperate crisis since the Persian War. Though in modern times this is perhaps the most popular of his works, it has never before had an English translation that aims to be reliable in detail and that is fully annotated. The Greek text is based on a fuller body of evidence than any previous edition. It is astonishing to think that this play was first performed over 2,400 years ago, because of all Aristophanes’ great comedies, Lysistrata seems to speak most clearly to our own age. It could perhaps be described as the world's first, and indeed still the world’s greatest feminist drama. This second edition was published in 1998, and revised with addenda and updated bibliography in 2007. [Text with facing translation, commentary and notes.]

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Aeschylus (525-456 BC) brought a new grandeur and epic sweep to the drama of classical Athens, raising it to the status of high art. The Persians, the only Greek tragedy to deal with events from recent Athenian history, depicts the final defeat of Persia in the battle of Salamis, through the eyes of the Persian court of King Xerxes, becoming a tragic lesson in tyranny. In Prometheus Bound, the defiant Titan Prometheus is brutally punished by Zeus for daring to improve the state of wretchedness and servitude in which mankind is kept. Seven Against Thebes shows the inexorable downfall of the last members of the cursed family of Oedipus, while The Suppliants relates the pursuit of the fifty daughters of Danaus by the fifty sons of Aegyptus, and their final rescue by a heroic king.

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Following the volume of six fragmentary Sophoclean tragedies published in this series in 2006, Alan Sommerstein and Thomas Talboy now present seven more. Three of these dramatise successive phases of the story of how a jealous and treacherous Odysseus brought about the judicial murder of the culture-hero Palamedes and of the terrible revenge taken by Palamedes' father Nauplius. The volume also includes dramas about the first day's fighting of the Trojan War ( The Shepherds ), about the foundation of the mystery-cult of Eleusis and the birth of agriculture ( Triptolemus , one of Sophocles' earliest plays), about a young woman who contrived the death of her father in order to save her beloved ( Oenomaus ) and about a young man who killed his mother in obedience to the last injunctions of his father ( The Epigoni or Eriphyle ). The volume includes the text and translation of all the surviving fragments (and of a selection of other texts that give us information about these plays), with full commentary and an introduction to each play discussing, among other things, the development of the myth and the likely content of the play so far as it can be reconstructed. The plays included are The Epigoni , Oenomaus , Palamedes , The Arrival of Nauplius , Nauplius and the Beacon , The Shepherds and Triptolemus . Greek text with facing-page translation.

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Offering a window into the world of ordinary Athenians, Aristophanes' The Birds and Other Plays is a timeless set of comedies, combining witty satire and raucous slapstick to wonderful effect. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Greek by David Barrett and Alan H. Sommerstein.The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In The Birds, two cunning Athenians persuade the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds' in the sky, blockading the Olympian gods and installing themselves as new deities. The Knights is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, who vies with a humble sausage-seller for the approval of the people; while The Assembly-Women deals with the battle of the sexes as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of Peace, inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and Wealth reflects on the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war.These lively translations by David Barrett and Alan H. Sommerstein capture the full humour of the plays. The introduction examines Aristophanes' life and times, and the comedy and poetry of his works. This volume also includes an introductory note for each play.Aristophanes (c.445-386 BC) was probably born in Athens. Little is known about his life, but there is a portrait of him in Plato's Symposium. He was twice threatened with prosecution in the 420s for his outspoken attacks on the prominent politician Cleon, but in 405 he was publicly honoured and crowned for promoting Athenian civic unity in The Frogs. Aristophanes had his first comedy produced when he was about twenty-one, and wrote forty plays in all. The eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes are published in the Penguin Classics series as The Birds and Other Plays, Lysistrata and Other Plays, The Wasps and Other Plays and The Frogs and Other Plays.If you enjoyed The Birds and Other Plays, you might like Aristophanes' The Frogs and Other Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.

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Four unconnected but unforgettable plays from ancient Athens’ first great tragedian.Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BC), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens, fought against the Persians at Marathon and probably also at Salamis, and had one of his productions sponsored by the young Pericles. He was twice invited to visit Sicily, and it was there that he died. At Athens he competed for the tragic prize at the City Dionysia about nineteen times between circa 499 and 458, and won it on thirteen occasions; in his later years he was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once. Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The first volume of this new Loeb Classical Library edition contains fresh texts and translations by Alan H. Sommerstein of Persians (472), on the recent war, the only surviving Greek historical drama; Seven against Thebes (467), the third play of a trilogy, on the conflict between Oedipus’ sons which ends when they kill each other; Suppliants, the first or second play of a trilogy, on the successful appeal by the daughters of Danaus to the king and people of Argos for protection against a forced marriage to their cousins (whom they will later murder, all but one); and Prometheus Bound (of disputed authenticity), on the terrible punishment of Prometheus for giving fire to humans in defiance of Zeus (with whom he will later be reconciled after preventing his overthrow). The second volume contains the complete Oresteia trilogy (458), comprising Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, and Eumenides, presenting the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, the revenge taken by their son Orestes, the pursuit of Orestes by his mother’s avenging Furies, his trial and acquittal at Athens, Athena’s pacification of the Furies, and the blessings they both invoke upon the Athenian people.This edition’s third volume offers all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays, with brief headnotes explaining what is known, or can be plausibly inferred, about their content, and bibliographies of recent studies.

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The Acharnians/The Clouds/Lysistrata'We women have the salvation of Greece in our hands'Writing at a time of political and social crisis in Athens, the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes was an eloquent, yet bawdy, challenger to the demagogue and the sophist. In Lysistrata and The Acharnians, two pleas for an end to the long war between Athens and Sparta, a band of women on a sex strike and a lone peasant respectively defeat the political establishment. The darker comedy of The Clouds satirizes Athenian philosophers, Socrates in particular, and reflects the uncertainties of a generation in which all traditional religious and ethical beliefs were being challenged. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Alan H. Sommerstein

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