Aeschylus

Oliver Taplin

The most renowned of Aeschylus' tragedies and one of the foundational texts of Western literature, the Oresteia trilogy is about cycles of deception and brutality within the ruling family of Argos. In Agamemnon, afflicted queen Clytemnestra awaits her husband's return from war to commit a terrible act of retribution for the murder of her daughter. The next two plays, radically retitled here as The Women at the Graveside and Orestes in Athens, deal with the aftermath of the regicide, Orestes' search to avenge his father's death, and the ceaseless torment of the young prince. A powerful discourse on the formation of democracy after a period of violent chaos, The Oresteia has long illuminated the tensions between loyalty to one's family and to the greater community. Now, Oliver Taplin's "vivid and accessible translation" (Victoria Mohl) captures the lyricism of the original, in what is sure to be a classic for generations to come.

Agamemnon, Women at the Graveside, Orestes in Athens

The Oresteia

This book attempts to reinstate the works of Greek Tragedy as plays rather than just texts to be read. Taplin concentrates on three plays each by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides to do this.

Greek Tragedy in Action

'Our present appreciation of Greek and Roman literature should be informed and influenced by consideration of what it was originally appreciated for. The past, for all its alienness, affects and changes the present.'The focus of this book - its new perspective - is on the 'receivers' of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Six contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from thebeginning of the Roman empire to the end of the classical era.The contributors deploy fresh insights to map out lively and provocative, yet accessible, surveys. They cover the kinds of literature which have shaped western culture - epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation,and panegyric. Who were the audiences, and why did they regard their literature as so important?

Literature in the Roman World

Emeritus Professor of Classics Oliver Taplin

In this book, Taplin looks for clues to Aeschylus's stagecraft in the texts of the plays themselves, analyzing the exits and entrances that occur throughout his works.

The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy

The Stagecraft of Aeschylus

Alessandro Grilli

Roberto Andreotti

Salvatore Settis

Monica Centanni

Maurizio Harari

Concetta Cataldo

Rocco Davide Vacca

Ludovico Rebaudo

Claudio Franzoni

Mara Sternini

Alessandra Pedersoli

Editoriale, a cura di Monica Centanni e Maurizio Harari. Oliver Taplin, A Clue to the Riddle of the Dareios krater /vaso di Dario?. Concetta Cataldo, Rocco Davide Vacca, Metamorfosi e peregrinazioni di Io. Dalla pittura vascolare alla tragedia, e ritorno. Monica Centanni, Alessandro Grilli, ἅπαξ δρώμενα. Un criterio per la relazione tra testi teatrali e iconografia vascolare (V-IV sec. a.C.). Alessandro Grilli, Dal mito tragico all’immagine su vaso. Nuclei d’azione e dinamiche trasmediali. Ludovico Rebaudo, Il sileno e Dioniso. Un cratere campano con attore comico in costume. Claudio Franzoni, La donna e il cavallo: persistenza di un paragone. Maurizio Harari, Giorgio de Chirico, Le printemps de l’ingénieur. Giuseppe Pucci. Scritti corsari di un archeologo classico. Antologia da “Alias”, supplemento culturale de “il manifesto” 2012-2021), a cura di Roberto Andreotti. Bibliografia di Giuseppe Pucci, a cura di Mara Sternini. Salvatore Settis, ‘Tradizione’, fra memoria e oblio. A dialogo con la Lettura corale di Incursioni. Arte contemporanea e tradizione (“Engramma” n. 180). Regesto degli spettacoli INDA al Teatro greco di Siracusa (1914-2021), aggiornamento a cura di Alessandra Pedersoli.

e183 | Alias. Miti còlti sul (manu)fatto

The book explores what has been made out of ancient Greece, and how the modern world has been inspired by, reacted against, imitated, transformed, parodied, recycled, subverted or received Greek culture. It is a brilliant attempt by one of our leading classical scholars to show why a new and fluid view of the Greek ideal - quite different from that of Renaissance painters or Victorian builders - is surfacing in our lives today and what the phenomenon might signify to us as we approach the twenty-first century. Visually spectacular and constantly surprising, this book is linked with a series of television documentaries made by Transatlantic Films with Channel 4.

Greek Fire

Edith Hall

Fiona Macintosh

Pantelis Michelakis

Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy, is one of the most influential theatrical texts in the global canon. In performance, translation, adaptation, along with sung and danced interpretations, it has been familiar in the Greek world and the Roman empire, and from the Renaissance to the contemporary stage. It has been central to the aesthetic and intellectual avant-garde as well as to radical politics of all complexions and to feminist thinking. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection of eighteen essays on its performance history include classical scholars, theatre historians, and experts in English and comparative literature. All Greek and Latin has been translated; the book is generously illustrated, and supplemented with the useful research aid of a chronological appendix of performances.

Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004

This interdisciplinary study opens up a fascinating interaction between art and theater. It shows how the mythological vase-paintings of fourth-century B.C. Greeks, especially those settled in southern Italy, are more meaningful for those who had seen the myths enacted in the popular new medium of tragedy. Of some 300 relevant vases, 109 are reproduced and accompanied by a picture-by-picture discussion. This book supplies a rich and unprecedented resource from a neglected treasury of painting.

Interactions Between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century B.C.

Pots & Plays

These original and distinctive verse translations convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies.

Antigone, Deianeira, Electra

Sophocles: Antigone and Other Tragedies

This book combines the exploration of the 'ethics' of the Iliad with its poetic and narrative techniques, all the way from touches of phrasing to the shaping of whole scenes and the interaction between scenes often separated by thousands of lines. These two approaches to the Iliad--through 'content' and through 'form'--are found to be inextricably worked together, which is why the book consists of 'soundings' or sample explorations, where larger arguments branch out from the observation of details in the formation of particular passages.

The Shaping of the Iliad

Homeric Soundings

Rosie Wyles

A comprehensive and fully illustrated collection of essays on the Pronomos Vase, the single most important piece of pictorial evidence for ancient theatre to have survived from ancient Greece.

The Pronomos Vase and Its Context

In this refreshing volume, we are offered a new perspective on Greek literature, based on the conviction that our present appreciation for it should be informed and influenced by how it was originally perceived. From the earliest surviving Greek poetry to the drama, history, and philosophy of Greece under Roman rule, this book focuses on the "receivers" of Greek literature-the readers, spectators, and audiences who first witnessed the works over two thousand years ago. Six contributors map out the lively and provocative surveys, covering the kinds of literature that have shaped Western culture--epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, elegy, satire, biography, and panegyric.

Literature in the Greek World

Sophocles

Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, influencing a vast array of artists and thinkers over the centuries. Disturbing and unrelenting, his tragedies portray what Matthew Arnold referred to as 'the turbid ebb and flow of human misery', allowing the audience to stand on the verge of the abyss and confront the waste and disorder of human existence. The heroic myths reinterpreted in the plays locate them within a world in which the extremes of human emotion in its darkest hours can be freely explored. It is, however, the creativity of Sophocles' plays which prevents them from descending into unbridled chaos or despair. The unflinching engagement with heartrending suffering reveals strengths held within the carefully crafted poetry, lyricism, and movement. There is, as Taplin writes, 'no blinking, no evasion, no palliative. ... Out of apparently meaningless suffering comes meaning and form.' This original and distinctive verse translation of four of Sophocles' plays conveys the vitality of his poetry and the vigour of the plays as performed showpieces, encouraging the reader to relish the sound of the spoken verse and the potential for song within the lyrics. Each play is accompanied by an introduction and substantial notes on points of fact and interpretation, drawing on the translator's many years of lecturing on Sophocles at the University of Oxford. Oedipus the King, often regarded as the archetypal tragedy, follows Oedipus, the 'man of sorrow', who has unwittingly chosen to enact his prophesied course by murdering his father and marrying his mother. Aias (or Ajax) tells the story of the warrior whose larger-than-life greatness brings him to harrowing humiliation and then to honourable burial. Philoctetes sees a once-noble hero, nursing his resentment during ten years in marooned isolation, eventually restored to glory at Troy. Oedipus at Colonus depicts the blind Oedipus towards the end of his life wandering as a beggar, but rewarded finally with revenge and a sublime death.

Oliver Taplin

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