This outstanding collection also offers short biographies of the playwrights, enlightening and clarifying introductions to the plays, and helpful annotations at the bottom of each page. Fresh translations into contemporary English breathe new life into the texts while capturing, as faithfully as possible, their original meaning. This exciting curated anthology features a cross section of the most popular-and most widely taught-plays in the Greek canon. Poets, philosophers, and politicians have long borrowed and adapted the ideas and language of Greek drama to help them make sense of their own times. Not only is the influence of Greek drama palpable in everything from Shakespeare to modern television, the insights contained in Greek tragedy have shaped our perceptions of the nature of human life.

The great plays of Ancient Greece are among the most enduring and important legacies of the Western world. Revisiting the original chapters as well to incorporate two decades of more recent scholarship, Lefkowitz again shows that what Greek men both feared and valued in women was not their sexuality but their intelligence.A landmark anthology of the masterpieces of Greek drama, featuring all-new, highly accessible translations of some of the world's most beloved plays, including Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, Bacchae, Electra, Medea, Antigone, and Oedipus the Kingįeaturing translations by Emily Wilson, Frank Nisetich, Sarah Ruden, Rachel Kitzinger, Mary Lefkowitz, and James Romm This updated and expanded edition includes six new chapters on such topics as heroic women in Greek epic, seduction and rape in Greek myth, and the parts played by women in ancient rites and festivals. Concentrating on those aspects of women’s experience most often misunderstood-life apart from men, marriage, influence in politics, self-sacrifice and martyrdom, and misogyny-she presented a far less negative account of the role of Greek women, both ordinary and extraordinary, as manifested in the central works of Greek literature. Where some scholars saw the Amazons as the last remnant of a forgotten matriarchy, Clytemnestra as a frustrated individualist, and Antigone as an oppressed revolutionary, Lefkowitz argued that such views were justified neither by the myths themselves nor by the relevant documentary evidence. Lefkowitz convincingly challenged narrow, ideological interpretations of the roles of female characters in Greek mythology. In the first edition of Women in Greek Myth, Mary R.

The Greek Plays by Mary R. Lefkowitz