A collection of innovative essays on major topics in ancient Greece and Rome, first published in 2004.

An illustrated introduction to ancient Greek tragedy, written by one of its most distinguished experts, which provides all the background information necessary for understanding the context and content of the dramas. A special feature is an individual essay on every one of the surviving 33 plays.

Examiningthe manifest and invisible dead, this book considers the nature, extent andlimitations of harmful interaction between the living and the dead in Greektragedy, concentrating on the abilities of the dead, the consequences of corpse exposure andmutilation, and the use of avenging agents by the dead.

In some versions of the myth, Iphigenia was due to be immolated by her father on Artemis’ altar before the beginning of the Trojan War, but was replaced by the goddess with a deer, at the last moment. This is the most staggering, and perhaps best-known, rite of sacrifice in Greek tragedy. Perfectly symmetrical, the end of this war is marked by another human tribute, Polyxena. Some of the topics investigated in this volume include whether these sacrifices, as well as similar ones such as those of Macaria and Menoeceus, the husbands of the Danaides, the hero Pentheus, and Aegisthus, are all a way to balance things out, or whether they cause an even greater unbalance.

The history and literature of the Roman Empire is full of reports of dream prophecies, dream ghosts and dream gods. This volume offers a fresh approach to the study of ancient dreams by asking not what the ancients dreamed or how they experienced dreaming, but why the Romans considered dreams to be important and worthy of recording. Dream reports from historical and imaginative literature from the high point of the Roman Empire (the first two centuries AD) are analysed as objects of cultural memory, records of events of cultural significance that contribute to the formation of a group's cultural identity. The book also introduces the term 'cultural imagination', as a tool for thinking about ancient myth and religion, and avoiding the question of 'belief', which arises mainly from creed-based religions. The book's conclusion compares dream reports in the Classical world with modern attitudes towards dreams and dreaming, identifying distinctive features of both the world of the Romans and our own culture.

Examines aspects of the dream in Homer and Greek tragedies as an originating cause or impetus of the action in a poem or play.

The Theatre of the Dream is a profound study of our dream world and its place in everyday life. The author grounds his ideas in Freud and psychoanalysis authors such as Klein, Bion, Rosenfeld and Matte Blanco, but also draws on the approach to dream phenomena in the work of philosophers, artists and poets. He argues that dreams are indeed, as the ancients held, messages. The dream is a theatrical re-recreation of certain unconscious experiences, which are both subjective and objective at the same time. It expresses not only desire but a complex working over of a problematic situation that is not quite resolved. In waking the dream is a new elaboration of everyday experience and one which creates the seeds of oracular awareness. Resnik develops his thesis with ample and enlightening examples of dreams and their significance from his own patients. The author's achievement is a new psychoanalytic reading of dreams one which does justice to Freud's momentous discovery but which broadens it and places it within the wider context of subsequent developments in psychoanalysis, semiotics and social and cultural anthropology. The book will be of great value to the professional psychotherapist or psychoanalyst as well as to students of literature, the arts and linguistics and the wider public interested in the ongoing relationship between dream reality and what is commonly called external reality. As has been remarked, each era can be defined on the basis of relations between dream and life.