A complex study that argues that Athena's wrath is essential to both the structure and the theme of the Odyssey shedding light on the central theme of the relations between gods and men and revealing subtleties of narrative and ambiguities of character.

The tenth book of the Iliad has been doubted, ignored, and even scorned in Homeric scholarship. Using established methods for interpreting oral traditional poetry, however, Due and Ebbott illuminate many of the interpretive questions that strictly literary approaches find unsolvable, and they demonstrate how the episode shares in the oral traditional nature of the whole epic, even though its poetics are specific to its nocturnal ambush plot. True to their multitextual approach to the text, Due and Ebbott have included a series of critical texts of Iliad 10, including the tenth-century Venetus A manuscript and select papyri, and discuss these individual witnesses and the variations they offer. The essays and commentary explore Iliad 10 within the larger contexts of Homeric epic and the epic tradition. --Book Jacket.

The pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus is the only extant Greek tragedy based on an episode from Homer’s Iliad and a unique witness for the history of the genre in the 4th century BC. This new edition, with introduction and commentary, discusses textual problems, language, metre and dramaturgy as well as the mythological and literary-historical background of the play. It is an indispensable aid for serious students of the text.

A COMPANION TO EURIPIDES A COMPANION TO EURIPIDES Euripides has enjoyed a resurgence of interest as a result of many recent important publications, attesting to the poet’s enduring relevance to the modern world. A Companion to Euripides is the product of this contemporary work, with many essays drawing on the latest texts, commentaries, and scholarship on the man and his oeuvre. Divided into seven sections, the companion begins with a general discussion of Euripidean drama. The following sections contain essays on Euripidean biography and the manuscript tradition, and individual essays on each play, organized in chronological order. Chapters offer summaries of important scholarship and methodologies, synopses of individual plays and the myths from which they borrow their plots, and conclude with suggestions for additional reading. The final two sections deal with topics central to Euripidean scholarship, such as religion, myth, and gender, and the reception of Euripides from the 4th century BCE to the modern world. A Companion to Euripides brings together a variety of leading Euripides scholars from a wide range of perspectives. As a result, specific issues and themes emerge across the chapters as central to our understanding of the poet and his meaning for our time. Contributions are original and provocative interpretations of Euripides’ plays, which forge important paths of inquiry for future scholarship.

This is an example of one of R.C. Jebb's editions of Sophocles' plays, originally appearing in the last years of the 19th century. He gives literary and dramatic interpretations and translations that face the Greek text.

From a corpus of Greek epics known in antiquity as the "Epic Cycle," six poems dealt with the same Trojan War mythology as the Homeric poems. Though they are now lost, these poems were much read and much discussed in ancient times, not only for their content but for their mysterious relationship with the more famous works attributed to Homer. In Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle, Benjamin Sammons shows that these lost poems belonged, compositionally, to essentially the same tradition as the Homeric poems. He demonstrates that various compositional devices well-known from the Homeric epics were also fundamental to the narrative construction of these later works. Yet while the "cyclic" poets constructed their works using the same traditional devices as Homer, they used these to different ends and with different results. Sammons argues that the essential difference between cyclic and Homeric poetry lies not in the fundamental building blocks from which they are constructed, but in the scale of these components relative to the overall construction of poems. This sheds important light on the early history of epic as a genre, since it is likely that these devices originally developed to provide large-scale structure to shorter poems and have been put to quite different use in the composition of the monumental Homeric epics. Along the way Sammons sheds new light on the overall form of lost cyclic epics and on the meaning and context of the few surviving verse fragments.

This volume aims at offering a critical reassessment of the progress made in Homeric research in recent years, focussing on its two main trends, Neonalysis and Oral Theory. Interpreting Homer in the 21st century asks for a holistic approach that allows us to reconsider some of our methodological tools and preconceptions concerning what we call Homeric poetry. The neoanalytical and oral 'booms', which have to a large extent influenced the way we see Homer today, may be re-evaluated if we are willing to endorse a more flexible approach to certain scholarly taboos pertaining to these two schools of interpretation. Song-traditions, formula, performance, multiformity on the one hand, and Motivforschung, Epic Cycle on the other, may not be so incompatible as we often tend to think.

This volume is arguably one of the most important studies of Euripides to appear in the last decade. Not only does it offer incisive examinations of many of Euripides' extant plays and their influence, it also includes seminal examinations of a number of Euripides’ fragmentary plays. This approach represents a novel and exciting development in Euripidean studies, since it is only very recently that the fragmentary plays have begun to appear in reliable and readily accessible editions. The book’s thirty-two contributors constitute an international "who’s who" of Euripidean studies and Athenian drama, and their contributions will certainly feature in the forefront of scholarly discourse on Euripides and Greek drama for years to come.

This volume is the first English-language survey of Homeric studies to appear for more than a generation, and the first such work to attempt to cover all fields comprehensively. Thirty leading scholars from Europe and America provide short, authoritative overviews of the state of knowledge and current controversies in the many specialist divisions in Homeric studies. The chapters pay equal attention to literary, mythological, linguistic, historical, and archaeological topics, ranging from such long-established problems as the "Homeric Question" to newer issues like the relevance of narratology and computer-assisted quantification. The collection, the third publication in Brill's handbook series, The Classical Tradition, will be valuable at every level of study - from the general student of literature to the Homeric specialist seeking a general understanding of the latest developments across the whole range of Homeric scholarship.