Aeschylus II ─ The Oresteia, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, Proteus

Aeschylus II contains “The Oresteia,” translated by Richmond Lattimore, and fragments of “Proteus,” translated by Mark Griffith.

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

Mark Griffith is a professor of classics and of theater, dance, and performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Albany, CA. Trained at Cambridge, Griffith is an enormously accomplished expert on the Greek Tragedies. Glenn W. Most studied at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale and is currently professor of ancient Greek at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and a visiting member of the Committe on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He divides his time between Pisa, Florence, and Chicago. Richmond Lattimore (1906–1984) was a poet, translator, and longtime professor of Greek at Bryn Mawr College. David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought.