Wasps was first produced at the Lenaea festival of 422 BC. The play is at once a political satire and also, like Clouds and the lost Banqueters, a comedy on the theme of the …
Sophocles’ Antigone is among the greatest and most famous of all works of Greek literature, and it is often the play that is read first, whether in Greek or in translation, by …
Philoctetes is a tragedy of surpassing human interest. It is played out almost entirely between a man and a boy, the former embittered by years of lonely exile, the second torn …
Ion is generally regarded as one of Euripides’ most attractive plays. A skilfully organised plot, charming characters, exciting situations and thought-provoking themes make it an …
The earliest comic drama to survive, Acharnians is a highly committed play, its message being that Athens war with the Peloponnesians can and should be ended, and that peace will …
If not the profoundest of Greek tragedies, Orestes is certainly one of the most exuberant and entertaining. Euripides stands traditional legend on its head to forge a melodrama …
Ecclesiazusae, probably produced in 391 BC, is at once a typically Aristophanic fantasy of gender inversion, obscenity and farce, the earliest surviving work in the western Utopian …
Lysistrata is the third and last of Aristophanes' peace plays. It is a dream of peace, of how the women could help to achieve an honourable settlement, conceived when Athens was …
Trojan Women is very much a play for our times. Strongly against war, it shows its aftermath through the eyes of a group of women, members of the Trojan royal household. They have …
Birds was produced at the City Dionysia in the spring of 414 BC. It differs from all the other fifth-century plays of Aristophanes that survive in having no strong and obvious …
