A group of Argive women has come to Eleusis to ask King Theseus and his city of Athens to bring about the burial of their sons who are being denied it by their Theban conquerors. …
Hecuba, in slavery after Troy's fall, fails to dissuade Odysseus, whose life she once saved, from sacrificing her daughter to honour his dead friend, Achilles; but the girl dies …
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 …
Rational persuasion and appeal to an audience's emotions are elements of most literature, but they are found in their purest form in oratory. The speeches written by the Greek …
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 …
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 …
