Aeschylus and His Contributions

Aeschylus was the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world's great art-forms. In this completely revised and updated edition of his book, Alan H. Sommerstein, analysing the seven extant plays of the Aeschylean corpus (one of them probably in fact the work of another author) and utilising the knowledge we have of the seventy or more whose scripts have not survived, explores Aeschylus' poetic, dramatic, theatrical, and musical techniques, his social, political, and religious ideas, and the significance of his drama for our own day.

Special attention is paid to the "Oresteia" trilogy, and the other surviving plays are viewed against the background of the four-play productions of which they formed part. There are chapters on Aeschylus' theatre, on his satyr-dramas, and on his dramatisations of Homer’s "Iliad" and "Odyssey", and a detailed chapter-by-chapter guide to further reading. No knowledge of Greek is assumed, and all texts are quoted in translation.