Aeschylus: Libation Bearers

The Libation Bearers (Choephori) of Aeschylus is the central tragedy of his Oresteia, the only Greek trilogy that survives in full and one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Greek literature. The play enacts and explores in profound detail the unsettling myth of Orestes, the young hero who was obliged to avenge the murder of his father Agamemnon by killing his mother Clytemnestra. The standard commentary, by A. F. Garvie, is intended for advanced students and professional scholars and makes few concessions to the less experienced. This edition, while taking full account of the latest advances in scholarship and criticism, seeks to make the play accessible to a much wider range of readers. Besides an introduction and bibliography it includes a newly constituted Greek text (with critical apparatus), a facing translation closely matched to this, and a commentary keyed to the translation. The commentary seeks to interpret the play at all levels, not avoiding detailed issues of textual criticism and the meaning of individual words but also exploring the play's imagery, questions of stagecraft and dramatic effect, the poet's use of existing mythical and poetic material, and the wider significance of the play in relation to the rest of the trilogy.

Author: Andrew Lyon Brown
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: 09/01/2018
Pages: 486
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.70w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9781786940995
ISBN10: 178694099X
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Ancient and Classical
- History | Ancient | Greece
- Literary Criticism | Drama

About the Author

Andrew Brown has edited Sophocles' Antigone for Aris & Phillips (1987) and is the author of A New Companion to Greek Tragedy (1983) and a number of articles on Greek tragedy in classical journals.