Brill’s Companion to Euripides, as well as presenting a comprehensive and authoritative guide to understanding Euripides and his masterworks, provides scholars and students with compelling fresh perspectives upon a broad range of issues in the field of Euripidean studies.

Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship aims at providing a reference work in the field of ancient Greek and Byzantine scholarship and grammar, thus encompassing the broad and multifaceted philological and linguistic research activity during the entire Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The first part of the volume offers a thorough historical overview of ancient scholarship, which covers the period from its very beginnings to the Byzantine era. The second part focuses on the disciplinary profile of ancient scholarship by investigating its main scientific topics. The third and final part presents the particular work of ancient scholars in various philological and linguistic matters, and also examines the place of scholarship and grammar from an interdisciplinary point of view, especially from their interrelation with rhetoric, philosophy, medicine and nature sciences.

A COMPANION TO EURIPIDES A COMPANION TO EURIPIDES Euripides has enjoyed a resurgence of interest as a result of many recent important publications, attesting to the poet’s enduring relevance to the modern world. A Companion to Euripides is the product of this contemporary work, with many essays drawing on the latest texts, commentaries, and scholarship on the man and his oeuvre. Divided into seven sections, the companion begins with a general discussion of Euripidean drama. The following sections contain essays on Euripidean biography and the manuscript tradition, and individual essays on each play, organized in chronological order. Chapters offer summaries of important scholarship and methodologies, synopses of individual plays and the myths from which they borrow their plots, and conclude with suggestions for additional reading. The final two sections deal with topics central to Euripidean scholarship, such as religion, myth, and gender, and the reception of Euripides from the 4th century BCE to the modern world. A Companion to Euripides brings together a variety of leading Euripides scholars from a wide range of perspectives. As a result, specific issues and themes emerge across the chapters as central to our understanding of the poet and his meaning for our time. Contributions are original and provocative interpretations of Euripides’ plays, which forge important paths of inquiry for future scholarship.

A recently-published second-century papyrus, P.Oxy. 5283, contains prose summaries (hypotheses) of six plays by the Greek dramatist Euripides, including two lost plays depicting the hero Perseus, Dictys and Danaë. This book demonstrates the significance of this discovery for our understanding of Greek tragedy. After setting out the mythological and dramatic context, and offering a new text and translation based on autopsy, the book analyses the light which the papyrus sheds on these plays, whose narratives, centred on female resistance to abusive male tyrants, speak as powerfully to us today as they did to their original audiences. It then investigates Euripides’ tragic trilogy of 431 BC, which ended with Dictys and began with Medea, whose dramatic power now stands in sharper focus given our improved understanding of the production in which it originally appeared. Finally, it ponders the purpose which these hypotheses served, and why readers in the second century AD should have wanted a summary of plays written more than half a millennium before. All Greek (and Latin) is translated, making the book accessible not just to classicists, but to theatre historians and to anyone interested in Greek literature, drama, and mythology.

Euripides’ Hippolytus is a fascinating play about passion, innocence, rejection, betrayal, and the tragic breakdown of a family. This commentary, designed for intermediate and advanced students of ancient Greek, helps readers understand and fully appreciate this classic tragedy in all its rich complexity. The volume is the first commentary on the play to appear in print since 1996, and it is the most student-friendly guide to Hippolytus currently available. To make the play accessible to students who are tackling it for the first time, this book features the Greek text in sections followed immediately by detailed line-by-line notes. By explaining various points of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and content, these notes allow students to read the play on their own without resorting frequently to dictionaries or other outside aids. The volume also includes the complete, uninterrupted text of the play. In her wide-ranging introduction to the book, Hanna M. Roisman discusses the play’s mythological background and relevant aspects of Greek tragedy and performance. In addition, she explains the literary devices Euripides employs, as well as meter, prosody, and lexicality. Comprehensive in scope, this commentary concludes with a detailed glossary; a line-by-line index of grammatical, syntactical, literary, and rhetorical figures; a list of irregular verbs; and a select bibliography.

The book is written mainly for students to enable them better to appreciate and enjoy Euripides' Andromache. Its presentation seeks to combine depth of analysis with clarity and accessibility. It discusses Greek theatre and performance, the myth behind the play, and the literary, intellectual, and political context in which it was written and first performed. The book provides analyses of the various characters, and highlights the play's ambiguities and complexities. What makes Andromache of special interest is the fact that, of the 32 extant tragedies, it might have been originally produced outside Athens. This in turn leads the discussion of how the play's scrutiny of the Spartan characters affected the off-stage audience. Andromache is the only play that portrays the human toll caused by the Trojan War to both the Trojan and the Greek sides. After the Fall of Troy, Andromache, former wife of Hector, has been given to Neoptolemus, Achilles' son, as a war-prize. Andromache bore Neoptolemus a son, Molossus, before Neoptolemus married Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen. While Neoptolemus is away, Menelaus and Hermione attempt to kill Andromache and Molossus, causing a rift between the two families who were the major players in the War: the house of Atreus and the house of Peleus, father of Achilles. Although Neoptolemus is murdered, the play ends with a prophecy for the future of the line of descent of Peleus and Thetis in the form of the blessed kingdom of Molossia.