This volume examines whether dramatic fragments should be approached as parts of a greater whole or as self-contained entities. It comprises contributions by a broad spectrum of international scholars: by young researchers working on fragmentary drama as well as by well-known experts in this field. The volume explores another kind of fragmentation that seems already to have been embraced by the ancient dramatists: quotations extracted from their context and immersed in a new whole, in which they work both as cohesive unities and detachable entities. Sections of poetic works circulated in antiquity not only as parts of a whole, but also independently, i.e. as component fractions, rather like quotations on facebook today. Fragmentation can thus be seen operating on the level of dissociation, but also on the level of cohesion. The volume investigates interpretive possibilities, quotation contexts, production and reception stages of fragmentary texts, looking into the ways dramatic fragments can either increase the depth of fragmentation or strengthen the intensity of cohesion.

This volume explores the relationships between masterworks of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes and critical events of Athenian history, by bringing together internationally distinguished scholars with expertise on different aspects of ancient theatre. These specialists study how tragic and comic plays composed in late fifth century BCE mirror the acute political and social crisis unfolding in Athens in the wake of the military catastrophe in 413 BCE and the oligarchic revolution in 411 BCE. With events of such magnitude the late fifth century held the potential for vast and fast cultural and intellectual change. In times of severe emergency humans gain a more conscious understanding of their historically shaped presence; this realization often has a welcome effect of offering new perspectives to tackle future challenges. Over twenty academic experts believe that the Attic theatre showed increased responsiveness to the pressing social and political issues of the day to the benefit of the polis. By regularly promoting examples of public-spirited and capable figures of authority, Greek drama provided the people of Athens with a civic understanding of their own good.

The fragmentary plays of Euripides are a body of texts still regularly increasing in number and extent. They are of very great interest in themselves, apart from the significant aid they give to the fuller appreciation of the surviving complete plays. This two-volume edition brings together for the first time for English readers the more substantial and important of the plays, about fifteen in all. Each play is introduced by a summary bibliography and an appreciative essay which analyses the mythic background and plot: reconstructs the play as far as the fragmentary text and secondary evidence allow; and discusses themes, characterisation, staging, date, reflections of the story in art and other dramatisations. For each play the fragmentary texts are presented as conveniently and succinctly as possible, together with a brief critical apparatus of sources and readings. An English translation stands on the facing page. The text and translation of each play are followed by a short, primarily interpretative commentary. Text with facing translation, commentary and notes.

This book analyzes the existence of the three nuances of the perfect tense occurring in the Greek New Testament: resultative-stative, anterior (current relevance), and simple past. The ancient Greek perfect expresses a resultative-stative nuance, with intransitivity dominant. Some of these archaic perfects survived up to the Koine period and appear in the Greek New Testament. In Classical Greek, the perfect went through a transition from resultative to anterior (current relevance) with increasing transitivity. In the Koine period, the Greek perfect shows another semantic change from the anterior to simple past. In the end, the perfect merged with the aorist, ending up in decay. It disappeared until the modern Greek development of a perfect forming using the auxiliary ἔχω.

Within modern frameworks of knowledge and representation, Dionysos often appears to be atypical for ancient culture, an exception within the context of ancient polytheism, or even an instance of a difference that anticipates modernism. How can recent research contribute to a more precise understanding of the diverse transformations of the ancient god, from Greek antiquity to the Roman Empire? In this volume, which is the result of an international conference held in March 2009 at the Pergamon Museum Berlin, scholars from all branches of classical studies, including history of scholarship, consider this question. Consequently, this leads to a new look on vase paintings, sanctuaries, rituals and religious-political institutions like theatre, and includes new readings of the texts of ancient poets, historians and philosophers, as well as of papyri and inscriptions. It is the diversity of sources or methods and the challenge of former views that is the strength of this volume, providing a comprehensive, innovative and richly faceted account of the “different” god in an unprecedented way.