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.

Sheds new light on the topic of women in tragedy by focusing on neglected evidence from the fragments.

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.

In classical mythology, Phaethon is the child of the sun god Helios, who tries to drive his father's chariot and is killed in the attempt. Euripides explains how this happened: Helios had seduced Phaeton's mother - already betrothed to another - and as the price of her seduction had promised to grant her a favour. As an adult Phaethon claims the promise and asks to drive his father's chariot, with disastrous consequences... Only a quarter of Euripides' original version of Phaethon has survived. Alistair Elliot has translated these surviving 327 lines and reconstructed the rest, staying as faithful as possible to Euripides' time and way of thinking. The result is something very like finding a lost Euripides play, unperformed since the fifth century BC and amounting to a new masterpiece.

Many famous texts from classical antiquity—by historians like Thucydides, tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides, the comic poet Aristophanes, the philosopher Plato, and, above all, Homer—present powerful and profound accounts of wartime experience, both on and off the battlefield. They also provide useful ways of thinking about the complexities and consequences of wars throughout history, and the concept of war broadly construed, providing vital new perspectives on conflict in our own era. Our Ancient Wars features essays by top scholars from across academic disciplines—classicists and historians, philosophers and political theorists, literary scholars, some with firsthand experience of war and some without—engaging with classical texts to understand how differently they were read in other times and places. Contributors articulate difficult but necessary questions about contemporary conceptions of war and conflict.