Youth in tragedy's literary forebears and contemporaries -- Intergenerational conflict in the Aeschylean Prometheus -- The politics of age and integration in Sophocles' Antigone -- The cult of the young warrior in Euripides' Heraclidae -- Youth and limitations on personal authority in Sophocles' Philoctetes -- Friendship and generational loyalty in Euripides' Orestes -- Euripides' Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis: a gap in the generations and political failure

This bold new set of interpretations of tragedy offers innovative analyses of the dynamic between politics and youth in the ancient world. By exploring how tragedy responded to the fluctuating attitudes to young people at a highly turbulent time in the history of Athens, Shipton sheds new light on ancient attitudes to youth. Focusing on famous plays, such as Sophocles' Antigone and Euripides' Bacchae, alongside lesser known tragedies such as Euripides' Heraclidae and Orestes, Shipton uncovers compelling evidence to show that the complex and often paradoxical views we hold about youth today can also be found in the ancient society of classical Athens. Shipton argues that the prominence of young people in tragedy throughout the fifth century reflects the persistent uncertainty as to what their role in society should be. As the success of Athens rose and then fell, young characters were repeatedly used by tragic playwrights as a way to explore political tensions and social upheaval in the city. Throughout his text, Shipton reflects on how negative conceptualisations of youth, often expressed via the socially constructed 'gang' are formed as a way in which paradoxical views on youth can be contained.

Reference will also be made to psychoanalytic theory on relations between generations where arguments are made that youth in tragedy offers a local variant on a more universal anxiety about youth and ageing. These arguments, in turn, are informed by classical scholarship that focuses on anthropological explanations for the culturally specific yet universal nature of attitudes towards social groups. The final two chapters deal exclusively with how youth is represented in times of the most acute political crisis, as evidence for the link between the political and literary, before the concluding section which offers a view on what further research is required to embed a 'youth studies' within classical scholarship.

Reference will also be made to psychoanalytic theory on relations between generations where arguments are made that youth in tragedy offers a local variant on a more universal anxiety about youth and ageing. These arguments, in turn, are informed by classical scholarship that focuses on anthropological explanations for the culturally specific yet universal nature of attitudes towards social groups. The final two chapters deal exclusively with how youth is represented in times of the most acute political crisis, as evidence for the link between the political and literary, before the concluding section which offers a view on what further research is required to embed a 'youth studies' within classical scholarship.

In this outstanding new book, Christian Meier examines the close relationship between drama and politics at the beginning of the great age of Greek tragedy, focusing on the works of Aeschylus. The author examines the political, social and even psychological problems of the inhabitants of fifth-century Athens, during a time of rapid change. Through the role of festivals and the role of the festival of Dionysus in particular, Meier moves on to the interpretation of Aeschylus' plays. He shows how the political statements of the mythical characters made sense of and even influenced the politics of the day. Finally, he discusses the work of Sophocles in counterpoint to the plays of Aeschylus. This book will be of interest to students and academics of history, particularly the history of the ancient world, as well as those studying literature and drama.

In this book J. Peter Euben argues that Greek tragedy was the context for classical political theory and that such theory read in terms of tragedy provides a ground for contemporary theorizing alert to the concerns of post-modernism, such as normalization, the dominance of humanism, and the status of theory. Euben shows how ancient Greek theater offered a place and occasion for reflection on the democratic culture it helped constitute, in part by confronting the audience with the otherwise unacknowledged principles of social exclusion that sustained its community. Euben makes his argument through a series of comparisons between three dramas (Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae) and three works of classical political theory (Thucydides' History and Plato's Apology of Socrates and Republic) on the issues of justice, identity, and corruption. He brings his discussion to a contemporary American setting in a concluding chapter on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in which the road from Argos to Athens, built to differentiate a human domain from the undefined outside, has become a Los Angeles freeway desecrating the land and its people in a predatory urban sprawl.