Books
Iliad
Translated by Stanley Lombardo
Introduction by Sheila Murnaghan, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
The Iliad is the story of a raging anger and its human toll. The poem recounts “the rage of Achilles,” the greatest of the Greek heroes fighting in the war against Troy. … A long-standing rivalry between Achilles and his commander Agamemnon flares up in a bitter quarrel. … Achilles’ self-willed estrangement from his former companions places him in unexpected situations that open up new and often painful perspectives on his role as a supremely great warrior. As it tells this story, the Iliad offers a full-scale examination of strife as an inescapable feature of human experience. -Shelia Murnaghan
Stanley Lombardo’s translation uniquely departs from older translations. It is lively and modern in many respects from the front cover art, of the D-Day Normandy landing, to Achilles’ Rambo-like diction.
Odyssey
Translated by Stanley Lombardo
Introduction by Sheila Murnaghan, Hackett Publishing, 2000.
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Selection for 2000
The Odyssey is an epic account of survival and homecoming. The poem tells of the return (or in Greek, nostos) of Odysseus from the Greek victory at Troy to Ithica, the small, rocky island from which he set out twenty years before. … getting home was at least as great a challenge for the Greeks as winning the war. … In telling this story, the poet has also given the greatest weight, not to the perilous, exotic sea journey from Troy, … but to the final phase of the hero’s return, his reentry into his household and recovery of his former position at its center. … As he struggles to reestablish himself in a place that has been changed by his twenty-year absence, we are made to reconsider, along with him, the value of the familiar and the danger of taking it for granted. -Shelia Murnaghan
Like his translation of the Iliad, Stanley Lombardo’s simplicity stands out. In an interesting touch, whenever Homer goes into one of his famous similes, Lombardo puts them into italics, separated from the text.
Oresteia
Translated with Notes, by Peter Meineck
Introduction by Helene P. Foley, Hackett Publishing, 1998.
Winner of the American Translators Association 2000 Lewis Galantière Award
Any reader of the Oresteia will immediately grasp its central theme: justice. … Despite the trilogy’s massive complexity, the story line of the Oresteia is not hard to follow. In Agamemnon, the king of Agros, Agamemnon, returns home from Troy after ten years of war accompanied by his Trojan slave concubine, the prophetess Cassandra. He is killed by his wife Clytemnestra, who plotted the murder with her lover, Aegisthus. Clytemnestra acts to avenge the death of her daughter, Iphigenia, who was sacrificed by her father so that the Greeks could go to Troy. … In The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon’s and Clytemnestra’s son Orestes returns from exile to avenge his father at the behest of the god Apollo…Orestes enters the palace in disguise, kills his mother and Aegisthus, and is finally forced to flee, pursued by his mother’s avenging Furies or Erinyes. In The furies, Orestes is purified by Apollo in Delphi but must go to Athens in an attempt to elude the persistent Furies. There the goddess Athena establishes the first trial by jury for murder at the court of Areopagus. … The plot itself encompasses an historical transition from vendetta justice to institutionalized trial by jury.
Helen P. Folley
Antigone
Translated with Introduction and Notes by, Paul Woodruff, Hackett Publishing, 2001.
When Oedipus was disgraced, Polyneices and his brother, Eteocles, were too young to rule, so their uncle Creon served as regent. In the opening scene, we learn that Creon has decided to reward the brother who defended Thebes but to impose a penalty on the other brother. While Eteocles will receive a noble funeral, Polyneices will have the punishment that is common for traitors – no burial at all, on pain of death for anyone who attempts to inter the body. … Antigone decides to shoulder the responsibility of burying her brother Polyneices. In this she goes beyond what is normally expected of women. … And so the drama unfolds, as a determined young woman falls foul of an unmovable king. -Paul Woodruff
Paul Woodruff includes the notes of multiple translations in his Antigone. Where there is uncertainty concerning who speaks the line, he includes the possible speakers.
Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes
Translated with Introduction and Notes, by Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff, Hackett Publishing, 2007.
Ajax
Ajax shows the aftermath of an altercation over the honors that warriors feel are due to them after battle. Achilles has been killed, and his fabulous armor is to go to the finest surviving fighter of the Greeks. To whom shall it go—to the brains of the army, Odysseus, or to its brawn, Ajax? Ajax believes that he deserves the armor of Achilles, and he is unable to accept that another warrior has been chosen as more worthy. His pride will not permit him to see the strength of Odysseus, nor will it allow him to recognize his own limitations. -Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff
Women of Trachis
In Women of Trachis (Trachiniai), Deianeira worries about her husband Heracles, who has been gone longer than she expected. We soon learn that Heracles, having completed his famous labors, has been tied up with other affairs, most recently with war. A procession of prisoners arrives, and we discover that one of them is to be Heracles’ new wife. Dieaneira is stung with jealousy but still careful not to be angry with the young woman; after all, this new wife is part of the spoils of war, and Deianeira knows what it is like to be a young girl won in battle—she had been such a girl. And Deianeira understands the power of sexual love over Heracles and claims not to resent it. Still, she wants him back, to be her passionate and loving mate. But the love-charm she tries to use on him turns out to be poison. When she learns this, she takes her life. Soon after, the dying hero is carried onstage, raging against his death and trying to control the power of his emotions, the manner of his death and the future of his family. In the end, he triumphs in all three contests. He will die without a cry, in a funeral pyre lit by a friend, and his son will marry the young woman he captured with his spear. -Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff
Electra
Agamemnon was victorious at Troy, and we soon learn that, during his long absence at war, his wife Clytemnestra found comfort with another man. But she has reasons to be angry with her husband: he sacrificed their daughter for a fair wind, and then he returned from war with another woman as a trophy. And so Clytemnestra killed him, with the help of her lover Aegisthus. Electra saved her young brother Orestes (who would otherwise have been killed as a potential avenger of their father) and sends him to grow up far away in safety. When the play begins, Orestes returns but Electra does not know it. She is angry and grief stricken at the murder of her father and longs for her absent brother to return so that he may kill the murderers. In this play we see Electra first under pressure to abandon her grief and anger, and then, after surprises that would break the resolve of a weaker person, we see her in triumph as her longings are fulfilled—as her mother shrieks under the death blows inside the royal house and as her mother’s body is revealed to the lover who is about to die. -Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff
Philoctetes
When Heracles was near death, he wished to be burned on a funeral pyre while still alive. No on but Philoctetes, his dear friend, would light the fire, and in return for this favor Heracles gave him his bow. Philoctetes leaves with the others to participate in the Trojan War, but gets bitten on the foot by a snake. The bite leaves him in constant agony, and it made him miserable company for the army. Odysseus leaves him on the desert island Lemnos.
Ten years pass, the Greeks need Philoctetes and the bow of Heracles to win the war. So Odysseus sails back to Lemnos with Neoptolemus (a late arriver to the Trojan War and son of Achilles) in order to get him. The task will not be easy, Philoctetes hates Odysseus, and he has a weapon of suck power that even a braver man than Odysseus would balk at confronting him directly.
Peter Meineck’s translations have the stage in mind. Stage directions have been created and based on his understanding of ancient staging techniques.
Euripedes – Bacchae
Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Paul Woodruff, Hackett Publishing 1998.
The Bacchae is based on the tragedy of Pentheus and his mother, Agave. A disguised Dionysus, the god who represents the liberating spirit of wine and revelry, returns to Thebes where his mortal mother lives, determined to punish her and the women in her family for denying his divinity. Pentheus, the young king of Thebes and cousin to Dionysus, declares to end the worship of Dionysus. In the madness that ensues, Pentheus is killed by the Dionysus victims—his own mother, his maddened aunts and the women who celebrate Dionysus.
Aristophanes 1 – Clouds, Wasps, Birds
Translated, with Notes, by Peter Meineck
Introduction by Ian C. Storey, Hackett Publishing 1998.
Clouds
The play revolves around an old country farmer, Strepsiades (“twister”) whose son, Pheidippidies has run him deeply into debt through an upper-class lifestyle and a passion for horses. His “great idea”: for his son to enter the phrontisterion (“Pondertorium”) of Socrates where he will learn the Inferior Argument, which “can debate an unjust argument and win” (115), and thus talk his way out of his father’s debt. When the son refuses to obey, Strepsiades goes himself to learn from Socrates. -Peter Meineck
Wasps
The setting throughout is the house of Procleon, an old man addicted to jury duty. His son, Contracleon, wants to remove his father from what he will describe in the agon as part addiction and part exploitation and to install him in a comfortable life at home. … Father and son argue, Procleon arguing that a juror’s life is to be envied, that it is full of advantages and is in fact comparable to the power of Zeus, while the son, speaking in the crucial second position, shows that the jurors are, in fact, exploited by the demagogues who care little for the mass of Athenian citizenry. A compromise is reached, that his father may fulfill his jury duty at home, trying offenses around the household. Procleon accidentally acquits a defendant and thus brings his career as a juror to an end. Contracleon attempts to dress up his father, take him out in polite company, and instruct him in proper behavior at a symposium. This all fails miserably and riotously, and the drunken old man dances off triumphantly at the end. -Peter Meineck
Birds
Two elderly Athenians, Peithetaerus (“Makemedo”) and Euelpides (“Goodhope”), have left home fed up with the problems of home, particularly Athenians’ love affair with the law courts. Their mission: to find Tereus, a figure of myth with an Athenian connection who has become a bird (the Hoopoe), and to ask him if in his travels he has seen a comfortable place where they might live. -Peter Meineck
These translations are uniquely set for performance, and have been developed through multiple productions with Peter Meineck’s London Small Theatre Company and the Aquila Theatre Company.
Five Comedies – Miles Gloriosus, Menaechmi, Bacchides, Hecyra and Adelphoe
Translated by Deena Berg and Douglas Parker, Hackett Publishing, 1999.
Miles Gloriosus
Pyrgopolynices is a braggart soldier and goes by the title, Miles Gloriosus from which the play gets its name. This foolish Miles Gloriosus brags openly and often about his supposed greatness, while the rest of the characters feign their admiration and secretly plot against him. -Berg and other sources
Menaechmi
Menaechmi, also known as The Brothers Menaechmi, is Plautus’ best-known comedy. Two brothers, twins, Menaechmus and Sosicles were separated as children when Menaechmus was adopted by a businessman. Menaechmus’ father died of grief and his twin brother was renamed Menaechmus. Both brothers end up in Epidamnus, and the comedy revolves around the mistaken identity that ensues. The mistaken identity causes Sosicles to view the people of Epidamnus as being rude and crazy and Menaechmus to get into a lot of trouble with both his wife and his friend Peniculus. Finally, the brothers meet and all is resolved.
Bacchides
Bacchides, or, The Wild, Wild Women is about two young friends, Mnesilochus and Pistoclerus, who fall in love with two sisters, and both prostitutes and both named Bacchis. It again, revolves around the humor of mistaken identity. Mnesilochus’ Bacchis has been hired for a year by Cleomachus. In order to get the money to buy her release Mnesilochus asks Chrysalus, the clever slave, to extort money from Nicobulus (a common recipe in Greek and Roman comedies). Chyrsalus succeeds in getting two hundred coins from the old man but then Pistoclerus announces his love for Bacchis. Mnesilochus, not knowing that there is more than one Bacchis, hands back the money to his father and reveals the whole deception and Chrysalus’s part in it. Then the truth comes out – There are two Bacchises and Pistoclerus loves the other Bacchis! In despair Mnesilochus returns to Chrysalus and begs him to try to get money from Nicobulus again. Chrysalus agrees and tricks Nicobulus out of his money by saying that Mnesilochus is in trouble because he has fallen in love with a soldier’s wife. He claims that the only way to get Mnesilochus out of trouble is to pay the soldier. Nicobulus falls for the trick and gives over the money. Soon he finds out that he has been deceived, and with Philoxenus he storms the brothel. Nicobulus demands his son and gold back. Bacchis offers the old man half of his gold back if he comes in. Philoxenus and Nicobulus soon give into Bacchis and her sister and join the sons in the brothel. -Berg and other sources
Hecyra
Hecyra, although a comedy, deals with serious issues of mistrust between husband and wife, miscommunication between parents and child, and rape and responsibility. Pamphilus has been reluctantly persuaded by his father to give up the prostitute Bacchis and to marry. Soon after the marriage he is sent away by his father on business. During his absence his wife leaves her mother-in-law’s house on a pretext and returns to her own mother’s house. There she gives birth to a baby conceived before her marriage, having been seduced by an unknown man under cover of darkness. This man had taken from her a ring, subsequently discovered in the possession of Bacchis. With the latter’s help it is discovered that the wife’s seducer was Pamphilus himself, who is after all the father of his wife’s child. Pamphilus, who had reluctantly felt that he must separate from his wife, therefore returns to her. The title of the play is derived from the carefully drawn characters of the two mothers-in-law. -Berg and various other sources
Adelphoe
Adelophoe, also known as The Brothers, asks the question, how does one rear a decent human being? Demea, having two sons, decides to raise one himself, Ctesipho, and let his brother who is not married to raise the other, Aeschinus. Through intertwining plots, the two sons, different in status and standing are brought together. By virtue of his money, charm, and rhetoric, Micio maintains the upper hand for most of the play. Demea finally “concedes,” but by applying his brother’s own tactics, forces Micio into a draw. Both children have their better sides, but neither lives up to his father’s claim of a “model citizen.” -Berg and various other sources
The Trojan War: A New History
by Barry Strauss, Simon and Schuster, 2006.
The Trojan War is one of history’s most famous conflicts, a ten-year-long war war waged over the beautiful Helen. For more than two thousand years this story has been a source of artistic inspiration. But is it true?
In The Trojan War historian and classicist Barry Strauss explores the myth and the reality behind the war, from Homer’s accounts in The Iliad and The Odyssey to Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of ancient Troy in the late nineteenth century to more recent excavations that have yielded intriguing clues to the story behind the fabled city.
Through vivid reconstructions of battles and insightful depictions of its famous characters, The Trojan War reveals the history behind Homer’s great epic, without losing the poetry and grandeur of the epic myth.
“A must-read for anyone interested in war, history, or ancient times.”
-Max Boot, senior fellow in national security studies, The Council on Foreign Relations
