Persians: Unabridged Edition

by Aeschylus

Overview

Persians by Aeschylus is the oldest surviving play in the history of theatre. The story takes place in Susa, one of the capitals of the Persian Empire at that time. The Chorus of old men of Susa are awaiting news of King Xerxes’ expedition against the Greeks, and so does Xerxes’ mother, Atossa, who expresses her anxiety and unease. An exhausted messenger arrives, offering a graphic description of the Battle of Salamis and its gory outcome. Summoned by the Chours, the ghost of Xerxes’ father, Darius the Great, appears. When he learns of the Persian defeat, Darius condemns the hubris behind his son’s decision to invade Greece. Persians is a political and a moral play at the same time, commonly considered the seminal work of western tragedy.
Unabridged edition with an interactive table of contents.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788834126998
Publisher:	Synapse Publishing
Publication date:	05/29/2019
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
File size:	412 KB

About the Author

Janet Lembke, a poet, is the author of Bronze and Iron, and is co-translator of the forthcoming edition of Euripides's Suppliants, also in the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series.
C. John Herington is Professor of Classics and Talcott Professor of Greek at Yale University. He is the author of several books, including Poetry into Drama and Aeschylus.

Editorial Reviews

"The musicality of Deborah Roberts' translation of Aeschylus' Persians, the earliest Greek tragedy that has come down to us, rivals the playwright's own astonishing lyricism. She crafts extended speeches by the drama's characters into captivating set-pieces of performance poetry. Roberts also replicates Herodotus' celebrated storytelling energy in her translation of the passages from his Histories included in this volume. In her Introduction, Roberts examines Aeschylus' drama and Herodotus' representations of Persian culture as crucial records of ancient Greek conceptions of otherness and perceptively appraises the Persians itself as a sober contemplation upon the shared human toll of political ambition and warfare’s traumas and grief, making this book urgently relevant to contemporary audiences."
—James Bradley Wells, PhD, Edwin L. Minar Professor of Classical Studies, DePauw University

From the Publisher