Scenes from Greek Drama

Bruno Snell’s Scenes from Greek Drama distills the 1963 Sather Classical Lectures into a searching exploration of lost and fragmentary works by Aeschylus and Euripides. Snell examines papyrus fragments, quotations, and testimonia to reconstruct dramas such as Aeschylus’ Achilleis and Euripides’ first Hippolytos, probing how Greek tragedy generated new concepts of decision, passion, and responsibility. His method—combining philological precision with intellectual history—reveals how shame an...