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This book's first appearance (1969) was a full response to the publication (in 1952) of a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus which indicated a late production date (in the 460s bc) for Aeschylus' trilogy Supplices, thus upsetting the previous scholarly consensus that it was an early work — indeed the earliest Greek tragedy to survive. There was, the book argued, no longer good reason to suppose that the play belonged to an early stage in its author's development. A final chapter also examines the evidence for reconstruction of the other, lost plays of the trilogy. Few would now argue, as they used to, that Supplices belongs to the 490s but some still have the feeling that it looks like an early play; they attempt to put it back into the 470s. Stylistic and structural evidence, itself often subjective, is not strong enough to place the play in one decade or exclude it from the previous one; but the book remains convinced that, even without the additional testimony of the papyrus, all the internal evidence points to the 460s. While the view that Supplices is very early may now have died, some of the salutary lessons of P.Oxy 2256 fr. 3 have still to be learnt and it is timely for this re-issue to be presented to a new generation of Aeschylean students and scholars.

This volume of specially written essays explores the understanding of the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood in ancient Greek and Roman culture, and the relationship between ancient and modern thinking on this topic. Essays consider the extent to which the concept of fiction was explicitly defined in ancient critical, rhetorical and philosophical writing or was implicitly recognised even if was not explicitly theorised. A wide range of genres of ancient writing are discussed, ranging from Homeric epic, Hesiod, and archaic Greek poetry to Greek and Roman historiography, philosophy (especially Plato), and the Greek and Roman novels or prose fictions. In ancient historiography, stress is laid on the combination of an explicit aspiration to factuality with a strong implicit element of creativity or inventive elaboration, extending in some cases to sheer lying. Essays discuss also especially the kind of ‘make believe’ or fictive belief invited by the ancient novels and the interplay between the ‘story world’ of the novels and the real world shared by its readers and author. Another area treated is the ethical value (or disvalue) of fiction and the question whether fiction is valued in the same way in antiquity as in the modern world. Although antiquity differs from the modern world in not defining fiction as such or in producing a literary theory of the novel, it is suggested by some essays that ancient and modern attitudes to fiction and its value are not as dissimilar as this difference might lead one to expect.

This is a study of Greek tragedies known to us only from small fragmentary remnants that have survived. The book discusses a variety of Greek tragic fragments from all three of the famous Athenian tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The recent publication of translations of some of these fragments (Sophocles in the Loeb series, and Euripides in the Aris and Phillips series) means that the fragments are now more readily available than ever for study. The large number of extant fragments of ancient Greek tragedy can tell us enormous amounts about that genre and about the society that produced it. Papyrus finds over the last hundred years have drastically altered and supplemented our knowledge of ancient Greek tragedy; the book is at the cutting-edge of research in this field.

This book provides separate discussions of each of Sophocles' seven plays: Ajax, Women of Trachis, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. It sets these between an chapter that outlines modern approaches to Greek tragedy and a final chapter that spotlights a key moment in the reception of each work. Focusing on the tragedies' dramatic power and the challenges with which they confront an audience, the book refuses to confine them within a supposedly Sophoclean template. They are seven unique works, only alike in the fact that they are all major masterpieces.