Book cover for The Complete Tragedies, Volume 2: Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, Agamemnon by Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The Complete Tragedies, Volume 2

Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, Agamemnon

2022 Released
320 Pages
5-7 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
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University of Chicago PressISBN 9780226821085
Translated by Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, David Konstan
The complete tragic works of the leading Stoic philosopher and playwright

Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca offers authoritative, modern English translations of the writings of the Stoic philosopher and playwright (4 BCE-65 CE). The two volumes of The Complete Tragedies presents all of his dramas, expertly rendered by preeminent scholars and translators.

The first volume contains Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The Trojan Women, and Octavia, the last of which was written in emulation of Senecan tragedies and serves as a unique example of political tragedy. This second volume includes Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, and Agamemnon. High standards of accuracy, clarity, and style are maintained throughout the translations, which render Seneca into verse with as close a correspondence, line for line, to the original as possible, and with special attention paid to meter and overall flow. In addition, each tragedy is prefaced by an original translator's introduction offering reflections on the work's context and meaning. Notes are provided for the reader unfamiliar with the culture and history of classical antiquity. Accordingly, The Complete Tragedies will be of use to a general audience and professionals alike, from the Latinless student to scholars and instructors of comparative literature, classics, philosophy, drama, and more.

Shadi Bartsch

Translated by

Shadi Bartsch is Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (1989); Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (1994); Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War (1998); The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (2006); and the forthcoming Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural.

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