An overview of Greek Antiquity
The first complete plays we have come from Athens in the fifth century BC, and they invented almost every theatrical convention later dramatists would either inherit or rebel against — the chorus, the dramatic unities, the tragic protagonist undone by a single fatal flaw. The works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were originally performed in open-air amphitheatres for civic festivals; today they fill graduate seminars, repertory seasons, and high-school auditoriums on every continent. To read Greek drama is to read the foundation document of Western theatre.
Plays from this era (31)
- Specimens of Greek Tragedy — Aeschylus and Sophocles — by Aeschylus
- The House of Atreus; Being the Agamemnon, the Libation bearers, and the Furies — by Aeschylus
- The Agamemnon of Aeschylus Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes — by Aeschylus
- Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and the Seven Against Thebes — by Aeschylus
- Æschylos Tragedies and Fragments — by Aeschylus
- The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus Translated into English Verse — by Aeschylus
- The Clouds — by Aristophanes
- Peace — by Aristophanes
- The Acharnians — by Aristophanes
- The Birds — by Aristophanes
- Lysistrata — by Aristophanes
- The Frogs — by Aristophanes
- The Eleven Comedies, Volume 1 — by Aristophanes
- The Eleven Comedies, Volume 2 — by Aristophanes
- The Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides — by Euripides
- Hippolytus; The Bacchae — by Euripides
- The Trojan women of Euripides — by Euripides
- Alcestis — by Euripides
- The Electra of Euripides Translated into English rhyming verse — by Euripides
- The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. — by Euripides
- The Rhesus of Euripides — by Euripides
- The Bacchae of Euripides — by Euripides
- Medea of Euripides — by Euripides
- Hecuba and other plays — by Euripides
- Menexenus — by Plato
- Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone — by Sophocles
- Philoktetes — by Sophocles
- The Seven Plays in English Verse — by Sophocles
- Oedipus King of Thebes Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes — by Sophocles
- The Philoctetes of Sophocles — by Sophocles
- The Captivi and the Mostellaria — by Titus Maccius Plautus
Legacy & influence
Plays from Greek Antiquity continue to define what working theatre artists assume a play is. Drama-school curricula are built around them; regional theatres programme at least one of them every season; high-school English departments teach them year after year because students respond to the structural clarity and the language. What looks at first like pious veneration of the canon is, on closer inspection, a working consensus among practitioners that these plays still teach us how the form actually works.