One night, several passersby see a group of thugs attacking someone in the center of the city. On a nearby island, another man’s childhood friend lies mortally ill, unable to rise from his bed. Athenian citizens, this time soldiers, are wounded and unable to walk as the rest of the army retreats after a disastrous battle. A man kidnapped by the marauding crew of a warship is first sold into slavery, then ransomed, then threatened with slavery once again if he cannot pay off his ransomers. In a murder trial, a slave is tortured for legal evidence as parties to...

Phaedra, young wife of Theseus, has fallen ill with suppressed love for her stepson Hippolytus. She suffers, she frets, she cannot stay still. In this scene from Euripides’Hippolytus,the loyal and garrulous servant who is tending Phaedra expresses weary exasperation at the task. Her comment that nursing entails “vexation of the mind, and hard work for the hands besides” strikes an undoubted note of realism. Of the three great fifth-century tragedians, Euripides was held to have created the most life-like characters, and the Nurse in particular has been taken to represent an ordinary woman (Pearson 1962, 12). Her grumbling...

Aeschylus wrote a tragedy, now lost, on the ransom of Hector; it stood third in a trilogy based on Books 16–24 of theIliad.¹ Unfortunately, we cannot know how the playwright dramatized the scene in which Priam, king of Troy, offers the Greek warrior Achilles an enormously rich ransom for the body of his slain son. In Homer, great attention is paid to the behavior of Achilles, who accepts the treasure and relinquishes Hector’s corpse: he does so at the behest of Zeus, but also in response to the old man’s supplication.² This poignant scene, which was also a...

In theAgamemnon,the old men of the chorus hear the terrible cries of their king as he is being stabbed to death by Clytemnestra. Speaking one after another, expressing contradictory views, they form the very picture of indecision and confusion. Should they rally the citizens, or should they rush inside the palace and catch the murderer with “fresh-flowing sword”? Should they put their own lives at risk? For what purpose? Can they prevent tyranny? It seems the king must already be dead, but is it possible that he still breathes and could be rescued? If we set aside the...

In the tragedy by Sophocles, the warrior Philoctetes has been abandoned on an island by his fellow Greeks because of an incurable and painful snakebite; his anguished cries hamper the performance of religious rites (9–11). For ten years he languishes in terrible isolation until the Greeks revisit the island; he then begs to be taken aboard their ship. Despite the mythical and symbolic dimensions of his plight, Philoctetes may remind us of a real enough problem: how fighting men on the move should handle their sick and wounded comrades.¹ The two narratives considered in this chapter come from the...

The immortal Prometheus stands shackled to towering rocks in desolate Scythia, exposed to the bright blaze of the sun. An adamantine wedge pierces his chest and pins him to the spot. He is there because Zeus is punishing him for giving to mankind the gift of fire. For the duration ofPrometheus Bound,every character that enters the stage must respond somehow to the spectacle of his suffering. Hephaestus, compelled to inflict pain upon kin and companion (39), expresses anguish. Kinsman and friend Oceanus (288–297) grieves with Prometheus and wants to intercede; the daughters of Oceanus feel tearful sympathy...

The social historian attempts to find out, among other things, what life was like for ordinary people and how society worked: its cultural ideals and its everyday realities. The task is difficult in the case of ancient Greece, since modern scholars must rely upon a limited corpus of literary works that are skewed toward the upper classes, the educated few whose wealth and leisure gave them the freedom to explore ideas. Most ancient literature was written both by and for the male citizen elite; insofar as it commented on the lives of ordinary people, it did so with an elite...