Books like Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy — picked by fans

My journey to specialising in gender and revenge in ancient Athens began when I read this trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus in the original ancient Greek. These plays captivated me because of their stunningly powerful and breathtakingly beautiful use of imagery and language.

The characters are equally striking, especially the clever and determined queen Clytemnestra, a ruthless and duplicitous killer who murders her husband in the bath. In turn, her son Orestes is faced with the dreadful prospect of killing his own mother to avenge the death of his father. Performing matricide brings forth the terrifying Erinyes, goddesses of vengeance, who demand that Orestes pay the price.

The powerful female characters and the dilemmas of the revenge plot are what make this trilogy one I return to time and time again.

This translation of four of Euripides’ plays features his three best female avengers.

Electra is the loyal daughter who conspires with her brother Orestes, to avenge the killing of their father by slaughtering their mother, Clytemnestra. Hecabe is the fierce maternal figure who exacts revenge for her dead son Polydorus on the man who killed him for his riches. Medea is the murderous mother who avenges herself on her faithless husband, Jason, by killing her own children to destroy his family line.

The power of these plays is in the way their plots build as the women move from grief to anger, culminating in their fatal acts of revenge and leaving the audience to ponder on the nature of justice.

The focus of this book is on the power women could wield through public lamentation of the dead, with particular attention to their abilities to demand vengeance through their songs. Holst-Warhaft makes use of modern Greek laments to put forward an argument about the dangers of women’s voices instigating violence and to suggest this is why the ancient Athenians wanted to restrict women’s lamentation.

I find particularly fascinating the preserved laments of women from Mani where they claim to have taken revenge themselves, such as the nineteenth-century lament of Kalopothos Sakkakos in which his sister Paraski says she poisoned his killers (her husband, father-in-law, and brother-in-law) in revenge.

The intersections between motifs in these folk songs and ancient tragedies are enlightening.

Sophocles’ play depicts Electra beautifully, from her bitter mourning for her dead father to her grim determination when she contemplates taking vengeance herself as she believes her brother Orestes is dead. The debate between Electra and her sister Chrysothemis over what they, as women, should do is a high point for me.

This edition features the Victorian translation of Jebb that matches the majesty of Sophocles’ play well and is enjoyable to read. Easterling’s introduction to the scholar’s career and approach is also fascinating.

As a cancer survivor and bone marrow transplant recipient, I found this book enormously helpful personally as well as professionally.

Drawing on his experience as a theater director producing ancient Greek tragedies for survivors of war, addiction, natural disasters, and other calamities, Doerries brings these ancient plays to life for contemporary audiences. His moving, personal, generous account – part memoir, part philosophical exploration – eloquently exposes the value of Greek tragedy for coping with trauma and tragedy today.

Williams was one of the most creative and engaging moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a student at Oxford of E.R. Dodds. While Dodds reminded his readers of how strange the Greeks are to us, in terms of their religious practices, Williams reminds us that the Greeks are also very like us in the moral problems they confronted. Rejecting the idea that modern people have given up on “shame” in favor of “guilt,” Williams showed that we still share the same concerns as the conflicted characters of Greek tragedy – like them, for good and for ill, we gain our sense of ourselves and our moral worth from the reactions of the those around us. 

In 1912 a posse made up of cowboys and state police caught up with an Indian family on the run and massacred almost all of them. Murderous Indians, vengeful whites: a simple Western story that when told through the multiple points of view of its participants, the sheriff who couldn’t intercept the posse in time, the son of a murdered Basque rancher, and, most poignantly, Shoshone Mike’s adolescent daughter, has the elements of a Greek tragedy. 

This is a story about three brothers. It starts with the funeral of one of them (you don’t know which) and goes back over their lives to unravel the mystery. They are all very different and none of them are likeable, and yet I found myself invested in all of them, trying my hardest to like them despite what they did – to each other and more widely. The book explores some serious issues around mental health and addiction, and I felt Nugent did this incredibly well – with both sympathy and clearly lots of research. The story is also told very skillfully. It uses multiple characters and jumps between timelines but reads very smoothly.

If Arnott’s approach makes it easier to understand and appreciate how Greek drama and theatre were part of a performance culture in classical Athens, Baldry’s widens that perception to the much broader social and political climate of ancient Greece, from the likely ‘invention’ of tragedy and comedy in Athens at the end of the 6th Century BCE, to their development throughout the Greek world over the next two centuries and survival to our own time.

The whole sense of this new art form, a synthesis of storytelling, poetry, music, and dance, which developed as a kind of living and moving sculpture, is a hard one to take in all at once.

What Baldry offers is a brief but clear introduction to the background of both tragedy and comedy for anyone whose awareness of the potential of plays and players only begins with Shakespeare. He is both readable and a reliable… show more.

While the first two links are a good introduction to classical drama and theatre for the uninitiated, this third choice is different, a vast and unparalleled compendium covering productions of the whole corpus of direct and marginal translations of Greek tragedy on the English stage over some 250 years.

It is a work of reference rather than a ‘good read’, but it is a book into which I hope everyone would find reason to dip who believes in research as an essential feature of creative preparation for the new production of a ‘classic’.

The book is written by two of the most prominent and inspirational contemporary classical scholars whose prolific output in kindred areas of the classics and of theatre history has little rival.

Issues such as stage censorship, social and political change and translation bias show how the classical repertoire from Aeschylus through to Seneca has made it possible,… show more.