This book is designed as an advanced critical introduction to Greek tragedy, primarily for the reader who has little or no Greek. I aim to provide a combination of powerful readings of individual plays with an understanding of the complex difficulties involved in the analysis of the workings of Greek tragic texts, in the light of modern literary critical studies.

For Greek tragedy, the best available critical material – on which I have drawn liberally – is based on a close reading of the Greek text, and even where an attempt is made to help the Greekless reader by transliteration or translation, insufficient assistance is provided for the reader without an extensive knowledge of fifth-century Athenian culture. It is little help to translate polis as ‘city’ or ‘city-state’, or to leave it in a transliterated form, if the reader has no understanding of the nature of civic ideology in the fifth century and its importance for tragedy in particular.

There have been works attempting such a wider introduction, but they are in general pitched, often with schools in mind, far below the level of critical awareness or sophistication required by the modern reader who approaches these plays from disciplines other than classics.