Aeschylus: The Suppliants

By Aeschylus

Book Overview

An extraordinary drama of flight and rescue arising from women's resistance to marriage, The Suppliants is surprising both for its exotic color and for its forceful enactment of the primal struggle between male and female, lust and terror, brutality and cunning. In his translation of this ancient Greek drama, Peter Burian introduces a new generation of readers to a powerful work of Aeschylus' later years. He conveys the strength and daring of Aeschylus' language in the idiom of our own time, while respecting what is essentially classical in this dramatist's art: the rigor of the formal constraint with which he compresses high emotion to the bursting point. The Suppliants, which is the first and only surviving part of a trilogy, does not conform to our expectations of Greek drama in that it has neither hero, nor downfall, nor tragic conclusion. Instead the play portrays unresolved conflicts of sexuality, love, and emotional maturity. These distinctly modern themes come alive in a translation that re-creates the psychological immediacy as well as the dramatic tension of this ancient work. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691014957
• ISBN13: 9780691014951
• Release Date: February 1991
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Sisters fleeing cousins.

This is the first play of a trilogy by Aeschylus (c. 525-456 B. C.), the other two being lost (Aeschylus wrote over seventy plays of which only seven are extant). It begins the story of the daughters of Danaus. The brothers Aegyptus and Danaus were descendents of Io. Aegyptus had fifty sons and Danaus had fifty daughters and the sons are determined to marry their cousins. The daughters flee to Argos, seeking sanctuary from Pelasgus, King of Argos. The play, which contains very little action, is really serving as a prologue to the other two missing members of the trilogy.