The tangled ways of Zeus

"This book brings together nineteen studies by Alan Sommerstein on ancient Athenian drama, especially tragedy; five of these have not previously appeared in print, and almost all the others were first published (between 1992 and 2(106) in out-of-the-way journals, collections, or conference volumes. These appear here as originally written, but are accompanied by updating addenda. Though they cover a wide range of topics from the presentation of violence in drama to the socialization of the adolescent male, from the authenticity of play titles to the significance of one character calling another 'dearest, ' most of them focus on four or five themes: the dramatists' exploitation and modification of myth; how much their audiences could know or guess in advance about the content of a play; connected suites of plays that were produced together (trilogies and tetralogies); the information that can be gleaned from our fragmentary evidence about plays that have not survived; and some of the multifarious connections between Athenian tragic drama and Athenian society, including the socioeconomic composition of audiences, the relationship between Aeschylus' Oresicia and the politics of its day, and evidence supporting the tradition that Aeschylus desired to be commemorated on his tomb not as a poet but as a soldier. All are informed by the conviction that 'the study of ancient, or any other, literature is a branch of history'."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.