Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the editorship of Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the plays. Already tested in performance on the stage, this translation shows for the first time in English the striking interplay of voices in Euripides' Suppliant Women. Torn between the mothers' lament over the dead and proud civic eulogy, between calls for a just war and grief for the fallen, the play captures with unremitting force the competing poles of the human psyche. The translators, Rosanna Warren and Stephen Scully, accentuate the contrast between female lament and male reasoned discourse in this play where the silent dead hold, finally, center stage.

Aeschylus' 'Suppliants' dramatises the myth of the fifty daughters of Danaos, who flee Egypt and come to Argos as suppliants, trying to escape forced marriage to their Egyptian cousins. It was long considered to be the earliest surviving tragedy. Even after the mid-20th century, when new evidence established a later date for the play, critics tended to condemn it for its alleged 'archaic' features. As a result it has long been underestimated, although a careful examination reveals it to be one of the most exciting tragedies. This companion employs a variety of critical approaches to set the play in its literary, dramatic, social and historical contexts, and also offers a thorough examination of the performance of the tragedy, investigating topics such as stage, action, music, song and dance.

Many of the themes of Aeschylus' Suppliants - the treatment of refugees, forced marriage, ethnic and cultural clashes, decisions on war and peace, political deception - resonate strongly in the world of today. The play was, however, for many years neglected in comparison to Aeschylus' other works, probably in part because it was wrongly believed to be very early and hence 'primitive', and this edition, aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students, is the first since 1889 to offer an accessible English commentary based on the Greek text. This provides particular help with the peculiarities of tragic, especially Aeschylean, Greek. An extensive introduction discusses the Danaid myth and its many variations, the four-play production (tetralogy) of which Suppliants formed part, the underlying social and religious issues and presuppositions, the conditions of performance, and the place of Suppliants in Aeschylus' work, among other topics.

Student-oriented edition with commentary of a long-neglected Greek tragedy about refugees, gender, race, war, and political deception.

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.

As Athenians of the classical era became increasingly aware of their own collective identity, they sought to define themselves and exclude others. They created a formal legal status to designate the free noncitizens living among them, calling them metics and calling their status metoikia. When Aeschylus dramatized the mythical flight of the Danaids from Egypt in his play Suppliant Women, he did so in light of his own time and place. Throughout the play, directly and indirectly, he casts the newcomers as metics and their stay in Greece as metoikia. Bakewell maps the manifold anxieties that metics created in classical Athens, showing that although citizens benefited from the many immigrants in their midst, they also feared the effects of immigration in political, sexual, and economic realms. Bakewell finds metoikia was a deeply flawed solution to the problem of large-scale immigration.

Aeschylus starts his tetralogy boldly, making the Danaids themselves prologue, chorus and protagonist. Guided by their father Danaus, these girls have fled from Egypt, where their cousins want to marry them, to seek asylum in Argos: they claim descent from Io, who was driven to Egypt five generations earlier when Zeus' love for her was detected by jealous Hera. In the long first movement of the play the Danaids argue their claim, pressing it with song and dance of pathos and power, upon the reluctant Argive king. He, forced eventually by their threat of suicide, puts the case to his people, who vote to accept the girls, but while they sing blessings on Argos, Danaus spies their cousins' ships arriving. Left on their own when he goes for help, they sing more seriously of suicide, and seek sanctuary upstage when the Egyptians enter. A remarkable tussle of two choruses ensues; in the nick of time the king arrives, sees off the Egyptians (but they promise a return) and offers his hospitality. The girls want their father, however, and go when guided by him and his escort of Argive soldiers. Their final song has elements of wedding song in it; they share it, provocatively, with the Argives. The rest of the tetralogy is lost, but enough is known to indicate that marriage is the theme. Aeschylus probably surprised his first audience in his use of the myth; his command of theatre and poetry is fully mature.A.J.Bowen is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. From 1993 to 2007 he was Orator of the University.