Marcus Sharp is a charismatic and enigmatic New York actor who recounts in gruesome detail how his obsessions with a wealthy doctor named Jason and the myth of Medea lead to horrific, unspeakable events. At once ancient and contemporary, this provocative mono-thriller is Grand Guignol horror in the style of Spalding Gray.

Alcestis/Medea/The Children of Heracles/Hippolytus 'One of the best prose translations of Euripides I have seen' Robert Fagles This selection of plays shows Euripides transforming the titanic figures of Greek myths into recognizable, fallible human beings. Medea, in which a spurned woman takes revenge upon her lover by killing her children, is one of the most shocking of all the Greek tragedies. Medea is a towering figure who demonstrates Euripides' unusual willingness to give voice to a woman's case. Alcestis is based on a magical myth in which Death is overcome, and The Children of Heracles examines conflict between might and right, while Hippolytus deals with self-destructive integrity. Translated by JOHN DAVIE

Medea - simply to mention her name conjures up echoes and cross-connections from Antiquity to the present. The vengeful wife, the murderess of her own children, the frail, suicidal heroine, the archetypal Bad Mother, the smitten maiden, the barbarian, the sorceress, the abused victim, the case study for a pathology. For more than two thousand years, she has arrested the eye in paintings, reverberated in opera, called to us from the stage. She demands the most interdisciplinary of study, from ancient art to contemporary law and medicine; she is no more to be bound by any single field of study than by any single take on her character. The contributors to this wide-ranging volume are Brian Arkins, Angela J. Burns, Anthony Bushell, Richard Buxton, Peter A. Campbell, Margherita Carucci, Daniela Cavallaro, Robert Cowan, Hilary Emmett, Edith Hall, Laurence D. Hurst, Ekaterini Kepetzis, Ivar Kvistad, Catherine Leglu, Yixu Lue, Edward Phillips, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Paula Straile-Costa, John Thorburn, Isabelle Torrance, Terence Stephenson, and Amy Wygant.

The central episode in the Portuguese rewritings of Medea is the break between the Asiatic princess and Jason, on the one hand, and Medea’s killing of their children in retaliation, on the other. The enthusiasm for the great classical plots and the challenge to remodel the Classics are the main motivation behind the Portuguese rewritings.

While modern students of Greek religion are alert to the occasion-boundedness of epiphanies and divinatory dreams in Greek polytheism, they are curiously indifferent to the generic parameters of the relevant textual representations on which they build their argument. Instead, generic questions are normally left to the literary critic, who in turn is less interested in religion. To evaluate the relation of epiphanies and divinatory dreams to Greek polytheism, the book investigates relevant representations through all major textual genres in pagan antiquity. The evidence of the investigated genres suggests that the ‘epiphany-mindedness’ of the Greeks, postulated by most modern critics, is largely an academic chimaera, a late-comer of Christianizing 19th-century-scholarship. It is primarily founded on a misinterpretation of Homer’s notorious anthropomorphism (in the Iliad and Odyssey but also in the Homeric Hymns). This anthropomorphism, which is keenly absorbed by Greek drama and figural art, has very little to do with the religious lifeworld experience of the ancient Greeks, as it appears in other genres. By contrast, throughout all textual genres investigated here, divinatory dreams are represented as an ordinary and real part of the ancient Greeks' lifeworld experience.