"A boon for classicists and general readers alike. For the reader who comes to tragedy for the first time, these translations are eminently 'accessible.' . . . For the classicist, these versions constitute an ambitious reinterpretation of traditional masterpieces."

"Don't look for the wild and woolly-these were put together by wordsmiths. . . . But they are a far cry from some of the stodgier translations."

"The 12-volume set will offer readers new verse translations of the complete surviving tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as the surviving comedies of Aristophanes and Menander. The complete line of Greek theater classics has not been offered to readers since 1938."

About the Translators J. T. Barbarese has published two volumes of poetry, Under the Blue Moon and New Science, and individual poems of his have appeared in many literary periodicals, including Antioch Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Sewanee Review, and Boulevard. He writes book reviews for The Journal of Modern Literature, The Bloomsbury Review, The Georgia Review, The Sewanee Review, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He received his Ph.D. degree from Temple University and has received the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship. David Curzon Greg Delanty's latest poetry collection is The Hellbox; his earlier volumes are American Wake, Southward, and Cast in the Fire. His poems have appeared in the United States, Ireland, England, and Australia in anthologies such as the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing and the Norton Introduction to Poetry as well as magazines and journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, the New Statesman, the Irish Times, and the Times Literary Supplement. Delanty edited, with Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Jumping Off Shadows: Selected Contemporary Irish Poetry and, with Robert Welsh, The Selected Poems of Patrick Galvin. His numerous honors include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Allen Dowling Poetry Fellowship, the Wolfers-O'Neill Award, and the Austin Clark Award. Delanty was born in Cork, Ireland, and lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he teaches at St. Michael's College. Carolyn Kizer is the author of seven volumes of original poetry (most recently Harping On), one volume of translations, and other works of prose (most recently Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose). She was the first director of literary programs of the National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Washington University in St. Louis, Barnard College, Columbia University, Stanford University, University of Maryland, and Princeton University. In 1996 she was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Theodore Roethke Award, the Frost Medal and the Masefield Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and she has been honored for her poetry by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, among other arts organizations. Debora H. Roberts has been a member of the Department of Classics at Haverford College since 1977. She has published work on Greek tragedy and on Aristotle's Poetics, and is coeditor of Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature. She has taught a variety of courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, and in comparative literature. Her interests include ancient literary criticism, the classical tradition, and children's literature. Katharine Washburn--a writer, critic, and translator of poetry from classical and modern European languages--is coeditor of the monumental World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, translator of Paul Celan: Last Poems, author of the forthcoming novel The Translator's Apology, and coeditor of Dumbing Down. She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and served for four years as an NEA panelist.

Introduction by Palmer Bovie
Ion
—Translated by Deborah H. Roberts
Children of Heracles
—Translated by J. T. Barbarese
The Madness of Heracles
—Translated by Katharine Washburn and David Curzon
Iphigenia in Tauris
—Translated by Carolyn Kizer
Orestes
—Translated by Greg Delanty
Pronouncing Glossary of Names
About the Translators