Euripides: Cyclops

Richard Hunter · Rebecca Laemmle

Jul 2020 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Euripides' Cyclops is the only example of Attic satyr-drama which survives intact. It is a brilliant dramatisation of the famous story from Homer's Odyssey of how Odysseus blinded the Cyclops after making him drunk. The play has much to teach us, not just about satyr-drama, but also about the reception and adaptation of Homer in classical Athens; the brutal savagery of the Homeric monster is here replaced by an ironised presentation of Athenian social custom. Problems of syntax, metre and language are fully explained, and there is a sophisticated literary discussion of the play. This edition will be of interest to advanced undergraduates and graduate students studying Greek literature, as well as to scholars.

About the author

RICHARD HUNTER is Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge, where he has taught since 1978, and a Fellow of Trinity College. He has taught at several American universities, including Princeton and the University of Virginia, and lectures in the United States and Europe regularly. He has published extensively in the fields of Greek and Latin literature; his most recent books include Critical Moments in Classical Literature (Cambridge 2009), (with Donald Russell) Plutarch, How to Study Poetry (Cambridge 2011), Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature: The Silent Stream (Cambridge 2012), Hesiodic Voices (Cambridge 2014), Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica Book IV (Cambridge 2015), and The Measure of Homer (Cambridge 2018). Many of his essays have been collected in the two-volume On Coming After: Studies in Post-Classical Greek Literature and its Reception (2008). He has edited the Journal of Hellenic Studies and is on the editorial board of Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Cambridge Classical Studies and several European journals. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, holds honorary degrees from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Ioannina, is a Corresponding Fellow of the Academy of Athens and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

REBECCA LAEMMLE is a University Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. She previously taught at the University of Basel, Switzerland and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany. Her doctoral thesis won the Heidelberger Förderpreis für Klassisch-Philologische Theoriebildung and the Marie Heim-Vögtlin Prize of the Swiss National Science Foundation in 2011 and was subsequently published as Poetik des Satyrspiels (2013). She has published widely on ancient literature and its reception.