Complete Greek Drama: All Extant Tragedies & Comedies (2 vols.)

The Complete Greek Drama: All the Extant Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the Comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, in a Variety of Translations (Random House, 1938). Two volumes. Edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill Jr.

2428 pages in 2 vols. | PDF


An ambitious undertaking when it was first published in 1938, these two volumes contain all the extant plays of ancient Greece -- the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Menander -- in a variety of translations. These plays are extremely important not only for their intrinsic values as comedies and tragedies, but also for the wide influence that they have exerted upon European drama and particularly the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

From the Preface: "The editors have endeavoured to choose the best available translation for each individual play. In some instances they were faced with an embarrassment of riches, while in others they were constrained to include a version with which they were somewhat dissatisfied, yet which clearly seemed to be superior to the other renderings at their disposal. The main criteria for determining the value of a particular version were these: essential correspondence to the Greek, original considered as a whole, plus as close fidelity as possible to the original in specific detail. Whether the version was in prose or verse was not made a primary consideration in the process of selection, but careful observance of the main criteria resulted in collecting a group of translations, thirty of which are in prose, fifteen in verse, and two in a combination of prose and verse. The variety of translations should enable the reader to obtain a better conception of the originals than would be possible if all the versions were from a single hand, however dexterous."

List of translators:

Richard Aldington
E. P. Coleridge
Thomas Francklin
R. C. Jebb
Paul Elmer More
E. D. A. Morshead
Gilbert Murray
L. A. Post
Robert Potter
F. M. Stawell
R. C. Trevelyan

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For modern translations of the Greek dramatists, see the following:

AESCHYLUS
http://kickasstorrents.ee/aeschylus-the-complete-greek-tragedies-11-books-t8747956.html

ARISTOPHANES
http://kickasstorrents.ee/aristophanes-the-complete-greek-comedies-7-books-t8751945.html

EURIPIDES
http://kickasstorrents.ee/euripides-the-complete-greek-tragedies-14-books-t8748928.html

SOPHOCLES
http://kickasstorrents.ee/sophocles-the-complete-greek-tragedies-17-books-t8750878.html