Product Description: As Voltaire famously opined, Athaliah, Racine’s last play, is “perhaps the greatest masterwork of the human spirit.” Its formidable antagonists, Athaliah, queen of Judah, and Jehoiada, high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, are engaged in a deadly struggle for dominion: she, fiercely determined to maintain her throne and exterminate the detested race of David; he, no less fiercely determined to overthrow this heathen queen and enthrone the orphan Joash, the scion of the house of David, whom Athaliah believes she slew as an infant ten years earlier...read more

With 1,125 entries and 170 contributors, this is the first encyclopedia on the history of classical archaeology. It focuses on Greek and Roman material, but also covers the early cultures of the Bronze Age Aegeans and the Etruscans and manifestations of Greek and Roman culture in other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea. Unlike recent studies focusing on the science of excavating, this book considers archaeological study in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern era. It includes entries on individuals whose activities influenced knowledge of sites and monuments and sites as seen, changed, and interpreted through time; entries on major works of art excavated during the Renaissance; and works that were known in the Middle Ages.

This is the third volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the “heroic” couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet’s compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine’s is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.In Iphigenia, his ninth play, Racine returns to Greek myth for the first time since Andromache. To Euripides’s version of the tale he adds a love interest between Iphigenia and Achilles. And dissatisfied with the earlier resolutions of the Iphigenia myth (her actual death or her eleventh-hour rescue by a dea ex machina), Racine creates a wholly original character, Eriphyle, who, in addition to providing an intriguing new denouement, serves the dual dramatic purpose of triangulating the love interest and galvanizing the wholesome “family values” of this play by a jolt of supercharged passion.

Product Description: This is the first volume of what is planned to be a complete traversal in English of Racine's twelve plays, only the third time such a project has been undertaken in the three hundred years since Racine's death. Volume I comprises "Iphigenia," "Andromache" and "Britannicus"; all three are potent blends of passion and politics, explosive in their confrontations between Racine's highly charged, highly volatile characters...read more