In this book, Taplin looks for clues to Aeschylus's stagecraft in the texts of the plays themselves, analyzing the exits and entrances that occur throughout his works.

This book opens up a neglected chapter in the reception of Athenian drama, especially comedy; and it gives stage-center to a particularly attractive and entertaining series of vase-paintings, hitherto regarded as marginal curiosities. These are the so-called "phlyax" vases; nearly all painted in the Greek cities of South Italy in the period 400-300 BC. Up till now, they have been taken to reflect some kind of folk theatre, but Oliver Taplin, promoted by three new vases recently published, argues that many reflect Athenian comedy of the sort represent by Aristophanes. This bold thesis opens up...

The Iliad came into existence to be heard from start to finish. While this is generally accepted in theory, the poem has not been properly studied in light of what this means in practice. Many connections, which are not obvious when the poem is read, become prominent if it is approached as an oral and aural creation, particularly if the poem is divided into three segments, probably a product of three night-long sessions of performance. This book contends that the shapings that these soundings, or sample explorations, bring into focus extend from details of wording and theme to the entire...

This collection of the writings of the late scholar Colin Macleod includes more than thirty essays--two never before published--on topics ranging from Horace, Thucydides, and Greek epic and tragedy to Roman love poetry and early Christian mysticism.

This interdisciplinary study opens up a fascinating interaction between art and theater. It shows how the mythological vase-paintings of fourth-century B.C. Greeks, especially those settled in southern Italy, are more meaningful for those who had seen the myths enacted in the popular new medium of tragedy. Of some 300 relevant vases, 109 are reproduced and accompanied by a picture-by-picture discussion. This book supplies a rich and unprecedented resource from a neglected treasury of painting.

The extensive performance history of Euripides' Medea since the Renaissance underscores its lasting social and political relevance. Here, papers drawn from an interdisciplinary colloquium hosted at Somerville College by the University of Oxford's Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in August 1998 are augmented by additional essays from specialists. The contributors to this important volume include Ian Christie, David Gowne, Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Platon Mavromoustakos, Marianne McDonald, Diane Purkiss, Margaret Reynolds, Mae Smethurst, Eva Stehlikova, Oliver Taplin, and...

Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy, is one of the most influential theatrical texts in the global canon. In performance, translation, adaptation, along with sung and danced interpretations, it has been familiar in the Greek world and the Roman empire, and from the Renaissance to the contemporary stage. It has been central to the aesthetic and intellectual avant-garde as well as to radical politics of all complexions and to feminist thinking. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection of eighteen essays on its performance history include classical scholars,...

Oliver Taplin's seminal study was revolutionary in drawing out the significance of stage action in Greek tragedy at a time when plays were often read purely as texts, rather than understood as performances.
Professor Taplin explores nine plays, including Aeschylus' agamemnon and Sophocles' Oedipus the King. The details of theatrical techniques and stage directions, used by playwrights to highlight key moments, are drawn out and related to the meaning of each play as a whole. With extensive translated quotations, the essential unity of action and speech in Greek tragedy is...

A 2016 Book of the Year, BBC History Magazine

Human wisdom is of little or no value', wrote Plato in his Apology. And yet the ancient Greeks, including Plato himself, more than any other people of antiquity were fascinated by the pursuit of the wisdom they called philosophia. That search for knowledge involved an extensive use of maxims and quotations, as we can see from those expressions of Homer prefaced by the phrase 'as people say'. Homer, the Seven Sages and the Pre-Socratic philosophers are still extensively quoted in all the major western languages....