Search Results: Ajax [Play]

Ajax is a play written by the 5th-century BCE Greek poet and dramatist Sophocles. Although Sophocles wrote at least 120 plays, only seven have survived. Of his surviving plays, the best-known is Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King) - part of a...

The Trojan War was fought between Greeks and the defenders of the city of Troy in Anatolia sometime in the late Bronze Age. The story has grabbed the imagination for millennia but a conflict between Mycenaeans and Hittites may well have occurred...

Homer's Iliad describes the final year of the Trojan War, a legendary conflict between an alliance of Greek cities and the city of Troy in Anatolia. It was probably written in the 8th century BCE after a long oral tradition. The Greeks themselves...

The satyr-play The Cyclops was written by Euripides, one of the great Greek tragedians, in 412 or 408 BCE. Like many of his fellow tragedians, Euripides centers his play on a well-known story from Greek mythology. The Cyclops is based on...

The play Agamemnon was written by one of the greatest Greek tragedians Aeschylus (c. 525 – 455 BCE), “Father of Greek Tragedy.” Older than both Sophocles and Euripides, he was the most popular and influential of all tragedians of his era...

Plutus (aka Wealth) is a play written by the great Greek comedy playwright Aristophanes in 388 BCE. It was the last of his plays to be performed during his lifetime. Like his earlier play Ecclesiazusae (The Assemblywomen), Wealth was written...

The tragedy Medea was written in 431 BCE by Euripides (c. 484 – 407 BCE). Euripides authored at least 90 plays of which 19 have survived intact. As with the plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus, the audience was already well aware of the myth...

Helen is a Greek tragedy by Euripides (c. 484-407 BCE). It is usually thought to have first been performed at the Great Dionysia of 412 BCE and was part of the trilogy that included Euripides' lost Andromeda. Helen recounts an unusual version...

Achilles is a figure from Greek mythology and literature and star of the Trojan War. Leader of the fearsome Myrmidons, sacker of cities, and slayer of Hector, godlike Achilles was quite simply invincible in battle. Only the divine intervention...

A detail of the celebrated Athenian black-figure belly amphora (Type A) by Exekias, c. 530 BCE. The central scene depicts Achilles and Ajax playing a board game during a respite in the Trojan War. (Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, The Vatican, Rome...