Using recent narrative theory, this book explores the narrative strategies that sustain the complex relationship between the tragic poet and his sophisticated audience. It discusses how these sprawling stories were typically shaped by Aeschylus into dramatic form; and, once established, how these patterns were successively adapted, subverted, capped or ignored by Sophocles and Euripides in the annual attempt to recreate suspense and express fresh meanings relevant to the difficult last decades of the fifth century.

Barbara Goward teaches Classics at Birkbeck College, London.