This remains the major book on Aeschylus' Supplices, its dating and the trilogy to which it belonged. Its first appearance (1969) was a full response to the publication of a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus which indicated a late production date (in the 460s BC) for the play, thus upsetting the previous consensus that it was an early work - indeed the earliest Greek tragedy to survive. There was, the book argues, no longer good reason to suppose that the play belonged to an early stage in its author's development. The final chapter also examines the evidence for reconstruction of the other, lost plays of the trilogy. The present (and first paperback) edition remains essentially unchanged, though a new preface and bibliography have been added to take account of scholarship since 1969. Garvie remains convinced that, even without the additional testimony of the papyrus, all the internal evidence from the text of the play points to the 460s, though some have tried to pull it back into the 470s because it feels like an early play.
Some of the salutary lessons to be drawn from the discovery of the papyrus have still to be learnt and it is timely for this reissue to be presented to a new generation of Aeschylean students and scholars. * Second edition with new preface and bibliography by the author. * Key study of the dating of a play hitherto thought to be our earliest surviving Greek tragedy. * New volume in the Ignibus Paperbacks series.