Greek Tragic Poetry

Greek Tragic Poetry by Albin Lesky. Translated by Matthew Dillon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. xi + 503 pages. $50.00.

For more than one hundred and fifty years, in the long international conversation among Hellenists, those speaking in German have had so much to say that their language has sometimes been jestingly dubbed the third classical language. At least a dozen major volumes of Hellenic scholarship and criticism have been translated from the German in recent decades, including two previous works by Albin Lesky. (Lesky, who died in 1981, was Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Vienna from 1949 to 1967 and ranks among the great scholars of this century.) His History of Greek Literature and Greek Tragedy are basic for all students. Despite the similarity in title, the present book is not a variant of Greek Tragedy. It is a translation of the third edition (1972) of Die tragische Dichtung der Hellenen, a more technical work which, even in its first edition (1956), was the necessary starting-place for all new scholars in the field: a dense compendium of the latest research and a sober adjudication of the major issues.