Edith Hall
Greek Chic
Bacchae: A New Translation
By Robin Robertson
Vintage Classics 128pp £12 order from our bookshop
A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde
By Lavinia Greenlaw
Faber & Faber 217pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
The Last Days of Troy
By Simon Armitage
Faber & Faber 137pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
The ancient Greeks refuse to go away. The appearance of a new novel, play or opera on a Greek theme has become almost a weekly occurrence. In each of these three publications, the relationship with ancient literature takes a different form. But all three works recycle narratives about Greek heroes whose actions were first described in Bronze Age poems dating from as early as the second millennium BC. God, death, love, war, sex and family, in Mycenaean Thebes or Troy, remain as stimulating to literary and theatrical creativity as ever.
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