Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession

This series of twenty complementary essays by experts in the field explores the art, social status, reputation and image of the ancient actor in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the sixth century B.C. to the Byzantine period. It covers tragedy, comedy, mime and pantomime and offers a full overview of the most important ancient evidence. In some essays new questions are asked, and in others, completely new evidence is offered. Numerous illustrations are included and all Greek and Latin passages are translated.

Pat Easterling is Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Newnham College and a Fellow of the British Academy. She was Professor of Greek at University College London from 1987 to 1994, and has also served as President of the Classical Association (1989/1990) and the Hellenic Society (1996–1999). In addition to serving as General Editor of the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics ever since its foundation over thirty years ago, she has published an edition within this series of Sophocles' Trachiniae (1982), co-edited, with B. M. W. Knox, Volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Classical Literature (1985) and edited The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997). She is currently working on an edition of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series.

Edith Hall is Professor of Greek Cultural History at the University of Durham and has previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Reading and Oxford. She is Co-Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford and author of Inventing the Barbarian (1989), editor of Aeschylus' Persians (1996) and co-editor of Medea in Performance (2000).