CCS’s next publication, due out in the middle of 2015, will be Greek Satyr Play: Five Studies by Mark Griffith.

This volume brings together, with a new introduction, minor revisions, and cross-references, five essays published between 2002 and 2010, only one of which is currently available online.

These essays refine and significantly modify our understanding of Athenian satyr-dramas of the 5th C. BCE. They show that these dramas constituted a significant and distinct genre whose elements of “romance” (adventure, love affairs, heroic characters, happy endings) worked closely in tandem with their accompanying tragedies, not so much as burlesques, parodies, or comic inversions of tragedy (as many modern scholars have argued), nor as an entirely ribald and gross type of comic relief (as many others have also claimed), but rather as providing a kind of “parallel universe”, a fantasy world of adventure and desire, in which distant, usually rustic places are visited, ogres and other threats and obstacles are overcome by noble Greek heroes and heroines, social norms are restored, and the rewards of music, wine, dance, and sex — including marriage for those noble characters — are shown to be attainable to all who merit them — a world that has much in common with Theocritean pastoral and the later prose romances.