David R. Slavitt was educated at Andover and Yale and has published more than sixty books: original poetry (recently Eight Longer Poems), translations (recently Broken Columns, of Statius and Claudian), novels (recently Lives of the Saints), critical works (recently Virgil), and short stories. He worked for seven years as a journalist at Newsweek and continues to do freelance reporting and reviewing. With Palmer Bovie he coedited the series Complete Roman Drama in Translation.

"What David Slavitt does, as the early Roman poets did, is to take a poem as his 'model' and make it his own by creating in late twentieth-century English an appropriate equivalent of the ancient poem. His Oresteia is the most lively and readable version known to me."-Gordon WilliamsPraise for the series:"A boon for classicists and general readers alike. For the reader who comes to tragedy for the first time, these translations are eminently 'accessible.'. . . For the classicist, these versions constitute an ambitious reinterpretation of traditional masterpieces."-Boston Book Review