The book studies the past of the characters in Aeschylus and Sophocles, a neglected but crucial topic. The characters’ beliefs, values, and emotions bear on their view of the past. This view reinforces their beliefs and their conception of themselves and others as agents of free will and members of a family and/or community. The study reveals that, although the characters’ idea of the past is fixed, the impact of the past is not. The characters consider, review, and construct narratives of it, as they seek to mould a future they perceive as morally just for themselves and others.

Trends in Classics, a series and journal edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos, publishes innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts the insights and methods of related disciplines such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity.

The series Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes welcomes monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings and collections of papers; it provides an important forum for the ongoing debate about where Classics fits in modern cultural and historical studies.　

The journal Trends in Classics is published twice a year with approx. 160 pp. per issue. Each year one issue is devoted to a specific subject with articles edited by a guest editor.