Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868) championed a comprehensive approach to antiquity, embracing history, literature, art and religion. This, and his openness to contemporary philosophical ideas about aesthetics and mythology, gave his work a visionary quality that inspired later figures as diverse as Usener and Wilamowitz. In this three-volume work on tragedy, his largest, published between 1839 and 1841, he attempts to reconstruct all the lost trilogies and tetralogies of Greek tragic theatre, insisting on their artistic unity, and demonstrating their fundamental debt to the Epic Cycle (which he had investigated in his Der Epische Cyclus, also reissued in this series). Amid much that is fantastic he made many brilliant discoveries, such that he must still be consulted by all serious students of the subject. Volume 3 discusses Greek tragedy in the Hellenistic period and the influence of Greek tragedy on later Roman drama.
