Introduction

Abstract

In 1990 Jack Winkler and Froma Zeitlin dropped a bomb on the study of Greek drama with the publication of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Taking their departure from the narrow formalist historicism of prior scholarship, with its interest in properly historical persons, events and trends, Winkler and Zeitlin shifted their attention toward ‘the entire social context of the [dramatic] festival’ (3). Greek drama would now be a window into the sociocultural pulse of fifth-century Athens. This new praxis came to be known as ‘cultural poetics’, and its practitioners viewed Greek drama as an embedded and constitutive element of a society in constant negotiation with itself. Drama now reflected or symptomatised historical, religious and political context. As Simon Goldhill put it in the introduction to his study of the Oresteia:Tragedy takes place…at the moment of maximal unresolved tension between…systems of ideas… It explores the different and competing ideals, different and competing obligations, different and competing sense of words in the developing polis, different and competing ideas of glory and success… It discovers tensions and ambiguities with the very civic ideology of democracy that is the context of tragedy's performance… Tragedy takes the developing notions, vocabulary, commitments of democracy and places them under rigorous, polemical, violent and public scrutiny.The impact and aftershock of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? can still be felt today. In one way or another, we might say, we are all the children (and grandchildren) of Winkler and Zeitlin. The question remains, however, what type of children we have been in the time since (kaloi men k'agathoi, kakoi de k'aischroi?) and how we will honour their legacy as we move forward with the study of Greek drama.