Tragedies Of Aeschylus Research Articles

A STUDY IN THE LIGHT OF ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDIES- “MADNESS” AS A TRAGIC ELEMENT

Since the beginning of time, madness has been ascribed to the sacred. This was also the case for the Ancient Greeks. They believed that their anthropomorphic deities were involved in all aspects of life. So they characterized madness as a condition sent by the gods. The connection between madness and the divine powers has also been the theme of Ancient Greek poetry. In Homer’s The Iliad, at the fiercest moment of the war, the enraged Hector wears the armor of Patroclus and there enters into him Ares the god of war, his limbs are filled with might. In The Odyssey, when the suitors of Penelope gather for dinner, Athena makes them laugh uncontrollably and then makes them cry. The theme of madness can also be seen in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Although insanity still is a divine punishment in those plays, there are other reasons for the madness of tragic heroes and heroines. Feelings of guilt, sense of responsibilty, sadness, shame, honor and arrogance may be mentioned among them. In the Sophoclean tragedy “Aias”, Aias goes mad and kills Greek cattle believing that it is the Greeks. After returning to his senses, he kills himself out of shame. In the Euripidean tragedy “Medeia”, after Iason’s betrayal, Medeia goes mad and takes vengeance on Iason by murdering Glauce, his new wife as well as her own children. Our aim in this study is to examine the notion of madness in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Модернистская драма и референциальность: «Суини-Агонист» Т.С. Элиота и «Происхождение немецкой барочной драмы» Вальтера Беньямина

“Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, … will not stay in place, / Will not staystill” (Burnt Norton V). Using words and not being used by them is rare to Eliot’s thought tormented figures, from his drama Sweeney Agonistes to Four Quartets. The struggle with words is a constant trait of Eliot’s poetry, besides being common among modernists all over Europe. His drama’s broken syntax mirrors the clashing mixture of Aeschylean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and the popular culture of music-hall, cabaret, and jazz, which make up the play. As a result, the play brings forth a modernistic defamiliarizing, and metatheatrical effect, by breaking up the linear rapport between action and word, actor and gesture, sign and signified. Poetic drama or unfinished poem, Sweeney Agonistes has been recently revalued (Chinitz, Buttram, Daniel, Cuda), but in its daring avant-garde experimentalism (de Villiers), still eludes interpretations, mainly because of the far from clear reason why Eliot neither finished it nor included it in his theatrical production. If, however, we place the play in the context of various dramatic theories and plays of the time, we may read its incongruities, and disjunctions between words and things, as a one of the modernistic traits that were widely discussed at the time, among others, by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Benjamin’s new way of looking at allegory, stressing its self-referential import, may help us find one more key to the revolutionary direction Eliot had envisaged in his non-dramatic tragedy. As Eliot himself said of Seneca: “the drama is all in the word and the word has no further reality behind it”. Although a link between Eliot’s conservative modernism and Benjamin’s messianism would seem unlikely, recent studies have highlighted some of their common ground (Neilson, Lehman). In order to account for the play’s disjunctions and metatheatrical language, I will dwell on Eliot’s notion of the dissociation of sensibility (1920–1927) comparing it to Benjamin’s allegorical perception, or “the falling apart of modern man”.

The Philosophical Stage. Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens by Joshua Billings

Reviewed by: The Philosophical Stage. Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens by Joshua Billings Anna Novokhatko Joshua Billings. The Philosophical Stage. Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 272. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-69-120518-2. Billings' study of the revival of the close and multifaceted relationship between philosophical and dramatic thought makes a challenging contribution to the fruitful discussions about the late Athenian polis, which witnessed a productive and competitive interaction of poetic and philosophical thought and writing. The book argues convincingly that Greek drama not only integrates developments in philosophical thought, but that dramatic texts are themselves developments in philosophical thought and should be recognised as part of the early Greek philosophical canon. The book consists of an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction explains in detail both general methodological issues and the main argument that Greek tragedy (and sometimes comedy) is most philosophical not when it reflects existing philosophical doctrines, but when it takes philosophical questions as its own. Chapter 1 considers the phenomenon of lists and catalogues in drama, particularly listing of inventions, gifts, achievements, or capacities that provides an image of human culture and reflects on the sources of authority and power in human existence. Palamedes and Prometheus were both associated with Aeschylean tragedy and allegorized the utopian image of the catalogue listing the capacities that raise humans above animals (frs. 181a, 182 and PV 447–506). Also, Theseus' speech of thanksgiving (Eur. Suppl. 163–249), Billings argues, represents the closest parallel to Prometheus' catalogue. The guiding idea of the speech is gratitude for the beneficial constituents of a teleologically ordered universe. The so-called Ode to Man from Sophocles' Antigone as well as the much-discussed Sisyphus Fragment (Euripides or Critias) are also brought into the philosophical context of major preoccupations of 5th century BCE intellectual culture on the central achievements of human culture and the role of the gods in human existence. Chapter 2 turns to another philosophical issue: the connection between deception and ontology, a significant question of the sophistic movement. Billings argues that dramas stage ontological questions as problems of ethical action and political community that concern language, truth, and being. Billings analyses the similarities of the four prologue scenes of Sophocles' Electra and Philoctetes, Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, and Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis. All four establish questions of reality, truth, and language that pervade the works as a whole and have a substantial presence in contemporary philosophical discourse. The "intrigue prologue" constitutes a form for probing the role of trust and truth within a community, where the problems of deception are raised in political terms, crystallizing questions of truth and knowledge within a democratic [End Page 93] collective. These texts constitute a reflection parallel to those of Parmenides or Gorgias on the relations among reality, perception, and persuasion. The plays problematize deception as a state between truth and falsehood, being and nonbeing, from which no one can fully emerge, least of all the audience. In forging a link between questions of reality and truth, on one hand, and political life, on the other, the "intrigue prologues" are argued to have made a distinctive contribution to fifth century philosophical thought. Chapter 3 deals with the questions of debate, intellectual authority, and novelty among three groups—politicians, poets, and craftsmen. The much-discussed idea of sophia closely linked to new forms of traditional socio-cultural authority as well as to novel intellectual trends is analysed in the agones sophias ("intellectual contests") in Euripides' Antiope and Palamedes, Aristophanes' Frogs, and Euripides' Bacchae. In Euripides' Antiope the two brothers Amphion and Zethus in debate contrast their active and contemplative lives while the agon represents a metadiscourse on musical and philosophical innovation in drama; in Euripides' Palamedes the confrontations over the meaning of sophia ("wisdom") are staged as well as questions surrounding the role of the poet in society and tragedy's role as a traditional source of wisdom. The agon in Aristophanes' Frogs puts into play various ideas of sophia as a conception connected to divinity and practice in a community and as human inquiry and individual pursuit. The play's thoroughgoing contrast between old and...

The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter

Reviewed by: The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter Adriana Brook (bio) Sarah Nooter. The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 309. $99.99. Moving on from the well-received When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge, 2012), Sarah Nooter's new book extends her exploration of the aural world of Greek tragedy through the plays of Aeschylus. This book examines all of the extant dramas, including many of the fragmentary ones, culminating in an in-depth reading of the Oresteia. Nooter takes as her subject the concept of voice, not as a worn metaphor for identity, but as a physical, embodied sound experienced in the moment of performance. Early in the book, she establishes a programmatic distinction between voice and language, arguing that, while the nature of our evidence (scripts) has led to an almost exclusive focus on words and their linguistic meaning, the voice as sound both "precedes and exceeds language" (6), a more concrete and honest counterpart to the evasiveness of language that we can investigate even without access to original performances. After a brief introduction, the book begins with a chapter that explores the conceptualization of the voice in archaic and classical Greek literature. The chapter establishes the human voice as existing somewhere between the extremes of the articulate divine and the inarticulate bestial (a category which includes babies). Nooter connects voice to the idea of breath; it represents a physical, material point of contact between the mortal and the divine as the gods literally inspire mortal voices in the form of prophecy or poetry. Breath and sound bridge the gap between inside and outside, arising from deep within the vocalizer and invading the body of the listener. Such sounds can produce both somatic and psychological effects that are more difficult to evade than visual stimuli. Harsh labial plosives can, for instance, reflect Zeus' power (27) or drive Agamemnon to the conclusion that he must kill his own daughter (156–57). The book's second chapter considers specifically Aeschylus's voice as it was perceived in the ancient world, focusing on its parody in Aristophanes's Frogs. Nooter offers a sophisticated analysis of Aeschylus's role in this drama, showing that the presentation of the playwright and his voice in Aristophanes's play exemplifies three categories of vocal presence that can be observed in Aeschylean [End Page 117] drama itself (voice described, voice performed, voice as plot). At the same time, she maps the way in which these three categories describe the vocal progression that Aeschylus undergoes in Frogs (his movement from silence to defensiveness to attack) and ultimately explain his unexpected victory in competition with Euripides. Progressing category by category, Nooter first elucidates these vocal effects as employed in the Frogs and then turns to vignettes from the Prometheus Bound, Seven Against Thebes, Persians, Suppliants, and assorted fragmentary tragedies and satyr plays that exemplify the same dramatic uses of voice by Aeschylus himself. Those looking for sustained discussion of plays beyond those of the Oresteia will find it in this chapter. The heart of the book is a three-chapter exploration of voice in the Oresteia, a trilogy that has been analyzed extensively for its ambiguous and indeterminate use of language, but has not been sufficiently considered through the lens of the physical voice. Nooter addresses precisely this issue in a powerful three-chapter sequence that largely stands on its own. Nooter frames the Agamemnon as a play in which the usual reliability of voice is called into question through mimetic performance. The chorus in particular "ventriloquizes" (124) characters who are either dead or absent (Calchas, Iphigenia), displacing the normally secure voice from its body. This introduces an element of instability into the drama that reflects the broader social instability of Mycenae. Ultimately, the truth of the voice supersedes the circularity and deceit of language, as the sonic effect of what the chorus is doing (through repetition and alliteration) overcomes the linguistic meaning of what they say. Aural patterns that should impose order on the world instead reveal its disruptions and the chorus's attempts to reassert order ultimately...

The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter

Reviewed by: The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter Melissa Mueller Sarah Nooter. The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. x + 307 pp. Cloth, £75. In the dystopian world of Ben Marcus' novel, The Flame Alphabet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), adults are forced to flee the viral toxicity of children's voices: pre-adolescent speech transmits a deadly disease for which there is no cure. Children alone are immune. This novel was often on my mind as I read The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Voice in all its sublimity lies at the heart of both Marcus' novel and Sarah Nooter's beautifully written study. I finished both books feeling awed by the power of human speech, and thinking about how high-stakes an activity listening can (and should?) be. Nooter's new book invites us really to hear the words on the page, by listening attentively for both the vocalizations and how they are received, a back-and-forth that, as she deftly demonstrates, is central to Aeschylus' artistry, particularly in the Oresteia. Nooter is careful to disambiguate voice from both language and sound. She is interested in the materiality of voice, voice as a thing, an object—what Wallace Stevens in a poem that provides the epigraph to her introduction calls the "the"—that creates the sonorous surround and encompasses both the nonsensical "body-in-utterance" as well as the "performative agent of action" (2). "Voice" has often served as shorthand for "the figure of the poet" or for "authority in language," as it does, for example, in Simon Goldhill's The Poet's Voice, or in Nooter's own earlier work, When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Sound-scape of Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). There, she was by her own admission invested in a notion of voice as language, i.e., as linguistic structure (3). In this book, by contrast, it is voice as aural presence that matters most. But because mortal voice is almost always already entwined with language, how do we locate aural presence? Simply abstracting linguistic structure from speech doesn't do the trick. Human voice is more than sound. One of the many strengths, therefore, of Nooter's approach is that she leads us, through a series of close readings, to a nuanced and felt understanding of voice. The voices of "others" both divine and human (as well as animal) dominate the first two chapters. Starting from the immaterial voices of the gods, whose sounds, even to be comprehended by humans, must be channeled through the "machinery of mouths, larynxes, lungs, and hearts" (19), we work our way down the structuralist ladder, pausing briefly to listen to the voices of a semi-divine mortal (i.e., Achilles) and a human-sympathizing god (i.e., Prometheus, reduced to non-linguistic cries of pain in Prometheus Bound) before finally reaching the voices of women, children, and animals. Chapter 2, "Voice in Early Aeschylus [End Page 561] and Aristophanic Parody," introduces us to an Io whose vocal utterances in Prometheus Bound capture her complicated status. Part-cow, part-woman, the stuttering repetitions of "ti" (as in τίς γῆ; τί γένος; τίνα φῶ, Pr. 560) make audible Io's desperation, "if not yet her subhuman fragility" (86). Paradoxically, or so it seems, the mortal voice emerges most clearly at moments when human characters (often women) are in the greatest danger of losing their humanity. In her reading of the Suppliants, Nooter observes that (at 996–1001) Danaus describes the sexual ripeness and "bloom" of his daughters in terms befitting the animal realm (88). She notes the similarly inarticulate vocalizations uttered by both the Egyptian attackers and the women they pursue, humans on the verge of "becoming the animals that violent male lust makes of women" (93). Chapters 3–5 are devoted to the Oresteia (a chapter on each tragedy) and it is here that Nooter's aural/oral readings are at their best. The sonic emissions we recognize as voice are all embodied. As Nooter explains in Chapter 1, "voice, even divine or deadly voice, can be understood as an act that arises from within someone...

The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter

The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Sarah Nooter

La tempête, le vent et les humeurs : autour d’une image médicale et poétique

The Tempest, the Wind, and the Humors : about a Poetical and Medical Image aim of this paper is to throw some new light on the medical use of metaphor in the Ancient Greek Literature. Metaphor was widely used by the Greek authors, in poetry as well as in medical treatises, where it served a mainly heuristic purpose. This paper focuses on one exceptionally well-developed metaphor, that of the storm inside the man in the Hippocratic Breaths, analyzing its functions within the medical discourse and comparing it to the functions of the same metaphor in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. This leads us to a somewhat better understanding of the way in which the medical discourse “ emancipates” itself from ordinary language.

Ésquilo e a poética da adivinhação

Este artigo tem como objetivo mostrar, em linhas gerais, como a adivinhação nas sete tragédias supérstites de Ésquilo é um elemento fundamental na construção de suas estratégias dramáticas, à medida que informa e define tanto a peculiaridade da poética esquiliana quanto sua visão do mundo. Para tanto, mostraremos como as mais reconhecidas características da obra de Ésquilo decorrem do uso que o tragediógrafo faz da adivinhação em sua obra e, em seguida, discorreremos brevemente sobre a presença da adivinhação em cada uma das sete tragédias.

“Ifigênia em Áulida”, de Eurípides: entre a tradição homérica e a herança esquiliana

Este artigo tem por objetivo indicar e comentar, na tragédia Ifigênia em Áulida, de Eurípides, a recepção da Ilíada de Homero e do Agamêmnon, de Ésquilo, de modo que, como procuraremos demonstrar, essa tragédia euripidiana se articula no entrecruzamento de uma tradição homérica, sobretudo iliádica – silenciosa a respeito do sacrifício da filha de Agamêmnon – e uma herança da tragédia esquiliana, em que não apenas se narra o sacrifício de Ifigênia, mas também se evidenciam suas amargas consequências.

Great Panathenaia in Greek drama

The works of the Greek playwrights of the classical period are an interesting source on the history of the panatheniac festival. The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes contain information about both the sacred part of the Great Panathenaia and agones the Panathenaic games. Of the elements of the sacral part of the Panathenaic festival were most often mentioned holiday peplos for Athena, the participants of the Panathenaic procession, the night procession, sacrifi ce. Part of the Panathenaic games were both in agony, which is characteristic for the Panhellenic games available for the citizens of Greece and local competitions, participation in which was limited only to the citizens of Athens. The mention of agones inherent in the Panhellenic games can be found in many works of Greek playwrights, but nowhere is there a clarifi cation that we are talking about the Panathenaic games. But it is interesting to note that more mentioned in the tragedies, and especially in the comedies of Aristophanes local competitions, which were sacred.

Реки и ворота Фив в трагедиях Эсхила, Софокла и Еврипида как часть образовательного пространства города

Реки и ворота Фив в трагедиях Эсхила, Софокла и Еврипида как часть образовательного пространства города

Aeschylus and the Beginning of Tragic Reperformances

Abstract:This chapter surveys the evidence for the reperformances of the works of Aeschylus from as early as the fifth century. Through a discussion of testimonies from the ancient biographers, ancient scholiasts, Herodotus, Philostratus, but also the fifth-century comedians, I attempt to highlight the (re)performative importance of Aeschylean tragedy in theatrical history and to show that restagings of drama started occurring during Aeschylus’ lifetime and were systematically developed after his death in 456.

Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus by Richard Seaford

BOOK REVIEWS Cosmologyand thePolis: TheSocial Construction ofSpaceand Timein the Tragediesof Aeschylus.ByRICHARDSEAFORD.Cambridgeand New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 366. Hardcover,$110.00. ISBN 978-1-107-00927-1. his bold and complex book develops a line of argument that Seaford has beenpursuingsinceReciprocityandRitual(1994)andMoneyandtheEarly GreekMind(2004).ItshowshowessentialelementsoftheGreekpolis— ritual, money, spatio-temporal structures—are also reflected in Greek drama and philosophy, with particular emphasison Aeschylus. Essential to Seaford’s analysis is the chronotope, a spatio-temporal unity that correlates socially constructed conceptions of uniform and analogous spatial and temporal frameworks. These frameworks are cognitive structures corresponding to communal and socially integrative practices, such as ritual, which articulates both space (in the form of, e.g. space covered by sacred processions) and time (through, e.g. sacred calendars). Earlier (Homeric) chronotopes, configured by reciprocity and plunder rather thanbyspatiallyfixed(landed)propertyasthemeansforwealthacquisition,show little interest in consistently articulating spatial relations, and construct time principallyin terms ofgenealogiesand ofreciprocal relations between ruling families. Bycontrast,the ascendancyofthe“aetiological”chronotopeinthecontextof the polis foregrounds the interconnection ofcultic, political, and cosmic space, by emphasizingcomprehensiveness(itembracesallcomponentsofthecosmos)and collectivity(thecommunityappropriatesandstructuresspace).Aetiologicaltime, too, unites mythic past and cultic present, especially as ritual regularly re-enacts events of the mythic past in the present, and homogenizes, through repeated circularity , the perception oftime as a linear sequence. Finally, in the “monetized” chronotope, time and space are imagined as potentially unlimited, insofar as money has the same purchasing power at any place or time,and also (unlike pre-monetarywealth) the capacity to accumulate unlimitedly , as well as being unlimited in scope qua universal standard (it can be exchangedwithallthings ).ThischronotopeinformingsomePresocraticphilosophy (esp.Anaximander and Heraclitus) and the politicalreformsof Solon. Seaford is particularly interested in the tension between the (socially integrative ) aetiological chronotope on the one hand and the (potentially disruptive) T BOOK REVIEWS 375 monetizedchronotopeontheother.Byarticulatingdistinctions,ritualimposesorderonmythicorsocialchaos ,andthuslimitsthepotentiallyunlimited.Money,on the contrary, by collapsing distinctions through a universal standard, permits unlimitedexchangesand unlimited accumulation over space and time. Seaford’sinsightsinto thetension between thesetwo chronotopesare subsequently applied on Aeschylus, in what is perhaps the most engaging part of his book. In Supplices, he argues, the multiple crises caused by the Danaids’ rejection of marriage—and their interstitial state as reflected in the location of their supplication at an altar that is neither in the royal abode nor in the agora—would have beenresolvedattheendofthetrilogy,withtheestablishmentofpoliscultordering gender relations, aswell asrelations between oikosand polis. In Septem,thetensionbetweenthechorus’ritual lament,whichintegratesthe polis, and its rejection by Eteocles, the introversion of the royal household, is resolvedbytheannihilationofthelatterbutalsobyitssubsequentcommemoration in hero cult and concomitant lamentation. Especially stimulating here is the discussion of how the new frame of thought represented by monetization is grafted onto older mythico-religious patterns, so that the ancestral curse is conceived (in the Oresteia) in terms ofa debt to be exacted in due time. In Agamemnon,Clytemnestra’sinitialcontrolbothofritualandofgeographic space (through the beacon sequence) perverts these into instrumentsof the royal house’sdestruction.Likewise,inChoephori,allusionstomysticritualattheclimactic scenessurroundingthetyrannicideareagain perverse,sincetheyfacilitate matricide in a distinctly non-public context (the introverted royal house). In Eumenides , however, Orestes’ supplication of Athena’s image takes place in civic space, in contrast to his earlier supplication in the god’s “house” in Delphi. Likewise, the Erinyes,who had threatened topursueOrestesover limitlessspace,areeventually contained, through public ritual in civic space, within the confines of the earth, therebylinkingpolisand cosmos. Thesameritualalsodistinguishesandimposesorderon theperverseunityof oppositesrepresented earlier inthe trilogyby the cycleofviolent reciprocity. This unity has a parallel in the non-differentiation inherent in monetary transactions and in the accumulation of monetary wealth. It is embodied by the Erinyes, who stand for both chronological homogeneity (their power to exact punishment is equallyvalidatalltimes)andspatialhomogeneity(theycanexactpunishmentanywhere ). In moments of crisis in tragedy, spatial and temporal homogeneity are emphasized: the remote space brings crisis into the immediate space (royal 376 BOOK REVIEWS house), and structurally similar actions (e.g. violent revenge) are cyclically repeated .Ritualbringsresolutionbydifferentiatingtheopposites:spaceisreclaimed by the community, and cyclical, repetitive suffering gives way to permanent wellbeing . The book also offers a wealth of insights into topics related to the interplay betweenthelimitednessofritualandtheunlimitednessofmonetizedwealth.Isingle out the discussion of “form-parallelism”—the juxtaposition of words or phrases that are parallel and often antithetical—as a vehicle for conveying ideas both ofantithesisand ofa deeper unity. For instance, in Septem 911–14 form...

2. Ancient Spectators, Ancient Readers

Sophocles was an outstandingly successful playwright in his lifetime, with a most impressive number of victories (pp. 5–6 above); he was even Socrates’ favourite tragedian. Shortly after his death he received praise in Aristophanes’ Frogs of 405, and in Phrynichus’ Muses of the same year, in which a character refers to his ‘many beautiful tragedies’. In particular, the sweetness of his poetry was remarked on while he was still alive, and would become a frequent image in later criticism, paradoxical though that may seem given the dark tones of so many of his plays. For the rest of antiquity he retained his popularity, though from now on he would always be overshadowed by a playwright who during his lifetime had only rarely beaten him. The greater favour enjoyed by Euripides is visible as early as the fourth century, when his plays seem to have been reperformed more often than those of Sophocles, and then in later times is reflected by the considerably larger numbers of papyri, as well as quotations from his plays in other authors. Aeschylus, on the other hand, was far less popular than either Sophocles or Euripides, as measured by the same criteria. The reason for these relative standings, which were to remain consistent, will lie partly in the relative difficulty of the Greek used by each playwright. Aeschylus’ lexicon is the furthest removed from everyday language; Sophocles’ vocabulary may be easier to grapple with, but his syntax is still difficult, certainly more difficult than that of Euripides. Aeschylean tragedy was also less suited to displaying the bravura abilities of individual actors who played such a part in the transmission of tragic texts; in addition, his fondness for connected trilogies may have proved challenging in dramatic contexts unsuited to that elaborate form.

Dall’autopsia del codice Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, H 56, sondaggi sulla triade bizantina di Eschilo (Prometheus-Septem-Persae)

The manuscript Perugia, Biblioteca Augusta, H 56, containing the plays of the so-called “Byzantine triad” of Aeschylus (Prometheus - Septem - Persae), was assigned to the Thoman class σ by Alexander Turyn; he also discusses its interrelationships with other manuscripts of the same group. I’ve analysed the paratextual sections and the errores coniunctivi, in order to make some observations about the place assigned to the Perugia manuscript by Turyn, taking into account the open recension theory formulated by R. D. Dawe about Aeschylean manuscript tradition. Then, I’ve analysed two lectiones singulares of the Perugia manuscript (Persae, vv. 169, 906) in order to re9ect on the value of the “Thoman recension” and on the contribution of XV century scribes in reading Aeschylean tragedy.

Cosmology and the polis: the social construction of space and time in the tragedies of Aeschylus

Introduction Part I. The Social Construction of Space, Time and Cosmology: 1. Homer: the reciprocal chronotope 2. Demeter Hymn: the aetiological chronotope 3. From reciprocity to money Part II. Dionysiac Festivals: 4. Royal household and public festival 5. Aetiological chronotope and dramatic mimesis 6. Monetisation and tragedy Part III. Limit and the Unlimited in Confrontational Space: 7. Telos and the unlimitedness of money 8. Suppliants 9. Septem 10. Confrontational space in Oresteia 11. The unlimited in Oresteia 12. Persians Part IV. The Unity of Opposites: 13. Form-parallelism and the unity of opposites 14. Aeschylus and Herakleitos 15. From the unity of opposites to their differentiation Part V. Cosmology of the Integrated Polis: 16. Metaphysics and the polis in Pythagoreanism 17. Pythagoreanism in Aeschylus 18. Household, cosmos and polis Appendix: was there a skene for all the extant plays of Aeschylus?

David Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: A Response

I dissent from Hart's project of a theological aesthetics by a hair's breadth: but that hair's breadth is tragedy. The Beauty of the Infinite is an excellent book, but it would be still better without its misinterpretations of tragedy. Nietzsche told us that ‘we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images’: that is, Attic tragedy arises from the clash of Dionysian music with Apollonian thought. Hart regards postmodernism as a story involving the clash of two ‘violences’ – the ‘chthonic and indiscriminate’ violence of Dionysus versus the ‘discriminating’ violence of Apollo. Nietzsche's sympathies lay with Dionysus: ‘Dionysus versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis.’ Nietzsche once confessed that The Birth of Tragedy ‘smells offensively Hegelian’. Both Hegel and Nietzsche read tragedy differently from Aristotle, and from the anterior Western tradition. Nietzsche could equally have confided that his first book imposes a nineteenth-century taste for melodrama on the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The argument of this article is that Hart likewise misconstrues tragedy as melodrama. If, as Hart says, ‘Nietzsche had atrocious taste’, it is self-defeating for him to assume that Nietzsche had the last word on Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Hart takes the modern theologians at their word when they speak of ‘tragedy’. He spontaneously deprecates the use of what he calls tragedy and what most people can recognize as melodrama in the writings of theologians such as Robert Jenson, Donald MacKinnon and Nicholas Lash. He tells us that, ‘None of what I say … is intended as a rejection of tragedy as such … but only as a critique … of the sacrificial logic from which Attic tragedy … sprang and according to which … tragedy is still read’. But his misinterpretation and rejection of tragedy has a wider reference than the writings of Sophocles and Aeschylus and rebounds on his own theology.

Character and characterization in Greek tragedy

Over the last three decades there has been a lively and controversial discussion about the importance of character and charac- terization in Greek tragedy. In the first and slightly larger part of my paper I will deal with the most important arguments, which have been brought forward against a character-oriented interpretation, and then after a short comparison of Aeschylus and Sophocles look at extent and form of characterization in Aeschylean tragedy.

The Rebirth of Tragedy: Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain

The Rebirth of Tragedy:Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain Michael Valdez Moses (bio) I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet. —W. B. Yeats, 1937 I Nearly all theorists of drama from G. W. F. Hegel to the present assume that the advent of modernity increasingly renders classical forms of tragedy aesthetically moribund and politically irrelevant. According to this historicist view, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, but only as historical artifacts within the culture museum of modernity. They may inspire modern thinkers and artists, but their forms, themes, and contexts cannot be revived except as an exercise in antiquarianism. Friedrich Nietzsche and W. B. Yeats provide striking, if rare instances of the critic and dramatist who refused to accept the historicist premises underlying the modern view of Attic tragedy. Nietzsche, no less than Hegel, regards the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles as antithetical to many of the values and institutions of European modernity, but for that very reason, [End Page 561] in his The Birth of Tragedy, he looks to the modern operas of Richard Wagner as both marking a genuine rebirth of the spirit of classical tragedy and heralding a revolutionary antimodern turn in the cultural history of modern Europe. Yeats, whose dramatic and critical works were influenced by Nietzsche, attempted, in no less hubristic a manner, to effect a rebirth of premodern, ritualized, and aristocratic tragedy within the apparently uncongenial confines of contemportary Irish politics. What Yeats found so attractive in Nietzsche was a shared hostility, even repugnance, to what both men considered the defining features of European modernity, and a common conviction that the forces of modernization might be resisted by bringing about a cultural rebirth of the spirit of ancient tragic drama. Yeats's drama and theatre criticism thus represent a sustained effort, a lá Nietzsche, to resist the notion that aristocratic tragedy and ritual theater are historically irrecoverable. Yeats saw his efforts to assist in the rebirth of ancient tragedy as an essential part of a militant cultural and political program to free modern Ireland from imperial British rule. Yeats's literary midwifery aimed to establish a free and independent Irish nation that would offer a counterweight to the forces of (English or British imperial) modernity. Though nationalism itself might be said to be a distinctively modern ideology, Yeats hoped to cultivate an independent Irish nation on nominally premodern or non-modern grounds. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Yeats grew increasingly disenchanted with the actual Irish Free State that emerged after 1921 and with the forms of Irish nationalism that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly, his disappointment did not lead him to abandon, but rather to intensify his efforts to promote an "anachronistic" form of dramatic tragedy, which he imagined would serve as a kind of cultural counterweight to the increasingly modernizing Irish nation-state that came into existence after formal independence. Yeats's continuing efforts to create a ritualistic, heroic, cultic, and antidemocratic form of dramatic tragedy from 1916 onwards represented his vigorous attempt to cultivate an "alternative" form of Irish modernity that was as much at odds with the British imperialism (and English culture) as it was with the predominant and increasingly official strains of modern Irish nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. As a founding member of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and later a leading dramatist, co-director, manager, and polemicist for the Irish National Theatre Society (founded in 1902 and better known after 1904 as the Abbey Theatre), Yeats looked to an "ancient" form of tragic verse drama to play a leading, even decisive role in revivifying and remaking Irish national culture at a time when prospects for Irish Home Rule, to say nothing of Irish national independence, were bleak. But despite his dominant position in the Abbey Theatre in its early years, Yeats ultimately found that his own heroic verse...

Civic ideology and the problem of difference: the politics of Aeschylean tragedy, once again

There have been few issues in the contemporary analysis of Greek tragedy as hotly debated as what I shall call ‘civic ideology and the problem of difference’. By this I mean a nexus of interrelated questions concerning the political import of tragedy both for the fifth-century Athenians and for subsequent generations: how does the festival of the Great Dionysia—its rituals and dramatic performances—relate to the dominant ideological structures of democracy? How should critical or contestatory discourse be located within the dramatic festival and within the polis? How should the texts of tragedy be related to the society in which they were produced—and to the societies in which they are still being read and performed? The problem is not merely essential to our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but is also intimately connected to the history and theory of democracy and its discontents. To what degree can democracy respond to criticism and what space can it allow, in theory and in practice, for alternative viewpoints or opposition? In its most aggressive form, such questioning of the exclusions and repressions of democracy is sometimes articulated as a challenge as to whether the costs of (ancient) democracy outweigh its benefits.