Attic Tragedy Research Articles

Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the "Oresteia"

Intertwined with the celebration of Athenian democratic institutions, we find in the "Oresteia" another chain of interactions, in which the elite families of Argos, Phokis, Athens, and even Mount Olympos employ the traditional aristocratic relationships of xenia and hetaireia to renegotiate their own status within-and at the pinnacle of-the civic order, and thereby guarantee the renewed prosperity of their respective communities. The capture of Troy is the result of a joint venture by the Atreidai and the Olympian "family" (primarily Zeus xenios and Athena). Although Agamemnon falls victim to his own mishandling of aristocratic privilege, his son is raised by doryxenoi in Phokis (Strophios and Pylades), a relationship which is mirrored by that with the Olympian "allies," Hermes and Apollo. Orestes' recovery of his father's position is thus shown to depend upon a network of "guest-friends" and "sworn-comrades," reinforced by the traditional language of oaths and reciprocal loyalty. In the Eumenides, the alliance between the Olympian and Argive royal families is re-invoked as the basis both for Athena's protection of Orestes, and finally for Zeus' concern for his daughter's Athenian dependents. In contrast to this successful "networking," and the resultant benefits that trickle down to the citizens of Argos and Athens, stand the seditious oaths and perverted "comradeship" of Aigisthos and Klytaimestra; likewise, the Erinyes are unable to draw on equivalent claims of pedigree or xenia to those enjoyed by Orestes and Apollo. Like all Greek tragedies, the "Oresteia" presents the action through constantly shifting viewpoints, those of aristocrats and commoners, leaders and led, while the propriety of this hierarchy itself is never questioned. And although the action moves from monarchical Argos to an incipiently democratic Athens, paradoxically we hear less and less about "ordinary," lower-class citizens as the trilogy progresses. Thus, at the same time that the trilogy reinforces the sense of collective survival and civic values (the perspectives, e.g., of the Argive Elders, Watchman, Herald, and Athenian Propompoi), it also suggests that these can be maintained only through the proper interventions of their traditional leaders. Aeschylus' plays were composed during a time when the Athenian democracy was still developing, and elite leadership and patronage were still taken for granted. Attic tragedy and the City Dionysia may be seen as a site of negotiation between rival (democratic and aristocratic) ideologies within the polis, wherein a kind of "solidarity without consensus" is achieved. Written and staged by the elite under license from the demos, the dramas play out (in the safety of the theater space) dangerous stories of royal risk-taking, crime, glory, and suffering, in such a way as to reassure the citizen audience simultaneously of their own collective invulnerability, and of the unique value of their (highly vulnerable, often flawed, but ultimately irreplaceable) leading families.

Medea and the reformation of the tragic polis

In the period between the Solonic and the Kleisthenic political reforms, tragedy began to emerge, beginning with Thespis and finding full expression in Aeschylus. As hoplite-democracy expressed the power of political legitimacy in unmistakable military victories over the Persians and in the creation of the Athenian Empire, Attic tragedy and its three greatest exponents flourished. No ornament of a newly rich society, tragedy was a substantive part of the development of Athens. Tragedy was the school of Athenian democracy, training its citizens in emerging forms of the political in an era of unprecedented change. Not only did tragedy help to legitimate new forms of decision-making based on new political structures in the face of rapidly changing events, it altered the Homeric warrior ethic to the needs of hoplite-democracy. More reliable and cooperative heroes were needed and in ever greater numbers if Athens were to win and hold its wealth and power to say nothing of its empire. Tragedy educated Athenians to the requirements of reconciling the individual with the needs of the society, the hero with the army, and the household with the state. Euripides, who fully appreciated the possibilities which flowed from the resolution of age-old human dilemmas, including the expansion of freedom, feared that Athens would not continue to develop. He wished to alert Athenians to the need to reform the polis by expanding the freedom of its citizens. It was time to bring women into the political.

The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700–1820) (review)

Reviews 159 about his impending death is to give only a half-picture, and perhaps to miss a chance to develop further insights into the lament as a female genre. Again, Palamas is rather taken to task here for failing to reproduce in «Ο τάφος» the virtues of the folk lament, when the power of his new poem perhaps lies in its very innovation and even its disturbing relation to the death-wish. Inevitably, perhaps, these are not the only cases where Gail HolstWarhaft 's exposition tries to cover too much ground too quickly. Chapter 5, which takes in much of Attic tragedy, clearly runs that risk; we sometimes find rather important issues (like, for example, the relative priority of Homer and the folk tradition) swept into a footnote. Yet the author powerfully makes her overall case for a reading of the Greek lament in the light of all the extant examples, ancient and modern, literary and non-literary. Above all, the basic contrast made in this book between men's and women's ways of articulating the fact of death—a nettle which the author unflinchingly grasps—gives the study not only sufficient unity but continual interest. And if we were in danger of considering the topic to be merely an academic one, the book's dedication is a reminder that, in thinking about the lament, we are thinking about something of more than academic significance. David Ricks King's College London Elena Frangakis-Syrett, TL· Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700— 1820). Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies. 1992. Pp. xix + 375. 5 Appendices. 25 Figures. Illustrated. In the eighteenth century, the city of Smyrna ( Izmir) became the major trading entrepôt of the eastern Mediterranean. Merchants from western Europe purchased cotton, wool, mohair, and dried fruits, the agricultural output of the city's Aegean hinterlands. In turn, they sold cloth manufactured in Europe as well as colonial products such as sugar, coffee, and indigo. It was a commerce in which both sides participated freely and profited. In an age of European expansion, the commerce of Smyrna stands out both for its absence of coercion and for its potential for the intercultural exchange of ideas and technologies. Although its story has been discussed in part by some of the early historians of trade in the eastern Mediterranean—namely, Paul Masson (HL·toire du commerce françaL· dans Ie Levant au XVIIIe siècle [Paris: Hachette, 1911]), Alfred Cecil Wood (A H^ory of the Levant Company [London: Oxford University Press, 1935]), and, more recently, Necmi Ülker—Elena Frangakis-Syrett provides the fullest account to date of both the volume of the trade and the ways in which commerce was conducted in the city. She has researched her subject extensively, employing archival materials 160 Reviews from the British Levant Company, the Chambre de Commerce of Marseilles, the French Foreign Office, and various other papers left by the European merchants in the city. Curiously, however, considering the thoroughness with which she obviously approached her research project, she has left out Dutch archival materials, which have been utilized by scholars such as G. R. Bosscha Erdbrink (At the Threshold of Felicity: Ottoman-Dutch Relations During the Embassy of CornelL· Calkoen at the Sublime Porte, 1726-1744 [Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1975]) and Niels Steensgaard (The Asian Trade Revolution of the 17th Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974]). Despite that omission, this work will undoubtedly stand for some time as the authoritative source for the European side of Smyrna's trade. In particular, Frangakis-Syrett's narrative characterizations of the nature and quantity of the trade of Smyrna with France are amply supported by numerous graphs and appendices that plot the annual trade figures both for imports to Smyrna and for exports from it. Owing to its wealth of statistical documentation, this monograph will serve as a key reference source for economic historians of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Although she discusses other western European traders in Smyrna, the author concentrates on France. As she explains, Smyrna emerged over the course of the eighteenth century as the...

SHOUTING "FIRE" IN A CROWDED THEATER: PHRYNICHOS'S CAPTURE OF MILETOS AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR IN EARLY ATTIC TRAGEDY

Article SHOUTING "FIRE" IN A CROWDED THEATER: PHRYNICHOS'S CAPTURE OF MILETOS AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR IN EARLY ATTIC TRAGEDY was published on December 1, 1993 in the journal Philologus (volume 137, issue 2).

“The High Roman Fashion”: Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage

Like the “tragic ways of killing a woman” that Nicole Loraux explores in Attic tragedy, Renaissance ways of killing a woman (including Shakespeare's in Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra, Marston's in Sophonisba, and Heywood's in The Rape of Lucrece) draw on ancient narratives of sacrificed virgins and suicidal wives. The theatrical practices that shape these narratives on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage challenge a critical discourse that has located the counterhegemonic impulses of Renaissance drama exclusively in popular theatricality. The moments that most enfranchise the boys who play Lavinia and Cleopatra and enable them to intervene in the meanings of their characters' deaths are those moments during which the Shakespearean stage most reveals its debt to the elite traditions of Senecan tragedy and the private playhouses of the children's companies.

Dynasty and Family in the Athenian City State: A View From Attic Tragedy

Greek tragedy shows a serious preoccupation with family concerns. Some of these concerns seem beyond the scope of ordinary family experience, particularly in the matter of the behaviour of women. The apparent discrepancy between historical evidence and the literary presentation of women has long been noted and variously explained. I want to suggest that this discrepancy reflects a way of distinguishing between the objectives and behaviour of the great aristocratic clans and of those families which were neither so wealthy nor so politically influential. A dichotomy is thus presented between dynastic interests and the interests of the ordinary family as a well-regulated part of the Athenian city state.

The Early Chronology of Attic Tragedy

City archives, mined by Aristotle for his Didaskaliai, preserved a reasonably complete record of dramatic productions in the fifth century. But how far back did these archives go? The so-called Fasti, an inscription set up c. 346 and listing dithyrambic, comic and tragic victors year by year, must have been based on the same archives, but went back, it is thought, only as far as 502/1. Its heading πρ⋯]τον κ⋯μοι ἦσαν τ[⋯ι διονὑσ]ωι τραγωιδο⋯ δ[, however supplemented, implies an intention of going back to the beginning of things, in other words to the beginning of the archival record. This raises serious doubt as to whether that record went back to the alleged date of Thespis' première, or indeed to those given for Choerilus' and Phrynichus'.

On the Pressure of Circumstance in Greek Tragedy

It is an unfortunate weakness of most of the standard textbooks on Greek tragedy that they fail to communicate the immediacy of pressure that is of its essence. This particular inadequacy has hardly been corrected by the recent spate of books on either staging or the visual presentation of plays, which suggest themselves now as the standard adjustment to existing handbooks for students with or without the language.One of the few certainties we have, in beginning the argument, is that tragedy is, if anything, about decisions and their consequences. This much is implied in Aristotle's intuition abouthamartia, which if it means ‘mistake’ can be taken to direct attention to the circumstances which dictate a decision. Indeed, decisions are far more prominent in Attic tragedy than mistakes as such: to take two examples from theOresteia, which as an Aeschylean trilogy should not seem so exceptional as people are inclined to make it, both Agamemnon and Orestes take decisions of terrifying consequence that can hardly be classed as ‘mistakes’ (namely to kill a daughter and to kill a mother, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra inAgamemnonandLibation Bearersrespectively). In this respect, Aristotle might be taken as considering more closely the sentimental drama that flourished in his day, and in this, if we judge by his perceptions, it may well be thatOedipus the Kingof Sophocles in fact marks a turning-point—in the desperate futility of Oedipus' errors—which is more readily, and perhaps with less justice, ascribed to Euripides.

Anachronism in Greek tragedy

Anachronism-hunting has been out of fashion with scholars in recent times, for the good reason that it can easily seem like a rather trivial sort of parlour game. But given that Greek tragedy draws so heavily on the past, a close look at some examples may perhaps throw light on a far from trivial subject, the dramatists' perception of the heroic world.So long as anachronism was treated as an artistic failing the debate was bound to be unproductive; one can symphathise with Jebb's view (on Soph. El. 48 ff.) that Attic tragedy was ‘wholly indifferent’ to it. And one can see why later scholars have objected to the very idea of anachronism as irrelevant and misleading. Ehrenberg, for example, wrote in 1954: ‘It is entirely mistaken to distinguish between mythical and thus quasi-historical features on the one hand and contemporary and thus anachronistic on the other. There is always the unity of the one poem or play, displaying the ancient myth, although shaped in the spirit of the poet's mind and time.’

Performative Categories and Symbols of Passage in Rural Greece

THE GREEK PATRIOT-SCHOLAR Spyridon Zambelios (?1813-1881) published a lengthy disquisition in 1859 on the origins of the demotic Greek word traghudho.1 This term is usually glossed as I sing, although the inadequacy of that translation will become all too evident in the present essay. Zambelios' treatise, which was presented as an attempt to establish ancient roots for modern usage, was not conceived as a purely disinterested work of scholarship. It combined a passionate ideological commitment to proving the Hellenic roots of modern Greece with the more personal goal of scoring points off the demoticist poet (and Zambelios' former friend) Dionisios Solomos. Its scholarly significance nevertheless transcends such particular disputes. As the first discussion of an indigenous performative genre and its terminology to appear in Greece, it remained unique beyond the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it represents one of the earliest studies of vernacular genre classification to appear anywhere in modern scholarship. Zambelios argued, not inaccurately, that traghudho was a derivative of the Classical Greek tragodia, tragedy. In a much more speculative vein, he further contended that this etymological relationship could only be explained as the surface effect of an indestructible historical fact: that the songs of the modern Greeks retained the spirit and essence of Attic Tragedy. As evidence of

Medea and the Tragedy of Revenge

Previous articleNext article No AccessMedea and the Tragedy of RevengeAnne BurnettAnne Burnett Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 68, Number 1Jan., 1973 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/365918 Views: 118Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1973 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Literaturverzeichnis, (Apr 2021): 269–280.https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666336072.269Nadine Grotkamp Konfliktlösung und Geschlecht, (Jun 2021): 127–134.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-56100-3_11Giuseppe Lentini Thymos and Metis in Medea by Euripides, Lexis , no.22 (Dec 2020).https://doi.org/10.30687/Lexis/2724-1564/2020/02/005Zina Giannopoulou Framing Lars von Trier’s Medea, Classical Receptions Journal 12, no.33 (Jan 2020): 375–399.https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clz032Judith Fletcher Euripides and Religion, (Dec 2016): 483–499.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119257530.ch31Aurélie Damet Bibliographie, (Jan 2012): 439–478.https://doi.org/10.4000/books.psorbonne.9447Kerri J. Hame Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy: Klytaimestra, Medea, and Antigone Hame, Classical Philology 103, no.11 (Jul 2015): 1–15.https://doi.org/10.1086/590091Ayala H. Gabriel Living With Medea and Thinking After Freud: Greek Drama, Gender, and Concealments, Cultural Anthropology 7, no.33 (Aug 1992): 346–373.https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1992.7.3.02a00040

Euripides,Medea1021–1080

No speech in Attic tragedy has made a stronger impression on later generations than Medea's farewell to her children. Four changes of mind and two displays of maternal affection lay bare the depths of a tortured soul; ‘there, in a short space, arelove and hatred, firmness and hesitation, fierce joy and unfathomable sorrow’.

The Role of the Chorus in Sophocles' Antigone

This essay depends upon certain assumptions, which had better be made explicit at the outset.The first is that in Attic tragedy the choral odes were always intended to have an organic relation to the drama as a whole. They are not mere intermezzi inserted to relieve tension and allow the audience to relax between successive steps in the real business of the drama, but serve rather as lyrical commentaries on what is happening on the stage, inviting us to the emotional response appropriate at that point in the action, and to reflect upon certain ideas and concepts implicit in the events themselves. They form a bridge between successive acts, and their contextual relevance looks back to what has immediately preceded and forward to what is about to come. At this level we need not expect complete consistency between different odes. The Chorus's interpretation of the situation and the emotional reaction it expresses may change quite drastically in the light of a change in situation or the revelation of hitherto unknown facts.

El discurso falso en los personajes femeninos de la novela griega

En este trabajo se analiza el uso que los personajes femeninos de las novelas griegas hacen del discurso falso. Tomando como punto de partida el análisis del discurso femenino en la tragedia ática, uno de los géneros literarios que más influyó en los discursos novelísticos, se estudia qué personajes de la novela utilizan el discurso falso y la finalidad con que lo hacen. Se descubren dos tipos de discursos falsos: los defensivos, usados por las protagonistas femeninas o por personajes secundarios similares a ellas en clase social e ideología, y los ofensivos, usados por personajes secundarios de clase social inferior y moralmente reprochables dentro del ideario amoroso que la novela publicita.

The End of Elizabethan Drama

Antonio's reflections, at the tomb of the heroine in The Duchess of Malfi, reverberate to him from a ruined abbey with an echo of finality : Like death that we have! Yet, strictly speaking, the existence of institutions and communities - let alone historical movements - can never be terminated as readily or as decisively as the individual lives of human beings. Hence the regime of a given ruler, while it sets a somewhat arbitrary terminus a quo and terminus ad quem, is less problematic than our retrospective arguments over some other beginning or ending of a particular period. It has proved much easier to talk about the reign of Elizabeth I than about the Renaissance in England. We do not speak of Attic tragedy as Periclean, nor do we refer to the theater of the Sigio de Oro as Philippine, and we have better reason to link Moliere and Racine with Louis XIV than we have to associate Shakespeare with the Virgin Queen. Nonetheless we are so impressed by the drama of her career, if not by her own theatrical interests, that we allow her to exceed its limits by almost forty years. No cut-off point for any branch of literature was ever quite so absolute as the closure of the theaters by order of the Long Parliament in 1642. Can we justify the presupposition that the English drama continued to be Elizabethan all the way up to that point? Are we justified, for that matter, in assuming that its prior development had been continuous? Father Harold Gardiner, in Mysteries3 End, argues for an earlier discontinuity, blaming Elizabeth for the suppression of the religious cycles.2 David Bevington, in From Mankind to Marlowe, has retraced a gradual train of secularization through the moralities and the troops of players.3 Recently, in Christian Rite and Christian Drama, O. B. Hardison, Jr., has renewed the attack on an evolutionary conception

Greek Lyric Poetry. A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry

This edition provides a full and representative selection of all early Greek lyric (omitting Pindar, who requires his own volume), elegiac and iambic poetry. First published in 1967 in the 'red Macmillan' series, it was reprinted by BCP in 1982 with addenda to the bibliography and an appendix reproducing a text of three substantial 'new' papyrus fragments by Archilochus, Stesichorus and Alcaeus. The extensive commentary gives assistance with matters of dialect and language, Homeric and Hesiodic comparisons, interpretation, content and metre. The book serves as an introduction to the poetics of the Greek archaic period - from the mid-seventh to the early fifth century BC - the 'bridge' between Homeric epic and Attic tragedy.

The Structure of Stichomythia in Attic Tragedy

The Structure of Stichomythia in Attic Tragedy

The Gyges fragment: a new Possibility

It is now nearly two and a half years since Mr Lobel published the fragment which he has called ‘as surprising as any recovered from the soil of Egypt’. Since then a considerable literature has grown up around the fragment. Mr Lobel with caution and Professor Page with more conviction have attributed the fragment to early Attic tragedy. But the other scholars who have written on the subject have with striking unanimity assigned it to the tragedy of the Hellenistic age, some of them with what seems to me a surprising self-assurance.Arguments from the nature of the subject-matter seem to give little help in reaching a decision. If one party can adduce thePersaeof Aeschylus and thePhoenissaeand theCapture of Miletusof Phrynichus, the other can retort with theThemistoclesof Mausolus and theCassandreisof Lycophron. Leaving subject-matter aside, three main types of evidence have been brought forward, that of the style, that of the language and that of the metre. Any inference about the date based solely on the style must rest on foundations that are at least partially subjective.

Δίπαλτος

―ἀμφοτέραις ταῖς χερσὶν οῖον περιδεξίως με φονεύοι παντὶ σθένει ὡς occurs in Attic tragedy in these three passages, and apparently nowhere else in Classical literature.On the passage in the Ajax, the earliest of the three, the Scholiast comments:―ἀμφοτέραις ταῖς χερσὶν οῖον περιδεξίως με φονεύοι παντὶ σθένει ὡςΔίδυμος ἤ ὁ στρατός με φονεύοι φονεύοι λαβὼν τὰ δίπαλτα δόρατα, ὡς Πῖός φησιν information which Suidas repeats in a slightly abbreviated form without reference to authorities. That is, there were two lines of interpretation, one literal, ‘with a spear in each hand’, as is plainly shewn by the reference to Φ 162–3 implied by περιδεξίως (περιδέξιος there can only be the equivalent of the metrically impossible ἀμφιδέξιος, a meaning recognised in AP xii. 247, an epigram with a Homeric flavouring) and one figurative ‘with might and main’ (διπλῇ χειρὶ καὶ πάσῃ δυνἁμει as Schol. Tricl. puts it). The meaning attached by Pius to δίπαλτος escapes us, since he may equally well have meant ‘spears brandished in each hand’ and ‘spears brandished mightily’, (i.e. ἀμφοτέραις ταῖς χερσίν without the defining περιδεξίως) but his comment implies that the weapon was assumed to be the spear. This is what the verb πάλλειν would in the first instance suggest to a Greek, since where weapons are concerned Homer uses it exclusively of brandishing a spear or stone.

Evidence of Greek Religion on the Text and Interpretation of Attic Tragedy

The object of this paper is partly to plead a cause, partly to proclaim a grievance. The last domain of ancient Greek life to attract the serious attention and study of modern scholars has been that of Greek Religion; and the exposition of it has revealed its many vital points of contact with the moral and spiritual energy and the artistic and poetic monuments of the ancient Hellenic race. An enthusiastic votary of this study might venture to hope that some general acquaintance with its facts and ideas would henceforth be recognized as belonging to the general curriculum of Hellenic culture. But any one merely interested in the good workmanship of the classical commentary ought at least to insist that something more than a general acquaintance with this subject should be regarded by those who set themselves to edit certain portions of the Greek classics as an essential preliminary and as a necessary part of their scholarly equipment. The authors to whom this rule specially applies are Hesiod, Pindar and the Attic Dramatists. A satisfying commentary on Hesiod is still a desideratum; and for such an achievement a long apprenticeship in anthropology and religious studies would be a necessity.