Download or read book The Pronomos Vase and Its Context written by Oliver Taplin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pronomos Vase is the single most important piece of pictorial evidence for ancient theatre to have survived from ancient Greece. It depicts an entire theatrical chorus and cast along with the celebrated musician Pronomos, in the presence of their patron god, Dionysos. In this collection of essays, illustrated with nearly 60 drawings and photographs, leading specialists from a variety of disciplines tackle the critical questions posed by this complex hub of evidence. Thediscussion covers a wide range of perspectives and issues, including the artist's oeuvre; the pottery market; the relation of this piece to other artistic, and especially celebratory, artefacts; the political and cultural contexts of the world that it was produced in; the identification of figures portrayedon it: and the significance of the Pronomos Vase as theatrical evidence. The volume offers not only the most recent scholarship on the vase but also some ground-breaking interpretations of it.
Download or read book Pots Plays written by Oliver Taplin and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2007-10-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study opens up a fascinating interaction between art and theater. It shows how the mythological vase-paintings of fourth-century B.C. Greeks, especially those settled in southern Italy, are more meaningful for those who had seen the myths enacted in the popular new medium of tragedy. Of some 300 relevant vases, 109 are reproduced and accompanied by a picture-by-picture discussion. This book supplies a rich and unprecedented resource from a neglected treasury of painting.
Download or read book Ancient Greek Letter Writing written by Paola Ceccarelli and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Ceccarelli offers a history of the development of letter writing in ancient Greece from the archaic to the early Hellenistic period. Highlighting the specificity of letter-writing, as opposed to other forms of communication and writing, the volume looks at documentary letters, but also traces the role of embedded letters in the texts of the ancient historians, in drama, and in the speeches of the orators. While a letter is in itself the transcription of an oral message and, as such, can be either truthful or deceitful, letters acquired negative connotations in the fifth century, especially when used for transactions concerning the public and not the private sphere. Viewed as the instrument of tyrants or near eastern kings, these negative connotations were evident especially in Athens where comedy and tragedy testified to an underlying concern with epistolary communication. In other areas of the Greek world, such as Sparta or Crete, the letter may have been seen as an unproblematic instrument for managing public policies, with inscriptions documenting the official use of letters not only by the Hellenistic kings, but also by some poleis.
Download or read book Theatre Props and Civic Identity in Athens 458 405 BC written by Rosie Wyles and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book answers the question 'How did Athenian drama shape ideas about civic identity?' through the medium of three case studies focusing on props. Traditional responses to the question have overlooked the significance of props which were symbolically implicated in Athenian ideology, yet the key objects explored in this study (voting urns and pebbles, swords, and masks) each carried profound connections to Athenian civic identity while also playing important roles as props on the fifth-century stage. Playwrights exploited the powerful dynamic generated from the intersection between the 'social lives' (off-stage existence in society) and 'stage lives' (handling in theatre) of these objects to enhance the dramatic effect of their plays as well as the impact of these performances on society. The exploration of the 'stage lives' of these objects across comedy, tragedy, and satyr drama reveals much about generic interdependence and distinction. Meanwhile the consideration of iconography representing the objects' lives outside the theatre sheds light on drama's powerful interplay with art. Essential reading for scholars and students of ancient Greek history, culture, and drama, the innovative approach and insightful analysis contained in this volume will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of Theatre Studies, Art History, and Cultural Studies.
Download or read book The Structure and Performance of Euripides Helen written by C. W. Marshall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his detailed study of Euripides' play, Helen, C. W. Marshall expands our understanding of Athenian tragedy and Classical performance.
Download or read book Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC written by Eric Csapo and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-06-18 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Age-old scholarly dogma holds that the death of serious theatre went hand-in-hand with the 'death' of the city-state and that the fourth century BC ushered in an era of theatrical mediocrity offering shallow entertainment to a depoliticised citizenry. The traditional view of fourth-century culture is encouraged and sustained by the absence of dramatic texts in anything more than fragments. Until recently, little attention was paid to an enormous array of non-literary evidence attesting, not only the sustained vibrancy of theatrical culture, but a huge expansion of theatre throughout (and even beyond) the Greek world. Epigraphic, historiographic, iconographic and archaeological evidence indicates that the fourth century BC was an age of exponential growth in theatre. It saw: the construction of permanent stone theatres across and beyond the Mediterranean world; the addition of theatrical events to existing festivals; the creation of entirely new contexts for drama; and vast investment, both public and private, in all areas of what was rapidly becoming a major 'industry'. This is the first book to explore all the evidence for fourth century ancient theatre: its architecture, drama, dissemination, staging, reception, politics, social impact, finance and memorialisation.
Download or read book Greek Theater in Ancient Sicily written by Kathryn G. Bosher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the origins and development of ancient drama, especially comedy, on Sicily and its relationship to the political situation.
Download or read book Reconstructing Satyr Drama written by Andreas Antonopoulos and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of satyr drama, and particularly the reliability of the account in Aristotle, remains contested, and several of this volume’s contributions try to make sense of the early relationship of satyr drama to dithyramb and attempt to place satyr drama in the pre-Classical performance space and traditions. What is not contested is the relationship of satyr drama to tragedy as a required cap to the Attic trilogy. Here, however, how Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (to whom one complete play and the preponderance of the surviving fragments belong) envisioned the relationship of satyr drama to tragedy in plot, structure, setting, stage action and language is a complex subject tackled by several contributors. The playful satyr chorus and the drunken senility of Silenos have always suggested some links to comedy and later to Atellan farce and phlyax. Those links are best examined through language, passages in later Greek and Roman writers, and in art. The purpose of this volume is probe as many themes and connections of satyr drama with other literary genres, as well as other art forms, putting satyr drama on stage from the sixth century BC through the second century AD. The editors and contributors suggest solutions to some of the controversies, but the volume shows as much that the field of study is vibrant and deserves fuller attention.
Download or read book The Transformation of Athens written by Robin Osborne and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How remarkable changes in ancient Greek pottery reveal the transformation of classical Greek culture Why did soldiers stop fighting, athletes stop competing, and lovers stop having graphic sex in classical Greek art? The scenes depicted on Athenian pottery of the mid-fifth century BC are very different from those of the late sixth century. Did Greek potters have a different world to see—or did they come to see the world differently? In this lavishly illustrated and engagingly written book, Robin Osborne argues that these remarkable changes are the best evidence for the shifting nature of classical Greek culture. Osborne examines the thousands of surviving Athenian red-figure pots painted between 520 and 440 BC and describes the changing depictions of soldiers and athletes, drinking parties and religious occasions, sexual relations, and scenes of daily life. He shows that it was not changes in each activity that determined how the world was shown, but changes in values and aesthetics. By demonstrating that changes in artistic style involve choices about what aspects of the world we decide to represent as well as how to represent them, this book rewrites the history of Greek art. By showing that Greeks came to see the world differently over the span of less than a century, it reassesses the history of classical Greece and of Athenian democracy. And by questioning whether art reflects or produces social and political change, it provokes a fresh examination of the role of images in an ever-evolving world.
Download or read book Page and Stage written by Stuart Douglas Olson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-06-19 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our knowledge of the ancient theatre is limited by the textual and iconographic character of the evidence available to us: we cannot watch or otherwise experience an Athenian tragedy or comedy. These essays, by a distinguished group of international scholars, bridge the gap between the surviving literary and iconographic evidence and the realities of performance on the ancient Greek stage. This ambitious goal is reached by means of a detailed examination of several case-studies: the construction of dramatic space in Sophocles’ Antigone; the significance of the use of deictic pronouns in Sophocles’ Trachiniae; the theatrical and religious dynamics of the appearance of divine figures on stage; the relationship between the victory celebrations at the end of Aristophanic comedies and their counterparts in the after-performance real world; the investigation of nude or semi-nude female characters in Aristophanes; the staging of Clouds and the opening scene of Acharnians; the meditation on the metapoetics of the use of props in 5th-century comedy; the relationship between performance context and text through a close reading of a number of Aristophanic fragments; the way the scholia vetera on Frogs imagine and use questions of staging practice; and the potential Aeschylean authorship of some of stage-direction traceable in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Diktoulkoi.
Download or read book Athenian Tragedy in Performance written by Melinda Powers and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foregrounding critical questions about the tension between the study of drama as literature versus the study of performance, Melinda Powers investigates the methodological problems that arise in some of the latest research on ancient Greek theatre. She examines key issues and debates about the fifth-century theatrical space, audience, chorus, performance style, costuming, properties, gesture, and mask, but instead of presenting a new argument on these topics, Powers aims to understand her subject better by exploring the shared historical problems that all scholars confront as they interpret and explain Athenian tragedy. A case study of Euripides’s Bacchae, which provides more information about performance than any other extant tragedy, demonstrates possible methods for reconstructing the play’s historical performance and also the inevitable challenges inherent in that task, from the limited sources and the difficulty of interpreting visual material, to the risks of conflating actor with character and extrapolating backward from contemporary theatrical experience. As an inquiry into the study of theatre and performance, an introduction to historical writing, a reference for further reading, and a clarification of several general misconceptions about Athenian tragedy and its performance, this historiographical analysis will be useful to specialists, practitioners, and students alike.
Download or read book Wandering Myths written by Lucy Audley-Miller and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spite of the growing amount of important new work being carried out on uses of myth in particular ancient contexts, their appeal and reception beyond the framework of one culture have rarely been the primary object of enquiry in contemporary debate. Highlighting the fact that ancient societies were linked by their shared use of mythological narratives, Wandering Myths aims to advance our understanding of the mechanisms by which such tales were disseminated cross-culturally and to investigate how they gained local resonances. In order to assess both wider geographic circulations and to explore specific local features and interpretations, a regional approach is adopted, with a particular focus on Anatolia, the Near East and Italy. Contributions are drawn from a range of disciplines, and cross a wide chronological span, but all are interlinked by their engagement with questions focusing on the factors that guided the processes of reception and steered the facets of local interpretation. The Preface and Epilogue evaluate the material in a synoptic way and frame the challenging questions and views expressed in the Introduction.
Download or read book Approaching the Ancient Artifact written by Amalia Avramidou and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume consists consists of forty contributions written by an internationally renowned selection of scholars. The authors adopt an interdisciplinary methodology, examining both literary and archaeological sources, and a comparative perspective that transgresses national, chronological, and cultural boundaries, in order to investigate the nature of the links between text and image. This multifaceted approach to the study of ancient artifacts enables the authors to treat art and artistic production as activities that do not merely mirror social or cultural relationships but rather, and more significantly, as activities that create social and cultural relationships. The essays in this book are motivated by their authors' belief that there is no simple direct link between art and myths, art and text, or art and ritual, and that art should not be delegated to the role of a by-product of a literate culture. Instead, the contextual and symbolic analyses of artifacts and representations offered in this volume elucidate how art actively shaped myth, how it changed texts, how it transformed ritual, and how it altered the course of local, regional, and Mediterranean histories.
Download or read book Religion in the Art of Archaic and Classical Greece written by Tyler Jo Smith and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An examination of the combined subjects of ancient Greek art and religion, dealing with festivals, performance, rites of passage, and the archaeology of death, to name a few examples, to explore the visual, material, and textual dimensions of ancient Greek religion"--
Download or read book The Illustrated Afterlife of Terence s Comedies 800 1200 written by Beatrice Radden Keefe and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about Roman comedy, ancient theatre imagery, and seven medieval illustrated manuscripts of Terence’s six Latin comedies. These manuscript illustrations, made between 800 and 1200, enabled their medieval readers to view these comedies as “mirrors of life”.
Download or read book A Companion to Greek Literature written by Martin Hose and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Greek Literature presents a comprehensive introduction to the wide range of texts and literary forms produced in the Greek language over the course of a millennium beginning from the 6th century BCE up to the early years of the Byzantine Empire. Features contributions from a wide range of established experts and emerging scholars of Greek literature Offers comprehensive coverage of the many genres and literary forms produced by the ancient Greeks—including epic and lyric poetry, oratory, historiography, biography, philosophy, the novel, and technical literature Includes readings that address the production and transmission of ancient Greek texts, historic reception, individual authors, and much more Explores the subject of ancient Greek literature in innovative ways
