Download or read book Theseus Tragedy and the Athenian Empire written by Sophie Mills and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of the Theseus myth and its importance for Athens. Mills examines all extant tragedies in which Theseus appear in order to assess the significance of his role as mythological representative of Athenian greatness. She argues that the Theseus of most Athenian tragedy is carefully drawn to exemplify the idealized image of the Athenian "national character" that was prevalent in the age of the empire.
Download or read book City of Suppliants written by Angeliki Tzanetou and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With close readings of suppliant dramas by each of the major playwrights, this book explores how Greek tragedy used tales of foreign supplicants to promote, question, and negotiate the imperial ideology of Athens as a benevolent and moral ruling city.
Download or read book Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy written by D. G. Beer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-03-30 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Athenian democracy of the 5th century B.C. created the most important political theatre of western culture. Sophocles, the most successful tragic playwright of the age, was a radical innovator who produced his tragedies to present to his audience complex moral, social, and political issues of a kind that they might be faced with in their various legal and political assemblies. Beer examines Sophocles as a political playwright against the background of Athenian democracy, breaking new ground by showing the importance of the mask for understanding Sophoclean tragedy and redefining the notion of skenographia, or setting the scene. He concludes that Sophocles revolutionized the concept of dramatic space. The Athenian tragic theatre was deeply political and played an important and active role in the life of Athenian democracy. This book presents an introduction to the political nature of Greek tragedy and Sophoclean tragedy in an effort to shed new light on the dramatic works of the 5th century playwright. As Aristotle noted, Sophocles' two most important innovations were the introduction of the third actor and skenographia, which brought tragedy to its fully evolved form. Beer argues that although his use of the third actor has been widely understood, his use of skenographia has not. Carefully exploring the true sense of this method of using dramatic space, Beer brings a new understanding to the works of this old master.
Download or read book Athenian Empire written by Polly Low and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fifth century BC, the Athenian Empire dominated the politics and culture of the Mediterranean world.This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the history and significance of the Athenian Empire. It starts by exploring possible answers to the crucial questions of the origins and growth of the empire. Subsequent sections deal with the institutions and regulations of empire, and the mechanisms by which it was controlled; the costs and benefits of imperialism (for both rulers and ruled); and the ideological, cultural and artistic aspects of Athenian power. The articles collected here engage with the full range of evidence available--literary, epigraphic, archaeological and art-historical--and offer a compelling demonstration of the range of approaches, and conclusions, for which that evidence allows.
Download or read book Children in Greek Tragedy written by Emma M. Griffiths and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astyanax is thrown from the walls of Troy; Medeia kills her children as an act of vengeance against her husband; Aias reflects with sorrow on his son's inheritance, yet kills himself and leaves Eurysakes vulnerable to his enemies. The pathos created by threats to children is a notable feature of Greek tragedy, but does not in itself explain the broad range of situations in which the ancient playwrights chose to employ such threats. Rather than casting children in tragedy as simple figures of pathos, this volume proposes a new paradigm to understand their roles, emphasizing their dangerous potential as the future adults of myth. Although they are largely silent, passive figures on stage, children exert a dramatic force that transcends their limited physical presence, and are in fact theatrically complex creations who pose a danger to the major characters. Their multiple projected lives create dramatic palimpsests which are paradoxically more significant than their immediate emotional effects: children are never killed because of their immediate weakness, but because of their potential strength. This re-evaluation of the significance of child characters in Greek tragedy draws on a fresh examination of the evidence for child actors in fifth-century Athens, which concludes that the physical presence of children was a significant factor in their presentation. However, child roles can only be fully appreciated as theatrical phenomena, utilizing the inherent ambiguities of drama: as such, case studies of particular plays and playwrights are underpinned by detailed analysis of staging considerations, opening up new avenues for interpretation and challenging traditional models of children in tragedy.
Download or read book A Companion to Euripides written by Laura K. McClure and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO EURIPIDES A COMPANION TO EURIPIDES Euripides has enjoyed a resurgence of interest as a result of many recent important publications, attesting to the poet’s enduring relevance to the modern world. A Companion to Euripides is the product of this contemporary work, with many essays drawing on the latest texts, commentaries, and scholarship on the man and his oeuvre. Divided into seven sections, the companion begins with a general discussion of Euripidean drama. The following sections contain essays on Euripidean biography and the manuscript tradition, and individual essays on each play, organized in chronological order. Chapters offer summaries of important scholarship and methodologies, synopses of individual plays and the myths from which they borrow their plots, and conclude with suggestions for additional reading. The final two sections deal with topics central to Euripidean scholarship, such as religion, myth, and gender, and the reception of Euripides from the 4th century BCE to the modern world. A Companion to Euripides brings together a variety of leading Euripides scholars from a wide range of perspectives. As a result, specific issues and themes emerge across the chapters as central to our understanding of the poet and his meaning for our time. Contributions are original and provocative interpretations of Euripides’ plays, which forge important paths of inquiry for future scholarship.
Download or read book Euripides Ion written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Euripides Ion written by Euripides and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ion is one of Euripides' most appealing and inventive plays. With its story of an anonymous temple slave discovered to be the son of Apollo and Creusa, an Athenian princess, it is a rare example of Athenian myth dramatized for the Athenian stage. It explores the Delphic Oracle and Greek piety; the Athenian ideology of autochthony and empire; and the tragic suffering and longing of the mythical foundling and his mother, whose experiences are represented uniquely in surviving Greek literature. The plot anticipates later Greek comedy, while the recognition scene builds on a tradition founded by Homer's Odyssey and Aeschylus' Oresteia. The introduction sets out the main issues in interpretation and discusses the play's contexts in myth, religion, law, politics, and society. By attending to language, style, meter, and dramatic technique, this edition with its detailed commentary makes Ion accessible to students, scholars, and readers of Greek at all levels.
Download or read book The Oxford encyclopedia of ancient Greece and Rome Vol 1 7 written by Michael Gagarin and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 3369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies written by Naoise Mac Sweeney and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the ancient world, origin stories were told across the ancient world in many different ways: through poetry, prose, monumental and decorative arts, and performance in civic and religious rituals. Foundation myths, particularly those about the beginnings of cities and societies, played an important role in the dynamics of identity construction and in the negotiation of diplomatic relationships between communities. Yet many ancient communities had not one but several foundation myths, offering alternative visions and interpretations of their collective origins. Seeking to explain this plurality, Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies explores origin stories from a range of classical and ancient societies, covering both a broad chronological span (from Greek colonies to the high Roman empire) and a wide geographical area (from the central Mediterranean to central Asia). Contributors explore the reasons several different, sometimes contradictory myths might coexist or even coevolve. Collectively, the chapters suggest that the ambiguity and dissonance of multiple foundation myths can sometimes be more meaningful than a single coherent origin narrative. Foundation Myths in Ancient Societies argues for a both/and approach to foundation myths, laying a framework for understanding them in dialogue with each other and within a wider mythic context, as part of a wider discourse of origins. Contributors: Lieve Donnellan, Alfred Hirt, Naoíse Mac Sweeney, Rachel Mairs, Irad Malkin, Daniel Ogden, Robin Osborne, Michael Squire, Susanne Turner.
Download or read book Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy written by P. J. Finglass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How were women represented in Greek tragedy? This question lies at the heart of much modern scholarship on ancient drama, yet it has typically been approached using evidence drawn only from the thirty-two tragedies that survive complete - neglecting tragic fragments, especially those recently discovered and often very substantial fragmentary papyri from plays that had been thought lost. Drawing on the latest research on both gender in tragedy and on tragic fragments, the essays in this volume examine this question from a fresh perspective, shedding light on important mythological characters such as Pasiphae, Hypsipyle, and Europa, on themes such as violence, sisterhood, vengeance, and sex, and on the methodology of a discipline which needs to take fragmentary evidence to heart in order to gain a fuller understanding of ancient tragedy. All Greek is translated to ensure wide accessibility.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity written by Emily Wilson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be, and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Looking at Persians written by David Stuttard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aeschylus' Persians is unique in being the only extant Greek tragedy on an historical subject: Greece's victory in 480 BC over the great Persian King, Xerxes, eight years before the play was written and first performed in 472 BC. Looking at Persians examines how Aeschylus responded to such a turning point in Athenian history and how his audience may have reacted to his play. As well as considering the play's relationship with earlier lost tragedies and discussing its central themes, including war, nature and the value of human life, the volume considers how Persians may have been staged in fifth-century Athens and how it has been performed today. The twelve essays presented here are written by prominent international academics and offer insightful analyses of the play from the perspectives of performance, history and society. Intended for readers ranging from school students and undergraduates to teachers and those interested in drama (including practitioners), this volume also includes an accurate, accessible and performance-friendly English translation of Persians by David Stuttard.
Download or read book The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy Volume 2 written by Matthew Wright and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surviving works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides have been familiar to readers and theatregoers for centuries; but these works are far outnumbered by their lost plays. Between them these authors wrote around two hundred tragedies, the fragmentary remains of which are utterly fascinating. In this, the second volume of a major new survey of the tragic genre, Matthew Wright offers an authoritative critical guide to the lost plays of the three best-known tragedians. (The other Greek tragedians and their work are discussed in Volume 1: Neglected Authors.) What can we learn about the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides from fragments and other types of evidence? How can we develop strategies or methodologies for 'reading' lost plays? Why were certain plays preserved and transmitted while others disappeared from view? Would we have a different impression of the work of these classic authors – or of Greek tragedy as a whole – if a different selection of plays had survived? This book answers such questions through a detailed study of the fragments in their historical and literary context. Making use of recent scholarly developments and new editions of the fragments, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy makes these works fully accessible for the first time.
Download or read book The Athenian Funeral Oration written by David M. Pritchard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important study of the funeral oration for dead combatants in democratic Athens since Nicole Loraux's classic work.
Download or read book Sophocles and Alcibiades written by Michael Vickers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary historians have long held the view that the plays of the Greek dramatist, Sophocles deal purely with archetypes of the heroic past and that any resemblance to contemporary events or individuals is purely coincidental. In this book, Michael Vickers challenges this view and argues that Sophocles makes regular and extensive allusion to Athenian politics in his plays, especially to Alcibiades, one of the most controversial Athenian politicians of his day.Vickers shows that Sophocles was no closeted intellectual but a man deeply involved in politics and he reminds us that Athenian politics was intensely personal. He argues cogently that classical writers employed hidden meanings and that consciously or sub-consciously, Sophocles was projecting onto his plays hints of contemporary events or incidents, mostly of a political nature, hoping that his audience's passion for politics would enhance the popularity of his plays. Vickers strengthens his case about Sophocles by discussing other authors - Thucydides, Plato and Euripides - in whom he also demonstrates a body of allusions to Alcibiades and others.
Download or read book Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective written by Richard Bourke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collaborative volume offers the first historical reconstruction of the concept of popular sovereignty from antiquity to the twentieth century. First formulated between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the various early modern conceptions of the doctrine were heavily indebted to Roman reflection on forms of government and Athenian ideas of popular power. This study, edited by Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, traces successive transformations of the doctrine, rather than narrating a linear development. It examines critical moments in the career of popular sovereignty, spanning antiquity, medieval Europe, the early modern wars of religion, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and their aftermath, decolonisation and mass democracy. Featuring original work by an international team of scholars, the book offers a reconsideration of one of the formative principles of contemporary politics by exploring its descent from classical city-states to the advent of the modern state.
