Classical Studies

This book discusses the use of drama as an intertext in the work of the 2nd century Latin author Apuleius, who wrote the only complete extant Latin novel, the Metamorphoses, in which a young man is turned into a donkey by magic. Apuleius uses drama, especially comedy, as a basic underlying texture, and invites his readers to use their knowledge of contemporary drama in interpreting the fate of his protagonist and the often comic or tragic situations in which he finds himself. This book employs a close study of the Latin text and detailed comparison with the corpus of dramatic texts from antiquity, as well as discussion of stock features of ancient drama, especially of comedy, in order to explain some features of the novel which have so far baffled Apuleian scholarship, including the enigmatic ending. All Latin and Greek has been translated into English.

This book presents a radically new critical study of Aristophanes. Against the limited view of Aristophanes as Athenian theatrical satirist, the author identifies him as one of the world's great writers. Through an exploration of Aristophanes' comic poetry, informed by a wide range of theory from Kierkegaard to Adorno, a particular consideration of Aristophanes' own understanding of his medium, and challenging comparisons with modern literature, this book adds a new chapter to the long-standing debate about the nature and potentialities of comedy. Close analyses of Aristophanes' language and style, lyric poetry, presentation of character, organizational structures, and humorous modes, are conducted in this spirit. The enigma of ‘serious comedy’ and of Aristophanes' complex preoccupation with tragedy is at the centre of a new assessment of Aristophanic comedy as a whole. All Greek in the text is translated; the versions offered seek to convey the distinctive character of the original.

This book looks at Roman comedy in the light of history and Roman history in the light of comedy. Plautus and Terence base their dramas on the New Comedy of 4th- and 3rd-century BC Greece. Yet many of the themes with which they engage are peculiarly alive in the Rome of the Hannibalic war, and the conquest of Macedon. This study takes issues as diverse as the legal status of the prisoner of war, the ethics of ambush, fatherhood and command, and the clash of maritime and agrarian economies, and examines responses to them both on the comic stage and in the world at large. This is a substantially new departure in ways of thinking about Roman comedy and one that opens it up to a far wider public than has previously been the case.

This book is a critical study of three late plays of Euripides. It offers a reading of the plays, which has important implications for the way in which we read Euripidean tragedy and tragedy in general. It re-evaluates the escape-tragedies (Helen, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and the fragmentary Andromeda) and argues that they are to be taken seriously as a major dramatic and intellectual achievement. The book also argues that the escape-tragedies were produced as a thematically connected trilogy in 412 BC. The book assesses the ways in which genre affects our understanding of the plays. It also examines the plays' treatment of central themes such as myth, geography, cultural identity, philosophy, and religion. These are not separate topics but are seen as being joined together to form an intricate nexus of ideas. The escape-tragedies emerge as being serious, dark, pessimistic plays which raise some disturbing questions about the human condition.

This book is a study of Euripides' so-called ‘political plays’ (Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women). Still disdained as the anomalously patriotic or propagandistic works of a playwright elsewhere famous for his subversive, ironic, artistic ethos, the two works in question — notorious for their uncomfortable juxtaposition of political speeches and scenes of extreme feminine emotion — continue to be dismissed by scholars of tragedy as artistic failures unworthy of the author of Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae. This study makes use of recent insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender (in real life and on stage) and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the political plays are, in fact, intellectually subtle and structurally coherent exercises in political theorizing — works that use complex interactions between female and male characters to explore the advantages, and costs, of being a member of the polis.

Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy, and many scholars have treated the questions of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation. This book gives these familiar issues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fuses the conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither of which can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. It pays particular attention to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Women of Euripides, both of which dramatize the sorrows of the later generations of the House of Oedipus, but in very different, and perhaps complementary, ways. All Greek quotations are translated.

This book studies the most important form of theatre in the entire Roman empire—pantomime, the ancient equivalent of ballet dancing. Performed for more than five centuries in hundreds of theatres from Portugal in the West to the Euphrates, Gaul to North Africa, solo male dancing stars—the ancient forerunners of Nijinsky, Nureyev and Baryshnikov—stunned their intercultural and cross‐class audiences with their erotic costumes, gestural delicacy, and dazzling athleticism. In sixteen specially commissioned and complementary studies, the leading world specialists explore the all aspects of the ancient pantomime dancer's performance skills, popularity, and social impact, while paying special attention to the texts that formed the basis of this distinctive art form. The book argues that the core elements that underlay pantomime performances were the presence of a solo male dancer, masked, who used his body rather than speech in an evocation of a mythical story, accompanied by music; however, the venues in which pantomime performances took place, their scale, tone, and selection of additional personnel, could vary enormously. The book pays particular attention to the texts or ‘libretti’ of pantomime, which were sung by accompanying choirs, to the impact of pantomime on ancient aesthetics and rhetoric, and the importance of the medium at the time when modern ballet was invented in the Early Modern period. An appendix of key sources in translation, from Xenophon to Macrobius, assists the reader to identify the most important evidential documents, and includes a translation of A Syriac text on pantomime by Jacob of Sarugh.

The collision of politics and claims of political intervention with the fantastic, absurd and impossible is characteristic of the Athenian comic drama of the late fifth and early fourth century BCE, but has proved persistently problematic for critics. This book sets the impossible centre-stage and argues that comic impossibility should not be ignored in political readings or, conversely, used as a reason for excluding comedy from political interventions, but that anti-realism and the absurd are precisely the mechanisms through which this sort of comedy had political and social effects, manipulated its audience, and maintained its position in an environment of many competing political claims. Drawing on a variety of theoretical paradigms, from semiotics and humour theory through to ancient literary criticism, this book seeks to articulate a model of comic narrative and argument that can be applied equally both to the impossible worlds of Old Comedy and those of related forms of comedy in other traditions. This model emphasises complex and provisional conceptual development over the linear and inflexible models of traditional models of comic narrative, and makes the joke and routine the base elements of comic plot. Pervasive comic self-reflexivity (‘metatheatre’) is presented as a special case of comic impossibility and one that intensifies and consolidates audience response. The ongoing dialogue with comic rivals and performance forms provides both foundational matter for comic worlds and a competitive dimension to those worlds, an argument about the best kind of comic world and a demonstration that comic anti-realism has the political and conceptual measure of its more widely-recognized and supposedly realist rivals.

This book argues that in both literary and ethical aspects, Seneca's tragedies are products of the Neronian age and of a Latin literary tradition. Their relationship with Attic tragedy is mediated, through allusion, by non-dramatic Augustan literature. It is a feature of Neronian literature to engage closely, sometimes destructively, with the texts and ideology of Augustus' golden age. Phaedra finds a rhetoric of desire in elegiac poetry while Hippolytus, innocent of such texts and tropes, finds a pattern for vulnerability in Roman pastoral. Virgil and Ovid inform Seneca's tragic sensibility. The deliberate criminality of many of Seneca's protagonists shows the influence of the Aeneid's Juno, but a more ambivalent heroism for Hercules is fashioned from competing models of human transgression in the first two books of the Metamorphoses. In his philosophical prose works, Seneca repeatedly uses the stage as a metaphor for the illusions we mistake for reality. This ethical context is a product frame of reference for interpreting the strange artificiality of Senecan tragedy: the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds, events and people are literary constructs. In Troades, Achilles' ghost and its vengeance are represented both as an inexorable dramatic reality and as a fable to be dismissed as a malignant fiction.

This book offers a revolutionary take on Sophocles’ tragic language – and on how we talk about tragedy as a genre. The first section explores how Sophocles excitingly develops the resources of Greek tragedy: it looks at Sophocles’ manipulation of irony, his construction of dialogue, his deployment of the actors, the role of the chorus, and reveals the playwright’s distinctive brilliance. The second section explores how the critical understanding of tragedy as a genre developed in the nineteenth century: how did Victorian critics develop a distinctive way of talking about irony, the chorus, the development of the actor’s role? Goldhill reveals the deep debt of modern critics to their nineteenth-century forebears. Finally, the book explores the foundational question of literary criticism raised by these two sections: how historical, how historically self-conscious should a reading of Greek tragedy be? This book makes a telling contribution to the discussion of tragedy, of literary criticism, and of how the past is understood.