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In this paper, I consider two ancient books (TM 59973 and TM 60527) whose fragments were acquired by different collections in different circumstances, a common enough phenomenon during the heyday of papyrological acquisitions. Although one goal of papyrology is to reunite such ‘relatives’, I am more interested in exploring the individual objects’ discrete histories. The books’ fragmentation, I argue, contains important lessons for papyrological methodology in the present and a corrective to the discipline’s reconstructive tendency. 

In this paper we explore the papyrus forgeries of Constantine Simonides, arguing that in making and publicizing them, he exploited the fantasy of the autograph. The illusive allure of the autograph papyrus manuscript beguiled scholars as papyri began to appear in the nineteenth century. Papyrus manuscripts promised to provide more immediate access to the ancient world in contrast to the indirect and compromised access delivered through the medieval manuscript tradition.

When faced with excitement of seeing a new but unprovenanced Sappho fragment or the administrative archive of a Mesopotamian city whose location is unknown except to looters, it is easy to come up with justifications to explain why the advance to knowledge of publishing the find outweighs the harm done during the process of bringing it to market. These harms are often dismissed as exaggerated or having happened so long ago that refusing to study the text now would have no preventative effect.

The title nods to Kehinde Wiley’s artwork ‘After John Raphael Smith’s A Bacchante (after Sir Joshua Reynolds)’ (2009). Rather as Honig invites us to look at a text anew by juxtaposing it with different texts, I am going to focus my response to her bold and brilliant book through a brief analysis of Wiley’s portrait. Wiley makes some similar critical moves to Honig. Both Wiley and Honig’s works stake a claim to classicism for those who are normally excluded from its traditions and both show the power of creative confabulation.

How does Greek tragedy move us (both literally and figuratively) towards action? How does it perform a politics of the body which also reimagines the body politic?

Bonnie Honig presents a powerful new counternarrative of Euripides’ Bacchae, focusing on the Theban bacchants, and mobilizing as key concepts ‘heterotopia’ and ‘inoperativity’. This paper, by contrast, focuses on the narrative provided by the Asian bacchants of the chorus, only marginally present in Honig’s discussion.  The chorus of migrant bacchants consciously offer their perspective on inoperativity, and create a series of heterotopias, materialising them onstage, via their song, and offstage, via their imagined future migrations.

In Bonnie Honig’s Feminist Theory of Refusal, she postulates Saidiya Hartman’s concept of fabulation as a feminist politic of refusal centered around the city in conjunction with the female mobility in Euripides’ Bacchae. It is the final chapter of her book which includes a multimedia analysis that curiously omits musicality from its framework, despite the fact that the Bacchae was a form of theater more closely resembling the modern musical rather than the modern stage drama.

As Edith Hall has discussed (2013: 92-134), Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (IT) is one of the most influential Athenian tragedies on the literature of the early empire. The friendship between Pylades and Orestes became a model for amicitia (Cic. de Amic. 7.24, de Fin. 5.22.63; Plut. Tox. 6) and Ovid uses the letter sent to the presumptively absent Orestes as an implicit model for his own sad letters from the Black Sea (Trist.

This papers analyzes and compares two Plutarchean anecdotes, the one about the Athenians who were prisoners in Syracuse after the defeat of the Athenian expedition and could escape and get freedom through their knowledge of Euripides (Nic. 29), and the other about the decision of the Greek allies not to destroy Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian war after listening to a Phocaean who sang the parodos of Euripides’ Electra (Lys. 15).

My presentation explores the tragic intertextuality of Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus, a Life whose ‘tragic colouring’ has not hitherto been probed. The first part makes the case that the ‘apolitical’ nature of Coriolanus has two tragic models, Sophocles’ Ajax and Adrastus’ funeral oration in Euripides’ Supplices.